US, Mexico sign rules on sharing Colorado River

FILE - In this Wednesday, March 5, 2008 file photo, water levels at the Colorado River's Horseshoe Bend begin to rise along the beaches just hours after the Glen Canyon Dam jet tubes began releasing water, in Page, Ariz. Drought, climate change and an increasing population in the West are pushing the Colorado River basin toward deep trouble in the coming decades, scientists say. (AP Photo/Matt York)

FILE - In this Wednesday, March 5, 2008 file photo, water levels at the Colorado River's Horseshoe Bend begin to rise along the beaches just hours after the Glen Canyon Dam jet tubes began releasing water, in Page, Ariz. Drought, climate change and an increasing population in the West are pushing the Colorado River basin toward deep trouble in the coming decades, scientists say. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Map shows the Colorado River Basin and how much water is allocated for each of the 7 states and Mexico who share from the river.

CORONADO, Calif. (AP) ? The United States and Mexico agreed Tuesday to new rules on sharing water from the Colorado River, capping a five-year effort on how to spread the pain of drought and reap the benefits of wet years.

The far-reaching agreement gives Mexico badly needed water storage capacity in Lake Mead, which stretches across Nevada and Arizona.

Mexico will forfeit some of its share of the river during shortages, bringing itself in line with western U.S. states that already have agreed how much they will surrender when waters recede. Mexico also will capture some surpluses when waters rise.

Also under the plan, water agencies in California, Arizona and Nevada will buy water from Mexico, which will use some of the money to upgrade its canals and other infrastructure.

The agreement, coming in the final days of the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon, is a major amendment to a 1944 treaty considered sacred by many south of the border. The treaty grants Mexico 1.5 million acre-feet of river water each year ? enough to supply about 3 million homes ? making it the lifeblood of Tijuana and other cities in northwest Mexico.

The pact represents a major departure from years of hard feelings in Mexico about how the U.S. manages the 1,450-mile river, which runs from the Rocky Mountains to Mexico. In 2001, U.S. states established rules on how to divide surpluses but set aside nothing for Mexico. Several years later, the U.S. government lined a border canal in California with concrete to prevent water from seeping through the dirt into Mexican farms.

"We have chosen collaboration over conflict, we have chosen cooperation and consensus over discord," said U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who called the new pact the most important international accord on the Colorado River since the 1944 treaty.

Mexico will begin to surrender some of its Colorado River allotment when the elevation in Lake Mead drops to 1,075 feet and begin to reap surpluses when it rises to 1,145 feet. Mexico will be allowed to store up to 250,000 acre-feet of water in the reservoir and draw on nearly all of those reserves whenever needed.

The agreement expires in five years and is being billed as a trial run, potentially making it more palatable in Mexico.

"These are big political steps for Mexico to take," said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which will buy some of Mexico's water. "Chances are we won't have a surplus and we won't have a shortage but, if we do, we'll have the guidelines in place on how we're going to handle it."

In 2007, facing an eight-year drought, California, Arizona and Nevada agreed on how much each state should sacrifice during shortages on the river. That same year, the U.S. and Mexico promised to work on ways to jointly address shortages.

The negotiations gained a sense of urgency for Mexico in 2010 after a magnitude-7.2 earthquake damaged canals and other infrastructure, forcing it to store water temporarily in Lake Mead.

"No matter how sacred the treaty is, and it is, the evidence is overwhelming that you have to adjust it," said Carlos de la Parra, who advised the Mexican government on the agreement.

Los Angeles-based Metropolitan and two other agencies ? the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Central Arizona Water Conservation District ? will buy water from Mexico as part of $21 million in payments from the U.S. to Mexico that also call for wetland preservation and other environmental measures south of the border.

California's largely agricultural Imperial Irrigation District, the largest single recipient of Colorado River water, refused to sign the agreement because it felt it should have been allowed to buy some of the water from Mexico. U.S. officials said they hoped to address those concerns.

"This is such a historic arrangement that I think, at the end of the day, it's going to be difficult for Imperial not to sign on," Salazar said.

The river is also a major source of water for Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

___

Associated Press writer Ken Ritter in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-11-20-US-Mexico%20Water/id-3b4a70ee1425466c9b285c94aabea913

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Nintendo Wii U

Nintendo is stepping into the next generation of game systems, which is a cross between the current gen and a concept we've never seen before. The Nintendo Wii U is the company's first high-definition game system, and its graphical power rivals the Xbox 360? and the PlayStation 3?. But its best feature isn't the ability to compare favorably to 7- and 6-year-old game consoles. Its big selling point is a huge, tablet-like controller that combines the motion controls of the Wii, the physical controls of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and the touch screen of the Nintendo 3DS?. This gamepad signals not only a step in Nintendo's console evolution, but a curious and bold twist on gaming conventions. The Wii U is bursting with potential, but since some key features aren't yet enabled, it will take some time before we'll know if that potential will be fulfilled.?

Editors' Note: While the Wii U is available for purchase, at the time of this writing, the console is missing features including TVii and support for multiple gamepads. Nintendo plans to launch the TVii feature in December, and individual gamepads will not be available for sale until 2013. We will reevaluate the Wii U when these features are added.

First, the basics: The Wii U is available in two versions. The glossy white Basic set is a $299.99 (list) system that gives you everything you need to start playing the Wii U, but nothing else. It includes the game console with 8GB of memory, the Wii U gamepad, power cables for each, a sensor bar, and an HDMI cable. The glossy black Deluxe set ($349.99 list) throws in a handful of useful accessories and a pack-in game. It includes everything in the Basic set (with 32GB of memory instead of 8GB), plus a charging cradle and a stand for the gamepad, a stand for the console to let you set it up vertically like the current Wii system, and a copy of Nintendo Land. At just $50 more, you get a lot of extras with the Deluxe set, making it the better deal (and, at the time of this writing, the rarer version to find at retail).

Console and Gamepad Design
While the Wii U looks as slender and compact as the original Wii, it's much heftier (but still more than a pound lighter than the recently slimmed-down Sony PlayStation 3). It weighs 3.4 pounds and measures 10.5 inches long while keeping a relatively slim 1.9-by-6.6-inch profile (HW). The front of the system houses a slot-loading optical drive, Power and Eject buttons, a syncing button for the game controller, and a plastic door that flips open to reveal an SD card slot and a USB port. Beside the built-in storage, which varies depending on the version of the console you buy, you can expand storage with an SD card or USB drive. You need an SD card for Nintendo's Byzantine system transfer process to bring your WiiWare and Virtual Console games to the Wii U from your old console. The back of the system houses an HDMI port, a power port, a sensor bar port, two USB ports, and an A/V port that uses the same component or composite video cables the Wii uses. The Wii U only comes with an HDMI cable, so if you want to use the analog inputs you'll have to buy a cable (or use one from your old Wii).

The big draw of the Wii U, like the Wii before it, is the controller. Instead of a motion-sensing Wiimote (which the Wii U can still use), the Wii U uses an ambitious gamepad that's more like a tablet than a traditional game controller. It features a 6.2-inch, 854-by-480-pixel resistive?touch screen that serves as the primary method of information input and menu navigation. The touch screen is sensitive enough for one-point activities, but it can't handle multi-touch gestures like smartphones and tablets. The low-res display is fine for most activities, but pales in comparison to some other touch-screen devices, like the PlayStation Vita's? brilliant 5-inch, 920-by-544 OLED screen or the Nexus 7? tablet's tightly-packed 7-inch 1280-by-800 IPS screen.

The gamepad also acts as its own display, either mirroring the Wii U's picture from your? HDTV, or offering additional information and menu options. You can also stream games directly to the gamepad and bypass the console entirely. Like its gamepad name implies, the controller also has a full selection of physical controls surrounding the screen, including dual analog sticks, six face buttons (A, B, X, Y, Start, and Select), a direction pad, four shoulder buttons, and Home, Power, and TV Remote buttons. You also get motion controls, just like with the Wiimote, so it can detect how it's positioned and at what angle. Despite its large size of 5.3 by 10.2 by 0.9 inches (HWD), the gamepad feels surprisingly light at 1.1 pounds, and is comfortable to hold.

A microphone on the bottom side of the gamepad can pick up your voice, two speakers let the controller provide its own music, and a front-facing camera lets you video chat with other Wii U users, and take photos for various reasons (like making a Mii avatar based on your face for use in games; it's not intended as a stand-alone camera for snapshots). A headphone jack sits on the top edge of the controller, along with a volume slider, a power port, and a removable stylus. The Wii U gamepad charges through a cable that plugs into the wall with the bundled adapter, but Deluxe owners can charge the gamepad with an included cradle, which easily connects through two contacts in the bottom of the controller. If you bought a Basic set, you can pick up the $20 cradle separately.

The gamepad will communicate with the Wii U at distances up to 30 feet. However, walls, corners, and physial obstructions can interfere with the wireless signal, which is based on a proprietary system Nintendo created to minimize latency. I used the gamepad all around my relatively small studio apartment, but I couldn't walk more than halfway down the length of the large PCMag Labs before the gamepad lost its connection to the Wii U.

On a single charge, the gamepad lasted between 3 to 5 hours in my tests. But if you run out of juice, you can use it as a wired controller with the power cable plugged in. Also, the gamepad battery is removable, so expect extended batteries from third-party companies in the coming months. Still, a 3-5 hour battery life for a home console controller is disappointing, and if you plan on marathon gaming sessions expect to keep the gamepad tethered.

(Next Page: Setup and Software)

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/3OhmI0uHVW0/0,2817,2412292,00.asp

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Indianapolis home explosion now investigated as a homicide ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- The house explosion that killed two people and destroyed several homes in an Indianapolis neighborhood is now being investigated as a homicide, authorities said, though no suspects have been named.

Indianapolis Homeland Security Director Gary Coons made the announcement Monday evening, shortly after a funeral was held for the husband and wife who had lived next door to the house where investigators believe the blast occurred.

"We are turning this into a criminal homicide investigation," Coons said after meeting with local residents, marking the first time investigators have acknowledged a possible criminal element to the Nov. 10 explosion.

Search warrants have been executed and officials are now looking for a white van that was seen in the subdivision on the day of the blast, Marion County Prosecutor Terry Curry said. Federal authorities are offering a $10,000 reward for information in the case.

Curry said the investigation is aimed at "determining if there are individuals who may be responsible for this explosion and fire," but neither he nor Coons took questions or indicated if investigators had any suspects. No arrests have been made.

Officials have said they believe natural gas was involved in the explosion, which destroyed five homes and left dozens damaged, some heavily. Investigators have focused on appliances in their search for a cause. The explosion caused an estimated $4.4 million in damage.

"We thought something like this was not just an accident," said Doug Aldridge, who heads the neighborhood Crime Watch.

Aldridge said he and other residents frequently saw a white van parked outside the home, though he didn't know who owned it. He said residents are angry and upset but that he expects most of them to stay in the neighborhood.

"Everyone had their suspicions," said Chris Sutton, who lives a street away from the blast site.

"It's kind of scary that someone might set off a gas explosion," he added. "It's really scary."

Hundreds of people attended the funeral earlier Monday for John Dion Longworth, 34, and his wife 36-year-old Jennifer Longworth.

She was a second-grade teacher remembered for knitting gifts for her students, while her husband, an electronics expert, was known as a gardener and nature lover. The school where Jennifer Longworth taught was closed Monday so teachers and students could attend the funeral.

Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard, who spoke at Monday's news conference, said he went to the Longworths' funeral and had been having a hard time coming to terms with what happened.

"There is a search for truth and there is a search for justice," Ballard said.

The co-owner of the house where investigators are focusing their criminal probe, John Shirley, told The Associated Press he had recently received a text message from his daughter saying the furnace in the home, which she shares with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, had gone out.

Shirley's ex-wife, Monserrate Shirley, said her boyfriend, Mark Leonard, had replaced the thermostat and that the furnace had resumed working.

She and her boyfriend were away at a casino at the time of the blast. The daughter was staying with a friend, and the family's cat was being boarded.

Monserrate Shirley's attorney, Randall Cable, declined comment Monday night.

Source: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/11/indianapolis_home_explosion_no.html

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Here's What You Need to Know About the Next Robocop Movie

I hardly remember the original Robocop movie other than I thought he looked freaking cool. The upcoming remake of Robocop may have die-hard fans worried but I'm always for any sort of movie that marries futuristic weapons with robots and humans. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/Yjo0T506e40/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-next-robocop-movie

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Big city slowly returns to bright lights after Sandy

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Few thought it would take quite so long to fully restore the dimmed lights of the famed skyline of New York City's Financial District.

At last, however, firms displaced by the flooding and power outages brought on by Superstorm Sandy seem ready to return downtown, if a little warier of the rivers and sea that surrounds them.

Water Street was more water than street when Sandy hit. Nearly three weeks later, many of the flooded office towers that line the street as it skirts the East River toward the harbor at Manhattan's southernmost tip remain closed.

Yellow caution tape still decks the doors to darkened, mucky lobbies. The usual crowds of suited office workers have vanished from the sidewalks, replaced by a handful of clean-up workers and security officers.

"It's definitely a hiccup in our revenue and a disruption of our ongoing business operations," said Lou Colasuonno, a senior managing director of FTI Strategic Communications, a PR firm specializing in crisis management.

He and about 90 other employees who usually work in a building near Water Street have had to decamp to another office owned by the firm in Midtown Manhattan. Many displaced firms have improvised in similar ways, by dispersing employees to other premises, renting temporary office space and encouraging employees to work remotely with their laptops and cellphones.

Despite the squeeze, Colasuonno said he was making the most of seeing colleagues he might normally only email. Echoing others, he also pointed out that the Financial District weathered a far graver disaster in the 2001 World Trade Center attacks.

"It's going to take more than a couple of feet of water to chase New Yorkers out of Manhattan," Colasuonno said of the record-breaking surges caused by Sandy.

A number of Wall Street institutions, including the New York Stock Exchange and some major banking firms, were able to resume business as soon as power was restored after the October 29 storm.

But many buildings in low-lying areas suffered longer-lasting damage to electrical and heating infrastructure. A report earlier this week from commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle showed about 30 percent of the area's rentable office space still was closed because of the storm.

CUSTOMERS GONE

As more buildings come back to life each day, the majority of displaced businesses were expecting to return home before November was out, although employees of the New York Daily News, based in one of the last buildings before Manhattan gives way to the sea, have been warned it may be nearly a year before they can return to their old newsroom.

John Wheeler, who heads the Jones Lang LaSalle's Lower Manhattan office, said there was little sign that businesses that got soaked would consider moving up Manhattan or elsewhere to higher ground.

"The attributes that lead to Lower Manhattan's resurgence are intact," he said, referring to office space that was on average around $20 to $25 cheaper per square foot compared to Midtown Manhattan.

In what is increasingly looking like a design flaw to some, electrical infrastructure and other things that should never get wet are commonly installed in building's basements. It's an issue several downtown landlords are planning to address, Wheeler said.

"When you're touring tenants in the future, this question could well be asked, and you'll want to be able to say, ?Oh, yes, we're doing x, y, z to avoid an outage,'" he said.

"Everybody recognizes this is a freak occurrence," said Andrew Willis, a spokesman for Brookfield Asset Management, a building management company that was able to reopen five of its six downtown office buildings within a week of the storm. "Our tenants have maintained their faith in lower Manhattan."

Still, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has said that 100-year storms seem to be turning into more regular events.

"Now what we're doing is assuming we will get flooded," Bob Benmosche, the CEO of insurance firm AIG, said in an interview. The firm's headquarters in the Financial District has been closed since the storm, but was expected to reopen to employees on November 19.

"We are moving our phone switches and other electrical switches from the basement to the second floor so that we're well above any floodplain whatsoever," Benmosche said, adding that they are also looking to see where in their building they might store emergency generator fuel.

In the end, it may be that the neighborhood food carts and washed-out cafes that cook office workers' lunches and who cannot work remotely will have endured the heaviest blow.

Standing by his hot dog cart, Marino Mastoras was one of the few signs of life at a Water Street intersection, which has been his home base for more than two decades. His earnings have been halved, and he is desperate for his customers to return.

"After that happened, all my steady customers are out, only construction people come," he said. Shifting his cart elsewhere was more complicated than it might sound, he said, and besides, there was a principle at stake: "People know I'm here. That's very important to me."

(Additional reporting by Clare Baldwin; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Bill Trott)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/big-city-slowly-returns-bright-lights-sandy-120227087.html

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BP Gulf of Mexico Case May Last to 2015 - Report

LONDON--British oil giant BP PLC (BP) could remain tangled in litigation over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill until 2015, the Telegraph reports Sunday.

Last week, BP reached an agreement with U.S. authorities to accept criminal responsibility for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 workers and to pay $4.5 billion in fines and restitution, the biggest penalty ever levied by the U.S. Justice Department.

However, the oil major still faces civil litigation for the pollution caused by the incident, which caused the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

BP stands accused of gross negligence in the Gulf of Mexico disaster and if found guilty could face fines of up to $20 billion under the Clean Water Act, about four times more than if the company is found simply to have been negligent.

The case is set to go before a federal judge in New Orleans in February.

"If something were to happen at the trial that read across to gross negligence we would certainly take that to appeal, which would probably take you out to 2014 or 2015," BP's chief financial officer Brian Gilvary told analysts, the Telegraph reports.

Website: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/9685683/BP-warns-that-4.5bn-deal-is-not-the-end-of-Gulf-of-Mexico-disaster.html

Write to Sarah Kent at sarah.kent@dowjones.com

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Source: http://www.automatedtrader.net/real-time-dow-jones/118759/bp-gulf-of-mexico-case-may-last-to-2015-_-report

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Super-efficient solar-energy technology: ?Solar steam? so effective it can make steam from icy cold water

ScienceDaily (Nov. 19, 2012) ? Rice University scientists have unveiled a revolutionary new technology that uses nanoparticles to convert solar energy directly into steam. The new "solar steam" method from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics is so effective it can even produce steam from icy cold water. The technology's inventors said they expect it will first be used in sanitation and water-purification applications in the developing world.

Rice University scientists have unveiled a revolutionary new technology that uses nanoparticles to convert solar energy directly into steam. The new "solar steam" method from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) is so effective it can even produce steam from icy cold water.

Details of the solar steam method were published online November 19 in ACS Nano. The technology has an overall energy efficiency of 24 percent. Photovoltaic solar panels, by comparison, typically have an overall energy efficiency around 15 percent. However, the inventors of solar steam said they expect the first uses of the new technology will not be for electricity generation but rather for sanitation and water purification in developing countries.

"This is about a lot more than electricity," said LANP Director Naomi Halas, the lead scientist on the project. "With this technology, we are beginning to think about solar thermal power in a completely different way."

The efficiency of solar steam is due to the light-capturing nanoparticles that convert sunlight into heat. When submerged in water and exposed to sunlight, the particles heat up so quickly they instantly vaporize water and create steam. Halas said the solar steam's overall energy efficiency can probably be increased as the technology is refined.

"We're going from heating water on the macro scale to heating it at the nanoscale," Halas said. "Our particles are very small -- even smaller than a wavelength of light -- which means they have an extremely small surface area to dissipate heat. This intense heating allows us to generate steam locally, right at the surface of the particle, and the idea of generating steam locally is really counterintuitive."

To show just how counterintuitive, Rice graduate student Oara Neumann videotaped a solar steam demonstration in which a test tube of water containing light-activated nanoparticles was submerged into a bath of ice water. Using a lens to concentrate sunlight onto the near-freezing mixture in the tube, Neumann showed she could create steam from nearly frozen water.

Steam is one of the world's most-used industrial fluids. About 90 percent of electricity is produced from steam, and steam is also used to sterilize medical waste and surgical instruments, to prepare food and to purify water.

Most industrial steam is produced in large boilers, and Halas said solar steam's efficiency could allow steam to become economical on a much smaller scale.

People in developing countries will be among the first to see the benefits of solar steam. Rice engineering undergraduates have already created a solar steam-powered autoclave that's capable of sterilizing medical and dental instruments at clinics that lack electricity. Halas also won a Grand Challenges grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create an ultra-small-scale system for treating human waste in areas without sewer systems or electricity.

"Solar steam is remarkable because of its efficiency," said Neumann, the lead co-author on the paper. "It does not require acres of mirrors or solar panels. In fact, the footprint can be very small. For example, the light window in our demonstration autoclave was just a few square centimeters."

Another potential use could be in powering hybrid air-conditioning and heating systems that run off of sunlight during the day and electricity at night. Halas, Neumann and colleagues have also conducted distillation experiments and found that solar steam is about two-and-a-half times more efficient than existing distillation columns.

Halas, the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, professor of physics, professor of chemistry and professor of biomedical engineering, is one of the world's most-cited chemists. Her lab specializes in creating and studying light-activated particles. One of her creations, gold nanoshells, is the subject of several clinical trials for cancer treatment.

For the cancer treatment technology and many other applications, Halas' team chooses particles that interact with just a few wavelengths of light. For the solar steam project, Halas and Neumann set out to design a particle that would interact with the widest possible spectrum of sunlight energy. Their new nanoparticles are activated by both visible sunlight and shorter wavelengths that humans cannot see.

"We're not changing any of the laws of thermodynamics," Halas said. "We're just boiling water in a radically different way."

Paper co-authors include Jared Day, graduate student; Alexander Urban, postdoctoral researcher; Surbhi Lal, research scientist and LANP executive director; and Peter Nordlander, professor of physics and astronomy and of electrical and computer engineering. The research was supported by the Welch Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Rice University. The original article was written by Jade Boyd.

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

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Journal Reference:

1. Oara Neumann, Alex Urban, Jared Day, Surbhi Lal, Peter Nordlander, Naomi J. Halas. Solar Vapor Generation Enabled by Nanoparticles. ACS Nano, 2012; : 121119075227007 DOI: 10.1021/nn304948h

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

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/GiR6aRSvmm8/121119140627.htm

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