Gunman's Computer Damaged, Drive Possibly Ruined

A computer at the Connecticut home where Newtown, Conn., school shooter Adam Lanza lived with his mother was badly damaged, perhaps smashed with a hammer, said police who hope the machine might still yield clues to the gunman's motive.

The computer's hard drive appeared to have been badly damaged with a hammer or screw driver, law enforcement authorities told ABC News, complicating efforts to exploit it for evidence.

Officials have "seized significant evidence at [Lanza's] residence," said Connecticut State Police spokesman Paul Vance, adding that the process of sifting through that much forensic evidence would be a lengthy and "painstaking process."

Authorities also told ABC News that the weapons used in Friday's rampage at Sandyhook Elementary School, which left dead 20 children and seven adults including Lanza's mother Nancy, were purchased by his mother between 2010 and 2012.

According to the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, Lanza visited shooting ranges several times in recent years, and went at least one time with his mother.

The first funeral for a child killed in the massacre was held today in Fairfield, Conn., where mourners gathered to remember the too-short life of first-grader Noah Pozner.

Authorities also revealed this morning that two adult women shot during the rampage survived and their accounts will likely be integral to the investigation.

"Investigators will, in fact, speak with them when it's medically appropriate and they will shed a great deal of light on the facts and circumstances of this tragic investigation," Connecticut State Police Lt. Paul Vance said at a news conference today.

Both survivors are women and are now home from the hospital after being shot, police said. Officials had previously mentioned just one adult survivor. The women have not been identified and police did not give details on their injuries.

READ MORE: School nurse hid from gunman.

Both adults, Vance said, were wounded in the "lower extremities," but did not indicate where in the building they were when they were injured.

Moving trucks were seen outside Sandy Hook Elementary School this morning, as school officials prepare to move furniture and supplies to a vacant school in neighboring Monroe.

Sandy Hook itself will remain a secure crime scene "indefinitely," said Vance.

Emily Friedman/ABC News, Handout

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CLICK HERE for complete coverage of the tragedy at Sandy Hook.

Police say Adam Lanza, 20, forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday, spraying bullets on students and faculty. Lanza killed 20 children and six adults before turning the gun on himself.

Lanza also killed his mother Nancy Lanza at the home they shared before going to school.

"There are many, many witnesses that need to be interviewed," Vance said. "We will not stop until we have interviewed every last one of them."

Vance said the investigation could take weeks or months to complete. "It's not something done in 60 minutes like you see on T.V."

Some of the other key witnesses will be children who survived the shooting spree by playing dead, hiding in closets and bathrooms and being rescued by dedicated teachers.

"Any interviews with any children will be done with professionals...as appropriate," Vance said. "We'll handle that extremely delicately when the time arises."

CLICK HERE for a tribute to the shooting victims.

The first funerals for victims of the shooting are today, beginning with 6-year-olds Noah Pozner and Jack Pinto.

Officials said today that the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where the shooting took place, will be closed "indefinitely."

Both the school and the home where shootings took place are being held by police as crime scenes and Vance predicted authorities would spend "months" investigating the elementary school.

All Newtown schools are closed today to give residents more time to cope. Every school except for Sandy Hook is expected to re-open Tuesday.

The town of Monroe has offered to open to Sandy Hook students the Chalk Hill School, a former middle school that currently houses the town's EMS and recreational departments.

Officials in Monroe, less than 10 miles from Newtown, say the building could be ready for students by the end of the week, but have not yet set a date to resume classes.

Nearly 100 volunteers are working to ensure the building complies with fire and security regulations and are working to retorfit the school with bathroom facilities for young children.

"We're working to make the school safe and secure for students," said Monroe Police Department spokesman Lt. Brian H. McCauley.

The neighboring community's school is expected to be ready to accommodate students in the next few days, though an exact schedule has not yet been published.

While the families grieve, federal and state authorities are working around the clock to answer the question on so many minds: "Why?"

ABC News has learned that investigators have seized computers belonging to Adam Lanza from the home he shared with his mother. Three weapons were found at the school scene and a fourth was recovered from Lanza's car. Lanza had hundreds of rounds and used multiple high-capacity magazines when he went on the rampage, according to Connecticut State Police.

Vance said that every single electronic device, weapon and round will be thoroughly examined and investigated as well as every aspect of Lanza's life going "back to the date of birth."

ABC News has learned that both the shooter and his mother spent time at an area gun range; however it was not yet known whether they had shot there.

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Zebrafish made to grow pre-hands instead of fins

PERHAPS the little fish embryo shown here is dancing a jig because it has just discovered that it has legs instead of fins. Fossils show that limbs evolved from fins, but a new study shows how it may have happened, live in the lab.

Fernando Casares of the Spanish National Research Council and his colleagues injected zebrafish with the hoxd13 gene from a mouse. The protein that the gene codes for controls the development of autopods, a precursor to hands, feet and paws.

Zebrafish naturally carry hoxd13 but produce less of the protein than tetrapods - all four-limbed vertebrates and birds - do. Casares and his colleagues hoped that by injecting extra copies of the gene into the zebrafish embryos, some of their cells would make more of the protein.

One full day later, all of those fish whose cells had taken up the gene began to develop autopods instead of fins. They carried on growing for four days but then died (Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.devcel.2012.10.015).

"Of course, we haven't been able to grow hands," says Casares. He speculates that hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of tetrapods began expressing more hoxd13 for some reason and that this could have allowed them to evolve autopods.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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Developed economies to grow by 1.6% in 2013: Lagarde

SANTIAGO: IMF chief Christine Lagarde upwardly revised the Fund's estimate of economic growth among developed nations, which she said would increase by 1.6 per cent next year, up from an earlier estimated 1.5 per cent.

She told Chile's La Tercera newspaper that developing countries should grow by 5.6 per cent, while the global economy is expected to expand by 3.6 per cent.

"So 2013 will be a little better than 2012," the Chilean daily quotes her as saying.

Lagarde was in Chile on Thursday and Friday for a visit that included a meeting with Chile's President Sebastian Pinera.

She also took part in a meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.

- AFP/fa

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Kamikaze conclusion for successful moon mission

Streaking through vacuum at a mile per second just above the cratered surface of the moon, two washing machine-size science probes that have completed their mission to map the lunar gravity field will slam into a mile-high mountainside Monday, bringing a successful $500 million mission to a kamikaze conclusion.

The twin probes, named Ebb and Flow in a student naming contest, have been flying in formation at extremely low altitude since January 1, 2012, mapping subtle changes in the moon's gravitational pull to gain insights into its internal structure.

With all of the mission's scientific objectives accomplished, the trajectories of both 440-pound satellites were fine tuned Friday to set up twin impacts on a rugged cliff near the moon's north pole that is part of the rim of a buried crater.

NASA's twin GRAIL spacecraft will crash into a mile-high cliff near the lunar north pole Monday to close out a successful mission to map the moon's gravity field with unprecedented precision.

(Credit:
NASA)

Ebb is expected to hit the mountain at 5:28 p.m. EST (GMT-5) Monday. Flow will follow suit about 30 seconds later, crashing some 25 miles away from its twin. And with that, the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory -- GRAIL -- mission will come to an abrupt end.

"We are not expecting a big flash or a big explosion" Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told reporters last week. "These are two small spacecraft, we use the term apartment-size washer/dryer-size spacecraft with empty fuel tanks. So we are not expecting a flash visible from Earth."

But NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will be on the lookout for any signs of the crashes during subsequent passes over the region.

"We've had our share of challenges during this mission and always come through in flying colors, but nobody I know around here has ever flown into a moon mountain before," David Lehman, GRAIL project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "It'll be a first for us, that's for sure."

Each spacecraft executed a rocket firing Friday using up most of the probes' dwindling propellant to ensure the twin spacecraft hit their target, well away from any U.S. or Russian "historic heritage" landing sites.

While the odds of accidentally hitting one of the legacy landers were extremely remote, mission managers ordered the targeted impact to make absolutely sure.

"In terms of the scientific measurements, we have achieved everything we could have possibly hoped for," Zuber said. "Frankly, in my wildest dreams, I could not have imagined that this mission would have gone any better than it has.

With their mission complete, NASA's twin GRAIL probes were directed to crash into a lunar mountain to avoid any chance of hitting one of several historic landing sites. In this graphic, U.S. and Russian manned and unmanned landing sites are marked, along with the trajectory of the GRAIL probes.

(Credit:
NASA)

"But when you orbit at very low altitudes above a planetary body that has a very bumpy gravity field, you use a lot of fuel. And so the mission is going to come to an end."

Launched September 10, 2011, Ebb and Flow reached the moon at the end of the year with the second spacecraft slipping into orbit on New Year's Day. After maneuvers to put both spacecraft into exactly the same orbit, the probes flew in close formation, constantly sending timed radio signals back and forth to precisely measure the distance between them.

The initial phases of the mission were carried out at an average altitude of 40 miles above the lunar surface. After a break over the summer due to solar power constraints, mapping resumed in August at an average altitude of just 14 miles. On December 6, a final set of observations was carried out at an altitude of just 6.8 miles above the surface.

Sailing over buried mass concentrations, craters, mountain ranges, basins and other geologic features, the satellites' velocity changed ever so slightly, one after the other, due to subtle gravitational differences. The ranging system was accurate enough to detect differences of as little as one micron, or the width of a red blood cell.

By carefully analyzing those changes, scientists have been able to map out the gravity field in unprecedented detail, shedding new light on the moon's evolution and, by extension, the evolution of Earth and other terrestrial worlds.

"GRAIL has produced the highest resolution, highest quality gravity field for any planet in the solar system, including Earth," Zuber said. "One of the major results that we found is evidence that the lunar crust is much thinner than we had believed before."

She said the data indicated "a couple of the large impact basins probably excavated the moon's mantle, which is very useful in terms of trying to understand the composition of the moon as well as the Earth. We actually think the Earth's mantle has a similar composition."

Another perhaps not-so-surprising result: the heavily cratered surface of the moon is extremely fractured and broken up by countless impacts.

"We found evidence that the shallow subsurface of the moon is largely pulverized, the crust of the moon has a very high average porosity indicative of the fact that it's been broken up by impacts," Zuber said. "And there is evidence that fracturing extends maybe several tens of kilometers possibly into the upper mantle."

The findings illustrate the role of "impact bombardment" on the evolution of early planetary crusts, Zuber said, including those of Earth and Mars.

"With Mars, there (are) a lot of questions about where did the water that we think was on the surface of Mars go? Well, if a planetary crust is that fractured, these fractures provide a pathway deep inside the planet and it's very easy to envision now how a possible ocean at the surface could have found its way deep into the crust of a planet."

Details about the moon's deep interior are expected to be announced after additional data analysis.

Read More..

Space Pictures This Week: Frosty Mars, Mini Nile, More

Photograph by Mike Theiss, National Geographic

The aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, illuminates the Arctic sky in a recent picture by National Geographic photographer Mike Theiss.

A storm chaser by trade, Theiss is in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to photograph auroras, which result from collisions between charged particles released from the sun's atmosphere and gaseous particles in Earth's atmosphere.

After one particularly amazing show, he wrote on YouTube, "The lights were dancing, rolling, and twisting, and at times looked like they were close enough to touch!" (Watch his time-lapse video of the northern lights.)

Published December 14, 2012

Read More..

Obama Visits Families of Conn. Shooting Victims

President Obama has started visiting with families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which a gunman killed 20 young children and six adults in the school.

A White House official told ABC News that the president was meeting with the families devastated by this tragedy in classrooms at Newtown High School.

Assuming a consoling role that has become all too familiar for this presidency, Obama will also privately meet with some of the families affected by the tragic shooting, as well as local first responders.

The president has witnessed five mass shootings since assuming office in 2009, his reaction to this most recent tragedy in New England being his most publicly emotional. On Friday, tears collected in his eyes as he addressed the nation after the tragedy.

"The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old," the president said, pausing to collect himself. "They had their entire lives ahead of them -- birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own."

Brendan Hoffman-Pool/Getty Images

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But the president has also been more directly political in the immediate aftermath of these killings, as national discussions simmer over how to move forward and what, if any, policy is needed to prevent future violence. The president said it was time for "meaningful action" to prevent such tragedies, "regardless of the politics."

"We have been through this too many times, whether it's an elementary school in Newtown or a shopping mall in Oregon or a temple in Wisconsin or a movie theater in Aurora or a street corner in Chicago," he said of the other mass shootings in the past year alone. "These neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children."

It is a subtle but noticeable shift for Obama, who has not actively pursued stricter gun control during his four years in office despite pledges to do so during his 2008 candidacy. Although the White House says it needs support from Congress to move forward with strong legislation, it is also known that many politicians shied away to such reforms during the 2012 campaign season out of fear of alienating potential voters.

In reality the Obama administration has loosened federal restrictions on Second Amendment rights in some areas, including possession in national parks and on Amtrak. But during the second presidential debate in October the president signaled that he is ready to take new action on gun control, including reintroduction of the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004.

Read More..

Zebrafish made to grow pre-hands instead of fins

PERHAPS the little fish embryo shown here is dancing a jig because it has just discovered that it has legs instead of fins. Fossils show that limbs evolved from fins, but a new study shows how it may have happened, live in the lab.

Fernando Casares of the Spanish National Research Council and his colleagues injected zebrafish with the hoxd13 gene from a mouse. The protein that the gene codes for controls the development of autopods, a precursor to hands, feet and paws.

Zebrafish naturally carry hoxd13 but produce less of the protein than tetrapods - all four-limbed vertebrates and birds - do. Casares and his colleagues hoped that by injecting extra copies of the gene into the zebrafish embryos, some of their cells would make more of the protein.

One full day later, all of those fish whose cells had taken up the gene began to develop autopods instead of fins. They carried on growing for four days but then died (Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.devcel.2012.10.015).

"Of course, we haven't been able to grow hands," says Casares. He speculates that hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of tetrapods began expressing more hoxd13 for some reason and that this could have allowed them to evolve autopods.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

Read More..

Counting under way in Egyptian referendum

CAIRO: Counting was under way early Sunday after a first-round referendum on a divisive new constitution pushed through by President Mohamed Morsi and his Islamist allies despite weeks of opposition protests.

Polling stations in half the country, including the biggest cities of Cairo and Alexandria, were tallying the results from Saturday's voting.

The second round of the referendum is to be held next Saturday, after which the official result is to be given.

Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood and main media outlets said that, based on very early unofficial figures, it appeared that the polling was trending towards 70 percent support for the draft charter.

But the opposition disputed that, saying its preliminary figures suggested that 66 percent of the voters had rejected the proposed constitution. It claimed the Muslim Brotherhood had sought to "rig" the vote.

If those contradictory positions are maintained, Egypt's turmoil of the past three weeks over the draft constitution will not subside.

Violent clashes claimed eight lives on December 5 amid a highly polarised political climate.

Late Saturday, riot police fired tear gas to disperse dozens of hardline Islamists who attacked the central Cairo headquarters of the opposition liberal Wafd Party with fireworks and stones, officers at the scene told AFP.

On Friday, clashes between stone-throwing and sword-wielding Islamists and opposition supporters erupted in Egypt's second city of Alexandria, injuring 23 people according to the official MENA news agency.

To ensure security, 120,000 troops were deployed to reinforce 130,000 police.

Voting was being staggered, with half the country casting their ballots on Saturday and the other half a week later.

The Muslim Brotherhood has thrown its formidable organisational machine behind a campaign in favour of the draft constitution.

The proposed charter "offers rights and stability," said one Cairo voter who backed it, Kassem Abdallah.

It will help Egypt "return to normal", agreed another, Ibrahim Mahmoud, a teacher.

But many opposition voters were especially hostile toward the Brotherhood, which the Front believes wants to usher in strict Islamic sharia laws.

Abbas Abdelaziz, a 57-year-old accountant, said he voted against the charter "because I hate the Muslim Brotherhood. It's very simple. They are liars."

Sally Rafid, a 28-year-old Christian, said: "There are many things in the constitution people don't agree on, and it's not just the articles on religion."

International watchdogs, the UN human rights chief, the United States and the European Union have expressed reservations about the draft because of loopholes that could be used to weaken human rights, including those of women, and the independence of the judiciary.

Analysts said it was likely - but not certain - that the draft constitution would be adopted.

Whatever the outcome, "lasting damage to the civility of Egyptian politics will be the main outcome of the current path Morsi has set Egypt on," one analyst, Issandr El Amrani, wrote for his think tank, the European Council on Foreign Relations.

"If the 'no' vote wins, the Morsi presidency will have been fully discredited and the pressure for his resignation will only increase," he said. "If 'yes' wins, the protest movement is unlikely to die down, (and) may radicalise."

- AFP/de

Read More..

Apple rumors never cease

The iPad Mini will be a magnet for lots of rumors in the coming months.

(Credit:
Apple)

Apple rumors are a fact of life.

And it's silly to think that tech sites will begin writing fewer stories about the latest
iPad/iPhone chatter.

It's like asking the Washington press corps to stop writing about Beltway scuttlebutt or Hollywood reporters to cease scribbling about la la land -- however frivolous. Ain't gonna happen.

Let's take the
iPad Mini Retina rumor-machine (which is just getting started, by the way).

Retina chatter: A Retina iPad Mini is an intriguing prospect, but it's hardly a fait accompli. If it were, Apple would have announced one on October 23.

So my guess is that any remotely tantalizing Retina rumor that surfaces will be picked up and propagated across the Apple universe.

Usually (but not always) for good reason. Getting a 300-pixel-per-inch display into the Mini's tiny chassis is really, really hard. One phone call and any analyst at NPD DisplaySearch -- who analyze the display industry for a living -- will tell you this.

So, a supply chain tidbit from DigiTimes, for example, that cites "backlighting industry" sources talking about a higher-resolution iPad Mini is definitely interesting.

A Retina Mini would require a smaller LED light apparatus than is used in conventional Retina-class displays, as the DigiTimes story alludes to.

DigiTimes: The Asia supply chain gossip sheet is invariably the source of more than a few rumors. The problem is it's accuracy is a reflection of the unpredictable supply chain it covers. I've discussed this with DisplaySearch analysts more than a few times.

It goes something like this. Some big component supplier gets an order from some big device maker, and a Taipei newspaper reports it. Then a few months pass and said supplier runs into a serious unexpected snag in ramping up production (like Sharp, for example, trying to ramp up IGZO display production and failing initially).

So the device maker has to turn to another supplier for a more practical (and less innovative) solution.

As a result, the Taipei newspaper's story doesn't pan out. But that doesn't mean the newspaper was just passing along bogus rumors. It means it reported what it was hearing as a credible development at the time.

These on-again, off-again scenarios occur constantly in the supply chain, according to DisplaySearch. And it's a real challenge for supply chain analysts to determine what is panning out and what isn't.

DigiTimes' problem is that it doesn't filter the rumors as well as, let's say, a DisplaySearch analyst would. But maybe that's not the intention anyway. Maybe DigiTimes feels it needs to pass along gossip as it hears it. Maybe that's what its Asia-based supply chain readership wants.

And analysts are hardly infallible, either. Some analysts in the financial community come up with much whackier Apple theories, masquerading as erudite analysis, that end up being reported as credible speculation.

But reporters will still regurgitate financial analyst musings, complaints about "dumb" Apple rumors notwithstanding.

Like I said, it's a fact of life.

Read More..

Space Pictures This Week: Frosty Mars, Mini Nile, More

Photograph by Mike Theiss, National Geographic

The aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, illuminates the Arctic sky in a recent picture by National Geographic photographer Mike Theiss.

A storm chaser by trade, Theiss is in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to photograph auroras, which result from collisions between charged particles released from the sun's atmosphere and gaseous particles in Earth's atmosphere.

After one particularly amazing show, he wrote on YouTube, "The lights were dancing, rolling, and twisting, and at times looked like they were close enough to touch!" (Watch his time-lapse video of the northern lights.)

Published December 14, 2012

Read More..