Pope calls for cooperation between Christians and Muslims

Pope Benedict XVI today called on Christians and Muslims to serve mankind with the “light of God s truth” while warning that extremists in nations such as Iraq were exploiting religious differences for political and violent agendas.

Speaking at the Hussein bin Talal Mosque the pontiff whose three-day pilgrimage to Jordan is an attempt to mend relations with the Muslim world said the “tensions and divisions between the followers of different religious traditions sadly cannot be denied. However is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion sometimes for political ends that is the real catalyst for tension and division and at times even violence in society “.

The speech before Catholic priests Muslim clerics and Orthodox bishops was brief but the copper-domed mosque offered a symbolic setting for the 82-year-old pope to damp criticism of his comments in 2006 that characterized Islam as a violent religion. Benedict has said he regretted the outrage he caused and made an effort at reconciliation two months later when he prayed silently with imams in the Blue Mosque in Turkey.

Many Muslim leaders in the Arab world feel the pope’s contrition has not been genuine. They also say he has not spoken forcefully enough in behalf of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and has apologized to Jews for the Roman Catholic Church’s past mistakes but has not done the same for historical injustices against Muslims.

Wow. The line I made bold above is the most powerful genuine thing I’ve ever heard this pope say. I’m impressed and a little shocked. This is what people who are turning away from religions of all kinds all around the world believe too.

Ps. It is not really his fault that he looks like Darth Vader’s boss.

Prehistoric man’s cave found in southwest China

A group of construction workers have accidentally stumbled upon a prehistoric man s cave underneath a Buddhist temple in southwest China s Guizhou Province archaeologists said here Friday. The stone structure containing hundreds of mammal fossils and stone implements was between 10 000 and 40 000 years old and presumably dated back either to the end of the Old Stone Age or the start of New Stone Age said Cai Huiyang a top archaeologist with the Guizhou Provincial Museum. “We hired the workers to relocate one of the Buddha statues at an donors s suggestion last month ” said Sheng Guo abbot of Simingdong Temple in Xiuwen County in the northern suburbs of the provincial capital Guiyang. After they removed the statue the workers found a hole about the size of a rice bowl and caught a snake about 6 cm thick he said. “When they dug deeper they found the stone cave and the fossils.” After two weeks of research at the site Cai and his colleagues concluded it was a prehistoric residence of human beings similar to that of the Peking Man found in Beijing early last century. Before this major discovery Cai said archaeologists had found pieces of similar animal fossils and stone implements near the temple. “We re conducting research to see whether the cave should be excavated further in search of human skeletons and other relics.”

The day the universe froze: New dark energy model includes cosmological phase transition

Imagine a time when the entire universe froze. According to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today.

The model, published online May 6 in the journal Physical Review D, was developed by Research Associate Sourish Dutta and Professor of Physics Robert Scherrer at Vanderbilt University, working with Professor of Physics Stephen Hsu and graduate student David Reeb at the University of Oregon.

A cosmological phase transition – similar to freezing – is one of the distinctive aspects of this latest effort to account for dark energy – the mysterious negative force that cosmologists now think makes up more than 70 percent of all the energy and matter in the universe and is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.

Another feature that distinguishes the new formulation is that it makes a testable prediction regarding the expansion rate of the universe. In addition, the micro-explosions created by the largest particle colliders should excite the dark energy field and these excitations could appear as exotic, never-seen-before sub-atomic particles.

“One of the things that is very unsatisfying about many of the existing explanations for dark energy is that they are difficult to test,” says Scherrer, “We designed a model that can interact with normal matter and so has observable consequences.”

The model associates dark energy with something called vacuum energy. Like a number of existing theories, it proposes that space itself is the source of the repulsive energy that is pushing the universe apart. For many years, scientists thought that the energy of empty space averaged zero. But the discovery of quantum mechanics changed this view. According to quantum theory, empty space is filled with pairs of “virtual” particles that spontaneously pop into and out of existence too quickly to be detected.

This sub-atomic activity is a logical source for dark energy because both are spread uniformly throughout space. This distribution is consistent with evidence that the average density of dark energy has remained constant as the universe has expanded. This characteristic is in direct contrast to ordinary matter and energy, which become increasingly dilute as the universe inflates.

The theory is one of those that attribute dark energy to an entirely new field dubbed quintessence. Quintessence is comparable to other basic fields like gravity and electromagnetism, but has some unique properties. For one thing, it is the same strength throughout the universe. Another important feature is that it acts like an antigravity agent, causing objects to move away from each other instead of pulling them together like gravity. …

via The day the universe froze: New dark energy model includes cosmological phase transition.

Pentagon’s Black Budget Grows to More Than $50 Billion

The Pentagon wants to spend just over $50 billion on classified programs next year, newly-released Defense Department budget documents reveal. “That’s the largest-ever sum,” according to Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman, a longtime black-budget seer — a three percent increase over last year’s total.

It makes the Pentagon’s secret operations, including the intelligence budgets nested inside, “roughly equal in magnitude to the entire defense budgets of the UK, France or Japan,” Sweetman adds. All in all, about seven and a half percent of the Defense Department’s total spending is now classified.

Black-world weapons-buying “remains dominated by the single line item,” according to Sweetman. (You can find it under the Air Force’s “other procurement” section, on page F-21 here.) “This year’s number stands just above $16 billion. In inflation-adjusted terms, that’s 240 per cent more than it was ten years ago.”

Many of the secret budgets still remain clandestine, however. In the research budget, the line item for a “Special Program”of the super-secret National Security Agency is a string of zeros. Same goes for an NSA “Cyber Security Initiative” kitty. And don’t even ask about NSA’s “Intelligence Support to Information Operations” account. That’s a blank slate, too.

Some other fun facts, buried in the Pentagon’s just-released budget docs:

* Money for “Directed Energy Technology” — real-life ray gun research — jumps from $62.7 million last year to $105.7 million in 2010.

* Cash for “Prompt Global Strike Capability Development” — weapons that can hit anywhere on the planet, in just a few hours — jumps from $74.1 million to $166.9 million.

* The high-flying Global Hawk drones get an an extra $486.8 million

via Pentagon’s Black Budget Grows to More Than $50 Billion (Updated) | Danger Room.

The giant rubber ‘sea snakes’ could power tens of thousands of homes

It looks and moves like a like a giant snake, but according to scientists this weird device could be generating energy off Britain’s coast within five years.

Each ‘anaconda’, which could be more than 200 yards long and made almost entirely of a rubber tube, may be capable of producing 1MW (megawatt) of power.

The plan is to have ‘shoals’ or ‘schools’ of the devices around the coast, where they would be harnessed to ‘swim’ just below the surface.

Groups of 50 anacondas could each generate enough electricity to power 50,000 homes at an ‘excitingly low’ cost, the developers Checkmate Group said.

A ten-yard version of the anaconda is currently in the final stage of ‘proof of concept’ testing at a 300-yard wave test tank run by QinetiQ in Gosport, Hampshire.

The test tank is the largest in the UK and can simulate the strength and frequency of the ocean waves the device would encounter in the sea.

Checkmate hopes to be testing full-scale devices in the ocean within three years, with the first anacondas in commercial production and deployed off the coast by 2014.

The anaconda is harnessed to the sea floor, and unlike other wave energy machines ‘swims’ head-on to the waves, like a ship in a storm, according to Professor Rod Rainey who came up with the original idea.

via The giant rubber ‘sea snakes’ that could generate electricity for tens of thousands of UK homes | Mail Online.

What Is The Best Way to Turn Plants into Energy?

The environmental case for ethanol from corn continues to weaken. Turning the food crop into ethanol would not be the best use of the energy embedded in the kernels’ carbohydrates, according to a new study in Science. That’s because fermenting corn into ethanol delivers less liquid fuel energy for internal combustion engines than does burning the kernels to generate power for electric motors.

“We had been studying the area of land that would be available to grow crops for energy and we were curious to discover the most efficient use of these crops,” explains environmental engineer Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced, who led the study. “We found that with a given amount of biomass you could produce more transportation and greenhouse gas offsets with electricity than with ethanol.”

The new study shows that burning biomass to produce electricity rather than converting it to ethanol (made from corn kernels or the other parts of the plant, so-called cellulosic ethanol) delivers 81 percent more miles per acre of transportation in electric vehicles than ethanol burned in internal combustion, even taking into account the lifetime costs of the expensive batteries available today. “The input energy to produce an electric vehicle was 1.5 times the energy to produce an [internal combustion vehicle],” Campbell says. “The batteries currently require large energy inputs in the vehicle production component of our life cycle assessment.”

On average, looking at a wide variety of source crops (corn kernels to switchgrass), ways to convert plants to energy, and vehicle sizes (ranging from compact cars to SUVs), bioelectricity delivered 56 percent more energy for transportation per acre, even including the fact that making ethanol produces other useful products, such as cattle feed. To take just one example: a small truck powered by bioelectricity could travel almost 15,000 city and highway miles (24,000 kilometers) compared with just 8,000 comparable miles (13,000 kilometers) for an internal combustion equivalent.

From the atmosphere’s point of view, growing biomass to burn in a power plant and using the electricity to move a car avoids 10 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per acre, or 108 percent more emission offsets than ethanol. “One other aspect of the electricity pathway is that most emissions are concentrated in one location, which provides perhaps an opportunity for more control of the emissions,” Campbell notes. “It also perhaps locates [other air pollution] emissions in a place where impacts might not be as harmful as where cars are driven today.”

via What Is The Best Way to Turn Plants into Energy?: Scientific American.

NASA set for dramatic shuttle rescue

As NASA prepares for its final service call to the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s also preparing for something never attempted in the history of the shuttle program: a rescue operation so dramatic that Hollywood would be hard-pressed to come up with a more outlandish plot.

If the Hubble repair crew due for liftoff on Monday got into the deepest sort of orbital trouble, yet another shuttle would have to be launched into orbit as little as a week later. NASA hasn’t launched two piloted spacecraft so close together in more than 40 years. But that’s just the first act of the drama.

The rescue shuttle, Endeavour, would have to pull within about two dozen yards of the stranded shuttle Atlantis, and then help Atlantis’ crew members make their way across a lifeline to refuge. Then Endeavour, full to capacity, would have to leave Hubble as well as Atlantis behind and return home — but not before Atlantis’ controls are set for a self-destruct sequence.

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The rescue mission, known as STS-400, would be NASA’s last resort for saving the lives of Atlantis’ astronauts in case of emergency. If Atlantis suffers irreparable damage to its thermal protection system — perhaps during ascent, perhaps from a space debris impact, perhaps from other less likely but not impossible hazards — it would no longer be able to return safely to Earth.

Because Atlantis is in an orbit different from that of the international space station, it wouldn’t be able to reach that safe haven, even though the station will periodically zoom below the shuttle. The only hope for survival would be STS-400’s arrival.

STS-400 would be arguably the most perilous journey ever planned for space travelers. And no matter what the outcome, the mission would probably bring the 28-year space shuttle program to an early end.

via NASA set for dramatic shuttle rescue- msnbc.com.