Did Stonehenge Builders Use Pythagoras’ Theorem 2,000 Years Before the Greek Philosopher Was Born?
June 23rd, 2018Via: National Post:
THE builders of Britain’s ancient stone circles such as Stonehenge used Pythagoras’s theorem 2,000 years before the Greek philosopher was born, experts have claimed.
A new book, Megalith, has re-examined the geometry of Neolithic monuments and concluded they were constructed by sophisticated astronomers who understood lunar, solar and eclipse cycles and built huge stone calendars using complex geometry.
More: Megalith: Studies in Stone
Researchers Fish Yellowcake Uranium from the Sea With Acrylic Fibers
June 23rd, 2018Via: IEEE:
Researchers at the U.S. Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and LCW Supercritical Technologies made use of readily available acrylic fibers to pull five grams of yellowcake—a powdered form of uranium used to produce fuel for nuclear power reactors—from seawater.
The milestone, announced in mid-June, follows seven years of work and a roughly US $25 million investment by the federal energy agency. Another $1.15 million is being channeled to LCW as it attempts to scale up the technique for commercial use. The effort builds on work by Japanese researchers in the late 1990s and was prompted by interest in finding alternative sources of uranium for a future time when terrestrial sources are depleted.
Nuclear power plant operators increasingly want their facilities to run for up to a century, says Gary Gill, a researcher at PNNL who led the seawater extraction effort. But within decades, he says, terrestrial sources of uranium could be depleted or prove to be too expensive for use in commercial reactors.
A 2017 assessment by the World Nuclear Association says that roughly 445 reactors worldwide, with a combined 390 gigawatts of generating capacity, require around 75,000 tons of uranium oxide concentrate each year to operate.
In the U.S., an expected surge of demand for uranium to fuel a fleet of new reactors largely dried up after the 2011 accident at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant. More recently, low natural gas prices have hurt the economic case for nuclear power plants, leading some developers to scrap plans for new units and a number of utility operators to consider closing existing ones.
Before it stopped reporting on U.S. uranium reserves a decade ago, the DOE’s Energy Information Administration said terrestrial uranium reserves could meet anywhere from 10 to 23 years’ worth of demand, depending on market prices. EIA pointed out at the time that domestic U.S. uranium mining supplied around 10 percent of U.S. requirements for nuclear fuel.
Unlike terrestrial sources that can be mined at specific locations, uranium in seawater shows up in concentrations of around 3.3 parts per billion. With a total volume estimated at more than 4 billion tons, there is around 500 times more uranium in seawater than in land-based sources. As a result, the widely dispersed sea-based resource could last for thousands of years, Gill says.
Flying Dragon Robot Transforms Itself to Squeeze Through Gaps
June 23rd, 2018Via: IEEE:
It’s a modular flying robot powered by ducted fans that can transform literally on the fly, from a square to a snake to anything in between, allowing it to stretch out to pass through small holes and then make whatever other shape you want once it’s on the other side.
Supreme Court Says Warrant Necessary for Phone Location Data
June 22nd, 2018Via: Cnet:
The US Supreme Court has ruled in favor of digital privacy.
In a 5-4 decision on Friday the justices said that police need warrants to gather phone location data as evidence for trials. That reversed and remanded a decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Carpenter v. United States is the first case about phone location data that the Supreme Court has ruled on. That makes it a landmark decision regarding how law enforcement agencies can use technology as they build cases. The court heard arguments in the case on Nov. 29.
The dispute dates back to a 2011 robbery in Detroit, after which police gathered months of phone location data from Timothy Carpenter’s phone provider. They pulled together 12,898 different locations from Carpenter, over 127 days.
The legal and privacy concern was that police gathered the four months’ worth of Carpenter’s digital footprints without a warrant. A Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals judge ruled that cellphone location data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable search and seizure, and therefore didn’t require a warrant.
In the Supreme Court’s ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the government’s searches of Carpenter’s phone records were considered a Fourth Amendment search.
Related: “You work it backwards to make it clean”
Big Pharma Vaccine Billionaire Just Bought the LA Times
June 21st, 2018I remember the operation the LA Times carried out on Gary Webb back in the 1990s, so…
Yeah.
Via: Natural News:
The latest example of Big Pharma taking over the media is the purchase of the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Tribune for $500 million by Big Pharma billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. Instead of paying for advertisements, pharma billionaires have decided to just buy the publications outright so they can control the entire publication. All the journalists here are now officially bought; these publications should officially be recognized as propaganda rags from now on.
Research Credit: Pookie
The World’s First Robot-Made Burger Is About to Hit the Bay Area
June 21st, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
On June 27, the world’s first robot-crafted burger will roll off a conveyor belt in San Francisco and into the hands of the public.
You could call it the freshest burger on Earth.
The product, from Bay Area-based Creator, a culinary robotics company, is assembled and cooked in a machine that contains 20 computers, 350 sensors, and 50 actuator mechanisms. It does everything from slicing and toasting the brioche bun to adding toppings (to order) and seasoning and cooking the patties, all in five minutes. The meat is ground to order—why it’s touted as so fresh—and sourced from premium ingredients. It emerges from the machine piled with tomatoes and lettuce, sprinkled with seasonings, and drizzled with sauces, at which point it’s transferred by human hands to the customer. The price: $6.
U.S. Releases Report Showing Elevated Health Risks from Nonstick Chemicals
June 21st, 2018Hair on fire lunatic fringe people who have assumed this for decades: Right again.
Via: Science Magazine:
President Donald Trump’s administration has released a politically charged toxicology report about nonstick chemicals showing they can endanger human health at significantly lower levels than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has previously called safe.
The draft report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is a toxicological profile of four types of stain- and water-resistant chemicals.
It finds that so-called “minimum risk levels” for the toxins should be seven to 10 times lower than standards set by EPA in 2016.
The lowest level included in the ATSDR report is 12 parts per trillion in drinking water, which is greater than 80% below the current maximum safe level EPA has advised for two types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.
By contrast, the 2016 EPA voluntary health advisory for perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) warned that exposure to the chemicals at levels above 70 parts per trillion could be dangerous.
The report’s release follows mounting congressional pressure from both sides of the aisle after news surfaced last month that a White House official in January had warned that releasing the report would be a “potential public relations nightmare” (E&E Daily, May 15).
Synthetic Biology Raises Risk of New Bioweapons
June 20th, 2018When “it” finally happens, my complete lack of surprise will coincide with a sense of wonder that “it” didn’t happen sooner.
U.S. Researchers Trying to Create Pandemic Avian Flu
Baxter International “Unintentionally” Sent Flu Samples to Companies that Contained H5N1 Avian Flu
Scientist Makes H5N1 Highly Contagious
New Bird Flu ‘Has Unique Traits’
Bird Flu Researchers to Continue Work on Engineered Virus
Scientists Sequence Black Death Bacteria DNA
And Now… Plague Sweeps Through al Qaeda Terror Training Camp, Killing 40
Bill Gates Funds Research Into ‘Flying Syringe’ Mosquitoes to Deliver Vaccines
Via: Guardian:
The rapid rise of synthetic biology, a futuristic field of science that seeks to master the machinery of life, has raised the risk of a new generation of bioweapons, according a major US report into the state of the art.
Advances in the area mean that scientists now have the capability to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body.
The three scenarios are picked out as threats of highest concern in a review of the field published on Tuesday by the US National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Department of Defense. The report was commissioned to flag up ways in which the powerful technology might be abused, and to focus minds on how best to prepare.
We Are All Prisoners of the Surveillance State
June 20th, 2018Via: The Rutherford Institute:
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers.
Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.
This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.
Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.
As French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.”
This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged.
Severe Obesity Rates Surging in Rural America
June 20th, 2018Via: Reuters:
Severe obesity rates have been on the rise nationwide since the turn of the century, disproportionately affecting children and adults in rural communities, two U.S. studies suggest.
Researchers examined data on height and weight collected from 2001 to 2016 for adults 20 and older and for youth ages 2 to 19. Severe obesity rates were higher in rural areas for youth as well as for men and women, while overall rates of obesity were higher only for rural women, researchers report in JAMA.
In rural communities, severe obesity rates more than tripled for men and more than doubled for women during the study period, while climbing 29 percent among young people. Obesity rates in rural areas, meanwhile, rose about 9 percent among children and teens and about 36 percent for adults.
