`The Pentagon’s fringe science arm wants to keep track of potential enemies-of-the-state in every way imaginable: not just by sight, or by sound, or by their e-mail; but by their smell, as well.
Darpa’s “Unique Signature Detection Project (formerly known as the Odortype Detection program)” aims to sniff out genetic markers in “human emanations (urine, sweat, etc.)” that “can be used to identify and distinguish specific high-level-of-interest individuals within groups of enemy troops.”
“Recent experimental results” show that chemical compounds in a mouse’s “urinary” scent produces an “odortype” that’s unique to each individual rodent, Darpa observes in its original solicitation for the project. “Although experimental data for humans is far less quantitative,” the agency is hoping that a similarly “genetically determined,” “exploitable chemosignal” can be found in people, too.’
`In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That’s the conviction that inspired Greenpeace’s first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions — or nearly 10 percent of global emissions — of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely.’
`Most self-respecting starships in science fiction stories use antimatter as fuel for a good reason – it’s the most potent fuel known. While tons of chemical fuel are needed to propel a human mission to Mars, just tens of milligrams of antimatter will do (a milligram is about one-thousandth the weight of a piece of the original M&M candy).
However, in reality this power comes with a price. Some antimatter reactions produce blasts of high energy gamma rays. Gamma rays are like X-rays on steroids. They penetrate matter and break apart molecules in cells, so they are not healthy to be around. High-energy gamma rays can also make the engines radioactive by fragmenting atoms of the engine material.
The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is funding a team of researchers working on a new design for an antimatter-powered spaceship that avoids this nasty side effect by producing gamma rays with much lower energy.’
`A natural light source that could put the traditional light bulb in the shade has been invented by US scientists. [..]
Previous attempts to make OLEDs like this have largely failed to make an impact because traditional phosphorescent blue dyes are very short lived.
The new polymer uses a fluorescent blue material instead which lasts much longer and uses less energy.
The researchers believe that eventually this material could be 100% efficient, meaning it could be capable of converting all of the electricity to light, without the heat loss associated with traditional bulbs.’
`Zoologists have found a remarkable fish that can wriggle from Africa’s tropical swamps to snaffle a snack on land.
The eel catfish, Channallabes apus, catches unsuspecting victims by arching upwards and descending upon prey, trapping an insect against the ground before sucking it up. It performs this trick thanks to a bendy neck supported by specialized vertebrae, which allows it to hover over prey without needing fins or arms to hold up its head.
The same trick may have been used by the very first vertebrates to venture onto land, the researchers speculate.’
`For a vision of war, it was almost elegant. The smoke and stink and deafening crack of munitions would be replaced by invisible beams of focused light. Modified 747 jets, equipped with laser weapons, would blast ballistic missiles while they were still hundreds of miles from striking our soil. “Directed-energy” cannons would intercept incoming rockets at the speed of light, heating up the explosives inside and causing them to burst apart in midair. And this wasn’t some relic of Reagan-era Star Wars visionaries. These were modern plans, initiated barely a decade ago, that would be realized not in some far-off future, but soon. Out in the New Mexico desert at the White Sands Missile Range, the U.S. Army’s Tactical High Energy Laser shot down dozens of Katyusha rockets and mortars. In 2004, Air Force contractors began test-firing the chemically powered beam weapon for a retrofitted 747, the Airborne Laser.
Then reality set in [..]’
with laser video.
`Iran announced overnight it had successfully enriched uranium to make nuclear fuel, a dramatic breakthrough in its disputed atomic drive that defies a UN Security Council demand for the work to be halted.
The announcement came just 15 days before the expiry of a Security Council deadline for Iran to freeze enrichment – a process that can be extended to make the fissile core of an atom bomb.
In a speech carried live on state television, vice president and atomic energy chief Gholam Reza Aghazadeh announced that “on April 9, we successfully enriched uranium to 3.5 per cent,” the purity required for civilian reactor fuel.’
`Government officials in Germany have reported what appears to be the first health-related recall of a nanotechnology product, raising a potential public perception problem for the rapidly growing but still poorly understood field of science.
At least 77 people reported severe respiratory problems over a one-week period at the end of March — including six who were hospitalized with pulmonary edema, or fluid in the lungs — after using a “Magic Nano” bathroom cleansing product, according to the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment in Berlin.
Symptoms generally cleared up within 18 hours, though some had persistent breathing problems for days.’
`Japan’s space agency reports that the sleepy Tokyo suburb of Kogane has been hit by a laser from an orbiting spacecraft. Click below for the full details of this first-ever extraterrestrial event.
Another first for Japan’s future military space-communications apparatus: the Optical Inter-orbit Communications Engineering Test Satellite, also known, fortunately, as Kirari, zapped the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in the Tokyo suburb of Kogane with a laser. Not to worry, though, the beam was fired for communication purposes, not destructive ones.’
`Scientists think they have solved the mystery of how planets form around a star born in a violent supernova explosion, saying they have detected for the first time a swirling disk of debris from which planets can rise.
The discovery is surprising because the dusty disk orbiting the pulsar, or dead star, resembles the cloud of gas and dust from which Earth emerged. Scientists say the latest finding should shed light on how planetary systems form.
“It shows that planet formation is really ubiquitous in the universe. It’s a very robust process and can happen in all sorts of unexpected environments,” said lead researcher Deepto Chakrabarty, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.’
Fucken cool eclipse image.
`Springtime light may lift the spirits, but in Rattenberg, residents have a long memory for shadows. From late fall to midwinter, this tiny Austrian town, famous for its glassblowing, gets no sun at all. And it has been that way for centuries. Next time, though, the villagers may finally see the light–thanks to giant rotating mirrors known as heliostats.
Bartenbach Light Laboratory in the Austrian Tyrol plans to begin construction of the heliostats this August. “The idea is not just to light the village,” says Silvia Pezzana, an engineer at the firm. “The idea is to give them the impression they have sun.”‘
`News flash! Scientists prove that swallowing magnets is bad for you. Stop the presses! Smoking hurts wealth as well as health. Eureka! Faraway objects can be hard to see.
Every year, serious scientists undertake detailed, rigorous studies to prove things that seem—well, painfully obvious. Why bother? We reviewed scores of unshocking discoveries and asked the researchers who conducted the work to explain their motivations. Two main themes emerged. First, scientists don’t assume how the world works; they test it. Common knowledge once held that meat spontaneously generated maggots. Then, in 1668, Italian physician Francesco Redi devised a set of investigative steps—what we now call an experiment—to prove wrong what everybody thought they knew.
Aside from testing untested observations, the other good reason to undertake no-duh studies, investigators told us, is that hard numbers often inspire social change. Simply put, scientists must quantify to justify.’
`Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago.
Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action – like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds.
As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power.
Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, said: “Our emergence on to the land is one of the more significant rites of passage in our evolutionary history, and Tiktaalik is an important link in the story.”‘
`Anne Arundel County in Maryland has been running five red light cameras for five years, during which period they raised a fat $2.85 million in ticket revenue. Unfortunately, a comparison of accident statistics shows that the cameras have increased the rate of accidents.
Immediately after installation, the cameras sparked a 40-percent increase in rear-end collisions, and never looked back, with five-year increases in accident rates far exceeding a 10-percent increase in traffic.
Unfortunately, this is hardly an isolated phenomenon. TheNewspaper.com reports similar results in the state of Georgia, where the city of Duluth’s one and only camera is forecast to generate a whopping $1 million next year, at the cost of a 21-percent increase in accidents. A study by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed red light cameras were linked to an increase in accidents, injuries and revenues across the state, although there is early indication that the rate of serious accidents in intersections is falling.’
`Talk radio and blogs are taking aim at a University of Texas biology professor because of a published report suggesting he advocates death for most of the human population as a means of saving the Earth.
However, Eric Pianka says his remarks about his beliefs were taken out of context, that he was just raising a warning that deadly disease epidemics are a threat if population growth isn’t contained.
“What we really need to do is start thinking about controlling our population before it’s too late,” he said Monday. “It’s already too late, but we’re not even thinking about it. We’re just mindlessly rushing ahead breeding our brains out.”‘
Followup to Meeting Doctor Doom.
`Recently citizen scientist Forrest Mims told me about a speech he heard at the Texas Academy of Science during which the speaker, a world-renowned ecologist, advocated for the extermination of 90 percent of the human species in a most horrible and painful manner. Apparently at the speaker’s direction, the speech was not video taped by the Academy and so Forrest’s may be the only record of what was said. Forrest’s account of what he witnessed chilled my soul. Astonishingly, Forrest reports that many of the Academy members present gave the speaker a standing ovation. To date, the Academy has not moved to sanction the speaker or distance itself from the speaker’s remarks.’
`British scientists report observing some of the largest waves ever measured — reportedly so big, some computer models indicate they shouldn’t even exist.
The observations occurred Feb. 8, 2000, aboard the Royal Research Ship Discovery during a scientific expedition to the North Atlantic, 155 miles west of Scotland, when a series of gigantic waves hammered the vessel. [..]
The Discovery’s crew witnessed waves of up to 95 feet from trough to crest — the highest waves ever measured by a scientific instrument on the open sea, according to an article the scientists published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The new data may be troubling for shipbuilders, said der Spiegel, since the scientists’ data suggest giant waves may be much more common than has been thought.’
`An international collaboration of scientists at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today (March 30, 2006) the first results of a new neutrino experiment. Sending a high-intensity beam of muon neutrinos from the lab’s site in Batavia, Illinois, to a particle detector in Soudan, Minnesota, scientists observed the disappearance of a significant fraction of these neutrinos. The observation is consistent with an effect known as neutrino oscillation, in which neutrinos change from one kind to another. The Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment found a value of delta m2 = 0.0031 eV2, a quantity that plays a crucial role in neutrino oscillations and hence the role of neutrinos in the evolution of the universe.’
`You are deep underground in a lab that once housed some of the finest minds in chemistry. But robots directed by a crackbrained artificial intelligence have taken it over and plan to use its equipment to destroy the world! After freezing an evil robot with your handy wrist-mounted hot-and-cold gun, you reach the Haber-Bosch room. And now you must correctly synthesize ammonia or die.
“Your students are playing video games,” Gabriela Weaver told a group of chemistry teachers at the American Chemical Society meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, on 29 March. “They are playing them more and more hours a day. They are probably playing them in your class.”
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Weaver, an associate professor of chemistry at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, is building a computer game about the subject – she hopes her prototype will be as appealing to students as the blockbuster games coming out of companies like Electronic Arts (EA).’
`Ryan Reynolds is a psittalinguist — a person who interprets budgie-speak.
Since 1999, he has invested thousands of hours slowing down and deconstructing recordings of his beloved budgie, Victor, who died five years ago at the young age of 3, as well as other talking budgies.
Victor had a vocabulary of 1,000 words, which he used in context, Reynolds says. [..]
So what are budgies saying?
“This is going to sound crazy, but they talk about spiritual things: God, the afterlife, a better world for them,” Reynolds says.’
`When asked, most individuals will describe themselves as better-than-average in areas such as leadership, social skills, written expression, or just about any flavor of savvy where the individual has an interest. This tendency of the average person to believe he or she is better-than-average is known as the “above-average effect,” and it flies in the face of logic… by definition, descriptive statistics says that it is impossible for a majority of people to be above average. Clearly a large number of the self-described “above average” individuals are actually below average in those areas, and they are simply unaware of their incompetence.’
`The first computer circuit to be built on a single molecule has been unveiled by researchers in the US.
It was assembled on a single carbon nanotube, a standard component of any nanotechnologist’s toolkit.
The circuit is less than a fifth of the width of a human hair and can only be seen through an electron microscope.
The researchers, from IBM and two US universities in Florida and New York, told the journal Science that the work could lead to faster computer chips.’
`H5N1 virus prefers to settle in cells deep within the lungs, rather than in the upper respiratory tract, as happens with human flu strains, two new studies have found.
H5N1 virus prefers to settle in cells deep within the lungs, rather than in the upper respiratory tract, as happens with human flu strains, two new studies have found.
That may help explain why human-to-human transmission of the bird flu virus has so far not happened — and might not happen in the future, Forbes.com reported Wednesday.
Since 2003, the H5N1 virus has been found in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and has led to the slaughter of tens of millions of domestic fowl. While infection has primarily been limited to birds, the virus has killed 103 people via bird-to-human transmission.’
`[..] Teachers at his facility are forbidden to use the “e-word” (evolution)
with the kids. They are permitted to use the word “adaptation” but only to refer to a current characteristic of an organism, not as a product of evolutionary change via natural selection. They cannot even use the term “natural selection.” Bob feared that not being able to use evolutionary terms and ideas to answer his students’ questions would lead to reinforcement of their misconceptions.
But Bob’s personal issue was more specific, and the prohibition more insidious. In his words, “I am instructed NOT to use hard numbers when telling kids how old rocks are. I am supposed to say that these rocks are VERY VERY OLD … but I am NOT to say that these rocks are thought to be about 300 million years old.”’
`Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.
At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.
The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn’t going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding.’
`A new jet engine design able to fly seven times the speed of sound is scheduled to launch over Australia on Saturday.
The scramjet engine, known as Hyshot III, has been designed by British defence firm QinetiQ.
If successful, it could pave the way for ultrafast, intercontinental air travel, and substantially cut the cost of putting small payloads into space.
The engine will launch on a rocket owned by the University of Queensland.’
`German and Japanese scientists recently collaborated to achieve just such a quantum leap in obliterating the world record for data transmission. By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40 Gbit/s, or around 50 times slower.’
`Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.’
`Humans have provoked the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65m years ago, according to a UN report that calls for unprecedented worldwide efforts to address the slide.
The report paints a grim picture of life on earth, with declining numbers of plants, animals, insects and birds across the globe, and warns that the current extinction rate is up to 1,000 times faster than in the past. Some 844 animals and plants are known to have disappeared in the last 500 years.’
