Oman Observer - Feature

Musandam readies for round-the-world attempt

Oman Sail’s 75-foot trimaran Musandam is ready to depart on her circumnavigation of the globe under the new colours of Oman and with a 5-man crew, including Mohsin Ali al Busaidy, who is set to become the first ever Omani to sail around the world. Weather dependant, Musandam will depart Marina Bander Al Rowdha for the start line on Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 1400hrs.

In their first attempt to sail Musandam non-stop from Muscat to Muscat, Mohsin and the international crew on Musandam will sail over 37,966 kilometres via the Indian Ocean and the three great Capes of the Southern Ocean — Cape Leeuwin (south-west tip of Australia), the notorious Cape Horn (tip of South America) and Cape of Good Hope (southern tip of South Africa) before turning left and heading back towards Muscat. The five crew will endure the calms and heat of the tropics for only ten per cent of the journey and will spend the majority of the trip in the freezing and hostile Southern Ocean where temperatures, with wind chill, will regularly be below -10oC.

Musandam crew:
Loik Gallon (FRA) — Skipper
Mohsin Ali al Busaidy (Oman)
Thierry Duprey Du Vorsent (FRA)
Charles Darbyshire (GBR)
Nick Houchin (GBR)
In the following interview, crew member Charles Darbyshire talks about their departure plans and some of the weather they expect to encounter en route.

Q: Is Musandam ready to go? What is left to do before departure?
Musandam is ready to leave! Everything that is needed for the round the world trip is on board. A few days before the team broke up for a two-week Christmas break, the tool boxes and spares boxes were sealed with a cable tie to stop anything being used from our on board kit — a sure sign we are nearing the end of our preparation. The last things to be added in the days before the boat’s departure on 8th January will be the food, and personal clothing and possessions. Over the Christmas break although divided by many thousands of miles a common thought has been lurking in the back of everyone’s mind — what else...

What else do we need to do, what else may we have missed, what else could be done to make life better on board, more reliable, more comfortable... The odd phone call or e-mail between the team to exchange these ideas calms the mind. The food is all packed up having been planned and assembled by Diane Johnson a nutritionist, and her husband Tim. Imagine shopping for five people for 80 days — everything from main meals (all freeze-dried, of course, just add hot water to re-hydrate!) to snacks, sweets, drinks, toilet and kitchen roll. It all needed to be listed, purchased and bagged up.

We are taking enough food for 80 days — each day there is just 5kg of food for the crew, consisting of two main meals, a sweet desert, drinks, breakfast and snack bars. Something around 4,000 calories per day for the hot sections of the race course (the first and last third approximately) and raising to around 6,000 calories for the Southern Ocean. If it’s not in the bags when they get loaded on the 6th of January then it’s not going round the world, we can’t go and shop for something, we can’t get something delivered — if it’s not on board we’ll manage without it.

Q: What is the weather pattern you expect on departure and outline the weather Musandam will experience round the world?
For now it’s still a bit too early to tell what the exact weather will be like for our departure — but we will get an accurate picture within a few days of the start. But the northern part of the Indian Ocean is notorious for its light airs — the Volvo Ocean Race fleet passed somewhere similar four weeks ago, and one of their powerful boats got stuck for two days — managing just 60 kilometres in one 24-hour period -something we’ll be looking to avoid if possible! Heading down the Indian Ocean our first major challenge is where to cross the famous Doldrums — a wide band of light airs where Trade Winds from the northern hemisphere meet with those from the southern hemisphere — a vast melting pot of opposing winds that cancel each other out — and towering thunder storm clouds that move masses of air in each squall — we’ll have to be fast to react to those, and change sails quickly.

Once through we are off south — via a blocking high pressure system called the St Helena High that lives between Africa and Australia — its exact location changes often. Forecasts will show tempting holes to pass through only to close again with a new forecast update (every 6 hours there is a new forecast). This will be the final hurdle before the great expanse of the Southern Ocean — where waves circle the globe unopposed by land, they gather speed and size from each storm. Eight and 10 metre high waves are not uncommon! The Vendée Globe fleet (solo round the world racers) are there right now, and this ocean has claimed a few casualties — two dismastings, capsizes and a broken leg give a chilling reminder that nothing can be taken for granted.

Solo sailing in the Southern Ocean is a different sport though and although it will be a real challenge for Musandam and us — the freezing temperatures, rain, snow and huge waves — we will have each other so share our concerns and fears. Five crew, all reliant on each other, is such a different prospect from tackling this ocean single-handed. When we see our first albatross, our first really big wave or our first big storm we’ll share it together knowing we are not alone, we have each other.

For anyone that has grown up sailing, the Southern Ocean is a pinnacle, though to be there day after day will be wearing. Meeting up with some old sailing friends during the last few days they all agreed they’d love to go there for an afternoon’s blast — spending 4 or 5 hours surfing down the big waves, but not more after 4 hours, then they would be cold, a bit damp, and ready for a hot drink, good food, and a comfortable bed! We will have this day after day for something like 30 days. It really is the ultimate challenge.

Put kangaroos, camels on eco-menu: scientists

Camels were introduced into Australia as pack animals for the vast outback in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but were released into the wild as rail & road travel became more widespread. With few natural predators and vast sparsely-populated areas in which to roam, the population has soared to around a million and is now doubling about every nine years

Camels arriving in Australia at Port Augusta 1890. Australians are considering saving the planet by eating kangaroos and wild camels.

Saving the planet by eating kangaroos and wild camels may seem like pie in the sky, but the offbeat menu comes with a scientific stamp of approval in Australia. The aim in both cases is to reduce damage to the environment, but the reasoning behind the push to put the animals on the menu is sharply different. In the case of kangaroos, environmentalists say the national animal should become a dietary staple in place of cattle and sheep as part of the fight against global warming. The farm animals make a major contribution to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions simply by belching and farting, while kangaroos emit negligible amounts of dangerous methane gas.

In other words, there should be more kangaroos and fewer farm animals. “For most of Australia’s human history —around 60,000 years — kangaroo was the main source of meat,” the government’s top climate change adviser Professor Ross Garnaut noted in a major report on global warming recently. “It could again become important.” In the case of camels, scientists say eating the imported animals would be one way of reducing the million-strong feral herd — one of the largest on earth — running amok in the fragile ecosystems of the outback. “Eat a camel today, I’ve done it,” says Professor Murray McGregor, co-author of a three-year study on the humpbacked pests presented to the government last month.

In each case, the scientists admit they face a struggle to change Australia’s eating habits, but believe strongly in the need to somehow cut the numbers of sheep, cattle and camels. Garnaut’s study concluded that by 2020, beef cattle and sheep numbers could be reduced by seven million and 36 million respectively, allowing for an increase in kangaroo numbers to 240 million by 2020, from 34 million now. He acknowledged, however, that there were some problems in this plan, including livestock and farm management issues, consumer resistance and the gradual nature of change in food tastes. The idea of farming kangaroos — which appear on the Australian coat of arms — for human consumption is distasteful to some, but many health-conscious Australians already eat kangaroo meat.

“It’s low in fat, it’s got high protein levels, it’s very clean in the sense that basically it’s the ultimate free range animal,” says Peter Ampt of the University of New South Wales’s institute of environmental studies. A similar argument was put forward last month in an attempt to whet Australian appetities for camel meat. A three-year study found that Australia’s population of more than a million feral camels is out of control and damaging fragile desert ecosystems, water sources, rare plants and animals. The Desert Knowledge Co-operative Research Centre, which produced the report presented to the federal government, said a good way to bring down the number of camels is to eat them.

“It’s beautiful meat. It’s a bit like beef. It’s as lean as lean, it’s an excellent health food,” said McGregor. Unlike the native kangaroo, camels were introduced into Australia as pack animals for the vast outback in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but were released into the wild as rail and road travel became more widespread. With few natural predators and vast sparsely-populated areas in which to roam, the population has soared to around a million and is now doubling about every nine years, the centre’s Glenn Edwards said. While putting camels on the menu could help reduce their numbers, and is one of the proposals in the report, Edwards admits it is unlikely that Australia can eat its way out of the problem.

Hundreds of thousands of camels will have to be removed to bring the numbers down to a point where they cause minimal damage, he said. “I think (eating them) is an option that may work in some areas but it won’t be the panacea,” he said. The local market for camel meat would be limited and even given the fact that there is a large demand from some countries overseas it would be difficult to harvest and process the animals. “To commercially use camels in that way you need to have access to them — so you need roads and, depending on how you are processing them, electricity and water.

“Parts of the range have the infrastructure but other places are simply too remote, nobody lives out there.” The only way to deal with the populations in those areas if they did not become commercially viable would be to shoot them from helicopters, he said, and leave them to rot. Switching from cattle and sheep to kangaroos also faces problems, said beef farmer Kelvin Brown. “In theory farming kangaroos is probably good because they are selective grazers, don’t tend to overgraze country and have a good conversion rate of feed into meat,” he said from his farm Ykicamoocow. But the practicalities would keep farmers on the hop. “You would need ten-feet (three-metre) high fencing similar to the deer industry,” Brown said.

Transporting kangaroos to the abattoir would also be fraught with difficulties. “You are dealing with an animal that isn’t used to being touched or herded and apparently they do have quite high rates of heart attacks from fright and also tend to damage themselves quite easily, break legs, things like that. “So although this idea of farming kangaroos is good, probably the only way you could do it would be to shoot the kangaroos on the farm and have some system of butchering on site.” Given the difficulties, it seems that kangaroos and camels will not become a staple of the Australian diet any time soon and environmentalists will have to look elsewhere for solutions to the planet’s problems.
— AFP

British scientists dismiss ‘detox’ myth as a con job

There is little or no proof that these products work, except to part people from their cash and downplay all the amazing ways in which our bodies can look after themselves

Don’t waste your money buying dodgy products that claim to ‘detox’ your body — instead, eat healthily and trust your liver and kidneys to do the job, scientists said in a report published yesterday. British science students who reviewed a range of ‘detox’ products — from bottled water to face scrubs — say many were “meaningless”.

The investigation was kicked off by a campaign to demolish “dodgy” science claims — where companies use phrases that sound scientific but do not actually mean anything. Despite a lack of scientific evidence, consumers are being misled into believing ‘detox’ products actually work, said the report by Voice of Young Science, a group representing PhD and post-doctorate students working in science.

No two companies use the same definition of “detox”, and their claims are “meaningless”, the study found, concluding that “detox” has no meaning outside of clinical treatment for drug addiction or for poisoning.

The liver and kidneys, the scientists said, were the most efficient “detox” system to rid the body of harmful chemicals. “Detox is marketed as the idea that modern living fills us with invisible nasties that our bodies can’t cope with unless we buy the latest jargon-filled remedy,” said biologist Harriet Ball, one of the authors of the report.

“There is little or no proof that these products work, except to part people from their cash and downplay all the amazing ways in which our bodies can look after themselves,” she added. Alice Tuff of Sense About Science, which published the report, said: “It is ridiculous that we’re seeing a return to mystical properties being claimed for products in the 21st century.” One researcher, who investigated a well-known face wash which claimed to ‘detoxify’ the skin by removing toxins, said the ‘toxins’ turned out to be the usual dirt, make-up and skin oils that any cleanser would be expected to remove. And a five-day detox plan from a pharmaceutical chain was criticised for not being backed by evidence. The researchers warned that, at worst, some detox diets could have dangerous consequences and, at best, they were a waste of money.
— IANS

Marine algae most promising bet for green fuel

Scientists see marine algae as the most promising bet for a green fuel that would help ease the dependence on fossil fuel and power vehicles of the future. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of Californa San Diego (UCSD), scientists along with their counterparts from its division of biological sciences are part of an emerging algal biofuel consortium that includes academic collaborators, CleanTECH, public and private partners.

Scripps biologist Greg Mitchell is quick to point out to anyone who asks that marine algae are the most efficient organisms on earth for absorbing light energy and converting it into a natural biomass oil product, the biofuel equivalent of crude oil. “Algae yields five to 10 times more bioenergy molecules per area, per time, than any terrestrial plant,” said Mitchell, a native of oil-rich Houston, Texas.

“Nothing else comes close.” From a sustainability perspective, algae hold the upper hand against other biofuel candidates, such as corn and soybeans. Algae can be grown on barren desert land using salt water, averting competition with agricultural cropland and the need for large amounts of precious fresh water for

irrigation. Since they require carbon dioxide for growth, algae are inherently carbon neutral, and they can suck up carbon dioxide directly from industrial pollution sources. Furthermore, algae can feed off the nutrients in discarded wastewater.

Adding yet another layer to their allure, the rich protein left over from algae harvests can be converted to animal feed. “There is still a lot of work to do, but algal-derived biofuels have the potential to become a major source of transportation fuel,” said Bernard Raemy, executive vice-president of Carbon Capture Corporation, a company growing algae in ponds for biofuel research in California’s Imperial Valley desert. Raemy acknowledges that a string of challenges lies ahead, but with appropriate investment he believes a new algal biofuel industry, based on collaborations with public and private sectors, could be built within 10 years.

The prospect of squeezing billions of gallons of biofuel oil from marine algae is enticing, but to transform tiny lime-green-coloured plant-like organisms into a viable and realistic fuel option, they must be tested and grown on a massive scale. Intermediate-sized, and eventually immense, algae production sites will be required to produce an economically relevant quantity of algae-based oil for biodiesel fuel in cars, trucks and airplanes. Such facilities are beginning to emerge, featuring farms with vast oval-shaped ponds capable of churning out hundreds of pounds of algal biomass per day, said a Scirpps release.

But these facilities are in their formative stages and face an array of problems, from selecting which species of algae are the best candidates for biofuel output to addressing the threat of airborne contaminants that invade algae ponds and disrupt growth processes. In 2005, as gas prices continued to rise and long-term oil supplies grew increasingly suspect, interest in algal biofuel research began to stir and society began to awaken on a large scale to the issues of fossil fuel emissions and a warming planet.

Mitchell, who spent years promoting algal biofuel but was largely dismissed, jumped in with zeal. He began organising seminars and meetings on the topic, in addition to co-ordinating efforts with national and international algal biofuel stakeholders. Mitchell’s lab began evaluating various species of algae for their biofuel potential. Today, the lab is evaluating diverse algal growth scenarios and resultant biological models, or test cases, which could be applied in algal pond farms.
— IANS

Diabetes dulls patient’s mental functioning

Diabetes dulls adult patients' mental functioning early during the onset and persists into old age, according to new research. Given the sharp rise in the incidence of diabetes, more adults may soon be living with mild but lasting deficits in their thought processes. University of Alberta researchers analysed a cross-section of adults with and without adult-onset Type 2 diabetes, all followed in the Victoria Longitudinal Study. At three-year intervals, this study tracks three independent samples of initially healthy older adults to assess biomedical, health, cognitive and neurocognitive aspects of aging.

The Neuropsychology study involved 41 adults with diabetes and 424 adults in good health, between ages 53 and 90. The research confirmed previous reports that diabetes impairs cognition and added two important findings. First, it teased out the specific domains hurt by diabetes. Second, it revealed that the performance gap was not worse in the older group. Thus, the reductions in executive function and processing speed seem to begin earlier in the disease. Healthy adults performed significantly better than adults with diabetes on two of the five domains tested: executive functioning, with significant differences across four different tests, and speed, with significant differences or trends across five different tests.

There were no significant differences on tests of episodic and semantic memory, verbal fluency, reaction time and perceptual speed, said an Alberta release. When researchers divided participants into young-old and old-old, with age 70 as the cutoff, they found the same pattern of cognitive differences between young-old and old-old in the diabetes and control groups. “Speed and executive functioning are thought to be among the major components of cognitive health,” said co-author Roger Dixon. According to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, new cases of diabetes nearly doubled in the past decade, with nearly one new case for every 100 adults between the years 2005 and 2007.
— IANS