2009
“Dr. Dean Ransom, AgriLife Research wildlife ecologist in Vernon, has conducted a study of the roadrunner’s ecology and habitat for the past four years. Using radio telemetry and studying more than 50 nests, he and his staff have researched home range, habitat use, nesting ecology and dispersal of young since 2006. The roadrunner is fairly common across the southwestern U.S., but very little is known about the bird, Ransom said. As their name suggests, roadrunners spend most of their time walking and running along the ground, but are capable of flight when pressured. ‘It’s not graceful, but it works,’ he said.
Roadrunner behavior is somewhat unique, Ransom said. They are monogamous and likely mate for life. Also, the male helps in all facets of nesting and feeding the young, including incubating the eggs at night. Nesting activity begins in early April, he said. The nest typically is located in a tree or shrub, about 3-5 feet high, and usually in dense brush not far from an edge, such as a fence line or ranch road.Such nest placement allows ease of movement to and from the nest, quick escape from predators and open areas to hunt and forage for lizards and snakes that bask in the bare dirt, Ransom said.
Most nests are well hidden and difficult to find, he said. They are generally in the crook of a large single-trunk tree, using the main branch of the trunk for stability. The nest is a flat-platformed shallow bowl with the outer rim lined with fairly large twigs and resembles a large mockingbird nest. Roadrunners lay about four eggs on average per nest, but the clutch size can range as high as 10, Ransom said. In the larger clutches, many of the young don’t survive and older nestlings have been documented eating their younger siblings…”
source: eurekalert.org
“Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, ‘all the way until that day of September 11.’
These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies. As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from ‘actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’) as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.”
source: infowars.com
“There’s a McDonald’s on the high street, suburban houses, rats the size of dogs and 229 of the world’s most high-profile prisoners. Six months after President Obama declared that he would close it down, Naomi Wolf heads to Guantánamo Bay to see whether anything has changed.
Six months ago this week President Obama, on his second day in office, promised to close the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, and to undo the secretive and coercive detention and interrogation policies of George W. Bush. But has Obama been as good as his word…”
source: truthout.org
“The US president has extended sanctions against certain Syrian and pro-Syrian individuals due what he has called their continued interference in neighbouring Lebanon. The move by Barack Obama to keep the sanctions in place for another year comes in spite of some encouraging steps by Syria in recent months, the White House said on Friday. ‘In the past six months, the United States has used dialogue with the Syrian government to address concerns and identify areas of mutual interest, including support for Lebanese sovereignty,’ Obama said in a statement.
He said there have been ’some positive developments in the past year, including the establishment of diplomatic relations and an exchange of ambassadors between Lebanon and Syria.’ But “the actions of certain persons continue to contribute to political and economic instability in Lebanon and the region and constitute a continuing unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” he said.”
source: aljazeera.net
“Artificial photosynthesis has yet to be cracked, but electrical engineers in the US think that synthetic leaves could be used to generate electricity in a different way – by sweating. Natural leaves constantly lose water through evaporation in a process called transpiration, which draws water from the roots to the very top of even the tallest trees. The new synthetic leaves also lose water through evaporation to create that mechanical water pump effect, and use it to generate power…
Michel Maharbiz at the University of California, Berkeley, working with colleagues at the University of Michigan and MIT, built their leaves from glass wafers shot through with a branching network of tiny water-filled channels arranged like the veins of a leaf. The smaller channels extend to the edge of the plate and have open ends that allow water to evaporate, drawing fluid along the leaf’s central stem at a rate of 1.5 centimetres per second.The researchers added metal plates to the walls of the central stem and connected them to a circuit. The charged plates and the water within the stem create a sandwich of two conducting layers separated by an insulating layer – in effect, a capacitor.The leaf is transformed into a source of power by periodically interrupting the water flowing into the leaf with air bubbles. Thanks to the different electrical properties of air and water, every time a bubble passes between the plates the capacitance of the device changes and a small electric current is generated, which passes to an external circuit where it’s used to pump up the voltage on a storage capacitor. ‘We use the mechanical energy in the liquid flow to change the capacitance and add energy to the capacitor,’ says Maharbiz…”
source: newscienties.com
“The city of Miami and several commercial partners plan to rollout a “smart grid” citywide electrical infrastructure by the year 2011. This rollout was
announced on the heels of news that foreign agents have infiltrated our existing electrical infrastructure and that recent penetration tests have uncovered numerous vulnerabilities in the proposed technologies. Simultaneously, the National Institute for Standards in Technology (“NIST”) has recently released a roadmap for producing smart grid standards. In this whitepaper, I will discuss the flaws with the current guidelines and map them to the criticisms of similar regulatory mandates, including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (“PCI DSS”), that rely heavily on organizations policing themselves…
As of the writing of this white paper, NIST has released a draft framework for review that includes some of the proposed standards. While there are several security standards listed in the framework, NIST appears to be making the same mistakes of previous regulatory mandate governing bodies. For example, the PCI DSS standards have been criticized for not requiring a high-level of security in environments that process cardholder data. Specifically, one of the major criticisms is the “self policing” aspect of these standards. The credit card companies (American Express, Discover
Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa Inc.) are responsible for ensuring that relevant companies are compliant with the standards. If a company is deemed non-compliant, then the credit card companies issue what they consider to be the appropriate punishment…”
source: blackhat.com
“An investigation into the kidnapping of five British men in Iraq has uncovered evidence of possible collusion by Iraqi government officials in their abduction, and a possible motive – to keep secret the whereabouts of billions of dollars in embezzled funds. A former high-level Iraqi intelligence operative and a current senior government minister, who has been negotiating directly with the hostage takers, have told the Guardian that the kidnapping of IT specialist Peter Moore and his four bodyguards in 2007 was not a simple snatch by a band of militants but a sophisticated operation, almost certainly with inside help. Only Moore is thought still to be alive.
Witnesses to the extraordinary operation which led to the abductions have also told us that they have been warned by superiors to keep quiet. ‘This operation was on a state level, not al-Qaida. Only the state has the capability to carry this out,’ one of the sources said.
The Guardian can also reveal that there was a sixth westerner who was working with Moore at the time of the kidnap. The man – whose identity is known to the Guardian – managed to narrowly avoid being captured by hiding in a toilet at the Iraqi ministry of finance, where the abductions took place. Over the past 10 months the Guardian has interviewed senior Iraqi figures and eyewitnesses as well as the former British military officer who investigated the kidnap for the men’s employers. Their accounts allege that the hostage takers had contacts in the Iraqi government, and also that officials in the ministry of defence warned off witnesses to the kidnap.”
source: guardian.co.uk
“Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke appeared incredibly nervous during an interview aired last night on PBS’ NewsHour, particularly during a question on the ongoing effort to pass legislation that would see the Fed’s books being opened up to a general audit. In a display that will greatly encourage those who continue for push for greater transparency of the privately run Fed’s actions, Bernanke stammered and stuttered his way through the interview, his voice shaking as he attempted to rail against calls to audit the Fed, reciting now familiar and standard lines of propaganda.
‘There’s an effort in Congress, and in the House in particular, to audit what the Federal Reserve does, particularly in monetary policy. How do you feel about that?’ asked PBS’ Jim Lehrer. ‘So that bill, people don’t fully understand what that bill is about. It sounds like, audit the Fed, it sounds like ‘Let’s look at the books.’ That’s what it sounds like.’ Bernanke spluttered…”
source: infowars.com
“Neurons can protect themselves against infection with HIV, new research has demonstrated. They owe their hardiness to a protein called FEZ-1, made uniquely by neurons, and which appears to lock out the virus. The finding raises the possibility of new treatments to thwart HIV by using gene therapy or drugs to activate production of the same protein in cells other than neurons – especially the white blood cells most vulnerable to infection.
Mojgan Naghavi of University College Dublin, Ireland, along with her colleagues Juliane Haedicke and Craig Brown, established the protective effects of FEZ-1 by blocking production of the protein in human neurons. When they did this, the neurons became vulnerable to infection. Likewise, they successfully blocked the usual infections in other types of brain cells, such as microglia, by engineering them to manufacture FEZ-1…”
source: newscientist.com
“The Obama administration says it will release Mohammed Jawad, who has been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp since 2002. Earlier this month officials admitted that there was no military case for Mr Jawad’s continued detention. But government lawyers had said they wished to keep him in detention pending a possible criminal prosecution…
Mr Jawad was arrested in Afghanistan in December 2002, after being accused of throwing a grenade at a jeep and injuring two US soldiers and their interpreter. His lawyers say he was 12 years old at the time of his arrest, although Pentagon officials say a bone scan indicates that he was actually 17. Shortly after his arrest, he was transported to the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, where he is still being held.
His lawyers campaigned for his release, arguing that his confession had been obtained by Afghan officials using torture. In October 2008, a military judge ruled the confession inadmissible and on 16 July, Judge Huvelle described the US government’s case against Mr Jawad as ‘an outrage’ that was “riddled with holes”. On Friday US authorities said they no longer considered him to be a military prisoner. But they also said that they intended to construct a criminal case against Mr Jawad, and that he should remain in detention while they did so…”
“A SECOND look at sunspot drawings from the 1700s has clarified a puzzling episode in the sun’s history, and could lead to more accurate forecasts of dangerous solar outbursts.
The sun sometimes hurls clouds of plasma our way, which can fry satellites and knock out power grids on EarthMovie Camera. The outbursts are most common during solar maxima, when the dark blemishes of sunspots appear in greatest abundance on the sun.
Although there is an average of 11 years between solar maxima, predicting the exact timing and height of each peak is difficult as there is little historical data to plug into models. About two dozen solar cycles have occurred since reasonably complete records began. Now an analysis of historic sunspot drawings suggests that this patchy record had omitted a solar cycle from the late 1700s…”
source: newscientist.com
“A new study by psychologists at the University at Buffalo and the F. W. Olin College of Engineering finds that in the aftermath of national trauma, the ability to make sense out of what happened has implications for individual well-being and that the kinds of stories people tell about the incident predict very different psychological outcomes for them.
The study, “The Political is Personal: Narrating 9/11 and Psychological Well-Being,” is by Jonathan M. Adler, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at Olin, and Michael J. Poulin, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at UB.
‘Understanding the stories people tell about national events provides a unique opportunity to understand how individual well-being is linked to the state of the society,’ Poulin explains…”
source: buffalo.edu
“An invasion led by artificially intelligent machines. Conscious computers. A smartphone virus so smart that it can start mimicking you. You might think that such scenarios are laughably futuristic, but some of the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are concerned enough about the potential impact of advances in AI that they have been discussing the risks over the past year. Now they have revealed their conclusions.
Until now, research in artificial intelligence has been mainly occupied by myriad basic challenges that have turned out to be very complex, such as teaching machines to distinguish between everyday objects. Human-level artificial intelligence or self-evolving machines were seen as long-term, abstract goals not yet ready for serious consideration.
Now, for the first time, a panel of 25 AI scientists, roboticists, and ethical and legal scholars has been convened to address these issues, under the auspices of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in Menlo Park, California. It looked at the feasibility and ramifications of seemingly far-fetched ideas, such as the possibility of the internet becoming self-aware…”
source: newscientist.com
“The laboratory for photovoltaics of the University of Luxembourg has produced its first thin film solar cells made from compound semiconductors, already reaching a 12 percent efficiency.
Thin film solar cells are considered the next generation of solar cells and are expected to be considerably cheaper because they need much less material and energy in their production than today’s photovoltaic modules.
Researchers around the globe are racing to develop efficient thin film solar cells. The solar cells made in Luxembourg are based on a semiconductor made of copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS) and made by a process with the potential for highest performance. Furthermore, the scientists of the University of Luxembourg produced another solar cell based on a new cheaper material, which does not contain the costly indium, and made by a low cost galvanic process. This solar cell has reached an efficiency of 3.2 percent. This is already close to the world record: the worldwide best cell based on this new material and prepared by a similar low cost process shows an efficiency of 3.4 percent…”
source: compoundsemi.com