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Enlarge ImageSliced. A zebrafish larvae tail 3 minutes, 17 minutes, and 61 minutes (top to bottom) after being cut. Hydrogen peroxide (red) emanates from the wound, fading to yellow and green as it dissipates through tissue.Credit: Philipp Niethammer Anyone who has felt the sting as hydrogen peroxide foams and fizzes on a scraped knee knows about the compound's antiseptic properties. But new research suggests that hydrogen peroxide does more than just kill microbes. It may also call for reinforcements, summoning an army of bacteria-fighting cells to cuts and wounds. Punctured skin sets off a chain reaction of chemical signals...

Two Muslim converts and two Turks go on trial in a bomb-proof courtroom in Düsseldorf today accused of plotting to blow up German civilians and US soldiers. “The world will burn!” boasted an intercepted e-mail sent between the accused, who are alleged to have wanted to wage an Islamic holy war in the heart of Europe. Three of the men — Fritz Gelowicz, 29, Daniel Schneider, 23 and the Turkish national Adem Yilmaz, 30 — are accused of attending a training camp on the Afghan-Pakistani frontier run by an Uzbek-based terror organisation known as the Islamic Jihad Union. Intelligence services...

Agency says radioactive materials recovered in home of man allegedly slain by his wife ...BELFAST, Maine — James G. Cummings, who police say was shot to death by his wife two months ago, allegedly had a cache of radioactive materials in his home suitable for building a “dirty bomb.” According to an FBI field intelligence report from the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center posted online by WikiLeaks, an organization that posts leaked documents, an investigation into the case revealed that radioactive materials were removed from Cummings’ home after his shooting death on Dec. 9 It says that four 1-gallon...

PRESS RELEASE SNIPPET - QUOTE: HP-1313 Washington, DC--The U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated three members of a German Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) cell under Executive Order 13224 (E.O. 13224), which targets terrorists and those providing support to terrorists or acts of terrorism. "We commend the vigilant and effective work of German authorities in apprehending this terrorist cell before it could carry out its brutal and horrifying attack plans," said Adam Szubin, director of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. "In concert with this important law enforcement action, United Nations global sanctions provide a tool of unparalleled scope to...

Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

HEIDELBERG, Germany — German federal police have sent out “wanted” posters for two Germans who they say are training at a Pakistan terrorist camp and planning suicide attacks such as one carried out in Afghanistan last month that killed two U.S. soldiers, according to German media. The two are members of an Islamist cell that German police busted in September when three of its other members were brewing up bombs, authorities said, to kill Americans in Germany. The two men in the posters — one a German, the other born in Lebanon but a resident of Germany — have been...

Attacks on nuclear power stations, oil and gas terminals, Canary Wharf and Heathrow’s control tower were being considered by leaders of the plot to blow up seven transatlantic airliners in mid-flight, a court was told yesterday. Documents found on computer memory sticks at the home of an alleged terrorist ringleader contained a list of targets across Britain – including the gas pipeline between Britain and Belgium. The man, Assad Sarwar, was said to be in contact with terrorist leaders overseas and visited Pakistan a month before his arrest as preparations for the airline attacks were being finalised. Peter Wright, QC,...

A British terror gang plotted to use liquid explosives to blow up transatlantic passenger jets in mid-flight, a court heard today. Eight men planned to smuggle bombs disguised as soft drinks on to flights from Heathrow to the United States and Canada and detonate them on board, Woolwich crown court was told. It would have caused a civilian death toll on an "almost unprecedented scale" and a "global impact". The gang allegedly targeted seven flights operated by Air Canada, United Airlines and American Airlines. They were arrested in August 2006 after a surveillance operation — as they were "almost ready"...

14 December 2007—To let Hollywood tell it, robots are ultrapowerful machines with seemingly inexhaustible stamina. In last summer’s CGI extravaganza Transformers, shape-shifting robots swatted cars and trucks aside like gnats at a barbecue and effortlessly outpaced fleeing humans—who, by comparison, were inferior in every regard. But the physics of the cineplex don’t hold true in the real world. Here, even the best humanoid robots don’t hold a candle to the race upon which they’re based. At 129 kilograms and just 1.6 meters in height, Honda’s P3 robot, for example, is a dumpy weakling that moves no faster than a slow...

"Credible Security Risk" Those are the words of the pilot on Delta Flight 1824 out of OIA, after it pulled back from the gate Friday morning to take off for Atlanta. Nine Middle Eastern passengers, six males and three females, had been denied access to the plane when TSA screeners found they were carrying an array of suspicious items ranging from hydrogen peroxide, which can be used to make bombs, to wires and Vaseline bottles taped together. Perhaps most disturbing, what one TSA worker tells me were the first positive tests for SEMTEX ever reported by security at OIA. SEMTEX...

Three men have been arrested for planning attacks on Frankfurt's international airport and the U.S. military base in Ramstein, the German Defense Minister said Wednesday. "There was an imminent threat," Franz Josef Jung told Germany's ARD broadcaster. He declined to elaborate. Two of the suspects had German citizenship while the third was Pakistani, Germany's Sudwestrundfunk public broadcaster said. German federal prosecutors said they had arrested three suspected members of "an Islamic motivated terrorist organization." It was not immediately clear whether the three were suspected of having links to al Qaeda. Sudwestrundfunk said the men were arrested Tuesday evening and were...

The soil on Mars may contain microbial life! Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, will declare on Friday the Viking spacecraft may have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid Martian surface. His analysis of one of the experiments carried out by the Viking spacecraft suggests that 0.1 percent of the Martian soil could be of biological origin. That is roughly comparable to biomass levels found in some Antarctic permafrost, home to a range of hardy bacteria and lichen. Developing....

Dramatic film of a fireman confronting one of the alleged July 21 bombers on a Tube train as other passengers fled in panic was shown to a jury yesterday. The CCTV footage showed Ramzi Mohammed, 25, wearing a rucksack and boarding the busy Northern Line Tube at Stockwell, south London. He turned his back towards a mother with a child in a pushchair before detonating his device. The detonator exploded, although the main charge, made up of liquid hydrogen peroxide and chapati flour, failed to go off. As other passengers tried to run, Angus Campbell, an off-duty fireman, stayed and...

Adding a layer of technology to manual searches of bags and packages taken into the New York City subway, police officials said yesterday that they would begin using mechanized devices that check for conventional explosives. At various stations beginning next week, riders will encounter officials using either hand-held devices that resemble portable vacuum cleaners or larger tabletop ones that look like fax machines. Both work the same way, the police said, by analyzing a cloth swab that is passed over a bag or package to test for the presence of such things as ammonium nitrate or hydrogen peroxide, which was...

AMMAN, Jordan - Islamic militants planned to detonate an explosion that would have sent a cloud of toxic chemicals across Jordan, causing death, blindness and sickness, a chemical expert testified in a military court Wednesday. Col. Najeh al-Azam was giving evidence in the trial of 13 men who are alleged to have planned what would have been the world's first chemical attack by the al-Qaida terror group. The accused include al-Qaida's leader in Iraq, Abu-Musab Al-Zarqawi, and three other fugitives who are being tried in absentia. Jordanian security services foiled the plot in April last year. Jordanian officials say that...