Groonk's Newsmine 2.0

Experiments with the advanced new device will start in July or August. If the experiments prove successful, China will become the first country in the world to build a full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, nicknamed "artificial sun", experts here said.

not actual station

Controlled nuclear fusion is seen as an efficient way for people to generate infinite, clean energy to offset the dearth of fossil fuels such as oil and coal.

Scientists believe that deuterium can be extracted from the sea and an enormous amount of energy can be obtained from a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction under huge temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius. After nuclear fusion, the deuterium extracted from one liter of sea water will produce energy equivalent to 300 liters of gasoline.

If a device is developed that can withstand temperatures as high as 100 million Celsius degrees and control a deuterium-tritium reaction, it will be as though an "artificial sun" had been created able to supply infinite, clean energy for human beings.

The edict covers Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, which is to be issued this week amid huge international interest. The edict is retroactive, covering not only the writings of the present pontiff — as Pope and as cardinal — but also those of his predecessors over the past 50 years. It therefore includes anything written by John Paul II, John Paul I, Paul VI and John XXIII.

The decision was denounced yesterday for treating the Pope’s words as “saleable merchandise” and endangering the Church’s mission to “spread the Christian message”.

The 16 Indians and 10 Somali men were aboard a traditional dhow that was chased and seized Saturday by the U.S. guided missile destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill, said Lt. Leslie Hull-Ryde of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain.

The dhow stopped fleeing after the Churchill twice fired warning shots during the chase, which ended 54 miles off the coast of Somalia, the Navy said. U.S. sailors boarded the dhow and seized a cache of small arms.

[...]

Piracy is rampant off the coast of Somalia, which is torn by renewed clashes between militias fighting over control of the troubled African country. Many shipping companies resort to paying ransoms, saying they have few alternatives.

Last month, Somali militiamen finally relinquished a merchant ship hijacked in October.

In November, Somali pirates freed a Ukrainian ore carrier and its 22 member crew after holding it for 40 days. It was unclear whether a US$700,000 ransom demanded by the pirates had been paid.

One of the boldest recent attacks was on Nov. 5, when two boats full of pirates approached a cruise ship carrying Western tourists, about 100 miles off Somalia and fired rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles.

The crew used a weapon that directs earsplitting noise at attackers, then sped away.

Somalia has had no effective government since 1991, when warlords ousted a dictatorship and then turned on each other, carving the nation of 8.2 million into a patchwork of fiefdoms.

I was tremendously excited by these developments. Instead of building a camera that mimicked the functionality of a traditional photographic camera, I had stumbled across a new tool for examining the relationships between time, motion, and image. What I though would be a two week art project has turned into one that has lasted for almost three years, and shows little sign of stopping. My cameras work a lot better now, although most of them still use a lot of duct tape, cardboard, and cheap flatbed scanners. I've begun to learn the vocabulary of the scanner camera, begun to be able to interpret and previsualize these strange new pictures. Some aspects of scanner photography are similar to traditional photography, and others are completely foreign.

Tania Singer of University College London, UK, and colleagues used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to analyse the brain activity of 32 volunteers after their participation in a simple game, called the Prisoner's Dilemma.

The game allows players to cooperate or double-cross one another, and so fosters camaraderie or enmity between players. Following the game, participants were placed inside an fMRI machine and then saw their fellow players zapped with electricity. The activity in their brain was recorded as they watched.

The scans revealed changes in activity as players who had cooperated got zapped, compared with those who had double-crossed them in the game. The results suggest that men get a much bigger kick than women from seeing revenge physically exacted on someone perceived to have wronged them.

"It was very surprising," Singer told New Scientist. "I didn't expect such a strong difference."

The Bush Administration has asked a federal judge to order the world’s most popular internet search engine to hand over the records of all Google searches for any one-week period, as well as other closely guarded data. The California-based company is to fight the move.

[...]

The law was immediately challenged by civil liberties groups and never came into force. It was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court on the grounds that it was unconstitutionally restrictive of free speech.

Vast numbers of Echizen kurage, or Nomura's jellyfish, have appeared around Japan's coast since July, clogging and ripping fishing nets and forcing fishermen to spend hours hacking them apart before bringing home their reduced catches.

[...]

Cutting up and disposing of the giants can turn a three-hour fishing trip into a 10-hour marathon, while valuable fish are poisoned or crushed under the weight of the unwanted catch.

And what a catch. One Echizen kurage can be up to 2 meters (6 feet, 7 inches) in diameter and weigh up to 200 kilograms (440 pounds).

[...]

Spikes in population have occurred in the past, notably in 1958, but consecutive outbreaks in 2002 and 2003 prompted the government to seek reasons and solutions.

Scientists have suggested global warming might be a factor.

The voice on the tape said heightened security in the United States is not the reason there have been no attacks there since the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings.

Instead, the reason is "because there are operations that need preparations," he said.

"The delay in similar operations happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures. But the operations are happening in Baghdad and you will see them here at home the minute they are through (with preparations), with God's permission," he said.

Some of the 25 spectators drawn to a tiny, locked graveyard in downtown Baltimore for the ceremony climbed over the walls of the site and were "running all over the place trying to find out how the guy gets in," according to Jeff Jerome, the most faithful viewer of the event.

[...]

Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, said early Thursday he had to chase people out of the graveyard, fearing they would interfere with the mystery visitor's ceremony.

"In letting people know about this tribute, I've been contributing to these people's desire to catch this guy," Jerome said. "It's such a touching tribute, and it's been disrupted by the actions of a few people trying to interfere and expose this guy."

7. Relativistic flaming semen:
In the unlikely event that a vaporised penis can perform ejaculation, then the relativistic semen will create enormous air resistance, burst into flames almost instantaneously, and generate enormous impact forces. These forces will be sufficient to pierce a small hole straight through a woman's lower torso, just like a speeding bullet, only incinerating the surrounding tissue as it passes through.

6. Time-dilated necrophilia:
Unfortunately, the woman will probably be dead before ejaculation anyway. According to the relativistic theory of time dilation, then if the man is to actually thrust in and out at a speed infinitesimally close to the speed of light, then from his point of view, his partner will be ageing extremely quickly, and will be long dead before he ejaculates. Legally, he will be committing necrophilia.
(the full answer)

Justices voted 6-3 to back the law, under which doctors are thought to have assisted with at least 208 suicides.

The ruling could free other states to pass laws like Oregon's, which is the only one of its kind in the US.

New Chief Justice John Roberts was in the minority in the court's first major case on ethics since he joined it.

"Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth," he wrote. "Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a new moustache. Nations consist of people; the first generation may be decrepit, or the 10,000th may be vigorous."

[...]

Societies don't die when they increase their longevity and decrease their birthrate. They don't die when their populations decline rather than increase. They change. And from some perspectives (although not necessarily the economic one) this change is desirable, the result of increasing health and wealth. In fact, this sort of change (controlled decline rather than mindless growth) might be the very condition of a society's sustainability -- and the world's.

2006 is a significant year for Japan. Demographers agree that sometime this year the Japanese population will stop increasing and start decreasing -- from today's 127 million to about half that figure by 2100, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. But when it comes to the interpretation of this scenario, there's less consensus.

The Japan Times recently reported the projections of Iwao Fujimasa, a demographer with the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. According to the Times, Fujimasa "believes that while depopulation could depress the real estate market and affect the financial standing of banks dependent on real estate prices, as well as rattle the pension system, it will probably have a big plus side. He pointed to possible trends such as boosting gender equality, breaking down generation gaps and ultimately allowing for a more relaxed way of living. Land prices will fall, people will be able to afford bigger homes, and the daily crush on trains will be lessened."

There are two reactions to population decline: a hard-nosed economic one and a softer, more philosophical attitude focused on quality of life. If we must use the national-individual metaphor, let's say that Japan may just be hitting a sort of collective midlife crisis. And the best kind of midlife crisis makes you ask questions like: "Is that all there is?" and "What really matters to me?"

"It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain. Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used, " said Herbert, 42, an early employee of Cisco Systems who says he solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead -- who were among the many artists inspired by LSD.

"When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing," said Herbert who intervened to ban drug testing of technologists at Cisco Systems.

Manuscripts, letters and first editions from Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are among the items on display.

A rare copy of Ginsberg's poem Howl, which is said to have ignited the Beat movement, is also housed in the museum.

The post caught on with cartoonists Dean Trippe and Jamie Dee Galey, and the two drew their own versions of Batgirl. And faster than you can say “a Batgirl meme has infected LiveJournal and the rest of the internet,” dozens and dozens of creators had drawn and posted their own versions of Batgirl.

Currently, there are over 200 versions of Batgirl in the list Galey has been keeping of artists who took up the de facto “Batgirl challenge.”

Tis life! Tis life!

Tis death! Tis death!

Tis life! Tis life!

Behold! There stands the hairy man

Who will cause the sun to shine!

One step upwards...

Another step upwards

The sun shines!

"These types of discoveries give us real insight into the past lives of these human ancestors, the world they lived in and the things they feared," Lee Berger, a paleo-anthropologist at Johannesburg's University of Witwatersrand, said as he presented his conclusions about a mystery that has been debated since the remains of the possible human ancestor known as the Taung child were discovered in 1924.

The Taung child's discovery led to the search for human origins in Africa, instead of in Asia or Europe as once theorized. Researchers regard the fossil of the ape-man, or australopethicus africanus, as evidence of the "missing link" in human evolution.

Researchers had speculated the Taung child was killed by a leopard or saber-toothed feline. But 10 years ago, Berger and fellow researcher Ron Clarke submitted the theory the hunter was a large predatory bird, based on the fact most of the other fossils found at the same site were small monkeys that showed signs of having been killed by a predatory bird.

[A] This is a catchphrase which seemed to arise out of nowhere and yet has had a long period of fashion and is still going strong. It's known mainly in Britain and Commonwealth countries, and is really a kind of interjection. It's used to show how simple it is to do something: "You put the plug in here, press that switch, and Bob's your uncle!".
(full meaning)

some friends and i have become tired of the muggers, rapists, and general riff raff causing problems in our city.

this is not a joke.

we've started a group called the Justice Society of Justice (offering twice the Justice as the leading competitors) and we go out and fight crime on a semi nightly basis.

we've only got about 8 hardcore members that go out with us right now,but we're hoping to raise that number tenfold.

Built with Fort Knox-type security, the three-million-dollar vault will be designed to hold around two million seeds representing all known varieties of the world's crops.

They are the precious food plants that have emerged from 10,000 years of selection by farmers.

The facility "would essentially be built to last forever," according to a feasibility study.

It will be built deep in permafrost in the side of a sandstone mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) from the North Pole, the British weekly says in its next issue, out on Saturday.

The first task for the center will be to design a class of devices for generating electric power — bio-batteries — for a wide array of implantable devices, starting with an artificial retina that has already been developed at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California. The artificial retina and accompanying nanobattery will be used to correct certain types of macular degeneration.

[...]

The database will contain a wide range of material... illustration and print cartoons catagorized by subject and artist; all kinds of animation art from character designs and model sheets to animation drawings and background paintings. Movies of pencil tests and key scenes by famous animators will be included, as will audio files documenting the work of major voice over artists. All of the digital files will be accessible by a simple keyword search. Artists will be able to quickly see different approaches to the design of a specific subject, research the work of artists who interest them, and gain inspiration from the rich history of animation.

There's a lot of silent-era stuff, but also a rich vein of kitsch trash, including clunkers from Ed Wood (Plan 9 from Outer Space), George Romero (Night of the Living Dead) and a Russian psychotronic/cult/camp sci-fi oddity called Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women.
(cult of mac)

This is money for old rope. The iPod generation is being wooed into spending money on old content it has already seen and in many cases already paid for. Just as we bought CD copies of albums we'd already bought on tape or vinyl, and in some cases then bought the same tracks again on the iTMS. The same thing, purchased three times! That sort of brand loyalty makes record and TV company executives smile.

There's a perceived value in nostalgia. People of my generation get a warm feeling when they hear those late 70s / early 80s new wave hits. And the same applies to some TV shows..."
(cult of mac)

IPod jacking is when two strangers swap headphone jacks to sample each others' music. It's one way to discover new music, and can be used to break the ice. IPod jacking was a lot easier when iPods were rarer, and the white earbuds signified membership of an exclusive club.
(cult of mac)

The AIAA is certainly not embarrassed. What's more, the US military has begun to cast its eyes over the hyperdrive concept, and a space propulsion researcher at the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories has said he would be interested in putting the idea to the test. And despite the bafflement of most physicists at the theory that supposedly underpins it, Pavlos Mikellides, an aerospace engineer at the Arizona State University in Tempe who reviewed the winning paper, stands by the committee's choice. "Even though such features have been explored before, this particular approach is quite unique," he says.

[...]

The answer to that question hinges on the work of a little-known German physicist. Burkhard Heim began to explore the hyperdrive propulsion concept in the 1950s as a spin-off from his attempts to heal the biggest divide in physics: the rift between quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of relativity.

[...]

In Heim's six-dimensional world, the forces of gravity and electromagnetism are coupled together. Even in our familiar four-dimensional world, we can see a link between the two forces through the behaviour of fundamental particles such as the electron. An electron has both mass and charge. When an electron falls under the pull of gravity its moving electric charge creates a magnetic field. And if you use an electromagnetic field to accelerate an electron you move the gravitational field associated with its mass. But in the four dimensions we know, you cannot change the strength of gravity simply by cranking up the electromagnetic field.

In Heim's view of space and time, this limitation disappears. He claimed it is possible to convert electromagnetic energy into gravitational and back again, and speculated that a rotating magnetic field could reduce the influence of gravity on a spacecraft enough for it to take off.

When he presented his idea in public in 1957, he became an instant celebrity. Wernher von Braun, the German engineer who at the time was leading the Saturn rocket programme that later launched astronauts to the moon, approached Heim about his work and asked whether the expensive Saturn rockets were worthwhile. And in a letter in 1964, the German relativity theorist Pascual Jordan, who had worked with the distinguished physicists Max Born and Werner Heisenberg and was a member of the Nobel committee, told Heim that his plan was so important "that its successful experimental treatment would without doubt make the researcher a candidate for the Nobel prize".

But all this attention only led Heim to retreat from the public eye. This was partly because of his severe multiple disabilities, caused by a lab accident when he was still in his teens. But Heim was also reluctant to disclose his theory without an experiment to prove it. He never learned English because he did not want his work to leave the country. As a result, very few people knew about his work and no one came up with the necessary research funding. In 1958 the aerospace company Bölkow did offer some money, but not enough to do the proposed experiment.

ApNano has tested armor said to be five times stronger than steel and twice as strong as any impact-resistant material used in protective gear.

Last year, a sample of the ApNano material was subjected to tests in which a steel projectile traveling at a speed of up to 1.5 kilometers per second slammed into the material.

Executives said the impact was the equivalent to dropping four diesel locomotives onto an area the size of a human fingernail.

They said the nano-based armor, which stemmed from a new carbon form called Inorganic Fullerenes, withstood the impact.

The company's chief executive officer, Menachem Genut, said the company would launch initial production within the next six months. Genut said this would mean the production of between 100 and 200 kilograms of the nano-material per day.

"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe.

When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the source of his experience, believing first that it had come from the fumes of a chloroform-like solvent he had been using. Inhaling the fumes produced no effect, though, and he realized he must have somehow ingested a trace of LSD. "LSD spoke to me," Mr. Hofmann said with an amused, animated smile. "He came to me and said, 'You must find me.' He told me, 'Don't give me to the pharmacologist, he won't find anything.' "

[...]

1. "'NEXTWAVE' is the most unique super hero comic on the market.
2. "'NEXTWAVE' is printed with mother's milk.
3. "'NEXTWAVE' will make you fall in love with Warren Ellis (you remember what love is, RIGHT?).
4. "'NEXTWAVE' is the funniest comic book ever (take that, Dark Knight Strikes Again!)
5. "'NEXTWAVE' proves that Stuart Immonen made a pact with the devil to make him the most versatile artist in the world.
6. "'NEXTWAVE' contains subliminal messages that will increase your IQ and lower your cholesterol.
7. "'NEXTWAVE' gloriously brings four lower tier characters back up into the upper tier while creating a few hilarious new characters.
8. "'NEXTWAVE' knows where you live. Don't piss it off."

The researchers scanned the volunteers’ brains using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect enhanced blood flow in various brain regions – the greater the flow, the greater the neural activity in those areas.

They developed a Pavlovian-type association by flashing a geometric shape on a computer screen and giving a squirt of juice into the volunteers’ mouths. However, the volunteers did not realise that they were being conditioned in this way – they were simply told to press a button to indicate on which side of the screen the shape had appeared.

The team measured how the volunteers had become conditioned by measuring their anticipation of the juice squirts following an image by measuring the dilation of their pupils.

The fMRI scans revealed significant responses reflecting learning in the ventral midbrain and the ventral striatum. Crucially, they found that the strength of the response correlated with the volunteer’s like or dislike of the juice.

“Stronger neural responses occur in these regions to a cue that is associated with a more preferred food,” said Doherty. “This shows that when you see a cue that is predictive of a reward, you are able to access information about your subjective preferences.”

Doherty says this kind of brain programming may have an evolutionary function in helping humans and animals predict both good and bad experiences in their environment.

“For instance, if you learn that a particular fast food outlet gave you food poisoning the last time you ate there – it is going to be in your interest to know not to go there again once you see the sign for that shop in the street,” he says.

He described comics as being part of the "brave new world" of entertainment. "Comic book characters are the new cult; the new religion."