RICHARD A. LOVETT, - National Geographic News
Stephan:
It’s no illusion: Science has found a way to make not just objects but entire events disappear, experts say.
According to new research by British physicists, it’s theoretically possible to create a material that can hide an entire bank heist from human eyes and surveillance cameras.
‘The concepts are basically quite simple,’ said Paul Kinsler, a physicist at Imperial College London, who created the idea with colleagues Martin McCall and Alberto Favaro.
Unlike invisibility cloaks-some of which have been made to work at very small scales-the event cloak would do more than bend light around an object.
(Also see ‘Acoustic ‘Invisibility’ Cloaks Possible, Study Says.’)
Instead this cloak would use special materials filled with metallic arrays designed to adjust the speed of light passing through.
In theory, the cloak would slow down light coming into the robbery scene while the safecracker is at work. When the robbery is complete, the process would be reversed, with the slowed light now racing to catch back up.
If the ‘before’ and ‘after’ visions are seamlessly stitched together, there should be no visible trace that anything untoward has happened. One second there’s a closed safe, and the next second the safe has been emptied.
Event Cloak ‘Fun’ but Challenging
The concept of an […]
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GREGORY MEYER, - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: This is a confluence of the climate change trend, the extreme weather events it produces, and the coming food crisis trend.
NEW YORK, NY — Half of Dahlen Hancock’s cotton fields are dead. The other half are clinging to life.
The 5,800 acres he farms near Lubbock, Texas, are half irrigated and half at the mercy of the clouds. And the past nine months have been the driest in Texas on record.
The Lone Star state is at the epicentre of a once-in-a-generation drought stretching from Arizona to Florida. The US’s southern underbelly is scorched like meat on a grill.
The drought has spawned wildfires, turning grasslands to ash. In Texas, the leading cotton producer in the US, 59 per cent of the cotton crop is in poor condition or worse. Harvests of hard winter wheat, prized for yeasted breads, have plummeted in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas as yields and acreage contracted. Ranchers cannot feed their cattle on parched pastures.
Mr Hancock, a fourth-generation farmer, says the cotton seeds he planted on his 3,000 dryland acres never germinated. ‘All I see is dry, barren farmland. The weeds really haven’t even grown,
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JOHN CAREY, - Scientific American
Stephan:
In North Dakota the waters kept rising. Swollen by more than a month of record rains in Saskatchewan, the Souris River topped its all time record high, set back in 1881. The floodwaters poured into Minot, North Dakota’s fourth-largest city, and spread across thousands of acres of farms and forests. More than 12,000 people were forced to evacuate. Many lost their homes to the floodwaters.
Yet the disaster unfolding in North Dakota might be bringing even bigger headlines if such extreme events hadn’t suddenly seemed more common. In this year alone massive blizzards have struck the U.S. Northeast, tornadoes have ripped through the nation, mighty rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri have flowed over their banks, and floodwaters have covered huge swaths of Australia as well as displaced more than five million people in China and devastated Colombia. And this year’s natural disasters follow on the heels of a staggering litany of extreme weather in 2010, from record floods in Nashville, Tenn., and Pakistan, to Russia’s crippling heat wave.
These patterns have caught the attention of scientists at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). They’ve been following the recent deluges’ […]
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Stephan: This is part of the active drive to create willful ignorance. This is not happening in any other high technology culture, and it is viewed with consternation by people who live outside of America's borders.
The debate that took place on the floor of the Tennessee House of Representatives in April could not exactly be described as a feast for the intellect.
Legislators were deliberating a bill that would open the door to creationism in public schools by requiring schools to ‘find effective ways
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Stephan: Here is an example of psycho-physical self-regulation at work.
NEW YORK — Inhaling albuterol helps asthmatic lungs work better, but patients who get it don’t feel much better than those treated with a placebo inhaler or phony acupuncture, according to a U.S. study.
The results, which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrate the importance of, literally, caring for patients and not just providing drugs, said co-author Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School.
The findings also demonstrate the impact of the so-called ‘placebo effect,’ or the phenomenon seen in clinical trials when people given inactive, fake ‘treatments,’ such as a sugar pill or saline, show improvements.
‘My honest opinion is that a lot of medicine is the doctor-patient relationship,’ Kaptchuk told Reuters Health.
‘A lot of doctors don’t know that, they think it’s their drugs. Our study demonstrates that the interaction between the two is actually a very strong component of healthcare.’
All of the 39 patients, each of whom had mild-to-moderate asthma, thought the placebos were just as effective as the real therapy.
Those who got albuterol reported a 50 percent improvement in symptoms. The ones who got phony albuterol said they improved by 50 percent as well, while those getting sham acupuncture had a subjective improvement rate of 46 percent.
The only […]
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