Cheryl Katzmarzyk measures a leg bone as she puts together remains from Srebrenica.


LUKAVAC, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The man's remains lie on a table. Next to him are the bones of his 22-year-old son and the remains of another son. But no one yet knows which of the man's two missing boys the third set of remains could be.

Cheryl Katzmarzyk wants to be able to put a name to the remains, and to those of hundreds of other bodies stacked around her in a building in Lukavac, near Tuzla in the northeast of Bosnia.

The bones are from more than 8,000 men and boys slaughtered in 1995 during the Bosnian war at Srebrenica in the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.

The killers -- Serbs seeking to drive out Bosnian Muslims in a policy of "ethnic cleansing" -- executed the region's fighting-age males, then used bulldozers to dump them into mass graves.

What makes the work harder for the teams trying to put the bodies back together -- so they can be returned to their families for proper burial -- is that so many have been broken up over the years.

Mass graves were dug up and the bodies moved sometimes again and again, to hide evidence as the Serbs retreated amid the NATO bombing that followed Srebrenica and led to the end of the war. Those killed in a warehouse execution at Sr ... Читать дальше »

Concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere currently stand at 385 parts per million (ppm) and are rising at a rate of two ppm per year. This is enough, say the scientists, to encourage dangerous changes to the Earth's climate.

As a result we risk expanding desertification, food shortages, increased storm intensities, loss of coral reefs and the disappearance of mountain glaciers that supply water to hundreds of millions of people.

The report, "Target Atmospheric CO₂: Where Should Humanity Aim?" appears in the latest edition of the Open Atmosphere Science Journal and brings together the expertise of ten scientists from the United States, the UK and France.

It is a departure from the previous climate estimates which predict that perilous CO₂ levels will be reached later in the century.

Drawing on improved paleoclimate records and current global observations has prompted the authors to reach new conclusions about what constitutes a safe level of CO _{... Читать дальше »}