Impact boosts focus on MICE market - The Nation

The Nation February 25, 2013 1:00 am

"As Thailand's major MICE player and venue provider, we commit ourselves to the ongoing improvement of our services and facilities to an international standard. This assures local and international business partners that Thailand is capable of being the host country for major MICE events with Impact as the leading venue partner," Loy Joon How, general manager of Impact Exhibition Management Co, said last week.

Moving towards its vision to rank among the top five venues in Asia, Impact has been focusing on developing synergy among its businesses, upgrading operations, enhancing service quality and investing in state-of-the-art facilities to attract the international MICE market.

The upcoming Asean Economic Community will provide opportunities for Thailand especially for overseas trade shows and exhibition organisers that target the Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam market due to its strategic location as well as logistics and supporting facilities.

"We can cater for the complete needs of functions ranging from 100 to over 30,000 delegates," he said.

Impact Muang Thong Thani offers the largest exhibition space in the country with over 140,000 square metres of indoor space in four main buildings - Impact Challenger, Impact Exhibition Centre, Impact Arena and Impact Forum.

These facilities serve over 800 events a year including trade and consumer exhibitions and attract 15 million visitors yearly.

The Rotary International Convention, Thailand International Motor Expo, Bangkok Gems and Jewellery Fair, THAIFEX-World of Food Asia, Herbalife Extravaganza, Amway Expo and ITU Telecom Asia are just a few of the major events attracted to Thailand.

The venue has recently spent US$27 million (Bt8071 million) to add 30 meeting rooms, bringing the total of breakout rooms to 52 across Impact. Two banquet halls have been opened with 5,710sqm to serve all kinds of functions in addition to the 3,500sqm Royal Jubilee and 2,000sqm Grand Diamond ballrooms.

In two years, facilities and support services to be completed include the Ibis hotel, which will add 600 rooms to the existing 380 ultra-modern rooms at the Novotel Bangkok Impact, a 2,000-seat auditorium, renovation of Impact Arena with more shops and renovation of the eight multipurpose halls at Impact Exhibition Centre.

"Impact is the country's first MICE venue, which was certified as international standard. It has successfully achieved ISO22000 for food safety management, ISO50001 for energy management and TIS22300 for MICE security management. The achievement enhances Impact's confidence and builds trust with business partners," he said.

This year Impact projects its revenue to rise 10 per cent to $67 million. The company aims to lift its international profile in order to tap the growth of the international MICE business, which is anticipated to generate 792,000 arrivals and $2.1-billion revenue this year.

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Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/business/Impact-boosts-focus-on-MICE-market-30200666.html

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New maps depict potential worldwide coral bleaching by 2056

Feb. 25, 2013 ? In a study published February 24 in Nature Climate Change researchers used the latest emissions scenarios and climate models to show how varying levels of carbon emissions are likely to result in more frequent and severe coral bleaching events.

Large-scale 'mass' bleaching events on coral reefs are caused by higher-than-normal sea temperatures. High temperatures make light toxic to the algae that reside within the corals. The algae, called 'zooxanthellae', provide food and give corals their bright colors. When the algae are expelled or retained but in low densities, the corals can starve and eventually die. Bleaching events caused a reported 16 percent loss of the world's coral reefs in 1998 according to the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network.

If carbon emissions stay on the current path most of the world's coral reefs (74 percent) are projected to experience coral bleaching conditions annually by 2045, results of the study show. The study used climate model ensembles from the upcoming Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Around a quarter of coral reefs are likely to experience bleaching events annually five or more years earlier than the median year, and these reefs in northwestern Australia, Papau New Guinea, and some equatorial Pacific islands like Tokelau, may require urgent attention, researchers warn.

"Coral reefs in parts of the western Indian Ocean, French Polynesia and the southern Great Barrier Reef, have been identified as temporary refugia from rising sea surface temperatures," said Ruben van Hooidonk, Ph.D., from the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS) at the University of Miami and NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. "These locations are not projected to experience bleaching events annually until five or more years later than the median year of 2040, with one reef location in the Austral Islands of French Polynesia protected from the onset of annual coral bleaching conditions until 2056."

The findings emphasize that without significant reductions in emissions most coral reefs are at risk, according to the study. A reduction of carbon emissions would delay annual bleaching events more than two decades in nearly a quarter (23 percent) of the world's reef areas, the research shows.

"Our projections indicate that nearly all coral reef locations would experience annual bleaching later than 2040 under scenarios with lower greenhouse gas emissions." said Jeffrey Maynard, Ph.D., from the Centre de Recherches Insulaires et Observatoire de l'Environnement (CRIOBE) in Moorea, French Polynesia. "For 394 reef locations (of 1707 used in the study) this amounts to at least two more decades in which some reefs might conceivably be able to improve their capacity to adapt to the projected changes."

"More so than any result to date, this highlights and quantifies the potential benefits for reefs of reducing emissions in terms of reduced exposure to stressful reef temperatures."

"This study represents the most up-to-date understanding of spatial variability in the effects of rising temperatures on coral reefs on a global scale," said researcher Serge Planes, Ph.D., also from the French research institute CRIOBE in French Polynesia.

The researchers involved in the study all concur that projections that combine the threats posed to reefs by increases in sea temperature and ocean acidification will further resolve where temporary refugia may exist.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. R. van Hooidonk, J. A. Maynard, S. Planes. Temporary refugia for coral reefs in a warming world. Nature Climate Change, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1829

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/qPqev71g7Fs/130225122045.htm

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Estimates raised for Russian meteor blast

Yekaterina Pustynnikova / Chelyabinsk.ru via AP

Click through scenes from Russia's Chelyabinsk region, where a huge meteor fireball set off alarms, injured hundreds of people and caused a factory roof to collapse.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

Scientists have raised their estimates of the size and power of what turns out to be the most widely witnessed asteroid strike in modern history. The size estimate puts the object that caused Friday's meteor blast over Russia in a troublesome category of asteroids: big enough to cause damage, but small enough to evade detection.

The new estimates, based on additional readings from a sensor network built to detect nuclear blasts, suggest the meteor released the energy equivalent of nearly 500 kilotons of TNT. That's about 30 times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

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Experts have been assessing the level of the meteor explosion using a network of infrasound sensors that were set up under the terms of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to check for changes in atmospheric pressure caused by nuclear blasts.

"These new estimates were generated using new data that had been collected by five additional infrasound stations located around the world ? the first recording of the event being in Alaska, over 6,500 kilometers away from Chelyabinsk," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement.

NASA now says the Chelyabinsk object must have been about 55 feet wide (17 meters wide) with a mass of 10,000 tons before it entered Earth?s atmosphere.

"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office said in the statement. "When you have a fireball of this size, we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface, and in this case there were probably some large ones."

Searchers have been focusing on a frozen lake about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Chelyabinsk, where they suspect meteorite fragments made a 20-foot-wide (6-meter-wide) hole in the ice. Searchers have found fragments up to a half-inch wide (1 centimeter wide) that might have come from the meteor, but nothing bigger yet, according to reports from Russia.

Experts emphasized once again that the meteor's trajectory was significantly different from the path of asteroid 2012 DA14, a 150-foot-wide (45-meter-wide) space rock that passed harmlessly within 17,200 miles (27,600 kilometers) of Earth later Friday. Thus, 2012 DA14 was "a completely unrelated object," NASA said.

The space agency said Friday's Russian meteor was the largest reported since 1908, when an asteroid roughly the size of 2012 DA14 exploded over a remote wooded area in Siberia's Tunguska region. That blast flattened millions of trees over a 820-square-mile area, but was not widely seen. Friday's event, in contrast, took place over a city of 1.1 million inhabitants, and hundreds of millions more watched the videos that were distributed over the Internet.

As powerful as the meteor blast was, it's on the low end of the asteroid impact scale. Astronomers estimate that there are about a million potentially hazardous near-Earth objects smaller than 100 meters (330 feet) in width, and only about 1 percent of those have been cataloged. For the time being, NASA is focusing on detecting and tracking near-Earth asteroids wider than 100 meters.

But what about the smaller ones?

"Defending the Earth against tiny asteroids such as the one that passed over Siberia and impacted there is a challenging issue. That is something that is not currently our goal," Chodas told reporters on Friday.

The asteroid behind Friday's meteor blast would have been particularly hard to spot during its final approach, because it was coming from Earth's daylit side. The asteroid would have been lost in the sun's glare and undetectable by ground-based telescopes, said Bill Cooke, the head of the Meteoroid Environment Center at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

Several programs on the horizon hold the promise of finding the smaller asteroids that could threaten Earth:

• NASA has just started funding the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS, which aims to establish two telescopes in Hawaii dedicated to scanning the skies for potential threats.
• The non-profit B612 Foundation has been raising money to launch its Sentinel Space Telescope as early as 2018. Sentinel would scan Earth's surroundings from an outward-looking position in a Venus-like orbit, interior to Earth's orbit. Such a project could provide advance warning for asteroids like the one that blew up on Friday. Former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, one of the foundation's founders, said he was "overwhelmed" by requests for information after Friday's blast. "It's pretty bonkers at the moment," he told NBC News.
• Planetary Resources, a commercial venture, is developing a fleet of Arkyd-100 space telescopes to identify near-Earth asteroids, in hopes of sending mining operations to them in the decades to come. "As the company ultimately develops the capability and infrastructure for intercepting and mining asteroids, Planetary Resources expects to be able to help in the (slight) redirection of these rocks to keep the Earth safe," Peter Diamandis, the company's co-founder and co-chairman, said in a blog posting.
• Another commercial space-mining venture, Deep Space Industries, is proposing its own set of asteroid-hunting space telescopes. "Placing 10 of our small FireFly spacecraft into position to intercept close encounters would take four years and less than $100 million," David Gump, the company's CEO, said in a statement. "This will help the world develop the understanding needed to block later threats."

More about asteroids and meteors:

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Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's?Facebook page, following?@b0yle on Twitter?and adding the?Cosmic Log page?to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out?"The Case for Pluto,"?my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Source: http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/16/16985690-estimates-raised-for-nuclear-sized-asteroid-blast-that-hit-russia?lite

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