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Archive Index

1 - 07/29/11 - The Electric Airplane Is Coming
2 - 07/29/11 - Sharing Electronic Schematics
3 - 07/29/11 - How Algorithms Shape Our World
4 - 07/29/11 - Biomaterial Could Let Doctors 'Sculpt' Delicate Facial Features
5 - 07/29/11 - Advanced Reactor Gets Closer to Reality
6 - 07/29/11 - Alien life-forms may be nearer than you think
7 - 07/29/11 - Alternative technology offers housing solution
8 - 07/29/11 - Former Google CIO Suggests 'Do Dumb Things'
9 - 07/29/11 - U.S. Debt Visualized: How It Literally Stacks Up
10 - 07/29/11 - B.S. Detector Invented By German Computer Expert Bernd Wurm
11 - 07/29/11 - Firm’s scooter invention commuters and holidaymakers
12 - 07/29/11 - Congress votes to allow corporations to patent inventions of others
13 - 07/29/11 - Hummer Hat attracts Hummingbirds for closeup viewing
14 - 07/29/11 - Scientists fear medical research will create talking monkeys
15 - 07/29/11 - Steve Perlman’s white paper explains “impossible” wireless tech
16 - 07/29/11 - RI art dealer gets 16 years in invention scam
17 - 07/29/11 - Transparent Solar Cells a success
18 - 07/29/11 - Free Video Downloading
19 - 07/29/11 - Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas
20 - 07/29/11 - Crowdsourcing Ancient Egyptian Scrolls
21 - 07/29/11 - New Soyuz Launch Facility Near the Equator
22 - 07/29/11 - Canadian Government Muzzling Scientists
23 - 07/29/11 - Space Station To Be Deorbited After 2020
24 - 07/29/11 - Car Window Touchscreens
25 - 07/29/11 - New Type Of Artificial Lung Created
26 - 07/29/11 - Researchers Say Dark Winters Led To Bigger Human Brains
27 - 07/29/11 - How Do You Keep Up With Science Developments?
28 - 07/29/11 - Solar Energy Is the Fastest Growing Industry In the US
29 - 07/29/11 - GE Bets On Holographic Optical Storage
30 - 07/29/11 - Why Your Dad's 30-Year-Old Stereo Sounds Better Than Yours
31 - 07/29/11 - War Texting Lets Hackers Unlock Car Doors Via SMS
32 - 07/29/11 - 3D Nausea Solved By Eye-Tracking
33 - 07/26/11 - Cool Your Car Down Quickly With This Trick
34 - 07/26/11 - Broken weather records are the new normal
35 - 07/26/11 - JELL-O memory for your brain
36 - 07/26/11 - Energy scavenger eats leftover wireless signals
37 - 07/26/11 - Researchers create the first artificial neural network out of DNA
38 - 07/26/11 - Explaining “adverse possession” — squatter’s delight
39 - 07/26/11 - Garage folds against side of wall (Oct, 1962)
40 - 07/26/11 - Fed Audit's Initial Report Reveals Trillions in Secret Loans
41 - 07/26/11 - Hybrid Human-Animal DNA Experiments Raise Concerns
42 - 07/26/11 - Share Links, Become Extradited To the US
43 - 07/26/11 - Massachusetts Tracks Where Your Car Has Been
44 - 07/26/11 - The Loudness Wars May Be Ending
45 - 07/26/11 - 3D Hurts Your Eyes
46 - 07/26/11 - DIY book scanner processes 600 pages/hour
47 - 07/26/11 - Today's Lighter TVs Mean Much Less E-Waste
48 - 07/26/11 - New Blood Test Can Detect Alzheimers
49 - 07/26/11 - Sandia Labs “Hopper” Robot
50 - 07/26/11 - 675k Stolen Credit Cards = Ten Years In Jail
51 - 07/26/11 - Congressman and Astronaut Propose a New Plan For NASA
52 - 07/26/11 - Project Nim
53 - 07/26/11 - Massive Solar Tower Planned For Arizona
54 - 07/26/11 - Heat 'Most Likely Cause' of Pioneer Anomaly
55 - 07/26/11 - Devolving through Inbreeding
56 - 07/22/11 - Renaissance Charge Free Energy Lawnmower
57 - 07/22/11 - Intelligent Street Lighting Saves Up to 80% On Energy
58 - 07/22/11 - BiPod Flying Car Makes (Short) Test Flights
59 - 07/22/11 - Lack of interest in 'never-ending energy' device
60 - 07/22/11 - Why we need to keep an eye on the ice sheets
61 - 07/22/11 - Hawaiian Dairy Farmers fight radiation with Boron
62 - 07/22/11 - Brakes and Tailpipes
63 - 07/22/11 - How 1 MILLION Pounds Of Organic Food Can Be Produced On 3 Acres
64 - 07/22/11 - Government funded Electric Car Maker Folds, Salinas Loses $500,000
65 - 07/22/11 - Steve Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts lays out the cause
66 - 07/22/11 - Secrets in plain sight
67 - 07/22/11 - Nickel for Visible-Light Nanoantennas?
68 - 07/22/11 - Police have 3rd suspect in Eugene Mallove killing
69 - 07/22/11 - Radiation Found in Strawberries, Spinach, Kale
70 - 07/22/11 - Weakening magnetic flux
71 - 07/22/11 - Ancient Atomic Blast & War
72 - 07/22/11 - Simultaneous broadcasting and receiving
73 - 07/22/11 - Conrad Schlumberger's Electrifying Oil Discovery
74 - 07/22/11 - Did this wooden box trigger the sexual revolution?
75 - 07/22/11 - Energy Independence for the United States -- How?
76 - 07/22/11 - Revering Teachers
77 - 07/22/11 - China Emerges as Early-stage Investor in Cleantech
78 - 07/22/11 - Manipulating facts to bolster a biased viewpoint
79 - 07/22/11 - Helium 3 in a catch-22
80 - 07/22/11 - A cream that slows down snakebites
81 - 07/22/11 - Facial Recognition Gone Wrong
82 - 07/22/11 - Earth's Population To Hit 7 Billion This Year
83 - 07/22/11 - Tae Bo Workout Sent Skyscraper Shaking
84 - 07/22/11 - Court Allows Webcam Spying On Rental Laptops
85 - 07/22/11 - Suppressed Report Shows Pirates Are Good Customers
86 - 07/22/11 - Predictions of the Future...From the 1960s
87 - 07/22/11 - Wolfram Launches Computational Document Format
88 - 07/22/11 - Fed Audit's Initial Report Reveals Trillions in Secret Loans
89 - 07/22/11 - Cat Stevens - Morning has Broken
90 - 07/22/11 - Real-time energy monitor could 'could cut gas bills by 20%'
91 - 07/22/11 - How I benefit from using my Mexistim
92 - 07/18/11 - Aluminum-Celmet Could Increase EV Range By 300%
93 - 07/18/11 - Rainbow Moon
94 - 07/18/11 - Cell phones: the mother of invention for electric vehicles
95 - 07/18/11 - New Invention Gives Truckers Big Fuel Savings
96 - 07/18/11 - Ford Demonstrates Networked Cars
97 - 07/18/11 - 1970s NASA video about colonizing space
98 - 07/18/11 - Understanding the Payoffs From Investing In Space Flight
99 - 07/18/11 - Time Cloaking: Physicists create a hole in time
100 - 07/18/11 - Future Farm: a sunless, rainless room indoors
101 - 07/18/11 - The future of energy storage – graphite and water
102 - 07/18/11 - Commercialising the Moon: the Lunar X Prize and beyond
103 - 07/18/11 - Jawbone tracking bracelet
104 - 07/18/11 - Cell may help curb farm crime
105 - 07/18/11 - Lessons Interface Designers Can Learn from Teledildonics
106 - 07/18/11 - Finally Hawass fired
107 - 07/18/11 - Phone Customers Pay $2B Yearly In Bogus Fees
108 - 07/18/11 - Acoustic Superlens Built From Soda Cans
109 - 07/18/11 - Cut Down On Nukes To Shave the Deficit
110 - 07/18/11 - Internet Use Found To Affect Memory
111 - 07/18/11 - Mass Psychosis In the USA?
112 - 07/18/11 - Police Increasingly Looking To Smartphones For Evidence
113 - 07/18/11 - Japanese Military Invents Tumbling, Flying Sphere
114 - 07/18/11 - Study Shows Programmers Get Better With Age
115 - 07/18/11 - Customer Asks For Itemized Bill, Verizon Tells Her To Get a Subpoena
116 - 07/18/11 - Robot Helps Quadriplegic Scratch an Itch
117 - 07/14/11 - No job is safe from the Robot Threat
118 - 07/14/11 - Trap for mosquitoes developed using odor from smelly feet
119 - 07/14/11 - US Lost “Space Race” Long Ago
120 - 07/14/11 - Hawaii law for affordable solar power signed
121 - 07/14/11 - Scavenging ambient electromagnetic energy
122 - 07/14/11 - Solar Cells use 'Upconversion' for energy from Red
123 - 07/14/11 - Automakers Give Flywheels a Spin
124 - 07/14/11 - Chemists Discover Freezing Point of Supercooled Water
125 - 07/14/11 - How to deactivate a cat
126 - 07/14/11 - Rethinking Work
127 - 07/14/11 - Sun Operates Gas Machine (May, 1938)
128 - 07/14/11 - The disturbing animals created when taxidermy goes wrong
129 - 07/14/11 - Megacities destroy your brain
130 - 07/14/11 - Unlimited number of regenerations possible
131 - 07/14/11 - File-Sharing Is Not a Religion, Says Swedish Government
132 - 07/14/11 - 25% of Car Accidents Linked to Gadget Use
133 - 07/14/11 - Belgrade Hosts First Public Solar-Powered Cell Charging Station
134 - 07/14/11 - Banks Find Way To Sell Consumers' Shopping Data
135 - 07/14/11 - The Fanless Spinning Heatsink
136 - 07/14/11 - Congress Voting To Repeal Incandescent Bulb Ban
137 - 07/14/11 - Robotic Refueling Experiment Set Up On Space Station
138 - 07/14/11 - The Wi-Fi Hacking Neighbor From Hell
139 - 07/14/11 - MIT Researchers Printing Solar Cells On Fold-able Sheets
140 - 07/14/11 - Were Adam and Eve Giants?
141 - 07/14/11 - Computer Learns Language By Playing Games
142 - 07/14/11 - Texas and Taxes: Is a Server a Business Presence?
143 - 07/14/11 - New Scottish Wave Energy Generator Unveiled
144 - 07/14/11 - Lizards Beat Birds In Intelligence Test
145 - 07/11/11 - Solar panel selling scam shown up by sting
146 - 07/11/11 - Geothermal technology packs one-two punch against climate change
147 - 07/11/11 - Boffins triple battery life with metal foam
148 - 07/11/11 - Sooner, Not Later: Interstellar Voyages a Reality?
149 - 07/11/11 - New Vehicle Designed in Tomsk
150 - 07/11/11 - Most Powerful Magnetic Field Created
151 - 07/11/11 - A Machine to Die for - The Quest for Free Energy
152 - 07/11/11 - Russian Spacecraft to Clean the Orbit
153 - 07/11/11 - Old folk should drink MORE, not less
154 - 07/11/11 - Beware of Science as Political Veneer
155 - 07/11/11 - Concerns grow over DNA test that determines your lifespan
156 - 07/11/11 - Nasty Gossip colors our view of People
157 - 07/11/11 - Apollo astronaut: End NASA, start from scratch
158 - 07/11/11 - How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means
159 - 07/11/11 - Could U.S. Manned Spaceflight Suffer 'Memory Loss'?
160 - 07/11/11 - Can Cities Feed?Us?
161 - 07/11/11 - How Allied bombing raids in World War Two caused climate havoc
162 - 07/11/11 - Scientists drag light by slowing it to speed of sound
163 - 07/11/11 - Dead people taking over the Internet
164 - 07/11/11 - NJ Judge Rules GPS Tracking of Spouse Legal
165 - 07/11/11 - Law Enforcement Wants To Try 'Predictive Policing'
166 - 07/11/11 - Novel Drive Wheel System Based On Spinning Sphere
167 - 07/11/11 - Millions of Jellyfish Invade Nuclear Reactors
168 - 07/11/11 - Bankruptcy 101...why Arizona did the right thing!!
169 - 07/08/11 - How America Can Get Its Tech Mojo Back
170 - 07/08/11 - A Texan's Answer to Welfare
171 - 07/08/11 - Solar-Powered Plane To Make First Trans-Mediterranean Flight
172 - 07/08/11 - Artificially intelligent machines that can argue back
173 - 07/08/11 - The Promise of Fusion: Energy Miracle or Mirage?
174 - 07/08/11 - UFO takes control of ICBMs
175 - 07/08/11 - La. researcher uses light to grow bigger crawfish
176 - 07/08/11 - Fan Death
177 - 07/08/11 - Yale Scientists Trace Cancer To Body Electricity (Dec, 1936)
178 - 07/08/11 - Myth, reality and the electric car
179 - 07/08/11 - Harnessing the power of feedback loops
180 - 07/08/11 - HOWTO clean LPs, DVDs, and CDs
181 - 07/08/11 - iPod credit card reader
182 - 07/08/11 - Junavia for Type 2 Diabetes
183 - 07/08/11 - Retailer Calls Rivals' Bluff On "HDMI Scam"
184 - 07/08/11 - New Approach For Laser Weapons
185 - 07/08/11 - DOT Exempts Maker of 'Flying Car' From Road Vehicle Safety Rules
186 - 07/08/11 - Renewable Energy Production Surpasses Nuclear In the US
187 - 07/08/11 - EU Proposal: Shift Farming Subsidies To Science
188 - 07/08/11 - Israeli Landspeeder (Sorta) Takes Flight
189 - 07/08/11 - Patent Troll Goes After Notebook Cooling
190 - 07/08/11 - IBM Watson To Replace Salespeople and Cold-Callers
191 - 07/08/11 - Spanish Surgeon Performs First Synthetic Organ Transplant
192 - 07/08/11 - Bill Gates On Energy
193 - 07/08/11 - Digital Generation Rediscovers Analog Wristwatches
194 - 07/08/11 - Why People Who Make Things Should Learn Chinese
195 - 07/05/11 - Sun Simba - Making solar power affordable to the world
196 - 07/05/11 - Roundabout Revolution Sweeping US (great video)
197 - 07/05/11 - New SynGas Reactor to be tested at Pulp Mill
198 - 07/05/11 - Energy evolution–where it’s come from and what’s the destination?
199 - 07/05/11 - Xergy 'Electrochemical Compression' will change Cooling Technology
200 - 07/05/11 - Panasonic develops breakthrough Thermoelectric Generator
201 - 07/05/11 - How Space Affects Human Bones
202 - 07/05/11 - Blow to the head makes people feel good about religion
203 - 07/05/11 - Massive Static Electricity before Cornish under-sea quake
204 - 07/05/11 - Poor man’s Peltier air conditioner
205 - 07/05/11 - Scientists in U-turn claim extreme weather and climate change linked
206 - 07/05/11 - Group of Quadrotors fail over and over
207 - 07/05/11 - Bureaucracy, anarchy & innovation amnesia: HBR Part 3
208 - 07/05/11 - Kairos Society smoothes the road ahead
209 - 07/05/11 - Some wishes do come true
210 - 07/05/11 - Electricity price jump to hurt hip pockets
211 - 07/05/11 - Move to Amend: coalition to abolish corporate personhood
212 - 07/05/11 - Plot Device: a filmmaker's fondest dream and worst nightmare
213 - 07/05/11 - Double Your Smartphone Battery Life
214 - 07/05/11 - Evolution Machine Accelerates Genetic Engineering
215 - 07/05/11 - Researchers Track Cell Phones Indoors By Listening In
216 - 07/05/11 - Toyota Scion IQ Electric Car To Launch In 2012
217 - 07/05/11 - Is it a star? Is it a thistle? No, it's Scotland's new welcome sign
218 - 07/05/11 - Can the US Still Lead In Space Despite Shuttle's End?
219 - 07/05/11 - Finger Length Linked to Penis Size
220 - 07/05/11 - Kinect-Based AI System Watches What You're Up To
221 - 07/05/11 - Magnetic Resonance imaging explains how brain processes jokes
222 - 07/05/11 - Japanese Team Finds New Source of Rare Earth Elements
223 - 07/05/11 - NASA's Next Mars Rover
224 - 07/02/11 - Fuel-electric hybrid air car wants to take flight, needs funding to do it
225 - 07/02/11 - Directly converting heat-waste into electrical energy.
226 - 07/02/11 - New theory disputes idea that all humans evolved from Africa
227 - 07/02/11 - Sun Produces Quite A Bit Of Energy
228 - 07/02/11 - How Greed Destroys America
229 - 07/02/11 - Driverless Car Law passed in Nevada
230 - 07/02/11 - A Guide to Implementing the Theory of Constraints
231 - 07/02/11 - Will 'bionic bodies' offer high-tech hope to the disabled?
232 - 07/02/11 - Got an APP Idea?
233 - 07/02/11 - Drug Rapamycin reverses 'Accelerated Aging Disease' in human cells
234 - 07/02/11 - Genetically altered pigs can grow human organs
235 - 07/02/11 - Electric “Bombardment” Treatment Cures Black Eye (Dec, 1936)
236 - 07/02/11 - Yet Another "People Plug In Strange USB Sticks" Story
237 - 07/02/11 - Finally NASA gets a clue SHOTGUN the money
238 - 07/02/11 - Cool-Factor Predicted To Spur Energy Conservation
239 - 07/02/11 - Inkjet Printing Solar Cells
240 - 07/02/11 - Every Ray Harryhausen stop-motion monster ever, in one video
241 - 07/02/11 - Irish Judge Orders 13-Year-Old To Surrender Xbox
242 - 07/02/11 - Facebook More Hated Than Banks, Utilities
243 - 07/02/11 - The Science of Human-Robot Love
244 - 07/02/11 - Electronic Skin Gives Robots a Sense of Touch
245 - 07/02/11 - Climate Skeptic Funded By Oil and Coal Companies
246 - 07/02/11 - Future Actions Predicted From Brain Activity
247 - 07/02/11 - Mystery Flash on Mauna Kea
248 - 07/02/11 - Solar Impulse Airplane Makes Public Debut In Paris
249 - 07/02/11 - Time To Close the Security Theater
250 - 07/02/11 - Court on Video Games: Less Cleavage, More Carnage
251 - 07/02/11 - U.S. cost of war at least $3.7 trillion and counting
252 - 07/02/11 - Magnetic Nanoparticles Fry Tumors
253 - 07/02/11 - Airplanes Cause Accidental Cloud Seeding
254 - 07/02/11 - DVD - the Physics of Crystals, Pyramids and Tetrahedrons
255 - 07/02/11 - KeelyNet BBS Files w/bonus PDF of 'Keely and his Discoveries'
256 - 07/02/11 - 'The Evolution of Matter' and 'The Evolution of Forces' on CD
257 - 07/02/11 - High Voltage & Free Energy Devices Handbook
258 - 07/02/11 - Hypnosis CD - 3 eBooks with How To Techniques and Many Cases
259 - 07/02/11 - 14 Ways to Save Money on Fuel Costs
260 - 07/02/11 - Shape Power
261 - 07/02/11 - The Physics of the Primary State of Matter
262 - 07/02/11 - $5 Alt Science MP3s to listen while working/driving/jogging
263 - 07/02/11 - 15 New Alternative Science DVDs & 15 MP3s

Be aware in case any of these links don't respond, most will be available through the Wayback Machine, simply cut and paste the link to recall the 'lost' information.

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ITEM #1 07/29/11 - The Electric Airplane Is Coming "The electric car is so yesterday; electric airplanes are coming. A battery electric-powered ultralight aircraft has been flying for the last year. A series-hybrid motor glider and a concept for an all-electric, 50-seat passenger plane were introduced at the Paris Air Show." / “Next-generation aircraft will feature more and more electronics,” said Dale Carlson, Executive for Advanced Engine Systems at GE Aviation, but “the last thing to convert to electric power will be the power plant. This is because th e batteries that would be required to supply the amount of electricity for large commercial aircraft, weigh a lot.” (General Electric is the sponsor of this magazine) The power capacity of battery technology, he continued, would have to grow by “at least a factor of four before we are near where we need to be to accomplish this.” Larger electric airliners would need hundreds of thousands of horsepower. - Full Article Source ITEM #2 07/29/11 - Sharing Electronic Schematics "CircuitBee is like YouTube for your circuit schematics. You upload your Eagle or Kicad schematics, we crunch the numbers and create an online embeddable version of your schematic." / Have you ever designed an electronic schematic then wanted to share it on your blog? Or wanted help improving your circuit on a forum? Ever peered at a tiny/massive image of a circuit on a website and wondered why on earth there wasn’t a better alternative? CircuitBee is like YouTube for your circuit schematics. You upload y our Eagle or KiCAD schematics, we crunch the numbers and create an online embeddable version of your schematic. You can pan and zoom, and mouse over components in your circuits for more details. We’re still at an early alpha stage right now, so you’ll hav e to forgive any hiccups we have going forward. But you can get started immediately by visiting Circuitbee and signing up for an account. Then simply upload your schematic files, any associated library files, and let our servers do the hard work. Within a few minutes your schematic should be ready to embed on your site or forum. Eventually we plan to add lots more useful features like downloading original schematic files, searching for components within schematics and adding notes and annotations to your circuits. We want to make it easier for all of us to communicate our circuit design ideas and to help each other improve our designs. We hope to make CircuitBee into the most useful service for hobby electronics enthusiasts, so we’re going to keep the ser vice free for as long as we can. We’ll need your help to reach our goals though, so please let us know what you think of the site, what needs improving and what else we can do to make learning about electronics and sharing your designs easier than ever be fore. - Full Article Source ITEM #3 07/29/11 - How Algorithms Shape Our World Kevin Slavin argues that we’re living in a world designed for — and increasingly controlled by — algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can’t understand, with implications we can’t control. - Full Article Source ITEM #4 07/29/11 - Biomaterial Could Let Doctors 'Sculpt' Delicate Facial Features The new material, which can be injected, molded, and set in place by exposure to light, could benefit people disfigured by disease or injury. A new biomaterial may help surgeons rebuild the delicate soft structures of the human face, like the cheeks, afte r a disease or injury has caused disfigurement. The material, which is half synthetic and half biological, can be injected under the skin as a liquid, massaged into shape, and then permanently "locked" by exposure to light. Alexander Hillel and his collea gues at Johns Hopkins University have created a new type of transplant material that addresses these problems. It's a blend of hyaluronic acid—a biological material already used as a soft-tissue implant—and polyethylene glycol, a synthetic material. The b lend is a liquid polymer that can be injected—thus avoiding the need for surgery. Once injected, the material can be sculpted into the necessary shape. When exposed to light of specific wavelengths, the messy tangle of polymer chains in the liquid implant rearrange into a stable, crosshatched form, stiffening the implant. The fact that the LED uses visible light to set the implant is important, says Farshid Guilak, a professor of orthopedic surgery and biomedical engineering at Duke University: "Visible l ight is much safer than UV light, - Full Article Source ITEM #5 07/29/11 - Advanced Reactor Gets Closer to Reality Terrapower, a startup funded in part by Nathan Myhrvold and Bill Gates, is moving closer to building a new type of nuclear reactor called a traveling wave reactor that runs on an abundant form of uranium. The company sees it as a possible alternative to f usion reactors, which are also valued for their potential to produce power from a nearly inexhaustible source of fuel. The reactor is designed to be safer than conventional nuclear reactors because it doesn't require electricity to run cooling systems to prevent a meltdown. But the new reactor doesn't solve what is probably the biggest problem facing nuclear power today: the high cost of building them. John Gilleland, Terrapower's CEO, says the company expects the reactors to cost about as much to build a s conventional ones, "but the jury is still not in on that." In the new design, the reactions all take place near the reactor's center instead of starting at one end and moving to the other. To start, uranium 235 fuel rods are arranged in the center of th e reactor. Surrounding these rods are ones made up of uranium 238. As the nuclear reactions proceed, the uranium 238 rods closest to the core are the first to be converted into plutonium, which is then used up in fission reactions that produce yet more pl utonium in nearby fuel rods. As the innermost fuel rods are used up, they're taken out of the center using a remote-controlled mechanical device and moved to the periphery of the reactor. The remaining uranium 238 rods—including those that were close enou gh to the center that some of the uranium has been converted to plutonium—are then shuffled toward the center to take the place of the spent fuel. - Full Article Source ITEM #6 07/29/11 - Alien life-forms may be nearer than you think Four years ago Joyce and a graduate student, Tracey Lincoln, now a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, evolved a molecule in a test tube that could replicate and evolve by itself, swapping little jerry-built genes in a test tube forever, as long as it was supplied with the right carefully engineered ingredients. An article in the Joyce Laboratory newsletter called it "The Immortal Molecule." Joyce's molecule is a form of RNA, or ribonucleic acid, which plays Robin to DNA's Batman in Life As We Do Know It, assembling proteins in accordance with the blueprint encoded in DNA. Neither RNA nor DNA is alive by itself, any more than any other chemical, such as bleach, or a protein. But in Joyce's test tube, his specially engineered RNA molecule comes close, copying itself over and over, and evolving. But, Joyce said, "We really would hope for more from our molecules than just replicating." Reproduction is the job of any life, he explained, but Earthly organisms have evolved a spectacula r set of tricks to improve the odds of success, everything from peacock feathers to whale songs. Joyce's molecules have not surprised him by striking out on their own to invent the molecular equivalent of writing a hit pop song. It is only a matter of tim e, he said, before they do. "The ability to synthesize life will be an event of profound importance, like the invention of agriculture or the invention of metallurgy," Freeman Dyson, a mathematician and physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Pri nceton, wrote in an email. "Nobody can tell in advance what will come of it." On Earth, all life as we know it is based on DNA, the carbon-based molecule that contains the instructions for making and operating living cells in a four-letter alphabet along its double-helix spine. The possibilities of a second example of life are as deep as the imagination. It could be based on DNA that uses a different genetic code, with perhaps more or fewer than four letters; it could be based on some complex molecule oth er than DNA, or more than the 20 amino acids from which our own proteins are made, or even some kind of chemistry based on something other than carbon and the other elements that we take for granted. - Full Article Source ITEM #7 07/29/11 - Alternative technology offers housing solution A housing solution for South Africans who fall in the affordable-housing bracket has come in the form of innovative and affordable fly ash technology. This forms part of a business model that was developed through a partnership between research and develo pment company Tower Technologies, a subsidiary of waste management company EnviroServ, energy and chemicals group Sasol’s business incubator Sasol ChemCity and financial services provider First National Bank (FNB). While fly ash housing is not a new inven tion, this particular technology makes use of fly ash and gypsum waste to make foamed cement. The foamed cement panels have improved insulation potential, which translates into energy savings, and can be erected in a short space of time. They are also 75% lighter than conventional brick and mortar, making the panels less costly to transport and erect. “Fly ash is an excellent exten- der of cement and can be used to create foamed cement, which forms the basis of our housing system,” explains Tower Technolo gies MD Mike Symons. - Full Article Source ITEM #8 07/29/11 - Former Google CIO Suggests 'Do Dumb Things' "Speaking at the CA Expo in Sydney, Australia, former Google CIO Douglas Merrill shared some management tips he learned during his tenure at the search giant. At the top of the list: 'Don't be afraid to do dumb things.' Merrill recalls that 'most of the e arly Google hardware was stolen from trash and as the stuff they stole broke all the time they built a reliable software system. Everyone knew we shouldn't build our own hardware as it was 'dumb', but everyone was wrong. Sometimes being dumb changes the g ame.' Another pearl of wisdom from Merrill: 'the more project management you do the less likely your project is to succeed.'" - Full Ar ticle Source ITEM #9 07/29/11 - U.S. Debt Visualized: How It Literally Stacks Up In former President Bill Clinton's first-ever State of the Union address, he announced that if America's debt were stacked in thousand dollar bills, it would "reach 267 miles" into space. Today, the U.S. debt is $14.3 trillion and the government is curren tly embroiled in a fierce debate over whether to raise the allowed borrowing amount further. Stacked and bundled into one-hundred dollar bills, the national debt would be as wide and long as two football fields and as high as the Statue of Liberty, report s graphic design artist Oto Godfrey. On his website, WTFnoway.com, Mr. Godfrey shows how the U.S. debt will literally stack up when compared to some of our greatest engineering wonders and machines. - Full Article Source ITEM #10 07/29/11 - B.S. Detector Invented By German Computer Expert Bernd Wurm Bernd Wurm is a 43-year-old computer science expert who has created a device called the “BlaBlaMeter” that detects excessively flowery and jargony phrases in a given piece and rates the total amount of B.S. Wurm created this -- perhaps, the single most-im portant invention of our time -- earlier this year because he was fed up with the “blown up speech” often used in advertisements and other promotional materials. The detector works like this: Paste the text of potential B.S. into the screen and press the button. The website will then analyze the words and rate them for B.S. -- the closer to zero, the better. Scores around one are considered full of B.S., but they can go much higher. "Technically, some language patterns collect 'bullshit points," he explained to HuffPost Weird News. "The result is then divided by the number of the words. This means for some occasions that the index can be higher than one, and our database tells us ev en higher than 5 in very very rare cases." Additionally, the B.S. detector scans for excessively long words, which Wurm describes as "bad words that you use whenever you want to impress someone else" he told TheLocal.de. - Full Article Source ITEM #11 07/29/11 - Firm’s scooter invention commuters and holidaymakers A COMPANY which started off selling children’s scooters has found a new use for the three-wheeled toys. Micro Scooters UK, of Coast Road, West Mersea, is selling a unique scooter, which incorporates a suitcase, allowing commuters and holidaymakers to save time by riding their luggage to their train or plane. A few months ago, they started selling the Micro Samsonite Scooter, a £250 suitcase with a three-wheeled scooter attached, allowing travellers to jump on their luggage and speed along. Small enough to take on a plane as hand luggage, the clever commuter scooters are being hailed as the next big thing, even offering people a new way to get to work in the morning. Regular flyer, Paul Davis, 28, from Maldon Road, Colchester, said he would consider invest ing in the unusual suitcase, but admitted he would feel a bit self-conscious. He said: “The little boy in me says it would be absolutely brilliant to race around Stansted Airport on my suitcase scooter, but the adult in me says maybe I would look a bit da ft. “I would worry about getting some strange looks, but apart from that, I think they look pretty cool.” - Full Article Source ITEM #12 07/29/11 - Congress votes to allow corporations to patent inventions of others In a move that critics say will cripple innovation and competition, Congress is preparing to change how patents are awarded. Current patent law awards patents under the “First-to-Invent” rule, meaning regardless of who files for a patent, it is awarded to the first person to invent the product. If another person or corporation files for a similar patent, it will be awarded to the original inventor provided the inventor can show proof of the original invention. Under the new legislation, patents will be aw arded to the first person or business to file a patent, regardless of who invented it. Many have said this change will benefit large corporations. Clyde Prestowitz, writing for Foreign Policy magazine, said that America currently out-invents other countr ies by a ratio of two to one. Prestowitz goes on to say the America Invents Act will stifle invention and creativity. Presowitz says current law benefits individuals and small companies by allowing time to test the viability and commercial potential of t he invention. It also provides protection from large corporations or others who, hearing of the invention, may rush out to file a claim. Legislators claim the reason for removing the First-to-Invent provision from patent law is to bring our laws into "ha rmonization" with the rest of the world. A bill summary states transitioning to the first file system "will simplify the application system and bring it in line with the nation's trading partners. - Full Article Source ITEM #13 07/29/11 - Hummer Hat attracts Hummingbirds for closeup viewing The buzz and flutter of a hummingbird is unmistakable when it's a few feet away. It sounds like a "whhrr" that buzzes and hums and is heard before it's seen. Imagine it five inches away. That's what inspired John Henderson, a semi-retired Freeland man, to make a hat from a hummingbird feeder. Two, actually. "It's fun. It's whimsical," Henderson said of his invention, called the Hummer Hat. The whimsical-nature of birds feeding only inches away enticed Diane Driver to purchase one for her husband, David Al bright. Henderson came up with the idea in the fall of 2008 and began making Hummer Hats soon after. He buys used helmets and applies rods to them that extend a few inches away from the wearer's face, and then hangs the hummingbird feeders from those rods . The Hummer Hats cost $37 and shipping is free if it is ordered on Whidbey Island. Since then, he's sold 35 Hummer Hats. Both Jackson and Jirikovic are wildlife and bird-watching enthusiasts. Jirikovic said she has three feeders around her house on South Whidbey. But watching hummingbirds through the window doesn't compare to watching them and feeling the air displaced by the fast flapping wings. "It was exciting. It was thrilling," Jirikovic said. "The hummers came right up on my ears and into my face." Jirikovic said both Anna's and Rufous hummingbirds fed inches from her face. "I got to see them up close," she said. "I got to hear their calls and, boy, do they talk a lot. I could actually feel their wing beats next to my cheek. That was exciting." - Full Article Source ITEM #14 07/29/11 - Scientists fear medical research will create talking monkeys The Academy of Medical Sciences of Britain warns of the risks of transplanting human genetic material into animals. For the report, "to create features such as language or human appearance" raises ethical questions. The Academy of Medical Sciences of Brit ain is urging the government to lay down stricter rules for medical research involving animals. The group fears that experiments involving the transplantation of cells end up creating anomalies, like monkeys with the ability to think and talk like humans. The academy also stresses that it is not opposed to experiments involving, for example, implanting cells and human tissue in animals. In current studies, for example, cancer cells are transplanted into mice in order to test new drugs against the advancem ent of the disease. The academy defends, however, that with the advancement of new techniques issues are emerging that urgently need to be regulated. "What we fear is that if we start to introduce a large number of human brain cells into the brains of pr imates and suddenly with that the apes acquire some of the skills that are considered uniquely human, such as language," says Professor Thomas Baldwin, another member of the academy. "These possibilities are explored a lot in fiction, but we need to start thinking about them," he says. - Full Article Source ITEM #15 07/29/11 - Steve Perlman’s white paper explains “impossible” wireless tech People have called Steve Perlman’s new wireless technology impossible. Today, he’s releasing a white paper that aims to show how it can really work. Perlman’s “distributed input distributed output” technology, or DIDO, allows each wireless user on a netwo rk to use the full data capacity of shared spectrum simultaneously with a bunch of other users. It does so by eliminating interference between users sharing the same spectrum. That’s a phenomenal invention that appears to violate the laws of physics, and Perlman calls it a “cloud wireless system.” The technology gets around Shannon’s Law — a physics law that figures the upper limit for data that can go through a wireless channel. The new technology can transmit data at speeds that are about 10 times the limits determined by Shannon’s Law, and Perlman thinks that could hit 1,000 times the limit eventually. “If everyone here decided to watch HD video on a tablet, that would overwhelm any network,” Perlman said at our GamesBeat 2011 event. “But with this te chnology, each of you would have the full bandwidth of being in that wireless cell; you would not interfere with each other at all.” With conventional wireless technologies, the data rate for each user drops as more users share the same spectrum. Claude S hannon, who created Shannon’s law, showed that was a necessary tradeoff: The more people using a spectrum, the more redundancy needs to be built into each individual’s transmissions in order to avoid interference. But with DIDO, the date rate per user rem ains steady as more users are added. As a result, DIDO “profoundly increases the data capacity of the wireless spectrum, while increasing reliability and reducing the cost and complexity of wireless devices.” The paper also says deploying DIDO is far less expensive than conventional commercial wireless deployment. Yet it also has higher capacity and performance and is able to tap existing consumer internet infrastructure and indoor wireless access points. This means that DIDO could have a virtually unlimi ted number of users, all of them streaming high-definition video, using the same spectrum that a single user would use with conventional wireless technology. There would be no dead zones, no interference, no reduction in data rate and a range of up to sev eral miles in urban and suburban settings with sub-millisecond latency. In rural areas, DIDO works at distances up to 250 miles. If these claims bear out, DIDO would revolutionize the wireless industry in almost every aspect. - Full Article Source ITEM #16 07/29/11 - RI art dealer gets 16 years in invention scam A former Rhode Island art dealer convicted of defrauding a wide range of investors -- from a wealthy Japanese sword collector to a school janitor -- was sentenced to 16 years in prison Thursday for his elaborate multimillion-dollar scheme. Judge William E . Smith imposed the sentence on DeSimone, 58, of Johnston, in U.S. District Court in Providence. Prosecutors said DeSimone deserved a stiff sentence because he is a "career con man" and criminal who bilked his victims of more than $6 million, saddling the m with "broken dreams, empty bank accounts, and untold distress." The trial focused on an invention called the Drink Stik, a device that connects beverage containers to respirators and gas masks worn by soldiers in contaminated areas. Prosecutors argued t hat DeSimone lied about access to deep-pocketed investors and promised the inventor he would sell the Drink Stik in exchange for a one-third stake in its patent. They say DeSimone then convinced investors to buy shares in his Drink Stik stake by falsely c laiming that major international corporations, including Fidelity Investments and Raytheon Corp., had offered to buy it for millions of dollars. Prosecutors told the jury he employed similar tactics to fraudulently solicit investments in two other inventi ons, including one in which he had no ownership stake at all. - Full Article Source ITEM #17 07/29/11 - Transparent Solar Cells a success A HIGH-TECH Oxfordshire company has raised £650,000 to commercialise its pioneering transparent solar panels, that come in a range of colours. Oxford PhotoVoltaics, based at Begbroke Science Park, will use the investment from venture capital companies and Business Angels to build a larger prototype of its solar cells. Harnessing the sun’s energy, the transparent solar cells are printed directly on to glass, are available in a range of colours and could be used in windows and glazing panels. The new solar cells are made from inexpensive, abundant, non-toxic and non-corrosive materials and can be scaled to any volume, according to the company. Chief executive Kevin Arthur said: “It’s exciting to demonstrate the unique aesthetic benefits of our transparent g lass-based screen-printable photovoltaic technology, and its simplicity of production and low manufacturing cost. “We believe this technology has the potential to deliver a paradigm-shift in the way solar energy solutions are deployed in the future.” The Oxfordshire company has combined earlier research on artificial solar cells and semi-conducting plastics to create a way of making panels using high-volume manufacturing processes. - Full Article Source ITEM #18 07/29/11 - Free Video Downloading So you sometimes see a video online that you want to save offline? Who doesn’t? Freemake.com just came out with a new version of its free video downloader tool. It lets you save videos from Facebook, YouTube, ComedyCentral, Vimeo, MTV, and 50 others place s. There’s also a new version of their Free Video Converter. It can convert one video format to another, whether it’s Blu-Ray, MP3, iPad, or any of a dozen others. It was so easy to use, we skipped their tutorial. - Full Article Source ITEM #19 07/29/11 - Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas "Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. 'When the number of committed opinion holders is below 1 0 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,' said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski. 'Once that number grows a bove 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.' The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E." - Full Article Source ITEM #20 07/29/11 - Crowdsourcing Ancient Egyptian Scrolls "Dons at Oxford University were on the BBC Radio 4 'Today' program this morning asking for help from listeners to transcribe unearthed ancient Egyptian texts and scrolls via their website. Visitors to the site are asked to match-up letters on scanned frag ments of papyrus with an on-screen Greek alphabet. By doing so, they can help reveal some of the amazing documents that the ancient Egyptians last read. You too can become a papyrologist!" - Full Article Source ITEM #21 07/29/11 - New Soyuz Launch Facility Near the Equator "Russian and French teams are currently hard at work in French Guiana on the northern coast of South America, building the first Soyuz launch facility in the Western Hemisphere. Soyuz rockets normally carry 3,500 pound payloads into orbit, but from the Fr ench Guiana spaceport, the rocket will have an added benefit of being near the equator where the Earth's spin makes launching slightly easier. This extra boost allows Soyuz to deliver a 6,600 pound payload into orbit. The first launches are scheduled for October." - Full Article Source ITEM #22 07/29/11 - Canadian Government Muzzling Scientists "Scientists in Canada researching why salmon stocks are depleting face being muzzled by the Canadian Conservative government. Quoting: 'Science told Miller to "please feel free to speak with journalists." It advised reporters to contact Diane Lake, a medi a officer with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Vancouver, "to set up interviews with Dr. Miller." The documents show major media outlets were soon lining up to speak with Miller, but the Privy Council Office said no to the interviews. Th e Privy Council Office also nixed a Fisheries Department news release about Miller's study, saying the release "was not very good, focused on salmon dying and not on the new science aspect," according to documents obtained by Postmedia News under the Acce ss to Information Act. Miller is still not allowed to speak publicly about her discovery, and the Privy Council Office and Fisheries Department defend the way she has been silenced.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #23 07/29/11 - Space Station To Be Deorbited After 2020 "Russia and its partners plan to plunge the International Space Station (ISS) into the ocean at the end of its life cycle after 2020 so as not to leave space junk, the space agency said on Wednesday. 'After it completes its existence, we will be forced to sink the ISS. It cannot be left in orbit, it's too complex, too heavy an object, it can leave behind lots of rubbish,' said deputy head of Roskosmos space agency Vitaly Davydov." - Full Article Source ITEM #24 07/29/11 - Car Window Touchscreens "As if we need more proof that touchscreens are all the rage, designers are dreaming up ways to put them in cars. In the video, a child gazes wistfully out the window at a dreary countryside. Fields roll by, a lake, cyclists, trees that have lost their le aves. The car stops, and the child starts 'drawing' on the window. The article includes fascinating videos showing how touchscreens might infiltrate our lives in the future." (Time to make a major investment in Windex stocks. - JWD) - Full Article Source Window to the World (CIID/Toyota) from CIID on Vimeo. ITEM #25 07/29/11 - New Type Of Artificial Lung Created "Researchers have created an artificial lung that uses air as a ventilating gas instead of pure oxygen — as is the case with current man-made lungs, which require heavy tanks of oxygen that limit their portability. The prototype device was built following the natural lung's design and tiny dimensions and the researchers say it has reached efficiencies akin to the genuine organ. With a volume roughly the same as a human lung, the device could be implanted into a person and even be driven by the heart." - < a href="http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/07/27/2120232/New-Type-Of-Artificial-Lung-Created" target="_blank" >Full Article Source ITEM #26 07/29/11 - Researchers Say Dark Winters Led To Bigger Human Brains "Humans living at high latitude have bigger eyes and bigger brains to cope with poor light during long winters and cloudy days, UK scientists have said. from the article: 'The scientists measured the eye sockets and brain volumes of 55 skulls from 12 popu lations across the world, and plotted the results against latitude. Lead author Eiluned Pearce told BBC News: "We found a positive relationship between absolute latitude and both eye socket size and cranial capacity."'" / The largest brain cavities came f rom Scandinavia, while the smallest were from Micronesia. Eiluned Pearce said: "Both the amount of light hitting the Earth's surface and winter day-lengths get shorter as you go further north or south from the equator. "We found that as light levels decre ase, humans are getting bigger eye sockets, which suggests that their eyeballs are getting bigger. "They are also getting bigger brains, because we found this increase in cranial capacity as well. "In the paper, we argue that having bigger brains doesn't mean that high-latitude humans are necessarily smarter. It's just they need bigger eyes and brains to be able to see well where they live." - Full Article Source ITEM #27 07/29/11 - How Do You Keep Up With Science Developments? "As a nerd who used to love science back in high school (specially physics), I now find myself completely disconnected from any and all scientific developments and news. How do you try to stay up to date with scientific developments? Science journals? Wha tever makes it into Slashdot's front page? Books? Magazines? I'm looking for something engaging and informative, for not something that will require me to go and get a PhD just to be able to comprehend." - Full Article Source ITEM #28 07/29/11 - Solar Energy Is the Fastest Growing Industry In the US "According to Rhone Resch, the last three years have seen the U.S. solar industry go from a start-up to a major industry that is creating well-paying jobs and growing the economy in all 50 states, employing 93,000 Americans in 2010, a number that is expec ted to grow between 25,000 to 50,000 this year (PDF). In the first quarter of 2011, the solar industry installed 252 megawatts of new solar electric capacity, a 66 percent growth from the same time frame in 2010. Solar energy is creating more jobs per meg awatt than any other energy source (PDF) with the capability, according to one study, of generating over 4 million jobs by 2030 with aggressive energy efficiency measures. There are now almost 3,000 megawatts of solar electric energy installed in the U.S. , enough to power 600,000 homes. In the manufacturing sector, solar panel production jumped 31 percent. 'The U.S. market is expected to more than double yet again in 2011, installing enough solar for more than 400,000 homes,' writes Resch. 'Last year, the industry set the ambitious yet achievable goal of installing 10 gigawatts annually by 2015 (PDF) – enough to power 2 million more homes each and every year.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #29 07/29/11 - GE Bets On Holographic Optical Storage "Years after announcing they had developed holographic optical disc technology that could store 500GB of data, GE this week said they're preparing to license the technology to manufacturing partners. At the same time, InPhase, which failed to actually get its holographic disc product out the door for years, says GE's product is nothing more than a 'science project,' and its own optical disc is almost ready to go to market — again. But, as one analyst quipped, the old joke about optical disc is that 'there 's more written about optical disc than stored on it.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #30 07/29/11 - Why Your Dad's 30-Year-Old Stereo Sounds Better Than Yours "Cnet's Steve Guttenberg sheds light on this interesting development that over the years, actual sound quality became a secondary selling point since most people started buying their equipment either online or from big box retailers. People started caring more about the number of connections and wireless interfaces and wattage of systems. As a result, there was less money in R&D budgets to spend on advancements in sound." - Full Article Source ITEM #31 07/29/11 - War Texting Lets Hackers Unlock Car Doors Via SMS "Software that lets drivers unlock car doors and even start their vehicles using a mobile phone could let car thieves do the very same things, according to computer security researchers at iSec Partners. Don Bailey and fellow iSec researcher Mathew Solnik say they've figured out the protocols that some of these software makers use to remote control the cars, and they've produced a video showing how they can unlock a car and turn the engine on via a laptop. According to Bailey, it took them about two hours to figure out how to intercept wireless messages between the car and the network and then recreate them from his laptop. Bailey will discuss the research at next week's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, but he isn't going to name the products they've hacked — they've looked at two so far — or provide full technical details of their work until the software makers can patch them." - Full Article Source ITEM #32 07/29/11 - 3D Nausea Solved By Eye-Tracking "If you are like me, then the slightest disparity in those 3D movies causes nausea — and I know it does with thousands of others too. LG claims to have solved the problem with a new technology that uses eye-tracking, similar to those red-eye detectors in digital cameras, adjusting the 3D display so that you don't get sick. Due to be available in LG's glasses-free 3D computer monitor it also displays normal 2D stuff, so even if you don't use the 3D much it might be worth a try. I plan on buying one of the 20-inch monitors this fall when it becomes available in the U.S. (It's only in Korea now.) If it works as advertised great; if not, at least I can still use it as a regular monitor." - Full Article Source ITEM #33 07/26/11 - Cool Your Car Down Quickly With This Trick The summer sun has a way of transforming cars into ovens, and it's no fun sweating while you wait for the air conditioner to provide some relief. You can speed things up with a bizarre yet apparently effective little trick. To pull off the magic, roll dow n a window on one side of the car, and open and close the door on the opposite side several times. The increased air circulation can drop your vehicle's overheated temperature by double digits. You can instantly cool down a car that has been sitting under the sun by rolling down the window on one side and opening and closing the door on the other side 5-6x. - Full Article Source ITEM #34 07/26/11 - Broken weather records are the new normal The red indicates weather stations where U.S. Daily Highest Min Temperature Records were set on July 21, 2011. The 21st of July, it was hotter than hell across much of the Eastern US. Nights, which tend to have the daily minimum, were especially unpleasan t. Out of 5,569 daily minimums recorded on the 21st, 188 broke previous records and another 138 tied them (exceeding or equaling, respectively, the previous record for daily minimum temperature)... - Full Article Source ITEM #35 07/26/11 - JELL-O memory for your brain "Our memory device is soft and pliable, and functions extremely well in wet environments – similar to the human brain," one of the researchers, Michael Dickey, said when announcing the breakthrough. To construct the circuits, the team used a liquid alloy of gallium and indium, set in water-based gels. "We've created a memory device with the physical properties of Jell-O," says Dickey. Being both squishy and hydrophilic, the circuits could be implanted in living tissue far more compatibly than garden-varie ty chips, where they could preform any number of different roles, from sensing biological activity to monitoring and collecting medical information – or possibly more, if your imagination has a bit of a sci-fi bent. The simple circuits "display memristor- like characteristics", the North Carolina State University team writes in the online edition of the journal Advanced Materials, in an article entitled "Towards All-Soft Matter Circuits: Prototypes of Quasi-Liquid Devices with Memristor Characteristics". M emristors – a portmanteau of "memory" and "resistor" – are memory circuits that change their resistive state when voltage is applied. In the NCSU device, each memory cell has two states: conductive and non-conductive. When the liquid alloy residing in the water-based gel is giving a positive juicing, it creates a resistive oxide skin. A negative charge "annihilates" the oxide, to use the researchers' term, allowing current again to flow. Pretty straightforward – but as the NCSU team explains, switching th e charge in this way would normally only make the oxide jump from on side of the cell to the other – meaning that the cell would always be resistive. The team's breakthrough was to dope one side of the cell with a a polymer that keeps the oxide from formi ng, and allows the memristor effect to occur. Although their work on mushy memristors is only beginning, the NCSU team has great hopes for the persistent-state memory technology in general. "Memristors may become the core of next generation memory devices ," they write, "because of their low energy consumption and high data density and performance." Interestingly, one of the more thought-provoking – pun intended – possibile uses of memristors was floated last year, when a University of Michigan scientist s uggested that since they can operate analogously to brain synapses, they could "learn" and eventually mimic a living brain. With the development of memristors that could live quite happily inside of a human brain, a whole range of possibilities may open u p. Getting old and feeling your memory slipping? Maybe an implantation of a few gooshy gigabytes of new synapse-impersonating memristors might help? - Full Article Source ITEM #36 07/26/11 - Energy scavenger eats leftover wireless signals The ambient signals that surround us all, causing cancer (or not), headaches (or not), or irrational panic (too often) among anyone who notices the transmitter, is of much lower power, and isn’t concentrated around a single frequency. To turn those stray signals into electricity – in small quantities, so don’t expect a “free” laptop charger anytime soon – the Georgia Tech researchers designed an ultra-wideband antenna that can pick up signals from 100 MHz to around 15 GHz. The Georgia Tech research has an other cool angle to it: the antennas were printed onto flexible material using a modified inkjet that uses refills containing silver and other nanoparticles in an emulsion. By printing onto polymer instead of paper, the group hopes to create antennae oper ating at up to 60 GHz. In experiments so far, the antennas have been able to harvest “hundreds of microwatts” from TV bands, successfully powering a temperature sensor using power scavenged from a transmitter a kilometer distant. - Full Article Source ITEM #37 07/26/11 - Researchers create the first artificial neural network out of DNA Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have created a circuit of interacting molecules that can recall memories based on incomplete DNA patterns, just like the human brain. 'So we asked, instead of having a physically connected network of n eural cells, can a soup of interacting molecules exhibit brainlike behavior?' Consisting of four artificial neurons made from 112 distinct DNA strands, the researchers' neural network plays a mind-reading game in which it tries to identify a mystery scien tist. The researchers 'trained' the neural network to 'know' four scientists, whose identities are each represented by a specific, unique set of answers to four yes-or-no questions, such as whether the scientist was British. After thinking of a scientist, a human player provides an incomplete subset of answers partially identifying the scientist. The player then conveys those clues to the network by dropping DNA strands that correspond to those answers into the test tube. Communicating via fluorescent sig nals, the network then identifies which scientist the player has in mind. Otherwise, the network can 'say' that it has insufficient information to pick just one of the scientists in its memory or that the clues contradict what it has remembered. The resea rchers played this game with the network using 27 different ways of answering the questions - out of 81 total combinations - and it responded correctly each time. This DNA-based neural network demonstrates the ability to take an incomplete pattern and fig ure out what it might represent — one of the brain's unique features. - Full Article Source ITEM #38 07/26/11 - Explaining “adverse possession” — squatter’s delight Here’s the basic version of how it works: 1) Someone owns a property, whether it’s a house, a condo or just a strip of ground. 2) If the owner isn’t using the property, somebody else can come in and use it, without the owner’s permission. 3) After some amount of time (in Texas it’s three years; in New York State it’s ten), the squatter can claim ownership free and clear. People have been making adverse possession claims for decades. The most famous cases happened on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s and ’90s, when artists, punks and homeless people squatted in vacant buildings and brownstones. - Full Article Source ITEM #39 07/26/11 - Garage folds against side of wall (Oct, 1962) A new awning garage bolts to an outside wall, folds flat when not in use, and pulls down to enclose a car. Its pivoted tubular ribs are spring-balanced for easy raising and lowering. British Carquad is made in seven lengths from 9 to 18 feet, can be attac hed to an existing garage for a second car or to house a small boat. - Full Article Source ITEM #40 07/26/11 - Fed Audit's Initial Report Reveals Trillions in Secret Loans "The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Gr eat Depression." - Full Article Source ITEM #41 07/26/11 - Hybrid Human-Animal DNA Experiments Raise Concerns "British scientists are calling for a new agency to oversee the mixing of human and animal DNA, which is progressing at a rate most may not be aware of: 'Among experimentation that might spark concern are those where human brain cells might change animal brains, those that could lead to the fertilization of human eggs in animals and any modifications of animals that might create attributes considered uniquely human, like facial features, skin or speech. ... Some disagree. "We think some of these should be done, but they should be done in an open way to maintain public confidence," said Robin Lovell-Badge, head of stem cell biology and developmental genetics at Britain's Medical Research Council, one of the expert group members. He said experiments injecti ng human brain cells into the brains of rats might help develop new stroke treatments or that growing human skin on mice could further understanding of skin cancer.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #42 07/26/11 - Share Links, Become Extradited To the US "Sharing links online, particularly links to copyrighted material, may render you extradited to the United States of America. 'In May, American law enforcement officials opened up yet another front in this war by seeking the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer . The 23-year-old British college student is currently working on his BS in interactive media and animation. Until last year, he ran a "link site" that helped users find free movies and TV shows, many of them infringing. American officials want to try him on charges of criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy.' The case is unique because the site, which the accused Englishman ran, was not located in the US in any way. Does this set a new precedent of things to come? The agency responsible for the ex tradition request is Immigrations and Customs Enforcement." - Full Article Source ITEM #43 07/26/11 - Massachusetts Tracks Where Your Car Has Been "Massachusetts wants to establish a database with the information gathered by license plate scanners installed in police cars. The scanners will scan license plates of every car the police vehicle passes and transmit that information (along with the locat ion) to a database that will be made available to various government agencies. The data wil be kept indefinitely." - Full Article Source ITEM #44 07/26/11 - The Loudness Wars May Be Ending "Mike Barthel reports on a technique called brick-wall limiting, where songs are engineered to seem louder by bringing the quiet parts to the same level as the loud parts and pushing the volume level of the entire song to the highest point possible. 'Beca use of the need to stand out on radio and other platforms, there's a strategic advantage to having a new song sound just a little louder than every other song. As a result, for a period, each new release came out a little louder than the last, and the ave rage level of loudness on CDs crept up (YouTube) to such a degree that albums actually sounded distorted, as if they were being played through broken speakers.' But the loudness wars may be coming to an end. Taking advantage of the trend towards listening to music online — via services like Pandora, Spotify, and Apple's forthcoming iCloud — a proposal by audio engineer Thomas Lund, already adopted as a universal standard (PDF) by the International Telecommunications Union, would institute a volume limit o n any songs downloaded from the cloud, effectively removing the strategic advantage of loudness. Lund's proposal would do the same thing for any music you could buy. 'Once a piece of music is ingested into this system, there is no longer any value in tryi ng to make a recording louder just to stand out,' says legendary engineer Bob Ludwig, who has been working with Lund. 'There will be nothing to gain from a musical point of view. Louder will no longer be better!'" - Full Article Source ITEM #45 07/26/11 - 3D Hurts Your Eyes "After experimenting on 24 adults, a research team at the University of California, Berkeley has determined that viewing content on a stereo 3D display hurts your eyes and your brain. This can supposedly cause visual discomfort, fatigue, and headaches Acc ording to the article, 3D content viewed over a short distance (like with desktops and smartphones) is more visually uncomfortable when the stereo content is placed in front of the screen. In a movie theater, it's the opposite: Stereo content that is plac ed behind the screen causes more discomfort than scenes that jump out at you. With the explosion of 3D-capable gadgetry such as televisions and mobile phones, understanding just what this kind of technology is doing to our bodies may help us better use it in the future. The only problem is that technology tends to far outpace research, and until we get a better handle on its effects, we're more or less walking blindly into a 3D world." - Full Article Source ITEM #46 07/26/11 - DIY book scanner processes 600 pages/hour The build is pretty simple – just a little bit of black craft board for the camera mount and adjustable book cradle. [Justin] ended up using the CHDK software for the Cannon PowerShot camera to hack in a remote trigger. The scanner can manage to photograp h 600 pages an hour, although that would massively increase if he ever moves up to a 2-camera setup. We’re wondering if OCR could be applied to this build – it’s nice to have an image of a page on your computer, but searchable text would be amazing - Full Article Source ITEM #47 07/26/11 - Today's Lighter TVs Mean Much Less E-Waste "We all know that today's flat-screen TVs weigh far less than old-style CRTs, or they wouldn't be able to hang on the wall. New research from the Consumer Electronics Association finds that this translates into a massive savings of electronics waste. The report found that today's flat screen TVs are 82% lighter and 75% smaller than cathode ray tube (CRT) TVs. In other words, 40- to 70-inch flat-panel TVs weigh 34% less than 13- to 36-inch CRT TVs. This reduction in materials has a staggering downstream ef fect. The report claimed that an old 36-inch CRT TV generated about the same amount of electronics waste as 5,080 cell phones. However, today's 70-inch flat-screen TV generate the equivalent of just 953 cell phones." - Full Article Source ITEM #48 07/26/11 - New Blood Test Can Detect Alzheimers "Samantha Burnham and her colleagues from the Australian national research organization CSIRO caused quite a buzz at the latest Alzheimer's Association International Conference when they announced that a blood test was effective at detecting Alzheimer's i n patients. The screen works by measuring the blood levels of nine different proteins or hormones. Routine blood tests could lead to earlier diagnoses and prove invaluable in efforts to treat the disease early and eventually find a cure." - Full Article Source ITEM #49 07/26/11 - Sandia Labs “Hopper” Robot Made by Boston Dynamics under contract from Sandia Labs, this “hopper” is quite incredible as you can see in the video after the break. Boston Dynamics is no stranger to great robotics designs, including the well known “Big Dog” four-legged robot. This ro bot, although possibly less advanced, has a very unique trick up it’s sleve. This robot’s distinguishing feature is that it can navigate autonomously not only with wheels, but also with a powerful single leg that allows it to jump over obstacles of up to 25 feet. Although envisioned to “deliver a payload” in an urban environment, one could imagine a terrifying horde of these ‘bots jumping into action armed with bombs or other weapons. According to Sandia’s website is that this form of locomotion has been “shown to be five times more efficient than hovering” when trying to get around obstacles under 10 meters. Technical challenges that have been overcome include managing the shock of landing and producing a leg powerful enough to jump to this height. - Full Article Source ITEM #50 07/26/11 - 675k Stolen Credit Cards = Ten Years In Jail "A hacker who had been found with more than 675,000 stolen credit card numbers that reportedly led to losses totaling more than $36 million, was sentenced on Friday to 120 months in prison. After pleading guilty on April 21, 2011, Rogelio Hackett Jr., 25, of Lithonia, Georgia, was slapped with a maximum prison sentence and ordered to pay a $100,000 fine. According to court documents, U.S. Secret Service special agents executing a search warrant in 2009 at Hackett's home found more than 675,000 stolen cred it card numbers and related information in his computers and email accounts. Hackett admitted in a court filing that since at least 2002, he has been trafficking in credit card information he obtained either by hacking into business computer networks and downloading credit card databases, or purchasing the information from others using the Internet through various carding forums." - Full Article Source ITEM #51 07/26/11 - Congressman and Astronaut Propose a New Plan For NASA NASA was directed to pursue a riskier course, diverting billions of dollars to a group of companies – most devoid of experience in manned space vehicles – to take over operations to low-earth orbit and the transport of astronauts to the International Spac e Station. The goal was to generate a private marketplace to support the cost of these manned missions. Meanwhile, NASA’s plan for deep space exploration, requiring development of new heavy lift rockets and crew vehicles, leaves them without a specific de stination and timetable. Really, without a mission. We don’t believe that a private market capable of supporting a low-earth orbit system, independent of government, exists in the near-term. If it did, it wouldn’t need government support. Space exploratio n is likely to continue to be a government-sponsored mission for the foreseeable future — if the U.S. is to retain its preeminence in space. This investment is vital to national security and our ability to remain competitive in science, engineering and te chnology. China, Russia, India and Japan continue to pursue their human space programs at breakneck speeds, and are likely to surpass us if we stop. - Full Article Source ITEM #52 07/26/11 - Project Nim From the Oscar-winning team behind MAN ON WIRE comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human c hild. Following Nim's extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his t rue nature - and indeed our own - is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling. - Full Article Source ITEM #53 07/26/11 - Massive Solar Tower Planned For Arizona "It's simple, clean, low-maintenance, and cost-effective: using hot air on a large scale to generate electricity. No, this not a plan to use Congress to generate power, though that would certainly be an endless supply — EnviroMission will use air rising u p a tall tower to generate 200 megawatts of electricity. The concept is simple: a giant greenhouse at the base of the tower warms the air. The warmed air rises through the tower and turns turbines, which generate electricity. The taller the tower, the fas ter the air moves, which increases power output. This structure will be a monster at over 2600 feet tall. It works in all weather, and if there is a feasible water source, food could be grown in the greenhouse." - Full Article Source ITEM #54 07/26/11 - Heat 'Most Likely Cause' of Pioneer Anomaly "Everything from clouds of dark matter, weird gravitational effects, alien tampering and exotic new physics have all been blamed for the 'Pioneer Anomaly' — the tiny, inexplicable sun-ward acceleration acting on the veteran Pioneer deep space probes. Howe ver, evidence is mounting for a more mundane explanation. Yes, it's the emission of heat from the spacecrafts' onboard radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), slowly nudging the Pioneers off course, that looks like the most likely culprit. It's unl ikely that this new finding will completely silence advocates of more exotic explanations, however." - Full Article Source ITEM #55 07/26/11 - Devolving through Inbreeding All human cultures display strict prohibitions against inbreeding and consanguineous marriage. Incest is a universal taboo. This is a transcendent anthropological fact. As a Roman Catholic, I attribute this to what is called "The Natural Law." Every h uman person without exception is created by God with a deep, innate knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong. Stabbing someone in the neck for no reason whatsoever is just as wrong here in Lone Tree, Colorado as it is in the Amazon basin, as it is on the high plateaus of Mongolia. In the Muslim culture, marriage and breeding between first cousins has existed since day one. Mohammed himself married Zaynab, who was his father's sister's daughter. Mohammed and Zaynab were direct first cousins. Marrying your first cousin is the genetic equivalent of marrying your half-sibling. Think of your own family. Let's say your dad has a sister, who is "Aunt Linda" to you. Your dad and Aunt Linda, being full siblings, have exactly the same genetic constitution. Their family trees prior to their generation are identical. Therefore, if Aunt Linda has any children, who are your first cousins, they are, in genetic terms, 50% identical to you. You share one of your two genetic constituencies with your cousins, thus making them genetically the same as a half-sibling would be. First cousin marriage for just one generation is extremely risky in and of itself. This is why virtually every other culture on earth prohibits it, and treats it as a cultural taboo. When two people come together who carry so many similar genetic al leles, the chance of an undesirable recessive trait expressing itself in their offspring soars. Now, understanding that single-generational risk, understand that Muslims have been marrying their first cousins over and over again for 1,400 years. Sit in stillness for a moment with the full, terrifying gravity of this. Muslim men are never, ever allowed to be around, see, converse with or otherwise interact with any females outside of their families. However, they are permitted to act a s chaperones for their female first cousins. If your first cousin is the only person of the opposite sex you ever get to interact with, is it any surprise that Muslims are marrying their first cousins more as the rule than as the exception? According to the BBC, 55% of Pakistani-Britons are married to a first cousin, and as a corollary to that produce "just under a third" of all children in the UK with genetic illnesses, despite being only 3% of the total births. As a direct result of inbreeding, the Muslim population is the only population on earth that is mentally and physically devolving. This inherent weakness makes Muslim populations more susceptible to nefarious, oppressive leadership and mass manipulation. The amount of obj ective evidence supporting this statement is colossal and obvious. All plants and animals have been designed to "bring out the best in themselves," and our DNA has built-in fail-safes to edit and correct any flaws which creep into our DNA over time. Given this, if the people now living under the fist of Islam are fin ally freed and can court and love and marry whomever they choose, thus reopening the genetic pool, this will allow hybrid vigor to cleanse and restore to full health their populations. - Full Article Source ITEM #56 07/22/11 - Renaissance Charge Free Energy Lawnmower This was during the Renaissance Charge Nov 2010 Convention at the CDA Resort. Motor was partially built for low HP application for Convention. Full potential of motor when complete is 100HP. Lawnmower motor charges equal 36V small battery bank while runni ng off identical small batteries. - Full Article Source July 29-31 2011 Renaissance Charge Free Energy Workshop Convention ITEM #57 07/22/11 - Intelligent Street Lighting Saves Up to 80% On Energy The system consists of street lights with LED lighting, motion sensors and wireless communication. This enables the installation to dim the lights when there are no cars, cyclists or pedestrians in the vicinity. Wireless communication between the street l ights and a control room is also possible. The Netherlands spends more than 300 million euros a year on electricity for street lighting. The network of street lighting also emits over 1.6 million tons of CO2 a year. The lights are always on at full power, regardless of whether there is anyone in the area. Compared with the current street-lighting system, Chintan Shah's intelligent system can reduce energy consumption and CO2 emission by up to 80%, is cheaper to maintain and can also help solve the problem of light pollution. A safe circle of light - Shah's system consists of electronic gear that can be added to any -- dimmable -- street light. The system comprises street lights with LED lighting, motion sensors and wireless communication. At first glance , it looks a lot like a widely available type of garden light with a motion sensor, but there are significant differences. In Shah's system, all surrounding street lights light up if anyone approaches. And the lights never go out completely; they are dimm ed to approx. 20% of the standard power. Passers-by move in a safe circle of light as it were. An added bonus is the fact that the lights automatically communicate any failures to the control room. This makes maintenance cheaper and more efficient than it is now. - Full Article Source ITEM #58 07/22/11 - BiPod Flying Car Makes (Short) Test Flights "The team at Scaled Composites pulled out all the stops to realize the final design of the company's founder and former CTO, Burt Rutan, ahead of his retirement in April earlier this year. In just four months, the Scaled Composites team went from beginnin g the preliminary design to the first flight of the 'BiPod,' a hybrid gasoline-electric flying car that grew out of a program to develop a rapid, low-cost electric test bed using as many off-the-shelf components as possible." / The result was an entirely new design with the ability to operate as a high-performance airplane with STOL (short take-off and landing) capabilities, a 200 mph (322 km/h) maximum speed and range of 700 miles (1,127 km) or as a road commuter vehicle capable of freeway speeds, urban driving and garage storage. Designed for the dual emphasis of safe ground operations and efficient high speed flight, the BiPod features a twin fuselage configuration with a 4-wheeled chassis with two cockpits - the left-hand cockpit used for ground drivi ng and the right-hand cockpit used for flight. There is also a protected storage area for stowing the wings and tail surfaces during ground operations. This unique configuration is enabled through the use of electric power transmission, which decouples th e engine location from the propeller location without the need for mechanical shafts and gearboxes. The craft has by two 450cc internal-combustion engines, one per fuselage, which provide electrical power to the rear wheels and propellers located on the h orizontal stabilizer by way of a generator. There are also lithium batteries located in the nose to provide additional energy for take-off and in case of an engine emergency. While the propellers are yet to be fitted, the vehicle has already made several bunny hops along the company's main runway in Mojave, California, propelled by the rear wheels, with the first "flight" taking place on March 30, 2011. - Full Article Source ITEM #59 07/22/11 - Lack of interest in 'never-ending energy' device Armenian mathematician Henrik Mkhitaryan has once again spoken about the lack of interest from various agencies in his inventions that he says are truly valuable and could be put at mankind’s service. The 70-year-old inventor, who has been making inventio ns since 2000, is now the author of about two dozen such ideas, including 14 for which he has been issued patents from the Republic of Armenia Intellectual Property Agency. However, he says, he can’t get them to be translated into action for people’s bene fit. The inventor believes that his complex station for generating an air flow and electricity from it that he initially called ‘perpetuum mobile’ due to its infinite resource will make it possible to obtain an unlimited amount of alternative energy and w ill help the human race to solve the global warming problem. “At the beginning they did not want to issue a patent for this invention, because they said such a thing was impossible, because I wanted to call it an eternal engine. That’s why then I had to c hange the name,” says the inventor, who is dismayed at the fact that the government allows foreign specialists to set up wind power stations in Armenia, while ignoring his project and not enabling him to proceed with it. “Italians are building a wind powe r station here for as much as about $240 million. If they allow me to proceed with my project, I will create a facility four times that capacity and they will not have to spend even $40 million let alone $240 million on that,” says Mkhitaryan. - Full Article Source ITEM #60 07/22/11 - Why we need to keep an eye on the ice sheets Loss of Arctic ice isn't just a threat to polar bears. Climate scientist James Hanson has just published a science brief on the NASA website about why those ice sheets are so important (besides providing an habitat for polar bears) and why we need to keep funding research that uses satellites to monitor the state of the world's ice sheets. / It is easy to see why this feedback amplifies the climate change, because reduction of ice sheet size due to warming exposes a darker surface, which absorbs more sunl ight, thus causing more warming. However, it is difficult for us to say how long it will take ice sheets to respond to human-made climate forcing because there are no documented past changes of atmospheric CO2 nearly as rapid as the current human-made change. If either ice sheet were to lose mass at a rate with doubling time of 10 years or less, multi-meter sea level rise would occur this century. - Full Article Source ITEM #61 07/22/11 - Hawaiian Dairy Farmers fight radiation with Boron Our goal to offer high quality safe food to our community has recently been challenged in the reality of the radioactivity being released into our environment. In the past weeks radioactive levels have increased in Hawaii, with high spikes and a more curr ent leveling off of radiation levels. Milk from the large dairies in Hamakua and Hawi has shown elevated levels of radiation, from 400 to 2400 times the recognized safe levels. Why is milk contamination significant in the world of agriculture? Because mil k represents the overall condition of the entire food chain, since cows consume grass and are exposed to the same elements as crops. So, when milk tests positive for radiation, it indicates the entire food chain is contaminated since cows eat grass. When grass is contaminated everything grown in the same soil is contaminated. This has proposed a serious concern to us farmers, with us asking what can we do? After much consideration, research, and conversations with much appreciated experts in the field of biological farming and human & animal health, we have found some things which we are able to do to protect our soil, animals, and bodies. Boron is the only mineral capable of accepting and ionizing radiation that never changes the innards or the nucleus o f the cell. Spoken simply, boron can take radiation and release it without upsetting its own very delicate balance. - Full Article Source ITEM #62 07/22/11 - Brakes and Tailpipes Really cool. EV1 Service Technician Bob Sexton explains how the electric car's "regenerative braking system" works, so that, when the driver eases up on the accelerator, the engine slows the car down. As a result, an electric car's braking system never ne eds to be serviced. Many argue that the "disruptor" effect of a car that hardly ever needs parts and service (because it has no engine) threatens the car industry more then anything. Of course, consumers would benefit. Bob explains about all the different mechanisms that a gas engine requires that the electric motor doesn't need, such as tailpipes, mufflers, or a catalytic converter. - Full Article Source ITEM #63 07/22/11 - How 1 MILLION Pounds Of Organic Food Can Be Produced On 3 Acres I came across this video of a man who has figured out a system to grow 1 million pounds of food on 3 acres each and every year. How are they doing this? * By producing 10,000 fish * Using 300 to 500 yards of worm compost * By utilizing vertical space * Having 3 acres of land in green houses * Using 1 simple aquaponic pump * Food is grown all year by using heat from the compost piles A packed greenhouse produces a crop value of $5 Square Foot! ($200,000/acre). Can you imagine if places like this started popping up all over the world? It would be one giant step towards self-reliance. Food self-sufficiency is a major step towards bei ng sovereign. If you are not able to start your own garden, consider finding a community garden or hooking up with a small local farm. (I can't recall who sent this in, but thanks! - JWD) - Full Article Source ITEM #64 07/22/11 - Government funded Electric Car Maker Folds, Salinas Loses $500,000 A Salinas car manufacturing company that was expected to build environmentally friendly electric cars and create new jobs folded before almost any vehicles could run off the assembly line. The start-up company set up shop in Salinas in the summer of 2009, after the city gave Ryan a $300,000 community development grant. When the company still ran into financial trouble last year, the city of Salinas handed Ryan an additional $240,000. Green Vehicles also received $187,000 from the California Energy Commiss ion. Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue said he was "surprised and disappointed" by the news. City officials were equally irked that Ryan notified them through an email that his company had crashed and burned. Salinas Economic Development Director Jeff Weir sai d Green Vehicles flopped because of a lack of investors. The start-up company promised city leaders that it would create 70 new jobs and pay $700,000 in taxes a year to Salinas. Green Vehicles was supposed to be up and running by March 2010 inside their 8 0,000-square-foot space at Firestone Business Park off of Abbot Street. Ryan had lofty goals, listing his company's mission as: "To make the best clean commuter vehicles in the world; To manufacture with a radical sense of responsibility; To engage in dee p transparency as an inspiration for new ways of doing business." Green Vehicles designed two vehicles, the TRIAC 2.0 and the MOOSE, which it planned to manufacture. On July 12, Ryan wrote a blog post announcing that his company was closing. "The truth is that not realizing the vision for this company is a huge disappointment," Ryan wrote. Ryan outlined three mistakes he made while steering his company into a brick wall. All three reasons boiled down failing to generate enough capital. - Full Article Source ITEM #65 07/22/11 - Steve Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts lays out the cause I'm afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what's going on on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing's going to ge t fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress. But everybody is so political, so focused on holding their job for the next year that the discussion in Washington is nauseating. And I'm saying it bluntly, that this admi nistration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration. And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America. You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it's not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are go ing to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don't want to say that. They'll say, God, don't be attacking Obama. Well, this is Obama's deal and it's Obama that's responsible for this fear in America. The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don't invest, their holding too much money. We haven't heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody's afraid of the government and there's no need soft peddling it, it's the truth. It is the truth. - Full Article Source ITEM #66 07/22/11 - Secrets in plain sight Secrets In Plain Sight is an awe inspiring exploration of great art, architecture, and urban design which skillfully unveils an unlikely intersection of geometry, politics, numerical philosophy, religious mysticism, new physics, music, astronomy, and worl d history. Exploring key monuments and their positions in Egypt, Stonehenge, Jerusalem, Rome, Paris, London, Edinburgh, Washington DC, New York, and San Francisco brings to light a secret obsession shared by pharaohs, philosophers and kings; templars and freemasons; great artists and architects; popes and presidents, spanning the whole of recorded history up to the present time. As the series of videos reveals how profound ancient knowledge inherited from Egypt has been encoded in units of measurement, in famous works of art, in the design of major buildings, in the layout of city streets and public spaces, and in the precise placement of obelisks and other important monuments upon the Earth, the viewer is led to perceive an elegant harmonic system linkin g the human body with the architectural, urban, planetary, solar, and galactic scales. - Full Article Source ITEM #67 07/22/11 - Nickel for Visible-Light Nanoantennas? Optical antennas work when light hits the surface of the metal antenna it causes the free conductive electrons to collectively move back and forth. These collective oscillations are called plasmons, and particular wavelengths of received light will cause resonant oscillations at particular frequencies or modes. Controllable optical antennas are also of much interest, and in particular, nanoantennas made of ferromagnetic materials would enable optical antennas to be remotely controlled by an external magne tic field. However, pure ferromagnetic materials strongly damp the plasmon resonance making them seemingly less useful than silver or gold for making optical antennas. Therefore, it is important to understand the properties of plasmons in pure ferromagnet ic nanostructures, for future development of either pure ferromagnetic nanoantennas, or hybrid gold/ferromagnetic devices. And this is exactly what a joint European team have done, headed by Jianing Chen at the Materials Physics Centre in San Sebastian, n orthern Spain. In a new study just published in Small, Chen and his colleagues used a combination of near- and far-field imaging of pure nickel nanoantennas, along with theoretical calculations, to try to document and understand the plasmonic resonance of their tiny antennas. - Full Article Source ITEM #68 07/22/11 - Police have 3rd suspect in Eugene Mallove killing The New London County State’s Attorney’s Office has signed a warrant charging a former Taftville man as the third person responsible in the 2004 slaying of Eugene Mallove, a state prosecutor confirmed Friday. State prosecutor Paul Narducci said Mozzelle B rown will be charged with felony murder based on an arrest warrant affidavit prepared by Norwich police detectives working on one of the city’s more notorious cold cases. Mallove, 56, of New Hampshire, was found beaten to death outside his 119 Salem Turnp ike rental home on May 14, 2004. Two men initially charged with murder in his death were freed because of lack of evidence, leading to the re-investigation of the case by a dedicated team and later the April 1, 2010, arrests of Chad Schaffer and Candace F oster, of Norwich — Mallove’s former tenants. According to courtroom testimony, Schaffer and Brown confronted Mallove after they learned Mallove was throwing away Schaffer’s parents’ belongings after their eviction. Foster has testified in court that she believed Schaffer and Brown had beaten Mallove to near death and then returned with her to the scene of the beating in order to make it look like a robbery. Foster claims Mallove was still alive and asking for help when the three returned, but that Schaf fer and Brown took turns beating him with a pipe and suffocating him with a bag. Schaffer testified that he threw “one punch,” but that it was Brown who started the fight with Mallove. “I was telling Mozzelle (Mallove) needed help and Mozzelle wasn’t list ening,” according to Schaffer’s statements. “I don’t know what happened next, but Mozzelle started hitting him and kicking him again. At some point in time, the landlord stopped breathing.” Schaffer’s and Foster’s cases are pending. - Full Article Source ITEM #69 07/22/11 - Radiation Found in Strawberries, Spinach, Kale Here are the latest test results from UCB. It has only been about two months and everything they have tested has come back with low isotopes. With radiation pouring out of the Fukishima Nuclear plant and heading east, the situation can only get worse. Ra dionuclides, once deposited by rainwater or air onto the ground, will find their way through the ecosystem. We are already tracking its path from rainwater to creek runoff to tap water, but we would also like to monitor how much these isotopes that make t heir way into our food. For example, how much gets taken up by the grass and eventually winds up in our milk? We have been collecting produce that is as local as possible to test for the radioactive isotopes. We might expect different kinds of plants to t ake up different quantities of cesium and iodine, so we are trying to measure as many different plants and fruits as we are able to. So far, we have measured grass, wild mushrooms, spinach, strawberries, cilantro, kale, and arugula. We have also measured local topsoil. As of 5/2, we will begin reporting on seaweed from the Northern California coast. - Full Article Source ITEM #70 07/22/11 - Weakening magnetic flux Measurement of actual magnetic flux has shown an accelerating decline in intensity. If it continues, we may not have a magnetic field by about May 2012. Cause? Unknown. Cure? - Full Article Source ITEM #71 07/22/11 - Ancient Atomic Blast & War Were There Really Nuclear Weapons In The Past? Here are eyewitness reports that raise the compelling question: Did nuclear weapons wipe out large sections of the civilized world in the third millennium BC? Let me share with you what’s in an ancient Indian text, the Mahabharata. This document of 200 verses was translated completely by 1884. Although it dates in its present form to 500 BC, textual evidence indicates that it refers to events that occurred 1500 to 2500 BC. The chief translator (decades before the appearance of aircraft, war gases, rockets and nuclear), commented that much in the book would to the purely English reader seem “ridiculous”. This ancient document recounts, in detail how aircraft were used to launch a weapon that devastated three c ities. The record is unnervingly similar to an eyewitness report of an atomic bomb explosion. It describes: - The brightness of the blast - The column of rising smoke and fire - The fallout - The intense shockwaves and heatwaves - The appearance of the victims - The effects of radiation poisoning Walls, furniture, people—melted, then crystallized. No natural burning flame or volcanic eruption could have produced a heat intense enough to cause this phenomenon. Do you know what? Only the heat released through something like atomic energy could ha ve done this damage. Advanced weaponry in ancient times? It’s more startling than fiction! That’s right…And you’ll discover more in 'Dead Men’s Secrets,' an astonishing report crammed with lost secrets of the ancient world. - Full Article Source ITEM #72 07/22/11 - Simultaneous broadcasting and receiving Stanford University develops method for simultaneous transmitting and receiving at same frequency. - Full Article Source ITEM #73 07/22/11 - Conrad Schlumberger's Electrifying Oil Discovery Dealing with the Soviets carried risks for Schlumberger, who worried about protecting his young firm's trade secrets. Yet he took the gamble — and improved a prospecting technique he had first used in 1927 in France. Instead of analyzing the makeup of roc ks and minerals at ground level, Schlumberger took measurements down drilled wells. Refined in the USSR from 1929 to 1932, his prospecting technology gained acceptance worldwide. From there, Schlumberger Ltd. (SLB) gushed into a leading oil equipment and services company. Negotiating a contract with Soviet officials was key to Schlumberger's success, said Michael Oristaglio, a researcher in Yale's Geology and Geophysics Department: "Conrad's breakthrough was saying let's try measuring electrical resistanc e not on the surface, but at the bottom of a well. That created a beautiful profile of individual rock layers at different depths. The borehole application became a big commercial success and helped bring about a new oil boom in the U.S. after the Depress ion." Schlumberger's invention "directly detected hydrocarbons at depth. That's the holy grail of exploration," Charles Sternbach, president of Houston-based consultancy Star Creek Energy, told IBD. "Without (it) we might not have had a hydrocarbon age," he added, referring to the crucial role of oil. - Full Article Source ITEM #74 07/22/11 - Did this wooden box trigger the sexual revolution? The original love machine, invented in the Fifties by psycho-analyst and therapist Dr Wilhelm Reich as a pathway to a better, if not the best ever, sexual experience. In some ways, you can't help feeling sorry for Austrian-born Reich — a disciple of Sigmu nd Freud in Vienna — who escaped from Hitler to the U.S. just before World War II. There he was, a prophet for the health- giving power of the guilt-free sexual climax. He coined the phrase 'sexual revolution' and devoted his life as a psycho-analyst to f reeing us all from our repressive Victorian selves. But his invention — later spoofed in a Woody Allen film as an 'Orgasmatron' — lived on, with its promise of delivering what he called 'orgastic potency', despite being little more than a plain wooden cup board lined with metal. No wheels, no whistles, no ticklers or teasers, no bells. It was just a box. Yet, according to author Christopher Turner in a new biography of Reich, Sean Connery had one at the height of his James Bond fame. The release that came with sexual climax, he declared, was the key to a healthy mind and healthy body — and, indeed, as the scope of his vision expanded, to a healthy world. It would not only cure neurotics of their fears, but war-mongering fascists of their odious beliefs. 'M ake love not war' was his belief long before it became a Sixties slogan. But his ambition didn't stop there. Reich was convinced he had discovered the very essence of life, a universal and eternal force that he named 'orgone' — hence the official name of his wooden box: the 'Orgone Energy Accumulator'. Orgone was not unlike the concept of the 'libido' his old teacher Freud had identified — except Reich insisted his life force had a physical presence, which manifested itself in glowing microscopic particle s of matter he called 'bions'. It was the physical harvesting and harnessing of 'orgone' from the atmosphere that was the purpose of his sex machine — which was best used, he said, in direct sunlight, in open country and well away from electricity power l ines. The wood in its construction absorbed the free-flying 'orgone' from the skies, while layers of metal kept it insulated inside. By concentrating the life force in this 'accumulator', he claimed, its users were charged up, much like a car battery plug ged into the mains, and then experienced the sexual ecstasy that would free their minds and bodies. That the box heated up, he claimed, was proof of its ability to attract natural energy. Sceptics, however, suggested that confining someone inside an insul ated container on a hot day was bound to lead to raised temperatures, but not necessarily anything else. Reich was undaunted. The potential of his contraption was, he maintained, limitless. It could heal the sick and even eliminate cancer tumours. It was the panacea the world had been waiting for. 'I am the discoverer of life energy,' he maintained confidently. - Full Article Source ITEM #75 07/22/11 - Energy Independence for the United States -- How? With the advent of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the early 70s, the energy crises ensued in the high energy-consuming countries in Europe along with the United States in which the price of oil was set and by OPEC -- an or ganized and collusive oligopoly -- a cartel. OPEC was able to shift approximately $2.1 trillion of additional wealth transfer -- above a free market price -- from the American consumers to oil producing countries during 1973-2011. In response, the West ha s opted for energy independence attempting to develop renewable energy. But the effort has been meager. For instance 17% of Germany's electricity supply is in renewable energy and only 8% of energy supply draws upon renewable energy in the U.S. Other poli cy measures such as price control, raising oil taxes, monetary and fiscal incentives have not been effective. Since energy independence is a public issue, the government must invest in basic and applied research perhaps in the order of $2 trillion despite the current status of high unemployment, high deficit, high national debt and high unfavorable balance of trade but because of it. A joint government -- university -- industry consortium is required to tackle the energy issue in a similar way that the go vernment invented the computer, the internet and many other high tech societal innovations. With its track record, the United States has proven to overcome challenges time and again. The energy challenge is no exception. - Full Article Source ITEM #76 07/22/11 - Revering Teachers The Finnish education system delivers consistent, high-quality education without testing, with long holidays for students, and with teachers who are considered national treasures. There is no domestic testing except a very quiet auditing program to test d emographic samples of kids; not for accountability, not for public consumption, and not for comparison across schools. The fascinating thing is that because they have created such a high level of professionalism, they can trust their teachers. Their motto is "Trust Through Professionalism." The difference between the highest performing school in Finland and the lowest performing school in Finland is less than four percent, and that's without any testing at all... Finland is rated among the highest in the world in innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. It's not your grandfather's socialist country in any sense of the word. But beyond that, what I find so striking is that the reforms in [the U.S.] have been driven and led by businesses for the last qu arter century. It was David Kearns at Xerox and Lou Gerstner at IBM calling for a national summit on education and they didn't invite any educators. They invited CEOs and governors and senators and congressmen. - Full Article Source ITEM #77 07/22/11 - China Emerges as Early-stage Investor in Cleantech The U.S. is extraordinarily good at nurturing entrepreneurship and invention, but not as good at building industries around those inventions. Case in point: While America leads in venture capital investments in clean energy, it has ceded leadership in man ufacturing and deployment to European and Asian countries. But now, according to new figures from Lux Research, America is starting to see competition from China with its core strengths in venture investments and entrepreneurship. In 2010, China’s ventur e capital investments – many of which are in cleantech-related industries like LED lighting, solar cells and batteries – rose to $5.4 billion. That’s almost an 80% jump over 2009: “Foreign investors look for breakout technological innovations. Domestic in vestors do as well, but they also factor in market channels and financials when selecting companies,” said Zhuo Zhang, a Lux Analyst and the report’s lead author. “And locals are getting in earlier: Series A rounds represent over 80% of all domestic VC-ba cked deals, while foreign VCs have backed less than half that many. This implies that many untapped opportunities await foreign investors willing to step beyond familiar territory.” America is still the dominant player in venture investments, representing $21.8 billion in 2010. When comparing cleantech specifically, the U.S. invested $4.9 billion while China came in second place with $479 million. While the U.S. is clearly still a leader in this area, Chinese growth rates in R&D have far outpaced any othe r country. According to Lux Research, China’s R&D spending has increased by 20%, while Europe and the U.S. have seen growth rates of 5% and 6%. - Full Article Source ITEM #78 07/22/11 - Manipulating facts to bolster a biased viewpoint Think Progress: "During this morning’s Senate DOMA hearings, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) destroyed Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery’s argument that children are better off with opposite-sex parents by demonstrating how Minnery misrepresented an HHS study. The study — which Minnery cited to oppose marriage equality — actually found that children do best in two-parent households, regardless of the parents’ gender." - F ull Article Source ITEM #79 07/22/11 - Helium 3 in a catch-22 Gerald Kulcinski, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, wants to create a Helium 3-powered world. (Yes! Just like in Moon!) The problem: Kulcinski's research is caught in a bit of a Catch-22. There isn't much Helium 3 on Earth and it's really expen sive. Soon, he won't be able to afford to do the research necessary to prove that Helium 3 fusion can work as an energy source. There's lots of Helium 3 on the Moon. (Yes! Just like in Moon!) But to prove that it's worth going to the Moon to get it, Kulci nski (you guessed it) needs to prove that Helium 3 fusion can work as an energy source. - Full Article Source ITEM #80 07/22/11 - A cream that slows down snakebites Aussie researchers have cooked up a really interesting new way to treat snakebites. They developed a cream that slows down the lymphatic system, and thus slows the spread of the venom. It is not a cure, but it could buy people more time to get to a hospit al. (Or just use high voltage from a stun/zapper gun, like they've done in the jungles for decades! - JWD) - Full Article Source ITEM #81 07/22/11 - Facial Recognition Gone Wrong "John H. Gass hadn't had a traffic ticket in years, so the Natick resident was surprised this spring when he received a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles informing him to cease driving because his license had been revoked. It turned out Gass was flagged because he looks like another driver, not because his image was being used to create a fake identity. His driving privileges were returned but, he alleges in a lawsuit, only after 10 days of bureaucratic wrangling to prove he is who he says he is. And apparently, he has company. Last year, the facial recognition system picked out more than 1,000 cases that resulted in State Police investigations, officials say. And some of those people are guilty of nothing more than looking like som eone else. Not all go through the long process that Gass says he endured, but each must visit the Registry with proof of their identity. Massachusetts began using the software after receiving a $1.5 million grant from the US Department of Homeland Securit y as part of an effort to prevent terrorism, reduce fraud, and improve the reliability and accuracy of personal identification documents that states issue." - Full Article Source ITEM #82 07/22/11 - Earth's Population To Hit 7 Billion This Year "The UN Population Division just announced that the world's human population will hit 7 billion by Halloween 2011. The increase of one billion people in the past 12 years is worrying, especially since the global population only reached one billion total i n the early 19th century. In the next 20 years, our population growth is predicted to rise to 8 billion people as our demand for food increases by 50 percent, water by 30 percent and energy by 50 percent." (Joe Rogan suspects all the science mysteries of the past like pyramids and such were carried out by smart people, but the stupid ones out-screwed the smart ones so they all died off, leaving us with mysteries and 'lost' superior technology that cou ld produce 'miracles' used by religions to control those who believe whatever they are told. It's hilarious! About 05:45 in the video below. - JWD) - Full Article Source *** Warning! This clip uses offensive language - Adults Only please *** Joe Rogan - Standup - 'Dumb People Out Breeding Smart People' ITEM #83 07/22/11 - Tae Bo Workout Sent Skyscraper Shaking "According to CNN: 'Seventeen people performing a vigorous Tae Bo workout caused tremors that forced the evacuation of a South Korean skyscraper earlier this month, the building's owners say. Scientists recreated the event in the 12th floor gym, according to a report in the Korea Times.' I don't know which is scarier, that they made such a flimsy skyscraper, or the sight of 17 scientists doing a Tae Bo workout. Hopefully they're better at it than the scientists I've seen in the gym." - Full Article Source ITEM #84 07/22/11 - Court Allows Webcam Spying On Rental Laptops "Back in May there was a class action lawsuit filed against the rental company Aaron's, which had secretly installed spying software that would turn on a laptop's webcam, take pictures and then send them back to the company. Overall it seemed like a large invasion of privacy, which should at least warrant an injunction to stop use of the software until the case is settled, right? Not to the judge, who refused to order an injunction on the grounds that the family was no longer in possession of the laptop. As for everyone else still using their Aaron's laptops, the judge had this to say to them (PDF): 'Moreover, it is purely conjecture that the other members of the putative class will be subjected to remote access of personal information.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #85 07/22/11 - Suppressed Report Shows Pirates Are Good Customers "The movie and music industry think pirates are criminals and parasites who cost both industries billions of dollars in lost sales. In order to prove this fact a number of studies have been commissioned to help demonstrate the effect a pirate has on sales of entertainment. GfK Group is one of the largest market research companies in the world and is often used by the movie industry to carry out research and studies into piracy. Talking to a source within GfK who wished to remain anonymous, Telepolis found that a recent study looking at pirates and their purchasing activities found them to be almost the complete opposite of the criminal parasites the entertainment industry want them to be. The study states that it is much more typical for a pirate to downl oad an illegal copy of a movie to try it before purchasing. They are also found to purchase more DVDs than the average consumer, and they visit the movie theater more, especially for opening weekend releases which typically cost more to attend." - Full Article Source ITEM #86 07/22/11 - Predictions of the Future...From the 1960s "Jetpacks, flying cars, death rays — the future isn't quite what the past hoped it would be. Of course, when predictions do come true it can be really shocking. Check out some of the more entertaining and eye-opening videos that show classic predictions f rom the 1960s. The Jet Age couldn't imagine the Age of Social Media clearly, but they got a few things right. And many more hilariously wrong." - Full Article Source ITEM #87 07/22/11 - Wolfram Launches Computational Document Format "Wolfram Research has launched its own document format, which it claims is 'as everyday as a document, but as interactive as an app.' The Computational Document Format (CDF) allows authors to embed interactive charts, diagrams and graphics into their docu ments, allowing readers to adjust variables to see how increasing a price affects profits, for example, or display different segments of a brain scan. Wolfram aims to make the format easy enough for non-programmers to use, based on the linguistic commands used in its search engine. '[Currently] anyone who can make an Excel macro should easily be able to make interactivity for CDF,' said Conrad Wolfram. 'Where I'd like to get is that anyone who can make an Excel chart can make interactivity in CDFs.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #88 07/22/11 - Fed Audit's Initial Report Reveals Trillions in Secret Loans "The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Gr eat Depression." - Full Article Source ITEM #89 07/22/11 - Cat Stevens - Morning has Broken Time to relax, get something cold to drink, sit back, listen to this wonderful song and gorgeous photos, revel in being alive! - Full Article Source ITEM #90 07/22/11 - Real-time energy monitor could 'could cut gas bills by 20%' A team from Edinburgh Napier University tracked the amount of power used in 65 housing association homes that had been fitted with an Ewgeco real-time energy monitor. The results of the six-month trial showed homes fitted with the Scottish firm’s device u sed up to 20% less gas than other households in the study. This news comes as official figures published yesterday showed that skyrocketing bills forced 1m more UK households into fuel poverty in the space of a year. The monitor’s simple traffic light dis play uses green, amber and red colours to highlight low, medium or high energy usage. It works with ordinary utility meters to give instantaneous information on their gas, energy and water consumption. 43 homes in the trial, funded by the UK’s Technology Strategy Board, had the Ewgeco monitor clearly on display, while it was hidden in the other homes. Researchers found that households that could see and use the energy-saving device consumed up to 20% less gas and 7% less electricity compared to those with a hidden monitor. In interviews, around 94% of tenants said the device made them more aware of the energy they were using, while 73% felt it made them use less energy. - Full Article Source ITEM #91 07/22/11 - How I benefit from using my Mexistim Normally I question such devices since they do not seem to work according to normal electronic principles. However, having used the Mexistim device while sleeping, I have noted positive changes for years now, I can only attribute them to the Mexistim. Can 't say it enough, but I know what it does for me and what people report when they write in. ; 1) Restful, sound sleep 2) Increased red cell count 3) Elimination of seasonal allergies 4) Increased overall energy 5) No headaches 6) No stomach pains or aches 7) No muscle pains 8) Weight loss 9) Increase urination 10) Lighter color, less smelly urine Two other things, the first is an increased desire for water, the second is when I can't sleep from too much energy, tossing and turning, I turn off the MexiStim. After a few days, I turn it back on and for the first two days I have these incredibly vi vid dreams, almost lucid! When I lived in Dallas for some 25 years, I periodically had all of the above problems which is why I noticed as they dissipated and I realized it was after I starting sleeping on a 3 X 4 foot aluminum wirescreen pad on top of my mattress which was connected to my bedside Mexistim unit. - Full Article Source ITEM #92 07/18/11 - Aluminum-Celmet Could Increase EV Range By 300% "Japanese company Sumitomo Electric Industries have developed a new material that they believe can significantly improve the capacity of EV batteries. The material is a form of porous aluminum called 'Aluminum-Celmet.' 'The positive electrode current coll ector in a conventional lithium-ion secondary battery is made from aluminum foil, while the negative electrode current collector is made from copper foil. Replacing the aluminum foil with Aluminum-Celmet increases the amount of positive active material pe r unit area. Sumitomo Electric’s trial calculations indicate that in the case of automotive onboard battery packs, such replacement will increase battery capacity 1.5 to 3 times. Alternatively, with no change in capacity, battery volume can be reduced to one-third to two-thirds. These changes afford such benefits as reduced footprint of home-use storage batteries for power generated by solar and other natural sources, as well as by fuel cells." - Full Article Source ITEM #93 07/18/11 - Rainbow Moon Bright pinkish areas are highlands materials, such as those surrounding the oval lava-filled Crisium impact basin toward the bottom of the picture. Blue to orange shades indicate volcanic lava flows. To the left of Crisium, the dark blue Mare Tranquillita tis is richer in titanium than the green and orange maria above it. Thin mineral-rich soils associated with relatively recent impacts are represented by light blue colors; the youngest craters have prominent blue rays extending from them. - Full Article Source ITEM #94 07/18/11 - Cell phones: the mother of invention for electric vehicles Heat inside lithium-ion batteries needs to be spread around. The idea is to prevent any one battery cell from getting too hot, which can drag down performance. Similar principles also apply to cell phones more generally, beyond just their batteries. In th e iPhone, for example, an ultra-thin layer of graphite known as a “heat spreader” helps distribute heat evenly throughout the device and keeps the temperature of the touch screen in a comfortable zone. Aluminum and copper were the traditional heat spreade rs for electronics, said Norley. But graphite, boasting lighter weight and higher thermal conductivity than either metal, has displaced aluminum and copper on “the higher-performance end.” What graphite-based alternatives can do, at least in theory, is ha ndle the same amount of heat with much less bulk than aluminum (or handle significantly more heat for the same bulk). Based on internal models, Norley said the combined weight of heat spreaders in a typical automotive battery pack could be reduced by abou t 75 percent when using graphite materials instead of aluminum. Of course, heat spreaders are but a sliver of the cell. Swapping out aluminum for graphite heat spreaders in a 9-millimeter-thick cell, for example, might make room for 214 cells in a pack wh ere previously only 200 cells would fit. “Not very impressive,” as McCallum put it. “But battery manufacturers would kill for a 7 percent increase in energy density” (packing those 14 extra cells into the space of a 200-cell pack). Simply swapping out the aluminum for the graphite has its benefits: making it possible to build a battery with the “same cells, but less stuff in the pack,” as GrafTech research scientist Ryan Wayne put it. - Full Article Source ITEM #95 07/18/11 - New Invention Gives Truckers Big Fuel Savings It's called the Trailer Tail. Created by physicist Andrew Smith, the invention, which looks kind of like a sawed-off pyramid covering the rear doors of a semi-truck's trailer, decreases the trailer's drag, making it easier to pull. The least aerodynamic s hape to move down the highway is a rectangular box," said Smith. But with this device, the drag is so greatly reduced, the fuel savings are nothing short of impressive. "The trailer tail can save 5 to 6 percent of the fuel burned by a tractor-trailer movi ng at highway speeds," said Smith. "Every trailer tail that you see on the highway is offsetting the fuel consumption of a passenger vehicle in a year." Depending on miles driven, $2,000 device can pay for itself in 6 to 24 months. "We're making the truck as aerodynamic as it possibly can be to go down the road, which makes it easier for us to drive without wind blowing us back and forth across lanes," said Hightower. The Trailer Tail can be deployed in three seconds, and retracted in less than that. It, in no way, interferes with the opening or closing of the doors. "The key is not only to deliver the fuel savings, but to deliver the fuel savings with no hassle to the trucking companies who have to get freight from point A to point B," said Smith. - Full Article Source ITEM #96 07/18/11 - Ford Demonstrates Networked Cars "Ford is touring U.S. cities demonstrating a technology that appears to closely resemble a private dynamic network among multiple cars. The cars connect to each other via short-range Wi-Fi (which actually has a reach of half a mile) and enables vehicles t o exchange location and movement data. Being aware of each other's location and movement direction enables them to help drivers avoid collisions, especially in situations where obstacles cannot be identified fast enough. The technology could be available for consumers as soon as 2013." - Full Article Source ITEM #97 07/18/11 - 1970s NASA video about colonizing space A NASA video from a time of great optimism about space exploration. The Apollo missions were completed and the Space Shuttle program was underway. How soon before cheap and frequent flights to space would allow the construction of O'Neal colonies and mini ng camps on the Moon? This visionary approach calls for tiered greenhouses in space and unlimited solar power beamed back to Earth... all before the year 2000! - Full Article Source ITEM #98 07/18/11 - Understanding the Payoffs From Investing In Space Flight "NASA has recorded about 1,600 new technologies or inventions each year for the past several decades, but far fewer become commercial products, said Daniel Lockney, technology transfer program executive at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. ... 'We did n't know that by building the space shuttle main engines we'd also get a new implantable heart device,' Lockney said. 'There's also a bunch of stuff we don't know we're going to learn, which leads to serendipitous spinoffs.' ... But some innovations do no t appear as a straight line drawn from NASA to commercial products. The U.S. space agency may not claim credit for computers and the digital revolution that followed, but it did create a pool of talent that perhaps contributed to that transformation of mo dern life. NASA brought together hundreds of the brightest scientists and engineers in the 1970s to work on the guidance computers that helped the Apollo missions land humans on the moon. When the Apollo era ended, many of those people dispersed to privat e companies and to Silicon Valley." - Full Article Source ITEM #99 07/18/11 - Time Cloaking: Physicists create a hole in time The cloak places two lenses in a series and sends a beam of light through the lenses, the first lens compresses the light in time and the second decompresses it again. Someone observing the light would view what comes out of the second lens as undistorted as if no event had occurred. The net effect is that the space between the two lenses deletes changes that occur in a short period. Right now, the time cloak only lasts for 110 nanoseconds and the researchers say that the best they can do is 120 microseco nds. - Full Article Source ITEM #100 07/18/11 - Future Farm: a sunless, rainless room indoors Sunlight is not only unnecessary but can be harmful, says Meeuws. Plants need only specific wavelengths of light to grow, but in nature they must adapt to the full range of light as a matter of survival. When light and other natural elements are manipulat ed, the plants become more efficient, using less energy to grow. In their research station, strawberries, yellow peppers, basil and banana plants take on an eerie pink glow under red and blue bulbs of Light-Emitting Diodes, or LEDs. Water trickles into th e pans when needed and all excess is recycled, and the temperature is kept constant. Lights go on and off, simulating day and night, but according to the rhythm of the plant — which may be better at shorter cycles than 24 hours — rather than the rotation of the Earth. In a larger “climate chamber” a few miles away, a nursery is nurturing cuttings of fittonia, a colorful house plant, in two layers of 70 square meters (750 sq. feet) each. Blasts of mist keep the room humid, and the temperature is similar to the plants’ native South America. After the cuttings take root — the most sensitive stage in the growing process — they are wheeled into a greenhouse and the chamber is again used for rooting. The process cuts the required time to grow a mature plant to six weeks from 12 or more. The Dutch researchers say they plan to build a commercial-sized building in the Netherlands of 1,300 square meters (14,000 sq. feet), with four separate levels of vegetation by the end of this year. After that, they envision gro wing vegetables next to shopping malls, supermarkets or other food retailers. Meeuws says a building of 100 sq meters (1,075 sq. feet) and 14 layers of plants could provide a daily diet of 200 grams (7 ounces) of fresh fruit and vegetables to the entire p opulation of Den Bosch, about 140,000 people. Their idea is not to grow foods that require much space, like corn or potatoes. “We are looking at the top of the pyramid where we have high value and low volume,” he said. Olaf van Kooten, a professor of hort iculture at Wageningen University who has observed the project but has no stake in it, says a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of tomatoes grown in Israeli fields needs 60 liters (16 gallons) of water, while those grown in a Dutch greenhouse require one-quarter of t hat. “With this system it is possible in principle to produce a kilo of tomatoes with a little over one liter of water,” he said. In order to make plant production possible all over the world PlantLab delivers turnkey Plant Production Units. The cultivation units vary in size and consist of several cultivation layers on top of each other. The surface of 1 hectare cultivation area can consist of 10 modules of 1000 m² which are stacked on top of each other. The ultimate dimensions are determined based on cultivation wishes, climate wishes, investment costs, production expectations, internal transport, automation and suchlike. - Full Article Source ITEM #101 07/18/11 - The future of energy storage – graphite and water Graphite and water, a combination of two ordinary materials, could produce energy storage systems that perform on par with lithium ion batteries, but recharge in a matter of seconds and have an almost indefinite lifespan. “The reason graphene isn’t being used everywhere is that these very thin sheets, when stacked into a usable macrostructure, immediately bond together, reforming graphite. When graphene restacks, most of the surface area is lost and it doesn’t behave like graphene anymore.” Now, Dr. Li an d his team have discovered the key to maintaining the remarkable properties of separate graphene sheets: water. Keeping graphene moist – in gel form – provides repulsive forces between the sheets and prevents re-stacking, making it ready for real-world ap plication. “The technique is very simple and can easily be scaled up. When we discovered it, we thought it was unbelievable. We’re taking two basic, inexpensive materials – water and graphite – and making this new nanomaterial with amazing properties,” sa id Dr. Li. When used in energy devices, graphene gel significantly outperforms current carbon-based technology, both in terms of the amount of charge stored and how fast the charges can be delivered. - Full Article Source ITEM #102 07/18/11 - Commercialising the Moon: the Lunar X Prize and beyond The Space X Prize was the springboard for Virgin Galactic and SpaceShipOne’s successor, SpaceShipTwo, is currently undergoing flight trials ahead of a planned first commercial flight later this year. With Virgin Galactic claiming to have secured some 500 customers, each paying $200,000 for their flight, commercial space flight certainly seems to be a sound and potentially lucrative venture. The Lunar X Prize entrants have similar hopes. ’Some people argue that the first group of trillionaire entrepreneurs will be involved in the commercialisation of space,’ said Michael Potter, leader of the first team to register for the Lunar X Prize, Odyssey Moon. Based on the Isle of Man, although working mainly from San Francisco, the organisation has already secured a number of customers for lunar landing services from a surprising range of sectors, from hard science to performance art. With Potter quoting costs of up to $5m per pound of payload, it certainly seems like the Moon is a viable business proposition. wha t makes it worthwhile to travel back to the Moon at all? The biggest goal for commercial Moon landings is believed to be helium-3, the isotope of the inert gas that could be a useful fuel for nuclear fusion because, unlike the most common form of fusion i n research, which forces the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium together, He-3 does not release a neutron when it fuses with hydrogen. Extremely rare on Earth, the main source of He-3 is from maintenance of nuclear weapons. But the Sun produces large amounts of He-3, sending it out into space in the solar wind. Earth’s atmosphere prevents it from reaching the surface of the planet, but the Moon has no such protection its surface has been absorbing the element for billions of years. It has been estima ted that there are 1.1 million tonnes of He-3 absorbed into the first few metres’ depth of the lunar surface, which could be recovered by heating lunar dust; and that 25 tonnes of the element which would fit in a volume the size of the space shuttle’s car go bay could power the US for a year. This gives it a value of something approaching £2bn per tonne. - Full Article Source ITEM #103 07/18/11 - Jawbone tracking bracelet Jawbone's new bracelet, called "Up", tracks your movements, sleeping patterns and eating habits, then transmits the data to an accompanying cellphone app. - Full Article Source ITEM #104 07/18/11 - Cell may help curb farm crime Inventor Kenneth Miya says he has designed a special cellphone that can help fight crime in remote areas, especially farming communities. Miya, 27, from Buffelspruit near Komatipoort, says his cellphone sends the owner a message or alarm signal within 20 seconds of detecting someone about 3m away from their home. "This device is mobile and needs no installation. It is to alarm systems what cellphones are to telephones," he said. Miya said the system also works if the cellphone owner is on holiday. He said the phone would alert the owner of any trouble back home. - Full Article Source ITEM #105 07/18/11 - Lessons Interface Designers Can Learn from Teledildonics Third-wave human-computer interaction, where users engage with machines on an emotional and even physical level, saw little expression in the marketplace, until a bunch of geeks jumped ship for the sex toy industry. Built from alloys and medical-grade pla stics, equipped with Li-ion batteries and remote connections to computers, MP3 players and the Internet, these devices resemble alien artifacts from a future in which the Internet of Things has pervaded even our most intimate moments. They are totems from a world post-sex singularity. Constructed through an entirely user-focused process of iterative experimentation, they are also significantly better designed than 99% of the human-computer interfaces on the market. They are some of the only existing succe ssful examples of so-called "third-wave human-computer interaction," which takes human interaction with machines into the realm of "experience, emotion and embodiment." - Full Article Source ITEM #106 07/18/11 - Finally Hawass fired Egypt has fired its voluble antiquities minister, Dr. Zahi Hawass. Among the few top government officials to keep his position through the revolution, his overbearing, Discovery Channel-friendly style—Hawass sells his own line of hats— and a recent graft conviction ultimately saw him out of his job: "He was the Mubarak of antiquities," said one archeologist. / (When we were there, our guides told us Hawass was notorious for secretly looting newly found tombs. They said he and his underlings would remove v ery peculiar or valuable objects and replace them with Egyptian objects, often of lesser value, taken from other tombs. They did not say what happened to the objects he removed but in many cases, they were NOT of Egyptian origin. - JWD) - Full Article Source ITEM #107 07/18/11 - Phone Customers Pay $2B Yearly In Bogus Fees "CNN reports that a one-year study by the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee shows about $2 billion a year in 'mystery fees' show up on the landline phone bills of Americans. Known as cramming, the extra charges include:long distance service, subscriptions for Internet-related services, access to restricted websites, entertainment services with a 900 area code, collect calls, and club memberships. The Commerce Committee's report says phone companies receive a small fee — often just a dollar or two — for allowing charges from third-party vendors to appear on their bills but due to the large number of customers the charges eventually add up. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan told the panel people are unaware their phone numbers can be charg ed almost like a credit card and her investigations indicate customers are not even getting services in return. 'My office has yet to see a legitimate third-party charge on a bill,' says Madigan, who added most customers don't detect the charges on their bills. Senator Jay Rockefeller says Congress needs to pass legislation to protect customers from unauthorized third-party charges on their phone bills because the telephone industry has failed to prevent the practice. 'It's pretty obvious at this point th at voluntary guidelines aren't solving this problem,' says Rockefeller. 'It's time for us to take a new look at this problem and find a way to solve it once and for all.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #108 07/18/11 - Acoustic Superlens Built From Soda Cans "Researchers in France have assembled an acoustic superlens from an array of soda cans. The cans act as resonators, and by exciting the array with tailored sound waves, the sound volume can be made to peak in specific volumes less than a few centimeters w ide." / When trying to focus sound waves into as small an area as possible, scientists run into a fundamental limit called the diffraction limit. That is, when sound waves are focused into a region smaller than one wavelength, the waves begin to bend and spread out. Recently, scientists have designed complex acoustic metamaterial lenses in an attempt to overcome the diffraction limit, but now a new study shows that this can be done using much simpler materials - specifically, 49 empty Coke cans. - Full Article Source ITEM #109 07/18/11 - Cut Down On Nukes To Shave the Deficit "Joe Cirincione writes in the Atlantic that the US government is set to spend almost $700 billion on nuclear weapons over the next 10 years, roughly as much as it spent on the war in Iraq over the last decade. Most of the money will be spent without any c lear guidance on how many weapons we need and for what purpose. As long as nuclear weapons exist, we will need some to deter nuclear threats from others, but do we really need to duplicate the entire nuclear triad for another 50 years? 'The Pentagon budge t includes funds to develop a new fleet of 12 nuclear-armed submarines with an estimated cost of $110 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Also planned is $55 billion for 100 new bombers, and a new missile to replace the recently upgrade d 450 Minutemen III intercontinental ballistic missiles. ... The consensus among military officials and bipartisan security experts is that nuclear reductions enhance US national security,' writes Cirincione. As the Nuclear Posture Review says, 'Our most pressing security challenge at present is preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism, for which a nuclear force of thousands of weapons has little relevance.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #110 07/18/11 - Internet Use Found To Affect Memory "The rise of Internet search engines has changed the way our brain remembers information, according to a new study out of Columbia University (abstract). 'We are reorganizing the way we remember things,' said the study's lead researcher. Because search en gines like Google and Bing are so easily at hand, we feel less need to remember details that can be easily looked up. One possible upside: 'Perhaps those who teach in any context, be they college professors, doctors or business leaders, will become increa singly focused on imparting greater understanding of ideas and ways of thinking, and less focused on memorization. And perhaps those who learn will become less occupied with facts and more engaged in larger questions of understanding.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #111 07/18/11 - Mass Psychosis In the USA? "James Ridgeway writes in Al Jazeera that with over $14 billion in sales in 2008, antipsychotics have become the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the U.S., surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux. While once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses, today it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. 'Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics,' writes Ridgeway. 'Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed a nti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.' By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. According to Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are 'simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so t hat nearly everyone has one.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #112 07/18/11 - Police Increasingly Looking To Smartphones For Evidence "Your smartphone could place you at the scene of a crime, destroy an alibi or maybe even provide one – which is why one of the first things police now do at the scene of a crime is take away a suspect's cellphone. This look into smartphone forensics revea ls how even wiping incriminating data from iPhones isn't enough to get criminals off the hook. 'If you're looking at your email messages and you rotate the phone, there's a snapshot of that message,' said Phil Ridley, a mobile phone analyst with CCL-Foren sics. And what people leave on their phones is horrific. 'We were contacted by police who couldn't get a video to work on a handset – it turned out to be a bloke beheading someone in his garage,' claimed another forensics expert." - Full Article Source ITEM #113 07/18/11 - Japanese Military Invents Tumbling, Flying Sphere "A Japanese developer has released a cool, new sphere that is billed as being able to go where humans can't. The sphere is 17-inches, features eight movable rudders, and can hover in the air for at least eight minutes. While reaching speeds of up to 37 mi les per hour, the sphere deftly moves through the air without much effort. It doesn't take much to get it up in the air and moving, and it will be adept at going into tight areas." - Full Article Source ITEM #114 07/18/11 - Study Shows Programmers Get Better With Age "It's a prejudice the young and old both share, but with opposite conclusions, of course. Young is best or old is best — most have an opinion. Now we have some interesting statistics ingeniously gathered and processed by Peter Knego, 'big data' style, tha t 'proves' older is better when it comes to programming, at least!" - Full Article Source ITEM #115 07/18/11 - Customer Asks For Itemized Bill, Verizon Tells Her To Get a Subpoena "A woman, who called Verizon to try to find out about the $4.19 she was being charged for six local calls, was told by Verizon reps that the only way it would provide her an itemized bill was to get a lawyer and have the lawyer get a subpoena to force Ver izon to disclose the information. Instead, the woman went to court (by herself) and a judge told Verizon (.docx) to hand over the itemized bill info. 'It is a basic matter of fair business practice that a consumer should be able to contact a utility about a charge on a bill and learn what the charge is for and learn that the charge was correctly applied. The only verification that Verizon's witness could offer that a charge like [the customer's] $4.19 measured use charge was accurate and billed correctly was her faith in the accuracy of Verizon's computer system. The only way that Verizon would offer any information about a past charge in response to a consumer inquiry was to require that customer to hire a lawyer and subpoena their own usage information. By no reasonable standard could this be considered reasonable customer service." - Full Article Source ITEM #116 07/18/11 - Robot Helps Quadriplegic Scratch an Itch "Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab and Willow Garage have been collaborating with Henry Evans, who became a mute quadriplegic after suffering a stroke 10 years ago, to use a PR2 robot as his surrogate. The robot is allowing him to do things like shav e himself and scratch itches when he has them, things for which he's been dependent on other people. Henry uses a head tracker to directly move the robot's body, including its arms and head, or invoke autonomous actions, such as navigating in a room or fe tching objects. The researchers hope personal robots will allow people with severe physical disabilities to live better and gain more independence." - Full Article Source ITEM #117 07/14/11 - No job is safe from the Robot Threat Top Comments * I'm proud of Reason TV and Drew Carey for doing this. People bash NAFTA because they know next to nothing about the economies and politics of the United States, Mexico, and Canada. They listen to 10 second sound bites that are editted the h ell out of on purpose to scare the hell out of people. We need honesty not propaganda which is what those who are against NAFTA constantly spill. * Bullshit. The fact is industrial farming is actually less productive than subsistence farming, gmo's or gen etically modified organisms destroy resources ten fold while forcing millions off their land. Manufacturing has actually increased, it's just american ceo's can make more money paying less labor costs overseas. This is propaganda by corporatists to divert attention from their greed that benefits the few while enslaving working people around the world with poverty wages. - Full Article Source ITEM #118 07/14/11 - Trap for mosquitoes developed using odor from smelly feet A new trap for malaria-spreading mosquitoes using the odor of human feet to lure them in is being developed by scientists in Tanzania. The traps are thought to attract up to four times as many mosquitoes as to humans themselves, then kill the bloodsucking creatures with a lethal dose of insecticide. Mosquitoes work through smell rather than sight so could not tell the difference between the trap and real humans before it was too late. “In their attempts to get blood from these devices, between 74 to 95 pe r cent of all of those who landed in them got killed,” he said. “We’re hoping this will be a worthwhile and significant addition to the malaria control arsenal.” The scientists now want to establish whether socks themselves or a synthetic version of their smell work best and whether the devices cut the number of times people are bitten. They also plan to simplify the devices enough to be made and sold by the villagers themselves. - Full Article Source ITEM #119 07/14/11 - US Lost “Space Race” Long Ago We lost the “space race” long ago — when as a nation we decided it was far more important to pay for cradle-to-grave social programs of all sorts, and to engage in multiple and costly military adventures around the world, than it was to focus seriously on manned space exploration. Neither Republican nor Democratic presidents since the end of the Apollo lunar exploration program in 1975 were willing to take the political heat they would have incurred had they proposed to cut back a single federal benefit p rogram, in order to continue development of newer and more technologically advanced manned spacecraft and missions. At the same time, not one of those many presidents had the courage to admit their decisions were slowly killing NASA in this regard; so the y proposed — and Congress routinely concurred — to spend just enough to continue duct-tape fixes to the woefully aged Shuttle program, as evidence they really were committed to manned space exploration. The demise of America’s manned space program, and th e fact that European and Russian programs will now eclipse ours, is a sad tribute to the myopic national vision that has captured national policy in recent decades. The United States in this 21st Century has become risk-averse; and turned its national gaz e from the sky and the far reaches of human advancement, to government coddling and control of virtually every aspect of citizens’ lives here on earth. - Full Article Source ITEM #120 07/14/11 - Hawaii law for affordable solar power signed The legislation calls for the investigation and possible creation of a system where residents could finance expensive up-front costs of solar power installations through their electric bills. The law could help defray costs of any renewable energy system, with its most widespread use being to aid homeowners when they want to install solar-powered hot water heaters or rooftop photovoltaic panels. Residents could slowly pay off their systems over several years through their monthly power bills. "The biggest obstacle that residents face when it comes to adopting clean energy is the upfront cost, and on-bill financing eliminates that," said Jeff Mikulina, executive director for the Blue Planet Foundation, which supports renewable energy initiatives. The measu re calls for the Public Utilities Commission to investigate the viability of the program, known as on-bill financing. If the commission finds it workable, it could create the program without any further legislation needed. - Full Article Source ITEM #121 07/14/11 - Scavenging ambient electromagnetic energy At this very moment, unseen radio waves are bouncing off almost everything that surrounds you. Emitted by everything from radio and TV stations to cell phone networks and satellites, these waves are full of unharnessed energy. That is, until now. Research ers at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering have been working diligently to harness this unused energy, and recently unveiled their new antenna technology at the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposium. The team, led by professor [Manos Tentzeris] has been working to develop ultra-wideband antennas to tap into the energy all around us. Using printers filled with a specially-formulated ink compound, they have been able to print these antennas on paper and polymer substrates. The a ntennas can harness energy stored in radio frequencies ranging from 100 MHz all the way up to 60 GHz, depending on the printing medium. The team can currently power temperature sensors using television signals, and is preparing a demo in which they will p ower a microcontroller simply by holding it up in the air. The technology is still in its infancy, but the list of applications is almost endless. We doubt you’ll be powering your TV with this technology any time soon, but it definitely holds promise for things such as wireless sensor mesh networks and the like. - Full Article Source ITEM #122 07/14/11 - Solar Cells use 'Upconversion' for energy from Red Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated a set of materials that could enable solar cells to use a band of the solar spectrum that otherwise goes to waste. The materials layered on the back of solar cells would convert red and near-infrared li ght—unusable by today's solar cells—into shorter-wavelength light that the cells can turn into energy. Even the best of today's silicon solar cells can't use about 30 percent of the light from the sun: that's because the active materials in solar cells ca n't interact with photons whose energy is too low. But though each of these individual photons is low energy, as a whole they represent a large amount of untapped solar energy that could make solar cells more cost-competitive. The process, called "upconve rsion," relies on pairs of dyes that absorb photons of a given wavelength and re-emit them as fewer, shorter-wavelength photons. In this case, the Bosch and Stanford researchers will work on systems that convert near-infrared wavelengths (most of which ar e unusable by today's solar cells). The leader of the Stanford group, assistant professor Jennifer Dionne, believes the group can improve the sunlight-to-electricity conversion efficiency of amorphous-silicon solar cells from 11 percent to 15 percent. - Full Article Source ITEM #123 07/14/11 - Automakers Give Flywheels a Spin The automakers Volvo and Jaguar are testing the possibility of using flywheels instead of batteries in hybrid electric vehicles to aid acceleration and help engines operate more efficiently. The devices could reduce fuel consumption by 20 percent and wou ld cost a third as much as batteries. Volvo will begin road-testing a car with the technology this fall. In a flywheel system, energy from the wheels is used to spin a flywheel at high speeds. The flywheel continues spinning, storing energy until that mot ion can be transferred back to the wheels via a transmission. The idea isn't new, but it's hard to make flywheels efficient—a lot of energy can be lost to friction. In 1982, for example, GM engineered a flywheel system that was intended for its 1985 vehic les, but they canceled the project after discovering that the fuel efficiency improvements were less than half of what they'd expected. Advances in the technology now have automakers taking a second look. "Industry has gone from being skeptical to thinkin g it can be done, but there are enormous challenges," says Derek Crabb, vice president of powertrain engineering for Volvo. One advantage of flywheel systems over batteries is their compact size. "Most hybrids with batteries provide a 15- to 25-kilowatt b oost of power. The flywheel can deliver 60 kilowatts in a way smaller package," says Andrew Atkins, chief engineer of technology at Ricardo. The trade-off is that flywheels can't supply energy for very long. Crabb says Volvo hasn't decided if it will use a system such as Ricardo's or something else to maintain the vacuum. - Full Article Source ITEM #124 07/14/11 - Chemists Discover Freezing Point of Supercooled Water Many of the properties of water still mystify scientists. One unsolved puzzle is its freezing point. Scientists have known for many years that you can cool liquid water well below zero degrees centigrade without it freezing. That's because water needs som e nucleation event to trigger the process of ice formation. Without ice nucleation, it remains liquid. But how low can you go? Part of the problem is that experiments to measure the freezing temperature are so difficult to perform that nobody has managed them. But the evidence points to the likelihood that ice crystals begin to form anyway at temperatures of about -41 C. Supercoooled water should freeze at around this temperature but nobody has succeeded in measuring it because it always begins to freeze earlier. Moore and Molinero get around this problem by simulating the freezing behaviour of over 250,000 water molecules on a computer. What they find is that once the natural process of ice formation begins to occur, then water cannot stay liquid at much lower temperatures. In fact, their simulation indicates that the natural freezing point of supercooled water is about -43 C, just below the temperature at which ice crystals form naturally. That's as expected but the simulation also gives new insights in to the way in which this freezing occurs. In this state, water is a mixture of low density ice and water molecules that are on the verge of becoming ice, what chemists call "four co-ordinated" meaning that each molecule is linked to four others. The struc ture of "four co-ordinated" water seems to have important impact on the rate at which ice can form and this is what determines the freezing point. - Full Article Source ITEM #125 07/14/11 - How to deactivate a cat A veterinarian put a cat on standby with a paper clip. / She was thinking her mother grabbed her, so she doesn't move. / It doesn´t hurt the cat at all. You obviously know nothing about these animals. / Cats are designed by nature to become docile when gr ipped by the scruff so their mothers can transport them safely as kittens. - Full Article Source ITEM #126 07/14/11 - Rethinking Work Since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Japan has lost a significant proportion of its power generation capacity. Not only is the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant out of commission, but numerous reactors are also off-line due either to damage sustaine d during the tremor or to shutdowns resulting from heightened concerns about the safety of atomic electricity. The Kanto plain, where around 35 million Japanese live in a mega-metropolis centered on Tokyo, and perhaps other regions of the country, will fa ce power shortages in the summer as higher temperatures increase air conditioning-induced energy demand. Consequently, the government and industry have taken commendable measures to lower energy consumption. These include shutting off some escalators and elevators, reducing the number of trains on some lines, and dimming lighting. But the most noticeable change for many has been an increase in the thermostat settings of office buildings and government offices. several businesses will give their workers a day off during the week in exchange for working during the weekend. This could help lower peak electricity demand, which is the key to avoiding power outages. Unfortunately, this might end up creating additional problems. Child care centres will have to a djust if parents have to work on weekend. Moreover, for industrial networks based on just-in-time deliveries, temporary weekday stoppages may also make supply-chain management extremely difficult, while train schedules will need to be altered to take into account higher weekend travel. Interestingly, one obvious solution has, it seems, been mostly overlooked. Tokyo is a white collar city. One creative option would therefore be to close down half of the floors in office towers, thus cutting down radically on air conditioning and light ing. Employees could telecommute two or three days a week, making it possible also to cut down on the number of commuter trains. It might increase home air conditioning demand, but the small individual houses and buildings where many Kanto plain residents live have windows that could make it easier to rely on a fan and some limited air conditioning than in their downtown glass and steel places of employment. Some could also adjust their schedule to wake up much earlier, taking advantage of the cooler temp eratures (and daylight) to save energy. Obviously there are employees who might not be able to take advantage of this option for one reason or another (too many family members at home, work that requires them to be physically in the office, lack of space at home, etc). But with the availability of high-speed Internet, free Skype video conferencing and other tools, it's possible a large number of white collar private and public sector staffers could actually be as efficient – in fact probably more efficien t – by working from home three days a week. Should this experiment turn out also to demonstrate the possibilities of massive telecommuting, it would be one of the greatest breakthroughs in management since the 'invention' of the large bureaucratic corporation in the late 19th cent ury. The cost savings could be enormous, while the time savings from avoiding long commutes would make it far easier for working couples to balance their professional lives with their family obligations, possibly contributing a much-needed higher fertilit y rate in countries such as Japan. Rather than measuring success by how uncomfortable workplaces are – and perhaps soon by tallying the number of heat stroke fatalities in these buildings – the energy shortage of summer 2011 offers an amazing opportunity for Japan to revolutionalize the way we work. - Full Article Source ITEM #127 07/14/11 - Sun Operates Gas Machine (May, 1938) Developed by Otto H. Mohr, of Concord, Calif., a specially constructed machine utilizes the sun’s rays to produce a gas which, when broken up by means of an electric current, yields hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen and oxygen are then stored in separate tanks for cooking, heating, etc. - Full Article Source ITEM #128 07/14/11 - The disturbing animals created when taxidermy goes wrong Animal lovers, look away now! These pictures show the misfortune of some of the world's best known creatures ranging from lame leopards to pitiful polar bears! The pictures were all posted up a Facebook page aptly named Badly Stuffed Animals and has a cur rent following of 2,707. (Click on the link and look at these very strange photos. - JWD) - Full Article Source ITEM #129 07/14/11 - Megacities destroy your brain Urban dwellers respond to them much more painfully than inhabitants of villages and small towns. Moreover, their neurophysiological response to stress is so intense that it can lead to destructive changes in the brain. The city and the countryside are two different worlds. Instead of the noise of leaves the city has crashing motorways, instead of grass and trees - jungle of concrete skyscrapers, and instead of a small circle of friends - thousands of indifferent strangers in the streets and subways. There is no doubt that the individuals who grew up in a quiet backwater are strikingly different from the urban dwellers. In asserting this, we mean habits, pace of life, and perhaps some psychological characteristics. However, recently German researchers have discovered that differences are far deeper. The brain of city dwellers functions differently than the brain of people living in rural areas. Under stress, urban dwellers displayed excessive activity of almond-shaped glands. Amygdala (located one in each hemisphere of the brain within the temporal lobe) is a part of the limbic system responsible for regulating the functions of internal organs, instinctive behavior, emotions, memory, cycles of sleep and wakefulness. Malfunction of the amygdala is presumed to be the primary cause of mental disorders such as autism, depression, post-traumatic shock and phobias. (Incidentally, patients whose amygdala is destroyed display complete absence of fear). "This gland is sort of a danger sensor in the brain and theref ore is associated with anxiety and depression," said Professor Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg with Heidelberg University. Volunteers from major cities showed hyperactivity in another part of the brain as well - the so-called cingulate gyrus. This organ (also pa rt of the limbic system), according to Meyer-Lindenberg, "is responsible for controlling emotions and avoidance of danger." It turns out that the inhabitants of megacities who are already subject to daily stress react to it much more painfully than the in habitants of villages and small towns. Moreover, if the findings of the scientists are correct, then the neurophysiological response to a stressful situation in city dwellers is so strong that it can lead to destructive changes in the brain and emotional disorders. - Full Article Source ITEM #130 07/14/11 - Unlimited number of regenerations possible An unlimited number of regenerations appear to be possible, once we discover the genes that allow other animals to regenerate. Scientists at the Research Institute for Science and Technology, Tokyo University of Science, Noda, Chiba, Japan have determined that newts can regenerate without genetic errors over and over again, even into old age. The extent to which adult newts retain regenerative capability remains one of the greatest unanswered questions in the regeneration field. Here we report a long-term lens regeneration project spanning 16 years that was undertaken to address this question. Over that time, the lens was removed 18 times from the same animals, and by the time of the last tissue collection, specimens were at least 30 years old. Regenerate d lens tissues number 18 and number 17, from the last and the second to the last extraction, respectively, were analysed structurally and in terms of gene expression. Both exhibited structural properties identical to lenses from younger animals that had n ever experienced lens regeneration. Expression of mRNAs encoding key lens structural proteins or transcription factors was very similar to that of controls. Thus, contrary to the belief that regeneration becomes less efficient with time or repetition, rep eated regeneration, even at old age, does not alter newt regenerative capacity. - Full Article Source ITEM #131 07/14/11 - File-Sharing Is Not a Religion, Says Swedish Government "ZeroPaid is reporting on an attempt in Sweden to recognize filesharing as a religion. The religion's website calls this 'Kopimism' and says that sharing of knowledge is sacred. Apparently, Swedish authorities were not convinced. A recent report shows tha t the attempt failed to convince the authorities to recognize Kopimism as a religion." / The self-styled Missionary Church of Kopimism holds “Crtl+C Ctrl+V” as sacred symbols and professes the unimpeded flow of information, reports popular weblog Torrent Freak. Copying and sharing is the most beautiful thing there is while denying the right to do it (like keeping secret the code of proprietary software) is sinful and comparable to slavery, they say. As for violation of copyright, which many consider to be stealing (both a secular crime and a sin for many religions), kopimists believe it to be a gesture of respect. When something you have authored is shared, you know you have done something good for the world, they argue. So far, the new religion founded b y 19-year-old philosophy student Isaac Gerson has had little success in receiving official recognition. The group applied for such status in late 2010. They were denied it in late March on the grounds that their gatherings did not constitute worship. The church has since requested an explanation of what the authorities want them to practice to gain acceptance. And they keep looking for new practitioners through their website. - Full Article Source ITEM #132 07/14/11 - 25% of Car Accidents Linked to Gadget Use "In a recent study by the Governors Highway Safety Association (PDF), driving distractions such as cell phones and other electronic devices cause as much as 25% of all US car accidents. It is common knowledge that driving while distracted is not a safe th ing to do, but now we have some scientific data that goes in-depth on the topic. From the article: '"Despite all that has been written about driver distraction, there is still a lot that we do not know. Much of the research is incomplete or contradictory. Clearly, more studies need to be done addressing both the scope of the problem and how to effectively address it," said GHSA Executive Director Barbara Harsha.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #133 07/14/11 - Belgrade Hosts First Public Solar-Powered Cell Charging Station "Dead battery in Belgrade, Serbia? Head to the city's Obrenovac district, where a group of students has developed the world's first public charging station powered entirely by solar energy. Known as the Strawberry Tree, the structure's 16 ports support a variety of handhelds, allowing pedestrians to juice up their handhelds in just ten to 15 minutes, at no charge. Its built-in batteries can also store up to a month's worth of back-up energy, enabling the station to hum along at night, or even during Serbi a's less sunny seasons. 'Energy from the sun is free, and it would be unethical to charge people to use the Strawberry Tree...We are trying to inspire young people to think about the source of the energy they use, and behave and act responsibly,' said the inventor Milos Milisavljevic (17 years old when he came up with the idea) and now, at the ripe old age of 22, is looking to plant new stations across other Serbian cities." - Full Article Source ITEM #134 07/14/11 - Banks Find Way To Sell Consumers' Shopping Data "Banks plan to compete with Groupon and LivingSocial by targeting coupons and deals at credit card holders based on their shopping habits. They found a way to do it without violating financial privacy laws: 'They're "selling" shopping habits the same way Facebook "sells" personal data about its users: in-network. It's a clever privacy work-around. Just as Facebook allows advertisers to specifically target certain kinds of users based on their profile information (without actually providing that profile in formation to the advertisers), banks plan to allow advertisers to send deals and coupons to their customers based on what they've bought before. That way, no user data actually leaves the network — instead, deals just enter the network. Each time a custom er cashes in on one of those deals, the bank gets a commission.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #135 07/14/11 - The Fanless Spinning Heatsink "There's a fundamental flaw with fan-and-heatsink cooling systems: no matter how hard the fan blows, a boundary layer of motionless, highly-insulating air remains on the heatsink. You can increase the size of the heatsink and you can blow more air, but ul timately the boundary layer prevents the system from being efficient. But what if you did away with the fan? What if the heatsink itself rotated? Well, believe it or not, rotating the heat exchanger obliterates the boundary layer, removes the need for a f an, and it's so efficient that it can operate at low and very quiet speeds. That's exactly what the Air Bearing Heat Exchanger, developed by Jeff Koplow of the Sandia National Laboratories, has developed. It's even intrinsically immune to the build up of dust and detritus!" - Full Article Source ITEM #136 07/14/11 - Congress Voting To Repeal Incandescent Bulb Ban "CNN Money is running as story about a bill Congress is going to vote on today to repeal the 'incandescent light bulb ban' that was put into place during the Bush administration. The bill is supported by Republicans in Congress who are claiming this place s unnecessary restrictions on the market. For those of you wondering, it does bring up the standard issues of energy efficiency, mercury (in both the bulbs and that emitted by coal power), and cost of the bulbs. The bill was introduced by Texas Congressma n Joe Barton." - Full Article Source ITEM #137 07/14/11 - Robotic Refueling Experiment Set Up On Space Station "The idea that the International Space Station could be used as a port-of-call for passing satellites that need fuel or repairs took one step closer to reality as NASA astronauts set up the robotic experiment in orbit today. The Robotic Refueling Mission structure will ultimately be attached to the ISS' infrastructure. Once up and running, it will show that remote-controlled robots can perform refueling tasks in orbit, using commands sent from controllers on Earth." - Full Article Source ITEM #138 07/14/11 - The Wi-Fi Hacking Neighbor From Hell "Barry Ardolf, a Minnesota hacker prosecutors described as a 'depraved criminal,' has been handed an 18-year prison term for unleashing a vendetta of cyberterror that turned his neighbors' lives into a living nightmare. Ardolf hacked into his next-door ne ighbors' Wi-Fi network and used it to try and frame them for child pornography, sexual harassment, various kinds of professional misconduct, and to send threatening e-mail to politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden. The bizarre tale began in 2009 when Matt and Bethany Kostolnik moved into the house next door to Ardolf. On their first day at their new home, the Kostolnik's then-4-year-old son wandered near Ardolf's house. While carrying him back next door, Ardolf allegedly kissed the boy on the lip s. 'We've just moved next door to a pedophile,' Mrs. Kostolnik told her husband. The couple reported Ardolf to the police, angering their creepy new neighbor (PDF). 'I decided to "get even" by launching computer attacks against him,' said Ardolf, who down loaded Wi-Fi hacking software and spent two weeks cracking the Kostolnik's WEP encryption. Then he used their own Wi-Fi network to create a fake MySpace page for the husband, where he posted a picture of a pubescent girl having sex with two young boys. Ar dolf turned down a 2-year plea agreement last year to charges related to the Biden e-mail. After that, the authorities piled on more charges, including identity theft and two kiddie-porn accusations carrying lifetime sex-offender registration requirements ." - Full Article Source ITEM #139 07/14/11 - MIT Researchers Printing Solar Cells On Fold-able Sheets "Following up on earlier work in the field, researchers at MIT are developing a process to print solar cells directly onto many common forms of paper. 'The technique represents a major departure from the systems used until now to create most solar cells, which require exposing the substrates to potentially damaging conditions, either in the form of liquids or high temperatures. The new printing process uses vapors, not liquids, and temperatures less than 120 degrees Celsius. These "gentle" conditions make it possible to use ordinary untreated paper, cloth or plastic as the substrate on which the solar cells can be printed. ... The resilient solar cells still function even when folded up into a paper airplane.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #140 07/14/11 - Were Adam and Eve Giants? At first a silly and far out question. However after doing a great deal of research including the reading of 6 books on the origins of Giants I have to repeat the question…were they? There is much evidence of giants throughout history but the problem I’m finding is that most all historians, scholars, authors and theologians over the last 2400 years believe that giants were all the product of evil angels mating with human women which is what they say the Bible means by the Hebrew word Nephilim (fellers, gi ants), used in Genesis 6. This has turned the idea of giants into the material for fairy tales. Another, slightly more credible theory says that a closer lunar orbit with a smaller moon, had a greater pull thus enlarging animals and man. Still a third bel ieves that there have always been a few giants and a few dwarves on the outer edge of the normal height of any society. Genesis states that there were even societies of giants (see Numbers 13) that lived before and after the flood. So where did they come from? Here is a very simple solution. In the beginning God created Adam and Eve. He created them in His likeness and image. I believe He created them tall, good-looking and extremely intelligent with the capacity to live forever. The world was nutrient ri ch and lush (which is why we have such enormous coal beds – formed from the lush, huge plant life before the flood). It was perfect and people were perfect so to speak. After the fall of man, they began to degenerate in size, intellect and lifespan. This is why the fossil record shows giant plant and animal life before the flood and the Bible says man’s lifespan was 900+ years. If life on earth was larger (there were dragonflies with 29” wingspans) back then why could there not be giant humans? Today we l ive 70-80 years and the plant and animal life is smaller and we are smaller. Therefore, I believe that there were Nephilim or giants but that they were simply the offspring of our giant parents, Adam and Eve. - Full Article Source ITEM #141 07/14/11 - Computer Learns Language By Playing Games "By basing its strategies on the text of a manual, a computer infers the meanings of words without human supervision. The paper Learning to Win by Reading Manuals in a Monte-Carlo Framework (PDF) explains how a computer program succeeds in playing Civiliz ation II using the official game manual as a strategy guide. This manual uses a large vocabulary of 3638 words, and is composed of 2083 sentences, each on average 16.9 words long. By this the program improves it success rate from 45% to 78% in playing the game. No prior knowledge of the language is used." - Full Article Source ITEM #142 07/14/11 - Texas and Taxes: Is a Server a Business Presence? "Does having a server in a data center give you an official business presence in the state where the data center is located – invoking the requirement to collect state taxes? Not in Texas anymore, thanks to a new bill, which clarified a ruling that would have required hosting companies leasing servers in Texas to collect state sales tax from their customers. That's a big deal, since Texas is home to many of the industry's largest hosting companies — including Rackspace and SoftLayer, who have comments on the issue." - Full Article Source ITEM #143 07/14/11 - New Scottish Wave Energy Generator Unveiled "We've learned about Scotland's wave energy initiatives in the past, and just this morning the nation unveiled Aquamarine Power's next-generation Oyster 800 wave power plant. The new generator can produce 250% more power at one third the cost of the first full-scale 315kw Oyster that was installed in Orkney in 2009. The device's shape has been modified and made wider to enable it to capture more wave energy, and a double seabed pile system allows for easier installation." - Full Article Source ITEM #144 07/14/11 - Lizards Beat Birds In Intelligence Test "Reptiles have long been thought to be dim-witted, but a new study in Biology Letters finds that the Puerto Rican anole, a type of lizard, can match birds in intelligence. Using cognitive tests that have been previously used on birds, researchers with Duk e University found that the lizards were capable of solving a problem they've never encountered before, remembering the solution in future trials, and even changing techniques when presented with new challenges. In fact, the tiny anoles solved the test wi th fewer tries than birds." - Full Article Source ITEM #145 07/11/11 - Solar panel selling scam shown up by sting Solar panel sales cowboys are - surprise! - exaggerating the benefits of the energy technology, a sting operation by consumer magazine Which? has found. Which? invited 12 solar companies to survey a house and produce cost and benefit estimates for a solar PV system. Seven out of the 12 recommended putting the panels in the shade, and some overestimated the benefits by thousands of pounds. “It seems extraordinary that the Government’s rules require companies to ignore whether you live in Cornwall or Scotla nd when working out how long it’ll take to pay for the solar panels," says Which? executive director Richard Lloyd. "It’s obvious that the more sun you get, the faster the payback. The Government has to put this right." Evidence of pressure selling was al so unearthed. - Full Article Source ITEM #146 07/11/11 - Geothermal technology packs one-two punch against climate change Two Univ. of Minnesota Department of Earth Sciences researchers have developed an innovative approach to tapping heat beneath the Earth’s surface. The method is expected to not only produce renewable electricity far more efficiently than conventional geot hermal systems, but also help reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)—dealing a one-two punch against climate change. Established methods for transforming Earth's heat into electricity involve extracting hot water from rock formations several hundred feet from the Earth’s surface at the few natural hot spots around the world, then using the hot water to turn power-producing turbines. The university’s novel system was born in a flash of insight on a northern Minnesota road trip and jump-started with $600,0 00 in funding from the U of M Institute on the Environment's Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment (IREE). The CPG system uses high-pressure CO2 instead of water as the underground heat-carrying fluid. CPG provides a number of advantages ove r other geothermal systems, Randolph said. First, CO2 travels more easily than water through porous rock, so it can extract heat more readily. As a result, CPG can be used in regions where conventional geothermal electricity production would not make sens e from a technical or economic standpoint. - Full Article Source ITEM #147 07/11/11 - Boffins triple battery life with metal foam Japanese researchers have developed a new material they estimate can triple the capacity of lithium-ion batteries. What gives Aluminum-Celmet its ability to be the basis of highly efficient batteries is its extreme porosity – up to 98 per cent. When used as a replacement for the aluminum foil anode in a secondary – rechargeable – lithium-ion battery, that porosity allows for the battery to contain a significantly larger amount of the lithium compound that contributes its ions to the electrical flow. Sumit omo Electric's development of the Aluminum-Celmet material is an outgrowth of its previous work on similar nickel and nickel-chromium materials that they branded as Celmet – presumably a mash-up of "cell" and "metal". The manufacturing method that achieve s Celmet's high porosity involves applying a conductive coating to plastic foam, nickel-plating that structure, then removing the foam by heating the material. The resulting material is a three-dimensional mesh of open, spherical pores that, Sumitomo Elec tric claims, is "easy to process" by conventional techniques such as cutting and stamping. Sumitomo Electric has already used nickel-based Celmet to create nickel-metal hydride and nickel-cadmium battery cells. The new Aluminum-Celmet material, however, h as the advantages of being lighter and having improved electric conductivity and corrosion resistance, properties that make it suitable for secondary lithium-ion batteries. The company calculates that a lithium-ion automotive battery pack built using Alum inum-Celmet could provide between 1.5 and three times as much charging capacity. By that calculation, the same amount of charge could be carried in a smaller, lighter battery. - Full Article Source ITEM #148 07/11/11 - Sooner, Not Later: Interstellar Voyages a Reality? Co-founder of Project Icarus, Richard Obousy explores some "disruptive technologies" that might push us to the stars sooner than we think. Access to Earth orbit is expensive, and wildly wasteful. A typical space shuttle mission, capable of transferring ab out 25 tons into orbit costs close to half a billion dollars, requires months of planning and a small army of support staff. Access to space is neither easy, nor routine. However, the space shuttle paradigm is only one model of space access. For example, the UK company Reaction Engines has been designing and testing elements of the Skylon launch vehicle, which would utilize an air-breathing rocket to access earth orbit with just a single stage engine. John Lewis, in his book "Mining the Sky," estimates that one of the closest asteroids to the Earth holds a mineral wealth upward of $15 trillion. To put this in perspective, this is about the same as the entire annual GDP of the United States. When you keep in mind that there are millions of such asteroids within our solar system alone, one can quickly see how space mining could very quickly become a terrific commercial opportunity. Currently, the Return on Investment for any space mining enterprise wo uld be very low (likely not profitable at all) due to launch costs mentioned earlier. However, if the disruptive technologies currently being explored are shown to be realistic, then the commercialization of space could begin in earnest. Once fusion is better understood, and is being harnessed routinely, it's a small leap to apply that technology for propulsion purposes. Pound for pound, fusion releases about one million times more energy than conventional chemical rocket fuel, and cou ld conceivably propel a spacecraft to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light, and produce an interstellar rocket that could reach a nearby star on timescales of a human lifetime. - Full Article Source ITEM #149 07/11/11 - New Vehicle Designed in Tomsk A Tomsk dweller suggests using a new vehicle for avoiding traffic jams. New vehicle is 40 cm high, weighs about 25 kilograms and feeds from batteries. It is very easy to handle with – 10-15 minutes, and you can drive. No driving license is required for th is vehicle, of course. Vehicle’s prototype consisted of an electric engine, a big wheel and two small ones, and several metal parts. The project was awarded a prize during “Start” contest for support of small business in the field of research and developm ent. - Full Article Source ITEM #150 07/11/11 - Most Powerful Magnetic Field Created Former Russian researcher Sergey Zherlitsyn and his colleagues built a special giant magnetic coil weighing about 200 kilograms, which generates extremely powerful magnetic field. Such powerful magnetic field is generated for several seconds, however, tha t is enough for studying properties of various materials. Researchers have solved the main problem of powerful magnetic fields – they used wire made of copper alloy instead of copper wire, which breaks by a magnetic field of 25 tesla. The hosting lab of t he coil is located in Dresden, Germany. Researchers from other institutions are welcome to perform their studies there. - Full Article Source ITEM #151 07/11/11 - A Machine to Die for - The Quest for Free Energy The one hour documentary A Machine to Die For: The Quest for Free Energy is about the search for ‘perpetual motion’ and ‘free energy’, which conventional science claims is impossible. Generations of inventors have been mesmerized by the promise of an engi ne that powers itself. The world’s reliance on diminishing fossil fuel resources and the associated problems of pollution serve to spur them on. "A Machine to Die For" showcases a number of dedicated, sometimes eccentric, and always obsessive individuals who have devoted their lives to this quest. - Full Article Source ITEM #152 07/11/11 - Russian Spacecraft to Clean the Orbit Russian engineers plan to use a manned spacecraft of a new generation for satellite repair and collection of large space debris, which invade Earth’s orbit. The spacecraft crew will be able to examine broken satellites and make some repairs, as well as pr ovide it with fuel or transfer the satellite to another orbit. Repair can be done during spacewalks or by means of special robots. The spacecraft will perform maintenance of meteorological satellites and remote sensing vehicles. The crew of a new spacecra ft is expected to consist of two people with mission no longer than two weeks. - Full Article Source ITEM #153 07/11/11 - Old folk should drink MORE, not less A report issued earlier this month by the Royal College of Psychiatrists described elderly (over-65) drinkers as society's "invisible addicts" and said that the government should issue stringent new recommendations on alcohol limits for older people - equ ivalent to just one glass of wine a day for men and a mere dirty glass for ladies. Now, academic reviewers at the International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research, based at Boston University's Medical Center, have responded to the British trick-cyclists . They say that a sudden cut in old-timers drinking would probably cause a lot of dangerous health problems: It should be made clear that 65-year-olds are healthier than people of that age a generation ago - age-specific disability rates are decreasing, not increasing. The [UK psychiatrists'] report was conspicuously lacking in a discussion of the important r ole that moderate drinking can play in reducing the risk of coronary heart disease, ischemic stroke, diabetes, dementia, and osteoporosis. Advising healthy people aged 65 years or older who are moderate, responsible drinkers to stop drinking or to markedl y reduce their intake would not be in their best health interests, especially in terms of their risk of cardiovascular diseases ... the absolute risk for cardiovascular diseases increases markedly with age, and therefore the beneficial or protective effec t of light to moderate drinking on cardiovascular diseases is greater in the elderly than in younger people. And there are in fact many other benefits of an occasional tipple when one finds oneself getting on a bit - in fact some of the worst scourges of the elderly are alleviated. Evidence is also accumulating that shows that the risk of Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia is lower among moderate drinkers than among abstainers. Neurodegenerative disorders are key causes of disability and death among elderly people. E pidemiological studies have suggested that moderate alcohol consumption, may reduce the incidence of certain age-related neurological disorders including Alzheimer's disease. Regular dietary intake of flavonoid-rich foods and/or beverages has been associa ted with 50% reduction in the risk of dementia, a preservation of cognitive performance with ageing,a delay in the onset of Alzheimer's disease and a reduction in the risk of developing Parkinson's disease. If this wasn't enough, the fact is that a drop of booze now and then just makes life more pleasant. Scientific data are consistent in demonstrating that quality of life is better and total mortality is lower among moderate drinkers than among abstainers. Indeed, taken overall, if the UK government as a whole - and trick-cyclists advising their patients in particular - actually wanted to help older folks to live pleasanter, healthier, more fulfilling lives they would in fact advise them to drink more, n ot less. - Full Article Source ITEM #154 07/11/11 - Beware of Science as Political Veneer “Scientization of politics,” not just politicization of science, weakens scientific integrity. “Some [government] decisions are based on the best available science,” said Francesca Grifo, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Scientific Integrity Program. “A lot of decisions end up being based on whatever values the politicians were elected to uphold.” That’s OK, she said, as long as the politicians don’t pretend those decisions were science-based. Scientists need to follow scientific principles without interference from government, business or other entities, Goldston said. That includes communicating scientific findings to the public. Despite widespread concerns about political meddling, Grifo said her organization’s investigations found that i mproper corporate interference is the bigger problem. Those who use scientists’ work need to be aware of the scientists’ biases and conflicts of interest, the panelists agreed. “Do they start with assumptions that lead them to ask only certain questions o r to filter results in a certain way?” Goldston asked. It’s important to distinguish bias from conflict of interest, Grifo said. A biased member of a scientific panel can be balanced by another scientist with different views, she said. But scientists shou ld “strive to eliminate” interest conflicts. Scientists and decision-makers who use scientists’ work need to be clear about what is scientific, how certain the science is and what isn’t science at all, the panelists said. Scientists should make clear “wha t is known, what is thought and what is unknown,” Grifo said. - Full Article Source ITEM #155 07/11/11 - Concerns grow over DNA test that determines your lifespan Scientists and medical ethicist are warning of the dangers posed by a new blood test for determining how fast someone is ageing, as revealed by The Independent yesterday. The £435 test, due to go on sale to the general public in Britain later this year, m easures the length of a person's telomeres, the structures on the tips of the chromosomes which get progressively shorter with age. Short telomeres are linked with age-related diseases and premature death. Experts are worried that people may misunderstand the limitations of the test, which purports to measure a person's true "biological" age rather than the usual chronological age. They are also concerned that the information may be used by insurance companies and organisations trying to sell fake anti-ag eing remedies. The test's inventor, Maria Blasco of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid, said the test is accurate in detecting dangerously short telomeres which are linked with age-related diseases and premature death. "We know that peo ple who are born with shorter telomeres than normal also have a shorter lifespan. We know that shorter telomeres can cause a shorter lifespan," Dr Blasco said. But Josephine Quintavale, of the pressure group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, warned that suc h tests might be used to marginalise the elderly. "Sadly, the elderly are already not the most popular members of society when it comes to healthcare allocation and I could definitely foresee a culture of not spending resources on those with short telomer es," she said. - Full Article Source ITEM #156 07/11/11 - Nasty Gossip colors our view of People Hearing gossip about people can change the way you see them — literally. Negative gossip actually alters the way our visual system responds to a particular face, according to a study published online by the journal Science. The findings suggest that the h uman brain is wired to respond to gossip, researchers say. And it adds to the evidence that gossip helped early humans get ahead. "Gossip is helping you to predict who is friend and who is foe," says Lisa Feldman Barrett, distinguished professor of psycho logy at Northeastern University and an author of the study. The team brought in volunteers and had them look at faces paired with gossip. Some of these faces were associated with negative gossip, such as "threw a chair at his classmate." Other faces were associated with more positive actions, such as "helped an elderly woman with her groceries." Then the researchers looked to see how the volunteers' brains responded to the different kinds of information. They did this by showing the left and right eyes of each person very different images. So one eye might see a face, while the other eye would see a house. These very different images cause something called binocular rivalry. The human brain can only handle one of the images at a time. So it unconsciously tends to linger on the one it considers more important. And the researcher found that volunteers' brains were most likely to fix on faces associated with negative gossip. "Gossip doesn't just influence your opinions about people, it actually influences ho w you see them visually," Barrett says. The finding suggests we are hardwired to pay more attention to a person if we've been told they are dangerous or dishonest or unpleasant, Barrett says. "If somebody is higher than you in the food chain, you want dir t about them. You want negative information, because that's the stuff you can exploit to get ahead." - Full Article Source ITEM #157 07/11/11 - Apollo astronaut: End NASA, start from scratch Harrison Schmitt, the 12th astronaut to walk on the moon and a former U.S. senator, has called for dismantling NASA and replacing it with a new agency devoted solely to deep-space exploration. Its charter, he believes, should simply be: Provide the People of the United States of America, as national security and economic interests demand, with the necessary infrastructure, entrepreneurial partnerships, and human and robotic operational capability to settle the Moon, utilize lunar reso urces, scientifically explore and settle Mars and other deep space destinations, and, if necessary, divert significant Earth-impacting objects. In his essay, Schmitt says NASA’s space science research should be transferred to the National Science Foundation, and its climate research to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The new agency must truly be a new agency, beginning wit h the workforce. Schmitt asserts: An almost totally new workforce must be hired and NSEA must have the authority to maintain an average employee age of less than 30. (NASA’s current workforce has an average age over 47.) Only with the imagination, motivation, stamina, and courage of yo ung engineers, scientists, and managers can NSEA be successful in meeting its Cold War II national security goals. Even as it manages the ISS, Johnson Space Center would eventually be subsumed into NSEA, maintaining its responsibility for spacecraft, training, communications and flight operations. - Full Article Source ITEM #158 07/11/11 - How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means "We are a network of people who self-organise. We don't have a position on things. It's about empowering the individual to go out there and be creative." "But is it wrong for individuals to attack buildings?" asked Maitlis. "You'd have to ask that particu lar individual," replied Annson. "But you are a spokesperson for UK Uncut," insisted Maitlis. And Annson came out with a wonderful line: "No. I'm a spokesperson for myself." What you were seeing in that interchange was the expression of a very powerful id eology of our time. It is the idea of the "self-organising network". It says that human beings can organise themselves into systems where they are linked, but where there is no hierarchy, no leaders and no control. It is not the old form of collective act ion that the left once believed in, where people subsumed themselves into the greater force of the movement. Instead all the individuals in the self-organising network can do whatever they want as creative, autonomous, self-expressive entities, yet someho w, through feedback between all the individuals in the system, a kind of order emerges. At its heart it says that you can organise human beings without the exercise of power by leaders. - Full Article Source ITEM #159 07/11/11 - Could U.S. Manned Spaceflight Suffer 'Memory Loss'? US astronaut Mark Kelly, who commanded shuttle Endeavour's final space flight, said Tuesday he is concerned about a drain of NASA talent once the US shuttle program ends later this year. "People leave, you know, engineers and operations people will move o n and do other things, so it is the corporate memory that I think I am most worried about," said Kelly, 47. "But over time, we will get the right mix of people. NASA has an incredible workforce, it is very talented and you know, from the late 1950s to tod ay we have taken on great challenges and we have never failed." - Full Article Source ITEM #160 07/11/11 - Can Cities Feed?Us? The cost of growing food on large plots of land far away from cities and transporting it to the teeming masses has begun to outweigh its benefits. Not only is the carbon footprint of such a system huge, but more often than not traditional farming has been a disaster for natural ecosystems and wildlife. And then there’s the problem of space. Already, over 80 percent of the world’s arable land is in use—some of it highly degraded. Add the 2.5 billion people who are likely to join us on the globe by 2050, an d there’s simply not enough room to keep farming the way we have been. In response, Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, wants to turn the old system on its head. For the past decade, Despommier has been cultivating a v ision of farms filling glass-and-steel towers the size of a city block and 30 stories high. Just one high-rise farm, he has calculated, could feed 50,000 people 2,000 calories a day all year round. Scale that up, and skyscrapers could produce enough food to feed everyone in Manhattan in a space roughly one-fifth the size of Central Park. Despommier’s ideas are a far cry from the backyard chicken coops and vacant-lot community gardens that are most frequently touted by urban-agriculture advocates. But he p assionately believes that if we think differently about food production, the big cities of the future might just be able to feed themselves. His optimism, however, didn’t come automatically. In 1999, students in one of Despommier’s classes decided to expl ore the potential of rooftop agriculture in New York City. The results of their calculations were depressing: even if all of the city’s residential rooftops were converted to rice paddies, the resulting crop would provide only two percent of Manhattan res idents’ caloric needs. “Why don’t we just put the farms inside the buildings?” Despommier recalls saying. It was a throwaway line at the time. “But the more I thought about it, the more appealing that solution became.” - Full Article Source ITEM #161 07/11/11 - How Allied bombing raids in World War Two caused climate havoc Researchers have examined meteorological data from wartime bombing raids to see exactly what effect thousands of aircraft have on the skies. Analysis of Met Office and military records revealed significant change to the sky on May 11, 1944, when 1,444 air craft took off from airfields across south-east England. Aircraft contrails are formed when hot, aerosol-laden air from a plane's engines mix with cold air in the upper troposphere. While some contrails swiftly disappear, others form widespread cirrus clo uds which block both the sun's rays and heat energy from the ground. The effect is known as air induced cloudiness (AIC). - Full Article Source ITEM #162 07/11/11 - Scientists drag light by slowing it to speed of sound Scientists at the University of Glasgow have, for the first time, been able to drag light by slowing it down to the speed of sound and sending it through a rotating crystal. Most people may think the speed of light is constant, but this is only the case i n a vacuum, such as space, where it travels at 671million mph. However, when it travels through different substances, such as water or solids, its speed is reduced, with different wavelengths (colours) travelling at different speeds. Prof. Miles Padgett i n the Optics Group in the School of Physics & Astronomy, said: “The speed of light is a constant only in vacuum . When light travels through glass, movement of the glass drags the light with it too. Dr Sonja Franke-Arnold, Dr Graham Gibson and Prof Padget t, in collaboration with their colleague Professor Robert Boyd at the Universities of Ottowa and Rochester, took a different approach and set up an experiment: shining a primitive image made up of the elliptical profile of a green laser through a ruby rod spinning on its axis at up to 3,000 rpm. Once the light enters the ruby, its speed is slowed down to around the speed of sound (approximately 741mph) and the spinning motion of the rod drags the light with it, resulting in the image being rotated by alm ost five degrees: large enough to see with the naked eye. - Full Article Source ITEM #163 07/11/11 - Dead people taking over the Internet As this dilemma (of people not removing the dead from their social network contacts) arises again and again throughout the life of any connected citizen, active filtering seems to be the only workable solution. Facebook and MySpace before it both allow ac counts to be memorialized, and presumably Google+ and maybe even Twitter will, too. But how often will that happen? How many people are even aware it's an option, or that once you're done making arrangements to lay someone's body to rest, you've got a who le 'nother round of virtual responsibilities to dispose of? We're all leaving a trail of digital bread crumbs across the web, some of us more than others. On the Internet, you can't die so much as join the ranks of the undead. Everyone who's left has to d ecide whether they can live with your ghost / zombie / poltergeist popping up and re-inserting itself into your life. The alternative is a double-tap to a loved one's leftover virtual self, a concerted effort to put one particular expression of a memory d own so the rest can live in peace. - Full Article Source ITEM #164 07/11/11 - NJ Judge Rules GPS Tracking of Spouse Legal "The use of a GPS device to track your whereabouts is not an invasion of privacy in New Jersey, a state appellate court panel ruled today. Based on the battle of a divorcing Gloucester County couple, the decision helps clarify the rules governing a techno logy increasingly employed by suspicious spouses — many of whom hire private investigators. No state law governs the use of GPS tracking devices, and the ruling, which does not affect police officers, is the first to address the issue, said Jimmie Mesis, past president of the New Jersey Licensed Private Investigators Association. 'We only use it when we are sure we have the appropriate conditions,' [private investigator Lisa Reed] said, noting that investigators make sure GPS devices are installed in cars on public streets and not private areas, and that the spouse must have some legal or financial connection to the car." - Full Article Source ITEM #165 07/11/11 - Law Enforcement Wants To Try 'Predictive Policing' "It’s great when cops catch criminals after they've done their dirty work. But what if police could stop a crime before it was even committed? Though that may sound like a fantasy straight from a Philip K. Dick novel, it's a goal police departments from L os Angeles to Memphis are actively pursuing with help from the Department of Justice and a handful of cutting-edge academics. It's called 'predictive policing.' The idea: Although no one can foresee individual crimes, it is possible to forecast patterns o f where and when homes are likely to be burgled or cars stolen by analyzing truckloads of past crime reports and other data with sophisticated computer algorithms. 'We know where crime has occurred in the last month, but that doesn't mean it'll be there n ext month,' Los Angeles Police Department Lt. Sean Malinowski says. 'The only way for us to continue to have crime reduction is to start anticipating where crime is going to occur.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #166 07/11/11 - Novel Drive Wheel System Based On Spinning Sphere "A Bradley University student has built a mobile robot that uses a hemispherical omnidirectional gimbaled, or HOG, drive wheel. It consists of a black rubber hemisphere that rotates like a spinning top, with servos that can tilt it left and right and forw ards and backwards. The HOG system delivers an amount of torque directly proportional to the tilt of the hemisphere, allowing the robot to move incredibly fast nearly instantaneously." - Full Article Source ITEM #167 07/11/11 - Millions of Jellyfish Invade Nuclear Reactors "A nuclear reactor in Japan was forced to shut down due to infiltration of enormous swarms of jellyfish near the power plant. A similar incident was also reported recently in Israel, when millions of jellyfish clogged the sea-water cooling system of a pow er plant." - Full Article Source ITEM #168 07/11/11 - Bankruptcy 101...why Arizona did the right thing!! It's easy to dismiss individual programs that benefit non-citizens until they're put together and this picture emerges. Someone did a lot of research to put together all of this data. Often these programs are buried within other programs making them diffi cult to find. A Real Eye Opener - WHY is the USA BANKRUPT? Informative, and mind boggling! You think the war in Iraq was costing us too much? Read this (and check the website for the verfications): We have been hammered with the propaganda that it was the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS. I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I also have included the URL's for verification of all the following facts... 1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments. 2. $22 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. 3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens. 4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English! 5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. 6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. 7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens. 8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers. 9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens. 10. Illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the U.S. 11. During the year of 2005, there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border, also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the US from the Southern border. 12. The National policy Institute estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period. 13. In 2006, illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin. 14. The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One million sex crimes committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States ... The total cost is a whopping $338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR AND IF YOU'RE LIKE ME, HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING THIS AMOUNT OF MONEY; IT IS $338,300,000,000.00 WHICH WOULD BE ENOUGH TO STIMULATE THE ECONOMY FOR THE CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY. Are we THAT Stu pid? YES, FOR LETTING THOSE IN THE U.S. CONGRESS GET AWAY WITH LETTING THIS HAPPEN YEAR AFTER YEAR!!!!! (Thanks to Infolink for the headsup. - JWD) - Full Article Source ITEM #169 07/08/11 - How America Can Get Its Tech Mojo Back "The American tech industry is hobbled by a poor education system, misguided spending priorities, and a byzantine patent system. But America can still come out on top, not least because of its longstanding tradition of individuality and private R&D invest ment. 'Open, distributed projects have the potential to outperform the traditional closed, controlled research model by reducing costs and duplication of effort, making it easy to collect and analyze masses of data from diverse sources, and allowing the b est brains to participate no matter where they live.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #170 07/08/11 - A Texan's Answer to Welfare (A friend sent me this today and I just have to post it, I want this guy for President to implement these ideas across the entire USA. - JWD) - This was in the Waco Tribune Herald, Waco, Texas, November 18, 2010 Put me in charge . . . Put me in charge of food stamps. I'd get rid of Lone Star cards; no cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho's, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want Steak and frozen pizza, then g et a job. Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I'd do is to get women Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations. Then, we'll test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine and document all tattoos and piercings. If you want to reproduce or us e drugs, alcohol, smoke or get tats and piercings, then get a job. Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks? You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair. Your "home" will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma T V or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place. In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or you will report to a "government" job. It may be cleaning the roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you. We will sell your 22 inch rims a nd low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the “common good.” Before you write that I've violated someone's rights, realize that all of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules. Before you say that this would be "demeaning" and ruin their "self esteem," consider that it wasn't that long ago that taking someone else's money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self esteem. If we are expected to pay for other people's mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices. AND While you are on Gov’t subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a Gov’t welfare check. If you want to vote, t hen get a job. - From a private email - Thanks Ken! ITEM #171 07/08/11 - Solar-Powered Plane To Make First Trans-Mediterranean Flight A team of Swiss engineers have announced their plan to fly the world's most advanced solar-powered airplane across the Mediterranean in 2012, then around the world in 2014. Encouraged by a recent flight to Belgium and France, the team is considering flyin g to Morocco next year. The pilot and engineers on the Solar Impulse team will be challenged by the trans-Mediterranean trip as the plane is very sensitive to turbulence. It will also have to remain airborne for 48 hours. Borschberg added that if the 1,20 0-mile trip to Morocco from Switzerland is successful, the team will attempt flying onward to Turkey before returning home. - Full Article Source ITEM #172 07/08/11 - Artificially intelligent machines that can argue back Scientists are building a voice-activated device that can interact with people in a 'natural and intelligent way'. Artificial intelligence will help it become familiar with a user's voice, with the ultimate goal that it can understand, speak and behave li ke a human. The five-year, £6.2million project is still in its infancy but researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Sheffield believe the technology will have many benefits. It could improve voice-activated computers, develop web sear ch engines for audio clips, and create voice-controlled devices for the home. The latter could help older people stay independent for longer. Professor Phil Woodland of Cambridge University's Engineering Department added that the focus of natural speech t echnology is to develop a system that can achieve human-like performance and behaviour. He said the group were particularly interested in improving the ability of the technology to learn about and adapt to particular users and contexts. Professor Phil Woo dland of Cambridge University's Engineering Department added that the focus of natural speech technology is to develop a system that can achieve human-like performance and behaviour. He said the group were particularly interested in improving the ability of the technology to learn about and adapt to particular users and contexts. - Full Article Source ITEM #173 07/08/11 - The Promise of Fusion: Energy Miracle or Mirage? The U.S. has invested billions of dollars trying to create a controlled form of nuclear fusion that could be the energy source for an endless supply of electricity. The world’s largest and highest-energy laser focuses the intense energy of 192 separate la ser beams into an even more intense single beam aimed at a BB-sized target filled with hydrogen fuel, with the goal of creating a tiny star by replicating the process that powers the sun and similar celestial bodies. This controlled form of fusion theoret ically could tap into the boundless energy that binds the universe together, creating intense heat and driving huge generators that could supply enough power to run the entire world’s electricity grid in perpetuity. The massive energy gain from controlled fusion is a prize that scientists have sought for decades. Yet to date, no laboratory has successfully pulled off a controlled, small-scale fusion reaction in which the…(get this!); “energy created by the reaction exceeded the energy needed to generate the reaction.” (Why, wouldn’t that be FREE ENERGY, the very same thing we alt science researchers are looking for and for which we are constantly lambasted at every turn by the uninformed? Despite what the uninformed think, We never claimed ‘energy from nothing’, we claim CONVERSION OF ENERGY just as the ‘fusioneers’ are trying to do, but we use MANY different methods. See Primer for Skeptics and Attackers. My Lab Project is that shotgun approach that will generate new technology. It's sheer stupidity that any person or government would stick with backward GRIDs to furnish power...the answer is small generators used in every home and many of them used in businesses, even factories by scaling them up. If the grid goes down, all power goes down, but if everyone makes their own power, it won't matter. – JWD) - Full Article Source ITEM #174 07/08/11 - UFO takes control of ICBMs In Washington last September, six former Air Force officers and a former enlisted man stepped forward to say that they'd seen or had been directly involved with UFO sightings at nuclear missile sites. UFO researcher Robert Hastings is saying three more wi tnesses are speaking to him about a more recent UFO sighting -- and it revolves around a serious communications scare at F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming last October, when the military acknowledged that it had lost contact with 50 of its nuclear Mi nuteman III missiles. "We've never had something as big as this happen," said a military officer who had been briefed on the event, according to the The Atlantic. "We can deal with maybe 5, 6 or 7 at a time, but we've never lost complete command and contr ol and functionality of 50 ICBMs." - Full Article Source ITEM #175 07/08/11 - La. researcher uses light to grow bigger crawfish Crawfish is one of the nation's biggest aquaculture crops, with the number of pounds harvested second only to catfish in most years. While Louisiana produces almost all of the fresh — not frozen — crawfish eaten in this country, there are farms at least a s far north as the Carolinas and Virginia. Crawfish also are raised in Europe and Australia. Julie Delabbio, director of Northwestern State University's Aquaculture Research Center in Lena, said she has found putting underwater lights in crawfish ponds dr amatically improves production. Her work is important as the U.S. looks to increase its domestic aquaculture. Ponds with a dozen underwater lights per quarter-acre produced about one-third to two-thirds more pounds of crawfish than unlit ones, Delabbio sa id. The work she's done over the past three years found lit ponds produced 800 to 1,000 pounds of crawfish per acre compared to 500 to 600 pounds in unlit ponds. This year's harvest was even better: ponds without lights produced about 850 pounds of market able crawfish per acre, compared to nearly 1,660 in those with lights, she said. The gains weren't just in the number of crawfish, but their size. "Just getting more crawfish isn't necessarily a good thing if you're getting a lot of little crawfish," Dela bbio said. "We're getting more sellable crawfish out of the ponds with underwater lights." Using lights to stretch the "day" has been used for decades to speed the growth of chickens, hogs and salmon, but the application with crawfish is new and Delabbio doesn't know just why it works. She has three ideas: the longer exposure to light may st imulate the animal's metabolism, as it does with chickens and hogs; the light may stimulate the growth of plankton, plants and insects, providing the crawfish with more food; or the lights may attract smaller invertebrates, creating spots where crawfish c an get an easy meal without expending a lot of energy. - Full Article Source ITEM #176 07/08/11 - Fan Death Fan death is a widely held belief (and misconception) prevailing in South Korea that an electric fan left running overnight in a closed room can cause the death of those inside. Fans sold in Korea are equipped with a timer switch that turns them off after a set number of minutes, which users are frequently urged to set when going to sleep with a fan on. The Korea Consumer Protection Board (KCPB), a South Korean government-funded public agency, issued a consumer safety alert in 2006 warning that "asphyxiat ion from electric fans and air conditioners" was among South Korea's five most common seasonal summer accidents or injuries, according to data they collected. A new story from yesterday: Summer death revives fan death myth. A South Korean man reportedly d ied on Monday morning after sleeping with an electric fan running. The 59 years-old victim, only known by his surname Min, was found dead with the fan fixed directly at him. - Full Article Source ITEM #177 07/08/11 - Yale Scientists Trace Cancer To Body Electricity (Dec, 1936) Electrical changes in the human body may explain the cause of cancer according to Prof. H. S. Burr, of the Yale School of Medicine. Working with Dr. R. G. Meader, Prof. Burr has found that minute changes in the living process are accompanied by changes in body electricity. - Full Article Source ITEM #178 07/08/11 - Myth, reality and the electric car Better Place, launched in Israel this year, provides owners of the Renault Fluence electric car with the ability to switch batteries. It isn’t cheap. In Denmark, where the company also operates, the cost is between $300-600 a month for a “subscription.” T he owner can choose a plan that allows unlimited switching of batteries, or allows them to drive around 10,000 km (6,200 miles). When the costs are added up, the savings are only 10-20% compared to buying gas for a regular car. Better Place estimates the cost of driving 40 miles would be about $3.20. Another cost comparison performed on the Tesla by PG & E claimed that the cost of charging the car to drive 40 miles would be between .56 and $3.18. If you drove that far each day then your cost per month wou ld be $60. Another question deals with what affect mass ownership would have on the electric grid. If Better place’s prediction of an $11 trillion industry came true, then that would mean, in my calculation, almost a doubling of residential electricity us e in certain urban markets. That means countries must immediately begin investing in new generating infrastructure to boost capacity, but given that people are gun-shy about nuclear power after Japan’s earthquake, that’s not likely. So the result will be a doubling in the cost of electricity and, perhaps, rolling brownouts. The cost of charging the cars, rather than going down as many predict, will actually go up. Even if the costof the cars themselves go down to a reasonable price (currently only governm ent rebates make them affordable), the infrastructure behind the battery, its cost and the ability to switch it out or charge it remains unresolved. This may be the Achilles heal of the industry, and it means the modern search for a fountain of youth is s till on. - Full Article Source ITEM #179 07/08/11 - Harnessing the power of feedback loops Technologies that incorporate feedback loops to change human behavior. - Full Article Source Vitality GlowCaps from Vitality on Vimeo. ITEM #180 07/08/11 - HOWTO clean LPs, DVDs, and CDs 've recently picked up several old vinyl LPs at thrift stores and garage sales. My musical taste is very eclectic, but these discs have one big thing in common: they're all filthy. Similarly, we have dozens of kids DVDs and CDs in our house coated in todd ler goo that would almost certainly beat the adhesive that holds the tiles on the space shuttle. This weekend, I plan to brew up a cauldron of the cleaning solution used by the master preservationists at the Library of Congress. Or maybe I'll just go with Ivory dish soap, warm water, and an old t-shirt. Anyway, here's the LoC's recipe:... - Full Article Source ITEM #181 07/08/11 - iPod credit card reader If you’ve ever been to an Apple store, you might have noticed there is no cash register and no check-out counter. Employees swipe your credit card on their iPod Touch and complete a transaction anywhere in the store. Other businesses are learning how to d o this too. The iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch/Android app getting a lot of buzz lately is called “Square.” It includes a card swiping accessory that plugs into the headset/microphone jack of the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. The app is free, and each user who sign s up gets a card reader; Square makes its money by charging 2.75 percent per transaction. The company is currently processing $3 million worth of transactions a day. More info at squareup.com. “Swipe” is another app that turns an iPhone or iPod Touch into a credit card reader. Their app is 99 cents and they also toss in the card reader for free. They don’t put pricing info on their website, but we asked and they charge 1.74 percent per “qualified” card plus 24 cents per transaction and $25 a month for the service. The fee for a $100 purchase on a standard Visa, Mastercard or Discover card would be $1.98. More info at AppNinjas.com. - Full Article Source ITEM #182 07/08/11 - Junavia for Type 2 Diabetes (A mexican friend tells me his aunt had type 2 diabetes. He said she takes this pill called Januvia which costs about 600 pesos for 14 days. Thats about $52US at one pill a day. He tells me since she switched to these pills her health has improved immense ly. - JWD) Januvia is an oral diabetes medicine that helps control blood sugar levels. It works by regulating the levels of insulin your body produces after eating. Januvia is for people with type 2 diabetes (non-insulin-dependent) diabetes. It is sometim es used in combination with other diabetes medications, but is not for treating type 1 diabetes. - Full Article Source ITEM #183 07/08/11 - Retailer Calls Rivals' Bluff On "HDMI Scam" "Retailer Kogan is offering customers of rival stores free HDMI cables to highlight the 'scam' of selling the cables for £100, saying its own £4 cable works just as well. 'An HDMI cable is an HDMI cable,' Kogan said. 'It's a digital cable. You either get a picture or you don't. Don't get conned into buying a 'fancy' HDMI cable because it will make no difference!' Rival retailers Currys and John Lewis said they preferred to offer customers a 'variety' of cables. 'Each of our HDMI cables offers excellent qu ality and value for money, and by providing our customers with a range of different cables which offer different specifications, we are able to help them find one to suit their specific needs, with features such as different cable lengths, ultra slim and high speed,' said a spokesman for John Lewis, which sells cables for £20 to £99." - Full Article Source ITEM #184 07/08/11 - New Approach For Laser Weapons "Laser guns and other 'directed energy weapons' have remained in sci-fi lore because of their inefficiency, bulkiness, and poor beam quality. Now an MIT Lincoln Lab spinoff called TeraDiode is developing a diode laser that uses 'wavelength beam combining' to create what it calls the brightest and most powerful laser of its kind. The two-year-old company, backed by $3 million from the U.S. Department of Defense and $4 million from venture capitalists, is working on a compact airborne laser system for plane s to shoot down heat-seeking missiles. Eventually, the lasers could be mounted on a tank or ship to destroy enemy UAVs or even incoming artillery shells. That's still at least three to five years away, but with advances in semiconductor lasers there seems to be quite a renewed interest in weaponry." - Full Article Source ITEM #185 07/08/11 - DOT Exempts Maker of 'Flying Car' From Road Vehicle Safety Rules Terrafugia, makers of a vehicle alternately called a 'flying car' or 'roadable aircraft,' have been granted a three-year exemption to federal motor vehicle safety rules in order to foster further development and innovation. "The DOT granted the three-year 'hardship' exemption because it bought the argument from Terrafugia that its attempt to comply with DOT regulations at the same time as Federal Aviation Administration rules would be prohibitively expensive. Terrafugia had argued that an exemption would allow it more time to research more appropriate solutions to the requirements at the same time as making the flying car a feasible project. The company, an MIT spin-off located in Woburn, Mass. intends to use motor-cycle tires and rims instead of tires us ually used for regular cars. The purpose is to minimize the weight of the craft." - Full Article Source ITEM #186 07/08/11 - Renewable Energy Production Surpasses Nuclear In the US "Renewable energy production has surpassed nuclear energy production in the U.S. according to the latest issue of Monthly Energy Review (PDF) published by the Energy Information Administration. ... During the first three months of 2011, energy produced fr om renewable energy sources (biomass/biofuels, geothermal, solar, hydro, wind) generated 2.245 quadrillion Btus of energy equating to 11.73 percent of U.S. energy production. During this same time period, renewable energy production surpassed nuclear ener gy power by 5.65 percent. In total, energy produced from renewables is 77.15 percent of that from domestic crude oil production." - Full Article Source ITEM #187 07/08/11 - EU Proposal: Shift Farming Subsidies To Science "There is a proposal in the EU budget which would provide a 45% increase in technology and innovation spending for the 2014-2020 time period. Interestingly, some of the increase from $79B to $114B would come from the controversial farm subsidies program, the Common Agricultural Policy. The article states ... 'While some scientists and observers feel optimistic that the proposal will pass, one stated that "it is extremely unlikely that the member states will agree to anything exceeding this, so we should r egard it as a ceiling" on the eventual research budget.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #188 07/08/11 - Israeli Landspeeder (Sorta) Takes Flight Actually, there probably would be a demand for a real-life Landspeeder. That’s why Israel’s Urban Aeronautics has worked since 2008 on a vertical-take-off-and-land drone airship called the AirMule, which just so happens to look like Luke Skywalker’s famil y cruiser. But from the looks of it, it won’t be racing around Tattooine any time soon. It’s cool that the AirMule’s ducted fans can keep it aloft. But those guidewires make it look like the robotic equivalent of a toddler swaying on his Big Wheel. And si nce we saw photographic footage of a similar takeoff a year and a half ago, it doesn’t inspire much confidence in the company’s progress, even though the Urban Aeronautics says it kept the tethers on to comply with “civil aviation and insurance flight cle arance requirements.” - Full Article Source ITEM #189 07/08/11 - Patent Troll Goes After Notebook Cooling "If you are manufacturing notebooks and you are using hardware that needs to be cooled down occasionally, you may be in the crosshairs of IPventure, which claims patent rights to an approach that is common in all notebooks today. For now, the company appe ars to be establishing its case by suing Fujitsu and Lenovo over the use of its invention in the Lifebook and Thinkpad series of products." - Full Article Source ITEM #190 07/08/11 - IBM Watson To Replace Salespeople and Cold-Callers "After conquering Jeopardy! and making inroads into the diagnosis of medical maladies, IBM's next application for Watson is improving sales and customer support. Companies will be able to simply fill Watson (or rather, DeepQA) with domain-specific informa tion about products and services, and sit back as it uses its natural language processing skills to answer the queries of potential customers. The potential benefits are huge. Watson could either augment existing sales and support teams, or replace them e ntirely. Also, in a beautiful and self-fulfilling twist, the first application of this re-purposed Watson will be be internally, at IBM, to help sell more IBM Watsons to other companies." - Full Article Source ITEM #191 07/08/11 - Spanish Surgeon Performs First Synthetic Organ Transplant "The BBC is reporting that surgeons in Sweden have transplanted a synthetic windpipe into a patient. The synthetic windpipe was grown from a scaffolding and coated with the patients own stem cells. The scaffolding was made using 3D images of the patient's own windpipe. The new windpipe was made by scientists in London." - Full Article Source ITEM #192 07/08/11 - Bill Gates On Energy An interview in Wired with Bill Gates on the future of energy. Gates sees nuclear as the only feasible option for base load generation. His views on the current direction of energy funding are particularly distressing: "But the economics are so, so far fr om making sense. And yet that's where subsidies are going now. We're putting 90 percent of the subsidies in deployment — this is true in Europe and the United States — not in R&D. And so unfortunately you get technologies that, no matter how much of them you buy, there's no path to being economical. You need fundamental breakthroughs, which come more out of basic research." - Full Article Source< /font> ITEM #193 07/08/11 - Digital Generation Rediscovers Analog Wristwatches "As recently as a half-decade ago, time seemed to be running out for the wristwatch; the mechanical device was declared to be going the way of the abacus. But now the NY Times reports that the 'sundial' of the wrist is experiencing an uptick among members of the digital generation, particularly by heritage-macho types in their 20s and 30s who are drawn to the wristwatch's retro appeal, just as they have seized on straight razors, selvedge denim and vintage vinyl. 'A cool machine that is all moving parts h as got to be intrinsically interesting to someone born into this generation,' says Mitch Greenblatt, an online retailer of design-forward watches who is seeing a surge in business, 'because there's just nothing like that in their life.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #194 07/08/11 - Why People Who Make Things Should Learn Chinese "MAKE Magazine is making that case that any 'maker' who builds, buys or creates electronics should learn (Mandarin) Chinese. MAKE outlines the resources for anyone wishing to learn the language of the soon-to-be largest economy and source of just about ev erything we buy in the USA." - Full Article Source ITEM #195 07/05/11 - Sun Simba - Making solar power affordable to the world Today, Mr. Morgan’s invention, the Sun Simba, is being field tested in Ontario and California and will likely enter large-scale production later this year. The brothers have raised more than $13-million in private and public funding, including an investme nt from Spain’s Iberdrola SA, one of the world’s largest renewable energy utilities. What is it about Morgan Solar that’s drawing interest from the clean energy industry’s major players? Mr. Morgan points to the unique technology. Most solar panels require glass lenses, prisms and mirrors to concentrate sunlight. This works, but it’s expensive. The Sun Simba doesn’t use this approach. It is largely made with a common polymer called poly (methyl methacrylate) – the same plastic m aterial used to make durable windows and rink-enclosing barriers in hockey arenas. The Sun Simba’s slimmer profile and mostly plastic construction translate into low material costs, says Mr. Morgan. And it doesn’t use tellurium, an incredibly rare and exp ensive metal used in many solar panels. Just as important, he adds, is the relatively conventional but highly automated manufacturing process that makes it easier – and cheaper – to set up factories in local communities. “To process the plastic, we use primarily injection moulding, a techniq ue widely used in other manufacturing processes today,” says Mr. Morgan. “This means our solar panels can essentially be built in the same factories that had previously built televisions or automotive products, whereas conventional solar panels are produc ed using a totally precise semi-conductor fabrication process.” Mr. Morgan estimates it would cost about $25-million to build a Sun Simba factory, compared to about $200-million for a factory producing conventional solar panels. This initial investment ca n be easily recouped with revenue from one year’s worth of production, with profit to spare, he says. “I believe firmly that the only way you can introduce broad change is if you can find a way to make the exercise profitable, so you can get investors behind it,” says Mr. Morgan, declining to disclose the profit margin on Sun Simba. “Otherwise it won’t be self-sustaining, and to enable [developing] parts of the world to blossom, you really need to rely on modes of change that are self-sustaining.” Another advantage with the Sun Simba is its relatively higher efficiency, says Mr. Morgan. Conventional solar panels can convert about 17 per cent of direct sunlight into electricity, whereas the Sun Simba’s conversion rate is 25 per cent, he says. “Just four of our panels would offset the consumption of a typical American home in a year.” T he Sun Simba works best when the sky is blue and the sun shines directly on the panels, says Mr. Morgan. “It’s really intended for parts of the world that have a lot of sunny days – like India, Africa, South America,” he says. “In a place like Ontario, it ’s actually okay, but it’s not as good in Alberta or in a country like Germany.” Developing countries, with their lack of centralized power grids, are an ideal market for Sun Simba, says Mr. Morgan. By offering an inexpensive and sustainable way of generating energy, Morgan Solar will make it easier for these countries to build local generation plants that would serve small, often remote communities, says Mr. Morgan. “The bigger goal behind bringi ng electricity into these places is to enable people to pursue more valuable work,” he says. “I believe lower-cost electricity is going to make the world a better place, and it’s the only thing worth devoting my life to.” - Full Article Source ITEM #196 07/05/11 - Roundabout Revolution Sweeping US (great video) "BBC News reports that U.S. cities are installing more roundabouts than ever before. The first British-style roundabout appeared in the U.S. in 1990, and now some cities — such as Carmel in Indiana, are rapidly replacing intersections with roundabouts. Su pporters claim that roundabouts result in increased traffic flow, reductions in both the severity and incidence of accidents, and fuel savings. Critics say that roundabouts are more difficult to navigate for unfamiliar American drivers, lead to higher tax es and accidents, and require everyday acts of spontaneous co-operation and yielding to others — acts that are 'un-American.'" As a driver who's hit all of the continental U.S. states except North Dakota, I dread roundabouts and rotaries for all the near accidents (and at least one actual accident) I've seen them inspire, and have been unhappy to see them spread. Spontaneous driver cooperation doesn't necessarily need the round shape, either. - Full Article Source ITEM #197 07/05/11 - New SynGas Reactor to be tested at Pulp Mill HydroMax is an advanced gasification system that offers significant benefits compared to conventional techniques.The process offers several critical advantages to industrial-scale customers, including a compact size for simple integration, biomass feedsto ck flexibility, synthetic gas (syngas) output variability, limited emissions output, and attractive economics. By leveraging proven processes from the metals and mining industries, the HydroMax technique intends to break the status-quo paradigm by deliver ing gasification systems at up to 50% the cost of traditional systems, with 80+% efficiency, and demonstrating high availability. Utilizing an iron/tin molten metal based reactor, the HydroMax system produces both carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2) in separate and distinct streams from the reactor. Using two distinct steps (shown as Step A and Step B), the HydroMax process begins with a molten iron/tin (FeSn) bath heated to 1300° C. In Step A, steam is injected into the bath which is then thermo-chemi cally split resulting in H2 gas (released) and oxidized iron. After the Fe is oxidized, steam injection ceases and a carbon source (coal, petroleum coke, tires, biomass, etc) is injected into the reactor (Step B). Carbon has a high affinity to oxygen and reduces the oxidation of Fe to its pure form and produces a CO-rich syngas which is released for use. For applications requiring hydrogen, a traditional gasifier must first produce syngas, then use portions of this syngas to produce hydrogen. For fuels sy nthesis, the syngas and hydrogen must then be combined in the correct ratio dependent upon the particular fuel desired. The proposed project would gasify fine wood residue to create a syngas of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which it would burn in place of natural gas.This syngas will be pumped into the burners of a process heating facility, offsetting the natural gas currently being used. The mill already produces about 95 percent of its own electricity and most of its overall energy from sawmill waste. B ut despite that, the energy-intensive pulp-making process still draws about 300 therms of gas each day through the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. pipeline. "We would be completely free of fossil fuel,” said Evergreen Senior Resource Manager Rex Bohn. - Full Article Source ITEM #198 07/05/11 - Energy evolution–where it’s come from and what’s the destination? There’s a great deal of debate about what will power the cars of the future. Whether it will be more efficient use of fossil fuels, biofuel, electricity, hybrid technology, hydrogen fuel cells, natural gas or old socks, there is a parallel discussion that has not been given nearly as many column inches. This debate centres on all of the ancillary components of a car. It’s a crucial consideration for the future of the car as none of us want to give up all of the creature comforts we’re now so used to, even if it does mean saving energy. We’re all now completely at ease with compact laptop computers and netbooks that just a decade ago would have seemed more at home on Tomorrow’s World. It’s the same with mobile phone technology, something almost everyone in any developed part of the world cannot be without now. Steve Douglas and many others like him are upbeat about the future of the car.In 10 years’ time, the average car may not be radically different to those we drive now, but under the skin there will be big changes. Steve Douglas believes we could see our part- or pure electric cars helping to power our homes. Rather than just drawing energy from a socket, electric cars could return energy to our homes at peak price times to cut our overall household fuel bills. It’s not a fantasy idea. Most electric vehicle users charge their cars overnight when electricity is at its cheapest. If we use our car as a mobile storage point for electricity, why not make use of that cheap electricity to reduce our home consumption in the evenings? As with all of the best radical ideas, it soon makes a lot of sense and makes you wonder why no-one thought of it before. This is where the debate about ancillary components in cars is headed and it’s potentially the more important and f ascinating debate than just what will power our cars. After all, as soon as we have what we want to make our cars go, we soon forget about where it came from or what it is. - Full Article Source ITEM #199 07/05/11 - Xergy 'Electrochemical Compression' will change Cooling Technology Founder, Bamdad Bahar said: "We believe this invention is disruptive for the refrigeration industry." Xergy Inc was founded in 2009 to commercialize a series of patents based on “electrochemical compression” to launch a new class of clean, green compressors for the refrigeration and cooling industry. Xergy’s technology is based on utilizing electrochemica l compression of clean non-GHG (non-Green-House-Gas) depleting refrigerants. This technology provides for highly-efficient, noiseless, vibration free, modular and scalable Cooling Systems. This technology is potentially transformational and disruptive for the conventional refrigeration industry. It uses stable and well-understood technology from the Fuel-cell industry in a novel fashion that simply uses electricity to produce refrigeration without the need for motors or polluting refrigerants. Devices uti lizing this technology could be deployed in any number of commercial, residential and automotive applications in a cost-effective, efficient and planet-friendly manner. It leverages existing proton-exchange-membrane technology with hydrogen’s excellent th ermodynamic characteristics and ability to co-exist with other fluids, to operate a clean and efficient refrigeration cycle. - Full Article Source ITEM #200 07/05/11 - Panasonic develops breakthrough Thermoelectric Generator “Panasonic has developed innovative thermoelectric tubes especially suited for fluid heat source such as hot water and steam. The tubular shape enables direct and efficient heat transfer without additional heat exchangers, yielding high density of generat ed power. Panasonic's thermoelectric tube with simple, compact, and efficient features is an ideal solution for capturing unused or wasted heat from hot springs and factory. “Thermoelectric technology is the direct energy conversion from heat into electri city and has attracted much attention as a renewable energy solution. Since conventional thermoelectric generators are complicated in structure and restricted in planar shape, they are difficult to scale-up and implement. Panasonic's thermoelectric tubes solve these problems by using unconventional phenomena called transverse thermoelectric effect, which takes place in tilted multilayer made of thermally-resistive thermoelectric materials and thermally-conductive metals . This effect makes it possible to control heat flow and electric current independently in materials, and realizes quite simple structure without complicated electric junctions and planar substrates. “The performance of power generation is strongly dependent on many parameters such as size of the tube and amount of heat source. Panasonic has developed the simulation technology to optimize the design of the thermoelectric tube in order to maximize t he output electric power in accordance with surrounding conditions. “The thermoelectric tube is constructed by stacking conical rings of bismuth telluride as thermoelectric material and nickel as metal. Panasonic has developed processing technologies in f abricating conical rings of brittle thermoelectric materials and bonding rings with minimum parasitic electric and thermal losses. “The 10 cm-long ( 4 inch) fabricated thermoelectric tube using technologies introduced above can generate 1.3 W of electricity by running hot water of 90 degrees C (194 F) inside, and cold water of 10 degrees C (50 F) outside the tube. The power densit y corresponds to as high as 10 kW with only 1 m3 (cubic meter)of volume. Development on system design, optimization in manufacturing and feasibility study are now under way or planned, with a view to realizing compact, efficient, and economical generators fueled by geothermal energy and waste heat in factories. The technology is scalable, according to the release. The thermoelectric tubes can made larger and more powerful. - Full Article Source ITEM #201 07/05/11 - How Space Affects Human Bones The crew of the International space station will study the problem of calcium removal from bones during long-term space flights. Scientists plan to experimentally estimate solubility of calcium phosphates and human bone tissue samples in water under micro gravity conditions. These experiments are expected to lead to possible solutions for demineralization of bones in cosmonauts during long-term space missions. Moreover, experiments include studying techniques for making stable solutions and suspensions of substances, which are poorly soluble or non-soluble on Earth under normal conditions. - Full Article Source ITEM #202 07/05/11 - Blow to the head makes people feel good about religion Psychologists in the US report that people who have suffered a serious blow to the head and who have "a sense of connection to a higher power" tend to report feelings of much greater life satisfaction. Having carried out a survey of 88 traumatic brain inj ury (TBI) sufferers and their significant others, Waldron-Perrine and her colleagues report: The results indicate that religious well-being (a sense of connection to a higher power) was a unique predictor for life satisfaction, distress and functional abi lity whereas public religious practice and existential well-being were not. Or in other words – among people who have been hit hard on the head – religious types enjoy life much more. "Perhaps especially for those with limited means and few alternatives, religion can take on great power as a psychosocial resource," said Waldron-Perrine. - Full Article Source ITEM #203 07/05/11 - Massive Static Electricity before Cornish under-sea quake This week, parts of the Cornish coastline were hit by what appears to have been a mini-tsunami. The wave was of no great height, but it was still substantial enough to suck the sea out for 150 feet or more, before surging back in to drench the causeway li nking St Michael’s Mount to the mainland near Penzance, and giving tourists a soaking. The wave rolled up the estuaries and rivers from Mounts Bay in the West to Plymouth in the east, sending small boats rolling on their keels. If that isn’t strange enoug h, witnesses said it was preceded by a surge of static electricity. ‘People’s hair stood on end,’ said a National Trust guide on the Mount. One theory is that the resulting rock vibrations could generate a powerful electrical charge, strong enough to trav el all the way along the seabed to land, up the beach, and reach the top of a tourist’s head. ‘It’s called the Piezoelectric Effect,’ says Chris Shepherd of the Institute of Physics, explaining that quartz crystals, present in the ancient rocks in and aro und Cornwall, could generate a high voltage if squeezed. ‘It’s the same effect used in gas lighters on your cooker.’ Intriguingly, something similar but far more dramatic seems to have taken place several days before the Japanese earthquake. After studyin g data sent by satellites over the Pacific Ocean, NASA scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland have discovered that there was a sudden and dramatic pulse of heat high in the atmosphere over the epicentre of the quake 72 hours before it s truck. The heat pulse was associated with an equally dramatic increase in electrical charge in the air. Similar effects were reported, retrospectively, before the Haiti earthquake in 2007. - Full Article Source ITEM #204 07/05/11 - Poor man’s Peltier air conditioner It’s summer in Germany, and [Valentin’s] room was getting hotter than he could handle. Tired of suffering through the heat, and with his always-on PC not helping matters any, he decided that he must do something to supplement his home’s air conditioner. T he result of his labor is the single room poor man’s A/C unit you see above. He had a spare Peltier cooler sitting around, so he put it to good use as the basis for his air conditioning unit. He sandwiched it between a pair of CPU heatsinks before crammin g his makeshift heat pump into a shoe box. Warm air is drawn into the box and across the cold side of the Peltier before being blown back into the room. On the hot side of the box air is also pulled in by a fan, drawing heat away from the unit before bein g exhausted outdoors through his window. While he hasn’t quantified the machine’s cooling power, he seems quite happy with the results. - Full Article Source ITEM #205 07/05/11 - Scientists in U-turn claim extreme weather and climate change linked Climate change is inextricably linked to the extreme weather that has wreaked destruction all over the world in the last ten years, scientists now claim. Experts are convinced of a legitimate link between the two after more than 20 years of reluctance to blame greenhouse gas emissions for the heavy storms, floods and droughts which have made global headlines. In the past, scientists have avoided linking single exceptional weather events with climate change, not least because the science of 'climate attrib ution' is likely to be pounced upon by sceptics who question the link between industrial carbon dioxide emissions and a rise in global temperatures. However, they now believe it is no longer plausible to say extreme weather is merely 'consistent' with cli mate change. Instead, the coalition wants to analyse each event to see whether it is probable that the increase in global temperature in the last century has contributed to or caused it. Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, added: 'We have this extra water vapour lurking around waiting for storms to develop and then there is more moisture as well as heat that is available for these storms [to form]. 'The models suggest it is going to get drier in the subtropics, wetter in the monsoon trough and wetter at higher latitudes. This is the pattern we're already seeing.' - Full Article Source ITEM #206 07/05/11 - Group of Quadrotors fail over and over Quadrotors are pretty cool vehicles, able to be tightly controlled from afar to do any number of things. We usually see them when they're performing well, but this video from UPenn shows them failing, often spectacularly. The UPenn GRASP lab works with qu adrotors every day, working to get them to fly in formation, build structures and other such tasks. But this video doesn't show them doing that. No, it shows them trying to do such things and just not getting there. Ouch. / The team over at UPenn’s GRASP Lab film everything they do when it comes to quadrotors for posterity’s sake. When your awesome job consists of directing quadrotors through all sorts of acrobatic hijinks however, mistakes are going to happen. Thankfully, the team doesn’t keep these a se cret, and while we’re typically wowed by what these flying machines can do, it’s also pretty fun to see them fail in such spectacular fashion. - Full Article Source ITEM #207 07/05/11 - Bureaucracy, anarchy & innovation amnesia: HBR Part 3 What works in innovation: dynamic linking. In 1986 in a famous article entitled, “The New New Product Development Game,” Professors Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka described how a range of firms had been successful in innovation. Some of the examples were in Japan, like Toyota, Fuji Film, and Honda, and a couple were American firms like HP, 3M, and Xerox. They showed how these companies had set up teams that became extraordinarily innovative and productive—without bureaucracy. Typically the companies set up self-organizing teams. They analyzed the competitive threat and then pulled together a team of their very best people. It was generally a cross-functional team, with people from R&D, engineering, finance, sales, marketing, and support. They would then give the team a challenging mission. At Honda, for instance, the challenge was to design a car that would appeal to young people and yet be cheap and of high quality. Then they would step back and let the team figure how to make it happen. At first, the people on the team would be concerned that this was a new form of layoff. After a while, they would settle down and would socialize with each other. And then they would wake up and realize that unless they got cracking, they would never f inish by the deadline. So the team would suddenly grasp the urgency of the situation and start to work together. Takeuchi and Nonaka noted that when this happened, the well-documented phenomenon of self-transcendence within the group would occur. Self-transcendence is a big word, but it simply means that the individuals started to feel that the goals of the te am were more important than their own part in it, their own careers, their own preferred position, their prior attitudes. If they were thinking only about themselves—their own goals and their own interests—the team would get locked into suboptimal pat terns of work. Takeuchi and Nonaka noted, “A project takes on a self-organizing character as it is driven to a state of ‘zero information’—where prior knowledge does not apply. Ambiguity and fluctuation abound in this state. Left to stew, the process begi ns to create its own dynamic order.” The psychology of this phenomenon was described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his classic book, Flow. He wrote about those times in our lives when, instead of being buffered by anonymous forces, we “feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fa te. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like. . . . The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or m ind is stretched to the limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” (Self-Transcendence is what is needed in the alternative science community, where people stop thinking about ego, power and greed and combine our efforts and resources towards higher goals. - JWD) - Full Article Source ITEM #208 07/05/11 - Kairos Society smoothes the road ahead Shakeel Avadhany and his friends were still students when they invented a shock absorber capable of converting kinetic energy created by bumps in the road into useable electricity. Armed with a brilliant idea but no links to industry, they turned to a stu dent entrepreneurship network for help and advice. That network allowed them to get in touch with Admiral William Owens, the former vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and within a couple of years their invention, called GenShock, was being use d by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The network was the Kairos Society, a global group of student entrepreneurs that has the backing of the White House and business luminaries such as Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft. "We will give them an e nvironment in which they can excel, in which they can develop their businesses further, put them in touch with mentors who are interested in what they are doing, to help them." Mr Shaikh is seeking businessmen and women to become mentors and has just agre ed a collaboration with SeedStartup, an outfit based in Dubai that aims to invest in entrepreneurs and provide coaching, mentoring and contacts. "I want it to be something that's going to be here for years to come, to develop the student entrepreneurship sector and get individuals to start thinking out of the box," he said. "And to those who are there and doing it already, because we do have people that are doing it, that's why we're setting up here, for them to come and join us and for the board to know that these people are here and we are solving problems through entrepreneurship, through innovation." - Full Article Source ITEM #209 07/05/11 - Some wishes do come true The desire to remain or at least prolong youth is hidden somewhere in everybody and hence the search for the elixir of youth and beauty. Pomegranates could keep you young, announced a salesman at the greengrocers last Saturday. Until recently, I had only heard greengrocers eulogizing rocca leaves, which they claim energize your depleted spirit. Researchers at a Middle East facility, echoing the claim of the street vendor, claim that the fruit can slow down the ageing rates of our cells. Pomegranates, they also claim, have more chemicals that fight heart disease and cancer than any other fruit or drink. The fruit contains a unique fatty acid called punicic acid, which is believed to give the fruit its healing power. Researchers hope to work out exactly how the acid helps combat heart disease, cancer and arrest the aging process. Isolated villages in some African countries have no quick way to contact emergency services, and it can take days to reach expert help, says the inventor. To combat this, a new pedal powered generator was built on the Isle of Dogs, which will power sho rt wave radios to allow rural people to contact doctors and police immediately. The generator powers the 100-watt radio transceiver directly without storing energy in car batteries. Instead, his machine has an unbreakable 32 kg cast-iron flywheel, the siz e of a Frisbee, to store the power and smooth out fluctuations from pedaling. An ingenious method of finding out what’s in a sealed container. The invention, officially known as Swept Frequency Acoustic Interferometer (SFAI), uses a gun — not a real gun, of course — to transmit sound waves and establish what is in a container by precisely measuring the way sound waves behave as they pass through. A match is then found by comparing the information with a database of known materials. Despite being developed for the US military to identify dangerous chemicals in Afghanistan, the de vice has a lot of civilian applications. It is so sensitive that it can detect contaminants in drinking water and can even tell you — without even touching the fridge door — if the milk in your fridge has gone bad. A new satellite is to help airlines cut costs by warning them of corrosion-inducing (ash or no ash) clouds of ozone. With real-time information from the satellite, the planes will be able to avoid the danger zone and reduce maintenance costs. The High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder (HILDS) satellite is a joint venture between Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council and NASA. Will it make any difference to passengers? Probably not. Poor passengers will continue to bear the high cost of aircraft maintenance, aviation fuel, exorbitant airport taxes, pilferage, insurance, staff training and turnover, and of course, the pre-World War II baggage allowance! - Full Article Source ITEM #210 07/05/11 - Electricity price jump to hurt hip pockets "The greatest invention of the 20th century was electricity, and here in the 21st century we are being told to feel guilty about using the blasted stuff," Mr McLaren said yesterday on the eve of big hikes in electricity tariffs. Country Energy's electrici ty tariff will rise by 18.1 per cent from today, but Mr McLaren thinks the effect of the jump is closer to 20 per cent, leading to nearly a doubling of electricity prices over the past four years. "The price of electricity has risen 80 per cent since 2007 ," he said. Mr McLaren, of the Shadforth Financial Group, said despite valiant attempts by people to cut back on energy consumption he thinks they will still be dismayed when their quarterly bills are affected by the new tariffs. "People are going to redu ce their energy consumption by 10 per cent and their bills will go up 20 per cent and they will think their cutbacks have been for nothing," he said. - Full Article Source ITEM #211 07/05/11 - Move to Amend: coalition to abolish corporate personhood A new coalition called Move To Amend is working to abolish corporate personhood in the US; they're working at the local and state level to pass laws to undo the work of Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruling that equated money with speech. Boulder is n ot alone in this fight, nor is it the first community to consider such a resolution. In April, voters in Madison and Dane County, WI overwhelmingly approved measures calling for an end to corporate personhood and the legal status of money as speech by 84% and 78% respectively. Similar resolutions have been passed in nearly thirty other cities and counties. Resolutions have also been introduced in the state legislatures of both Vermont and Washington... Move to Amend is gaining momentum rapidly in communit ies throughout the country precisely because the problems of corporate power are most evident locally. Developers seeking special favors pour money into elections. Big polluters avoid investigations and litigation by hiding behind their illegitimate "righ ts." Bad employers lie to the public about unfair labor practices with no legal consequences. People see it every day. They get it and they're ready to fight back. Move to Amend is here to help them do that with a strategy for long-term success. - Full Article Source ITEM #212 07/05/11 - Plot Device: a filmmaker's fondest dream and worst nightmare When an aspiring filmmaker adds a "Plot Device" to his Amazon shopping basket, he doesn't realize that he's just upended his life with a box that transports him from one action scene to another. It's a great, funny, exciting short film, and a clever way t o advertise a low-cost video-effects package. "Plot Device," a nine minute short film directed by Seth Worley, and executive produced by Red Giant's own Aharon Rabinowitz. Aharon and Seth co-wrote the film, working together in close collaboration througho ut the project. Plot Device was created to demonstrate first hand the high caliber work that can be created when using Magic Bullet Suite 11, even on a limited budget. - Full Article Source Plot Device from Red Giant on Vimeo. ITEM #213 07/05/11 - Double Your Smartphone Battery Life Mobile devices today waste a lot of energy searching for a WiFi signal and then staying connected while overtaxed wireless networks ferry data to and from them. SleepWell allows a mobile device to slip into power-saving mode while it is waiting its turn t o connect. This is no small matter, particularly when scores of caffeine-craving technophiles gather at the local Starbucks to take advantage of the free wireless access. Manweiler likens the competition for WiFi to big-city traffic. When workers leave th eir offices en masse at the end of the day, they clog up the roads and rail lines. If these workers staggered the times they left, the transit systems would be less crowded, and it would take less time to get home. Similarly, if mobile devices took their turn accessing WiFi access points, data would move faster and these devices would use less energy. SleepWell is installed on the devices that create a WiFi network infrastructure, including WiFi routers and access points. As such, it is designed so that a ny mobile device—whether it uses Apple OS X, Google Android, Windows or some other platform—can take advantage of it. The sleep periods differ from sleep mode on most laptops that kick in after a few minutes. SleepWell enables is more like power-napping, short sleep periods many times a second. In trials, reports the magazine, battery life was in some cases doubled. - Full Article Source< /font> ITEM #214 07/05/11 - Evolution Machine Accelerates Genetic Engineering "New Scientist has an article about the Evolution Machine — a device which can accelerate directed artificial evolution to discover desirable DNA changes in days rather than years. One of the aims of these researchers is to create an organism that is gene tically immune to all viruses." / For instance, a yeast engineered to churn out the antimalarial drug artemisinin has been hailed as one of the great success stories of synthetic biology. However, it took 150 person-years and cost $25 million to add or tw eak around a dozen genes - and commercial production has yet to begin. The task is so difficult and time-consuming because biological systems are so complex. Even simple traits usually involve networks of many different genes, which can behave in unpredic table ways. Changes often do not have the desired effect, and tweaking one gene after another to get things working can be a very slow and painstaking process. Many biologists think the answer is to try to eliminate the guesswork. They are creating librar ies of ready-made "plug-and-play" components that should behave in a reliable way when put together to create biologicial circuits. But George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, thinks there is a far quicker way: let evolution do al l the hard work for us. Instead of trying to design every aspect of the genetic circuitry involved in a particular trait down to the last DNA letter, his idea is to come up with a relatively rough design, create lots of variants on this design and select the ones that work best. The basic idea is hardly original; various forms of directed evolution are already used to design things as diverse as proteins and boats. Church's group, however, has developed a machine for "evolving" entire organisms - and it w orks at an unprecedented scale and speed. The system has the potential to add, change or switch off thousands of genes at a time - Church calls this "multiplexing" - and it can generate billions of new strains in days. - Full Article Source ITEM #215 07/05/11 - Researchers Track Cell Phones Indoors By Listening In "Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan have developed a technique which aims to extend the reach of mobile phone location tracking. Their free iPhone app, Batphone, extracts a location 'fingerprint' from a short recording o f ambient sound. This software-only approach allows the device to determine its location with high accuracy using its built-in microphone. Unlike prior indoor tracking techniques, Batphone does not rely on the presence of Wi-Fi access points to serve as l andmarks, although these can be used to assist the system when available. They also posted a web game which allows you to test your own ability to recognize rooms by listening. Technical details are in a paper which was presented at the MobiSys conference on Thursday. This is from the same people who brought you laptop sonar." - Full Article Source ITEM #216 07/05/11 - Toyota Scion IQ Electric Car To Launch In 2012 "Toyota officially announced at an annual dealer meeting in Las Vegas that the all-electric Scion iQ will be launched next year in the United States. According to Toyota, Scion iQ can only go 50 miles on a single charge. Because of this, it will be facing tough competition from 73-mile Nissan Leaf and 85-mile Mitsubishi." - Full Article Source ITEM #217 07/05/11 - Is it a star? Is it a thistle? No, it's Scotland's new welcome sign A jewel-encrusted landscape sculpture known as the Star of Caledonia will straddle the Border with England, it was announced yesterday. The bold vision by structural designer Cecil Balmond was declared the winner of the Gretna Landmark Border Crossing ini tiative, which it is hoped will clearly mark the point where the two nations meet. The giant star, featuring rotating spirals glistening in the night sky, will measure 180ft high by 131ft wide. It was hailed by competition judges as an idea that acknowled ged Scotland's scientific heritage. Balmond's work will sit atop a large-scale landform designed by Jencks. Andrew Dixon, chief executive of Creative Scotland and a member of the eight-strong judging panel, said: "Cecil Balmond's outline proposal will com bine artistic vision and engineering to produce a landmark that is rooted in Scotland's scientific contribution to the world. "The project will provide millions of future visitors with an iconic welcome and an ever changing contemporary symbol of a confid ent, creative Scotland." Balmond, whose works include the Arcelor Mittal Orbit tower, the UK's largest public art sculpture, created for the 2012 London Olympics, said the design for the Star of Caledonia aimed to capture the "powerful energy, scientific heritage, and magnetic pull of Scotland", in particular the work of James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist and mathematician noted for his groundbreaking work in electromagnetic theory. "The Star of Caledonia is a welcome," he said. "Its kinetic form and ligh t-paths are a constant trace of Scotland's power of invention." - Full Article Source ITEM #218 07/05/11 - Can the US Still Lead In Space Despite Shuttle's End? "NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden says that the future is bright and promises that one day humans will land on Mars. 'American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we've laid the foundation for success,' the nat ion's space chief said in a speech at the National Press Club. 'When I hear people say that the final shuttle flight marks the end of U.S. human space flight, you all must be living on another planet. We are not ending human space flight. We are recommitt ing ourselves to it.' Bolden says within a year private companies can take over the process of sending cargo shipments into orbit and by 2015 industry can take over astronaut transport, freeing NASA to focus on the long-term goals of reaching beyond Earth 's shadow. 'Do we want to keep repeating ourselves or do we want to look at the big horizon?' says Bolden. 'My generation touched the moon today, NASA, and the nation, wants to touch an asteroid, and eventually send a human to Mars.' A group of former ast ronauts and other critics have blasted the agency and the Obama administration for ending the 30-year-old shuttle program, once the cornerstone of NASA. 'NASA's human spaceflight program is in substantial disarray with no clear-cut mission in the offing. We will have no rockets to carry humans to low-Earth orbit and beyond for an indeterminate number of years,' write Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan. 'After a half-century of remarkable progress, a coherent plan for maintaining America's leadersh ip in space exploration is no longer apparent.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #219 07/05/11 - Finger Length Linked to Penis Size Men: Hold up your right hand. Are your index and ring fingers close to the same size? Congratulations, you're more likely than men with mismatched digits to have a long penis. A smaller ratio between the second and fourth fingers is linked to a longer str etched penis size, researchers report today (July 4) in the Asian Journal of Andrology. The findings go beyond providing a new finger ratio-based pick-up line for men in bars, however; researchers say that a quick look at a man's fingers could reveal his exposure to male hormones in the womb, providing a hint about his risk for hormone-driven diseases like prostate cancer. The idea that men's finger ratio and hormone exposure are linked is not a new one. Studies have found that the ratio between the secon d and fourth finger is related to sperm count, likelihood of heart attack, hand preference, facial masculinity and more. One small 2002 study published in the journal Urology found a correlation between the length of the index finger and genital size in h ealthy men under 40, suggesting that testosterone exposure in the womb affects the growth of both. In the new study, researchers at Gachon University Gil Hospital in South Korea recruited 144 volunteers 20 years of age and older who were going to undergo urological surgery. While the men were under anesthesia, the researchers measured their finger lengths and both their flaccid and stretched penis lengths. Stretched penis length is statistically correlated to the size of the penis when fully erect. [5 Myt hs About the Male Body] - The average flaccid penis length, the researchers found, was 3.0 inches (7.7 centimeters), with a range of 1.6 to 4.7 in. (4 to 12 cm). Stretched lengths ranged from nearly 3.0 to 6.7 in. (7.5 to 17 cm), with an average of 4.6 in . (11.7 cm). The average ratio between the two fingers was 0.38 in. (0.97 cm), with a range of 0.35 to 0.44 in. (0.88 to 1.12 cm), making the differences hard to make out with the unaided eye. But the lower the digit ratio, the study found, the longer the penis was likely to be. - Full Articl e Source ITEM #220 07/05/11 - Kinect-Based AI System Watches What You're Up To "Researchers from Cornell have used AI to create a system based on the Kinect that can recognize what you are doing — cleaning your teeth, cooking, writing on a whiteboard etc. In a smart home it could be used to offer help: 'Would you like some help with that recipe, Dave?' Or it could monitor patients or workers to make sure they are doing what they are told. The study also reveals that there is probably enough information in how activities are performed to recognize an individual — so providing yet mor e biometrics. There are clearly a lot more things that we can teach the Kinect to do with machine learning than just gesture recognition." - Full Article Source ITEM #221 07/05/11 - Magnetic Resonance imaging explains how brain processes jokes Researchers at the unit of cognition and brain sciences from the Medical Research Council used functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe and compare what happens in the brains of normal people when they hear common phrases and funny jokes, includin g puns. In assessing the brains of 12 healthy volunteers, they noted that the reward areas of the brain light up when processing jokes more than when processing normal speech. In the study, the reward reaction increased as the participants would find a jo ke funny. "We found a characteristic pattern of brain activity when the jokes or puns were used," said Matt Davis, coordinator of the study, in a statement. Davis' team, that had their work published on Tuesday (28th) in the Journal of Neuroscience, said it would be possible to use the study to find out if someone in a vegetative state can experience positive emotions - a step that could help relatives to understand the mental state of patients. "We can now use similar methods to get positive emotions in these patients. This is very important for families and friends of patients who want to know if their loved ones still can experience joy and laughter, despite the adversity." - Full Article Source ITEM #222 07/05/11 - Japanese Team Finds New Source of Rare Earth Elements "As reported in the BBC, a Japanese survey team has discovered 'vast' quantities of rare earths in international waters in the Pacific Ocean. The search for alternative sources of these expensive elements (used in common consumer electronics including mob ile phones) was intensified recently after a territory dispute with China, which produces more than 90% of the world's rare earths, resulted in China blocking export to Japan." - Full Article Source ITEM #223 07/05/11 - NASA's Next Mars Rover "In August 2012, the NASA rover Curiosity is scheduled to touch down on the surface of Mars. The size of a small car, it's four times as heavy as predecessors Spirit and Opportunity, and comes with a large robot arm, a laser that can vaporise rocks at sev en meters, a percussive drill and a weather station. Oh, and 4.8kg of plutonium-238. Wired has some high-resolution photographs from lab that is putting the next rover together." Curiosity's destination on Mars has reportedly been chosen: Gale Crater. The 150-kilometer wide depression 'includes a tantalizing 5-kilometer-high mound of ancient sediments, [and] may have once been flooded by water.' The Planetary Society blog has a couple of additional pictures and a time-lapse video of the delicate, lengthy process of preparing the lander for transport. Curiosity will launch near the end of 2011. No cats were harmed during its construction. - Full Article Source ITEM #224 07/02/11 - Fuel-electric hybrid air car wants to take flight, needs funding to do it This brainchild of Trek Aerospace designer Michael Moshier and test-pilot Robert Bulaga employs the same ducted-fan tech the duo used in their DARPA-funded, NASA design-assisted, Popular Science 'Invention of the Year' winning SoloTrek. Like its predecess or, this hybrid air car is ideal for those close-quartered take-off and landing situations thanks to its enclosed propulsion system -- good news for birds, trees and even human heads everywhere. Though still in the design phase, the pair hopes a generous round of funding will propel this 1960s Jetsons promise into a world-class fleet. - Full Article Source ITEM #225 07/02/11 - Directly converting heat-waste into electrical energy. The Pan Charger directly converts heat to electric energy to charge cellphones during emergencies. It has a USB connection with protable phone and is compatible with iPhone, iPod and Sony's Walkman. The USB connection also can power a lantern or radio. Th e thermoelectric module provide 5vdc at about 2Watts with an output current of approximately 400mA. It is equivalent to the energy produced from USB charging. When charging, the green LED is on, when there is a problem the red LED is on. Contact info@tes- ne.com - Full Article Source ITEM #226 07/02/11 - New theory disputes idea that all humans evolved from Africa Homo erectus migrated out of Africa around 1.8million years ago. By around 500,000 years ago it had vanished from Africa and much of Asia and was, until now, thought to have survived in Indonesia until as recently as 35,000 years ago. Early modern humans reached the region about 40,000 years ago, and so were believed to have co-existed with their ancestors. The new research suggests this assumption was wrong - and Homo erectus disappeared long before the arrival of Homo sapiens in Asia. New excavations an d dating analysis indicate that Homo erectus was extinct by at least 143,000 years ago, and perhaps more than 550,000 years ago. If this is the case, it challenges the widely accepted 'Out of Africa' hypothesis which holds that modern humans became fully evolved in Africa before emigrating to other parts of the world. The model predicts an overlap between Homo sapiens and older species they replaced outside Africa. - Full Article Source ITEM #227 07/02/11 - Sun Produces Quite A Bit Of Energy - Full Article Source ITEM #228 07/02/11 - How Greed Destroys America The Washington Post published a lengthy front-page article on June 19, describing the findings of researchers who gained access to economic data from the Internal Revenue Service which revealed which categories of taxpayers were making the high incomes. T o the surprise of some observers, the big bucks were not flowing primarily to athletes or actors or even stock market speculators. America’s new super-rich were mostly corporate chieftains. As the Post’s Peter Whoriskey framed the story, U.S. business und erwent a cultural transformation from the 1970s when chief executives believed more in sharing the wealth than they do today. The article cites a U.S. dairy company CEO from the 1970s, Kenneth J. Douglas, who earned the equivalent of about $1 million a ye ar. He lived comfortably but not ostentatiously. Douglas had an office on the second floor of a milk distribution center, and he turned down raises because he felt it would hurt morale at the plant, Whoriskey reported. However, just a few decades later, G regg L. Engles, the current CEO of the same company, Dean Foods, averages about 10 times what Douglas made. Engles works in a glittering high-rise office building in Dallas; owns a vacation estate in Vail, Colorado; belongs to four golf clubs; and travels in a $10 million corporate jet. He apparently has little concern about what his workers think. “The evolution of executive grandeur – from very comfortable to jet-setting – reflects one of the primary reasons that the gap between those with the highest i ncomes and everyone else is widening,” Whoriskey reported. - Full Article Source ITEM #229 07/02/11 - Driverless Car Law passed in Nevada As we mentioned, among the bill’s requirements is for Nevada’s DMV to set guidelines by which a person obtains an autonomous vehicle driver’s licenses. The seemingly contradictory license is made even more so by the bill’s language: “The driver’s license endorsement…must…recognize the fact that a person is not required to actively drive an autonomous vehicle.” But of course guidelines must be set when operating a vehicle that navigates city streets, stops for pedestrians, etc. I’m guessing these ‘drivers’ won’t actually be allowed to nap on the way to work (at least not yet, but that is the whole point, isn’t it?), and they’re definitely going to have to know where the kill switch is in case of a malfunction. - Full Article Source ITEM #230 07/02/11 - A Guide to Implementing the Theory of Constraints It struck me one day, as I was searching, that even in the largest technical bookshops in some of the largest industrialized cities in the world, such as Tokyo or Singapore, we are hard-pressed to find an aisle for operations. Sure, there is no shortage o f advice on strategy, but there is a very real dearth on the tactics that are needed to put the strategy into place. And, honestly, if we don’t know the tactics, then how on earth can we really know the strategy that goes with the tactics? Strategy and ta ctics are interrelated. I find this very strange, there is no shortage of advice on the thinking/talking part of business, but there is a very apparent shortage on the people and doing part of business. Nevertheless, the information does exist, it is prag matic, and it is very successful. We just need to know where it is, and we just need to know how to make use of it. This website is about the Theory of Constraints – how to substantially improve an organization, any organization, by moving a group of peop le towards a common shared goal. It is an application-based view of Theory of Constraints. The intent is to make much of the available background and practice more readily accessible while presenting it within the broader context of other parts of the gen eral management literature and also my personal experience. - Full Article Source ITEM #231 07/02/11 - Will 'bionic bodies' offer high-tech hope to the disabled? PBS NewsHour has a new piece by Miles O'Brien on the latest in bionics, and how new technologies are extending physical and sensory capacities for people with serious disabilities— and changing lives. - Full Article Source ITEM #232 07/02/11 - Got an APP Idea? If you have a business, you can make your own iPhone or iPad app to lure in customers without any special programming knowledge. There are tools out there that let you select items off a menu. One we like is “Bizness Apps,” $39 a month from BiznessApps.co m. It has features you can add to your app automatically, like GPS “turn by turn” directions to your place of business and coupon discounts when customers check in to your store. We also found “Red Foundry,” which is free if you’re in the $99-a-year Apple developer program, or $39 a month otherwise. - Full Article Source ITEM #233 07/02/11 - Drug Rapamycin reverses 'Accelerated Aging Disease' in human cells Kan Cao, an associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics and colleagues at the University of Maryland, have found that the drug rapamycin can reverse the effects in human cells of the rapid aging disease known as Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome. Rapamycin, an immunosuppressant drug used to prevent rejection of transplanted organs, has already been shown to extend life span in healthy mice. The compound appears to enhance the ability of human cells to prevent the accumulates of proteins that cause cells to lose function over time. - Full Article Source ITEM #234 07/02/11 - Genetically altered pigs can grow human organs Pigs genetically altered so that their organs can be used to replace your aging organs. Researchers show that altering or overexpressing the human programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) molecule in the endothelial cells of pig arteries reduces the conditions that lead to rejection. This strongly suggests that humans could receive altered porcine organs with fewer complications. 'Genetically engineered pigs may someday overcome the severe donor organ shortage, and save human lives,' said Qing Ding, Ph.D., co-study author from the Shanghai Institute of Immunology at the Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine in Shanghai, China. - Full Article Source ITEM #235 07/02/11 - Electric “Bombardment” Treatment Cures Black Eye (Dec, 1936) - Full Article Source ITEM #236 07/02/11 - Yet Another "People Plug In Strange USB Sticks" Story "I'm really getting tired of stories like this: Computer disks and USB sticks were dropped in parking lots of government buildings and private contractors, and 60% of the people who picked them up plugged the devices into office computers... People get US B sticks all the time. The problem isn't that people are idiots... The problem is that the OS trusts random USB sticks." - Full Article Source ITEM #237 07/02/11 - Finally NASA gets a clue SHOTGUN the money "NASA's role as commercial space entrepreneur is going well and the four companies it is funding to build future spacecraft that could take astronauts to and from the International Space Station and other destinations are moving forward. That was the chie f observation in a status report the space agency issued this week entitled 'NASA's return on investment report.' You may recall that in April NASA split $270 million between Boeing ($92 million), Space Exploration Technologies (Space X--$75 million), Sie rra Nevada ($80 million) and Blue Origin ($22 million) to continue development of commercial rockets and spacecraft capable of safely flying astronauts into orbit and to the International Space Station." - Full Article Source ITEM #238 07/02/11 - Cool-Factor Predicted To Spur Energy Conservation "Panelists at a recent technology expo argued about how to motivate people to conserve energy, dragging out all the usual suspects, from financial incentives to emotion appeals to 'save the planet.' However, one panelist trumped the status quo by noting t hat adding the 'cool factor' could make energy conservation fun via apps on smartphones and tablets. By making energy conservation as fun as a video game, the fickle on-again, off-again of human nature might just be overcome." - Full Article Source ITEM #239 07/02/11 - Inkjet Printing Solar Cells "Traditional solar cell production techniques are usually time consuming and require expensive vacuum systems or toxic chemicals. Depositing chemical compounds such as CIGS on a substrate using vapor phase deposition also wastes most of the expensive mate rial in the process. For the first time, engineers at Oregon State University (OSU) have now developed a process to create 'CIGS' solar cells with inkjet printing technology that allows for precise patterning to reduce raw material waste by 90 percent and significantly lower the cost of producing solar cells with promising, yet expensive compounds." - Full Article Source ITEM #240 07/02/11 - Every Ray Harryhausen stop-motion monster ever, in one video "Ray Harryhausen is a stop-motion-animation wizard who is widely regarded as the master of old-school special effects." - Full Article Source ITEM #241 07/02/11 - Irish Judge Orders 13-Year-Old To Surrender Xbox "In Belfast a High Court judge has ordered a 13 year old to surrender his Xbox to the authorities. The boy was charged with a series of robberies and in the bail application the judge asked the boy what he owned that meant a lot to him. The teenager said it was his Xbox games system. The judge told the youth that the surrender of the Xbox would show him what it was like to have something he really valued taken from him." - Full Article Source ITEM #242 07/02/11 - Facebook More Hated Than Banks, Utilities "According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Facebook raises a lot of ire among its customers — more than Bank of America or AT&T Mobility. This bodes ill for the company — as blogger Chris Nerney points out, many of the others on the most-hate d list are utilities and other companies with monopolies, which can hold customers despite bad service. At least Facebook edged out MySpace." - Full Article Source ITEM #243 07/02/11 - The Science of Human-Robot Love "By harnessing a new sphere of science called 'lovotics', Hooman Samani, an artificial intelligence researcher at the Social Robotics Lab at the National University of Singapore, believes it is possible to engineer love between humans and robots. Samani's robots have artificial psychological and biological systems that mimic the human brain and endocrine systems, and use movements, sounds, and lights to show their mood and level of affection for a human." - Full Article Source ITEM #244 07/02/11 - Electronic Skin Gives Robots a Sense of Touch "Providing robots with sensory inputs is one of the keys to the development of more capable and useful machines. Sight and hearing are the most common senses bestowed upon our mechanical friends, but even taste and smell have gotten a look. There have als o been a number of efforts to give robots the sense of touch so they can better navigate and interact with their environments. The latest attempt to create a touchy feely robot comes from the Technical University Munich (TUM) where researchers have produc ed small hexagonal plates, which when joined together, form a sensitive skin." - Full Article Source ITEM #245 07/02/11 - Climate Skeptic Funded By Oil and Coal Companies "'One of the world's most prominent scientific figures to be sceptical about climate change has admitted to being paid more than $1m in the past decade by major US oil and coal companies.' This somewhat contradicts that [Harvard researcher Willie] Soon in a 2003 US senate hearing said that he had 'not knowingly been hired by, nor employed by, nor received grants from any organisation that had taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto protocol or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #246 07/02/11 - Future Actions Predicted From Brain Activity "Bringing the real world into the brain scanner, researchers say they can now determine the action a person was planning, mere moments before that action is actually executed. In the study at the University of Western Ontario, human subjects had their bra in activity scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they performed one of three hand movements. By using the signals from many brain regions, the researchers could predict, better than chance, which of the actions the volunteer wa s merely intending to do, seconds later." - Full Article Source ITEM #247 07/02/11 - Mystery Flash on Mauna Kea Can you help identify this phenomena? The below video shows a flash of currently unknown origin observed at Mauna Kea Observatory the morning of 2011 March 22. - My name is Ichi Tanaka, a Support Astrnomer of Subuaru Telescope, Hawaii. On the early mornin g of 22 March we, Subaru Telescope observers on the summit of Mauna Kea, noticed that there is a huge halo of light above the eastern horizon. It was slowly expanding to over 45 degrees in 5 minutes or more. The event was captured by the Subaru Catwalk Ni ght Camera and also by CHFT's NNW webcam. The animated gif movie of the Subaru webcam is attached. I also contacted Kanoa Withington in CFHT, and they made a quite nice movie of the event. http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/~kanoa/ball/event.mp4 We have absolutel y no idea about the nature of this. It appears that the event happened not on the Summit area, but much farther away, according to the comparison of the two videos. This means that the size of the light halo is quite large. After some discussion, we decid ed to send this to APOD, in the hopes that APOD readers can help us to understand the nature of this event. - Full Article Source ITEM #248 07/02/11 - Solar Impulse Airplane Makes Public Debut In Paris "The Solar Impulse airplane made its debut at the Paris Air Show with a 20 minute public voyage powered by nothing but solar cells, with 12,000 cells on the wings powering 4 10-horsepower motors." / The Solar Impulse proved itself with last summer when it conducted a 26 hour, 10 minute, 19 second flight over Switzerland. Since then it has also flown between Geneva and Zurich in commercial airspace. Read more: Solar Impulse Airplane Makes Public Debut at Paris Air Show | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World - Full Article Source ITEM #249 07/02/11 - Time To Close the Security Theater "An editorial at Forbes calls for the dismantling of the TSA, pointing to recent headlines as the latest examples of 'security theater' at its worst. From the article: 'The problem isn't that the TSA is harassing the wrong people. The problem is that the TSA is harassing anyone. The TSA is encroaching on fundamental liberties and providing no discernable benefit. ... Naturally, the TSA responds to incidents like these by saying that the agents are highly trained and that they have followed proper procedur e. This indicates a signal failing for the agency: if "doing it by the book" involves touching people in ways that would be considered sexual assault in virtually any other context or telling a 90-year old breast cancer survivor to remove her bra lest it contain explosives (as happened to a friend's grandmother), then the book needs to be shredded and rewritten. Better yet, it needs to be replaced with a competitive market for air travel in which the airports, the airways, and the airliners are in private hands. Some might object that private firms will have incentives to cut corners on safety. It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out.'" - Full Article Source ITEM #250 07/02/11 - Court on Video Games: Less Cleavage, More Carnage On Monday we discussed news of a Supreme Court ruling which held that violent video games deserved free speech protection under the First Amendment. Now, frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with this followup that questions the Court's c onsistency in such matters. "I'm glad the Supreme Court struck down the California law against selling violent video games to minors, but reading over the decision, I had the odd feeling that the arguments by the dissenters made more sense than the majori ty — mainly because of the hypocrisy of continuing to ban sexuality while giving violence a pass." - Full Article Source ITEM #251 07/02/11 - U.S. cost of war at least $3.7 trillion and counting When bama cited cost as a reason to bring troops home from Afghanistan, he referred to a $1 trillion price tag for America's wars. Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released on Wednesday. The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project "Costs of War" by Brown Universit y's Watson Institute for International Studies. In the 10 years since U.S. troops went into Afghanistan to root out the al Qaeda leaders behind the September 11, 2001, attacks, spending on the conflicts totaled $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion. And there's more money to be spent: Those numbers will continue to soar when considering often overlooked costs such as long-term obligations to wounded veterans and projected war spending from 2012 through 2020. The estimates do not include at least $1 trillion more in interest payments coming due and many billions more in expenses that cannot be counted, according to the study. And how people have been killed? In human terms, 224,000 to 258,000 people have died directly from warfare, including 125,000 civilians in Iraq. Many more have died indirectly, from the loss of clean drinking water, healthcare, and nutrition. An additi onal 365,000 have been wounded and 7.8 million people -- equal to the combined population of Connecticut and Kentucky -- have been displaced. For every person killed on September 11, another 73 have been killed since. So does that means we're winning? - Full Article Source ITEM #252 07/02/11 - Magnetic Nanoparticles Fry Tumors "In a new study, a team found that injecting mice with tiny magnets and cranking up the heat eliminated tumors from the animals' bodies with no apparent side effects. The nanoparticles heat up when a magnetic field is applied, and because they are only in jected into tumors, only cancerous cells get fried. Researchers hope the technique, known as magnetic hyperthermia, could be used in cancer patients, obviating the need for chemotherapy and radiation." - Full Article Source ITEM #253 07/02/11 - Airplanes Cause Accidental Cloud Seeding "A new study by a team of U.S. researchers found that commercial and private jetliners may be contributing to a form of accidental cloud seeding. When an airplane flies through a cloud, its propellers cause the expansion and cooling of the air behind them which can cause water droplets to spontaneously cool and crystals to form. The aircraft sets off a chain reaction in the cloud that can continue on for hours after the plane has passed by. The researchers also discovered that this phenomenon is more comm on near the poles, where many of Earth's weather monitoring systems are, and it could be skewing data that research teams are gathering in those areas." - Full Article Source ITEM #254 07/02/11 - DVD - the Physics of Crystals, Pyramids and Tetrahedrons This is a wonderful duel DVD set lasting 2 hours and which presents one man's lifelong study of pyramids, crystals and their effects. Several of his ori ginal and very creative experiments are explained and diagramed out for experimenters. These experiments include; 1) transmutation of zinc to lower elements using a tetrahedron, 2) energy extraction from a pyramid, 3) determining mathematic ratios of nature in a simple experiment, 4) accelerating the growth of food, 5) increasing the abundance of food, 6) how crystals amplify, focus and defocus energy, 7) using crystals to assist natural healing, 8) how the universe uses spirals and vortexes to produce free energy and MORE... - Two DVDs - More Info and check out this Youtube Clip ITEM #255 07/02/11 - KeelyNet BBS Files w/bonus PDF of 'Keely and his Discoveries' Finally, I've gotten around to compiling all the files (almost 1,000 - about 20MB and lots of work doing it) from the original KeelyNet BBS into a form you can easily navigate and read using your browser, ideally Firefox but it does work with IE. Most of these files are extremely targeted, interesting and informative, I had forgotten just how much but now you can have the complete organized, categorized set, not just sprinklings from around the web. They will keep you reading for weeks if not longer and g ive you clues and insights into many subjects and new ideas for investigation and research. IN ADDITION, I am including as a bonus gift, the book (in PDF form) that started it all for me, 'Keely and his Discoveries - Aerial Navigation' which includes the analysis of Keely's discoveries by Dr. Daniel G. Brinton. This 407 page eBook alone is worth the price of the KeelyNet BBS CD but it will give you some degree of understanding about what all Keely accomplished which is just now being rediscovered, but of course, without recognizing Keely as the original discoverer. Chapters include; Vibratory Sympathetic and Polar Flows, Vibratory Physics, Latent Force in Interstitial Spaces and much more. To give some idea of how Keely's discoveries are being slowly redi scovered in modern times, check out this Keely History. These two excellent bodies of information will be sent to you on CD. If alternative science intrigues and fascinates you, this CD is what you've been looking for... - More Info ITEM #256 07/02/11 - 'The Evolution of Matter' and 'The Evolution of Forces' on CD Years ago, I had been told by several people, that the US government frequently removes books they deem dangerous or 'sensitive' from libraries. Some are replaced with sections removed or rewritten so as to 'contain' information that should not be availab le to the public despite the authors intent. A key example was during the Manhattan Project when the US was trying to finalize research into atomic bombs. They removed any books that dealt with the subject and two of them were by Dr. Gustave Le Bon since they dealt with both energy and matter including radioactivity. I had been looking for these two books for many years and fortunately stumbled across two copies for which I paid about $40.00 each. I couldn't put down the books once I started reading them. Such a wealth of original discoveries, many not known or remembered today. / Page 88 - Without the ether there could be neither gravity, nor light, nor electricity, nor heat, nor anything, in a word, of which we have knowledge. The universe would be sile nt and dead, or would reveal itself in a form which we cannot even foresee. If one could construct a glass chamber from which the ether were to be entirely eliminated, heat and light could not pass through it. It would be absolutely dark, and probably gra vitation would no longer act on the bodies within it. They would then have lost their weight. / Page 96-97 - A material vortex may be formed by any fluid, liquid or gaseous, turning round an axis, and by the fact of its rotation it describes spirals. The study of these vortices has been the object of important researches by different scholars, notably by Bjerkness and Weyher. They have shown that by them can be produced all the attractions and repulsions recognized in electricity, the deviations of the ma gnetic needle by currents, etc. These vortices are produced by the rapid rotation of a central rod furnished with pallets, or, more simply, of a sphere. Round this sphere gaseous currents are established, dissymetrical with regard to its equatorial plane, and the result is the attraction or repulsion of bodies brought near to it, according to the position given to them. It is even possible, as Weyher has proved, to compel these bodies to turn round the sphere as do the satellites of a planet without touch ing it. / Page 149 - "The problem of sending a pencil of parallel Hertzian waves to a distance possesses more than a theoretical interest. It is allowable to say that its solution would change the course of our civilization by rendering war impossible. Th e first physicist who realizes this discovery will be able to avail himself of the presence of an enemy's ironclads gathered together in a harbour to blow them up in a few minutes, from a distance of several kilometres, simply by directing on them a sheaf of electric radiations. On reaching the metal wires with which these vessels are nowadays honeycombed, this will excite an atmosphere of sparks which will at once explode the shells and torpedoes stored in their holds. With the same reflector, giving a p encil of parallel radiations, it would not be much more difficult to cause the explosion of the stores of powder and shells contained in a fortress, or in the artillery sparks of an army corps, and finally the metal cartridges of the soldiers. Science, wh ich at first rendered wars so deadly, would then at length have rendered them impossible, and the relations between nations would have to be established on new bases." - More Info ITEM #257 07/02/11 - High Voltage & Free Energy Devices Handbook This wonderfully informative ebook provides many simple experiments you can do, including hydrogen generation and electrostatic repulsion as well as the keys to EV Gray's Fuelless Engine. One of the most comprehensive compilations of information yet detai ling the effects of high voltage repulsion as a driving force. Ed Gray's engine produced in excess of 300HP and he claimed to be able to 'split the positive' energy of electricity to produce a self-running motor/generator for use as an engine. Schematics and tons of photos of the original machines and more! Excellent gift for your technical friends or for that budding scientist! If you are an experimenter or know someone who investigates such matters, this would make an excellent addition to your library or as an unforgettable gift. The downloadable HVFE eBook pdf file is almost 11MB in size and contains many experiments, photos, diagrams and technical details. Buy a copy and learn all about hydrogen generation, its uses and how to produce electrostatic repulsion. - 121 pages - More Info ITEM #258 07/02/11 - Hypnosis CD - 3 eBooks with How To Techniques and Many Cases If you have a few minutes, you might want to read my page on hypnosis and all the amazing things associated with its application. Included is an experience I had when I hypnotized a neighbor kid when I was about 14. As well the hypnotic gaze of snakes, th e discovery of 'eyebeams' which can be detected electronically, the Italian Hypnotist Robber who was caught on tape with his eyes glowing as cashiers handed over their money and remembered nothing, glamour and clouding the mind of others, several methods of trance induction and many odd cases, animal catatonia, healing, psychic phenomena, party/stage stunts, including my favorite of negative hallucination where you make your subject NOT see something...much more...if nothing else, its might be a hoot to read. - More Info ITEM #259 07/02/11 - 14 Ways to Save Money on Fuel Costs This eBook is the result of years of research into various methods to increase mileage, reduce pollution and most importantly, reduce overall fuel costs. I t starts out with the simplest methods and offers progressively more detailed technologies that have been shown to reduce fuel costs. As a bonus to readers, I have salted the pages with free interesting BONUS items that correlate to the relevant page. Jus t filling up with one tank of gas using this or other methods explained here will pay for this eBook. Of course, many more methods are out there but I provided only the ones which I think are practical and can be studied by the average person who is looki ng for a way to immediately reduce their fuel costs. I am currently using two of the easier methods in my own vehicle which normally gets 18-22 mpg and now gets between 28 and 32 mpg depending on driving conditions. A tank of gas for my 1996 Ford Ranger c osts about $45.00 here so I am saving around $15-$20 PER TANK, without hurting my engine and with 'greener' emissions due to a cleaner burn! The techniques provided in this ebook begin with simple things you can do NOW to improve your mileage and lower your gas costs. - eBook Download / More Info ITEM #260 07/02/11 - Shape Power Dan Davidson's analysis of the mysterious pyramid energies, Keely's aether force, Reich's orgone energy, Schauberger's diamagnetic energy, plus a host of others, and shows how shape and materials interact with the universal aether to modify the aether into electromagnetic, gravitic, and various healing energies... - More Info and check out this Shape Power Youtube ITEM #261 07/02/11 - The Physics of the Primary State of Matter The Physics of the Primary State of Matter - published in the 1930s, Karl Schappeller described his Prime Mover, a 10-inch steel sphere with quarter-inch copper tubing coils. These were filled with a material not named specifically, but which is said to have hardened under the influence of direct current and a magnetic field [electro-rheological fluid]. With such polarization, it might be guessed to act like a dielectric capacitor and as a diode... - More Info ITEM #262 07/02/11 - $5 Alt Science MP3s to listen while working/driving/jogging No time to sit back and watch videos? Here are 15 interesting presentations you can download for just $5 each and listen to while driving, working, jogging, etc. An easy way to learn some fascinating new things that you will find of use. Easy, cheap and simple, better than eBooks or Videos. Roughly 50MB per MP3. - More Info ITEM #263 07/02/11 - 15 New Alternative Science DVDs & 15 MP3s An assortment of alternative science videos that provide many insights and inside information from various experimenters. Also MP3s extracted from these DVDs that you can listen to while working or driving. Reference links for these lectures and workshops by Bill Beaty of Amateur Science on the Dark Side of Amateur Science, Peter Lindemann on the World of Free Energy, Norman Wootan on the History of the EV Gray motor, Dan Davidson on Shape Power and Gravity Wave Phenomena, Lee Crock on a Method for Stimulating Energy, Doug Konzen on the Konzen Pulse Motor, George Wiseman on the Water Torch and Jerry Decker on Aether, ZPE and Dielectric Nano Arrays. Your purchase of these products helps support KeelyNet, thanks! - More Info Six Ways to Support Keelynet

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