Large Hadron Collider

8 07 2008

The gigantic scientific instrument called Large Hadron Collider has to be started up today in a world’s largest and most respected centre for scientific research near Geneva at the border Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. This grand scientist experiment will help physicists to learn more about the laws of Nature. What is the result we should expect from such grandioso human’s practical activities on the Earth? There are many theories and discussions about. But the main goal is finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works.

Do you think the answer will be found soon? I don’t so. But no doubt today is the beginning of the process.


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Categories : Future, Nature, News, Science, Secrets, Space, Technology

Phoenix Landed on Mars.

26 05 2008

Phoenix spacecraft landed in the northern polar region of Mars on May 25, 2008 to begin three months of examining a site chosen for its likelihood of having frozen water within reach of the lander’s robotic arm, NASAreports.

Radio signals received at 4:53:44 p.m. Pacific Time (7:53:44 p.m. Eastern Time) confirmed the Phoenix Mars Lander had survived its difficult final descent and touchdown 15 minutes earlier. The signals took that long to travel from Mars to Earth at the speed of light.

Mission team members at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver; and the University of Arizona, Tucson, cheered confirmation of the landing and eagerly awaited further information from Phoenix later tonight.


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Categories : News, Science, Space

Last 3 Days Earthquakes.

25 05 2008

It became known that yesterday at least six people were killed when a shallow, 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit Colombia, destroying homes and shaking buildings in the capital Bogota, where panicked residents fled into the streets. The quake blocked a highway out of Bogota and flattened ten houses and a church near the epicenter, authorities said.

Francisco Gomez, a geology professor at the University of Missouri who has studied the New Madrid Seismic Zone in southeast Missouri and other “intraplate” zones that cause mid-continent earthquakes, said the quake was strong, but it doesn’t necessarily mean there are more to come.

“There always is the concern with something like this that there may be the potential for larger earthquakes in the Wabash River Valley,” he said of the Indiana-Illinois region. “But there’s also the high probability that this is just a moderate earthquake that happened and now they’ll return to the normal level of activity which is pretty infrequent.”

He added: “Does this mean there’s a big one yet to come? Well, not necessarily.”

Gomez said intraplate quakes like this and the massive 7.5-magnitude events that struck Missouri in 1811 and 1812, levelling buildings in St. Louis and reportedly causing the Mississippi River to flow backwards, are very “enigmatic.” They can’t be easily explained or monitored like California earthquakes, which occur when tectonic plates push against each other.

“There are different possibilities. Some of it has to do with the fact that the crust of the earth in continental areas is old and it has a lot of old fractures and cracks within it,” said Gomez. “Sometimes stress gets concentrated and it produces an earthquake. But what causes stress to build? That’s one of the big debates right now.”

As is generally known earthquakes as a natural phenomenon is everyday occurrence. Here you can check the list of Worldwide Earthquakes that happened only in the Last 3 Days.

25-MAY-2008 09:34:09 33.07 104.96 4.9 10.0 GANSU, CHINA
25-MAY-2008 08:21:48 32.58 105.46 5.8 10.0 SICHUAN, CHINA
25-MAY-2008 05:45:12 15.24 -91.70 5.0 193.1 MEXICO-GUATEMALA BORDER REGION
25-MAY-2008 04:27:06 31.92 104.50 4.6 10.0 SICHUAN, CHINA
25-MAY-2008 04:17:06 14.51 -91.43 4.3 82.8 GUATEMALA
25-MAY-2008 03:25:40 46.52 153.32 4.7 39.3 KURIL ISLANDS
25-MAY-2008 02:07:52 -12.76 -14.66 4.8 10.0 SOUTHERN MID-ATLANTIC RIDGE
24-MAY-2008 23:23:07 44.24 -129.31 4.6 10.0 OFF COAST OF OREGON
24-MAY-2008 23:20:39 44.33 -129.76 4.2 10.0 OFF COAST OF OREGON
24-MAY-2008 22:29:15 18.37 -105.37 4.2 10.0 OFF COAST OF JALISCO, MEXICO
24-MAY-2008 19:48:12 -23.45 -179.71 4.9 530.7 SOUTH OF FIJI ISLANDS
24-MAY-2008 19:20:42 4.45 -73.63 5.7 3.6 COLOMBIA
24-MAY-2008 13:24:11 -7.27 156.02 5.9 67.1 SOLOMON ISLANDS
24-MAY-2008 13:21:28 -0.31 -19.01 5.1 10.0 CENTRAL MID-ATLANTIC RIDGE
24-MAY-2008 10:28:43 -19.32 169.51 5.1 281.6 VANUATU ISLANDS
24-MAY-2008 09:24:05 -22.11 -179.53 4.9 591.8 SOUTH OF FIJI ISLANDS
24-MAY-2008 08:18:18 71.49 -3.06 4.5 10.0 JAN MAYEN ISLAND REGION
24-MAY-2008 07:40:39 -8.78 124.03 5.3 45.6 TIMOR REGION, INDONESIA
24-MAY-2008 06:53:32 -42.01 -71.77 4.7 83.4 S. CHILE-ARGENTINA BORDER REGION
24-MAY-2008 06:26:31 -41.90 -71.81 5.0 69.7 S. CHILE-ARGENTINA BORDER REGION
24-MAY-2008 04:58:19 42.44 -30.55 5.5 10.0 AZORES ISLANDS REGION
24-MAY-2008 02:43:46 -41.95 -71.88 5.3 78.9 S. CHILE-ARGENTINA BORDER REGION
24-MAY-2008 01:59:35 53.13 172.69 4.4 75.1 NEAR ISLANDS, ALEUTIAN ISLANDS
23-MAY-2008 22:50:30 -7.03 129.57 5.7 62.2 BANDA SEA
23-MAY-2008 20:46:18 -22.59 -68.55 5.0 99.8 NORTHERN CHILE
23-MAY-2008 19:35:35 7.26 -34.88 6.4 10.0 CENTRAL MID-ATLANTIC RIDGE
23-MAY-2008 16:10:22 32.25 105.10 4.5 10.0 SICHUAN, CHINA
23-MAY-2008 12:27:16 -23.60 178.99 5.0 524.2 SOUTH OF FIJI ISLANDS
23-MAY-2008 11:42:14 65.21 -133.94 4.1 5.0 NORTHERN YUKON TERRITORY, CANADA
23-MAY-2008 03:35:06 -8.03 106.89 4.9 10.0 SOUTH OF JAWA, INDONESIA
23-MAY-2008 03:33:07 51.69 177.92 5.2 35.0 RAT ISLANDS, ALEUTIAN ISLANDS
23-MAY-2008 01:07:46 -20.46 -179.34 5.1 652.5 FIJI ISLANDS REGION
23-MAY-2008 00:13:11 7.59 -78.07 4.4 10.0 PANAMA
23-MAY-2008 00:05:06 31.26 103.95 4.6 10.0 SICHUAN, CHINA


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Categories : Nature, News

Ecologically Better Way Construction.

18 04 2008

Five designs have been shortlisted in a competition to create an iconic visitor centre for a Lancashire wildlife haven. Lancashire Wildlife Trust has won the race to save Brockholes Wetland, a former gravel extraction site near Preston. The first phase will include the restoration of the wetlands, creation of ponds, seeding of meadows, planting new hedgerows and trees, making access paths and building proper bird watching hides.

It is hoped that the most urgent works can be completed in about three months, when there will be a grand opening by the Partners. However, this will only be the beginning of a project that will be measured in years. Local people will be encouraged to become involved in the reserve, trained and assisted by Wildlife Trust staff on site.

Brockholes will be an inspirational visitor attraction: a mosaic of lakes, reed beds, flower-rich grassland and woodland. It is encircled by the River Ribble, where otters are returning and is bordered by the largest ancient woodland in Lancashire, where badgers and bluebells thrive. It is already one of the finest sites for bird watching in the North West of England.

Critically, the development of Brockholes will also have a significant economic impact at both a local and regional level – dramatically enhancing a key gateway into the region (the site sits along side the M6), driving increased investment into the area through the extensive visitor and tourism facilities that will be developed on site and by providing an attractive and well managed area of green space for local people.

It is already home to a fantastic variety of birdlife including Lapwing, Sand Martin and Kingfisher, together with more vulnerable species such as Whimbrel, Skylark and Reed Bunting. The rich diversity of wildlife will include Great Crested Newts, bats, dragonflies and damselflies.


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Categories : Ecology, Future, News

Mars Rover program is Continuing.

26 03 2008

On Monday we’ve head that scientists plan to put one of the twin Mars rovers to sleep and limit the activities of the other robot to fulfill a NASA because their budget was being cut by $4 million.

But on the next day NASA says that it has absolutely no plan to turn off either of the Mars Rovers because of budget cuts. It has rescinded a letter that recommended budget cuts in the Mars Rover program to cover the cost of a next-generation rover on the Red Planet.


(this is Mars, general view )

The agency’s administrator, Michael D. Griffin, says NASA needs the money to keep the space shuttle fleet aloft, complete the International Space Station and build a new crew exploration vehicle to replace the shuttle and but as was saying in a statement Tuesday neither of the rovers will be shut down.


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Categories : News, Science, Space

Robot Big Dog.

20 03 2008

Watching the Big Dog lifelike moves and balances I was filled with mixed feelings. I would not like to meet this monster tête-à-tête :-) But it’s really good job! The robot was created by Boston Dynamics Inc and you can see here its climbing through the woods, through snow, and recovering its balance while trying to negotiate an icy parking lot. Bravo creators!

Boston Dynamics engineers were contracted to develop a robot with the ability to run, maneuver and jump to avoid obstacles. The robot would measure 1 meter tall and 2 meters wide, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. The goal of the project, which was slotted to last 15 months, is to produce a robot with animal-like strength, speed and mobility, according to defense officials.

The DARPA contract, which was commissioned by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, includes three one-year contract renewals valued at total of $40 million.


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Categories : Future, Invention, News, Science, Technology

Apple, Touch Panel, RFID readers.

27 02 2008

As it became known Apple Corporation had tendered the US patent agency with a new invention which will give users of sensor screen gadgets more operative possibilities. The innovation will let users just using up their fingers to cut, copy and paste fragments of text and to work with files. This is a logical pace and it was to be certainly expected.
At the moment the company produces the Smartphone iPhone and multimedia player iPod Touch with multi-sensor displays. Their capabilities and the capabilities of notebooks Macbook Air with the analogical touchpad Apple in the document are called referring to the “major.”

Touch Panel monitors have become more and more popular and can be easely attached now to both home PC and Industrial Computer or used as a terminal to networks. The line of operator interface touch panels is one of the most powerful and easy to use in the industry, using it you can virtually replace almost all mechanical pushbuttons, switches, meters, and other peripheral devices. Also it has assisted in recent changes in the design of personal digital assistant (PDA), satellite navigation, mobile phone and security devices integrated radio frequency identification RFID readers and RFID making all these devices more handy and usable.

What kinds of gadgets and gizmos will make our daily lives easier? Do we expect some day cell phones and PDAs with GPS will be integrated into our bodies and individual air vehicles will whisk you anywhere you want to go? I think so. The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.


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Categories : Computers, News, Science, Technology

Bio-Electromagnetic Weapons.

18 02 2008

At the beginning of February the U.S. Navy test fired an incredibly powerful new big gun designed to replace conventional weaponry aboard ships. New weapon uses electromagnetic energy instead of explosive chemical propellants to fire a projectile farther and faster. The railgun, as it is called, will ultimately fire a projectile more than 230 miles (370 kilometers) with a muzzle velocity seven times the speed of sound (Mach 7) and a velocity of Mach 5 at impact.
The test-firing, captured on video, took place Jan. 31 in Dahlgren, Va., and Navy officials called it the “world’s most powerful electromagnetic railgun.”

“I never ever want to see a Sailor or Marine in a fair fight. I always want them to have the advantage,” said Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gary Roughead. “We should never lose sight of always looking for the next big thing, always looking to make our capability better, more effective than what anyone else can put on the battlefield.”

What is Bio-electromagnetic Weapons?
This is an ultimate weapon system that operates at the speed of light; they can kill, torture and enslave; but the public are largely unaware that they exist, because these weapons operate by stealth and leave no physical evidence. Electromagnetic weapons have been tested on human beings since 1976 and according to “Science in Society” this weapon was being deployed in Iraq.

There is only one electromagnetic spectrum. Nuclear weapons release a great deal of ionizing radiation in the high frequency range above visible light, where the energy of the radiation is capable of breaking chemical bonds. The beginning of working up started in 1959 when Saul B. Sells, a professor of social psychology at a minor US university submitted a proposal to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to build for them the most sophisticated electroencephalography machine that would have an integral computational capacity to analyze and, hopefully, make sense of the brain waves it recorded. In other words, the professor proposed to make a machine that could tell the CIA what a person was thinking, whether or not the person wished to disclose that information. In 1973, Joseph C. Sharp, an experimental psychologist at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research performed an experiment that was pivotal to the development of the torture equipment being shipped to Iraq today. He had James Lin set up equipment in his laboratory which converted the shape of sound waves into microwave radiation that enabled him to hear himself vocalize the names of the numbers from one to ten in his head, by-passing the mechanism of his own ears. This particular experiment was never published but is mentioned in Lin’s book, Microwave Auditory Effects and Applications, published in 1978.

Today after the weapon test we can definitely say that the inevitable has occurred! But what is in store for us in future? I don’t thing it will be something good. Any weapon wants to be used.


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Categories : Ecology, Future, History, News, Science, Secrets, Technology, Weapons

Blue Eyes.

9 02 2008

“Blue eyes
Baby’s got blue eyes
Like a deep blue sea
On a blue blue day
Blue eyes”
It appears that beautiful blue eyes is the result of a genetic mutation that likely occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, researchers say. Scientists believe they have tracked down the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans on the planet today.

“Originally, we all had brown eyes”, said Prof Hans Eiberg from the University of Copenhagen, who led the team. Blue eye colour most likely originated from the near east area or northwest part of the Black Sea region, where the great agriculture migration to the northern part of Europe took place in the Neolithic periods about six–10,000 years ago.
“That is my best guess,” he said. “It could be the northern part of Afghanistan.”

The mutation affected a gene called OCA2 and “literally ‘turned off’ the ability to produce brown eyes”, he says. OCA2 is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives colour to hair, eyes and skin. The mutation in the adjacent gene does not switch off the OCA gene entirely but limits its action, reducing the production of melanin in the iris of the eye – “diluting” brown eyes to blue.

If the OCA2 gene had been completely turned off, those who inherited this mutation would be without melanin in their hair, eyes or skin colour - albino. For the study, Prof Eiberg’s team examined DNA in blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, India, Denmark and Turkey.

His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Prof Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being one of those responsible for eye colour.
“They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA. From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” said Prof Eiberg, who reports the work in the journal Human Genetics.


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Categories : News

Do We Have a Future?

5 02 2008

Recent scientific researches argued that a new epoch in the planet’s geologic history has begun. It seams that we have to say goodbye to the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch and hello to the Anthropocene. Our world is in trouble.
Among the major changes heralding this two-century-old man-made epoch:
Vastly altered sediment erosion and deposition patterns.
Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature.
Wholesale changes in biology, from altered flowering times to new migration patterns.
Acidification of the ocean, which threatens tiny marine life that forms the bottom of the food chain.
In the February issue of the journal GSA Today, a publication of the Geological Society of America, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams of the University of Leicester and colleagues at the Geological Society of London argue that industrialization has wrought changes that usher in a new epoch, livescience.com. reports. Scientists of the future will have no trouble deciding if the proposal was timely. All they’ll need to do is dig into the planet and examine its stratigraphic layers, which reveal a chronology of the changing conditions that existed as each layer is created. Layers can reflect volcanic upheaval, ice ages or mass extinctions.
“Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene — currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change — as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion,” Zalasiewicz’s team writes.
Up to half of Earth’s land has been transformed by human activity, wrote Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer of the University of Michigan. They also noted the dramatic increase in greenhouse gases and other chemicals and pollutants humans have introduced into global ecosystems.
As early as the late 1800s scientists were writing about man’s wholesale impact on the planet and the possibility of an “anthropozoic era” having begun, according to Crutzen, who is credited with coining the term Anthropocene (anthropo = human; cene = new) back in 2000. That year, Crutzen and a colleague wrote in the scientific newsletter International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme about some of the dramatic changes:
“Urbanization has … increased tenfold in the past century. In a few generations mankind is exhausting the fossil fuels that were generated over several hundred million years.”
Up to half of Earth’s land has been transformed by human activity, wrote Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer of the University of Michigan. They also noted the dramatic increase in greenhouse gases and other chemicals and pollutants humans have introduced into global ecosystems.
The epochal idea has merit, according to geologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University.
“In land, water, air, ice, and ecosystems, the human impact is clear, large, and growing,”Alley told ScienceNow, an online publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “A geologist from the far distant future almost surely would draw a new line, and begin using a new name, where and when our impacts show up.”

Calling things by their right the main and only cause of dramatic change is a critical mass of humanity that influences change at a global scale. What is the solution?


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Categories : Ecology, Future, Nature, News, Science, Space, Technology

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