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Un missile M51 tiré d'un sous-marin au large du Finistère s'est "autodétruit" peu après son lancement. Le coût d'un tel missile est évalué à 120 millions d'euros.

Une enquête va tenter de déterminer les causes de la destruction d'un missile balistique stratégique M51 ce dimanche au large du Finistère.  Un coup dur pour l'armée française et un incident très rare. "Le dernier échec de ce type remonte en effet à septembre 1996", explique à TF1 Jean Guisnel, spécialiste des questions de défense."Tant que les raisons de l'échec ne sont pas trouvées, cela indique que la dissuasion n'est pas fiable à 100%." 

Rarissime, cet échec est aussi très coûteux : le prix d'un tel missile, qui équipe déjà un autre sous-marin français, est estimé à 120 millions d'euros pour une durée de 30 ans. 

L'engin s'est autodétruit. L'engin, tiré vers 9h30  à partir du sous-marin nucléaire lanceur d'engin "Le Vigilant", depuis la baie d'Audierne s'est autodétruit peu après son décollage au-dessus de l'océan.  Ce tir est "un échec",  a reconnu peu après le capitaine de corvette Lionel Delort, officier de communication de la préfecture maritime de l'Atlantique. Le missile a été détruit "dans une zone interdite pour la circonstance à la navigation maritime et à la circulation aérienne".

Installé sur les sous-marins depuis 2010. Ce tir a été entrepris par la direction générale de l'armement (DGA) et la Marine nationale. Le missile M51, système d'arme des sous-marins nucléaires lanceurs d'engin (SNLE), avait été validé en juillet 2010, après un cinquième tir d'essai (deux depuis le sous-marin nucléaire "Le Terrible" en janvier puis juillet 2010, et trois depuis des installations terrestres en 2006, 2007 et 2008).

"J'ai vu dans le ciel une fumée blanche et des gros débris tomber dans la mer"

Une habitante du Guilvinec interviewée par France 3 a décrit la scène : "J'ai vu une fumée blanche et des gros débris dans la mer. J'ai d'abord cru que c'était un avion qui s'était abimé dans l'océan."

Pas d'impact environnemental. Selon l'officier de la préfecture maritime, "il n'y a pas d'impact environnemental avéré sur ce tir, ni d'impact sur la population puisque ce tir a eu lieu en mer et que la zone de retombée des débris se trouve dans une zone d'exclusion" qui avait été spécialement délimitée pour cet essai.

"Ces débris sont en train d'être récupérés par la préfecture maritime, par moyens nautiques et aériens que nous mettons en oeuvre actuellement", a précisé le commandant. Des débris qui se trouvent à environ 25 kilomètres de la côte, sur des fonds de l'ordre de 100 m et qui seront "intéressants pour les enquêteurs", a commenté l'officier.

La zone de retombée devait être le centre de l'Atlantique nord

Comme les précédents tirs d'essai, celui de dimanche a été effectué au sud de la pointe de Penmarc'h. La zone de retombée aurait dû se situer, si l'essai avait été réussi, au centre de l'Atlantique nord, à plusieurs centaines de kilomètres de toute côte.

Les vols de M51 sont habituellement suivis par les moyens techniques de la Direction générale de l'armement de Biscarosse et de Quimper, et par le Monge,
bâtiment d'essais et de mesures chargé du suivi de l'essai au large. Lors de chaque essai, des zones aériennes et maritimes sont réservées temporairement.
Les missiles sont toujours sans charge nucléaire lors des essais.

Le M51 est le dernier né des missiles balistiques installé sur les sous-marins français. Après le Terrible, il équipe désormais le Vigilant et bientôt le Triomphant. Ce missile, capable de transporter une ogive nucléaire d'une puissance équivalente à 60 fois Hiroshima, peut être lancé sous l'eau depuis le sous-marin. Avec ses 50 tonnes, il est plus lourd et plus gros que la génération précédente de missiles (M45) mais sa portée peut atteindre 9000 km.

Stuttgart is one of the last places you’d expect to find in a power pinch. This south German city’s massive automotive plants run 24-7 without a hiccup, efficiency measures have held industrial power consumption flat, and solar panels flash from atop its major buildings. But now all that is at risk. The country’s accelerated shift from nuclear power and fossil fuels to renewable resources, such as wind and solar, has exposed a huge gap in its transmission capacity. If they are to survive, Stuttgart’s factories—and power consumers across southern Germany—will need to import a lot more power from the north, and Germany’s grid is already at capacity.

To fill the gap, Germany is considering an aggressive plan that would push high-voltage direct current, or HVDC, from its conventional position on the periphery of AC grids to a central role. The primary reason is simple: For the first time, HVDC seems cheaper than patching up the AC grid. But Germany’s transmission planners also have another motivation: They want to provide as much performance and reliability as they can to an AC grid that’s already strained by excess wind power. For that, they’re considering implementing power electronics that are capable of doing something that’s never before been done on a commercial line: stop DC current in milliseconds flat.

As IEEE Spectrum went to press in early April, the €10 billion project was still being debated by the German parliament, but planning for the first HVDC line was already well under way. The project would start with the southern half of a 1000-megawatt, 660-kilometer line called Corridor A, to be strung from the North Sea port of Emden—a connection point for offshore wind farms under construction around Germany’s Borkum Island. It would end at an AC grid hub near the nuclear power station at Philippsburg, which lies 70 km northwest of Stuttgart.

If Germany moves forward with such HVDC lines, it could help pave the way for something much bigger, a “supergrid” of inter connected DC lines capable of transporting electricity on a continental scale, ferrying energy from North Sea turbines, dams in Scandinavia, or Mediterranean solar farms to wherever demand is greatest at that moment. The European Commission is counting on this sort of flexibility to meet its goal of an 80 percent renewable power supply by 2050. Corridor A could be the first step.

The idea for HVDC lines started to gain traction two years ago, when the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan led German chancellor Angela Merkel to shut down 8 of her country’s 17 nuclear reactors and revive plans to phase out the rest of them by 2022. Although this will eliminate just 16 percent of the country’s annual electricity generation, the share comes to nearly half in the southern states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, of which Stuttgart is the capital. Stuttgart will have to make up part of the loss by drawing on distant sources of wind power and fossil-fueled power plants. All told, some 10 gigawatts of power will need to be moved from northern to southern Germany once the last nuclear plant is closed. And the grid simply isn’t up to the challenge.

Renewable energy is already getting dumped because of it. In 2010, for example, German wind farms let some 127 gigawatt-hours of energy, enough to supply more than 30 000 German households for a year, fly on by. There was no grid capacity to deliver that power. The grid is so stressed that Bundesnetzagentur (BNetzA), Germany’s federal networks regulator, recently departed from typically dry language in its annual report [PDF] to warn that the accelerated shift from nuclear to renewables has “brought the transmission systems to the brink.”

Like many German cities, Stuttgart has a complex energy portfolio. The city generates one-eighth of its own electricity and gets most of the rest from elsewhere in Baden-Württemberg. Solar panels are the fastest-growing supplier in both the city and the state, thanks to premium prices set by the federal government. PV alone could account for as much as 18 percent of the energy produced in Baden-Württemberg by 2020.

Little of that power will arrive in the winter, however, and none overnight. At the same time, solar generation is flattening peak power prices, undermining the profitability of natural gas and coal power plants. The Düsseldorf-based power company E.ON blamed the weakened market last November when it mothballed two natural-gas plants and shelved plans for a state-of-the-art coal plant; all happen to be in the south.

On 30 April 1993 CERN published a statement that made World Wide Web technology available on a royalty free basis, allowing the web to flourish

On 30 April 1993 CERN published a statement that made World Wide Web ("W3", or simply "the web") technology available on a royalty-free basis. By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.

British physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the web at CERN in 1989. The project, which Berners-Lee named "World Wide Web", was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for information sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world.

Other information retrieval systems that used the internet - such as WAIS and Gopher - were available at the time, but the web's simplicity along with the fact that the technology was royalty free led to its rapid adoption and development.

“There is no sector of society that has not been transformed by the invention, in a physics laboratory, of the web”, says Rolf Heuer, CERN Director-General. “From research to business and education, the web has been reshaping the way we communicate, work, innovate and live. The web is a powerful example of the way that basic research benefits humankind.”

The first website at CERN - and in the world - was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people's documents and how to set up your own server. Although the NeXT machine - the original web server - is still at CERN, sadly the world's first website is no longer online at its original address.

To mark the anniversary of the publication of the document that made web technology free for everyone to use, CERN is starting a project to restore the first website and to preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web. To learn more about the project and the first website, visit http://first-website.web.cern.ch

Texas A&M University, College of Science

COLLEGE STATION -- In the mind of Texas A&M University physicist Peter McIntyre, two of America's most pressing energy challenges -- what to do with radiotoxic spent nuclear fuel and dwindling energy resources -- can be solved in one scientific swipe. He is developing the technology that is capable of destroying the dangerous waste and, at the same time, potentially providing safe nuclear power for thousands of years into the future.

In his high-energy physics laboratory east of the Texas A&M campus, McIntyre and his research team are developing a new form of green nuclear power that would extract 10 times more energy out of spent nuclear fuel rods than currently obtained in the first use, as well as destroy the transuranics -- the chemical elements beyond uranium in the periodic table -- lurking within the hazardous toxic soup of used nuclear fuel.

Buoyed by seed funding from Texas A&M University ($750,000) and the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation ($500,000), McIntyre is preparing a proposal to the U.S. Department of Energy seeking the large-scale funding that would enable him to take the next steps.

Although viewed as a major national issue, McIntyre says nuclear waste problem is a multifaceted one for which no viable solution yet has emerged, despite decades of discussion. Most recently in 2010, federal authorities scrapped a plan to create a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada to store the nationwide spent nuclear fuel capacity that now stands at 65,000 tons.

"In my opinion, the only way to properly deal with transuranics is to destroy them," McIntyre said. "They are an unthinkable hazard if they ever get into the biosphere. There has long been discussion that we could find a site like Yucca Mountain that's so isolated from groundwater and so stable geologically that we could say with confidence it will be the same 100,000 years from now as it is today, and that burying fuel there, closing the door and forgetting it is something we can responsibly do. I don't buy those arguments."

How it works

Each of the nation's 104 reactors is fueled with about 90 tons of enriched uranium fuel, packaged in sealed metal tubes called fuel pins. As the uranium fissions, the byproducts are trapped inside these pins, where they accumulate and begin to take on neutrons that would otherwise be driving the continuing fission process. The ongoing build-up, which includes the heavier transuranic elements, renders the reactor non-operational after about five years once the fission process stops. At this point, the pins are replaced with a new set, and the spent fuel typically is stored in a pool of water at the reactor site.

McIntyre, a professor since 1980 in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the inaugural holder of the Mitchell-Heep Chair in Experimental High-Energy Physics within the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, describes his team's technology as a "win-win."

"It destroys the bad stuff -- the transuranics -- and recovers the good stuff -- the fuel," he said.

To destroy the transuranics, McIntyre's team has developed a conceptual design for accelerator-driven subcritical fission in a molten salt core (ADSMS). With this technology, the transuranics are extracted into molten salt using a process called pyroprocessing, in which the spent fuel pins are chopped up and loaded into a basket, which is placed in a pot of molten salt. The oxide fuel inside the pins dissolves in the molten salt so that all of the remaining fuel -- along with all of the transuranics -- is extracted into the molten salt. The transuranics could then be destroyed through subcritical nuclear fission, which is driven by a beam of energetic protons within the custom-built, high-efficiency accelerator he envisions.

McIntyre's design builds on work at Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory as well as the PRIDE facility in South Korea which demonstrated the process for extracting the fuel and separating the transuranic elements and fission products in molten salt. Scientists from those teams are collaborating with McIntyre in the new development.

"In the same process by which we extract the transuranics from the spent fuel, we also extract the uranium so it can be re-used as an ongoing energy resource to provide nuclear energy for the next several thousand years," McIntyre said.

The idea isn't new. But earlier proposals for accelerator-driven subcritical fission faced the problem that there was no known way to deliver the necessary proton beam power to a core. The ADSMS design uses a novel invention of McIntyre's called the strong-focusing cyclotron. In the strong-focusing cyclotron, bunches of protons are accelerated through superconducting radio-frequency (RF) cavities and focused using superconducting beam transport channels. These proton bunches are continually re-focused to contain high-beam current within the accelerator aperture -- an approach that McIntyre says makes it possible to deliver 10 times more fission-driving beam power than previously achievable, and to do it with high-energy efficiency.

"We are preparing a proposal to the DOE to build and put into operation a first model of this strong-focusing cyclotron," McIntyre said. "It would be quite an advance in the field of accelerator physics unto itself. But most particularly, for the first time, it will make it feasible to drive a subcritical fission core capable of destroying transuranics at the same rate they are made in a power reactor."

No stranger to Big Science

McIntyre knows the hurdles ahead for his project, including convincing federal officials to make a major scientific investment during an age of cutbacks, and proposing a new and better way for nuclear power at a time when Fukushima is fresh in the public mind. (McIntyre notes that the Fukushima explosions in 2011 involved spent fuel storage pools, a problem his technology would eliminate.)

But the road the 65-year-old scientist treks has a familiarity to it. He zigzagged the state and nation in the 1980s -- also a time of fiscal restraint -- to make the scientific and political cases for another major project, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which would have accelerated particles to nearly the speed of light and maintained American supremacy in high-energy physics. Congress killed the SSC 20 years ago, and the prospect of big discoveries at the frontier of high-energy physics gravitated to CERN in Switzerland, which celebrated the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson on July 4 last year.

Physicists, including Stephen Hawking, have lamented the loss to American science represented by the failure of the SSC, but McIntyre sees a silver lining to that effort: It gave him invaluable experience at figuring out how to connect science with the political leaders who could bring it to fruition, skills the grayer and wiser McIntyre is using now. Back in the 1980s, he ended up making a presentation about the SSC in the West Wing of the White House to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, who subsequently asked for a two-pager to carry to President Ronald Reagan.

"That moment was the birth of the SSC," McIntyre said. "That's how things can happen, and that's how they do happen in this world. It takes persistence and ingenuity in trying to find a way."

The Winter Olympics are set to begin in 2014, which means the Olympic torch will once again be carried around the world before it finally lands in the Olympic Stadium in Russia to mark the beginning of the sporting event. However, the torch will take a trip to space where it will be taken on a spacewalk for the first time ever.

Two cosmonauts will be making the spacewalk along with the Olympic torch in order to celebrate the games that will be taking place in Russia. The torch walk is scheduled to begin on October 7 this year, and it will span 123 days and travel more than 34,000 miles. The torch will also be carried by 14,000 different people, which would be a record for Olympic torch walks.

The deputy head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, Vitaly Davydov, said that the torch that will be carried to space will be “the same as the torch at the Olympics,” although the torch will not be lit on its way to space, since open flames are prohibited from being carried inside a spaceship while traveling to the ISS.

The spacewalk with the torch is set to take place in November, and it’s expected to return back to Earth on November 12. Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazansky are expected to perform the space walk with the torch. Other places that the torch is scheduled to go to is Mount Elbrus (the highest peak of Europe), the bottom of Lake Baikal, and the North Pole.

Immerger des fûts de matières irradiées en pleine mer semble scandaleux, mais cette technique a été considérée comme une forme de stockage scientifiquement justifiée : la radioactivité des déchets déposés à plus de 4 500 mètres de profondeur était censée s'éliminer par dilution. Près des côtes d'Europe reposent ainsi plus de 100 000 tonnes de déchets radioactifs oubliés. Déchets nucléaires, les clés pour comprendre

Immerger des fûts de matières irradiées en pleine mer semble aujourd’hui scandaleux, mais cette technique a été par le passé considérée comme une forme de stockage scientifiquement justifiée : la radioactivité des déchets déposés à plus de 4 500 mètres de profondeur était censée s’éliminer par dilution. Il est désormais admis qu’elle ne fait que se répandre de manière incontrôlée. Dans quel état sont aujourd’hui ces barils, dont même les autorités ne connaissent pas la localisation exacte ?

If you’ve been around the block once or twice, you know that the speed of light in a vacuum — 299,792,458 meters-per-second — is the absolute maximum speed that any form of energy in the Universe can travel at. In shorthand, this speed is known as c to physicists.

But you or I, no matter how hard we try, will never attain that speed. There’s a simple reason for this: we have mass. And for an object with mass, you can accelerate it all you want, but it would take an infinite amount of energy to reach c, and I’m sorry, folks, there’s only a finite amount of energy in the Universe.

But that doesn’t mean we settle for 90% of c, or 99%, or 99.9999%. We always strive for that extra fraction of speed, that extra bit of energy, that extra push ever-closer to the unattainable limit. You may be most familiar with our latest attempts to do this at CERN, where we’ve recently discovered the Higgs Boson.

By smashing two protons into one another, one moving at 299,792,447 meters per second (just 11 m/s shy of the speed of light) in one direction and the other moving at the same speed in the opposite direction, we can produce incredibly energetic particles, bounded only by the energy available via Einstein’s E=mc2. After the LHC’s upgrade is complete, that speed will increase to 299,792,455 m/s, which will make these the fastest protons ever created on Earth.

But they’re hardly the fastest particles we’ve ever made.

Image credit: Matt Strassler, 2012, via http://profmattstrassler.com/.

But they’re hardly the fastest particles we’ve ever made.

After all, a proton is a relatively heavy particle, some 1,836 times heavier than it’s orbiting friend, the electron! Even though we’ve created protons that are at higher energies than electrons, it only takes one-1,836th the energy (or 0.054%) to get the electron up to the same speed. Which means that LEP — the Large Electron-Positron Collider (and the LHC’s predecessor) — where they got electrons up to 104.5 GeV of energy (compared to the 6,500 GeV expected for the LHC after the upgrade), still holds the record for particle accelerator record speed.

What is that speed? 299,792,457.9964 meters per second, or a whopping 99.9999999988% the speed of light, just 3.6 millimeters-per-second slower than light in a vacuum!

But that’s just here on Earth, with our lame superconducting electromagnet accelerators, powered by puny chemical energy sources. Compared to what comes out of the Universe, our terrestrial sources don’t stand a chance.

As much as we love the PR2, it's not a robot that anyone would likely describe as "quick." Not that it's trying to be quick or anything, but it does have a tendency towards being absurdly slow, generally because it's doing very complicated things.

However, for a robot like the PR2 to be useful in any sort of versatile industrial setting (which is slowly but surely becoming a huge market for robotics), speed, efficiency, and reliability is very important. Some talented roboticists have been working away at this problem, and they've managed to get a PR2 to pick and place (or at least, pick and drop) objects at a rate of one every seven seconds from a conveyor belt moving at over a foot per second. This is quite possibly the fastest I have ever seen a PR2 move.

For the PR2 to pull this off, it has to combine 3D object recognition, object pose estimation, collision-free arm and gripper trajectory generation, and grasping, which is a lot to do in under seven seconds. It's the grasping bit that's especially tricky, since a delay in the grasping task of just 100 milliseconds means that the object's position will have changed enough to cause the robot to miss. The grasps themselves were learned from humans, with a user teaching the robot a set of several workable ways to pick up each object, while arm movements were planned using the CMU's SBPL (Search Based Planning Library).

Overall, the robot managed a success rate of 87 percent at picking objects off of the conveyor, which is really quite good, considering that (as far as the hardware goes) it's not optimized for this sort of work. Better grippers would have helped, and the primary constraint on the speed of the pick and place was that the PR2's arms just can't move any faster.

Now, if this all reminds you of a certain other two-armed factory robot, well, yeah. It's not like PR2 is going to be stealing jobs from Baxter anytime soon, but teaching mobile manipulation platforms to robustly perform tasks like this may eventually lead to more robots like Baxter doing all kinds of work all over the place. Plus, both robots rely on ROS, so maybe they can even learn something from each other.

"Perception and Motion Planning for Pick-and-Place of Dynamic Objects," by Anthony Cowley, Benjamin Cohen, William Marshall, Camillo J. Taylor, and Maxim Likhachev from UPenn's GRASP Lab, Lehigh University, and CMU, has been submitted to IROS 2013. For the record, Anthony Cowley and Benjamin Cohen are two of the guys behind the (now legendary) POOP SCOOP demo. No word on how much overlap there is between the two, but we have to assume that they've at least cleaned PR2's grippers since then.

MOSCOW, April 21 (RIA Novosti) - The Progress M-17M cargo spacecraft, which undocked from the International Space Station on April 15, will be "buried" in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday, Russia's Mission Control said.

“Progress’s engines will switch to the braking mode at 6:07 p.m. Moscow time [02:07 p.m. GMT] on April 21. The space freighter’s fragments that will not burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere will splash down at 6:58 p.m. Moscow time in the Pacific Ocean far from navigation routes,” Mission Control said.

The Progress M-17M arrived at the orbital station on October 31 last year. It was the second spacecraft in the history of the world orbiter’s operation that performed an accelerated docking with the ISS just under six hours after liftoff from the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan. The first accelerated docking was performed by the M-16M space freighter in August 2012.

The Progress M-17M space freighter undocked from the Zvezda module of the Russian segment on the ISS on April 15 and operated in an autonomous mode in the next six days, conducting a series of scientific experiments under the Radar-Progress project.

The departure of Progress M-17M clears a docking port on the Zvezda module for the next Russian resupply vehicle, Progress M-19M, which will blast off aboard a Soyuz-U carrier rocket from the Baikonur space center on April 24.

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TEPCO has been forced to take drastic measures to deal with the continual contamination of the Pacific Ocean from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.  To quell the transfer of contaminated marine soil, the utility worked to cover the ocean floor in the port with concrete.  They later discovered that the fish life in the port was highly radioactive, which forced them to seal the entrance of the port to prevent as much fish from escaping as possible.

In July of 2012, TEPCO workers sampled marine soil inside of the port entrance of the facility.  This week, TEPCO announced that it had detected Plutonium 238, Plutonium 239, and Plutonium 240 in the marine soil in the port at Fukushima Daiichi near the Unit 1 water intake canal.

The report showed that levels of Plutonium 238 had been measured at 0.21 becquerels per kilogram, where before levels had remained either Non-Detect, or under 0.06 becquerels per kilogram according to date from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology.  Prior to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, Plutonium 238 had not been detected off short of the nuclear power plant, and the densities of Plutonium 239 and Plutonium 240 were over double what they were before.  Plutonium 239 and Plutonium 240 were found to be around 1.2 becquerels per kilogram, significantly greater than previous measurement values in the sea near Fukushima Daiichi (0.17-0.56 becquerels per kilogram).

Invited by Japan to review the nation's efforts to plan and implement the decommissioning of TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, an IAEA expert team began work Monday, 15 April 2013.

The International Peer Review of Japan's Mid-and-Long-Term Roadmap towards the Decommissioning of TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Units 1-4 is scheduled to complete its mission on 22 April 2013.

The 13-person team of IAEA and external experts on 17 April 2013 visited the nuclear accident site to collect first-hand information about Japan's plans to decommission the facility. Earlier, the team held two days of meetings in Tokyo with officials from the Ministry of Energy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). The team also met with officials of the Nuclear Regulation Authority.

"We have had a first opportunity to receive information and to discuss with our counterparts from Japan," said Team Leader Juan Carlos Lentijo, the IAEA's Director of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology, during a meeting with METI State Minister, Kazuyoshi Akaba. "They have been very open and transparent, and we're looking forward to the rest of our mission."

The review is expected to be the first of a two-mission programme to provide IAEA support for Japan's decommissioning of the damaged reactors at Fukushima Daiichi.

Japan's request for the mission comes in the context of the IAEA Action Plan on Nuclear Safety, endorsed by all IAEA Member States in September 2011. The Action Plan defines a programme of work to strengthen the global nuclear safety framework, and it encourages the use of peer review missions to take full advantage of worldwide experience.

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- Two airplanes taxiing while preparing for takeoff at Newark Liberty International Airport on Wednesday night clipped each other, authorities said.

No one was injured when the planes touched around 7:30 p.m. at one of the nation's busiest airports, Federal Aviation Administration officials said. A Scandinavian Airlines plane's left wing clipped the tail of a United Airlines plane while they were on a taxiway.

Scandinavian Airlines Flight 908, bound for Oslo, Norway, was directly behind ExpressJet Flight 4226, destined for Nashville, Tenn., on the taxiway and was turning right to get onto another taxiway when its wing clipped the ExpressJet plane's tail, officials said.

The ExpressJet plane was towed back to the gate, and the Scandinavian Airlines plane taxied back to the gate, where passengers disembarked, New York's WNBC-TV reported.

The accident is being investigated. Scandinavian Airlines, which has hubs in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, didn't immediately respond to telephone messages and emails seeking comment.

ExpressJet Airlines released a statement Wednesday night saying it is "working in coordination with officials to determine a cause." All 31 passengers on the plane were re-accommodated, the airline said.

ExpressJet, which bills itself as the world's largest regional airline, operates as a United Express partner from United's Newark hub. United, which has headquarters in Chicago, is part of United Continental Holdings Inc.

Dietmar Eckell has traveled the world in pursuit of ruin. His portfolio is filled with mystifyingly beautiful pictures of abandoned buildings, forgotten military sites and decomposing cars. For his newest project, he tracked down 15 rotting airplane carcasses left over from crash sites where there were no fatalities and everyone was rescued.

“We hear enough about air disasters in the news so I didn’t feel the need to dramatize that in my photography,” he says. “Instead I wanted to give the viewer a positive ‘wow’ effect.”

For nearly three years, he trekked to extremely isolated locations across the world — nine countries on four continents — to find the photos and now he’s running an Indiegogo campaign to fund a self-published book.

“I shoot all kinds of abandoned relics with amazing stories, but the planes are special,” he says. “Visually it’s just surreal when you see an airplane after the long journey to get out [to these remote spots].”

In Papua New Guinea he says the quest to find a downed plane was like a trip through history. He was after a piece of modernity, but to get there he had to cross through communities that still clung to centuries-old traditions and had no electricity or running water. While chasing another wreck in North Africa he had to negotiate with a local rebel group in order to get transported across the border from Mauritania into Western Sahara.

“That was a different kind of thrill,” he says.

Most of the airplanes have sat in the same spot for decades, so over time they’ve become part of the landscape. In the forests, trees grow through broken windows. In the desert, piles of sand conform to the shape of the fuselage. In the mountains, their gray metal innards start to resemble the rocks around them.

To find the wrecks, Eckell pored over internet forums, dug through archives and searched Google Earth. Once he had a general region, he also began surveying local pilots to see if they had details on a specific location.

He couldn’t get to the most remote crashes in places like Antarctica and Greenland because it was too expensive, but he hasn’t given up. He’s trying to raise more money and plans to eventually track them down.

“One day I’ll get there,” he says.

According to Fukushima prefecture, the fallout level spiked up in Fukushima city.

The sampling date is 4/27/2013. It was the second highest since last April of 2012. The reading was 100.4 MBq/Km2 (Cs-134/137). The average of this April was 3.85 MBq/Km2 until 4/26/2013.

(cf, Fallout level keeps on increasing, “The highest level since last April” [URL])

The reason is not verified.

Selon la préfecture de Fukushima, les retombées marquent un pic sur la ville de Fukushima.
L’échantillonnage est du 17 avril 2013. C’est le second record depuis avril 2012. Le relevé marque 100,4 MBq/Km⊃2; (Cs-134/137). La moyenne de ce mois d’avril est de 3,85 MBq/Km⊃2; au 26 avril 2013. (cf. Le niveau des retombées continue d’augmenter : Au plus haut depuis avril de l’an dernier)
La raison n’en est pas communiquée.

Peter Higgs didn't discover the elusive speck on his own, and now some are wondering whether it should be renamed to honor some of the other scientists too

Peter Higgs didn’t ask anyone to call the subatomic particle that gives all other particles mass the Higgs Boson.

This particle has a big deal recently—mostly because scientists are pretty sure they found it. Many thought that the discoverers would get the Nobel Prize last year, just a few months after announcing their findings. They almost certainly will get one eventually, assuming the data holds up. But who is the “they” here? Higgs didn’t discover the elusive speck on his own, and now some are wondering whether it should be renamed to honor some of the other scientists involved.

There were five other key physicists who the particle’s name might have honored: Francois Engelert, Gerard Guralnik, Tom Kibble, Robert Brout, and Carl Hagen. But at the press release announcing their findings, the only one who received a huge round of applause from the room was Higgs. And the co-finders noticed.

“Peter Higgs was treated as something of a rock star and the rest of us were barely recognised by most of the audience. It was clear that Higgs was the dominant name because of the fact his name has become associated with the boson,” Hagen told the BBC.

Now, the research team had come up with a name for their discovery—SM Scalar Boson—and tried to convince everyone to use it in March. But, of course, no one did.

The physicists are looking for ways to rename the particle that honors all of them or, at least, doesn’t just honor one person. The Engelert-Guralnik-Kibble-Brout-Hagen-Higgs Boson isn’t exactly practical. One suggestion would be to use initials like BEHGHK, which would apparently be pronounced “berg.” Others have suggested renaming the particle the H Boson. Hagen has suggested the Standard Model Scalar Meson. But even he knows that no one would ever bother with that full name, so he suggested the abbreviation SM Squared.

Peter Higgs has been quite classy about the whole thing, saying that’s he’s open to changing the name to H Boson. But the name “Higgs boson” has been in use for decades now, so chances are that, even if the physicists convince other physicists to change the name, most people will forever call it the Higgs. Which, to be fair, is far better than its other nickname—The God Particle.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Nearly a decade after Richard Branson founded the space tourism wing of his Virgin empire and more than three years after he unveiled the ship that will get humans into the suborbital vacation business, SpaceShipTwo has proven itself ready for liftoff. On Monday morning Virgin Galactic announced that it had successfully conducted the first rocket-assisted flight test for its next-generation space vessel, at 55,000 feet above California's Mojave desert. A cargo plane called the White Knight Two, also developed by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, flew SS2 to approximately 47,000 feet before releasing it, as seen in the video below:

The hour-long test represents the biggest development in Branson's attempt to commercialize space travel since he unveiled SpaceShipTwo in December 2009. Today's flight puts the company on track to test the craft's full "flight envelope" — its maximum speed and load — before the year's end. Which means some of those 500 space tourists who have already signed up could see the view from up there by late this year or sometime in 2014.

What will the SpaceShipTwo do, exactly? If all goes well, it will carry six human beings on a "sub-orbital" trip to outer space, meaning that the craft falls back to the Earth's surface before making a complete orbit. The trip will cost $200,000, last 2.5 hours, and give passengers about 6 minutes of weightlessness — which is good enough for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. According to a press release on Virgin Galactic's website, "the vehicles will allow an out-of-the-seat, zero-gravity experience with astounding views of the planet from the black sky of space for tourist astronauts and a unique microgravity platform for researchers." The innovation here has less to do with zero-gravity experiences — which can be replicated by elliptical flight patterns — than with access to (relatively) affordable and safe space travel, which lays the groundwork for interplanetary travel. After all, nobody starts a space flight company simply for the cool views alone — and Richard Branson isn't the only one in on the game.

Palomar 2 is part of a group of 15 globulars known as the Palomar clusters. These clusters, as the name suggests, were discovered in survey plates from the first Palomar Observatory Sky Survey in the 1950s, a project that involved some of the most well-known astronomers of the day, including Edwin Hubble. They were discovered quite late because they are so faint — each is either extremely remote, very heavily hidden behind blankets of dust, or has a very small number of remaining stars.

This particular cluster is unique in more than one way. For one, it is the only globular cluster that we see in this part of the sky, the northern constellation of Auriga (The Charioteer). Globular clusters orbit the center of a galaxy like the Milky Way in the same way that satellites circle around the Earth.

This means that they normally lie closer in to the galactic center than we do, and so we almost always see them in the same region of the sky. Palomar 2 is an exception to this, as it is around five times further away from the center of the Milky Way than other clusters. It also lies in the opposite direction — further out than Earth — and so it is classed as an “outer halo” globular.

It is also unusual due to its apparent dimness. The cluster is veiled by a mask of dust, dampening the apparent brightness of the stars within it and making it appear as a very faint burst of stars. The stunning NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows Palomar 2 in a way that could not be captured from smaller or ground-based telescopes — some amateur astronomers with large telescopes attempt to observe all of the obscure and well-hidden Palomar 15 as a challenge, to see how many they can pick out from the starry sky.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Le régulateur américain a donné son feu vert vendredi au nouveau système de batterie du Boeing 787 Dreamliner, un pas décisif vers la reprise des vols commerciaux de cet avion ultra-sophistiqué cloué au sol depuis plus de trois mois.

L'Autorité fédérale de l'aviation civile (FAA) a annoncé avoir approuvé le plan détaillé des modifications à apporter à ces batteries, une décision qui permet à Boeing de publier un bulletin de service et de réaliser les réparations sur les 50 appareils détenus par des compagnies aériennes dans le monde.

D'autres régulateurs mondiaux doivent approuver le projet de modifications des batteries de Boeing hors des Etats-Unis, mais ils devraient le faire rapidement après le feu vert de la FAA.

"La semaine prochaine, la FAA va publier des instructions aux opérateurs sur les changements à faire sur les appareils et va publier au registre fédéral la directive définitive qui permettra la reprise d'activité des Boeing 787 Dreamliner avec les modifications des systèmes de batteries. La directive prendra effet dès publication", a déclaré l'agence fédérale.

"La FAA va exiger des compagnies aériennes ayant des 787 qu'elles installent des systèmes de confinement et de ventilation, pour les systèmes de batteries principales et auxiliaires, et qu'elles remplacent les batteries et leurs chargeurs par des composants modifiés."

L'immobilisation du Dreamliner en janvier à la suite de deux incidents, l'un à Boston et l'autre au Japon, mettant en cause la sécurité des batteries lithium-ion de l'appareil, a coûté 600 millions de dollars (460 millions d'euros) à Boeing selon des estimations et l'a obligé à interrompre les livraisons du 787.

Plusieurs compagnies ont en outre annoncé leur intention de demander des indemnités au constructeur américain.

Les réactions dans le secteur ont été vives et enthousiastes.

"Nous voilà repartis, les enfants!", a déclaré dans un tweet le Washington Aerospace Partnership, un groupe d'hommes d'affaires, de syndicalistes et de responsables politiques locaux qui soutiennent Boeing.

"C'est un bon pas en avant", a déclaré United, seule compagnie américaine à avoir des 787, qui prévoit de les réintégrer dans son programme de vols à partir du 31 mai.

A la suite du feu vert de la FAA, Boeing a déclaré qu'il allait pouvoir entamer les modifications à la flotte de 787 existante, tout en ajoutant que le groupe atteindrait entièrement ses objectifs de livraisons de 787 Dreamliner pour 2013 et que ces problèmes de batterie n'auraient pas d'impact significatif sur ses objectifs financiers pour l'année en cours.

Le groupe a consacré ces derniers mois à repenser la conception du système de batteries de l'avion pour éviter les court-circuit qui ont été à l'origine des incidents de janvier.

Boeing a fait savoir que ses batteries lithium-ion seraient désormais recouvertes d'une enveloppe d'acier inoxydable et que le bloc d'alimentation serait équipé d'une meilleure isolation, d'entretoises et d'une gaine résistante à la chaleur.

Il avait déjà formé les équipes et préparé les kits techniques permettant de modifier les appareils touchés, un processus qui devrait prendre quatre à cinq jours par avion.

All Nippon Airways et Japan Airlines, qui exploitent à elles deux près de la moitié des B787 en service dans le monde, seraient les premières compagnies concernées par les modifications.

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Russian cosmonauts performing a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) have faced some problems with the activation of scientific equipmentRussian cosmonauts performing a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) have faced some problems with the activation of scientific equipment, Alexander Kaleri, the chief of the Energia space rocket corporation's scientific and technical center, told journalists at the mission control on Friday.

The cosmonauts are roughly following the schedule, but some hitch has occurred. One of the Obstanovka units could not be switched on," Kaleri said.

Specialists on the ground should decide what to do next after analyzing telemetry, Kaleri said. The problem could possibly be eliminated by re-mating the connector halves, he said. "They will do this once again right now," he said.

The Obstanovka experiment is aimed at studying plasma waves and the effect of space weather on the Earth's ionosphere.

Photo-illustrated introductions to outstanding MHI Group products and technologies. Current feature: Accelerators.

How does matter attain its mass? Why does the cosmos that expands across the heavens exist? Since the distant past, prominent researchers from Galileo to Newton and Einstein have sought solutions to the mysteries of science; today's scientists are aided by the accelerator, an innovative instrument that has substantially contributed to the development of modern science and technology.

The largest of these accelerators are tens of kilometers in total length. Their role is to apply energy from radio frequency waves to charged particles such as electrons and protons and accelerate them to near the speed of light. These extremely fast-moving and high-energy particles are forced to collide with one another. Research into their states can benefit the validation of the laws of physics and more. For example, the origin of the universe is thought to be the Big Bang that occurred approximately 13.7 billion years ago. If an accelerator can be used to re-create the state of the universe immediately following the Big Bang in which there was nothing more than particles flying at high speed, it would provide a significant clue to discovering the origin of the universe.

Also, if the orbit of high-energy electrons is bent, light with extremely short wavelengths in the manner of x-rays is emitted. The use of this synchrotron radiation greatly expands possibilities for observing and understanding nano level phenomena such as the unknown mechanism by which photosynthesis occurs in the nucleus - phenomena that heretofore could not be understood using microscopes. The fruits of research using synchrotron radiation have also recently been put to use in familiar fields. One example of this would be pharmaceuticals with new functions and efficacies that were created thanks to the analysis of three-dimensional structures of proteins.

Accelerators have provided us with a diverse array of benefits in our everyday lives.

The accelerator operations of MHI commenced at the beginning of the 1960s, and goes back to the dawning of accelerator development in Japan. At the time, the foundation for the technology that is essential to the manufacture of accelerators was already in place as the company was using precision processing technology for nonferrous metals such as copper and aluminum that are indispensable to its manufacturing of aircraft components. Thereafter MHI took part in almost all large-scale accelerator research projects in Japan, and continued to refine such technology while gaining the confidence of researchers and research institutions.

Design and manufacturing has now expanded to accelerating structures and accelerating cavities that accelerate particles to near the speed of light, waveguides and radio frequency windows that introduce high-power microwave to the accelerating structure and accelerating cavities, vacuum beam chambers used as passageways for the accelerated particles, and periodical magnetic field generators, so-called undulators or wigglers that generate powerful synchrotron radiation by bending the orbit of particles in tiny increments. High-energy physics research in Japan has been outstanding, with five of the country's 17 Nobel Prize laureates involved in research, and MHI's accelerator technology has contributed to this research.

The KEKB Accelerator (electron-positron collider) of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) was used in the validation of the Kobayashi-Maskawa theory predicting CP violation, for which they were honored with the 2008 Nobel Prize for physics. Amid this effort, MHI designed and produced the injector accelerating structure, vacuum beam chamber, normal conducting ARES cavity, and superconducting crab cavity, thereby contributing to the Japanese scientists being so honored.

MHI's accelerators have continuously supported the successes of researchers from behind the scenes for over 50 years and MHI continues to support passionately the dreams of researchers in their quest for scientific technology that will benefit mankind