Captain blames faulty brakes, motor for NY ferry accident

NEW YORK: The captain of a packed ferry that crashed into a New York City pier injuring 74 people blamed malfunctioning brakes and a faulty motor for the accident, US investigators said Thursday.

"As the boat was coming in, the captain found that the reverse thrust was not operating as anticipated," said Robert Sumwalt of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the accident.

The captain said there was also a problem with the motor on the vessel, telling investigators that at some point "both diesel engines shut off," while he steered it toward the pier, Sumwalt told reporters.

There were 326 passengers and five crew on board the ferry at the time of Wednesday's mishap.

The accident took place during the morning rush hour at Pier 11 in lower Manhattan's East River, not far from Wall Street. The ferry was arriving from New Jersey.

Sumwalt said the captain, who is 36 years old, has 12 years of experience as a ferryboat captain and tested negative for alchohol use, as did the entire crew. Results of drug testing have yet to be completed, he said.

Some witnesses reported that the ferry, the Seastreak Wall Street, was going too quickly as it approached the pier.

Weather conditions were good at the time of the accident, with hardly any wind and good visibility.

Dozens of ferries bring thousands of commuters from New Jersey or Brooklyn to Manhattan every day, but accidents are rare.

The most serious mishap, in October 2003, killed 11 people and injured 70 others when a Staten Island ferry slammed into a pier at full speed.

- AFP/ck

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Obama signs Netflix-backed amendment to video privacy law

Ready to share your Netflix viewing on Facebook?

(Credit:
LG)

President Obama signed Netflix-backed legislation today that makes it easier for people to share their video-viewing habits online.

With his signature on H.R. 6671, Obama approved an amendment to the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act that allows video rental companies to obtain customer consent to share information about their viewing preferences on social networks such as Facebook. The law was enacted after a weekly newspaper printed the video rental history of Judge Robert H. Bork during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

The House bill is similar to a proposal approved last November by the Senate Judiciary Committee, minus language inserted by Sen. Patrick Leahy that would have required police to obtain search warrants before accessing files stored in the cloud, including e-mail. However, Leahy later withdrew the controversial proposal.

Netflix, which had argued that the 25-year-old law was outdated and due for an overhaul, has said it plans to introduce social features for subscribers this year. Netflix users outside the United States already have the option to link their accounts with Facebook, allowing them frictionless sharing of their video viewing preferences with other member of their online social network.

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Google and Twitter Help Track Influenza Outbreaks

This flu season could be the longest and worst in years. So far 18 children have died from flu-related symptoms, and 2,257 people have been hospitalized.

Yesterday Boston Mayor Thomas Menino declared a citywide public health emergency, with roughly 700 confirmed flu cases—ten times the number the city saw last year.

"It arrived five weeks early, and it's shaping up to be a pretty bad flu season," said Lyn Finelli, who heads the Influenza Outbreak Response Team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Boston isn't alone. According to the CDC, 41 states have reported widespread influenza activity, and in the last week of 2012, 5.6 percent of doctor's office visits across the country were for influenza-like illnesses. The severity likely stems from this year's predominant virus: H3N2, a strain known to severely affect children and the elderly. Finelli notes that the 2003-2004 flu season, also dominated by H3N2, produced similar numbers. (See "Are You Prepped? The Influenza Roundup.")

In tracking the flu, physicians and public health officials have a host of new surveillance tools at their disposal thanks to crowdsourcing and social media. Such tools let them get a sense of the flu's reach in real time rather than wait weeks for doctor's offices and state health departments to report in.

Pulling data from online sources "is no different than getting information on over-the-counter medication or thermometer purchases [to track against an outbreak]," said Philip Polgreen, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa.

The most successful of these endeavors, Google Flu Trends, analyzes flu-related Internet search terms like "flu symptoms" or "flu medication" to estimate flu activity in different areas. It tracks flu outbreaks globally.

Another tool, HealthMap, which is sponsored by Boston Children's Hospital, mines online news reports to track outbreaks in real time. Sickweather draws from posts on Twitter and Facebook that mention the flu for its data.

People can be flu-hunters themselves with Flu Near You, a project that asks people to report their symptoms once a week. So far more than 38,000 people have signed up for this crowdsourced virus tracker. And of course, there's an app for that.

Both Finelli, a Flu Near You user, and Polgreen find the new tools exciting but agree that they have limits. "It's not as if we can replace traditional surveillance. It's really just a supplement, but it's timely," said Polgreen.

When people have timely warning that there's flu in the community, they can get vaccinated, and hospitals can plan ahead. According to a 2012 study in Clinical Infectious Diseases, Google Flu Trends has shown promise predicting emergency room flu traffic. Some researchers are even using a combination of the web database and weather data to predict when outbreaks will peak.

As for the current flu season, it's still impossible to predict week-to-week peaks and troughs. "We expect that it will last a few more weeks, but we can never tell how bad it's going to get," said Finelli.

Hospitals are already taking precautionary measures. One Pennsylvania hospital erected a separate emergency room tent for additional flu patients. This week, several Illinois hospitals went on "bypass," alerting local first responders that they're at capacity—due to an uptick in both flu and non-flu cases—so that patients will be taken to alternative facilities, if possible.

In the meantime, the CDC advises vaccination, first and foremost. On the bright side, the flu vaccine being used this year is a good match for the H3N2 strain. Though Finelli cautions, "Sometimes drifted strains pop up toward the end of the season."

It looks like there won't be shortages of seasonal flu vaccine like there have been in past years. HealthMap sports a Flu Vaccine Finder to make it a snap to find a dose nearby. And if the flu-shot line at the neighborhood pharmacy seems overwhelming, more health departments and clinics are offering drive-through options.

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Hero Teacher Talks Shooter into Dropping Gun

A California high school teacher is being hailed a hero for talking a 16-year-old shooter into putting down his gun and turning himself in after opening fire on a classroom and wounding another student, police said.

The student victim was taken to a nearby hospital and remains in critical but stable condition, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood told reporters on Thursday.

The teacher, whose name has not yet been officially released by authorities, helped evacuate nearly two dozen students out a door at Taft Union High School in Taft, Calif., while calmly engaging the young gunman, who is a student at Taft Union, in conversation.

Chris McCullah/The Californian/ZUMA

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The teacher and a campus supervisor, who responded to the gunfire and arrived at the classroom, helped convince the teenager to stop shooting.

"They talked him into putting the shotgun down," Youngblood said.

The shooting began around 9 a.m. in the school's science building and sheriff's deputies were on the scene within one minute of the call. An armed security guard who is typically at the school was not on campus because he had been snowed in, the sheriff said.

Two other students received minor injuries: One reported hearing loss and the other fell over a table. The teacher was shot with a pellet, but refused medical treatment, according to police.

The school's 900 students were evacuated from the building and many of them were met by parents within minutes of the first 911 calls.

Today's shooting comes less than month after 20-year-old Adam Lanza opened fire on an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. killing 20 children and six adults.

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Hints of new dark force seen in galactic smash-ups

Colliding clusters of galaxies may hold clues to a mysterious dark force at work in the universe. This force would act only on invisible dark matter, the enigmatic stuff that makes up 86 per cent of the mass in the universe.

Dark matter famously refuses to interact with ordinary matter except via gravity, so theorists had assumed that its particles would be just as aloof with each other. But new observations suggest that dark matter interacts significantly with itself, while leaving regular matter out of the conversation.

"There could be a whole class of dark particles that don't interact with normal matter but do interact with themselves," says James Bullock of the University of California, Irvine. "Dark matter could be doing all sorts of interesting things, and we'd never know."

Some of the best evidence for dark matter's existence came from the Bullet cluster, a smash-up in which a small galaxy cluster plunged through a larger one about 100 million years ago. Separated by hundreds of light years, the individual galaxies sailed right past each other, and the two clusters parted ways. But intergalactic gas collided and pooled on the trailing ends of each cluster.

Mass maps of the Bullet cluster showed that dark matter stayed in line with the galaxies instead of pooling with the gas, proving that it can separate from ordinary matter. This also hinted that dark matter wasn't interacting with itself, and was affected by gravity alone.

Musket shot

Last year William Dawson of the University of California, Davis and colleagues found an older set of clusters seen about 700 million years after their collision. Nicknamed the Musket Ball cluster, this smash-up told a different tale. When Dawson's team analysed the concentration of matter in the Musket Ball, they found that galaxies are separated from dark matter by about 19,000 light years.

"The galaxies outrun the dark matter. That's what creates the offset," Dawson said. "This is fitting that picture of self-interacting dark matter." If dark matter particles do interact, perhaps via a dark force, they would slow down like the gas.

This new picture could solve some outstanding mysteries in cosmology, Dawson said this week during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California. Non-interacting dark matter should sink to the cores of star clusters and dwarf galaxies, but observations show that it is more evenly distributed. If it interacts with itself, it could puff up and spread outward like a gas.

So why doesn't the Bullet cluster show the same separation between dark matter and galaxies? Dawson thinks it's a question of age – dark matter in the younger Bullet simply hasn't had time to separate.

New window

The idea complements a previous study that saw evidence for dark forces at work in the Bullet cluster. In 2007 Glennys Farrar of New York University and colleagues said that the smaller cluster was moving too fast for gravity alone to be responsible. They suggested that some mysterious force related to dark matter might be hurrying it along.

Still, two clusters is not a lot to go on. Dawson, Bullock and colleagues are following up with about 20 more galactic collisions to see if they show any unusual behaviours. "I really think that we're almost to the point where we have enough observational data in hand," Dawson said. "We could close the book on self-interacting dark matter."

If the new force does exist, we might soon be able to see its effects on things influenced by dark matter, such as the behavior of black holes or the masses of the first stars, says Douglas Finkbeiner of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the new study.

"The simple thing isn't always the right thing, so I really appreciate that Will is trying to look into these other possibilities," he says.

Louis Strigari of Stanford University in California agrees. "Self-interacting dark matter is worth pursuing because we're still very ignorant," he said. "We're desperate to understand what dark matter is, so any new window is welcome."

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EU leaders want UK in union, but not treaty change

LONDON: European leaders on Wednesday stressed the importance of keeping Britain in the EU, but said they opposed treaty changes demanded by Prime Minister David Cameron.

"Britain is an essential part of the EU," Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said during a conference in Dublin marking the beginning of his country's six-month presidency of the bloc.

"Great Britain has great value and is a very important member of the EU," added EU President Herman Van Rompuy.

The two leaders highlighted the importance of the union for British businesses, saying that it was essential for them that Britain remained a full and active member.

A majority of Britons favour severing all ties with the union, according to polls, and Cameron is expected to deliver a speech within the next few days spelling out his views on the country's relationship with Brussels.

He insisted last year that he supported Britain's membership, but that he wanted to negotiate a "new agreement" which would allow it to opt out of certain directives.

Kenny and Van Rompuy both repeated their opposition to any treaty changes.

"I don't see a reopening of the treaties, I don't see an issue in treaty change for any individual countries," said the Irish prime minister.

Irish Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore stressed that the top concern of European citizens, "whether from Liverpool or Limerick", was unemployment.

Van Rompuy reiterated that it would be possible to change the treaties after the 2014 European elections, but added that he strongly supported deeper EU integration as opposed to an "a la carte" union.

He pointed out that there was already scope for increasing EU partnership.

"We don't need, at this stage, a treaty change," he said. "We can deliver for a deeper EU within the treaties."

- AFP/jc

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Apple updates App Store screenshot rules to shutter scam

Apple has thrown a block in the path of scamming developers looking to trick App Store users into downloading apps they might think is another popular game -- like Minecraft.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rich Brown/CNET)

Apple announced a new App Store policy for developers today that effectively puts an end to a common bait-and-switch scam.

In a note on its Developer Portal, Apple said screenshots submitted by developers to accompany app descriptions in its App Store will be locked in place when the app wins approval.

Beginning January 9, app screenshots will be locked in iTunes Connect once your app has been approved. New screenshots may be uploaded when you submit a binary for an update to an existing app or a new app.

Before the new policy went in to place, app developers would often upload legitimate game screenshots to accompany the app description, then switch them out for screenshots that resembled more popular games once the app was approved. The switch often snagged unsuspecting victims who assumed they were downloading a different app.

The popular game Minecraft was a frequent target of clone apps, with developers lifting screenshots from the game to promote an unrelated game. One example, cited by Panic Blog, showed a game called Mooncraft with a Minecraft app image that billed itself as "a moon-themed Minecraft-type game for iOS." But as a Panic video shows (see below), the game was instead an app that featured building blocks labeled with numbers and letters.

While this presumably means that scamming developers will no longer be able to game the App Store, it also hobbles legitimate developers trying to keep their app descriptions up to date.

(Via MacRumors)

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Embryonic Sharks Freeze to Avoid Detection

Jane J. Lee

Although shark pups are born with all the equipment they'll ever need to defend themselves and hunt down food, developing embryos still stuck in their egg cases are vulnerable to predators. But a new study finds that even these baby sharks can detect a potential predator, and play possum to avoid being eaten.

Every living thing gives off a weak electrical field. Sharks can sense this with a series of pores—called the ampullae of Lorenzini—on their heads and around their eyes, and some species rely on this electrosensory ability to find food buried in the seafloor. (See pictures of electroreceptive fish.)

Two previous studies on the spotted catshark (Scyliorhinus canicula) and the clearnose skate (Raja eglanteria)—a relative of sharks—found similar freezing behavior in their young. But new research by shark biologist and doctoral student Ryan Kempster at the University of Western Australia has given scientists a more thorough understanding of this behavior.

It all started because Kempster wanted to build a better shark repellent. Since he needed to know how sharks respond to electrical fields, Kempster decided to use embryos. "It's very hard to test this in the field because you need to get repeated responses," he said. And you can't always get the same shark to cooperate multiple times. "But we could use embryos because they're contained within an egg case."

Cloaking Themselves

So Kempster got his hands on 11 brownbanded bamboo shark (Chiloscyllium punctatum) embryos and tested their reactions to the simulated weak electrical field of a predator. (Popular pictures: Bamboo shark swallowed whole—by another shark.)

In a study published today in the journal PLoS One, Kempster and his colleagues report that all of the embryonic bamboo sharks, once they reached later stages of development, reacted to the electrical field by ceasing gill movements (essentially, holding their breath), curling their tails around their bodies, and freezing.

A bamboo shark embryo normally beats its tail to move fresh seawater in and out of its egg case. But that generates odor cues and small water currents that can give away its position. The beating of its gills as it breathes also generates an electrical field that predators can use to find it.

"So it cloaks itself," said neuroecologist Joseph Sisneros, at the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the study. "[The embryo] shuts down any odor cues, water movement, and its own electrical signal."

Sisneros, who conducted the previous clearnose skate work, is delighted to see that this shark species also reacts to external electrical fields and said it would be great to see whether this is something all shark, skate, and ray embryos do.

Marine biologist Stephen Kajiura, at Florida Atlantic University, is curious to know how well the simulated electrical fields compare to the bamboo shark's natural predators—the experimental field was on the higher end of the range normally given off.

"[But] they did a good job with [the study]," Kajiura said. "They certainly did a more thorough study than anyone else has done."

Electrifying Protection?

In addition to the freezing behavior he recorded in the bamboo shark embryos, Kempster found that the shark pups remembered the electrical field signal when it was presented again within 40 minutes and that they wouldn't respond as strongly to subsequent exposures as they did initially.

This is important for developing shark repellents, he said, since some of them use electrical fields to ward off the animals. "So if you were using a shark repellent, you would need to change the current over a 20- to 30-minute period so the shark doesn't get used to that field."

Kempster envisions using electrical fields to not only keep humans safe but to protect sharks as well. Shark populations have been on the decline for decades, due partly to ending up as bycatch, or accidental catches, in the nets and on the longlines of fishers targeting other animals.

A 2006 study estimated that as much as 70 percent of landings, by weight, in the Spanish surface longline fleet were sharks, while a 2007 report found that eight million sharks are hooked each year off the coast of southern Africa. (Read about the global fisheries crisis in National Geographic magazine.)

"If we can produce something effective, it could be used in the fishing industry to reduce shark bycatch," Kempster said. "In [America] at the moment, they're doing quite a lot of work trying to produce electromagnetic fish hooks." The eventual hope is that if these hooks repel the sharks, they won't accidentally end up on longlines.

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Arias Caught Lying to Cops in Recorded Phone Calls

Jodi Arias blatantly lied to police who asked her about Travis Alexander's death, telling them in recorded phone calls that she kept trying to call and message Alexander the week of his death but never heard back from him.

The phone calls were played as evidence during the fourth day of Arias' trial, in which she is charged with murder and could face the death penalty if convicted of killing Alexander in a "depraved and heinous" way. Arias has admitted to killing her former boyfriend, but claims it was self-defense.

During the phone conversations played in court, Arias can be heard telling Mesa, Ariz., detective Esteban Flores that she last talked to Alexander on Tuesday night, June 3, 2008, around 10 p.m. She had been in Los Angeles, about to leave to go to Utah to visit a new love interest, she said.

After June 3, he stopped calling her back, she said.

Photos of Key Players and Evidence in the Jodi Arias Murder Trial

"On Tuesday night (I talked to him), it was brief though, 10 o'clock maybe. I'd say 10 p.m. or 9 - 9:30. I was calling people because I was bored on the road. He was nice and cordial, but kind of acting like he had hurt feelings," she said.

"I may have called him Wednesday, from the road, and I sent him a couple of text messages, and a couple of pictures," she said, though Alexander didn't pick up and his voice mailbox was full. "That's unusual. He deletes all of his messages. I didn't want to be obsessive about it because we're not together anymore and I didn't like to call too much."

According to court records, Arias, 32, actually went to Alexander's home on in Mesa on Wednesday morning. There, the pair had sex and took graphic photos of one another with Alexander's camera.

Then, Arias is believed to have killed Alexander, 30, in his shower by stabbing him, slashing his throat from ear to ear, and shooting him in the head.

In the phone conversations, Arias told Flores that she considered calling Alexander's friends when he stopped returning her calls on Wednesday, but didn't want to act like "his mother."

Alexander's friends found his body five days later with stab wounds and a bullet wound, lying in blood in his home.

Flores asked Arias if she ever considered buying a gun, she said she was too scared of handguns.

Jodi Arias/Myspace | ABC News

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"I've looked into handguns. I have a list of things I'm scared of that I'm trying to overcome," she said. "I got that from Travis, you know, to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and do things you're afraid of. But handguns are expensive and not really in my price range right now."

Arias is accused of stealing her grandmother's handgun and using it to shoot Alexander in the head during the attack.
The detective interviewed Arias by phone multiple times in June after Alexander's body was discovered by his friends on June 9.

Arias was indicted on July 9, 2008, and changed her story again before her arraignment, telling a TV news station that she was at Alexander's house when he was killed and witnessed two intruders kill him.

After she was arraigned, Arias told police she killed Alexander, but did it in self-defense. Arias's attorneys have said that Alexander was controlling and abusive toward Arias, and described him as a "sexual deviant."

In earlier testimony in court today, Arias's new love interest, Ryan Burns, testified that Arias showed up to his house on the morning of Thursday, Dec. 5, just 24 hours after she killed Alexander.

There, the pair cuddled, kissed, and watched movies, according to Burns.

Burns, who met Arias at a business conference in spring, 2008, said he exchanged frequent long phone calls and online conversations with Arias before inviting her to come visit him in West Jordan, Utah, in June. Arias lived in California at the time.

She arrived at Burns's home 24 hours after she was expected there, telling him that she got lost, drove the wrong way on a freeway for a few hours, fell asleep for awhile, and then got lost again, Burns testified today.

She never told him that she had confronted Alexander with a knife or gun and ended up killing him just hours before their date.

When she arrived, the pair quickly got physical, he testified.

"We went back to my house. We talked for awhile, and agreed that we were going to watch a movie. At some point we were talking and we kissed. Every time we started kissing it got a little more escalated. Our clothes never came off, but at some point she was kissing my neck, I was kissing hers, but our clothes never came off," he said.

Burns said that both he and Arias stopped kissing at the time, though they again became physically involved later in the evening when Arias climbed on top of Burns and began kissing him. Burns said that they stopped kissing because he did not want her to "regret the visit" because of her Mormon beliefs about sex.

He also told prosecutors upon questioning that Arias was physically strong.

"She's very fit," he said, describing their encounter when she climbed on top of him. "She's very strong. She has close to a six pack (of abs)."

Prosecutors likely asked about the strength of Arias because in testimony Tuesday Maricopa County medical examiner Kevin Horn said Alexander was stabbed so forcefully that the blade chipped his skull and his neck was cut all the way back to the spinal cord.

Burns, who is also a Mormon, said he noticed two bandages on Arias's hand when she arrived at his house, which she told him she got when a glass broke at her place of employment, Margaritaville.

During her visit, the pair also went to a business meeting and went out with Burns' friends where Burns described Arias as acting "shy" and a "little awkward."

"She was fine, she was laughing about simple little things like any other person. I never once felt like anything was wrong during the day. With a crowd she was a little awkward in social areas, but one on one she was very talkative and excitable," he said.

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Pruney fingers give us better grip underwater

WHY do our fingers do prune impressions when soaked? It could be an adaptation that gives us better grip underwater.

Fingers and toes wrinkle in water after about 5 minutes due to the constriction of blood vessels. This reduction in volume pulls the skin inward, but as the skin's surface area cannot change, it wrinkles. A study in 2011 showed that wrinkles form a pattern of channels that divert water away from the fingertip – akin to rain treads on tyres. The team thought that this could aid grip.

To find out, Tom Smulders and his team at Newcastle University, UK, timed people as they transferred wet or dry objects from one box to another with and without wrinkled fingers.

With wrinkles, wet objects were transferred about 12 per cent faster than with unwrinkled fingers. The time it took to transfer dry objects was the same regardless of wrinkles.

So why aren't our digits always prune-like? "With wrinkles, less of your skin surface touches the object, so there may be issues of sensitivity," Smulders suggests.

Journal reference: Royal Society Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0999.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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