$19M AIDS Vaccine Fraud
December 26th, 2013The remarkable thing here is that he was busted.
Via: Medical Daily:
Iowa State University researcher, Dr. Dong-Pyou Han, resigned after news broke of an investigation into the validity of his AIDS research. Han is believed to have tampered with research results for a possible AIDS vaccine.
“At Iowa State’s request, the research samples in question were examined by researchers at another university; they confirmed samples had been spiked,” ISU spokesman John McCarroll wrote in an email to the Des Moines Register. “He later admitted responsibility and resigned from Iowa State, effective Oct. 4, 2013.”
Related:
Scientific Fraud in Medicine: More Than a Few Bad Apples
American Society for Microbiology: ‘Has Modern Science Become Dysfunctional?’
Scientific Fraud: ‘Nobody Had Noticed the Whole Thing Was Rotten’
The Science-Is-Self-Correcting Myth
Only 6 of 53 Landmark Cancer Studies Could be Proved Valid
France: Half of Drugs Prescribed Useless or Dangerous
No Hands on Deck: Dawn of the Crewless Ship
December 26th, 2013Automation, lower costs, you know the routine.
The monkey wrench in the gears appears further down in the piece.
Via: Financial Times:
Remote-controlled ships used to come wrapped up as presents under the Christmas tree, but if European researchers and one of the world’s best-known engineering groups have their way, full-size versions will start replacing much of the tonnage afloat on the high seas in the coming years.
There are plenty of compelling reasons to switch to crewless ships. But the main driver for Oskar Levander, head of marine innovation at Rolls-Royce, is cost.
A ship that does not have to accommodate a crew for weeks on end can dispense with many if not all the life-support systems needed by humans, from the galley to the sewage treatment system, the accommodation area and the deck house.
Removing these would not only leave more space for cargo but would also mean lighter ships, holding out the prospect of big savings on fuel bills, which account for about half of a ships total operating cost. Mr Levander says crew expenses vary but can range between 10 and 30 per cent of operating costs.
He envisages a shore-based team of qualified captains working in a replica 3D bridge, similar to the simulators used for training today, that could operate a fleet of a dozen ships at the same time.
…
But Peter Hinchliffe, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Shipping is more circumspect. He says the highly complex collision avoidance rules would have to be rewritten to allow autonomous ships to operate in the same environment with crewed ships, a change that could take decades to implement.
Mikhail Kalashnikov, Soviet Inventor of the AK-47, Dies at 94
December 23rd, 2013Via: Time:
Mikhail Kalashnikov, the Soviet general who designed the ubiquitous automatic weapon that now bears his name, died Dec. 23 at the age of 94. Iterations of the gun he invented now exist in the tens of millions, making it the most popular rifle in the wars of the latter half of the twentieth century.
A former Soviet tank gunner of humble Siberian origins, Kalashnikov submitted his prototype as part of a competition held to design a new Soviet infantry rifle in the waning moments of World War II. The AK-47 was born: a light-weight automated gun that was both easy to use and maintain. As C.J. Chivers, the New York Times journalist and author of a history of the AK-47, writes, Soviet infantry first wielded these rifles during the brutal crackdown on the Hungarian uprising in 1956. It was “repression’s chosen weapon, the rifle of the occupier and police state,” writes Chivers. But it was also the chief instrument of a new generation of global conflict.
Use of the weapon first spread along ideological lines, proliferating among armies and militias that had common cause with the Soviet Union. It sprung up in Vietnam in the 1960s and made its way to insurgencies in Africa and Latin America. The flag of Mozambique—an ensign adopted after the successful struggle of leftist guerrillas against Portuguese colonial rule—still features an AK-47 armed with a bayonet.
Subsequent models and versions of the gun mushroomed elsewhere. It became synonymous with the activities of militant groups. In the 1980s, mujahideen brandishing Kalashnikovs clashed with the Soviet army occupying Afghanistan and, to this day, the culture that spawns the Taliban’s footsoldiers is branded with a telling alliteration: the Quran and the Kalashnikov.
Kalashnikov, the man himself, remained through his life a figure of Soviet and later Russian nationalism. He still professed loyalty to Lenin and Stalin, despite losing family members to Siberian prison. He also claimed the creation of his weapon was not for offensive purposes, but the “defense of the motherland”—no matter that there’s now virtually no place on earth not in range of a Kalashnikov’s muzzle.
The OpenWorm Project
December 23rd, 2013Via: Telegraph:
An ambitious project to recreate an entire roundworm, cell by cell, in a software model has reached a crucial breakthrough as the digital animal wriggled for the first time.
The OpenWorm project brings together scientists and programmers from around the world in the common goal of entirely recreating the structure and behaviour of Caenorhabditis elegans inside a machine.
The 1mm worm lives in warm soil and was the first multi-cellular organism to have its whole genome completely sequenced. The creature is the perfect candidate for the project because it exhibits relatively advanced behaviour such as finding a mate and avoiding predators despite being composed of just 1,000 cells, and has been the focus of a huge amount of scientific research.
All of the basic elements of the creature are being created in software from the bottom-up. It is hoped that the observed behaviour of real worms will eventually emerge once the model is adequately accurate. Each cell in the animal is being simulated one-by-one, along with neuron links between them, inside a new simulation environment called Geppetto.
The latest version of the model has now been shown to move and writhe in the same way and at the same speed as the real roundworm, showing that the team are making progress towards their ultimate goal, although the latest demonstration was driven by hard-coded instructions rather than the “synthetic brain” currently under development and comprised of 302 neurons.
Pentagon Spending Billions of Dollars on Accounting Boondoggles; Yes, Trillions Still Missing
December 23rd, 2013Black hole.
Via: Reuters:
With its efforts to build reliable accounting systems in disarray, the Pentagon isn’t likely to meet a congressionally mandated 2017 deadline to be audit-ready. All other federal agencies are audited annually, in accordance with a 1990 law, and with rare exceptions, they pass every year. The Pentagon alone has never been audited, leaving roughly $8.5 trillion in taxpayer dollars unaccounted for since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited.
Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke
December 23rd, 2013Via: Rolling Stone:
If you’ve ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you’ve ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or “drug paraphernalia” in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.
Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who’s ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a “record” financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.
Google-Owned SCHAFT Robot Won DARPA Robotics Challenge
December 22nd, 2013Via: Slashgear:
The Google-owned Japanese robotics company SCHAFT has won the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials by a wide margin. It scored 27 out of 32 points, beating its nearest competitor IHMC Robotics by seven points. Coming up third was Tartan rescue with 18 points, and MIT following that with 16 points.
The contest took place Dec. 20-21 at the Homestead-Miami Speedway, where 16 teams from around the world did their best to guide their robots through a series of tasks. The robots were to be programmed in such a way that they could be guided by simple commands issued by a non-expert, e.g., “Open the door” or “Clear away the debris in front of you.”
The object of the challenge, DARPA says, was to create a robot that could stand in for humans in disaster and emergency zones. In all, eight tasks were included: drive a vehicle; walk across rubble; remove debris; open a door and walk through it; climb a ladder and cross an industrial walkway; break a concrete panel with a tool made for humans; find and close a valve; and connect a fire hose to a pipe and open the valve.
Windows XP: Microsoft’s Ticking Time Bomb
December 22nd, 2013I’m surprised by how many of you guys are still using XP.
April 8th, 2014 is the date to circle on your calendar. Whatever you decide to do, make sure that you’ve done it by then.
Via: PC Pro:
The final deadline for Windows XP support will act as a starting pistol for hackers, as they target hundreds of millions of users on unpatched systems.
Microsoft has already granted the 12-year-old OS several stays of execution, but the firm has said it will finally end extended support on 8 April 2014 – despite the fact that XP remains the second-most popular OS, with almost a third of PCs running it.
These hundreds of millions of desktops and laptops will be vulnerable to hackers once XP stops receiving security updates, with Microsoft warning earlier this year that hackers could use patches issued for Windows 7 or Windows 8 to scout for XP exploits.
“The very first month that Microsoft releases security updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will reverse-engineer those updates, find the vulnerabilities and test Windows XP to see if it shares [them],” wrote Tim Rains, the director of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group.
“If it does, attackers will attempt to develop exploit code that can take advantage of those vulnerabilities on Windows XP,” Rains added. “Since a security update will never become available for Windows XP to address these vulnerabilities, Windows XP will essentially have a zero-day vulnerability forever.”
Velkess: New Residential Scale Flywheel Design
December 21st, 2013Via: Scientific American:
Renewables could be the world’s primary source of energy if only someone could solve the storage problem—how to store lots of electricity cheaply on a wide scale? Batteries are too expensive and don’t last long enough. Pumped hydro is cheap but not feasible for most locations. Thermal storage is promising but still too expensive or hard to scale. Compressed air is cheap and scalable but not yet efficient enough (although LightSail, a new company backed by Peter Thiel, Vinold Khosla and Bill Gates, hopes to change that). And what about flywheels? The biggest player, Beacon Power, went bankrupt in 2011.
Flywheels may be getting a second life, however. Silicon Valley inventor Bill Gray has a new flywheel design that would deliver distributed and highly scalable storage for around $1,333 a kilowatt, making it price competitive with pumped hydro and compressed air. With an efficiency of more than 80 percent, it would rival the best storage alternatives, and come with a 10-year guarantee. And it would make a perfect complement to an off-grid house with a solar photovoltaic (PV) system, able to charge fully in five hours—within the charging time of most solar PV systems—and store 15 kilowatt-hours of power, enough to run a modest house from sunset to sunrise.
Gray calls his invention the Velkess (for VEry Large Kinetic Energy Storage System). He is currently raising money for the prototype in a Kickstarter campaign.
The Velkess improves on traditional flywheels by better managing the natural “wobble” of a spinning mass. Traditional flywheels have been very expensive because engineers align the natural axis of the wheel’s rotation with the desired rotation of the generator. Thus, they are always struggling to minimize the natural wobble of the wheel using very expensive magnets and bearings, high-precision engineering and materials like high-grade carbon fiber or rigid steel. Beacon’s flywheel for grid storage cost a whopping $3 million per megawatt-hour.
Instead of trying to fight the wobble, Gray redirected it by suspending the wheel within a gimbal—the same concept that makes a gyroscope work.
The gimbal in the Velkess is asymmetrical, so the two axes of rotation—the flywheel axis as well as that of the rotor, which drives the brushless, inducting DC motor—are not on the same plane, and have different periods of frequency. This dampens the resonance effects that make traditional flywheels hard to control (a resonant disturbance in one of the planes can intensify until the device shatters). With the gimbal, resonance in one plane is translated into the other, which is nonresonant at the same frequency. Accordingly, only very loose engineering tolerances—about one sixteenth of an inch—are required to build the device.
Related:
Residential Energy Storage with Underground Flywheels
A Solar Boom So Successful, It’s Been Halted
December 21st, 2013Greed and incompetence at power companies are running up against the unstoppable force of distributed power generation.
Not long to go now.
Germans laugh at this, by the way.
Flashback 2011: Residential Energy Storage with Underground Flywheels
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Update 2013: Velkess: New Residential Scale Flywheel Design
Via: Scientific American:
William Walker and his wife, Mi Chong, wanted to join what’s seen as a solar revolution in Hawaii. Shortly after buying their Oahu home earlier this year, they plunked down $35,000 for a rooftop photovoltaic system.
The couple looked forward to joining neighbors who had added panels, to cutting their $250 monthly power bills and to knowing they were helping the environment.
Their plans shifted the day after the PV panels went up in early October. The Walkers learned from a neighbor about a major change in the local utility’s solar policy. It led to those 18 panels sitting dormant nearly three months later.
Hawaiian Electric Co., or HECO, in September told solar contractors on Oahu that the island’s solar boom is creating problems. On many circuits, the utility said, there’s so much solar energy that it poses a threat to the system and a safety issue. Studies are needed on whether grid upgrades are necessary. If they are, residents adding solar must foot the bill. And starting immediately, contractors and residents would need permission to connect most small rooftop systems to the grid.
The new HECO policy was included deep in the text of emails the Walkers’ solar contractor had sent, but it escaped their notice before installation. They’re now paying $300 per month on a loan for the panels, plus the $250 electric bill.
“It goes from frustration to outrage,” William Walker, 33, said of his reaction. “We hear the excuses that HECO provides, that they put out there at least as far as the justification. There’s really not a lot of substantiation. My belief is it’s purely profit-motivated, to keep people away from PV and keep them on the grid.”
