‘Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).
In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. “Being poor sucks,” Lisi says. “It’s hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you’re trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month.”
Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.
Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.’
‘Car hoons will be penalised and humiliated under a NSW government initiative to wreck the vehicles of offenders and publish video footage of the destruction.
Premier Morris Iemma says the plan proposes to destroy hoons’ cars in demonstration tests under controlled conditions.
“Car hoons engage in potentially lethal, property destroying, anti-social behaviour,” Mr Iemma said in a statement today.
“We’re turning the tables. We’ll destroy their property – but do it for the right reasons.”‘
‘A new antenna made of plasma (a gas heated to the point that the electrons are ripped free of atoms and molecules) works just like conventional metal antennas, except that it vanishes when you turn it off.
That’s important on the battlefield and in other applications where antennas need to be kept out of sight. In addition, unlike metal antennas, the electrical characteristics of a plasma antenna can be rapidly adjusted to counteract signal jamming attempts.
Plasma antennas behave much like solid metal antennas because electrons flow freely in the hot gas, just as they do in metal conductors. But plasmas only exist when the gasses they’re made of are very hot. The moment the energy source heating a plasma antenna is shut off, the plasma turns back into a plain old (non conductive) gas. As far as radio signals and antenna detectors go, the antenna effectively disappears when the plasma cools down.’
‘Someone made off with 15 kilometres of copper wire during the power outage caused by post tropical storm Noel, RCMP said Wednesday.
The theft was discovered Tuesday afternoon when power was restored to Pratt and Whitney Drive near the Halifax airport but the lights were still not on.
RCMP said it appears the culprits removed access panels to streetlights, cut the connections and then pulled out the underground copper wires that connect the lights.
The thieves made off with five separate strands of wire, each one three kilometres long.’
‘Our brains can turn down our ability to see to help them listen even harder to music and complex sounds, say experts.
A US study of 20 non-musicians and 20 musical conductors found both groups diverted brain activity away from visual areas during listening tasks.
Scans showed activity fell in these areas as it rose in auditory ones.
But during harder tasks the changes were less marked for conductors than for non-musicians, researchers told a Society for Neuroscience conference.’
I have been trying to explain to people how noises can make it hard to see for a few weeks now. 🙂 Hooray for science.
‘Two-photon (2-P) microscopy offers several advantages for biological imaging – in particular for non-injurious imaging of dynamic cell behaviors deep within intact tissues, organs and even the living animal [Cahalan et. al., 2003, Stutzmann et al., 2005]. However, its widespread adoption for such applications has been hindered by two factors: commercial 2-P microscopes are very expensive, and they typically acquire images at frame rates too slow to resolve many biological processes. Both of these problems may be circumvented by building your own 2-P microscope!
[..] The object of this web page is to gather together all the information you should need to build your own 2-P microscope.’
‘The father of a fallen Marine was awarded nearly $11 million Wednesday in damages by a jury that found leaders of a fundamentalist church had invaded the family’s privacy and inflicted emotional distress when they picketed the Marine’s funeral.
The jury first awarded $2.9 million in compensatory damages. It returned later in the afternoon with its decision to award $6 million in punitive damages for invasion of privacy and $2 million for causing emotional distress to the Marine’s father, Albert Snyder of York, Pa.
Snyder sued the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church for unspecified monetary damages after members staged a demonstration at the March 2006 funeral of his son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq. [..]
Church members routinely picket funerals of military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, carrying signs such as “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “God hates fags.”‘
‘A physicist and his biologist son destroyed a common virus using a superfast pulsing laser, without harming healthy cells. The discovery could lead to new treatments for viruses like HIV that have no cure.
“We have demonstrated a technique of using a laser to excite vibrations on the shield of a virus and damage it, so that it’s no longer functional,” said Kong-Thon Tsen, a professor of physics at Arizona State University. “We’re testing it on HIV and hepatitis right now.” [..]
In the latest research, Tsen and his son demonstrated that their laser technique could shatter the protein shell, or capsid, of the tobacco mosaic virus, leaving behind only a harmless mucus-like mash of molecules.
The laser shattered the capsid at low energy: 40 times lower, in fact, than the energy level that harmed human T-cells. Other types of radiation, like ultraviolet light, kill microbes on produce, but would damage human cells.’
‘An Australian researcher is on the road to riches after discovering a way to make broadband connections up to 100 times faster.
University of Melbourne research fellow Dr John Papandriopoulos is in the throes of moving to Silicon Valley after developing an algorithm to reduce the electromagnetic interference that slows down ADSL connections.
Most ADSL services around the world are effectively limited to speeds between 1 to 20Mbps, but if Dr Papandriopoulos’s technology is successfully commercialised that speed ceiling would be closer to 100Mbps.’
‘A study of more than 5000 youngsters in Switzerland has found those who smoke marijuana do as well or better in some areas as those who don’t.
But the same was not true for those who used both tobacco and marijuana, who tended to be heavier users of the drug, said the report by Dr J.C. Suris and colleagues at the University of Lausanne.
The study did not confirm the hypothesis that those who abstained from marijuana and tobacco functioned better overall, the authors said.
In fact, those who used only marijuana were “more socially driven … significantly more likely to practice sports and they have a better relationship with their peers” than abstainers, it said.’
‘New UC Irvine research is among the first to demonstrate that neural stem cells may help to restore memory after brain damage.
In the study, mice with brain injuries experienced enhanced memory – similar to the level found in healthy mice – up to three months after receiving a stem cell treatment. Scientists believe the stem cells secreted proteins called neurotrophins that protected vulnerable cells from death and rescued memory. This creates hope that a drug to boost production of these proteins could be developed to restore the ability to remember in patients with neuronal loss.
“Our research provides clear evidence that stem cells can reverse memory loss,” said Frank LaFerla, professor of neurobiology and behavior at UCI. “This gives us hope that stem cells someday could help restore brain function in humans suffering from a wide range of diseases and injuries that impair memory formation.”‘
‘Untriseptium (IPA: /ÊŒntrʌɪˈsÉ›ptiÉ™m/) is a chemical element which has not yet been observed to occur naturally or be synthesised. Its atomic number is 137 and symbol is Uts. [.]
In a non-relativistic approximation, the speed of an electron in a 1s electron orbital, v, can be obtained using the expression:
v = Zac = Zc / 137.036
where Z is the atomic number, and α is the fine structure constant, a measure of the strength of electromagnetic interactions. Under this approximation, any element with an atomic number of greater than 137 would require 1s electrons to be traveling faster than c, the speed of light.’
‘The Storm worm is fighting back against security researchers that seek to destroy it and has them running scared, Interop New York show attendees heard Tuesday.
The worm can figure out which users are trying to probe its command-and-control servers, and it retaliates by launching DDoS attacks against them, shutting down their Internet access for days, says Josh Korman, host-protection architect for IBM/ISS, who led a session on network threats.
“As you try to investigate [Storm], it knows, and it punishes,” he says. “It fights back.”‘
‘These guys build a huge stack of wood and then wheel in a large jet engine to start the fire. Amazing the power from a jet engine as the wood is engulfed in flames.’
(7.5meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘You might think this big shaggy Newfoundland dog, named Jackson, read the firefghter’s survival manual. The dog did everything right when a fire destroyed its Farmingville, Long Island home on Monday.
Firefighters say they found Jackson in the bathtub with his nose pressed against the drain getting fresh air.
The dog’s owner, Debbie Credidio, said that Jackson likes to lay in the bathroom to escape the heat. Going to his favorite spot may have saved the 3-year-old Newfoundland’s life.
Firefighters Vince Egbert and Edgar Trejo pulled aside a shower curtain and found the dog “actually sucking air out of the drainpipe, which is an old-school thing that a fireman would do.”’
‘It has long been regarded as a potentially troublesome, redundant organ, but American researchers say they have discovered the true function of the appendix.
The researchers say it acts as a safe house for good bacteria, which can be used to effectively reboot the gut following a bout of dysentery or cholera.
The conventional wisdom is that the small pouch protruding from the first part of the large intestine is redundant and many people have their appendix removed and appear none the worse for it.
Scientists from the Duke University Medical Centre in North Carolina say following a severe bout of cholera or dysentery, which can purge the gut of bacteria essential for digestion, the reserve good bacteria emerge from the appendix to take up the role.’
‘The Storm worm first appeared at the beginning of the year, hiding in e-mail attachments with the subject line: “230 dead as storm batters Europe.” Those who opened the attachment became infected, their computers joining an ever-growing botnet.
Although it’s most commonly called a worm, Storm is really more: a worm, a Trojan horse and a bot all rolled into one. It’s also the most successful example we have of a new breed of worm, and I’ve seen estimates that between 1 million and 50 million computers have been infected worldwide. [..]
Worms like Storm are written by hackers looking for profit, and they’re different. These worms spread more subtly, without making noise. Symptoms don’t appear immediately, and an infected computer can sit dormant for a long time. If it were a disease, it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will eventually come back years later and eat your brain.’
‘”Water undoubtedly is the most important chemical substance in the world,” explained Elmar Fuchs and colleagues from the Graz University of Technology in Austria in a recent study. “The interaction of water with electric fields has been intensely explored over the last years. We report another unusual effect of liquid water exposed to a dc electric field: the floating water bridge.”
When exposed to a high-voltage electric field, water in two beakers climbs out of the beakers and crosses empty space to meet, forming the water bridge. The liquid bridge, hovering in space, appears to the human eye to defy gravity.
Upon investigating the phenomenon, the scientists found that water was being transported from one beaker to another, usually from the anode beaker to the cathode beaker. The cylindrical water bridge, with a diameter of 1-3 mm, could remain intact when the beakers were pulled apart at a distance of up to 25 mm.’
‘Hair is a better source of ancient DNA than bone or muscle, a new study involving woolly mammoth hair suggests.
“The main problem with things like bone is that it contains real DNA from the source, but also a load of DNA that is undesirable,” said study team member Tom Gilbert of the University of Copenhagen. “For example, when a mammoth dies and the body starts putrefying, bacteria gets all throughout the body. Later, as it’s buried in the ground, soil bacteria get into it.”
Contamination from bacteria DNA generally make up 50 to more than 90 percent of the raw DNA extracted from the bone and muscles of ancient specimens, Gilbert said. In contrast, more than 90 percent of the DNA extracted from hairs taken from woolly mammoth specimens in the new study belonged to the extinct mega-mammals themselves.
“The quality of the DNA was fantastic,” Gilbert told LiveScience. “It was way better than we ever imagined. There’s both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA in there.”‘
‘More searches which Mother Nature never intended! Most of these are handy for finding security exploits on your own site; simply add a string from your own domain’s URL to check. But really, why limit ourselves? If it has an evil purpose, I’m including it. By the way, there is nothing illegal about typing in a search string; it is up to the website to secure this data. It’s what you DO with this information that you find which makes all of the difference.’
‘Harvard physicists have shown that specially treated diamond coatings can keep water frozen at body temperature, a finding that may have applications in future medical implants.
Doctoral student Alexander Wissner-Gross and Efthimios Kaxiras, physics professor and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics, spent a year building and examining computer models that showed that a layer of diamond coated with sodium atoms will keep water frozen up to 108 degrees Fahrenheit.
In ice, water molecules are arranged in a rigid framework that gives the substance its hardness. The process of melting is somewhat like a building falling down: pieces that had been arranged into a rigid structure move and flow against one another, becoming liquid water.
The computer model shows that whenever a water molecule near the diamond-sodium surface starts to fall out of place, the surface stabilizes it and reassembles the crystalline ice structure.’
This guy make some lights that flash in time to music, out of a condom, some LEDs and part of a drink bottle.
(2.8meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘A Pythagorean cup (also known as a Pythagoras cup) is a form of drinking cup which forces its user to imbibe only in moderation. Credited as an invention to Pythagoras of Samos, it allows the user to fill the cup with wine (a popular beverage in Pythagoras’ time) up to a certain level. If the user fills the cup no further than that level he may enjoy his drink in peace. If he exhibits gluttony however, the cup wreaks instant retribution by spilling its contents out the bottom (the intention being: onto the lap of the immodest drinker).’
‘If you’re taking a fat-blocking medication for weight loss, you’ve probably experienced “treatment effects” – flatulence, oily anal discharge, bowel urgency, and liquid stools that are difficult to control. [..]
You shouldn’t have to compromise your freedom in order to lose weight. You shouldn’t have to worry about where the nearest lavatory is, or whether the dark spots will show through your pants if you lose control and soil yourself. You shouldn’t have to stifle a laugh or a sneeze for fear of anal incontinence.
You deserve a better backup plan than the extra change of clothes in your car. Now there’s a simple and effective solution that can allow you to use weight-loss fat blockers while giving you a sense of security and confidence, knowing that you’ll be in control.’
Followup to alli: Miracle diet pill with teeny-tiny side effect and Diet Drug: Lose Weight, Possibly Soil Self.
‘Reporting in the June 21 issue of the journal Nature, University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical and biological engineering Professor James Dumesic and his research team describe a two-stage process for turning biomass-derived sugar into 2,5-dimethylfuran (DMF), a liquid transportation fuel with 40 percent greater energy density than ethanol.
The prospects of diminishing oil reserves and the threat of global warming caused by releasing otherwise trapped carbon into the atmosphere have researchers searching for a sustainable, carbon-neutral fuel to reduce global reliance on fossil fuels. By chemically engineering sugar through a series of steps involving acid and copper catalysts, salt and butanol as a solvent, UW-Madison researchers created a path to just such a fuel.’
‘Dr. Whippy, had people queue despite the wet wet weather in the streets of Linz during ars electronica. The machine proffers soft scoop ice cream according to the perceived unhappiness level of the customer.
“Employing voice stress analysis of the user’s answers to specific questions, varying degrees of unhappiness are measured and the counteractive quantity of ice cream is dispensed: The more unhappy you are, the more ice cream you need.”‘
‘Permanent water restrictions for Sydney have been announced by the NSW Government in a bid to combat climate change.
Called Long-term Water Saving Rules, they will remain in effect regardless of dam levels or downgrades of the current water restrictions scheme.
The rules include restrictions on watering between 10am and 4pm (AEST), the fitting of trigger nozzles on hoses and no hosing of hard surfaces.
Premier Morris Iemma said today the permanent restrictions reflected the Government’s commitment to conserving water in the long term.’
‘Are you sick of pigeons crapping all over your pool or backyard? Are plastic owls not getting the job done? It might be time to try the motion activated sprinkler defense system.’
(2.7meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘The hidden content in ancient works could be illuminated by a light source 10 billion times brighter than the Sun.
The technique employs Britain’s new facility, the Diamond synchrotron, and could be used on works such as the Dead Sea Scrolls or musical scores by Bach.
Intense light beams will enable scientists to uncover the text in scrolls and books without having to open – and potentially damage – them. [..]
The team now plans to use the Diamond synchrotron’s powerful X-ray source to penetrate many layers of parchment.
The synchrotron, which covers the area of five football pitches, generates light beams that can probe matter down to the molecular and atomic scale.’
‘Behold! The work is now complete.
Once started, the machine opens the each page of the book and scans the content. The whole process is automatic.
The lesson of this story is that LEGO is great.’
