Local councils making cities less liveable, independent infrastructure adviser says

Australia's patchwork of small local councils is threatening urban liveability, according to the independent infrastructure adviser.

Infrastructure Australia has encouraged the Federal Government to reward states with money if they can simplify planning processes, in a 134-page report released on Friday.

The Future Cities research found "the large number of small local councils in many of our major cities has resulted in cases of fragmented governance, and disjointed infrastructure and service delivery".


CEO Philip Davies identified the Greater Sydney Commission — which has responsibility for city-wide planning — and the Brisbane City Council,
the largest council in the southern hemisphere, as arrangements allowing for better long-term infrastructure planning.

"We've got four of the world's top 10 most-liveable cities in Australia," he said.

"However we also know that if we don't get the planning right, we won't have the most liveable cities."

The report predicted what Sydney and Melbourne would look like in the 2040s under low, medium and high-density development.

It concluded the low density scenario — the likely outcome from an unplanned or uncoordinated approach — made both cities less liveable, with strain on infrastructure and poorer access to services.

Council crunch already underway
Former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett cut the number of council areas in his state by almost two thirds in the 1990s.

Similar attempts have been made elsewhere since then, most recently in Western Australia and New South Wales, but both were aborted before they were completed.

The Federal Government is already rolling out "city deals" which bring local, state and federal governments together in exchange for federal infrastructure investment in Townsville, Launceston, Darwin, Hobart and Geelong.


Local planning reform has been announced as part of the Hobart deal, but such an arrangement had been discussed by Hobart councils prior to the federal offer.

Infrastructure Australia argues the Federal Government needs to introduce a scheme where funding is given in exchange for streamlined planning.

"All the Federal Government has as a lever is money, and then it needs to back that up with help in getting the right policies in place," Mr Davies said.

Eamon Waterford, acting CEO of independent group Committee for Sydney, said "there's always going to be tension between different levels of government" but he believed the Greater Sydney Commission was working.

"Local government does a really good job but they're not resourced or expected to look at the bigger issues about where a train line goes, or where a new freeway goes, or where a new hospital goes, although they have huge implications for their area," he said.

Genes remain active after death.

Cells continue to function even after an individual dies.

That is according to a scientific study published in Nature Communications.

Analysing post-mortem samples, an international team of scientists showed that some genes became more active after death.

As well as providing an important dataset for other scientists, they also hope that this can be developed into a forensic tool.

Inside the cells of  bodies, life plays out under the powerful influence of our genes; their outputs controlled by a range of internal and external triggers.

Understanding gene activity provides a perfect insight into what an individual cell, tissue or organ is doing, in health and in disease.

Genes are locked away in the DNA present in our cells and when these are switched on, a tell-tale molecule called an RNA transcript is made.

Some of the RNA directly controls processes that go on in the cell, but most of the RNA becomes the blueprint for proteins.

It's the RNA transcripts that scientists often measure when they want to know what's going on in our cells, and we call this analysis transcriptomics.

Inner workings

But obtaining samples for study is not an easy thing.

Blood is relatively easy to get, but lopping off an arm or sticking a needle into a living person's heart or liver is no trivial undertaking.

So, scientists rely on a relatively abundant source of samples - tissues and organs removed after death.

Whilst studies of post-mortem samples can provide important insights into the body's inner workings, it isn't clear if these samples truly represent what goes on during life.

The other confounding factor is that samples are rarely taken immediately after death, instead a body is stored until post-mortem examination and sampling can take place and its impact is unclear.

And it's this reliance on stored post-mortem samples that concerned Prof Roderic Guigó, a computational biologist based at the Barcelona Institute for Science and Technology and his team.

"You would expect that with the death of the individual, there would be a decay in the activity of the genes," he explained.

And this decay might affect proper interpretation of transcriptomics data.

Post-death throes

To see if this was the case the team used next generation mRNA sequencing on post-mortem specimens collected within 24 hours of death and on a subset of blood samples collected from some of the patients before death and, as Prof Guigó explained, what they discovered was surprising:

"There is a reaction by the cells to the death of the individual. We see some pathways, some genes, that are activated and this means that sometime after death there is still some activity at the level of transcription," he said.

Although the exact reason the genes remained active was unclear, Prof Guigó does have one possible explanation: "I would guess that one of the major changes is due to the cessation of flow of blood, therefore I would say probably the main environmental change is hypoxia, the lack of oxygen, but I don't have the proof for this."

What the study did provide was a set of predictions of post-death RNA level changes for a variety of commonly studied tissues against which future transcriptomic analyses could be calibrated.

And the understanding of the changes in RNA levels that occur after death might also be pivotal in future criminal investigations.

"We conclude there is a signature or a fingerprint in the pattern of gene expression after death that could eventually be used in forensic science, but we don't pretend we have now a method that can be used in the field," said Prof Guigó.

Whilst the data was consistent across different cadavers, and accurate predictions of time since death could be estimated from the RNA levels, Prof Guigó explained that extra work would be needed before its application in forensics could become a reality:

"It requires further investigation, longer post-mortem intervals, not only 24 hours, the age of the individual, the cause of death - all of these will need to be taken into account if we are to convert this into a useful tool."

Crypto-currency craze 'hinders search for alien life'

Scientists listening out for broadcasts by extra-terrestrials are struggling to get the computer hardware they need, thanks to the crypto-currency mining craze, a radio-astronomer has said.

Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) wants to expand operations at two observatories.

However, it has found that key computer chips are in short supply.

"We'd like to use the latest GPUs [graphics processing units]... and we can't get 'em," said Dan Werthimer.

Demand for GPUs has soared recently thanks to crypto-currency mining.

"That's limiting our search for extra-terrestrials, to try to answer the question, 'Are we alone? Is there anybody out there?'," Dr Werthimer told the BBC.

"This is a new problem, it's only happened on orders we've been trying to make in the last couple of months."

Mining a currency such as Bitcoin or Ethereum involves connecting computers to a global network and using them to solve complex mathematical puzzles.

This forms part of the process of validating transactions made by people who use the currency.

As a reward for this work, the miners receive a small crypto-currency payment, making it potentially profitable.

GPUs are high-performance chips and aren't just used for powering video games - they may be stacked together by Bitcoin miners, radio-astronomers or others interested in processing large amounts of data for certain applications.

"At Seti we want to look at as many frequency channels as we possibly can because we don't know what frequency ET will be broadcasting on and we want to look for lots of different signal types - is it AM or FM, what communication are they using?" explained Dr Werthimer, who is chief scientist at the Berkeley Seti Research Center.

"That takes a lot of computing power."

He added that at some telescopes, Seti has around 100 GPUs crunching data from large listening arrays.

These arrays can pick up the faintest of radio frequencies that have been flung across our solar system from elsewhere in the universe - often from natural phenomena such as collapsing stars.

Seti is currently trying to improve its capacity for analysing such data at two observatories - Green Bank in West Virginia and Parkes in Australia.

But the institute has been hit by the GPU shortage.

"We've got the money, we've contacted the vendors, and they say, 'we just don't have them'," said Dr Werthimer.

Earlier this year, there were reports that video gamers had been hit by a sudden rise in the cost of GPUs, thanks in particular to a rise in Ethereum mining, which can be done with chips aimed at consumers.

At the time, major chip-maker Nvidia said that retailers should make arrangements to make sure gamers' demands were met.

Star search

Other radio-astronomers have been affected.

A group looking for evidence of the earliest stars in the universe was recently shocked to see that the cost of the GPUs it wanted had doubled.

"We're in the process of expanding our telescope - we got a grant from the National Science Foundation here in the United States to do so," said Aaron Parsons at the University of California at Berkeley.

Prof Parsons' radio telescope array, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array (Hera) project, is an American, British and South African venture located in South Africa's western plains.

It has been designed to listen to low frequency radio waves emitted by the reionising hydrogen gas that permeated the universe before the first stars and galaxies formed.

GPUs are needed in order to bring together data from Hera's many small radio telescopes - this synthesises a much larger array, offering an especially wide field of view peering out into the universe.

Three months ago, the Hera team had budgeted for a set of GPUs that cost around $500 ($360) - the price has since doubled to $1,000.

"We'll be able to weather it but it is coming out of our contingency budget." added Prof Parsons.

"We're buying a lot of these things, it's going to end up costing about $32,000 extra."

He also said he was concerned that future work could even be stopped in its tracks, should the GPU shortage worsen.

Mining's meteoric rise

Thanks in part to a recent boom in the price of crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, mining crypto-currencies has never been more popular.

While Bitcoin miners have largely moved on to specialised "Asic" chips that have been designed from scratch to support mining, it's still possible to use GPUs on the Ethereum mining network to lucrative ends, according to cyber-security expert Matthew Hickey at Hacker House.

"[You can] use GPUs effectively to turn a small profit, you're not going to make millions but if you put 12 or 24 GPUs together, you'll make back the cost in six months," he told the BBC.

GPUs are versatile, he added, pointing out that cyber-security experts sometimes use them for password-cracking experiments, in which computers make many millions of attempts at breaking into a system.

But Mr Hickey has also noticed that GPUs are now being sold on sites such as Ebay at inflated prices.

"It's becoming increasingly difficult to find suppliers and cards," he said.

Eiffel Tower closes as snow blankets Paris and northern France.

The Eiffel Tower turned away tourists on Tuesday as snow swept across northern France, causing traffic chaos in Paris during the French capital’s first real dose of wintry weather this season.

The Meteo France weather service put the greater Paris region on alert for snow and black ice on roads, among 27 departments it expected to be on alert across the country until midday Wednesday.

The weather caused major gridlock across the city, with more than 700km (430 miles) of traffic jams recorded at 7.30pm local time (1830 GMT) on Tuesday, local information service Sytadin said.

Paris bus services were cancelled on Tuesday evening, according to the RATP transport authority, and school transport would not run on Wednesday in several areas.

Meteo France says the snowfall will intensify overnight Wednesday, with temperatures expected to fall as low as minus 10C (14F), leaving 5-10cm (two to four inches) in most areas on alert.

Snow had already dusted Paris on Monday before quickly melting away.

“This will be the first blast of winter, late but the real thing, with cold air from Scandinavia colliding with a perturbation coming up from the south,” said forecaster Sebastien Leas.

Rail operator SNCF had to slow down trains on several of its high-speed TGV lines, with service disrupted across much of northern France.

Thousands of emergency accommodation spaces will be opened to shelter homeless people, the country’s territorial cohesion ministry said.

In the Paris region, traffic was banned for vehicles weighing over 7.5 tonnes, which were told to bypass the area by police, who also advised locals limit road trips.

On Tuesday night in the southern Paris suburb of Essonne, many truck drivers forced to stop on the road were preparing to spend the night.

“We have been stuck since 4.30pm. We are cold, we have no food or toilet. I do not know when I will be able to leave,” one truck driver, Mehdi Benomar, told AFP.

The cold snap marks a sharp contrast from the weeks of mild and rainy weather across northern France in recent weeks, prompting flooding in several areas and pushing the Seine river to more than four metres above its normal levels as it flows through the capital.