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Enlarge Image Going deep. Drilling for natural gas in shale formations in Pennsylvania. Credit: Ruhrfisch, Wikimedia Commons VANCOUVER—A controversial method of drilling for natural gas, called fracking, has boomed in recent years—as have concerns over its potential to cause environmental contamination and harm human health. But a major review of the practice, released today, uncovered no signs that it is causing trouble below ground. “We found no direct evidence that fracking itself has contaminated groundwater,� said Charles Groat of the University of Texas, Austin, who led the study. The report, released here at the annual meeting of the American...

Enlarge Image Laser-induced switching. Experimental images showing two small domains with magnetic orientation up (white) and down (black). Each laser pulse reverses the direction repeatedly. Credit: Johan Mentink; Richard Evans (inset) An ultrashort heat pulse can predictably flip a bit in a magnetic memory like the one in your hard drive. The surprising effect could ultimately lead to magnetic memories hundreds of times faster and more energy efficient than today's hard drives. It also provides a way to control the direction in which a bit is magnetized without applying something else that has a direction, such as a magnetic...

Updated: Dick Smith Extends $1m Offer To Defkalion February 16, 2012 Following Andrea Rossi’s refusal of Dick Smith’s $1m test offer, the Australian Businessman and skeptic has now extended that offer to Defkalion. While a cursory check has been made on his identity, care should be taken until it is confirmed by his office. The offer was made in answer to a question in the eCatNews comments section: No X price but of course I would be happy to make a similar $1 million offer to Defkalion It of course will be a waste of time as they are both...

This is the second time Thunderbird has "crashed" and lost ALL of my archived e-mail.

Twitter Inc. has acknowledged that after mobile users tap the "Find friends" feature on its smartphone app, the company downloads users' entire address book, including email addresses and phone numbers, and keeps the data on its servers for 18 months. The company also said it plans to update its apps to clarify that user contacts are being transmitted and stored. The company's current privacy policy does not explicitly disclose that Twitter downloads and stores user address books.

Anyone else experience this? It's just on Free Republic only.

Chemists in the US have created a molecule that closely resembles the key active portion of molybdenum disulfide, an important solid industrial catalyst that shows promise for the generation of hydrogen from water. There are relatively few catalytically active sites on molybdenum disulfide crystals, so a molecular analogue could lead to a catalyst with similar chemistry but a higher density of active sites. In addition, a molecular mimic can be experimented upon more easily, to improve efficiencies and unpick the catalytic mechanism - something that is still unclear for MoS2. The molybdenum sulfide mimic will help researchers work out how...

THE DAWN OF THE ENERGY AGE February 09, 2012 3:35 PM I'm sure that I've written things that you didn't agree with and probably thought were downright crazy. Well, strap yourself in, because I'm about to take crazy to a whole new level: Within five years, the number of gas customers for the Middleboro Gas & Electric Department will start to plummet. Within 10 to 15 years, there won't be a single customer remaining for either gas or electric. The year 2012 will be looked at by future historians as the dawn of a new age of man -...

Home > News Though most of today's nuclear reactors are cooled by water, we've long known that there are alternatives; in fact, the world's first nuclear-powered electricity in 1951 came from a reactor cooled by sodium. Reactors cooled by liquid metals such as sodium or lead have a unique set of abilities that may again make them significant players in the nuclear industry. At the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, a team led by senior nuclear engineer James Sienicki has designed a new small reactor cooled by lead—the Sustainable Proliferation-resistance Enhanced Refined Secure Transportable Autonomous Reactor, or...

After a decades-long streak of troubled weapon acquisitions, the Air Force is looking to get off on the right foot as it seeks to buy a new intercontinental stealth bomber. The Pentagon’s new budget proposal gives the Air Force the green light to begin designing a new bomber with a target date for starting production in the mid-2020s. The goal is to acquire up to 100 new aircraft at a cost of about $55 billion. But skeptics already are casting doubts on the plan. They consistently point to the B-2 batwing stealth bomber as a cautionary tale. The Pentagon spent...

Billionaire Sidney Kimmel to Donate $5.5 to Fund University of Missouri Cold Fusion Research February 11, 2012 The Columbia Daily Tribune is reporting that Sidney Kimmel, Chairman of the Board of Directors and founder of Jones Apparel Group, Inc., is donating $5.5 million through his charitable foundation to fund studies in the field of cold fusion at the University of Missouri. The purpose of the gift is to try to understand the ‘pure science’ behind the excess heat that is generated in many cold fusion/LENR experiments. Kimmel’s gift will establish the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance, or SKINR,...

Last year I wrote about sudden surges in renewable energy that set up a conflict between wind producers in the Pacific Northwest and the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency that runs hydroelectric dams and the regional grid. When unseasonable storms created a simultaneous surplus of wind and water, Bonneville gave free power away but still had to deal with an oversupply that could overwhelm the grid. Eventually it resorted to unplugging the wind machines because routing excess water around its dams could create excess bubbles in the river... --snip-- Another would be using batteries, the secretary of energy said....

[Vo]: MIT suggest new physical model for condensed matter The Vorts have some great comments about this theory. http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg63015.html David ledin Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:40:12 -0800 MIT suggest new physical model for condensed matter to explain many observations of anomalies in condensed matter systems. they named Fleischmann , Pons and Piantelli but not rossi . http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.4377.pdf ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg63024.html Mark Iverson-ZeroPoint Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:07:44 -0800 The key phrase in the abstract is: "In the resulting model, there appears a new term in which nuclear transitions are coupled to lattice vibrations." I wonder if Hagelstein has been reading...

More Respectability for LENR: Now to be Discussed at CERN Colloquium February 9, 2012 Shortly after NASA’s web site has featured a video promoting LENR as a possible future energy solution, we now find that CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) is providing a forum for the subject at a colloquium to be held on March 22 entitled, “Overview of Theoretical and Experimental Progress in Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR)” The description about the event reads as follows: An overview will be given on the main progress made –since March 1989- through experimental/theoretical studies on thermal/nuclear anomalies observed...

http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/02/swartz-and-hagelstein-respond-to-steven-b-krivits-reporting-of-jet-energy-cold-fusion/ Swartz and Hagelstein Publish Data in Response to Steven B. Krivit’s Reporting of JET Energy Cold Fusion February 5, 2012 Cold Fusion Times (owned and operated by Mitchell Swartz) has produced a lengthy response to reporting by Steven B. Krivit of New Energy Times who has criticized Swartz for posting what he (Krivit) considers “misleading” information on a personal web site about the recent cold fusion demonstration at MIT. The response states that Swartz and Hagelstein have decided to publish a portion of the data collected in the class in order to rebut the analysis of Krivit, including the...

...any recommendations, Suggestions?

"...security researcher Brendan O’Connor is trying a different approach to spy hardware: building a sensor-equipped surveillance-capable computer that’s so cheap it can be sacrificed after one use, with off-the-shelf parts that anyone can buy and assemble for less than fifty dollars. At the Shmoocon security conference Friday in Washington D.C., O’Connor plans to present the F-BOMB, or Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors. Built from just the hardware in a commercially-available PogoPlug mini-computer, a few tiny antennae, eight gigabytes of flash memory and some 3D-printed plastic casing, the F-BOMB serves as 3.5 by 4 by 1 inch spy computer....

January 30-31, 2012 - Cambridge, MA. - As part of the IAP Course on COLD FUSION at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Mitchell Swartz, JET Energy, and Prof. Peter Hagelstein demonstrated cold fusion openly for scientists and engineers. The demonstration was a two day part of the detailed, yet overview, seven day course run by Prof. Hagelstein and Dr. Swartz, and followed the first open demonstrations of cold fusion at MIT in 2003. This JET Energy NANOR(TM) demonstrated a significant energy gain greater than 10, much larger than the previous open demonstration. This exhibition is also remarkable because it...

Summary: It’s actually cheaper to go to another planet than to give an iPad to every child. This month, Apple dropped a bombshell on the academic community by introducing iBooks Textbooks and iBooks Author. In combination, the two create a compelling framework for re-engineering the textbook in electronic form for K-12 students, permitting for rich color educational content and possibly an entirely new textbook ecosystem that could be made accessible to tens of millions of schoolchildren. The problems with Apple’s daring textbook plan are twofold. First, in that the iPad as a hardware platform is completely unsuitable to the needs...

...........During the darkest days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union decided to build a gigantic missile ship and troop transport to spearhead any future invasion of America or Western Europe. This Soviet sky monster was called an ekranoplan. The one you see in photos here is the Lun-class Ekranoplan. The most unique aspect of the “part plane, part boat, and part hovercraft” ekranoplan was its propulsion method, which is why it was also called a Ground Effect Vehicle (GEV) or “Sea Skimmer.” As Business Insider puts the GEV’s aerodynamic feat: “A GEV takes advantage of an aeronautical effect that...

Scientists have shown that a newly discovered molecule in Earth's atmosphere has the potential to play a significant role in off-setting global warming by cooling the planet. In a breakthrough paper published in Science, researchers from The University of Manchester, The University of Bristol and Sandia National Laboratories report the potentially revolutionary effects of Criegee biradicals. These invisible chemical intermediates are powerful oxidisers of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, produced by combustion, and can naturally clean up the atmosphere. Although these chemical intermediates were hypothesised in the 1950s, it is only now that they have been detected....

It may be slimy, slippery and rather unpleasant, but seaweed actually has a surprisingly wide range of uses, being a common source of food, chemicals, medicines and cosmetics. It may soon also be a source of biofuel, thanks to an engineered microbe able to transform seaweed directly into ethanol. Seaweed has a number of important advantages over other biofuel feedstocks. Unlike maize and sugarcane, it isn't grown on fields that otherwise would be producing food and unlike wood and energy crops, such as switchgrass, it doesn't contain any lignin, which makes the sugar molecules in it much easier to release.  As a...

The Greek company Defkalion has invited scientific and business organizations to test the core technology in its forthcoming energy products. The products are based on LENR – Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. In a press release on January 23, Defkalion has invited "internationally recognized and reputable scientific and business organizations" from now and two months ahead, to do independent testing with their own instruments on the reactors used in the Defkalion's forthcoming energy device, "Hyperion" . The apparatus is according to Defkalion based on "Chemically Assisted Low Energy Nuclear Reactions caused by Nickel and Hydrogen Nuclei", a technology supposedly developed by...

Senator Lamar Smith, lead sponsor of the currently dead SOPA bill you’ve heard so much about, has another bill in the works that uses Child Pornography as a screen to push through an amendment that’ll have your internet service provider tracking all of your financial dealings online. Each time you use a credit card, each time you read your bank statement, all of your IP information and your search history will be required by your ISP to be stored for 18 months at all times. This bill is H.R. 1981 and will have more dire consequences than SOPA or PIPA...

The Justice Department seized Megaupload.com, one of the world's most popular file-sharing sites, and several of its related sites on Thursday. Prosecutors charged seven employees of Megaupload with criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit racketeering and other charges. Each faces up to 55 years in prison.

The Google logo has been blacked out today. Wikipedia, reddit, Mozilla and Twitpic are all blocking access to content. Even Star Trek icon George Takei has blocked his site. The moves are displays of cyber-protest against the heavy-handed and ill-conceived Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). From a political and public relations standpoint, this has already been a complete and utter failure for Hollywood and their formerly formidable lobbying arm, the Motion Picture Association of America. Former Sen. Chris Dodd became the new CEO of the MPAA after he realized he would never be re-elected in his home state of Connecticut...

TEL AVIV: External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna on Tuesday said India and Israel have made impressive strides in areas of critical importance to both countries ranging from agriculture and water management to latest the hi-tech applications in communications, health and energy. Krishna in his remarks at the at the reception to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between India and Israel, said: "Twenty years may appear to be a short period but the impressive and multi-faceted development of our bilateral relationship shows how much can be achieved even in a few years given the necessary commitment and...

The community has asked us to preserve emergency access options. The following methods will remain available to access content: Disabling JavaScript in your browser Using bookmarklets or other tools to unhide the content Visiting the mobile site at http://en.m.wikipedia.org/ Accessing site content via the API Appending ?banner=none to the end of page URLs.

Highly sensitive explosives could become safer and greener by exploiting newly characterised ionic polymer structures, say chemists in the US. Such materials could replace explosives based on toxic heavy metals like lead and mercury salts.Sensitive materials are routinely used as primary explosives in detonators to set off larger amounts of less sensitive high explosives in mining or military applications. The challenge is to make them stable enough to be handled safely in the field, but also sensitive enough to detonate reliably, packing as much energetic punch as possible. 'It's a very fine balance,' says Louisa Hope-Weeks of Texas Tech University...

As many as 10 fake iPad 2s, all made of slabs of modeling clay, were recently sold at electronic stores in Vancouver, British Columbia. Best Buy and Future Shop have launched investigations into how the scam was pulled off. The tablet computers, like most Apple products, are known for their sleek and simple designs. But there's no mistaking the iPad for one of the world's oldest "tablet devices." Still, most electronic products cannot be returned to stores. For the the stores and customers to be fooled by the clay replacements, the thieves must have successfully weighed out the clay portions...

Spectroscopy, a key method of identifying atoms and molecules with light, has been taken to its most fundamental level - a single photon absorbed by a single molecule. In addition to paving the way toward new experiments that observe the interaction between light and matter at its most basic level, the researchers that accomplished the feat suggest that their technique could also work with other photon-emitters, including those under study for quantum communication.Spectroscopy works by finding the frequencies of light that will put an atom or molecule into an excited state - these comprise the chemical's unique absorption and emission...

A Russian scientific spacecraft whizzing out of control around the Earth, and expected to re-enter the atmosphere on Saturday, may have failed because it was struck by some type of antisatellite weapon, the director of Russia’s space agency said in an interview published Tuesday. He did not say who would want to interfere with the spacecraft, which was intended to explore a moon of Mars. The Russian craft, named Phobos-Grunt for the moon and the Russian word for ground, ran into trouble soon after it was launched in November, when its rockets failed to lift it out of low Earth...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Researchers at I.B.M. have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible. The findings, being reported Thursday in the journal Science, could help lead to a new class of nanomaterials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities than the current silicon-based computers but will consume significantly less power. And they may offer a new direction for research in quantum computing. “Magnetic materials are extremely useful...

Surgeons in Sweden have replaced the cancerous windpipe of a Maryland man with one made in a laboratory and seeded with the man’s cells. The windpipe, or trachea, made from minuscule plastic fibers and covered in stem cells taken from the man’s bone marrow, was implanted in November. The patient, Christopher Lyles, 30, whose tracheal cancer had progressed to the point where it was considered inoperable, arrived home in Baltimore on Wednesday. It was the second procedure of its kind and the first for an American. “I’m feeling good,” Mr. Lyles said in a telephone interview from his home, where...

If you’ve ever used the Internet, you have an online identity. Maybe it’s slight: a Hotmail account here, a comment on a news story there. Or maybe you’ve been more prolific, leaving a trail of usernames, accounts, messages, and profiles across the digital landscape. In any case, an active internet user owes it to himself to do a bit of self-Googling. What you’ll find will be both enlightening and humbling—even worrying. Read more: How to Disappear Completely (From the Internet) - Popular Mechanics

The control of US military spy drones appears to have shifted from Windows to Linux following an embarrassing malware infection. Ground control systems at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, which commands the killer unmanned aircraft, became infected with a virus last September. In a statement at the time the Air Force dismissed the electronic nasty as a nuisance and said it posed no threat to the operation of Reaper drones, but the intrusion was nonetheless treated seriously. "The ground system is separate from the flight control system Air Force pilots use to fly the aircraft remotely; the ability of...

The iPad 3 release date will be this quarter, according to sources at CES 2012, who also blabbed about its specs and features. There seem to be few external changes, so, in IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder if it'll be called the iPad 2S.

Celani, Piantelli Geneva LENR Presentations January 9, 2012 Francesco Celani is a colourful and respected character in the evolving LENR scene. An experienced nuclear physicist, it was he who tried to sneek a peek at the radiation spectra during the January 2011 eCat demo before Rossi stopped him. An offer to test the eCat in order to settle the mud surrounding it was refused by the inventor who pointed out that such a move would only benefit competitors . Celani has not been idle and recently reported success working with Ni H reactions. It appears that his efforts do...

The amazing story of how our supersecret, Cold-War spy satellites took photos of the Soviet empire and dropped them to Earth, all without the help of computers, bandwidth, or digital cameras. Here's your mission, should you choose to accept it: build a camera that can take high-resolution photographs of the Earth from orbit and return them to the Central Intelligence Agency. There's only one catch: you don't get to use a computer or a single kilobyte of network bandwidth. That's the task that the United States government gave to a group of engineers at the optical instruments company Perkin-Elmer...

BEIJING: Japanese Premier Yoshihiko Noda's ongoing India visit aimed at boosting bilateral strategic ties was part of Tokyo's attempt to strengthen its alliances with Asia-Pacific nations to "contain" China, the official media here claimed today. Boosting ties with India is part of Japan's strategy of strengthening alliances with Asia-Pacific nations with an eye on China, state-run China Daily quoted security analysts as saying. The India-Japan summit is a continuance of Japan's "Arc of Freedom and Prosperity" strategy, which has been widely interpreted as an effort to contain China, Lu Yaodong, director of the department of Japanese diplomacy at the Institute...

Ultra- D is the company’s display technology that can carry out realtime conversion of 2-D to 3-D without necessitating the use of special glasses for viewing. What’s more, the technology enables the realtime conversion of 3-D content with glasses to 3-D content without glasses. The company’s press announcement describes this approach as autostereoscopic 3-D imagery. The company’s Ultra-D is dependent upon custom hardware, middleware techniques and software algorithms to give viewers the instant conversions. The company says Ultra-D works with Blu-ray, DVD, PC gaming, Internet, cable and satellite content. The technology allows users the freedom to customize the 3-D effect...

To speak out against the anti-scientific orthodoxy that prevails among large segments of the educated class is to make yourself the skunk at the garden party. Imagine yourself at one of those fashionable dinner parties you go to now and then—you know, the kind where everybody has retro-chic eyeglasses and au courant haircuts, and the food isn’t just vegetarian but organic.You make the mistake of mentioning your headache and the woman on your left offers you some capsules from the health food store. Here is your side of the ensuing conversation:“Oh, thanks, but you know I only take medications that...

In Afghanistan, supply convoys have been a favorite target of insurgent fighters, not only because they make warfighting possible for troops at forward operating bases but also because they are so very vulnerable to ambushes and IEDs. But on Saturday, NATO logisticians hit a major milestone in Afghanistan, reaching out and touching one of the holy grails of robotic warfare when an unmanned K-MAX helicopter successfully delivered a sling-load of beans, bullets, and band-aids to an unspecified base for the first time.

A new research breakthrough has enabled scientists to grow human tissue to repair or replace organs, and someday, maybe even limbs. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports.Be advised: Some of the images are graphic.MILES O'BRIEN: I am not sure when or why I thought it was a good idea to go for a bike ride on a 100-degree Texas afternoon with a 26-year-old Marine corporal. There I was eating Isaias Hernandez's dirt. No surprise, right? Well, take a look at his right thigh.CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ, U.S. Marine Corps: It looked like a chicken, like if you would take a bite out...

From the continuing rise of tablet devices to the daily-deals craze and the return of the Internet IPO, 2011 has been a transformative year for technology. The pace of change has become blisteringly fast, with traditional industries -- bookstores, video-rental chains, newspapers -- crumbling more quickly than we could have imagined. Predicting what will happen in 2012, therefore, is a shot in the dark: A year is virtually a lifetime in the digital era. And yet we can at least make a guess at what will happen in the early part of next year simply by looking at the trends...

Eight hours into Thursday’s marathon hearing on the controversial “Stop Online Piracy Act” not a single amendment proposed by the bill’s critics in Congress had been passed. In fact, at the time of this posting, all of the amendments introduced by House lawmakers designed to improve the legislation for critics have so far been voted down by a core of SOPA-supporters in the House Judiciary Committee, moving the controversial bill closer toward passage. . . Another amendment that was voted down was proposed by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA). It would have allowed ISPs to refuse takedown notices that would interfere...

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan are building the world’s biggest plane to help launch cargo and astronauts into space, in the latest of several ventures fueled by technology tycoons clamoring to write America’s next chapter in spaceflight. Their plans, unveiled Tuesday, call for a twin-fuselage aircraft with wings longer than a football field to carry a rocket high into the atmosphere and drop it, avoiding the need for a launch pad and the expense of additional rocket fuel. Allen, who teamed up with Rutan in 2004 to send the first privately financed, manned spacecraft into space,...

High noon is approaching for the biggest manhunt in the history of physics. At 8 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday morning, scientists from CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, are scheduled to give a progress report on the search for the Higgs boson — infamously known as the “God particle” — whose discovery would vindicate the modern theory of how elementary particles get mass. The report comes amid rumors that the two competing armies of scientists sifting debris from hundreds of trillions of proton collisions in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or L.H.C., outside Geneva, have both finally seen hints...

Just recieved this. I'm a little suspicious but maybe it's legitimate. Anybody know anything about it? ********************************************************* Dear MSN and Hotmail Subscriber, ===================== Virus Notification A DGTFX Virus has been detected in your folders. Your email account has to be upgraded to our new Secured DGTFX anti-virus 2011 version to prevent damages to our web mail log and to your important files. Click your reply tab, Fill the columns below and send back to us or your email account will be terminated to avoid spread of the virus. Full Name: ................................... User name: ............................... Password: .................................. Reconfirm Password: .................. Date...

The Ascendancy of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions December 9, 2011 | Brian Wang put up two posts today [(1) + (2)] that link to what should seen as seminal events in the basic view of LENR (low energy nuclear reactions). Time passing as more hard credence evolves into research and the results, will show us which of the various physics are the activities of nature in LENR. The progress cannot come fast enough . Piantelli's LENR Experiment Apparatus. Click image for the largest view . As the technology sits today The Rossi E-Cat is in production facility exploration. Blacklight...