http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/world/middleeast/gaps-in-egyptian-airport-security-face-scrutiny-after-crash.html?ref=world&_r=0NewsGaps in Egyptian Airport Security Face Scrutiny After CrashByKAREEM FAHIMandNICOLA CLARKNOV. 7, 2015SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt The airport is surrounded by a wall topped with barbed wire. Armed sentries are stationed at its entrance, and passengers pass through two security screenings before reaching departure gates; before a recent departing flight, there were no fewer than eight uniformed guards standing around the checkpoint.But potential inconsistencies inairport securityhere and elsewhere inEgypthave never been hard to detect. As guards at a metal detector here forced a departing passenger on a recent trip to throw out a pack of safety razors found in his luggage, an airport cafe worker breezed past the checkpoint without any search or inspection. At the Cairo airport on Friday, an officer at an X-ray machine sent text messages while he was scanning luggage. Another guard took a passenger at his word when he said it was his phone that had caused a metal detector to beep.Those potential gaps are now under a spotlight, as preliminary evidence from the crash of a Russian charter jet on Oct. 31 points to the possibility of a bombing, and several countries have restricted flights to and from Sharm el Sheikh. Theories about how a bomb might have gotten onto the plane, whose passengers and crew were almost all Russians, have focused on the possibility that an airport worker might have been involved.The Egyptian authorities have repeatedly refused to offer or confirm any theories about the cause of the disaster. At a news conference on Saturday, they said they were still considering all possibilities, and that no conclusions could be reached until the investigation had run its course.Airport officials have been trying to reassure travelers by letting foreign reporters tour and film the airport, including its baggage scanning facility. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ofEgyptsaid in London last week that Egyptianairport securityauthorities willingly complied with specific requests the British government made 10 months ago about improving procedures at Sharm el Sheikh, a resort city where many Britons vacation. We have cooperated with them, Mr. Sisi said. And they checked the security actions; they were happy with that.The security failings at Sharm el Sheikh and other Egyptian airports, some of them identified as recently as January 2015, were seen as significant enough to prompt formal recommendations to the Egyptians that they be addressed. One country even agreed to provide the Sharm el Sheikh airport with additional explosives-detection equipment to screen checked baggage. But the security problems were evidently never considered serious enough to warrant banning flights.We have been working for some considerable time with the Egyptians on Sharm, said a British official, who acknowledged that London had sent a team of experts in January to look at the security situation in the resort, and including, as part of that, at the airport.While declining to discuss specifics, that official said the Egyptian authorities had been responsive to the concerns that were raised and addressed them to Britains satisfaction at the time. We set out a number of measures that we thought would be helpful and that should be put in place, and the Egyptians worked very closely with us on those, the official said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/science/space/mars-atmosphere-stripped-away-by-solar-storms-nasa-says.htmlAcademic ProseMars Atmosphere Stripped by Solar Winds, NASA SaysByKENNETH CHANGNOV. 5, 2015The air onMars what there is of it is leaking away, about half a pound a second sputtering into space, scientists announced on Thursday.The planets early atmosphere is thought to have been as thick as or thicker thanEarths today, and even over the 4.5-billion-year history of the solar system, that slow leak would not explain how it atrophied to its current wisps.But new readings fromNASAsMars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission Maven, for short show that whenMarsis hit by a solar storm, the ferocious bombardment of particles from the sun strips away the upper atmosphere much more quickly.That could help explain the disappearance of the atmosphere. The sun during its youth was more unsettled, with many more solar storm eruptions, and it shone brighter in the ultraviolet wavelengths that also help knock atoms out of Mars atmosphere.What this tells us is loss through space has been an important process, said Bruce M. Jakosky, a scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado and the principal investigator for the Maven mission.The answer to what happened to the Martian air is key to understanding how Mars might have once been a warm, habitable planet withlakesandmaybe an oceancovering the northern hemisphere. When the air disappeared, liquid water largely disappeared, too.Dr. Jakosky and other scientists reported their findings from Mavenin four scientific papers published on Thursday in the journal Science. More than 40 additional papers by the Maven team appear inthe journal Geophysical Research Letters.Weve been trying to piece together its upper atmospheric physics from a bunch of incomplete views from other spacecraft, said Michael W. Liemohn, a professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences at the University of Michigan who is not directly involved with Maven. These are great stories that theyve put together from the initial data sets.The Maven spacecraft, whichentered orbit around Mars in September last year, carries a suite of instruments to analyze the solar wind and its effects on the atmosphere.Jasper Halekas, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa and a member of the Maven team, said the energy hitting the Martian atmosphere during the storm was equivalent to a million tons of TNT an hour. Thats one large nuclear weapon per hour, if you like, he said.Such solar storms are not everyday events, but they are also not rare, happening perhaps a few times a year, Dr. Halekas said. He gave an analogy of a geologist studying beach erosion, wondering whether more sand is washed away by the steady, daily effects of waves and tides or by one or two big tsunami. Another set of observations measured dust in the Martian upper atmosphere, so high and so evenly distributed that the scientists concluded the grains came from interplanetary space and not the surface or Mars moons.