Excerpt from designntrend.comResearch on a 4.4 billion-year-old meteorite reveals that it is a piece of the Red Planet's crust - the first piece of its kind to reach Earth. The study, which was carried out by researchers at Brown University sug...
Tag: broken (page 2 of 5)
Excerpt from seattletimes.com
Elon Musk thought three major trends would drive the future: the Internet, the quest for sustainable energy and space exploration. He’s got skin in all three games.
The famous entrepreneur isn’t going to live here, at least not yet. But earlier this month he did announce plans to bulk up an engineering center near Seattle for his SpaceX venture. The invitation-only event was held in the shadow of the Space Needle.
If the plan happens, SpaceX would join Planetary Resources and Blue Origin in a budding Puget Sound space hub. With talent from Boeing, the aerospace cluster and University of Washington, this offers fascinating potential for the region’s future.
Elon Musk sounds like the name of a character from a novel that would invariably include the sentence, “he had not yet decided whether to use his powers for good or for evil.”
He is said to have been the inspiration for the character Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr. in the “Iron Man” movies. He’s also been compared to Steve Jobs and even Thomas Edison.
The real Musk seems like a nice-enough chap, at least based on his ubiquitous appearances in TED talks and other venues.
Even the semidishy essay in Marie Claire magazine by his first wife, Justine, is mostly about the challenge to the marriage as Musk became very rich, very young, started running with a celebrity crowd and exhibited the monomaniacal behavior common to the entrepreneurial tribe.
A native of South Africa, Musk emigrated to Canada and finally to the United States, where he received degrees from the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School. He left Stanford’s Ph.D. program in applied physics after two days to start a business.
In 1995, he co-founded Zip2, an early Internet venture for newspapers. Four years later, he co-founded what would become PayPal. With money from eBay’s acquisition of PayPal, he started SpaceX. He also invested in Tesla Motors, the electric-car company, eventually becoming chief executive. Then there’s Solar City, a major provider of solar-power systems.
Musk has said that early on he sensed three major trends would drive the future: the Internet, the quest for sustainable energy and space exploration. He’s got skin in all three games.
At age 43, Musk is seven years younger than Jeff Bezos and more than 15 years younger than Bill Gates.
His achievements haven’t come without controversy. Tesla played off several states against each other for a battery factory. Nevada, desperate to diversify its low-wage economy, won, if you can call it that.
The price tag was $1.4 billion in incentives and whether it ever pays off for the state is a big question. A Fortune magazine investigation showed Musk not merely as a visionary but also a master manipulator with a shaky deal. Musk, no shrinking violet, fired back on his blog.
SpaceX is a combination of the practical and the hyperambitious, some would say dreamy.
On the practical side, the company is one of those chosen by the U.S. government to resupply the International Space Station. Musk also hopes to put 4,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit to provide inexpensive Internet access worldwide.
The satellite venture will be based here, with no financial incentives from the state.
But he also wants to make space travel less expensive, generate “a lot of money” through SpaceX, and eventually establish a Mars colony.
“SpaceX, or some combination of companies and governments, needs to make progress in the direction of making life multiplanetary, of establishing a base on another planet, on Mars — being the only realistic option — and then building that base up until we’re a true multiplanet species,” he said during a TED presentation.
It’s heady stuff. And attractive enough to lead Google and Fidelity Investments to commit $1 billion to SpaceX.
Also, in contrast with the “rent-seeking” and financial plays of so many of the superwealthy, Musk actually wants to create jobs and solve practical problems.
If there’s a cautionary note, it is that market forces alone can’t address many of our most serious challenges. Indeed, in some cases they make them worse.
Worsening income inequality is the work of the hidden hand, unfettered by antitrust regulation, progressive taxation, unions and protections against race-to-the-bottom globalization.
If the hidden costs of spewing more carbon into the atmosphere are not priced in, we have today’s market failure exacerbating climate change. Electric cars won’t fix that as long as the distortions favoring fossil fuels remain.
So a broken, compromised government that’s cutting research dollars and failing to invest in education and forward-leaning infrastructure is a major impediment.
The United States did not reach the moon because of a clever billionaire, but through a national endeavor to serve the public good. I know, that’s “so 20th century.”
Also, as Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon might argue, visionaries such as Thomas Edison grabbed relatively low-hanging fruit, with electrification creating huge numbers of jobs.
Merely recovering the lost demand of the Great Recession has proved difficult. Another electrificationlike revolution that lifts all boats seems improbable.
I’m not sure that’s true. But it will take more than Iron Man to rescue the many Americans still suffering.
The Lunatic Piran found abandoned Jure Stwerk at the Helm ...
Excerpt from foxnews.com
Despite cost overruns, lawsuits, public opposition and a projected completion date 13 years behind schedule, California Gov. Jerry Brown broke ground Tuesday on what is to become the most expensive public works project in U.S. history: the California bullet train.
Over the next 1,000 days, California is estimated to spend roughly $4 million a day on the project.
The high-speed train, set to be finished in 2033, originally was supposed to deliver passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and 40 minutes. That was the promise when voters narrowly approved $10 billion in bonds for the project in 2008. Since then, however, the estimated trip time has grown considerably, and the train has encountered persistent problems -- as experts uncovered misrepresentations in the ballot proposition, and opponents sued to stop the project on environmental and fiscal grounds.
"We're talking about real money here," said Kris Vosburgh, executive director of taxpayer watchdog group Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. "This is money that's not available for health care or education, for public safety, or put back in taxpayers' pockets so they have something to spend. This is money being drawn out of the system for a program that is going to serve very few people."
Much about the project has changed since it was sold to the public.
Voters were told the project would cost just $33 billion. Once experts crunched the numbers, however, the price tag soared to $98 billion. It was supposed to whoosh riders from Southern California to the Bay Area in less than three hours, but now it’s more than four hours due to changing track configurations and route adjustments. The train was supposed to get people off the freeway and reduce carbon emissions, but a panel of experts now says any carbon savings will be nominal. (A drive by car takes just over 6 hours. Ed.)
Further, ridership projections have been cut by two-thirds from a projected 90 million to 30 million a year. Fewer riders means higher prices. According to a panel of transportation experts hired by the Reason Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, tickets will exceed $80 -- not $50 -- and the system will require annual subsidies of more than $300 million annually.
"The public has turned sour on this plan but the governor, to paraphrase Admiral Farragut, has taken a position of 'damn the people, full speed ahead'," Vosburgh said.
Undaunted by critics, Brown broke ground in Fresno on Tuesday on the first 29-mile segment of the train's system. Under Brown's direction, the California High Speed Rail Authority has gone to court to seek an exemption from an environmental quality law the state imposes on other projects but not this one. Brown also convinced the state Legislature to dedicate an annual revenue stream from the state's carbon tax, to help pay for the bullet train.
"It's a long project, a bold project and one that will transform the Central Valley," Brown said Monday as he began his fourth and final term as governor.
Once construction begins, supporters say it will be harder to stop the project. Several lawsuits linger, but a bigger question concerns the money: Where will it come from? If every penny committed to the project is added up, the project is still more than $30 billion short. Republicans in Congress are vowing not to commit a dollar more than President Obama approved in 2012.
"For years now, Governor Brown and the high-speed rail authority have turned the idea of high-speed rail into a public albatross far beyond what Californians envisioned or voted for," House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a statement released Tuesday. "Sadly, today's groundbreaking is a political maneuver. Supporters of the railroad in Sacramento can't admit their project is deeply flawed, and they won't give up on it despite the cost. But these political tricks are exactly what the American people are tired of and what the new Republican Congress is committed to ending."
Supporters don't see waste. They argue the project will reduce freeway gridlock, offer competition to air travel and provide an alternative to trucking freight.
Environmentalists also have opposed the project, suing and claiming the construction project would harm 11 endangered species and worsen air quality in the already dirty Central Valley. They lost when a federal judge ruled the project did not have to adhere to the state Environmental Quality Act, unlike other projects. Additional legal challenges remain, but supporters believe once the train leaves the station and ground is broken, there's no going back.
"The legacy of the Brown family is that they have been big thinkers, but also big builders," said Democratic state Assemblyman Henry Perea. "I think this is an opportunity for the legislature to step up, support Governor Brown. "
Excerpt from
sciencerecorder.com
New research from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), studying how memories are stored, finds that lost memories can be recovered—offering possible hope for patients suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
The finding contradicts the long-held belief that memories are stored at the connections between neurons, or synapses—areas that are destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease.
“Long-term memory is not stored at the synapse,” said lead author David Glanzman, a UCLA professor of integrative biology and physiology and of neurobiology, in a statement. “That’s a radical idea, but that’s where the evidence leads.”
According to Glanzman, the nervous system can regenerate lost or broken synaptic connections. If synaptic connections can be restored, memory will return. “It won’t be easy, but I believe it’s possible,” he said.
The findings recently were published in the open-access journal eLife.
Glanzman said the finding that the destruction of synapses does not result in the destruction of memories could have important implications for people with Alzheimer’s disease.
“As long as the neurons are alive, the memory will still be there, which means you may be able to recover some of the lost memories in the early stages of Alzheimer’s,” Glanzman said.
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| Clay, Neolithic period, Late 7th Millennium B.C.E., From Israel (excavated at Sha'ar Hagolan). On loan from the Israeli Antiquities Authority to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. |
The Yarmukian culture was a Neolithic culture, the first culture in prehistoric Israel, dating to circa 6400–6000 BC. The archeological site was first discovered in the 1930's, but excavation did not begin until 1949 by a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, led by Moshe Stekelis. The site was again excavated in 1989–90, 1996–2004), by another team from the same University and led by Yosef Garfinkel . The dig's official website can be found here.
A large number of extraordinary figurines have been unearthed at this Neolithic site, artifacts that continue to puzzle modern day researchers.
The official perspective concerning these pieces is that they are 'highly stylized' pieces of art, and may be symbolic of fertility. I will allow you to form your own opinions about these artifacts, but I will say that I feel it is at least possible these pieces are not 'highly stylized' pieces of art, instead, as remarkable as it may seem, these figurines may have been crafted to depict just what the artists were looking at while they molded clay between their fingers.
Greg Giles
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| This is a figurine head, broken off from the rest of the piece. |
Below is a figurine of what looks very much like a terrier breed of dog. Note this piece does not appear to be stylized at all, but an accurate representation of the popular breed.
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| Universal human: This reconstruction is of a different modern human from Romania 43,000 years ago. But it gives some clues to what the Siberian man may have looked like. This population was not long out of Africa and genetically midway between Europeans and Asians |
Excerpt from bbc.com
The genome sequence from a thigh bone found in Siberia shows the first episode of mixing occurred between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago.The male hunter is one of the earliest modern humans discovered in Eurasia.
The study in Nature journal also supports the finding that our species emerged from Africa some 60,000 years ago, before spreading around the world.
The analysis raises the possibility that the human line first emerged millions of years earlier than current estimates.
Prof Svante Paabo Max-Plack Institute"We seem to have caught evolution red handed”
"The amazing thing is that we have a good genome of a 45,000 year old person who was close to the ancestor of all present-day humans outside Africa," Prof Paabo told BBC News.
Prof Paabo has analysed DNA from part of a leg bone of a man that lived in Western Siberia around 45,000 years ago. This is a key moment at the cross roads of the world, when modern humans were on the cusp of an expansion into Europe and Asia.
Prof Paabo Svante has unlocked the secrets contained in this femur from one of the earliest humans discovered out of Africa.
"Our analysis shows that modern humans had already interbred with Neanderthals then and we can determine when that first happened much more precisely than we could before."
Prof Paabo and his team published research in 2010 which showed that all non-African humans today have Neanderthal DNA. But that genetic material has been broken into much smaller chunks over the generations.
According to Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, this early interbreeding might indicate when the ancestors of people living outside of Africa today made their first steps out of the continent in which our species evolved more than 150,000 years ago.
Prof Stringer was among those who believed that the first exit by modern humans from Africa that give rise to people outside of Africa today might have happened earlier, possibly 100,000 years ago. The evidence from Prof Paabo's research is persuading him that it was now much later.
Crossroads for humanity: the river Irtysh in Western Siberia where the bone was found.
Prof Paabo also compared the DNA of the man living 45,000 years ago with those living today. He found that the man was genetically midway between Europeans and Asians - indicating he lived close to the time before our species separated into different racial groups.
Prof Paabo was also able to estimate the rate at which human DNA has changed or mutated over the millennia. He found that it was slower than the rate suggested by fossil evidence and similar to what has been observed in families.
"We have caught evolution red handed!" Prof Paabo said gleefully.
This raises the possibility that the very first species of the human line separated from apes 10 or 11 million years ago - rather than the five or six million years ago that genetic evidence had previously suggested.
But he stressed in his research paper that much more analysis was needed before re-dating the emergence of the human line.
"We caution that (mutation) rates may have changed over time and may differ between human populations," he said.
Gregg Prescott, M.S., In5D GuestWhat if EVERYONE was wealthy beyond their wildest dreams and how would that affect our perceived “freedom”?I often use an analogy of freedom as a man walking his dog. The man is the government, you are the dog and the leash is your freedom.And this isn’t even “freedom”. These are “civil liberties”.In an ideal world, there would only be two rules or laws:1. Love everyone. 2. Respect everything.What we are g [...]
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