National Tuscan Archipelago Park, which is already popular among tourists is ready to become the first National park completely free from oil.

Mario Tozzi, the chief of the Tuscan Archipelago National Park, is preparing to put a proposal to vote in front of inhabitants of the Island to ensure the end of dependency on fossil fuels. Absence of fossil fuels will liberate the island from pollutants mainly responsible for environmental crisis such as global warming and increase in greenhouse gases.

This proposal also includes generation of electricity by renewable sources, switch from gas to biofuels, and increase in recycling of the islands’ rubbish and improve the management of water resources.

Minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, the leader of Italy’s Green Party readily accepted this wonderful proposal without much of thinking.

If everything happened according to the proposal, Elba will make environmental history by being first Park going totally oil free.

With a hope to enhance the beauty of this Italian gem, Tozzi said, “It would be the first oil-free national park in Europe, perhaps the first in the world.”

The archipelago, which is of historical significance in the Mediterranean for thousands of years, is made up of Elba, the largest of the islands, - Pianosa, Capraia, Montecristo, Giglio, Gorgona and Giannutri.

This step seems promising and ready to let you experience the tranquil beauty which nature holds for everyone without asking much in return. All we need to learn is that nature has enough beauty to amaze us and need not to be altered artificially.

Mt Etna started erupting late Tuesday, throwing volcanic dust and ash into the atmosphere and the surroundings without endangering life.

Europe’s largest active volcano Mt Etna on the east coast of Italy in Sicily is in an almost constant state of eruption for almost half a million year, which can be extremely dangerous at times but peaceful most of the time. On Tuesday, Etna started spewing volcanic ash into the surroundings, down the mountain, threatening life but without causing danger. Unlike explosive eruptions, Tuesday’s eruption only ignited the darkness, making visible the entire landscape.

Violent and extremely hazardous eruptions have taken place earlier causing mammoth damage to man and property. Etna is used to explosive and effusive eruptions alternately threatening people living on its slopes and in the surrounding areas. Amidst the dangers it poses, its fertile volcanic soils support agriculture, particularly vineyards and orchards flourish across its lower slopes and the Plain of Catania to the south.

Volcanoes usually occur on plate boundaries. The entire Pacific rim associates itself with volcanoes. Etna, Stromboli, Vesuvious form a chain of volcanoes in the Mediterranean with a devastating history.
Etna’s eruptive history is itself a maze of explosions and peaceful spewing, making it one of the most active volcanoes on earth.

There's something special about river journeys. In a round-up of the best, Jane Archer begins at the Yangtze to see the Three Gorges - and that dam.

Rivers that deliver

In pictures: exotic river cruises

If Mark Twain were with me now, he would no doubt have something pithy and memorable to say. Something along the lines of: "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Because here I am, cruising the Yangtze River, five years after British tour operators told us we had to take a cruise immediately, before the main attraction - the Three Gorges - disappeared. The reason: in June 2003 the reservoir created by the Three Gorges Dam would begin to fill, flooding the river.

	The majestic views of the Three Gorges.

"It was all such rubbish. You'll see. It's much more beautiful now," whispered a Yangtze insider as we drove from Yichang airport to Maoping to board our cruise boat, Viking Century Sky. Meanwhile Jack, our dam guide, rattled off facts and figures about China's new Great Wall: 1.4 miles long; 606ft high; a billion cubic feet of concrete; and enough steel to build 63 Eiffel Towers.

Of course he was only half right. I would certainly see the river and the Three Gorges, but as I had not seen either before I couldn't really judge if they were better. While Jack and other guides are keen to cite reasons for building the dam that sound compelling enough - to stop the summer floods that have killed thousands of people living along the river over the past century, and to provide hydroelectric power to replace some of the electricity generated by China's environmentally unfriendly coal power stations - it remains one of the most controversial construction projects in the world.

About 1.13 million people have had to leave their homes to escape the rising water level (it has gone up from 91m above sea level in 2003 to 156m, and will rise to 175m when the dam project is completed in 2009). Many of them were farmers, who were forced to give up working the land to live in ugly concrete apartments in new towns, and to be trained for urban jobs.

On the positive side, the new apartments have more living space and mod cons such as flushing toilets, we were told. The delightfully named Summer, my guide on an excursion from Fengdu new town to the Snowy Jade Cave, was so delighted to have hot water in her new apartment that she didn't care she had to walk up seven flights of stairs to get to her front door. Apparently buildings only got a lift if they had 10 or more floors.

Whatever the wrongs and rights of it, the dam has given China a new tourist attraction.

As we drove to the construction site for our first excursion - included in the cruise price, as are all the tours on this cruise - the words of a guide on a recent trip to the Aswan Dam in Egypt were ringing in my ears. "People always ask me, why do we have to look at a damn dam?" I quickly realised I was alone in my scepticism - the place was crawling with sightseers. It apparently attracts up to 15,000 visitors a day, many of them from the 35-plus cruise boats that ply the river.

Actually, although the dam is about as attractive as... well, a lump of concrete, it was exciting to get up close and to see the massive locks that boats and barges have to pass through to get up or down river. There are five locks in each direction, and boats take about three hours to transit, so I imagine that by the time you get through you really have had enough of the damn dam. There will also be a lift to get small boats over the dam - but it won't be ready until at least 2011.

Back on our river boat, we set sail for the first of the three gorges, as cruise manager Max gave a lecture about the Yangtze to a packed audience. Each evening before dinner Max also gave a quick preview of what was coming up the next day, with details on the walking involved, the number of steps to climb and the quality of what our guides liked to call "happy houses" en route. This was important, as the Americans took great exception to the local toilets, which were simply a hole in the ground - usually clean and dry, if paperless.

The lecture over, we all piled up to the top deck for the main event - sailing through the first of the Three Gorges. And almost everyone set their alarms for the following morning, as we had to be up and out early for gorge No 2.

So there we were in Wu Gorge at 7am when about 50 left hands shot into the air, all obeying Owen, the river guide. "Now can you see the goddess, above your thumb?" he asked, clearly seeing nothing peculiar in our stance, which looked more like something from a political rally of the dictatorship variety. Judging by the mumbled responses, we were equally divided between the "no" and the "not sure" camps, with just an occasional whoop of delight as someone finally saw her.

For more than 50 long years scientists have remained perplexed as to why iron down in the innermost core of Earth behaves the way it does. Now a research has shown that iron, which is the main constituent of the core of Earth, can become unusually soft at extreme temperature and pressure.

This research can substitute the age old ways of studying earthquakes and in the nearest future we can expect materials that can handle the force of an earthquake in a way better than what all we have seen till now.

The research was carried out by a team of Swedish and Russian researchers who used advanced computer simulations that were performed on supercomputers. The research has also provided an answer for seismic data-signals that our Earth transmits during an earthquake. These have been captured by stations all over the world and the variations of these signals till now have remained an enigma for researchers.

Anatoly Belonoshko at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm directed the studies. He stated that:

“These new discoveries about the innermost part of the earth provide an explanation for the low velocity of the seismic waves deep down in the earth. They explain, in turn, why signals from earth tremors look like they do, thereby facilitating the work of seismologists.”

Researchers also stated that the innermost core of the earth consists of highly compressed iron in a solid state, but due to the high pressure and temperature there is loses all its rigidity and starts to behave more like a liquid. It lacks all the resistance to shear enabling the shifts to take place easily inside the core of earth. This is the reason for the seismic waves to move slowly than expected on the surface of the inner core.

The pressure and the temperature inside the core of the earth is extremely high, these extremes make iron behave like a liquid, which was not expected by scientists, because iron has never shown such tendencies to change its basic properties in experiments conducted in laboratories.

To explain these dual state characteristics of iron, the researchers stated that atoms of iron are so arranged that they can move under extremes as present in the inner part of earth. It behaves more like a solid structure held together with rubber bands.

A more technical answer to this riddle is that iron at the centre of the earth is not present in a form like it is present on the surface of earth. The iron we all know is a single crystalline form of iron, whereas, when we go deep inside the core of earth then we find iron which is more like a polycrystalline material with liquid-like granule edges and masses of defects in the structure. These characteristics of iron inside the core of the earth make it to behave more like a liquid.

The next milestone for researchers is to develop new ways to calculate the elastic properties of various materials at high temperatures.

Technological advances seem to have never hesitated exploring new arenas as well as merge separate technologies to boost scientific brilliances and improve machine-expertise.

This is revealed by yet another brilliant marriage of laser sources with X-rays’ penetrating power along with atomic sensitivity. And, the result is — the birth of the world’s first X-ray free electron laser, Linac Coherent Light Source undulator system.

Though, the undulator system will be operational not before 2009, it can well be foreseen that the system, surely will, open up new scientific frontiers, representing an immense technical achievement for the United States.

Being designed and constructed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the X-ray free electron laser will be a 130-meter undulator system that would provide a precise magnetic field through which an electron beam will travel.

This is how the new improved laser would work:

The undulators’ magnetic fields force the electrons to oscillate back and forth and produce large amounts of X-rays. These X-rays interact back on the electrons and force them to bunch at X-ray wavelengths. When this occurs, the electrons emit their light coherently, causing a large gain in radiation power that raises the X-rays’ intensity.

And the result – Compared to the prevailing X-ray machines, the pulses of X-ray laser light from the Linac Coherent Light Source, will be shorter, but, a billion times brighter.

True, no other X-ray source presently available can produce such bright light and perhaps, would never be able to in the near future – making it a fourth-generation light-source.

Researchers at the University of Utah have reported that the reason we are able to keep ourselves afloat is the massive natural engine of Earth that heats it’s interior.

Without this internal heat all the major cities of Earth would have been hundreds of feet below sea level. In an estimate, researchers have stated that mile-high Denver would be 727 feet below sea level, New York would have been a quarter-mile below and Los Angeles would be almost three-quarters of a mile below the Pacific Ocean.
They also stated that if this engine is shut down then most of the United States would drown, except for some major Western Mountain ranges.

These researchers also stated that the heat inside Earth accounts for more than half the reason why land rises above sea level and forms mountains. Previously it was thought that the density and the makeup of rocks and the tectonic forces were the main reasons for this elevation of land.

However, these researchers have failed to tell what makes heat keep these rocks less dense and more buoyant, but future research can positively give an answer to this query also.

Researchers have also commented that the heat inside Earth’s interior and from the radioactive decay of Uranium, thorium and potassium in Earth’s crust will stay around for a long time to come, and even if the heat generating engine is cooled right now it would take billions of years for the continents to sink.

At auction Christie decided to put lot with a list of names of passengers who travelled in first-class cabins "Titanic", which will be sold with price 48,000 dollars. This is not the first document relating to the tragic deaths jet, a negotiable auction. Previous lot, a witness death certificate ship found its new owner for 16,800 dollars. Its author was part of the year fateful events of April 1912 Marie Crib.

Six schoolchildren were killed in Indonesia, Vioxx noxious fumes of the volcano, back to Sunday, July 8, Associated Press Agency.

Adolescents aged 14 to 16 years had the weekend in the mountains at an altitude of more than two thousand meters. Joining them were 50 adolescents.

The incident occurred on Saturday, July 7, near the volcano crater Salak (Salak), near the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.

In Indonesia, more active volcanoes than any other country in the world, said agency. Rising on side of the volcano at a time when it is not active, is a favorite hobby of Indonesians.