CANTON, Mississippi — Fresh from her victories in three out of four states last week and surging back in the national polls, Hillary Clinton has crafted a new strategy for winning the Democratic nomination which she believes will legitimise her claim to be president. Clinton thinks she can win a majority of the popular vote in primaries and caucuses, even if she cannot overtake Barack Obama, her rival, in the number of ‘pledged’ delegates who will vote to choose the candidate at the Democratic national convention in August. The New York senator has unnerved Obama, who has been left reeling by a series of errors from senior policy advisers. The two opponents face an ugly six-week battle in the run-up to a potentially pivotal primary in Pennsylvania next month. Democrats boosted Obama in Wyoming last night in state caucuses that gave the Illinois senator a comfortable victory. With almost all votes tallied he beat Clinton by 59% to 40%. Not how many delegates, but how good Democratic ‘superdelegates’ could hand Hillary Clinton the nomination even if she is still trailing in August, says Tim Hames * Hillary Clinton hints at a […]
File this under futuristic (and perhaps a little scary): In a step toward one day perhaps deciphering visions and dreams, new research unveils an algorithm that can translate the activity in the minds of humans. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, report in Nature today that they have developed a method capable of decoding the patterns in visual areas of the brain to determine what someone has seen. Needless to say, the potential implications for society are sweeping. ‘This general visual decoder would have great scientific and practical use,’ the researchers say. ‘We could use the decoder to investigate differences in perception across people, to study covert mental processes such as attention, and perhaps even to access the visual content of purely mental phenomena such as dreams and imagery.’ The scientists say that previous attempts to extract ‘mental content from brain activity’ only allowed them to decode a finite number of patterns. Researchers would feed image to an individual (or ask them to think about an object) one at a time and then look for a corresponding brain activity pattern. ‘You would need to know [beforehand], for each thought you want to read out, what kind […]
One day last fall, a young Israeli woman named Sharon went with her fiancé to the Tel Aviv Rabbinate to register to marry. They are not religious, but there is no civil marriage in Israel. The rabbinate, a government bureaucracy, has a monopoly on tying the knot between Jews. The last thing Sharon expected to be told that morning was that she would have to prove - before a rabbinic court, no less - that she was Jewish. It made as much sense as someone doubting she was Sharon, telling her that the name written in her blue government-issue ID card was irrelevant, asking her to prove that she was she. Sharon is a small woman in her late 30s with shoulder-length brown hair. For privacy’s sake, she prefers to be identified by only her first name. She grew up on a kibbutz when kids were still raised in communal children’s houses. She has two brothers who served in Israeli combat units. She loved the green and quiet of the kibbutz but was bored, and after her own military service she moved to the big city, which is the standard kibbutz story. Now she is a Tel Aviv professional […]
They may not be gas-guzzlers, but electric cars have a raging thirst for water. A comparison of the volume of coolant water used in the thermoelectric power plants that provide most of our electricity and that used in extracting and refining petroleum suggests that electric vehicles require significantly more water per mile than those powered by gasoline. The findings could bode ill for drought stricken areas in the event of a large scale switch to plug-in vehicles. ‘I wouldn’t sound the alarm that this is going to ruin the day,’ says Carey King from the University of Texas, Austin, US, noting that no mass-market electric vehicle is currently available. ‘But looking into the future, this is something we should take into account.’ Dry cooling King and colleagues found that cars, light trucks, and SUVs running off the electric grid consume three times more water and withdraw 17 times more water per mile than their equivalent gasoline-powered vehicles. For electricity generation, ‘consumed’ water is the amount of water lost to evaporation whereas ‘withdrawn’ water is the amount of surface water a power plant uses and later returns to its source, typically a nearby lake or river. […]
A four-monthly jab may one day replace the need to regularly take pills to control blood pressure, scientists say. A team from the Swiss biotechnology firm Cytos found the vaccine against a hormone in the blood significantly cut blood pressure, the Lancet reported. The jab was tested on 72 patients with high blood pressure and it was found to work without serious side-effects. The researchers and independent experts said the findings were promising but large-scale trials were now needed. High blood pressure, which affects a quarter of all adults, doubles the risk of dying from heart disease or stroke and is blamed for 60,000 deaths a year in UK. Those who are being treated for it often have to take a daily course of pills to keep it under control. But many people do not keep to their treatment regimes as people with high blood pressure do not display symptoms. The researchers believe the vaccine, which works against the hormone angiotensin, which causes blood vessels to constrict and increase blood pressure, may offer a simple alternative. They tested two different doses of the vaccine – 300 microgrammes and 100 microgrammes – as […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
