The world has a burgeoning appetite for meat. Fifty years ago global consumption was 70m tonnes. By 2007—the latest year for which comparable data are available—it had risen to 268m tonnes. In a similar vein, the amount of meat eaten by each person has leapt from around 22kg in 1961 to 40kg in 2007. Tastes have changed at the same time. Cow (beef and veal) was top of the menu in the early 1960s, accounting for 40% of meat consumption, but by 2007 its share had fallen to 23%. Pig is now the animal of choice, with around 99m tonnes consumed. Meanwhile advances in battery farming and health-related changes in Western diets have helped propel poultry from 12% to 31% of the global total. Although populous middle-income countries such as China are driving the worldwide demand for meat, it is mainly Western countries who still eat most per person. Luxembourgers, who top this chart, are second only to Argentinians in beef consumption. Austrians are the keenest pig-eaters, wolfing down 66kg every year—just more than Serbians, Spaniards and even neighbouring Germans. At the other end of the scale, cow-revering Indians eat only 2.6kg of meat each, the least of the 177 countries assessed.
[full data]

(The Economist)

Luxembourg is about as cuddly as countries come: prosperous, picturesque and delightfully tiny. At 999 square miles, it is the smallest but one of the European Union states. You could drive its length (55 miles) or its width (35 miles) in less time than it takes to watch a feature-length movie — provided you don’t stop at one of the many touristy villages or vineyards along the way. The capital, also called Luxembourg, is a cozy city of barely 100,000 souls; its major problem is not drugs or urban decay, but the apparently unfixable fact that it’s rather boring.

Luxembourg is the only country in the world ruled by a grand duke, which sounds more like the setup to a fairy tale than a real-world constitutional arrangement. The grand duchy is a founding member of the European Union and NATO, and hosts the European Court of Justice, Eurostat (the European Statistical Office), the Secretariat of the European Parliament and other supranational institutions. Luxembourg expects to be listened to and taken seriously by its international peers. And it is: of its last four prime ministers, one went on to become president of the United Nations General Assembly, another of the European Commission, and a third of the Eurogroup.

All that from a country less populous than Hanover, Germany’s 13th largest city. It is so small that even tiny Belgium is able to smirk about the grand duchy’s size, replicating the scorn heaped upon itself by its own larger neighbors. Why is Luxembourg so determined to punch above its weight? Could it be that it has a grander idea of itself than its neighbors have? An elevated sense of self is a useful survival tool, for countries as well as people. But Luxembourgers could argue that they don’t have delusions of grandeur, but rather memories of grandeur. Once upon a time, you see, there was a Greater Luxembourg.

The state’s roots go back to 963 A.D., when Siegfried, count of the Ardennes, acquired Lucilinburhuc, an old Roman fort with a Frankish name. Over the next few centuries, the House of Luxembourg would choose its wars and wives wisely, and the County of Luxembourg would grow to encompass an area four times the size of the present grand duchy.

Indeed, Luxembourg’s international ambitions, mainly within the vast and chaotic German Empire, are almost as old as the house itself. It produced three Holy Roman emperors, several kings of Bohemia and a fair share of archbishops. Perhaps Luxembourg’s most lasting impression on the empire was the Golden Bull of 1365, a decree that would determine how Holy Roman emperors would be elected for over four centuries, until the empire’s dissolution in 1806. It was issued by Emperor Charles IV of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, who in 1354 elevated his ancestral county to a duchy.

Unfortunately, Luxembourg soon lost control of its own fate. In 1441 Duchess Elizabeth sold it to Burgundy; it later passed into Hapsburg hands and was eventually integrated into the Netherlands as one of its 17 provinces. Lack of an independent dynasty meant an end to Luxembourg’s influence in the world, and it eventually fell under the geopolitical knife. Like once enormous Poland, to the east, it suffered three partitions, resulting in the bonsai nation it currently is.

In fact, the three countries surrounding present-day Luxembourg all own territory that once belonged to the Duchy of Luxembourg, and they all at one point or another demanded its total annexation into their own territory. In 1659, the Treaty of the Pyrenees accorded just over 400 square miles (or 10 percent of its size at the time) of Luxembourg to France, which gained the fortified cities of Stenay, Thionville and Montmédy. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Prussia got the fort at Bitburg, and all lands west of a new riverine border, further reducing Luxembourg by 880 square miles (or an additional 24 percent of the original). Part of these lands would go to Belgium after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

But the worst loss occurred in 1839, when the Netherlands accepted the Treaty of London, formally recognising Belgian independence. In return, the Dutch king William I got to keep the eastern halves of Limburg and Luxembourg, provinces which had nevertheless cheered on Belgium’s secession. As a result, the grand duchy lost its western half (1,687 square miles, or 42 percent of its territory at its largest extension) to Belgium, which still has a province also called Luxembourg. William remained grand duke of the eastern half of Luxembourg, establishing a personal union with the Netherlands that would last until 1890.

And of course the country didn’t avoid the horrors of 20th century Europe, either: in the first half of the 20th century, Germany brutally occupied Luxembourg twice, annexing it outright the second time.

That list of unfortunate events would be enough justification for a grand duchy to be brimming with resentment, with local politicians falling over one another demanding the return of the lost territories, a condition common to many once grand nations. But political extremism is a fringe movement in Luxembourg politics —probably so small that it can be identified as that one guy fuming behind his Weissbier in a bar in Echternach.

Instead, Luxembourg has sublimated irredentism, that unpalatable side dish of nationalism, into something much more powerful. Outwardly, the Luxembourgers are the best students of the European class. Their national motto, rendered in Luxembourgish, is: “Mir wollebleiwe, watmir sin” (“We want to stay what we are”), a good summary of the folksy, don’t-rock-the-boat conservatism that dominates the political scene.

But the real slogan might just as well be: “We want to become what we were”: European power brokers, as they were in the Middle Ages. Luxembourg is stealthily positioning itself as the central pivot of a new supernational zone within Europe, generically called the Grande Région.

This Greater Region of Luxembourg is one of Europe’s many cross-border cooperations called Euroregions, welding Luxembourg with the Walloon region of Belgium (including its German-speaking area), the French region of Lorraine, and the German states of Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate. The Greater Region is much wider than the old Greater Luxembourg, comprising an area of 25,250 square miles and counting more than 11 million inhabitants.

Ostensibly only a forum to discuss economic, social, cultural and tourist affairs, the Greater Region of Luxembourg could nevertheless be seen as the inchoate resurrection of an ancient European entity: Middle Francia, the centerpiece of Charlemagne’s empire. It’s been a long time coming: While the empire’s eastern and western parts later evolved into Germany and France, Middle Francia — extending in a narrow corridor from the North Sea to the Mediterranean — did not survive its creation at the Treaty of Verdun, in 843 A.D., for very long.

Perhaps this is Luxembourg’s insurance policy in case the European Union goes to the dogs. Plan A is to be the best student in the European class, at which is excels. Plan B is to recreate Middle Francia, but this time as a viable third way between France and Germany. Middle Francia’s undoing was its lack of cultural cohesion. Perhaps the Luxembourgers, fluently trilingual, can turn that defect around to an advantage. And maybe one day, Europeans tired of a superstate dominated by France and Germany will resolutely declare, from Amsterdam to Athens: “Mir wollebleiwe, watmir sin.”

(NY Times)

Germany’s government wants search engines and news aggregators to pay news publishers for using pieces of their material.

Its coalition committee has resolved that a collecting society should charge royalties to re-publishers of news material.

“The term of protection should be one year,” according to the committee.

“Commercial traders out there such as search engines and news aggregators should pay a fee to the publishers in the future for the distribution of press products (such as newspaper articles) on the internet.”

This could bring Germany in to line with the UK, where the Newspaper Licensing Agency (originally formed to charge royalties on photocopies of news clippings that are used commercially) now requires commercial news aggregators and their customers each pay a license to, respectively, process and receive summaries of newspapers’ online articles.

As in the UK, Germany is proposing “normal” private re-users of web news article summaries be exempt from royalties. But, whilst the UK mechanism avoids charging Google News because it targets only pay-for news aggregators, Germany’s proposal mentions both search engines and news aggregators.

The debate over whether search engines should pay for the privilege of crawling and using excerpts has been a long-running one that Google has sought to contain on multiple fronts…

Belgian newspapers won a European court case forcing Google to stop excerpting stories, demanding a phenomenal €49 million in damages. They even sued the European Commission for the same thing.

Since then, Germany’s publishing industry has been lobbying lawmakers for action, too…

In 2009, Germany hosted some 169 publishing execs (149 of them German) who signed what they called the Hamburg Declaration on Intellectual Property Rights – effectively a lobbying attempt on Europe’s then-media commissioner that complained: “Numerous providers are using the work of authors, publishers and broadcasters without paying for it.”

A year later, Germany’s Federation of Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) and Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) complained to the federal government about Google’s use of snippets.

Now the German coalition, in its legislative attempt, is weighing heavily the fact that newspaper publishers are facing hard economic times.

Legal firm Pinsent Mason’s Out-Law site, which first reported the government’s intention, writes: “The European Court of Justice ruled in 2009 that ‘isolated sentences’ or even parts of sentences were copyright-protectable if they conveyed ‘to the reader the originality of a publication such as a newspaper article, by communicating to that reader an element which is, in itself, the expression of the intellectual creation of the author of that article’.”

(Paid Content)

Discovery could pave the way for new fertility treatments and a longer reproductive life.

It’s time to rewrite the textbooks. For 60 years, everyone from high-school biology teachers to top fertility specialists has been operating under the assumption that women are born with all the eggs they will ever produce, with no way to replenish that supply. But the discovery of human egg-producing stem cells, harvested from the ovaries of six women aged 22 to 33, puts that dogma in doubt.

The work, published online in Nature Medicine by Jonathan Tilly and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, parallels the findings of a Shanghai-based group that isolated similar stem cells from mice in 2009. However, both this and Tilly’s earlier work in mice remained controversial, with many experts sceptical that such stem cells existed.

“This is unequivocal proof that not only was the mouse biology correct, but what we proposed eight years ago was also correct — that there was a human population of stem cells in young adult tissue,” says Tilly.

To address the doubts, Tilly’s team began by developing a more sensitive method for identifying and collecting mouse ovarian stem cells. Their method, based on a technique called fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS), attaches a fluorescently labelled antibody to a protein, Ddx4, that is present on the outer surface of the stem cells but not on the surface of the later-stage egg cells or oocytes. The FACS instrument lines up cells in single file and sorts them one by one, separating the labelled ones from the rest; it also gets rid of dead or damaged cells, such as oocytes, in which internal Ddx4 might become accessible to the antibody. This method is more selective than previous isolation methods, which did not get rid of such cells.

Once the team confirmed that it had isolated mouse ovarian stem cells by this method, it set its sights on reproductive-age human ovaries. Yasushi Takai, a former research fellow in Tilly’s lab and now a reproductive biologist at Saitama Medical University in Japan, supplied frozen whole ovaries removed from sex-reassignment patients, all young women of reproductive age. “It was 9 November when we did the first human FACS sort and I knew immediately that it had worked,” says Tilly. “I cannot even put into words the excitement — and, to some degree, the relief — I felt.”

The cells they pulled out, called oogonial stem cells (OSCs), spontaneously generated apparently normal immature oocytes when cultured in the lab. To look at the development of the putative human OSCs in a more natural environment, the team labelled the cells with green fluorescent protein to make them traceable, and injected them into fragments ofadulthumanovarian tissue, which were then transplanted under the skin of mice. After one to two weeks of growth, the OSCs had formed green-glowing cells that looked like oocytes and that also expressed two of the genetic hallmarks of this cell type.

“There’s no confirmation that we have baby-making eggs yet, but every other indication is that these cells are the real deal — bona fide oocyte precursor cells,” says Tilly. The next step, to test whether the human OSC-derived oocytes can be fertilized and form an early embryo, will require special considerations — namely, private funding to support the work in the United States (federal funding cannot by law be used for any research that will result in the destruction of a human embryo, whatever the source of the embryo) or a licence from the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to do the work with collaborators in the United Kingdom.

Evelyn Telfer, a reproductive biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, was once sceptical of the mouse work, but has become a believer. “I’ve visited [Tilly’s] lab, seen these cells and how they behave. They’re convincing and impressive,” she says. Telfer, who studies the maturation of human eggs in vitro, will work with Tilly to try to grow the OSC-derived eggs to the point at which they are ready for fertilization.

She notes that there’s still no evidence that the OSCs form new eggs naturally in the body. However, if they could be coaxed in a dish to make eggs that could successfully be used for in vitro fertilization (IVF), it would change the face of assisted reproduction.

“That’s a huge ‘if’,” admits Tilly. But, he continues, it could mean an unlimited supply of eggs for women who have ovarian tissue that still hosts OSCs. This group could include cancer patients who have undergone sterilizing chemotherapy, women who have gone through premature menopause, or even those experiencing normal ageing. Tilly says that follow-up studies have confirmed that OSCs exist in the ovaries of women well into their 40s.

In addition, growing eggs from OSCs in the lab would allow scientists to screen for hormones or drugs that might reinvigorate these cells to keep producing eggs in the body and slow down women’s biological clocks. “Even if you could gain an additional five years of ovarian function, that would cover most women affected by IVF,” notes Tilly.

(Nature)

Biologists have previously predicted that the male sex-determining Y chromosome, which once carried around 800 genes, like the X, has lost hundreds of them over the past 300 million years, will mutate itself out of existence, leading to the eventual extinction of men.

However, researchers of a study published in the latest issue of Nature found evidence to suggest that the Y chromosome will not shed anymore of the 19 ancestral genes that it is left with. Researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT compared sequenced the Y chromosome of the rhesus macaque, a primate whose evolutionary path diverged from that of humans around 25 million years ago, to human and chimpanzee Y chromosomes sequences and discovered that humans had only lost one gene from the Y chromosome since the time the rhesus macaque and people took on separate evolutionary paths. Researchers said that their findings debunks the “so-called rotting Y theory” that assumed that the human Y chromosome will continue to rapidly decay genetically until it is devoid of any genes, including its raison d’être, male-determining gene, in less than 10 million years.

“For the past 10 years, the one dominant storyline in public discourse about the Y is that it is disappearing,” Whitehead Institute Director David Page said in a statement released on Wednesday. “Putting aside the question of whether this ever had a sound scientific basis, the story went viral—fast—and has stayed viral. I can’t give a talk without being asked about the disappearing Y. This idea has been so pervasive that it has kept us from moving on to address the really important questions about the Y.”

Researchers said that the Y chromosome emerged around 200 to 300 million years ago, and before male and females were determined by environmental factors like temperature, rather than genetics. Scientists believe that to maintain genetic diversity and prevent potentially harmful mutations the early X and Y chromosomes reshuffled their genetic material in each generation between the X and the Y on the 23rd pair of the specialized sex chromosome in humans in a process called “crossing over”. About 300 million years ago, a segment of the X stopped crossing over with the Y and over the next millions of years four more segments also ceased crossing over with the Y, which resulted in the Y to rapidly wither away as it loses most of its genes as well as its ability to recombine with the X.

Lab researcher Jennifer Hughes and her team had sequence of the chimpanzee Y chromosome in 2010 and found that chimpanzees have shed many protein-coding genes since their lineage diverged from that of humans about 6 million years ago, but other parts of their Y chromosomes had been duplicated in that time. After decoding the 25 million years old rhesus macaque, an ancestor to both chimpanzees and humans, the researchers found that the macaque Y contained just 20 genes, just one more that the human Y has lost, and although the human Y chromosome has lengthened and grown significantly longer than the macaque chromosome, the genes were mostly the same.

“The Y was in free fall early on, and genes were lost at an incredibly rapid rate,” said Page. “But then it leveled off, and it’s been doing just fine since.”
“Now our empirical data fly in the face of the other theories out there. With no loss of genes on the rhesus Y and one gene lost on the human Y, it’s clear the Y isn’t going anywhere,” Hughes concluded.

(Medical Daily)

Ein neues Ranking der Universität Zürich sieht die weltweit besten Demokratien in Skandinavien. Die Position der Schweiz dürfte viele überraschen.

Die Schweiz ist nicht wie erwartet die Demokratie par excellence, sondern nur Mittelmass. Im Vergleich mit 29 etablierten Demokratien liegt sie auf Rang 14. Dies zeigt das Demokratiebarometer, ein neu entwickeltes Instrument zur Messung der Demokratiequalität.

Die höchste Demokratiequalität weist gemäss dem Demokratiebarometer Dänemark auf, gefolgt von Finnland und Belgien. Am Ende der Skala sind Polen, Südafrika und Costa Rica. Dies teilte die Universität Zürich am Donnerstag mit. Sie hat zusammen mit dem Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin das Demokratiebarometer entwickelt.

Das Barometer zeigt, wie sich die 30 besten Demokratien der Welt zwischen 1995 und 2005 entwickelt haben. Es misst beispielsweise den Schutz der individuellen Freiheit vor Eingriffen Dritter, Rechtsstaatlichkeit, Transparenz, Partizipation, politischen Wettbewerb, Gewaltenkontrolle und die Fähigkeit, demokratische Entscheidungen umzusetzen.

Mangelhafte politische Beteiligung in der Schweiz

Die Schweiz erweise sich zwar hinsichtlich der Erfüllung individueller Freiheiten, aktiver Öffentlichkeit, Wettbewerb und Regierungsfähigkeit als ein demokratisches Musterland, heisst es weiter. Gewaltenkontrolle, Transparenz und Partizipation würden aber nur sehr schlecht umgesetzt.

In der Schweiz könne die Legislative die Regierung nur «sehr unzureichend kontrollieren», die Judikative sei im Vergleich mit anderen Demokratien «nicht sehr unabhängig». Zudem gebe es keine transparente Parteienfinanzierung, heisst es weiter.

Ausserdem befinde sich die politische Partizipation sowohl bei Wahlen als auch bei Abstimmungen auf einem sehr niedrigen Niveau. Ein grosser Teil der Schweizerinnen und Schweizer beteilige sich nicht an der Politik.

Beteiligen würden sich vor allem Gebildete, Wohlhabende, Ältere und überproportional Männer. Vom Ideal einer Demokratie, in der alle Bürgerinnen und Bürger sich politisch engagieren und deren Interessen und Werte gleichmässig in die politische Arena gelangen, ist die Schweiz laut Barometer «weiter als die meisten anderen Demokratien entfernt».

Hoffnungsschimmer

Mit dem Demokratiebarometer lassen sich Entwicklungen über die Zeit aufzeigen. Nimmt man den Durchschnittswert der elf Jahre, liegt die Schweiz auf Rang 14. Betrachtet man hingegen die Rangliste der einzelnen Jahre, lässt sich für die Schweiz ein optimistischeres Fazit ziehen.

1995 belegte sie Rang 19, im Jahr 2005 Rang 9. Zu dieser Verbesserung beigetragen haben insbesondere die Verfassungsrevision 1999, aber auch einige Fortschritte hinsichtlich Transparenz und Partizipation.

Die Schweiz sei denn auch jenes Land in der untersuchten Ländergruppe, das im Untersuchungszeitraum «die markanteste positive Entwicklung in seiner Demokratiequalität zeigt».

(Tages Anzeiger – NCCR Democracy)

La traque internationale s’est organisée contre les divulgations de Wikileaks. Après le géant américain Amazon qui s’est débarrassé de Wikileaks mercredi dernier, Éric Besson, ministre français en charge de l’Économie numérique, avait demandé vendredi à la société OVH, basée à Roubaix, de ne plus héberger la plateforme sur ses serveurs.

Redéploiement des données

La parade de Wikileaks: redéployer les données sur d’autres serveurs. Et depuis la nuit de dimanche à lundi, avec le concours de la Piratenpartei Luxemburg, Wikileaks est également hébergé sur trois serveurs luxembourgeois. «Nous avons repris des copies intégrales des contenus de la plateforme originale et assurons leur diffusion», confirme Sven Clément, président de la Piratenpartei.

Hébergement au Luxembourg

Le Luxembourg est un des pays où Wikileaks trouve encore refuge sur des serveurs: «Nous pensons que la liberté de la presse jouit d’une telle importance au Grand-Duché que nous ne prenons qu’un risque mesuré en soutenant Wikileaks», souligne Sven Clément. Les frais de cette initiative se montent à plus de 500 euros, ce qui représente beaucoup d’argent pour un petit parti comme la Piratenpartei. «Mais nous pouvons compter sur le soutien de donateurs généreux, qui nous mettent du matériel à disposition», assure Sven Clément.

(L’Essentiel – Wikileaks.ch)

Deleting a certain gene in mice can make them smarter by unlocking a mysterious region of the brain considered to be relatively inflexible, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have found.

Mice with a disabled RGS14 gene are able to remember objects they’d explored and learn to navigate mazes better than regular mice, suggesting that RGS14’s presence limits some forms of learning and memory.

The results were published online this week in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Since RGS14 appears to hold mice back mentally, John Hepler, PhD, professor of pharmacology at Emory University School of Medicine, says he and his colleagues have been jokingly calling it the “Homer Simpson gene.”

RGS14 is primarily turned on in one particular part — called CA2 — of the hippocampus, a region of the brain known for decades to be involved in consolidating new learning and forming new memories. However, the CA2 region lies off the beaten path scientifically and it’s not clear what its functions are, Hepler says.

RGS14, which is also found in humans, was identified more than a decade ago. Hepler and his colleagues have previously shown that the RGS14 protein can regulate several molecules involved in processing different types of signals in the brain that are known to be important for learning and memory. They believe RGS14 is a key control protein for these signals.

To probe RGS14’s functions, Sarah Emerson Lee, a graduate student working with Hepler, characterized mice whose RGS14 genes were disabled using gene-targeting technology. In collaboration with Serena Dudek, PhD, at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, they examined how the CA2 region responded to electrical stimulation in the gene-altered mice.

Many researchers have examined how other parts of the hippocampus are involved in long-term potentiation, a strengthening of connections between neurons that can be seen after new memory formation or artificial stimulation in a culture dish. The CA2 region is distinct from other regions for being resistant to long-term potentiation, and neurons within CA2 are able to survive injury by seizures or stroke more than neurons in other parts of the hippocampus.

The researchers were surprised to find that, in mice with a disabled RGS14 gene, the CA2 region was now capable of “robust” long-term potentiation, meaning that in response to electrical stimulation, neurons there had stronger connections. On top of that, the ability of the gene-altered mice to recognize objects previously placed in their cages was enhanced, compared to normal mice. They also learned more quickly to navigate through a water maze to a hidden escape platform by remembering visual cues.

“A big question this research raises is why would we, or mice, have a gene that makes us less smart – a Homer Simpson gene?” Hepler says. “I believe that we are not really seeing the full picture. RGS14 may be a key control gene in a part of the brain that, when missing or disabled, knocks brain signals important for learning and memory out of balance.”

The lack of RGS14 doesn’t seem to hurt the altered mice, but it is still possible that they have their brain functions changed in a way that researchers have not yet been able to spot. Besides being resistant to injury by seizure, certain types of CA2 neurons are lost in schizophrenia, and loss of another gene turned on primarily in the CA2 region leads to altered social behaviors, Hepler notes.

“This suggests that these mice may not forget things as easily as other mice, or perhaps they have altered social behavior or sensitivity to seizures,” he says. “But not necessarily.”

Lee is investigating some of these possibilities now.

“The pipe dream is that maybe you could find a compound that inhibits RGS14 or shuts it down,” he adds. “Then, perhaps, you could enhance cognition.”

(Medical Daily)

Le gouvernement allemand a indiqué lundi avoir demandé aux ministres et hauts responsables de bannir l’usage des téléphones mobiles IPhone et des BlackBerry, en raison d’une hausse «spectaculaire» des attaques contre les réseaux allemands de téléphonie et internet.

Selon un porte-parole du ministère de l’Intérieur, cette mesure découle d’une recommandation «pressante» de l’Office fédéral pour la sécurité des techniques d’information (BSI) et les ministres ont été invités à utiliser plutôt les appareils Simko de la compagnie de téléphonie Deutsche Telekom.

Les smartphones BlackBerry, fabriqués par le canadien Research in Motion (RIM), offrent un haut niveau de protection des données et des courriels, mais Berlin est semble-t-il inquiète que les données transitent toutes via deux centres de RIM au Canada et en Grande-Bretagne.

Le ministre de l’Intérieur Thomas de Maizière a fait état lundi d’une «augmentation dramatique des attaques» contre les réseaux allemands de téléphonie et internet, en particulier ceux du gouvernement, dans une interview au quotidien Handelsblatt.

Les ministères, les ambassades et l’administration sont victimes d’une offensive d’envergure de piratage de leurs réseaux de communication, a dit le ministre conservateur. Or «le gouvernement doit garder à l’esprit qu’il doit protéger son propre réseau de manière efficace», a-t-il dit.

Selon une note interne du ministère, citée par le Handelsblatt, «les réseaux de téléphonie mobile en particulier sont un facteur de danger». Le journal indique, en citant les services allemands du renseignement, que les attaques proviendraient de services du renseignement étrangers et du crime organisé.

Certains pays cherchent à obtenir l’accès aux messages électroniques cryptés des BlackBerry.

L’Arabie saoudite a annoncé début août la suspension des services de BlackBerry. Les Emirats arabes unis prévoient eux aussi de suspendre dès octobre certains services du téléphone multifonctions BlackBerry non conformes aux lois en vigueur dans le pays et qui soulèveraient des problèmes de sécurité, selon les autorités. Et l’Inde s’interrogerait à son tour sur des mesures similaires.

(L’Alsace)

Le Soleil sort lentement d’une longue léthargie comme il n’en avait pas connu depuis 1913. Ce repos inexpliqué est-il la cause d’un climat plus froid et perturbé ? Les scientifiques restent partagés.

Alors que l’Europe grelotte, astronomes, climatologues et autres géophysiciens calculent et recalculent sans cesse. Pendant deux ans, le Soleil a affiché un calme inquiétant. Les experts cherchent à comprendre pourquoi il est resté dans un « minimum profond » aussi longtemps et à savoir si cette léthargie a des conséquences directes sur la Terre.

De telles périodes de repos ne sont pas inhabituelles. «Elles reviennent suivant un cycle bien connu, en moyenne tous les onze ans. Le Soleil donne alors l’impression de s’être assagi, puis les éruptions à sa surface reprennent et il projette à nouveau de grandes quantités de matière dans l’espace», explique le planétologue Jean-Loup Bertaux.

Mais cette fois, rien. Pendant 266 jours, notre étoile s’est même offert le luxe de rester vierge de taches noires, signe de reconnaissance d’une reprise d’activité. Du jamais-vu depuis le début du XXe siècle !

A l’automne, quelques soubresauts ont laissé croire à l’Agence spatiale américaine (Nasa) que notre astre avait décidé de sortir de sa torpeur. Fausse alerte : il s’est rendormi aussitôt. D’éminents spécialistes se sont alors alarmés : et si l’étoile, sans laquelle toute survie nous est impossible, ne retrouvait pas son intensité habituelle ?

David Hathaway, du Marshall Space Flight Center de la Nasa, s’est inquiété d’une diminution du rayonnement depuis le dernier minimum d’activité, en 1996, et de graves perturbations du vent solaire. «Nous sommes à peu près sûrs que le prochain maximum d’activité solaire sera nettement plus faible que le précédent», ajoute Jean-Loup Bertaux.

De leur côté, des climatologues ont constaté un ralentissement du réchauffement climatique et les météorologues enregistrent des records de mauvais temps en période hivernale. C’est le cas en ce moment sur l’Europe. Ce le fut il y a quelques semaines en Chine et l’année dernière au Moyen-Orient et en Amérique du Sud…

L’idée que la Terre pourrait entrer dans une mini-période glacière fait son chemin. D’autant qu’un tel phénomène n’est pas sans précédent. «Le Soleil a eu un minimum d’activité similaire très prolongé entre 1912 et 1913, explique Guillaume Aulanier, astronome au laboratoire d’Etudes spatiales et d’instrumentation en astrophysique (Lesia). En remontant encore dans le temps, c’est arrivé sous Louis XIV, pendant près de soixante ans. Ce cycle est connu des astronomes sous le nom de minimum de Maunder et du grand public comme la “petite période glacière”. Il fit alors extrêmement froid en Europe et en Amérique du Nord, ce qui laisse penser à certains chercheurs que les fluctuations de l’activité du Soleil influencent le climat.»

Sur cette question, la communauté scientifique reste divisée. Pour le Groupement d’experts intergouvernemental sur l’évolution du climat (Giec), les variations de l’activité solaire n’ont pas de conséquences sur l’équilibre de notre planète. «Une chose est sûre, la variation de luminosité totale du Soleil est extrêmement faible. Elle ne suffit pas, à elle seule, pour expliquer les grandes différences de température qu’on pourrait avoir actuellement ou qu’on a constatées pendant le minimum de Maunder. Des questions d’orbite, de perturbations par Jupiter ou les rayons cosmiques peuvent jouer. On sait aussi que les hautes couches de l’atmosphère sont très sensibles aux variations des ultraviolets et des rayons X. Autant d’objets de recherche sur lesquels nous sommes encore incapables de trancher.»

Quant à savoir si le Soleil commence un nouveau cycle d’activité, rares sont ceux qui s’aventurent à un pronostic après la fausse alerte de septembre dernier. Pourtant, des taches noires plus importantes et plus régulières commencent à assombrir sa surface. Quelques petites éruptions – équivalentes, tout de même, à plusieurs fois la taille de la Terre – ont été constatées. L’activité est modérée, mais l’étoile de notre système semble avoir décidé de se remettre au boulot. Pour retirer les moufles et les cachemires, un conseil : il faut attendre un peu.

(Le Figaro)