Stuart Cable, the former drummer with the British rock band Stereophonics, has died at the age of 40.

South Wales Police say Cable was found early Monday at his home in the town of Aberdare, 165 miles (265 kilometers) west of London.

The force says the cause of death has not been determined, but there are no suspicious circumstances.

Cable co-founded Stereophonics with singer Kelly Jones in the early 1990s. The band had a string of British top 10 hits, including 'Have a Nice Day.'

Cable left the group in 2003 amid reports of conflicts with band mates.

He recently formed a new band, Killing for Company, and worked as a broadcaster, with a show on BBC Radio Wales.

http://www.thevine.com.au/music/news/ex … 00608.aspx

A dead turtle floats on a pool of oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in Barataria Bay off the coast of Louisiana on Monday.

By Brian Winter, USA TODAY
COCODRIE, La. '” Wash, rinse and repeat. And repeat.

And then repeat some more.

That's the routine for rescue workers in the Gulf of Mexico, where oil creeps back into marshes and wetlands faster than they can clean it up. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the coordinator of the federal response to the disaster, warned Monday that it could take "years" of hard work to fully scrub the Gulf Coast of all the crude.

The spill "will be contained," President Obama said in Washington. "It may take some time, and it's going to take a whole lot of effort."

The latest government projections show oil spreading farther to the east and west of the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig. Oil is coming on shore to the west of the Mississippi River delta near Cocodrie and is washing up on beaches in the Florida Panhandle.

n the marshes near the Louisiana fishing port of Cocodrie, about 80 miles southwest of New Orleans, crews of contractors on barges labored in 95-degree heat and humidity to protect foot-high grass, which provides shelter to baby crabs, shrimp and birds during the current breeding season.

On one barge, sweating workers in hazmat suits pulled brown-stained absorbent barriers from the water's surface and stuffed them into clear plastic bags for disposal. On a trailing boat, workers laid down a pristine layer of boom where the grass meets the water.

In one spot, oil appeared to have disappeared in the past few days, Coast Guard spokesman John Miller said. "That's the work of the cleanup workers, and some of it's self-cleaning, too" because oil breaks down naturally with tides and microorganisms, he said. "That's really gratifying," Miller said.

Across the bay, though, there was a setback. "Oh, no!" exclaimed Chris Griffin, 46, an area shrimper driving an airboat carrying a group of visiting journalists. Grass that had been scrubbed clean by workers in recent days was coated again in a dark, syrupy mess.

Allen says the oil has split into "hundreds or thousands" of smaller slicks scattered around the Gulf, which means that in relatively small areas such as Cocodrie, one area of shore can be clean while another nearby is covered in crude.

"They'll come back here and try to sop this back up," Miller said. "That's how it works."

The 678 cleanup workers based out of Cocodrie are digging in for a long cleanup effort, setting up trailers, communication posts and other amenities in what was just a tiny village a few weeks ago, Miller said. The staff includes Coast Guard, military, contractors and employees of BP, the energy company that operated the rig that caused the leak in April.

A whole sub-economy has sprung up to support the workers. Under a makeshift white tarp, a sign for "Granny's Laundry" offered clean clothes in 24 hours.

Griffin says he's making "decent" money as a contractor but would prefer to be back out on his shrimp boat. "The faster we can get rid of all this, the happier I'll be," he says. "But I think it's going to take a long while."

A cap over the ruptured wellhead captures more than 460,000 gallons of oil a day, Allen said. Judging by flow rate estimates supplied by the government, the cap could be collecting 37% to 77% of the oil gushing out.

BP spokesman Robert Wine said the company plans to replace the cap next month with a slightly bigger device that will "provide a better, tighter fit."

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An image of Saturn's moon Titan captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Titan, the orange-shrouded moon of Saturn, may harbor hints to answering the riddle of life, three new studies suggest.

Saturn's largest moon, Titan possesses an ammonia and methane atmosphere that obscures its frozen surface from view. Since a 1980 Voyager I flyby, astrobiologists have been tantalized by the world, seeing it as a chilled time capsule of early planetary conditions at the start of the 4.6-billion year old solar system.

The surface of Titan "is still enshrouded in a cloud of mystery despite the initial flood of data," begins a current Journal of Geophysical Research report led by Roger Clark of the United States Geological Survey. That mystery persists, notwithstanding 68 overflights since 2004 by the international Cassini space probe, and an intentional plummet into the atmosphere by the 2005 European Space Agency's Huygens lander.. A 69th flyby of the moon, passing some 1,200 miles over the 3,000-mile-wide world, comes early Saturday, June 5.

Using new Cassini data, Clark and colleagues report that the moon's surface is a stew of organic compounds, benzene, ethane and methane. But what is interesting is that another compound, acetylene, appears absent.

Why is that interesting? Well, five years ago, NASA  astrobiologist Chris McKay, suggested acetylene might make dandy fuel for any life living on the -290 degree surface of the moon. "One interpretation of the acetylene data is that the hydrocarbon is being consumed as food," noted a Jet Propulsion Laboratory statement highlighting the research this week.

Another interesting Titan find comes in the current Icarus journal, where Cassini planetary atmosphere investigator Darrell Strobel of Johns Hopkins University, reports about half as much hydrogen as expected on the surface of the moon. McCay predicted in a 2005 paper that life on Titan might eat both hydrogen and acetylene. "It's the obvious gas for life to consume on Titan, similar to the way we consume oxygen on Earth," McKay said in the JPL statement, pointing to the possibility of methane-based life on the mystery moon.

Strobel is much more cautious in the Icarus report, writing surface hydrogen "is in substantial excess" of the amount that McKay predicted would be there, if life was running around gobbling up hydrogen molecules. .

But what makes all this discussion of a far-off, frozen world most interesting is a third paper by Eric Wolf and O. B. Toon of the University of Colorado, Boulder, in the current Science journal, suggesting an ammonia haze '” like Titan's current cloak '” may have insulated the early Earth, keeping it warm during the sun's dim youth.

AstronomersCarl Sagan and George Mullen noted the "Early Faint Sun Paradox" in 1972, finding that during the first billion years of the sun's 4.6 billion year life, it was about 30% less bright than today. The sun only slowly increased its luminosity to the point about 2 billion years ago where current greenhouse gas warming seen in the atmosphere would have been able to prevent worldwide glaciation. Nevertheless, the Earth didn't freeze over, and life even started in this time, with early fossil blue-green algae preserved in 3.4 billion-year-old rock.

While earlier studies theorized an ammonia-rich atmosphere on the early Earth should have produced cooling instead of global warming, Wolf and Toon suggest that instead a puffy ammonia and methane aerosol haze provided a powerful greenhouse gas insulating blanket for the early Earth. Aerosol particles of the right size, about 50 nanometers wide (.000002 inches), suspended in air would have trapped heat in the atmosphere.

"The Archean Earth (3.8 to 2.5 billion years ago) was probably enshrouded by a photochemical haze composed of fractal aggregate hydrocarbon aerosols. The fractal structure of the aerosols would have had a strong effect on the radiative (heat-trapping) properties of the haze," they find in an analysis, adding, "the haze would have provided a strong shield against ultraviolet light while causing only minimal anti-greenhouse cooling."

The young Earth would have resembled Saturn's haze-shrouded moon, Titan, the two scientists suggest. The idea "revitalizes the Miller-Urey hypothesis," a 1953 experiment that zapped ammonia, methane and water with electricity. After a week, the experiment yielded a small amount of organic chemicals, which the experimenters saw as precursors to life. The origin-of-life explanation went out of style after researchers came to doubt that the atmosphere contained that much ammonia, but the new paper puts it back into play.

"The Wolf and Toon result looks pretty convincing," says Princeton's Christopher Chyba, a pioneer in the early faint sun paradox field. He notes that cosmologists have several explanations for resolving the early, faint sun paradox, including a faster-spinning young Earth producing different heat-reflecting clouds, "and the real answer is probably a mix of them."

Titan is just one end of the spectrum for how "comparative planetology" can answer questions about our own world, he adds. Even if the early Earth was iced over, some astrobiologists have pointed to Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter thought to harbor an interior ocean, as another model for where life might have gotten a start long ago.

Such comparisons are, "classic Carl (Sagan) thinking, looking at conditions on one world and asking what they mean for our own," Chyba adds. "In the big picture, I think what all these studies tell us is something about the value of exploring space to help us make sense of things on Earth."

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ROBERT, La. (AP) '” BP admitted defeat Saturday in its attempt to plug the Gulf of Mexico oil leak by pumping mud into a busted well, but said it's preparing yet another method to fight the spill after a series of failures.

BP PLC Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said the company determined the "top kill" method had failed after after it spent three days pumping heavy drilling mud into the crippled well 5,000 feet underwater.

"This scares everybody, the fact that we can't make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven't succeeded so far," Suttles said. "Many of the things we're trying have been done on the surface before, but have never been tried at 5,000 feet."

It was the latest setback for the company casting about for ways to stop the crude from further fouling waters, wildlife and marshland. A 100-ton box placed over the leak failed after ice-like crystals clogged it, while a mile-long tube that sucked more than 900,000 gallons of oil from the gusher was removed to make way for the top kill.

uttles said BP is already preparing for the next attempt to stop the leak. Under the plan, BP would use robot submarines to cut off the damaged riser from which the oil is leaking, and then try to cap it with a containment valve. Officials say the cutting and capping effort would take at least four days.

"We're confident the job will work but obviously we can't guarantee success," Suttles said of the new plan.

The oil spill began after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in April, killing 11 people. It's the worst spill in U.S. history '” exceeding even the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 off the Alaska coast '” dumping between 18 million and 40 million gallons into the Gulf, according to government estimates.

Word that the top-kill had failed hit hard in the fishing community of Venice, La., near where oil first made landfall in large quanities almost two weeks ago.

"Everybody's starting to realize this summer's lost. And our whole lifestyle might be lost," said Michael Ballay, the 59-year-old manager of the Cypress Cove Marina.

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