March 12th, 2009
Some Democrats are increasingly concerned about President Obama’s $787 billion financial fix for the ailing economy, and are demanding greater transparency on further spending.
With the White House seemingly comparing the nation’s economy to a house on fire, some congressional Democrats are asking, where’s the fire truck?
One New Hampshire congresswoman said as much to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on Capitol Hill recently.
“I said, hurry, please hurry, because people are waiting and they are hurting, and they need the help now,” Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, D-New Hampshire, said.
She’s one of a growing number of nervous Democrats on edge or at odds with some of the Obama’s administration’s plans on the economy. Some are taking aim at the president’s budget proposals that would curb popular tax deductions for wealthier Americans. Video Watch more on why some Democrats are nervous
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March 11th, 2009
Humans lost in the desert are well known for going around in circles, prompting researchers to ask how desert creatures find their way around without landmarks for guidance. Now research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Frontiers in Zoology shows that Desert Ants input both local smells and visual cues into their navigation systems to guide them home.
Until now scientists thought that the Desert Ant Cataglyphis fortis, which makes its home in the inhospitable salt pans of Tunisia, was a pure vision-guided insect. But Kathrin Steck, Bill Hansson and Markus Knaden from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Gera number of used gas chromatography to verify that desert microhabitats do have unique odour signatures that can guide the ants back to the nest.
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March 11th, 2009
The last two remaining male in the UK New Zealand Blue Duck Hymenolaimus malacorhynchos were homosexuals. Unusual behavior of birds, the newspaper The Daily Telegraph reports.
Males Ben and Jerry live in the bird sanctuary in West Sussex in the UK. Employees of the Reserve had hoped that they will be able to restore the bird populations, as well as a third of New Zealand blue duck was female Cherry. However, when it was placed in an aviary with Cherry, Ben showed no interest. Jerry also refused to mate with females.
Reserve Officers noticed that the males show a typical marital behavior in relation not to Cherry but to each other. Ben and Jerry lived in an aviary, where they co-exist perfectly together.
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March 11th, 2009
During the survey the seabed for search carried hurricane “Ike” junk off the coast of Texas the remains of merchant ship “Caroline” sank in 1864 a were found. It is anticipated that they had previously been hidden by a layer of sand and silt, but the hurricane completely “cleaned” the bottom of the bay and made the splinters accessible to researchers, the Associated Press reports.
According to historical data, a private merchant vessel had tried to break through the blockade of the city Galvestoun organized by warships northerners during the Civil War years in the U.S. 1861-1865. After unsuccessful attempts to evade prosecution team had sent a ship in shallow waters where, in order to avoid enemy capture, it was burned. Remains of “Carolina” sanked.
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March 11th, 2009
Back in 1952 a team of scientists was desperate to test the capabilities of Mark One `Baby`, the computer built at Manchester University.
One of them, Christopher Strachey, devised a quirky software programme by entering hundreds of romantic verbs and nouns into the new machine.
He then sat back as Mark One `Baby` trawled the literary database to create a stream of light-hearted verse.
In much the same way as magnetic letters are displayed on fridges today, he and his team would print off the computer’s best efforts and put them on a notice board.
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March 9th, 2009
The rest of the developed world has high-speed rail. We don’t. That’s finally about to change.
With its soaring, arched ceilings, 20-story bell tower, and gilded frescoes, the Gare de Lyon rail station in Paris feels like a kind of church. This cathedral of transport was built for the World Exposition of 1900, a Belle Époque celebration of the achievements in science and technology that had given birth to the Industrial Revolution a century earlier. Coal soot and dark halos of steam billowed in the rafters, symbols of the original builders’ faith in eternal progress.
Today, sunlight streams through the roof, layers of caked-on coal grime having long since been scrubbed from the latticework of glass and steel. Gleaming silver-and-blue trains glide noiselessly in and out of the station, pushed and pulled at both ends by electrical “power units” that nuzzle the concrete platforms with aerodynamic, space-shuttle-like noses. These supertrains, which shoot through the countryside at almost 200 miles an hour, have transformed the Gare de Lyon from a sooty monument of the revolution that brought us global warming into something quite different. Now it’s a temple to high-speed rail, a technology that some experts say is essential to helping us get out of our climate fix.
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March 9th, 2009
The number of people whose deaths are directly related to obesity has leapt by 35 per cent since 2003, according to new figures obtained by The Independent on Sunday.
Obesity was cited on death certificates as a contributing factor in 1,203 deaths in England and Wales in 2007, highlighting how the incidence of related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and blood clots continues to rise alarmingly. The outlook is believed to be as serious in Scotland.
Experts warn that these figures are the tip of the iceberg, as the majority of obesity-related deaths are not being recorded on death certificates.
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March 9th, 2009
A third version of Downadup has been identified by Symantec, which says the new variant gives infected machines more powerful instructions to disable antivirus software and analysis tools, among other actions.
W32.Downadup.C is a modular component for machines currently infected with Downadup. This variant of Downadup, also called Conficker, is not attempting to self-replicate and appears to behave more like a Trojan than a worm, says Vincent Weafer, vice president of Symantec Security Response.
“Think of it as an updated module that’s more aggressive, more robust in defending itself,” Weafer says.
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March 9th, 2009
It’s well-known that most electronic devices in our homes are sucking up energy even while they are turned off. But for all the information out there, many questions remain. I got hundreds of reader questions after writing the post What’s wasting energy in your home right now. Below are answers to the five most common inquiries:
Which electronic devices waste the most energy when they are turned off but still plugged in?
Set-top cable boxes and digital video recorders are some of the biggest energy hogs. Unfortunately, there’s little consumers can do since television shows can’t be taped if boxes are unplugged. It also typically takes a long time to reboot boxes.
However, some of the other major consumers of standby power are more easily dealt with: computers, multifunction printers, flat-screen TVs, DVDs, VCRs, CD players, power tools, and hand-held vacuums. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) measured standby power for a long list of products.
While it’s true each individual product draws relatively little standby power, the LBNL says that when added together, standby power can amount to 10% of residential energy use.
Why do electronic devices use energy when they are switched off?
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March 5th, 2009
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March 5th, 2009
During the test-drive Porsche 911 (experimental model of 2010) crashed on highway in Germany. 51-year-old engineer of the company has died. The car was traveling just 130 km per hour, on the road without a speed limit.
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March 5th, 2009
Group of young people decided to meet spring with joy. They committed the mass jump from the 22 meter bridge. Everything went fine and nobody was hurt. And the main – they got amazing pictures of this action.
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March 4th, 2009
I don’t know exactly what it is, but you have to see it.
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March 4th, 2009
A year ago, we uncovered 16 dirty little secrets the restaurant industry was keeping hidden under countertops and tucked behind boardroom doors. We exposed certain chains for refusing to disclose their nutritional content, and others for refusing to remove trans fatty acids from their foods, in spite of a flood of scientific evidence that shows how harmful partially hydrogenated oils can be. The good news is that, once exposed, some of the shamed chains moved to rectify these secrets. The bad news is that some didn’t. And the even more disappointing news is that in the year since, we’ve discovered 16 new secrets that the restaurant industry would rather you never hear about. Too bad for them.
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March 4th, 2009
A new reactor design could make nuclear power safer and cheaper, says John Gilleland.
Enriching the uranium for reactor fuel and opening the reactor periodically to refuel it are among the most cumbersome and expensive steps in running a nuclear plant. And after spent fuel is removed from the reactor, reprocessing it to recover usable materials has the same drawbacks, plus two more: the risks of nuclear-weapons proliferation and environmental pollution.
These problems are mostly accepted as a given, but not by a group of researchers at Intellectual Ventures, an invention and investment company in Bellevue, WA. The scientists there have come up with a preliminary design for a reactor that requires only a small amount of enriched fuel–that is, the kind whose atoms can easily be split in a chain reaction. It’s called a traveling-wave reactor. And while government researchers intermittently bring out new reactor designs, the traveling-wave reactor is noteworthy for having come from something that barely exists in the nuclear industry: a privately funded research company.
As it runs, the core in a traveling-wave reactor gradually converts nonfissile material into the fuel it needs. Nuclear reactors based on such designs “theoretically could run for a couple of hundred years” without refueling, says John Gilleland, manager of nuclear programs at Intellectual Ventures.
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