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BS: Random Traces From All Over
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 12 Oct 10 - 08:44 PM A team of linguists announced Tuesday that they have discovered a new and unique language, called Koro, in northeastern India, but immediately warned that it was highly endangered. Only around 800 people are believed to speak the Tibeto-Burman language, and few of them are under the age of 20, according to the researchers who discovered Koro during an expedition as part of National Geographic's "Enduring Voices" project. The language, they said, has never been written down. "We found something that was making its exit, was on the way out," said National Geographic fellow Gregory Anderson, one of the leaders of the expedition that discovered Koro. "If we had waited 10 years to make the trip, we might not have come across close to the number of speakers we found," he said. Koro is so distinct from other Tibeto-Burman languages -- around 150 of which are spoken in India alone -- that the expedition team was unable to find any other language from the same family that was closely related to it. It was discovered in the Arunachal Pradesh region of India, a rugged and hilly part of the subcontinent which visitors require a special permit to enter. Few linguists have worked in Arunachal Pradesh and no one has ever drawn up a reliable list of languages spoken there. The National Geographic expedition, which also included Indian linguist Ganesh Murmu of Ranchi University, was, in fact, in search of two other languages, Aka and Miji, known to be spoken in a small district of Arunachal Pradesh. Going door to door among the bamboo houses that sit on stilts in the hillside villages of the region, the team spoke to villagers and recorded their vocabularies. And while they were doing so, they began to detect a third language, which was not listed in standard international registries or even in Indian language surveys. That third language was Koro. The linguists made the first-ever recordings of Koro, capturing thousands of words during their expedition, which began in 2008. The new language has a completely different inventory of sounds than other languages in the region, and its own way of putting together words and sentences. For example, in Aka, the word for "pig" is "vo." In Koro, a pig is a "lele." Despite their geographic proximity, the two languages "sound as different as, say, English and Japanese," National Geographic fellow David Harrison, one of the leaders of the expedition, said in the recently published book "The Last Speakers." With Koro, linguists now count 6,909 languages worldwide. But around half those languages are endangered, the victims of cultural change, ethnic shame, government repression and other factors, according to linguists. One of the aims of National Geographic's Enduring Voices project is to document vanishing languages. The team that discovered Koro plans to return to India in November to continue studying the new language. A scientific paper on Koro will be published in the journal Indian Linguistics. http://news.discovery.com/human/new-language-india.html |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 13 Oct 10 - 07:46 PM n 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science. Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations. University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes. This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something. (Full article can be found here at Red Ice on Myspace). |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 13 Oct 10 - 11:40 PM "Natalie Angier writes in The Hindu that it is now becoming clear that Newton spent thirty years of his life slaving over a furnace in search of the power to transmute one chemical element into another. Angier writes, 'How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic pseudoscience like alchemy, which in its commonest rendering is described as the desire to transform lead into gold?' Now new historical research describes how alchemy yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. 'Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry,' says Dr. William Newman, 'and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation.' Newman adds that Newton's alchemical investigations helped yield one of his fundamental breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays that can be recombined with a lens. 'I would go so far as to say that alchemy was crucial to Newton's breakthroughs in optics,' says Newman. 'He's not just passing light through a prism Ñ he's resynthesizing it.'" Slashdot |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 16 Oct 10 - 10:40 AM A new study suggests the universe and everything in it could end within the Earth's lifespan -- less than 3.7 billion years from now -- and we won't know it when it happens. But one expert says the result isn't valid because the researchers chose an arbitrary end point. The universe began in a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding at an ever accelerating rate ever since. According to standard cosmology models the most likely outcome for the universe is that it will expand forever. But a team of physicists led by Raphael Bousso from the University of California, Berkeley, claim their calculations show the universe will end. Writing in the prepublication blog arXiv.org Bousso and colleagues say there's a "measure problem" in the cosmological theory of eternal inflation. Eternal inflation is a quantum cosmological model where inflationary bubbles can appear out of nothing. Some expand and go on forever, others collapse and disappear again. These bubbles, each being a universe, pop in and out of existence like bubbles in boiling water. They argue, in an eternally inflating universe, every event that is possible will eventually occur -- not just once, but an infinite number of times. This makes predicting when each event will occur impossible, such as the probability that a universe like ours exists. "If infinitely many observers throughout the universe win the lottery, on what grounds can one still claim that winning the lottery is unlikely?" they write. Bousso's team have being trying to determine the number of bubbles that exist at any given time and the number of 'observers' in each bubble to come up with the relative frequency of observers that can live in one universe compared to the relative frequency of observers who can live in another universe. But the "measure problem" makes calculating this value impossible. According to Bousso and colleagues, the only way to avoid this conundrum is to introduce a cut-off point, which then helps make sense again. By introducing this cut-off, they say there is "a 50-50 chance of the universe ending in the next 3.7 billion years." Charles Lineweaver from the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory says Bousso's team are simply imposing a catastrophe for statistical reasons. He says the need for a better statistical solution has led the researchers to a false conclusion about the end of the universe. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 20 Oct 10 - 01:45 PM A Norwegian camping ground is the site of what may become one of Europe's most significant archeological discoveries. Archeologists have found an almost perfectly preserved Stone Age settlement which may have been buried by a sandstorm over 5,000 years ago. In Norway archeologists have found what is being described as a kind of "mini-Pompeii." The well-preserved site is by the sea shore at Hamresanden in southern Norway and was discovered when excavators began digging there, prior to the construction of retirement homes. The "sealed" Stone Age settlement, near the city of Kristiansand's airport, is thought to have been covered by a sandstorm, possibly in the course of a few hours. Under about a meter (three feet) of sand, excavations uncovered an almost perfectly preserved example of a settlement from what is known as the Funnel Beaker Culture, so called because of the distinctive clay beakers used by the first Stone Age farmers, with a funnel shaped rim. This was the major culture in north-central Europe between around 4000 BC to 2700 BC. Archeologists estimate that the Hamresanden settlement was buried by sand around 3500 BC -- that is, around 5,500 years ago. At the time, Norway's climate was much more arid and geological formations have shown that sand storms were not uncommon. Archeological Sensation The sudden prehistoric sand storm conserved walls, arrowheads, complete wooden artifacts and vessels from the era, in much the same way that the volcanic ash preserved the doomed town of Pompeii in Italy around 2,000 years ago. Up until now, archeologists in Norway had only found pieces of broken clay pots from the Stone Age. But at the Hamresanden site, which lies at the edge of a camping site, one complete vessel has already been pulled from the ground. Other large shards of pottery already found will enable archeologists to recreate several more of the large vessels. "This is the first time we've made a find like this in Norway," Håkon Glørstad of the University of Oslo told Norwegian daily Aftenposten. He said that the site would be "carefully and finally stripped of the last of the earth, in about the same way that one uncovers a dinosaur skeleton. This is an archeological sensation." (der Spiegel) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: bobad Date: 25 Oct 10 - 10:29 PM Why complex life probably evolved only once * 12:52 21 October 2010 by Michael Le Page The universe may be teeming with simple cells like bacteria, but more complex life – including intelligent life – is probably very rare. That is the conclusion of a radical rethink of what it took for complex life to evolve here on Earth. It suggests that complex alien life-forms could only evolve if an event that happened just once in Earth's history was repeated somewhere else. All animals, plants and fungi evolved from one ancestor, the first ever complex, or "eukaryotic", cell. This common ancestor had itself evolved from simple bacteria, but it has long been a mystery why this seems to have happened only once: bacteria, after all, have been around for billions of years. The answer, say Nick Lane of University College London and Bill Martin of the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, is that whenever simple cells start to become more complex, they run into problems generating enough energy. The basic principles are universal. Even aliens need mitochondria "It required a kind of industrial revolution in terms of energy production," says Lane. "[Our hypothesis] overturns the traditional view that the jump to complex eukaryotic cells simply required the right kinds of mutations." "It is very, very convincing, in my opinion," says biologist John Allen of Queen Mary, University of London, on whose work Lane and Martin have drawn. Growing costs To become more complex, cells need more genes and more proteins – and so they need to get bigger. As the volume of any object increases, however, its relative surface area falls: an elephant has less surface area per unit of volume than a mouse, for instance. This is a major problem because simple cells generate the energy they need using the membrane that encloses them. Lane and Martin calculate that if a bacterium grew to the size of a complex cell, it would run out of juice. It might have space for lots of genes, but it would have barely enough energy to make proteins from them. Folds don't help In theory, there is an easy answer to the energy problem: create lots of folds in the cell membrane to increase its surface area, which in turn will increase the amount of energy the membrane can produce. Indeed, many bacteria have such folds. But this leads to another problem as they get larger. Producing energy by "burning" food is playing with fire. If the energy-producing machinery straddling the membrane is not constantly fine-tuned, it produces highly reactive molecules that can destroy cells. Yet fine-tuning a larger membrane is problematic because detecting and fixing problems takes longer. These obstacles were overcome when a cell engulfed some bacteria and started using them as power generators – the first mitochondria. By increasing the number of mitochondria, cells could increase their membrane area without creating maintenance problems: each mitochondrion is a self-contained system with built-in control and repair mechanisms. Birth of complexity Once freed from energy restraints, genomes could expand dramatically and cells capable of complex functions – such as communicating with each other and having specialised jobs – could evolve. Complex life was born. So if Lane and Martin are right, the textbook idea that complex cells evolved first and only later gained mitochondria is completely wrong: cells could not become complex until they acquired mitochondria. Simple cells hardly ever engulf other cells, however – and therein lies the catch. Acquiring mitochondria, it seems, was a one-off event. This leads Lane and Martin to their most striking conclusion: simple cells on other planets might thrive for aeons without complex life ever arising. Or, as Lane puts it: "The underlying principles are universal. Even aliens need mitochondria." Journal reference: Nature, vol 467, p 929 |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 26 Oct 10 - 03:48 PM During the hunt for the predicted ripples in space-time — known as gravitational waves — physicists stumbled across a rather puzzling phenomenon. Last year, I reported about the findings of scientists using the GEO600 experiment in Germany. Although the hi-tech piece of kit hadn't turned up evidence for the gravitational waves it was seeking, it did turn up a lot of noise. Before we can understand what this "noise" is, we need to understand how equipment designed to look for the space-time ripples caused by collisions between black holes and supernova explosions. Gravitational wave detectors are incredibly sensitive to the tiniest change in distance. For example, the GEO600 experiment can detect a fluctuation of an atomic radius over a distance from the Earth to the Sun. This is achieved by firing a laser down a 600 meter long tube where it is split, reflected and directed into an interferometer. The interferometer can detect the tiny phase shifts in the two beams of light predicted to occur should a gravitational wave pass through our local volume of space. This wave is theorized to slightly change the distance between physical objects. Should GEO600 detect a phase change, it could be indicative of a slight change in distance, thus the passage of a gravitational wave. While looking out for a gravitational wave signal, scientists at GEO600 noticed something bizarre. There was inexplicable static in the results they were gathering. After canceling out all artificial sources of the noise, they called in the help of Fermilab's Craig Hogan to see if his expertise of the quantum world help shed light on this anomalous noise. His response was as baffling as it was mind-blowing. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," Hogan said. Come again? The signal being detected by GEO600 isn't a noise source that's been overlooked, Hogan believes GEO600 is seeing quantum fluctuations in the fabric of space-time itself. This is where things start to get a little freaky. According to Einstein's view on the universe, space-time should be smooth and continuous. However, this view may need to be modified as space-time may be composed of quantum "points" if Hogan's theory is correct. At its finest scale, we should be able to probe down the "Planck length" which measures 10-35 meters. But the GEO600 experiment detected noise at scales of less than 10-15 meters. As it turns out, Hogan thinks that noise at these scales are caused by a holographic projection from the horizon of our universe. A good analogy is to think about how an image becomes more and more blurry or pixelated the more you zoom in on it. The projection starts off at Planck scale lengths at the Universe's event horizon, but its projection becomes blurry in our local space-time. This hypothesis comes out of black hole research where the information that falls into a black hole is "encoded" in the black hole's event horizon. For the holographic universe to hold true, information must be encoded in the outermost reaches of the Universe and it is projected into our 3 dimensional world. But how can this hypothesis be tested? We need to boost the resolution of a gravitational wave detector-type of kit. Enter the "Holometer." Currently under construction in Fermilab, the Holometer (meaning holographic interferometer) will delve deep into this quantum realm at smaller scales than the GEO600 experiment. If Hogan's idea is correct, the Holometer should detect this quantum noise in the fabric of space-time, throwing our whole perception of the Universe into a spin. Read complete article here. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 26 Oct 10 - 04:06 PM Yep the holographic universe theory is scarily close to the Matrix. ------------------------------------------------------------------- IT was recently discovered that gravity has a higher fundamental value in or near areas of great mass. Gravity is fundamentally weaker in areas of vast emptiness of matter. This means that gravity is not a descrete force but is an accumulated energy that resides in or near mass, dark matter or dimensions that populate areas of matter more than empty space. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 26 Oct 10 - 04:37 PM That is to say a kilogram of mass in empty space has less gravity than a kilo of mass in a galaxy. This as Richard Feynman would say, defies the greatest premise of scientific principles which is that fundmental relationships here should be the same as fundamental relationships elsewhere and anywhere in the universe. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 27 Oct 10 - 01:56 PM Russian Bears Find Graveyards Snacks In the absence of mushrooms and berries, Russian bears will turn to cadavers, reports The Guardian. Local officials have warned that a dearth of food caused by a parched summer has forced bears to scavenge in unusual places, including cemeteries. On Saturday in the village of Vezhnya Tchova, two women stumbled across a bear eating a corpse next to a grave, according to Russian newspaper reports. People living near the Arctic Circle have recently reported increases in the number of bears scavenging for scraps in Dumpsters and garden patches. The cemetery incident might come down to ursine resourcefulness as much as hunger, however. "You have to remember that bears are natural scavengers," said Masha Vorontsova of WWF Russia, who cited another example of bear grave robbers in the northern Karelia republic two years ago. "In Karelia one bear learned how to do it [open a coffin]. He then taught the others. They are pretty quick learners." The biggest threat to Russian bears is not a lack of fish and ants, say experts, but the presence of trophy hunters who can wipe out entire populations of large male bears. The Guardian | Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010 |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 01 Nov 10 - 11:23 AM From an article on Civil War (US) History: "... Today's lusterless brass would never declare, as Sherman did, "I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!" or say of a superior, as Sherman did of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, "He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk." You can hear the same, bold voice in the writing of common soldiers, their letters unmuzzled by military censors and their dialect not yet homogenized by television and Interstates. "Got to see the elephant at last," an Indianan wrote of his first, inglorious combat. "I don't care about seeing him very often any more, for if there was any fun in such work I couldn't see it ... It is not the thing it is bragged up to be." Another soldier called the Gettysburg campaign "nothing but fighting, starving, marching and cussing." Cowards were known as "skedaddlers," "tree dodgers," "skulkers" and "croakers." There's character even in muster rolls and other records, which constantly confound the stereotype of a war between brotherly white farm boys North and South. You find Rebel Choctaws and Union Kickapoos; Confederate rabbis and Arab camel-drivers; Californians in gray and Alabamans in blue; and in wondrous Louisiana, units called the Corps d'Afrique, the Creole Rebels, the Slavonian Rifles and the European Brigade. By war's end, black troops constituted over 10 percent of the Union Army and Navy. The roster of black sailors included men born in Zanzibar and Borneo. Then there are the individuals who defy classification, like this one from a Pennsylvania muster roll: "Sgt. Frank Mayne; deserted Aug. 24, 1862; subsequently killed in battle in another regiment, and discovered to be a woman; real name, Frances Day." ..." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: bobad Date: 01 Nov 10 - 11:58 AM Prop 19: Bad News for British Colombia, Good News for American Big Business Marijuana British Columbia's billion-dollar illegal marijuana economy is already seeing the effects of potential marijuana legalization in California. The cash industry makes up a large part of the region's economy and is likely to see serious consequences in their retail and service sectors should that change, Research performed by one American non-profit group suggested that the cost of pot could plummet by as much as 80 percent in the face of the Nov. 2 vote that could legalize the drug. What is bad news for British Columbia; however, is good news for the state of California, which would likely assume Canada's position on top of the industry and begin reviving the state's sunken economy. Marijuana is already California's biggest cash crop, bringing in $14 billion a year, but the additional production and resulting revenue for the state would hold benefits both for California and the small and large business owners who call it home. Many California marijuana distributors that were shut down in raids earlier this year have been eagerly awaiting the Nov. 2 vote in the hopes of rebuilding their businesses and rehiring the thousands of employees that were left jobless when they closed. Others, like U.S. Cannabis (OTCPK:LLUX) have been thinking bigger. Unlike in British Columbia where operations had to stay relatively small to avoid visibility and higher risk, US Cannabis is looking toward a new frontier in the marijuana business, and it's broader and more expansive than anything we've seen before. US Cannabis establishes eight objectives which include medical, management, internet and media, financial services, product development, industrial agriculture, dispensary management, political relations and philanthropy. Essentially they are looking to manage and leverage the marijuana product, given its pending legality becomes a reality, from all possible angles. A marijuana company that operates like a recognized legal operation; that seeks to increase efficiency and visibility and has the capacity to closely manage product quality is the first its kind. Only unlike many new companies, the demand for this product is well recognized, evidenced foremost by the 40,000 patients the company's medical care database. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 01 Nov 10 - 04:25 PM In a reversal of long-standing policy, the U.S. Justice Department announced on Friday that naturally occurring genes—human or otherwise—could not be patented. This ruling does not include manipulated or altered genes. So, for instance, you can still patent the specific, fiddled-with genes behind a GM crop. But, this is still a very big deal. Right now the genes associated with increased risk of breast cancer are patented and, thus, there is only one, very expensive, test available to look for them. In March, a judge ruled those patents invalid. And now it looks like the federal government is backing up that ruling. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 01 Nov 10 - 04:26 PM February 22, 2007—In Antarctica's Ross Sea, a fishing boat has caught what is likely the world's biggest known colossal squid (yes, that's the species' name), New Zealand officials announced today. Heavier than even giant squid, colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) have eyes as wide as dinner plates and sharp hooks on some of their suckers. The new specimen weighs in at an estimated 990 pounds (450 kilograms). The sea monster had become entangled while feeding on Patagonian toothfish (toothfish photos) caught on long lines of hooks. The crew then maneuvered the squid into a net and painstakingly hauled it aboard—a two-hour process. The animal was frozen and placed in a massive freezer below decks. Now in New Zealand, the carcass awaits scientific analysis. "Even basic questions such as how large does this species grow to and how long does it live for are not yet known," said New Zealand Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton in a statement. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 01 Nov 10 - 11:42 PM A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls. This law was meant to protect the poor fish from a distorted nature of reality, since bent light might show them an odd portrayal of their surroundings. Hawking and Mlodinow bring up the incident to make the point that it is impossible to know the true nature of reality. We think we have an accurate picture of what's going on, but how would we know if we were metaphorically living in a giant fishbowl of our own, since we would never be able to see outside our own point of view to compare? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 02 Nov 10 - 12:05 AM One of the subtlest sentences in the English language: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Explanation here |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 03 Nov 10 - 05:52 PM From the Templeton Foundation: "For centuries, Western science and philosophy has been built on the bedrock understanding that there is a clear difference between the material and the immaterialÑor, in theological terms, between the natural and the supernatural. What if new scientific findings hinted that the distinction might present an inaccurate view of reality? Observations like that, if proven, would cause a revolution in thought. That tantalizing philosophical possibility was one of the reasons behind Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality, a scientific conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, and held at St. AnneÕs College, Oxford University, from September 26-29. The goal: to identify and explore a cutting-edge series of quantum-based questions about the nature of reality. The conference attracted 83 of the worldÕs most celebrated philosophers, theoreticians, and experimental scientists, including quantum physicists Tony Leggett and Anton Zeilinger, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, and Royal Society president and astronomer Martin Rees. The star-studded event, described by one observer as Òthe best minds asking the biggest questions,Ó was held in honor of the 80th birthday of John Polkinghorne, the eminent Cambridge physicist and 2002 Templeton Prize winner. In an opening address to the scholarly gathering, Polkinghorne claimed that quantum physics, which challenges our commonsense notions of reality, has the potential to lead a scientific revolution more radical and consequential than that brought about by Einstein and relativity. ÒThe discussions were notable for the respect shown for the way that the different disciplines could contribute to each other,Ó said Andrew Briggs, an Oxford physicist and conference co-chairman. ÒDr. Polkinghorne more than once remarked on the impressive involvement of experimentalists. It does indeed seem that conditions are excellent for further experimental progress in elucidating the nature of quantum reality.Ó What does it mean to speak of Òquantum reality,Ó as distinct from ordinary reality? Classical physics operates according to laws, which dependably explain how reality, as we experience it, works. But at the quantum (atomic and subatomic) level, these laws break down, resulting in bizarre phenomena that scientists are only beginning to understand. Quantum entanglement, for example, occurs when two distinct particles are observed ÒaffectingÓ each other from far away, apparently instantaneously. A befuddled Einstein called this Òspooky action at a distance.Ó Results from nearly a century of quantum experiments profoundly challenge our commonsensical notions of reality, and in turn, pose dramatic philosophical questions about the fabric of space and time, even the nature of truth. Quantum theory is currently enjoying a season of fertile growth, particularly in the new field of quantum information, which explores the concept that information, not spacetime, may be the basis for reality. If proven true, quantum information theory would dramatically blur, if not collapse, the distinction between immaterial ÒideasÓ and material reality. As physicist Hyung Choi, who directs the FoundationÕs programs in mathematical and physical sciences, explains, ÒQuantum mechanics seems to be telling us that information may not be just a representation of reality, but may be, in some sense, reality itself. If this turns out to be the case, this could have a very significant impact on our philosophical framework. It would somehow bring together a sense of unity in our understanding of reality.Ó Choi points out that Sir John Templeton was so passionate about the connection between visible and invisible reality that he devoted an entire chapter in his book Possibilities for One Hundredfold More Spiritual Information to the topic. ÒQuantum physics deals with the boundary between the seen and the unseen,Ó says Choi. ÒBernard dÕEspagnat won the Templeton Prize for making a conceptual advance, through quantum physics, [indicating] that the material world is a Ôveiled reality,Õ a window into the unseen. ThatÕs what Sir John cared about. He said that the seen is the ladder to the unseen, and that in his view, there is a continuum in reality, physical and spiritual. I donÕt think he ever divided them.Ó" |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: bobad Date: 07 Nov 10 - 05:42 PM Stem cell scientists turn skin into blood By Agence France-Presse Sunday, November 7th, 2010 -- 5:43 pm WASHINGTON — Stem cell researchers have found a way to turn a person's skin into blood, a process that could be used to treat cancer and other ailments, according to a Canadian study published Sunday. The method uses cells from a patch of a person's skin and transforms it into blood that is a genetic match, without using human embryonic stem cells, said the study in the journal Nature. By avoiding the controversial and more complicated processes involved with using human embryonic stem cells to create blood, this approach simplifies the process, researchers said. "What we believe we can do in the future is generate blood in a much more efficient manner," said study author Mick Bhatia of the McMaster's Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine. With the ability to create blood for transfusion from a person's own skin, the advance means someday patients needing blood for surgery or to treat anemia could bypass the blood bank and derive the necessary supply from themselves. The breakthrough could also see future uses such as allowing patients undergoing chemotherapy to endure a longer regime of treatment without the breaks currently needed to rejuvenate the body. Researchers have been able to perform the skin-to-blood transformation in the past, but while using human pluripotent stem cells, widely known as embryonic stem cells. Stem cells that are derived from human embryos hold significant promise for medical breakthroughs but also carry risks, such as the potential to create tumors. But researchers say their new method can create enough blood for a transfusion from a four by three centimeter (1.6 by 1.2 inch) patch of adult human skin, and can avoid those potential hurdles. "So we don't need to take skin cells and put it into a pluripotent stem cell. That is inefficient in terms of time," Bhatia told AFP. "There are also concerns that they might form a tumor, and the fact that we bypass that makes it more feasible for transplants." Those needing bone marrow transplants could be particularly aided by the breakthrough, according to John Kelton, dean of health sciences for McMaster University. "For all physicians, but especially for the patients and their families, the illness became more frustrating when we were prevented from giving a bone marrow transplant because we could not find a perfect donor match in the family or the community," Kelton said. "Dr. Bhatia's discovery could permit us to help this important group of patients." Clinical trials could start as soon as 2012, the study said. Cynthia Dunbar, head of the molecular hematopoiesis section of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health in the United States, said she was eager to try out the Canadian team's approach. "I think there are exciting aspects in terms of this potentially being a much safer approach than going back through embryonic stem cells," said Dunbar, who estimated it would be five to 10 years before the technique reaches the general public. "I work for the US federal government, and whether or not we can work with embryonic stem cells is up in the air," she added. "I'm very excited to try this." Bhatia said researchers would next begin experiments to see what other kinds of human cells can be derived from adult skin. The research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute, the Stem Cell Network and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 07 Nov 10 - 07:32 PM Archaeologists revealed they have found a piece of a stone axe dated as 35,500 years old on sacred Aboriginal land in Australia, the oldest object of its type ever found. The shard of stone, found in Australia's lush and remote far northern reaches in May, has marks that prove it comes from a ground-edge stone axe, Monash University's Bruno David said on Friday. "We could see with the angled light that the rock itself has all these marks on it from people having rubbed it in order to create the ground-edge axe," he told the ABC. "The person who was using the axe was grinding it against a sandstone surface in order to make it a smoother surface." David said the previous oldest ground-edge axes were 20,000 to 30,000 years old, and the conventional belief was that the tool first emerged in Europe when populations grew and forests flourished at the end of the last Ice Age. "What we've got in Australia, however, is evidence of ground-edge axes going back 35,000 years ago," he said. "What this all means is that we know that the conventional story that comes from Europe does not explain the origin of axes globally. So we've got to think of it in a very different way." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 08 Nov 10 - 11:34 PM Central dogma of genetics maybe not so central In thousands of genes, RNA is not a faithful copy of DNA By Tina Hesman Saey Web edition : Thursday, November 4th, 2010 WASHINGTON Ñ RNA molecules arenÕt always faithful reproductions of the genetic instructions contained within DNA, a new study shows. The finding seems to violate a tenet of genetics so fundamental that scientists call it the central dogma: DNA letters encode information and RNA is made in DNAÕs likeness. The RNA then serves as a template to build proteins. But a study of RNA in white blood cells from 27 different people shows that, on average, each person has nearly 4,000 genes in which the RNA copies contain misspellings not found in DNA. ÒItÕs unbelievable,Ó says Mingyao Li, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia. Li presented the finding November 3 in Washington, D.C., at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. Scientists already knew that every now and then RNA letters can be chemically modified or edited Ñ sort of the molecular equivalent of adding an umlaut to some letters. But those RNA editing events are not common. What Li and her colleagues discovered is quite common. RNA molecules contained misspellings at 20,000 different places in the genome, with about 10,000 different misspellings occurring in two or more of the people studied. The most common of the 12 different types of misspellings was when an A in the DNA was changed to G in the RNA. That change accounted for about a third of the misspellings. (Science News) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 09 Nov 10 - 09:41 PM Something big is going on at the center of the galaxy, and astronomers are happy to say they donÕt know what it is. A group of scientists working with data from NASAÕs Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope said Tuesday that they had discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The bubbles, they said at a news conference and in a paper to be published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal, extend 25,000 light years up and down from each side of the galaxy and contain the energy equivalent to 100,000 supernova explosions. ÒTheyÕre big,Ó said Doug Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of the team that discovered them. The source of the bubbles is a mystery. One possibility is that they are fueled by a wave of star births and deaths at the center of the galaxy. Another option is a gigantic belch from the black hole known to reside, like Jabba the Hutt, at the center of the Milky Way. What it is apparently not is dark matter, the mysterious something that astronomers say makes up a quarter of the universe and holds galaxies together. ÒWow,Ó said David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton who was not involved in the work. ÒAnd we think we know a lot about our own galaxy,Ó Dr. Spergel added, noting that the bubbles were almost as big as the galaxy and yet unsuspected until now. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 13 Nov 10 - 10:47 AM Twenty years ago today, when Vanilla IceÕs ÒIce Ice BabyÓ was at the top of the charts, two engineers at CERNÕs data handling division requested funding for the research project that would give birth to the web. The proposal, submitted by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau on November 12, 1990, laid out what they wanted to build and the resources theyÕd require. The team wanted to start by building a browser and a server. They estimated development would take six months, and that it would require Òfour software engineers and a programmer.Ó There are also some serious hardware requirements totaling tens of thousands of dollars (or is it Swiss francs?), but about a third of the requested funding was dedicated to software user licenses. HereÕs the overview: The attached document describes in more detail a Hypertext project. HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: bobad Date: 14 Nov 10 - 07:52 AM Nazis Were Given 'Safe Haven' in U.S., Report Says By ERIC LICHTBLAU Published: November 13, 2010 WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government's Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a "safe haven" in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad. Dave Dieter/The Huntsville Times, via Associated Press The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades. It describes the government's posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official's drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government's mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible. The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis. Perhaps the report's most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency's involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.'s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations. MORE |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: bobad Date: 15 Nov 10 - 09:49 PM Oil to run out 100 years before replacements become viable, study claims By Agence France-Presse Monday, November 15th, 2010 -- 4:41 pm The world will run out of oil around 100 years before replacement energy sources are available if oil use and development of new fuels continue at the current pace, a US study warns. In the study, researchers at the University of California, Davis (UC-Davis) used the current share prices of oil companies and alternative energy companies to predict when replacement fuels will be ready to fill the gap left when oil runs dry. And the findings weren't very good for the oil-hungry world. If the world's oil reserves were the 1.332 trillion barrels they were estimated to be in 2008 and oil consumption was some 85.22 million barrels a day and growing at 1.3 percent a year, oil would be depleted by 2041, says the study published online last week in Environmental Science and Technology. But by plugging current stock market prices into a complex equation, UC-Davis engineering professor Debbie Niemeier and postdoctoral researcher Nataliya Malyshkina calculated that a viable alternative fuel to oil won't be available before the middle of next century. The researchers analyzed the share prices of 25 oil companies quoted on US, European and Australian stock exchanges, and of 44 alternative energy companies. They found that the market capitalization, or total value of all stock shares, of traditional oil companies far outstripped that of the alternative energy companies. That indicated that investors believe oil is going to do well in the near future and occupy a larger share of the energy market than alternative energy, said Malyshkina. "To assess the time until a considerable fraction of oil is likely to be replaced by alternatives, we used advanced pricing equations to make sense of the large discrepancy between the market capitalization of traditional oil companies and the market capitalization of alternative-energy companies," Malyshkina told AFP. The answer they came up with was that there would not be a widely available replacement for oil-based fuels before 2140, which, even if the more optimistic date of 2054 for oil depletion is retained, would mean there could be a nearly 90-year gap when it might be difficult to run a motor vehicle. Nearly two-thirds of crude oil is used to produce gasoline and diesel to run vehicles, says Malyshkina. The calculations used by the researchers are based on the theory that long-term investors are good predictors of when new technologies will become commonplace. Similar calculations have been used to accurately predict the outcome of elections and the results of sports events, Malyshkina said. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: bobad Date: 16 Nov 10 - 08:05 AM The perfect crime tool: Researchers work on 'event cloak' By Agence France-Presse Monday, November 15th, 2010 -- 10:54 pm PARIS — Jewelry robbers, magicians, exam cheats and practical jokers everywhere will have an interest in an offbeat idea launched by physicists on Tuesday: to make the passage of time invisible. The scientists have conceived of a "spacetime cloak" which manipulates light and, in essence, conceals whole events from a viewer. The theory is based on censoring the flow of events, which we perceive as a stream of light particles, also called photons, that strike the retina. By exploiting a characteristic of fiber optics, the flow of photons can be slowed, events edited out and stitched back together, say the team from Imperial College London and Salford University, northwestern England. "A safecracker would be able, for a brief time, to enter a scene, open the safe, remove its contents, close the door and exit the scene, whilst the record of a surveillance camera apparently showed that the safe door was closed all the time," according to their paper. The theory is expounded in a daunting series of equations and diagrams in the Journal of Optics, published by the Institute of Physics. It would work thanks to different light intensities that affect the refractory index in optical fiber, the cable widely used in telecoms today. The refractory index is a determinant of the speed with which the light is transported in the cable. In the example of the safe cracker, the "leading" segment (the image of the unmolested safe) would be slowed down. The middle segment, of the robber opening the safe and making off with the contents would be edited out, disappearing into a "spatio-temporal void". The final segment -- of the safe room apparently untouched -- would be accelerated so that it catches up with the leading segment and dovetails seamlessly with it. "By manipulating the way the light illuminating an event reaches the viewer, it is possible to hide the passage of time," said Martin McCall, an Imperial College professor who headed the work. "Not only can specific events be obscured, but it is possible for me to be watching you, and for you to suddenly disappear and reappear in a different location." The paper appears in the Journal of Optics, published by Britain's Institute of Physics. The theory has yet to be tested or confirmed in a lab, but the authors are confident that this will not be too far ahead. The physicists are keen to point out that their notion of "invisible events" differs from the fast advancing realm of "invisible materials". These are so-called metamaterials, whose nano-metric surface interferes with light at specific wavelengths. As a result, light deviates around an object, making it invisible -- or, more accurately, invisible in specific colors of the light spectrum. "It is unlike ordinary cloaking devices because it does not attempt to divert light around an object," said co-author Alberto Favaro. "Instead, it pulls apart the light rays in time, as if opening a theater curtain -- creating a temporary corridor through which energy, information and matter can be manipulated or transported undetected." Beyond its sci-fi potential, the "spacetime cloak" could have benefits for quantum computing, which depends on the manipulation of light to transport huge amounts of data. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 16 Nov 10 - 04:03 PM Indeed, according to biocentrism, it's us, the observer, who create space and time (which is the reason you're here now). Consider everything you see around you right now. Language and custom say it all lies outside us in the external world. Yet you can't see anything through the vault of bone that surrounds your brain. Your eyes aren't just portals to the world. In fact, everything you experience, including your body, is part of an active process occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the mind's tools for putting it all together. Theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow recently stated: There is no way to remove the observer -- us -- from our perceptions of the world ... In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities." If we, the observer, collapse these possibilities (that is, the past and future) then where does that leave evolutionary theory, as described in our schoolbooks? Until the present is determined, how can there be a past? The past begins with the observer, us, not the other way around as we've been taught. The observer is the first cause, the vital force that collapses not only the present but the cascade of past spatio-temporal events we call evolution. "If, instead of identifying ourselves with the work," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, "we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, pre-existing within us in their highest form." "Biocentrism" (co-authored with astronomer Bob Berman) lays out Lanza's theory of everything. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/why-are-you-here-new-theo_b_781055.html |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 17 Nov 10 - 11:57 AM "Randomness is indistinguishable from complicated, undetected and undetectable order; but order itself is indistinguishable from artful randomness." Taleb |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 17 Nov 10 - 03:55 PM For physicists, a bit of antimatter is a precious gift indeed. By comparing matter to its counterpart, they can test fundamental symmetries that lie at the heart of the standard model of particle physics, and look for hints of new physics beyond. Yet few gifts are as tricky to wrap. Bring a particle of antimatter into contact with its matter counterpart and the two annihilate in a flash of energy. Now a research collaboration at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, has managed, 38 times, to confine single antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap for more than 170 milliseconds. The group reported the result in Nature online on 17 November1. "We're ecstatic. This is five years of hard work," says Jeffrey Hangst, spokesman for the ALPHA collaboration at CERN. An antihydrogen atom is made from a negatively charged antiproton and a positively charged positron, the antimatter counterpart of the electron. The objective — both for ALPHA and for a competing CERN experiment called ATRAP — is to compare the energy levels in antihydrogen with those of hydrogen, to confirm that antimatter particles experience the same electromagnetic forces as matter particles, a key premise of the standard model. "The goal is to study antihydrogen and you can't do it without trapping it," says Cliff Surko, an antimatter researcher at the University of California, San Diego. "This is really a big deal." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 18 Nov 10 - 08:53 PM Scientists at CERN, the research facility that's home to the Large Hadron Collider, claim to have successfully created and stored antimatter in greater quantities and for longer times than ever before. Researchers created 38 atoms of antihydrogen Ð more than ever has been produced at one time before and were able to keep the atoms stable enough to last one tenth of a second before they annihilated themselves (antimatter and matter destroy each other the moment they come into contact with each other). Since those first experiments, the team claims to have held antiatoms for even longer, though they weren't specific of the duration. While scientists have been able to create particles of antimatter for decades, they had previously only been able to produce a few particles that would almost instantly destroy themselves. "This is the first major step in a long journey," Michio Kaku, physicist and author of Physics of the Impossible, told PCMag. "Eventually, we may go to the stars." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 20 Nov 10 - 01:52 AM The first Native American to arrive in Europe may have been a woman brought to Iceland by the Vikings more than 1,000 years ago, a study by Spanish and Icelandic researchers suggests. The findings boost widely-accepted theories, based on Icelandic medieval texts and a reputed Viking settlement in Newfoundland in Canada, that the Vikings reached the American continent several centuries before Christopher Columbus traveled to the "New World." Spain's CSIC scientific research institute said genetic analysis of around 80 people from a total of four families in Iceland showed they possess a type of DNA normally only found in Native Americans or East Asians. "It was thought at first that (the DNA) came from recently established Asian families in Iceland," CSIC researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox was quoted as saying in a statement by the institute. "But when family genealogy was studied, it was discovered that the four families were descended from ancestors who lived between 1710 and 1740 from the same region of southern Iceland." The lineage found, named C1e, is also mitochondrial, which means that the genes were introduced into Iceland by a woman. ... Discovery News |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 21 Nov 10 - 05:16 PM Pure Energy Systems News Copyright © 2010 In a little more than a week from now, on November 29, Green Power Inc. (GPI) of Pasco, Washington, who has a technology to turn municipal solid waste (MSW) into synthetic liquid fuel and electricity, plans to begin the manufacturing of plants in fulfillment of orders from around the world. The photo on the right shows their 100 ton/day pilot plant. This fuel would be of higher quality and cheaper than fuel derived from crude oil -- and it comes from local feedstock, while turning waste into energy. Green Power claims it manufactures equipment that can convert 100 tons of garbage into 12,000 gallons of diesel fuel at 78 cents a gallon. So not only would the fuel be cheaper, but it doesn't come from countries who aren't always so friendly, mitigating these unsavory international dependencies. It addresses the pollution problem, and the energy problem, and the political tension problem. "We would not need to import any foreign oil if we could turn our municipal waste stream into fuel," GPI's CEO, Michael Spitzauer has told me. I classify waste-to-energy as a form of "free energy" because as long as there are humans on this planet there will be waste, and often in the case of waste there is actually a tipping fee for the feedstock, providing revenue on that end as well. And if we ever get to the point of using all our waste as feedstock for such processes, we will still have plenty of landfills to clean up, not to mention the huge gyres of plastic waste the size of Texas in the oceans. Spitzauer, says that GPI has over $2 billion dollars in signed contracts for GPI plants, including in Vietnam, Spain, France, Yugoslavia, and a very large installation in South America to be launched in April. He said GPI has money in the bank from the S. American contract, for example, ready to finance immediate construction. The civil work has been done locally. Ground has been graded, concrete poured, foundations laid. On September 17, a Bosnian newspaper reported (original url) that the director of the Slovenian company 'Green power', Zoran Petrovic, told reporters that the company will employ 50 workers (in its construction), and that the plant should become operational in the second half of next year. In August of 2009, GPI was shut down by Washington state's Ecology Department who said GPI had "not provided adequate compliance with the environmental air quality regulations." This was cleared on September 8, 2010 by an EPA ruling that support's GPI's claim and reverses Washington state's Ecology Department's claim that placed the GPI process in the class of incinerators, which it is not. According to the EPA ruling: "Green Power describes its process as a proprietary catalytic pressure-less depolymerization process (CDP) where municipal solid waste or a wide variety of organic wastes are 'cracked' at the molecular level and the long-chain polymers (plastic, organic material such as wood, etc.) are chemically altered to become short-chain hydrocarbons with no combustion. Combustion requires oxygen or a similar compound, but according to Green Power the CDP occurs in an anaerobic environment, exposed only to inert gases like nitrogen...". |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 22 Nov 10 - 12:53 PM Researchers at the University of Newcastle in the UK have created a new kind of concrete glue that can patch up the cracks in concrete structures, restoring buildings that have been damaged by seismic events or deteriorated over time. But the glue isn't an adhesive or some kind of synthetic material; the researchers have custom-designed a bacteria to burrow deep into the cracks in concrete where they produce a mix of calcium carbonate and a special bacteria glue that hardens to the same strength of the surrounding concreate. "BacillaFilla," as the researchers call it, is a genetically modified version of Bacillus subtilis, a bacteria commonly found in common soil. The researchers have tweaked it's genetic properties such that it only begins to germinate when it comes in contact with the highly-specific pH of concrete. Once the cells germinate, they are programmed to crawl as deep as they can into cracks in the concrete, where quorum sensing lets them know when enough bacteria have accumulated. That accumulation lets the bacteria know they've reached the deepest part of the crack, at which point the cells begin to develop into bacterial filaments, cells that produce calcium carbonate, and cells that secrete a kind of bacterial glue that binds everything together. Once hardened, the bacteria is essentially as strong as the concrete itself, restoring structural strength and adding life to the surrounding concrete. The bacteria also contains a self-destruct gene that keeps it from wildly proliferating away from its concrete target, because a runaway patch of bacterial concrete that continued to grow despite all efforts to stop it would be somewhat annoying. The researchers hope their BacillaFilla will improve the longevity of concrete structures, which can be environmentally costly to erect. It could also be deployed in earthquake stricken zones to quickly reinforce damaged buildings and reduce the number of structures that have to be razed after a disaster. [MSNBC] |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 23 Nov 10 - 05:53 AM F*ng Nothing! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 23 Nov 10 - 11:44 AM ...(T)here's a shocking report recently published by astrophysicists at the University of Arizona in Tucson: The Milky Way's baby black holes are missing. It might sound like a bizarre singularity kindergarten kidnapping case (I'm looking at you Andromeda), but Feryal Özel's Arizona team are in doubt as to whether the baby black holes existed in the first place. WATCH VIDEO: Did you know there's a black hole in the center of our galaxy? A stellar-mass black hole is theorized to be created after a supernova. Supernovae are triggered when stars over eight-times the mass of our sun reach the end of their lives after catastrophically running out of fuel feeding stellar core fusion. Immediately after supernova, if the remnant core has a mass of less than three suns, one would expect a blob of degenerate neutron matter to be spinning in the explosion's wake. This is a neutron star. However, if the supernova remnant exceeds three solar masses, conventional physics suggests a black hole should be left behind. But there's a problem. No stellar-mass black holes weighing between 2-5 solar masses have ever been observed, putting a serious question mark over the lower-mass black hole theory. What's going on? Are low-mass black holes vanishing? Or is there some black hole formation process we're not familiar with? Özel's team studied 16 binary systems in our galaxy known to contain a black hole and a stellar partner. None of them had a black hole of 2-5 solar masses living there, even after observational uncertainties were considered. Their findings will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. All right you clowns--Casseiopea? Betelgeuse? Horsehead? Where'd you stash the black holes, huh? You relaize you are putting the entire balance of forces in our galaxy at risk here? Quit dicking around (or asimoving around, or heinleining around, whatever...). |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 23 Nov 10 - 11:59 AM You can justify partying all year 'round once you subscribe to the calendar of the global economy. Happy Diwali, you-all. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 24 Nov 10 - 02:00 PM Physicists have created a new kind of light by chilling photons into a blob state. Just like solids, liquids and gases, this recently discovered condition represents a state of matter. Called a Bose-Einstein condensate, it was created in 1995 with super-cold atoms of a gas, but scientists had thought it could not be done with photons, which are basic units of light. However, physicists Jan Klärs, Julian Schmitt, Frank Vewinger and Martin Weitz of the University of Bonn in Germany reported accomplishing it. They have dubbed the new particles "super photons." Particles in a traditional Bose-Einstein condensate are cooled down close to absolute zero, until they glom onto each other and become indistinguishable, acting as one giant particle. Experts thought photons (packets of light) would be unable to achieve this state because it seemed impossible to cool light while concentrating it at the same time. Because photons are massless particles, they can simply be absorbed into their surroundings and disappear, which usually happens when they are cooled down. The scientists needed to find a way to cool the photons without decreasing their numbers. "Many scientists believed that it would not be possible, but I was pretty sure that it would work," Weitz told LiveScience. To trap the photons, the researchers devised a container made of mirrors placed very, very close together – about a millionth of a meter (1 micron) apart. Between the mirrors, the researchers placed dye molecules – basically, little bits of color pigment. When the photons hit these molecules, they were absorbed and then re-emitted. The mirrors trapped the photons by keeping them bouncing back and forth in a confined state. In the process, the light packets exchanged thermal energy every time they hit a dye molecule, and they eventually cooled down to about room temperature While room temperature is nowhere near absolute zero, it was cold enough for photons to coalesce into a Bose-Einstein condensate. "Whether a temperature is cold enough to start the condensation depends on the density of the particles," Klärs wrote in an e-mail. "Ultra-cold atomic gases are very dilute and they therefore have very low condensation temperatures. Our photon gas has a billion times higher density and we can achieve the condensation already at room temperature." The researchers detail their findings in the Nov. 25 issue of the journal Nature. Physicist James Anglin of Germany's Technical University Kaiserslautern, who was not involved in the project, called the experiment "a landmark achievement" in an accompanying essay in the same issue of Nature. In effect, getting the photons to condense into this state caused them to behave more like regular matter particles. It also showcased the ability of photons, and indeed all particles, to behave as both a point-like particle and a wave – one of the most perplexing revelations of modern quantum physics. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Donuel Date: 24 Nov 10 - 07:56 PM THat sounds like the holy trinity of the three states of matter; father ice, liquid son and gassy ghost. Ha A bottle of frozen light please. that'll be 3 million dollars. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 28 Nov 10 - 10:56 AM The cortex of the human brain holds more than 100 trillion neural connections, or synapses, packed into a layer of tissue just 2 to 4 millimeters thick. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 29 Nov 10 - 02:23 PM This week, doctors drilled a hole into a Scottish truck driver's head and injected his brain with 2 million stem cells, in the first-ever regulated human trial for stem cell stroke treatment. Doctors at Glasgow's Southern General Hospital will conduct periodic MRI scans to look for repairs or changes in areas of the patient's brain damaged by stroke. The trial, called Pilot Investigation of Stem Cells in Stroke (PISCES), is designed to check the procedure's safety, but any signs of physical improvement would be a major leap in neural medicine. Before the surgery, researchers at UK company ReNeuron grew the stem cells into neural stem cells. British media said the company obtained the cells from a donated 12-week-old human fetus from the U.S. (An embryo becomes a fetus about eight weeks after fertilization.) The procedure was initially approved last year. Keith Muir of the University of Glasgow, the lead researcher on the trial, said some of the injected neural stem cells would grow into neurons. But they could prove even more versatile — earlier studies in rats showed that the stem cells triggered a wide variety of cell development, including new brain blood vessels. During the next year, as many as 12 other patients will get progressively higher doses of stem cell injections, reaching as many as 20 million cells, according to Muir. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 29 Nov 10 - 02:34 PM In recent years, computer scientists have begun to exploit evolution's amazing power. One thing they have experienced time and time again is evolution's blind progress. Put a genetic algorithm to work and it will explore the evolutionary landscape, looking for local minima. When it finds one, there is no knowing whether it is the best possible solution or whether it sits within touching distance of an evolutionary abyss that represents a solution of an entirely different order of magnitude. That hints at the possibility that life as it has evolved on Earth is but a local minima in a vast landscape of evolutionary possibilities. If that's the case, biologists are studying a pitifully small fraction of something bigger. Much bigger. Today, we get an important insight into this state of affairs thanks to a fascinating paper by Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese at the University of Illinois. Goldenfeld is a physicist by training while Woese, also a physicist, is one of the great revolutionary figures in biology. In the 1970s, he defined a new kingdom of life, the Archae, and developed a theory of the origin of life called the RNA world hypothesis, which has gained much fame or notoriety depending on your viewpoint. Together they suggest that biologists need to think about their field in a radical new way: as a branch of condensed matter physics. Their basic conjecture is that life is an emergent phenomena that occurs in systems that are far out of equilibrium. If you accept this premise, then two questions immediately arise: what laws describe such systems and how are we to get at them. Goldenfeld and Woese say that biologists' closed way of thinking on this topic is embodied by the phrase: all life is chemistry. Nothing could be further from the truth, they say. They have an interesting analogy to help press their case: the example of superconductivity. It would be easy to look at superconductivity and imagine that it can be fully explained by the properties of electrons as they transfer in and out of the outer atomic orbitals. You might go further and say that superconductivity is all atoms and chemistry. And yet the real explanation is much more interesting and profound. It turns out that many of the problems of superconductivity are explained by a theory which describes the relationship between electromagnetic fields and long range order. When the symmetry in this relationship breaks down, the result is superconductivity. And it doesn't just happen in materials on Earth. This kind of symmetry breaking emerges in other exotic places such as the cores of quark stars. Superconductivity is an emergent phenomenon and has little to do with the behaviour of atoms. A chemist would be flabbergasted. According to Goldenfeld and Woese, life is like superconductivity. It is an emergent phenomenon and we need to understand the fundamental laws of physics that govern its behaviour. Consequently, only a discipline akin to physics can reveal such laws and biology as it is practised today does not fall into this category. MIT Tech Review |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 29 Nov 10 - 07:48 PM Researchers at the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at Mount Sinai School of Medicine wanted to determine whether oxytocin, a hormone and neurotransmitter that is known to regulate attachment and social memory in animals, is also involved in human attachment memories. They conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over trial, giving 31 healthy adult men oxytocin or a placebo delivered nasally on two occasions. Prior to administering the drug/placebo, the researchers measured the men's attachment style. About 90 minutes after administering the oxytocin or the placebo the researchers assessed participants' recollection of their mother's care and closeness in childhood. They found that men who were less anxious and more securely attached remembered their mothers as more caring and remembered being closer to their mothers in childhood when they received oxytocin, compared to when they received placebo. However, men who were more anxiously attached remembered their mothers as less caring and remembered being less close to their mothers in childhood when they received oxytocin, compared to when they received placebo. These results were not due to more general effects of oxytocin on mood or well-being. Physorg.com |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 30 Nov 10 - 10:44 AM "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." That's what Richard Feynman said in 1965, and it is not getting any easier. Scientists are reporting in the journal Science that they have linked the uncertainty principle and "spooky" nonlocal interactions. Quantum measurements are governed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It states that measurements of pairs of physical quantities, such as time and energy or position and momentum, are linked such that the more you know about one, the less you do about the other. If you know exactly where a particle is, you know nothing about its momentum, and vice versa. When the states of two quantum systems are coupled, they are said to be entangled. For example, if a particle decays into two with opposite spins, quantum mechanics states that each particle has a 50 percent chance of being spin up or spin down. If you measure one particle to be spin up, then you have collapsed the wave function and changed the probability of the second particle to be 100 percent spin down. So what happens when the two particles have moved apart? Entangled interactions are referred to as nonlocal interactions when the measurement of one of the particles would have to travel faster than the speed of light to collapse the wave function of the second particle. Einstein really did not like this, and referred to these interactions as "spooky," because one particle seems to instantaneously know what was measured on the other. Linking these two apparently separate phenomena is the concept of steerability. Steerability refers to the ability to influence the states of one particle with measurements made on another. If two people each have access to an entangled system, then they each have some idea of what measurements each other have made, and they can make educated guesses as to the states of each other's systems. What the researchers have shown is that the strength of nonlocal interactions is a tradeoff between steerability and uncertainty. The more influence one has on the system, the more uncertainty there is. And the more you decrease the uncertainty, the less you can steer the measurements. In a nutshell, the uncertainty principle puts a limit on the amount of information that an entangled system can hold. (ArsTechnica) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 30 Nov 10 - 01:35 PM July 31, 1858 The Atlantic Telegraph And so the great cable, on which the hopes of two worlds rested, has broken for the second time! We trust the next attempt will achieve the grand object, or at all events approximate nearer to success, for it must be confessed the last has been a more total failure than the first. The idea that two such nations as England and America will abandon the undertaking shows a great ignorance of our national character - since it is not likely a people who for three centuries continued its researches to discover a North-west Passage, for a mere theoretical object, will relinquish, after only two failures, one so practical and important as the instantaneous communication between Europe and America. We are disposed to think that the people on both sides the Atlantic will be more inclined to take counsel of the great Bruce, who, having been seven times defeated in his attempts to regain his crown, was lying one morning on his couch in despair, when he observed a spider endeavoring to reach a certain spot in the corner of his room - it failed - again it essayed, and failed again - thus on till the eighth time - when it at last succeeded! Bruce rose comported from his bed, and shaking the despair from his soul, made another attempt for his crown. We all know that he triumphed! We think with Bruce, that what a spider did man can do, and that despite the recent mishap, the cable will be eventually laid. The details of the disaster are very contradictory, although we have only the statement of the officers and engineers of the Niagara, who have somewhat prematurely, and disingenuously, we think, thrown all the blame on those on board the Agamemnon. We forbear to point out the manifest discrepancies, as a few days will put all right; but we do most thoroughly hope the blame really rests where our officers of the Niagara says it does, otherwise the national character will be compromised by their statements, should they prove unfounded. In so great an undertaking, and especially when so much more has been done by the British Government than by our own, it will, indeed, be a deplorable and humiliating thing, after the haste made by the staff of the Niagara to accuse their British associates, should the blame really rest with us instead of with our partners in the enterprise, since it will naturally indispose the English Government to admit us to any participation in their future, and we deliberately add, successful efforts. (News report of the period, reprinted in :The Atlantic" magazine) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 30 Nov 10 - 10:00 PM Physicists performed a Bell experiment between the islands of La Palma and Tenerife at an altitude of 2,400 m. Starting with an entangled pair of photons, one photon was sent 6 km away to Alice, and the other photon was sent 144 km away to Bob. The physicists took several steps to simultaneously close the locality loophole and freedom-of-choice loophole. The latest test in quantum mechanics provides even stronger support than before for the view that nature violates local realism and is thus in contradiction with a classical worldview. By performing an experiment in which photons were sent from one Canary Island to another, physicists have shown that two of three loopholes can be closed simultaneously in a test that violates Bell's inequality (and therefore local realism) by more than 16 standard deviations. Performing a Bell test that closes all three loopholes still remains a challenge, but the physicists predict that such an experiment might be "on the verge of being possible" with state-of-the-art technology. (PhysOrg.com) -- |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 01 Dec 10 - 09:27 AM The current widely-held theory of life, the universe, and everything holds that at some point roughly 13.7 billion years ago everything that now is was packed into a tight little package from which sprung the Big Bang, which violently hurled everything into existence. But 13.7 billion years to get to where we are isn't enough for renowned physicist Sir Roger Penrose, and now he thinks he can prove that things aren't/weren't quite so simple. Drawing on evidence he found in the cosmic microwave background, Penrose says the Big Bang wasn't the beginning, but one in a series of cyclical Big Bangs, each of which spawned its own universe. By Penrose's estimation, our universe is not the first – nor will it be the last – to spawn from a dense mass of highly-ordered everything into the complex universe we see around us. In fact, it's that high degree of order that was apparently present at the universe's birth that set him on this line of thought. The current Big Bang model doesn't supply a reason as to why a low entropy, highly ordered state existed at the birth of our universe unless things were set in order before the Big Bang occurred. According to Penrose, each universe returns to a state of low entropy as it approaches its final days of expanding into eventual nothingness. Black holes, by virtue of the fact that they suck in everything they encounter, spend their cosmic lifetimes working to scrub entropy from the universe. And as the universe nears the end of its expansion the black holes themselves evaporate, setting things back into a state of order. Unable to expand any further the universe then collapses back in on itself as a highly ordered system, ready to trigger the next Big Bang. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 01 Dec 10 - 03:41 PM During the period of the Witches Act there were two or three intense periods of fervent witch-hunting. One episode was triggered by the famous case of the North Berwick Witches. It is said that on Halloween 1590, a group of witches in North Berwick met to summon up a wind to shipwreck James VI of Scotland, who was returning home from Denmark with his new bride, Anne. A grand Sabbat was held, where the Devil appeared and gave his instructions. A cat was baptised and thrown into the sea causing the water to churn. Graves were robbed for the purpose of acquiring ingredients. Church doors were opened by means of a 'Band of Glory' - the hand of a murderer was cut from a corpse as it swung on the gibbet, Incantations were chanted and cauldrons bubbled. When all of this was done, the witches danced and frolicked in the kirk yard at North Berwick. Coincidentally the ship that the King was travelling on was disturbed by a storm. On his safe return to Scotland and much preoccupied with the notion of witchcraft, King James set about tracking down the culprits. Agnes Simpson, the principal witch, was tortured first and she gave a number of names. Among them, the King's cousin, the Earl of Bothwell. This was all that the King needed. Fearing for his life, a huge witch-hunt was launched and swept the country. The last main witch-hunt in Europe took place in Renfrewshire in 1697. Christian Shaw, the eleven-year old daughter of the Laird of Bargarran, accused a number of tenants and servants of bewitching her. She was an ill child who spent a lot of her time with the local minister - who no doubt encouraged her in her claims. Twenty people were accused on her evidence, and seven executed. With the coming of the age of enlightenment, however, the idea of flying, shape-changing witches lost favour, and the Act was quietly dropped. But it came too late for Janet Horne, who was accused of turning her daughter into a donkey and riding her to the witches' sabbats. For this she was burnt alive, the last person in Scotland to be executed for the crime of witchcraft. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: gnu Date: 01 Dec 10 - 03:57 PM A... do you ever sleep or are you zombie that stares at the screen 24/7? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 01 Dec 10 - 10:02 PM "Apple has been awarded a U.S. patent for a display system that would allow multiple viewers to see a high-quality 3D image projected on a screen without the need for special glasses, regardless of where they are sitting. Entertainment is far from the only field in which 3D can enhance the viewing experience: others include medical diagnostics, flight simulation, air traffic control, battlefield simulation, weather diagnostics, advertising and education, according to Apple's U.S. patent 7,843,449 for a 3D display system." Gnu: I have hired small children to do this for me... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: Amos Date: 02 Dec 10 - 09:41 AM MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-167 NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2 WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov. Participants are: - Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington - Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif. - Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. - Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla. - James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe Media representatives may attend the conference or ask questions by phone or from participating NASA locations. To obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Steve Cole at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov or call 202-358-0918 by noon Dec. 2. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over From: bobad Date: 02 Dec 10 - 02:03 PM Mystery Surrounds Cyber Missile That Crippled Iran's Nuclear Weapons Ambitions By Ed Barnes Published November 26, 2010 FoxNews.com In the 20th century, this would have been a job for James Bond. The mission: Infiltrate the highly advanced, securely guarded enemy headquarters where scientists in the clutches of an evil master are secretly building a weapon that can destroy the world. Then render that weapon harmless and escape undetected. But in the 21st century, Bond doesn't get the call. Instead, the job is handled by a suave and very sophisticated secret computer worm, a jumble of code called Stuxnet, which in the last year has not only crippled Iran's nuclear program but has caused a major rethinking of computer security around the globe. Intelligence agencies, computer security companies and the nuclear industry have been trying to analyze the worm since it was discovered in June by a Belarus-based company that was doing business in Iran. And what they've all found, says Sean McGurk, the Homeland Security Department's acting director of national cyber security and communications integration, is a "game changer." The construction of the worm was so advanced, it was "like the arrival of an F-35 into a World War I battlefield," says Ralph Langner, the computer expert who was the first to sound the alarm about Stuxnet. Others have called it the first "weaponized" computer virus. Simply put, Stuxnet is an incredibly advanced, undetectable computer worm that took years to construct and was designed to jump from computer to computer until it found the specific, protected control system that it aimed to destroy: Iran's nuclear enrichment program. The target was seemingly impenetrable; for security reasons, it lay several stories underground and was not connected to the World Wide Web. And that meant Stuxnet had to act as sort of a computer cruise missile: As it made its passage through a set of unconnected computers, it had to grow and adapt to security measures and other changes until it reached one that could bring it into the nuclear facility. When it ultimately found its target, it would have to secretly manipulate it until it was so compromised it ceased normal functions. And finally, after the job was done, the worm would have to destroy itself without leaving a trace. That is what we are learning happened at Iran's nuclear facilities -- both at Natanz, which houses the centrifuge arrays used for processing uranium into nuclear fuel, and, to a lesser extent, at Bushehr, Iran's nuclear power plant. At Natanz, for almost 17 months, Stuxnet quietly worked its way into the system and targeted a specific component -- the frequency converters made by the German equipment manufacturer Siemens that regulated the speed of the spinning centrifuges used to create nuclear fuel. The worm then took control of the speed at which the centrifuges spun, making them turn so fast in a quick burst that they would be damaged but not destroyed. And at the same time, the worm masked that change in speed from being discovered at the centrifuges' control panel. At Bushehr, meanwhile, a second secret set of codes, which Langner called "digital warheads," targeted the Russian-built power plant's massive steam turbine. Here's how it worked, according to experts who have examined the worm: --The nuclear facility in Iran runs an "air gap" security system, meaning it has no connections to the Web, making it secure from outside penetration. Stuxnet was designed and sent into the area around Iran's Natanz nuclear power plant -- just how may never be known -- to infect a number of computers on the assumption that someone working in the plant would take work home on a flash drive, acquire the worm and then bring it back to the plant. --Once the worm was inside the plant, the next step was to get the computer system there to trust it and allow it into the system. That was accomplished because the worm contained a "digital certificate" stolen from JMicron, a large company in an industrial park in Taiwan. (When the worm was later discovered it quickly replaced the original digital certificate with another certificate, also stolen from another company, Realtek, a few doors down in the same industrial park in Taiwan.) --Once allowed entry, the worm contained four "Zero Day" elements in its first target, the Windows 7 operating system that controlled the overall operation of the plant. Zero Day elements are rare and extremely valuable vulnerabilities in a computer system that can be exploited only once. Two of the vulnerabilities were known, but the other two had never been discovered. Experts say no hacker would waste Zero Days in that manner. --After penetrating the Windows 7 operating system, the code then targeted the "frequency converters" that ran the centrifuges. To do that it used specifications from the manufacturers of the converters. One was Vacon, a Finnish Company, and the other Fararo Paya, an Iranian company. What surprises experts at this step is that the Iranian company was so secret that not even the IAEA knew about it. --The worm also knew that the complex control system that ran the centrifuges was built by Siemens, the German manufacturer, and -- remarkably -- how that system worked as well and how to mask its activities from it. --Masking itself from the plant's security and other systems, the worm then ordered the centrifuges to rotate extremely fast, and then to slow down precipitously. This damaged the converter, the centrifuges and the bearings, and it corrupted the uranium in the tubes. It also left Iranian nuclear engineers wondering what was wrong, as computer checks showed no malfunctions in the operating system. Estimates are that this went on for more than a year, leaving the Iranian program in chaos. And as it did, the worm grew and adapted throughout the system. As new worms entered the system, they would meet and adapt and become increasingly sophisticated. During this time the worms reported back to two servers that had to be run by intelligence agencies, one in Denmark and one in Malaysia. The servers monitored the worms and were shut down once the worm had infiltrated Natanz. Efforts to find those servers since then have yielded no results. This went on until June of last year, when a Belarusan company working on the Iranian power plant in Beshehr discovered it in one of its machines. It quickly put out a notice on a Web network monitored by computer security experts around the world. Ordinarily these experts would immediately begin tracing the worm and dissecting it, looking for clues about its origin and other details. But that didn't happen, because within minutes all the alert sites came under attack and were inoperative for 24 hours. "I had to use e-mail to send notices but I couldn't reach everyone. Whoever made the worm had a full day to eliminate all traces of the worm that might lead us them," Eric Byres, a computer security expert who has examined the Stuxnet. "No hacker could have done that." Experts, including inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, say that, despite Iran's claims to the contrary, the worm was successful in its goal: causing confusion among Iran's nuclear engineers and disabling their nuclear program. Because of the secrecy surrounding the Iranian program, no one can be certain of the full extent of the damage. But sources inside Iran and elsewhere say that the Iranian centrifuge program has been operating far below its capacity and that the uranium enrichment program had "stagnated" during the time the worm penetrated the underground facility. Only 4,000 of the 9,000 centrifuges Iran was known to have were put into use. Some suspect that is because of the critical need to replace ones that were damaged. And the limited number of those in use dwindled to an estimated 3,700 as problems engulfed their operation. IAEA inspectors say the sabotage better explains the slowness of the program, which they had earlier attributed to poor equipment manufacturing and management problems. As Iranians struggled with the setbacks, they began searching for signs of sabotage. From inside Iran there have been unconfirmed reports that the head of the plant was fired shortly after the worm wended its way into the system and began creating technical problems, and that some scientists who were suspected of espionage disappeared or were executed. And counter intelligence agents began monitoring all communications between scientists at the site, creating a climate of fear and paranoia. Iran has adamantly stated that its nuclear program has not been hit by the bug. But in doing so it has backhandedly confirmed that its nuclear facilities were compromised. When Hamid Alipour, head of the nation's Information Technology Company, announced in September that 30,000 Iranian computers had been hit by the worm but the nuclear facilities were safe, he added that among those hit were the personal computers of the scientists at the nuclear facilities. Experts say that Natanz and Bushehr could not have escaped the worm if it was in their engineers' computers. "We brought it into our lab to study it and even with precautions it spread everywhere at incredible speed," Byres said. "The worm was designed not to destroy the plants but to make them ineffective. By changing the rotation speeds, the bearings quickly wear out and the equipment has to be replaced and repaired. The speed changes also impact the quality of the uranium processed in the centrifuges creating technical problems that make the plant ineffective," he explained. In other words the worm was designed to allow the Iranian program to continue but never succeed, and never to know why. One additional impact that can be attributed to the worm, according to David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Studies, is that "the lives of the scientists working in the facility have become a living hell because of counter-intelligence agents brought into the plant" to battle the breach. Ironically, even after its discovery, the worm has succeeded in slowing down Iran's reputed effort to build an atomic weapon. And Langer says that the efforts by the Iranians to cleanse Stuxnet from their system "will probably take another year to complete," and during that time the plant will not be able to function anywhere normally. But as the extent of the worm's capabilities is being understood, its genius and complexity has created another perplexing question: Who did it? Speculation on the worm's origin initially focused on hackers or even companies trying to disrupt competitors. But as engineers tore apart the virus they learned not only the depth of the code, its complex targeting mechanism, (despite infecting more than 100,000 computers it has only done damage at Natanz,) the enormous amount of work that went into it—Microsoft estimated that it consumed 10,000 man days of labor-- and about what the worm knew, the clues narrowed the number of players that have the capabilities to create it to a handful. "This is what nation-states build, if their only other option would be to go to war," Joseph Wouk, an Israeli security expert wrote. Byers is more certain. "It is a military weapon," he said. And much of what the worm "knew" could only have come from a consortium of Western intelligence agencies, experts who have examined the code now believe. Originally, all eyes turned toward Israel's intelligence agencies. Engineers examining the worm found "clues" that hinted at Israel's involvement. In one case they found the word "Myrtus" embedded in the code and argued that it was a reference to Esther, the biblical figure who saved the ancient Jewish state from the Persians. But computer experts say "Myrtus" is more likely a common reference to "My RTUS," or remote terminal units. Langer argues that no single Western intelligence agency had the skills to pull this off alone. The most likely answer, he says, is that a consortium of intelligence agencies worked together to build the cyber bomb. And he says the most likely confederates are the United States, because it has the technical skills to make the virus, Germany, because reverse-engineering Siemen's product would have taken years without it, and Russia, because of its familiarity with both the Iranian nuclear plant and Siemen's systems. There is one clue that was left in the code that may tell us all we need to know. Embedded in different section of the code is another common computer language reference, but this one is misspelled. Instead of saying "DEADFOOT," a term stolen from pilots meaning a failed engine, this one reads "DEADFOO7." Yes, OO7 has returned -- as a computer worm. Stuxnet. Shaken, not stirred. |
