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28 June 2006, 00:00 UT, Earth seen by Mtsat 140° E
28 June 2006, 00:12 UT, Cerro Paranal, Chile
Astronomer Morten Andersen is at the control console for Yepun, the fourth telescope in the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope array. He is taking a census of the smallest stars of the Galaxy's most massive young cluster, Westerlund 1. The high-resolution near-infrared camera (CONICA) allows him to obtain images with a resolution of less than 0.1 arcsec — as good as if the whole telescope were in space.
24°38' S 70°24' W; 20:12, 20 June, local time
28 June 2006, 00:23 UT, Bintulu, Malaysia
Diana James Junau, a project officer with Grand Perfect Conservation, measures the dimensions of a molar tooth from one of a series of pig skulls. The skulls were collected from upriver Iban longhouses as part of a five-year research project into the population biology of the bearded pig (Sus barbatus). The study will help to determine whether humans' traditional food sources are sustainable after we have turned forests into patchworks of wood and cleared land.
3°10' N 113°02' E; 08:23 local time
28 June 2006, 00:26 UT, Low Earth orbit
The Hubble Space Telescope begins a 1,344-second near-infrared exposure. Once transmitted to Earth, the data will be processed and analysed by Anton Koekemoer of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland. He will combine it with subsequent exposures of the same field, obtained continually throughout the day, to build up an image for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field project. The aim is to find distant galaxies that were the first sources of light in the primordial Universe.
28 June 2006, 01:00 UT, Oarai, Japan
At a test facility of the JOYO experimental fast reactor, Takafumi Aoyama, a nuclear engineer for the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, consults and calibrates a temperature monitor. The monitor, which works on the basis of thermal expansion, has been developed for use in the reactor's core subassembly.
36°19' N 140°36' E; 10:00 local time
28 June 2006, 01:05 UT, Lillehammer, Norway
Costas Synolakis, of the University of Southern California, is in Lillehammer for the Geohazards 2006 conference. He has been studying the fact that so many videos of the 2004 tsunami show people seemingly mesmerized by the wave. This morning he presented a paper suggesting they were tricked by an optical illusion in which the tsunami approaches the shore at a snail's pace but accelerates in the shallows. Now he's being mesmerized by the constant twilight and a lack of thick blinds.
61°08' N 10°30' E; 03:05 local time
28 June 2006, 01:12 UT, Harima, Japan
The SPring-8 synchrotron facility, one of the most powerful X-ray sources in the world, is quiet. There is no electron beam in the accelerator today; the next run will begin on 25 June. One of the researchers, Shigeru Kimura, is showing visitors from the science ministry two of the beamlines — one devoted to surface and interface structures, one to powder diffraction — and their experimental equipment. The beamlines form part of the ministry's Nanotechnology Support Project.
35°00' N 134°40' E; 10:12 local time
28 June 2006, 01:30 UT, Hanoi, Vietnam
Nguyen Van Hanh, a PhD student, shows Bui Xuan Nguyen some egg cells that have been matured in vitro for 22 hours. Nguyen needs the cells for his attempt to clone the saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis), a species of ox that lives only on the Laos–Vietnam border and one of the rarest mammals in the world. The bovine oocytes do not look suitable, but there are some nice swamp-buffalo oocytes with clear polar bodies. Nguyen starts to remove the nuclei from the buffalo egg cells while a colleague prepares some saola cells, readying them for fusion around noon.
21°01' N 105°30' E; 08:30 local time
28 June 2006, 02:00 UT, Maprik, Papua New Guinea
Ivo Müller of the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research on the steamy East Sepik plains calls his boss, John Reeder, currently in Melbourne, Australia (where it's rather chilly). They are working on a large trial of intermittent preventative treatment in infancy (IPTi), a strategy designed to cut the devastating impact of malaria on children in Papua New Guinea. The field work has got off to a great start, but adapting good clinical practice to the challenges of a remote setting in a developing country always presents problems that need to be talked through.
3°38' S 143°03' E; 12:00 local time
28 June 2006, 02:55 UT, Bangalore, India
This little girl, weighing 3.14 kg, was born just before 08:00 local time in Manipal Hospital — the first baby for proud mother and father Rhadhika and Rajesh Sinha, who were still thinking of a name for her when this photo was taken. Hers was one of the estimated 358,522 new human lives entering the world on 21 June 2006, more than double the number (155,000 or so) leaving it. The estimated world population on this day stands at 6,523,642,761. Babies born in India can currently expect to live for 63.3 years, some years shy of the global life expectancy of 67.
12°58' N 77°34' E; 07:55 local time
28 June 2006, 02:55 UT, Tsukuba, Japan
A television crew has joined the morning meeting at Yoshiyuki Sankai's lab. This is actually less unusual than it might seem. Sankai is one of Japan's leading experts on robotics and has designed what he calls 'hybrid assistive legs', which strap on to human legs like a pair of bionic trousers. Sankai's ideas about how such technologies can help the ageing population of Japan have made him something of a media star.
36°04' N 140°09' E; 11:55 local time
28 June 2006, 01:00 UT, Canberra, Australia
Today the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration announced approval for Gardasil, a vaccine against cervical cancer. Along with some parliamentarians and officials, Ian Frazer of the University of Queensland, whose work on virus-like particles was crucial to the vaccine's development, speaks at a press conference in Canberra to mark the occasion. He's asked whether there are any chances of a vaccine for stupidity: "A significant public-health issue, particularly in Canberra, if a little difficult to define. I'll defer comment on the need to my expert colleagues on the panel."
35°18' S 149°08' E; 13:00 local time
28 June 2006, 03:15 UT, Newcastle, Australia
Anne Imenes at Australia's National Solar Energy Centre is testing the optical performance of one of the 200 mirrors intended for the 'solar concentrator'. The experimental array will concentrate 500 kW of solar thermal power on to a reactor 17 metres above the ground, heating it to more than 1,000°C. The reactor will be installed in July.
32°53' S 151°44' E; 13:15 local time
28 June 2006, 03:45 UT, Strait of Johor
Juan Walford and his colleague B. Sivaloganathan of the National University of Singapore are checking on some six-month-old seahorses, which they are rearing in a floating fish farm off the east coast of Singapore. Their study aims to use the seahorses as living indicators of the marine environment. This morning they find a lot of 'pregnant' males with embryos in their brood pouch, indicating that the juveniles have successfully reached reproductive age, so it would be feasible to restock the area.
1°24' N 103°58' E; 11:45 local time
28 June 2006, 03:47 UT, Florham Park, New Jersey
Dan Silver, marketing director for a multinational manufacturer of medical devices in New Jersey, e-mails ProMED-mail with a report that he has translated from a Chinese newspaper. The Internet site (www.promedmail.org) provides information on disease outbreaks and depends on doctors, researchers and health professionals around the world sending in information in this way. The report describes 60 students and teachers who have come down with an undiagnosed febrile illness in Shaanxi, China, since 12 June.
40°47' N 74°28' W; 23:47, 20 June, local time
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