China’s green promise
It’s always nice to be one up on your fellow superpowers. During a visit to the UK, Xie Zhenhua of China’s declared that his country will never release as much carbon dioxide per person as the US. Doing so, he said, would be a “disaster for the world”. On average, every Chinese person emits .
Cannabis chaos
Advertisement
Rats given a drug mimicking the effect of cannabis lose their way in a maze, showing confusion similar to the schizophrenic-like symptoms seen in those who abuse the drug. Brainwaves usually linking the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex had become desynchronised, suggesting “re-tuning” brain activity might offer a treatment (Journal of Neuroscience, ).
Satellite’s watery end
The German X-ray telescope ROSAT fell to Earth over the Bay of Bengal on 23 October, say mission controllers at the DLR lab in Cologne. Tracking data supplied by NASA does not reveal if any parts of the craft survived re-entry to reach the ocean, nor if any debris hit land. “We think it fell entirely over water,” says DLR spokesman Andreas Schütz.
Two down, one to go
The last Javan rhinoceros in Vietnam has been , probably by poachers. Two of the three subspecies of are now extinct, and less than 50 remain of the third, all in Java.
Moon museum
NASA has drafted the first guidelines for preserving the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 lunar landing sites. The agency suggests no-fly zones for future travellers -to avoid spraying dust and exhaust on the spacecraft, tools, artefacts and footprints from the first human visits to the moon.