France Will Soon Host Thermonuclear Star-Making Technology
Friday, 20 April 2012 08:29
‘An artificially excavated limestone pit in the south of France will soon host star-making technology, New Scientist reports. “If all goes well,” the magazine explains, in a few year’s time the pit will “rage with humanity’s first self-sustaining fusion reaction, an artificial sun ten times hotter than the one that gives our planet life.”
Reaching that point, however, requires an ambitious reformatting of the entire site, seemingly the very limit of landscape architecture: a kind of concrete garden that produces stars.’
Read more: France Will Soon Host Thermonuclear Star-Making Technology
XNA is synthetic DNA that’s stronger than the real thing
By Robert T. Gonzalez
http://io9.com/5903221/meet-xna-the-first-synthetic-dna-that-evolves-like-the-real-thing
New research has brought us closer than ever to synthesizing entirely new forms of life. An international team of researchers has shown that artificial nucleic acids – called “XNAs” – can replicate and evolve, just like DNA and RNA.
We spoke to one of the researchers who made this breakthrough, to find out how it can affect everything from genetic research to the search for alien life.
For the First Time, Electrons are Observed Splitting into Smaller Quasi-Particles
By Clay Dillow Posted 04.19.2012 at 1:34 pm
We generally think of electrons as fundamental building blocks of atoms, elementary subatomic particles with no smaller components to speak of. But according to Swiss and German researchers reporting in Nature this week, we are wrong to think so. For the first time, the researchers have recorded an observation of an electron splitting into two different quasi-particles, each taking different characteristics of the original electron with it.
Using samples of the copper-oxide compound Sr2CuO3, the researchers lifted some of the electrons belonging to the copper atoms out of their orbits and placed them into higher orbits by manipulating them with X-rays. Upon placing them in these higher–and higher-velocity–orbits, the electrons split into two parts, one called a spinon that carried the electron’s spin with it, and another called an obitron that carried the electron’s orbital momentum with it.
Spin and orbit are–at least as our basic understanding goes–attached to each particular electron. So the fact that they have been separated is pretty significant. And while researchers have thought for a while that this kind of separation could be theoretically achieved, they’ve had a hard time proving it empirically until now. It’s a reminder that at the quantum level there are still things that more or less mystify us.
But that’s not all it is. This particular observation of an electron splitting could have big-time implications in the field of high-temperature superconductivity. Understanding the way electrons can decay into quasi-particles could improve our overall understanding of the electron and how it moves, and thus help us figure out new ways of moving electrons–or electricity–around in bulk without losing large amounts of it as waste.
[PhysOrg]
World’s First Handmade Cloned Transgenic Sheep Born in China
Chinese scientists from BGI, the world’s largest genomics organization, together with the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and Shihezi University, Xinjiang province, made a significant breakthrough in animal cloning. The world’s first transgenic sheep produced with a simplified technique, handmade cloning, was successfully born at 12:16pm, March 26, 2012, in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China. The project was also supported by the Animal Science Academy of Xinjiang.
The European Stabilization Mechanism, Or How the Goldman Vampire Squid Just Captured Europe
Thursday, 19 April 2012
‘In September 2008, Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, managed to extort a $700 billion bank bailout from Congress. But to pull it off, he had to fall on his knees and threaten the collapse of the entire global financial system and the imposition of martial law; and the bailout was a one-time affair. Paulson’s plea for a permanent bailout fund—the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP—was opposed by Congress and ultimately rejected.
By December 2011, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, former vice president of Goldman Sachs Europe, was able to approve a 500 billion Euro bailout for European banks without asking anyone’s permission. And in January 2012, a permanent rescue funding program called the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) was passed in the dead of night with barely even a mention in the press. The ESM imposes an open-ended debt on EU member governments, putting taxpayers on the hook for whatever the ESM’s Eurocrat overseers demand.’
Mandatory ‘Big Brother’ Black Boxes In All New Cars From 2015
Thursday, 19 April 2012 08:51
‘A bill already passed by the Senate and set to be rubber stamped by the House would make it mandatory for all new cars in the United States to be fitted with black box data recorders from 2015 onwards.
Section 31406 of Senate Bill 1813 (known as MAP-21), calls for “Mandatory Event Data Recorders” to be installed in all new automobiles and legislates for civil penalties to be imposed against individuals for failing to do so.’
Read more: Mandatory ‘Big Brother’ Black Boxes In All New Cars From 2015
Why don’t we know more about the long-term effects of abortion?
Though abortion is one of the most contested medical practices in U.S. history, we know shockingly little about how this simple outpatient procedure affects women. There are almost no scientific studies on what happens to women who receive abortions, and even fewer on what happens to women who are unable to get them. The American government regulates access to abortion, but rarely funds studies on the procedure through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). That means that most abortion policies in the U.S. are not based on scientific evidence from medical studies.
To find out why, we talked to the University of California at San Francisco’s Tracy Weitz, who for the past decade has run a program at UCSF called Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH). The group, funded entirely by private donors, has done some of the only comprehensive studies in the U.S. about abortion in the medical system. Weitz told us what she and her colleagues have found.
Read more: http://io9.com/5902201/why-dont-we-know-more-about-the-long+term-effects-of-abortion
Canada Launches Its Own Virtual Cash, Called MintChip
By Rebecca Boyle Posted 04.12.2012 at 11:02 am
Next time you visit Canada, you might use digital currency to purchase your poutine, using something called MintChip backed by the Canadian government. The Royal Canadian Mint announced it’s getting rid of the penny and starting a new e-currency instead, and it wants the software community to help develop it.
The government just launched the MintChip Challenge— which was apparently so popular it’s already fully registered — to seek new digital payment apps for this new virtual currency. The idea is sort of a hybrid, combining the convenience of electronic transactions and the anonymity of cash. It will work via SD cards, but it will have no personal information or bank account data associated with it. It’s sort of like BitCoin but with actual, government-backed value.
The four-month contest includes 500 developers who will build apps that can demonstrate MintChip’s value. They’ll have to work on a variety of smartphone and desktop browsers. The prize: Solid gold wafers and coins worth about $50,000.
Its anonymity is a pretty unique idea. Other electronic payment systems — PayPal, Square, NFC-enabled phones, etc. — all connect to a person’s credit card or bank account. But cash is a great equalizer; you don’t need to have good credit to use it. MintChip would enable the same type of low-cost transactions for which you’d normally use cash. A Canadian banking group called Interac estimates that small-value transactions under $20 are worth $90 billion to the Canadian economy, the Toronto Star reported.
MintChip still has some kinks to be ironed out, including privacy, security of the currency and other questions. But it’s certainly an interesting concept.
[via Slashdot]
Cassini Flies Right By Saturn’s Moon Enceladus, Snapping New Up-Close Pics
The Cassini spacecraft has been busy over this past week, making close flybys of both Enceladus and and Tethys, two of Saturn’s moons. And we’re not using “close” as a relative term here. Cassini skimmed Enceladus in such proximity that it was literally able to taste the plume of water ice, vapor, and other organic compounds spewing from the moon’s south polar region.
That flyby was at an altitude of just 46 miles above Enceladus’s surface, a hair’s breadth as these sorts of things go. Unfortunately for us, Baghdad Sulcus–the fracture from which said plume emanates–is in darkness for this flyover, but Cassini was able to snap various high-res surface shots of the moon as it passed back into daylight.
For its Tethys encounter, Cassini took a bit more conservative approach, passing about 5,700 miles above the moon’s surface. It was the first imaging expedition to Tethys since 2005, when Cassini captured imagery from its Saturn-facing side. This time Cassini snapped views of Tethys’s other side, which should provide researchers with enough data to start building decent digital elevation maps of Tethys’s surface.
[JPL]
Nanoparticle Coating Makes Paper Magnetic, Waterproof, and Antibacterial
By Rebecca Boyle Posted 04.18.2012 at 4:28 pm
Scientists at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa, Italy, developed a process to cover any cellulose fiber, like paper or fabric, with a reactive coating. It involves combining the fiber molecules with a nanoparticle solution, creating a polymer matrix.
Believe nothing 