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At least 147 people have been killed in a stampede at a Hindu temple in the north-western Indian state of Rajasthan, the state government says.

Scores more were injured, many seriously, in the crush at the Chamunda Devi temple in Jodhpur.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday signed into law a measure banning motorists from text messaging and e-mailing while operating a vehicle.
The law, written by Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, takes effect Jan. 1.

Sept. 23 (Bloomberg) — Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion plan to buy devalued assets from financial companies is “a joke” because it doesn’t go far enough to calm markets, said Kenichi Ohmae, president of Business Breakthrough Inc.

Developed by Dr. Klaus Lackner these synthetic trees could be used as CO2 scrubbers cleaning our air. Using a chemical reaction to pull carbon dioxide from the air this technology could buy the world time to development and implement alternative energy sources.

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The idea is that air would flow through the vanes of these structures. Flowing through sodium hydroxide (NaOH) which is inside the synthetic tree CO2 would chemically react to create sodium carbonate liquid which condenses and collects at the bottom of the synthetic tree. This would be the storage mechanism for excess CO2 in the atmosphere.

Then what? Well the condensed liquid would be pumped into porous rock below the sea bed using oil drilling technology. There the carbon would be stored for millions of years.

Lackner states that one tree could scrub 90,000 tons of C02 from the air per year. Unlike a real tree no oxygen is released from the synthetic tree but the carbon sink principle is comparable to real trees. This technology is a band aid on the problem of fossil fuel use but as Lackner intends it could buy time and reduce existing carbon levels in our atmosphere.

As for now it is a sketch and a prototype but the synthetic tree is a potential remedy for our carbon problems.
[tags]synthetic trees, environmental trees, new tech trees, synthetic trees CO2[/tags]

Up to 30 more airlines will go bankrupt before Christmas, the chief executive of British Airways warned yesterday, as the biggest rescue of stranded passengers in travel industry history began.

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Willie Walsh said the scenes of chaos in which 85,000 passengers have been stranded at locations around the world after the collapse of XL, Britain’s third largest holiday company,

A freight train collided with a rush-hour commuter train in Los Angeles on Friday evening, killing at least 18 people and injuring scores of others, many of them critically. The crash was potentially the deadliest accident in the history of the Southern California commuter trains.

Sharing a bed with someone could reduce your brain power – at least temporarily and if you are a man – Austrian scientists suggest.

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When men spend the night with a bed mate their sleep is disturbed and this impairs their mental ability the next day. In addition, the resulting lack of sleep also increases a man’s stress hormone levels. Women who share a bed, on the other hand, tend to fare better because they sleep more deeply.

Professor Gerhard Kloesch and colleagues at the University of Vienna studied eight unmarried, childless couples in their 20s. Each couple was asked to spend 10 nights sleeping together and 10 apart while the scientists assessed their rest patterns with questionnaires and wrist activity monitors. The next day the couples were asked to perform simple cognitive tests and had their stress hormone levels checked. Although the men reported they had slept better with a partner, they fared worse in the tests, with their results suggesting they actually had more disturbed sleep.

Both sexes had a more disturbed night’s sleep when they shared their bed. But women apparently managed to sleep more deeply when they did eventually drop off, since they claimed to be more refreshed than their sleep time suggested. Their stress hormone levels and mental scores did not suffer to the same extent as the men. Nevertheless, the women still reported that they had the best sleep when they were alone in bed.

Dr Neil Stanley, a sleep expert at the University of Surrey, said: “It’s not surprising that people are disturbed by sleeping together. Historically, we have never been meant to sleep in the same bed as each other. It is a bizarre thing to do. Sleep is the most selfish thing you can do and it’s vital for good physical and mental health. Sharing the bed space with someone who is making noises and who you have to fight with for the duvet is not sensible. If you are happy sleeping together that’s great, but if not there is no shame in separate beds.”
Source:Current.com
[tags]share bed brain drain, sharing bed partners, new partner study[/tags]

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a “preliminary inquiry” into how an outdated bankruptcy story sparked a $1 billion run on an airline’s stock value.

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The article about how United Airlines filed for bankruptcy in 2002 was revived when it showed up on a newspaper site’s “most viewed” section on Monday.

The scientists behind the £4.4bn atom smasher had already received threatening emails and been besieged by telephone calls from worried members of the public concerned by speculation that the machine could trigger a black hole to swallow the earth, or earthquakes and tsunamis, despite endless reassurances to the contrary from the likes of Prof Stephen Hawking.

Now it has emerged that, as the first particles were circulating in the machine near Geneva, a Greek group had hacked into the facility and displayed a page with the headline “GST: Greek Security Team.”

The people responsible signed off: “We are 2600 – dont mess with us. (sic)”

The website – cmsmon.cern.ch – can no longer be accessed by the public as a result of the attack.

Scientists working at Cern, the organisation that runs the vast smasher, were worried about what the hackers could do because they were “one step away” from the computer control system of one of the huge detectors of the machine, a vast magnet that weighs 12,500 tons, measuring around 21 metres in length and 15 metres wide/high.

If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector and, said the insider, “it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it.”

Fortunately, only one file was damaged but one of the scientists firing off emails as the CMS team fought off the hackers said it was a “scary experience”.

The hackers targeted the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, or CMS, one of the four “eyes” of the facility that will be analysing the fallout of the Big Bang.

The CMS team of around 2,000 scientists is racing with another team that runs the Atlas detector, also at Cern, to find the Higgs particle, one that is responsible for mass.
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“There seems to be no harm done. From what they can tell, it was someone making the point that CMS was hackable,” said James Gillies, spokesman for Cern. “It was quickly detected.”

“We have several levels of network, a general access network and a much tighter network for sensitive things that operate the LHC,” said Gillies.

“We are a very visible site,” he said, adding that of the 1.4 million emails sent to Cern yesterday, 98 per cent was spam.

The hacking attempt started around the time that the giant machine was about to circulate its first particles, under the spotlight of the world’s media.

On Wednesday afternoon, as the world held its breath as the machine sparked up, CMS team members were scouring computers at the machine for half a dozen files uploaded by the hackers on September 9 and 10.

“We think that someone from Fermilab’s Tevatron (the competing atom smasher in America) had their access details compromised,” said one of the scientists working on the machine. “What happened wasn’t a big deal, just goes to show people are out there always on the prowl.”

The CMS team studied the files inserted by the hackers carefully before deleting, in case a “backdoor” had been installed, a means of access to the computer that bypasses security.

The system the hackers managed to access was CMSMON, which monitors the CMS software system as the vast detector takes data, during collisions between particles to study the energies and physics in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, which created the universe.

Cern relies on a ‘defence-in-depth’ strategy, separating control networks and using firewalls and complex passwords, to protect its control systems from malicious software, such as denial-of-service attacks, botnets and zombie machines, which can strike with a synchronised attack from hundreds of machines around the world.

However, there have been growing concerns about security as remote or wireless access, notebooks and USB sticks offer new possibilities for a virus or worms to enter the network, not to mention hackers and terrorists who might be interested in targeting computers to shutdown the system.

More than 110 different control systems are used at Cern. These systems monitor, supervise and safeguard Cern’s accelerators, experiments and infrastructure – from buildings, electricity and heating to access control, radiation protection and safety.

To refine security methods Cern set up a working group called Computing and Network Infrastructure for Controls. One document written by the group said: “Recent events show that computer security issues are becoming a serious problem also at Cern.”

However, the team said yesterday that it did not want to comment on security at the international facility.

A few years ago, Stanford University in California announced that a number of high-performance academic computer centres had been attacked by hackers lured by the phenomenal power of the grid – pools of computing power linked by dedicated high-speed networks. Beyond shutting down the machines or stealing or deleting data, one likely malicious use of such power is to crack passwords.

In 2003, hackers broke into ScotGrid, a network of 150 machines based at the University of Glasgow. They intercepted the password of a remote user based in Geneva and used it to gain access to ScotGrid. They ran scripts that tried to reconfigure the machine to steal more passwords.

The commissioning of the giant machine is making extraordinary progress.

Now that the team has managed to get beams of particles circulating stably, they must be “captured” so that the particles stay in bunches.

This has now been done with the anticlockwise beam, circulating a beam for full half an hour. Commissioning, said Gillies, “is going incredibly fast.” They now hope to capture the second clockwise beam. “To give you a feel for how well these guys are doing, what happened on Wednesday was days one to four of main commissioning.”

This latest step “is really a more significant achievement than Wednesday’s fun and games,” comments Dr David Sankey of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire.
[tags]hackers lhc, hack large hadron collider, lhc hacked[/tags]

Source:Telegraph.co.uk

From the flagellants of the Middle Ages to the doomsayers of Y2K, humanity has always been prone to good old-fashioned the-end-is-nigh hysteria. The latest cause for concern: that the earth will be destroyed and the galaxy gobbled up by an ever-increasing black hole next week.

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On Sept. 10, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, will switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — a $6 billion particle accelerator that will send beams of protons careening around a 17-mile underground ring, crash them into each other to re-create the immediate aftereffects of the Big Bang, and then monitor the debris in the hope of learning more about the origins and workings of the universe. Next week marks a low-power run of the circuit, and scientists hope to start smashing atoms at full power by the end of the month.

Critics of the LHC say the high-energy experiment might create a mini black hole that could expand to dangerous, Earth-eating proportions. On Aug. 26, Professor Otto Rossler, a German chemist at the Eberhard Karis University of Tubingen, filed a lawsuit against CERN with the European Court of Human Rights that argued, with no understatement, that such a scenario would violate the right to life of European citizens and pose a threat to the rule of law. Last March, two American environmentalists filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Honolulu seeking to force the U.S. government to withdraw its participation in the experiment. The lawsuits have in turn spawned several websites, chat rooms and petitions — and led to alarming headlines around the world (Britain’s Sun newspaper on Sept. 1: “End of the World Due in 9 Days”).

Should we be scared? No. In June, CERN published a safety report, reviewed by a group of external scientists, ruling out the possibility of dangerous black holes. It said that even if tiny black holes were to be formed at CERN — a big if — they would evaporate almost instantaneously due to Hawking Radiation, a phenomenon named for the British physicist Stephen Hawking, whose theories show that black holes not only swallow up the light, energy and matter around them, but also leak it all back out at an accelerating pace. According to Hawking, if tiny black holes occurred at CERN, they would evaporate before they got a chance to do any damage. (Even if Hawking’s theories prove to be wrong — no one has yet witnessed black-hole evaporation — scientists at CERN say the LHC’s collisions are already known to be harmless: an equivalent amount of energy is produced hundreds of thousands of times a day by cosmic rays colliding with the earth and other objects in the cosmos — always without incident.)

After taking in the results of CERN’s report, the European Court rejected Rossler’s request last week for an emergency injunction that would have stopped the LHC (it will still hear his lawsuit). The U.S. suit is pending, but CERN spokesman James Gillies said that even if it is successful the experiment will go ahead without U.S. participation.

“The U.S. court has no jurisdiction over our equipment. It could pull American scientists out of the experiment, but that would just be a great shame for them. The LHC presents no risk. What it does do is hold the promise of substantially enriching humanity by providing insight into the mysteries of the universe. It’s a tremendously exciting time for physicists here and around the world,” he said.

Scientists believe the LHC’s results will help fill in gaps in the Standard Model, the far-reaching set of equations on the interaction of subatomic particles that is the closest that modern physics comes to a testable “theory of everything.” For example, scientists believe the LHC will produce a particle, the Higgs Boson, that will end debate over how matter in the universe acquires mass. Or, it could even provide evidence for more ambitious theories of the universe, such as string theory, which unites quantum mechanics and general relativity, the previously known laws of the small and large that are currently incompatible in the Standard Model.

Despite these exciting prospects, however, physicists studying the cosmos at CERN and other accelerators still face a fundamental dilemma: to explain the awesome scale of their work while calming the public’s inevitable trepidation. There remains a credibility gap surrounding high-profile physics, after all: The most tangible results of atomic research in the last 50 years have been bombs capable of ending all life on earth. CERN officials refer to the laboratory as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics because they feel “nuclear” in the literal translation carries negative implications, and tour guides at the LHC are quick to point out that the accelerator has no weapons applications.

But it’s not just physicists whose work provokes strong and often irrational fear, according to Professor Robin Williams, director of the Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation at the University of Edinburgh. He points out that the millennial anxiety about scientific and technological breakthroughs predates particle physics. When the locomotive was first conceived, for example, even some engineers predicted catastrophe resulting from the human body’s inability to withstand the strains of high-speed travel. The word “vaccine” comes from the Latin word for cow, “vacca” — the first vaccinations, against smallpox, used bovine ingredients, leading to widespread fear that the injections would turn humans into cows.

But Williams also believes that the flip side of such fear is faith in the redemptive potential of science (there are equally irrational websites about CERN, for example, that predict the LHC will create wormholes to distant corners of the universe where humanity can escape to other inhabitable planets). Williams wrote in an e-mail: “I have come to see that in their early days, new technology and scientific breakthroughs often serve as Rorschach tests — a phenomenon about which we have little concrete understanding, onto which contemporary social anxieties (and dreams) can readily be projected. As a result we find (often polarized) utopian and dystopian visions being articulated.” Humanity will certainly survive the LHC’s experiment, Williams added, but so too will its darkest fears about its own destructive potential, and hope for its future.
[tags]cern activated, cern turned on, LHC dead, large hadron collider[/tags]
Source: Time.com