India Temple Crush Causes 160 Deaths

At least 147 people have been killed in a stampede at a Hindu temple in the north-western Indian state of Rajasthan, the state government says.

Scores more were injured, many seriously, in the crush at the Chamunda Devi temple in Jodhpur. Read more

Governor’s New Cell Phone Texting Bill

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday signed into law a measure banning motorists from text messaging and e-mailing while operating a vehicle.
The law, written by Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, takes effect Jan. 1. Read more

Econ Bailout: More Like $5 Trillion!!

Sept. 23 (Bloomberg) — Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion plan to buy devalued assets from financial companies is “a joke” because it doesn’t go far enough to calm markets, said Kenichi Ohmae, president of Business Breakthrough Inc. Read more

Synthetic Trees to be Developed

Developed by Dr. Klaus Lackner these synthetic trees could be used as CO2 scrubbers cleaning our air. Using a chemical reaction to pull carbon dioxide from the air this technology could buy the world time to development and implement alternative energy sources.

The idea is that air would flow through the vanes of these structures. Flowing through sodium hydroxide (NaOH) which is inside the synthetic tree CO2 would chemically react to create sodium carbonate liquid which condenses and collects at the bottom of the synthetic tree. This would be the storage mechanism for excess CO2 in the atmosphere.

Then what? Well the condensed liquid would be pumped into porous rock below the sea bed using oil drilling technology. There the carbon would be stored for millions of years.

Lackner states that one tree could scrub 90,000 tons of C02 from the air per year. Unlike a real tree no oxygen is released from the synthetic tree but the carbon sink principle is comparable to real trees. This technology is a band aid on the problem of fossil fuel use but as Lackner intends it could buy time and reduce existing carbon levels in our atmosphere.

As for now it is a sketch and a prototype but the synthetic tree is a potential remedy for our carbon problems.

Google’s $10 Million Dollar Idea Contest

Got an idea that could change the world, or at least help a lot of people? Google wants to hear from you — and they’ll pay as much as $10 million to make your idea a reality.
Google Inc. will award $10 million to solicit ideas it believes could benefit the world.

To help celebrate its 10th birthday, the ambitious Internet giant is launching an initiative to solicit, and bankroll, fresh ideas it believes could have broad and beneficial impact on people’s lives.

Called Project 10^100 (pronounced “10 to the 100th”), Google’s initiative will seek input from the public and a panel of judges in choosing up to five winning ideas, to be announced in February.

Google announced the project live on CNN on Wednesday morning.

“These ideas can be big or small, technology-driven or brilliantly simple — but they need to have impact,” said Google in a press release. “We know there are countless brilliant ideas that need funding and support to come to fruition.”

Ideas such as the Hippo Water Roller, which Google cited as the kind of concept the company would be interested in rewarding. Developed in Africa, where it is most used, the Hippo Water Roller is a barrel-shaped container, attached to a handle, that holds 24 gallons of water and can be rolled with little effort, like a wheelbarrow, making it easier for villagers on foot to transport critically needed fresh water to their homes.
Don’t Miss

People are encouraged to submit their ideas, in any of 25 languages, on http://www.project10tothe100.com/index.html through October 20. Entrants must briefly describe their idea and answer six questions, including, “If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?”

30 Airlines to Go Bankrupt Within Year

Up to 30 more airlines will go bankrupt before Christmas, the chief executive of British Airways warned yesterday, as the biggest rescue of stranded passengers in travel industry history began.

Willie Walsh said the scenes of chaos in which 85,000 passengers have been stranded at locations around the world after the collapse of XL, Britain’s third largest holiday company, Read more

18 Killed in Train Accident in Los Angeles

A freight train collided with a rush-hour commuter train in Los Angeles on Friday evening, killing at least 18 people and injuring scores of others, many of them critically. The crash was potentially the deadliest accident in the history of the Southern California commuter trains. Read more

Sharing a Bed with a Partner is Brain Draining New Study Reports

Sharing a bed with someone could reduce your brain power - at least temporarily and if you are a man - Austrian scientists suggest.

When men spend the night with a bed mate their sleep is disturbed and this impairs their mental ability the next day. In addition, the resulting lack of sleep also increases a man’s stress hormone levels. Women who share a bed, on the other hand, tend to fare better because they sleep more deeply.

Professor Gerhard Kloesch and colleagues at the University of Vienna studied eight unmarried, childless couples in their 20s. Each couple was asked to spend 10 nights sleeping together and 10 apart while the scientists assessed their rest patterns with questionnaires and wrist activity monitors. The next day the couples were asked to perform simple cognitive tests and had their stress hormone levels checked. Although the men reported they had slept better with a partner, they fared worse in the tests, with their results suggesting they actually had more disturbed sleep.

Both sexes had a more disturbed night’s sleep when they shared their bed. But women apparently managed to sleep more deeply when they did eventually drop off, since they claimed to be more refreshed than their sleep time suggested. Their stress hormone levels and mental scores did not suffer to the same extent as the men. Nevertheless, the women still reported that they had the best sleep when they were alone in bed.

Dr Neil Stanley, a sleep expert at the University of Surrey, said: “It’s not surprising that people are disturbed by sleeping together. Historically, we have never been meant to sleep in the same bed as each other. It is a bizarre thing to do. Sleep is the most selfish thing you can do and it’s vital for good physical and mental health. Sharing the bed space with someone who is making noises and who you have to fight with for the duvet is not sensible. If you are happy sleeping together that’s great, but if not there is no shame in separate beds.”
Source:Current.com

Google’s $1 billion dollar United Airlines Mistake

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a “preliminary inquiry” into how an outdated bankruptcy story sparked a $1 billion run on an airline’s stock value.

The article about how United Airlines filed for bankruptcy in 2002 was revived when it showed up on a newspaper site’s “most viewed” section on Monday. Read more

Hackers HACK Large Hadron Collider’s computer system! How Safe…

The scientists behind the £4.4bn atom smasher had already received threatening emails and been besieged by telephone calls from worried members of the public concerned by speculation that the machine could trigger a black hole to swallow the earth, or earthquakes and tsunamis, despite endless reassurances to the contrary from the likes of Prof Stephen Hawking.

Now it has emerged that, as the first particles were circulating in the machine near Geneva, a Greek group had hacked into the facility and displayed a page with the headline “GST: Greek Security Team.”

The people responsible signed off: “We are 2600 - dont mess with us. (sic)”

The website - cmsmon.cern.ch - can no longer be accessed by the public as a result of the attack.

Scientists working at Cern, the organisation that runs the vast smasher, were worried about what the hackers could do because they were “one step away” from the computer control system of one of the huge detectors of the machine, a vast magnet that weighs 12,500 tons, measuring around 21 metres in length and 15 metres wide/high.

If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector and, said the insider, “it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it.”

Fortunately, only one file was damaged but one of the scientists firing off emails as the CMS team fought off the hackers said it was a “scary experience”.

The hackers targeted the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, or CMS, one of the four “eyes” of the facility that will be analysing the fallout of the Big Bang.

The CMS team of around 2,000 scientists is racing with another team that runs the Atlas detector, also at Cern, to find the Higgs particle, one that is responsible for mass.
advertisement

“There seems to be no harm done. From what they can tell, it was someone making the point that CMS was hackable,” said James Gillies, spokesman for Cern. “It was quickly detected.”

“We have several levels of network, a general access network and a much tighter network for sensitive things that operate the LHC,” said Gillies.

“We are a very visible site,” he said, adding that of the 1.4 million emails sent to Cern yesterday, 98 per cent was spam.

The hacking attempt started around the time that the giant machine was about to circulate its first particles, under the spotlight of the world’s media.

On Wednesday afternoon, as the world held its breath as the machine sparked up, CMS team members were scouring computers at the machine for half a dozen files uploaded by the hackers on September 9 and 10.

“We think that someone from Fermilab’s Tevatron (the competing atom smasher in America) had their access details compromised,” said one of the scientists working on the machine. “What happened wasn’t a big deal, just goes to show people are out there always on the prowl.”

The CMS team studied the files inserted by the hackers carefully before deleting, in case a “backdoor” had been installed, a means of access to the computer that bypasses security.

The system the hackers managed to access was CMSMON, which monitors the CMS software system as the vast detector takes data, during collisions between particles to study the energies and physics in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, which created the universe.

Cern relies on a ‘defence-in-depth’ strategy, separating control networks and using firewalls and complex passwords, to protect its control systems from malicious software, such as denial-of-service attacks, botnets and zombie machines, which can strike with a synchronised attack from hundreds of machines around the world.

However, there have been growing concerns about security as remote or wireless access, notebooks and USB sticks offer new possibilities for a virus or worms to enter the network, not to mention hackers and terrorists who might be interested in targeting computers to shutdown the system.

More than 110 different control systems are used at Cern. These systems monitor, supervise and safeguard Cern’s accelerators, experiments and infrastructure - from buildings, electricity and heating to access control, radiation protection and safety.

To refine security methods Cern set up a working group called Computing and Network Infrastructure for Controls. One document written by the group said: “Recent events show that computer security issues are becoming a serious problem also at Cern.”

However, the team said yesterday that it did not want to comment on security at the international facility.

A few years ago, Stanford University in California announced that a number of high-performance academic computer centres had been attacked by hackers lured by the phenomenal power of the grid - pools of computing power linked by dedicated high-speed networks. Beyond shutting down the machines or stealing or deleting data, one likely malicious use of such power is to crack passwords.

In 2003, hackers broke into ScotGrid, a network of 150 machines based at the University of Glasgow. They intercepted the password of a remote user based in Geneva and used it to gain access to ScotGrid. They ran scripts that tried to reconfigure the machine to steal more passwords.

The commissioning of the giant machine is making extraordinary progress.

Now that the team has managed to get beams of particles circulating stably, they must be “captured” so that the particles stay in bunches.

This has now been done with the anticlockwise beam, circulating a beam for full half an hour. Commissioning, said Gillies, “is going incredibly fast.” They now hope to capture the second clockwise beam. “To give you a feel for how well these guys are doing, what happened on Wednesday was days one to four of main commissioning.”

This latest step “is really a more significant achievement than Wednesday’s fun and games,” comments Dr David Sankey of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire.Source:Telegraph.co.uk

Next Page »