Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have made a polymer material that can heal itself repeatedly when it cracks. It’s a significant advance toward self-healing medical implants and self-repairing materials for use in airplanes and spacecraft. It could also be used for cooling microprocessors and electronic circuits, and it could pave the way toward plastic coatings that regenerate themselves. The first self-healing material was reported by the UIUC researchers six years ago, and other research groups have created different versions of such materials since then, including polymers that mend themselves repeatedly when subject to heat or pressure. But this is the first time anyone has made a material that can repair itself multiple times without any external intervention, says Nancy Sottos, materials-science and engineering professor at UIUC and one of the researchers who led the work. ‘It’s essentially like giving life to a plastic,’ says Chris Bielawski, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The ultimate goal would be to create materials that mend themselves, he says, and ‘this is an amazing proof of concept.’ Sottos and her colleagues have designed the new material, reported in this week’s Nature Materials, to […]
WASHINGTON — The White House’s former political director was furious at Justice Department officials for disclosing to Congress that the administration had forced out the U.S. attorney in Little Rock, Ark., to make way for a protege of Karl Rove, President Bush’s political adviser, according to documents released late Tuesday. Then-White House political affairs director Sara Taylor spelled out her frustrations in a Feb. 16 e-mail to Kyle Sampson, then the chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. She sent the message after Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty told the Senate that unlike other federal prosecutors, U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins wasn’t fired for performance reasons, but to make way for former Republican political operative Tim Griffin. Griffin, serving as the interim U.S. attorney, then announced that he wouldn’t seek confirmation to the Arkansas post, but would remain until the Senate confirmed someone else. Griffin has since resigned. ‘Tim was put in a horrible position; hung out to dry w/ no heads up,’ Taylor lashed out in the e-mail, which was sent from a Republican Party account rather than from her White House e-mail address. ‘This is not good for his long-term career.’ The Taylor e-mail […]
On a warm and rainy Thursday evening in July 1941, inside a War Department office in Washington, a small group of Army officers hastily assembled for a meeting and listened in disbelief to the secret plan outlined by their commander. The general spoke in the velvety Southern accent of his native Arkansas. He was not in uniform — Army policy kept officers in civilian clothes so as to disguise from Congress the burgeoning military population in Washington — but he cut an immaculate figure, with his trim build, combed-back, graying hair and neatly groomed mustache. Over the past eight months, the officers of the Army’s Construction Division had grown accustomed to bold and quick action from their chief. At age 49, Brig. Gen. Brehon Burke Somer-vell had earned a reputation as a smooth but ruthless operator. ‘Dynamite in a Tiffany box’ was how an associate later described him. Now Somervell turned his eyes — ‘the keenest, shrewdest, most piercing eyes one is likely to meet,’ in the words of one observer — toward his chief of design, Lt. Col. Hugh ‘Pat’ J. Casey. The War Department needed a new headquarters, Somervell said. The building he wanted to create […]
In another harsh rebuke to the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism strategy, a divided federal appeals panel ruled Monday that the government cannot detain U.S. residents indefinitely without charging them by declaring them enemy combatants. The three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the nation’s most conservative, also ruled that the government should charge Ali al-Marri or release him from military custody. ‘Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them ‘enemy combatants,” the court said. Such detention ‘would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution - and the country,’ Judge Diana G. Motz wrote in the majority opinion. The court also found that the federal Military Commissions Act doesn’t strip Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident and the only alleged enemy combatant held on American soil, of his constitutional right to challenge his accusers in court. Al-Marri’s lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz, of the Brennan Center for Justice, said the decision protects both U.S. citizens and legal aliens and shows that the Bush administration ‘can’t […]
It is called Atlas, after the Greek god who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders: 150 feet long, 82 feet high and weighing 7000 tonnes, this mammoth machine has been designed to measure particles so small you can fit hundreds of billions of them into a beam narrower than a human hair. For the next few months, PhD students and Nobel prize winners will hurry around it like Lilliputians tending a giant. Every pipe, magnet and sensor will be tested and tested again. Then the machine will be switched on, and the world will hold its breath: the search for the so-called ‘God particle’ will start. Some of nature’s deepest secrets will be investigated: What is dark matter? Why is the universe expanding? What are its building blocks? Located at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva, the world’s largest particle accelerator has taken 25 years to plan and £1.5 billion to build. When up and running, it will fire two beams of proton particles in opposite directions around a 17-mile ring some 300 feet under the earth’s surface. Travelling in a vacuum, the beams will approach the speed of light, making 11,245 […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
