Italian Scientists Claim To Have Discovered Nickel-Hydrogen Cold Fusion, Create Copper As Byproduct | zero hedge. According to PhysOrg.com, two Italian scientists from the University of Bologna have taken on one of physics' historically most discredited concepts, cold fusion, and have actually succeeded in creating a sustainable reaction. Aside from the major implications of the energy market should this be validated and recreated (an issue that buried the original Cold Fusion discovery by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann), one of the more economically important side effects of this purported rediscovery is that one of the byproducts of the reaction is none other than recently uber-bubbleicious copper.
One wonders what the implications for the copper supply and demand curves (and equilibrium price) would be should the reaction documented by Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi be proven to not be a hoax. Is modern day alchemy the only thing that can dethrone copper from its historic price highs? From Physorg: DARPA's MSEE to develop new mathematical language, race of sentient machines. Did NASA Discover Life on One of Saturn's Moons? China's Second Mass UFO Sighting In Two Weeks - Technorati Technology - (Build 20100722150226) Shanghai Daily is reporting that a mass UFO sighting has taken place in the Chinese city of Chongqing, less than two weeks after another UFO sighting disrupted airline travel in Hangzhou.
On July 15, multiple witnesses reported “four lantern-like objects forming a diamond shape that hovered over Chongqing’s Shaping Park for over an hour.” This follows the July 7 sighting of “a twinkling object” which shut down Hangzhou’s Xioshan Airport for nearly an hour when first spotted over the city. Subsequent requests from UFO investigators to obtain radar images from Xioshan Airport were refused. The explanation given by airport officials, according to Shanghai Daily, was that “radar caught nothing.” Although UFO sighting reports are relatively rare in China, this is at least the second time that a sighting has occurred in Chongqing. China’s Global Times reported on August 26, 2009 that a “twinkling, V-like object” was sighted over the Beibei district of Chongqing on the evening of August 23. Harvard scientists reverse aging in mice, laugh maniacally at human possibilities.
After 14 Years of Drilling, the World's Longest Tunnel Breaks Through the Swiss Alps Today. The Gotthard Base Tunnel, two parallel tubes of over 35 miles each through the Swiss Alps, is a ridiculously ambitious undertaking, one that has taken 14 years so far and still has a few left to go before it'll be operational. But the Swiss have achieved a major milestone today: One of the tunnels broke through, cementing the Gotthard's place as the world's longest tunnel. Drilling of the tunnel began way back in 1996 (remember those heady days--the drillers might have been humming along to Joan Osborne's breakthrough, "One of Us"), and has encountered its fair share of difficulties in the succeeding decade and a half. From the Sedrun (a layer of soft rock near the middle) to a near-disaster during the test phase that unleashed a torrent of water and sand, the drilling has not been particularly easy.
One of the main drills was even trapped by falling sand, held incapable of drilling for a whopping six months at one point. [Der Spiegel] WikiLeaks. A shocking discovery. The 100-year leap. In December 1837, the British mathematician Charles Babbage published a paper describing a mechanical computer that is now known as the Analytical Engine. Anyone intimate with the details of electronic computers will instantly recognize the components of Babbage’s machine.
Although Babbage was designing with brass and iron, his Engine has a central processing unit (which he called the mill) and a large amount of expandable memory (which he called the store). The operation of the Engine is controlled by program stored on punched cards, and punched cards can also be used to input data. Inside the mill, individual operations are controlled by the equivalent of a microprogram. The microprogram is stored on cylinders covered in studs (much like in a music box) that Babbage refers to as the barrels. Data is transferred from the store to the mill for processing and returned to the store for later use.
For output, the Analytical Engine plans call for both a printer and a plotter. Related: The Secret Code Inside the Supervirus Attacking Iran Nuclear Power. Earth-like planet that could support life found. New Delhi: Astronomers have discovered an earth-like planet that could support the crucial conditions needed for life. The new planet sits directly in the middle of what is referred to as the habitable or Goldilocks zone, unlike any of the nearly 500 other planets astronomers have found outside Earth's solar system. This new planet is three times the mass of the earth and slightly larger in width. Reportedly this planet orbits every 37 days and does not rotate much so one side of it is almost bright, the other dark. Temperatures can be as hot as 71 degrees Celsius or as frigid as minus 4 degrees Celsius, but in between, in the land of constant sunrise, it would be "shirt-sleeve weather," according to co-discoverer Steven Vogt of the University of California at Santa Cruz.
The astronomers' findings are being published in Astrophysical Journal and were announced by the National Science Foundation on Wednesday. But there remain many unanswered questions about the planet. News Story | Fifty Meter Asteroid Might Hit Earth In 2098. Video: Canadian Student Becomes First Human to Fly By Flapping Wings. A Canadian engineering student achieved sustained flight in a human-powered ornithopter for the first time in August, and has just filed a claim for a world record, according to the University of Toronto. The Snowbird is the first contraption of its kind to allow humans to fly like birds, by flapping massive wings to create lift. The record stands on the likely-enormous shoulders of Todd Reichert, an engineering PhD candidate at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, who designed and piloted the craft. An SUV towed him to takeoff, and then his wing-flapping device sustained altitude for 19.3 seconds and carried him 475 feet, with an average speed of 16 miles per hour.
It's a stunning sight: (Wings start flapping about 1:40 in) Reichert, 28, lost 18 pounds over the summer in his quest to fly the Snowbird, which has a 105-foot wingspan (just six feet shorter than a Boeing 737) and weighs just 94 pounds. It is made of carbon fiber and balsa wood. First plasma obtained in Kazakhstan. Advanced Computer Worm Was Specifically Designed to Attack Iranian Nuclear Reactor, Experts Say. The sophisticated computer worm called Stuxnet, which has been targeting industrial operations around the world, was likely designed to take out Iran's new Bushehr nuclear reactor, cybersecurity experts say.
It's the first known cyber-super-weapon designed to destroy a real-world target, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Researchers studying the worm say it was built by an advanced attacker with plentiful resources — possibly a nation-state. Initially, experts thought it was designed for industrial espionage, but upon examining its code, they now think it was built for sabotage. Ralph Langner, an expert on industrial systems security, has been studying Stuxnet since it was first discovered at a Belarus-based security firm in June. He speculates that the target is Iran's Bushehr reactor, currently under construction. Stuxnet has targeted Siemens-operated industrial facilities like power plants and chemical factories. Curing Blindness. LHC results: Not just the same old thing.
Humungous bubbles blown from small black hole. July 9, 2010 § You know how much I love bubbles. This is the coolest one I have seen in a while. The universe is such an amazing place. I wouldn’t live anywhere else. ;-) Read the Story behind this image on NewScientist.com Like this: Like Loading... Tagged: Cool, Science, Space. No drugs needed to cure diabetes in rats. WASHINGTON U. -ST. LOUIS (US)—Researchers have cured diabetes in rats using transplants from both embryonic and adult pigs. The rats adopted the pig transplants as their own and produced enough insulin to control their blood sugar—all without the need for anti-rejection drugs. The new research—the first long-term, successful cross-species transplant of pig islets without immune suppression—raises the prospect that it may one day be possible to cure diabetes in humans using a similar strategy.
Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Using a two-step approach, the researchers first transplanted a cluster of embryonic pig pancreatic cells into diabetic rats. Pig cells could overcome the shortage of human islets available from deceased donors and the need for transplant patients to take anti-rejection drugs for life. Pig insulin has been used to treat diabetes in humans, making the animals potentially good islet donors for humans with the disease. A Single Molecule Computes Thousands of Times Faster than Your P. A demo of a quantum calculation carried out by Japanese researchers has yielded some pretty mind-blowing results: a single molecule can perform a complex calculation thousands of times faster than a conventional computer.
A proof-of-principle test run of a discrete Fourier transform -- a common calculation using spectral analysis and data compression, among other things -- performed with a single iodine molecule transpired very well, putting all the molecules in your PC to shame. Using quantum interference – the vibrations of the atoms themselves – the team was able to run the complete discrete Fourier transform extremely quickly by encoding the inputs into an optically tailored vibrational wave packet which is then run through an excited iodine molecule whose atomic elements are oscillating at known intervals and picked up by a receiver on the other side.
The entire process takes just a few tens of femtoseconds (that's a quadrillionth of a second). [Science Daily] The Blueprint To All Our Data Is Hidden Inside This Mountain For. New Quantum Imaging Technique IDs Objects Using a Single Photon. Physicists have long been able to "ghost image" -- that is, to use a split laser beam to detect the presence of an object without actually seeing or interacting with it -- but the process is complicated and can take a while. Now physicists at the University of Rochester's Institute of Optics say they've devised a simpler means to detect the presence of a known object using a single photon. Ghost imaging involves splitting a laser and firing the beams at two different photon detectors, one of which is behind the target object and one of which is set up as a "camera. " The laser will at intervals produce two identical photons simultaneously, and from those simultaneous hits on the photon detectors -- the first detector won't register any photons that bounce off the target -- an outline of the object is created at the "camera" detector.
While this is a cool concept, with an even cooler name, it's short on practical uses. [New Scientist] Researchers Achieve Quantum Teleportation Over 10 Miles of Empty. Scientists in China have broken the record for quantum teleportation, achieving a distance of about 10 miles, according to a new study in Nature Photonics. That's a giant leap from previous achievements. The feat brings us closer to communicating information without needing a traditional signal transmission, the researchers note.
Although it's called teleportation, no matter is really moved. Rather, the quantum state of one object is transferred to another object. It works by entangling two objects, like photons or ions. The first teleportation experiments involved beams of light. Until now, this has only been achieved with particles that are at most a couple hundred feet apart. In the latest experiment, researchers entangled two photons and zapped the higher-energy one through a special 10-mile-long free-space tunnel, instead of a fiber one. It worked because the team "maximally entangled" the photons, using spatial and polarization modes, according to Ars Technica.
[Ars Technica] Using Ultracold Atoms Instead of Electrons, Atomtronics Could Re. The electron has been good to us. It has christened an entire field of both theoretical exploration and practical devices -- electronics -- and has allowed us to leverage its most simple property, charge, to create complex devices and processing methods. But a group of researchers in Colorado think we're selling ourselves short. By tapping the more complex properties of entire atoms, the field of atomtronics could completely rewrite the book on information processing.
Atomtronics is a relatively new field of study and one that hasn't been very well explored, or even talked about at length it seems. But a group at the National Institute of Standards and Technologies in Boulder has been tinkering with the idea of using lasers to create systems that are analogous to electronic components using ultracold atoms and optical lattices rather than electrons, semiconductors, and logic gates for decades now. What they plan to do with all this know-how remains to be seen. [Technology Review] Fujitsu's quantum dot laser fires data at 25Gbps, not just for s. Social media can help save the planet, says Greenpeace boss - CN. Online success of Greenpeace viral Kit Kat video shows power of social mediaCampaign against Nestle was aimed at reducing use of palm oil grown on deforested landGreenpeace will continue to work with companies and use public campaigning (CNN) -- Greenpeace is well-known for taking direct action in the name of saving the environment, but key to its campaigning now is the collective power of the Internet and social media, says Greenpeace's executive director, Kumi Naidoo.
Naidoo was talking to CNN about a recent campaign to stop Nestlé using palm oil sourced from plantations that it says are responsible for deforestation, primarily in Indonesia. Palm oil is used in a variety of consumer products, from chocolate to washing powder, and is used by numerous companies across the world, not just Nestlé. According to Greenpeace and other activist groups, rising demand for it has led to virgin rainforests being cleared to make way for new plantations. Read the letter in full here. The Unknown Promise of Internet Freedom.
Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space MELBOURNE – Google has withdrawn from China, arguing that it is no longer willing to design its search engine to block information that the Chinese government does not wish its citizens to have. In liberal democracies around the world, this decision has generally been greeted with enthusiasm. But in one of those liberal democracies, Australia, the government recently said that it would legislate to block access to some Web sites. A readers’ poll in the Sydney Morning Herald showed 96% opposed to those proposed measures, and only 2% in support. The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world. Remarkably, this came about with no central planning, no governing body, and no overall control, other than a system for allocating the names of Web sites and their addresses. Reality is more complex. Google’s withdrawal is a decision in accordance with its own values.
Synthetic life: Dr Craig Venter seeking ‘monopoly’, claims gene. Seven atom transistor sets the pace for future PCs. Quantum Dot | Quantum Computers | Nanotechnology | Computer Chip. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declares the gloves are of. South Korea restarts propaganda broadcasts to North. NASA Announces Date of Next Mars Lander Mission | Popular Scienc. Behold our dark, magnificent horror. Breakthrough In Magnet Technology Could Lead to Handheld MRI Sca. Japanese Spacecraft Deploys First-Ever Solar Sail | Wired Scienc. Astronomers Capture First Images of an Exoplanet Orbiting Its St. Access : Quantum optics: Single-atom transistor for light : Natu. Stem cells made without new genes.