MSNBC: Since 2003 US military leaders repeatedly and urgently requested — and were denied — an energy beam weapon called the Active Denial System. The device, which is perched on a Humvee or a flatbed truck, has a range of 500 yards and uses directed-energy beams that can penetrate a few millimeters under the skin causing pain. As the soldiers train it on a crowd, the pain makes them disperse.
"I am convinced that the tragedy at Fallujah would not have occurred if an Active Denial System had been there," Air Force science advisor Gene McCall told Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to an e-mail obtained by Associated Press. The system should become "an immediate priority," McCall said.
However, the international red cross and other non-profit organizations, and other governments have a number of concerns related to the deployment of energy-based weapons, including whether such devices break the Geneva Convention on torture and the convention on conventional weapons. See also an earlier Physics Today news pick on laser blinding weapons being deployed to Iraq.
Laser blinding weapons in Iraq
Federation of American Scientists web site on the Convention on Conventional Weapons
convention on conventional weapons web site
Active Denial System wikipedia entry
August 2007 Archives
Reuters: Imagine cramming 30,000 full-length movies into a gadget the size of an iPod.
Scientists at IBM said on Thursday they had moved closer to such a feat by learning how to steer single atoms in a way that could create building blocks for ultra-tiny storage devices.
Houston Chronicle: The $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source facility, though still powering up, has established a new mark as the world's most powerful accelerator-based source of neutrons for scientific research.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced Thursday that the SNS's neutron beam reached 183 kilowatts on Aug. 11, surpassing the 163-kilowatt record held by the ISIS facility at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England.
Although the capacity of the ISIS facility is being doubled, Oak Ridge officials said their accelerator is designed to produce up to 10 times more neutrons than now.
LA Times: Paul B. MacCready, an accomplished meteorologist, a world-class glider pilot and a respected aeronautical engineer, has died. He was 81. The Caltech-trained scientist and inventor created the Gossamer Condor -- the first successful human-powered airplane--as well as other innovative aircraft.
MacCready died in his sleep at his Pasadena home Tuesday, according to an announcement from AeroVironment Inc., the Monrovia-based company he founded. The statement said he had been recently diagnosed with a serious ailment but the cause of death was not listed.
Science: Particle physicists and geophysicists rarely meet to compare notes, but earlier this year researchers from these two disciplines gathered to discuss antineutrinos (the antiparticle of the neutrino). These fundamental particles are a by-product of reactions occurring in nuclear reactors and pass easily through Earth, but they are also generated deep inside Earth by the natural radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium (in which case they are called geoneutrinos). Particle physicists have recently shown that it is possible to detect geoneutrinos and thus establish limits on the amount of radioactive energy produced in the interior of our planet.
Science: Free the NPOESS Five. That's the message from U.S. climate scientists hoping to find a way into space for five sensors stripped last year from plans for a multibillion-dollar satellite system (Science, 16 June 2006, p. 1580). An upcoming report lays out their preferences for salvaging the sensors, which are innocent victims of massive cost overruns in the $11 billion National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). But those choices--essentially, sticking the sensors back onto NPOESS or flying them on separate missions--are running up against tight budgets and a government decision to emphasize short-term monitoring for military and civilian weather forecasts over long-term measurements of global climate.
Science: If the moon shines more brightly on Asia in the next few years, it may be because three Asian powers are using a trio of spacecraft to shed some scientific light on the lunar surface. Barring last-minute glitches, Japan will launch its Selene mission on 13 September. China's Chang'e 1 is expected to go up within a few weeks of that launch, and India aims to follow in April with Chandrayaan-I.
Lunar scientists are cheering the science-driven missions, which promise the most detailed look at the moon since NASA's Apollo program. The results could help resolve outstanding questions about the moon's hazy origins and evolution and prepare for possible crewed landings. And although most data will be shared with European and U.S. colleagues, Asian scientists will be spearheading the analyses. "It's a good chance for Asian scientists" to make a mark in lunar studies, says Hitoshi Mizutani, a planetary scientist who led Selene's development until retiring 2 years ago from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) in Sagamihara, Japan.
Nature: It was one of the most important astronomical discoveries of the twentieth century, and it became one of the more controversial when only one of the discoverers received a Nobel prize. Now, 81-year-old Charles Schisler, who forty years ago was a US Air Force staff sergeant at a remote Alaskan radar outpost, has come forward to explain how he had used a military radar to identify around a dozen radio sources, some of which were pulsars, months before the science community officially discovered the astronomical objects.
Astronomers who have seen Schisler's meticulous logs believe that he spotted a bright pulsar in the nearby Crab Nebula months before the first scientific observation of a pulsar was published in Nature (A. Hewish et al. Nature 217, 709–713; 1968). Although Schisler never knew exactly what he was seeing, the story should be counted as an early pulsar spotting, says Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, UK, and one of the authors on the original paper. "He happened to be a very observant person," Bell Burnell says.
International Herald Tribune: Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists and engineers sued NASA and the California Institute of Technology on Thursday, challenging extensive new background checks that the space exploration center and other federal agencies began requiring in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles by 28 plaintiffs. Many have worked on such projects as the Mars rovers, the Galileo probe to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn, but none are involved in classified work, according to the suit. It seeks class-action status to represent similar JPL employees.
Caltech was sued because it manages JPL for NASA and employs its staff. The suit also named the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is involved in promulgating federal identification standards.
Washington Post: David Hoffman reports on the efforts to contain the flow of nuclear material into the wrong hands, by following Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) on a visit to Podolsk, Russia.
Last Wednesday, five green reinforced containers holding a total of 21 pounds of uranium, about a third of it highly enriched, which had been quietly removed from a research reactor in Otwock, Poland, were opened up in Podolsk and blended down for use in nuclear power plants.
Lugar, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, "People around the world would be reassured if they saw what we saw today." Nunn and Lugar who sponsored legislation at the end of the cold war to remove thousands of tons of weapons-grade radioactive material from loosely guarded sites remain worried at the slow pace of the decommissioning program.
BBC: The UN nuclear watchdog says Iran has agreed to a plan aimed at clearing up questions about its controversial nuclear activities.
The IAEA says the development is "significant", but adds that for the plan to work, it is essential to get full and active co-operation from Iran.
It also says Iran is continuing its enrichment programme, but at a slower pace than before, despite UN sanctions
CERN Courier: Repairs to the magnets that have caused so much trouble at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have passed the pressure tests that caused the unaltered magnets to lurch out of position (see an upcoming story in the September issue of Physics Today for more information about the LHC's delayed schedule).
Space.com: Burning more brilliantly than a billion suns, the energy-packed star deaths known as supernovas have lately enabled scientists to discover fundamental properties of the universe.
Now physicists hope to uncover new cosmic secrets by recreating some supernova features in the lab.
The REsonator SOLenoid with Upscale Transmission (RESOLUT) joins a small number of facilities around the world able to recreate some of the emissions and reactions of nature's biggest fireworks display.
Nature: Neville Nicholls from Monash University in Australia reminds readers of Nature that thirty-five years ago this week, atmospheric scientist J. S. Sawyer published (Nature 239, 23–26; 1972) a prediction that a 25% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide predicted to occur by 2000 corresponded to an increase of 0.6 °C in world temperature. In fact global surface temperature rose about 0.5 °C between the early 1970s and 2000.
As the prediction was made during a period in which global temperatures had been falling in the decades, "Sawyer's prediction of a reversal of this trend, and of the correct magnitude of the warming, is perhaps the most remarkable long-range forecast ever made," says Nicholls.
Xinhua: Albert Einstein and science fiction writers predicted the warping of space-time around neutron stars, the most dense observable matter in the universe, and now there is proof.
Wired: A team of Italian scientists says their latest nanotech discovery is the secret to the wall-scaling Spiderman suit.
Guardian Unlimited: Secret papers reveal post-war campaign to loot military and commercial assets
Reuters: Greenhouse gas emissions -- not El Nino or other natural phenomena -- pushed U.S. temperatures for 2006 close to a record high, government climate scientists reported on Tuesday.
Xinhua: Chinese lawmakers are legislating for the first time to allow scientists to report failures during the process of innovation without blotting their records in future funding applications.
USA Today: Solar power has long been the Mercedes-Benz of the renewable energy industry: sleek, quiet, low-maintenance.
BBC: It is a commonly held belief that Jupiter shields Earth from comets or asteroids that might otherwise hit us.
VNUNet.com: Scientists have published a new theory which describes how the transistors in next-generation quantum computers may be created.
Reuters: Russia's state security service said on Friday it had dropped an investigation into two scientists suspected of disclosing state secrets in a book to commemorate the anniversary of their institute.
Xinhua: leading plasma physicist testified Friday on international collaboration for building the world's first experimental fusion reactor at the Chinese legislature.
The Washington Post: After two years of painstaking negotiations, a historic nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and India appears to be unraveling as a broad spectrum of political parties calls on the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to scrap the deal, saying it limits the country's sovereignty in energy and foreign policy matters.
The Daily Telegraph: Scientists are planning a mission to drill beneath the Moon's surface for buried meteorites that may hold clues to how life began on Earth.
Telelegraph.co.uk: Astronomers are scratching their heads over a puzzling non-discovery, an enormous hole in the universe measuring nearly a billion light-years across.
The New York Times: Los Angeles appears to be in a centuries-long seismic lull between periods of powerful earthquake activity, while communities inland could be at higher risk of big quakes.
Science: Two key science agencies have issued policy directives this month that emphasize the role of investigators in helping postdocs grow into independent researchers.
Reuters: A historic nuclear energy deal between India and the United States is hanging in the balance due to political opposition in New Delhi, but could still be saved if it reaches the U.S. Congress early next year, analysts said.
ScienceNow: A huge tank of liquid buried deep in the Italian Apennine mountains has made the first accurate measurement of low-energy neutrinos coming from the heart of the sun. The results generally confirm physicists' theories of how the sun's nuclear furnace generates its heat and support recent findings about the strange nature of neutrinos.
The Christian Science Monitor: A tweak to NASA’s record shows that 4 of the 10 warmest years in the USoccurred during in the 1930s, not more recently. Climate change deniers say this points out that concern over global warming is unfounded.
MSNBC: Some scientists worry about Cassini orbiter’s flyby of Enceladus
Nature: When measuring photons, it's a case of 'wanted, dead' — catching them alive is not an option. But we can observe how a superposition of many photon waves progressively collapses as it interacts with a beam of atoms.
ABC News: Iran, IAEA Agree on Nuclear Timetable, but U.S. Criticizes Accord
Miami Herald: A three-year veil of secrecy in the name of national security was used to keep the public in the dark about the handling of highly enriched uranium at a nuclear fuel processing plant - including a leak that could have caused a deadly, uncontrolled nuclear reaction.
MSNBC: ‘Standard model’ leaves out gravity and turns wonky at high energies
BBC: The constellations of Andromeda, Hydra and Vulpecula are now just a mouse click away for amateur star-gazers, following the launch of Google Sky.
Space.com: A giant underground experiment has given researchers their first glimpse into the heart of the sun and the subatomic particles that shine down on Earth everyday.
Environmental News Network: Emissions of a key air pollutant fell slightly in China in the first half of the year but water quality worsened, the country's environmental watchdog said Tuesday, urging tougher measures to deal with a grim pollution situation.
BBC: Astronomers have spotted a space oddity in Earth's neighbourhood - a dead star with some unusual characteristics.
Slate.com: If economics can tell us something useful about crime, marriage, or carpooling—as I believe it can—then other academic disciplines should have something to tell us about economies. Last month, Science published an example that may turn out to be important. Two physicists, Cesar Hidalgo and Albert-László Barabási, and two economists, Bailey Klinger and Ricardo Hausmann, have been drawing unusual pictures of economic "space" that promise a deeper understanding of the biggest question in economics: why poor countries are poor.
Chicago Tribune: A proposed $500 million particle accelerator could help it land an even bigger project
The Register: It is 21 years since the nuclear plant at Chernobyl went bang, and the extent of the damage wrought by the radioactive fallout is still becoming clear.
Science: Astronomer Arthur Eddington's prophetic quote about the universe still holds: It is stranger than we can imagine. And new images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory combined with views from two ground-based optical telescopes have produced one of the biggest cosmic mysteries yet. A collision between giant galactic clusters seems to have separated the galaxies from their dark matter cores. The find threatens to turn current thinking about dark matter on its ear.
NPR: In southern France, researchers from around the globe are building a massive machine that will recreate fusion. That's where two atoms become one, and release energy. Researchers say this new machine will come close to their final goal: a fusion power plant that generates electricity.
Science: A NSF-funded survey to explore the impact of NSF rejecting an increasing number of grant applications over the last four years has found that 56% of scientists thought the NSF review process was fair. However, the same survey found that program managers, reviewers are working harder to process an increasing number of applications, and that one in six scientists decline an invitation to review proposals, either by mail or in person at NSF's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. Nearly two-thirds of those who say no cite a lack of time.
"My fear is getting into an irreversible downward spiral, with funding rates so low that people stop submitting and we can't find enough reviewers," says NSF director Arden Bement. "Right now we're on the precipice."
Reuters: John Church of the Australian government-backed Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation has called for the establishment of a network of deep ocean moorings to extend a system already in operation in the northern hemisphere. Church is a senior science adviser to the U.N.-backed World Climate Research Programme.
Probes should be strung across the South Atlantic and through the Indonesian archipelago, as well as in the Southern Ocean in order to warn of changes in ocean circulation that may affect the global climate says Church.
Nature: For 30 years scientists have believed that there are no organic molecules in the martian soil. Will NASA's Phoenix probe prove them right or wrong, asks Corinna Wu
BBC: Scientists have painted the first detailed picture of Atlantic ocean currents crucial to Europe's climate.
Using instruments strung out across the Atlantic, a UK-led team shows that its circulation varies significantly over the course of a year.
Writing in the journal Science, they say it may now be possible to detect changes related to global warming.
Financial Times: Victoria Kim reports that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is helping to fund a new initiative to relocate more than 150 Iraqi scholars who are facing persecution. The foundation will provide $5m (£2.5m) for fellowships to Iraqi scholars trying to continue their work at institutions in other countries, notably Jordan, matching funds provided by the US Congress. The money will be administered by the Scholar Rescue Fund, an organisation founded in 2002 by Wall Street investors that helps academics in conflict zones.
Iraq is "the closest thing that any of us have seen to the Holocaust in terms of attacks on science and learning", said Allan Goodman, president and chief executive of the non-profit International Institute of Education, which administers the fund.
"It is not even clear who is doing it," said Dr Jarecki, the fund's chairman.
Nature: In order to form a glass by cooling a liquid, the normal process of solid crystallization must be bypassed. Achieving that for a pure metal had seemed impossible — until pressure was applied to liquid germanium
Reuters: Britain is likely to put forward legislation within three months to cut carbon emissions by at least 60 percent in the fight against global warming, environmentalists said on Wednesday.
Various: NPR investigates the latest news on the nuclear industry. In one report, Emily Harris visits the worlds first deep underground waste storage in Finland. The dump is scheduled to open in 2020, but some Finnish groups are concerned how the waste will cope with being buried for thousands of years. In a separate report John Ydstie talks to Fortune magazine's David Whitford about the future of the nuclear power industry. See also a Stronger Future for Nuclear Power, Physics Today February 2006, page 19.
Energy Firms Plan New Nuclear Power Plants
Concerns Linger for 2020 Nuclear Dump Openingt
NPR: Even without big-name makers of electric cars, there are some big names driving them: Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Clooney both bought the all-electric Roadster sports car. It goes from zero to 60 miles per hour in four seconds, and charges from a household plug.
BBC: Minuscule wind engines could help to take computing power to the next level, scientists believe.
San Francisco Chronicle: Why he's quitting: Dynes says he wants to spend more time with wife of 5 months
USA Today: Electrically charged specks of interstellar dust organize into DNA-like double helixes and display properties normally attributed to living systems, such as evolving and reproducing, new computer simulations show
The New York Times: Gino Segre followed the family tradition of becoming a physicist, but then turned to writing science history for a broader audience.
BBC: Flexible paper batteries could meet the energy demands of the next generation of gadgets, says a team of researchers.
Wired: U.S. military robots ran 30,000 missions in 2006 -- hunting for, and getting rid of, improvised explosives. Now, the military has launched a crash project to radically increase its unmanned ground forces. Call it the robotic equivalent of the "surge."
The Age: There is a case for supplying uranium to India, but only in accordance with a revised globalnon-proliferation regime.
Salon.com: Turkish-American physicist Taner Edis explains why science in Muslim lands remains stuck in the past -- and why the Golden Age of Mesopotamia wasn't so golden after all.
Continue reading The religious state of Islamic science.
The New York Times: Global warming is by nature a big-enough problem to create the kind of necessity that could be mother, father and midwife to invention. And plenty of big ideas are out there to address it, some that may even lead to substantial enterprises much as our military needs have.
Science: Astronomers have discovered five full-sized galaxies in the extremely distant--and therefore extremely young--universe. The galaxies, which are forming stars very rapidly, are big for their age, meaning that astronomers might have to rethink current ideas about galaxy formation.
Sacramento Bee : Scientists from Davis contribute to gigantic project in Europe
Wired: President Bush signed the America COMPETES ACT -- which authorizes funding for certain high-risk, high-reward research -- into law today. The law also creates a new Advanced Research Projects Administration for Energy (ARPA-E) with three overriding goals: reduce foreign energy imports, reduce greenhouse gas and other emissions, and improve energy efficiency.
Continue reading Science, technology sectors to receive billions of dollars.
Science: Last week, as part of a mammoth innovation bill (see related story), Congress created the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy that would, as the legislation explains, identify and fund "transformational technological advances that industry by itself is not likely to undertake."
The New York Times: The area of floating ice in the Arctic has shrunk more this summer than in any other summer since satellite tracking began in 1979, and it has reached that record point a month before the annual ice pullback typically peaks, experts said yesterday.
Telegraph.co.uk: Here is the climate forecast for the next decade; although global warming will be held in check for a few years, it will come roaring back to send the mercury rising before 2014.
BBC: When engineers flick the switch to turn on the world's fastest supercomputer later this year it will be capable of chewing its way through 1,000 trillion calculations every second.
Forbes:
University of Illinois officials said they still don't know if the school will be home to a new supercomputer intended to be the world's fastest, despite a news report saying the decision had been made.
Nature: India's new Ministry of Earth Sciences is at the helm of ambitious plans to advance deep-sea and polar research. K. S. Jayaraman reports.
Wired: Price drops for semi-pro astronomy gear have put some impressive equipment in the hands of astrophotographer hobbyists. Here you'll meet some of the best DIY astrophotographers in this growing subculture.
USA Today: The disaster caused by the collapse of one of this city's highway bridges points to the need for better technologies to inspect bridges, but states have been slow to spend money on the new methods, national safety and engineering experts said Monday.
The Christian Science Monitor: They reign supreme in checkers and chess. Poker may be next. What other areas will artificial intelligence soon dominate?
Los Angeles Times: The efforts of the Swedish scientist now allow for assays of corrosion of metal surfaces, identification of contaminants and many other applications.
Environmental News Network: A U.S. summit in September on climate change, one of at least four international meetings set for this year, is already raising doubts about any action being taken before President Bush leaves office.
Telegraph.co.uk: Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists.
The New York Times: The biggest name-dropper in science, Albert Einstein, mentioned God often enough that one could imagine he and the "Old One" had a standing date for coffee or tennis.
The Boston Globe: The British soccer player David Beckham is famous for many things. His hairstyles (there's a website that allows you to view yourself with 13 of his distinct do's); his fashion choices (the British tabloids just loved his male sarong and pink nail polish); and his marriage to a pop star, Victoria Beckham -- Posh Spice of the Spice Girls.
And then there's his soccer fame, which is largely based on his innate command of the laws of physics.
AZoNano.com: Northeastern University Physics professor Sergey V. Kravchenko along with colleagues Svetlana Anissimova (Northeastern University), A Punnoose (City College if the City University of New York), AM Finkelstein (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) and TM Klapwijk (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands), has published an important new paper in the August issue of Nature Physics which answers a long standing question in the field of condensed matter physics.
USA Today: Malicious, vindictive and mean-spirited. These are words that might surface in divorce court.
But they have been lobbed in the course of a different estrangement: the standoff between the Bush administration and the nation's scientific community.
CNET: At Los Alamos National Lab, scientists are working on ways to keep the world safe from weapons of mass destruction
The New York Times: The National Science Foundation is planning to award I.B.M. a contract to build the world’s fastest supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, according to documents that were accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week
BBC: A team of UN nuclear experts has begun a four-day inspection of a Japanese atomic power plant damaged in a powerful earthquake last month.
Various: Both NPR and the Christian Science Monitor report on today's launch of Phoenix, a Mars probe that will look for evidence of cliamte change and organic compounds at the Martian polar caps. It will be the first soft landing on Mars by NASA in more than 30 years. All being well, the probe will arrive at Mars in May next year.
Science: Researchers have used a novel light-splitting technique to achieve an unofficial record of 42.8% efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity.
The Washington Post: A team of experts from the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency will inspect next week the Japanese nuclear power plant damaged in an earthquake, after pressure from local authorities in the area worried about safety.
CNET: I'm standing in the middle of "the center of the known universe," as this room is sometimes called. And in a way, it feels like that's actually where I am.
That's because I'm in the control center of the Very Large Array, a collection of 27 dish antennas, each of which weighs 230 tons and has a diameter of 25 meters. Together, the antennas form the world's largest radio telescope.
Renewable Energy Access: University of Delaware-led team sets solar cell record, joins DuPont on $100 million project
The New York Times: Alarmed at recent indications of climate change here in the Amazon and in other regions of Brazil, the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has begun showing signs of new flexibility in the tangled, politically volatile international negotiations to limit human-caused global warming.
Nature: When two 'bits' of magnetic information race around a nanoscale wire, two factors determine whether or not they survive the course: the condition of the track, and how fast they respond to the starting signal.
International Herald Tribune: Foreign ministers of the countries involved in talks on North Korea's nuclear program reaffirmed their commitment to resolve the dispute in a meeting with Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, an official said Wednesday.
Photonics.com: Workers could face a health threat -- in some cases, on par to that of cigarette smoking -- from office laser printers that emit large amounts of tiny particles into the air. Potential effects range from respiratory irritation to effects on the cardiovascular system and cancer, said Professor Lidia Morawska from the Queensland University of Technology, as reported in Australia's ABC Science Online.
Wired: The Hubble Space Telescope is 17 years old — that's like 150 to you and me. Next year, the geriatric orbiting eye will receive its final tune-up, and soon it will go live on a farm where it can play with other obsolete space-based observatories. The good news is that NASA scientists have already cooked up a replacement. The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for a 2013 launch, folds to fit into the cone of a rocket for deeper deployment than its predecessor. Once in orbit, it will capture infrared instead of visible light and — since distance equals time in space — will be able to see back to about 400 million years after the big bang. That should let it snag shots of the first bright objects, the origins of planetary systems, and the assembly of galaxies. "Every time you get new capabilities, you see a quantum jump in progress," says Mark Clampin, the observatory's project scientist. "I'm sure we'll discover things we've never seen before."
The New York Times: Workers are trying to determine how to clean up one of the worst radioactive waste leaks in years at the Hanford nuclear reservation, officials said.
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