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Hello everyone! it's time for my quarterly "What Are You reading Now?" survey. As you know, I consider Freepers to be among the more well-read of those of us out in cyberspace. As a result, I like to find out what you're reading. It can be anything...a technical journal, a NY TImes bestseller, a trashy pulp novel, in short, it can be anything. Please do not defile this thread by posting "I'm reading this thread". It became very unfunny a long long time ago. I'll start. I went to the library and picked up a copy of "Sam Walton, Made...

TESTING VALIDATES HYDRINO THEORY by Joe Shea AR Correspondent Bradenton, Fla. BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 18, 2010 -- A remarkable new energy source from fractional hydrogen will allow a gallon of ordinary water to become the energy equivalent of 200 barrels of oil, a team of physicists working near the onetime laboratories of Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein are saying. "With further optimization," Dr. K.V. Ramanujachary of Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., says, "there is no doubt that this technology will present an economically viable and environmentally benign alternate to meet global energy needs. If advanced to commercialization, it would be...

The signatures of a bubble collision: A collision (top left) induces a temperature modulation in the CMB temperature map (top right). The “blob” associated with the collision is identified by a large needlet response (bottom left), and the presence of an edge is determined by a large response from the edge detection algorithm (bottom right). Image credit: Feeney, et al.(PhysOrg.com) -- By looking far out into space and observing what’s going on there, scientists have been led to theorize that it all started with a Big Bang, immediately followed by a brief period of super-accelerated expansion called inflation. Perhaps this...

Like exploding stars, black holes, dark matter? How about cosmic intrigue, deep space astronomy , or origins of the universe? Then you’re gonna love this. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are putting the finishing touches on a giant underground telescope buried beneath the South Pole to help understand said phenomenon.

The CMS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has completed a search for microscopic black holes produced in high-energy proton-proton collisions. No evidence for their production was found and their production has been excluded up to a black hole mass of 3.5-4.5 TeV (1012 electron volts) in a variety of theoretical models. Microscopic black holes are predicted to exist in some theoretical models that attempt to unify General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics by postulating the existence of extra “curled-up” dimensions, in addition to the three familiar spatial dimensions. At the high energies of the Large Hadron Collider, such theories...

In Once Before Time, Martin Bojowald explains how he developed the idea of loop quantum gravity and how it will soon be put to the test. At the moment of the big bang, our universe emerged from a state of infinite density, a point in space and time so small it had no size at all. This, the standard cosmological story tells us, is the singularity, the seed of creation. Singularities can also serve as seeds of destruction, lurking in the centres of black holes, the final endpoints of total gravitational collapse. Many physicists, however, believe singularities do not mark...

Mark Felt Hinted at Exotic Antigravity Project? Thien Vehl, jeudi, 09/06/2005 - 19:26 Fil de presse | Politique A few years ago while in San Francisco, Bob Woodward made an intriguing remark. He told the San Francisco Chronicle he wouldn’t expose Deep Throat until the man died but that when he died people would begin to research the case and one thing would lead to another. Woodward said it would all lead to a “fantastic” discovery. Now that we know that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, former #2 man at the FBI and the architect of J. Edgar Hoover’s...

Natural Selection Derives From Cosmic Expansion Two suggested editorial items: I. Origin And Nature Of Natural Selection Update Concepts And Comprehension Life is another mass format. All mass formats are subject to natural selection. Natural selection is delaying conversion of mass to energy fueling cosmic expansion. Cosmic expansion is reconversion of all mass to energy. Natural Selection Updated 2010 Beyond Historical Concepts Natural Selection applies to ALL mass formats. Life is just one of them. Natural Selection Defined: Natural selection is E (energy) temporarily constrained in an m (mass) format. Period. Natural selection is a ubiquitous property of each and...

Latest research deflates the idea that the Universe cycles for eternity.Our view of the early Universe may be full of mysterious circles — and even triangles — but that doesn't mean we're seeing evidence of events that took place before the Big Bang. So says a trio of papers taking aim at a recent claim that concentric rings of uniform temperature within the cosmic microwave background — the radiation left over from the Big Bang — might, in fact, be the signatures of black holes colliding in a previous cosmic 'aeon' that existed before our Universe.

The Double Quasar image bodes well for the UK's future in radio astronomy E-Merlin is an array of seven linked UK radio telescopes, updated last year with fibre optic technology that has vastly increased its power. Light from the Double Quasar has been bent by a massive object between it and the Earth, resulting in a double image.This gravitational lensing is a powerful demonstration of one aspect of Einstein's theory of relativity.The quasar - short for quasi-stellar radio source - sprays out tremendous amounts of energy and matter, powered by a super-massive black hole at its heart.The E-Merlin image shows...

Matter/Antimatter from the Vacuum by Paul Gilster on December 10, 2010 New work at the University of Michigan, now written up in Physical Review Letters, discusses the possibility of producing matter and antimatter from the vacuum. The idea is that a high-energy electron beam combined with an intense laser pulse can pull matter and antimatter components out of the vacuum, creating a cascade of additional particles and anti-particles. UM Engineering research scientist Igor Sokolov has this to say about the theoretical study: “We can now calculate how, from a single electron, several hundred particles can be produced. We believe...

A team of physicists from the University of Toronto and Rutgers University have mimicked the explosion of a supernova in miniature. A supernova is an exploding star. In a certain type of supernova, the detonation starts with a flame ball buried deep inside a white dwarf. The flame ball is much lighter than its surroundings, so it rises rapidly making a plume topped with an accelerating smoke ring. “We created a smaller version of this process by triggering a special chemical reaction in a closed container that generates similar plumes and vortex rings,” says Stephen Morris, a University of Toronto...

A startup snags funding to start early work on a low-budget test reactor.By Tyler Hamilton General Fusion, a startup in Vancouver, Canada, says it can build a prototype fusion power plant within the next decade and do it for less than a billion dollars. So far, it has raised $13.5 million from public and private investors to help kick-start its ambitious effort.Unlike the $14 billion ITER project under way in France, General Fusion's approach doesn't rely on expensive superconducting magnets--called tokamaks--to contain the superheated plasma necessary to achieve and sustain a fusion reaction. Nor does the company require powerful lasers,...

It may look like any average building but behind closed doors could lie the answer to safe renewable energy of the future. Here at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore California, scientists are aiming to build the world's first sustainable fusion reactor by 'creating a miniature star on Earth'. Following a series of key experiments over the last few weeks, the £2.2 billion project has inched a little closer to its goal of igniting a workable fusion reaction by 2012.

(AFP) - After billions of years the Sun finally has an owner -- a woman from Spain's soggy region of Galicia said Friday she had registered the star at a local notary public as being her property. Angeles Duran, 49, told the online edition of daily El Mundo she took the step in September after reading about an American man who had registered himself as the owner of the moon and most planets in our solar system. There is an international agreement which states that no country may claim ownership of a planet or star, but it says nothing about...

Researchers have developed a simple technique that adds evidence to the theory that the Universe is flat. Moreover, the method - developed by revisiting a 30-year-old idea - confirms that "dark energy" makes up nearly three-quarters of the Universe. The research, published in Nature, uses existing data and relies on fewer assumptions than current approaches. Author Christian Marinoni says the idea turns estimating the Universe's shape into "primary school" geometry. While the idea of the Earth being flat preoccupied explorers centuries ago, the question of whether the Universe itself is flat remains a debatable topic. The degree to which the...

Astronomer Brian G. Marsden, a comet and asteroid tracker who stood sentinel to protect the Earth from collisions with interplanetary rocks and other remnants of the solar system's creation, died Thursday of cancer at Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Burlington, Mass. He was 73. Director emeritus of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., Marsden was perhaps best known for his 1998 announcement that an asteroid known as 1997 XF11 might strike the Earth in 2028, causing untold damage. The announcement sparked additional studies which quickly showed that such an impact was unlikely. Marsden,...

<p>Antigravitational devices developed by a computer geek could eventually change the world as we know it.</p> <p>Or they may just blow a few holes into some barn roofs.</p> <p>The devices are known as "lifters." When charged with a small amount of electrical power, they levitate, apparently able to resist Earth's gravitational forces.</p>

Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang? The current cosmological consensus is that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang. But a legendary physicist says he's found the first evidence of an eternal, cyclic cosmos. The Big Bang model holds that everything that now comprises the universe was once concentrated in a single point of near-infinite density. Before this singularity exploded and the universe began, there was absolutely nothing - indeed, it's not clear whether one can even use the term "before" in reference to a pre-Big-Bang cosmos, as time itself may...

(Reuters) - Scientists at the CERN research center say their "Big Bang" project is going beyond all expectations and the first proof of the existence of dimensions beyond the known four could emerge next year. In surveys of results of nearly 8 months of experiments in their Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they also say they may be able to determine by the end of 2011 whether the mystery Higgs particle, or boson, exists. Guido Tonelli, spokesman for one of the CERN specialist teams monitoring operations in the vast, subterranean LHC, said probing for extra dimensions -- besides length, breadth, height...