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Counterfeit electronics and military hardware risks American lives It would be reasonable to expect the United States military contractors building the aircraft our military uses to defend the nation to be absolutely sure electronics they use in the aircraft are legitimate and don't suffer from any security issues. However, a Senate report indicates that this not always the case. The Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report documenting the year-long investigation launched by Democratic Chairman Carl Levin and ranking Republican John McCain into counterfeit Chinese electronics in military aircraft. The report spans 112 pages shows that 1,800 cases of bogus...

Research suggests that irises do not remain the same for life after all. Identifying people by scanning the irises of their eyes may not be as reliable as some governments and the public might think. That’s according to new research suggesting that irises, rather than being stable over a lifetime, are susceptible to ageing effects that steadily change their appearance over time. With iris recognition now being used at border control in countries such as the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, this has huge implications, says Kevin Bowyer, a professor of computer science at the University of Notre...

More on LENR at NASA: Bushnell and Zawodny Speak May 24, 2012 Two interesting publications have just come out from NASA, one an article, and the other a video showing that NASA recognizes the promise of LENR and is getting involved in understanding what is going on in this field, and how to develop LENR technologies for real world applications. Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist and NASA’s Langney Research Center has written an article entitled “Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, the Realism and the Outlook” in which he discusses the current state of research in the field of LENR. First, he...

A Senate panel is reviewing Facebook's high-profile stock offering last week amid allegations that the bank handling the IPO may have provided select clients with a negative assessment of the company. A Democratic aide to the Senate Banking Committee says the panel wants to learn more about the initial public offering. The committee seeks briefings with representatives of Facebook, regulatory agencies and others. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because the committee's planned inquiry hasn't been publicly announced. Regulators are examining whether Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter for the IPO, selectively informed clients of an analyst's negative view of...

Human use of water contributes markedly to rising tides. Climate change, with its associated melting ice caps and shrinking glaciers, is the usual suspect when it comes to explaining rising sea levels. But a recent study now shows that human water use has a major impact on sea-level change that has been overlooked. During the latter half of the twentieth century, global sea level rose by about 1.8 millimetres per year, according to data from tide gauges. The combined contribution from heating of the oceans, which makes the water expand, along with melting of ice caps and glaciers, is estimated...

Volvo Trucks unveiled last week its plans to launch a 13-liter heavy-duty natural gas engine featuring Westport high pressure direct injection (HPDI) technology. The engine, marketed under the “Blue Power” designation, is scheduled to launch for the North American market in 2014. The engine’s advanced high pressure diesel ignition technology will provide significant fuel efficiency gains compared with current natural gas products. Combined with the company’s previously announced offering of compressed natural gas (CNG)-powered Volvo VNM and VNL model daycabs, the new engine will provide customers with a complete range of natural gas-powered transportation solutions. Volvo is also testing another...

Running a diesel like engine on gasoline is something Delphi is doing in notable fashion. They claim they are on to a promising way to enjoy an engine that gives the vehicle owner high efficiency and low emissions. Delphi, a major Michigan-based auto-parts supplier, is developing this technology which has shown impressive results in tests. Delphi tried out its combustion concept, which reaps the best of two worlds of low-emission gas and efficient diesel engines. Delphi claims its technology is an improvement upon the fuel economy of gas-powered cars, and can bring forth benefits of the hybrid at less the...

Enlarge Image Small wonder. This electrode array, called BrainGate, reads brain waves and sends them to a computer that translates them into commands. The commands have enabled two paralyzed patients to control a robotic arm with their thoughts. Credit: Braingate2.org A thought-powered robotic arm could put independence within reach for disabled patients, researchers report. In a new study, two people with almost-complete body paralysis were able to reach and grasp small foam balls and a thermos of coffee with a robotic arm using only their brain signals to direct the motion. The result, a first for human subjects, brings...

Microsoft’s Windows Phones are outselling iPhones in the Chinese and Russian markets. Though Windows Phone was only launched in China 2 months ago it has surged to 7 per cent market share compared to 6 per cent for iOS. Android is still top dog in China with 69 per cent of the market. Meanwhile in Russia figures from their largest mobile operator MTS have been released that paint a similar picture to the Chinese results. In the Russian results Windows Phone accounted for 8.2 per cent of sales compared to 7.3 per cent for iOS devices. The leading sales for...

Of all the interesting tidbits to come out of The Atom Unexplored conference in Turin, Italy in May 4, perhaps the account by Dr. Peter Hagelstein of MIT on how a prominent physicist actively worked to cut cold fusion funding was the most eye-opening. In the question and answer session held after the morning LENR portion of the proceedings, a member of the audience asked a rather poignant question regarding why scientists often fail to develop clear “road maps�  from the laboratory to the “real world.�  In responding to this question, Dr. Hagelstein gave a quite detailed and thoughtful answer...

This is really rather amusing. Until just recently if you asked Siri, the voice assistant on the latest of Apple‘s iPhones, which was the best cell phone ever the reply would be that it was the Nokia Lumia. Which is, as all know, a Windows based phone. The proof is here with a screen shot. The reason why it gave this unexpected answer (well, unexpected to me, it might actually be that the Lumia is the best cell phone ever) is that Siri interrogates the Wolfram Alpha database to answer such questions. And if there are four reviews (as there...

The automaker plans to ship its Model S electric sedan in June, rather than July. Tesla Motors announced today that it is on track to start delivering its Model S in June, a month ahead of schedule. It moved up the date of the first deliveries because it’s nearly completed testing on 80 cars it’s built so far. Tesla continues to lose money. It lost nearly $90 million in the first quarter of 2012, compared to a loss of about $50 million during the same period the year before. It’s staying afloat in large part thanks to a Department of...

U.S. forces said they had destroyed a target in the first successful test of the Navy's newest anti-missile interceptor, designed to protect allies from attacks by countries like North Korea and Iran. A target ballistic missile was downed near Hawaii late on Wednesday by the latest Raytheon Co-built Standard Missile-3 interceptor, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said. The advanced interceptor is key to the next phase of an anti-missile shield being built by the United States in and around Europe. The United States plans to deploy increasingly capable SM-3 versions up to around 2020 to boost defences against missiles...

A rapid route to synthesise graphene capsules has been developed by researchers in the US and Korea. The capsules can be nano-engineered on demand and show promise in oil absorption. After oil uptake the capsules aggregate on the water surface allowing them to be collected Hollow spheres of graphene or graphene oxide (GO) have previously been made, but usually via complicated routes that involve the assembly of GO sheets onto template particles and then a separate template removal step. Now, a team led by Jiaxing Huang at Northwestern University and HeeDong Jang at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral...

A campaign of cyber attacks has been targeting US natural gas pipeline operators, officials acknowledged, raising security concerns about vulnerabilities in key infrastructure.

Corporate offshore outsourcing lobbyists are on a roll, going on talk shows and writing propaganda plants as articles. White papers are falling like snow where even labor economics equations are manipulated. Every day we hear pure statistical fiction and politicians tout corporate lobbyist provided talking points, even in GOP debates. Why? Corporations are demanding more immigration and foreign guest worker Visas to displace Americans, repress wages, technology transfer and offshore outsource further. There is No Labor Shortage in the United States. None, and that includes high skilled labor. In 2010, there were 3,531,000 computer & mathematical related occupation workers. Yet...

Nanoparticles heated by radio waves switch on genes in mice Researchers have remotely activated genes inside living animals, a proof of concept that could one day lead to medical procedures in which patients’ genes are triggered on demand. The work, in which a team used radio waves to switch on engineered insulin-producing genes in mice, is published today in Science1. Jeffrey Friedman, a molecular geneticist at the Rockefeller University in New York and lead author of the study, says that in the short term, the results will lead to better tools to allow scientists to manipulate cells non-invasively. But with...

Enlarge Image Slow flow.Satellite observations of glacial flow in Greenland reveal that many of the island's glaciers have slowed in recent years, a sign that ice loss during the 21st century could be less dire than in the worst-case scenarios. Credit: Science/AAAS For lumbering hunks of ice, glaciers have a surprising amount of personality. A new study reveals that not all of Greenland's glaciers behave alike, with some slowing their advance seaward in recent years, whereas others have surged in their forward march. Sea levels will continue to rise during the 21st century, as many studies have predicted, but...

Turanor PlanetSolar, a futuristic-looking 100-foot catamaran, on Friday became the first vessel to have circumnavigated the planet exclusively on power generated by the sun. The voyage, which began and ended in Monaco, lasted 19-plus months and included layovers in 28 countries, which were designed to promote the importance of solar energy. [...] The boat, which was built in Germany for about $10 million, is 25 feet high and has a 50-foot beam (width), and wave-piercing pontoons. It's constructed largely of lightweight carbon fiber and powered by four electric motors that deliver silent, clean propulsion. [...]

US scientists have developed a method to deliver probes into cells to track the cells. Therapies such as those based on stem cells that require whole body tracking using non-invasive imaging, for example magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), would benefit from the probes.Current nanoparticle-based tracking systems rely on probes entering cells passively, which is inefficient because the probes often get sequestered in endosomes (compartments in cells that sort molecules for degradation or recycling back to the cell membrane). Now, a team from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory led by Brett Helms has avoided this problem by coating a nanocrystal probe with...

US chemists have shown that trace impurities - below the sensitivity of standard characterisation techniques - can halve the efficiency of bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells. Their finding means that initially promising materials for device applications may have been written off prematurely owing to their low efficiencies.  Trace impurities are difficult to detect owing to their similarity to donor molecules in solar cells. The impurities can significantly influence photovoltaic properties Unlike traditional inorganic solar cells, polymer cells do not immediately create charge carriers but instead create electron-hole pairs called excitons over a donor-acceptor interface, which migrate to the electrodes. In...

A UK based team has combined two methods into a new technique to investigate cell-substrate interactions in biomedical research.The new technique, correlative light-ion microscopy (CLIM), combines both ion and fluorescence microscopy to obtain topographical and biochemical information for the same area of a sample.The idea for the technique came to Molly Stevens and her colleagues at Imperial College London, when they observed unknown structures while conducting characterisation tests on human tissue samples. 'We realised that there was no simple and efficient method to correlate structural and biochemical information at the micro and nanoscale. Therefore, the only way forward was to...

A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the National Human Genome Research Institute has evaluated the whole genomic sequence of stem cells derived from human bone marrow cells -- so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells -- and found that relatively few genetic changes occur during stem cell conversion by an improved method. The findings, reported in the March issue of Cell Stem Cell, the official journal of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), will be presented at the annual ISSCR meeting in June. "Our results show that human iPS cells accrue genetic changes at about the...

A team of chemical engineers led by Paul J. Dauenhauer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has discovered a new, high-yield method of producing the key ingredient used to make plastic bottles from biomass. The process is inexpensive and currently creates the chemical p-xylene with an efficient yield of 75-percent, using most of the biomass feedstock, Dauenhauer says. The research is published in the journal ACS Catalysis. Dauenhauer, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at UMass Amherst, says the new discovery shows that there is an efficient, renewable way to produce a chemical that has immediate and recognizable use for...

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Admin Previously I posted an article, Belgian LANR patents, covering the LANR patents of former chemist and patent attorney Jan Van den Bogaert. Mr. Van den Bogaert spent his career at AGFA, the Belgian multinational corporation that has long specialized in photography-related technology. He filed, and had granted, numerous LANR-related patents, which that for the last 20 years have not been available for review to those who did not speak Flemish, a Belgian variation of the Dutch language. The previous article included a link to the PDF file to two of those patents...

He may have co-founded the company that became Microsoft's largest competitor, but former Apple boss Steve Wozniak has glittering things to say about his former rival's mobile OS. Mr Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs in 1976, has given a shocking endorsement of Windows' 7.5 Mango interface. The 61-year-old, who no longer works full-time for Apple, says of the four phones he travels with (including two iPhones), the Nokia Lumia makes him feel as though he is 'with a friend, not a tool'. Shock endorsement: Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs in 1976,...

A surge in Galaxy smartphone sales fuelled earnings at Samsung Electronics to a record high in the first quarter, usually a tough season for the global consumer electronics industry, outshining handset rivals such as Nokia. Samsung sold more smartphones in the first three months of the year than Apple and raked in more than 70% of its operating profit from mobile businesses. Shares in Samsung shot up nearly 3%. Net profit nearly doubled from a year earlier to a record 5.05 trillion won (£2.75bn) for the quarter to 31 March. Operating profit also hit a record high, at 5.85 trillion...

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is known for playing around with all kinds of mobile tech, even if it competes with iOS devices. Wozniak recently bought Nokia's new Lumia 900 Windows Phone, and shared some of his thoughts on Microsoft's Mobile platform in a podcast interview with The Report. (The Verge first picked up the interview). Overall, Wozniak says he prefers the look and feel of Windows Phone apps over Android and iPhone apps. He also likes Windows Phone better overall than Android. We had similar feelings towards Windows Phone apps when we reviewed the Lumia 900. Many apps such as...

Synthetic strands with different backbones replicate and evolve just like the real thing. Nearly all organisms share a single genetic language: DNA. But scientists have now demonstrated that several lab-made variants of DNA can store and transmit information much like the genuine article. Researchers led by Philipp Holliger, a synthetic biologist at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, say that the alternative molecules could help others to develop new drugs and nanotechnologies. They publish their results today in Science1. DNA is made up of nucleic acid bases — labelled A, C, G and T —...

Microsoft revealed late last week that usage of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview has doubled that of Windows 7 during the same pre-release timeframe for that version. “Millions” of people are already using Windows 8 every day, the company claimed. Because this is literally all the information that Microsoft communicated about this incredible milestone, let’s read between the lines a bit. I have two thoughts about this issue, one of which has been bothering me for some time. First, this announcement is an attempt by Microsoft to remind people of how popular Windows really is. While the mainstream media is...

AT&T and Verizon Wireless want Windows Phone smartphones to succeed in the U.S., partly to provide leverage against Apple's demands for subsidies and other concessions required for selling the popular iPhone. AT&T recently began selling the Nokia Lumia 900 with the Windows Phone 7 operating system for a competitive $99.99 price. Meanwhile, Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo recently told Reuters that Verizon is "really looking at the Windows Phone 8.0 platform because that's a differentiator." Both carriers need a strong competitor -- like Windows Phone -- to go up against the iPhone and Android phones, analysts said. The wireless...

Toxic prions in the brain can be detected with self-illuminating polymers. The originators, at Linköping University in Sweden, has now shown that the same molecules can also render the prions harmless, and potentially cure fatal nerve-destroying illnesses. Linköping researchers and their colleagues at the University Hospital in Zürich tested the luminescent conjugated polymers, or LCPs, on tissue sections from the brains of mice that had been infected with prions. The results show that the number of prions, as well as their toxicity and infectibility, decreased drastically. This is the first time anyone has been able to demonstrate the possibility of...

Astronomers have discovered their "holy grail" - a planet capable of supporting life outside our solar system. The planet lies in what they describe as a 'habitable zone', neither too near its sun to dry out or too far away which freezes it. And the discovery could help answer the question of whether we are alone in the universe, which has been plagued astronomers and alien fanatics for years. Scientists found the planet, Gliese 667Cc, orbiting around a red dwarf star, 22 light years away from the earth. Red dwarf stars are the most common stars in the neighbourhood of...

The new spaceship being built by private aerospace firm Sierra Nevada Corp. may look like a miniature space shuttle, but while the design takes cues from the past, company officials are hoping this vehicle shepherds in a new era of commercial human spaceflight. Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser space plane is being developed to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit. The company is aiming to begin full orbital flights in 2016. But the Dream Chaser design, which is reminiscent of NASA's space shuttle, is actually based on a concept vehicle, called HL-20, which was first...

Physicists in the US have discovered yet another useful property of the wonder material graphene – it can function much like a laser when excited with very short femtosecond light pulses. The team has shown that the material has two technologically important properties – population inversion of electrons and optical gain. The findings suggest that graphene could be used to make a variety of optoelectronics devices, including broadband optical amplifiers, high-speed modulators, and absorbers for telecommunications and ultrafast lasers. Graphene is a sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-like lattice just one atom thick. Since its discovery in 2004,...

Rabbits with brain injuries hop again after treatment with dendrimers. By tacking drugs onto molecules targeting rogue brain cells, researchers have alleviated symptoms in newborn rabbits that are similar to those of cerebral palsy in children. Cerebral palsy refers to a group of incurable disorders characterized by impairments in movement, posture and sensory abilities. In general, medicines tend to act broadly rather than influence certain sets of cells in the brain. “You don’t expect large molecules to enter the brain, and if they do, you don’t expect them to target specific cells, and immediately act therapeutically — but all of...

In a challenge to the prevailing belief that Apple computers are immune to the sort of cyberattacks that plague WIndows-based machines, research firm Sophos has released a study claiming that one in five Macs have malware. The report, released on Tuesday, is based on a “100,000-strong snapshot” of the millions of Macs that downloaded Sophos’s free Mac antivirus software. The study found that 20% of Macs were carrying one or more instances of Windows malware. Such malware doesn’t cause symptoms unless the Mac owners run Windows on their machines, but it can be spread to others. However, this doesn’t appear...

A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — has announced plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water. Planetary Resources, Inc. intends to sell these materials, generating a healthy profit for itself. But it also aims to advance humanity's exploration and exploitation of space, with resource extraction serving as an anchor industry that helps our species spread throughout the solar system. (snip) "We're out there right now, talking to customers," Anderson said. "We are open for discussions with companies — aerospace companies, mining companies,...

FOR much of the last century, the straightforward solution to making a car perform better has been to install a bigger engine. In the hybrids and electric cars of coming years, however, the answer might be installing motors with more powerful magnets. Until the 1980s, the most powerful magnets available were those made from an alloy containing samarium and cobalt. But mining and processing those metals presented challenges: samarium, one of 17 so-called rare earth elements, was costly to refine, and most cobalt came from mines in unstable regions of Africa. In 1982, when researchers at General Motors developed a...

Enlarge Image Bending the rules. Light normally travels in straight lines, but with some clever pre-adjustment, it curves instead. Credit: F. Courvoisier and J. M. Dudley Any physics student knows that light travels in a straight line. But now researchers have shown that light can also travel in a curve, without any external influence. The effect is actually an optical illusion, although the researchers say it could have practical uses such as moving objects with light from afar. It's well known that light bends. When light rays pass from air into water, for instance, they take a sharp turn;...

Researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM, Spain) have mathematically shown that particles charged in a magnetic field can escape into infinity without ever stopping. One of the conditions is that the field is generated by current loops situated on the same plane. At the moment this is a theoretical mathematical study, but two researchers from UCM have recently proved that, in certain conditions, magnetic fields can send particles to infinity, according to the study published in the journal Quarterly of Applied Mathematics. "If a particle 'escapes' to infinity it means two things: that it will never stop, and...

Full title: Serious blow to dark matter theories? New study finds mysterious lack of dark matter in Sun's neighborhood The most accurate study so far of the motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume around the Sun. According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighbourhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit...

Journalists walk on the 450-meter (1,476 feet)-high observation deck of the Tokyo Sky Tree during a press preview in Tokyo Tuesday, April 17, 2012. The world's tallest freestanding broadcast structure that stands 634-meter (2,080 feet) will open to the public in May. (AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye)

Speaking of F/A-XX, the Navy’s planned 6th generation fighter that will replace the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, below you’ll find the Navy’s brand new Request for Information on the aircraft. By Brand new, I mean it just dropped on Friday. Whatever jet is selected will hopefully replace the Super Hornets around 2030, said Rear Adm. Donald Gaddis this afternoon at the Navy League’s annual Sea, Air, Space conference in National Harbor, Md. Before the Navy can settle on the final capabilities such a plane will have, it needs to know what types of technology the defense industry can bring to the...

NASA is clearly looking far into the future for a way to handle both human waste and a need for fuel on either long space flights or when attempting to colonize another planet. To that end, they’ve assigned life support engineer Jonathan Trent the task of coming up with a way to use algae to solve both problems at once. His solution is to use plastic bags floating in seawater as small bioreactors, containing wastewater, sunlight and carbon dioxide to grow algae that can be used as a means to create biofuel. The whole thing is called Offshore Membrane Enclosures...

If AmericaÂ’s ongoing experiment in democracy and economic freedom is to endure, we will need to think again about cultivating the necessary habits of the heart and resisting the allure of the ideology of technology. Why are Americans addicted to technology? The question has a distinctly contemporary ring, and we might be tempted to think it could only have been articulated within the last decade or two. Could we, after all, have known anything about technology addiction before the advent of the Blackberry? Well, as it turns out, Americans have a longstanding fascination and facility with technology, and the question...

China’s mysterious Internet outage; speculation over a ‘kill switch’ By Hana Stewart-Smith | April 13, 2012, 5:33am PDT At approximately 11am local time yesterday, Internet users around China reported significant Internet blackouts. Not only were they unable to access some Chinese sites, but also many foreign Web sites that had not previously been blocked. The issue was not isolated to China. Web users in Hong Kong and Japan also reported issues with accessing Chinese sites. A number of explanations immediately came to light, with the most viable cause being the 8.7 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia on Wednesday, that might have...

A collagen-binding peptide with applications in wound healing has been developed by scientists in the US. The peptide is able to invade the strands of collagen, forming a strong and stable non-covalent bond at room temperature. Pendant drug molecules could be attached to the peptide and anchored at the wound site to aid wound healing. Representation of a collagen mimetic peptide (CMP) annealing to damaged collagen to anchor a molecule (X) in a wound bed Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body and makes up three quarters of the dry weight of skin. It is formed from three...

Researchers in China and Australia have observed superlubricity – the dropping of friction to near zero – on length scales much larger than before. They say that the phenomenon, which they measured in sheared pieces of graphite, could find applications in sensitive microscopic resonators or nanoscale gyroscopes. Superlubricity is sometimes used to mean simply very low friction, but the original meaning is that the friction between two surfaces disappears almost completely. Proposed in the early 1990s by Motohisa Hirano, then at the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation in Tokyo, Japan, and others, it relies on a special arrangement of atoms...

Researchers in California have developed a system that can rapidly determine the size of an earthquake and the extent of its impacts within a fault zone, including its potential for triggering a devastating tsunami. The researchers have used the system – which is based on GPS measurements – to accurately model two historic earthquakes in Japan and northern Mexico. The 2011 Japanese earthquake disaster showed that the first few minutes after an earthquake are critical. When the T�hoku earthquake struck, it took geophysicists more than 20 min to compute that the earthquake was magnitude 9.0 on the Richter scale. Had...