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Firefighters are battling to save Australian communities threatened by searing wildfires that have already claimed 181 lives, a toll that is expected to rise.

As tales of the horror wrought by the infernos that have razed whole towns transfixed Australia, officials said the danger was far from over and the final death toll would pass 200.

“This was truly an inland tsunami,” Russell Hildebrandt, a chaplain at the Healesville relief centre, told AFP.

“It’s just come in, swept through everything in its path and killed hundreds of people who were caught completely unawares.”

Victoria state Premier John Brumby said more than 50 people were believed by the coroner to be “already deceased but not yet identified”, and the final toll from Australia’s deadliest bushfires would “exceed 200 deaths.”

Exhausted firefighters, most of them volunteers who have had little rest since the firestorms flared in Victoria on Saturday, were fighting to halt the advance of the flames bearing down on rural towns and villages.

Healesville, about 50 kilometres (31 miles) northeast of Melbourne, was the latest community threatened by one of the 24 fires still burning, some of which are believed to have been deliberately lit.

Cool winds helped avert another disaster as the fires skirted around the town in the heart of the wine-making Yarra Valley region, but firefighters said hot weather would return later in the week.

Victoria’s Country Fire Authority had warned the town was in danger from “heavy ember attack,” a phenomenon that survivors who have faced it liken to a fiery hailstorm of burning embers.

Further east in Gippsland, firefighters were trying to control a massive blaze stretching more than 100 kilometres.

Investigators began the country’s largest ever arson probe as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd vowed to track down anyone believed responsible.

“We are left speechless at the thought and the possibility that some of these fires may have been deliberately lit,” Rudd told parliament.

“This is simply murder on a grand scale. Let us attend to this unfinished business of the nation and come to grips with this evil thing.”

Rudd said the fires had left 500 people injured, nearly 1,000 homes destroyed, 365,000 hectares (902,000 acres) burnt and had affected 25 local government authorities.

More than 5,000 people have been left homeless, many seeking shelter in community halls, schools and churches.

US President Barack Obama telephoned Rudd to offer his condolences and offer US help in fighting the blazes, the White House said, as other offers of help and support poured in from around the world.

More than 30 US firefighters are flying to Australia to join reinforcements from fire departments around the country who are heading to Victoria, Sky News reported.

Police have cordoned off whole towns as crime scenes even as desperate survivors try to return to their homes to inspect the damage.

“Road by road, house by house, we are working our way through,” Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon said.

“We believe the toll will rise. It’s a very sad thing for all of us in our community.”

In devastated Kinglake, Ross Buchanan risked his life to save his home — only to find his 15-year-old son McKenzie and daughter Neeve, nine, had been killed as fire ripped through the rest of the town.

“I’ve lost two kids, nothing can bring them back,” he told Sky News.

Annette Smit told how she had hidden under a house in Kinglake West to shelter from the ferocious firestorm after her own home had been destroyed.

“I knew people were dying around us, I knew.

“It rained (fire), it was like lava,” the survivor told the Herald Sun online in one of the many compelling stories of survival emerging as the nation’s worst wildfire disaster unfolds.

Australians have donated more than 30 million dollars (20 million US) to relief appeals and the Red Cross called for more money, saying some survivors had been left with only the clothes they stood in.

Queen Elizabeth II also made a private contribution, a Buckingham Palace spokeswoman said, while Australia’s celebrated national cricket team will visit the bushfire frontline to help out, the Australian Associated Press reported.

The terrain was reduced to a blackened lanscape stretching into the distance, with horses that survived the inferno searching for food in the charred soil.

up to a whopping 120 times the mass of the sun — has long perplexed astronomers. The big question was how these stellar behemoths reached their enormous sizes without blowing off all the gas that feeds them.

A new computer simulation of star formation has found a surprisingly simple solution to how these stars might get around this problem.

The new findings, detailed in the Jan. 16 issue of the journal Science, also explain why these giants tend to occur in binary or multiple star systems.

“We didn’t’ set out to solve that question, so it was a nice side benefit of the study,” said study leader Mark Krumholz of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Balancing forces

When a star begins to form, two opposing forces are at play. One is the pull of gravity creating by the rotating gas cloud from which the star is born. Gravity pulls the gaseous material in, feeding the protostar.

The other force, called radiation pressure, is generated by the growing star itself. This pressure is the force exerted by electromagnetic radiation on the surfaces it strikes. For ordinary light, this force is nearly negligible, but it becomes significant in the interior of stars because of the intensity of their radiation.

For massive stars, radiation pressure is the dominant outward-flowing force counteracting gravity’s inward pull to prevent the further collapse of the star. Previous studies had suggested that radiation pressure would blow away a star’s gas cloud before the star could grow much larger than 20 times the mass of the sun.

“When you apply the radiation pressure from a massive star to the dusty interstellar gas around it, which is much more opaque than the star’s internal gas, it should explode the gas cloud,” Krumholz explained.

Yet plenty of these massive stars have been spotted by astronomers (though they are rarer than small stars).

Surprise solution

Krumholz and his colleagues solved the dilemma with a three-dimensional computer simulation of the collapse of a giant interstellar gas cloud to form a massive star. Their research was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy.

As the dusty gas collapsed, onto the star’s growing core, instabilities developed that resulted in channels where radiation blew out through the cloud into interstellar space, while gas continued falling inward through other channels.

“You can see fingers of gas falling in and radiation leaking out between those fingers of gas,” Krumholz said. “This shows that you don’t need any exotic mechanisms; massive stars can form through accretion processes just like low-mass stars.”

The disk of the collapsing gas also did something unexpected: it clumped to form a series of small secondary stars, most of which collided into the primary star, but some of which came to be stars in their own right and formed a multiple star system.

“I think now we can consider the mystery of how massive stars are able to form to be solved,” Krumholz said.

Seventeen previously unknown species of reptiles and amphibians have been found in the threatened rainforests of eastern Tanzania, Italian and Tanzanian scientists reported on Monday.

The haul of new species, which include chameleons, tree frogs and snakes, highlights the rich biodiversity of the East African country’s South Nguru Mountains region, they wrote in the journal Acta Herpetologica.

Authors Michele Menegon of the Natural Science Museum of Trento in Italy and colleagues said the region’s ecosystem was under threat from fire, logging, collection of wood for fuel and land clearance for cultivation.

To stem the damage, the government and villagers have outlined a series of steps needed to improve conservation, such as reducing the population’s dependence on unsustainable methods of growing cardamoms, a popular cooking spice and an important cash crop for highland farmers.

“The program represents an opportunity to reverse the current trend of forest loss and degradation,” the scientists wrote.

“To succeed, the program will need sustained commitment from the government of Tanzania, civil society organizations, the local communities and development partners.”

A detailed analysis of the measurements of five different satellites has revealed the existence of the warm plasma cloak, a new region of the magnetosphere.

This region is the invisible shield of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surround and protect Earth from the onslaught of the solar wind.

The study was conducted by a team of scientists headed by Charles Chappell, research professor of physics and director of the Dyer Observatory at Vanderbilt University.

“Although it is invisible, the magnetosphere has an impact on our everyday lives,” Chappell said.

“For example, solar storms agitate the magnetosphere in ways that can induce power surges in the electrical grid that trigger black outs, interfere with radio transmissions and mess up GPS signals. Charged particles in the magnetosphere can also damage the electronics in satellites and affect the temperature and motion of the upper atmosphere,” he added.

The other regions of the magnetosphere have been known for some time.

Chappell and his colleagues pieced together a “natural cycle of energization” that accelerates the low-energy ions that originate from Earth’s atmosphere up to the higher energy levels characteristic of the different regions in the magnetosphere.

This brought the existence of the new region into focus.

The warm plasma cloak is a tenuous region that starts on the night side of the planet and wraps around the dayside but then gradually fades away on the afternoon side.

As a result, it only reaches about three-quarters of the way around the planet.

It is fed by low-energy charged particles that are lifted into space over Earth’s poles, carried behind the Earth in its magnetic tail, but then jerked around 180 degrees by a kink in the magnetic fields that boosts the particles back toward Earth in a region called the plasma sheet.

“We have recognized all the other regions for a long time, but the plasma cloak was a fuzzy thing in the background which we didn’t have enough information about to make it stand out. When we got enough pieces, there it was!” said Chappell.

Students drink heavily to relax, relieve stress and boredom, according to a new research.

‘The University of Canberra (UC)… is concerned about the safety and well-being of its students,’ said researcher Amanda George of the Healthpact Research Centre.

‘Our research is addressing this issue and exploring ways to reduce harmful levels of consumption and alcohol-related harms,’ she added.

The research team, comprising Amanda George, Rhian Parker, Katja Mikhailovich and Debra Rickwood, found 86 percent of UC students drinkers and around half those drinking at hazardous levels.

The findings, based on a sample of 1,151 students who completed an online survey, are not surprising, according to George, who says targeting the reasons for drinking may help students, a UC release says.

Likely recommendations include the introduction of alcohol-free social events and a cafe, and an information campaign to increase student awareness of the counselling services available on campus.

NASA appears to have resolved problems with a new urine recycling system on the International Space Station, bolstering hopes it will be able to expand the research outpost’s crew next year, officials at the U.S. space agency said on Tuesday.

Reusing wastewater is essential for doubling the size of the crew living aboard the station from three members to six, especially since the space shuttles, which produce water as a byproduct of their electrical systems, are to be retired in two years.

The device, part of a $250 million new life-support system aboard the station, shut down during three previous attempts to purify urine. NASA wants the visiting shuttle Endeavour crew to bring home processed samples for analysis before declaring the water purification system suitable for use.

Two rounds of modifications to stabilize the device’s centrifuge appear to have worked, flight director Brian Smith said on Tuesday. It completed a full five-hour run Monday and was nearing completion of a second full run early Tuesday.

Engineers planned to keep the device operating all day in hopes of producing enough processed urine before Endeavour’s departure on Friday. The device was ferried into orbit and installed in the station’s Destiny laboratory after the shuttle arrived on November 16.

The shuttle’s stay at the station was extended a day to wait for the samples.

“We’re going to try to keep it going all day and have the crew just reload the (urine) tank as it gets low,” Smith said.

Also Tuesday, NASA tested the station’s newly repaired solar wing rotary joint, which was cleaned and restored during four spacewalks by Endeavour astronauts.

The joint had been contaminated by metal filings, prompting NASA to lock it in place to prevent damage. Immobilizing the wing, however, prevented panels from tracking the sun for full power.

While the crews slept, engineers on the ground watched as the joint automatically pivoted to track the sun for the first time in a year.

“There’s months worth of testing left to go before we can really determine what impact all four (spacewalks) had on that joint,” Smith said.

Endeavour is due back at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday after 16 days in orbit.

NASA plans eight more flights to the station, a $100 billion project of 16 nations, before the shuttles are retired in 2010.

Canadian researchers claim to have developed a technique to get clues into the mystery of plasma - the most abundant form of matter in the universe.

Unlike general matter in which negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons are bound by electromagnetic force to form a neutral atom, plasma is that state of matter which can have surplus of negative or positive charge.

Also called ionized (or charged) gas, plasma can be as common as in fluorescent light bulbs or exotic in the extreme, as a thermonuclear explosion.

The earth’s upper atmosphere is a plasma, as are lightning bolts and virtually all stars that light up the night sky and Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in our solar system.

Though scientists have found clues to the nature of general matter whose basic units called atoms comprise negatively charged electron tied to positively charged protons, they have no clues to the nature of plasma.

They have failed to understand how positive and negative charges can exist without recombining into one unit or atom.

They have tried to develop intricate mathematical theories to explain the plasma state, but have failed because plasmas are hot, complex and difficult to characterise either in the natural world or in the laboratory.

But now researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver claim to have found a way to create ultra-cold plasmas out of molecules, a weekend university statement said.

Starting with a gaseous sample cooled in a supersonic molecular beam, researchers led by chemistry department head Ed Grant have formed a plasma of nitric oxide that has ion and electron temperatures as cold as plasmas made from trapped atoms, the statement said.

These plasmas last 30 microseconds, it added.

“The ability to break out of the atom ‘trap’ is tremendously liberating and could lead to a whole new field of physics,” the statement said quoting Ed Grant.

“It’s amazing that our plasmas have sustained life at all,” he said.

“We think that the high charged particle density we create interferes with ion-electron recombination.”

Grant said further understanding of ultra-cold plasma on a molecular level could lead to new knowledge about gas planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in our solar system, white dwarf stars, thermonuclear fusion and X-ray lasers.

The technique has been published in the current issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

A team of French astronomers has used the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT) to detect a planet-like object located very close to the star Beta Pictoris, and which apparently lies inside its disc.

With a projected distance from the star of only 8 times the Earth-Sun distance, this object is most likely the giant planet suspected from the peculiar shape of the disc and the previously observed infall of comets onto the star.

It would then be the first image of a planet that is as close to its host star as Saturn is to the Sun.

The hot star Beta Pictoris is one of the best-known examples of stars surrounded by a dusty ‘debris’ disc.

Debris discs are composed of dust resulting from collisions among larger bodies like planetary embryos or asteroids.

Earlier observations showed a warp of the disc, a secondary inclined disc and infalling comets onto the star.

“These are indirect, but tell-tale signs that strongly suggest the presence of a massive planet lying between 5 and 10 times the mean Earth-Sun distance from its host star,” said team leader Anne-Marie Lagrange.

In 2003, the French team used the NAOS-CONICA instrument, mounted on one of the 8.2 m Unit Telescopes of ESO’s VLT, to study the immediate surroundings of Beta Pictoris.

Recently, a member of the team re-analysed the data in a different way to seek the trace of a companion to the star. Infrared wavelengths are indeed very well suited for such searches.

“For this, the real challenge is to identify and subtract as accurately as possible the bright stellar halo,” explained Lagrange. “We were able to achieve this after a precise and drastic selection of the best images recorded during our observations,” she added.

The strategy proved very rewarding, as the astronomers were able to discern a feeble, point-like glow well inside the star’s halo.

To eliminate the possibility that this was an artifact and not a real object, a battery of tests was conducted and several members of the team, using three different methods, did the analysis independently, always with the same success.

Moreover, the companion was also discovered in other data sets, further strengthening the team’s conclusion that the companion is real.

“Our observations point to the presence of a giant planet, about 8 times as massive as Jupiter and with a projected distance from its star of about 8 times the Earth-Sun distance, which is about the distance of Saturn in our Solar System,” said Lagrange.

Flight controllers were revamping plans Wednesday for the remaining spacewalks planned during space shuttle Endeavour’s visit to the international space station, after a crucial tool bag floated out to space during a repair trip.

The briefcase-sized tool bag drifted away from astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper on Tuesday as she cleaned and lubed a gummed-up joint on a wing of solar panels on the space station. She and fellow astronaut Stephen Bowen were midway through the first of four spacewalks planned for the mission. The tool bag was one of the largest items ever lost by a spacewalker.

As Stefanyshyn-Piper cleaned up a large gob of grease that seeped from a gun used to lubricate the joint, the tool case somehow became untethered from a larger bag and floated away along with a pair of grease guns, wipes and a putty knife attached to it.

“What it boils down to is all it takes is one small mistake for a tether not to be hooked up quite correctly or to slip off, and that’s what happened here,” said lead spacewalk officer John Ray.

Stefanyshyn-Piper and Bowen finished the spacewalk in almost seven hours by sharing tools from Bowen’s bag. Ray noted that Stefanyshyn-Piper showed “real character and great discipline” by continuing on. She was the first woman to be assigned as lead spacewalker for a shuttle flight.

“Despite my little hiccup, or major hiccup, I think we did a good job out there,” Stefanyshyn-Piper said after returning to the space station.

Flight controllers are considering having the two spacewalkers share Bowen’s pair of grease guns for the three remaining spacewalks on Thursday, Saturday and Monday. They could also use caulking guns meant for repairing the space shuttle. Another option is to have one spacewalker clean the joint while the other uses the grease gun to lubricate it.

For more than a year, the joint has been unable to automatically point the right-side solar wings toward the sun for maximum energy production.

Officials weren’t worried the bag would hit the space station or the docked space shuttle because by late Tuesday it already was 2 1/2 miles in front of the orbiting complex, said flight director Ginger Kerrick.

“It is definitely moving away with every orbit,” Kerrick said.

Inside the space station, crew members were so ahead of schedule in moving equipment delivered by Endeavour that shuttle flight planners were contemplating skipping an extra day at the outpost orbiting 220 miles above Earth.

The equipment includes a recycling system that converts urine into water, an extra bathroom, kitchenette, two bedrooms, an exercise machine and refrigerator that will allow space station residents to enjoy cold drinks for the first time. And the extra gear will allow the space station’s crew to double to six next year.

The water recycling system was to be hooked up late Wednesday, and the first batch of urine would run through the system later in the week. Samples will be flown back to Earth for safety tests before astronauts can use it.

A spacewalking astronaut accidentally let go of her tool bag Tuesday after a grease gun inside it exploded, and helplessly watched as the tote and everything inside floated away.

It was one of the largest items ever to be lost by a spacewalker, and occurred during an unprecedented attempt to clean and lube a gummed-up joint on a solar panel.

Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper was just starting to work on the joint when the mishap occurred.

She said her grease gun exploded, getting the dark gray stuff all over a camera and her gloves. While wiping off herself, the white, backpack-size bag slipped out of her grip, and she lost all her other tools.

“Oh, great,” she mumbled.

Stefanyshyn-Piper was carrying out the spacewalk with Stephen Bowen. He had his own tool bag with another grease gun, putty knife and oven-like terry cloth mitts to wipe away metal grit from a clogged joint at the space station.

Mission Control agreed the spacewalk would continue as planned, and that the two astronauts would share tools. Flight controllers were assessing the impact the lost bag would have on the next three planned spacewalks.

Earlier, the spacewalkers spotted a screw floating by, but were too far away to catch it. “I have no idea where it came from,” Stefanyshyn-Piper told Mission Control.

Mission Control said the screw was not considered a serious hazard, but did not immediately elaborate on the missing tool bag. Flight controllers were tracking its location in orbit.

The lost bag marred what had been a near-flawless mission by Endeavour and its seven-member crew.

Putting her disappointment aside, Stefanyshyn-Piper — the first woman to be assigned as lead spacewalker for a shuttle flight — carried out her work on the joint with Bowen.

For more than a year, the jammed joint has been unable to automatically point the right-side solar wings toward the sun for maximum energy production. The repair work — expected from the outset to be greasy and hand-intensive — is supposed to take up much of all four spacewalks.

The joint is located near the extreme reaches of the 220-mile-high outpost. The spacewalkers had 85-foot safety tethers to keep them connected to the mother ship at all times.

NASA suspects a lack of lubrication caused the massive joint to break down; grinding parts left metal shavings everywhere and prompted flight controllers to use the joint sparingly. Besides scraping and wiping away the grit and applying grease, the spacewalkers will replace the bearings.

As a precaution, extra grease will be applied on a later spacewalk to the joint on the opposite side of the space station that has allowed those solar wings to produce ample electricity.

As the action unfolded outside, the astronauts inside the shuttle-station complex started unloading the gear inside a huge trunk that was brought up by Endeavour.

The big-ticket item — and one of the first things to be hooked up — is a recycling system that will convert astronauts’ urine and sweat into drinking water. It is essential if NASA is to double the size of the space station crew to six next June.

Endeavour also delivered an extra bathroom, kitchenette, two bedrooms, an exercise machine and refrigerator that will allow space station residents to enjoy cold drinks for the first time.

The additions — coming exactly 10 years after the first space station piece was launched — will transform the place into a two-bath, two-kitchen, five-bedroom home.

Endeavour arrived at the space station Sunday. The shuttle will remain docked through until at least Thanksgiving. The next spacewalk is set for Thursday.