Atmospheric Electricity Powers Small Motor
November 27th, 2013Update: Atmospheric Powered Motor 2.0
Via: LaserHacker:
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Via: Laser Hacker:
Narcotrafficking, Murder and Toxic Soup
November 27th, 2013Via: MCAS El Toro Superfund Site:
As was his custom when expecting a visitor, Marine Colonel Jim Sabow placed his television on mute, arose from his easy chair, and left his house through the patio door. He walked the length of the patio, called the dogs in the back yard and enclosed them in the garage. Whether he opened the front door to greet his visitor or went out the back door onto his patio is not known, but we do know that he had only moments to live.
Colonel Sabow, decorated Vietnam fighter with 221 combat missions, met his death at the hands of others on January 22, 1991. The unexpected blow to the right side of the head was violent, resulting in unconsciousness. Occipital skull fragments from the shotgun blast penetrated into the back of his brain. He was near death due to the massive brainstem trauma in which agonal hyperventilation characteristic of this type of injury occurs. Sabow was aspirating blood from a wound in his pharynx that resulted from a basilar skull fracture. In fact, the tracheae, bronchi, bronchioles and alveoli were filled with blood, doubling the weight of the right lung. There was no mention of the depressed skull fracture from the violent blow to his head in the autopsy report.
Government investigation reports made no mention of the intrusion of three men who entered the crime scene with government credentials, forcing Naval Investigative Service (NIS) agents and Marine MPs to leave the crime scene and wait across the street until ordered to return. A Marine MP told a documentary film maker in 2013 that the patio chair was placed over the body by an NIS agent (now a senior executive in the NCIS) to support the official report of suicide as the manner of death. Another Marine MP at the crime scene who was a reservist called to active duty in 1991 and a full time Detroit police officer could not be located because the Marine Corps denied the availability of the duty roster, which would identify the man. The duty rosters are maintained on file at Quantico but the El Toro duty roster for MPs from January 1991 was not available, even when a FOIA was submitted to the Corps.
A doctored autopsy photograph was submitted to Congress in 2004 and a sworn affidavit to the NIS by a renowned pathologist who reported homicide and crime scene tampering was unexceptionally withdrawn. Michael Jacobs, the former Supervisor, Homicide Trials Division, Orange County District Attorney’s Office, reported that, “Colonel Sabow’s death could not have been a suicide but had to have been a homicide inflicted by the hands of another.” Gene Wheaton, a former military investigator and expert in homicide investigations, told Dr. David Sabow, the younger brother of Colonel Sabow, that a military assassination team within the DoD/Pentagon exists to murder military officers who are a threat to blow the whistle on covert operations. The evidence strongly supports that Colonel Sabow was murdered by this assassination team. There’s every reason to believe that this assassination team remains in place today.
Research Credit: Dr. David Sabow, Brother of Col. James Sabow
U.S. B-52s Flew Through China’s Newly Declared Air Defense Zone
November 26th, 2013Update: Japanese Airliners Also Ignoring Chinese Directive
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Via: CNN:
Two U.S. military aircraft flew into China’s newly claimed and challenged air defense zone over the East China Sea, a U.S. official said, an action that could inflame tensions between the world powers.
The large U.S. Air Force B-52 planes — which were not armed because they were on a training mission — set off Monday from Guam and returned there without incident. The mission lasted for several hours, and the aircraft were in China’s newly declared air zone for about an hour, according to the U.S. official.
The planes’ pilots did not identify themselves upon entering the disputed airspace, as China would have wanted, according to the official.
Quantum Light Harvesting Hints At Entirely New Form of Computing
November 26th, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review:
Light harvesting in plants and bacteria cannot be properly explained by classical processes or by quantum ones. Now complexity theorists say the answer is a delicate interplay of both, an idea that could transform computation.
Physicists have long known that plants and bacteria convert light into chemical energy in a way that is hugely efficient. But only in recent years have they discovered that the molecular machines behind this process rely on quantum mechanics to do the job.
That’s a big surprise because of the temperatures involved. Quantum states are highly fragile—sneeze and they disappear in a puff of smoke. Physicists can maintain these states for some time in carefully controlled environments at low temperature but nobody can explain how it can be possible in the warm wet environments inside living things.
Today, Gabor Vattay at Eotvos University in Budapest and Stuart Kauffman at the University of Vermont in Burlington have the answer. They say the processes behind light harvesting are a special blend of the quantum and the classical. And that this delicate mix represents an entirely new form of computing that nature might exploit in other systems too.
Gold Fix Drawing Scrutiny
November 26th, 2013Via: Bloomberg:
Every business day in London, five banks meet to set the price of gold in a ritual that dates back to 1919. Now, dealers and economists say knowledge gleaned on those calls could give some traders an unfair advantage when buying and selling the precious metal.
The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority is scrutinizing how prices are set in the $20 trillion gold market, according to a person with knowledge of the review who asked not to be identified because the matter isn’t public. The London fix, the benchmark rate used by mining companies, jewelers and central banks to buy, sell and value the metal, is published twice daily after a telephone call involving Barclays Plc (BARC), Deutsche Bank AG (DBK), Bank of Nova Scotia, HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA) and Societe Generale SA. (GLE)
The process, during which gold is bought and sold, can take from a few minutes to more than an hour. The participants also can trade the metal and its derivatives on the spot market and exchanges during the calls. Just after the fixing begins, trading erupts in gold derivatives, according to research published in September. Four traders interviewed by Bloomberg News said that’s because dealers and their clients are using information from the talks to bet on the outcome.
“Traders involved in this price-determining process have knowledge which, even for a short time, is superior to other people’s knowledge,” said Thorsten Polleit, chief economist at Frankfurt-based precious-metals broker Degussa Goldhandel GmbH and a former economist at Barclays. “That is the great flaw of the London gold-fixing.”
Hollywood’s Arnon Milchan Says He Was Israeli Spy
November 26th, 2013Via: MSN:
Stories about Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan’s alleged double life have been circulating for years.
Now, the Israeli businessman behind hits like “Pretty Woman,” ”Fight Club” and “L.A. Confidential” has finally come forth with a stunning admission — for years he served as an Israeli spy, buying arms on its behalf and boosting its alleged nuclear program.
In a far-reaching interview aired Monday with Israel’s Channel 2 TV’s flagship investigative program “Uvda,” Milchan detailed a series of clandestine affairs in which he was involved and particularly how he helped purchase technologies Israel allegedly needed to operate nuclear bombs.
New Inks and Tools Allow 3-D Printing of Lithium-Ion Technology
November 26th, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review:
By making the basic building blocks of batteries out of ink, Harvard materials scientist Jennifer Lewis is laying the groundwork for lithium-ion batteries and other high-performing electronics that can be produced with 3-D printers.
Although the technology is still at an early stage, the ability to print batteries and other electronics could make it possible to manufacture new kinds of devices. Think of self-powered biomedical sensors, affixed to the skin, that would continuously transmit vital signs to a smartphone. Or existing products could be made more simply and efficiently.
For example, the plastic shell of a hearing aid is already 3-D printed for a custom fit inside a wearer’s ear. But the electronics are manufactured separately, and the batteries are often the type that must be replaced frequently. If the electronics and a rechargeable battery were printed together, the final product could be made more rapidly and seamlessly.
Software Mines Science Papers to Make New Discoveries
November 26th, 2013In other news: Majority of Landmark Cancer Studies Cannot Be Replicated.
Via: MIT Technology Review:
Software that read tens of thousands of research papers and then predicted new discoveries about the workings of a protein that’s key to cancer could herald a faster approach to developing new drugs.
The software, developed in collaboration between IBM and Baylor College of Medicine, was set loose on more than 60,000 research papers that focused on p53, a protein involved in cell growth implicated in most cancers. By parsing sentences in the documents, the software could build an understanding of what is known about enzymes called kinases that act on p53 and regulate its behavior; these enzymes are common targets for cancer treatments. It then generated a list of other proteins mentioned in the literature that were probably undiscovered kinases, based on what it knew about those already identified. Most of its predictions tested so far have turned out to be correct.
“We have tested 10,” Olivier Lichtarge of Baylor said Tuesday. “Seven seem to be true kinases.” He presented preliminary results of his collaboration with IBM at a meeting on the topic of Cognitive Computing held at IBM’s Almaden research lab.
Lichtarge also described an earlier test of the software in which it was given access to research literature published prior to 2003 to see if it could predict p53 kinases that have been discovered since. The software found seven of the nine kinases discovered after 2003.
“P53 biology is central to all kinds of disease,” says Lichtarge, and so it seemed to be the perfect way to show that software-generated discoveries might speed up research that leads to new treatments. He believes the results so far show that to be true, although the kinase-hunting experiments are yet to be reviewed and published in a scientific journal, and more lab tests are still planned to confirm the findings so far. “Kinases are typically discovered at a rate of one per year,” says Lichtarge. “The rate of discovery can be vastly accelerated.”
Lichtarge said that although the software was configured to look only for kinases, it also seems capable of identifying previously unidentified phosphatases, which are enzymes that reverse the action of kinases. It can also identify other types of protein that may interact with p53.
The Baylor collaboration is intended to test a way of extending a set of tools that IBM researchers already offer to pharmaceutical companies. Under the banner of accelerated discovery, text-analyzing tools are used to mine publications, patents, and molecular databases. For example, a company in search of a new malaria drug might use IBM’s tools to find molecules with characteristics that are similar to existing treatments. Because software can search more widely, it might turn up molecules in overlooked publications or patents that no human would otherwise find.
Cicada 3301
November 26th, 2013Via: Telegraph:
For the past two years, a mysterious online organisation has been setting the world’s finest code-breakers a series of seemingly unsolveable problems. But to what end? Welcome to the world of Cicada 3301.
Wikipedia: Cicada 3301
Similar: OTP22: Calling the ‘Beautiful Minds’ of Cryptogon [OTP22 is very active with many unsolved puzzles.]
Britain: £150 Cosy Cob Home
November 26th, 2013If this sort of thing calls to you, see: The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage by Ianto Evans.
Via: Daily Mail:
Smallholder Michael Buck spent eight months constructing the house using the ancient technique of cob – building with a mixture of sand, clay, straw, water and earth. He taught himself the method by reading a book, even shaping the walls without a single power tool.
He also made the simple wooden roof frame and thatched it himself with straw from his fields. The 300 sq ft of floor space features floorboards rescued from a skip, while an old windscreen from a lorry provided glass for the windows.
With no central heating, you might think it would be a bit chilly, but he says the cob walls and thatched roof make it incredibly well insulated – and the ceiling is stuffed with sheep’s wool from a nearby farm to help keep the heat in further.
