In a further sign of the United States’ growing diversity, nonwhites now make up a majority in almost one-third of the most-populous counties in the country and in nearly one in 10 of all 3,100 counties, according to an analysis of census results to be released today. The shift reflects the growing dispersal of immigrants and the suburbanization of blacks and Hispanics pursuing jobs generated by whites moving to the fringes of metropolitan areas. From July 1, 2005, to July 1, 2006, metropolitan Chicago edged out Honolulu in Asian population, and Washington inched ahead of El Paso in the number of Hispanic residents. In black population, Houston overtook Los Angeles. ‘The new wave of immigration, along with its continued dispersal to the suburbs and Sun Belt, is transforming the places which are now being classified as multiethnic and majority minority,’ said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. ‘The new melting pots are not large international gateways,’ Professor Frey said, adding, ‘Rather, many are fast-growing suburbs themselves.’ In 36 counties with more than 500,000 residents each, non-Hispanic whites are now a minority, up from 29 counties of that size in 2000. From […]
WASHINGTON — China and the United States have agreed on measures to improve the safety of Chinese exports of food and drugs after a wave of scandals involving tainted products. The move could reduce tensions between the world’s biggest consumer and exporter. Beijing has cited its own safety concerns in blocking imports of US food, but officials and commentators here have seen the action as retaliation for US rejection of Chinese goods. Chinese authorities and visiting US officials agreed on an initial framework to strengthen product safety standards and their enforcement, the state-run Xinhua news agency said on Saturday. Details of the agreement, reached with a delegation of senior officials of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), remained to be spelled out. Washington and Beijing sought ‘to increase cooperation and information-sharing between the US and Chinese governments on these safety issues and, at the request of the Chinese, to enhance the technical capacity of China’s regulatory agencies to help ensure Chinese exports to the United States meet US safety standards’, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said in an earlier statement. China has held similar talks with […]
Don’t Try to Hack the Hackers. That’s what Dateline NBC’s Associate Producer Michelle Madigan learned at this year’s DefCon, the largest gathering of hackers, crackers and security professionals in the world. Going undercover, she hoped to reveal cybercriminals talking openly about their illegal exploits. Instead, the sting backfired: A conference organizer outed her in a room filled with thousands of her would-be targets. The crowd, usually a friendly group despite some vampirish clothes and complexions, wasn’t pleased. As a few chanted ‘burn the witch,’ Madigan scurried out of the Riviera Hotel to her car, with about 150 hackers-turned-hecklers in pursuit. DefCon’s inhospitable treatment of Madigan wasn’t just because she was missing a press badge, says one conference spokesman who goes by the handle ‘Priest.’ She had also missed the point. By focusing on the bad apples, Priest says, Madigan was glossing over DefCon’s true spirit: smart people getting together to mess around with technology. ‘Middle America thinks we’re stealing your social security numbers, raping your children and breaking into your bank account,’ he says. ‘The reality is, we are the ultimate explorers. We see a technology, and we want to know how it works.’ That […]
Could all our blunders be reversed, our failings eliminated? Perhaps so, if an Israeli scientist’s research is to be believed. With the help of Prof. Amos Ori, we might just be able to go back and stop the screw-ups from happening in the first place. Ori, a physicist from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, has come up with what he says are practical solutions to overcome the hindrances that experts have long regarded as stopping us from traveling back in time. In a paper published in the latest issue of the Physical Review journal, the scientist offers a theoretical model, based on mathematical equations describing conditions that, if established, could help lead to the development of a time machine of sorts. But rather than building an actual device, Ori explains that ‘the machine is space-time itself.’ Time travel research is based on bending space-time so far that the time lines actually warp back on themselves to form a loop. ‘We know that bending does happen all the time, but we want the bending to be strong enough and to take a special form where the lines of time make closed loops,’ explains Ori. ‘We […]
Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists. Beijing saleswoman demonstrates toy which levitates by magnetic force; Physicists have ‘solved’ mystery of levitation. In theory the discovery could be used to levitate a person In earlier work the same team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible. Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an ‘incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together. Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts. Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person. The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
