Amesj's Odditorium

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http://www.greatnewsnetwork.org/inde...ts/?source=rss

Macedonia plants three million trees to revive forests
Apr 02, 11 | Comment
"There is no better feeling than when you plant a tree and after some time come and see it growing,"
- opera singer and UNESCO Artist for Peace Boris Trajanov

Thousands of Macedonians took a day off work on Thursday to plant three million trees to revive the nation's forests after fires ravaged an estimated 35,000 hectares (86,000 acres) of greenery.

Trajanov launched the initiative three years ago, gaining wide support from the government, local authorities, non-governmental organisations, foreign representatives and businesses.

Around 30 million trees have previously been planted on more than 8,500 hectares.

"This has become a nice tradition that is not only increasing the awareness among citizens about need for protection of the environment, but is making Macedonia more green and more clean," the Interior Minister Gordana Jankuloska said as she planted a tree near the capital Skopje.

Continue reading on Terra Daily article opens in new window

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http://www.realitysandwich.com/contesting_abundance

Contesting Abundance: Shared for the Common Good or Monopolized for Private Profit?

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http://www.dangerousminds.net/commen...hedelize_utah/

Hare Krishnas psychedelicize Utah

Every year the Hare Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork, Utah puts on the biggest Holi celebration in the Western Hemisphere. In 2011 the Spanish Fork Police department estimated that over 40,000 people attended in the first day alone of the two-day festival. Organizers carefully rationed their stash of approximately 120,000 bags of colored powder.

Attendees come from all over the country (and some from abroad), but the majority of attendees are students from Brigham Young, Utah Valley, and Utah universities.

Holi celebrates the triumph of good over evil and ushers in the spring season. The festival commemorates a Hindu myth about a witch who burned children in a fire. One child repeated the Hare Krishna mantra as he was carried into the flames and the witch was burned instead. At the Spanish Fork festival, rock and roll, R&B, and other modern interpretation of the mantra are played by musicians throughout the day and chanted in a call and response game between performers and attendees. The main event of each festival is the coordinated throwing of colored powder, when the sky above the crowd is filled with rainbow puffs of dye.

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http://www.gizmag.com/michelin-prote...-closed/18333/

New Michelin bike inner tube squeezes punctures closed

Bicycle inner tubes that contain a small-puncture-sealing slimy liquid may not be a new development in and of themselves, but Michelin has released a product that takes the concept a step further. The company's Protek Max tube not only contains a sealant, but is designed to compress when punctured to assist the self-sealing process.

The two things you'll notice about the Protek is that it has a square cross-section, and funny little bumps on its surface. The square shape helps align it within the tire casing and against the rim well, which Michelin says eases mounting and eliminates the twisting problems that can occur with traditional sausage-shaped tubes.

When the tube is fully inflated within the tire, its textured surface causes the rubber to compress instead of expand when under pressure. This means that the internal air pressure actually closes holes off, giving the sealant a better chance at taking care of them for good.

The tubes also are claimed to hold air longer – when tested against Michelin's self-sealing AIRSTOP tube, the Protek was said to maintain proper pressure for twice the amount of time.

Commuters and mountain bikers, but not road racers, can get a Protek Max to fit their tire. It is available in sizes of 700 x 35-47c (200 grams) and 26 x 1.4-2.125 inches (260 grams), with Presta or Shrader valves, for a suggested retail price of US$8.99.

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http://hackaday.com/2011/04/06/every...8Hack+a+Day%29

If you work with electronics at any skill level you need juice. [Jon] has a great, and clearly worded tutorial about with pretty much everything you need to know about those little black boxes hanging off of your outlets.

The whole thing starts off with the basics like transformers, rectification smoothing and regulation, then moves on to the different basic types, dedicating a page to linear, regulated and switching types, giving output performance charts under different situations.

Also included is a run-down of DC barrel jack structure so you get the right plug every time, wall wart type identification, a random sample comparison test, and a good selection of formulas to even keep the old hats reading along. Although you might want to set aside a little time at 9 pages and some Q/A in the comments, it might take a moment to read.

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http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/la/o...ain+%28Main%29



We talk a lot about simplifying our lives, usually starting with clearing out the physical clutter in our homes and sometimes involving incorporating cleaner, more streamlined modern furniture that fits a certain simple aesthetic.

But what about not just buying furniture for aesthetic desires, but to alter your habits to fit a lifestyle you want to achieve? Two examples immediately come to mind. Urbancase, a small design company in Seattle, has two pieces: their Ledge is reminiscent of the old-fashioned writing desk—updated for electrical needs—and created to encourage simple, undistracted correspondence. Their Emergency Cocktail Station was designed because urbancase founder Darin Montgomery wants to see more pre-dinner socialization and less veg-out-in-front-of-the-TV-after-work habits.

Dean Heckler’s One Less Desk fits this idea, too. Designed to help folks shake off the old way we used to work—with giant desks to hold all our giant tech things—One Less Desk isn’t just about creating a desk with a slim profile. By taking away more surface area, it forces you to avoid stacks and clutter, perhaps slowly helping you achieve a more organized state of living (or at the very least desk working).

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http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/06/d...hugs-it-hippi/

Dell to trial mushroom-based packaging on servers, hugs IT hippies

We've already seen Dell embracing the bamboo woods to package its products, so what's next for Round Rock's green fingers? Mushrooms, apparently. Unveiled at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference yesterday is a biodegradable cushioning tray, which is grown -- yes, grown -- out of a mold stuffed with old cotton hulls, mushroom spawn, and nutritious agricultural waste. While it does take about five to ten days for the mycelium (aka mushroom root) to form the desired shape, the merit of such process is that all the energy required for the manufacture is provided by the recycled waste, thus reducing other energy dependencies. What's more, this fungal packaging has already passed Dell's extensive lab tests "like a champ," and it'll soon be trialed on Multipack packaging shipments for the PowerEdge R710 servers. If you want to thank Michael, he'll be in his usual tree house.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/sc...icle.html?_r=2

At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths

By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: April 5, 2011

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.

Giovanni Punzi, the Fermilab physicist who is spokesman for the international team that did the work, said by e-mail that he and his colleagues were “strongly thrilled at the possibility, and cautious at the same time, because this would be so important that almost scares us — so we think of all possible alternative explanations.”

Physicists outside the Fermilab circle said they regarded the results, which have been widely discussed in physics circles for several months, with a mixture of awe and skepticism.

“If it holds up, it’s very big,” said Neal Weiner, a theoretical physicist at New York University. Lisa Randall, a theorist at Harvard, said the same thing: “It is definitely interesting, if real.”

But Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said he did not find the bump convincing, saying it could be an artifact of how the data was sliced and diced.

The important thing, he said, was that if this and other anomalies recently reported at the Tevatron are real, then the Large Hadron Collider, a rival machine run by CERN, “will see dramatic evidence in not too long — that’s certainly what I’m waiting for.”

The key phrase, everyone agrees, is “if it holds up.” The experimenters estimate that there is a less than a quarter of 1 percent chance their bump is a statistical fluctuation, making it what physicists call a three-sigma result, enough to attract attention but not enough to claim an actual discovery. Three-sigma bumps, as every physicist knows, can come and go.

The Tevatron has been colliding beams of protons and their opposites, antiprotons, that have been accelerated to energies of one trillion electron volts, for more than two decades looking for new forces and particles. The bump showed up in an analysis of some 10,000 of those collisions collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab, one of two mammoth detectors at the facility, which is outside Chicago.

They found that in about 250 more cases than they expected, what came out of the collision were two jets of lightweight particles, like electrons, and a heavy-force-carrying particle called the W boson were produced. The team found that in about 250 times more cases than expected, the total energy of the jets clustered around a value of about 144 billion electron volts, as if they were the decay products of a hitherto unsuspected particle with that mass-energy. For comparison, a proton weighs about one billion electron volts.

This could not be the Standard Model Higgs, Dr. Punzi and his colleagues concluded, because the Higgs is predicted to decay into much heavier particles, namely quarks. Moreover, the rate at which these mystery particles were being produced was 300 times greater than Higgs bosons would be produced.

If real, it was something totally new, Dr. Punzi said. The result had recently been strengthened, he said, by new calculations of interactions between quarks, which are notoriously difficult to compute. “It is so new, so astonishing, we ourselves can barely believe it,” he said. “We decided we had to let the whole world know.”

Dr. Punzi and his colleagues have submitted a paper that was to be posted on a physics Web site Tuesday night and has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.

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http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-...good-news.html

Overturned scientific explanation may be good news for nuclear fusion

Flat out wrong. That’s what a team of Duke researchers has discovered, much to its surprise, about a long-accepted explanation of how nuclei collide to produce charged particles for electricity – a process receiving intense interest lately from scientists, entrepreneurs and policy makers in the wake of Japan’s nuclear crisis.

Plasma physicists have been trying for 25 years to create electricity from the fusion of boron and hydrogen atoms.

The new study says their efforts have been based on a misunderstanding of the underlying physics – although the error could end up actually helping those looking to fusion energy as an alternative energy source.

Researchers have been developing reactors to slam hydrogen at high speeds into boron-11, a collision that yields high-energy helium nuclei, or alpha particles. Those alphas then spiral through a tunnel of electromagnetic coils, transforming them into a flow of electrons, or electricity.

“Obviously, a detailed understanding of the energy and location of every outgoing alpha particle is crucial to the development of this reactor,” says Duke nuclear physicist Henry Weller, a co-author of the new study.

Weller and his colleagues took a fresh look at the hydrogen-boron reaction at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) on Duke’s campus. They expected to confirm the accepted wisdom that a collision of one hydrogen particle and one boron-11 particle produces a single high-energy alpha particle -- which produces electricity well – and two lower energy alphas, which are less useful for generating electricity.

Instead, the team found the collision yields two high-energy alphas, which shoot off at an angle of 155 degrees, along with one lower-energy alpha. The existence of this second high-energy alpha could mean these kinds of fusion systems are able to produce much more electricity than expected, says Duke nuclear physicist and study co-author Mohammad Ahmed. The results appear online in Physics Letters B.

The unexpected finding appears to confirm a long-forgotten observation from physicists at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. In 1936, they made crude, but apparently correct, estimates of the two higher-energy alphas.

Their results were “buried in history” until now, Ahmed says.

Now, 75 years later, the new insight makes the boron-fusion reaction even more interesting as a possible alternative to the nuclear fission process used in reactors in Japan and other parts of the world. A reactor based on this process could produce electricity without radioactive wastes. It also would not produce the carbon dioxide and other gases emitted by coal-powered plants.

Nuclear fusion still faces formidable challenges, one of the greatest being that hydrogen and boron only begin to fuse at temperatures close to 1 billion degrees Kelvin (nearly 2 billion degrees Fahrenheit). But building this type of reactor is realistic, says Weller, whose team is continuing to study the process at TUNL

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Stem cells coaxed into forming partial eyeball




Mouse stem cells have been coaxed into forming a partial eyeball, and the method may one day lead to retina transplants.

Yoshiki Sasai at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, and colleagues encouraged embryonic stem cells to develop into retinal cells, and then grew them alongside a protein matrix to promote the formation of tissue.

Over 12 days, the retinal cells formed a vesicle which subsequently transformed into a cup-like structure. Within this "optic cup", six major types of retinal cells were identified. They had spontaneously arranged themselves into six different layers, mimicking those seen in the adult retina.

While it is not yet possible to generate a fully formed eye – including a lens, sclera and cornea – Sasai says it may be feasible to use human stem cells with minor modifications to generate retinal tissues large enough for human transplantation in the next few years.

"The retina is severely impaired in genetic diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa. This replacement therapy would become practical once human retina tissue is available by our method," says Sasai.

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http://www.krqe.com/dpp/news/botanis...us-plant-in-nm

Botanist finds mysterious plant in NM

Updated: Saturday, 02 Apr 2011, 10:35 AM MDT
Published : Saturday, 02 Apr 2011, 10:35 AM MDT

ROSWELL, N.M. (KRQE) - Little green men are no strangers to Roswell, but now one New Mexico botanist says a little green plant has an out-of-this world connection to New Mexico.

David Salman said he was on a seed hunting trip near Roswell when he noticed a faint glow coming from what appeared to be a meteor crater.

He said it turned out the light was coming from a small patch of carnivorous cacti.

Salman said he found a cactus that eats bugs, glows and probably came to earth on a meteor.

He says he scooped up some samples to see if someone could identify them, so far no one has been able to.

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http://www.gizmag.com/solar-thermal-cell/18346/

New solar-thermal device harnesses heat and light

Researchers at Wake Forest University have developed a new type of polymer solar-thermal device that combines photovoltaics with a system that captures the Sun's infrared radiation to generate heating. By taking advantage of both heat and light, researchers say the device could deliver up to 40 percent savings on the cost of heating, as well as helping reduce power bills by producing electricity.

The hybrid cell is designed with an integrated array of clear tubes, five millimeters (approx 1/4 inch) in diameter. Lying flat, visible sunlight shines into the clear tube which is filled with an oil blended with a proprietary dye, heating the oil which then flows into a heat pump to transfer the warmth inside a home.

Electrical current is produced via a polymer photovoltaic sprayed onto the back of the tubes.

The result is a solar-thermal device with an impressive 30 percent conversion efficiency.

In comparison to flat solar cells, the tube design also has the advantage of being able to capture light at oblique angles, so it can accumulate power for a much longer stretch in the day and be more readily integrated into building materials – it could be produced to resemble a roofing tile for example.

The research team aims to produce a 3 foot square solar thermal cell over the coming months, a key step in bringing the technology closer to market.

"It's a systems approach to making your home ultra-efficient because the device collects both solar energy and heat," said David Carroll, Ph.D., director of the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials at Wake Forest University. "Our solar-thermal device takes better advantage of the broad range of power delivered from the sun each day."

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Blurring the distinction between a particle and its mirror image

Mirror demonstrates quantum superposition states (credit: Technische Universität Wein)

Physicists from Heidelberg Unversity, and colleagues from Technische Universität (München and Wein), have extended a thought experiment by Einstein and managed to blur the distinction between a particle and its mirror image by creating quantum superpositions.

The physicists experimentally produced motional coherence by a single spontaneous emission event close to a mirror surface. By placing atoms close to the mirror’s surface, they demonstrated that there are two possible paths for any photon traveling to an observer: one emitted directly in the direction of the observer, and a second traveling in the opposite direction and reflected in the mirror.

They showed that if there is no way of distinguishing between these two paths, the motion of the atom is indeterminate and the atom moves in a superposition of both paths. The atom paradoxically moves towards the mirror and away from the mirror at the same time.

The research extends Einstein’s recoiling slit experiment, in which a particle hits a plate with two slits and passes through both slits simultaneously, due to its wave-like quantum mechanical properties.

Ref.: Jörg Schmiedmayer & Markus K. Oberthaler et al., Single spontaneous photon as a coherent beamsplitter for an atomic matter-wave, Nature Physics, April 3, 2011

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This is how I am. I'm usually in bed at 2a, and up at 6-7a.

http://www.disinfo.com/2011/04/the-elite-dont-sleep/

For a small group of people—perhaps just 1% to 3% of the population—sleep is a waste of time.

Natural “short sleepers,” as they’re officially known, are night owls and early birds simultaneously. They typically turn in well after midnight, then get up just a few hours later and barrel through the day without needing to take naps or load up on caffeine.

They are also energetic, outgoing, optimistic and ambitious, according to the few researchers who have studied them. The pattern sometimes starts in childhood and often runs in families.

While it’s unclear if all short sleepers are high achievers, they do have more time in the day to do things, and keep finding more interesting things to do than sleep, often doing several things at once.

Nobody knows how many natural short sleepers are out there. “There aren’t nearly as many as there are people who think they’re short sleepers,” says Daniel J. Buysse, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional group.

Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

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Score! Thanks Rev.

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Hmmm, i'll have to spend some time there.

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http://www.sacred-texts.com/cfu/artwar.txt

II. Waging War

1. Sun Tzu said: In the operations of war, where there are in the
field a thousand swift chariots, as many heavy chariots, and a hundred
thousand mail-clad soldiers, with provisions enough to carry them
a thousand li, the expenditure at home and at the front, including
entertainment of guests, small items such as glue and paint, and sums
spent on chariots and armor, will reach the total of a thousand ounces
of silver per day. Such is the cost of raising an army of 100,000
men.

2. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming,
then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped.
If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.

3. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State
will not be equal to the strain.

4. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength
exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up
to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will
be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.

5. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has
never been seen associated with long delays.

6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged
warfare.

7. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war
that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.

8. The skillful soldier does not raise a second levy, neither are
his supply-wagons loaded more than twice.

9. Bring war material with you from home, but forage on the enemy.
Thus the army will have food enough for its needs.

10. Poverty of the State exchequer causes an army to be maintained
by contributions from a distance. Contributing to maintain an army
at a distance causes the people to be impoverished.

11. On the other hand, the proximity of an army causes prices to go
up; and high prices cause the people's substance to be drained away.

12. When their substance is drained away, the peasantry will be afflicted
by heavy exactions.

13,14. With this loss of substance and exhaustion of strength, the
homes of the people will be stripped bare, and three-tenths of their
income will be dissipated; while government expenses for broken chariots,
worn-out horses, breast-plates and helmets, bows and arrows, spears
and shields, protective mantles, draught-oxen and heavy wagons, will
amount to four-tenths of its total revenue.

15. Hence a wise general makes a point of foraging on the enemy. One
cartload of the enemy's provisions is equivalent to twenty of one's
own, and likewise a single picul of his provender is equivalent to
twenty from one's own store.

16. Now in order to kill the enemy, our men must be roused to anger;
that there may be advantage from defeating the enemy, they must have
their rewards.

17. Therefore in chariot fighting, when ten or more chariots have
been taken, those should be rewarded who took the first. Our own flags
should be substituted for those of the enemy, and the chariots mingled
and used in conjunction with ours. The captured soldiers should be
kindly treated and kept.

18. This is called, using the conquered foe to augment one's own strength.

19. In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.

20. Thus it may be known that the leader of armies is the arbiter
of the people's fate, the man on whom it depends whether the nation
shall be in peace or in peril.

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http://inhabitat.com/ge-will-build-t...united-states/

GE Will Build the United States’ Largest Solar Panel Factory
by Rebecca Paul, 04/07/11
filed under: Renewable Energy,Solar Power

solar panel factory, GE, General Electric, General Electric solar panel factory, thin-film solar, First Solar, solar power, renewable energy, primestar, primestar solar

GE has just announced their plans to build the largest solar panel factory in the U.S. The company will spend 600 million dollars on the new factory and their goal is to produce of 400 megawatts of thin-film solar annually, by the time they open for business in 2013. GE’s solar panels with be composed of the same thin layers of cadmium telluride currently used by their largest competetor First Solar, but for nearly less than a third of the cost.

GE has become one of the world’s primary manufacturers of wind turbines, and according to Victor Abate, Vice President of GE’s renewable energy business, the company will continue to actively invest in high-tech solar products to advance their position in the renewable energy industry.GE’s first step toward building their new factory has included the recent acquisition of PrimeStar Solar located in Arvada, Colorado.

Abate relays, “The biggest challenge for solar is the cost of energy. For every point you can move [higher] in efficiency, you reduce the cost of the system by 10%.” To counter this issue PrimeStar Solar is seen as a major asset to GE. The company has been able to produce a CdTe thin-film panel with a record-breaking efficiency of 12.8%. The cadmium telluride thin-film also proves to be cost efficient, reducing production costs from $1.20 a watt (the cost of traditional silicon solar panels) to just $.80 a watt.

GE has stated that worldwide demand for solar products is expected to grow by 75 gigawatts over the next five years. With these focused investments GE is hoping to capitalize on the growth. Thus far they already have 100 megawatts worth of orders from utility-scale solar customers in the U.S.

Via Forbes

Read more: GE Will Build the Largest Solar Panel Factory in the United States | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

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http://www.kurzweilai.net/huge-aster...th-in-november



The Asteroid 2005 YU55, about 1,300 feet in diameter, will approach Earth within 0.85 lunar distances in early November 2011.

Discovered on December 28, 2005, “the close Earth approach of 2005 YU55 on November 8 is unusual since it is close and big. On average, one wouldn’t expect an object this big to pass this close but every 30 years,” says Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

“This flyby will be the closest by any near-Earth asteroid with an absolute magnitude this bright since 1976 and until 2028,” says Lance Benner, a research scientist at JPL.

Initially the asteroid will be too faint for telescopes. But late in the day (UTC) on November 8, the solar elongation will grow sufficiently to see it.

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I wonder when/if google will buy GE?

http://inhabitat.com/google-invests-...er-5000-homes/

Google announced that they are putting an investment of $5 million USD — or $3.5 million euros — into one of Germany’s largest solar power plants. The investment is their first renewable energy investment in Europe and though the plans still need approval from the German government, when it is finished it will power about 5,000 homes in the area. The project is slated to be built on land that was once used as training grounds for the Russian military.


After Google created their own energy subsidiary the company began investing heavily in wind power projects in the United States — including the massive Atlantic Wind Connection that will bring wind power up and down the East Coast.

The announcement of the investment in Germany by Google comes at a time when Germany is wrestling with the future of their renewable energy systems. Following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear emergency in Japan, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a moratorium on all pending nuclear projects and turned away from her promise to keep Germany’s 17 reactors operating into the future. She’s now promising a move away from nuclear and toward other forms of renewable energy. With the momentum of Germany’s energy ideas at the moment, we’re thinking this new solar project will get off the ground pretty quickly and Google will soon be part owner of Germany’s clean energy future.

Via PhysOrg

Read more: Google Invests in German Solar Power Plant That will Power 5,000 Homes | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

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http://cryptogon.com/?p=21636

Via: Forbes: Sunny Saudi Arabia plans to shift most of its domestic energy use to solar and nuclear power, diverting more oil to exports, a Saudi official said yesterday at the Third Saudi Solar Energy Forum in Riyadh. “The use of alternative sustainable and reliable resources reduces dependency on hydrocarbons and keeps them as a [...]



What does this tell you via a business perspective?

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Psychedelic drug cuts brain blood flow and connections
from New Scientist - Online News

Rather than expand the mind, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms decreases blood flow and connectivity

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Again, for those of you who like this thread - but don't want to be tied to the OM for it - I do have a google reader feed and twitter. I've been a little lax with it - but i've been a little busy these days.