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April 2007 Plenum News 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. 04/30/07 - Sheer Myths Eating eggs will raise your cholesterol. Eating carbohydrates makes you fat. Drink eight glasses of water a day. Everyone needs vitamin supplements. (Details at the link.) 04/30/07 - Ocean currents, not humans' CO2 emissions, causing global warming Hurricane forecaster William Gray said Friday that global ocean currents, not human-produced carbon dioxide, are responsible for global warming, and the Earth may begin to cool on its own in five to 10 years. Gray, a Colorado State University researcher best known for his annual forecasts of hurricanes along the U.S. Atlantic coast, also said increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere won't produce more or stronger hurricanes. He said that during the past 40 years the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined compared with the previous 40 years, even though carbon dioxide levels have risen. Gray said ocean circulation patterns are behind a decades-long warming cycle. He has argued previously that the strength of these patterns can affect how much cold water rises to the surface, which in turn affects how warm or cold the atmosphere is. He also disputed assertions that greenhouse gases could raise global temperatures as much as some scientists predict. "There's no way that doubling CO2 is going to cause that amount of warming," he said. Gray said warming and cooling trends cannot go on indefinitely and that he believes temperatures are beginning to level out after a very warm year in 1998. 04/30/07 - Vitamin D casts cancer prevention in new light For decades, researchers have puzzled over why rich northern countries have cancer rates many times higher than those in developing countries - and many have laid the blame on dangerous pollutants spewed out by industry. But research into vitamin D is suggesting both a plausible answer to this medical puzzle and a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren't caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations. Researchers are linking low vitamin D status to a host of other serious ailments, including multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes, influenza, osteoporosis and bone fractures among the elderly. In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the sunshine vitamin. Their results are nothing short of astounding. A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large - twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking - it almost looks like a typographical error. Only brief full-body exposures to bright summer sunshine - of 10 or 15 minutes a day - are needed to make high amounts of the vitamin. But most authorities, including Health Canada, have urged a total avoidance of strong sunlight or, alternatively, heavy use of sunscreen. Both recommendations will block almost all vitamin D synthesis. Anyone practising sun avoidance has traded the benefit of a reduced risk of skin cancer - which is easy to detect and treat and seldom fatal - for an increased risk of the scary, high-body-count cancers, such as breast, prostate and colon, that appear linked to vitamin D shortages. Avoiding most bright sunlight wouldn't be so serious if it weren't for a second factor: The main determinant of whether sunshine is strong enough to make vitamin D is latitude. Living in the north is bad, the south is better, and near the equator is best of all. 04/30/07 - 10,000 year old Camel bones found in Mesa, AZ Workers digging at the future site of a Wal-Mart store in suburban Mesa have unearthed the bones of a prehistoric camel that is estimated to be about 10,000 years old. "There's no question that this is a camel; these creatures walked the land here until about 8,000 years ago, when the same event that wiped out a great deal of mammal life took place," Archer told The Arizona Republic. "In my 15 years at ASU doing this work I can think of six or seven times when finds this important have been made," Archer said. "This is the first camel. Others have been horses, once a mammoth on Happy Valley Road. This sort of thing is extremely rare." 04/30/07 - There's more to ethanol than just corn W.S. Pryor, a retired oil company executive, advocates continued development of the nation's petroleum resources. While he pointed out familiar concerns about corn grain-based ethanol as an alternative fuel, he failed to mention the variety of other ethanol sources under investigation. These additional sources aren't just the future of ethanol as a fuel; they are the future of energy - and the future of our state and nation. Plant residues form biomass, which is the raw material from which cellulosic ethanol is derived. The preferred biomass feed stocks are switchgrass and woody biomass crops like poplar trees. These grow well all over Tennessee on mostly idle, marginal lands. Biomass can also be derived from residue left behind after forest products have been harvested or from the elements of corn left in the field to rot after the grain has been harvested. Cellulosic ethanol comes from the part of the corn plant not used for food. So, in addition to corn grain-based ethanol, Tennessee has an array of potential new energy sources from biomass - cellulosic ethanol. This expands ethanol's potential availability well beyond corn grain, which greatly expands our alternative fuel options - and in no way competes with any utilization of corn. A unit of corn ethanol, made from grain, yields about 40 percent more energy than it takes to produce that unit, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. A unit of cellulosic ethanol yields more than 500 percent of the energy that goes into producing it. In contrast, gasoline made from petroleum returns 20 percent less energy than it takes to produce it. That's why cellulosic ethanol is the future of energy. 04/30/07 - Climate change sees fish grow faster in warmer water Climate change is affecting the growth of fish, with those living in warmer, shallow waters growing faster and species in cooling deep ocean waters growing slower, according to an Australian study. The research by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) found fish were growing faster in waters above a depth of 250 meters (825 feet) and had slower growth rates below 1,000 meters (3,300 feet). "Fish growth rates are closely tied with water temperatures, so warming surface waters mean the shallow-water fish are growing more quickly, while the deep water fish are growing more slowly than they were a century ago." Populations of large marine species are subject to two major stress factors, commercial fishing and climate change, and the heavy exploitation increases the sensitivity of species to environmental effects, said Thresher. Thresher's team studied 555 fish specimens, such as Banded Morwong, Redfish, Jackass Morwong and Orange Roughy, from waters around Maria Island off the east coast of Australia's island state of Tasmania. The fish were aged 2 to 128 years and had been born between 1861 to 1993. 04/29/07 - Are we safe from robots that can think for themselves? Scientists told yesterday of a new generation of robots which can work without human direction. They predict that in the next five years robots will be available for child-minding, to work in care homes, monitor prisons and help police trace criminals. And while it may sound like something out of a science-fiction film, the experts say advances in technology have made the thinking robot possible. Until now most robots have been operated by humans, usually by remote control or verbal commands. But now autonomous machines such as toys and vacuum cleaners which cover the room without needing any human instructions or guidance are being introduced. Manufacturers are exploring ways to make robotic toys look after children, which experts say will lead to child-minding machines able to monitor youngsters, transmitting their progress to the parents by onboard cameras. In Japan, scientists are producing robots to act as companions for the elderly and check their heart rate. "But the danger is that we will sleepwalk into a situation where we accept a large number of autonomous robots in our lives without being sure of the consequences. "The outcome could be that when given a choice the robot could make the wrong decision and someone gets hurt. They can go wrong just like a motor car can. "We should be aware of the future that we are letting ourselves in for. We need to look at their safety and reliability." 04/29/07 - Nuclear reactions may produce phones' power For several years a Chicago entrepreneur has labored quietly building a company to create an alternative to batteries for powering cell phones and other small gadgets. The company, Lattice Energy LLC, deliberately kept a low profile because its core technology, first called cold fusion 18 years ago, has long been ridiculed by mainstream scientists. Lewis Larsen, Lattice's founder, didn't want his enterprise tainted by the empty promises of unlimited cheap energy surrounding cold fusion. Larsen, who has had careers in investment banking and consulting, has worked with many scientists doing experiments with what now is called low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) rather than cold fusion. Even with the name change, he said, many scientists mistakenly still believe they are creating nuclear fusion in a bottle when they thrust palladium or other metals into heavy water and add energy. The experimenters were convinced that atoms of a form of hydrogen called deuterium were fusing together to form helium. "That kind of fusion requires very high temperatures," Widom said. Rather than look for other explanations, most experimenters preferred to invent new laws of physics to account for cold fusion, Widom said. But instead of a strong nuclear force like fusion at work, he concluded that a weak force was at the core of the experimental results. Electrons were combining with protons to form neutrons, giving off energy in the process. The entrepreneur and the professor have published their Widom-Larsen theory of low-energy nuclear reactions and have been meeting with business executives and government officials to build credibility for their ideas. "Our model invokes no new physics," said Widom. "Everything we've done conforms to the Standard Model's predictions for weak interactions." With advances in nanotechnology, Larsen predicts it will become practical to design devices using LENR to power cell phones that can last 500 hours. The technology also might be used to produce power in other settings, but Larsen said, "We're going for the best available market with lots of demand, and that's electronic mobile devices." 04/29/07 - RIAA Claims Ownership of All Artist Royalties For Internet Radio "With the furor over the impending rate hike for Internet radio stations, wouldn't a good solution be for streaming internet stations to simply not play RIAA-affiliated labels' music and focus on independent artists? Sounds good, except that the RIAA's affiliate organization SoundExchange claims it has the right to collect royalties for any artist, no matter if they have signed with an RIAA label or not. 'SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free ... So how it works is that SoundExchange collects money through compulsory royalties from Webcasters and holds onto the money. If a label or artist wants their share of the money, they must become a member of SoundExchange and pay a fee to collect their royalties.'" 04/28/07 - Sorry for the limited updates, I'm too sore and sick to do it. Bumpy roads all day = major bruises, but getting better. 04/28/07 - DARPA Developing Defensive Plasma Shield "According to an article at New Scientist, DARPA is developing a plasma shield that would allow troops to stun and disorientate enemies. The system will use a technology known as dynamic pulse detonation (DPD), which involves producing a ball of plasma with an intense laser pulse, and then a supersonic shockwave within the plasma using another pulse. The result is a gigantic flash and a loud bang in a the air. 'The company has also pitched a portable laser rifle, which would be lethal, to the US Army. It would weigh about fifteen kilograms, would have a range of more than a mile, and could have numerous advantages over existing rifles - better accuracy and the ability to hit a moving target at the speed of light.'" 04/28/07 - Is Wind Power Full of Hot Air? Wind power might be the ticket, as 4,000MW of wind power capacity is possible by the end of 2007, according to research reported by Manufacturing.Net earlier this month. Industrial Info Resources has found that China’s geography provides an estimated wind power potential of 3.2 billion kilowatts, and it is expected to surpass Germany and the U.S. as the world’s largest wind power producer by 2020. While these are no doubt impressive statistics, it is important to understand what it is involved to make wind power work. The National Center for Policy Analysis recently provided a short and sweet guide of examples to wind power that highlights both its merits and its shortcomings. Consider these NCPA facts that don’t exactly paint a rosy picture for wind power: • In 2002, there were 54 days in western Denmark on which the wind power systems supplied less than 1 percent of demand, according to an analysis by Denmark energy consulting firm Incoteco. • For half the days in Germany in 2004, wind plant output was less than 11 percent of rated capacity; in California, at the time of peak demand in July 2006, turbines generated 10 percent of capacity, and Texas generates about 17 percent. • In contrast, coal and natural gas plants generate at a little better than 70 percent of capacity, and nuclear plants at more than 90 percent. “If our electricity was generated only by wind turbines, such inefficiencies and variability in the electrical power supply would be routine and entirely unacceptable,” says Pete du Pont, chairman of the NCPA and former governor of Delaware. Du Pont also cites plenty of wind power benefits, though, and says the technology is best used as part of a larger, alternative energy strategy. Shortcomings notwithstanding, plenty of people are betting big on wind power’s potential. 04/27/07 - A diesel Honda? That gets 62.8 miles a gallon? Feast your eyes on this, car technology and high-mileage nuts. It's a Honda Accord that runs on diesel. Honda expects to bring the clean-diesel car to the U.S. by 2010. It gets 62.8 miles a gallon on the highway, but otherwise looks and feels like a regular Accord. 04/27/07 - Top Hedge Fund Managers Earn Over $240 Million James Simons, a 69-year-old publicity shy former math professor, uses complex computer-driven mathematical models to make bets on stocks, bonds and commodities, among other things. His earnings last year were $1.7 billion. And Mr. Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies, is not the only member of the billion-dollars-a-year club. Two other hedge fund managers, Kenneth C. Griffin and Edward S. Lampert, each took home more than $1 billion last year, with George Soros missing the hurdle by a hair, give or take $50 million, according to an annual ranking of the top 25 hedge fund earners by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, which comes out today. 04/26/07 - Video - TrussMe Builder helper Watch us put up trusses on this house in minutes instead of hours with the Truss-Me system!! New invention for really fast, safe and accurate placement and securing of trusses when building a house. 04/26/07 - Steorn's free energy seems curiously expensive There are easy ways to tell pseudoscience: grand claims with no way to verify them, important facts that are alluded to and not presented, claims of conspiracy or closed-mindedness by the scientific community, production of claims by press release rather than scientific papers. Steorn more than fulfils all of these: it is, by any objective test, pseudoscience. Unpredicted science is even better, when you see something happen, go "Hold on a sec..." and try and work out why. If you can't work that out using the very best science of the time, then you could be onto something. Chances are, you're not. You've missed experimental error, an aspect of existing theory, even a straightforward misinterpretation of results. To catch this, you put out a paper saying: "I've found this, and I think it's important". Others - not as attached to your discovery as yourself - then check what you've done. They repeat the experiment, but not to reproduce the results: instead, the idea is to pick holes in your logic, find problems, show why it's not important after all. Get past that stage and then and only then is it deemed good enough to build further theories. McCarthy says Steorn won't do that bit, and won't really explain why. Or rather, he says it will - but in private with hand-picked scientists, because it wants to have a really good explanation of how it works before it's prepared to demonstrate that it does. Put the plans up on the site, I said. What would it hurt? Multiple independent demonstrations are difficult to refute. The conversation ended up with him saying in effect: "This is how we've chosen to do it". There was talk of intellectual property and patents, yet if you want to patent something you keep quiet about it, not take out full-page ads in the Economist. They don't have to have a theory for it to be science - in fact, it's clear that they don't - but that doesn't matter. Build a box. Show it working. That's enough. Hans Christian Ørsted showed electromagnetism in 1820 and it wasn't fully explained until James Clerk Maxwell's masterwork nearly 50 years later - but it was all science. For the price of that Economist advert and whatever they're paying their PR company, they could have built 10 apparatuses that actually demonstrated their effect and Fedex'd them to the major centres of scientific excellence on the planet. It wouldn't even cost them that much. If they'll send me the plans, I'll build one. Having built it, I'll convince myself that it does produce more energy than it takes in - which will take a glass of water, a resistor, a thermometer, a couple of test meters and some basic mathematics, all of which I already have. I shall then get on the train to Cambridge and refuse to leave until the nice people at the Cavendish take a look at it. I shall do all this at no charge to Steorn, because it will make me very famous if it turns out to be true and I'll get a great article out of it if it isn't. Whether it's being driven by madness, genuine misapprehension or some ulterior motive yet to be revealed, it's not being driven by science. 04/26/07 - Does Miracle Germ Killing Product Live Up To Its Hype? A cleaning agent that not only kills potentially harmful bacteria, germs, mold and mildew, but removes odours and stains as well. The secret lies in the machine that puts ozone into the H20 from your kitchen tap. "We're taking the oxygen in that water and just converting it to super oxygen," explains inventor Steve Hengsperger. "So we're taking the O2 and converting it to O3." He calls ozone a "natural sanitizer" that's 50 percent stronger than bleach and works 3,000 times faster. And he maintains that not even mutated germs can survive its power. Water that's treated with the substance is harmless to kids, pets and plants and doesn't hurt the environment, unlike some cleaners laced with ammonia or other chemicals. It breaks down completely after about 15 minutes and is always potable. Researchers say you can spray it on a diaper pail or a laundry hamper as a disinfectant. You can use it to kill invisible nasties lurking on stove and kitchen countertops. And scientists swear you can even spray it on food to kill any microorganisms lurking there. The invention comes with a variety of different models, including one for your kitchen and food and even one for your toothbrush. Treating the water requires buying the unit and that involves a not so minor monetary outlay, although the manufacturers believe you'll make it back by not having to purchase any other clearing products at your store. It costs around Cdn.$200 to get it into your home, but once you've got one, it's supposed to last for years. E. coli reductions - Tomato: 99.9% Grapes: 99.9% Snow Pea: 99.8% Kumquat: 99.8% Listeria reductions - Tomato: 99.9% Grapes: 99.0% Snow Pea: 99.6% Kumquat: 97.5% Salmonella reductions - Tomato: 99.9% Grapes: 99.9% Snow Pea: 99.5% Kumquat: 99.2% 04/26/07 - WIPO winners - Drug Tester and Solar Dryer Marina Myagkova, from the Russian Federation, received an award for inventing a drug screening test which diagnoses whether a person has consumed narcotics within a period of two to four months. The second award went to a national of Congo, Tsengué Tsengué, for the invention of a continuous and adjustable solar-powered dryer for agricultural use which collects thermal solar energy, stocks it and releases it on demand. 04/26/07 - Your Alcohol Habits Revealed Using A Tuft Of Hair Alcohol has just been classified as the fifth most seriously harming drug, after only heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and street methadone. In 2005, 19% of men and 8% of women were classed as ‘heavy drinkers’. Even more shocking is the fact that liver disease is the fifth highest cause of death in Britain. Alcoholics are just as prevalent in society as diabetics. Before today, it has just not been possible to check on someone’s previous long term alcohol abuse. As the hair grows, it absorbs special markers called fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEE’s) and ethyl glucuronide (EtG) into its structure, which remain in the hair indefinitely. These patented markers are only produced when there is alcohol in the bloodstream, and the more markers there are, the more alcohol you have consumed. What makes this analysis revolutionary is that it gives a history going back month by month or even years if required. No other method can do this. Afterwards, an alcoholic’s treatment can be monitored periodically as their hair grows. What are the benefits of knowing someone’s alcohol history? • Identify long-term alcohol addicts, offer help and improve treatment success rate • Prove a parent is fit to have custody of their children • Identify an alcohol abuser in a safety critical job • For forensic use, e.g. to prove whether a driver in a road accident was or was not in the habit of overindulging alcohol. (example: Princess Diana’s chauffeur, Henri Paul) • To prove someone does not have an alcohol problem and is fit to lead (for example running a political party, or head of a corporate business - all hair colours are suitable) • To prove someone is long-term abstinent and a suitable candidate for a liver transplant. 04/26/07 - Revolutionary breakthrough in fighting a cold Innovative Vicks First Defence - a drug-free nasal spray - is being hailed as one of the most exciting advancements in the cold industry for years. Until now, cold treatments have fallen into two categories; products reputed to boost the immune system such as Vitamin C and Echinacea, or products that relieve the symptoms of the infection, such as decongestants. The introduction of Vicks First Defence means there is now a cold intervention product that is scientifically proven to attack colds at their source before they have a chance to develop. Vicks First Defence attacks the cold by physical rather than pharmacological means, supplementing the body’s natural ability to disarm and remove the cold virus before it takes a strong hold in the nose and throat. When sprayed into the back of the nasal passage, the viscous gel coats the virus so it can’t dock to the body’s cells, disarms it by creating an environment in which it cannot flourish and then flushes out the viruses, aided by mucus secretions. Vicks First Defence was successfully launched in the United Kingdom in 2005. A survey of patients who had tried the treatment there reported that, after using it, 88 per cent claimed they did not catch a cold or their cold was less severe than usual. The average incubation period for a common cold is usually around two days. Research shows this incubation period offers an opportunity to inhibit the virus before it takes hold. As a result, Vicks First Defence is most effective when used at the early signs of a cold - a tickly sore throat and sneezing are the most common. For optimum results, Vicks First Defence should continue to be used for two days after the symptoms have subsided. It can also be taken when there is an increased risk of catching a cold, for example on public transport, in the office or when a partner or family member already has a cold. Vicks First Defence, $16.99, 15ml, available over the counter at pharmacies or in supermarkets. 04/26/07 - Deep brain implants show bionic vision promise Most visual prosthetics rely on implants behind the retina. These stimulate surrounding nerve tissue to generate points of light, called phosphenes, in the mind's eye. Such prosthetics require a detailed map of where phosphenes appear in response to electrical stimulation. Once this map is complete, digital images, captured by a camera, can be converted to electrical pulses that produce multiple points of light, allowing a blind person to "see" simple shapes. In patients with severe eye trauma, however, there may not be enough surviving retinal neurons to stimulate. Or a patient's retinas may simply have degenerated over time. An alternative is to place implants directly in the brain, within the visual cortex. But this is a large and complexly folded part of the brain, making access and mapping of the visual field a serious challenge. Now John Pezaris and colleague R. Clay Reid, both at Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, have shown that phosphenes can be produced by stimulating the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) - an area deep in the centre of the brain that relays visual signals from the retina to the cortex. The LGN was previously thought to be too difficult to reach. But surgical advances for deep brain stimulation - including treatment used for movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease - have made accessing it relatively easy, via a single small hole in the skull. 04/26/07 - Questions follow reports of stem cell diabetes cure Diabetes cured by stem cells! Or so you would think, judging from last week's media coverage. The excitement focused on a trial conducted in Brazil that resulted in people with type 1 diabetes being able to live without injections of insulin for months - in one case for three years. It is unclear, however, whether the treatment constitutes a cure, or even whether any benefit was due to stem cells. Indeed, the trial's real significance may be to highlight the fact that tests of potentially risky stem cell treatments are increasingly taking place in Asia and Latin America, where approval may be granted more readily than in the US or Europe. n type 1 diabetes, immune T-cells attack cells in the pancreas that secrete insulin - a hormone controlling blood sugar. Sufferers face a lifetime of insulin injections, which may not be fully effective. As an alternative, doctors led by Júlio Voltarelli of the Regional Blood Center in Ribeirão Preto in southern Brazil treated 15 newly diagnosed people with immunosuppressive drugs. They then gave infusions of stem cells that had previously been harvested from each person's own bone marrow (The Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 297, p 1568). The idea was that these cells would produce new immune cells that would no longer attack the pancreas. It is unclear whether this is what happened, say diabetes specialists. 04/26/07 - Single Fatty meal stresses Heart Researchers found that people who ate a fatty, fast-food breakfast were more prone to suffer the negative effects of stress than those who ate a healthy, low-fat breakfast. "What's really shocking is that this is just one meal," says researcher Tavis Campbell, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Calgary, in a news release. "It's been well documented that a high-fat diet leads to atherosclerosis [hardening of the arteries] and high blood pressure, and that exaggerated and prolonged cardiovascular responses to stress are associated with high blood pressure in the future." "So when we learn that even a single, high-fat meal can make you more reactive to stress, it's cause for concern because it suggests a new and damaging way that a high-fat diet affects cardiovascular function." 04/26/07 - Can Migration change the World? The standard rap on migration in well-intentioned circles in the global North seems to have been split between two camps: those who believe that migration is completely bad, because it changes cultures in the South while adding to the number of people who are over-consuming in the North, and those who think it is mostly bad, but okay in small doses as a means of creating a multicultural society. But what if migration, properly conceived, could be crafted into a powerful force for good? Already, remittances -- the money sent home from the two hundred million people who have migrated from the Global South to the North, often intending to return home -- may prove to be, as we're remarked before, one of the most important levers for creating the conditions for sustainable development. About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is as big if not bigger. Were these half-billion or so people to constitute a state - migration nation - it would rank as the world’s third-largest. While some migrants go abroad with Ph.D.’s, most travel ... with modest skills but fearsome motivation. The risks migrants face are widely known, including the risk of death, but the amounts they secure for their families have just recently come into view. Migrants worldwide sent home an estimated $300 billion last year - nearly three times the world’s foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums - “remittances” - bring Morocco more money than tourism does. They bring Sri Lanka more money than tea does. ...In 22 countries, remittances exceed a tenth of the G.D.P., including Moldova (32 percent), Haiti (23 percent) and Lebanon (22 percent). Why do they head North? Many are pushed by desperation, but many more are lured by the desperate and growing need for young laborers created by the aging of the developed world. 04/26/07 - Fixya Stuff - Online Support Community For Repairing Consumer Stuff The idea behind FixYa is to aggregate all support information that is scattered throughout the internet in a single user friendly location. In addition, FixYa is a huge knowledgebase that is constantly updated by a live community of users who share their experiences of technical problems and solutions. Through the site's unique rating system, FixYa is allowing users to find the best solution for every problem and even offer a new solution. Our aim is that over time, FixYa will offer the best solutions for the most common problems of each and every product the site is covering. The best thing about our knowledgebase is that it's based on true user experience rather than on projected FAQs by the manufacturer. 04/26/07 - GoLoco: The Ride Revolution GoLoco is a service that helps people quickly arrange ride sharing between friends, neighbors, and colleagues. We also handle online payments from passengers to drivers for their share of the trip costs. 04/26/07 - Video - Best Invention Ever! Too good to pass up but the title sounded so intriguing I had to check it out. CYA indeed! 04/26/07 - GlobalFreeloaders GlobalFreeloaders.com is an online community, bringing people together to offer you free accommodation all over the world. Save money and make new friends whilst seeing the world from a local's perspective! 04/26/07 - Hotdoll: The Sex Doll for Dogs (Forgive me for this one, too funny NOT to post! And be sure to read the comments. - JWD) Is your dog in heat and humping anything it can wrap its horny little legs around? Are you constantly having to pry your promiscuous pooch off the legs of guests, parents and members of your church? Protect your leg from a hump attack by getting Scruffy a Hotdoll. Yes, it's a sex doll for dogs. It's shaped like a dog and it'll allow your tension-filled pet to go to town as much as his little heart desires, humping away until he passes out in exhaustion, leaving a wispy coil of friction-singed dog-fur smoke wafting into the air. 04/26/07 - Fuel-Efficient Cars Dent States' Road Budgets The Federal Highway Administration estimates that by 2009 the tax receipts that make up most of the federal highway trust fund will be $21 billion shy of what's needed just to maintain existing roads, much less build new roads or add capacity. Trying to compensate for highway-budget shortfalls, a handful of states are exploring other, potentially more lucrative ways to raise highway money. In a year-long pilot program overseen by Mr. Whitty, the cars of 260 volunteers were outfitted with Global Positioning Systems and electronic odometers that recorded the number of miles driven. The drivers bought gasoline at specially equipped service stations, where computers on the pumps subtracted the 24-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax and added a 1.2 cent fee for every mile driven. The pilot program ended last month. State officials are reviewing the results to determine whether the system would raise more revenue than the gasoline tax. The initiative likely will be revived and expanded when a few bugs are worked out, says Mr. Whitty. If the program is fully implemented at some point, Oregon would likely have to keep dual tax methods. Out-of-state drivers, whose cars wouldn't be equipped with the required mileage devices, would continue to pay the gas tax, while Oregon drivers would be switched to the mileage-based fee. 04/25/07 - India's Successful Commercial Satellite Launch "Yesterday India successfully launched an Italian astronomical satellite. A BBC article (view video clip) notes that the launch grants India membership in the exclusive group of nations that can sustain commercial satellite launches. India's launch vehicle has less overall capacity than the competition - up to 1,500 kg to orbit - but the country plans to sweep the low end of the market by offering the lowest cost per launched kilogram for smaller payloads." 04/25/07 - Study Shatters Myth of Hybrid Premium A new study of 118 Prius drivers, recruited mostly through flyers placed on their windshield, shatters the conventional wisdom that hybrids do not pay for themselves. Most of the Prius shoppers wanted an eco-friendly car. But when asked what kind of car they would have purchased if they had not bought a hybrid, these shoppers would have purchased a vehicle costing thousands of dollars more than a Prius. Therefore, the Prius was not only their most desired vehicle; it was cheaper than other cars on their shopping list. “This study captured the people that traded down from a luxury vehicle, such as Audi A6, BMW X3 or Acura TL,” said Jonathan Klein, general partner of the Topline Strategy Group, the Boston-based business and technology strategy firm which conducted the study. 04/25/07 - Video - Outdoor Coanda Ufo demo Outdoor flight demo of a RC Flying Saucer based on the Coanda Effect by Jean-Louis Naudin. more info - The GFS-UAV, propelled by an electric engine, uses the Coanda effect to take off vertically, fly, hover and land vertically ( VTOL ). There is no big rotor like on an helicopter and the flight is very stable and safe for the surrounding. The design of the GFS-UAV N-01A is based on the Geoff Hatton' flying saucer from GFS Project limited. 04/25/07 - How Plugin Hybrids will Solve the Fuel Crunch The future of American motoring can be found in any hardware store. It's not in the automotive section, but over in the power tools aisle. There it sits, proudly displayed as the newest must-have tool in DIY America: the high-powered cordless drill. It's the battery we're interested in, a lithium-ion pack so densely charged with energy that a new 28-volt ­power pack is slimmer than an older 18-volt nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) battery. In just over a year, li-ion completed a leap from cellphones to power tools and grabbed the spotlight in that market. Now its boosters say the battery is preparing to graduate to the big time, 4 million miles of American road. Efficient, affordable, 110-volt-powered vehicles could be on dealers' lots within three years-if engineers can get the lithium-ion batteries right. 04/25/07 - Japanese Genesis magnetic motorbike The EV-X7 uses a hybrid magnetic engine, allowing the electric motorcycle to travel 180 kilometers (112 miles) on a single charge. Japanese electric vehicle manufacturer Axle unveils a new electric motorcycle EV-X7 powered by new hybrid magnetic motor SUMO, developed with its partner company Genesis Corp. in Tokyo April 4, 2006. The magnetic motor - a hybrid of a electromagnet and a permanent magnet - greatly enhances energy efficiency and allows the electric motorcycle to travel up to 180 kilometres (112 miles) on one charge, the makers said. / The EV-X7 weighs 200kg (440.92 lbs.) and is equipped with a newly-developed high-efficiency electric motor which drives the rear wheel. It can travel up to speeds of 150 kilometers per hour (90+ mph) and has a maximum range of 110 miles. All this is possible thanks to a state-of-the-art magnetic motor which is a hybrid between a electromagnet and a permanent magnet. The new motor is called Sumo or "super motor" and is actually housed inside the bike's rear wheel. The manufacturers say the motor is seven times more cost efficient than gas-powered scooters. "There will be a lot of advantages when motor vehicles go beyond existing hybrids and develop into purely electric vehicles. They'll become noiseless and will not harm the environment," said Jiro Sato, VP, Axle Corporation. The company plans to start selling a mini-scooter version of the magnetic-powered bike next year, which will be priced at about $2100. Daisuke Ito, a professional racer who test rode the EV-X7 prototype said, "I just feel that in the near future, we'll be seeing these kinds of electric motorbikes running all around town. And when that happens, conventional vehicles could disappear from motor racing, too, and we'll be competing only in electric vehicles." - More Info 04/25/07 - Video - 10 years of funny inventions Outrageous and crazy inventions. 04/25/07 - Video - Free energy using magnets Claim that angled magnetics will produce a continual rotation which can be used to drive a generator and produce power. The system shown should be scaleable if it works as claimed. It is reminescent of several other self-powered magnets particularly the Perended wheel. The angle of the magnetic fields and the overlap seem to provide a self-resetting driving force. 04/25/07 - Quantum physics says goodbye to reality Physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it. This opens the door to all kinds of weird semi-religious thinking that some folks will have lots of problems with. 04/25/07 - Video - Free Energy Ocean Star Patent number:WO2004091083 - Turkish inventors device produce electric energy without battery.patented.Muammer yildizin icadi bedava elektrik ureten cihaz.erke gibi.Dogruysa muthis! / From the patent - A system which generates electrical power via an accumulator that provides the initial motion for the system This isa portable systemthat generates electrical power via an accumulator that provides the initial motion for the system Already existing systems can generate electric power of whose duration depends on the lifetime of the battery. In these systems, the battery has to be reloaded in order to restart the system.12V electrical power provided by the batteries used m cars are increased to 220 V via transformers. Two accumulators are used in our invention. The system works on a continuous basis after the initial start up via these accumulators. There is no need for another transformer. Our system, which generates electrical power, does not need any other devices and it keeps on generating energy via its own mechanism. Also, the system works without connecting it to a network. Thus, it can be used at any place where no electricity exists. Nevertheless, when this system is connected to the entry of the buildings, there is no need for an additional network. The system can produce electrical power independentof a network. Ocean Star Website 04/25/07 - The Meaning of Longevity Nobody wants to die and longevity has always been a hot topic. Indeed, the now-standard Google Search test returns more than 17 million results with more than a few of them selling nostrums that promise to extend life. (Hint: they don’t work.) The unspoken assumption is that the goal of extended life is to stay healthy enough to continue as in midyears to chase additional success, wealth and recognition. There was not an inkling during the program that not everyone finds these goals fulfilling (even in midlife), and that after one has lived for five or six or seven decades, one’s attention might shift to goals and pleasures as different from midlife as midlife is from childhood and adolescence. That in later years, there might be a more complex reality to investigate and realize than continued career-building. A big difference between elders and younger people is that elders have been the age of everyone younger; we know what it is like to be 20, 30, 40, 50. But no younger person can know what it is like to be older. Yet they assume, without ever considering differently, that their goals are ours. Now that the culture of perpetual youth is fully established, the media - which pretty much is our culture - is operated exclusively by midlife adults promoting their stage of life as the right way, the only way, for everyone to live. For many years, I’ve held to a not entirely unique idea of the stages of life. In this theory, there are three broad divisions. The first, up until about age 30, is the information-gathering phase: school, early career, gaining experience as professionals and at living. The next 25 to 30 years are the busy, go-get ’em period: growing a career, making a home, raising children while adding to one’s store of knowledge. The third stage, then, is for integrating all that information, making sense of the first 50 or 60 years and suggesting ways to put that experience to use for the good of society - be it as small as one's family or as large as the world. More people are living longer, healthier lives than in the past and there are as many ways to use that longevity as there are people who attain it. 04/25/07 - Video - Free Energy Scalar/Magnet/Capacitor claim This is a very simple build at home free energy demonstration unit. It is built from a 1F 5.5v supercap sandwiched between 2 motor magnets with like poles facing. They are secured to the supercap with heat shrink tube, then a scaler winding around that and there you have it enjoy the video. 04/25/07 - Citizen journalism as a form of fascism If you've ever lived in a small community or belonged to an affinity group online, you know how things go. I belonged to an online group for Harley-Davidson Sportster riders, and even that went south. From discussing bike mechanics and good rides, it devolved into politics and where you stand on Iraq with lots of name-calling to boot. Let's face it, besides the good things about living in a small community, there are also the busybodies, the ones who think they are the community watchdogs and censors. They don't see or understand the value of impartiality or the benefit of standing on the outside and looking in. Is that who you want to get your information from? I guarantee at some point some local citizen journalist will ask why Mr. Jones down the street doesn't put out a flag on July 4th. What's wrong with him anyway? Or why does that guy with the funny accent never say hello to me? What's he hiding? 04/24/07 - Imagine an Earth without calamities Tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis: Mother Nature seems to have it in for our world these days. In a way, though, we live in a relatively peaceful time. While it's no comfort to those hurting or grieving now, Earth saw far greater catastrophes in its long and troubled past. The planet has been frozen, roasted, smothered, battered, shaken, half-drowned. Entire species have been obliterated; so far, fortunately, that doesn't include Homo sapiens, but we've had a close call. And these are all natural calamities, not those caused by humans, such as war, terrorism or the Holocaust. Researchers have collected evidence of at least five major extinctions, dated at 65, 200, 250, 360 and 440 million years ago. In the most recent episode, an asteroid 6 miles across slammed into what is now an area off the Yucatan Peninsula, killing off the dinosaurs and many other creatures. The biggest extinction of all, 250 million years ago, is known as "The Great Dying" because more than 80 percent of the species then alive disappeared. This was a "far greater crisis than the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago," said Douglas Erwin, a paleobiologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. "Plants and animals came closer to complete elimination than at any point since they first evolved," he wrote in his 2006 book, "Extinction." Earth's calamities included collisions with asteroids and comets, eruptions of supervolcanoes, massive lava flows engulfing millions of square miles, shattering earthquakes and devastating tsunamis. Most catastrophes aren't bad enough to cause an extinction, but they create tremendous havoc. Sometimes they've contributed to the rise and fall of civilizations. A rash of climate disasters about 2,300 years ago may have led to multiple civilization collapses in Egypt, the Middle East, India and China, according to Benny Peiser, an anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in England. The world has experienced repeated episodes of global warming due to natural, not human, causes: variations in the sun's radiance, wobbles in the Earth's orbit, massive emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. These hot spells have alternated with lengthy ice ages that uprooted plants and animals and drove many to extinction. 04/24/07 - Fascinating page on Vortices This is the evidence describing the Vortex nature of our curved and divided, Electric Universe of appearances, from the so-called "sub-atomic" to the super-galactic, as opposed to the curved space and time of einstein's imagination. This site details the cause of our Universe of appearances due to the optical nature of gravity controlled light, which "pushes light" into vortices of expansion or compression, thereby creating all the various conditions of matter and energy witnessed by mankind through our limited senses and instruments. The history of suppression of knowledge and inventions by the global elite and the mechanisms and machinations by which they operate in plain view, without being noticed by the populous at large, will be thoroughly addressed in the many links found upon this page as well as links to the many recent findings which validate this Cosmology of Light. I have woven together many disparate theories found in the links from this web page, which interface with one another in their central tenets, relating to vortices. The various theorists are describing similar perceptions of the mechanics of our Universe according to different terms at times and from different levels of observation at others. The point of my work here is to show via the latest discoveries, the similarity of all these alternative and dissenting theories which are diametrically opposed to the physics as taught by corporate academia. These theories have born technologies, which will free us from the present pyramidal systems of control administered by the global elite, central bankers, energy barons, and war mongers. When the people of this planet finally understand this dissenting science, they will demand the immediate release and production of all free energy machines for the benefit of mankind as a whole. 04/24/07 - July 2006 - Ukrainians put free energy generator on eBay Here's one for the technically-minded among you to ponder: a Ukrainian "free energy electro power source" which has popped up on eBay. Quite how the 100kW+ wonder machine works is anyone's guess, and the vendors are remaining pretty tight-lipped on the matter. It doesn't run on petrol or diesel, but does consume 1200m3 of air per hour. Quite remarkably, in can apparently operate simultaneously in a vacuum, which attests to its hi-tech capabilities. There are, nonetheless, a couple of clues as to the possible power source. First up, the blurb carries this dire warning aimed at preventing purchasers from investigating the machine's innards: "With the purpose to provide technology safety, the case of electric power station will be closed, and at its unauthorized opening electric power station will be self-destructed." Secondly, the same outfit is punting rather a lot of ex-military Geiger counters. Long-term readers may remember that back in 2004, the Ukrainians admitted they had somewhat absent-mindedly mislaid hundreds of nuclear missiles. Based on the available evidence, we have pointed the UN's nuclear watchdog in the direction of this auction, where they can get an example of the electro power source right now for a mere £143,600. 04/24/07 - Simple filter may inspire smaller fuel cells The device, developed by Chinese researchers, extracts by-products that normally impair the efficiency of "direct methanol" fuel cells (DMFCs), without requiring extra power. Electronics firms including Samsung and Toshiba are interested in using this type of fuel cell to power portable devices, since the conversion of methanol is potentially more efficient on this scale than using either hydrogen or standard batteries (see Batteries not included). In one half of a DMFC, fuel is oxidised by a catalyst, forming carbon dioxide, protons and electrons. The protons and electrons take different routes to the opposite side of the cell where they recombine to make water. On the way round, the electrons provide electrical power. Waste removal - However, waste CO2, along with water and methanol vapour, normally collect inside the cell, diluting the fuel concentration and reducing the power output. Pumps can remove these by-products, but require space and power, reducing overall efficiency. The new device acts like a filter, collecting gas and vapour in a few simple steps. Firstly, around a hundred 50-micron-wide holes, each coated with water-repelling Teflon, allow CO2 to escape into the surrounding air. At the same time methanol and water vapour condense on the surface around the holes. The condensed liquid then flows 5 millimetres towards a reservoir for collection. A surface treated to repel water strongly at the start, and less so towards the collection point, pushes the liquid into the collection chamber. It can then be disposed of or recycled by extracting the methanol. 04/24/07 - UAE looks to tap the sun for energy Masdar has announced plans to build a $ 350 million 100-MW solar plant. In the vast desert surrounding the capital Abu Dhabi, the authorities are planning to spread arrays of solar panels to transform the blazing sun into energy. The plan may be expensive, but the handsome surpluses currently earned from oil revenues can cover the cost. “In the UAE today we do not suffer from a lack of energy security, but we never want to suffer from it,” said Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company (ADFEC). “We are thinking ahead of ourselves,” he said as he explained ADFEC’s initiative to develop alternative energy - branded Masdar, or “source” in Arabic. The booming city-state of Dubai, which unlike Abu Dhabi has dwindling oil wealth, faces a surging demand for energy to power its rapid economic development. Such “green” talk brings wide grins to the faces of environmental activists. “This is a very good prospect for the country’s energy sector,” said Habiba Al Marashi, who chairs the non-governmental Emirates Environmental Group. “It is very encouraging to know that the leaders of the country are making moves to shift to renewable sources of energy,” she said, predicting that it will blaze a trail for other initiatives. Abu Dhabi’s ambition also aims to maintain its world reputation as an energy exporter. “It is time for Abu Dhabi to start positioning itself as a (solar) technology developer... This is to maintain, and hopefully expand, Abu Dhabi’s position in the global market,” Jaber said. In practical terms, Masdar has announced plans to build a $ 350 million 100-megawatt solar plant, which will later be boosted to 500 megawatts to help ease peak-time pressure on the national grid. The plant, which will use concentrated solar power (CSP) technology, will be tendered in August to foreign developers who it is hoped will also bring in investment. 04/24/07 - Chinese Automakers Showcase Eco-Cars “The government is trying to find a solution as quickly as possible, but this is a difficult problem.” One experimental clean-energy car runs on natural gas. Another uses ethanol distilled from corn. A third has a zero-emissions electric motor powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. These alternative vehicles were created not by a global automaker but by China's small but ambitious car companies, which displayed them Sunday alongside gasoline-powered sedans and sport utility vehicles at the start of the Shanghai Auto Show. At a time when they are still trying to establish themselves in international markets, Chinese automakers are already investing in such avant-garde research in a bid to win a foothold in the next generation of technology. 04/24/07 - Mulit-Lever Phenomenon for Free Energy The more pivoting weighted levers I added to a wheel in a even manner the more balanced the wheel became, this is because the levers on one side would counterbalance the levers on the other side, thus needing less energy to rotate the wheel. If the leverage ratios of the levers are large enough and they are provided with a means to extract there leverage energy's, when rotated the wheel creates more leverage energy than the energy required to rotate the wheel, so the potential for self rotation is relevant. Note if you do not have a sufficient numbers of levers then the phenomenon will not work. See the two devices on page 3 that use the multi lever phenomenon to gain rotary energy from the input of gravity's energy. I have discovered that one of the reason for the multi Lever phenomenon, is that because the device rotates slower than the speed of gravity's 9.8 metres a second acting on the falling levers, means that mechanical advantage (Leverage) is gained free from gravity, this is gained at the cost of a small lever system imbalance, this also means that gravity's energy input is larger than the devices rotary output which means my leverage devices on page three comply with the natural laws of mechanics. 04/24/07 - British Crime Victims Must Pay Police to Investigate Motorists whose cars are stolen are being told they must pay the police at least £105 if they want them to recover their vehicle when it is found and check it for forensic clues. The scheme - being implemented by forces across the country - has been attacked by angry motorists. Only car owners who agree to pay the fee, which in theory is to cover storage, are assured their cars will be “forensicated” - which means dusted down for fingerprints or swabbed for DNA. A police letter approved by the Home Office warns motorists who recover their own vehicles that the cars will not be checked for clues. It states: “[The police force will accept] no further responsibility and will be unable to take further action to identify the person who took it.” David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: “Taxpayers already pay twice for policing, through central taxation and council tax. “It’s ludicrous to charge them a third time for the police to do their normal job when their cars have been stolen through no fault of their own.” 04/24/07 - Caffeinated Soap The soap, called Shower Shock, supplies the caffeine equivalent of two cups of coffee per wash, with the stimulant absorbed naturally through the skin, manufacturers say. Scented with peppermint oil, each bar is designed to provide a stimulant boost within five minutes. You can get it for between $6.99 to $37.99 at ThinkGeek. 04/24/07 - Marking your Territory It looks like a harmless teenage prank - training shoes dangling from telephone wires in a quiet suburban street. But for residents in this affluent neighbourhood it is a sign of something far more sinister. It tells them violent gangs are operating in their midst. Police say the symbol has started springing up across the country as a warning sign from gangs to rivals to keep off their 'patch'. The shoes are often taken from mugging victims and hurled on to the wires by new members of the gangs as an initiation ritual. This method of marking territory was first adopted by gangs in the Los Angeles ghettos but can now be seen across Britain. 04/24/07 - Broadcast live events with Ustream.tv Ustream.tv lets you broadcast any live event over the web using nothing more than a webcam. You could use this free service to broadcast your band's concert, your high school's football game, your company's training session or just about anything else. All you need is a Ustream.tv account, a video camera (either a webcam or a camcorder that has webcam capabilities) and a broadband Internet connection (cellular modem cards are recommended for on-the-run notebook users). You can schedule events, send out invites and archive broadcasts for later viewing. 04/24/07 - 'How we made the Chernobyl rain' Russian military pilots have described how they created rain clouds to protect Moscow from radioactive fallout after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Major Aleksei Grushin repeatedly took to the skies above Chernobyl and Belarus and used artillery shells filled with silver iodide to make rain clouds that would "wash out" radioactive particles drifting towards densely populated cities. More than 4,000 square miles of Belarus were sacrificed to save the Russian capital from the toxic radioactive material. "If the rain had fallen on those cities it would've been a catastrophe for millions. The area where my crew was actively influencing the clouds was near Chernobyl, not only in the 30km zone, but out to a distance of 50, 70 and even 100 km." In the wake of the catastrophic meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, people in Belarus reported heavy, black-coloured rain around the city of Gomel. Shortly beforehand, aircraft had been spotted circling in the sky ejecting coloured material behind them. Moscow has always denied that cloud seeding took place after the accident, but last year on the 20th anniversary of the disaster, Major Grushin was among those honoured for bravery. He claims he received the award for flying cloud seeding missions during the Chernobyl clean-up. A second Soviet pilot, who asked not to be named, also confirmed to the programme makers that cloud seeding operations took place as early as two days after the explosion. 04/23/07 - Ex-generals: Global warming threatens U.S. security Global warming poses a "serious threat to America's national security" and the U.S. likely will be dragged into fights over water and other shortages, top retired military leaders warn in a new report. The report says that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water, increased hunger instability from worsening disease and rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees. "The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism," the 35-page report predicts. The report was issued by the Alexandria, Virginia-based, national security think-tank The CNA Corporation and was written by six retired admirals and five retired generals. They warn of a future of rampant disease, water shortages and flooding that will make already dicey areas -- such as the Middle East, Asia and Africa -- even worse. "Weakened and failing governments, with an already thin margin for survival, foster the conditions for internal conflicts, extremism and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies," the report says. "The U.S. will be drawn more frequently into these situations." "We're going to have a war over water," Root said. "There's just not going to be enough water around for us to have for us to need to live with and to provide for the natural environment." University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver said the military officers were smart to highlight the issue of refugees who flee unstable areas because of global warming. "There will be tens of millions of people migrating, where are we going to put them?" Weaver said. 04/23/07 - What to do first to Save the Planet Back in the 1970s during the oil shock that created long lines at gas stations, a man named Arthur Rosenfeld did some calculations and came to a surprising answer. When the OPEC oil embargo hit in October 1973, Rosenfeld did a little math. He discovered that if Americans used energy as efficiently as the Europeans or Japanese, the United States could have been exporting oil in 1973, rather than sitting in rationing lines at gas stations. The solution, he realized, was not to bend the Arab oil regimes to America's will but to end America's thralldom to them by wasting less energy. The following summer, Rosenfeld and a few like-minded physicists organized a month long workshop, held at Princeton, that attracted top scientists and engineers from fields such as building design, transportation, the manufacturing sector, and gas and electric utilities. "We began looking at some things that were all sort of common sense," he recalls. "Change incandescent lights to fluorescents, make better use of skylights, put more insulation in buildings, that kind of thing. By the end of the first week, we realized that we had blundered into one of the world's largest oil and gas fields. The energy was buried, in effect, in the buildings of our cities, the vehicles on our roads, and the machines in our factories. A few of us began to suspect that the knowledge we gained during that month would change our lives." So what should we do first? Let's follow California's sensible lead. * Waste less energy. * Use renewable power wherever we can. * Become carbon neutral. 04/23/07 - Is Travel Destroying the Planet? Planes, trains and automobiles are playing havoc with the earth’s climate. Is it still possible to see the world’s marvels without creating lasting harm to the environment? Whether you want to call it global warming, climate chaos or a trough between ice ages, there’s no longer any disagreement that something is out of whack. A February 2007 report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.” Climatologists have been ringing alarm bells about global warming for more than two decades. Finally, we may have come to a point when ordinary people stop talking about the weather and start doing something about it. In December 2006, the Indian island of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, sank below the rising water level in the Bay of Bengal. The low-lying South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu expects it might be next; it has signed an informal agreement to evacuate its entire population of 11,000 to New Zealand if sea levels continue to rise. Eight World Cup skiing events were canceled this year as a result of too little snow in the European Alps. Mount Kilimanjaro has lost 82 percent of the snow and ice that once covered its peaks. There’s no getting around it: Just moving about does harm to the environment. Cars use gas, planes use jet fuel (a shocking amount of it while on the ground), and ships pour tons of sludge into the ocean. Even the Transportation Security Administration is compounding the problem. Ever since Sept. 26, 2006, we’ve been required to keep our toiletries in landfill-clogging three-ounce bottles-and if that weren’t enough, bundle them all together in a zip-top bag, yet another disposable product made from petroleum. It could even be argued that so-called ecotourism, which often involves driving jeeps into untamed areas and mucking about with the local flora and fauna, is more harmful to those environments than a bus tour that stays on the paved road. By most accounts, a cross-country airline flight dumps close to a ton of CO2 per passenger(or about as much as a single tree absorbs over its lifetime). Automobile emissions are harder to pinpoint, but it’s safe to say that driving instead of flying isn’t any better for the planet. According to the Climate Trust, if you drive 12,000 miles per year at 20 miles per gallon, you’re adding more than 5 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere annually. All in all, the average American emits more than 16 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, a cost to the Earth that can be offset for about $200. 04/23/07 - Device Uses Solar Energy to Convert Carbon Dioxide into Fuel Clifford Kubiak, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and his graduate student Aaron Sathrum have developed a prototype device that can capture energy from the sun, convert it to electrical energy and “split” carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen. Because their device is not yet optimized, they still need to input additional energy for the process to work. “For every mention of CO2 splitting, there are more than 100 articles on splitting water to produce hydrogen, yet CO2 splitting uses up more of what you want to put a dent into,” explained Kubiak. “It also produces CO, an important industrial chemical, which is normally produced from natural gas. So with CO2 splitting you can save fuel, produce a useful chemical and reduce a greenhouse gas.” Although carbon monoxide is poisonous, it is highly sought after. Millions of pounds of it are used each year to manufacture chemicals including detergents and plastics. It can also be converted into liquid fuel. “The technology to convert carbon monoxide into liquid fuel has been around a long time,” said Kubiak. “It was invented in Germany in the 1920s. The U.S. was very interested in the technology during the 1970s energy crisis, but when the energy crisis ended people lost interest. Now things have come full circle because rising fuel prices make it economically competitive to convert CO into fuel.” The device designed by Kubiak and Sathrum to split carbon dioxide utilizes a semiconductor and two thin layers of catalysts. It splits carbon dioxide to generate carbon monoxide and oxygen in a three-step process. The first step is the capture of solar energy photons by the semiconductor. The second step is the conversion of optical energy into electrical energy by the semiconductor. The third step is the deployment of electrical energy to the catalysts. The catalysts convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide on one side of the device and to oxygen on the other side. Because electrons are passed around in these reactions, a special type of catalyst that can convert electrical energy to chemical energy is required Researchers in Kubiak’s laboratory have created a large molecule with three nickel atoms at its heart that has proven to be an effective catalyst for this process. 04/23/07 - Solid State Flapping Aircraft You're gazing at the horizon when you see a small dot moving across the sky. A plane? A bird? No, it's the solid-state aircraft. A futuristic plane concept created by a small research team, the solid-state aircraft will fly just like a bird; it will arch its broad wings up and then flap them down in one continuous, fluid motion. No turbines or propellers, no flaps or rudders, will interrupt the smooth surface of the plane's flattened body. "As currently envisioned," Colozza writes, "the ultraslim vehicle would be unmanned, solar-powered, and made of strong, lightweight materials." Rather than a conventional metal framework and hydraulically actuated parts, the plane's body would consist of a plasticlike material called an ionic polymer-metal composite, which deforms when exposed to an electric field. The plane will also use thin sheets of photovoltaics material and lithium battery. Colozza's team calls the aircraft "solid-state" because it has no moving parts and uses advanced materials. But why fly like a bird? Colozza says energy efficiency is the main reason. The solid-state aircraft will fly like an albatross, which can glide great distances and circle over the same area for long periods of time, flapping only to regain altitude. Another advantage is control. To maneuver, the solid-state aircraft will adjust its wings into complex shapes, much as birds do, rather than using flaps or other moving surfaces. 04/23/07 - Six Degrees: our future on a hotter planet During the cold war, every person on earth knew what the worst endgame would look like: the three-minute warning, the futile scrambling under desks, and universal incineration. With the just-as-real, just-as-dangerous threat of global warming, there is a vague sense of doom, but no clear mental picture of what meltdown would look like - until now. One of the last jeers of the dwindling band of climate change "sceptics" is that a world that is six degrees warmer sounds rather nice, thank you very much. John Redwood, a leading figure in David Cameron's fake-green New Tories, wheeled this canard out only last month. At first glance, they're right: a warming of 1°C to 6°C - which is what the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts - doesn't sound like much. It is. Lynas talks us through the six degrees of separation between us and a planet we do not recognise and cannot survive on. Some 18,000 years ago, the world was six degrees cooler. It was an ice age. Most of England was a freezing polar desert where winter temperatures went as low as -40°C. There were almost no animals, and the only plants to be found were a few species of lichens and mosses. It was possible to walk to France across the channel. No agriculture was possible, because the climate fluctuated too wildly. So what happens as we move in the opposite direction, up to six degrees warmer? With just one degree of warming, here's what happens: the Great Barrier Reef bleaches and dies, the Greenland ice sheet melts, the Maldives and many islands in the South Pacific disappear beneath the waves, rockfalls from the Alps multiply as the mountains melt, the seasonal rainfalls in sub-Saharan Africa change leaving millions at risk of drought and famine, and hurricanes start to hit Brazil for the first time in millennia. One degree. At three degrees, the Amazon rainforest - the planet's lungs - will die. Lynas explains: "The trees in the Amazon are used to constant humidity, and have no resistance to fire." Once the humidity dries out, so does the forest. They will burn and turn to ash. And at six degrees - the IPCC's higher-end predictions for this century - humanity enters its endgame. "An entirely new planet comes into being - one unrecognisable from the Earth we know today," Lynas writes. The rainforests are gone, the world's ice supplies are only a memory, the seas are encroaching, and inland cities see temperatures ten degrees higher than today. In the world's major crop-growing areas - India, Australia, the inland United States - most crops are dying, and mass starvation is a perennial risk. 04/23/07 - Slowly but Surely We Are Skinning Our Planet Throughout history civilizations expanded as they sought new soil to feed their populations, then ultimately fell as they wore out or lost the dirt they depended upon. When that happened, people moved on to fertile new ground and formed new civilizations. That process is being repeated today, but in a new book a University of Washington geomorphologist argues the results could be far more disastrous for humans because there are very few places left with fertile soil to feed large populations, and farming practices still trigger large losses of rich dirt. In essence we are slowly removing our planet's life-giving skin. "It only takes one good rainstorm when the soil is bare to lose a century's worth of dirt." Flat lands and areas with thicker, richer soil tend to have less natural erosion, while steeper areas have greater erosion from both wind and water. Removing vegetative cover just worsens the problem, Montgomery said. "If you take sloping land and strip the plants away, it leaves the soil bare and exposed. There will be a huge impact the next time it rains or when the wind blows," he said. "Plow-based agriculture can change the erosion rate of even a flat place like Kansas into the erosion rate of a place like the Himalayas. Basically that type of farming is remaking the surface of the planet." When the Earth's population was smaller people could move from one place to another and give soil a chance to regenerate. But now, with more than 6 billion people on the planet, that option no longer exists, Montgomery said. "We're farming about as much land as we can on a sustainable basis, but the world's population is still growing," he said. "We have to learn to farm without losing the soil." He advocates a wholesale change in farming practices, moving to no-till agriculture, which he says would reduce erosion closer to its natural rate. That method would eliminate plowing and instead crop stubble would remain in the field, to be mixed with the very top layer of the soil using a method called disking. Farmers might need more herbicides to control weeds, but it would take fewer passes of farm machinery - and thus less fuel - to tend crops. Currently about 5 percent of the world's farmers engage in no-till agriculture, the vast majority of them in the United States and Latin America, Montgomery said. 04/23/07 - Baking boosts efficiency of plastic solar cells Heating plastic solar cells can alter their structure in a way that boosts efficiency, new research shows. The US and Korean scientists behind the discovery say it could ultimately allow flexible, lightweight plastic cells to replace rigid traditional cells. Solar cells are usually made from silicon, which is inflexible and relatively heavy. The best plastic solar cells are made from a light-absorbing polymer containing soccer ball-shaped carbon molecules called fullerenes. The fullerenes provide stepping stones in the plastic film for charge to hop across. The main efficiency-limiting factor is a kind of electrical "traffic jam" that occurs inside the plastic. "When you draw off the electrons freed when light hits these devices you leave behind an absence of electrons we call 'space charge'," Carroll told New Scientist. This presents a barrier to other electrons. "Charge isn't mobile enough in these materials to fill the gap and everything gets blocked up," he adds. Carefully heating plastic cells seems to solve this problem. Working with colleagues Jiwen Liu and Manoj Namboothiry, also from Wake Forest University, and Kyungkon Kim from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology in Seoul, Carroll found that heating can introduce crystal patterns into the plastic to diffuse these jams. "It's possible to create little 'highways' that prevent space charge from building up," Carroll says. Crystal whiskers By carefully heating finished cells to around 150ºC, Carroll and colleagues made the fullerene molecules form whiskers of crystal. These trigger crystallisation in the surrounding polymer as well. The fullerene-and-polymer crystal creates a network across the cell, allowing charge to move easily and preventing space charge blockages. "Getting around space charge is a big step," says Carroll. The heating process can increase efficiency from 5% to 6%. "Some performed as well as 7%," Carroll told New Scientist. "We think we can probably push it up to 10%." 04/23/07 - Plastic Solar Cell Efficiency Breaks Record The global search for a sustainable energy supply is making significant strides at Wake Forest University as researchers at the university’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials have announced that they have pushed the efficiency of plastic solar cells to more than 6 percent. In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters, Wake Forest researchers describe how they have achieved record efficiency for organic or flexible, plastic solar cells by creating “nano-filaments” within light absorbing plastic, similar to the veins in tree leaves. This allows for the use of thicker absorbing layers in the devices, which capture more of the sun’s light. Efficient plastic solar cells are extremely desirable because they are inexpensive and light weight, especially in comparison to traditional silicon solar panels. Traditional solar panels are heavy and bulky and convert about 12 percent of the light that hits them to useful electrical power. Researchers have worked for years to create flexible, or “conformal,” organic solar cells that can be wrapped around surfaces, rolled up or even painted onto structures. Three percent was the highest efficiency ever achieved for plastic solar cells until 2005 when David Carroll, director of the Wake Forest nanotechnology center, and his research group announced they had come close to reaching 5 percent efficiency. Now, a little more than a year later, Carroll said his group has surpassed the 6 percent mark. In order to be considered a viable technology for commercial use, solar cells must be able to convert about 8 percent of the energy in sunlight to electricity. Wake Forest researchers hope to reach 10 percent in the next year, said Carroll, who is also associate professor of physics at Wake Forest. Because they are flexible and easy to work with, plastic solar cells could be used as a replacement for roof tiling or home siding products or incorporated into traditional building facades. These energy harvesting devices could also be placed on automobiles. Since plastic solar cells are much lighter than the silicon solar panels structures do not have to be reinforced to support additional weight. 04/23/07 - The Climate Engineers “Mitigation is not happening and is not going to happen,” physicist Lowell Wood declared at the NASA conference. Wood, the star of the gathering, spent four dec­ades at the University of California’s Law­rence Livermore National Laboratory, where he served as one of the Pentagon’s chief weapon designers and threat analysts. (­He reportedly enjoys the “Dr. Evil” nickname bestowed by his critics.) The time has come, he said, for “an intelligent elimination of undesired heat from the biosphere by technical ways and means,” which, he asserted, could be achieved for a tiny fraction of the cost of “the bureaucratic suppression of CO2.” His engineering approach, he boasted, would provide “instant climatic gratification.” Wood advanced several ideas to “fix” the earth’s climate, including building up Arctic sea ice to make it function like a planetary air conditioner to “suck heat in from the ­mid­latitude heat bath.” A “surprisingly practical” way of achieving this, he said, would be to use large artillery pieces to shoot as much as a million tons of highly reflective sulfate aerosols or ­specially ­engineered nanoparticles into the Arctic stratosphere to deflect the sun’s rays. Delivering up to a million tons of material via artillery would require a constant ­bombardment-­basically declaring war on the strato­sphere. Alternatively, a fleet of B-747 “crop dusters” could deliver the particles by flying continuously around the Arctic Circle. Or a 25-kilometer-­long sky hose could be tethered to a military superblimp high above the planet’s surface to pump reflective particles into the ­atmosphere. Astronomer J. Roger Angel suggested placing a huge fleet of mirrors in orbit to divert incoming solar radiation, at a cost of “only” several trillion dollars. Atmospheric scientist John Latham and engineer Stephen Salter hawked their idea of making marine clouds thicker and more reflective by whipping ocean water into a froth with giant pumps and eggbeaters. Most frightening was the science-fiction writer and astrophysicist Gregory Benford’s announcement that he wanted to “cut through red tape and demonstrate what could be done” by finding private sponsors for his plan to inject diatomaceous ­earth-­the ­chalk­like substance used in filtration systems and cat ­litter-­into the Arctic stratosphere. He, like his fellow geoengineers, was largely silent on the possible unintended consequences of his plan. 04/23/07 - The Global Warming Survival Guide 51 Things We Can Do to Save the Environment. Can one person slow global warming? Actually, yes. You-along with scientists, businesses and governments-can create paths to cut carbon emissions. Here is our guide to some of the planet's best ideas. "Doing simple things could drastically reduce your energy costs, by 40%," says Oru Bose, a sustainable-design architect in Santa Fe, N.M. For example, control heat, air and moisture leakage by sealing windows and doors. Insulate the garage, attic and basement with natural, nontoxic materials like reclaimed blue jeans. Protect windows from sunrays with large overhangs and double-pane glass. Emphasize natural cross ventilation. "You don't need to have 24th century solutions to solve 18th century problems," Bose says. Next, consider renewable energy sources like solar electric systems, compact wind turbines and geothermal heat pumps to help power your home. 04/23/07 - Stop coming to work and Save the Planet The Institute of Directors is calling for flexible hours and more home working to help tackle global warming. Miles Templeman, the institute's director-general, said offering employees greater flexibility would ease pressure on transport networks and cut rush-hour power demand - thereby reducing emissions. Mr Templeman urged ministers not to rush into policies that risked harming the economy, such as caps on emissions and carbon taxes. 04/22/07 - Opposition expected from oil interests (This article refers to the water to gas patent posted here on 04/16/07 - Water instead of Gas. - JWD) James Hunt is a little bit puzzled. The inventor of an on-demand hydrogen fuel generation system for automobiles can't understand why someone didn't come up with the system and mass produce it many years ago. "The idea itself, it originated in 1894," Hunt said. Actually, Hunt does have some ideas as to why the system that could eliminate the U.S. need for foreign oil is just nearing the prototype testing stage in Galesburg, a small city in west-central Illinois. "One of the major obstacles that I see for the implementation of my hydrogen fuel generation system is the vast infrastructure for the use and distribution of gasoline, which is already in place," Hunt said in a prepared release explaining his project. "Oil companies and petroleum processing plants have a lot to lose from an invention of this magnitude, but since future oil resources (sic) quantities are diminishing on a global scale, my invention could be an equitable alternative resource for the future." / Water into Gas - A short summary of the process has been named as "hydrogen extraction from water via plasmatic induction. By inducing a small amount of plasma into a water tank, we're able to extract hydrogen from the water." The "plasmatic induction," as been mentioned by Hunt mentioned as a form of electrolysis. The water used is ordinary drinking water. The present car is not a FuelCel having a tank of oxygen and a tank of hydrogen and is said "is destructive beyond belief”; this vehicle also carries a price tag of $95,000. Hunt said his system could be retrofitted into any vehicle for about $2,000 which is expected to be possible to do that by the early as next year. It has been emphasized that with the system is stationed in place, there shall be no fuel worries. It shall be possible to find that after a year, a motorist would take his vehicle to a special service station to have the carbon rods replaced, at a cost of about what it takes to fill a car with gasoline for a month, and be good to go for another year. / With his fellow student inventors, he also has launched a business called WarAngel Innovations to market the hydrogen fuel system, which one of his instructors claimed in a recent news article could eliminate the country's "need for fossil fuels altogether." 04/22/07 - Bangladesh Efficient Motor THE recent news about the Bangladesh Machine Tools Factory in Gazipur having developed a fuel-efficient engine has revealed a seemingly big event. A local press report has stated, it runs on a mix of gas with 20 per cent diesel and consumes 40 per cent less fuel. It has not, however, indicated whether the fuel efficiency is in respect of operation per hour or based on performance -- output or rotation per hour. Yet, if it has been fabricated entirely locally, it is an achievement that merits serious attention. It ought to be locally patented and the action in this regard, notified to the pertinent international body. Even if modified designs of some crucial components of a foreign-made engine have secured its fuel efficiency, the innovations involved should be patented. 04/22/07 - Edison did not invent the Incandescent light bulb Edison, bright though he was, did NOT invent the incandescent light bulb. The glory should belong to Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans, pals in Toronto in the 1870s. Henry was a medical student and electrician on Colborne St. Mathew ran the White Hart Hotel just up Yonge, across from today's Sam The Record Man. The two sometimes got together to muck about with Henry's induction coil. Electrical World and Engineer magazine, in 1900, described that eureka moment of 1873: "While seated at dusk one evening watching the buzzer of the induction coil, the light of the spark at the contact post attracted their attention. "It impressed them with the idea that if they could confine the spark in a globe a marvellous invention would be the result." GLASS TUBE Woodward is said to have held up his watch to the spark and exclaimed: "Why you can even see the time." So the friends scurried over to Morrison's Foundry on King St. W. near York and got to work. Their crude lamp was a glass tube filled with nitrogen, housing electrodes and a carbon rod. They made six, connected by battery. Imagine that moment in the foundry. Evans: "There were four or five of us sitting around a large table. Woodward closed the switch and gradually we saw the carbon become first red and gradually lighter and lighter in colour until it beamed forth in beautiful light. "This was the most exciting moment of my experience." Woodward was so inflamed he went to Paris to buy an advanced electric dynamo. By 1876, the two friends had patents here and in the U.S. They waited for the millions to roll in. Folks just laughed. Who needs a glowing piece of carbon? Investors bailed. Enter Thomas Alva Edison. The great man had been working on the same idea, but was light years behind the Canadians. So he bought the patent for five grand, a lot of glow back then. Suddenly, the light bulb was American. In 1880, Edison began to market his new, improved version. Woodward and Evans became a flicker of history. 04/22/07 - StupidMeter determines intelligence A Russian inventor believes he has invented a device that can measure the intelligence or stupidity of a subject. Lev Galenkevich, inventor of the "StupidMeter," says that the wires and spirals of his machine are sensitive to lepton fields in people, and that by placing the contraption near a person's head he can instantly judge the person's intellectual capacity. When the StupidMeter is put near a person's head, the energy from his brain will create a moving impulse that causes the wires of the device to rotate. The more rotations it makes, the more intelligent the person. "I picked up the device description in ancient oriental manuscripts," claims Galenkevich. He says the average person can make his invention spin 2.5 times, but the students in his University class are only able to make it spin once. Source Pravda 04/22/07 - Human waste into Water and Power The city of Flagstaff is looking to try out a machine that promises to turn millions of gallons of sewage waste into fuel for automobiles and clean water. Sewage sludge is what is left over at the Rio de Flag Water Reclamation Plant once the water and large items of trash, like boards, have been screened out. In Flagstaff, it's 7.33 million gallons of mud and what you might call solids, now being buried in the ground near the Wildcat Hill Wastewater Treatment Plant. A company called Magne-Gas has proposed sending the waste through a 10,000-degree arc of electricity that would separate the waste into sterilized water and other components. The process would produce a hydrogen-based gas that could be burned in alternative fuel vehicles or other vehicles with converters, said Bo Linton, MagneGas president. The sludge is dumped into a machine, pumped into a hollow carbon electrode and separated into its elements under intense heat that's similar to a welding arc, Linton said. Water, carbon, metals and other solids are magnetized and separated out, with the solids drying to form a carbon-impregnated coal. The water can be filtered as much as desired to remove more and more solids, to even drinking quality, he said. Meanwhile, hydrogen gases are produced, which are captured and can be used to power vehicles with less emissions than gasoline, Linton said. "Everything is 100 percent clean and recyclable. There's nothing that gets released to the environment. Not even smell," he said. A similar invention that turns garbage into energy and a waste used to pave roads has been written up in the magazine Popular Science. St. Lucie County, Fla., is planning to use such units to consume waste from old landfills, predicted to take in 3,000 tons of trash per day, administrators there said. The primary difference between the technology proposed for Flagstaff and the one in St. Lucie is the addition of water in the Flagstaff proposal. The machine can consume other wastes, but they must be chopped up and liquefied. 04/22/07 - Argentine cow clones to produce insulin in milk Argentine scientists said on Tuesday they had created four cloned and genetically modified calves capable of producing human insulin in their milk, a step they said could cut the cost of treating diabetes. "This model of a genetically modified cow is a model that allows us to produce large quantities of products at very low cost," said managing director Marcelo Criscuolo, adding that insulin produced by cows would be at least 30 percent cheaper. To produce pharmaceutical products from cow's milk, scientists insert the human gene of interest into an embryo before implanting it into a surrogate mother cow. In this case they used a gene for insulin. Once milk is obtained from the genetically modified cow, it will be purified and refined to extract the insulin. Similar techniques have already been used to produce human proteins in goats and cows. Insulin is used to treat type-1 diabetes and the most severe cases of the more common type-2 diabetes, which is linked to obesity, poor diet and lack of exercise. Patients with type-1 diabetes normally inject the hormone to control their blood-sugar levels. There are about 200 million diabetics worldwide, and the Argentine scientists said just 25 insulin-producing cows would be enough for Argentina's 1.5 million diabetics. The initial source of insulin in medicine was from cow, horse, pig or fish pancreases, because it is almost the same as human insulin. Most insulin is currently produced by genetically engineered bacteria in tanks. 04/22/07 - You're rude, crude and in my face - and I've had enough In an era devoted to personal space, our obsession with privacy means that we have forgotten how to behave in public. Music on a train was being broadcast by a bunch of schoolchildren. In place of wit to defend their behaviour, they unleashed a torrent of fierce obscenity and delirious aggression. Everyone else in the carriage held studiously blank expressions like those I imagine to have been on the faces of people in the Soviet Union ignoring the sight of the KGB making an arrest, afraid that the next victim is the one whose eyes flicker with solidarity for the last one. We were terrorised. Relating this story to friends, I have been surprised not by how many similar stories I get in return, but by how easily they segue into a liturgy of complaint about the decline in public mores. I am struck by how much people who still dress (rather optimistically) like teenagers sound like grumpy old men and women. Demographers say that Britain is ageing, but I'm not sure that a premature onset of Victor Meldrewism among thirty-somethings is what they mean. The focus of the lament is always rudeness and an apparent coarsening of relations between strangers. That is not the same as antisocial behaviour, the official label for public rowdiness. Antisocial behaviour is a political invention, a euphemism for petty crime. Vandalism, verbal assault and drunken disorderliness have long been against the law. But by giving them a new name, ministers can claim to have identified a new problem, which is preferable to admitting failure to solve an old one. The distinction is important. As Poole points out, groups of young people hanging around, listening to their favourite song, are displaying very social behaviour. Even when their socialising dominates public spaces, it isn't necessarily criminal, but it is rude. And it is not a habit exclusive to hooded teens. The colonisation of public space with private behaviour is well advanced: listening to loud music; bellowing into mobiles on buses; swearing noisily in libraries; failing to end a phone call while conducting a transaction in a shop. / Rude - ill-mannered: socially incorrect in behavior; uncivil: lacking civility or good manners. 04/22/07 - 1857 claim - Solidifying Coal Dust "Solids from Atoms. -- It will be seen by his advertisement, that Mr. J.N. Tavares holds the secret of solidifying coal dust! and that, too, without the use of chemicals. This secret he offers to sell and in his advertisement, the many reliable appliances of his invention will be seen. In a city like ours, where fuel is so valuable, at a time when loss of navigation renders its procuration so difficult this use of coal dust may be rendered an important act of economy." 04/22/07 - Games Theory - the ESP game Online play can help researchers tackle tough computational problems. I'm online wrapped up on the ESP Game, and I'm finding it hard to stop. As each round ends, I'm eager to try again to rack up points. The game randomly pairs players who have logged on to the game's Web site (www.espgame.org). Both players see the same image, selected from a large database, but they can't communicate directly. Each player types in words that describe the image. When the words match, both players earn points and move to the next image. Each round lasts 150 seconds and displays up to 15 images. I keep hoping that my invisible, anonymous partner's thoughts are in sync with mine-all the better to rise on the list of top players. I'm having fun, but there's more to this game than meets the eye. To its inventor, computer scientist Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and his colleagues, the game provides an innovative way to label images with descriptive terms that make them easier to find online. Most of the billions of images on the Web have incomplete captions or no labels at all, von Ahn says. Accurate labels would improve the relevance of image search results and make the information in images accessible to blind users. However, computers aren't good at looking at images and determining what's in them, and it's boring for a person to label images. "The ESP Game turns the tedious task of entering words that describe an image into something that's fun," von Ahn says. Moreover, the game is addictive, he admits. Since it debuted in late 2003, more than 100,000 people have registered to play. Some players spend more than 40 hours a week accumulating points at the site. 04/22/07 - 50% Good News Is the Bad News in Russian Radio At their first meeting with journalists since taking over Russia’s largest independent radio news network, the managers had startling news of their own: from now on, they said, at least 50 percent of the reports about Russia must be “positive.” In addition, opposition leaders could not be mentioned on the air and the United States was to be portrayed as an enemy, journalists employed by the network, Russian News Service, say they were told by the new managers, who are allies of the Kremlin. How would they know what constituted positive news? “When we talk of death, violence or poverty, for example, this is not positive,” said one editor at the station who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. “If the stock market is up, that is positive. The weather can also be positive.” In a darkening media landscape, radio news had been a rare bright spot. Now, the implementation of the “50 percent positive” rule at the Russian News Service leaves an increasingly small number of news outlets that are not managed by the Kremlin, directly or through the state national gas company, Gazprom, a major owner of media assets. The three national television networks are already state controlled, though small-circulation newspapers generally remain independent. 04/22/07 - BabelDisc: Linux for technophobes BabelDisc, the brainchild of U.K. Internet pioneer and Pipex founder Peter Dawe, is a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution that runs only from a CD and does not even require the host PC to have a hard drive, opting instead for subscriber-based hosted storage. "We are targeting the 60 percent of the population that are unhappy using computers," Dawe said, "but some of the other 40 percent will also find our proposition attractive because they're fed up with being the unpaid support engineers for Microsoft." The disc comes with a variety of preinstalled open-source applications, including Firefox, OpenOffice, Sylpheed (for e-mail), F-Spot (for viewing photos), Xine (for music and video) and Gaim (for instant messaging). Application upgrades are performed automatically at the boot stage. "A lot of the smartness of what we've done is actually removing features," Dawe said. "In our environment, you cannot add another application, as the BabelDisc user doesn't have root privilege--this is to make it as foolproof as possible." Dawe also claimed that the distribution would find a natural user base in the enterprise environment. "With an awful lot of staff, all they require is access to Web and intranet applications, word processing, e-mail and IM. The BabelDisc service is one where you can just take virtually any old PC made since the year 2000, put the disc in, and that person is instantly up and running." A critical element of the design is that "you can try Linux at no risk to your Windows installation," Dawe continued. For "virtually all the other Linux distributions, you have to install onto the hard drive. We've actually designed it so you cannot write to the hard drive, (although) you can read from the hard drive, so you can import your files into the BabelDisc environment." The BabelDisc CD also contains software to set up a "BabelBooster"--software installed on a USB hard drive to free up the PC's CD drive and accelerate start-up and performance. 04/21/07 - PowerBeam uses laser to power solar panel with energy beam Who ever heard of wireless electricity? Seems impossible. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen a demo myself at PowerBeam, a Sunnyvale start-up. PowerBeam co-founders David Graham and Xiaobing Luo showed me how they could power up a little toy with a spinning fan without using either batteries or a wired power source. They can do so with an invention that seems suspiciously simple. They pointed a laser beam at a solar cell. The solar cell collects the light energy from the laser and converts it into electricity. Light in, electricity out. Then the electricity travels from the solar cell into the device. They call it an "optical power beam." It's the same principle that powers your pocket calculator with a solar cell. But in this case, PowerBeam gets a lot more electrical power from a laser as far away as 65 feet. In a patent application, PowerBeam says it can produce much more electrical power than other methods because it has tamed a dangerous laser. It uses a powerful laser of the sort that could cut through your hand, but it has integrated a safety system, allowing it to channel a lot of energy into the solar cell. Graham envisions someone using a laptop without plugging it in at all. You could, for instance, sit at a cafe or in the middle of a hotel ballroom and draw power from a light fixture above the center of the room. A laser atop the light fixture would seek out any solar receptor in the room with help from a detection system, such as a camera. When it finds it, the laser would conce