Not if the Meteor Kills Us First!

The conference also heard a gloomy analysis of the way the North Atlantic Ocean is reacting to global warming from Ruth Curry of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Her new study showed that vast amounts of fresh water more than 20,000 cubic kilometres have been added to the northernmost parts of the ocean over the past 40 years because the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting.

According to Dr Curry, the resulting change in the salinity balance of the water threatens to shut down the Ocean Conveyor Belt, which transfers heat from the tropics towards the polar regions through currents such as the Gulf Stream. If that happened, winter temperatures in northern Europe would fall by several degrees.

The possible failure of the North Atlantic conveyor has been discussed for several years and was fictionalised last year in the film The Day After Tomorrow. Dr Curry said the accumulation of freshwater in the upper ocean layers since the 1990s meant that the risk should be taken seriously. (Financial Times)

A Burglar Alarm for a House with no Locks

On Tuesday, Bill Gates and other Microsoft executives at the RSA Conference in San Francisco outlined several moves to beef up Windows' security, including giving away anti-spyware software for personal and home use, assembling a consumer-oriented anti-virus service, and releasing a beta of an updated Internet Explorer -- dubbed IE 7.0 -- to Windows XP users by the middle of 2005. (Information Week)

Mission Accomplished!

New allegations of prisoner abuse by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have been revealed in Army documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The documents show photographs of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan posing with hooded and bound detainees during mock executions. The photos were taken at a base in southern Afghanistan (Fire Base Tycze) between December 2003 and February 2004. Some members of the infantry regiment said they took the pictures for fun and destroyed some of them after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq to avoid another public outrage. (Voice of America)