Let's Get 7 in IELTS

Thailand's beleaguered Prime Minister, Samak Sundaravej, has said he will not resign despite mounting pressure.

In a radio address to the nation, he said he would not bow to the demands of anti-government protesters.

On Tuesday Mr Samak imposed a state of emergency in Bangkok after his supporters and opponents clashed in the capital, leaving one person dead.

Protesters say the government is a front for Thaksin Shinawatra - the former prime minister, now in exile.

The Milky Way's central black hole may not be able to hide for much longer. Observations have been made three times closer to the centre of our galaxy than ever before, strengthening the case that a supermassive black hole lurks there.

The Milky Way's centre hosts a bright object called SgrA*, which may be a disc of swirling gas and dust surrounding a heavyweight black hole.

Measuring the size and shape of SgrA* could help confirm the existence of the black hole. But a blur of clouds between the galactic centre and the Earth has prevented astronomers from getting a clear view of the object's shape.

Now, a team has managed to get three times closer than previous studies in viewing SgrA*. They did it by looking for the object's higher frequency radio signals, which cut through intervening gas and dust.

Linked telescopes

The size of SgrA* suggests the matter it contains is about 10 times denser than previous measurements, bolstering the idea that the object harbours a black hole, says astronomer Sheperd Doeleman of MIT's Haystack Observatory: "Our results are more evidence that we are looking at a black hole."

(The punishment for the game of  our IELTS studying group.)

Are gun owners more likely to kill themselves? Two doctors who think so are asking lawmakers and psychologists to take a new look at the risks of firearms.

Matthew Miller of the Harvard School of Public Health studied four years of data in the US and found higher rates of suicides involving firearms in states with more gun owners – up to four times higher for men and eight times higher for women. The numbers of suicides not involving firearms, on the other hand, were the same.

This contradicts the common assumption, says Miller, that anyone serious enough to use a gun would find another equally effective means of suicide if a gun were not available. He argues that suicide is an impulsive action. "If people reach for a gun, they don't get a second chance; if they reach for pills, they do." says Miller.

A dozen smaller case studies have all shown a two- to 10-times greater risk of suicide in homes with a gun, both for the owner and for the spouse and children. Like smoking and cancer, the effect increases with exposure. A gun kept unlocked and loaded increases the risk even more than a secured gun.

 ScienceDaily (June 12, 2008) — East Siberia's permafrost contains about 500 Gigatons (1100 trillion pounds) of frozen carbon deposits that are highly susceptible to disturbances as the climate warms.

Called the Yedoma, this permafrost has not undergone much alteration by soil microorganisms since its formation, which took place between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. To investigate how easily this huge carbon stock could be degassed in future warming scenarios, Khvorostyanov et al. use a model of heat transfer and soil organic matter decomposition in frozen soils and find that specific conditions trigger the irreversible thawing of Yedoma, which is maintained by heat production by soil microbial activity.

Once started, irreversible thawing could release 4.4-6.2 trillion pounds of carbon per year into the atmosphere between the years 2300 and 2400, transforming 74 percent of the initial carbon stock into carbon dioxide and methane.

Further investigations reveal that the faster the planet's surface warms, the sooner fast deep-soil decomposition will start, although the tipping point above which soil carbon starts irreversible mobilization due to permafrost thawing increases slightly with larger external warming rates.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 3, 2008) — Permafrost blanketing the northern hemisphere contains more than twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, making it a potentially mammoth contributor to global climate change depending on how quickly it thaws.

So concludes a group of nearly two dozen scientists in a paper appearing this week in the journal Bioscience. The lead author is Ted Schuur, an associate professor of ecology at the University of Florida.

Previous studies by Schuur and his colleagues elsewhere have estimated the carbon contained in permafrost in northeast Siberia. The new research expands that estimate to the rest of the permafrost-covered northern latitudes of Russia, Europe, Greenland and North America. The estimated 1,672 billion metric tons of carbon locked up in the permafrost is more than double the 780 billion tons in the atmosphere today.

With Hurricane Gustav on course to hit the US Gulf of Mexico coast, the damage it does to the region's oil facilities could be a "worse case scenario".

The stark warning comes from extreme weather impact analyst Jim Roullier, who says Gustav may be more damaging than 2005's Hurricane Katrina.

Output from oil rigs in the US Gulf has already been cut by three-quarters, as staff continue to be evacuated.

The region produces 25% of the US's crude oil and 15% of its natural gas.

About 4,000 offshore oil and gas facilities are located in the US gulf, 100 of which were badly damaged three years ago by Katrina and the follow on Hurricane Rita.

A teenage cancer patient has undergone successful surgery to rebuild his shoulder using his elbow.

Tom Lemm, 15, from Pontefract, had his left arm amputated by surgeons at Leeds General Hospital because of a tumour at the top of the limb.

Doctors used tissue and muscle from his unaffected elbow to create a new shoulder in what is believed to be the first UK operation of its kind.

Tom's surgeon said the shoulder would be able to support an artificial arm.

In the operation, the whole arm and the shoulder joint were removed.

First-born babies may be programmed in the womb to have a higher risk of asthma and allergy, research suggests.

A University of South Carolina led team carried out tests on more than 1,200 newborns from the Isle of Wight.

They found first borns were more likely to carry a gene variant which raised their risk of allergy.

The study, to be presented to the American Thoracic Society, found this seemed to translate to a higher risk of allergy through to the age of ten.

The researchers measured levels of an antibody called Immunoglobulin E (IgE) in the babies' umbilical cord blood.

Air traffic at some three dozen airports across the US has been disrupted by a computer glitch, the Federal Aviation Administration says.

The network problem hit an FAA flight plan processing facility near Atlanta, Georgia, leaving a hub in Salt Lake City to handle data for the entire US.

The FAA said air safety was not affected and systems were returning to normal by late on Tuesday.

The Department of Homeland Security said there was no link to terrorism.

The network glitch began at about 1330 local time (1930 GMT), triggering delays at airports coast-to-coast.

Analysis has a long and, some might say, rather worthy history as a thoughtful documentary strand on Radio 4. So it was pretty surprising that the programme this week found itself at the centre of suggestions that it had been used by a Whitehall counter-terrorism unit as part of a "global propaganda push" against al-Qaeda.

The story on the front page of Tuesday's Guardian didn't actually name Analysis. The paper's home affairs editor Alan Travis reported that, according to a secret Home Office paper, the BBC was being targeted by the Research, Information and Communication Unit (RICU), which aims to counter al-Qaeda propaganda in Britain and overseas.

It was quoted by the Guardian as saying: "We are pushing this material to UK media channels, eg a BBC radio programme exposing tensions between AQ leadership and supporters." It was quickly apparent to us that the programme in question must be the 7 August edition of Analysis, presented by the BBC's Security Correspondent Frank Gardner, and broadcast in a slightly different form on the World Service this week.