Month: March 2007

Hydrogen Storage Technology Breakthrough

Hydrogen Storage: UNBF Researchers Achieve Technology Breakthrough — March 7, 2007 – News@UNB
Hydrogen gas is typically stored under pressure in large metal cylinders, approximately four feet high. These cylinders are heavy and expensive to transport. Since they are under pressure, they also pose a safety hazard.

“We’ve reached a milestone with our ability to condense hydrogen into a usable solid,” said Dr. McGrady. “The next step is to produce a safe, compact storage system for the compound that is both lightweight and affordable.”

The research is expected to produce reversible hydrogen storage materials that can be processed into a powder for use in limitless commercial applications. Continue reading “Hydrogen Storage Technology Breakthrough”

What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing

What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing – New York Times
He and Professor Provine figure that the first primate joke — that is, the first action to produce a laugh without physical contact — was the feigned tickle, the same kind of coo-chi-coo move parents make when they thrust their wiggling fingers at a baby. Professor Panksepp thinks the brain has ancient wiring to produce laughter so that young animals learn to play with one another. The laughter stimulates euphoria circuits in the brain and also reassures the other animals that they’re playing, not fighting.

Humans are laughing by the age of four months and then progress from tickling to the Three Stooges to more sophisticated triggers for laughter (or, in some inexplicable cases, to Jim Carrey movies). Laughter can be used cruelly to reinforce a group’s solidarity and pride by mocking deviants and insulting outsiders, but mainly it’s a subtle social lubricant. It’s a way to make friends and also make clear who belongs where in the status hierarchy.

NIST bans Vista in major blow to Microsoft

NIST bans Vista in major blow to Microsoft | ZDNet Government Blog | ZDNet.com
The National Institute of Standards and Technology isn’t just another federal agency – it sets the standards for federal computing. And NIST doesn’t like Vista. In fact it has banned it from its internal networks, according to document obtained by InformationWeek. IW obtained a copy of the formal agenda for an April 10 meeting at which tech staffers will explain their concerns and discuss “the current ban of this operating system on NIST networks,” the newsweekly said.

This follows news that the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration are also banning Vista. FAA CIO Dave Bowen told InformationWeek he wold consider running a combination of Linux and Google Apps. Among other things, Bowen said he is concerned that Windows Vista may be incompatible with many software applications already in use at the FAA

To Have, Hold and Cherish, Until Bedtime

To Have, Hold and Cherish, Until Bedtime – New York Times
Not since the Victorian age of starched sheets and starchy manners, builders and architects say, have there been so many orders for separate bedrooms. Or separate sleeping nooks. Or his-and-her wings.

In interviews, couples and sociologists say that often it has nothing to do with sex. More likely, it has to do with snoring. Or with children crying. Or with getting up and heading for the gym at 5:30 in the morning. Or with sending e-mail messages until well after midnight.

In a survey in February by the National Association of Home Builders, builders and architects predicted that more than 60 percent of custom houses would have dual master bedrooms by 2015, according to Gopal Ahluwalia, staff vice president of research at the builders association. Some builders say more than a quarter of their new projects already do.

Dark energy – The Universe – Out There –

Dark energy – The Universe – Physics – Out There – Richard Panek – New York Times

The Sunday NY Times magazine ran this “out there”article, thankfully pointed-out by rather “out there”Bob Bopp.
Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life trying to reconcile: how to unify his new physics of the very large (general relativity) with the new physics of the very small (quantum mechanics). What makes the two incompatible — where the physics breaks down — is gravity.

In physics, gravity is the ur-inference. Even Newton admitted that he was making it up as he went along. That a force of attraction might exist between two distant objects, he once wrote in a letter, is “so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” Yet fall into it we all do on a daily basis, and physicists are no exception. “I don’t think we really understand what gravity is,” Vera Rubin says. “So in some sense we’re doing an awful lot on something we don’t know much about.”

Game over for China’s net addicts at Beijing boot camp

FEATURE – Game over for China’s net addicts at Beijing boot camp | Reuters.com
Patients, overwhelmingly male and aged 14 to 19, wake up in common dormitories at 6.15 a.m. to do morning calisthenics and march on the cracked concrete grounds wearing khaki fatigues. Drill sergeants bark orders at them when they are not attending group and one-on-one counselling sessions. Therapy includes patients simulating war games with laser guns.

“Many of the Internet addicts here have rarely considered other peoples’ feelings. The military training allows them to feel what it’s like to be a part of a team,” said Xu Leiting, a psychologist at the hospital. “It also helps their bodies recover and makes them stronger”.

At the end of 2006, China had 137 million Internet users, an increase of 23.4 percent from the previous year. Of users under 18, an estimated 13 percent — or 2.3 million — are Internet addicts, according to a 2006 study by the China National Children’s Centre.

Addiction to the Internet is blamed for most juvenile crime in China, a number of suicides, and deaths from exhaustion by players unable to tear themselves away from marathon game sessions. In 2005, a Shanghai court handed a life sentence to an online game player who stabbed a competitor to death for stealing his cyber-sword — a virtual prize earned during game-play.

Desktop Earth

CodeFromThe70s.org
Desktop Earth is a wallpaper generator. It will generate a high-resolution, accurate representation of the Earth. The imagery is based on NASA’s Blue Marble Next and Earth’s City Lights.

Day and night is accurately represented depending on the Sun’s overhead position (which depends on both the time of day and the day of the year) and both the snow cover and the foliage changes with the seasons. The program is downloadable from the hyperlinked 70s.orgsite or has the option to get a current snap-shot to view in your browser. If you don’t have enough RAM, the desktop program could tax your resources.

Preserved in ice for 100 years, the whisky Shackleton used to keep out the cold

Preserved in ice for 100 years, the whisky Shackleton used to keep out the cold | News | This is London
They say whisky matures with age…but leaving it embedded in the Antarctic ice for almost 100 years may be going a bit far.

Two cases of MacKinlay’s Rare Old Whisky that Ernest Shackleton’s team abandoned on their failed 1908 expedition to the South Pole have been uncovered intact.

The pine cases were discovered by a conservation team excavating ice from beneath the hut where Shackleton and his men sheltered from the long, savage winter. They showed almost no damage from the ice and the company’s stag’s head logo is clearly visible.