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Latest Articles: Science-Technology
Climate scientist admits to defrauding the Heartland Institute
Post Date: 2012-02-21 21:09:41 by CZ82
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Climate scientist admits to defrauding the Heartland Institute Science is all about attacking critics and making stuff up. by John Hayward 02/21/2012 These are dark days for the “climate change” fraud. In 2010, 141 scientists wrote a letter to the United Nations challenging the junk science of the global warming cult, declaring “climate change science is in a period of ‘negative discover’ – the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly, the science is not settled.” A year later, over a thousand scientists joined forces to express their skepticism of the climate change ...
Lesson from China: Electric Cars Pollute more than those that use Gas
Post Date: 2012-02-14 19:11:27 by CZ82
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Lesson from China: Electric Cars Pollute more than those that use Gas Posted on 14 February 2012 by Ben Peterson China uses electric cars over conventional cars by a 2 to 1 ratio. While that is the average green enthusiast’s wildest dream, the reality is that electric cars are causing more pollution than gasoline powered cars ever could according to findings by the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Chris Cherry, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, and graduate student Shuguang Ji, analyzed the emissions and environmental health impacts of five vehicle technologies in 34 major Chinese cities, focusing on dangerous fine particles. What Cherry and his team ...
Fall of Communism Changed Mathematics in US
Post Date: 2012-02-12 19:08:58 by jwpegler
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The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 brought an influx of Soviet mathematicians to U.S. institutions, and those scholars' differing areas of specialization have changed the way math is studied and taught in this country, according to new research by University of Notre Dame Economist Kirk Doran and George Borjas from Harvard University. "In this paper, we examine the impact of the influx of renowned Soviet mathematicians into the global mathematics community," says Doran. "In the period between the establishment and fall of communism, Soviet mathematics developed in an insular fashion and along very different specializations than American mathematics. As a result, ...
‘Tribler’ Software Makes Internet Piracy Impossible To Stop
Post Date: 2012-02-09 12:21:07 by Brian S
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Internet piracy has been a hot topic in recent weeks, but it’s about to heat up even more. With lawmakers all over the world struggling to agree upon copyright regimes that would disconnect people from the Internet, shut down websites simply for linking to infringing content and cut off whole advertising networks that support pirate domains, one might think the world was on the verge of plugging up the copied media loophole for good. But then, one would be wrong. A piece of software getting a fresh look this week seems to have the answer that media pirates are looking for: invincibility, with zero liability for website operators. That’s because this software, known as Tribler, ...
January Was USA's 4Th-Warmest On Record
Post Date: 2012-02-08 12:14:40 by Brian S
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The warmth last month wasn't a mirage: January 2012 was the USA's 4th-warmest January on record, federal climate scientists announced on Tuesday. The national average temperature in January was 36.3 degrees F, which is 5.5 degrees F above the long-term average and the warmest since 2006, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center. The other warmer Januarys were in 1990 and 1953. The data is based on records dating back to 1895. Nine states — Arizona, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming — had January temperatures ranking among their ten warmest. Florida and ...
Russian Scientists Drill Into Antarctic Lake Sealed Off For 15 Million Years
Post Date: 2012-02-06 19:11:52 by Brian S
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Russian scientists have drilled into an Antarctic lake that has been sealed off from the rest of the world for about 15 million years. Sampling the waters of Lake Vostok could reveal clues about the evolution of life on Earth and may yield entirely unknown forms of life. According to the Russian newswire RIA Novosti, scientists from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St Petersburg drilled through the 3,768 metres of ice above Lake Vostok to reach the surface of the lake on Sunday. Lake Vostok is the largest of hundreds of lakes that sit under the thick layer of ice on the Antarctic continent. Russian scientists had been planning to drill through the ice to the lake ...
The Matrix Is Here: We Are Now Able To Harvest Electricity From Cockroaches
Post Date: 2012-02-05 17:56:36 by A K A Stone
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Remember how in the movie The Matrix, humans were used as energy sources by the machines? I personally thought the idea was inefficient; why not make batteries or something? But still, it appears that we are now the machines and have been able to rig a poor cockroach up with electrodes and squeeze out some measurable amount of electricity. “Maximum power density reached nearly 100 microwatts per square centimeter at 0.2 volts. Maximum current density was about 450 microamps per square centimeter.” It’s the chemical within the roach that power this particular reaction. And if you want the gritty details of how it was done, just hit the jump for a fuller description and links. ...
Autonomous Quadrotors Fly Amazing Formations
Post Date: 2012-02-05 00:39:22 by A K A Stone
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Roboticists at the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP are able to get as many as 20 of their autonomous microcopters to fly in formation and perform complex maneuvers flawlessly. In an impressive new video, the GRASP — General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception — team makes their swarm of flying microbots flip, change direction, navigate through obstacles and even fly figure-eights with jaw-dropping agility and precision. GRASP has since 2010 made remarkable advancements in the capabilities of their tiny quadrotors, developed by Kmel Robotics, and documented them with a series of videos showing bots flying hoops and building a tower-like structure. The lab is ...
Driverless cars yield to reality
Post Date: 2012-01-24 20:53:31 by We The People
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Even as Google tests its small fleet of self-driving vehicles on California highways, legal scholars and government officials are warning society has only begun wrestling with the changes needed to a system created a century ago for horseless carriages. What happens if a police officer wants to pull one of these vehicles over? When it stops at a four-way intersection, would it be too polite to take its turn ahead of aggressive human drivers or equally polite robots? What sort of insurance would it need? These and other implications of what Google calls autonomous vehicles were debated by Silicon Valley technologists, legal scholars and government regulators at a symposium sponsored by the ...
Russian Scientist Finds Life on Venus!
Post Date: 2012-01-23 16:42:14 by Happy Quanzaa
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Life spotted on Venus: Russian scientist MOSCOW: Several objects resembling living beings were detected on photographs taken by a Russian landing probe in 1982 during a Venus mission, says an article published in the Solar System Research magazine. Leonid Ksanfomaliti of the Space Research Institute of Russia's Academy of Sciences published a research that analysed the photographs from the Venus mission made by a Soviet landing probe, Venus-13, in 1982. The photographs feature several objects, which Ksanfomaliti said, resembled a "disk", a "black flap" and a "scorpion". All of them "emerge, fluctuate and disappear", the scientist said, ...
Strongest Solar Storm Since 2005 Hitting Earth
Post Date: 2012-01-23 12:38:29 by Brian S
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(01-23) 08:36 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) -- Space weather officials say the strongest solar storm in more than six years is bombarding Earth with radiation with more to come. The radiation is mostly an issue for satellite disruptions and astronauts in space. It can cause communication problems for polar-traveling airplanes. The Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado observed the flare Sunday at 11 p.m. EST. Physicist Doug Biesecker (BEE-secker) says the biggest concern is the radiation, which arrived on Earth an hour later. It will likely continue through Wednesday. Biesecker said the storm's radiation levels are considered strong but other storms have been more severe. It is the ...
Wind Power Without the Blades: Big Pics
Post Date: 2012-01-22 18:55:41 by lucysmom
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Noise from wind turbine blades, inadvertent bat and bird kills and even the way wind turbines look have made installing them anything but a breeze. New York design firm Atelier DNA has an alternative concept that ditches blades in favor of stalks. Resembling thin cattails, the Windstalks generate electricity when the wind sets them waving. The designers came up with the idea for the planned city Masdar, a 2.3-square-mile, automobile-free area being built outside of Abu Dhabi. Atelier DNA’s "Windstalk"project came in second in the Land Art Generator competition a contest sponsored by Madsar to identify the best work of art that generates renewable energy from a pool of ...
Tanaka Precious Metals Begins Providing World's First Silver Ink Able to Form Electronic Circuits with UV Light
Post Date: 2012-01-16 22:18:33 by Mad Dog
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Enabling wiring through room-temperature hardening without heating, optimal for all base materials such as PET film Tokyo, Jan 17, 2012 - (JCN Newswire) - Tanaka Holdings Co., Ltd (a company of Tanaka Precious Metals) today announced that Tanaka Kikinzoku Kogyo K.K., which operates the Tanaka Precious Metals' manufacturing business, had commercialized the world's first conductive silver ink capable of forming electronic circuits using only hardening by ultraviolet (UV) light without the need for hardening by heating, and will begin selling the product on January 18. After printing a circuit on base material using this ink and exposing it to UV light for approximately 0.3 seconds, ...
Study Shows Humans Were Skilled Fishermen 42,000 Years Ago
Post Date: 2012-01-15 18:05:17 by Brian S
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HONG KONG (Reuters) – Fish hooks and fishbones dating back 42,000 years found in a cave in East Timor suggest that humans were capable of skilled, deep-sea fishing 30,000 years earlier than previously thought, researchers in Australia and Japan said on Friday. The artifacts — nearly 39,000 fishbones and three fish hooks — were found in a limestone cave in Jerimalai in East Timor, 50 metres (165 feet) above sea level, said Sue O’Connor from the Australian National University’s department of archaeology and natural history. “There was never any hint of (what) maritime technology people might have had in terms of fishing gear 40,000 years ago,” ...
Plants Can Recognize, Communicate With Relatives, Studies Find
Post Date: 2012-01-13 10:53:07 by lucysmom
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An ability to tell family from strangers is well known in animals, allowing them to cooperate and share resources, but plants may possess similar social skills, scientists believe. Susan Dudley and Amanda File of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, report they have demonstrated for the first time that plants can recognize their kin. This suggests that plants, though lacking cognition and memory, are capable of complex social interactions. "Plants have this kind of hidden but complicated social life," Dudley said. snip "We hypothesized that plants have evolved to emit a secondary signal to help nearby relatives by promoting the recruitment of natural enemies [of the ...
Photo: The Bounty of Species in a Single Scoop of Seafloor Mud
Post Date: 2012-01-06 22:03:39 by A K A Stone
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A mere handful of seafloor mud may contain as many species as are found in a square meter of tropical rainforest. The fantastic assemblage seen above was gathered from a single scoop of mud, about 2 inches deep and 5 inches across. “It’s easy, when you get away from the coast, to think of the oceans as a homogeneous blue. It’s a lot more complex than that,” said biologist Craig McClain of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. McClain and colleagues collected the mud while surveying distributions of seafloor organisms, the lives of which are shaped by “marine snow” — a slow, steady, shower of organic particles that drift down from high in the ...
Does a Magnet Gun Conserve Momentum?
Post Date: 2011-12-27 23:14:49 by A K A Stone
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The Gauss gun. A very simple, yet very cool device. Check out this video. The Gauss gun. A very simple, yet very cool device. Check out this video. There are many other examples of this Gauss gun. You can easily reproduce this yourself. You just need some magnets and steel balls (or balls of steel). In terms of work-energy, I can think of the balls and the magnets as closed system. This means there is no work done and the energy equation can be written as: Since the final ball speed is greater than the initial, the change in kinetic energy is a positive value. This means that the change in magnetic potential would have to be negative. Just what the heck is magnetic potential ...
The Ice Worm Cometh
Post Date: 2011-12-22 21:25:05 by A K A Stone
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This is the prototype for our new-and-experimental Short variety of article. If well-received, these Shorts will help to fill the gaps between full articles. Please let us know what you think…who likes short Shorts? In 1887, a glacial geologist named George Frederick Wright was hiking across the Muir Glacier in southeast Alaska when something strange caught his eye. Just as the daylight began to fade, the previously uninterrupted expanse of white snow around him began to develop what appeared to be a five o’clock shadow. These wriggling “whiskers” grew rapidly and emerged from the solid ice, leaving the snow crawling with an astonishing number of small black worms. ...
IBM says 'mind control' possible in five years
Post Date: 2011-12-19 22:06:22 by A K A Stone
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As part of IBM's "5 in 5" forecasts of predictions, the company says that "minding reading" (more like mind control) will no longer be a science fiction dream and that within five years, we'll all be controlling our computers and smartphones by just wiggling our brains. While Apple focuses on speech technology with Siri, IBM believes the next revolution will involve our brains. To tackle and make mind control a reality, we'd all need to wear something like Emotiv's EPOC neuroheadset that's equipped with sensors that read electrical brain signals. According to IBM Research News "the idea is to use these electrical synapses to also do everyday ...
Hydrogel helps grow new scar-free skin over third degree burns
Post Date: 2011-12-19 18:50:50 by A K A Stone
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Third-degree burns typically require very complex treatment, and leave nasty scars once they've healed. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, however, are reporting success at treating such burns on lab mice, using a new type of hydrogel that grows new skin (as opposed to scar tissue) over burn sites. The gel contains no drugs or biological components - it's made mainly from water and dissolved dextran, which is a sugar-like polymer. The team, led by principal investigator Sharon Gerecht, had originally planned on infusing the hydrogel with stem cells and growth factors. Due to processes they don't fully understand, however, the gel in its basic form was able to grow new ...
Comet Lovejoy Survives Brush With the Sun
Post Date: 2011-12-16 23:45:14 by A K A Stone
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On Wednesday, I reported on the approach to the Sun by Comet Lovejoy, the first "sungrazing" comet to be discovered by a ground-based observer in over 40 years. Most comet experts had predicted that the comet, officially known as C/2011 W3 (Lovejoy), would disintegrate on Friday, vaporized by its passage just a fraction of a solar radius from our star. Clearly, the comet had other ideas. To the delight of astronomers, it survived its close encounter with the Sun, retaining much of its brilliance as seen in images from spaceborne observatories. It’s now receding from the Sun and should become visible in the night sky within days for observers at southerly latitudes. ...
Broadband vs. Internet
Post Date: 2011-12-12 10:51:51 by A K A Stone
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The Internet is no more capable than the infrastructures that carry it. Here in the U.S. most of those infrastructures are owned by telephone and cable companies. Those companies are not only in a position to limit use of the Internet for purposes other than their own, but to reduce the Net itself to something less, called “broadband.” In fact, they’ve been working hard on both. We’ll talk about broadband below. For now let’s look at the clobbering the Internet took last week when Verizon, the only large provider of fiber optic Internet connections in the U.S., put an end to expansion of FiOS, their fiber-to-the-premise telephone, Internet and cable TV system. This ...
Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke
Post Date: 2011-11-29 17:23:31 by CZ82
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Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke By Richard Martin The thick hardbound volume was sitting on a shelf in a colleague’s office when Kirk Sorensen spotted it. A rookie NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Sorensen was researching nuclear-powered propulsion, and the book’s title — Fluid Fuel Reactors — jumped out at him. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Hours later, he was still reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the arcane writing. “I took it home that night, but I didn’t understand all the nuclear terminology,” Sorensen says. He pored over it in the coming months, ultimately deciding ...
Study Funded By National Science Foundation Concludes: ‘Global Warming Rate Less Than Feared’
Post Date: 2011-11-25 08:51:42 by CZ82
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Study Funded By National Science Foundation Concludes: ‘Global Warming Rate Less Than Feared’ by Publius Chillin' at the ice hotel As serious scientists pull back from the alarmist predictions of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and from the extreme policy pronouncements of left-wing lobby groups, the complex reality of climate is starting to emerge. AFP reports today, “Global warming rate less than feared: study”: High levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may have less of an impact on the rate of global warming than feared, a study said Thursday. The authors of the study funded by the US National Science Foundation stressed that ...
Robotic bear pillow stops your snoring by gently mauling your face
Post Date: 2011-11-16 18:27:42 by sneakypete
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Looking to stop snoring? What you need is Jusui-Kun, a robot bear that paws your face while you're sleeping. Okay, it's more of a "gentle tickling," according to the bear's creators. The key is to get the snorer sleeping on the pillow to move his or her head from side to side. Jusui-Kun has a built-in mic to detect the sleeper's snoring, while an equally cuddly hand monitor detects blood oxygen levels, letting the bear know when to issue one of its loving face swipes. Video after the break. Continued at link with text and video Click for Full Text!
Poster Comment:This could be a big help for people with sleep apnea.
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