BS: Random Traces From All Over

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 05 Aug 08 - 01:25 PM

Secret Gorilla "Paradise" Found; May Double World Numbers

Dan Morrison
for National Geographic News

August 5, 2008
Deep in the hinterlands of the Republic of the Congo lies a secret ape paradise that is home to 125,000 western lowland gorillas, researchers announced today.

The findings, if confirmed, would more than double the world's estimated population of this great ape subspecies, which is classified as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Western lowland gorillas have been devastated in recent years by illegal hunting for bush meat and the spread of the Ebola virus. Just last year scientists projected the animals' numbers could fall as low as 50,000 by 2011.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Aug 08 - 04:30 PM

I saw a picture of an underwater lake at the botom of the sea.
The interface makes the lake appear almost as surface lakes do. They reflect and diffract light quite nicely.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Aug 08 - 04:42 PM

Amos, YOU once wrote in 2001,

"We will not tire. We will not falter. And we will not fail.
Wish I knew that guy's speechwriter. Good line. What if it is true? Whoa! For wanting to put an end to terrorism, I am sure we are stirring up a good dose of stark terror.

But even so, it is plain that there are even some Afghans who think the arrival of the Mellicans just might improve life in general for them, since it can't get much worse. Others, contrariwise.

The religous ideology which admits of violence against innocents, women and children is not mainstream Islam, and was only articulated for use against (I believe) Nasser, in the 20th century. The version that Ladenites and their ilk assert is a cruel distortion of mainstream Islamic teachings, and is motivated not by religous belief but by the desire for power, money, control, and other pleasures of the not-quite-bright.

Maybe the whole thing was a trick to get us to waste our treasure bombing the deserts? Naaah -- it couldn't be!!

The big risk in all this would be a complete failure of Bush's cabinet to understand the bazaar mentality and the cultural mandates the people they are opposing live under. What is required is a massively skillful PR campaign of the sort that is hardly ever accomplished--lots of intell, deep understanding of buttons, a mastery of humor and deft deflection, surehanded reversals of rhetorical postures on their part, etc. Black PR where needed. Massive amounts of it.

For example, the forces on the other side have already started a wide-spread rumor circulating among Muslims in both India and Pakistan with great certainty that the whole 9-11 caper was a scam perpetrated by the Israelis, to stir up hatred of Arabs and Muslims. Not hard to deflect if you catch it early or can manage the exposure correctly, because it is so ridiculous (I think). But its a masterful rumour to spread amongst the uncritical crowds.

You can't fight that brand of insanity with just Big Iron. It takes intell, and craft in psychological operations.

__________________________________

Now that we have tired, faltered and failed, where is that intel and psy-ops?

The latest confirmed by Sy Hirsh of the NYT is that the White House approved of a plan to stage a war with US troops dressed as Iranian regulars and suffer actual deaths of other US troops unaware of the deception.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 05 Aug 08 - 04:48 PM

I saw that abysmal scheme--which was so evil even those it was being presented to rejected it. It was not approved, as I recall the Hirsch story, just proposed.

If we had spent an eighth of the money we have spent on meat and steel in Iraq on PR, psy-ops and intell, and never invaded, we would have started a reformation in Iraq with much less woe and loss.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Aug 08 - 10:37 PM

Right now I envision somewhere there is an Iraqi author equivalent to our dearly departed Shelby Foote busily writing the definitive 3 volumn history of the Bush Invasions of Iraq.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Aug 08 - 11:01 PM

The cold war mind set of out spending an enemy on new weaponry served both the arms makers and pentagon. It did uniquely work on the Soviets at one point in time. When it is used now against an enemy with box cutters and strap on bombs it is pure nonsense but still beneficial for Lookheed. A $47 billion bomber contract and 300 billion Halliburton contract must help someone, but not our country.

The Old CIA idea that perception becomes reality when it is repeated earnestly and frequently is disasterous in this situation.
WHile that psy weapon is alive and well on FOX it is totally cock blocked by Al Jazeera in the Middle East.

I have thought of a psyop program that comes directly from the mouths of soldiers and seasoned with the spice of common sense.
The problem is that we have lost our treasury to the ravings of the Rand Corporation and like minded ruling class think tanks.
There is no $ left to carry it out except in a feeble shadow state of its best implementation.
Most of it was done in 2001. Don't assume that I suffer from extreme hubris. Aferall if an idiot like Bush could get us this far into bankruptcy and defeat,an idiot like me could get us out.

The truth is closing the barn door now after Q Khan , bin Laden and George W have escaped, is useless.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 06 Aug 08 - 11:13 AM

SAN DIEGO – There were no takers in San Diego Tuesday for a trial self-deportation program initiated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Under "Operation Scheduled Departure," which began Tuesday, immigrants who have not complied with a final order of deportation are being asked to turn themselves in to federal immigration officials with the promise that they will not be placed in custody and can schedule their own departure date within 90 days.



Advertisement "The way I have presented it is this: Either you knock on our door, or we knock on yours," said Rob Baker, field office director for detention and removal for ICE in San Diego.
The pilot program, which is being tried in five cities including San Diego, ends Aug. 22.

The program has generated skepticism and even ridicule from critics since it was announced. Baker said that while no prospective deportees showed up Tuesday at ICE offices in the federal building at 880 Front St. in downtown San Diego, about five people sought information for family members.

The other cities in the pilot program are Santa Ana, Chicago, Phoenix and Charlotte, N.C. It could be expanded nationwide if successful.

As of Tuesday afternoon, only one person – in Phoenix – took the offer, according to an ICE official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because not all the numbers are in.

Angel Martinez, a construction worker in Charlotte, N.C., told the AP he did not think the program would work.

"You would have to be crazy – who would want to turn themselves in?" Martinez said. "Nobody wants to go back. We risked everything to get here for a reason."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Aug 08 - 09:25 AM

A Pirate's Life for Me!

BOSASSO, Somalia, Aug 6 (Reuters) - Somali pirates are investing heavily in trafficking the narcotic khat, along with other businesses, as they seek to spend big profits from ransom payments after months of attacks.

Maritime officials say at least 26 ships have been hijacked off the coast of the Horn of Africa country so far this year.

Most of them brought ransoms of at least $10,000, and in some cases much more. A lot of that money is now in the hands of pirates in the semi-autonomous northern region of Puntland.

Siyad Mohamed and his gang recently shared a $750,000 ransom after releasing a German ship they seized in May. Mohamed said they decided to invest in trafficking khat, a mild narcotic leaf that is very popular in the region.

"We've started importing," Mohamed told Reuters by telephone from Garowe, Puntland's capital.

"We bought it from Kenya after normal supplies dwindled due to delays. We saw an opportunity and took it."

Mohamed said he earned $75,000 from the German ransom, a large amount in such a poor region.

"We work in three groups. One group is at sea now looking for ships to hijack. The other two, including mine, are next in line. We all share the ransom money," the 30-year-old former fisherman said. "Fellow pirates get free khat supply."

Banned in many Western countries, khat is a flowering plant that is native to east Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and is believed to have originated in Ethiopia. Users, mostly men, chew the fresh leaves to get a mild amphetamine-like high.

Other pirates have benefited even more from the trade. And residents of Garowe and Bosasso, Puntland's other main town, say most of the hijackers are well known.

Following this year's sharp increase in attacks at sea, the wealthy pirates have attained near-celebrity status in the area, building palatial beach villas and other buildings, cruising around town in expensive cars and marrying additional wives.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Aug 08 - 07:49 PM

Exoskeleton for grannies

Finding ways to assist and care for the growing elderly population in many developed countries is a growing problem. One challenge is to work out how to improve the strength and utility of ageing limbs.

Yoshiyuki Sankai at the University of Tsukuba near Tokyo, has developed an exoskeleton for a single arm that can do just that.

The device consists of a tabard worn over the shoulders with a motorised exoskeleton for one arm attached. The exoskeleton senses the angle, torque and nerve impulses in the arm and then assists the user to move his or her shoulder and elbow joints accordingly.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Aug 08 - 09:24 PM

The answer to ÒGot milk?Ó just got a little older: A new study indicates that people have been milking cattle and other domesticated animals as well as processing and storing milk products for 2,000 years longer than originally thought.

A group of scientists studied thousands of pottery shards from sites all over the Near East and the Balkans and tested them for residues of milk fats. They found that milk was already being used and processed by societies there by the seventh millennium B.C.

Previously, the earliest evidence of milk use came from the fifth millennium, though cattle, sheep and goats had already been domesticated by the eighth millennium.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Aug 08 - 09:44 PM

hysics may not be the most obvious subject of a rap song (in fact, itÕs probably the least), but thatÕs exactly what inspired Katherine McAlpine over at the CERN (the acronym in French for the European Organization for Nuclear Research) press office.

In a, well frankly, hilarious video (courtesy of the New Scientist) the scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider can be seen doing their best rapper impressions as they put together the parts of the enormous particle accelerator.

While the rapping isnÕt exactly up to P. DiddyÕs (or whatever heÕs calling himself these days) standards, itÕs certainly a pretty entertaining explanation of what some of the LHCÕs components will be doing once it switches on this month: namely, smashing together very tiny particles at very high speeds to see what happens. Its experiments could yield insights into some of the big mysteries of the universe, perhaps providing a glimpse of the elusive Higgs boson or answering the question of just what exactly dark matter is made up of.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Aug 08 - 09:49 PM

That first word is "PHYSICS" and the video linked above is ROCKIN'!!!!!



A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 08 Aug 08 - 12:18 AM

"Our place in the universe may be a lot more special than many experts have assumed, new evidence suggests.
Scientists simulating the formation of planetary systems have discovered there is nothing average about the Solar System.
The Earth, and its inhabitants, exist in a peaceful system where planets have near circular orbits and do not interfere with each other.

This is not true of other star systems, where orbits are elongated and unstable.
The new computer simulations, using data from 300 planets orbiting other "suns", show that the Solar System owes its quiet life to early conditions being "just right".
If they had been even slightly different, unpleasant things might have happened - like planets being thrown into the sun or jettisoned into deep space.

Before the discovery of "exoplanets" in the early 1990s astronomers had no reason to think the Solar System was unusual.

Professor Frederic Rasio, from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, US, said: "We now know that these other planetary systems don't look like the Solar System at all. The shapes of the exoplanets' orbits are elongated, not nice and circular.

"Planets are not where we expect them to be. Many giant planets similar to Jupiter, known as 'hot Jupiters', are so close to the star they have orbits of mere days.
"Clearly we needed to start afresh in explaining planetary formation and this greater variety of planets we now see.""

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 11 Aug 08 - 11:46 AM

"In 2005, the world's current account balances - exceptionally - did actually balance. Since then, the surpluses have gained the upper hand. According to the IMF's latest estimates, the world will show an overall combined surplus of $265 billion this year.

Large surpluses in China ($385 billion), Japan ($193 billion), Germany ($191 billion), Saudi Arabia ($145 billion) Russia ($99 billion), Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (each $66 billion) more than compensate for the red ink in the deficit countries, led by the US ($614 billion), Spain ($171 billion), UK ($137 billion), France ($67 billion), and Italy ($56 billion).

The world has never seen such a profusion of imbalances - a potent source of international liquidity as well as of potential financial instability. No one is sure how, when or why, but sooner or later these figures will have to come into better balance. If we are lucky, the correction will take place without too much damage to the global economy". (David Marsh of MarketWatch)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: beardedbruce
Date: 12 Aug 08 - 10:13 AM

a threefer, from CNN!

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/11/remains.found.ap/index.html


http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/08/11/lw.better.than.sex/index.html


http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/08/11/hm.pole.dancing/index.html

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 01:08 AM

A hand holding a biological brain and a robot. The brain consists of a collection of neurons cultured on a Multi Electrode Array (MEA) which communicates and controls the robot via a Bluetooth connnection. Scientists in Britain announced that they had stitched together thousands of rat neurons into primitive brains capable of controlling the movement of robots.

Meet Gordon, probably the world's first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue. Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon's primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.

Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.

"The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a biological brain," said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and one of the robot's principle architects.

Observing how the nerve cells cohere into a network as they fire off electrical impulses, he said, may also help scientists combat neurodegenerative diseases that attack the brain such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"If we can understand some of the basics of what is going on in our little model brain, it could have enormous medical spinoffs," he said.

Looking a bit like the garbage-compacting hero of the blockbuster animation "Wall-E", Gordon has a brain composed of 50,000 to 100,000 active neurons.

Once removed from rat foetuses and disentangled from each other with an enzyme bath, the specialised nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-rich medium across an eight-by-eight centimetre (five-by-five inch) array of 60 electrodes.

This "multi-electrode array" (MEA) serves as the interface between living tissue and machine, with the brain sending electrical impulses to drive the wheels of the robots, and receiving impulses delivered by sensors reacting to the environment.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 01:12 AM

Phys.Org reports:

Democratic politicians receive a 40% increase in contributions in the 30 days after appearing on the comedy cable show The Colbert Report. In contrast, their Republican counterparts essentially gain nothing. These findings appear to validate anecdotal evidence regarding the political impact of the program, such as the assertions by host Stephen Colbert that appearing on his program provides candidates with a "Colbert bump" or a rise in support for their election campaigns.

This analysis of one of America's most well-known pop icons of recent years is conducted by political scientist James H. Fowler (University of California, San Diego), who is also a self-identified fan of the show. The research appears in the July issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association. It is online at http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/PSJuly08Fowler.pdf .

While Fowler notes that Colbert often makes "outlandish" claims for laughs, he also observes that specific segments of the program are devoted to politicians and that politicians themselves have taken notice of the Colbert Report's impact. Moreover, even a cursory analysis demonstrates that despite being a comedy program The Colbert Report appears to exercise "disproportionate real world influence"—likely due to the "elite demographic" of its audience. To investigate the claim of the Colbert bump, the author uses data acquired from the Federal Election Commission on fundraising by Congressional Democrats and Republicans.

His analysis finds that Democrats who appear on The Colbert Report enjoy a significant increase in the number and total amount of donations they receive over the next 30?? days when compared to similar candidates who do not appear on the show. Specifically, Democrats who come on the program raise $8,247 more than colleagues who don't do so on the 32nd day following their appearance—"a bump of roughly two-fifths over the normal rate of receipts." Republicans do not appear to benefit at all from appearing on the program; notably, they raise more funds in the month before coming on the program while actually raising less money in the month following their appearance—hinting at a possible "Colbert bust" for the GOP instead.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 09:38 AM

"The Earth, and its inhabitants, exist in a peaceful system where planets have near circular orbits and do not interfere with each other."

This was probably not always the case.

There is evidence that Venus and Saturn and a planet formerly sharing a Mars orbit as its moon, were all in different orbits than they are today.




AI biologic brains sounds chillingly like the plot premis to Arnolds Terminator series.




Abe Lincoln and Charles Darwin share the same birthday.

Bbruce, Aren't cults cool?

At the Olympics George Bush said "Once religion enters the picture, nothing can stop it."
he did not clariify which religion.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 09:49 AM

Cashew Shells have a substance called (Erucial) that seems to turn on the immune system to make one immune for life to poison ivy.
npr story

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 10:08 AM

How to slow aging http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/08/11/2331197.htm?site=science

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 17 Aug 08 - 08:46 AM

"...When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN. And a study this year from the center's Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that " 'The Daily Show' is clearly impacting American dialogue" and "getting people to think critically about the public square."

While the show scrambled in its early years to book high-profile politicians, it has since become what Newsweek calls "the coolest pit stop on television," with presidential candidates, former presidents, world leaders and administration officials signing on as guests. One of the program's signature techniques — using video montages to show politicians contradicting themselves — has been widely imitated by "real" news shows, while Mr. Stewart's interviews with serious authors like Thomas Ricks, George Packer, Seymour Hersh, Michael Beschloss and Reza Aslan have helped them and their books win a far wider audience than they otherwise might have had.

Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it's been "The Daily Show" that has tenaciously tracked big, "super depressing" issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power."NYT

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 17 Aug 08 - 03:54 PM

DO SUBATOMIC PARTICLES HAVE FREE WILL?
By Julie RehmeyerWeb edition : Friday, August 15th, 2008   Text Size If we have free will, so do subatomic particles, mathematicians claim to prove.FIXED FORK?
"If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?"—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55 BC.


Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably.

The finding won't give many physicists a moment's worry, because traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics embrace unpredictability already. The best anyone can hope to do, quantum theory says, is predict the probability that a particle will behave in a certain way.

But physicists all the way back to Einstein have been unhappy with this idea. Einstein famously grumped, "God does not play dice." And indeed, ever since the birth of quantum mechanics, some physicists have offered alternate interpretations of its equations that aim to get rid of this indeterminism. The most famous alternative is attributed to the physicist David Bohm, who argued in the 1950s that the behavior of subatomic particles is entirely determined by "hidden variables" that cannot be observed.

Conway and Kochen say this search is hopeless, and they claim to have proven that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself, rather than just in quantum theory. And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.

Their argument starts with a proof Kochen created with Ernst Specker 40 years ago. Subatomic particles have a property called "spin," which occurs around any axis. Experiments have shown that a type of subatomic particle called a "spin 1 particle" has a peculiar property: Choose three perpendicular axes, and prod the spin 1 particle to determine whether its spin around each of those axes is 0. Precisely one of those axes will have spin 0 and the other two will have non-zero spin. Conway and Kochen call this the 1-0-1 rule.

Spin is one of those properties physicists can't predict in advance, before prodding. Still, one might imagine that the particle's spin around any axis was set before anyone ever came along to prod it. That's certainly what we ordinarily assume in life. We don't imagine, say, that a fence turned white just because we looked at it — we figure it was white all along.

But Kochen and Specker showed that this assumption — that the fence was white all along — can't hold in the bizarre world of subatomic particles. They used a pure mathematical argument to show that there is no way the particle can choose spins around every imaginable axis in a way that is consistent with the 1-0-1 rule. Indeed, there is a set of just 33 axes that are enough to force the particle into a paradox. It could choose spins around the first 32 axes that conform with the rule, but for the last, neither 0 nor non-zero would do. Choosing zero spin would create a set of three perpendicular axes with two zeroes, and choosing non-zero spin would create a different set of three perpendicular axes with three non-zeroes, breaking the 1-0-1 rule either way....

(Science NEws)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 17 Aug 08 - 03:57 PM

Related news from the same site:

"INVISIBLE HAND, AND A QUICK ONE AT THAT
By Davide CastelvecchiWeb edition : Wednesday, August 13th, 2008   Text Size Any alternative to quantum weirdness would require faster-than-light communication.
It's another bad day for Einstein. He either has to give up relativity or embrace quantum mechanics.

Reality seems governed by the kind of randomness that Einstein loathed and that quantum theory is rooted in. But any alternative explanation would have to allow information to travel at least 10,000 times faster than light, physicists have now shown in the most stringent such test to date.

Nicolas Gisin and his team at the University of Geneva sent pairs of photons traveling separately along optical fibers. Without weirdness of quantum mechanics, the photons' behavior could only be explained if photons separated by 18 kilometers could influence each other virtually instantaneously. That would be a blatant violation of the solidly tested principle that nothing travels faster than light — part of Einstein's theory of relativity.

The team sent the photons along two optical fibers, from Geneva to the nearby towns of Jussy and Satigny, they describe in the Aug. 14 Nature. The photons were generated in a state of quantum uncertainty, so that their departure times would be slightly fuzzy.

When a photon arrived at its destination, it was detected. This detection gave the photons' travel times precise values, erasing the uncertainty. The travel times showed small, random variations from one photon to the next, Gisin explains. Quantum theory predicts that in this type of situation, it is impossible to predict the exact travel time in advance, and that, in fact, even the photons themselves don't know what the travel time is.

The physicists also created the photons in such a way that the destiny of each photon sent to Jussy was linked by quantum entanglement to the destiny of a photon sent to Satigny. Quantum entagled particles form one system, rather than separate systems with independent properties.

In this case, the travel times were correlated, and once a photon was detected, the travel time of its twin ceased to be undefined. Once measured, the second photon's travel time turned out to be identical to that of its entangled twin.

But, to a quantum mechanics skeptic, it's as if one photon let the other know what value to pick. For one photon's choice to affect the other's, information would have to travel the 18 kilometers separating the two towns in virtually no time. The team couldn't prove that information traveled instantaneously. But because their experimental errors were limited to time differences of less than one-third of a billionth of a second, they could prove that — if one photon influenced the other — the information must have traveled at least 10,000 times faster than light...."

A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Aug 08 - 11:13 AM

Pacific Gas and Electric (PCG) in California announced last week it will buy 800 megawatts of solar-generated electricity from two companies, enough to light 239,000 homes. Within three years, PG&E will buy its solar energy from OptiSolar and SunPower, which plan to build the world's two largest solar farms in California as part of the deal.

It would nearly double the USA's entire solar-panel capacity. Driving the trend are solar's falling costs and state alternative-energy mandates.

Solar power has grown but still makes up well under 1% of U.S. power generation. More than 90% of solar panels have been installed on rooftops by maverick consumers and businesses. Utilities' embrace of solar energy will help push it to about 10% of power generation by 2025, predicts Ron Pernick, principal of research firm Clean Edge.

"Just a handful of utilities doing something big changes the scale of the entire market," says Julia Hamm of the Solar Electric Power Association.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 18 Aug 08 - 11:39 AM

Sooner or later Amos, we are going to see the reason why there is spooky action at a distance (independent of time and the speed of light.)

Sooner or later we will see why a real object visible to the naked eye truely is at two places at the same time.

Sooner or later we will understand why our mere act of looking, changes the behavior of an atom.


hint:

It will be more of an inderstading than an understanding.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 18 Aug 08 - 06:34 PM

Hologrphic Evabgelical preacher http://www.slate.com/id/2197166/

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 Aug 08 - 01:16 PM

"Dinasaurs are old. That much we knew. But a new find in a limestone quarry located in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt may show that they are fully 15 million years older than scientists currently believe.

According to a Tuesday report in the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, a local paper in the region, archaeologists working in the quarry found traces of a dinosaur that they believe are 250 million years old -- older than any known evidence of dinosaurs. So far, officials from the state's Office for Preservation of Monuments and Archaeology have declined to confirm the find. A spokeswoman there has merely pointed out that the quarry is still in operation and that hobby diggers should stay away.

The scientific community, though, is electrified. Should the age of the traces be confirmed, the find could shed light on the very beginnings of dinosaurs. One expert told the paper that the find is of "sensational importance to science."

Until now, scientists assumed that dinosaurs first evolved from archosaurs approximately 235 million years ago -- a good 15 million years after the creation of the dinosaur traces now discovered. Archosaurs were lizard-like creatures that were much smaller than most dinosaurs. Present-day alligators, crocodiles and a few species of birds are likewise descendents of archosaurs. Dinosaurs, though, died out some 65 million years ago.

..."

(Der Spiegel)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 20 Aug 08 - 06:32 PM

Stem cells to make O negative blood in quantiy.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/08/universal-blood.html

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 Aug 08 - 11:53 AM

ASSOCIATED PRESS

4:54 a.m. August 21, 2008

BOSTON – Two Massachusetts businesses are battling over the macabre legacy of a former Sunday school teacher who was accused in the hatchet deaths of her wealthy father and stepmother more than 110 years ago.

The owner of the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, which is in the home where the 1892 slayings took place, has filed a federal lawsuit to prevent a new museum and gift shop in Salem from using Borden's name.

Advertisement Donald Woods insists the attraction would infringe on his trademark of "Lizzie Borden Museum" and siphon business away from Fall River, a hardscrabble fishing community 80 miles south of Salem, which is in Boston's far-north suburbs.
Fall River Mayor Robert Correia said the double-murder mystery is one of his community's top tourist attractions. Borden was acquitted but widely believed to be guilty. No one else was ever charged.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 Aug 08 - 05:37 PM

Elephants master basic mathematics
12:10 20 August 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Ewen Callaway



A cunning Asian elephant wins a simple counting game
Watch the full-size video

Biologist Naoko Irie and one of her mathmatical elephants (Photo courtesy of Naoko Irie)
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Long streamers of gas in a galaxy called NGC 1275 have been a puzzle until now


Add elephants to the growing menagerie of animals that can count.
An Asian elephant named Ashya beat this reporter at a devilishly simple addition problem. When a trainer dropped three apples into one bucket and one apple into a second, then four more apples in the first and five more in the second, the pachyderm recognised that three plus four is greater than one plus five, and snacked on the seven apples. (In my defence, I watched the video in a noisy and crowded auditorium.)
"I even get confused when I'm dropping the bait," says Naoko Irie, a researcher at the University of Tokyo, Japan, who uncovered the elephant's inner genius. She presented her findings last week at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology's annual meeting in Ithaca, New York.
Moreover, Irie found that as well as summing small numbers with almost 90% accuracy, elephants can discriminate between small numbers.
That's not so surprising, considering that animals from salamanders to pigeons to chimpanzees can discern numerical values. But all animals, including humans when forced to make split-second decisions, are best at telling apart two quantities when the ratio between the large and small number is greatest.
Spot the difference
Not so for elephants, Irie says. The four that she tested distinguished between five and six apples as well as they did between five and one. They picked the bucket with the most fruit 74% of the time, on average, far above 50-50.
"It really is tough to figure out why [elephants] would need to count," says Mya Thompson, an ecologist at Cornell University who studies elephants and attended Irie's talk. Asian elephants live in close-knit groups of six to eight, and they may count one another to make sure the herd sticks to together. "You really don't want to lose your group members," she says.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 24 Aug 08 - 01:52 PM

rs ago
A British-built solar-powered spy plane has set an unofficial record by staying in the air for three-and-a-half days, the company behind it announced.
The Zephyr used solar power in the day and rechargeable batteries at night to beat the world record for the longest duration unmanned flight.
Defence company Qinetiq said the plane flew on autopilot for 82 hours 37 minutes, exceeding the current official world record for unmanned flight which stands at 30 hours 24 minutes set by Global Hawk in 2001 and Zephyr's previous longest flight of 54 hours achieved last year.

But a spokesman said the record was unofficial because the firm did not set out to fulfil necessary criteria to make it official.

"We were more concerned about demonstrating the technology to the customer than the record status," he said.

According to Qinetiq, the Zephyr - a high-altitude long-endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) - completed the test flight at the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona on July 28-31.

Launched by hand, Zephyr is an ultra-lightweight carbon-fibre aircraft that flies on autopilot, the firm said.

By day it uses solar power generated by amorphous silicon solar panels no thicker than sheets of paper that cover the aircraft's wings.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 25 Aug 08 - 05:44 PM

" This organization is a terrorist organization and [it] created mayhem against the public life, so we decided to declare it banned."

REHMAN MALIK,
Pakistani Interior Ministry chief, explaining the nation's decision today to ban the Taliban after its militants claimed responsibility for a series of deadly attacks in Pakistan

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 27 Aug 08 - 04:44 PM

Tijuana is currently covered with fiberglass cows. They invaded about a month ago, and they've been grazing the sidewalks all over the city since then. Along Revolucion and Paseo de los Heroes, in Santa Cecilia Plaza and Parque Morelos, throughout Zona Rio, outside the Palacio Municipal and CECUT, at the Instituto Municipal de Arte y Cultura and the airport. They're everywhere.

Hooker cows, matador cows, airplane cows, two-headed tiger cows, Marilyn Monroe cows, crucigrama cows, taco cows. Cows plowing through fake chunks of the border fence. Cows with neon Lucha Libre masks for spots. Cows dressed like firefighters with fire hoses for udders.

Seventy in total, 20 owe their markings to Baja California artists, many of whom covered them with Tijuana iconography. Things like 1980s Ford station wagon taxi cabs that still miraculously run. Or those scruffy donkeys that have been done up with paint to look like zebras.

The rest of the herd hails from all over Mexico, a trait unique to this installment of the international craze that is CowParade. The public art exhibits traditionally call one town home, with local businesses and organizations sponsoring individual cows. But Mexican dairy king Lala purchased all 70 and bumped it up to a national affair that travels from city to city.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Aug 08 - 01:19 PM

Northeast and Northwest Passages Both Free of Ice
By Christoph Seidler

For the first time ever, both the Northwest and the Northeast Passages are free of ice. Shipping companies have been waiting for this moment for years, but they will have to wait a little while longer before they can make use of the Arctic shortcut.

Shippers in Bremen are getting impatient. The Beluga Group, a shipping company based in the northern German city, had planned to send a ship through the Northeast Passage -- or the Northern Sea Route, as Russians call it -- this summer, according to spokeswoman Verena Beckhausen. The route leads from the Russian island Novaya Zemlya, off the northern coast of Siberia, through the Bering Strait between far eastern Russia and Alaska.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 28 Aug 08 - 08:00 PM

those cows were in DC about 10 years ago.

Vladamir Putin announced that he is extending a security force to Poland's border DUE TO WHAT ONE OF THE CANDIDATES SAID REGARDING THEIR MISSLES.

clever that he would not say which candidate.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 29 Aug 08 - 04:23 PM

A VAST region of the Amazon forest in Brazil was home to a complex of ancient towns in which about 50,000 people lived, according to scientists assisted by satellite images of the region.

The scientists, whose findings were published yesterday in the journal Science, described clusters of towns and smaller villages connected by complex road networks and housing a society doomed by the arrival of Europeans five centuries ago.

European colonists and the diseases they brought with them probably killed most of the inhabitants, the researchers said. The settlements, consisting of networks of walled towns and smaller villages organized around a central plaza, are now almost entirely overgrown by the forest.
"These are not cities, but this is urbanism, built around towns," University of Florida anthropologist Mike Heckenberger said.

"If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon. Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning," Mr Heckenberger added.

Helped by satellite imagery, the researchers spent more than a decade uncovering and mapping the lost communities.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans starting in 1492, the Americas were home to many prosperous and impressive societies and large cities. These findings add to the understanding of the various pre-Columbian civilisations.

The existence of the ancient settlements in the Upper Xingu region of the Amazon in north-central Brazil means what many experts had considered virgin tropical forests were in fact heavily affected by past human activity, the scientists said.

The US and Brazilian scientists worked with a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous Amazonian people descended from settlements' original inhabitants.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 01 Sep 08 - 04:49 PM

SALT LAKE CITY — The best deal on fuel in the country right now might be here in Utah, where people are waiting in lines to pay the equivalent of 87 cents a gallon. Demand is so strong at rush hour that fuel runs low, and some days people can pump only half a tank.

It is not gasoline they are buying for their cars, but natural gas.

By an odd confluence of public policy and private initiative, Utah has become the first state in the country to experience broad consumer interest in the idea of running cars on clean natural gas.

Residents of the state are hunting the Internet and traveling the country to pick up used natural gas cars at auctions. They are spending thousands of dollars to transform their trucks and sport utility vehicles to run on compressed gas. Some fueling stations that sell it to the public are so busy they frequently run low on pressure, forcing drivers to return before dawn when demand is down.

It all began when unleaded gasoline rose above $3.25 a gallon last year, and has spiraled into a frenzy in the last few months.

Ron Brown, Honda's salesman here for the Civic GX, the only car powered by natural gas made by a major automaker in the country, has sold one out of every four of the 800 cars Honda has made so far this year, and he has a pile of 330 deposit slips in his office, each designating a customer waiting months for a new car.

"It's nuts," Mr. Brown said. "People are buying these cars from me and turning around and selling them as if they were flipping real estate."

Advocates for these cars see Mr. Brown's brisk sales as a sign that natural gas could become the transport fuel of the future, replacing much of the oil the nation imports. While that remains a distant dream, big increases recently in the country's production of natural gas do raise the possibility of making wider use of the fuel.

To a degree, it is already starting to happen in Utah, where the cost savings have gotten the public's attention. Natural gas is especially cheap here, so that people spend about 87 cents for a quantity of gas sufficient to propel a car approximately the same distance as a $3.95 gallon of gasoline.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 10:27 AM

PAMELA MAY HAVE SPOTTED THE DARK STUFF
By Ron CowenWeb edition : Thursday, September 4th, 2008   

Data from an orbiting observatory record more positrons than standard model accounts forCosmologists are agog about the possibility that an orbiting observatory may have discovered particles of dark matter — the proposed, invisible material that researchers believe makes up most of the mass of the universe.

At two meetings in August, researchers analyzing data from the Russian-European observatory PAMELA, short for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics, reported preliminary evidence that the device had recorded more positrons from the Milky Way than could be accounted for by the standard model of elementary particle physics.

At the International Conference on High Energy Physics, held in Philadelphia, PAMELA researcher Mirko Boezio of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Trieste suggested that the surplus of positrons — the electron's antiparticle, which is equal in mass but opposite in charge — could be accounted for by the annihilation of pairs of dark-matter particles. According to an existing theory, when dark-matter particles collide, they decay into a spray of ordinary, visible particles, including an abundance of positrons.

"We plan to have final results ready by early October and submit a paper to a peer-reviewed journal," Boezio told Science News. Until then, he says, the findings remain preliminary, and "We prefer to withhold further comments."

But that hasn't stopped other researchers from posting their interpretations of the data on the Internet.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 11:37 AM

REMAINS of a long dead house mouse have been found in the wreck of a Bronze Age royal ship. That makes it the earliest rodent stowaway ever recorded, and proof of how house mice spread around the world.

Archaeologist Thomas Cucchi of the University of Durham, UK, identified a fragment of a mouse jaw in sediment from a ship that sank 3500 years ago off the coast of Turkey.
The cargo of ebony, ivory, silver and gold - including a gold scarab with the name of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti - indicates it was a royal vessel. Because the cargo carried artefacts from many cultures, its nationality and route is hotly debated, but the mouse's jaw may provide answers. Cucchi's analysis confirms it belonged to Mus musculus domesticus, the only species known to live in close quarters with humans (Journal of Archaeological Science, vol 35, p 2953). The shape of the molars suggests the mouse came from the northern Levantine coast, as they are similar to those of modern house mice in Syria, near Cyprus.

And, when generations of rodents live aboard ships, they evolve larger body shapes. Yet this mouse was roughly the same shape and size as other small, land-dwelling mice of the time, suggesting it boarded just before the ship set sail.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 11:40 AM

Swimming cages may soon shepherd farmed fish about the ocean, giving them a more natural environment and reducing their impact on natural ecosystems. The first tests of the wandering cages have just taken place in Puerto Rico.

Fish farms in the open ocean offer an alternative to conventional fishing, which is on track to wipe out all commercial stocks by 2050. But there are concerns that installing large, static farms could damage local ecosystems.

"Depending on the size of the stock, large residues of fish faeces could catch under the cages and degrade the seabed," says Cliff Goudey from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Anchoring cages against the battering of storms would also be a challenge.
So Goudey came up with the idea of wandering cages. These wouldn't stay in any one place long enough to damage local wildlife, and could drift with storm waves to avoid feeling their full force.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 04:22 PM

http://wamu.org/programs/dr/08/06/24.php



Jeff Sharlet researched the largest most powerful influence on the US goverment for the last 70 years.

His book is entitled 'The family'

The facts I gleaned from his book is source from which I accurately use words like fascism and mafia when refering to certain Congressional power brokers.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Bee
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 04:31 PM

FTA: "The foreclosure market is getting wild in Lake Elsinore: "Taking advantage of a slump in local real estate, a family of bobcats has moved into a foreclosed Lake Elsinore home, lolling about on fences and walls and riveting an entire neighborhood."

Click on the photo to enlarge - it's a really neat scene.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laland/2008/09/bobcats-on-a-ba.html

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Alice
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 04:51 PM

Great bobcat photo. Thanks for that!

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Sep 08 - 11:23 PM

ScienceDaily (Sep. 7, 2008) — Researchers in Switzerland have developed a new method to fabricate borosilicate glass nanoparticles. Used in microfluidic systems, these "Pyrex"-like nanoparticles are more stable when subjected to temperature fluctuations and harsh chemical environments than currently used nanoparticles made of polymers or silica glass.

Their introduction could extend the range of potential nanoparticle applications in biomedical, optical and electronic fields.

Thanks to their large surface-to-volume ratio, nanoparticles have generated wide interest as potential transporters of antibodies, drugs, or chemicals for use in diagnostic tests, targeted drug therapy, or for catalyzing chemical reactions.

Unfortunately, these applications are limited because nanoparticles disintegrate or bunch together when exposed to elevated temperatures, certain chemicals, or even de-ionized water. Using borosilicate glass (the original "Pyrex") instead of silica glass or polymers would overcome these limitations, but fabrication has been impossible to date due to the instability of the boron oxide precursor materials.

In this week's advance online issue of Nature Nanotechnology, a group of EPFL researchers, led by Professor Martin Gijs, reports on a new procedure to fabricate and characterize borosilicate glass nanoparticles. In addition to biomedical applications, the new nanoparticles could also have applications in the production of photonic bandgap devices with high optical contrast, contrast agents for ultrasonic microscopy or chemical filtration membranes.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 10 Sep 08 - 09:34 AM

Wednesday, September 10, 2008
After 14 years and $8 billion, scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside Geneva, succeeded in turning on the most powerful microscope ever built for investigating the elemental particles and forces of nature.

At 4:27 a.m., Eastern time, the protons made their first circuit around a 17-mile-long racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, 300 feet underneath the Swiss French border, and then made a return journey.

"It's a fantastic moment," said Lyn Evans, who has been the project director of the collider since its inception. "We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 10 Sep 08 - 10:26 AM

From a nurse's story of losing a patient (NYT):

I am 43. I came to nursing circuitously, following a brief career as an English professor. Often at work in the hospital I hear John Donne in my head:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.


But after my Condition A I find his words empty. My patient died looking like one of the flesh-eating zombies from "28 Weeks Later," (and indeed in real life, even in the world of the hospital, a death like this is unsettling.

What can one do? Go home, love your children, try not to bicker, eat well, walk in the rain, feel the sun on your face and laugh loud and often, as much as possible, and especially at yourself. Because the only antidote to death is not poetry, or drama, or miracle drugs, or a roomful of technical expertise and good intentions. The antidote to death is life.

(Theresa Brown, staff nurse at a hospital in Pennsylvania).

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 12 Sep 08 - 02:37 PM

Researchers have made a major advance in inorganic chemistry that could lead to a cheap way to store energy from the sun. In so doing, they have solved one of the key problems in making solar energy a dominant source of electricity.

Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at MIT, has developed a catalyst that can generate oxygen from a glass of water by splitting water molecules. The reaction frees hydrogen ions to make hydrogen gas. The catalyst, which is easy and cheap to make, could be used to generate vast amounts of hydrogen using sunlight to power the reactions. The hydrogen can then be burned or run through a fuel cell to generate electricity whenever it's needed, including when the sun isn't shining.

Solar power is ultimately limited by the fact that the solar cells only produce their peak output for a few hours each day. The proposed solution of using sunlight to split water, storing solar energy in the form of hydrogen, hasn't been practical because the reaction required too much energy, and suitable catalysts were too expensive or used extremely rare materials. Nocera's catalyst clears the way for cheap and abundant water-splitting technologies.

Nocera's advance represents a key discovery in an effort by many chemical research groups to create artificial photosynthesis--mimicking how plants use sunlight to split water to make usable energy. "This discovery is simply groundbreaking," says Karsten Meyer, a professor of chemistry at Friedrich Alexander University, in Germany. "Nocera has probably put a lot of researchers out of business." For solar power, Meyer says, "this is probably the most important single discovery of the century."

The new catalyst marks a radical departure from earlier attempts. Researchers, including Nocera, have tried to design molecular catalysts in which the location of each atom is precisely known and the catalyst is made to last as long as possible. The new catalyst, however, is amorphous--it doesn't have a regular structure--and it's relatively unstable, breaking down as it does its work. But the catalyst is able to constantly repair itself, so it can continue working.

(Technology Review, July 31 08)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 17 Sep 08 - 11:55 AM

PALO ALTO, CA—Gathering for what members of the international science community are calling "potentially the most totally out-to-lunch freaky head trip since Einstein postulated that space and time were, like, curved and shit," a consortium of the world's top physicists descended upon Stanford University Monday to discuss some of the difficult questions facing the cutting edge of theoretical thinking.

Cal Tech physicist Dr. Jonathan Friedrich postulates a bunch of freaky shit that makes his colleagues' heads spin right the hell off.
Among the revolutionary ideas expected to be raised at the historic week-long summit is the possibility that, like, our whole friggin' universe might be just one big atom in, say, some super-duper huge thing out there somewhere, or something.

"Whoa, man," Dr. Jacob "The Boz" Bozeman of MIT told reporters. "The implications of this deceptively simple hypothesis are, like, completely blowing my mind. Like, we could all be nothing more than this little dot in the fingernail of some huge-ass giant dude. Or maybe a seed in the mustard of, like, some really big sandwich, or even a germ on the back of a flea that's, like, sitting on a hair on some giant dog's ass. Truly, it boggles the freakin' mind, man. It freaks me the fuck right out."

The universe-as-possible-giant-atom theory originated in May with a team of Cal Tech particle physicists, who developed the theory late one night while sitting around on a couch in the Physics Department's cyclotron and foosball facility, "just shooting the shit." The theory, which was reportedly conceived after the group became highly engrossed in ceiling-tile patterns for several minutes while waiting for a pizza to arrive, is said to be so advanced that only a few scientists in the world even have their heads together enough to really, you know, deal. Yet even among this elite group, many are said to be "seriously thrown for a loop" by its implications.

"I'm like, 'Whoa there, man, slow down,'" said Dr. Dieter Gerhardt, a low-temperature physicist at Cornell University. Pausing for a moment to collect himself, the renowned scientist then placed his hands on his forehead before extending them outward in a sweeping gesture and making a buzzing "space-noise" sound effect with his lips, non-verbally indicating the degree to which his mind was blown by the whole freaky deal.

Among other topics to be explored at the Stanford conference, according to Bozeman: the concept of parallel, or "alternate," Earths; the theory of multi-dimensional "superstrings" that fold backward and forward throughout the fabric of the universe; and "a whole bunch of other shit I totally can't even handle thinking about right now."

On Monday, the most high-profile conference attendee, Cambridge's Dr. Stephen Hawking, discussed his recent research exploring the possible existence of "sideways," or lateral, time, a concept most scientists in attendance described as "way out there."

"I don't want to fuck with anybody's head here," Hawking told the assembled scientists via his voice-simulation device, "but if time goes sideways as well as forward, there might be, like, other versions of this reality, where, say, the Roman Empire is still in charge and stuff."

"By the way," Hawking added, "ever think about what'd happen if you, say, went back in time and accidentally killed your own younger self? Man, that shit would be so fucked up."

Hawking's ideas provoked strong reaction. "I remember I was pretty wigged out when Feynman came up with that shit about antiparticles just being normal particles traveling backwards in time," said Dr. Wei Lo-Huang of Princeton. "That was heavy enough to have to deal with. But now Hawking comes up with this? What is with that?"

"Fuck, man... if this turns out to be true, it will require a total recalibration of all our methods for measuring space-time flux, and that means all my old equations are gonna be, like, for shit," Wei said. "Aw, man."

Though Hawking's lateral-time theory may prove significant, most scientists in attendance said they plan to avoid it for now, explaining that the "whole one big atom deal" (or "WOBAD" theory, as it has come to be known within physics circles) is more than enough to completely freak their shit, and that they would prefer to take these mind-blowing questions one at a time, just so they don't completely, you know, lose it. "... The Onion parody site

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Sep 08 - 09:06 AM

William Yuan, a seventh-grader from Portland, OR, developed a three-dimensional solar cell that absorbs UV as well as visible light. The combination of the two might greatly improve cell efficiency. William's project earned him a $25,000 scholarship and a trip to the Library of Congress to accept the award, which is usually given out for research at the graduate level.

"Current solar cells are flat and can only absorb visible light," he said. "I came up with an innovative solar cell that absorbs both visible and UV light. My project focused on finding the optimum solar cell to further increase the light absorption and efficiency and design a nanotube for light-electricity conversion efficiency."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Sep 08 - 12:00 PM

The Onion reports:

Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs: Humanity Says 'Oh, *****'

In an announcement with grave implications for the primacy of the species of man, marine biologists reported Monday that dolphins, or family Delphinidae, have evolved opposable thumbs on their pectoral fins."I believe I speak for the entire human race when I say, 'Holy *****,'" said Dr. James Aoki. "That's it for us monkeys."