JERUSALEM — Because a massive and – for at least 90 minutes – peaceful commemoration in Gaza City called by the once dominant Fatah movement in memory of the late Yasser Arafat ended in bloodshed on Monday. Gunfire by the Hamas forces left seven of the demonstrators dead, shocking much of Gaza’s already beleaguered and impoverished 1.4 million population. On the face of it, the shootings serve once again to underline the depth of Palestinian political disunity; with two competing and opposed administrations. One in the West Bank is loyal to Palestine president Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, and another in Gaza, controlled by Hamas which won free and fair elections in January 2006, briefly shared power with Fatah between March and June this year under a coalition deal brokered in Saudi Arabia, and then seized full control of Gaza after a week of bloody infighting that cost more than 100 lives in June. Secondly they can hardly fail to add to the sense of frustration felt by a Gaza public facing ever-deepening poverty, isolation, and for most Gazans imprisonment within its Israeli-controlled borders without even the compensating – if still extremely vague – prospect of the ‘political horizon’ […]
Few scientific fields are as fraught with risk as that of research into human intelligence. The two questions that arise over and over again are ‘is it a result of nature or nurture?’ and ‘to the extent it is nature, does race make a difference?’ Making stupid comments about the second question can be a career-killing move, as James Watson, a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, recently found. He suggested that he was ‘inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa’ because ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours [presumably he meant white people]-whereas all the testing says not really’. Such remarks are not merely offensive, they are scientifically weird. If the term race has any useful scientific meaning, then Africa, the continent where modern humanity began, is the most racially diverse place on the planet. The resulting hoo-ha caused Dr Watson to be eased out of the chancellorship of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, near New York, where he had worked for almost 40 years. Fortunately, the study of links between intelligence and genetics has some wiser practitioners than Dr Watson. One of them, Terrie Moffitt, of King’s […]
CHICAGO — A new method of producing hydrogen gas from biodegradable organic material has been developed, potentially providing an abundant source of clean-burning fuel. The technology offers a way to cheaply and efficiently generate hydrogen from readily available and renewable biomass such as cellulose or glucose, and could be used for powering vehicles, making fertiliser and treating drinking water. Public transport systems Numerous public transportation systems are moving toward hydrogen-powered engines as an alternative to gasoline, but most hydrogen today is generated from non-renewable fossil fuels such as natural gas. The new method developed by engineers at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, U.S., combines electron-generating bacteria and a small electrical charge in a microbial fuel cell to produce hydrogen gas. Microbial fuel cells work through the action of bacteria, which can pass electrons to an anode. The electrons flow from the anode through a wire to the cathode producing an electric current. In the process, the bacteria consume organic matter in the biomass material. An external jolt of electricity helps generate hydrogen gas at the cathode. In the past, the process, which is known as electrohydrogenesis, has had poor efficiency rates and low […]
High oil prices are fueling one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history. Oil consumers are paying $4 billion to $5 billion more for crude oil every day than they did just five years ago, pumping more than $2 trillion into the coffers of oil companies and oil-producing nations this year alone. The consequences are evident in minds and mortar: anger at Chinese motor-fuel pumps and inflated confidence in the Kremlin; new weapons in Chad and new petrochemical plants in Saudi Arabia; no-driving campaigns in South Korea and bigger sales for Toyota hybrid cars; a fiscal burden in Senegal and a bonanza in Brazil. In Burma, recent demonstrations were triggered by a government decision to raise fuel prices. In the United States, the rising bill for imported petroleum lowers already anemic consumer savings rates, adds to inflation, worsens the trade deficit, undermines the dollar and makes it more difficult for the Federal Reserve to balance its competing goals of fighting inflation and sustaining growth. High prices have given a boost to oil-rich Alaska, which in September raised the annual oil dividend paid to every man, woman and child living there for a year to $1,654, an […]
Usually when physicists talk about nonlocality in quantum mechanics, they’re referring to the fact that two particles can have immediate effects on each other, even when separated by large distances. Einstein famously called the phenomena ‘spooky interaction at a distance’ because information about a particle seems to be traveling faster than the speed of light, violating the laws of causality. Although the idea is counterintuitive, nonlocality is now widely accepted by physicists, albeit almost exclusively for two-particle systems. So far, no experiment has sufficiently demonstrated the nonlocality of a single particle, although explanations have been proposed since 1991 (starting with Tan, Walls, and Collett). Since then, the issue has been strongly debated by physicists. In 1994, Lucien Hardy proposed a modified scheme of Tan, Walls, and Collett’s claim. However, others (notably Greenberger, Horne, and Zeilinger) objected to Hardy’s scheme, claiming that it was really a multi-particle effect in disguise, and could not be demonstrated experimentally. Now, Jacob Dunningham from the University of Leeds and Vlatko Vedral from the University of Leeds and the National University of Singapore have modified Hardy’s scheme, publishing their results in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. By eliminating all unphysical inputs, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
