Scientists have confirmed today that Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, has a watery ocean

Earth is not the only orb with oceans. In 2005 Cassini, an American spacecraft, saw plumes of water shooting into space from cracks in the icy surface of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons (see picture).

Courtesy NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Enceladus is the sixth-largest of the moons of Saturn, with a mean radius of 252 km (156 miles). In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft spotted what appeared to be plumes of water shooting into space from cracks in the icy surface of Enceladus. The only reasonable explanation would be that the moon has an ocean of liquid water under the ice. Now, a team led by Luciano Iess of theUniversity of Rome confirmed that the ocean exists, and also showed that, like Earth’s, it doesn’t cover the entire surface.

But how could a salty liquid ocean exist, under ice, in Saturn’s area – so far away from the Sun? The likely cause is gravity: as the moon moves around Saturn, tidal forces from the planet and the other moons flex and bend the core of the planet, creating friction – therefore heat. This melts the ice, maintaining a liquid ocean.

Gravitational measurements made by the Cassini spacecraft revealed that a 10km-deep ocean of water, larger than Lake Superior, lurks beneath the icy surface of Enceladus at the moon’s south pole; the liquid ocean reduces the volume of the southern hemisphere, so judging by the larger volume of the northern hemisphere, it’s likely that the ocean can only be found in the southern areas.

David Stevenson, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said the body of water was so large it “may extend halfway or more towards the equator in every direction. It might even extend all the way to the north.”

So what does this mean? Is it far fetched to think that Enceladus could host life? No, not really. There are clear indications that it is habitable – the temperature is right, you get liquid water, and you get some important chemical elements for life, so Enceladus might be the perfect place to look for life (probably microscopic life).

“The question is what conditions do you need to form life and, of course, we don’t know what temperature the ocean is today, nor do we know what it was back in the geological past. But it’s conceivable that it was warm enough, with circulation of water coming from the silicate core as well, to allow life to form even if today that ocean is maintained by antifreeze and is slightly below the freezing point,” said Jonathan Lunine, a member of the team at Cornell University in New York. The antifreeze in question is salt, which reduces the temperature at which water freezes.

Enceladus is not the only moon which sports a liquid water the ice: we’ve written several articles about Europa, a moon of Saturn, and how promising it is. Europa has a more extensive, global ocean under the surface – it is regarded by many as the most likely place to host life in our solar system (bar Earth). But Enceladus also has researchers rubbing their hands due to its vapour plumesfrom the south pole which also contain organic molecules – possible, but not clear signs of life.

To me, the next step here is to establish permanent satellites around Europa and Enceladus, and gather as much geological information as possible, and in time (why not?) land a rover there. The main problem, is, of course, the funding.

Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at Nasa’s Ames Research Centre in California, said:

“There are now several lines of evidence – the geysers, the plume chemistry, and now gravity – that indicate a substantial body of liquid water. For astrobiology this is confirmation of what we expected and is good news. My one view is that Enceladus should be the priority.”

An artist’s impression of the interior of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Credits: Nasa/JPL-Caltech.

Dr Iess describes, in a paper in Science, how his team mapped Enceladus’s gravity by tracking Cassini’s orbit. The moon’s southern hemisphere is less massive than it would be were there no ocean, but its northern hemisphere is not. So the ocean covers only the southern part of the moon.

Reference: Underground Ocean Makes This Saturn Moon a Top Bet for Extraterrestrial Life
                    Scientists have confirmed today that Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, has a watery ocean

DOLLY PARTON’S IMAGINATION LIBRARY

Since the mid-1980s, Parton has supported many charitable efforts, particularly in the area of literacy, primarily through her Dollywood Foundation.

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library

Her literacy program, Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, a part of the Dollywood Foundation, mails one book per month to each enrolled child from the time of their birth until they enter kindergarten. Currently over 1600 local communities provide the Imagination Library to almost 700,000 children each and every month across the U.S., Canada, the UK, and Australia.The program distributes more than 8.3 million free books to children annually.

In 2006, Parton published a cookbook, Dolly's Dixie Fixin's: Love, Laughter and Lots of Good Food.

The Dollywood Foundation, funded from Parton's net profits, which has been noted for bringing jobs and tax revenues to a previously depressed region. Parton has also worked to raise money on behalf of several other causes, including the American Red Cross and a number of HIV/AIDS-related charities.

In December 2006, Parton pledged $500,000 toward a proposed $90-million hospital and cancer center to be constructed in Sevierville in the name of Dr. Robert F. Thomas, the physician who delivered her. She announced a benefit concert to raise additional funds for the project. The concert played to about 8,000 people. That same year, she andEmmylou Harris allowed their music to be used in a PETA ad campaign that encouraged pet owners to keep their dogs indoors rather than chained outside. In May 2009, Parton gave the commencement address at the University of Tennessee. Her speech was about her life lessons, and she encouraged the graduates to never stop dreaming.

Source:

DOLLY PARTON’S IMAGINATION LIBRARY

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library in Alaska

American Officer Writes a Letter to His Son on Hitler's Personal Stationery

Richard Helms was a US Navy officer during World War II and later the Director of the CIA. At the end of the war in 1945, he wrote a letter to his young son on Hitler's personal stationery:

“Dear Dennis,” reads the letter from Helms, then a spy stationed in Germany. “The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe – three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins. He had a thirst for power, a low opinion of man as an individual, and a fear of intellectual honesty. He was a force for evil in the world. His passing, his defeat – a boon for mankind. But thousands died that it might be so.  The price for ridding society of bad is always high.  Love, Daddy."

Dennis Helms found the letter among the family papers in 2002. He donated it to the CIA Museum, where it is now on display.

The letter was among a trove of memorabilia that Dennis sent to the museum 66 years later, in May 2011, to form part of an exhibit that pays tribute to the CIA’s roots in a wartime agency called the Office of Strategic Services, or the OSS.

The OSS wing of the CIA’s museum, which opened in 2011, traces the short history of an organization that was founded in 1942 to aid resistance fighters and run spies behind enemy lines before morphing into the CIA four years later. The exhibit includes counterfeit German postage stamps created by the OSS with a skull superimposed on Hitler's image, the desk of OSS director William "Wild Bill" Donovan, and all manner of secret weapons and messaging systems.

Among the exhibits is a tribute to Virginia Hall, an OSS agent who posed as a French farmhand as she counted German military units prior to D-Day. Hall, who had a wooden leg, organized sabotage and trained Resistance fighters. The Gestapo knew her as the “limping lady,” and called her the most dangerous of all Allied spies. She later became one of the CIA’s first female officers.

The Helms memorabilia in the museum also includes a piece of Hitler’s personal china, snatched from the Fuehrer’s Berlin chancellery, as well as other photos and correspondence. But the letter on Hitler's stationery, said curator Toni Hiley, is “truly a treasure in our collection."

Dennis Helms, now 71 and a lawyer in New Jersey, said he found the letter when he was a teenager in the late 1950s, while he was living with his parents in Virginia.

"My mother was an avid scrapbook keeper," said Helms. "And I was prowling through one of the scrapbooks and I found this. I asked about it. (I thought it) was really cool. But I had no idea there'd be so much interest in it later on."

Helms said the letter was very out of character for his dad, who, like many veterans of World War II, spoke little about his experiences during the war. The elder Helms, according to his son, was also guarded in general. He was CIA director from 1966 to 1973, during the Vietnam era, and was a controversial figure in American life. In 1977, he pleaded no contest to failing to testify fully to Congress about the CIA’s efforts to oust Chilean president Salvador Allende.

"He was very unguarded in this (letter),” said the younger Helms. “He actually gave his opinion of things. Later on, after years in the agency, everything was based on fact. He never varied from that ... That's what makes this so unusual to me."

There are a few questions about the circumstances under which the letter was written. Richard Helms, who died in 2002 at age 89, can’t answer them. The letter is dated “V-E day” – Victory in Europe day, which was May 8, 1945 – but the stationery says Obersalzberg, a town in the Bavarian Alps that was the site of Hitler’s mountaintop retreat, the Eagle’s Nest. Helms was among the first intelligence officers to visit the Eagle’s Nest, but according to his memoir he was in France on V-E day.

Reference:

How a letter on Hitler’s stationery, written to a boy in Jersey, reached the CIA
The price for ridding society of bad is always high

Lotto Rules Probe Key To Payoff In Virginia

Representatives of an Australian syndicate came to Virginia lottery headquarters to claim their $27 million jackpot, but lottery officials told them they might not be paid.

The International Lotto Fund, which includes more than 2,500 investors from Australia, confirmed that it held the winning ticket from the Feb. 15 Lotto drawing, ending a two-week mystery that has attracted national attention.

The fund also confirmed that it used another Australian firm to work out the logistics of buying the millions of lottery tickets and hired a Richmond accounting firm as a courier to purchase them.

Lottery officials say it is the first time a foriegn corporation has tried to corner an American lottery, and the first time any corporation has claimed a prize in Virginia.

The Lotto Fund reportedly spent about $5 million on lottery tickets. Its winning ticket would entitle it to $1 million a year for the next 20 years.

The Australians also claim to have a substantial number of smaller winners from the same lottery drawing-tickets with three to five correct numbers. Lottery  Director Kenneth Thorson said the payoff for those could exceed $500,000.

But before it pays anything, the lottery and the  attorney general`s office will investigate whether the syndicate broke lottery regulations, Thorson said. They will decide in a few days whether the Australians will be paid.

The investigation will be separate from other probes into the bulk sales launched by Virginia State Police, the FBI and Australian authorities.

Thorson suggested that if the ticket was declared invalid, the lottery could refund the Australians as little as $1, the cost of a ticket. No winning ticket in Virginia has ever been declared invalid.

Two representatives of the Australian firms, Joseph Franck and Robert Hans Roos, and two Richmond attorneys showed up at lottery headquarters Thursday to meet with lottery officials and representatives of the attorney general.

Stefan Mandel, a reputed numbers wiz who once cornered a $1.1 million Australian lottery and who Thorson said was affiliated with the syndicate, could not be reached for comment. An aide from Mandel`s Melbourne office, who would not give her name, said, ``The meeting went very well. We`re looking forward to payment.``

At a press conference, Thorson described the meeting as ``quite cordial.`` He said the men provided information about how they had tried to buy enough tickets to cover all 7.1 million possible six-number Lotto combinations. But it was still unclear, he said, whether the purchase of the winning ticket violated any lottery rules.

``The regulations have always been applied to the letter`` of the law, Thorson said. ``And the question here is what . . . does that letter require. ``It is just as likely that we will honor the claim as that we won`t,``

he said. ``The lottery is not reneging on anything. If the person has a valid ticket they get the prize.``

The lottery requires that tickets be bought at a licensed location. But the Australian firm, using cashiers` checks, paid for $2.4 million worth of lottery tickets at the Farm Fresh supermarket chain`s central headquarters in Norfolk, which Thorson said was not licensed to sell tickets.

The winning ticket was picked up at one of the chain`s Chesapeake stores, which was licensed to sell the ticket.

Thorson acknowledged the lottery was uncertain where the winning ticket itself was paid for and might never determine the location. The lottery knows some tickets were paid for at the headquarters. In other instances, tickets were purchased at the stores, he said.

One gambling law expert said Friday that the Australians were likely to receive the prize money, even if rules were broken when the group bought the ticket.

``If they`ve got a winning ticket, I`m assuming they`re going to get the money,`` said I. Nelson Rose, a professor at Whittier College School of Law in Los Angeles.

Rose said if the ticket holders purchased the ticket and followed what they thought were proper procedures, it would be difficult for the Virginia Lottery to invalidate the ticket.

Reference:

Virginia Lottery

Lotteries Virginia

Publications & Products: Homicide Trends In The United States

Product Type	Title (and Summary)	Date	Product Number
	Homicide in the U.S. Known to Law Enforcement, 2011 Presents data on homicide trends from 1992 to 2011. Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series	12/30/2013	NCJ 243035
	Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008 Presents findings from data on homicides that occurred in the United States from 1980 through 2008. It also includes overall homicide rates for 2009 and 2010. Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series	11/16/2011	NCJ 236018
	Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008 HOMICIDES FALL TO LOWEST RATE IN FOUR DECADES Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series	11/16/2011	NCJ 236018
	Homicide Trends in the United States This report contains a series of charts that describe homicide patterns and trends in the United States since 1976. Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series	7/1/2007
	Homicide Trends in the United States: 2002 Update Outlines the primary findings from the updated section of the BJS website about homicide patterns and trends since 1976. Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series	11/1/2004	NCJ 204885
	Homicide Trends in the United States: 2000 Update This BJS Crime Data Brief outlines the primary findings from the updated section of the BJS website about homicide patterns and trends since 1976. Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series	1/1/2003	NCJ 197471
	Homicide Trends in the United States: 1998 Update This BJS Crime Data Brief outlines the primary findings of and new additions to the section of the BJS website about homicide patterns and trends since 1976. Part of the Homicide Trends in the United States Series