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March 2008 Plenum News 2008 (enhanced) Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 2007 (enhanced) Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 2006 (enhanced) Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 2005 (enhanced) Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Entire Year (minimal, early formats) 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 You can write Comments or read the KeelyNet discussion list. Feel free to subscribe. 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. 03/30/08 - California cuts future quotas for clean-air cars by 75% California's influential Air Resources Board on Thursday cut by 70 percent the number of electric cars and other zero-emission vehicles automakers will be required to sell in coming years, in a strong signal that technology has lagged hopes in the largest U.S. auto market. - Source 03/30/08 - US vs Europe car efficiencies In 2004 domestic cars had a better average gas mileage than foreign cars, or that over the past four years, foreign cars have gained 12% in gas mileage while American cars have eked out a measly 3% gain. - Source 03/30/08 - Electroshocking plants brings chemical rewards The roots of garden pea plants were exposed to low-level electric current and subsequently produced 13 times more pisatin, an antifungal chemical, than plants that were not exposed to electricity. To shock the plants, Cuello applied a 30 to 100 milliamp current to the growth-medium of plants grown hydroponically, or, in the case of barrel medic, to the solution surrounding the cell cultures. Other compounds that have been tested to stress plant cells include heavy metals, chemicals such as methyl jasmonate and sodium acetate, and the cell walls of microorganisms. But these methods have drawbacks: introduced metals and chemical compounds can taint desired plant chemicals and microbe preparation and introduction can be costly and time consuming. "I thought about electricity because you can optimise the magnitude and exposure time of the current," says Cuello, adding that the current he and colleagues used wouldn't be enough to electrocute a human and doesn't burn the plant's cells. "You just introduce two electrodes and you can turn it on and off, it's that convenient," he says. - Source 03/30/08 - Run Old-School DOS Games with DOSBox Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): Do you harbor nostalgia-tinged memories of autoexec.bat files? Does the phrase "Soundblaster-compatible" mean anything to you? Dig out those floppies and try out DOSBox, a free, open-source DOS emulator for all platforms. The app supports at least 3,000 games, and likely many more, as it can recreate most graphics and sound setups, and lets you set your own processor speed to prevent the warp-speed effect games often suffer on modern systems. DOSBox is a free download for Window, Mac, Linux, and other platforms. (via lifehacker.com) - Source 03/30/08 - Future Days may have 25 hours due to Earth’s decelerating rotation Days are gradually growing longer. To the layman this means that in the northern hemisphere days are longer in summer than they are in winter. But geoscientists interpret this phrase as follows: they found that days grow longer not only in spring time. The reason for that is the Moon, first and foremost. Its gravity creates permanent waves in oceans and in Earth’s depths. Thus our planet seems to waver, the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung wrote. Earth resembles a rotating figure skater. To slow rotations down, a figure skater stretches his or her arms out. That is why in the far future there will be 25 hours in a day. A British astronomer managed to prove that Earth’s rotation has been slowing down since 700 B.C. When prehistoric proto-animals inhabited Earth 530 million years ago, there were 21 hours in a day. For dinosaurs who lived 100 million years ago days alternated each other every 23 hours. About 530 million years ago Earth rotated on its axis faster than it does today, but it rotated about the sun at a steady speed. At that time the year had the same amount of hours as it has today, but there were 420 days in it. / (A Martian day is almost 25 hours long (24 hours plus 39.5 minutes) and after all, that's where we came from... So will this change gravitation and the 'flow' of time on Earth? - JWD) - Source 03/30/08 - Farm Lobby Beats Back With grain prices soaring, farm income at record highs and the federal budget deficit widening, the subsidies and handouts given to American farmers would seem vulnerable to a serious pruning. But it appears that farmers, at least so far, have succeeded in stopping the strongest effort in years to shrink the government safety net that doles out billions of dollars to them each year. At some point, you have to step back and ask, 'Does this make sense for the American taxpayer?'" says Rep. Ron Kind. The Democrat from Wisconsin sponsored a measure that would have slashed about $10 billion over five years in subsidies -- and saw it get crushed on the House floor. Stories like this showcase the sheer lunacy of our political system - you don't know whether to laugh or cry at the inaneness. A sensible system would have some levers in place - i.e. when crop prices hit so and so level, we know times are tight and the subsidies would hit; but when crop prices rise above so and so level, they go away. But that would be common sense which we have no place for in legislation. And don't forget our tariffs on foreign sugar ethanol - can't have any of that seeping into the system. If most of this money went to the every man small farmer, that would be one thing but all the pieces I have read on the subject show that 90% of the benefits accrue to ...whom else... the corporate (largest 10%) farmer. - Source 03/30/08 - Regular-looking people need not apply Would you attend a casting call looking for "inbred types"? What if a film asked for "deformed" or "unusual" people? Does that describe you? Would you still show up if you read that "regular-looking" people need not apply? On Feb. 26, Pittsburgh-based casting director Donna Belajac was fired from the production of Shelter, a supernatural horror thriller starring Julianne Moore and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, after her casting call for background actors was deemed offensive by the film's producers and others. The casting notice, published in a news release and posted on Donna Belajac Casting's website, asked for "men and women of all races, 18 or older...including an albino-like girl and deformed people -- to depict West Virginia mountain people." The notice sought "unusual body shapes, even physical abnormalities as long as there is normal mobility.... 'Regular-looking' children should not attend this open call." - Source 03/30/08 - Mounting evidence shows red wine antioxidant kills cancer Rochester researchers showed for the first time that a natural antioxidant found in grape skins and red wine can help destroy pancreatic cancer cells by reaching to the cell's core energy source, or mitochondria, and crippling its function. The study is published in the March edition of the journal, Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology. The study also showed that when the pancreatic cancer cells were doubly assaulted -- pre-treated with the antioxidant, resveratrol, and irradiated -- the combination induced a type of cell death called apoptosis, an important goal of cancer therapy. - Source 03/30/08 - The Bum Bot Hollywood might have had RoboCop, but the real world now has a robot more attuned to the prosaic realities of the street. The Bum Bot. That is what Rufus Terrill calls the rolling, remote-controlled invention he uses to flush out the prostitutes and pushers who gather near his Atlanta bar, which is two blocks from the city's largest and most controversial homeless shelter. The Bum Bot, like the homeless people it polices, is a creature of hand-me-downs. The wheels are from one of those scooters for the elderly; the PA system is a walkie-talkie wired to a home-alarm speaker. The rotating turret is an old Cajun meat smoker. The cylindrical smoker gives the Bum Bot its R2D2-ish profile. But its black armor - made of exercise mats - and the stenciled letters spelling out SECURITY lend it a menacing air. Using a twin-joystick remote, Terrill usually sends his robot up the street to the parking lot of a day care center, where a sketchy, drug-dealing crowd congregates after dark. The police sometimes round them up, Terrill says, but soon, it seems, they are back on the street. So Terrill speaks to them through the Bum Bot, transmitting his voice via walkie-talkie: Move along, he tells the loiterers, or get wet. Sometimes he tells them he is capturing them on video - the Bum Bot's camera feeds into a big-screen television back at his pub, giving patrons a hyperlocal dose of reality TV. The street people tend to run away. "It scares the bejesus out of 'em," Terrill said, smiling. - Source 03/30/08 - Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users. The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security. "We are seeing people affected," says Ken Lowenberg, senior director of web and print publishing at the Epilepsy Foundation. "It's fortunately only a handful. It's possible that people are just not reporting yet -- people affected by it may not be coming back to the forum so fast." The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs. - Source 03/30/08 - Moon offered as final resting place THE moon could become a final resting place for some people, thanks to a commercial service that hopes to send human ashes to the lunar surface on robotic landers. Celestis inc, a company that pioneered the sending of cremated remains into suborbital space on rockets, said it would start a service to the surface of the moon that could begin as early as next year. The cost starts at $US10,000 ($10,100) for a small quantity of ashes from one person. "For many people, it would be a romantic notion to look up into the sky and see the moon and know that your mom or dad or loved one is up there memorialized." In the past 11 years, Celestis Inc, a unit of Houston-based Space Services Incorporated, has sent the ashes of hundreds of people from 14 nations into space, including US astronaut Gordon Cooper and Star Trek actor James Doohan, who played chief engineer Scotty in the popular TV series. - Source 03/30/08 - Firing photons makes advance in space communication For the first time, physicists have been able to identify individual returning photons after firing and reflecting them off of a space satellite in orbit almost 1,500 kilometres above the earth. The experiment has proven the possibility of constructing a quantum channel between Space and Earth. Until now, quantum-encrypted communication has only been proven possible at distances up to about 150 kilometres, either down optical fibres or via telescopes. When sent down optical fibres, photons are dissipated due to scattering and adsorption and, when using telescopes, photons are subject to interfering atmospheric conditions. - Source 03/30/08 - Piracy funding Terror Attorney General Michael Mukasey warned Friday that the huge profits generated from piracy and counterfeiting are increasingly flowing into the coffers of terrorist groups. Mukasey said the economy and national security of the United States are increasingly threatened by violations involving copyrighted software code, patented inventions and trademarked properties. Terror groups are taking their cues from organized crime and increasingly funding their operations from counterfeiting and piracy, he said. - Source 03/30/08 - Trash Today, Ethanol Tomorrow University of Maryland research that started with bacteria from the Chesapeake Bay has led to a process that may be able to convert large volumes of all kinds of plant products, from leftover brewer's mash to paper trash, into ethanol and other biofuel alternatives to gasoline. The Zymetis process can make ethanol and other biofuels from many different types of cellulosic sources including plants and plant waste. Cellulosic biofuels can be made from non-grain plant sources such as waste paper, brewing byproducts, leftover agriculture products, including straw, corncobs and husks, and energy crops such as switchgrass. When fully operational, the Zymetis process has the potential to lead to the production of 75 billion gallons a year of carbon-neutral ethanol. The secret to the Zymetis process is a Chesapeake Bay marsh grass bacterium. Hutcheson found that the bacterium has an enzyme that could quickly break down plant materials into sugar, which can then be converted to biofuel. - Source 03/28/08 - Lloyd's cool water-saving invention runs hot A DARLING Downs resident has invented a valve that stops the average household losing 16,000 litres (4,227 gallons) of water down the drain. Lloyd Linson-Smith's Enviro Save device diverts and saves cold water that flows from domestic taps before hot water arrives. The $198 valve can be fitted to plumbing systems in new homes or retro fitted to older style houses for $475. Inventor Linson-Smith says, "I came up with the idea of a brass valve that is installed in the hot water pipeline just before the kitchen sink." "The cold water ahead of the arrival of the hot water is identified by a thermal element and bypasses the sink. "The tap handle is the trigger for a process where potable cold water is returned to tanks." Retro fitting was more expensive because it also required a tank and a pressure-reducing valve to save the cold water, which was fed back into the distribution system. But Mr Linson-Smith said: "When a three-person house can save 40 litres a day or 16,000 litres a year it does not take long to get the investment back. / Check out the Enviro Save website where you can buy your own. - Source 03/28/08 - Suzuki set to be first with production fuel cell motorcycle Suzuki and British firm Intelligent Energy have announced an extension of their agreement to develop hydrogen fuel-cell motorcycles with the intention of creating a production-ready hydrogen-powered bike in the near future. The colaboration between the two firms bore fruit last autumn with the showing of the Suzuki Crosscage motorcycle, a hydrogen fuel-cell powered concept bike with similar performance to a 125cc machine. Hydrogen power means the only emission from the Crosscage is pure water. - Source 03/28/08 - Bulging Dementia Bad news for those with bulging bellies: fat that builds up around the waist during middle age may cause dementia decades later, say researchers who examined the health records of thousands of senior citizens... Incidence of dementia increased steadily with the amount of belly fat, such that the 20% with the most belly fat were over two and half times more likely to develop dementia that those carrying the least. Levels of total fat also seemed to increase dementia risk, but not by the same magnitude. - Source 03/28/08 - The Web's best free stuff We surfed, clicked, and installed to find sparkling free gems capable of planning your time, keeping you in touch, and tuning and securing your PC, not to mention glitzing up your desktop, helping you stay productive, and entertaining you with music, videos, photos, and games. We paid special attention to programs and services you may not have heard of before. We also singled out two free offerings--one download and one online service --as the best of the bunch. - Source 03/28/08 - Japanese Gravestones Let the Living 'Call' the Dead A Japanese gravestone maker called Ishinokoe (Voice of the Stone) plans to sell GRAVESTONES WITH BARCODES embedded in them. Anyone with the right kind of cell phone can simply scan or snap a picture of the stone, and get information on the departed. The barcodes will be QR codes, otherwise known as "matrix codes" or two-dimensional bar codes. - Source 03/28/08 - Large Hadron Collider Sparks 'Doomsday' Lawsuit "In what can only be considered a bizarre court case, a former nuclear safety officer and others are suing the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to stop the use of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) until its safety is reassessed. The plaintiffs cite three possible 'doomsday' scenarios which might occur if the LHC becomes operational: the creation of microscopic black holes which would grow and swallow matter, the creation of strangelets which, if they touch other matter, would convert that matter into strangelets or the creation of magnetic monopoles which could start a chain reaction and convert atoms to other forms of matter. CERN will hold a public open house meeting on April 6 with word having been spread to some researchers to be prepared to answer questions on microscopic black holes and strangelets if asked." - Source 03/28/08 - PedalPub It's the size of a minivan and weighs more than a ton (empty). Maximum speed: 6 mph. It's also passenger-powered. The PedalPub carries 16 passengers, plus the driver. There are 5 pedaling seats, on each side, plus one non-pedaling seat over the rear wheels. There is also a bench in the back of the PedalPub that seats three, plus one standee spot in the middle for the "bartender". The PedalPub offers tours of different Twin Cities neighborhoods -- mostly bar tours, of course. - Source 03/28/08 - Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison "The New York Times is reporting that sound recordings pre-dating Edison's made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer, were discovered by American audio historians at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. The archives are on paper and were meant for recording but not playback. Researchers used a high quality scan of the recording and an electronic needle to play back the sounds recorded 150 years ago. 'For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words "Mary had a little lamb" on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison's invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.'" - Source 03/28/08 - How to Think In a class called "How to Think," the focus would be on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules, which I sometimes share with students. 1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. 2. Learn how to learn (rapidly). 3. Work backward from your goal. 4. Always have a long-term plan. 5. Make contingency maps. 6. Collaborate. 7. Make your mistakes quickly. 8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols. 9. Document everything obsessively. 10. Keep it simple. - Source 03/28/08 - Purple-shaded glasses to spot garden trouble in advance The lenses block out the green reflected by chlorophyll in the healthy areas of your lawn and garden, causing those areas to show as black or gray. Any unhealthy spots, deficient in chlorophyll, will show up as pink, red or coral colors. It's the plant equivalent of full-body MRIs that detect problems before their symptoms surface. - Source 03/28/08 - Phisick Antique Medical Collection [The Phisick Antique Medical Collection] started out as a handful of items which were used for display and teaching purposes in a London based general practice. Acquired from auction houses, antique fairs and bric-a-brac shops in the UK, Europe and America, and as far afield as Asia and the Australias. It seemed a shame to have these rare and beautifully crafted antiques locked away out of sight - hence the birth of the 'Phisick' website. The number of pieces has grown over time and the process of cataloguing and developing the collection has become a true labour of love. - Source 03/28/08 - Too Much Information? Study Shows How Ignorance Can Be Influential. Southern California researchers provide a challenge to the classic economic model of information manipulation, in which knowing more than anybody else is the key to influence. Instead, economists Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo present a situation -- commonly observed in real life -- in which all parties have access to the same information, but one party still manages to control public opinion. For example, a pharmaceutical company such as Merck may be obliged to make public the findings of all studies related to a new drug. Preliminary trials may indicate no short-term side effects, and the company may elect not to perform follow-up trials before releasing the drug on the market. - Source 03/28/08 - Real Electric Car Featured in Star Trek Movie The Aptera is a unique 3-wheel, multiple-passenger vehicle with a composite safety cage (like those in Formula 1 cars); the two wheels in the front, one in the back, design reduces roll-over. The car has traction control and the production models will be able to exceed 85 miles per hour. The price? About $26,000. The new Star Trek will tell the story of the young James T. Kirk and his companions at Star Fleet Academy. Apparently, they will be tooling around the campus on the ghostly silent Aptera electric vehicle (see photo). In his prophetic 1894 story A Journey in Other Worlds, John Jacob Astor referred to amazing vehicles that would silently carry passengers to their destination. All that was required was a source of power: Another change that came in with a rush upon the discovery of a battery with insignificant weight, compact form, and great capacity, was the substitution of electricity for animal power for the movement of all vehicles. This, of necessity brought in good roads, the results obtainable on such being so much greater than on bad ones that a universal demand for them arose. This was in a sense cumulative, since the better the streets and roads became, the greater the inducement to have an electric carriage. (An annotated ebook of - Source 03/28/08 - No bait! Fish may respond to sound Scientists are testing a plan to train fish to catch themselves by swimming into a net when they hear a tone that signals feeding time. If it works, the system could eventually allow black sea bass to be released into the open ocean, where they would grow to market size, then swim into an underwater cage to be harvested when they hear the signal. Previous experiments have used sound to train a fish to feed - similar to what Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov did in his famous dogs that salivated at the sound of a bell, expecting food. In Japan, scientists have used sound to keep newly released farmed fish in certain areas, where they could be caught in traditional ways. But no one has ever tried to get fish to leave and return to an enclosure where they can be scooped up. Simon Miner, a research assistant at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood's Hole, said the first objective was to see if the fish could truly be trained. He got his answer after keeping the fish in a circular tank, then sounding a tone before he dropped food in an enclosed "feeding zone" within the tank that the fish could enter only through a small opening. Researchers played the tone for 20 seconds, three times a day, for about two weeks. Afterward, whenever the tone sounded, "you have remote-control fish," Miner said. "You hit that button, and they go into that area, and they wait patiently," he said. Some fish forgot after five days. Others remembered as long as 10. Miner said the strength of memory seems tied to how long the fish are trained. - Source 03/26/08 - Is Industrial Civilization a Pyramid Scheme? The fossil fuels of the planet are a capital stock: they represent past solar income the planet received in its 4 billion year history, which wasn't consumed at the time, but was locked away as fossil energy. (Some geologists believe that the vast quantities of oil and coal that we received as our endowment was made from sunlight that was turned into biomass before herbivores evolved to eat it.) We're drawing down our capital stock and treating the inflow of money as income. Does this make our economy a pyramid scheme? Consider: anyone who offers you interest in exchange for a loan of money is betting that the economy will grow. (I borrow the price of a gallon of milk today, and promise to pay you a gallon and a pint next year. Multiply by billions: the economy has got to grow, has got to produce a gallon-and-a-pint next year for every gallon it produced this year, or someone is going to be left holding worthless claims.) We've built a system that has to grow or it will crash; and like Ponzi's pyramid scheme, we've built a system that cannot grow forever, and so it must crash. - Source 03/26/08 - Wind Powers 40% Of Spain Wind power is breaking new records in Spain, accounting for just over 40 percent of all electricity consumed during a brief period last weekend. As heavy winds lashed Spain on Saturday evening wind parks generated 9,862 megawatts of power which translated to 40.8 percent of total consumption. Between Friday and Sunday wind power accounted for an average of 28 percent of all electricity demand in Spain. Spain’s wind power generation equaled that of hydropower for the first time in 2007. - Source 03/26/08 - U.S. must develop its own energy sources Oil and gas prices continue to rise, driving up the costs of all goods in the U.S. OPEC refuses to increase supply, driving costs constantly higher. We must develop additional energy sources within the U.S., including ethanol, biodiesel, solar energy and wind and water power. We must produce our own energy and stop importing oil, while reducing fuel consumption, especially in vehicles. Our economy will benefit from new jobs created in renewable energy industries. We will reduce the danger of energy price exploitation from abroad. An oil embargo would ruin our economy. - Source 03/26/08 - B.C. herbalist makes hair-raising discovery Dirk Stass, who concocts herbal teas and remedies from native plants, is preparing for clinical trials on what many consider the cosmetic industry's Holy Grail. In a recent interview with CBC News, the Cherryville man said a friend had been ribbing him about his bald spot. As a joke, Stass said, he rubbed a herbal healing tea into his scalp. "A month and a half, maybe two months later, my then fiancée told me, 'Uh, honey, your shiny spot isn't so shiny anymore,' " Stass said. Since then, Stass has tried out the formula on balding friends and family members. The results have been so impressive, he's applied for a patent. "I stumbled across a recipe that rejuvenates the epidermis, and therefore cleanses the hair follicles, and therefore regrows hair - to a degree," Stass said. The tonic won't turn a bald man into a human Chia Pet, Stass said. Testing with friends and family has shown some hair growth, but the tonic seems more effective at stopping hair loss. - Source 03/26/08 - Over the Counter Home DNA Paternity Test After home pregnancy kits revolutionized stick peeing from an office to a home affair, the door was opened to the general public performing previously lab-only work on their own toilets. Identigene and Rite Aid have taken it one step further, allowing you to tell whether or not that kid is yours with a simple $29.99 kit (plus $119 lab fee) that includes three mouth-rubbing swabs. Results are obtained in the longest three to five business days you’ve ever experienced, but if you want a result that’s actually “court admissible”, you’ll have to pay an another additional fee. - Source 03/26/08 - Contraceptive Pill Also Used to Help Women Conceive Researchers have found that using birth control pills, for 10-14 days after a period, allows the treatment to be adjusted without compromising the “ovarian response to stimulation.” This way, egg-harvesting can fall on a date mutually convenient to both the clinician and patient. “With a proven and safe method for timing when a woman can undergo therapy, there is a lot less stress placed on the physicians’ shoulders too,” Dr. Pinkas said. - Source 03/26/08 - Hypnotist thief on video Italian police released video of a thief who allegedly hypnotizes clerks at supermarket registers. From the BBC News: In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: "Look into my eyes", before finding the till empty... The cashier who was shown the video footage has no memory of the incident, according to Italian media, and only realised what had happened when she saw the money missing. - Source 03/26/08 - Must a CD Cost $15.99? Wal-Mart is the largest music retailer selling "an estimated one out of every five major-label albums" in the US. Wal-Mart willingly loses money selling CDs for less than $10 in order to draw customers into the store, but they are tired of taking a loss on CDs. The mega-retailer is telling the major record labels to lower the price of CDs or risk losing retail space to DVDs and video games. The record industry needs to refine their business models, because the consumer is the ultimate arbitrator. And the consumer feels music isn't properly priced. - Source 03/26/08 - BitStrips.com : comics-creation for everone BitStrips is a fast, easy, sharing-friendly comic creation site -- you make "characters" using a Wii-style menu, pose them and fill in dialog, layout your strips and monkey with the backgrounds, borrowing material from any of the thousands of strips that have been made to date. Once your strip is done, anyone can modify it -- it becomes part of the commons. In the first two weeks of the site's existence, more than 16,000 strips were created by the users of the service. - Source 03/26/08 - Record-Setting 4.5Ghz Resonator Researchers at Cornell University have created a silicon microresonator that vibrates at 4.51 gigahertz, the highest frequency ever recorded in such a silicon device. Other researchers have demonstrated silicon microresonators that vibrate up to 1.5 gigahertz, say the Cornell researchers. Usually, as frequency increases, the Q factor, which is a measure of an oscillator's stability, drops. Essentially, the Q factor is a measure of quality: it indicates how long an oscillator can maintain a vibration at a certain frequency. A high Q factor means that the oscillations die out more slowly. The higher the number, the better. The Q factor for the Cornell device at 4.51 gigahertz is close to 10,000, which compares well with quartz resonators. The Cornell device is 8.5 micrometers long and 40 micrometers wide, compared with a width of about a millimeter for a quartz resonator. - Source 03/26/08 - Weather Engineering in China To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird's Nest, Beijing's Weather Modification Office will track the region's weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer. Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city's weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium. Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird's Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won't fall until those clouds have passed over. Zhang Qian, head of Beijing's Weather Modification Office, explains, "We use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their average size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall, and precipitation can be reduced." - Source 03/26/08 - $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer are intimately linked The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked. While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an "escort" $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush's new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators. Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers' bordello: Eliot Spitzer. Who are they kidding? Spitzer's lynching and the bankers' enriching are intimately tied. How? Follow the money. / (Thanks to Paul for sharing this. - JWD) - Source 03/26/08 - Even at Megastores, Hagglers Find No Price Is Set in Stone Shoppers are discovering an upside to the down economy. They are getting price breaks by reviving an age-old retail strategy: haggling. A bargaining culture once confined largely to car showrooms and jewelry stores is taking root in major stores like Best Buy, Circuit City and Home Depot, as well as mom-and-pop operations. Savvy consumers, empowered by the Internet and encouraged by a slowing economy, are finding that they can dicker on prices, not just on clearance items or big-ticket products like televisions but also on lower-cost goods like cameras, audio speakers, couches, rugs and even clothing. The change is not particularly overt, and most store policies on bargaining are informal. Some major retailers, however, are quietly telling their salespeople that negotiating is acceptable. “We want to work with the customer, and if that happens to mean negotiating a price, then we're willing to look at that,” said Kathryn Gallagher, a spokeswoman for Home Depot. - Source 03/26/08 - Huge Antarctic ice chunk collapses A chunk of Antarctic ice about seven times the size of Manhattan suddenly collapsed, putting an even greater portion of glacial ice at risk, scientists said Tuesday. Satellite images show the runaway disintegration of a 160-square-mile chunk in western Antarctica, which started February 28. It was the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf and has been there for hundreds, maybe 1,500 years. This is the result of global warming, said British Antarctic Survey scientist David Vaughan. Because scientists noticed satellite images within hours, they diverted satellite cameras and even flew an airplane over the ongoing collapse for rare pictures and video. Scientists said they are not concerned about a rise in sea level from the latest event in Antarctica, but say it's a sign of worsening global warming. - Source 03/24/08 - 'Lego' design promises cheap solar cells Researchers at a Dutch university have devised a method of "substantially improving" the production of relatively inexpensive dye-sensitised solar cells. Long touted as a cheap alternative to high-cost silicon solar cells, dye-sensitised cells imitate the natural conversion of sunlight into energy by plants and light-sensitive bacteria. Annemarie Huijser, from the Delft University of Technology, noted that plants are able to transport absorbed solar energy over long distances, typically about 15-20 nanometres, to a location in which it is converted into chemical energy. This is because the chlorophyll molecules in leaves are arranged in the best possible sequence. Huijser attempted a partial recreation in solar cells of this process as found in plants. She focused on what are known as dye-sensitised cells comprising a semiconductor, such as titanium dioxide, covered with a layer of dye. The dye absorbs energy from sunlight, which creates excitons. These energy parcels then need to move towards to the semiconductor. Once there, they generate electric power. "You can compare dye molecules to Lego bricks. I vary the way the bricks are stacked and observe how this influences the exciton transport through the solar cells," explained Huijser. "Excitons need to move as freely as possible through the solar cells in order to generate electricity efficiently." - Source 03/24/08 - Major food source threatened by climate change Rice is arguably the world's most important food source and helps feed about half the globe's people. But yields in many areas will drop as the globe warms in future years, a review of studies on rice and climate change suggests. The poorest parts of the world, including Africa, will probably be hardest hit, the study says. Rice harvests already need to increase by about a third just to keep up with global population growth. In regions where the average daily temperatures are expected to rise above 30ºC, rice yields will start to fall off, and the impact will get worse as the temperature increases. Harvests will also be reduced by rising ground-level ozone concentrations. They are caused by nitrogen oxides (NOX) from power stations that catalyse the formation of ozone in warm and sunny conditions. - Source 03/24/08 - Clean Energy: It's Getting Affordable Clean-energy critics are fixated on cost. To them, the use and deployment of renewable sources of energy simply doesn't make financial sense. That's why we've got to continue doing things the old-fashioned way, by employing coal, oil, and natural gas. Those excuses are wearing thin. To see why, one need look no further than the growth in the markets for solar, wind, biofuels, and fuel cells, and how the cost of such renewable energy sources is approaching parity with carbon-emitting energy sources. The cost for solar and wind have both dropped significantly over the past 30 years, bringing the cost of both sources within striking distance of, and in some cases lower than that of conventional energy sources. Consider the costs of geothermal, wind, and solar power compared with nuclear power, often lauded as one of the cheapest sources of energy. The average up-front capital cost for a new 1-gigawatt nuclear plant, sufficient power for about 1 million U.S. homes, is $2 billion to $6 billion. The cost of 1 gigawatt of geothermal and wind power is less than $2 billion; the same amount of solar power cost $5 billion to $10 billion. - Source 03/24/08 - Slavery Is More Popular Than Ever With $50 and a plane ticket to Haiti, one can buy a slave. This was just one of the difficult lessons writer Benjamin Skinner learned while researching his book, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery. Skinner met with slaves and traffickers in 12 different countries, filling in the substance around a startling fact: there are more slaves on the planet today than at any time in human history. How much? After adjusting for inflation, Skinner found that, "In 1850, a slave would cost roughly $30,000 to $40,000 - in other words it was like investing in a Mercedes. Today you can go to Haiti and buy a 9-year-old girl to use as a sexual and domestic slave for $50. The devaluation of human life is incredibly pronounced." / (I'm keen on the idea of robot servants/assistants so this news item really sickened me. Imagine your life bought for another to use as they will. - JWD) - Source 03/24/08 - People prefer robots that do small talk To find out how quickly domestic robots should respond to their owners' requests, Toshiyuki Shiwa and colleagues at the ATR laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, asked 38 students to give orders such as "take out the trash" to a robot, which took between zero and 5 seconds to respond. The students liked delays of no more than 1 second best, with 2 seconds being their limit. However, when the robot took longer, impatient students were assuaged if it filled the time with words such as "well" or "er". "When the robot used conversational fillers to buy time until it could respond, people didn't notice the delay," Shiwa says. - Source 03/24/08 - A Super-Efficient Light Bulb A Silicon Valley company, Luxim, that has developed a tiny, full-spectrum light bulb, based on a plasma of argon gas, that gives off as much light as a streetlight while using less power. The Tic Tac-sized bulb operates at temperatures up to 6000K and produces 140 lumens/watt, almost ten times as efficient as standard incandescent lamps, and twice the efficiency of high-end LEDs. The new bulbs also have a lifetime of 20,000 hours. There's no mention of mercury or other heavy metals, which pose a problem for compact fluorescents. - Source 03/24/08 - Tiny buckyballs squeeze hydrogen like giant Jupiter A group of scientists are claiming to have discovered a means of storing hydrogen using buckminsterfullerene, better known as "bucky balls." The soccer-ball-like molecules appear to be able to strong enough to hold a hydrogen at a density approaching that of the depths of Jupiter. At least, that's what the press release says. If it actually pans out, we may some day be able to power hybrids using something that will vaguely resemble plastic sand. - Source 03/24/08 - 40% boost in Thermoelectric efficiencies A major boost in the effectiveness of a material that transforms waste heat into electricity could significantly boost energy efficiency in anything from air conditioners to car engines. It is the first major improvement in such "thermoelectric" materials in 50 years, say researchers. Thermoelectric materials can also work in reverse to convert electricity into differences in temperature, allowing cooling without pipes, pumps or coolants. The dramatic 40% boost is relatively simple to achieve. Grinding bismuth antimony telluride into fine particles and then pressing it back together again using heat transforms its thermoelectric properties, according to researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston College, both Boston, US. Sticking the nanoscale particles back together increased the alloy’s peak figure of merit, a term used to measure metals’ relative thermodynamic performance, by 40% from 1.0 to 1.4. The researchers say the jump happens because the reincarnated alloy has a finer-grained crystalline structure. The new structure offers greater resistance to the quantum vibrations called phonons that transport heat within solids, making it a better thermal insulator. - Source 03/24/08 - Prius proves a gas guzzler in a race with the BMW 520d The official fuel consumption figure for the Prius - supplied by Toyota itself - is 65.7mpg in mixed motoring. That’s a claim not supported by many of the letter writers to The Sunday Times who say they get nearer to 50mpg. If our readers are right and the official figure is wrong it has important implications, not least of which is that people driving frugal diesels are getting a raw deal. To find out we set a challenge: to drive a Prius to Geneva using motorways and town driving. The direct route is 460 miles but we drove almost 100 miles further to give the Prius the advantage of running in urban conditions where its petrol-electric drivetrain comes into its own. We took along a conventionally powered car - a diesel BMW executive saloon - for comparison and drove both cars an identical number of miles (545). The BMW computer reported for the journey as a whole, the car averaged more than 50mpg. The test had taken us along just over 200 miles of autoroute, about 200 miles of B roads, including winding ascents and descents in Switzerland, and 100 miles of urban driving. Average fuel consumption for the Prius was 48.1mpg. - Source 03/24/08 - Humpback flipper based Wind Turbines A new type of wind-turbine blade that mimics the aerodynamic performance of a humpback whale's flipper, allowing a turbine to capture more of the wind's energy at much lower speeds. The odd-looking blades, which have teeth-like bumps along their leading edge, are a dramatic departure from the smooth and sleek design that graces most wind turbines. It turns out the key to a humpback's agility lies in its long flippers, which feature a unique row of bumps or "tubercles" along their leading edge that give the wing-like appendages a serrated look. Researchers such as Frank Fish, a professor of biology at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, have found that the tubercles dramatically increase the whale's aerodynamic efficiency. In one particular study conducted inside a controlled wind tunnel, Fish and research colleagues at Duke University and the U.S. Naval Academy saw 32 per cent lower drag and an 8 per cent improvement in lift from a flipper with tubercles compared to a smooth flipper found on other whales. They also discovered that the angle of attack of the bump-lined flipper could be 40 per cent steeper than a smooth flipper before reaching stall - that is, before seeing a dramatic loss in lift and increase in drag. In an airplane scenario, that's typically when you lose control and crash. "That stall typically occurs on most wings at 11 or 12 degrees at the angle of attack," says Fish, adding that with the humpback design "stall occurred much later, at about 17 or 18 degrees of attack. So the stall is being delayed." The implications are potentially enormous. Delayed stall on airplane wings can improve safety and make planes much more manoeuvrable and fuel-efficient. The same benefits can also be found on ship and submarine rudders, which explains the U.S. Navy's quiet involvement. - Source 03/24/08 - Truckers Slowing Down to Save Fuel Coast-to-coast trucker Lorraine Dawson says fellow drivers used to call her "Lead Foot Lorraine." But with diesel fuel around $4 a gallon, she and other big-rig drivers have backed off their accelerators to conserve fuel. "I used to be a speed demon, but no more," said Dawson, based at Tacoma, Wash. "Most drivers have cut their speed considerably." - Source 03/24/08 - Change in gasoline consumption habits bigger story than oil prices Over the past six weeks the nation's gasoline consumption has decreased an average of 1.1 percent from last year's levels. The Wall Street Journal reports this is the most sustained demand drop seen in 16 years. The EIA estimates personal income declining 1 percent results in gasoline demand being reduced 0.5 percent. In addition to the economy, however, we would suggest demand is shifting as consumers change their usage patterns and alter their lifestyle in response to years of rising prices. - Source 03/24/08 - ‘Parabolic’ antlers help moose hear female sweet nothings Canadian scientists using the trophy rack from a large male moose for a series of acoustic experiments have discovered that the beast's antlers act like natural hearing aids, bouncing sounds -- including sweet talk from a potential mate -- toward its ears. Using artificial ears equipped with sound meters -- created by technicians from Japan's NHK television network -- the researchers sent audio signals toward the 18-kilogram, 1.38-metre-wide antlers during experiments conducted at the Ontario university's arboretum. The tests showed that sound reception improved by up to 20 per cent because of the antlers. - Source 03/24/08 - Regrowing Limbs: Can People Regenerate Body Parts? The gold standard for limb regeneration is the salamander, which can grow perfect replacements for lost body parts throughout its lifetime. Understanding how can provide a road map for human limb regeneration. The early responses of tissues at an amputation site are not that different in salamanders and in humans, but eventually human tissues form a scar, whereas the salamander’s reactivate an embryonic development program to build a new limb. Learning to control the human wound environment to trigger salamanderlike healing could make it possible to regenerate large body parts. - Source 03/22/08 - Michigan Congressman Wants 50-Cent Tax Hike on Every Gallon of Gas Polls show that a majority of Americans support policies that would reduce greenhouse gases. But when it comes to paying for it, it's a different story. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., wants to help cut consumption with a gas tax but some don't agree with the idea, according to a new poll by the National Center for Public Policy Research. The poll, scheduled to be released on Thursday, shows 48 percent don't support paying even a penny more, 28 percent would pay up to 50 cents more, 10 percent would pay more than 50 cents and 8 percent would pay more than a dollar. "I don't want to pay more, I don't think anyone wants to," said Karen Deacon, a motorist. "I think that wouldn't make any sense," said Frankie Hoe, a motorist. "Ugh ... who's making the money from all this and where is that money going? Is it going to go green? I don't see any green things anywhere." Even if Americans abandoned their cars, global emissions would fall by less than one percent. "A tax on gas is a way to reduce dependence on import oil, reduce traffic congrestion and reduce carbon emissions," said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute. The Earth Policy Institute proposes raising the gas tax 30 cents per gallon each year over a decade and offset with a reduction of income taxes, Brown said. - Source 03/22/08 - H2 to Go Moshe Stern, head of C.En (Clean Energy), says his company's scientists have developed a revolutionary breakthrough that will enable automobile manufacturers to produce - and sell - cars that use hydrogen power. It's a breakthrough that has been getting a lot of attention - and oil companies got wind of it, too, with one company allegedly offering him $50 million to shelve his project. Stern didn't take the money, though; he intends to see his hydrogen car project through. While producing the hydrogen is easy enough, getting the fuel into the car and storing it in a fuel tank is one of the biggest obstacles for the technology. This, industry experts say, has traditionally been the deal-breaker for increased hydrogen use. Most hydrogen vehicles on the road use a liquid form of the material, which requires a super strong and super heavy storage tank. Liquid hydrogen is unstable and needs to be insulated from the excess shocks from bumps and potholes that are a part of everyday driving, so the tanks themselves are large and heavy, and hold at most 20 liters of fuel - enough for barely 250 kilometers of driving. C.En's tank uses hydrogen gas, collected from the environment (i.e. not produced from fossil fuels) and enclosed in a thin but leakproof glass container. The best part: You'll be able to buy your "gas" at automotive or discount stores, fueling up every 600 kilometers or so. "We can build a 60-liter tank that can travel up to 600 km. and weighs no more than 50 kg.," Stern said, unlike tanks currently used for liquid hydrogen that weigh hundreds of kilos. "Our company's breakthrough is in accumulating hydrogen in a glass material that is very small, only a few microns," said Stern, who is also president of waste treatment company Environmental Energy Resources (EER). "You don't need to transport hydrogen to fuel stations and you don't need pipelines. The tanks will be like a battery that can be replaced and you can carry a reserve in the car." The cells, in fact, will act just like batteries in electric or hybrid cars and fit right in with the standard internal combustion engine - which means that Detroit or Yokohama don't have to retool their factories or production lines to build cars with the capacity for hydrogen cells. The knowhow and means of production are in use right now, in fact, as nearly every car manufacturer is already producing hybrids or straight electric cars. With Stern's hydrogen solution, all you have to do is pull out the empty cell and put in the fresh one. You'll be good to go for another 600 kilometers, plenty of time to get your spent cell refilled. - Source 03/22/08 - X-Prize Offering $10 Million for 100 MPG Production Car As an encore to a similar contest from last year, the X-Prize Foundation is offering $10 million dollars to the team that designs and builds a production ready car capable of 100 mpg. More than 60 teams have signed up for the contest which is open to anyone, including established automakers. A cross country race will be held in 2009 for finalists where fuel efficiency, speed and distance will be part of the judging criteria. Many different technologies are represented, including diesel cars, electric cars and most interestingly a compressed air powered car from MDI Motors. - Source 03/22/08 - Branson and friends seek to save a world 'on fire' They tried to figure out what to do about it and perhaps get richer in the process. Some of them, like Page, carbon-consciously jet-pooled in from Silicon Valley, where the financiers who bankrolled the Web boom of the 1990s have started chasing the new "New New Thing": green power. In an era of $100-plus oil, venture capitalists like Vinod Khosla, another invitee, are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into young companies that cook up biofuels and harness the power of the sun. So far, however, the hopes and dreams of alternative energy have far outstripped reality. But for Stromback and many of the other participants, a confluence of two powerful forces - soaring oil prices and growing concern over global warming - means the era of economically viable green power is finally at hand. Talk ranged from the practicality of electric-powered cars to how much money would have to be invested in biofuels to reduce the price of crude to $35 a barrel, a prospect Khosla said was possible within the next 15 years. But the big question that hung over the meeting was whether the nations or the world could ever work together to tackle climate change and emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. - Source 03/22/08 - 40 years from Global Catastrophe - No time for Repair Climate change scientist James Lovelock believes it is too late to repair the damage. By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine. The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain. We will, he says, have to set up encampments in this country, like those established for the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the conflict in East Africa. Lovelock believes the subsequent ethnic tensions could lead to civil war. Selection is already happening. "Nations are selecting who they allow in. We are a soft touch in the UK compared with Australia." As nationals move to escape catastrophe, new forms of colonisation will occur. Lovelock believes that the current Chinese economic interest in Africa is part of a greater plan. "By 2040, China will be uninhabitable." Lovelock believes that the Chinese, because of their high levels of industrial activity, will be the first to suffer, with the death of all plant life. "So I think the Chinese will go to Africa. They are already there, preparing a new continent - the Chinese industrialists who claim to be out there mining minerals are just there on a pretext of preparing for the big move. "This is not science fiction. Mr Putin will colonise Siberia. Those who will have a very rough time are those in the indian subcontinent. You don't need much of a sea level rise to wipe Bangladesh off the face of the Earth." Australians have enough land and resources to stay put. Lovelock sees Americans moving to Canada. Americans have the natural advantage of being born migrants. "White Americans are descended from those who had the guts to cross on rough old ships and find a new life. They have the right spirit of can-do." - Source 03/22/08 - New twist to matter-antimatter mystery A new particle-smashing experiment suggests that a complete solution to the mystery of why the observable universe is dominated by matter, and not antimatter, may have to await the discovery of novel particles or the invention of new physics. When a normal particle and an anti-particle collide, they annihilate one another in an explosion of pure energy. When these two particles smash together, they create a burst of pure energy which quickly materialises into particles called 'B mesons'. The experiment created four different types of B mesons: neutral B mesons; the antimatter counterpart of neutral B mesons, sometimes called anti-Bs; positive B mesons; and the antimatter counterpart of positive B mesons, called negative B mesons. A study in 2004 showed that neutral B mesons break down, or "decay," into other subatomic particles faster than anti-Bs. Scientists had previously assumed that the differences in makeup between different B mesons were minor. This led them to predict that positive B mesons should decay at the same rate as neutral B mesons (since both are normal matter particles), and that negative B mesons should decay at the same rate as anti-Bs (both are antimatter particles). The new study reveals this isn't true. The team found that neutral B mesons decayed faster than anti-Bs, but positive B mesons decayed slower than their antiparticles. "It's not just that there's a particle-antiparticle asymmetry. It's that there are two particle-antiparticle asymmetries that are different from one another," commented Michael Peskin, a theorist at Stanford University in California, U.S. who was not involved in the study. "That's the thing that tips you off there's something new that's going on." - Source / Additional information from the KeelyNet BBS archive as Annihilation of Energy to produce Over-Unity. 03/22/08 - Buckyballs Can Store Concentrated Hydrogen "Using a computer model, Yakobson's research team has tracked the strength of each atomic bond in a buckyball and simulated what happened to the bonds as more hydrogen atoms were packed inside. Yakobson said the model promises to be particularly useful because it is scalable, that is it can calculate exactly how much hydrogen a buckyball of any given size can hold, and it can also tell scientists how overstuffed buckyballs burst open and release their cargo." The buckyballs can contain up to 8% of their weight in hydrogen, and they are strong enough to hold it at a density that rivals the center of Jupiter. - Source 03/22/08 - Biofuel demand upping cost of popcorn As a consequence of the booming demand for alternative fuels - with farmers replacing acres of popcorn with more profitable crops that can be converted into ethanol and other biofuels - the sellers of the nation's favorite movie snack say the salty tub soon will take a bigger bite out of your wallet when you're at the multiplex. "The consumer will probably see an increase in popcorn prices pretty soon," said Carlton Smith, the chairman of Iowa's Jolly Time popcorn brand. While the price hike probably will be modest, perhaps no more than 15 cents a serving, the rise is inevitable and necessary, according to the popcorn providers and theater owners gathered here for ShoWest, the National Association of Theater Owners' annual convention, which ended Thursday. - Source 03/22/08 - For amputees, an unlikely painkiller: Mirrors Dr. Jack Tsao, a Navy neurologist with the Uniform Services University, was looking for ways to help soldiers like Paupore. He remembered reading in graduate school a paper by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran that talked about an unusual treatment for amputees suffering "phantom limb pain," using a simple $20 mirror. The mirror tricks the brain into "seeing" the amputated leg, overriding mismatched nerve signals. Here's how it works: The patient sits on a flat surface with his or her remaining leg straight out and then puts a 6-foot mirror lengthwise facing the limb. The patient moves the leg, flexing it, and watches the movement in the mirror. The reflection creates the illusion of two legs moving together. Paupore was one of the first to give it a try. At first, he was skeptical. When approached about joining a clinical trial at Walter Reed Army Medical Center to test Tsao's theory, he declined. But sometimes his phantom pains were coming five to six times an hour and lasting up to a minute. After a month of treatment, all of the patients in the mirror group had significantly less phantom pain. In the covered mirror group, only one patient experienced a decrease in pain, and for half of those patients, the pain worsened. Sixty-seven percent of the patients visualizing their limbs got worse instead of better. The pain decreased in almost 90 percent of the patients who then switched to mirror therapy. - Source / and this related news item - Massage illusion helps amputees - Amputees can feel relief from phantom limb pain just by watching someone else rub their hands together, a study says. The treatment appears to fool the brain that it is their missing hand being massaged, California researchers say. Dr Ramachandran suggested the amputees "felt" the actions of others because their missing limb provided no feedback to prevent their mirror neurons being stimulated, and therefore not telling them they were not "literally" being touched. He said: "If an amputee experiences pain in their missing limb, they could watch a friend or partner rub their hand to get rid of it." 03/22/08 - Money buys happiness -- if you spend on someone else Spending as little as $5 a day on someone else could significantly boost happiness, the team at the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School found. Their experiments on more than 630 Americans showed they were measurably happier when they spent money on others -- even if they thought spending the money on themselves would make them happier. "Regardless of how much income each person made, those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not," Dunn said in a statement. They gave their volunteers $5 or $20 and half got clear instructions on how to spend it. Those who spent the money on someone or something else reported feeling happier about it. "These findings suggest that very minor alterations in spending allocations -- as little as $5 -- may be enough to produce real gains in happiness on a given day," Dunn said. This could also explain why people are no happier even though U.S. society is richer. - Source 03/22/08 - How to hack RFID-enabled credit cards for $8 A number of credit card companies now issue credit cards with embedded RFIDs (radio frequency ID tags), with promises of enhanced security and speedy transactions. But on today's episode of Boing Boing tv, hacker and inventor Pablos Holman shows Xeni how you can use about $8 worth of gear bought on eBay to read personal data from those credit cards -- cardholder name, credit card number, and whatever else your bank embeds in this manner. Fears over data leaks from RFID-enabled cards aren't new, and some argue they're overblown -- but this demo shows just how cheap and easy the "sniffing" can be. - Source 03/22/08 - Computer scientists release most realistic online makeover tool Anyone with a digital photograph can now apply more than 4,000 makeup products with the click of a mouse. It’s all at www.taaz.com - the creation of two Jacobs School of Engineering computer scientists turned entrepreneurs. You can watch a video demonstration of the online makeover tool at: Makeover Video. The computer scientists invented an algorithm for separating gloss from non-gloss in digital images -- a technical feat crucial for taaz.com’s patented approach to applying photorealistic makeup to images. It is also useful for more traditional computer vision applications like face recognition. Taaz.com is easy and free. Simply upload a portrait-style photograph and a computer vision system automatically identifies your eyes, nose, lips and cheeks. From here, you can apply thousands of makeup products from a wide range of brands to your digital portrait and experiment with new hairstyles and colored contacts. Once you create a new look, you can share it with friends, post the picture in taaz.com’s public gallery or upload it to social networking sites. To make shopping easier, you can print a list of what you tried on at taaz.com. “With taaz.com, we take something very complicated -- giving digital portraits a photorealistic makeover -- and make it very easy,” says Satya Mallick, a taaz.com co-founder with a fresh Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UCSD. - Source 03/22/08 - Air safety proposal: Passenger Shock-bracelets Lamperd, a "firearm training system" company, has patented a bracelet that delivers debilitating shocks when remotely triggered. Their killer app for this is aviation safety: they're proposing that the TSA could force everyone who flies to wear one of these and then flight-attendants could zap us into a stupor if we turn out to be Al Quaeda. (via boingboing.com) - Source 03/22/08 - Boomerang works in space, says astronaut IN an unprecedented experiment, a Japanese astronaut has thrown a boomerang in space and confirmed it flies back much like on Earth. Astronaut Takao Doi "threw a boomerang and saw it come back" during his free time on March 18 at the International Space Station, a spokeswoman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said. "I was very surprised and moved to see that it flew the same way it does on Earth," the Mainichi Shimbun daily quoted the 53-year-old astronaut as telling his wife in a chat from space. The space agency said a videotape of the experiment would likely be released later. - Source 03/22/08 - Self-Healing Artificial Muscles "Researchers in California have developed an artificial muscle that heals itself and generates electricity. 'We've made an artificial muscle that, when you apply electricity to it, it expands, more than 200 percent, the motion and energy is a lot like human muscles,' said Qibing Pei, a scientist at UCLA and study author. The researchers used flexible carbon nanotubes as electrodes. If an area of the carbon nanotube fails, the region around it seals itself by becoming non-conductive and prevents the damage from spreading to other areas. This material also conserves about 70% of the energy you put into it. As the material contracts after an expansion the rearranging of the carbon nanotubes generates a small electric current that can be captured and used to power another expansion or stored in a battery. The research appeared in the January issue of Advanced Materials." - Source 03/20/08 - Patent Reform Act poses a Threat to Inventions By protecting the rights of inventors, the U.S. patent system has spurred the development of everything from the light bulb to life-saving medicine. You wouldn't think that Congress would want to mess with such a winning formula. But that's exactly what lawmakers plan to do this month, when the Patent Reform Act hits the Senate floor. Under current law, U.S. patent protection gives innovators the exclusive right to sell their new inventions for a set period, usually 17 years. After that, anyone can make and sell the same product. This short-term monopoly rewards inventors and gives them enough time to recoup their costs -- while ensuring that the new product eventually reaches a broader market. Today, when a patent has been violated, the patent holder may sue the copycat. If the patent holder wins, the court awards damages. The bill would make it harder to win much in damages by changing the way they're calculated. Currently, the calculation takes the value of the whole invention into account. But the new bill stipulates that the calculation of a "reasonable royalty" look only at the bit of the invention the patent holder truly created, leaving out the value of any previously existing technology that's built in. The Patent Reform Act would require the publication, online, of all patent applications 18 months after filing -- even if no decision has been made on granting a patent. That means that inventors big and small would see their precious creations exposed to the world, in all their scientific detail, with no certainty of ever gaining patent protection. And copycats around the world would have more than a year to duplicate the invention and even claim it as their own. - Source 03/20/08 - Salt could shake up world energy supply Only up to powering light bulbs so far, "salt power" is a tantalising if distant prospect as high oil prices make alternative energy sources look more economical. Two tiny projects to mix sea and river water -- one by the fjord south of Oslo, the other at a Dutch seaside lake -- are due on stream this year and may point to a new source of clean energy in estuaries from the Mississippi to the Yangtze. The science at the heart of the projects is the fact that when salt and fresh water mix at river mouths, they are typically warmed by 0.1 degree Celsius (0.2 Fahrenheit). Dutch scientists say such energy at all the world's estuaries is equivalent to 20 percent of world electricity demand. Osmosis' power was shown in 1748 when French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet put a pig's bladder filled with alcohol in a trough of water. The bladder swelled and burst -- the more concentrated liquid draws pure water into it. At Tofte, the power exerted by salt water sucking in fresh water is equivalent to water falling 270 metres in a waterfall. The only emissions are brackish water. Unlike the osmosis of the Norwegian system, the Dutch scheme captures salt particles which give off electrical currents. Yale's Elimelech said a full scale plant would demand membranes covering perhaps 100 acres (40 hectares), at risk of damage by pollutants dissolved in the river or the sea. Also, filters have to be in place to avoid sucking in fish and there are environmental concerns about drawing water away from estuaries, perhaps threatening plants and creatures in the area. "The membrane is the challenge," agreed Skilhagen. "In tests we have come over three watts per square metre (of membrane), but we have to reach five. When we do that it will be industrially interesting." - Source 03/20/08 - Invention helps reverse effects of aging A local dentist says he has created an orthodontic appliance that can straighten an adult's teeth and reverse the effects of aging by remodeling an individual's jaw bones. Catskill dentist Theodore Belfor said the benefits of his Homeoblock Appliance include broader smiles, fuller lips, more prominent cheekbones and a brighter, more youthful appearance around an individual's eyes. It also helps straighten teeth and can help eliminate snoring and sleep apnea, he said. "There are no negative side-effects," Belfor said of the appliance. appliance stimulates the development of a person's jaws where that development was incomplete causing the teeth to become crowded in the mouth. The appliance is worn at night and works with the body so the changes occur naturally, developing the bones of the face, he said. Belfor said the changes that occur are based on each person's genetic potential. Often, facial development does not reach its full potential as an individual grows because of the food a person eats, lack of breast-feeding as an infant or polluted air, among other causes, he said. Belfor said the Homeoblock helps reverse the sign of aging because as the appliance develops the bones of the face it increases the volume and support of the soft tissue, which reduces lines and wrinkles on the face. The Homeoblock, according to information provided by Belfor, does not work like a typical orthodontic appliance wherein mechanical pressure forces the teeth and bones of the dental arches apart. The acrylic of the Homeoblock Appliance does not actually touch the soft tissue in a person's mouth. Instead, the device creates a bellows-like action on an individual's dental arches, causing them to widen. Each week the patient turns an expansion screw on the appliance to keep up with the widening of the bones of the dental arches. As the dental arches expand, the teeth have more room in the mouth and can straighten out. For additional information on the Homeoblock Appliance visit www.facialdevelopment.com. - Source 03/20/08 - Funds shun renewable energy AUSTRALIAN Government investment funds are putting nearly 50 times more money into the fossil fuel and uranium industries than into renewable energy, a new report has found. Large Government-owned investors, including the Federal Government's Future Fund and state bodies such as the Workcover Authority, are investing in direct conflict with their governments' plans to reduce greenhouse emissions, according to the report, to be released today by the Australian Conservation Foundation. 78 per cent of Australians remain unaware that the fossil fuel industry receives taxpayer subsidies of just over $800 per person each year, about 28 times the amount given in subsidies to the renewable industry. Ninety per cent of those polled said they would prefer to see renewable energy given the same subsidies as the coal, oil and gas industries. - Source 03/20/08 - Research fuels grim trade in death "The BBC are reporting on a grisly trade lying behind the booming business for replacement body parts in medical procedures. Many unscrupulous "dealers" will procure body parts from anyone willing to deal them - e.g., undertakers, medics - and will process them for resale onto legitimate companies. Apparently a fully processed cadaver can fetch up to $250,000. Now, who says I'm worth more alive than dead?" Because these crimes are so difficult to detect, many experts feel that there are many more body-snatchers out there. Over the past few years a handful of high profile cases of grave-robbery in funeral homes and medical school have come to light but they are probably just the tip of the iceberg. - Source 03/20/08 - Video Documentary examines possibility of US dollar collapse "This is a summary of a documentary that aired recently on Dutch national television. The documentary was based on a script made by an economist who was assigned the task to make a 'what if' scenario about how the dollar could crash within 24 hours." Americans are living beyond their means and Asia is currently financing that. But eventually the Asians/Europeans will stop financing the USA and then the bubble will burst. - Source 03/20/08 - Cellphone Microscope Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a modular, high-magnification microscope attachment for cell phones. The device will enable health workers in remote, rural areas to take high-resolution images of a patient's blood cells using a cell-phone camera, and then transmit the photos to experts at medical centers. The researchers hope that the innovation will help patients with blood disorders who live far from medical specialists get more accurately diagnosed and treated. The total cost of the first prototype, built from off-the-shelf components, was $75. The current version provides its own sample illumination from cheap, low-power LEDs. The device comes in two versions: with a magnification of about 5 times, for taking images of moles and rashes, and with a magnification of about 60 times, for capturing the details of blood cells and parasites. The higher-magnification model--the larger of the two--is roughly the size and shape of a roll of quarters. Both scopes attach to the phone with a modified belt clip. - Source 03/20/08 - Silent Tiny Ionic Cooling Systems The compact, solid-state fan, developed with support from NSF's Small Business Innovation Research program, is the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size. It produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size. The RSD5 incorporates a series of live wires that generate a micro-scale plasma (an ion-rich gas that has free electrons that conduct electricity). The wires lie within un-charged conducting plates that are contoured into half-cylindrical shape to partially envelop the wires. Within the intense electric field that results, ions push neutral air molecules from the wire to the plate, generating a wind. The phenomenon is called corona wind. With the breakthrough of the contoured surface, the researchers were able to control the micro-scale discharge to produce maximum airflow without risk of sparks or electrical arcing. As a result, the new device yields a breeze as swift as 2.4 meters per second, as compared to airflows of 0.7 to 1.7 meters per second from larger, mechanical fans. The contoured platform is a part of the device heat sink, a trick that enabled Schlitz and Singhal to both eliminate some of the device's bulk and increase the effectiveness of the airflow. "The technology has the power to cool a 25-watt chip with a device smaller than 1 cubic-cm and can someday be integrated into silicon to make self-cooling chips," said Schlitz. - Source 03/20/08 - Man shot by killer robot AN 81-year-old Gold Coast man built, and yesterday used, an intricate suicide machine to remotely shoot himself, after downloading the plans from the internet. He spent hours searching the internet for a way to kill himself, downloaded what he needed and then built a complex machine that would remotely fire a gun. He set the device up in his driveway about 7am yesterday, placed himself in front of it and set it in motion. His notes explained that he chose the driveway as he knew there were tradesmen working next door who would find his body. The plan worked as the workmen heard the gunshots and ran to investigate. The Gold Coast Bulletin will not reveal how the machine worked, but it was attached to a .22 semi-automatic pistol loaded with four bullets. It was able to fire multiple shots into the man's head after he activated it. - Source 03/20/08 - Botnet scams are exploding Largely unnoticed by the public, botnets have come to inundate the Internet. On a typical day, 40% of the 800 million computers connected to the Internet are bots engaged in distributing e-mail spam, stealing sensitive data typed at banking and shopping websites, bombarding websites as part of extortionist denial-of-service attacks, and spreading fresh infections, says Rick Wesson, CEO of Support Intelligence, a San Francisco-based company that tracks and sells threat data. "It's like a disease you can't even feel," Wesson says. "The mechanisms we use to protect our networks simply are not working." - Source 03/20/08 - R.I.P. Creator of the 'Eliza' program Man who invented the Eliza computer program dies. WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE DIES? I mean he's no longer living. CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE? - (via fark.com) / Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published one of the most celebrated computer programs of all time. The program interacted with a user sitting at an electric typewriter, in English, in the manner of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Weizenbaum called the program "Eliza" because "like the Eliza of Pygmalion fame, it could be taught to 'speak' increasingly well". All the program did was to decompose the user's input into its constituent parts of speech, and type them back at the user in a manner that sustained the conversation. Eliza was a sensation on the MIT campus and quickly spread to other universities. Weizenbaum was so disturbed that naive users could put their faith in a relatively trivial program, that it changed the future course of his life: he became an advocate for social responsibility in science and a critic of artificial intelligence (AI). - Source 03/20/08 - Corn ethanol will worsen 'dead zone' Increasing production of corn-based ethanol to meet alternative fuel goals will worsen the "dead zone" that plagues the Gulf of Mexico, according to a new study that adds to the growing list of concerns over the fuel. Each year, spring runoff washes nitrogen-rich fertilizers from farms in the Mississippi River basin and carries them into the river and the streams that feed it. The nitrogen eventually empties out of the mouth of the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico, where tiny phytoplankton feed off of it and spread into an enormous bloom. When these creatures die, they sink to the ocean floor, and their decomposition strips the water of oxygen. This condition, called hypoxia, prevents animals that depend on oxygen, such as fish or shrimp, from living in those waters. - Source 03/20/08 - The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans. "There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," says Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming." In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it's also possible that something more mysterious is going on. - Source 03/18/08 - Stars Illuminate Visionary's Second Coming for US Auto Industry DiMora Motorcar has unveiled a bold plan to bring the Motor City back to its heyday in the auto manufacturing business. U.S. automakers have lost large swaths of the global and domestic markets to foreign competitors over the last 30 years with experts citing a product line lacking in diversity. Alfred DiMora is answering the distress calls with a new paradigm for production. His mission? Simple. Reintroduce a time-tested industry mantra: American innovation. Marrying the technological triumphs of Silicon Valley with the still beating heart of the American automotive industry, DiMora is bridging worlds to create what truly will be known as "The New Detroit", rethinking the way we look at cars from bumper to bumper. DiMora Motorcar is currently developing the first eco-friendly, hand-built, $2 million production automobile. The Natalia SLS 2 sport luxury sedan, their premier creation, will be the world's most luxurious, expensive, and technologically-advanced vehicle. DiMora has assembled a team of leading-edge Technology Partners such as NVIDIA, Advanced Technology and Design, Brembo, Mercury Computer Systems, Azentek, and Robot-Racing. Their collective ingenuity is outfitting the Natalia with a broad spectrum of features never before seen in one automobile, showcasing such amenities as temperature-responsive color-changing paint, heated windshield wipers, headlights that house video projectors, personal on-board computers with terabytes of storage, an all-glass top with variable shades on command, and soy-based seat cushions. These are only a few of hundreds of innovations that will appear in the Natalia SLS 2. Although available in many custom colors, the Natalia reflects green. Not only is DiMora Motorcar exploring other flex-fuel options, the vehicle is also 95 percent recyclable. The name Natalia literally means "rebirth", exactly what DiMora intends to deliver. Setting sights to become a major contender in the car business within the next five to eight years, DiMora Motorcar may be just the polish needed to put a new shine on America's automobile industry, ushering in an automotive renaissance worthy of DiMora's "New Detroit." - Source 03/18/08 - Banyugeni Water-based Hydro-Fuel alternative energy Patented under the trade name Banyugeni, hydro-fuel was officially soft-launched at the university campus on Jl. Ringroad Barat in Bantul, Yogyakarta, recently by Rector Khoiruddin Bashori. “We have produced the fuel on a laboratory scale but we plan to start mass production soon,” said Khoiruddin. Banyugeni, according to Khoiruddin, currently has four different product variants - hydro-kerosene, hydro-diesel, hydro-premium and hydro-avtur. He said these were equivalent to their fossil-fuel counterparts kerosene, diesel, gasoline and airplane fuel. The newly invented fuel had been tested by PT CoreLab Indonesia, an independent international laboratory, and had been subsequently declared to meet the standards of the Directorate General of Oil and Gas at the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry. The test result, he said, was convincing. Hydro-premium, for example, proved to be non-corrosive, non-residual and to show low-emission rates. The hydro-avtur is similarly non-corrosive, low in emission rates and has a low freezing temperature of minus 45 degrees Celcius. “The test on aero-modeling crafts shows that hydro-fuel can be categorized as jet fuel,” said Purwanto, adding that this particular variant ran cool with an initial boiling point of 164 degrees Celcius. Similar results were shown from tests on hydro-diesel and hydro-kerosene variants, Khoiruddin said. Purwanto said hydro-fuel was produced using so-called “mechano-thermal-electro-chemical” technology involving four processes: mechanical, thermal, electrical and chemical, all using water as the raw material. “Water is basically flame. It comprises explosive hydrogen and flammable oxygen,” said Purwanto. The process of turning the water into hydro-fuel, he said, was basically keeping the two atoms in the water in such a position where the water could revert to its constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen. “The results are fuel products that are not polluting and are environmentally friendly,” said Purwanto, adding that the products’ elements and characteristics had made it possible for them to be directly applied on machines without any modification to the machines’ components. Hydro-kerosene, for example, can be directly used in kerosene stoves or lamps. Hydro-diesel, similarly, can be directly used to start a diesel engine while the hydro-premium can be used to run motorcycles or cars. The hydro-avtur, according to Purwanto, has also been tested on jet-fuel machines such as the ones propelling aero-modeling aircraft. Once processed, Nike said, a liter of pure water could produce about the same volume either of hydro-premium, hydro-kerosene or hydro-diesel, according to the desired results. “We used seawater for the research, but basically any water including liquid waste can be processed into hydro-fuel,” said Nike. Nike said the decision to use seawater was mainly made with a consideration that ground water was for human consumption. Thus, mass production of hydro-fuels would not disturb clean water supplies for humans, he said. - Source 03/18/08 - Could You Power Your Car With its Paint? Scientists working at a university in Wales have found a way to gather solar power through paint. The invention is nowhere close to ready for mass production, but the prospects are promising. Steel would be treated with a photovoaltaic substance (the paint), which would gather energy and transfer it to whatever system needed power. According to Sc