Number of Ebola Cases ‘Probably Doubling Every Three to Four Weeks’
October 10th, 2014Via: Irish Independent:
The UN special envoy on Ebola says the number of cases is probably doubling every three to four weeks and the response needs to be 20 times greater than it was at the beginning of October.
E-Cat Third Party Test: COP Between 3.2 and 3.6
October 10th, 2014Via: Network World:
Yesterday a new paper was published on a Swedish blog titled Observation of abundant heat production from a reactor device and of isotopic changes in the fuel. The paper was authored by Giuseppe Levi (Bologna University, Bologna, Italy), Evelyn Foschi (Bologna, Italy), Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson and Lars Tegnér (Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden), and Hanno Essén (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden); all members of the previous test team. Their conclusion?
The measured energy balance between input and output heat yielded a COP factor of about 3.2 and 3.6 for the 1260 ºC and 1400 ºC runs, respectively. The total net energy obtained during the 32 days run was about 1.5 MWh. This amount of energy is far more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume.
Most U.S. Food Labeled ‘Natural’ Contains GMOs
October 10th, 2014Via: Russia Today:
Nearly all US packaged food with a “natural” label in fact contains high levels of genetically modified ingredients, tests by the product testing watchdog Consumer Reports reveal.
Consumer Reports said its study included more than 80 different processed foods containing corn or soy – the two most prevalent genetically modified crops in the US – to determine if the “natural” labels was in fact true, Reuters reports.
The conclusion: consumers are being deceived by the “natural” label, Urvashi Rangan, executive director of Consumer Reports Food Safety and Sustainability, told the agency.
While the “non-GMO” and “organic” labels proved trustworthy, the study found that nearly all of the food bearing the natural “label” contained substantial amounts of GMO ingredients. The watchdog tested a minimum of two samples from each of the 80 products, which were purchased between April and July 2014.
Products considered to be GMO-free contained no more than 0.9 percent genetically modified corn or soy, a stricter standard than that employed by the US government.
Current US Department of Agriculture regulations allow food products that contain 95-100 percent certified organic ingredients to use the USDA Organic seal.
Consumer Reports has long spearheaded a campaign to eliminate the “natural” label from grocery shelves.
Research Credit: Windhorse
Tesla Model S Gains Autopilot
October 10th, 2014Via: cNet:
…Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk announced at an event in Los Angeles that every car manufactured over the last two weeks comes with new sensor hardware to enable what he calls Autopilot capabilities.
…
The Autopilot hardware includes forward-looking radar and camera, combined with all-around long-range ultrasonic sensors. A software update being sent out to cars as an over-the-air update will enable driver assistance features such as adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping assist and automated parking.
In addition, Musk said owners will be able to summon their cars, or set a calendar so the cars will meet them at a prearranged spot. However, this capability will only be enabled on private property to avoid liability issues.
UW Fusion Reactor Concept Could Be Cheaper Than Coal
October 8th, 2014Via: University of Washington:
Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply.
Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven’t penciled out. Fusion power designs aren’t cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.
University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output.
The team published its reactor design and cost-analysis findings last spring and will present results Oct. 17 at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Fusion Energy Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.
“Right now, this design has the greatest potential of producing economical fusion power of any current concept,” said Thomas Jarboe, a UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics and an adjunct professor in physics.
The UW’s reactor, called the dynomak, started as a class project taught by Jarboe two years ago. After the class ended, Jarboe and doctoral student Derek Sutherland – who previously worked on a reactor design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – continued to develop and refine the concept.
The design builds on existing technology and creates a magnetic field within a closed space to hold plasma in place long enough for fusion to occur, allowing the hot plasma to react and burn. The reactor itself would be largely self-sustaining, meaning it would continuously heat the plasma to maintain thermonuclear conditions. Heat generated from the reactor would heat up a coolant that is used to spin a turbine and generate electricity, similar to how a typical power reactor works.
“This is a much more elegant solution because the medium in which you generate fusion is the medium in which you’re also driving all the current required to confine it,” Sutherland said.
Research Credit: SWS
Cancer and Artificial Turf
October 8th, 2014Via: NBC:
Soccer coach Amy Griffin was in a Seattle hospital visiting a young goalie who was receiving chemotherapy when a nurse said something that made the hair on Griffin’s neck stand up.
It was 2009. Two young female goalies Griffin knew had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Griffin, associate head coach for the University of Washington’s women’s soccer team, had started to visit the women and other athletes in local hospitals, helping them pass the time during chemo with war stories from her three decades of coaching.
That day, the nurse looked down at the woman Griffin was sitting with and said, “Don’t tell me you guys are goalkeepers. You’re the fourth goalkeeper I’ve hooked up this week.”
Later, the young woman with the chemo needle in her arm would say, “I just have a feeling it has something to do with those black dots.”
Artificial turf fields are now everywhere in the United States, from high schools to multi-million-dollar athletic complexes. As any parent or player who has been on them can testify, the tiny black rubber crumbs of which the fields are made — chunks of old tires — get everywhere. In players’ uniforms, in their hair, in their cleats.
Watch NBC Nightly News for More on Concerns about Synthetic Fields
But for goalkeepers, whose bodies are in constant contact with the turf, it can be far worse. In practices and games, they make hundreds of dives, and each plunge sends a black cloud of tire pellets into the air. The granules get into their cuts and scrapes, and into their mouths. Griffin wondered if those crumbs – which have been known to contain carcinogens and chemicals – were making players sick.
“I’ve coached for 26, 27 years,” she said. “My first 15 years, I never heard anything about this. All of a sudden it seems to be a stream of kids.”
Since then, Griffin has compiled a list of 38 American soccer players — 34 of them goalies – who have been diagnosed with cancer. At least a dozen played in Washington, but the geographic spread is nationwide. Blood cancers like lymphoma and leukemia dominate the list.
China Overtook U.S. as World’s Largest Economy
October 8th, 2014Via: Business Insider:
Sorry, America. China just overtook the US to become the world’s largest economy, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Chris Giles at the Financial Times flagged up the change. He also alerted us back in April this year that it was all about to happen.
Basically, the method used by the IMF adjusts for purchasing power parity, explained here.
The simple logic is that prices aren’t the same in each country: A shirt will cost you less in Shanghai than San Francisco, so it’s not entirely reasonable to compare countries without taking this into account. Though a typical person in China earns a lot less than the typical person in the US, simply converting a Chinese salary into dollars underestimates how much purchasing power that individual, and therefore that country, might have. The Economist’s Big Mac Index is a great example of these disparities.
So the IMF measures both GDP in market exchange terms, and in terms of purchasing power. On the purchasing power basis, China is overtaking the US right about now and becoming the world’s biggest economy.
Multitasking Damages Your Brain and Career
October 8th, 2014Via: Forbes:
You’ve likely heard that multitasking is problematic, but new studies show that it kills your performance and may even damage your brain.
Research conducted at Stanford University found that multitasking is less productive than doing a single thing at a time. The researchers also found that people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information, or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time.
A Special Skill?
But what if some people have a special gift for multitasking? The Stanford researchers compared groups of people based on their tendency to multitask and their belief that it helps their performance. They found that heavy multitaskers—those who multitask a lot and feel that it boosts their performance—were actually worse at multitasking than those who like to do a single thing at a time. The frequent multitaskers performed worse because they had more trouble organizing their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant information, and they were slower at switching from one task to another. Ouch.
Multitasking reduces your efficiency and performance because your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. When you try to do two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to perform both tasks successfully.
German Journalist Udo Ulfkotte Admits Spreading CIA and BND Propaganda for Decades
October 8th, 2014Via: Russia Today:
Rolls-Royce to Add ‘Robotic’ Chauffeur
October 7th, 2014Via: Drive:
Rolls-Royce is set to join the race to delete the driver – and the chauffeur too.
The iconic British luxury car maker is looking to its parent company, BMW, to adopt autonomous driving technologies before the end of the decade.


