British researchers believe that they have made a groundbreaking scientific discovery after apparently managing to ‘create’ energy from hydrogen atoms. In results independently verified at Bristol University, a team from Gardner Watts – an environmental technology company based in Dedham, Essex – show a ‘thermal energy cell’ which appears to produce hundreds of times more energy than that put into it. If the findings are correct and can be reproduced on a commercial scale, the thermal energy cell could become a feature of every home, heating water for a fraction of the cost and cutting fuel bills by at least 90 per cent. The makers of the cell, which passes an electric current through a liquid between two electrodes, admit that they cannot explain precisely how the invention works. They insist, however, that their cell is not just a repeat of the notorious ‘cold fusion’ debacle of the late 1980s. Then two scientists claimed to have found a way of generating nuclear energy from a similar-looking device at room temperature. The findings were widely challenged and the scientists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, accused of incompetence, fled America to set up labs in France. ‘We are absolutely […]
A ‘Surveillance Society Clock’ created by the American Civil Liberties Union will symbolize the encroachment of government spying on private citizens as part of the war against terrorism - and the ticktock is fast approaching midnight. ‘The extinction of privacy is a real possibility,’ said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project. ‘We believe that privacy is not yet dead - it is a patient on life support.’ The online clock is patterned after the ‘Doomsday Clock,’ created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 to warn against a nuclear holocaust. Midnight symbolized a total ‘1984’-style ‘surveillance society.’ ‘Every generation deserves its own clock,’ Mr. Steinhardt said in a teleconference yesterday announcing the project and a new report on mass surveillance by the government. He said that an explosive increase in new technology and data mining is fueling the trend and creating a false sense of security - from satellites to national-identity systems, the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program, DNA data-banking and Web search engines that store every query, even satellites. ‘The false security of a surveillance society threatens to turn our country into a place where individuals are […]
More American adults are leaving public restrooms without washing their hands, and the worst offenders are men, a new survey found. Researchers who staked out public potties found that one-third of men didn’t bother to wash after using the bathroom, compared with 12% of women. Two years ago, the last time the survey was done, only one-quarter of men didn’t wash, compared with 10% of women. ‘Guys need to step up to the sink,’ said Brian Sansoni, spokesman for the Soap and Detergent Association, which co-sponsors the survey and related education campaigns. The American Society of Microbiology, a group of infectious disease researchers, released the results of the latest survey today at a news conference in Chicago. It said men in particular need to get better acquainted with soap and water in order to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. ‘We want people to understand how inexpensive and how valuable hand-washing is,’ said Judy Daly, a University of Utah pathologist and spokeswoman for the American Society of Microbiology. ‘We’re trying every avenue to find a way to educate people about the importance of hand-washing.’ The study observed 6,076 people in public restrooms in […]
Investors should brace themselves for a prolonged period of market turmoil, Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, said yesterday as he held emergency meetings with the Chancellor and the French Finance Minister. Mr Paulson flew to London to discuss the financial crisis with Alistair Darling as markets remained in the grip of anxieties over the continuing toll from the global credit squeeze. Speaking after talks with his counterparts in France and Britain, Mr Paulson insisted that the global economy remained strong despite the seizures in interbank lending, but admitted that the American economy would take a knock from the turmoil. After meeting Christine Lagarde, the French Finance Minister, Mr Paulson said: ‘It will take a while to work through the turbulence in capital markets.’ Mr Paulson acknowledged that bad lending practices were to blame for the present financial crisis, which has been triggered by the high number of American homeowners falling into arrears on their mortgages. However, he added that ‘the whole world, including the US, has benefited from . . . credit availability’. Ms Lagarde had called for new rules to prevent a repeat of the credit turmoil, but Mr Paulson argued that […]
Former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan predicted in his memoir that the world’s economic fate depends on China and its market economic development by the year of 2030. ‘If China continues to press ahead toward free-market economy, it will surely propel the world to new levels of prosperity，’ Greenspan wrote in ‘The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.’ ‘Much of how the world will look in 2030 rests on this outcome,’ said the legendary US central bank chief. Greenspan retired in January 2006 after more than 18 years as chairman of the Fed, the US central bank, which regulates monetary policy. He also praised China for creating ‘a huge change in the world economy’ after shifting toward market economy. ‘It went into a seriously impressive disinflation, which brought all interest rates down, made a huge boom in the economy, a huge increase in assets,’ Greenspan said in a Fortune interview. China’s economy is enjoying its fifth straight year of double-digit economic growth, with the growth for the first half of this year hit 11.5 percent, according to statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics. The country has soared to be the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
