Nuclear Fusion Milestone Passed at U.S. Lab
October 7th, 2013Via: BBC:
Researchers at a US lab have passed a crucial milestone on the way to their ultimate goal of achieving self-sustaining nuclear fusion.
Harnessing fusion – the process that powers the Sun – could provide an unlimited and cheap source of energy.
But to be viable, fusion power plants would have to produce more energy than they consume, which has proven elusive.
Now, a breakthrough by scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) could boost hopes of scaling up fusion.
NIF, based at Livermore in California, uses 192 beams from the world’s most powerful laser to heat and compress a small pellet of hydrogen fuel to the point where nuclear fusion reactions take place.
The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel – the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.
This is a step short of the lab’s stated goal of “ignition”, where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply. This is because known “inefficiencies” in different parts of the system mean not all the energy supplied through the laser is delivered to the fuel.
But the latest achievement has been described as the single most meaningful step for fusion in recent years, and demonstrates NIF is well on its way towards the coveted target of ignition and self-sustaining fusion.
Chinese Jitters Over Absurd $1.3 Trillion Gamble in U.S. Debt
October 7th, 2013Via: Independent:
China, the biggest foreign creditor of the United States, has waded into the American budget crisis, warning Congress that it must resolve the political impasse over the debt ceiling without further delay.
The Chinese Vice Foreign Minister, Zhu Guangyao, told America’s deadlocked politicians on Monday that “the clock is ticking” and called on them to approve an extension of the national borrowing limit before the federal government is projected to run out of cash on 17 October.
“We ask that the United States earnestly takes steps to resolve in a timely way the political issues around the debt ceiling and prevent a US debt default to ensure the safety of Chinese investments in the United States,” Mr Zhu told reporters in Beijing. “This is the United States’ responsibility,” he added.
The American government entered its seventh day of shutdown on Monday, following the failure of Congress to approve the national budget a week ago. And there was little sign of progress on the still more crucial issue of the fast-approaching “debt ceiling” deadline. Yet rather than indicating a willingness to negotiate, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, stated on Sunday that it was “time for us to stand and fight” over the budget. He added that a default was “the path we’re on”.
Self-Assembling Robots: MIT M-Blocks
October 7th, 2013Via: MIT News:
Small cubes with no exterior moving parts can propel themselves forward, jump on top of each other, and snap together to form arbitrary shapes.
40 Percent of Humanity Online
October 7th, 2013Via: AFP:
Around 2.7 billion people — 40 percent of the world’s population — will be connected to the Internet by the end of 2013, the United Nations said Monday.
Another 250 million people came online in 2012, but 4.4 billion people remain unconnected, said the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Ninety percent of those not online live in developing countries.
The ITU also said there would be 6.8 billion mobile-cellular subscriptions -? almost as many as there are people on the planet — by the end of the year.
South Korea leads the world in information and communication technology (ICT) development for the third consecutive year, followed closely by Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Norway, the ITU said in its annual report.
Long Island School Bans ‘Footballs, Baseballs, Lacrosse Balls, or Anything that Might Hurt Someone’
October 7th, 2013Via: CBS:
Worries about injuries at a Long Island school have led to a surprising ban.
As CBS 2’s Jennifer McLogan reported Monday, officials at Weber Middle School in Port Washington are worried that students are getting hurt during recess. Thus, they have instituted a ban on footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls, or anything that might hurt someone on school grounds.
Tossing a football during recess has long seemed to be a rite of passage for kids in the school community.
“I think we need the soccer balls, the footballs and everything, so we can have some fun,” one student said.
But the students will have no such option anymore. They were just informed that during recess, football is out and Nerf ball is in. Hard soccer balls have been banned, along with baseballs and lacrosse balls, rough games of tag, or cartwheels unless supervised by a coach.
Whistleblower Terminated from Northwestern for Revealing Human Medical Experimentation
October 7th, 2013Via: CNN:
Why would a bright and promising cardiologist be fired from the University hospital that she had practiced at since 2000?
Apparently, protecting her patients is grounds for dismissal. At least, that is the case at Northwestern University in Illinois.
Despite being promoted to Valve Director in 2006, Dr. Nalini M. Rajamannan was terminated in 2008 after reporting the use of non-FDA approved, experimental medical devices being implanted in patients without their knowledge.
The doctor conducting these human experiments, Dr. Patrick McCarthy, was testing his own inventions, an IMR annuloplasty device and a Myxo annuloplasty device manufactured by Edwards Lifescience.
These devices had not been approved by the FDA and even now, many patients have no idea that they have these experimental devices in their bodies.
Pharmaceutical Firms Paid to Attend Meetings of Panel that Advises FDA
October 7th, 2013Via: Washington Post:
A scientific panel that shaped the federal government’s policy for testing the safety and effectiveness of painkillers was funded by major pharmaceutical companies that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the chance to affect the thinking of the Food and Drug Administration, according to hundreds of e-mails obtained by a public records request.
The e-mails show that the companies paid as much as $25,000 to attend any given meeting of the panel, which had been set up by two academics to provide advice to the FDA on how to weigh the evidence from clinical trials. A leading FDA official later called the group “an essential collaborative effort.”
Patient advocacy groups said the electronic communications suggest that the regulators had become too close to the companies trying to crack into the $9 billion painkiller market in the United States. FDA officials who regulate painkillers sat on the steering committee of the panel, which met in private, and co-wrote papers with employees of pharmaceutical companies.
The FDA has been criticized for failing to take precautions that might have averted the epidemic of addiction to prescription drugs including Oxycontin and other opioids.
“These e-mails help explain the disastrous decisions the FDA’s analgesic division has made over the last 10 years,” said Craig Mayton, the Columbus, Ohio, attorney who made the public records request to the University of Washington. “Instead of protecting the public health, the FDA has been allowing the drug companies to pay for a seat at a small table where all the rules were written.”
Russia Planning ‘Near-Total Surveillance’ of Visitors, Athletes at Sochi Winter Olympics
October 6th, 2013HAHA. Warning, Americans, the Russians will be doing to you what the U.S. Government does to you 24/7.
Via: Telegraph:
Security measures at the Sochi winter Olympics will include such extensive electronic eavesdropping and surveillance that the US State Department has advised Americans headed to Russia to leave smart phones and laptops at home, an investigation has revealed.
Recovery: ‘Families Hoard Cash 5 Years After Crisis’
October 6th, 2013Voluntary simplicity, or, living well on very little money, kicks evil people in the nuts and gouges out their eyes… Doing this in the U.S. has a force multiplier effect because the U.S. is the largest source of the funds that keep the global ponzi scheme running. When people in wealthy countries opt out, the action causes major economic damage to the machine.
—Commentary on Voluntary Simplicity from 2007
This AP piece is remarkable:
Shunning debt and spending less can be good for one family’s finances. When hundreds of millions do it together, it can starve the global economy.
If families, acting in their own best interests, “Can starve the global economy,” something is very wrong with the global economy.
Via: AP:
Five years after U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a global financial crisis and shattering confidence worldwide, families in major countries around the world are still hunkered down, too spooked and distrustful to take chances with their money.
An Associated Press analysis of households in the 10 biggest economies shows that families continue to spend cautiously and have pulled hundreds of billions of dollars out of stocks, cut borrowing for the first time in decades and poured money into savings and bonds that offer puny interest payments, often too low to keep up with inflation.
“It doesn’t take very much to destroy confidence, but it takes an awful lot to build it back,” says Ian Bright, senior economist at ING, a global bank based in Amsterdam. “The attitude toward risk is permanently reset.”
A flight to safety on such a global scale is unprecedented since the end of World War II.
The implications are huge: Shunning debt and spending less can be good for one family’s finances. When hundreds of millions do it together, it can starve the global economy.
Harvest Time: Canadian Government Takes Man’s Farm to Build Military Base
October 6th, 2013Via: Maclean’s:
In Frank Meyers’s eyes, the view from his dining room window is priceless. Literally. He can see the old wooden house where he lived as a little boy. The family barn, rebuilt with his talented hands. Rows and rows of sweet corn, sprouting from prime Ontario soil. No matter how many federal bureaucrats knocked on his door—or how much cash they offered to pay—the 85-year-old farmer refused, again and again, to sell his beloved land. As he likes to say: “You can’t eat the money.”
But as Frank Meyers learned today—in a heartbreaking moment he’d been dreading for years—you can’t stop the government, either. If the feds want your property (in his case, to build a state-of-the-art training ground for the Canadian military’s elite special forces commandos), fighting back is futile. “In other countries, they’re crushing you with bullets and guns and ammunition and tanks and explosives,” Meyers says. “Not in Canada. It’s pencil and paper here, and then they’ve got control.”
