Vermont poised to elect America's first socialist senator

Amid the furious debate over Iraq and the speculation that George Bush may be a lame duck after next Tuesday's mid-term elections, an extraordinary political milestone is approaching: a cantankerous 65-year-old called Bernie looks set to become the first socialist senator in US history.

Bernie Sanders is so far ahead in the contest for Vermont's vacant seat for the US Senate that it seems only sudden illness or accident could derail his rendezvous with destiny, after eight terms as the state's only congressman. His success flies in the face of all the conventional wisdom about American politics.

He is an unapologetic socialist and proud of it. Even his admirers admit that he lacks social skills, and he tends to speak in tirades. Yet that has not stopped him winning eight consecutive elections to the US House of Representatives.

"Twenty years ago when people here thought about socialism they were thinking about the Soviet Union, about Albania," Mr Sanders told the Guardian in a telephone interview from the campaign trail. "Now they think about Scandinavia. In Vermont people understand I'm talking about democratic socialism."

Democratic socialism, however, has hardly proved to be a vote-winning formula in a country where even the word "liberal" is generally treated as an insult. Until now the best showing in a Senate race by a socialist of any stripe was in 1930 by Emil Seidel, who won 6% of the vote.

John McLaughry, the head of a free-market Vermont thinktank, the Ethan Allen Institute, said Mr Sanders is a throwback to that era. "Bernie Sanders is an unreconstructed 1930s socialist and proud of it. He's a skilful demagogue who casts every issue in that framework, a master practitioner of class warfare."

When Mr Sanders, a penniless but eloquent import from New York, got himself elected mayor of Burlington in 1981, at the height of the cold war, it rang some alarm bells. "I had to persuade the air force base across the lake that Bernie's rise didn't mean there was a communist takeover of Burlington," recalled Garrison Nelson, a politics professor at the University of Vermont who has known him since the 1970s.

"He used to sleep on the couch of a friend of mine, walking about town with no work," Prof Nelson said. "Bernie really is a subject for political anthropology. He has no political party. He has never been called charming. He has no money, and none of the resources we normally associate with success. However, he learned how to speak to a significant part of the disaffected population of Vermont."

Mr Sanders turned out to be a success as mayor, rejuvenating the city government and rehabilitating Burlington's depressed waterfront on Lake Champlain while ensuring that it was not gentrified beyond the reach of ordinary local people. "He stood this town on its ear," said Peter Freyne, a local journalist.

"I tried to make the government work for working people, and not just for corporations, and on that basis I was elected to Congress," Mr Sanders said. He has served 16 years in the House of Representatives, a lonely voice since the Republican takeover in 1994. He has however struck some interesting cross-party deals, siding with libertarian Republicans to oppose a clause in the Patriot Act which allowed the FBI to find out what books Americans borrowed from libraries.

He says his consistent electoral success reflects the widespread discontent with rising inequality, deepening poverty and dwindling access to affordable healthcare in the US. "People realise there is a lot to be learned from the democratic socialist models in northern Europe," Mr Sanders said. "The untold story here is the degree to which the middle class is shrinking and the gap between rich and poor is widening. It is a disgrace that the US has the highest rate of childhood poverty of any industrialised country on earth. Iraq is important, but it's not the only issue."

In a state of just over 600,000 people he also has a significant advantage over his Republican opponent, Rich Tarrant, a businessman who has spent about $7m on his campaign. "Sanders is popular because even if you disagree with him you know where he stands," said Eric Davis, a political scientist at Vermont's Middlebury College. "He pays attention to his political base. He's independent and iconoclastic and Vermonters like that."

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No more seafood by 2050?

There may be no more commercial fish stocks left in the sea by 2050, according to a new study cataloguing the global collapse of marine ecosystems.

It blames not just over-fishing, but also mankind’s wider attack on the health of ocean ecosystems, for instance from pollution. “Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working eco-systems, then this century is the last century of wild food,” says Steve Palumbi at Stanford University in California, US, who carried out the four-year investigation with colleagues.

The study is the biggest and most all-embracing effort yet to understand the productivity of the oceans and predict their future. Uniquely, it combines historical data on fish catches, some of it going back a thousand years, with analysis of marine ecosystems and experiments to bring marine life back to protected areas.

The authors, from five countries, reviewed hundreds of individual studies covering every scale from whole oceans to marine plots of a few square metres. They say the same pattern emerges at every scale. Rich ecosystems with many species can survive over-fishing and other threats well – but once biodiversity is lost, the entire system, including fish stocks, goes into exponential decline.

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Human like Androids in Japan

Androids which are remarkably like humans, and come complete with silicone 'skin', have been on display in Japan.

The robots are fitted with a supply of compressed air so that they even appear to breathe. Samantha Smith reports.

Full story here.

Photo gallery: Amazing shots from Hubble's 16-year mission.

Hackers Zero In on Online Stock Accounts

Hackers have been breaking into customer accounts at large online brokerages in the United States and making unauthorized trades worth millions of dollars as part of a fast-growing new form of online fraud under investigation by federal authorities.

E-Trade Financial Corp., the nation's fourth-largest online broker, said last week that "concerted rings" in Eastern Europe and Thailand caused their customers $18 million in losses in the third quarter alone.

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IE7 unleashed

Microsoft's much-anticipated IE7 browser is finally available for download, 18 months after Bill Gates announced plans to deliver Redmond's first major upgrade to its browser software since the release of IE6 in August 2001.

Key enhancements to IE 7 over IE 6 include anti-phishing features and improved ActiveX controls among several security improvements. The browser also promises enhancements to support web standards (such as HTML 4.01/CSS 2), the long-awaited introduction of tabbed browsing, and an integrated RSS feed reader. Many of these features are already included in Opera, and improved anti-phishing features will debut with the imminent (if delayed) arrival of Firefox 2.0, so to some extent market-leader Microsoft could be described as playing catch-up with its smaller rivals.

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Red Planet Double Team

NASA’s newest Mars orbiter has spied the plucky rover Opportunity perched at the rim of the red planet’s massive Victoria Crater as both vehicles explore the fourth planet from the Sun.

Appearing almost as a shiny boulder, Opportunity’s lumpy outline and its camera mast shadow can easily be seen in a high-resolution image of Victoria Crater taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and released by the space agency on Friday.

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The American Economy Dethroned By the Swiss ...

Switzerland was the most competitive country in the world in 2006, according to the yearly rankings published by the World Economic Forum . Yesterday, the people responsible for the rankings said the Confederation's public institutions and scientific research programs were the best in the world.

Our Swiss neighbors, who were number four last year, have thus managed to nose out the usual champions, Finland and Denmark, with the United States now dropping to number six in the rankings, two thirds of which are based on the results of a survey carried out of 11.000 of the planet's business executives.

"Switzerland has a well developed infrastructure in terms of scientific research," says Augusto Lopez-Claros, the chief author of this Global Competitiveness Report . "Good institutions and competent macroeconomic management, coupled with world-class educational attainment and a focus on technology and innovation, are a successful strategy for boosting competitiveness in an increasingly complex global economy," he added.

In addition to its infrastructure, Switzerland received good grades on its institutional framework, characterized by a "respect for the rule of law, an efficiently working judicial system, and high levels of transparency and accountability within public institutions." In this domain, the United States, very well noted for its technological innovation, has been outdone again this year: it has dropped five places in rankings because of the increasing mistrust on the part of economists of the burgeoning deficits and debt of the country. Washington is therefore number 69 of 125 in terms of "macroeconomic environment."


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Did Americans Build First Plane ... or was it a Brazilian?

[Editor's Note: According to the Brazilians, no one saw the flight of the Wright Brother's first flight, The Flyer, in 1903, and the flight in 1905 was not officially ratified. But the 1906 flight by Santos Dumont in his 14 BIS in Paris was ratified and registered].

Independently of who flew first and which flight proved more, the fact is that Santos-Dumont's Demoiselle surpassed all other in popularity and innovation as soon as it appeared. With his extraordinary capacity to understand the significance of these new aeronautical concepts, the Brazilian inventor executed great technological leaps in a very small number of steps, enormously speeding the evolution of aviation in its early years.

And unlike the Wright Brothers, Santos-Dumont made it a point not to patent his inventions. He freely distributed the blueprints for the Demoiselle to anyone who requested them. They were published in 1910 by the American magazine "Popular Mechanics" and made the tiny "dragonfly" the most popular plane in the United States and Europe. "The first airplane factory was for the Demoiselle," said Botelho.

And despite the long-standing dispute, the two aeronautical traditions will fly together, side by side, in the demonstration in Dayton, showing the world that there is room in the world for more than one father of aviation.

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NASA's Orion Capsule Will Fly in Seven Years

NASA has announced that Lockheed Martin will build America's new space capsule, called Orion. Expected to orbit Earth by 2014, Orion is expected to reach the moon by 2020. Although the capsule design has not been deemed to be especially exciting, unlike earlier capsules, Orion will be reusable. Melissa Block talks with U.S. Air Force Chief Scientist Mark Lewis about the spacecraft.

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Europe's first lunar mission reaches moon

BERLIN (AP) — Europe's first spacecraft to the moon ended its three-year mission Sunday by crashing into the lunar surface in a volcanic plane called the Lake of Excellence, to a round of applause in the mission control room in Germany.

Hitting at 1 1/4 miles per second, the impact of the SMART-1 spacecraft was expected to leave a 3-yard-by-10-yard crater and send dust miles above the surface. Observatories watched the event from Earth and scientists hoped the cloud of dust and debris would provide clues to the geologic composition of the site.

"That's it — we are in the Lake of Excellence," said spacecraft operations chief Octavio Camino as applause broke out in mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. "We have landed."

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A Vote to Quit the Electoral College

SACRAMENTO — Lawmakers sent Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a bill Wednesday that would make California the first state to jump aboard a national movement to elect the president by popular vote.

Under the legislation, California would grant its electoral votes to the nominee who gets the most votes nationwide — not the most votes in California. Get enough other states to do the same, backers of the bill say, and soon presidential candidates will have to campaign across the nation, not just in a few key "battleground" states such as Ohio and Michigan that can sway the Electoral College vote.

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Pluto loses status as a planet

Astronomers meeting in the Czech capital have voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.

About 2,500 experts were in Prague for the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) general assembly.

Astronomers rejected a proposal that would have retained Pluto as a planet and brought three other objects into the cosmic club.

Pluto has been considered a planet since its discovery in 1930 by the American Clyde Tombaugh.

The ninth planet will now effectively be airbrushed out of school and university textbooks.

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The New Solar System

A controversial new proposal by the International Astronomical Union would reclassify an asteroid and a moon as planets, plus add one far-out object. Here's the whole mix. Continue to see each of the 12 "planets." Click to enlarge.

Scientists flock to test 'free energy' discovery

A man who claims to have developed a free energy technology which could power everything from mobile phones to cars has received more than 400 applications from scientists to test it.

Sean McCarthy says that no one was more sceptical than he when Steorn, his small hi-tech firm in Dublin, hit upon a way of generating clean, free and constant energy from the interaction of magnetic fields. 'It wasn't so much a Eureka moment as a get-back-in-there-and-check-your-instruments moment, although in far more colourful language,' said McCarthy. But when he attempted to share his findings, he says, scientists either put the phone down on him or refused to endorse him publicly in case they damaged their academic reputations. So last week he took out a full-page advert in the Economist magazine, challenging the scientific community to examine his technology.

McCarthy claims it provides five times the amount of energy a mobile phone battery generates for the same size, and does not have to be recharged. Within 36 hours of his advert appearing he had been contacted by 420 scientists in Europe, America and Australia, and a further 4,606 people had registered to receive the results.

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PC celebrates 25th anniversary

IT was no more powerful than a modern calculator, but the arrival of the original IBM personal computer 25 years ago was an epoch-making event in the evolution of modern life.

The PC has redefined modern life – from the way people work to the way they look for love, chat with friends and even shop.

The IBM 5150 PC was released on August 12, 1981, the product of a year's feverish development by a close-knit team of computer engineers working in Florida.

"Designed for business, school and home, the easy-to-use system sells for as little as $US1565," IBM's original press statement said back then.

That price is worth more than $US4000 ($5000) in today's money. But if you wanted colour graphics, two floppy disk drives and a printer, it would set you back triple the amount of the base model.

The PC weighed 11.5kg with one floppy disk drive fitted, over a third more than a present-day computer. The keyboard alone weighed 2.7 kg.

At 16 kilobytes, its memory was 50,000 times less powerful than modern PCs.

It offered VisiCalc, a breakthrough spreadsheet program, and EasyWriter, which IBM promised "will store letters, manuscripts and other text for editing or rapid reproduction on the printer".

And there was Microsoft Adventure, which "brings players into a fantasy world of caves and treasures".

second half of piece

Also see The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time.

After 10 Years, Few Believe Life on Mars: NASA Struggling

It was a science fiction fantasy come true: Ten years ago this summer, NASA announced the discovery of life on Mars.

At a Washington, D.C., news conference, scientists showed magnified pictures of a four-pound Martian meteorite riddled with wormy blobs that looked like bacterial colonies. The researchers explained how they had pried numerous clues from the rock, all strongly supporting their contention that microscopic creatures once occupied its nooks and crannies.

It was arguably the space agency's most imagination-gripping moment since Apollo. Space buffs and NASA officials said that it just might be the scientific discovery of the century.

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Scientists Say They’ve Found a Code Beyond Genetics in DNA

Researchers believe they have found a second code in DNA in addition to the genetic code.

Loren Williams/Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology

In a living cell, the DNA double helix wraps around a nucleosome, above center, and binds to some of its proteins, known as histones.

The genetic code specifies all the proteins that a cell makes. The second code, superimposed on the first, sets the placement of the nucleosomes, miniature protein spools around which the DNA is looped. The spools both protect and control access to the DNA itself.

The discovery, if confirmed, could open new insights into the higher order control of the genes, like the critical but still mysterious process by which each type of human cell is allowed to activate the genes it needs but cannot access the genes used by other types of cell.

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China to test its 'artificial sun'

BEIJING, July 24 (UPI) -- The first plasma discharge from China's experimental advanced superconducting research center -- the so-called "artificial sun" -- is set to occur next month.

The discharge, expected about Aug. 15, will be conducted at Science Island in Hefei, in east China's Anhui Province, the Peoples Daily reported Monday.

Scientists told the newspaper a successful test will mean the world's first nuclear fusion device of its kind will be ready to go into actual operation, the newspaper said.

The plasma discharge will draw international attention since some scientists are concerned with risks involved in such a process. But Chinese researchers involved in the project say any radiation will cease once the test is completed.

The experiment will take place in a structure made of reinforced concrete, with five-foot-thick walls and a three-foot-thick roof.

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Chinese Cars Gain Foothold in Venezuela

CARACAS, Venezuela — Chinese automobile manufacturers are seeking a share of Venezuela's car market, which has grown with the help of an oil-fueled consumption boom.

President Hugo Chavez has long been trying to foster greater economic ties with the Asian giant. On top of greater energy and mining sector cooperation, Chavez has also pursued Chinese development of a computer assembly line in the Andean nation.


Two Chinese car dealers have recently set up showrooms across Venezuela to try to compete with more established brands.

Great Wall Motors, China's largest car maker, is offering large utility vehicles.

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