cryptogon.com

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“This gives us an unprecedented tool to control a quantum system, perhaps even atom by atom,” said Patil, lead author of the paper. Atoms in this state are extremely sensitive to outside forces, he noted, so this work could lead to the development of new kinds of sensors.

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When your only fixed living cost is truck insurance, you can save a large chunk of your income.

One San Francisco-based Google employee in this exact situation, who lives in a 128-square-foot truck in the company’s parking lot, saves about 90% of his take-home pay.

Brandon — who asked to withhold his last name and photo to maintain his privacy — doesn’t use electricity, and his phone bill is handled by his employer, meaning his one recurring cost is his $121 monthly truck insurance.

“I’m going for a target of saving about 90% of my after-tax income, and throwing that in student loans and investments,” the 23-year-old software engineer tells Business Insider.

He graduated with $22,434 worth of student loans, and has paid it down to $16,449 over the course of four months. He expects to have the loans fully paid off within the next six months, which will save him thousands of dollars in interest that can add up over the standard 10- or 20-year repayment plans.

Saving on rent has also allowed him to dine at nice restaurants and enjoy San Francisco more than if he opted for living in an apartment.

Environmental Protection Agency officials confirmed 99 of 135 beta-radiation sensors in its RadNet system—which monitors in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico—aren’t working and have been turned off. Officials blame electromagnetic interference from sources such as cellphone towers and said efforts to resolve the problem have been unsuccessful.

EPA officials said the beta-detection problem cropped up in 2006 when they started putting the real-time monitors into the field.

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Some nuclear experts said that in an emergency, knowing as much as possible about whether beta or gamma emitters are present, and in which amounts, can be crucial for making decisions such as how large an area might need protective measures. In instances where only a beta emitter is present, the lack of a working monitor could leave officials unaware of potentially dangerous levels of contamination, they added.

The beta-monitoring issue could fuel critics who contend the EPA has been pulling back on its radiation-protection mission—an assertion the agency strongly disputes.

Gamma- and beta-emitting radionuclides can be carried by the wind long distances from a nuclear event, such as an explosion or power-plant accident. Gamma rays from those radionuclides can then travel hundreds of feet or more and penetrate objects, including human tissue, according to federal government websites. Beta particles generally travel only several feet from their emission source. While they can penetrate skin, their main health threat comes if inhaled or ingested in tainted food or water.

The EPA upgraded the RadNet system after 9/11 to monitor and transmit data on both types of radiation. While the attacks didn’t involve radioactive material, “one of the weaknesses identified in the post-9/11 reassessment of the RadNet air network was that decision makers were not receiving data quickly enough,” the EPA said in 2012.

Officials said they don’t know why some beta monitors still work, including locations in Phoenix, Dallas, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.

Real-time information on various types of radiation “is very important to the emergency-response community” because it could help determine the need for ordering evacuations or telling people to stay indoors, said Jim Hardeman, retired manager of the environmental radiation program at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

Federal officials said they can still obtain beta data by retrieving the filter from each monitoring station. These filters, which collect particles from air flowing through the machines, are sent to an EPA lab for analysis. The EPA said filters are typically changed once or twice a week.

Even with the beta-detection problem, the RadNet system, along with other government radiological resources, has enough capability to do the job, EPA officials said. “We can confidently say that this system is fully capable now and fully operational now with the current monitors it has to detect fairly minute levels of radiation,” said Jonathan Edwards, director of the EPA’s radiation protection division.

EPA officials acknowledged that one major radionuclide—strontium-90, which can get into people’s bones—emits only beta particles. However, they said, an event releasing a large amount of strontium-90 would also release large amounts of gamma-emitting radionuclides that could be picked up. Even with beta monitors, laboratory filter analyses would be needed to confirm the strontium, they added.

But some experts, inside and outside of government, argue that being able to separately and quickly detect the presence of a beta emitter such as strontium-90 could influence evacuation or other emergency plans. The 2012 EPA report also said gamma monitoring wasn’t sufficient to deal with the threat from strontium-90, which could “cause large-scale public health impacts.”

“If real-time beta measurements were unnecessary, why did the government spend money installing the capability in the first place?” asked Daniel Hirsch, a lecturer on nuclear policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a longtime critic of federal radiation-protection efforts who has studied the RadNet system. The EPA’s explanation “seems like an after-the-fact rationalization when they discovered the monitors didn’t work.”

Kyodo News has reported on this event, but only in regard to Bordne’s crew. In my opinion, Bordne’s full recollections—as they relate to the other seven crews—need to be made public at this time as well, because they provide more than enough reason for the US government to search for and release in timely fashion all documents relating to events in Okinawa during the Cuban Missile Crisis. If true, Bordne’s account would add appreciably to historical understanding, not just of the Cuban crisis, but of the role accident or miscalculation have played and continue to play in the Nuclear Age.

What Bordne contends. Bordne was interviewed extensively last year by Masakatsu Ota, a senior writer with Kyodo News, which describes itself as the leading news agency in Japan and has a worldwide presence, with more than 40 news bureaus outside that country. In a March 2015 article, Ota laid out much of Bordne’s account and wrote that “[a]nother former US veteran who served in Okinawa also recently confirmed [Bordne’s account] on condition of anonymity.” Ota has subsequently declined to identify the unnamed veteran, because of the anonymity he’d been promised.

Ota did not report portions of Bordne’s story that are based on telephone exchanges that Bordne says he overheard between his launch officer, Capt. Basset, and the other seven launch officers. Bordne, who was in the Launch Control Center with the captain, was directly privy only to what was said at one end of the line during those conversations—unless the captain directly relayed to Bordne and the other two crew members in the Launch Control Center what another launch officers just said.

With that limitation acknowledged, here is Bordne’s account of the ensuing events of that night:

Immediately after opening his pouch and confirming that he had received orders to launch all four nuclear missiles under his command, Capt. Bassett expressed the thought that something was amiss, Bordne told me. Instructions to launch nuclear weapons were supposed to be issued only at the highest state of alert; indeed this was the main difference between DEFCON 2 and DEFCON1. Bordne recalls the captain saying, “We have not received the upgrade to DEFCON1, which is highly irregular, and we need to proceed with caution. This may be the real thing, or it is the biggest screw up we will ever experience in our lifetime.”

While the captain consulted by phone with some of the other launch officers, the crew wondered whether the DEFCON1 order had been jammed by the enemy, while the weather report and coded launch order had somehow managed to get through. And, Bordne recalls, the captain conveyed another concern coming from one of the other launch officers: A pre-emptive attack was already under way, and in the rush to respond, commanders had dispensed with the step to DEFCON1. After some hasty calculations, crew members realized that if Okinawa were the target of a preemptive strike, they ought to have felt the impact already. Every moment that went by without the sounds or tremors of an explosion made this possible explanation seem less likely.

Still, to hedge against this possibility, Capt. Bassett ordered his crew to run a final check on each of the missiles’ launch readiness. When the captain read out the target list, to the crew’s surprise, three of the four targets were not in Russia. At this point, Bordne recalls, the inter-site phone rang. It was another launch officer, reporting that his list had two non-Russian targets.Why target non-belligerent countries? It didn’t seem right.

The captain ordered that the bay doors for the non-Russian-targeted missiles remain shut. He then cracked open the door for the Russia-designated missile. In that position, it could readily be tipped open the rest of the way (even manually), or, if there were an explosion outside, the door would be slammed shut by its blast, thereby increasing the chances that the missile could ride out the attack. He got on the radio and advised all other crews to take the same measures, pending “clarification” of the mid-shift broadcast.

Bassett then called the Missile Operations Center and requested, on the pretense that the original transmission had not come through clearly, that the mid-shift report be retransmitted. The hope was that this would help those at the center to notice that the original transmission’s coded instruction had been issued in error and would use the retransmission to rectify matters. To the whole crew’s consternation, after the time-check and weather update, the coded launch instruction was repeated, unaltered. The other seven crews, of course, heard the repetition of the instruction as well.

According to Bordne’s account—which, recall, is based on hearing just one side of a phone call—the situation of one launch crew was particularly stark: All its targets were in Russia. Its launch officer, a lieutenant, did not acknowledge the authority of the senior field officer—i.e. Capt. Bassett—to override the now-repeated order of the major. The second launch officer at that site reported to Bassett that the lieutenant had ordered his crew to proceed with the launch of its missiles! Bassett immediately ordered the other launch officer, as Bordne remembers it, “to send two airmen over with weapons and shoot the [lieutenant] if he tries to launch without [either] verbal authorization from the ‘senior officer in the field’ or the upgrade to DEFCON 1 by Missile Operations Center.” About 30 yards of underground tunnel separated the two Launch Control Centers.

At this most stressful moment, Bordne says, it suddenly occurred to him that it was very peculiar such an important instruction would be tacked to the end of a weather report. It also struck him as strange that the major had methodically repeated the coded instruction without the slightest hint of stress in his voice, as if it were little more than a boring nuisance. Other crew members agreed; Bassett immediately resolved to telephone the major and say that he needed one of two things:

Raise the DEFCON level to 1, or
Issue a launch stand-down order.

Judging from what Bordne says he heard of the phone conversation, this request got a more stress-filled reaction from the major, who immediately took to the radio and read out a new coded instruction. It was an order to stand down the missiles … and, just like that, the incident was over.

To double-check that disaster had really been averted, Capt. Bassett asked for and received confirmation from the other launch officers that no missiles had been fired.

At the beginning of the crisis, Bordne says, Capt. Bassett had warned his men, “If this is a screw up and we do not launch, we get no recognition, and this never happened.” Now, at the end of it all, he said, “None of us will discuss anything that happened here tonight, and I mean anything. No discussions at the barracks, in a bar, or even here at the launch site. You do not even write home about this. Am I making myself perfectly clear on this subject?”

Prince Abdel Mohsen Bin Walid Bin Abdulaziz and four other men were held after what was described as the biggest ever drugs bust at the city’s main Rafik Hariri International Airport, according to local media and security sources.

They were allegedly “attempting to smuggle about two tons of Captagon pills and some cocaine”, a security source was quoted as saying.

Captagon is a brand name for the widely used amphetamine phenethylline.

Although this type of amphetamine has been prescribed in the past to treat childhood and other behavioural disorders, it is now used overwhelmingly as a stimulant in the Middle East.

The first photo of the drugs sized in Beirut Airport in a private jet that belong to a #Saudi prince. #Lebanon pic.twitter.com/GSjtaWgsz5
— Nasser Atta (@nasseratta5) October 26, 2015

It has long been banned in the West.

It is the drug of choice for front-line fighters on both sides in the Syrian war, allowing a heightened state of alertness.

The world’s largest retailer by revenue has for several months been conducting indoor tests of small unmanned aircraft systems – the term regulators use for drones – and is now seeking for the first time to test the machines outdoors. It plans to use drones manufactured by China’s SZ DJI Technology Co Ltd.

In addition to having drones take inventory of trailers outside its warehouses and perform other tasks aimed at making its distribution system more efficient, Wal-Mart is asking the Federal Aviation Administration for permission to research drone use in “deliveries to customers at Walmart facilities, as well as to consumer homes,” according to a copy of the application reviewed by Reuters.