J.K. Rowling secret novel
surges to popularity in Britain


A detective novel secretly written by J.K. Rowling surged to the top of bestseller lists Monday after the true identity of the author was revealed, embarrassing some publishers who had rejected the manuscript.
 
Rowling, whose Harry Potter series made her Britain's best-selling author, posed as a retired military policeman called Robert Galbraith to write “The Cuckoo's Calling,” only to see her cover blown by a Sunday newspaper.
 
The novel had only sold 1,500 hardback copies since being published in April. But by Monday it had raced to the top of Amazon.co.uk's best-selling list, leaving online book merchants unable to slake demand.
 
“For a title that isn't even in our top 5,000 to shoot to number one so quickly is almost unheard of,” Darren Hardy, books manager at Amazon.co.uk, said by email.
 
Hardy said this meteoric rise in sales meant “The Cuckoo's Calling” has established itself as a contender to become one of the biggest-selling books of the summer.
 
Publisher Little, Brown, which last year published Rowling's first adult novel “The Casual Vacancy,” said it was immediately reprinting “The Cuckoo's Calling.” The novel is about war veteran turned private eye Cormorant Strike investigating the death of a model.
 
“We're looking forward to publishing Strike's next installment in summer 2014,” the publisher said in a statement.
 
Ms. Rowling, 47, said it had been wonderful to publish for once without hype or expectation and to get feedback under a different name, even if that meant some publishers rejected her work.
 
Her Harry Potter series was also spurned by about 12 publishers before the first of her seven novels about the boy wizard was published in 1997.
 
Kate Mills, fiction editor at London-based Orion Publishing, went onto Twitter to admit she rejected Ms. Rowling's new work.
 
“So I can now say that I turned down J.K. Rowling. I did read and say no to 'Cuckoo's Calling.' Anyone else going to confess?” Ms. Mills tweeted.
 
Reviewers as well admitted to missing the book that received largely positive write-ups from those who did read it.
 
Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller, said it was not unusual in the publishing world to use a pseudonym if authors wanted to write in a new genre to attract a new readership or for women writers who did not want to alienate male readers.
 

Commission considers making
Antarctic waters protected


An international commission is considering whether to designate the waters around Antarctica special marine reserves, a step campaigners say would safeguard the habitat of whales, seals and penguins and more than double the world's protected sea area.

Any change in status requires a unanimous decision by the 25 members of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. Two members, Russia and Ukraine, have raised legal concerns, a German delegate told a media briefing Monday.

The Russian and Ukrainian delegations were not immediately available for comment.

The commission was founded in 1982 to protect Antarctic marine life. The United Nations has committed to classifying 10 percent of the world's coastal waters and oceans as protected areas by 2020, up from 2 percent at present.

Last November commission members, which include the European Union, Norway, China, Australia and New Zealand, failed to agree on setting up marine protected areas amid disputes over scientific findings, the duration of the protection period, and a reluctance by some to shut off commercial access to new fishing waters.

At a new fresh round of talks in the German town of Bremerhaven on Monday, delegates are examining a U.S. and New Zealand-backed proposal on preserving the Ross Sea, which is seven times the size of Germany, and a European Union, France and Australia-backed proposal for the waters of East Antarctica.

In an open letter to Vladimir Putin, the Ocean Elders campaign group appealed for the Russian president's support.

“The Ross Sea and East Antarctica have been spared the impact of widespread pollution, invasive species, bottom trawling and other large-scale commercial fishing operations that are imperiling other marine areas around the world."

“But conditions are changing, and the need to take steps to better protect key areas in the Southern Ocean is compelling,” the letter to Putin said.

Some fishing fleets are looking south because stocks nearer home are depleted and some nations worry about shutting off large areas of the oceans.

“The Ross Sea region is one of the last and greatest ocean wilderness areas on the planet. It is home to a unique and productive ecosystem,” the U.S. Department of State said in a statement. “It is also a natural laboratory for scientific study to better understand climate change, our oceans, and our world.”


Indians gathers to mark
end of telegraph system


Thousands of people crowded telegraph offices around India to send the country's last telegrams, as the government shut down the 163-year old service on Sunday.

Most Sunday afternoons, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone at the Central Telegraph Office in New Delhi, let alone people lined up in the rain.  But this day is different.  For engineer Rasmeet Chawla it is the end of an era.
 
 “I am here for the same reason as everybody.  This is the last day, and I wanted to have a souvenir of this telegraph medium,” he admitted.
 
Most of the people who crowded the office were young and have grown up in the age of mobile phones and e-mail, technology that eventually helped make the telegram obsolete.
 
But others like Neelima Chandak, who brought her 19-year old daughter to the office, remembered the weight the small slip of paper carried when it was finally delivered to its destination.
 
“Most of the time, it used to be anxiety.  As soon as you heard the word ‘telegram,’ you mostly associated it with news of death and sometimes a job,” she recalled.
 
On July 14, the last for the Central Telegraph Office in the Indian capital, most of the telegrams carried nostalgic messages and good wishes for loved ones.  By late Sunday, with just a few hours to go before the doors closed for good, 1,500 telegrams had been processed, compared to 10 to 20 on any other day.
 
An employee for 31 years, Jagdish Chand joked the telegraph service would never have incurred huge losses and be shut down had it seen crowds like this through the years.
 
Still, he said he is proud to be part of a communication mode that carried messages during India’s fight for independence and was a vital part of Indians’ day-to-day life.
 
“If someone had to be picked up at the railway station or from the airport, the telegram used to reach on the same day," he explained. "I was very happy that along with doing my job, I was also doing a public service.”
 
His service along with that of about 1,000 other workers across India will no longer be needed.  Many will either retire or be transferred to other departments within state-owned telecommunications company, which will continue its focus on expanding Internet and mobile phone services across India.


Most stroke victims fail
to follow physicians' advice


After someone has a heart attack or stroke, doctors usually recommend changes in lifestyle like losing weight, exercising or stopping smoking.  A new study looked at people around the world to see if they followed their doctors' advice.

"Heart disease is preventable," said Patrice Desvigne Nickens, with the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health. "Healthy lifestyles can reduce risks."

Dr. Desvigne-Nickens said there are three key elements to living a healthy life. “Don’t smoke, maintain a healthy weight, exercise,” she stated.

Ignoring even one of these increases the risk for cardiovascular disease, which includes heart attack and stroke, the number one killer around the world.

So Canadian researcher Koon Teo at Ontario's Hamilton General Hospital wanted to see if people changed their lifestyle after one of these events. He followed patients in high, middle and low-income countries.

"People who had heart disease or stroke, about a fifth of them, still continued to smoke and only a third of people had regular physical activities," he explained. "Just about two-fifths of them ate what we determine as a healthy diet."

And it didn't seem to matter where they lived.

"The low-income countries had the worst diet, but if you look at people from high income countries, they did not do that much better," Teo said.

Overall, only about 4 percent of the patients who participated in the study followed the recommendations.    

"All countries need to look at this finding to try to improve and close the gap about healthy living, particularly in people who had already had the stroke or a heart attack," Teo added.

National and international efforts to get people to monitor their blood pressure and reduce salt consumption are gaining momentum.  Both reduce the risk for heart attack or stroke. In the U.S., Janet Wright, of the Million Hearts campaign, gives this advice.

"Make one small change to your health and do it daily," she asserted. "It could be adding a fruit or a vegetable.  It could be building your way up to 150 minutes of exercise each week."

The Cleveland Clinic has a program for its employees that has helped them lead healthier lives.

"The key is to start. Buy a pedometer, record it daily," explained Michael Roizen, Cleveland Clinic. "Try to walk 10,000 steps a day."

And if you take medication for high blood pressure, take it as prescribed.

"Every day of an uncontrolled blood pressure is damaging the heart, the kidneys, the eyes and all of the blood vessels putting the individual at high risk for heart attack and stroke," Wright stated.

These experts stress that the power to prevent heart attack or stroke is in your hands. Teo's study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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Montage of Neptue shows known moons and the new one in the upper right.



An astronomer studying archived images of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has found a 14th moon orbiting the planet, NASA said Monday.
 
Estimated to be about 12 miles (20 kms) in diameter, the moon is located about 65,400 miles (105,251 kms) from Neptune.
 
Astronomer Mark Showalter, with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, was searching Hubble images for moons inside faint ring fragments circling Neptune when he decided to run his analysis program on a broader part of the sky.
 
“We had been processing the data for quite some time and it was on a whim that I said, 'OK, let's just look out further,” Showalter said.
 
“I changed my program so that instead of stopping just outside the ring system it processed the data all the way out, walked away from my computer and waited an hour while it did all the processing for me. When I came back, I looked at the image and there was this extra dot that wasn't supposed to be there,” Showalter added.
 
This diagram provided by NASA shows the orbits of several moons located close to the planet Neptune. The new moon, Neptune's tiniest, is designated S/2004 N 1.This diagram provided by NASA shows the orbits of several moons located close to the planet Neptune. T

Follow-up analysis of other archived Hubble images of Neptune verified the object was a moon.
 
Showalter and colleagues are mulling over a name to propose to the International Astronomical Union, which has final say in the matter.
 
“We haven't really gotten far with that. What I can say is that the name will be out of Roman and Greek mythology and it will have to do with characters who are related to Neptune, the god of the oceans,” Showalter said.
 
Neptune's largest moon, Triton, was discovered in 1846, just days after the planet itself was found. Nereid, Neptune's third largest moon was found in 1949.
 
Images taken by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft unveiled the second largest moon, Proteus, and five smaller moons, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Galatea and Larissa.
 
Ground-based telescopes found Halimede, Laomedeia, Sao and Nestor in 2002. Sister moon Psamathe turned up a year later.
 
The newly found moon, designated S/2004 N 1, is located between Larissa and Proteus. It orbits Neptune in 23 hours.
 
A paper on the discovery is pending.


Putin blames U.S. for  leaker
being trapped at airport


Russian President Vladimir Putin says fugitive U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden will leave the country as soon as there is an opportunity for him to do so.

Putin said Monday the United States essentially has trapped Snowden in Russian territory by revoking his passport.

"He arrived on our territory without an invitation. We didn't invite him. And he was not flying to us. He was flying in transit to other countries," he said. "But as soon as he got in the air it became known, and our American partners, actually, locked his further flight. They themselves scared other countries."

Snowden has been offered asylum in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela, but has been stuck for three weeks in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, unable to fly without travel documents.

The U.S. government accuses him of leaking information about classified U.S. National Security Agency surveillance programs, and wants him returned home to face trial.

Friday, Snowden met with human rights activists at the airport, telling them he is seeking temporary asylum in Russia until he can safely travel to Latin America.
 
Russian officials say they have not yet received an application from him.


Loggerheads found disloyal
to specific nesting beaches

   
Threatened loggerhead sea turtles in the northern Gulf of Mexico can travel distances up to several hundred miles and visit offshore habitats between nesting events in a single season, taking them through waters impacted by oil and fishing industries.

Evidence from a U.S. Geological Survey study challenges the widely-held view that sea turtles remain near one beach throughout the nesting season and suggests the threatened species may require broader habitat protection to recover. The findings also cast new uncertainties on current estimates of the size of the species’ Gulf of Mexico subpopulation.

“This is the first study to locate and quantify in-water habitat use by female loggerheads in the northern Gulf of Mexico subpopulation during their reproductive periods,” said lead author Kristen Hart, a Geological Survey research ecologist. “Our tracking results show they depend on a much broader range of habitat during this critical part of their lives than was previously thought to be required.”

The study reveals detailed loggerhead movements during “inter-nesting” periods, showing patterns that vary for individual turtles. Generally, this period begins when a female returns from open seas around May and lasts roughly until September. Up until now, efforts to protect the species generally centered on beaches with high nesting activity under the assumption that once turtles had nested on those beaches, they either remained in their immediate vicinity or migrated back out to sea.

“The satellite data and our observations on the ground tell the same story: loggerheads in this subpopulation nest at multiple beaches, sometimes hundreds of miles apart,” said Ms. Hart. “Some of the females we captured and tagged on beaches in Alabama traveled over 250 miles to nest in Florida, where we recaptured them. Likewise, we also captured some females in Alabama that had previously been tagged at the Florida site in earlier breeding years.” 

Researchers used the same statistical technique for analyzing their movements that enabled them to pinpoint loggerhead feeding hotspots at sea last year and, more recently, locate Kemp’s ridley feeding grounds in the northern Gulf by differentiating between behavioral modes. They analyzed where 39 adult female sea turtles went after they nested on beaches in Alabama and Florida between 2010 and 2012 to learn where they spent time in the water during the breeding season before migrating back to sea.

“We were surprised to find a lot of variation in their behavior,” said co-author and survey biologist Meg Lamont.  “On average, the tagged turtles visited areas about 33 kilometers (20 miles) from shore and moved about 28 kilometers (17 miles) to nest at another beach. Several of them journeyed more than 200 kilometers (124) miles to nest at additional beaches, while others simply cruised back out to sea after the first nest.” 

The results of the study explain a mystery that had puzzled Ms. Lamont, who has 16 years of data from the St. Joseph Peninsula in Florida showing that few of the nesting loggerheads they tagged returned to nest again on the peninsula. “We didn’t know whether they were dying or simply nesting elsewhere,” explained Ms. Lamont, “Now we know they aren’t as faithful to one nesting site as was once thought.” 

One of the turtles that Ms. Lamont tagged in 2002 appeared at Ms. Hart’s site in Alabama, nearly a decade later. In fact, the researchers saw several turtles nesting both in Alabama and the St. Joseph Peninsula (roughly 250 miles apart) within a period of just two weeks. 

“These data show it is not sufficient to just protect habitat around high density nesting beaches – such as the St. Joseph Peninsula because many turtles that nest on the peninsula use the entire region from the eastern Florida Panhandle to Louisiana,” said Ms. Lamont.

There could also be fewer female loggerheads nesting in the northern Gulf of Mexico than current estimates suggest because they are calculated using nest numbers. “Our research shows that the same turtle could easily deposit eggs in Alabama and Florida if nests are separated by about 2 weeks,” said Ms. Hart. “Population numbers based on nest counts may therefore be biased upwards if nests at the two sites were assumed to have come from two different females.” 

The study also noted that the areas the loggerheads used during the inter-nesting period overlapped with human uses, such as shrimp trawling and oil and gas platforms.

“We are working towards defining areas where sea turtles concentrate their activities at sea, effectively building a map of in-water turtle hotspots,” said Ms. Hart. “The more we know about their habitat use, the more questions are raised about their behavior and ability to adapt. We hope to build a better understanding of how frequently turtles return to these same locations, and whether or not they move to new habitats when those locations are impacted. This type of information would be extremely valuable for developing management strategies to help in population recovery.”


Canada's Harper shuffles
his cabinet of ministers


Faced with falling public opinion poll numbers, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has named eight new ministers in his biggest cabinet reorganization since taking office in 2006.

A half-dozen ministers recently announced they were stepping down, but ministers with key portfolios, such as finance and foreign affairs, will remain at their posts. The appointees include four women.

The government shake-up appears to be aimed at making a new start for the Canadian government before federal elections in 2015. An recent expenses scandal dented Harper's Conservative Party's popularity.

Harper named the new ministers in Twitter messages, before a formal announcement.

There are currently 38 ministers associated with the Harper cabinet.


Continued rise in sea level
predicted by new report


In a new report, climate change scientists predict that for each one degree Celsius of increase in global temperature, sea levels will rise 2.3 meters. They say their estimate may be accurate for as long as the next 2,000 years.

Earlier studies have predicted various changes in sea level as the climate warms, but a team from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research says its analysis is the first to consider historic climate data, along with computer simulations of factors contributing to future global sea level changes. Lead author Anders Levermann says the combination of physics and data gives him confidence in the accuracy of the prediction.

According to the World Bank, researchers say global temperatures may rise at much as 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era levels over the next 30 years, due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This will lead to a rise in sea level globally as glaciers and the polar ice caps melt, and the oceans expand due to excess heat.
 
World Bank official Robert Bisset said that a sea level rise of as much as 50 centimeters by the 2050s may be unavoidable. It will have pronounced effects at the equator, especially around densely populated areas such as Bangkok, Thailand and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Scientists predict more intense tropical storms, food shortages, dangerous heat waves, and eventually flooding that could render coastal areas uninhabitable. That increase is 20 inches.

Levermann warns that sea level rise is inevitable unless global temperatures go down. The Potsdam Institute researchers call for planning hundreds of years into the future to address the long-term effects of climate change.