Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Robert Pattinson 'A Really Cool Guy,' Reese Witherspoon Says

Don't miss 'MTV First: This Means War' at 7:56 p.m. ET Tuesday on MTV, followed by an in-depth chat on MTV.com.
By Kara Warner, with reporting by Josh Horowitz


Reese Witherspoon
Photo: MTV News

In addition to her successes as an actress and her respectable reputation, Reese Witherspoon is the envy of millions of Twilighters after working alongside superstar heartthrob Robert Pattinson in not one, but two films — not to mention the fact that she's kissed him too.

When MTV News caught up with Witherspoon recently as part of "MTV First: This Means War," we asked her the first thing that comes to mind when she thinks of her "Water for Elephants" and "Vanity Fair" co-star.

"I would say [he is] the hardest-working person I've ever worked with, honestly," she said. "[He's] professional, hard-working, so appreciative, more grateful than I've ever seen anyone for where he is in life."

Pattinson dished details on how he prepped for his shirtless scene! Kristen Stewart got super embarrassed when looking back at her first MTV interview! Take a look back at the classic "MTV First: Breaking Dawn."

Given the fact that Witherspoon has been in the business for decades and experienced every facet of being famous, we asked her to weigh in on the current fan frenzy that surrounds Pattinson wherever he goes and how it may or may not affect a person.

"I've never experienced what he has — going to premieres and there's just millions of people waiting for him to touch them," she said. "I think it must be strange, but I don't even know how to process what he deals with and Kristen [Stewart] deals with. I don't know."

Justin Bieber revealed the secrets behind his "Mistletoe" music video and why his fans are perfect just the way they are in "MTV First: Justin Bieber."

The Oscar-winning actress said Pattinson handles his fame very well, despite the sometimes-chaotic circumstances. "[He's]a really cool guy," she said.

Don't miss our exclusive sit-down with Witherspoon during Tuesday's "MTV First: Reese Witherspoon." Tune in to MTV at 7:56 p.m. ET, when the actress will premiere a previously unseen clip from her upcoming film "This Means War," followed by an in-depth interview on MTV.com.

Before "MTV First: This Means War" hits MTV on Tuesday at 7:56 p.m. ET, check out Reese's first-ever, totally adorable MTV interview, when she opened up in 1991 at the age of 14 about what drew her to Hollywood. And make sure to stick with Reese's chat when it moves to MTV.com after an exclusive "This Means War" clip premieres Tuesday on MTV!

Related Photos

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1678093/reese-witherspoon-robert-pattinson.jhtml

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Monday, January 30, 2012

Top U.S. spies to face grilling on Taliban, Iran talks (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? The possible release of detained Taliban leaders is likely to join Iran's nuclear ambitions at the top of a busy agenda when the top seven American intelligence chiefs testify before the Congress this week.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper -- as well as the heads of the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Counterterrorism Center and State and Homeland Security department intelligence units -- will be grilled on "worldwide threats" at a pair of open hearings.

The hearings -- before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday and its House of Representatives counterpart on Thursday -- are an annual ritual. But they offer a rare opportunity for legislators publicly to raise sensitive national security topics that are usually discussed only in secret briefings.

Lawmakers have expressed concern about the Obama administration's efforts to engage in peace talks with the Afghan Taliban, including consideration of the release of five Taliban leaders incarcerated at Guantanamo as a "confidence building" gesture, sources close to the committee said.

Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, told Reuters at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week that he and the panel's Democratic chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, had twice written to the Obama administration "raising strong objections" to the proposed move, which purportedly would involve the release of the Taliban prisoners into Afghan government custody.

Chambliss said he and Feinstein first wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "We've gotten a response" from Clinton, he said, declining to discuss the classified contents of her letter.

But he hinted that Clinton's response did not mollify them, adding that he and Feinstein then wrote a second letter to President Barack Obama.

Chambliss said there was "every reason to believe" some of the five Taliban detainees were involved in the death of CIA officer Johnny Micheal Spann during an uprising by Taliban prisoners at a fortress outside the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif in November 2001.

"I think it's bad policy. We don't negotiate with terrorists. We never have," Chambliss said, calling the detainees "five of the meanest, nastiest killers in the world."

Two detainees slated for possible release, former senior Taliban army commanders Mohammed Fazl and Noorullah Noori, were held at the historic Qala-i-Jangi fortress outside Mazar-i-Sharif when the prison revolt erupted in 2001.

But a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, insisted earlier this month that he knew of no evidence that they were involved in the death of Spann, who was surrounded and killed by rioting prisoners.

CONGRESS NOT NOTIFIED

Chambliss said Obama had not yet notified Congress of the administration's plan to transfer the prisoners from Guantanamo, a step which is required by a law which the president signed on December 31.

"It's the president's call. There's an ongoing conversation about it, let me say that," said Chambliss. To date, all discussions the Administration has had with Congress on the prisoner transfer issue have taken place behind closed doors.

Iran's nuclear progress and threats to Persian Gulf shipping and U.S. interests are almost certain to be key topics of discussion, with U.S. intelligence officials expected to offer a less alarming take on Iranian activity than those voiced by some conservative and Israeli analysts.

U.S. officials have told Reuters they believe that Iran's leaders have not yet made a decision to build nuclear weapons, an assessment which the U.S. intelligence community has held since it published extracts of a controversial National Intelligence Estimate on the issue in 2007.

U.S. officials say the reason Iranian leaders have not made a decision to build a bomb is because they are still weighing the costs and benefits of doing so.

But while a lot of what Iran is doing in its nuclear program has civilian applications, U.S. officials also believe that Tehran is keeping its options open regarding the building of a bomb -- adding to the air of ambiguity surrounding Iran's intentions and dealings with the U.S. and the outside world.

Other subjects which officials said might come up during this week's hearings are the stability of North Korea's regime and the future of its nuclear program after the death last month of Kim Jong-il and his replacement by his son Kim Jong-un; the recent discovery by authorities in Thailand of possible stockpiling of bomb-making materials by an individual with alleged links to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah; and drug-related violence and instability in Mexico.

The activities of homegrown U.S. militants could also be raised at the hearings. The FBI and other domestic law enforcement agencies have been particularly concerned about "lone wolf" militants who become radicalized via the internet and plot violence without catching the attention of authorities.

"We have to constantly be vigilant against a range of threats. Terrorism didn't begin with (Osama) bin Laden, it's not over with his death. There are other al Qaeda, al Qaeda-related groups, and we have the growth of homegrown extremists," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Monday.

Last week in Baltimore, a man pleaded guilty to attempting to bomb a military recruiting center. Investigators said he had no connection to international militants but had been trying unsuccessfully to recruit others to join his plot until he was trapped by authorities in a "sting" operation.

Earlier in January, a home-grown militant in Tampa was arrested in connection with a plot to car-bomb nightclubs and then attack crowds of onlookers with guns or a suicide vest.

(Reporting By Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel; additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/iran/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120130/ts_nm/us_usa_congress_threats

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Astronomers solve mystery of vanishing electrons in Earth's outer radiation belt

ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2012) ? UCLA researchers have explained the puzzling disappearing act of energetic electrons in Earth's outer radiation belt, using data collected from a fleet of orbiting spacecraft.

In a paper published Jan. 29 in the advance online edition of the journal Nature Physics, the team shows that the missing electrons are swept away from the planet by a tide of solar wind particles during periods of heightened solar activity.

"This is an important milestone in understanding Earth's space environment," said lead study author Drew Turner, an assistant researcher in the UCLA Department of Earth and Space Sciences and a member of UCLA's Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP). "We are one step closer towards understanding and predicting space weather phenomena."

During powerful solar events such as coronal mass ejections, parts of the magnetized outer layers of sun's atmosphere crash onto Earth's magnetic field, triggering geomagnetic storms capable of damaging the electronics of orbiting spacecraft. These cosmic squalls have a peculiar effect on Earth's outer radiation belt, a doughnut-shaped region of space filled with electrons so energetic that they move at nearly the speed of light.

"During the onset of a geomagnetic storm, nearly all the electrons trapped within the radiation belt vanish, only to come back with a vengeance a few hours later," said Vassilis Angelopoulos, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences and IGPP researcher.

The missing electrons surprised scientists when the trend was first measured in the 1960s by instruments onboard the earliest spacecraft sent into orbit, said study co-author Yuri Shprits, a research geophysicist with the IGPP and the departments of Earth and space sciences, and atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

"It's a puzzling effect," he said. "Oceans on Earth do not suddenly lose most of their water, yet radiation belts filled with electrons can be rapidly depopulated."

Even stranger, the electrons go missing during the peak of a geomagnetic storm, a time when one might expect the radiation belt to be filled with energetic particles because of the extreme bombardment by the solar wind.

Where do the electrons go? This question has remained unresolved since the early 1960s. Some believed the electrons were lost to Earth's atmosphere, while others hypothesized that the electrons were not permanently lost at all but merely temporarily drained of energy so that they appeared absent.

"Our study in 2006 suggested that electrons may be, in fact, lost to the interplanetary medium and decelerated by moving outwards," Shprits said. "However, until recently, there was no definitive proof for this theory."

To resolve the mystery, Turner and his team used data from three networks of orbiting spacecraft positioned at different distances from Earth to catch the escaping electrons in the act. The data show that while a small amount of the missing energetic electrons did fall into the atmosphere, the vast majority were pushed away from the planet, stripped away from the radiation belt by the onslaught of solar wind particles during the heightened solar activity that generated the magnetic storm itself.

A greater understanding of Earth's radiation belts is vital for protecting the satellites we rely on for global positioning, communications and weather monitoring, Turner said. Earth's outer radiation belt is a harsh radiation environment for spacecraft and astronauts; the high-energy electrons can penetrate a spacecraft's shielding and wreak havoc on its delicate electronics. Geomagnetic storms triggered when the oncoming particles smash into Earth's magnetosphere can cause partial or total spacecraft failure.

"While most satellites are designed with some level of radiation protection in mind, spacecraft engineers must rely on approximations and statistics because they lack the data needed to model and predict the behavior of high-energy electrons in the outer radiation belt," Turner said.

During the 2003 "Halloween Storm," more than 30 satellites reported malfunctions, and one was a total loss, said Angelopoulos, a co-author of the current research. As the solar maximum approaches in 2013, marking the sun's peak activity over a roughly 11-year cycle, geomagnetic storms may occur as often as several times per month.

"High-energy electrons can cut down the lifetime of a spacecraft significantly," Turner said. "Satellites that spend a prolonged period within the active radiation belt might stop functioning years early."

While a mechanized spacecraft might include multiple redundant circuits to reduce the risk of total failure during a solar event, human explorers in orbit do not have the same luxury. High-energy electrons can punch through astronauts' spacesuits and pose serious health risks, Turner said.

"As a society, we've become incredibly dependent on space-based technology," he said. "Understanding this population of energetic electrons and their extreme variations will help create more accurate models to predict the effect of geomagnetic storms on the radiation belts."

Key observational data used in this study was collected by a network of NASA spacecraft known as THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms); Angelopoulos is the principal investigator of the THEMIS mission. Additional information was obtained from two groups of weather satellites called POES (Polar Operational Environmental Satellite) and GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite).

A new collaboration between UCLA and Russia's Moscow State University promises to paint an even clearer picture of these vanishing electrons. Slated for launch in the spring of 2012, the Lomonosov spacecraft will fly in low Earth orbit to measure highly energetic particles with unprecedented accuracy, said Shprits, the principal investigator of the project. Several key instruments for the mission are being developed and assembled at UCLA.

Earth's radiation belts were discovered in 1958 by Explorer I, the first U.S. satellite that traveled to space.

"What we are studying was the first discovery of the space age," Shprits said. "People realized that launches of spacecraft didn't only make the news, they could also make scientific discoveries that were completely unexpected."

This project received federal funding from NASA and the National Science Foundation. Other co-authors include Michael Hartinger, a UCLA graduate student in Earth and space sciences.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles. The original article was written by Kim DeRose.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Drew L. Turner, Yuri Shprits, Michael Hartinger, Vassilis Angelopoulos. Explaining sudden losses of outer radiation belt electrons during geomagnetic storms. Nature Physics, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nphys2185

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120129150958.htm

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