Every dog lover knows how a pooch expresses its feelings. Ears close to the head, tense posture, and tail straight out from the body means ‘don’t mess with me.’ Ears perked up, wriggly body and vigorously wagging tail means ‘I am sooo happy to see you!’ But there is another, newly discovered, feature of dog body language that may surprise attentive pet owners and experts in canine behavior. When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left. A study describing the phenomenon, ‘Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli,’ appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and two veterinarians, Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi, at the University of Bari, also in Italy. ‘This is an intriguing observation,’ said Richard J. Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It fits with a large body of research showing emotional asymmetry in the brain, he said. Research has […]
Panic selling of Spanish real estate stocks this week sent shudders through property markets worldwide. As investors bet that Spain’s 10-year construction boom is finally over, we take a look at global property hotspots to see who will be the next casualty. Spain For Brits fantasising about sipping sangria while watching the value of their Spanish holiday-home soar, the dream is over. After five years of double-digit growth, house prices rose by a relatively modest 9 per cent in 2006 and are expected to slow dramatically this year. A constant stream of bad news has shaken foreign buyer confidence in Spanish property, while relatively high prices and competition from cheaper destinations such as Morocco and Bulgaria has drained demand. Corruption scandals linked to property deals have been rife – in Marbella, several municipal councillors are in jail awaiting trial for allegedly taking kick-backs. Mark Stucklin, who runs the Spanish Property Insight consultancy, believes house prices in many parts of Spain will stagnate this year, and stagnate or fall next year. ‘I think attractive properties in good areas and on the best developments will hold their value in the short-term, and deliver solid returns in the long-term. […]
2Red Herring reports that SRI International has licensed technology to produce lower cost solar-grade silicon to three Asian companies and that pilot plants could be up and running in 18 months. SRI’s technology promises to make solar-grade silicon for $14 per kilogram, less than half the price of competing technologies, Mr. Dubois says. SRI claims its process produces silicon with almost no impurities (0.02 parts per million) at one-tenth the energy and one-fifth the capital costs of the conventional Siemens process used by most of the big polysilicon manufacturers. So far, SRI’s technology has only been used in the lab. But analysts say that, with contract prices rising up to $85 per kilogram and non-contract prices skyrocketing to $200 per kilogram, companies are willing to try new technologies. A 1986 patent by A. Sanjurjo, assigned to SRI, is described as follows: Apparatus is described for producing low cost, high purity solar grade silicon ingots in single crystal or quasi single crystal ingot form in a substantially continuous operation in a two stage reactor starting with sodium fluosilicate and a metal more electropositive than silicon (preferably sodium) in separate compartments having easy vapor transport there between and […]
LONDON — Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on ‘carbon credit’ projects that yield few if any environmental benefits. A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place. Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway. The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a ‘green gold rush’, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go ‘carbon neutral’, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming. The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period. The FT investigation found: â– Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions. â– Industrial companies profiting from doing very little […]
Up to 70% of files exchanged between Saudi teenagers’ mobile phones contain pornography, according to a study in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom. The study quoted in Arab News focussed on the phones of teenagers detained by religious police for harassing girls. The same researcher also found that 88% of girls say they have been victims of harassment using Bluetooth technology. Saudi Arabia has toughened penalties for misuse of mobile phones which challenge its strict social traditions. ‘The flash memory of mobile phones taken from teenagers showed 69.7% of 1,470 files saved in them were pornographic and 8.6% were related to violence,’ said report author Professor Abdullah al-Rasheed. He presented his study at a seminar organised by the King Fahd Security Academy, Arab News reports. Public social contact between genders is banned in public in Saudi Arabia, which enforces a strict interpretation of Islamic law and morality. But the spread of Bluetooth technology, allowing wireless connection between mobile phones, has allowed for increased opportunities of communication as well as abuse by predatory young men.
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
