`Australians are more likely to be attacked by a shark or hit by lightning than die from a nuclear power plant disaster.
In releasing a report commissioned on the viability of nuclear power in Australia, Prime Minister John Howard said there were no sound reasons to not go nuclear.
The final report from the Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy review board said the risk of implementing nuclear power is of an acceptably low level.’
`Mankind has had less effect on global warming than previously supposed, a United Nations report on climate change will claim next year.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there can be little doubt that humans are responsible for warming the planet, but the organisation has reduced its overall estimate of this effect by 25 per cent.
In a final draft of its fourth assessment report, to be published in February, the panel reports that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has accelerated in the past five years. It also predicts that temperatures will rise by up to 4.5 C during the next 100 years, bringing more frequent heat waves and storms.’
`NASA has announced it plans to build a permanently occupied base on the moon, most likely at the lunar north pole.
The habitat will serve as a science outpost as well as a testbed for technologies needed for future travel to Mars and construction will follow a series of flights to the moon scheduled to begin by 2020.
NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, Scott “Doc” Horowitz, told reporters of the plans in a teleconference from the Johnson Space Centre in Houston on Monday.
“We’re going for a base on the moon,” he said.’
`Own the one and only prototype of the Moller M400 Skycar®. This test vehicle has flown repeatedly and demonstrated its hover capabilities in over a dozen flights at the Moller International facilities in Davis, California. It is our intent to offer it for sale by auction on eBay to raise capital for the Company.
This is the Real Deal – A working “Flying Car” prototype!’
At the time of posting, the auction is just above US$2mil and the reserve isn’t me. [sigh] Looks like I can’t afford it. 🙂 [Unless lots of people start clicking AdSense links. :)]
`An enormous ring of superconducting magnets similar to a particle accelerator could fling satellites into space, or perhaps weapons around the world, suggest the findings of a new study funded by the US air force. [..]
The tunnel would direct the cone to a ramp angled at 30° to the horizon, where the cone would launch towards space at about 8 kilometres per second, or more than 23 times the speed of sound. A rocket at the back end of the cone would be used to adjust its trajectory and place it in a proper orbit.’
`In recent years, police around the country have started to use powerful infrared cameras to read plates and catch carjackers and ticket scofflaws. But the technology will soon migrate into the private sector, and morph into a tool for tracking individual motorists’ movements, says former policeman Andy Bucholz, who’s on the board of Virginia-based G2 Tactics, a manufacturer of the technology. [..]
“I know it sounds really Big Brother,” Bucholz says. “But it’s going to happen. It’s going to get cheaper and cheaper until they slap them up on every taxicab and delivery truck and track where people live.” And work. And sleep. And move.’
`[..] political interest in nuclear power is reviving across the world, thanks in part to concerns about global warming and energy security. Already, some 441 commercial reactors operate in 31 countries and provide 17% of the planet’s electricity, according to America’s Department of Energy. Until recently, the talk was of how to retire these reactors gracefully. Now it is of how to extend their lives. In addition, another 32 reactors are being built, mostly in India, China and their neighbours. These new power stations belong to what has been called the third generation of reactors, designs that have been informed by experience and that are considered by their creators to be advanced. But will these new stations really be safer than their predecessors?’
`The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday. [..]
He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.
“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Hawking said. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”‘
`If you look at it just right, the universal radiation warning symbol looks a bit like an angel. The circle in the middle could indicate the head, the lower part might be the body, and the upper two arms of the trefoil could represent the wings. Looking at it another way, one might see it as a wheel, a triangular boomerang, a circular saw blade, or any number of relatively benign objects. Whatever a person’s first impression of it may be, someone unfamiliar with the symbol probably wouldn’t guess that it means “Danger! These rocks shoot death rays!”
The U.S. Department of Energy has been grappling with that problem recently, as they designed the warning markers to use at Yucca Mountain and at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) nuclear waste storage facilities. There’s no telling who might be around to exhume our radioactive sins in future centuries, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandates that warnings be erected which will warn away potential intruders for the next 10,000 years, whomever those intruders may be.’
`Iran’s radical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on Thursday in Malaysia that Islam will be the dominant power in the “near future”, the official state news agency reported.
“The near future will be in the hands of Islam”, Ahmadinejad said after a meeting in Kuala Lumpur with the King of Malaysia. He cited the victory of the Islamist group Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections as a sign of the rise of Islamism in the world.
“History has shown that when Muslims become powerful, they do not use their power to the detriment of others, but use it in the service of peace and tranquillity”, Ahmadinejad said.’
`The results of the second OMNI Opinion Poll, concerning predictions for the year 2007, turned up some interesting ideas. The least change is envisioned in terms of religion and the arts, while progress is seen for the medical and educational arenas. All in all, the opinions of the OMNI Online audience didn’t differ too drastically from those of the experts in January’s “The Seers’ Catalog”.’
`The Clock, as its designer Danny Hillis calls it, will stand over 60 feet tall and keep track of every second, minute, day, century, and millennium for at least 10,000 years. Over that time, it will function with near perfect accuracy by occasionally resetting itself automatically using the warming heat of the desert sun. Its pendulum will be powered by the Earth itself – by temperature and pressure changes during the desert night. But its many faces will require winding. Thus if forgotten it will enter a long silence but continue to mark the years as they pass.’
`A typical morning in the year 2001: You wake up, scan the custom newspaper that’s spilling from your fax, walk into the living room. There you speak to a giant screen on the wall, part of which instantly becomes a high-quality TV monitor. When you leave for work, you carry a smart wallet, a computer the size of a credit card. When you come home, you slip on special eyeglasses and stroll through a completely artificial world.
Incredible, but all very possible. “In the next 11 years, you’ll see incredible breakthroughs in the home,” says Robert Simon, director of Lotus West, the West Coast R & D center of Lotus Development, maker of 1-2-3.’
`As the joke goes, on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. But although anonymity has been part of Internet culture since the first browser, it’s also a major obstacle to making the Web a safe place to conduct business: Internet fraud and identity theft cost consumers and merchants several billion dollars last year. And many of the other more troubling aspects of the Internet, from spam emails to sexual predators, also have their roots in the ease of masking one’s identity in the online world.
Change, however, is on the way. Already over 20 million PCs worldwide are equipped with a tiny security chip called the Trusted Platform Module, although it is as yet rarely activated. But once merchants and other online services begin to use it, the TPM will do something never before seen on the Internet: provide virtually fool-proof verification that you are who you say you are.’
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