Schwarzenegger dedicates Livermore laser
LIVERMORE, Calif., May 29 (UPI) -- California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger Friday dedicated the world's largest laser system in Livermore, calling it a gateway to new energy sources.
The sprawling National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco has been 12 years in the making and is designed to further research into fusion energy.
"NIF has the potential to revolutionize our energy system -- teaching us a new way to harness the energy of the sun to power our cars and homes," Schwarzenegger said in a written statement.
"California was the home of the first working laser, so it is no surprise that the Golden State has now produced the world's largest and most powerful one."
The NIF will house 192 lasers that together will produce temperatures and pressures on par with the sun when the beams are focused on a small hydrogen-filled target.
The 10-story center will also carry out advanced astrophysics research and be used to test the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons without having to actually detonate a bomb.
The governor's office said the NIF would support around 1,000 jobs and will have generated more than $2 billion in spending in California by next year.
Global warming accounts for 300,000 deaths
LONDON, May 29 (UPI) -- Climate change today accounts for more than 300,000 deaths throughout the world each year, officials of humanitarian group in Switzerland said.
Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan, president of the Global Humanitarian Forum, released the report on the human impact of climate change in London Friday. Increasingly severe heat waves, storms, floods and forest fires will cause greater hunger, disease and poverty, the report said, and by 2030 will bring the annual death toll from climate change to half a million people a year.
The report, the first comprehensive study of the effects of climate chance on people, said that climate change already seeriously affects 325 million people every year, a number that may double in 20 years.
The Global Humanitarian Forum commissioned Dalberg Global Development Advisers to develop the report by collating all relevant information and current statistics relating to the human impact of climate change.
The populations most gravely at risk are over half a billion people in some of the poorest areas that are also highly prone to climate change -- in particular, the semi-arid dry land belt countries from the Sahara to the Middle East and Central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, South and South East Asia, and small island developing states.
"Climate change is a silent human crisis," Annan said in a statement.
"Already today, it causes suffering to hundreds of millions of people most of whom are not even aware that they are victims of climate change."
Annan said he was alarmed by the weak leadership and widespread ignorance about global warming.
"If leaders cannot assume responsibility they will fail humanity," Annan said. "Agreement is in the interests of every human being."
Malaria proves resistant in Cambodia
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, May 29 (UPI) -- Malaria's resistance to treatment in western Cambodia could foretell a global health crisis, a British researcher said.
Malaria in western Cambodia is proving resistant to the artemesinin family of drugs, until now the world's most effective drugs for treating the illness, said Nick Day, director of the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit.
In recent trials, it took up to five days to clear patients' blood of malaria parasites when the drugs previously worked in two or three days, Day said.
While Cambodia long has been a laboratory for malaria research, about half the world's population would be at risk if the resistance to artemesinin drugs grows, Day said. Malaria kills about 1 million people a year now.
In 2006, the World Health Organization warned of a possibility the malaria parasite could become resistant to artemesinin drugs, the BBC reported Friday.
China has first domestic H1N1 infection
GUANGZHOU, China, May 29 (UPI) -- A Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention official said Friday his country has confirmed its first mainland case of domestic infection of swine flu.
CDC chief epidemiologist Zeng Guang said the confirmed domestic infection case in China's Guangdong Province has resulted in a call for increased control and prevention efforts regarding the spread of the potentially deadly influenza strain.
Zeng told China's official state-run Xinhua news agency if the threat of a swine flu outbreak increases, such preventative measures could include closing entertainment venues and schools in China.
But the CDC official insisted the domestic infection case involving a 24-year-old female should not prompt panic among the general public. Zeng said China has made preparations to help prevent and treat swine flu.
Xinhua said the woman at the center of the new H1N1 case is thought to have contracted the influenza strain from a 28-year-old Chinese-American man from New York. Both individuals, who were not identified, are said to be in stable condition after being confirmed as H1N1 patients.
