Free Republic

By looking at satellite imagery, University of Maryland scientists hope to predict cholera epidemics four to six weeks before they actually happen. The research could help save lives worldwide, and could be used to develop other models to predict other seasonal or climate-driven infectious diseases. "Predicting the conditions that trigger cholera outbreaks in coastal regions could be very valuable for public health," said Rita Colwell, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied cholera for decades. "If we see this coming we could go into these areas with bottled water and medication to save lives." Cholera, a disease that gives...

Is there something wrong with the boards? Some articles on News/Activism don't have viewable comments and it appears that new articles are not appearing. I posted a comment on one thread as a test and that does not show up in the thread or in my pings.

Somewhere between carbon fibres and carbon nanotubes, a new material shows its strengths. The colossal carbon tube is relatively stronger and lighter than a conventional carbon fibre.PRL/ H. Peng et al A new form of carbon material, potentially lighter and stronger than conventional carbon fibres, has been discovered by researchers in China and the United States.Huisheng Peng of Tongji University in Shanghai and his colleagues have found that a carbon vapour, made by heating ethylene and paraffin oil, will condense into tubes of pure carbon tens of micrometres wide and up to several centimetres long1.Individual tubes have a tensile strength...

SpaceDev, Inc. announced today that SpaceDev Founder and Board Member James Benson, 63, died peacefully in his home. Benson was diagnosed in 2007 with a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor, the cause of his death early this morning. Mr. Benson had resigned from an operational role in SpaceDev in September 2006. He retained a seat on the Board of Directors of SpaceDev where he had continued to support the Company that he founded in 1997. "Jim was a true visionary," said Mark Sirangelo, SpaceDev's CEO and Chairman of the Board. "He saw that space exploration could be more effective if done...

Artificial Bladder: John Carnett Almost 100,000 people languish on organ-transplant waiting lists. But new tissue-fabrication techniques should make swapping in a man-made liver as easy as snapping Lego bricks into place. Blood vessels Method: 3-D printer When: 5 years Gabor Forgacs, a tissue engineer at the University of Missouri, is making blood-vessel networks by culturing three types of vessel cells and loading them into a fridge-size bioprinter. This machine prints out the cells to build capillaries in preprogrammed patterns. Liver Method: Grown using stem cells from umbilical-cord blood When: 15–25 years Colin McGuckin has made silver-dollar-size, functional “mini livers.”...

Reanimating lifeless organs brings new hope for the millions on transplant waiting lists Born to Beat: a rat heart fused with rat cells incubates in a bioreactor at the University of Minnesota: Courtesy Emily Jensen In late 2005, cardiac researcher Doris Taylor revived the dead. She rinsed rat hearts with detergent until the cells washed away and all that remained was a skeleton of tissue translucent as wax paper—a ghost heart, as Taylor calls it. She injected the scaffold with fresh heart cells from newborn rats. Then she waited. What she witnessed four days later, once the cells had a...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. researchers have developed ultrathin films that when sandwiched together form a superconductor, an advance that could lead to a new class of fast, power-saving electronics. The films can be used at relatively high temperatures for superconductors, making them easier to handle and produce, they said on Wednesday. "What we have done is we have put together two materials, neither of which is a superconductor, and we found their interface -- where they touch -- is superconducting," said physicist Ivan Bozovic of the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, in a telephone interview. "This superconducting layer...

Green fluorescent protein bags the biggest gong in science. Aequorea victoria, source of the green fluorescent protein.G. OCHOCKI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The molecule responsible for a jellyfish's glow has won its discoverer and developers this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The green fluorescent protein (GFP) has revolutionized medical and biological science by providing a way to track the activity of individual proteins within a living cell, and thereby monitor how genes are expressed. The prize is shared equally between three scientists: Osamu Shimomura, now an emeritus professor at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University...

The University of Minnesota has concluded that falsified data were used in a 2001 article published by one of its researchers on adult stem cells. The school is asking that the article be retracted. The conclusion follows an 18-month investigation into research published by stem-cell expert Dr. Catherine Verfaillie. The investigation clears Verfaillie of misconduct but points to a former graduate student, Dr. Morayma Reyes, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Washington. The university blames Verfaillie for "inadequate training and oversight," and says it has asked for a retraction of the published article, which appeared in...

How much will $700 billion get you? Roughly speaking, the widely publicized cost of the financial bailout … er, rescue package … is equal to seven Apollo programs, or 70 state-of-the-art atom-smashers. The magnitude of the figures being thrown around is so much easier to understand when you use our currency conversion chart for mega-projects. (snip) Does all this make you feel better about the $700 billion, or worse? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

(UWIRE.com) This story was written by June Q. Wu, Harvard Crimson Researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute are one step closer to achieving the ultimate promise of stem cell research creating tissues for every part of the body without the use of harmful viruses or cancer-causing genes. Harvard Medical School professor Konrad A. Hochedlinger and his colleagues reported last week on the Web site of the journal Science that they have created mouse induced pluripotent stem cells without permanently altering the genetic makeup of the cells. Their technique allows scientists to genetically manipulate a patients cells typically skin cells...

The Sun has gone quiet, very quiet. The solar wind – which is comprised of electrically charged particles streaming out from the star – is weaker than at any time since scientists began accurate observations in the 1950s, and the number of sunspots in 2008 may be the lowest since the 19th century. This year’s solar silence has surprised space physicists, who were expecting the Sun to have moved away from the minimum point of the 11-year solar cycle by now. “To see such a significant and consistent long-term reduction in the solar wind output is really remarkable,” says David...

Should the government continue to fund NASA or should private companies take over the space industry? Vote here

(PhysOrg.com) -- In collaboration with scientists from the NanoTech Institute of the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) – CSIRO has achieved a major breakthrough in the development of a commercially-viable manufacturing process for a range of materials made from carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes possess a number of qualities – high tensile strength, high flexibility, high electrical and thermal conductivity, and transparency – which have excited great interest in a number of manufacturing industries including the electronic, automotive, energy and clothing industries. The flexible carbon nanotubes have been spun into ribbons that conduct electricity efficiently – and are five times...

Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly devoid of matter. Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe's expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation. Dark energy is the name given to the hypothetical force that could be drawing all the stuff in the universe outward at an ever-increasing rate. Current thinking is that 74 percent of the universe could be made up of this exotic dark

Controversial research hints that solar cycle affects cyclone intensity. A new study suggests that more sunspots mean less intense hurricanes on Earth. But many hurricane experts are cool on the idea. James Elsner, a climatologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has analyzed hurricane data going back more than a century. He says he has identified a 10- to 12-year cycle in hurricane records that corresponds to the solar cycle, in which the Sun's magnetic activity rises and falls. Solar activity varies on a roughly 11-year cycle, in which its magnetic activity waxes and wanes.NASA/TRACE The idea is that increased...

The Falcon 1 booster redeemed itself Sunday with an electrifying launch that put an exclamation point on six years of hard work and disappointment for SpaceX, the startup company chartered to revolutionize space travel. The 70-foot-tall rocket successfully delivered a 364-pound hunk of aluminum to orbit on the launcher's fourth flight, ending a streak of three consecutive Falcon 1 failures dating back to 2006. "That was freakin' awesome," said Elon Musk, CEO and chief technical officer of Space Technologies Corp. Musk established SpaceX in 2002 and funded the company from the fortune he earned from starting Zip2 and PayPal. "We...

Prof Stephen Hawking is to unveil a remarkable £1 million clock with no hands that pays tribute to the world's greatest clockmaker. One clock made by the legendary John Harrison, the pioneer of longitude, took 36 years to build and he was still calibrating it when he died at his home in London on March 24, 1776, his 83rd birthday. The Corpus Clock will be unveiled by Prof Stephen Hawking The Corpus Clock will be unveiled by Prof Stephen Hawking The Corpus Clock has been invented and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior...

WASHINGTON: The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to approve the Indo-US nuclear deal that would allow the US to provide nuclear materials to India. While there was bi-partisan support for the Bill, a considerable number of Democrats voted against the Bill moved by party colleague Howard Berman, an opponent of the measure who was persuaded to change his line. While 120 Democrats voted for the Bill, 107 Democrats voted against. Of the Republicans, 178 voted for and 10 voted against. The deal still faces major obstacles in the Senate. The accord reverses three decades of US policy by shipping atomic...

September 27, 2008 The Tesla Brand of luxury electric vehicles is certainly capturing a lot of the limelight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limelight as the era of the EV dawns. The company has announced a state-of-the-art US$250(sic) assembly facility in the heart of Silicon Valley Silicon Valley . The facility will build a new US$60,000 five-passenger luxury sedan with exceptional perfroamnce and a lithium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium -ion battery pack capable of delivering 240 miles per charge. The first sedans are likely to roll off the assembly line in late 2010. The new plant will be able to produce at least 15,000 sedans – up to...

A security hole in Adobe Systems Inc software, used to distribute movies and TV shows over the Internet, is giving users free access to record and copy from Amazon.com Inc's video streaming service. The problem exposes online video content to the rampant piracy that plagued the music industry during the Napster era and is undermining efforts by retailers, movie studios and television networks to cash in on a huge Web audience. "It's a fundamental flaw in the Adobe design. This was designed stupidly," said Bruce Schneier, a security expert who is also the chief security technology officer at British Telecom....

Excerpt - Chinese taikonaut Zhai Zhigang slipped out of the orbital module of Shenzhou-7 Saturday afternoon, starting China's first spacewalk or extravehicular activity (EVA) in the outer space. "Shenzhou-7 is now outside the spacecraft. I feel well. I am here greeting the Chinese people and people of the whole world," the taikonaut reported to the ground control in Beijing, where Chinese President Hu Jintao watched the proceedings with country's top space scientists. Donning a 4-million-U.S.dollar homemade Feitian space suit, Zhai waved to the camera mounted on the service module after pulling himself out of the capsule in a head-out-first position...

Here's the first look at the final version of the deadly XM25. We learnt this morning about the weapon's destructive power, but now we have all the details, starting with the key for its destruction power, a built-in fire-control system that can program each of the weapon's 25 millimeter rounds wirelessly, in real time, so soldiers can take down enemies around obstacles:As you can see in the schematics, the fire-control system uses thermal optic, day-sight, laser range finder, compass and IR light to exactly measure the distance to the target, programming each of the rounds' fuses so it explodes next...

September 24, 2008 Last week saw the one year anniversary of SSC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scleroderma ’s Ulimate Aero http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AERO becoming the fastest production car in the world at 256.18 mph, pushing past marks set by Koenigsegg’s CCR and Bugatti’s Veyron. It’s the first time the top speed record has stood for a whole year since McLaren’s F1 held it for seven years with 386.4 kmh (240.1mph). Now comes news that an Ultimate Aero EV (Electric Vehicle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle ) is in development. A 500 bhp EV is planned for late 2009 and a 1000 bhp 4WD EV is also under consideration. Now here’s...

A political stalemate that threatened to boot the United States off the International Space Station eased on Thursday after U.S. lawmakers passed an exemption allowing NASA to buy rides from the Russians, agency officials said. (snip) The Soyuz capsules are the only available vehicles capable of ferrying people to and from the station aside from the U.S. space shuttles, which are being retired in two years. Soyuz capsules also serve as the space station's lifeboats.

here may be a workable way to solve most of America's energy problems, end dependence on foreign oil and dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions with little pain. Remarkably, while proposals for renewed offshore oil drilling, new atomic power plants, expanded carbon trading and other proposed tactics abound in this year's presidential campaign, no one mentions the single most promising technique.This may be because its name contains the word "reactor." Combined with the fact that it depends on a sophisticated form of nuclear technology, that appears to make the notion of power plants using the Integral Fast Reactor anathema to today's...

With the high cost of gasoline and diesel fuel impacting costs for automobiles, trucks, buses and the overall economy, a Temple University physics professor has developed a simple device which could dramatically improve fuel efficiency as much as 20 percent. According to Rongjia Tao, Chair of Temple's Physics Department, the small device consists of an electrically charged tube that can be attached to the fuel line of a car's engine near the fuel injector. With the use of a power supply from the vehicle's battery, the device creates an electric field that thins fuel, or reduces its viscosity, so that...

When Google announced the Open Handset Alliance (a group of wireless industry players looking to get their names associated with Google's Android open mobile platform project), true open-source smartphones were a great idea that seemed far from commercial realization. This will change on October 22, when the T-Mobile G1 – the product of an exclusive partnership among T-Mobile, Google, and Asian handset manufacturer HTC -- becomes the first shipping mobile device based on the Android platform. The Android platform is open source -- Google has committed to publishing the source code for the entire platform, not just an application-level SDK....

The first smartphone based on Google's Android marries a sophisticated HTC handset with software features that outmaneuver iPhone On October 22, T-Mobile will reap the benefits of its founding membership in the Open Handset Alliance. Through an exclusive partnership with Google and Asian handset manufacturer HTC, the T-Mobile G1 will become the first shipping mobile device based on the Android platform. Google and company have worked hard to make the T-Mobile G1 both affordable and easy to use. And while it's too soon to know how far developers will take the open source Android platform, we now know what to...

Melamine in pesticides, human food chain - experts HONG KONG, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Melamine, a chemical that has tainted milk formula and made thousands of Chinese children ill, is used as an agricultural pesticide in China and may have been part of our food chain for a long time, experts said on Tuesday. Chan King-ming, associate professor of biochemistry at the Chinese University, said cyromazine, a derivative of melamine, was very commonly used in China as a pesticide. "It is absorbed into plants as melamine ... of course it is already in our food chain and animal feed," Chan...

Excerpt - WASHINGTON - The hunt for the hacker who broke into Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's personal e-mail account is shaping up to be a remarkably simple investigation, by the standards of major cybersecurity whodunits. ~ snip ~

Over the last few years, attorney Ray Beckerman has been defending broadband users accused of copyright infringement by the RIAA, and frequently blogs about it. His blog frequently highlights instances where the RIAA has sued individuals in error, often highlighting the tenuous legal ground many RIAA cases rest on. The RIAA is now targeting Beckerman, claiming he's a "vexatious" litigator, and demanding unspecified monetary sanctions to punish him for blogging about his cases.

EU parliament approves military use of Galileo In a majority decision on Thursday, the European parliament adopted a resolution on the importance of space for European security. The draft of the resolution submitted by Karl von Wogau, a member of the German CDU party and chairman of the European Parliament's subcommittee on security and defence, stipulated that Europe's future satellite navigation system, Galileo, should also be available for operations related to European security and defense policy (ESDP). 502 MEPs voted for the resolution, 83 against. The European Green Party proposed amendments so that Galileo could only be used for civilian...

An automotive revolution is coming -- but it's traveling in the slow lane. High oil prices have accomplished what years of pleas from environmentalists and energy-security hawks could not: forcing the world's major auto makers to refocus their engineers and their capital on devising mass-market alternatives to century-old petroleum-fueled engine technology. With all the glitzy ads, media chatter and Internet buzz about plug-in hybrids that draw power from the electric grid or cars fueled with hydrogen, it's easy to get lulled into thinking that gasoline stations soon will be as rare as drive-in theaters. The idea that auto makers can...

Startle Response Linked to Politics More Sensitive May Mean More Conservative, Study Finds By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, September 19, 2008; A09 People who startle easily in response to threatening images or loud sounds seem to have a biological predisposition to adopt conservative political positions on many hot-button issues, according to unusual new research published yesterday. The finding suggests that people who are particularly sensitive to signals of visual or auditory threats also tend to adopt a more defensive stance on political issues, such as immigration, gun control, defense spending and patriotism. People who are less sensitive...

LOS ANGELES — Senator Barack Obama used one to announce to the world his choice of a running mate. Thousands of Americans have used them to vote for their favorite “American Idol” contestants. Many teenagers prefer them to actually talking. Almost overnight, text messages have become the preferred form of communication for millions. But even as industry calculations show that Americans are now using mobile phones to send or receive more text messages than phone calls, those messages are coming under increasing fire because of the danger they can pose by distracting users. Though there are no official casualty statistics,...

When the transformer malfunctioned, operating temperatures rose from below 2 Kelvin to 4.5 Kelvin -- extraordinarily cold by most standards, but warmer than the normal operating temperature. The Large Hadron Collider was launched September 10, when scientists circled a beam of protons in a clockwise direction at the speed of light. That was followed by a counterclockwise beam.

India's moon mission may lift off Oct 19 Bangalore/New Delhi, Sep 18 : Weather permitting, India's maiden moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, may lift off Oct 19 from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, scientists associated with the odyssey indicated Thursday. "The tentative date is Oct 19," they said in Bangalore after completing all the work on the cuboid-shaped 590 kg spacecraft that will carry 11 payloads. Meanwhile, the government Thursday approved a sequel to the mission few years down the line. "The union cabinet today gave its approval for undertaking lunar mission Chandrayaan-2 and upgrading the associated existing ground segment at a total...

Alternative energy doesn't always mean solar or wind power. In fact, the alternative fuels developed by University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical and biological engineering professor James Dumesic look a lot like the gasoline and diesel fuel used in vehicles today. That's because the new fuels are identical at the molecular level to their petroleum-based counterparts. The only difference is where they come from. Click Here! Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, Dumesic and his team have developed a process that creates transportation fuels from plant material. The paper, published in the Sept. 18 online version...

It runs on water -- Jeff Falk demonstrates his hydrogen powered generator. It uses an electrolyzer to break the water down into hydrogen and oxygen, then burns the hydrogen for fuel. It produces zero carbon emissions and is "very safe." Falk's goal is to get off the grid completely. Photo By Don Lee EUREKA SPRINGS -- Are the high prices of fuel getting to you? Do you cringe whenever you pull up to the pumps, or when the electric bill arrives in the mail? If the answer is yes, it's a safe bet most Americans share your concern. But Jeff...

Cloud computing puts your health data at risk By Stuart J. Johnston The advent of "in the cloud" medical records services, such as Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health, promises an explosion in the storage of personal health-care information online. But these services pose sticky privacy questions — unless you know how to protect your personal medical records. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Private health data goes public by mistake Part of consumers' reticence to sign up for electronic personal health-care records — with or without services "in the cloud" — has to do with a handful of recent high-profile...

BLINK and you would have missed it. The expression of disgust on former US president Bill Clinton's face during his speech to the Democratic National Convention as he says "Obama" lasts for just a fraction of a second. But to Paul Ekman it was glaringly obvious. "Given that he probably feels jilted that his wife Hillary didn't get the nomination, I would have to say that the entire speech was actually given very gracefully," says Ekman, who has studied people's facial expressions and how they relate to what they are thinking for over 40 years. It seems that Clinton's micro-expression...

Private companies in the US are hoping to use red light cameras and speed cameras as the basis for a nationwide surveillance network similar to one that will be active next year in the UK. Redflex and American Traffic Solutions (ATS), the top two photo enforcement providers in the US, are quietly shopping new motorist tracking options to prospective state and local government clients.... The technology would be integrated with the Australian company's existing red light camera and speed camera systems. It allows officials to keep full video records of passing motorists and their passengers, limited only by available hard...

Canon engineers are being held back from developing new sensor technology by marketing departments in a "race for megapixels", claims an employee of the Japanese photography company. (Advertisement) The employee told Tech Digest that Canon have the technology to "blow the competition away" in terms of image sensors, but are instead being asked to focus on headline figures like the number of megapixels a camera has. When asked for his opinion on the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, which we covered this morning, the employee said: "I am hugely disappointed because once again Canon engineers are dictated by their marketing...

<p>Chicago radio station WGN-AM is again coming under attack from the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama for offering airtime to a controversial author. It is the second time in recent weeks the station has been the target of an "Obama Action Wire" alert to supporters of the Illinois Democrat.</p>

In recent years, scientific publishing has changed profoundly as the Internet simplified access to the scientific journals that once required a trip to a university library. That ease of access has caused many to question why commercial publishers are able to dictate the terms by which publicly funded research is made available to the public that paid for it. Open access proponents won a big victory when Congress voted to compel the National Institutes of Health to set a policy of hosting copies of the text of all publications produced by research it funds, a policy that has taken effect...

Contact: Sheryl Weinstein sheryl.m.weinstein@njit.edu 973-596-3436 New Jersey Institute of Technology The Department of Justice has awarded NJIT $254,889 to continue developing childproof child-safe gun technology. US Senators Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and US Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ-08) earmarked the grant in last year's annual Congressional appropriation bill. "The money will help NJIT improve its patented dynamic grip recognition technology and move child-safe handgun technology closer to commercial consideration," said NJIT Senior Vice President of Research and Development Donald H. Sebastian. Our researchers look forward to using this new grant to solve the challenge of adding...

Don't get the idea that we've found every kind of astronomical object there is in the universe. In a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, astronomers working on the Supernova Cosmology Project report finding a new kind of something that they cannot make any sense of. Now you don't see it, now you do. Something in Bootes truly in the middle of nowhere — apparently not even in a galaxy — brightened by at least 120 times during more than three months and then faded away. Its spectrum was like nothing ever seen, write the discoverers, with "five broad...

In the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, the cell-phone systems are likely to be overloaded. Please don't call into the affected areas: wait for them to call you. If you really want to get a message in to see if they are OK, send a text message. If you don't have a cell phone or don't want to spend the 10-20 cents per message to send and receive them, there are several ways to do so from your computer: If you know which cell phone service is used by the recipient, you can send it directly from that company's website: VerizonSprintT-Mobile...

The Queen to visit Google She already exchanges emails with her grandchildren and she has shared video on YouTube but now the Queen plans to make a further foray into the world of cyberspace with a visit to Google. By Andrew Pierce Last Updated: 10:37AM BST 11 Sep 2008 The trip to the British headquarters of the world's most used internet search engine next month is at the express request of the monarch. The Queen, 82, who learnt to use a computer only two years also, was the first monarch to set up her own channel on the video-sharing website...