tagged w/ Science and Technology
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NBC | LOS ANGELES...
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Scientists Find Post-Tsunami Radiation in Sea Kelp, Seek to Expand Research
Scientists found radioactive kelp locally following Japan nuclear disaster
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By Melissa Pamer
| Thursday, Apr 5, 2012 | Updated 5:43 PM PDT
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Scientists Find Radiation in Food Chain
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Giant kelp off Southern California --such as the plants displayed here from the California Science Center -- were found to harbor radioactive iodine after Japan's nuclear disaster.
Two scientists who found radiation in sea kelp along the Southern California coast after Japan’s 2011 tsunami-induced nuclear disaster now hope to study whether contamination may be present in fish such as opaleye and other ocean creatures, including lobster and sea urchin.
The two researchers – from California State University, Long Beach – are hoping to expand on their recently published study showing that giant kelp contained up to 250 times the normal levels of a radioisotope of iodine in the weeks after last year's earthquake and resulting tsunami severely damaged Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Kelp is the tall, wavy, green algae that provides near-shore habitat for many marine species, some of which eat the plant.
Tests showed that contamination in the kelp was gone within a month, and there’s no risk to humans from the Iodine-131 radiation. Still, the research indicates that radiation from the damaged Japanese nuclear facility reached California.
“Of course it’s cause for concern – because you don’t find this naturally in kelp or fish. It can’t be a positive thing. It also tells you that what happens half a world away can be detected,” said Cal State biology professor Steven Manley, a co-author of the study.
Manley and his co-author, marine biology professor Chris Lowe, hope next to find out whether other kinds of nuclear contamination – two radioisotopes of cesium that break down much more slowly than the Iodine-131 – are found in California marine life, including kelp and fish.
Those two cesium radioisotopes were found to contaminate waters around Japan, according to preliminary results of a study published this week by an international team of scientists.
“Our coastal environment is pretty complex. We get a lot of our food out there,” Manley said. “We should be monitoring it for these radioisotopes.”
Lowe wants to trace the concentration of radioactive cesium up the food chain in Southern California.
“Our question is: How much gets into the ocean? Kelp is really kind of the basis for the food web and is important habitat for many of our coastal marine animals,” Lowe said. “The next step is to look at organisms that eat kelp. “
Kelp is consumed by sea urchin and some fish, including opaleye, halfmoon and senorita, according to the study. Urchin are in turn eaten by lobster and some large fish species that could be consumed by humans.
Getting funding for the future research shouldn’t be a problem, given the attention that Lowe and Manley have gotten for their recent study, which was published last month in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The study was first reported by nonprofit Environmental Health News and on Scientific American’s website.
A month after the earthquake after Japan, the Long Beach pair obtained kelp samples from seven sites along the coast: the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County; Crystal Cove, Laguna Beach and Corona del Mar in Orange County; and farther north in Santa Barbara, Pacific Grove and Santa Cruz.
Kelp from Corona del Mar had the highest concentration of radioactive iodine, up to 250 times the amount found in kelp before the Japanese nuclear reactor spewed radiation in the atmosphere.
Lowe said they believe the Corona del Mar site was more contaminated because a lot of urban runoff goes through the area – meaning radiation-contaminated rain would have accumulated there.
The scientists chose to study kelp – which grows from the ocean floor up to the surface, where it floats – because it is especially good at absorbing iodine from both the water and the atmosphere.
Lowe compared kelp to the badge that X-ray technicians where to show how much radiation they’ve been exposed to.
.NBC | LOS ANGELES...
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Scientists Find Post-Tsunami Radiation in Sea Kelp,... more
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Its a special kind of underwear - with a strategically placed fig leaf design - and a Colorado man says itll get you through the airport screeners with your dignity intact..
http://www.indiareport.com/India-usa-uk-news/ap/mbd/47289Its a special kind of underwear - with a strategically placed fig leaf design - and a... more
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On the tails of a recent TED conference where Bill Gates stated that vaccines need to be used to reduce world population figures, he added more to this insanity last week with a keynote address at the mHealth Summit, an annual gathering whose supposedly focuses on improving health care through mobile technology.
Gates told an audience of more than 2,000 that if we could register every worldwide birth on a cell phone, we could ensure that children receive the proper vaccines. He also said the key to controlling population growth is to save the lives of children under 5; and the next big thing in technology is robots.
Gates said computing technology has been great for health care, and there are plenty of opportunities to use the cell phone in clinic settings. Although he noted that some places which need mhealth technology the most may not be able to fully benefit from it.
“We have to approach these things with some humility,” he said. “There’s not Internet connections back there. Often [patients are too sick] for some cell phone thing to do something for them.”
Gates said the key health care metric that we as a society should be trying to improve is one that is in the front of his mind all the time–the number of children who die before age 5. Today, he said the number is 8.5 million; in 1960 it was 20 million.
“About one-third [of that improvement] is by increasing income,” he said. “The majority has been through vaccines. Vaccines will be the key. If you could register every birth on a cell phone—get fingerprints, get a location—then you could [set up] systems to make sure the immunizations happen.”
Gates said he’d like to see a birth registration system, and because it’s a new technology, “we should let 1,000 new ideas blossom.”
He said vaccination rates in poorer areas, such as northern Nigeria and northern India, are below 50 percent, and mobile technology could make a significant difference.
“When I think about the biggest impacts, I think aobut patient reminders,” Gates said. He explained that technology could help remind people to take the TB drugs regularly or remind mothers to do certain things in their child’s first year of life.
He also said technology will be important in monitoring the supply chain (i.e. making sure there aren’t counterfeits among vaccinations and medications) as well as saving lives on the ground. “Malaria and TB are going to be the first things where you say, ‘Wow, without this mobile application, all these people would have died.’”
Gates told the audience that there is no such thing as a healthy, high-population growth country. “If you’re healthy, you’re low-population growth,” he said.
While most of us assume that saving the lives of children will contribute to overpopulation, Gates said the contrary is true.
“The key thing, the most important fact that people should know and make sure other people know: As you save children under 5, that is the thing that reduces population growth. That sounds paradoxal. The fact is that within a decade of improving health outcomes, parents decide to have less children.
“As the world grows from 6 billion to 9 billion, all of that population growth is in urban slums,” he said. “Slums is a growing businesses. It’s a very interesting problem.”
He said no matter what we care about—the environment, schools, nutrition, conflict—the issues are insoluble at 3 percent population growth per year. “Nobody can handle that type of situation, so the best thing you can do is avoid those deaths.”
He said we are in a tough time for foreign aid, and governments are cutting their budgets in response to the financial climate. “The U.K. is quite exemplary,” he said. “They set aside their aid budget and are on track to keep their commitment. It will grow while they cut the rest of their budget. I hope it doesn’t get cut here in the U.S., but I’ll say I’m quite concerned that it will be.”
Gates said he has resorted to pleading for money. “I’m a beggar now,” he said. “I go around and beg governments for the final [millions of dollars] needed to eradicate polio. The financial component may be why it doesn’t get done.”
When asked what’s next in our technological advancement, Gates said there’s no doubt it’s robots. “If you don’t want to go to a convention,” he said, “just send a robot. “When we look at something like infant mortality, there’s a certain level you can’t get below if you can’t do C-sections.” He said doing a caesarean section delivery requires a sterile environment, but Gates said it’s fairly routine, so it could be done by a robot.
He said that we are moving from computers sitting idle while we type; to those that can see us and have high-end applications; to computers that allow us to move and connect with other users in applications like Xbox.
“Computers are learning to see, learning to talk ,learning to listen, learning to move around,” Gates said. “The dexterity things are maybe five years behind.” But he said once a robot learns a task, “it doesn’t forget how to do it. It can do it 24 hours a day.”
Gates used an example in South Africa to illustrate how health education doesn’t always lead to behavior change. He said the Gates Foundation partnered with the Kaiser Family Foundation to educate young people about HIV, with several types of outreach, including billboards. When interviewed, there was no question that the young people understood what caused HIV, but there were not significant behavior changes, because in their minds, the disease was in the distant future.
“If AIDS killed you immediately, things would be better because you’d see these piles of bodies outside bars [and think], ‘I don’t want to go in there… looks suspicious.’ It’s these discontinuities that are the problem,” Gates said. “If all the poor people lived in your neighborhood we wouldn’t have problems with foreign aid.”
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with David Rockefeller’s Rockefeller Foundation, the creators of the GMO biotechnology, are also financing a project called The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) headed by former UN chief, Kofi Annan. Accepting the role as AGRA head in June 2007 Annan expressed his “gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and all others who support our African campaign.” The AGRA board is dominated by people from both the Gates’ and Rockefeller foundations.
Sources:
http://www.smartplanet.com/
http://oilgeopolitics.net/On the tails of a recent TED conference where Bill Gates stated that vaccines need to... more
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Now, an inflatable collar which can protect bikers and cyclists who have been crying out for alternative to the helmet.
Designers in Sweden have made the 'Hvvding' helmet which is an airbag 'collar 'that springs into action within 0.1 seconds, covering the skull and neck of a rider in the event of an impact, the 'Daily Mail' reported. http://www.indiareport.com/India-usa-uk-news/latest-news/921826/International/2/20/2Now, an inflatable collar which can protect bikers and cyclists who have been crying... more
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"In this unique time-lapse video created from thousands of individual frames, photographers Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman and Philip Scott Andrews condense six weeks of painstaking work into three minutes, 52 seconds"
http://www.airspacemag.com/video/Go-For-Launch.html"In this unique time-lapse video created from thousands of individual frames,... more
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An article published by William Saletan of Slate.com explores the era of in vitro fertilization, harvesting and then freezing eggs, donor eggs, and womb-rejuvenating hormone therapy has opened the door for baby boom era women to want to be "mommies" again. And for some, for the first time. Which begs the questions, "should old women have babies" and "is middle-aged motherhood getting out of control"?
According to the Daily Mail's Allison Pearson middle-aged women should stop trying to defy biological laws and accept they are in their 60's and not 30's and 40's. About three years ago, Maria del Carmen Bousada, 66, pretended to be 55, in order to persuade a California fertility clinic to impregnate her with donated eggs and sperm. She gave birth to twins later that year and now, just two weeks ago, at the age of 69, Bousard dies of cancer leaving behind her two year-old twins.
In her column Pearson responded to the public outcry over the Bousada case. "There's a lesson for baby boomers in the story of Maria del Carmen Bousada," wrote columnist Allison Pearson in London's Daily Mail. "The lesson is that, contrary to the fond belief perpetrated by the most self-absorbed generation ever to grace the planet, 60 is not the new 40 and it never will be." Pearson called Bousada "part of an epidemic of older women who think they can get away with defying biological laws that have held good for thousands of years."
The article claims over the last three decades, the U.S. birth rate among women aged 35 or older has increased by 140 percent. These women now produce one of every seven American children. In Europe, women over 35 have increased their share of pregnancies from 5 percent to 20 percent. More than 100,000 American women aged 40 or older have babies each year. In the last 15 years, at least a dozen women aged 60 or older have done it. The oldest age at which a woman has given birth is now 70. As a result, the number of new pregnancies of women who are 55 and older are increasing at alarming rates.
Saletan also counters Pearson's response to "older women think they can get away with defying biological laws" by stating that the biological laws of maternity are shifting. Sixty may not be the new 40, but in some respects, 65 is the new 55. Maternal age is going up in part because, in terms of frailty and longevity, older women aren't as old as they used to be.
The clinic that impregnated Bousada ends eligibility for treatment at age 55. British and Spanish clinics have informal cutoffs at 50. Tony Rutherford, the head of the British Fertility Society, draws the line at 45 in his own practice. A bioethics institute is proposing to enforce the same limit in Spain. Britain's National Health Service cuts off in vitro fertilization at 40.
Why draw these lines? One rationale is nature. The British Fertility Society opposes fertility treatment after age 50 because "nature didn't design women to have assisted conception beyond the age of the natural menopause," says its secretary, Allan Pacey. "Once you get into the mid-50s, I think nature is trying to tell us something."
But what exactly is nature saying? Assisted conception is inherently unnatural. Strictly speaking, nature is telling us not to do it at all. Furthermore, in 1900, life expectancy for a girl born in the United States was 50.7 years. Was nature telling us that women shouldn't live, much less bear children, beyond that point? That didn't stop us from using science to extend women's lives. Why should it stop us from extending their fertility?
The medical community will say that women who wait until they're in their mid to late 40's and older to have children is not a wise thing to do. Factors include increased miscarriages, failing to get pregnant, or not living long enough to raise a child (Pearson argues that a woman should "survive until the kids reach 18." These are odds and with advances in medicine today women are successfully pregnant.An article published by William Saletan of Slate.com explores the era of in vitro... more
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1. Stirling Engine Systems is developing equipment for utility-scale renewable energy power plants and distributed electrical generating systems. Its most remarkable achievement is the recent contract with Southern California Edison to install a 500-megawatt plant that is expected to cover 4,500 acres of land with 20,000 large, dish-shaped mirrors and open in 2009.
These plants are expected to generate power possibly more cheaply than coal and natural gas plants.1. Stirling Engine Systems is developing equipment for utility-scale renewable energy... more
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this is a fishboowl with a vape hooked to it and a
rechargeable battery op led below
and candles and very nice and smooth and
you should try it
music is althea and donna
rza as bobby digital
and stiletto silhouettethis is a fishboowl with a vape hooked to it and a
rechargeable battery op led below... more
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A new catalyst makes it feasible to split water with solar power.
MIT chemists say the catalyst, used in conjunction with cheap photovoltaic solar panels, could lead to inexpensive, simple systems that use water to store the energy from sunlight.
In the process, the scientists may have cleared the major roadblock on the long road to fossil fuel independence: Reducing the on-again, off-again nature of many renewable power sources.
The catalyst enables the electrolysis system to function efficiently at room temperature and at ordinary pressure. Like a reverse fuel cell, it splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. By recombining the molecules with a standard fuel cell, the O2 and H2 could then be used to generate energy on demand.
"You've made your house into a fuel station," Daniel Nocera, a chemistry professor at MIT said. "I've gotten rid of all the goddamn grids."A new catalyst makes it feasible to split water with solar power.
MIT chemists say... more
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It looks like Toshiba decided to greet 2009 with a barrage of major cleatech projects. Just days after announcing a new battery facility, the computer and technology giant made a decisive leap in the solar technology direction.
On January 1 Toshiba's Transmission Distribution & Industrial Systems Company spun off the Photovoltaic Systems Division, marking a full-scale entry into the solar photovoltaic (PV) systems business. Drawing on its expertise in high-efficiency power conditioning systems and the Super Charge ion Battery (SCiB), Toshiba plans to move beyond residential applications, targeting megawatt-scale projects for utility and industrial plants.It looks like Toshiba decided to greet 2009 with a barrage of major cleatech projects.... more
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In just a few weeks' time, the British would see the next step of a voluntary withdrawal of incandescent lights by companies in the country. According to Daily Mail, the last 100 and 75 watt incandescents in Britain will be sold out within a few weeks' time. The switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs was initiated in the country last 2007. This past 2008, 150 watt bulbs were also phased out.In just a few weeks' time, the British would see the next step of a voluntary... more
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Israeli University spin-off company Innowattech will test its piezoelectric technology on a 100 meter stretch of road next month. The technology is called IPEG or Piezo Electric Generator, entailing the integration of piezoelectric crystals on the road to harness energy.
These crystals can harness mechanical energy to be used to produce electricity. By mechanical energy, I mean the movement of the vehicles that pass on top of crystals and squeeze them in the process. Other than the weight and motion of the vehicles passing above them, the crystals could also harness energy from the vibration and the temperature changes that take place. The heavier the vehicle and the traffic that pass across the road, the greater the energy produced.
According to Innowattech, a one kilometer stretch of road with piezoelectric crystals could generate 400 kilowatts of electricity. The power produced could be fed to the grid or be used directly by public infrastructures such as road lighting and the like. The IPEG for roadways is but one of the many types and sizes of piezoelectric generators being developed by Innowatech. Similar technologies were also used for the club that generates energy from people's dancing and a train station in Japan.Israeli University spin-off company Innowattech will test its piezoelectric technology... more
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2.6 million cubic yards of sludge from a coal destroyed a neighborhood in Tennessee on Monday — enough to fill 798 Olympic-size swimming pools. Think there is such a thing as "clean coal?"-These residents might disagree.2.6 million cubic yards of sludge from a coal destroyed a neighborhood in Tennessee on... more
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All I have to say is WHOA, this is TOO COOL and I am so getting a PS3 for Christmas!
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