In a modest building on the west side of Salt Lake City, a team of specialists in advanced materials and electrochemistry has produced what could be the single most important breakthrough for clean, alternative energy since Socrates first noted solar heating 2,400 years ago. The prize is the culmination of 10 years of research and testing - a new generation of deep-storage battery that’s small enough, and safe enough, to sit in your basement and power your home. It promises to nudge the world to a paradigm shift as big as the switch from centralized mainframe computers in the 1980s to personal laptops. But this time the mainframe is America’s antiquated electrical grid; and the switch is to personal power stations in millions of individual homes. Former energy secretary Bill Richardson once disparaged the U.S. electrical grid as ‘third world,’ and he was painfully close to the mark. It’s an inefficient, aging relic of a century-old approach to energy and a weak link in national security in an age of terrorism. Taking a load off the grid through electricity production and storage at home would extend the life of the system and avoid the expenditure of […]
An interesting poll from Daily Kos/Research 2000 asks Americans which of the three main cable news channels they watch. Some hypotheses are confirmed right away: Republicans mostly watch Fox (25 percent of them daily), Democrats mostly watch MSNBC (14 percent of them daily), and independents, who don’t particularly watch anything, mostly gravitate towards CNN. The biggest swing region in the poll? The South. In Southern states, 46 percent of viewers say that Fox News is ‘extremely reliable or ‘reliable. Only 6 percent of them say that of MSNBC, compared to 26 percent who say it of CNN, a huge shift from the days when CNN was derided as the ‘Communist/Clinton News Network. And non-white viewers really don’t like Fox. Only 5 percent of African-Americans, 11 percent of Hispanics, and 8 percent of other minorities consider the network reliable, while a majority of every one of those groups trusts CNN and sizable pluralities trust MSNBC.
An Oklahoma judge decided Tuesday that doctors do not need to perform ultrasounds and offer women detailed information about the tests before performing abortions, striking down the strictest such law in the country. Oklahoma County District Judge Vicki L. Robertson ruled that the 2008 law, which included other abortion-related provisions, violated a state constitutional provision that requires laws to address only one subject. Thirteen states regulate the provision of ultrasounds by abortion providers, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health think tank. The provisions have been pushed by abortion opponents as a means of deterring women from having the procedures. The Oklahoma law, which was never enforced, was the first to mandate that any woman seeking an abortion must have an ultrasound and that doctors describe the image in detail, including organs and extremities, even if the woman objects. A Tulsa clinic run by Nova Health Systems, represented by the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, filed a lawsuit charging that the law not only violated the state Constitution’s ‘single-subject’ rule but also infringed on a woman’s right to privacy, violated her dignity and endangered her health. The law could have forced Nova and Oklahoma’s […]
Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases. The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person. ‘You can just engineer a crime scene, said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. ‘Any biology undergraduate could perform this. Dr. Frumkin is a founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes to sell to forensics laboratories. The planting of fabricated DNA evidence at a crime scene is only one implication of the findings. A potential invasion of personal privacy is another. Using some of the same techniques, it may be possible to scavenge anyone’s DNA from a discarded drinking cup or […]
WASHINGTON — Given hardening Republican opposition to congressional health care proposals, Democrats now say they see little chance for the minority’s cooperation in approving any overhaul, and are increasingly focused on drawing support for a final plan from within their own ranks. Top Democrats said Tuesday that their go-it-alone view was being shaped by what they saw as Republicans’ purposely strident tone against health care legislation during this month’s congressional recess, as well as remarks by leading Republicans that current proposals were flawed beyond repair. The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said of Republican lawmakers, ‘Only a handful seem interested in the type of comprehensive reform that so many people believe is necessary to ensure the principles and the goals that the president has laid out.’ The Democratic shift may not make producing a final bill much easier. The party must still reconcile the views of moderate and conservative Democrats worried about the cost and scope of the legislation with those of more progressive lawmakers determined to win a government-run insurance option to compete with private insurers. On the other hand, such a change could alter the dynamic of talks surrounding health care legislation, and even […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
