The head of Russia’s space agency Sunday said the US has rebuffed an offer from Moscow to jointly explore the moon, while announcing a separate contract with NASA for nearly one billion dollars for the International Space Station. Roskosmos chief Anatoly Perminov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency that Russia had proposed pooling resources to explore the moon. ‘We were ready to cooperate but for unknown reasons, the United States have said they will undertake this programme themselves,’ he said. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in December said it envisaged setting up a manned base, possibly on the moon’s south pole, by around 2020, powered by sunlight and perhaps hydrogen and oxygen, with astronauts cruising over the lunar surface in pressurized rovers. Perminov said Roskosmos had meanwhile signed with NASA a ‘contract for nearly one billion dollars’ — an unprecedented sum — to supply cargo shuttles between now and 2011 for the US segment of the International Space Station. The US-led ISS draws upon the scientific and technological resources of 16 nations: Canada, Japan, Russia, 11 nations of the European Space Agency and Brazil.
US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer. The scientists ran a ‘cortical simulator’ that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer. In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains. Now the team is tuning the simulation to make it run faster and to make it more like a real mouse brain. Life signs Brain tissue presents a huge problem for simulation because of its complexity and the sheer number of potential interactions between the elements involved. The three researchers, James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and Dharmendra S Modha, laid out how they went about it in a very short research note entitled ‘Towards Real-Time, Mouse-Scale Cortical Simulations’. Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons each one of which can have up to 8,000 synapses, or connections, with other nerve fibres. Modelling such a system, the trio wrote, puts ‘tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform’. The team, from the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the […]
WASHINGTON — Drawing on a trove of private papers from Hillary Clinton’s best friend, the legendary Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein is to publish a hard-hitting and intimate portrait of the 2008 presidential candidate, which will reveal a number of ‘discrepancies’ in her official story. Bernstein, who was played by Dustin Hoffman in the film All the President’s Men, has spent eight years researching the unauthorised 640-page biography, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. ‘Bernstein reaches conclusions that stand in opposition to what Senator Clinton has said in the past and has written in the past,’ said Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf, which publishes the book on June 19. With the thoroughness for which he is famous, Bernstein spoke to more than 200 of Clinton’s friends, colleagues and adversaries. He stops short of accusing the New York senator of blatantly lying about her past, but has unearthed examples of where she has played fast and loose with the facts about her ‘personal and political life’, according to Knopf. The book could revive the explosive charge, made earlier this year by David Geffen, a former Clinton donor and Hollywood mogul, that ‘the Clintons […]
PORTLAND, Maine — When Maine became the first state in years to enact a law intended to provide universal health care, one of its goals was to cover the estimated 130,000 residents who had no insurance by 2009, starting with 31,000 of them by the end of 2005, the program’s first year. So far, it has not come close to that goal. Only 18,800 people have signed up for the state’s coverage and many of them already had insurance. ‘I think when we first started, in terms of making estimates, we really were kind of groping in the dark,’ said Gov. John E. Baldacci, who this month proposed a host of adjustments. The story of Maine’s health program - which tries to control hospital costs, improve the quality of health care and offer subsidized insurance to low-income people - harbors lessons for the country, as covering the uninsured takes center stage. States, including California, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, have unveiled programs of their own, seeking to balance the needs and interests of individuals, employers, insurers and health care providers. But as Maine tries to reform its reforms, it faces some particular challenges: It has large rural, poor […]
Cancer is set to outpace cardiovascular disease as the leading killer of Canadians, according to Statistics Canada data on mortality rates released yesterday – good news, say medical experts, for the success of new treatments but bad news for rates of developing a serious illness. Over the past quarter century, deaths due to heart disease have steadily declined to 30% in 2004 from 47% in 1979 while deaths attributable to cancer have climbed to 30% from 23% over the same period. The rates were near the point of converging in 2004. But some experts say that cancer likely has already surpassed cardiovascular maladies as the chief cause of death among Canadians since those figures were collected. ‘We probably have crossed over already,’ said Andreas Wielgosz, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at Ottawa Hospital and a spokesman for the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation. He attributed the lower mortality rates among those with cardiovascular problems to major advancements recognizing and treating heart attacks. ‘I think the decline is a combination of factors including better treatment, both surgical and medical and a lot of effort in prevention of disease, particularly in the area of prevention of a recurrence […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
