This gets more and more depressing. I have to post of more wolves to be killed.
Finland,USA and now Norway ~legal~ killing off wolves that can be added to by French and Spanish illegal killings of wolves. Lucky all barring the USA are in the EU club and this at a time that CITES is looking at the killing off and need to protect species....it selects
Outrage as Norway plans to cull majority of its wolf population
Animal rights groups have strongly criticised a plan that will allow hunters in Norway to shoot 47 of an estimated 68 wolves living in the wilderness.
The Norwegian government justified this year’s planned cull – the biggest in more than a century – on the basis that the predators pose a threat to sheep.
Environmental groups dispute this claim, saying the real damage is minimal and the proposed response is disproportionate.
Nina Jensen, chief executive of WWF in Norway, said on Twitter: “This is an outright mass slaughter. Something like we have not seen in almost 100 years.”
“This decision must be stopped,” said Silje Ask Lundberg, chair of Friends of the Earth Norway, the Guardian reported. “We are calling on the minister of environment to stop the butchering. Today, Norway should be ashamed.”
“Shooting 70% of the wolf population is not worthy of a nation claiming to be championing environmental causes. People all over the country, and outside its borders, are now reacting,” Jensen said.
It appears there’s a huge appetite for hunting in the Scandinavian country. Last year, more than 11,000 hunters applied for licences to shoot 16 wolves, a ratio of more than 700 applicants to each licence.
Under the proposals, 24 wolves will be shot within the region of the country designated for wolf habitat, while another 13 will be shot in neighbouring regions and a further 10 in other areas of the country.
Animal rights activists and others have reacted angrily to Norway’s wolf cull plan.
BBC NEWS http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37473617 Image copyrightNASAImage captionEuropa is one of the best search targets for extra-terrestrial life in the Solar System
Further evidence has been obtained to show that Jupiter's icy moon Europa throws jets of water out into space.
Scientists first reported the behaviour in 2013 using the Hubble telescope, but have now made a follow-up sighting.
It is significant because Europa, with its huge subsurface ocean of liquid water, is one of the most likely places to find microbial life beyond Earth.
Flying through the jets with an instrumented spacecraft would be an effective way to test the possibility.
One could even attempt to capture a sample of ejected material and bring it back to Earth for more detailed biological analysis.
The alternative - of trying to land on the moon and drill through perhaps tens of kilometres of ice to examine the ocean's water - would be immensely challenging.
Hubble made its latest identification by studying Europa as it passed in front of Jupiter.
The telescope looked in ultraviolet wavelengths to see if the giant planet's light was in any way being absorbed by material emanating from the moon's surface.
Ten times Hubble looked and on three of those occasions it spied what appeared to be "dark fingers" extending from the edge of Europa.
Image copyrightNASA/ESA/W. SPARKS (STSCI)/USGSImage captionThis composite image shows suspected plumes of water vapour erupting at the 7 o’clock position
William Sparks, the lead astronomer on the study, said he could think of no natural phenomenon other than water plumes that might produce such protuberances.
"We're not aware of any instrumental artefacts that could cause these features; they are statistically significant. But we remain cautious because we are working at difficult wavelengths for Hubble," he told reporters.
"We do not claim to have proven the existence of plumes, but rather to have contributed evidence that such activity may be present."
Nonetheless, the location for the putative jets looks very similar to the region where Hubble earlier this decade detected an excess of oxygen and hydrogen - the component parts of water.
That certainly made for an intriguing case, said Hubble's senior project scientist, Jennifer Wiseman.
"The [earlier work] used spectroscopy, so they really could discern evidence of dissociated water molecules," she commented.
"The Sparks team discovered evidence of plume activity through imaging - visually. So these are different approaches but they complement one another, and they appear to be independent evidence of plume activity on Europa."
The suggestion is that the jets reach several hundred kilometres in height before then falling back on to Europa. The calculation based on the 2013-reported work estimated a volume of water equivalent to an Olympic swimming pool could be being spewed into space about every eight minutes.
What is clear though is that any activity is sporadic, and scientists will need to understand why that should be so.
Image copyrightNASAImage captionIntricate patterns of fractures can be seen on the icy surface of Europa
Water jets have already been seen up close at Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn. These emanate from a series of fissures at its south pole.
The Cassini spacecraft, in orbit currently at Saturn, has even dived through the emissions to "taste" some of their chemistry. But the probe's instrumentation is not designed to detect the presence or activity of microbes. That would require a mission dedicated to the task.
The US space agency (Nasa) has just sent a satellite to Jupiter called Juno, but again this has no life-detection equipment onboard and, in any case, is not going anywhere near Europa in the course of its work.
Both Nasa and the European space agency do however have future missions in the planning stage that will visit Europa to make repeated flybys, and the determination that the moon has water jets will surely factor into the organisations' thinking.
Curt Niebur, who works on the American concept, said the spacecraft would have instruments that could "aggressively investigate" any plumes, but he also stressed that obtaining convincing proof that microbes lived at Europa was far from easy.
"The Europa flyby mission which will launch in the 2020s is not a life-finding mission," he explained. "That mission is focused on assessing the habitability of Europa.
"And we do it in this way for a very simple reason: we know how to measure habitability; we have a lot of experience at doing that; we have a lot of instruments that are very robust and good at doing that. When it comes to finding life, we don't have as much experience. And we actually have an ongoing and vigorous debate in the scientific community as to the best way of going about detecting life on a mission such as this."
What was not in doubt, said Paul Hertz, the director of the astrophysics at Nasa, was Europa's profile as a key target in the search for extra-terrestrial life: "On Earth, life is found wherever there is energy, water and nutrients. So we have a special interest in any place that might posses those characteristics. And Europa might be such a place."
Well it seems that the presence of "water" is not going to prove to be as rare as some scientists once thought. Let's wait and see what else NASA has to tell us...
Water found on PLUTO hours before NASA makes Europa announcement
PLUTO has thousands of gallons of LIQUID WATER hidden under the surface, scientists have claimed.
The exciting revelation comes just hours before NASA reveals details about Jupiter’s moon Europa – with many believing the announcement will also be about the discovery of subsurface water.
Experts have suspected Pluto has had a subsurface ocean since the New Horizon spacecraft flew past it last year.
Now experts at Brown University have been analysing the images sent by NASA’s spaceship, and concluded there is likely more than 100 kilometres of liquid water under Pluto’s surface.
Brandon Johnson, an assistant professor in Brown University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, said: "Thermal models of Pluto's interior and tectonic evidence found on the surface suggest that an ocean may exist, but it's not easy to infer its size or anything else about it.
"We've been able to put some constraints on its thickness and get some clues about composition.”
The team, led by Mr Johnson, mainly focussed their research on the Sputnik Planum – a 900 kilometre stretch that makes up the western lobe of Pluto’s famous ‘heart’.
It is believed the Planum was caused by a giant meteor crashing into the dwarf planet.
GETTY
Pluto is not much bigger than Earth's moon
However, as the team states, an impact would usually mean the area which had been hit would have a negative mass – essentially void of any content.
Mr Johnson said: "An impact crater is basically a hole in the ground. You're taking a bunch of material and blasting it out, so you expect it to have negative mass anomaly, but that's not what we see with Sputnik Planum.”
But what the researchers has found is that the crater has a positive mass, which they believe is a result of the asteroid hitting Pluto, which caused the subsurface ocean to even out across the dwarf planet.
Mr Johnson: "We wanted to run computer models of the impact to see if this is something that would actually happen.
“What we found is that the production of a positive mass anomaly is actually quite sensitive to how thick the ocean layer is.
"It's also sensitive to how salty the ocean is, because the salt content affects the density of the water.
"What this tells us is that if Sputnik Planum is indeed a positive mass anomaly – and it appears as though it is – this ocean layer of at least 100 kilometres has to be there.
"It's pretty amazing to me that you have this body so far out in the solar system that still may have liquid water."
