Severe droughts could devastate sub-Saharan Africa following a recent decades-long drought that killed 100,000 people in Africa’s Sahel region, scientists say.

Sub-Saharan Africa often suffers droughts, but the group of specialists reported on Thursday that global climate change will make these dry periods more severe and more difficult for the people who live there.

The prediction is contained in a study published in the journal of Science by the scientits at the University of Arizona, US.

“Clearly, much of West Africa is already on the edge of sustainability, and the situation could become much more dire in the future with increased global warming,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climatologist and co-author of the study.

Via Aljazeera English.

The container ship, the Maersk Alabama, was carrying thousands of tons of relief aid to the Kenyan port of Mombasa, the company that owns the ship said.

The ship was taken by pirates at about 7:30 a.m. local time, 280 miles southeast of the Somali city of Eyl, a known haven for pirates, a spokesman for the United States Navy said. It is owned and operated by Maersk Line Limited, a United States subsidiary of A.P. Moller – Maersk Group, the Danish shipping giant.

The Maersk Alabama was at least the sixth commercial ship commandeered by pirates this week off the Horn of Africa, one of the most notoriously lawless zones on the high seas, where pirates have been operating with near impunity despite efforts by many nations, including the United States, to intimidate them with naval warship patrols.

Via New York Times.  Arrrr.  Obviously, we hope our American crew and all aboard are allowed to return home unharmed.

I have an idea about a way to curtail these activities:  send them ships filled with reality TV stars, one after another after another.  Imagine a ship filled with Real World/Road Rules alumni, or perhaps another one with the contestants from a new series of Survivor, “Survivor: Somalia.”  When the pirates find themselves unable to collect ransom on them, they’ll soon grow weary of the whole venture.  Then perhaps they’ll retire to dry land and fall into Internet scamming, or another less violent hobby.

UPDATE, from the New York Times:  At about noon Eastern time, some twelve hours after the hijacking, a Pentagon official speaking on condition of anonymity said that “it is our understanding that the crew has taken back control of the vessel.”

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven’t sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” said a senior intelligence official. “So have the Russians.”

The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn’t target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. “There are intrusions, and they are growing,” the former official said, referring to electrical systems. “There were a lot last year.”

Via Wall Street Journal.  Seems like an awful lot of time and money invested in disrupting our electrical supply when we are more than capable of doing that ourselves.  On a regular basis.

When oil prices collapsed from $147 a barrel in the summer of 2008 to $35 a barrel in January, American drivers, Congress, government bureaucrats, and the mainstream media refocused on other, more pressing issues, like executive bonuses. Peak oil likely occurred between 2005 and 2009; oil production will now embark on a long slow decline. The world isn’t prepared.

Matt Simmons, energy analyst and author of Twilight in the Desert, recently told Reuters

“We are 3, 6, maybe 9 months away from a price shock… These prices now are dangerously low. The lower prices fall, the less oil will be produced and the greater the chance of an oil spike…. [And] unless oil demand falls by 10 or 15% per annum, which it is not going to do, then we don’t need to wait for oil demand to come back before we have a supply crunch.”

In this scenario, low oil prices will continue to take oil fields out of production and reduce exploration. Once prices recover, companies will have trouble gearing back up due to the credit crunch, resulting in production-increase delays.

– From an Op Ed by James Quinn, at Minyanville.

“Everything that they have undertaken in the last 24 hours cannot be described as anything other than a coup d’etat,” Vladimir Voronin said in a television address, referring to opposition leaders, after demonstrators ransacked the president’s office and parliament.

Opposition leaders, Voronin said, “have embarked on the path of violent seizure of power” and the authorities “would resolutely defend the state against the leaders of the pogrom.”

Via Reuters.

GENEVA, Sept 20 (Xinhua) — The atom-smasher designed to probe into the origins of the universe was forced to shut down for two months after a helium leak, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said Saturday.

    Preliminary investigation showed that the possible cause of Friday’s helium leak into the tunnel on the Swiss-French border, where the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine was located, is a faulty electrical connection between two magnets.

    ”A full investigation is underway but it is already clear that the sector will have to be warmed up for repairs to take place. This implies a minimum of two months down time,” said CERN.

    ”Strict safety regulations ensured that at no time was there any risk to people,” it said.

    The atom-smashing machine, which began its operation last Wednesday under minus 271.3 degrees Celsius, was built to simulate the conditions of the “Big Bang” that recreated the universe.

Via Xinhua.

MEYRIN, Switzerland (AP) – The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August.

But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists’ wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth?

Or spit out particles that could turn the planet into a hot dead clump?

Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials CERN — some of whom have been working for a generation on the $5.8 billion collider, or LHC.

“Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on,” said project leader Lyn Evans.

David Francis, a physicist on the collider’s huge ATLAS particle detector, smiled when asked whether he worried about black holes and hypothetical killer particles known as strangelets.

“If I thought that this was going to happen, I would be well away from here,” he said.

The collider basically consists of a ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors. The ring, which straddles the French and Swiss border, is buried 330 feet underground.

The machine, which has been called the largest scientific experiment in history, isn’t expected to begin test runs until August, and ramping up to full power could take months. But once it is working, it is expected to produce some startling findings.

Scientists plan to hunt for signs of the invisible “dark matter” and “dark energy” that make up more than 96 percent of the universe, and hope to glimpse the elusive Higgs boson, a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass.

The collider could find evidence of extra dimensions, a boon for superstring theory, which holds that quarks, the particles that make up atoms, are infinitesimal vibrating strings.

The theory could resolve many of physics‘ unanswered questions, but requires about 10 dimensions — far more than the three spatial dimensions our senses experience.

The safety of the collider, which will generate energies seven times higher than its most powerful rival, at Fermilab near Chicago, has been debated for years. The physicist Martin Rees has estimated the chance of an accelerator producing a global catastrophe at one in 50 million — long odds, to be sure, but about the same as winning some lotteries.

By contrast, a CERN team this month issued a report concluding that there is “no conceivable danger” of a cataclysmic event. The report essentially confirmed the findings of a 2003 CERN safety report, and a panel of five prominent scientists not affiliated with CERN, including one Nobel laureate, endorsed its conclusions.

Critics of the LHC filed a lawsuit in a Hawaiian court in March seeking to block its startup, alleging that there was “a significant risk that … operation of the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet.”

One of the plaintiffs, Walter L. Wagner, a physicist and lawyer, said Wednesday CERN’s safety report, released June 20, “has several major flaws,” and his views on the risks of using the particle accelerator had not changed.

On Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department lawyers representing the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation filed a motion to dismiss the case.

The two agencies have contributed $531 million to building the collider, and the NSF has agreed to pay $87 million of its annual operating costs. Hundreds of American scientists will participate in the research.

The lawyers called the plaintiffs’ allegations “extraordinarily speculative,” and said “there is no basis for any conceivable threat” from black holes or other objects the LHC might produce. A hearing on the motion is expected in late July or August.

In rebutting doomsday scenarios, CERN scientists point out that cosmic rays have been bombarding the earth, and triggering collisions similar to those planned for the collider, since the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.

And so far, Earth has survived.

“The LHC is only going to reproduce what nature does every second, what it has been doing for billions of years,” said John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist at CERN.

Critics like Wagner have said the collisions caused by accelerators could be more hazardous than those of cosmic rays.

Both may produce micro black holes, subatomic versions of cosmic black holes — collapsed stars whose gravity fields are so powerful that they can suck in planets and other stars.

But micro black holes produced by cosmic ray collisions would likely be traveling so fast they would pass harmlessly through the earth.

Micro black holes produced by a collider, the skeptics theorize, would move more slowly and might be trapped inside the earth’s gravitational field — and eventually threaten the planet.

Ellis said doomsayers assume that the collider will create micro black holes in the first place, which he called unlikely. And even if they appeared, he said, they would instantly evaporate, as predicted by the British physicist Stephen Hawking.

As for strangelets, CERN scientists point out that they have never been proven to exist. They said that even if these particles formed inside the Collider they would quickly break down.

When the LHC is finally at full power, two beams of protons will race around the huge ring 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. They will travel in two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space.

Their trajectory will be curved by supercooled magnets — to guide the beams around the rings and prevent the packets of protons from cutting through the surrounding magnets like a blowtorch.

The paths of these beams will cross, and a few of the protons in them will collide, at a series of cylindrical detectors along the ring. The two largest detectors are essentially huge digital cameras, each weighing thousands of tons, capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of CDs 12 miles tall. The data will require a high speed global network of computers for analysis.

Wagner and others filed a lawsuit to halt operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state in 1999. The courts dismissed the suit.

The leafy campus of CERN, a short drive from the shores of Lake Geneva, hardly seems like ground zero for doomsday. And locals don’t seem overly concerned. Thousands attended an open house here this spring.

“There is a huge army of scientists who know what they are talking about and are sleeping quite soundly as far as concerns the LHC,” said project leader Evans.

Via CNN.  I’m fine with this whole thing — except for that last part about a “huge army of scientists.”  That’s almost as scary as swarms of shape-shifting micro-robots.

Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday said oil prices are being controlled by ‘invisible hands’ in a ‘fake way’ for political and economic reasons, reported Reuters. Speaking at an OPEC meeting, Ahmadinejad said the price rise is ‘completely fake and imposed’ because it is occurring at a time when ‘the market is full of oil and the growth of consumption is lower than the growth of production.’

And meanwhile, on Wall Street:

Crude oil’s ‘bull run’ may be over following Saudi Arabia’s pledge to increase supplies and the increasing volatility of prices, according to analysts at JP Morgan and Chase. Prices are expected to ‘correct’ over the next few months, the analysts said, noting that spare production capacity may reach 5 million barrels a day by 2010, similar to levels in 2002 to 2003, when oil was $30 a barrel, reported Bloomberg.

Via AMEInfo.  It is interesting to note that both Ahmadinejad and Wall Street analysts see an overheated oil market, but it is hard to imagine two more different orientations on the topic.