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A New Reflection in the Mirror A scanning electron microscope image of some of the magnetic mirror's “fish scale”-shaped aluminum nanowires. Credit: Alexander Schwanecke A research group has devised a new type of mirror that reverses the magnetic field of a light wave upon reflection, rather than its electric field, as regular mirrors do. Seems like a minor difference? It's not. “Our mirror's ability to reverse the magnetic field of a light wave but not its electric field is extremely unusual,” physicist Alexander Schwanecke, the study's corresponding scientist, said to PhysOrg.com. Schwanecke is a researcher at the NanoPhotonics Portfolio Centre...

Excerpt - LITTLE ROCK — Former president Bill Clinton said Monday that he remembered the moment he realized he made the shift from a world leader to a philanthropist. "One day I was shaving in my house up in New York and Ilooked at myself in the mirror, and I thought, 'My God, I've become an NGO (non-government organization),'" Clinton told a crowd of 300 people gathered at his presidential libary in downtown Little Rock. ~ snip ~ "My climate-change initiative is being funded by Barbra Streisand and Rupert Murdoch," Clinton said, delighted by the unlikely alliance between the actress...

Building upon recent studies on optomechanical entanglement with lasers and mirrors, a group of scientists has developed a theoretical model using entanglement swapping in order to entangle two micromechanical oscillators. This ability could lead to advances in information processing, as well as other applications that use micromechanical resonators, such as electrometers, displacement detectors, and radio frequency signal processors, wrote scientists Stefano Pirandola et al. in a recent Physical Review Letters. "Until now, entanglement has been observed only for optical modes, i.e., photons (which are massless particles)," Pirandola told PhysOrg.com. "The significance of purely mechanical entanglement would be that it involves...

8/11/2006 - KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. (AFPN) -- A dual-mirror system, designed to extend the range of high-energy lasers by receiving and redirecting laser energy, is being tested here. The system, a prototype called the Aerospace Relay Mirror System, or ARMS, is being developed at the Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate. The operational version might be suspended from a high-altitude airship at an altitude of 70,000 feet, where atmospheric turbulence, or jitter, is less of a problem for beam quality. For testing, the dual-mirror prototype is suspended 100 feet above the ground using a mechanical crane, to...

European astronomers are planning to build an optical telescope that is four times bigger than any in existence. With a main mirror around 42m-wide, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will allow remote objects to be studied in greater detail than ever before. The powerful observatory will allow astronomers to see some of the first galaxies to form in the Universe. It could also look for signatures of life, such as vegetation, on distant planets circling other stars. The European Southern Observatory (Eso) operates the 8.2m Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal in Chile, which has been described as a...

INDIANAPOLIS -- A 3-year-old boy was fatally injured when a floor-mounted mirror fell on him at an Indianapolis Wal-Mart. Police said Christopher Antonio was apparently playing near the 5-foot-tall mirror in the children's section of the store Saturday evening when it fell at the store in the 3200 block of 86th Street. The boy was with his 5-year-old sister and his mother. The mother told police she was about 5 feet away from her son when she heard a loud crash. Police said it took two people to pull the mirror off the boy.

Sometimes you read an article in the newspaper, and you just wonder aloud how some people's views of the world can be so skewed, and wonder if they are even from the same planet as you. Now I admit that usually, in the context of politics, that is me reading the latest rant of a Howard Dean or an Al Gore. But in the article I am referring to today, it is Congressman Tom Davis of Virginia, a Republican, who heavily quoted in an article in today's Washington Times entitled, GOP Left Slams Club for Growth. Davis is the head...

I am not a trekkie, but I do remember a Star Trek episode in which several members of the crew of the starship Enterprise entered an alternative universe. That universe was the mirror image of the “normal” universe, that is, it was exactly like the normal universe, but everyone in it had the exact opposite character of the people in the normal universe We have entered that alternative universe in California. I know that term limits and the recall have substantially diminished the experience in Sacramento, but anyone paying even the smallest attention to history can tell that Gray Davis...

Humans Do Not Understand Mirror Reflections, Say Researchers General Science : December 21, 2005 Newsletter Psychologists at the University of Liverpool have found that people still find it difficult to understand how mirrors work. Dr Marco Bertamini, from the University’s School of Psychology, conducted a number of experiments by covering a mirror on a wall and inviting participants to walk along a line parallel to the mirror. He asked them to guess the point at which they would be able to see their reflection. Results showed that people believe they can see themselves even before they are level with the...

LONDON - Trinity Mirror's woes have been compounded by a poor month for the Daily Mirror, which dropped below 1.7m copies for the first time after a 3.28% fall in circulation. The paper, which is currently facing the possibility of job cuts under a review announced by Trinity Mirror three weeks ago, sold almost 57,000 fewer copies than in September, leaving it at 1.684m copies. A Trinity Mirror spokesman said: "We continue to invest in our brands, both in content and marketing, but unlike our competitors, we're not going to use marketing just to attain a number. The fact that...

SAS troops were last night poised to storm into Afghanistan and capture Osama bin Laden. Special forces have "good intelligence" the al-Qaeda boss or a senior henchman is holed up in a Taliban enclave. Two squadrons are on stand-by waiting for the go-ahead from reconnaissance troops on the ground in Afghanistan. Specialist counter-terrorist soldiers in the rapid-deployment group are on high alert at the SAS's Hereford base. Advertisement The other team consists of troops serving around the world. Commanders have insisted on waiting for news on the ground because of the cost of the operation, which could run into hundreds...

Tatyana Karaulnova, 45, lives in the village of Ust-Serta of the Kemerovo region. She is a unique human being because she has a mirror-like arrangement of internal organs. She does not regard herself unique, though. According to Tatyana, there is nothing unusual about her heart located on the right or her liver which is on the left. She believes everybody might have been built that way in the past and "changed" later on. Tatyana looks like an ordinary woman. She works as a receptionist in a local hospital. However, she has a special ability which she can feel in her...

Police: 48-Year-Old Used Wire, Electrical Tape To Build Periscope-Like Device CHULUOTA, Fla. -- A 48-year-old man was arrested and charged with voyeurism for allegedly using a cell phone and a mirror attached to sticks to spy on women showering at a campground in Seminole County, according to Local 6 News. Police said a woman was bathing at a shower facility at Lake Mills Park Tuesday night when an insect landed on her causing her to scream for help. Her husband ran to the shower area and noticed Kevin Lambrechts standing outside the building with a machete, Local 6 News reported....

Tonight's Sci-Fi Listing: Star Trek Eterprise : 8pm/7pm UPN - In a Mirror Darkly Part 2 of 2.

Tongiht Sci-Fi listing: Star Trek Enterprise: Part 1 of 2, this is the mirror universe episodes...

...In the heat of the U.S. campaign, people with limited access to the facts -- that is to say adherents to certain TV and print news outlets -- may have gotten the impression that Mr. Bush's had alienated nine-tenths of the inhabitants of the planet with his proactive style. Actually, his international opposition, aside from Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, consisted mostly of the acolytes of French President Jacques Chirac. Now that the American people have spoken, Mr. Chirac, who never had as many friends as he was credited with, is looking all the more lonely. Even the Germans,...

London – Europe's gut reaction to President Bush's re-election was clearly displayed on the front page of the Daily Mirror, a London tabloid. "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" the headline asked. It's no secret that most Europeans do not consider Bush to be an intellectual giant, but now it seems they have grave doubts about the rest of us, or at least the 59 million of us who voted for Bush. Simon Schama, the eminent British historian and writer who now teaches at Columbia University, divides us into two nations. One America, he explains to the liberal readership...

(2004-07-22) -- The 9/11 commission report released today blames the 2001 terror attacks on a "failure of imagination" among government officials, and urges intelligence agencies to "hire more evil people who could effectively anticipate acts of unrestrained wickedness." According to the report, America is vulnerable to terrorism because the CIA and FBI are filled with "patriotic people of integrity who have a hard time imagining the kinds of twisted and macabre things which are the stock-in-trade of terrorists." The report recommends that intelligence agencies recruit and hire "a new generation of heartlessly wicked and depraved agents and analysts who can...

Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan tonight stepped down after admitting that the pictures of soldiers abusing Iraqis were a "calculated and malicious hoax". Mr Morgan left his post hours after the regiment at the centre of the controversy demanded an apology. A statement from Mirror publishers Trinity Mirror said: "The Daily Mirror published in good faith photographs which it absolutely believed were genuine images of British soldiers abusing an Iraqi prisoner. "However there is now sufficient evidence to suggest that these pictures are fakes and that the Daily Mirror has been the subject of a calculated and malicious hoax. "The...

The Daily Mirror has issued a front page apology and sacked its editor after admitting its Iraq abuse photos are fake. Piers Morgan's dismissal came as the paper "apologised unreservedly" for printing the pictures. The editor, one of the best known faces in Fleet Street, had earlier brushed away growing pressure on him to quit. But in a dramatic turn of events, the paper's board forced the 39-year-old to step down with immediate effect. A statement from the paper said: "The Daily Mirror published in good faith photographs which it absolutely believed were genuine images of British soldiers abusing an...