///////////////////Physicists Discover Gold Can Be Magnetic on the Nanoscale
Atlanta (February 28, 2008) —Physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have made two important findings regarding gold on the nanoscale. They found that applying an electrical field on a surface-supported gold nanocluster changes its structure from a three-dimensional one to a planar flat structure. In another paper, they relate their discovery that gold in this size regime can be made magnetic through oxygenation of gold nanowires. They also found that up to a certain length, oxygenated gold nanowires behave as a conducting metal, but beyond that, they become insulators. This marks the first time on the nanoscale that such a metal-to-insulation transition has been found on the nanoscale. Both findings are important predictions that could some day be implemented as control parameters governing the chemical and physical material properties employed in nanotechnology.
//////////////////THE JOY OF NOT BEING SOLD ANYTHING
////////////////LOSING AN ELECTRON MAKES U POSITIVE=PMA
////////////////<21 IN EDUCN AND TRAINING
>65,OAP=REDUCED FARE BUS PASSES
/////////////////////"If you can piss in it, it's craft. If you can piss on it, it's art." -froslov
/////////////////
The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer."
Victor Borge
///////////////////
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."
Jack Handey
/////////////////////
Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do."
Voltaire
//////////////////BREAKFST IN LINDON,LUNCH IN NEW YORK,LUGGAGE IN ANKARA-CONCORD
////////////////
A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking."
Arthur Block
///////////////////
Erotic is when you use a feather. Kinky is when you use the whole chicken."
Unknown
///////////////////
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!"
but "That's funny ...
////////////////////
Saturday 29 March 2008
Friday 28 March 2008
CDS 290308-OCD 312
//////////////EXIT INSURANCE POLICY
///////////////Agence France-Presse reportedFrench euthanasia woman overdosed on barbiturates: prosecutorDIJON, France (AFP) ? A severely disfigured French woman, found dead this month after a court rejected her request for euthanasia, took a lethal overdose of barbiturates, a prosecutor said on Thursday.Former schoolteacher Chantal Sebire, 52, suffered from a rare and incurable tumour which severely deformed her face and caused her to lose the sense of smell, taste and finally her eyesight.Her body was found at her home in Plombieres-les-Dijon on March 19, two days after the high court in the eastern French city of Dijon decided current French law did not allow her doctor to prescribe her lethal drugs."The tests conducted reveal the presence in the blood of a toxic concentration of barbiturate, Pentobarbital," prosecutor Jean-Pierre Alacchi told reporters in Dijon."The concentration found is three times the lethal level for this product," he said, adding that investigators were working to establish how Sebire obtained the drug, which is not delivered by French pharmacies.The drug Pentobarbital is commonly used for animal euthanasia and can be legally prescribed for assisted human suicide in Switzerland, Belgium and the US state of Oregon.In her request to the high court, Sebire said she wanted to put an end to "atrocious suffering" and an irreversible worsening of her condition, called an esthesioneuroblastoma.The mother-of-three had said she would not appeal the decision and that she would find life-terminating drugs through other means.Before-and-after pictures of Sebire, along with her account of frightened children who ran away at the sight of her, attracted a strong outpouring of sympathy in France.The case prompted doctors, politicians and intellectuals calling for a debate on a change to French law to allow euthanasia in exceptional cases.Legislation adopted in 2005 allows families to request that life-support equipment for a terminally-ill patient be switched off, but does not allow a doctor to take action to end a patient's life.Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are the only European Union countries that currently allow active euthanasia.
/////////////////RTD
//////////////////PHYSORG=Why matter matters in the universe
A new physics discovery explores why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. The latest research findings, which involved significant contributions from physicists at the University of Melbourne, have been recently published in the prestigious journal Nature.
Sponsored Links (Ads by Google)
Quark and monopole - An alternative explanation of strong and nuclear forces www-nuclear.tau.ac.il
Origin of the Universe - "Was it Created by - God?" Astronomy, The Big Bang & DNA www.CelestialMechanic.com
The Theory of Everything - Some physicists think the mind is at the heart of modern physics. NewPhysicsAndTheMind.net
The paper reveals that investigation into the process of B-meson decays has given insight into why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. “B-mesons are a new frontier of investigation for us and have proved very exciting in the formation of new thought in the field of particle physics.” said Associate Professor Martin Sevior of the University’s School of Physics who led the research. Sevior says that B-mesons contain heavy quarks that can only be created in very high energy particle accelerators. Their decays provide a powerful means of probing the exotic conditions that occurred in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang created the Universe. “Our universe is made up almost completely of matter. While we’re entirely used to this idea, this does not agree with our ideas of how mass and energy interact. According to these theories there should not be enough mass to enable the formation of stars and hence life.” “In our standard model of particle physics, matter and antimatter are almost identical. Accordingly as they mix in the early universe they annihilate one another leaving very little to form stars and galaxies. The model does not come close to explaining the difference between matter and antimatter we see in the nature. The imbalance is a trillion times bigger than the model predicts.”
Sponsored Links (Ads by Google)
"The Secret" Movie Unleash your self power & gain more joy with hidden ebooks behind moviewww.SecretsofTheSecret.com
Science Worksheets Help For Teaching SATs Register Today To Improve Learning!www.EdPlace.co.uk/Science
Science News Get the latest science news from the UK and around the World.www.independent.co.uk/ScienceSevior says that this inconsistency between the model and the universe implies there is a new principle of physics that we haven’t yet discovered. “Together with our colleagues in the Belle experiment, based at KEK in Japan, we have produced vast numbers of B mesons with the world’s most intense particle collider.” “We then looked at how the B-mesons decay as opposed to how the anti-B-mesons decay. What we find is that there are small differences in these processes. While most of our measurements confirm predictions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, this new result appears to be in disagreement.” “It is a very exciting discovery because our paper provides a hint as to what the new principle of physics is that led to our Universe being able to support life.”
/////////////////The Mysterious Case of Two Spheres Falling to Earth in Australia and Brazil
On the March 24th, a story hit the web from Brazil asking for help identifying a mysterious-looking sphere found in farmland. The black, shiny object appeared to be wrapped in fibrous material and it was hot to the touch. Immediately thoughts of extra-terrestrial origin came to mind…
Today, several news sources covered the discovery of a mysterious spherical object found in the Australian outback last year. The farmer who made the discovery has only just started to make enquiries into what the object actually is.
So are the two objects connected in some way? Are they indeed from outer space? (more…)
/////////////////ut=
///////////////DEEP CLEANING THE WARD 7
/////////////////Darkness Washes Around The Globe As Earth Hour Descends
35 countries, 26 major cities, 370 towns and literally tens of millions of people… What do they all have in common?
They're all switching off their lights for one hour at 8:00 pm local time in a now staggering global event known as Earth Hour. From around the world, Universe Today readers made a huge impact. (more…)
//////////////////MRSA AND C DIFF
/////////////////////Hawaiian Man Files Lawsuit Against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is set to go online in May of this year. This magnificent machine will accelerate particles and collide them at such high energies that scientists expect to make some of the biggest discoveries ever about the very small (exotic sub-atomic particles) and the very large (the structure of the Universe itself).
But not everyone is happy. Particle accelerators have always been the source of controversy; at the end of the day, we can only predict the outcome of the LHC experiments. But what if scientists have overlooked something? What if the theories are wrong? A guy living on the other side of the planet to the LHC believes the world may come to an end and he's begun filing a lawsuit against the completion of the accelerator. The concern? A massive black hole might be created, or vast amounts of antimatter will destroy the Earth. And where's the scientific basis for all this panic? Hmmm… didn't think so… (more…)
////////////////////Why There's More Matter Than Antimatter in the Universe
In the first few moments of the Universe, enormous amounts of both matter and antimatter were created, and then moments later combined and annihilated generating the energy that drove the expansion of the Universe. But for some reason, there was an infinitesimal amount more matter than antimatter. Everything that we see today was that tiny fraction of matter that remained.
But why? Why was there more matter than antimatter right after the Big Bang? Researchers from the University of Melbourne think they might have an insight. (more…)
//////////////////////Galaxy Zoo Results Show that the Universe Isn't 'Lopsided'
In July of last year, the doors of the online galaxy classification site Galaxy Zoo opened for business. The response? Tens of thousands of people logged-in to begin classifying galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. If you've been one of the users madly clicking away at galaxies on the Zoo, this is what you've been waiting for: the first results have been submitted for publication, and it turns out that our Universe is, in fact, not 'lopsided'. (more…)
//////////////////////13.73 Billion Years - The Most Precise Measurement of the Age of the Universe Yet
NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has taken the best measurement of the age of the Universe to date. According to highly precise observations of microwave radiation observed all over the cosmos, WMAP scientists now have the best estimate yet on the age of the Universe: 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years (that's an error margin of only 0.87%… not bad really…). (more…)
BBTBR=13.73BYA BB
/////////////////////WELL LEAVE IT THERE
////////////////
Human noses 'can detect danger'
Our noses can quickly learn to link even subtle changes in smell with danger, claim scientists.
Volunteers who could not differentiate between two similar smells found they could do it easily after being given a mild electric shock alongside one.
Brain scans confirmed the change in the "smelling" part of the brain.
The US research, published in the journal Science, suggests our distant ancestors evolved the ability to keep us away from predators.
/////////////////////////Today is Mar 29, 2008.Autumn wins you best by this, its mute Appeal to sympathy for its decay.~Robert Browning, Paracelsus (sc. 1)~
//////////////////SPRING FORWARD AUTUMN DECAY
//////////////////100 YA STSMN=Yesterday afternoon at 3-24 the Viceroy left Howrah for Manikpur by special train. The departure was private and the usual salute was fired at Fort William. Several European officials and Indian gentlemen were at the Howrah Station to see His Excellency off.
/////////////////œAs long as a word remains unspoken, you are its master; once you utter it, you are its slave.â€
////////////////œHow quickly passes away the glory of this worldâ
////////////////////XOD=
Warren Buffett, World's Richest Man of 2008 with $62 Billion Worth of Assets
Posted: 28 Mar 2008 04:48 PM CDT
Warren Buffett is currently the world's richest man as of March 2008. This 77-year-old native of Omaha, Nebraska, has an estimated $62 billion worth of assets. His businesses includes insurance, jewelry , utilities, food, among others.
America's most beloved investor is now the world's richest man. Soared past friend and bridge partner Bill Gates as shares of Berkshire Hathaway climbed 25% since the middle of last July. Son of Nebraska politician delivered newspapers as a boy. Filed first tax return at age 13, claiming $35 deduction for bicycle. Studied under value investing guru Benjamin Graham at Columbia. Took over textile firm Berkshire Hathaway 1965.Link
////////////////////Greg Kolodziejzyk, Travelled 647 Miles in One Day Under His Own Power
Posted: 28 Mar 2008 07:01 AM CDT
If you are wondering how much distance man can travel in 24 hours under his own power, Greg Kolodziejzyk can tell you that. He travelled 647 Miles in one day under his own power and sets the Guinness World Record.
Greg Kolodziejzyk is a retired entrepreneur on a mission to break the existing 24 hour human powered distance record of 1021.36 km set in 1995. That's almost the distance from a snow shovel in Calgary to a palm tree in California. He has exactly 24 hours to do it and it will be strictly under his own power. No wind or stored energy of any sort allowed. Greg designed and built a custom carbon fiber bicycle called "Critical Power". More appropriately called a "Human powered vehicle", Critical Power is a two wheeled recumbent bicycle encapsulated by a bullet-like streamlined body called a fairing. The sleek body was computer designed for maximum aerodynamic efficiency by Ben Eadie of Mountain-wave.ca. CP is capable of achieving speeds in excess of 100 km per hour and was built to maintain a cruising speed of 50 kph on a flat road with effort levels that would see a paltry 20 kph on a typical mountain bike.
////////////////MCCARTNEY-65
///////////////////Challenger Deep, The Deepest Surveyed Point in the Ocean
Posted: 28 Mar 2008 06:43 AM CDT
With about 11,000 meters deep, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench is the deepest surveyed point in the Ocean. At this depth, the pressure is approximately 1,095 times that at the surface, or over 16,000 pounds per square inch.
The Challenger Deep is the deepest surveyed point in the oceans, with a depth of about 11,000 metres (about 36,000 feet). It lies in the Mariana Islands group at the southern end of the Mariana Trench. The closest land is Fais Island, one of the outer islands of Yap, 289 km southwest and Guam 306 km to the northeast. The point is named after the British Royal Navy survey ship HMS Challenger, which first discovered the trench in 1872.Link
//////////////////
HILDREN TOLD TO SIT DOWN AND SHUT THE F*CK UP FOR 18 YEARS
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CHILDREN should just shut it and do as they are told for once in their fucking lives, according to the results of a major academic study.
It's called The Big Book of Shutting the Fuck UpResearchers at Glasgow Clyde University found that instead of being treated like equals and asked for their opinion on a wide range of issues, children should button their fucking lips and remember who pays the sodding bills round here.
Professor Henry Brubaker said: "There has been a move in recent years to include children in decision making and respect their opinions. Why? They're idiots."Even doctors are now being told to take children seriously. So when some moronic little turd comes in with a 50p piece rammed up his nose, the GP is supposed to chat to him about interest rates? Give me a fucking break."We studied 50 children over a two-week period and concluded that rather than indulging these ghastly, violent, cheeky little shits, perhaps we should concentrate on feeding them three times a day and making sure they do outlandish things like their homework, brushing their teeth and going to bed at a reasonable hour. All the while telling them to sit down and shut the fuck up on a regular basis."He added: "Once you've established a pattern you can then carry on doing that right up to the point where they find a job and get the fuck out of my house."But Kyle Stephenson, 12, a spokesman for the British Youth Parliament, said: "Children have a right to be heard. In fact, I have just finished writing a really important thing about the environment. "It's called Why Can't People Just Stop Doing Things That Are Bad And Start Doing Things That Are Really Good Instead.
"The Prime Minister has asked me to start work at the Number 10 Policy Unit as soon as my balls drop."
//////////////////DLY MASH
/////////////////ME TIME ON CMPTR
////////////////
///////////////Agence France-Presse reportedFrench euthanasia woman overdosed on barbiturates: prosecutorDIJON, France (AFP) ? A severely disfigured French woman, found dead this month after a court rejected her request for euthanasia, took a lethal overdose of barbiturates, a prosecutor said on Thursday.Former schoolteacher Chantal Sebire, 52, suffered from a rare and incurable tumour which severely deformed her face and caused her to lose the sense of smell, taste and finally her eyesight.Her body was found at her home in Plombieres-les-Dijon on March 19, two days after the high court in the eastern French city of Dijon decided current French law did not allow her doctor to prescribe her lethal drugs."The tests conducted reveal the presence in the blood of a toxic concentration of barbiturate, Pentobarbital," prosecutor Jean-Pierre Alacchi told reporters in Dijon."The concentration found is three times the lethal level for this product," he said, adding that investigators were working to establish how Sebire obtained the drug, which is not delivered by French pharmacies.The drug Pentobarbital is commonly used for animal euthanasia and can be legally prescribed for assisted human suicide in Switzerland, Belgium and the US state of Oregon.In her request to the high court, Sebire said she wanted to put an end to "atrocious suffering" and an irreversible worsening of her condition, called an esthesioneuroblastoma.The mother-of-three had said she would not appeal the decision and that she would find life-terminating drugs through other means.Before-and-after pictures of Sebire, along with her account of frightened children who ran away at the sight of her, attracted a strong outpouring of sympathy in France.The case prompted doctors, politicians and intellectuals calling for a debate on a change to French law to allow euthanasia in exceptional cases.Legislation adopted in 2005 allows families to request that life-support equipment for a terminally-ill patient be switched off, but does not allow a doctor to take action to end a patient's life.Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are the only European Union countries that currently allow active euthanasia.
/////////////////RTD
//////////////////PHYSORG=Why matter matters in the universe
A new physics discovery explores why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. The latest research findings, which involved significant contributions from physicists at the University of Melbourne, have been recently published in the prestigious journal Nature.
Sponsored Links (Ads by Google)
Quark and monopole - An alternative explanation of strong and nuclear forces www-nuclear.tau.ac.il
Origin of the Universe - "Was it Created by - God?" Astronomy, The Big Bang & DNA www.CelestialMechanic.com
The Theory of Everything - Some physicists think the mind is at the heart of modern physics. NewPhysicsAndTheMind.net
The paper reveals that investigation into the process of B-meson decays has given insight into why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. “B-mesons are a new frontier of investigation for us and have proved very exciting in the formation of new thought in the field of particle physics.” said Associate Professor Martin Sevior of the University’s School of Physics who led the research. Sevior says that B-mesons contain heavy quarks that can only be created in very high energy particle accelerators. Their decays provide a powerful means of probing the exotic conditions that occurred in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang created the Universe. “Our universe is made up almost completely of matter. While we’re entirely used to this idea, this does not agree with our ideas of how mass and energy interact. According to these theories there should not be enough mass to enable the formation of stars and hence life.” “In our standard model of particle physics, matter and antimatter are almost identical. Accordingly as they mix in the early universe they annihilate one another leaving very little to form stars and galaxies. The model does not come close to explaining the difference between matter and antimatter we see in the nature. The imbalance is a trillion times bigger than the model predicts.”
Sponsored Links (Ads by Google)
"The Secret" Movie Unleash your self power & gain more joy with hidden ebooks behind moviewww.SecretsofTheSecret.com
Science Worksheets Help For Teaching SATs Register Today To Improve Learning!www.EdPlace.co.uk/Science
Science News Get the latest science news from the UK and around the World.www.independent.co.uk/ScienceSevior says that this inconsistency between the model and the universe implies there is a new principle of physics that we haven’t yet discovered. “Together with our colleagues in the Belle experiment, based at KEK in Japan, we have produced vast numbers of B mesons with the world’s most intense particle collider.” “We then looked at how the B-mesons decay as opposed to how the anti-B-mesons decay. What we find is that there are small differences in these processes. While most of our measurements confirm predictions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, this new result appears to be in disagreement.” “It is a very exciting discovery because our paper provides a hint as to what the new principle of physics is that led to our Universe being able to support life.”
/////////////////The Mysterious Case of Two Spheres Falling to Earth in Australia and Brazil
On the March 24th, a story hit the web from Brazil asking for help identifying a mysterious-looking sphere found in farmland. The black, shiny object appeared to be wrapped in fibrous material and it was hot to the touch. Immediately thoughts of extra-terrestrial origin came to mind…
Today, several news sources covered the discovery of a mysterious spherical object found in the Australian outback last year. The farmer who made the discovery has only just started to make enquiries into what the object actually is.
So are the two objects connected in some way? Are they indeed from outer space? (more…)
/////////////////ut=
///////////////DEEP CLEANING THE WARD 7
/////////////////Darkness Washes Around The Globe As Earth Hour Descends
35 countries, 26 major cities, 370 towns and literally tens of millions of people… What do they all have in common?
They're all switching off their lights for one hour at 8:00 pm local time in a now staggering global event known as Earth Hour. From around the world, Universe Today readers made a huge impact. (more…)
//////////////////MRSA AND C DIFF
/////////////////////Hawaiian Man Files Lawsuit Against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is set to go online in May of this year. This magnificent machine will accelerate particles and collide them at such high energies that scientists expect to make some of the biggest discoveries ever about the very small (exotic sub-atomic particles) and the very large (the structure of the Universe itself).
But not everyone is happy. Particle accelerators have always been the source of controversy; at the end of the day, we can only predict the outcome of the LHC experiments. But what if scientists have overlooked something? What if the theories are wrong? A guy living on the other side of the planet to the LHC believes the world may come to an end and he's begun filing a lawsuit against the completion of the accelerator. The concern? A massive black hole might be created, or vast amounts of antimatter will destroy the Earth. And where's the scientific basis for all this panic? Hmmm… didn't think so… (more…)
////////////////////Why There's More Matter Than Antimatter in the Universe
In the first few moments of the Universe, enormous amounts of both matter and antimatter were created, and then moments later combined and annihilated generating the energy that drove the expansion of the Universe. But for some reason, there was an infinitesimal amount more matter than antimatter. Everything that we see today was that tiny fraction of matter that remained.
But why? Why was there more matter than antimatter right after the Big Bang? Researchers from the University of Melbourne think they might have an insight. (more…)
//////////////////////Galaxy Zoo Results Show that the Universe Isn't 'Lopsided'
In July of last year, the doors of the online galaxy classification site Galaxy Zoo opened for business. The response? Tens of thousands of people logged-in to begin classifying galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. If you've been one of the users madly clicking away at galaxies on the Zoo, this is what you've been waiting for: the first results have been submitted for publication, and it turns out that our Universe is, in fact, not 'lopsided'. (more…)
//////////////////////13.73 Billion Years - The Most Precise Measurement of the Age of the Universe Yet
NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has taken the best measurement of the age of the Universe to date. According to highly precise observations of microwave radiation observed all over the cosmos, WMAP scientists now have the best estimate yet on the age of the Universe: 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years (that's an error margin of only 0.87%… not bad really…). (more…)
BBTBR=13.73BYA BB
/////////////////////WELL LEAVE IT THERE
////////////////
Human noses 'can detect danger'
Our noses can quickly learn to link even subtle changes in smell with danger, claim scientists.
Volunteers who could not differentiate between two similar smells found they could do it easily after being given a mild electric shock alongside one.
Brain scans confirmed the change in the "smelling" part of the brain.
The US research, published in the journal Science, suggests our distant ancestors evolved the ability to keep us away from predators.
/////////////////////////Today is Mar 29, 2008.Autumn wins you best by this, its mute Appeal to sympathy for its decay.~Robert Browning, Paracelsus (sc. 1)~
//////////////////SPRING FORWARD AUTUMN DECAY
//////////////////100 YA STSMN=Yesterday afternoon at 3-24 the Viceroy left Howrah for Manikpur by special train. The departure was private and the usual salute was fired at Fort William. Several European officials and Indian gentlemen were at the Howrah Station to see His Excellency off.
/////////////////œAs long as a word remains unspoken, you are its master; once you utter it, you are its slave.â€
////////////////œHow quickly passes away the glory of this worldâ
////////////////////XOD=
Warren Buffett, World's Richest Man of 2008 with $62 Billion Worth of Assets
Posted: 28 Mar 2008 04:48 PM CDT
Warren Buffett is currently the world's richest man as of March 2008. This 77-year-old native of Omaha, Nebraska, has an estimated $62 billion worth of assets. His businesses includes insurance, jewelry , utilities, food, among others.
America's most beloved investor is now the world's richest man. Soared past friend and bridge partner Bill Gates as shares of Berkshire Hathaway climbed 25% since the middle of last July. Son of Nebraska politician delivered newspapers as a boy. Filed first tax return at age 13, claiming $35 deduction for bicycle. Studied under value investing guru Benjamin Graham at Columbia. Took over textile firm Berkshire Hathaway 1965.Link
////////////////////Greg Kolodziejzyk, Travelled 647 Miles in One Day Under His Own Power
Posted: 28 Mar 2008 07:01 AM CDT
If you are wondering how much distance man can travel in 24 hours under his own power, Greg Kolodziejzyk can tell you that. He travelled 647 Miles in one day under his own power and sets the Guinness World Record.
Greg Kolodziejzyk is a retired entrepreneur on a mission to break the existing 24 hour human powered distance record of 1021.36 km set in 1995. That's almost the distance from a snow shovel in Calgary to a palm tree in California. He has exactly 24 hours to do it and it will be strictly under his own power. No wind or stored energy of any sort allowed. Greg designed and built a custom carbon fiber bicycle called "Critical Power". More appropriately called a "Human powered vehicle", Critical Power is a two wheeled recumbent bicycle encapsulated by a bullet-like streamlined body called a fairing. The sleek body was computer designed for maximum aerodynamic efficiency by Ben Eadie of Mountain-wave.ca. CP is capable of achieving speeds in excess of 100 km per hour and was built to maintain a cruising speed of 50 kph on a flat road with effort levels that would see a paltry 20 kph on a typical mountain bike.
////////////////MCCARTNEY-65
///////////////////Challenger Deep, The Deepest Surveyed Point in the Ocean
Posted: 28 Mar 2008 06:43 AM CDT
With about 11,000 meters deep, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench is the deepest surveyed point in the Ocean. At this depth, the pressure is approximately 1,095 times that at the surface, or over 16,000 pounds per square inch.
The Challenger Deep is the deepest surveyed point in the oceans, with a depth of about 11,000 metres (about 36,000 feet). It lies in the Mariana Islands group at the southern end of the Mariana Trench. The closest land is Fais Island, one of the outer islands of Yap, 289 km southwest and Guam 306 km to the northeast. The point is named after the British Royal Navy survey ship HMS Challenger, which first discovered the trench in 1872.Link
//////////////////
HILDREN TOLD TO SIT DOWN AND SHUT THE F*CK UP FOR 18 YEARS
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CHILDREN should just shut it and do as they are told for once in their fucking lives, according to the results of a major academic study.
It's called The Big Book of Shutting the Fuck UpResearchers at Glasgow Clyde University found that instead of being treated like equals and asked for their opinion on a wide range of issues, children should button their fucking lips and remember who pays the sodding bills round here.
Professor Henry Brubaker said: "There has been a move in recent years to include children in decision making and respect their opinions. Why? They're idiots."Even doctors are now being told to take children seriously. So when some moronic little turd comes in with a 50p piece rammed up his nose, the GP is supposed to chat to him about interest rates? Give me a fucking break."We studied 50 children over a two-week period and concluded that rather than indulging these ghastly, violent, cheeky little shits, perhaps we should concentrate on feeding them three times a day and making sure they do outlandish things like their homework, brushing their teeth and going to bed at a reasonable hour. All the while telling them to sit down and shut the fuck up on a regular basis."He added: "Once you've established a pattern you can then carry on doing that right up to the point where they find a job and get the fuck out of my house."But Kyle Stephenson, 12, a spokesman for the British Youth Parliament, said: "Children have a right to be heard. In fact, I have just finished writing a really important thing about the environment. "It's called Why Can't People Just Stop Doing Things That Are Bad And Start Doing Things That Are Really Good Instead.
"The Prime Minister has asked me to start work at the Number 10 Policy Unit as soon as my balls drop."
//////////////////DLY MASH
/////////////////ME TIME ON CMPTR
////////////////
CDS 280308-SSTR TB TURNS 40
//////////////////////He who is afraid to ask is ashamed of learning.-- Danish Proverb He who never made a mistake never made a discovery.-- Samuel Smiles
////////////////////////Learn to Be KindScientificAmerican.com Mar. 28, 2008*************************University of Wisconsin-Madisonscientists says imaging technologyshows that people who practicemeditation that focuses on kindnessand compassion actually undergochanges in areas of the brain thatmake them more in tune to whatothers are feeling....http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=8280&m=33138
/////////////////////Read books not TV watches.Read books, magazines or anything that interests an insomniac instead of watching television. Television enhances attention, which makes a person awake. Reading on the other hand while in bed causes the eye to get tired and creates a sleepy feeling.
///////////////////Bhagavad Gita Selection Number 280, for Friday, March 28, 2008From Chapter XIII: The Yoga of the Division Between the Field and the Knower of the FieldXIII.3. KSHETRAJNAM CHAAPI MAAM VIDDHI SARVAKSHETRESHU BHAARATA; KSHETRAKSHETRAJNAYOR JNAANAM YATTAT JNAANAM MATAM MAMA. (Krishna speaking to Arjuna)Do thou also know Me as the Knower of the Field in all fields, OArjuna! Knowledge of both the Field and the Knower of the Field isconsidered by Me to be the knowledge. XIII.4. TAT KSHETRAM YACCHA YAADRIK CHA YADVIKAARI YATASHCHA YAT; SA CHA YO YATPRABHAAVASHCHA TATSAMAASENA ME SHRINU. What the Field is and of what nature, what its modifications areand whence it is, and also who He is and what His powers are-hearall that from Me in brief.
BBTBR-PANGON
/////////////////////
////////////////////////Learn to Be KindScientificAmerican.com Mar. 28, 2008*************************University of Wisconsin-Madisonscientists says imaging technologyshows that people who practicemeditation that focuses on kindnessand compassion actually undergochanges in areas of the brain thatmake them more in tune to whatothers are feeling....http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=8280&m=33138
/////////////////////Read books not TV watches.Read books, magazines or anything that interests an insomniac instead of watching television. Television enhances attention, which makes a person awake. Reading on the other hand while in bed causes the eye to get tired and creates a sleepy feeling.
///////////////////Bhagavad Gita Selection Number 280, for Friday, March 28, 2008From Chapter XIII: The Yoga of the Division Between the Field and the Knower of the FieldXIII.3. KSHETRAJNAM CHAAPI MAAM VIDDHI SARVAKSHETRESHU BHAARATA; KSHETRAKSHETRAJNAYOR JNAANAM YATTAT JNAANAM MATAM MAMA. (Krishna speaking to Arjuna)Do thou also know Me as the Knower of the Field in all fields, OArjuna! Knowledge of both the Field and the Knower of the Field isconsidered by Me to be the knowledge. XIII.4. TAT KSHETRAM YACCHA YAADRIK CHA YADVIKAARI YATASHCHA YAT; SA CHA YO YATPRABHAAVASHCHA TATSAMAASENA ME SHRINU. What the Field is and of what nature, what its modifications areand whence it is, and also who He is and what His powers are-hearall that from Me in brief.
BBTBR-PANGON
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Wednesday 26 March 2008
DIETWALK
Exercising Heart Rate Speed vs. Fat Loss
08 January 2008, 18:56:58 Russ Turley & Jeff Ainslie
If you see an older heart rate chart in your local gym, you will see that most will have a “fat burning” and a “cardio” range.
The “fat burning” range was based upon studies that looked at the first few minutes of exercise at different intensity levels. It is now accepted that the total amount of calories expended is more important than the intensity for overall fat loss.
We live in a world where fat loss occurs over a 24 hour period, not just when we exercise. At the end of the day, it is still the old saying “calories in vs calories out”. Exercise helps you to increase your negative caloric intake and helps to speed up your metabolism.
When you are exercising for cardiovascular and muscle endurance results, you do need to push yourself to a reasonable level. There is a difference between activity and exercise if you want significant results, but for fat loss, your body really cares about negative calories at the end of the day.
Here is an example: Lets say that you burn 500 calories on an elliptical trainer or stair climber. If it took you 30 or 40 minutes to accomplish this, you still have the same negative calories at the end of the day. Your overall “fitness” workout is better with a higher intensity, but weight loss would be similar.
Think of it this way. If you are a new runner and you go out and try to run as fast as you can for as long as you can, you may only last 3 minutes and burn 25 calories. It is intuitive that if you walked/jogged for half an hour you may burn 250 calories. It’s clear that in this instance, the slower runner has the superior workout if the goal is fat loss.
You do need to be aware of the extremes with regard to heart rate and exercise. The rule of thumb is to subtract your age from 220 to get your maximum heart rate. Think of this as the “extreme danger level”. Once you have this level, don’t exceed 85% of this number while exercising. If you are close to this number, you are close to your maximum safe level of exertion.
For Example: 35 years old
Maximum Heart Rate: 220-30 = 185 beats per minuteMax Safe Exercise Rate: 185 X .85 = 157 bpm
If you are exercising at a lower intensity and your heart rate is very fast, don’t be too concerned. As your cardiovascular fitness increases, your heart rate will lower. If you are on a fitness machine that keeps your heart at a constant rate during exercise, you will find that over time, you will be working out harder and harder at the same heart rate.
F2FR=
///////////////////////
Two Oxygenation Events In Ancient Oceans Sparked Spread Of Complex Life
08 March 2008, 22:55:47
The rise of oxygen and the oxidation of deep oceans between 635 and 551 million years ago may have had an impact on the increase and spread of the earliest complex life, including animals, according to a new study.
///////////////////COUSCOUS FROM SEMOLINA
////////////////////DAVID BECKHAM-100=1996-2008
//////////////////////////Asthma Patients Should Not Take Drug Holiday From Maintenance Therapy Asthma patients tend to reduce use of asthma medications during summer months, which may be a major reason for hospitalizations for exacerbations seen in the fall.Medscape Medical News 2008
////////////////////
KINDNESS
Dolphins saves stuck whales
In New Zealand or any other areas for that matter, dolphins usually swim next to humans or play with each other. This time, they decided to do something different, a story that will make us smile and think about these adorable creatures.
People sawMoko, a bottlenose dolphin swim to two stranded whales and guiding them back to safety.
////////////////////Middle class parents worry needlessly about cot death, says authorBy JONATHAN GORNALL - More by this author » Last updated at 09:44am on 12th February 2008
Comments (1) Every new parent knows how it feels. The nagging fear at the back of the mind, the nights of broken sleep punctuated by the constant, anxious checking to make sure the baby is still breathing.
It's a measure of the fear induced by the spectre of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) that a multi-million-pound worldwide industry thrives on the back of it, peddling breathing alarms to worried parents on the basis that apnoea - when a baby stops breathing momentarily - is one of the causes of SIDS, even though there is no evidence that it is, or that such monitors have prevented a single cot death.
///////////////////AF=Negative Utilitarianism
24 March 2008, 01:15:56 Michael Anissimov
The basic idea of utilitarianism is to do the greatest good for the greatest number. A related idea, negative utilitarianism, requires us to prevent the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number. According to its proponents, the greatest harms are more consequential than the greatest goods.
Would you rather avoid being tortured for a day, or engage in your favorite activity for a day? For many, the answer is obvious: avoid torture. This synchs well with humanity’s empirically demonstrated aversion to risk. It also makes sense evolutionarily, as avoiding pain was probably more adaptive than merely seeking pleasure.
Negative utilitarianism seems like a reasonable enough philosophy, at least at first. What could possibly be wrong with minimizing harm? Well, it turns out that the optimal implementation of negative utilitarianism would be to kill off all of humanity in the quickest and most painless way possible. That way, the probability of Earth-originating sentients experiencing harm in the future is reduced to zero. From the perspective of negative utilitarianism, this is the best possible outcome.
Hah! Now I’ll bet you think negative utilitarianism sounds like a horrible idea, don’t you? The problem is that it may be a philosophically appealing viewpoint to a subset of humanity. One challenge of futuristic technologies is that they may make possible the existence of groups that are unaccountable in practice. I’m not saying I want such groups to exist, or that such groups existing is a good idea, just that it could actually happen and we might be hard pressed to do anything about it. A prototype of such a scenario is given in the novel Aristoi, where aristocrats uses nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces to ensure absolute dominance over the rest of humanity.
If an Aristoi class decides that negative utilitarianism makes sense, then from their perspective, it could be quite appealing to destroy all of humanity. Do we have any intelligent strategies for averting such a possibility?
/////////////////AF=
Top 10 Excuses for Dying13 March 2008, 19:56:36 Michael Anissimov
1. Every year, there are fewer bars playing hits from the 70s.2. Afraid of getting into future accident involving flying cars.3. Wouldn’t want to disappoint my enemies.4. Cancellation of Family Guy.5. Escaping sexless marriage.6. Wanted to have an ironic gravestone.7. Trying to be more existentialist.8. Halo server is down.9. God made me do it.10. I have no friends.
//////////////////GAME THEORY AND RECIPROCITY
/////////////////HUMAN=JUST AN ADVANCED ANIMAL
//////////////////The first thing to understand is that copycat suicides are not something new. In fact there is an academic name for them - the Werther Effect - and this name shows that these strange deaths have happened for many years.
Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was published in 1774. And its publication was followed by many reports of young men shooting themselves. Why? It was widely believed that these suicides were copies of the death of the novel's hero.
When academic David Phillips studied copycat suicides in the early 1970s, he coined the term Werther Effect.
Studying suicides in the US between 1947 and 1968, Phillips found that within two months of a front-page suicide, an average of 58 more people than usual killed themselves. And there is also a sharp rise in car crash fatalities and other forms of disguised suicides.
In 2001 it was noted in the American Journal of Epidemiology that:
statistical evidence indicates that suicide clusters occur primarily among teenagers and young adults and that they account for 1–5 percent of all teenage suicides.
Now, if suicide is contagious (an idea also raised by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point) it needs a means of spreading. And traditionally newspapers were that means.
SUICD MEME
////////////////////
In New Zealand or any other areas for that matter, dolphins usually swim next to humans or play with each other. This time, they decided to do something different, a story that will make us smile and think about these adorable creatures.
People sawMoko, a bottlenose dolphin swim to two stranded whales and guiding them back to safety.
////////////////////Middle class parents worry needlessly about cot death, says authorBy JONATHAN GORNALL - More by this author » Last updated at 09:44am on 12th February 2008
Comments (1) Every new parent knows how it feels. The nagging fear at the back of the mind, the nights of broken sleep punctuated by the constant, anxious checking to make sure the baby is still breathing.
It's a measure of the fear induced by the spectre of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) that a multi-million-pound worldwide industry thrives on the back of it, peddling breathing alarms to worried parents on the basis that apnoea - when a baby stops breathing momentarily - is one of the causes of SIDS, even though there is no evidence that it is, or that such monitors have prevented a single cot death.
///////////////////AF=Negative Utilitarianism
24 March 2008, 01:15:56 Michael Anissimov
The basic idea of utilitarianism is to do the greatest good for the greatest number. A related idea, negative utilitarianism, requires us to prevent the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number. According to its proponents, the greatest harms are more consequential than the greatest goods.
Would you rather avoid being tortured for a day, or engage in your favorite activity for a day? For many, the answer is obvious: avoid torture. This synchs well with humanity’s empirically demonstrated aversion to risk. It also makes sense evolutionarily, as avoiding pain was probably more adaptive than merely seeking pleasure.
Negative utilitarianism seems like a reasonable enough philosophy, at least at first. What could possibly be wrong with minimizing harm? Well, it turns out that the optimal implementation of negative utilitarianism would be to kill off all of humanity in the quickest and most painless way possible. That way, the probability of Earth-originating sentients experiencing harm in the future is reduced to zero. From the perspective of negative utilitarianism, this is the best possible outcome.
Hah! Now I’ll bet you think negative utilitarianism sounds like a horrible idea, don’t you? The problem is that it may be a philosophically appealing viewpoint to a subset of humanity. One challenge of futuristic technologies is that they may make possible the existence of groups that are unaccountable in practice. I’m not saying I want such groups to exist, or that such groups existing is a good idea, just that it could actually happen and we might be hard pressed to do anything about it. A prototype of such a scenario is given in the novel Aristoi, where aristocrats uses nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces to ensure absolute dominance over the rest of humanity.
If an Aristoi class decides that negative utilitarianism makes sense, then from their perspective, it could be quite appealing to destroy all of humanity. Do we have any intelligent strategies for averting such a possibility?
/////////////////AF=
Top 10 Excuses for Dying13 March 2008, 19:56:36 Michael Anissimov
1. Every year, there are fewer bars playing hits from the 70s.2. Afraid of getting into future accident involving flying cars.3. Wouldn’t want to disappoint my enemies.4. Cancellation of Family Guy.5. Escaping sexless marriage.6. Wanted to have an ironic gravestone.7. Trying to be more existentialist.8. Halo server is down.9. God made me do it.10. I have no friends.
//////////////////GAME THEORY AND RECIPROCITY
/////////////////HUMAN=JUST AN ADVANCED ANIMAL
//////////////////The first thing to understand is that copycat suicides are not something new. In fact there is an academic name for them - the Werther Effect - and this name shows that these strange deaths have happened for many years.
Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was published in 1774. And its publication was followed by many reports of young men shooting themselves. Why? It was widely believed that these suicides were copies of the death of the novel's hero.
When academic David Phillips studied copycat suicides in the early 1970s, he coined the term Werther Effect.
Studying suicides in the US between 1947 and 1968, Phillips found that within two months of a front-page suicide, an average of 58 more people than usual killed themselves. And there is also a sharp rise in car crash fatalities and other forms of disguised suicides.
In 2001 it was noted in the American Journal of Epidemiology that:
statistical evidence indicates that suicide clusters occur primarily among teenagers and young adults and that they account for 1–5 percent of all teenage suicides.
Now, if suicide is contagious (an idea also raised by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point) it needs a means of spreading. And traditionally newspapers were that means.
SUICD MEME
////////////////////
UFTOE-C/TAPCHIDU
/////////////////http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1721954,00.htmlGenes and age may have more impact on our general well-being than our best day-to-day attempts at joy
//////////////////http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/heisenberg07/heisenberg07_index.htmlWerner Heisenberg on science and religion
/////////////////////Read One Book Per Week - I strive to read one book each week. Sometimes this can be difficult with time constraints, but the benefits are impressive. If you want to save time on this one, learn speed reading.
//////////////////20k annual salary has exponential incr to happiness-not after that
////////////////The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of getting beaten.”—Independent on Sunday, October 12, 1997
///////////////////npls=Move More And Remake Your Brain!
Posted: 25 Mar 2008 10:18 PM CDT
Want to rewire your brain? Then you’ve gotta’ move. Nogo A is an inhibitory protein that prevents neuron growth when it interacts with the Nogo-66 receptor site. Exercise increases neuroplasticity by down-regulating the production of the Nogo A protein, thus enhancing the brain’s ability to re-map itself. Cortical re-mapping allows the brain to reorganize [...]
Posted: 25 Mar 2008 10:18 PM CDT
Want to rewire your brain? Then you’ve gotta’ move. Nogo A is an inhibitory protein that prevents neuron growth when it interacts with the Nogo-66 receptor site. Exercise increases neuroplasticity by down-regulating the production of the Nogo A protein, thus enhancing the brain’s ability to re-map itself. Cortical re-mapping allows the brain to reorganize [...]
//////////////////
Tuesday 25 March 2008
OUR LOCAL GALAXY
Galactic Superbubbles around the Solar Neighborhood & our Local ChimneyThe first detailed map of space within about 1,000 light years of Earth places the solar system in the middle of a large hole that pierces the plane of the galaxy, perhaps left by an exploding star one or two million years ago.
The new map, produced by University of California, Berkeley, and French astronomers, alters the reigning view of the solar neighborhood. In that picture, the sun lies in the middle of a hot bubble - a region of million-degree hydrogen gas with 100-1,000 times fewer hydrogen atoms than the average gas density in the Milky Way - and is surrounded by a solid wall of colder, denser gas.
Instead, said astronomer Barry Welsh of UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, the region around the sun is an irregular cavity of low-density gas that has tunnels branching off through the surrounding dense gas wall. Welsh and his French colleagues suspect that the interconnecting cavities and tunnels, analogous to the holes in a sponge, were created by supernovas or very strong stellar winds that swept out large regions and, when they encountered one another, merged into passageways.
///////////////////ZL=Can Sharks Predict the Weather?
Posted: 25 Mar 2008 03:24 PM CDT
A student at Aberdeen University in the U.K. is engaged in a groundbreaking study to see if we might be able to monitor the behavior of sharks in order to predict the weather. When Hurricane Gabrielle arrived in Florida in 2001, shark researchers noticed that young black tipped sharks (who presumably had been tagged) moved to deeper depths as the storm approached.
//////////////HRT 'might ward off Alzheimer's'Hormone replacement therapy may protect post-menopausal women against Alzheimer's disease, research suggests.
//////////////////GOLODGHARMO KOL
/////////////////NIGHT SHIFT=Twenty percent of American workers are night-shift workers, and the number is growing by about 3% per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the rest of society sleeps, police officers, security guards, truck drivers, office cleaning crews, hotel desk clerks, nurses, pilots and many others keep patients alive, streets safe and packages moving. But at a price.
These workers -- and people with more conventionally sleep-deprived lifestyles -- are known to be at higher risk for accidents, sleep disorders and psychological stress due to daytime demands, such as family and other obligations, that interfere with sleeping. Now scientific evidence suggests their disrupted circadian rhythms may also cause a kind of biological revolt, raising their likelihood of obesity, cancer, reproductive health problems, mental illness and gastrointestinal disorders.
////////////////////language brain=This study therefore provides some evidence that the organization of the arcuate fasciculus was strongly modified in the human lineage, and that this was one of the brain specializations that led to the emergence of language.
In the macaque, the brain regions analogous to Wernicke's area are involved in higher order processing of visual information. It seems, then, that when humans diverged from other primates during the course of evolution, another specialization necessary for language was the addition of new cortical fields such as Wernicke's area.
///////////////////
The new map, produced by University of California, Berkeley, and French astronomers, alters the reigning view of the solar neighborhood. In that picture, the sun lies in the middle of a hot bubble - a region of million-degree hydrogen gas with 100-1,000 times fewer hydrogen atoms than the average gas density in the Milky Way - and is surrounded by a solid wall of colder, denser gas.
Instead, said astronomer Barry Welsh of UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, the region around the sun is an irregular cavity of low-density gas that has tunnels branching off through the surrounding dense gas wall. Welsh and his French colleagues suspect that the interconnecting cavities and tunnels, analogous to the holes in a sponge, were created by supernovas or very strong stellar winds that swept out large regions and, when they encountered one another, merged into passageways.
///////////////////ZL=Can Sharks Predict the Weather?
Posted: 25 Mar 2008 03:24 PM CDT
A student at Aberdeen University in the U.K. is engaged in a groundbreaking study to see if we might be able to monitor the behavior of sharks in order to predict the weather. When Hurricane Gabrielle arrived in Florida in 2001, shark researchers noticed that young black tipped sharks (who presumably had been tagged) moved to deeper depths as the storm approached.
//////////////HRT 'might ward off Alzheimer's'Hormone replacement therapy may protect post-menopausal women against Alzheimer's disease, research suggests.
//////////////////GOLODGHARMO KOL
/////////////////NIGHT SHIFT=Twenty percent of American workers are night-shift workers, and the number is growing by about 3% per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the rest of society sleeps, police officers, security guards, truck drivers, office cleaning crews, hotel desk clerks, nurses, pilots and many others keep patients alive, streets safe and packages moving. But at a price.
These workers -- and people with more conventionally sleep-deprived lifestyles -- are known to be at higher risk for accidents, sleep disorders and psychological stress due to daytime demands, such as family and other obligations, that interfere with sleeping. Now scientific evidence suggests their disrupted circadian rhythms may also cause a kind of biological revolt, raising their likelihood of obesity, cancer, reproductive health problems, mental illness and gastrointestinal disorders.
////////////////////language brain=This study therefore provides some evidence that the organization of the arcuate fasciculus was strongly modified in the human lineage, and that this was one of the brain specializations that led to the emergence of language.
In the macaque, the brain regions analogous to Wernicke's area are involved in higher order processing of visual information. It seems, then, that when humans diverged from other primates during the course of evolution, another specialization necessary for language was the addition of new cortical fields such as Wernicke's area.
///////////////////
CDS 260308 TTP-HS CRSS-RIDM-RAS-NBT
//////////////////////œSuccess is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.â€=Churchill
///////////////////BONK-TATA
/////////////////////NSD-LMP
///////////////////PPDIS-70/70
////////////////////////XOD=Zach Dunlap, Declared Dead After an All-terrain Vehicle Accident But Soon Recovered Fully
Posted: 25 Mar 2008 09:36 AM CDT
Zach Dunlap has been declared dead by his doctors after an all-terrain vehicle accident but came back to life - in time before his organ was to removed by doctor as donations. After four months, he soon recovered fully.
Dunlap was pronounced dead Nov. 19 at United Regional Healthcare System in Wichita Falls, Texas, after he was injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident. His family approved having his organs harvested. As family members were paying their last respects, he moved his foot and hand. He reacted to a pocketknife scraped across his foot and to pressure applied under a fingernail. After 48 days in the hospital, he was allowed to return home, where he continues to work on his recovery.
Posted: 25 Mar 2008 09:36 AM CDT
Zach Dunlap has been declared dead by his doctors after an all-terrain vehicle accident but came back to life - in time before his organ was to removed by doctor as donations. After four months, he soon recovered fully.
Dunlap was pronounced dead Nov. 19 at United Regional Healthcare System in Wichita Falls, Texas, after he was injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident. His family approved having his organs harvested. As family members were paying their last respects, he moved his foot and hand. He reacted to a pocketknife scraped across his foot and to pressure applied under a fingernail. After 48 days in the hospital, he was allowed to return home, where he continues to work on his recovery.
////////////////////DUKKHA DHARAPAT
////////////////QP=New York Times, a list of technology famous quotes which may or may not have been said. Two of which I believe I've used before (doh!):
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." This quotation is attributed to Bill Gates, but Mr. Shapiro suspects that it is apocryphal, and is seeking the person who either said it or first attributed it to Mr. Gates...."I think there is a world market for about five computers." This is a attributed to Thomas J. Watson, Jr., but Mr. Shapiro suspects it of being apocryphal and is seeking the person who either said it or first attributed it to Mr. Watson.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." This quotation is attributed to Bill Gates, but Mr. Shapiro suspects that it is apocryphal, and is seeking the person who either said it or first attributed it to Mr. Gates...."I think there is a world market for about five computers." This is a attributed to Thomas J. Watson, Jr., but Mr. Shapiro suspects it of being apocryphal and is seeking the person who either said it or first attributed it to Mr. Watson.
/////////////////////
Sunday 23 March 2008
DIETWALK-A MILE A DAY
///////////////Human ancestors more primitive than once thought By Neil Schoenherr
Sept. 20, 2007 -- A team of researchers, including Herman Pontzer, Ph.D., assistant professor of physical anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has determined through analysis of the earliest known hominid fossils outside of Africa, recently discovered in Dmanisi, Georgia, the former Soviet republic, that the first human ancestors to inhabit Eurasia were more primitive than previously thought.
Herman Pontzer
The fossils, dated to 1.8 million years old, show some modern aspects of lower limb morphology, such as long legs and an arched foot, but retain some primitive aspects of morphology in the shoulder and foot. The species had a small stature and brain size more similar to earlier species found in Africa.
"Thus, the earliest known hominins to have lived outside Africa in temperate zones of Eurasia did not yet display the full set of derived skeletal features," the researchers conclude.
////////////////////
The people of the Hunza Valley do not look Pakistani at all. They are decendents of Alexander The Great's Army which marched through in 330 BC. Aima and Shamila smile happily for the camera. Karimabad, Pakistan (9/99).
/////////////////Quest for the Lost Land Renée Hetherington, J. Vaughn Barrie, Roger MacLeod and Michael Wilson
Editor's note: For more background about the studies on the early Americans and dating terminology, read the previous feature.
Until recently, researchers believed our North American roots stretched back only about 11,200 radiocarbon years before present (YBP). These earliest settlers, from a culture now called Clovis, traveled from northeast Asia across the "Beringia landbridge," hunting large mammals with stone tools and colonizing the Americas via an "ice-free corridor" east of the Canadian Rocky Mountains (see story, this issue). However, in 1989, archaeologist Tom Dillehay at the University of Kentucky published a two-volume work entitled Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile, which describe a human settlement dated to 12,500 YBP, approximately 1,300 years before Clovis. This site contained non-Clovis stone tools, a child's footprints and a community of dwellings constructed in part from animal skins. Archaeological sites like this and others found south of areas glaciated during the last ice age, and dated to between 12,500 and 11,500 YBP, imply that people had reached the southern tip of South America prior to the recession of the giant ice sheets, leading archaeologists to postulate alternative migration routes. Now geologists are also working on these alternative routes, exploring the region's glacial past to reconstruct a potential path for early peoples along the northwestern coast of North America.
////////////////////////Watching the English
The hidden rules of English behaviour — Kate Fox
"I don't see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to remote corners of the world and get dysentery in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizarre beliefs and mysterious customs, when the weirdest, most puzzling tribe of all is right here on our doorstep."
In Watching the English, Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people. She puts the English national character under her anthropological microscope, and finds a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and Byzantine codes of behaviour. Her minute observation of the way we talk, dress, eat, drink, work, play, shop, drive, flirt, fight, queue – and moan about it all – exposes the hidden rules that we all unconsciously obey.
The rules of weather-speak. The Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex-apology rule. The paranoid-pantomime rule. Class indicators and class-anxiety tests. The money-talk taboo. Humour rules. Pub etiquette. Table manners. The rules of bogside reading. The dangers of excessive moderation. The eccentric-sheep rule. The English 'social dis-ease'.
//////////////////////
Sept. 20, 2007 -- A team of researchers, including Herman Pontzer, Ph.D., assistant professor of physical anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has determined through analysis of the earliest known hominid fossils outside of Africa, recently discovered in Dmanisi, Georgia, the former Soviet republic, that the first human ancestors to inhabit Eurasia were more primitive than previously thought.
Herman Pontzer
The fossils, dated to 1.8 million years old, show some modern aspects of lower limb morphology, such as long legs and an arched foot, but retain some primitive aspects of morphology in the shoulder and foot. The species had a small stature and brain size more similar to earlier species found in Africa.
"Thus, the earliest known hominins to have lived outside Africa in temperate zones of Eurasia did not yet display the full set of derived skeletal features," the researchers conclude.
////////////////////
The people of the Hunza Valley do not look Pakistani at all. They are decendents of Alexander The Great's Army which marched through in 330 BC. Aima and Shamila smile happily for the camera. Karimabad, Pakistan (9/99).
/////////////////Quest for the Lost Land Renée Hetherington, J. Vaughn Barrie, Roger MacLeod and Michael Wilson
Editor's note: For more background about the studies on the early Americans and dating terminology, read the previous feature.
Until recently, researchers believed our North American roots stretched back only about 11,200 radiocarbon years before present (YBP). These earliest settlers, from a culture now called Clovis, traveled from northeast Asia across the "Beringia landbridge," hunting large mammals with stone tools and colonizing the Americas via an "ice-free corridor" east of the Canadian Rocky Mountains (see story, this issue). However, in 1989, archaeologist Tom Dillehay at the University of Kentucky published a two-volume work entitled Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile, which describe a human settlement dated to 12,500 YBP, approximately 1,300 years before Clovis. This site contained non-Clovis stone tools, a child's footprints and a community of dwellings constructed in part from animal skins. Archaeological sites like this and others found south of areas glaciated during the last ice age, and dated to between 12,500 and 11,500 YBP, imply that people had reached the southern tip of South America prior to the recession of the giant ice sheets, leading archaeologists to postulate alternative migration routes. Now geologists are also working on these alternative routes, exploring the region's glacial past to reconstruct a potential path for early peoples along the northwestern coast of North America.
////////////////////////Watching the English
The hidden rules of English behaviour — Kate Fox
"I don't see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to remote corners of the world and get dysentery in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizarre beliefs and mysterious customs, when the weirdest, most puzzling tribe of all is right here on our doorstep."
In Watching the English, Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people. She puts the English national character under her anthropological microscope, and finds a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and Byzantine codes of behaviour. Her minute observation of the way we talk, dress, eat, drink, work, play, shop, drive, flirt, fight, queue – and moan about it all – exposes the hidden rules that we all unconsciously obey.
The rules of weather-speak. The Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex-apology rule. The paranoid-pantomime rule. Class indicators and class-anxiety tests. The money-talk taboo. Humour rules. Pub etiquette. Table manners. The rules of bogside reading. The dangers of excessive moderation. The eccentric-sheep rule. The English 'social dis-ease'.
//////////////////////
EASTER SUNDAY SNOW
/////////////////TAX POEM=tax his land, tax his wage,Tax his bed in which he lays.Tax his tractor, tax his mule,Teach him taxes is the rule.Tax his cow, tax his goat,Tax his pants, tax his coat.Tax his ties, tax his shirts,Tax his work, tax his dirt.Tax his chew, tax his smoke,Teach him taxes are no joke.Tax his car, tax his grass,Tax the roads he must pass.Tax his food, tax his drink,Tax him if he tries to think.Tax his sodas, tax his beers,If he cries, tax his tears.Tax his bills, tax his gas,Tax his notes, tax his cash.Tax him good and let him knowThat after taxes, he has no dough.If he hollers, tax him more,Tax him until he's good and sore.Tax his coffin, tax his grave,Tax the sod in which he lays.Put these words upon his tomb,"Taxes drove me to my doom!"And when he's gone, we won't relax,We'll still be after the inheritance tax.
//////////////////////HS CRSS=BLTN
/////////////////////Michio Kaku Video: New Views on Time Travel
Is time travel possible? In his new book, Physics of the Impossible, renowned physicist Michio Kaku warns us that nothing should be considered impossible or beyond our eventual understanding. "In my own short lifetime," he writes, "I have seen the seemingly impossible become established fact over and over again."
In "Physics of the Impossible," Kaku divides the "seemingly impossible" into three classes: Class I consists of technologies that...
Read the whole entry »
//////////////////There is enough for all. The earth is a generous mother; she will provide in plentiful abundance food for all her children if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and in peace. -- Nietzsche
///////////////////Brains are hardwired to act according to the Golden RuleBrains are hardwired to do unto others as we would have them do unto ushttp://www.brainmysteries.com/research/Brains_are_hardwired_to_act_according_to_the_Golden_Rule.asp
////////////////Childhood Personality Can Predict Important Outcomes in Emerging AdulthoodA new study reveals the extent to which children's personality types can predict the timing of key transitional moments between childhood and adulthoodhttp://www.brainmysteries.com/research/Childhood_Personality_Can_Predict_Important_Outcomes_in_Emerging_Adulthood.asp
///////////////////Time isn't money: Study finds that we spend the resources differentlyEconomists usually treat time like money - as another scarce resource that people spend to achieve certain ends. Money is used to pay for things like furniture and plane tickets; time is spent assembling the do-it-yourself bookshelf or searching for cheap flights on the Internet. But despite the old adage that time is money, the two are far from psychologically equivalent, reveals a study from the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Research - particularly when it comes to consumer spending decisions.http://www.brainmysteries.com/research/Time_isnt_money_Study_finds_that_we_spend_the_resources_differently.asp
////////////////////GORILLAS BRANCHED OFF B4 CHIMPS FROM OUR FMLY TREE
///////////////////////Mass Movement DNA evidence prompts new hypothesis about early migrations to America.
Research by anthropologists in LAS indicate that early humans may have migrated from Asia to the Americas more slowly than originally believed. New DNA evidence suggests that they settled in the area between Siberia and Alaska for 15,000 years, then spread into the Americas. (Image courtesy of Ripan Mahli.)
Apparently the first humans to reach the New World took a while to get there. A geneticist at the University of Illinois believes that migrants from Asia lingered around a former land mass between Siberia and Alaska—called Beringia—for as long as 15,000 years before finally spreading south into the Americas.
The standstill provided researchers with clues to understand their migration. The pause was long enough for the first Americans to have formed their own distinct genetic makeup before populating the New World, according to a research team led by Ripan Malhi in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Department of Anthropology.
/////////////////////ENSI EVOLUTION and the NATURE of SCIENCE INSTITUTESMarch 2006
Chimps Belong on Human Branch of Family TreeStudy SaysJohn Pickrell in Englandfor National Geographic NewsMay 20, 2003http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0520_030520_chimpanzees.html
A new report argues that chimpanzees are so closely related to humans that they should be included in our branch of the tree of life. Chimpanzees and other apes have historically been separated from humans in classification schemes, with humans deemed the only living members of the hominid family of species.
Now, biologists at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan, provide new genetic evidence that lineages of chimps (currently Pan troglodytes) and humans (Homo sapiens) diverged so recently that chimps should be reclassed as Homo troglodytes. The move would make chimps full members of our genus Homo, along with Neandertals, and all other human-like fossil species. "We humans appear as only slightly remodeled chimpanzee-like apes," says the study.
/////////////////Chocolate drinks - probably fermented ones - popular long before previously thought, says anthropologist (11/19/2007)
Tags:
central america, humans
This Bodega burnished type bottle from an unidentified site in northern Honduras corresponds to a type produced between 900 and 200 B.C. at Puerto Escondido. It is part of the collection of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia, Museo de San Pedro Sula in Honduras. (Courtesy of John S. Henderson)Mesoamerican menus featured cacao beverages - probably fermented ones - at least as early as 1100 B.C., some 500 years earlier than previously documented anywhere, according to new research published in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The paper, "Chemical and archaeological evidence from the earliest cacao beverages," summarizes the landmark research of anthropologists Rosemary Joyce of the University of California, Berkeley, and John S. Henderson an anthropology professor of Cornell University, as well as of Gretchen R. Hall, a research associate with the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania Museum , W. Jeffrey Hurst of the Hershey Foods Technical Center in Philadelphia, and Patrick E. McGovern, a senior research scientist and adjunct associate professor of anthropology at the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology.
//////////////////40kya=we became human
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BGITA
Reading the Bhagavad Gita opened to me a world I had never thought could exist. How many wonderful things I found therein! Many were amazing, not the least being the statement: “When the whole country is flooded, the reservoir becomes superfluous. So, to the illumined seer, the Vedas are all superfluous.†(Bhagavad Gita 2:46) Here was a scripture that told me I should go beyond it and know for myself–and showed me the way to do that! Sri Ramakrishna often used the simile of a letter. Once you read it and know what it says, what more need do you have for it?
The self cannot be known through scriptural study, for Krishna tells us that “he who even wishes to know of yoga transcends the Vedic rites.†(Bhagavad Gita 6:44) Books are nothing more than paper and ink. Obsession with them is detrimental, proving the truth of the statement that: “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.†(II Corinthians 3:6) We must get behind the words of even illumined masters and tap the Source of those words.
Sri Ramakrishna frequently pointed out that almanacs predict rainfall, but you cannot get a drop by squeezing them, however hard. In the same way, intense study of scriptures cannot give a drop of spiritual life, for no book can reveal That which lies beyond all we think or know. (“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.†(Isaiah 55:8, 9))
The self cannot be known through scriptural study, for Krishna tells us that “he who even wishes to know of yoga transcends the Vedic rites.†(Bhagavad Gita 6:44) Books are nothing more than paper and ink. Obsession with them is detrimental, proving the truth of the statement that: “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.†(II Corinthians 3:6) We must get behind the words of even illumined masters and tap the Source of those words.
Sri Ramakrishna frequently pointed out that almanacs predict rainfall, but you cannot get a drop by squeezing them, however hard. In the same way, intense study of scriptures cannot give a drop of spiritual life, for no book can reveal That which lies beyond all we think or know. (“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.†(Isaiah 55:8, 9))
///////////////////READING=In the latest study, the researchers sought to determine the limits of the ventral system. They asked 12 adult participants to read words of different lengths that were either intact or degraded (transformed) in one of three ways: they were rotated up to 90 degrees in either direction; extended visually in length, with up to three spaces between letters; or shifted into the far right or left visual field. As one might expect, the more degraded the visual representation of these words, the longer it took to comprehend them. Furthermore, reading time was related to the length of the words only when they were very degraded, suggesting that degraded words were being consciously deciphered. So far, so predictable. Results from functional MRI scans, however, provided far more interesting insights. Although intact or slightly degraded words activated the VWFA and the ventral route, text that was highly degraded activated another area often described as part of the dorsal route. This route has been linked to letter-by-letter processing especially in children who are learning to read.
The brain never ceases to impress me. It's easy to forget that reading - this ability to make sense of abstract symbols - is a purely cultural invention. Back in the Pleistocene, when natural selection was engineering the human brain, it never imagined that we'd get so obsessed with written language. And yet, thanks to the wonders of cortical plasticity, the mind has managed to internalize the skill, so that we can read this sentence without even thinking about it. It's as if your computer sprouted new microchips depending on how you used it.
The brain never ceases to impress me. It's easy to forget that reading - this ability to make sense of abstract symbols - is a purely cultural invention. Back in the Pleistocene, when natural selection was engineering the human brain, it never imagined that we'd get so obsessed with written language. And yet, thanks to the wonders of cortical plasticity, the mind has managed to internalize the skill, so that we can read this sentence without even thinking about it. It's as if your computer sprouted new microchips depending on how you used it.
///////////////////
KEEP THE EARTH CLEAN ITS NOT URANUS
///////////////////Grape skin compound fights the complications of diabetesResveratrol in grape skins could stop diabetic complications such as heart disease, retinopathy and nephropathy, research findshttp://www.curingdeath.com/research/Grape_skin_compound_fights_the_complications_of_diabetes.asp
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Passing Days
by Marcus Edward John Cross, Mar 21, 2008
Time, falling through my fingers like sand.
Days pass so quickly, I'm afraid.Days pass so randomly, I'm scared.Days,Fall into a holeInside my own mind;And I'm dazed,As I distract myself again...
I'm running away from here,I'm running free,Don't you see?I'm running out of time,I'm running free, but it doesn't matter;Not today,Because I'm okay,But sometimes...
Passing Days
by Marcus Edward John Cross, Mar 21, 2008
Time, falling through my fingers like sand.
Days pass so quickly, I'm afraid.Days pass so randomly, I'm scared.Days,Fall into a holeInside my own mind;And I'm dazed,As I distract myself again...
I'm running away from here,I'm running free,Don't you see?I'm running out of time,I'm running free, but it doesn't matter;Not today,Because I'm okay,But sometimes...
/////////////////
Charity 'makes you feel better'It's not having lots of money that makes us happy - it's spending money on others, say US researchers.
Charity 'makes you feel better'It's not having lots of money that makes us happy - it's spending money on others, say US researchers.
////////////////////Folate 'may keep sperm healthy'A diet rich in the vitamin folate may protect men against producing abnormal sperm, a study suggests.
////////////////////
CDS 230308-SLCTR CRSS
//////////////////Countdown to Earth Hour 2008…
Do you remember last year when Sydney, Australia made the news by turning their lights out for one hour to show their concern about global warming? Besides being concerned about the effects, especially for my children and grandchildren, as an astronomer I support anything which helps reduce light pollution, even if it's just for an hour. Beyond extinguishing the lights for 60 minutes at 8pm March 29, 2008, there are lots of things you can do to make Earth Hour 2008 an even greater success. Let's take a look. (more…)
Do you remember last year when Sydney, Australia made the news by turning their lights out for one hour to show their concern about global warming? Besides being concerned about the effects, especially for my children and grandchildren, as an astronomer I support anything which helps reduce light pollution, even if it's just for an hour. Beyond extinguishing the lights for 60 minutes at 8pm March 29, 2008, there are lots of things you can do to make Earth Hour 2008 an even greater success. Let's take a look. (more…)
//////////////////////////Bhagavad Gita Selection Number 275, for Sunday, March 23, 2008From Chapter XII: The Yoga of DevotionXII.15. YASMAANNODWIJATE LOKO LOKAANNODWIJATE CHA YAH; HARSHAAMARSHABHAYODWEGAIRMUKTO YAH SA CHA ME PRIYAH. (Krishna speaking to Arjuna)He by whom the world is not agitated and who cannot be agitated by the world, and who is freed from joy, envy, fear and anxiety-he is dear to Me. XII.16. ANAPEKSHAH SHUCHIRDAKSHA UDAASEENO GATAVYATHAH; SARVAARAMBHAPARITYAAGEE YO MADBHAKTAH SA ME PRIYAH. He who is free from wants, pure, expert, unconcerned, and untroubled, renouncing all undertakings or commencements-he who is (thus) devoted to Me, is dear to Me.
ECAPOM
/////////////////////////
100 years ago today
News ItemsJute Fire, ~ A fire broke out early yesterday morning in a large godown in Ultadanga containing about 20,000 drums of jute belonging to Babu Ashutosh Chatterjee. The godown had been locked upon the previous evening. About 2 A.M. yesterday a constable noticed flames shooting out from the openings under the corrugated roofing of the godown and reported the fact at the thana. Information was at once sent to the Chitpur Fire Station and the Brigade turned out. The godown was surrounded by the firemen who played on the flames and prevented them from spreading. The roof collapsed shortly after the outbreak. By 6 A.M. the entire stock of jute was damaged. The cause of the fire is at present unknown. The jute was insured for the sum of Rs 16,000. A Cure For Rheumatism. ~ Mrs Stannard, the well-known novelist who writes under the name of John Strange Winter, claims to have been cured of Rheumatism by Genoform Tablets, a recently invented remedy, and has written publicly expressing her anxiety that every sufferer from Rheumatism should know what Genoform has done for her. Lantern Address. ~ The usual Students Service will take place at 6.30 this evening in the L.M.S. Institution, Bhowanipore. Speaker: Rev A. Warren. Subject: The Parable of the Sower.
100 years ago today
News ItemsJute Fire, ~ A fire broke out early yesterday morning in a large godown in Ultadanga containing about 20,000 drums of jute belonging to Babu Ashutosh Chatterjee. The godown had been locked upon the previous evening. About 2 A.M. yesterday a constable noticed flames shooting out from the openings under the corrugated roofing of the godown and reported the fact at the thana. Information was at once sent to the Chitpur Fire Station and the Brigade turned out. The godown was surrounded by the firemen who played on the flames and prevented them from spreading. The roof collapsed shortly after the outbreak. By 6 A.M. the entire stock of jute was damaged. The cause of the fire is at present unknown. The jute was insured for the sum of Rs 16,000. A Cure For Rheumatism. ~ Mrs Stannard, the well-known novelist who writes under the name of John Strange Winter, claims to have been cured of Rheumatism by Genoform Tablets, a recently invented remedy, and has written publicly expressing her anxiety that every sufferer from Rheumatism should know what Genoform has done for her. Lantern Address. ~ The usual Students Service will take place at 6.30 this evening in the L.M.S. Institution, Bhowanipore. Speaker: Rev A. Warren. Subject: The Parable of the Sower.
/////////////////God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.”
/////////////////Addiction to internet 'is an illness'Guardian - 6 hours agoTense? Angry? Can't get online? Internet addiction is now a serious public health issue that should be officially recognised as a clinical disorder, according to a leading psychiatrist.
//////////////////Study unlocks Latin American pastThe arrival of European settlers triggered a dramatic shift in the genetic profile of South America's population, a study says.
/////////////////Writing 'eases stress of cancer'Getting cancer patients to write about their fears may improve their quality of life, according to a US study.
///////////////////Spoilt children 'disrupt schools'Primary schoolchildren spoilt at home can disrupt classes with behaviour such as tantrums, a report says.
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Homeowners to pick up £1.3bn bank bill of ‘reckless’ mortgage lendersTimes Online - 11 hours agoBritain's homeowners face paying an extra £1.3 billion a year because mortgage lenders have increased their profit margins to recoup their losses from bad debts.
Homeowners to pick up £1.3bn bank bill of ‘reckless’ mortgage lendersTimes Online - 11 hours agoBritain's homeowners face paying an extra £1.3 billion a year because mortgage lenders have increased their profit margins to recoup their losses from bad debts.
///////////////////Homeowners to pick up £1.3bn bank bill of ‘reckless’ mortgage lenders
Kathryn Cooper
Britain's homeowners face paying an extra £1.3 billion a year because mortgage lenders have increased their profit margins to recoup their losses from bad debts.
Figures reveal that lenders have increased their margin fourfold over the past year, and consumer groups are accusing “reckless” banks of “plundering” homeowners.
Eddy Weatherill, chief executive of the Independent Banking Advisory Service, said: “They all got into this position and now the customer is going to pay for it.”
The new figures, compiled by Deutsche Bank, analyse the margin between the rate at which a bank or building society borrows money and the fixed-rate deals it offers. In some cases the margin has increased eightfold in a year.
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Related Links
Building societies faced with funding drought
King attacked for 'failing' to support banks
Can you insure against higher mortgage rates?
In 2007 a homeowner on a standard two-year fixed-rate deal with a small deposit would typically have paid an interest rate just 0.2% higher than the rate at which their financial institution borrowed the money. That mark-up has now increased to more than 1.6%.
The increase is bad news for the 1.4m homeowners who are coming to the end of their fixed-rate deals this year.
They already face a dwindling choice of mortgage products and are likely to face bigger monthly payouts, despite falling interest rates.
A year ago Halifax was so keen to attract new business that its two-year fixed-rate deal, at 5.14%, was lower than the rate at which it could borrow the money, which was 5.64%.
The cost of borrowing for lenders for fixed-rate deals, known as the “swap rate”, has now dropped to 4.89% but Halifax’s two-year deal is currently 5.99%.
Its rival lender Abbey has also increased the cost of fixed rates recently despite the fall in the cost of borrowing. Indeed these increases are reflected across the sector, with the average margin on fixed rates now 1.05%, compared with a margin of 0.255% a year ago.
The estimated cost to consumers is an extra £110m a month in payments, or £1.3 billion per year. Experts say the credit crunch has moved “pricing power” from borrowers back to lenders.
Ray Boulger, of Charcol, an online mortgage broker, said: “Lenders are writing new fixed-rate business at better margins than they have done for years.
“Where lenders have had to make big write-downs on mortgage-backed securities, they have got to replenish their balance sheets somehow, and the only way they can do that is to make bigger profit margins or issue new shares.”
A spokesman for the Council of Mortgage Lenders said the market had been “extremely competitive” but some of the deals on offer a year ago were “not sustainable in current market conditions”.
Kathryn Cooper
Britain's homeowners face paying an extra £1.3 billion a year because mortgage lenders have increased their profit margins to recoup their losses from bad debts.
Figures reveal that lenders have increased their margin fourfold over the past year, and consumer groups are accusing “reckless” banks of “plundering” homeowners.
Eddy Weatherill, chief executive of the Independent Banking Advisory Service, said: “They all got into this position and now the customer is going to pay for it.”
The new figures, compiled by Deutsche Bank, analyse the margin between the rate at which a bank or building society borrows money and the fixed-rate deals it offers. In some cases the margin has increased eightfold in a year.
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}
Related Links
Building societies faced with funding drought
King attacked for 'failing' to support banks
Can you insure against higher mortgage rates?
In 2007 a homeowner on a standard two-year fixed-rate deal with a small deposit would typically have paid an interest rate just 0.2% higher than the rate at which their financial institution borrowed the money. That mark-up has now increased to more than 1.6%.
The increase is bad news for the 1.4m homeowners who are coming to the end of their fixed-rate deals this year.
They already face a dwindling choice of mortgage products and are likely to face bigger monthly payouts, despite falling interest rates.
A year ago Halifax was so keen to attract new business that its two-year fixed-rate deal, at 5.14%, was lower than the rate at which it could borrow the money, which was 5.64%.
The cost of borrowing for lenders for fixed-rate deals, known as the “swap rate”, has now dropped to 4.89% but Halifax’s two-year deal is currently 5.99%.
Its rival lender Abbey has also increased the cost of fixed rates recently despite the fall in the cost of borrowing. Indeed these increases are reflected across the sector, with the average margin on fixed rates now 1.05%, compared with a margin of 0.255% a year ago.
The estimated cost to consumers is an extra £110m a month in payments, or £1.3 billion per year. Experts say the credit crunch has moved “pricing power” from borrowers back to lenders.
Ray Boulger, of Charcol, an online mortgage broker, said: “Lenders are writing new fixed-rate business at better margins than they have done for years.
“Where lenders have had to make big write-downs on mortgage-backed securities, they have got to replenish their balance sheets somehow, and the only way they can do that is to make bigger profit margins or issue new shares.”
A spokesman for the Council of Mortgage Lenders said the market had been “extremely competitive” but some of the deals on offer a year ago were “not sustainable in current market conditions”.
//////////////////
PhysOrg.comFossil sheds light on the history of sexTimes Online - 21 Mar 2008A long, thin rope-like creature standing erect on the sea floor up to 570 million years ago has been identified as the first animal on Earth to have had sex.
PhysOrg.comFossil sheds light on the history of sexTimes Online - 21 Mar 2008A long, thin rope-like creature standing erect on the sea floor up to 570 million years ago has been identified as the first animal on Earth to have had sex.
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BBC NewsAddicts 'not second-class people'BBC News - 5 hours agoDrug users should not be treated as second-class citizens and deserve the same right to care as everyone else, the Scottish Government has said.
BBC NewsAddicts 'not second-class people'BBC News - 5 hours agoDrug users should not be treated as second-class citizens and deserve the same right to care as everyone else, the Scottish Government has said.
///////////////////TOUCHES ALL COVERS NONE
//////////////////HS CRSS=ICNBAH-RAS-NBT
//////////////////////Is Time Disappearing From the Universe? -A Galaxy Classic
Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. This radical new theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years.
Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed...
Read the whole entry »
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Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. This radical new theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years.
Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed...
Read the whole entry »
• Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • •
////////////////////Bhagavad Gita Selection Number 273, for Friday, March 21, 2008From Chapter XII: The Yoga of DevotionXII.12. SHREYO HI JNAANAMABHYAASAAT JNAANAADDHYAANAM VISHISHYATE; DHYAANAAT KARMAPHALATYAAGAS TYAAGAACCHAANTIR ANANTARAM. (Krishna speaking to Arjuna)Better indeed is knowledge than practice; than knowledge meditation is better; than meditation the renunciation of the fruits of actions; peace immediately follows renunciation.
//////////////////œThou hast created me not from necessity but from grace.â€
////////////////////“Find your own light.”
////////////////The regulation of negative emotions: impact on brain activityEmotions play an important role in the lives of humans, and influence our behavior, thoughts, decisions, and interactions. The ability to regulate emotions is essential to both mental and physical well-being. "Conversely, difficulties with emotion regulation have been postulated as a core mechanism underlying mood and anxiety disorders," according to the authors of a new study published in Biological Psychiatry on March 15th. Thus, these researchers set out to further expand our understanding of the differential effects of emotion regulation strategies on the human brain.http://www.brainmysteries.com/research/The_regulation_of_negative_emotions_impact_on_brain_activity.asp
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Thursday 20 March 2008
HS STEP CRSS
//////////////////WELLNESS How to eat less when snackingDon't take the whole box of crackers (or container of other snacks) with you to the computer desk for a pre-meal snack. Instead take a handful and return if you're still hungry. You'll eat much less than if you had taken them all with you in the first place.
//////////////////////COOKING How to make broccoli taste goodRight after I married my wife, she got me to try ketchup on my broccoli. I thought it sounded repulsive, but I agreed to try it once. It was so delicious that I've been eating steamed broccoli that way ever since - including tonight!
////////////////////Happily Marrieds Have Lower Blood Pressure than Social SinglesHappily married adults have lower blood pressure than singles with supportive social networks. Both men and women in happy marriages scored four points lower on 24-hour blood pressure than single adults. Having supportive friends did not translate into improved blood pressure for singles or unhappily marrieds. (Embargo expired on 20-Mar-2008 at 00:00 ET)Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 20-Mar-2008—Brigham Young University
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//////////////////////COOKING How to make broccoli taste goodRight after I married my wife, she got me to try ketchup on my broccoli. I thought it sounded repulsive, but I agreed to try it once. It was so delicious that I've been eating steamed broccoli that way ever since - including tonight!
////////////////////Happily Marrieds Have Lower Blood Pressure than Social SinglesHappily married adults have lower blood pressure than singles with supportive social networks. Both men and women in happy marriages scored four points lower on 24-hour blood pressure than single adults. Having supportive friends did not translate into improved blood pressure for singles or unhappily marrieds. (Embargo expired on 20-Mar-2008 at 00:00 ET)Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 20-Mar-2008—Brigham Young University
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Wednesday 19 March 2008
FWGAD=FWMO=CDS 200308
//////////////////RENAL CA AF STD DPRTD FRM VK DD
/////////////////JRQ=FWMO
//////////////Dairy Products Consumed by Children Too High in Fat? A study published in the November 2007 issue of The Journal of Pediatrics looks at children's dairy intake.
///////////////Autism and Vaccine Link On March 6, a federal court granted compensation to a Georgia girl because she developed autism-like symptoms after receiving childhood vaccines in 2000. Officials did not say the vaccines caused autism; rather, they concluded the vaccines aggravated a preexisting condition. Do you agree or disagree with the court's decision to award compensation?
////////////////TRASH AND CASH
////////////////Symptom Profile of Common Colds in School-Aged Children The common cold in school-aged children is characterized by nasal congestion, cough, and runny nose. Signs and symptoms usually continue for at least 10 days.
//////////////////CME Cognitive and Neuromotor Impairments Seen at 5 Years in Children Born Preterm Results from a study show that in children born before 33 weeks' gestation, cognitive and neuromotor impairments by 5 years of age increase with decreasing gestational age.
//////////////////Topical Emollients Improve Survival of Very Premature Neonates Skin barrier therapy in the form of topical application of sunflower seed oil or Aquaphor reduces mortality in very premature neonates in hospital settings, according to results of a study from Bangladesh.Reuters Health Information 2008
////////////////////Apnea After Immunization Predictable in Some Hospitalized Neonates Multiple factors, including severity of illness, predict apnea following immunization in hospitalized infants, researchers report in the March issue of Pediatrics.Reuters Health Information 2008
//////////////////New Research Confirms Childhood Stroke More Common in Boys Two large studies into childhood stroke confirm earlier findings from smaller studies that stroke is more common in boys.
MEDSCAPE=
//////////////////////Oxygen Therapy for Hospitalized Infants With Bronchiolitis Determines LOS Oxygen supplementation is the prime determinant of the length of stay (LOS) for infants hospitalized with acute viral bronchiolitis, Scottish researchers report in the March issue of Pediatrics.Reuters Health Information 2008
///////////////////Court Ruling Does Not Confirm Autism-Vaccine Link, CDC Says Federal health officials said on Thursday the government has not conceded that vaccines cause autism even after a Georgia girl won federal compensation in a case arguing a vaccine led to her autistic condition.
/////////////////80% HMLESS IN LNDN DRG USRS?
////////////////////HS CRSS-TTP2
//////////////////AMJ=Exactly 150 years ago, a hot summer and the effluent from growing numbers of water closets reduced the river Thames in London to what was publicly termed a 'great stink'. Today, at least one-sixth of the world's population lives in slums and shanty-towns as unhealthy as those in Britain's 19th-century towns and cities, with similar health and social problems.http://abcmail.net.au/t/111460/603940/2381/0/
//////////////////DARK MATTER NUGGETS
//////////////////METHADONE OD-ODAD
/////////////////5000 MAMMAL SPECIES THERE
//////////////////IN WILD,MORE SLEEP MORE CHANCE OF SURVIVAL AND PASS ON GENES
/////////////////ABC=Quantum entanglement
Listen Now - 15032008 Download Audio - 15032008
Quantum entanglement is a strange telepathic link which allows particles to influence each other's properties. Some have suggested the power travels at millions of times the speed of light. The notion defies our idea of common sense. Einstein dismissed the theory as too spooky to be real. But entanglement is more than just a product of the equations of quantum theory. It exists and plays a part in the real world. It is at the forefront of a technological revolution. It can be used in encrypting information. It is unbreakable. The race is on to bring quantum cryptography to a worldwide market. It will be used to protect financial transactions and information flow. It will be used to drive quantum computers. Michael Brooks's book, Entanglement is a thriller based on the power of entanglement falling into the wrong hands.
Show Transcript
Transcript
This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.
Robyn Williams: Physics can be really mind-boggling. Try Entanglement. That's both a concept in physics and the title of a gripping novel by Michael Brooks. If you think solid light is a worry, entanglement is beyond belief.
Michael Brooks: Around five years ago a researcher called Nicolas Gisin performed a strange experiment in the mountains of Switzerland. He and his team sent million of photons, the quantum particles of light, whizzing through optical fibres between two villages 11 kilometres apart. The photons travelled at the speed of light which, according to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, is supposed to be the fastest anything can move through the universe. However, the photons were connected via a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, a strange almost telepathic link that allows particles to influence each other's properties. Gisin measured how fast that influence travelled and clocked it at least 10 million times the speed of light.
Quantum entanglement defies all our notions of common sense. When you entangle a pair of particles by letting them interact, all the information about those two particles-their size, their momentum, their electrical charge or whatever-no longer resides on one or the other, it lives in both of them, which means they can continue to affect each other no matter how far apart they are. Even if you send one of an entangled pair of particles to the other side of the universe, you can still tweak that particle's properties instantaneously by tweaking the particle you hold in your hand. It is almost like having a remote control for the universe.
Einstein hated the idea of entanglement. Even though experiments have shown that it doesn't pass information at more than the speed of light and so it doesn't strictly contravene relativity, it was nevertheless too strange for him, belonging more to the realm of magic and fairytales than to science. He dismissed it as too spooky to be real. Though it was a product of the equations of quantum theory, he felt it showed there must be something wrong with the theory. Unfortunately Einstein died before experiments showed that entanglement was more than just an artefact of quantum equations. It does exist, and it plays an important role in the real world.
Entanglement is actually everywhere. Any two subatomic particles that interact in some way become entangled, sharing that spooky link. When you see light coming from a faraway star, for instance, the photon, the particle of light, is almost certainly still entangled with the atoms way up there in the star that emitted it. Next time you look up at the heavens you can marvel at your spooky link with the stars too; when your eye absorbs the energy of that starlight you become, in some small way, linked in with the distant constellations.
The constant interactions between electrons and the atoms that make up your body mean that you yourself are a mass of entanglements. In fact it might even explain why you are alive while the chair you are sitting on is not. The physicist Paul Davies has suggested that a better understanding of quantum entanglement might help us work out what it means for something to be alive, something that biologists are still struggling to understand.
Quantum entanglement is not just about esoteric and strange wonderings about the nature of life or our links with the universe however. It is also at the forefront of a technological revolution. Gisin, for instance, is now working with a Melbourne-based technology company called Senetas to put entanglement to work as a means of encrypting data. At the end of last year, this Swiss-Australian collaboration made entanglement's first real-world contribution to data protection when it used quantum entanglement to lock down the security of the Swiss national elections. The elections were protected by a technology called quantum cryptography where information is transmitted securely in photons of light that have been entangled together. It is an unbreakable encryption because it is rather like putting a seal on a document. The only way to read the information is to disturb the entanglement, and any such tampering is, like a broken seal, immediately obvious.
After their success in Switzerland, Nicolas Gisin's company, id Quantique, is now working with Senetas to bring Quantum encryption to a worldwide market. They face stiff competition in this. Companies all over the world are trying to exploit quantum entanglement for data security. Plans are afoot to use this same idea to protect data and therefore money in electronic bank transfers, for example. US government researchers are going a step further. They have sent entangled photons for quantum cryptography into space to reprogram a satellite without anyone being able to eavesdrop on the transmission.
The US government has a very good reason to be so interested in quantum cryptography, it is the only kind of encryption that can withstand an attack by the other technological revolution that entanglement brings; the quantum computer. Quantum computers use entanglement between atoms to perform incredibly fast number crunching. In the quantum world an atom can be used to encode several different numbers at once, and if you entangle enough atoms together you increase that power exponentially. Entangle together just 250 atoms and you can simultaneously encode more numbers than there are atoms in the entire universe. So quantum computing with even a modest number of entangled atoms can be like having several thousand computers working together on a problem. The world's most secret codes are only secret because it requires too much computing power to crack them. When the quantum computer fulfils its potential, these codes will be extremely vulnerable to attack.
Building a truly powerful quantum computer is fraught with difficulties, but Australian researchers are at the centre of one of the most impressive and promising efforts. That's because, in 1988, University of NSW researcher Bruce Kane had a brilliant idea. Kane bypassed all the laborious efforts to use exotic new tools to bring the quantum computer to life, showing instead that techniques currently used to make normal computers could be harnessed to make a quantum version. Overnight, building a quantum computer became a plausible idea.
Within a year of Kane's proposal being published, the Australian government had put millions of dollars into establishing the Australian Centre for Quantum Technology, now led by Robert Clark of UNSW. Making Kane's idea work is not easy but the project is still leading the race to make the first quantum computer. Just now quantum computers are at a very early stage of development and not particularly threatening in their code-cracking abilities. However, the machines of the future will be very impressive indeed and very threatening if, like the US government, you have secrets that you want to keep safe. The threat would be especially serious if the technology should fall into the wrong hands, a scenario that is not beyond the realms of possibility.
Shortly after Kane published his paper, I was at a meeting at the European Union headquarters in Brussels. Senior administrators were trying to decide how much money Europe should be putting into quantum computing research. In order to work this out they were asking a series of questions, such as how far the Americans have got with quantum technology. Their final question was rather more unexpected. 'Is there,' they asked, 'any mafia involvement?' The possibility hadn't occurred to me until then but when the question was raised I was suddenly aware what was at stake. The idea of cracking government codes would surely be of enormous interest to those who wanted to sell military secrets, say, or hack coastguard communications in order to send shipments of narcotics around the world.
And that was the point at which my novel Entanglement was born. The premise comes right from Kane's breakthrough; what if someone out of the blue showed you how to make a code-cracking quantum computer and then disappeared? It wouldn't be long before people were knocking at your door. You'd just have to hope that it wasn't the organised crime syndicates that got to you first.
The first truly powerful quantum computer has yet to be built, as far as we know. But the fact that quantum technology is now being pursued by governments shows how far we have come since Einstein dismissed entanglement as nothing more than 'spooky' half a century ago. Entanglement is very weird, yes, but it's also very real. Sometimes even the greatest minds get it wrong.
Robyn Williams: Michael Brooks writes about physics for New Scientist magazine. His novel Entanglement is both a thriller awash with blood and a quantum physics primer.
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Listen Now - 15032008 Download Audio - 15032008
Quantum entanglement is a strange telepathic link which allows particles to influence each other's properties. Some have suggested the power travels at millions of times the speed of light. The notion defies our idea of common sense. Einstein dismissed the theory as too spooky to be real. But entanglement is more than just a product of the equations of quantum theory. It exists and plays a part in the real world. It is at the forefront of a technological revolution. It can be used in encrypting information. It is unbreakable. The race is on to bring quantum cryptography to a worldwide market. It will be used to protect financial transactions and information flow. It will be used to drive quantum computers. Michael Brooks's book, Entanglement is a thriller based on the power of entanglement falling into the wrong hands.
Show Transcript
Transcript
This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.
Robyn Williams: Physics can be really mind-boggling. Try Entanglement. That's both a concept in physics and the title of a gripping novel by Michael Brooks. If you think solid light is a worry, entanglement is beyond belief.
Michael Brooks: Around five years ago a researcher called Nicolas Gisin performed a strange experiment in the mountains of Switzerland. He and his team sent million of photons, the quantum particles of light, whizzing through optical fibres between two villages 11 kilometres apart. The photons travelled at the speed of light which, according to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, is supposed to be the fastest anything can move through the universe. However, the photons were connected via a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, a strange almost telepathic link that allows particles to influence each other's properties. Gisin measured how fast that influence travelled and clocked it at least 10 million times the speed of light.
Quantum entanglement defies all our notions of common sense. When you entangle a pair of particles by letting them interact, all the information about those two particles-their size, their momentum, their electrical charge or whatever-no longer resides on one or the other, it lives in both of them, which means they can continue to affect each other no matter how far apart they are. Even if you send one of an entangled pair of particles to the other side of the universe, you can still tweak that particle's properties instantaneously by tweaking the particle you hold in your hand. It is almost like having a remote control for the universe.
Einstein hated the idea of entanglement. Even though experiments have shown that it doesn't pass information at more than the speed of light and so it doesn't strictly contravene relativity, it was nevertheless too strange for him, belonging more to the realm of magic and fairytales than to science. He dismissed it as too spooky to be real. Though it was a product of the equations of quantum theory, he felt it showed there must be something wrong with the theory. Unfortunately Einstein died before experiments showed that entanglement was more than just an artefact of quantum equations. It does exist, and it plays an important role in the real world.
Entanglement is actually everywhere. Any two subatomic particles that interact in some way become entangled, sharing that spooky link. When you see light coming from a faraway star, for instance, the photon, the particle of light, is almost certainly still entangled with the atoms way up there in the star that emitted it. Next time you look up at the heavens you can marvel at your spooky link with the stars too; when your eye absorbs the energy of that starlight you become, in some small way, linked in with the distant constellations.
The constant interactions between electrons and the atoms that make up your body mean that you yourself are a mass of entanglements. In fact it might even explain why you are alive while the chair you are sitting on is not. The physicist Paul Davies has suggested that a better understanding of quantum entanglement might help us work out what it means for something to be alive, something that biologists are still struggling to understand.
Quantum entanglement is not just about esoteric and strange wonderings about the nature of life or our links with the universe however. It is also at the forefront of a technological revolution. Gisin, for instance, is now working with a Melbourne-based technology company called Senetas to put entanglement to work as a means of encrypting data. At the end of last year, this Swiss-Australian collaboration made entanglement's first real-world contribution to data protection when it used quantum entanglement to lock down the security of the Swiss national elections. The elections were protected by a technology called quantum cryptography where information is transmitted securely in photons of light that have been entangled together. It is an unbreakable encryption because it is rather like putting a seal on a document. The only way to read the information is to disturb the entanglement, and any such tampering is, like a broken seal, immediately obvious.
After their success in Switzerland, Nicolas Gisin's company, id Quantique, is now working with Senetas to bring Quantum encryption to a worldwide market. They face stiff competition in this. Companies all over the world are trying to exploit quantum entanglement for data security. Plans are afoot to use this same idea to protect data and therefore money in electronic bank transfers, for example. US government researchers are going a step further. They have sent entangled photons for quantum cryptography into space to reprogram a satellite without anyone being able to eavesdrop on the transmission.
The US government has a very good reason to be so interested in quantum cryptography, it is the only kind of encryption that can withstand an attack by the other technological revolution that entanglement brings; the quantum computer. Quantum computers use entanglement between atoms to perform incredibly fast number crunching. In the quantum world an atom can be used to encode several different numbers at once, and if you entangle enough atoms together you increase that power exponentially. Entangle together just 250 atoms and you can simultaneously encode more numbers than there are atoms in the entire universe. So quantum computing with even a modest number of entangled atoms can be like having several thousand computers working together on a problem. The world's most secret codes are only secret because it requires too much computing power to crack them. When the quantum computer fulfils its potential, these codes will be extremely vulnerable to attack.
Building a truly powerful quantum computer is fraught with difficulties, but Australian researchers are at the centre of one of the most impressive and promising efforts. That's because, in 1988, University of NSW researcher Bruce Kane had a brilliant idea. Kane bypassed all the laborious efforts to use exotic new tools to bring the quantum computer to life, showing instead that techniques currently used to make normal computers could be harnessed to make a quantum version. Overnight, building a quantum computer became a plausible idea.
Within a year of Kane's proposal being published, the Australian government had put millions of dollars into establishing the Australian Centre for Quantum Technology, now led by Robert Clark of UNSW. Making Kane's idea work is not easy but the project is still leading the race to make the first quantum computer. Just now quantum computers are at a very early stage of development and not particularly threatening in their code-cracking abilities. However, the machines of the future will be very impressive indeed and very threatening if, like the US government, you have secrets that you want to keep safe. The threat would be especially serious if the technology should fall into the wrong hands, a scenario that is not beyond the realms of possibility.
Shortly after Kane published his paper, I was at a meeting at the European Union headquarters in Brussels. Senior administrators were trying to decide how much money Europe should be putting into quantum computing research. In order to work this out they were asking a series of questions, such as how far the Americans have got with quantum technology. Their final question was rather more unexpected. 'Is there,' they asked, 'any mafia involvement?' The possibility hadn't occurred to me until then but when the question was raised I was suddenly aware what was at stake. The idea of cracking government codes would surely be of enormous interest to those who wanted to sell military secrets, say, or hack coastguard communications in order to send shipments of narcotics around the world.
And that was the point at which my novel Entanglement was born. The premise comes right from Kane's breakthrough; what if someone out of the blue showed you how to make a code-cracking quantum computer and then disappeared? It wouldn't be long before people were knocking at your door. You'd just have to hope that it wasn't the organised crime syndicates that got to you first.
The first truly powerful quantum computer has yet to be built, as far as we know. But the fact that quantum technology is now being pursued by governments shows how far we have come since Einstein dismissed entanglement as nothing more than 'spooky' half a century ago. Entanglement is very weird, yes, but it's also very real. Sometimes even the greatest minds get it wrong.
Robyn Williams: Michael Brooks writes about physics for New Scientist magazine. His novel Entanglement is both a thriller awash with blood and a quantum physics primer.
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