Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Assault Breacher Vehicles Beat Bombs In Afghanistan
From Popular Mechanics:
Marine corps engineers in Afghanistan have a new beast of a vehicle to help them defeat explosive booby traps.
The civilian mechanics at Anniston Army Depot in Alabama usually only fix vehicles for the Army, not design them for the Marine Corps. But as Marines push into contested areas of Afghanistan, their engineers face a persistent threat from roadside bombs. The mechanics at Anniston saw they could build a safe ride for these military engineers by adding off-the-shelf equipment to an M1A1 Abrams battle tank. The result, called the Assault Breacher Vehicle (ABV), maximizes the depot staff’s experience at fixing the M1A1 and their ability to mount heavy engineering equipment, including a 12-foot plough, onto its hull. The Army donated excess tank parts from its inventory to create the ABV.
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My Comment: This is a monster.
New iPhone Could End AT&T's U.S. Monopoly
From The Wall Street Journal:
Apple Inc. plans to begin producing this year a new iPhone that could allow U.S. phone carriers other than AT&T Inc. to sell the iconic gadget, said people briefed by the company.
The new iPhone would work on a type of wireless network called CDMA, these people said. CDMA is used by Verizon Wireless, AT&T's main competitor, as well as Sprint Nextel Corp. and a handful of cellular operators in countries including South Korea and Japan. The vast majority of carriers world-wide, including AT&T, use another technology called GSM.
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Oceanology: Robot 'Gliders' Swim The Undersea World
Engage the wave drive (Image: Liquid Robotics)From New Scientist:
THE way we study oceans could be transformed by a high-tech "surfboard" that generates its own power from sunlight and water waves. The device is capable of navigating at sea for months at a time and recently completed a 4000-kilometre trip from Hawaii to San Diego, California.
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Cern's Giant Collider Is Back – And The Hunt For Fundamental New Insights Is On
The Large Hadron Collider is set for record-breaking high-energy particle experiments after an 18-month delay for repairs. Photograph: ReutersFrom The Guardian:
• Two beams of protons will be collided at record energy levels
• Large Hadron Collider may find Higgs boson, or 'God particle'
The largest, most complex scientific instrument in the world will begin its long-delayed hunt for new particles, forces and extra dimensions on Tuesday at Cern, the European Nuclear Research Organisation, on the outskirts of Geneva.
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Picking Our Brains: What Are Memories Made Of?
Want to forget a fright? (Image: WIN-Initiative/Getty)From New Scientist:
MEMORIES are the basic stuff of thought. We access our stores of knowledge every time we perform a task, communicate through speech or formulate the simplest concepts. Yet the physical form of memory has long been mysterious. What changes occur in the brain when a new memory is encoded?
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Atom Smasher Will Help Reveal 'The Beginning'
Physicists gather at CERN to witness results of the LHC's first half-power particle collisions. Photograph courtesy Maximilien Brice, CERNFrom The Washington Post:
GENEVA -- The world's largest atom smasher threw together minuscule particles racing at unheard of speeds in conditions simulating those just after the Big Bang - a success that kick-started a megabillion-dollar experiment that could one day explain how the universe began.
Scientists cheered Tuesday's historic crash of two proton beams, which produced three times more energy than researchers had created before and marked a milestone for the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider.
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US Marines Embrace Web 2.0
In About-Face, Marines Embrace Web 2.0 -- The Danger Room
Last summer, the U.S. Marine Corps took a draconian approach to Web 2.0, issuing a sweeping ban on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks.
In an order issued yesterday, the service changed course, issuing guidelines to encourage “responsible and effective use” of social networking technology. “The Marine Corps embraces and strives to leverage the advances of internet-based capabilities,” the directive states. “Effective immediately, internet-based capabilities will be made available to all MCEN [Marine Corps Enterprise Network] users.”
Read more ....My Comment: I call this a positive direction. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. they all add to the morale and well being of our soldiers.
$500 Million Launcher Lacks One Thing: Rocket
The Constellation Program's Ares I-X test rocket roars off Launch Pad 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 28. At right is space shuttle Atlantis. Photo courtesy of Scott AndrewsFrom MSNBC:
Space industry tense over pending demise of Constellation program.
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. - Anyone need a $500 million, 355-foot steel tower for launching rockets into space?
There's one available at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Brand new, never been used.
The mobile launcher has been built for a rocket called the Ares 1. The problem is, there is not yet any such thing as an Ares 1 rocket — and if the Obama administration has its way, there never will be.
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For One Tiny Instant, Physicists May Have Broken A Law of Nature
This image of a full-energy collision between gold ions shows the paths taken by thousands of subatomic particles produced during the impact. (Credit: Image courtesy of Yale University)From Science Daily:
ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2010) — For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken.
Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun, and conservation of energy remained intact. But for the tiniest fraction of a second at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists created a symmetry-breaking bubble of space where parity no longer existed.
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Mysterious Lead Coffin Found Near Rome
The lead coffin archaeologists found in the abandoned ancient city of Gabii, Italy could contain a gladiator or bishop. Credit: University of Michigan.From Live Science:
Archaeologists found a 1,000-pound lead coffin while digging in the ruins of an ancient city near Rome last summer. The mission now is to determine who or what is buried inside.
The project – which is headed by Nicola Terrenato, a professor of classical studies at the University of Michigan – is the largest American-led dig in Italy in the past 50 years.
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'Uranium-Eating' Bacteria To Clean-Up Radioactive Sites
Ranger Mine - a uranium mine in Kakadu National Park, Australia.From Cosmos:
SYDNEY: Some bacteria have the capacity to stabilise uranium contaminated sites, and if they are used they could reducing the chances of these sites contaminating major waterways and ecosystems, U.S. scientists have said.
Of the millions of tonnes of bacteria living within the Earth's subsurface, some are able to transform the oxidative state of uranium, which defines how the element with interact with oxygen to form various molecules. They change it from the radioactive, toxic and water soluble uranium (VI) to the less soluble, stationary and therefore less harmful uranium (IV) as part of their normal growth.
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With Processor Speeds Stagnating, Researchers Look Beyond Silicon Toward Computing's Future
Flexible Silicon More flexible circuits can help silicon stay relevant in the future of computing Science/University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign From Popular Mechanics:
After a breathless race through the '80s and '90s, desktop computer clock speeds have spent the last decade languishing around the 3 gigahertz mark. That stagnation in processing speeds has prompted scientists to debate whether it's time to move beyond semiconductors -- and what better place to debate than in the journal Science? Ars Technica gives a top-down overview of several future paths laid out in the journal's latest issue by researchers such as Thomas Theis and Paul Solomon of IBM.
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James Lovelock: Humans Are Too Stupid To Prevent Climate Change
Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change, according to the British scientist James Lovelock. Illustration: Murdo MacleodFrom The Guardian:
In his first in-depth interview since the theft of UEA emails, the scientist blames inertia and democracy for lack of action.
Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.
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Sex Infection Gonorrhea Risks Becoming "Superbug"
From Reuters:The sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea risks becoming a drug-resistant "superbug" if doctors do not devise new ways of treating it, a leading sexual health expert said.
Catherine Ison, a specialist on gonorrhea from Britain's Health Protection Agency said a World Health Organization (WHO) meeting in Manila next week would be vital to efforts to try to stop the bug repeatedly adapting to and overcoming drugs.
"This is a very clever bacteria. If this problem isn't addressed, there is a real possibility that gonorrhea will become a very difficult infection to treat," she said in a telephone interview.
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YouTube's 50 Best Videos
From Time Magazine:
YouTube — breeding ground for the Web's wackiest and wildest viral videos — turns 5 in 2010. In recognition, TIME takes a look back at the site's 50 greatest hits
YouTube's most viewed video of all time is an unlikely champion. Seen more than 170 million times since its posting in May 2007, "Charlie Bit My Finger" was never meant to be anything more than a family flick. But the Internet's hive mind saw something it liked and catapulted the clip, which depicts a laughing British baby gnawing on the finger of his crying brother, past "Evolution of Dance" as YouTube's views champ by the fall of 2009.
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How The Human Brain Got Bigger By Accident And Not Through Evolution
Colin Blakemore believes the human brain became bigger through genetic accident and not evolution. Photograph: David Hartley / Rex FeaturesFrom The Guardian:
Oxford neurobiologist Colin Blakemore tells Robin McKie why he thinks a mutation in the human brain 200,000 years ago suddenly made us a super-intelligent species.
According to Woody Allen, it is his second favourite organ and it absorbs more than 25% of the energy that our bodies generate. But why? For what purposes did the human brain evolve and why does it take so much of our physiological resources?
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3DTVs Too Expensive For Mass Market
Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana in Avatar, or Dances with Wolves in Space 3D, to give it its working title Photo: REUTERS From The Telegraph:
A survey suggests that 53 per cent of consumers won’t pay more than £499 for 3DTVs, which currently retail at around £2,000.
Three dimensional television might be the latest product to be receiving all the hype, but a new survey suggests that just 1.4 per cent of consumers are willing to pay the £2,000 price tags that new sets typically carry.
In a survey for discount site VoucherCodes.co.uk, 28.6 per cent of those asked said they would like to buy a 3DTV but that current prices were far too high. More than half – 53 per cent – said that they would only be willing to pay up to £499.
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The Father Of Civilisation: Alexander The Great
Alexander the Great: The Greek leader made Alexandria a place of knowledge, discovery and sexual intriguesFrom The Daily Mail:
There is not, and has never been, another city to match it. It was a glittering metropolis, home to the most sexually charismatic queen of all time, founded by a man whose megalomaniac ambitions knew no bounds.
It was a buzzing hub that boasted one of the seven wonders of the world, where intellectual geniuses from both East and West met to tussle and debate in a library containing all the knowledge on the planet.
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Monday, March 29, 2010
Physicists Detect Rare Geo-Neutrino Particles, Peek Into Earth's Core
Inside the scintillator at Borexino. (Credit: Borexino Collaboration)From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 29, 2010) — Using a delicate instrument located under a mountain in central Italy, two University of Massachusetts Amherst physicists are measuring some of the faintest and rarest particles ever detected, geo-neutrinos, with the greatest precision yet achieved. The data reveal, for the first time, a well defined signal, above background noise, of the extremely rare geo-neutrino particle from deep within Earth.
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Toyota Recall Might Be Caused by Cosmic Rays
From Live Science:It may not lessen Toyota's woes to hear that the problems the company has been having with faulty gas pedals could be blamed on cosmic rays from space. Sound unbelievable? The concept is actually a lot more plausible than you might think.
Toyota's sticky gas pedals caused sudden and unintended acceleration in several of the automaker's top-selling Toyota and Lexus-brand cars, which led to a massive recall of more than 9 million vehicles worldwide, beginning in November.
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