Army bomb disposal expert killed on final day of Afghanistan tour

An army bomb disposal expert who saved countless lives in Afghanistan was killed on his final mission in the warzone.

Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid, 30, died instantly when a roadside bomb he was trying to disarm blew up.

The Improvised Explosive Devices are the favoured weapon of the Taliban and since June Sergeant Schmid had successfully dealt with 64 of them.

Senior military officers described the Royal Logistics Corps warrior as a ‘legend’ who ‘stared death in the face on a daily basis’.

He was on his last operational day of a five-month stint when he lost his life. He was due to fly home for a two-week break with his family this Saturday before returning to Afghanistan for a final month.

Offering a chilling insight into the mortal dangers he faced, Sergeant Schmid – nicknamed ‘Oz’ – told ITN News before he deployed of the gruelling ‘mental, emotional and physical challenge’ of disarming bombs.

via Army bomb disposal expert killed on final day of Afghanistan tour | Mail Online.

Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart (With sample questions)

IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It’s a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush’s IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and “as a result ill-informed”. The political pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough accused him of lacking intellectual depth, claiming that compared with other US presidents whose intellect had been questioned, Bush junior was “in a league by himself”. Bush himself has described his thinking style as “not very analytical”.

How can someone with a high IQ have these kinds of intellectual deficiencies? Put another way, how can a “smart” person act foolishly? Keith Stanovich, professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, has grappled with this apparent incongruity for 15 years. He says it applies to more people than you might think. To Stanovich, however, there is nothing incongruous about it. IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, he says, including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity – how much information you can hold in mind.

But the tests fall down when it comes to measuring those abilities crucial to making good judgements in real-life situations. That’s because they are unable to assess things such as a person’s ability to critically weigh up information, or whether an individual can override the intuitive cognitive biases that can lead us astray.

This is the kind of rational thinking we are compelled to do every day, whether deciding which foods to eat, where to invest money, or how to deal with a difficult client at work. We need to be good at rational thinking to navigate our way around an increasingly complex world. And yet, says Stanovich, IQ tests – still the predominant measure of people’s cognitive abilities – do not effectively tap into it. …

As an illustration of how rational-thinking ability differs from intelligence, consider this puzzle: if it takes five machines 5 minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? Most people instinctively jump to the wrong answer that “feels” right – 100 – even if they later amend it. When Shane Frederick at the Yale School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut, put this and two similarly counter-intuitive questions to about 3400 students at various colleges and universities in the US – Harvard and Princeton among them – only 17 per cent got all three right (see “Test your thinking”). A third of the students failed to give any correct answers (Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol 19, p 25). …

For example, consider the following problem. Jack is looking at Anne, and Anne is looking at George; Jack is married, George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? If asked to choose between yes, no, or cannot be determined, the vast majority of people go for the third option – incorrectly. If told to reason through all the options, though, those of high IQ are more likely to arrive at the right answer (which is “yes”: we don’t know Anne’s marital status, but either way a married person would be looking at an unmarried one). What this means, says Stanovich, is that “intelligent people perform better only when you tell them what to do”.

…

Test your thinking

When researchers put the following three problems to 3400 students in the US, only 17 per cent got all three right. Can you do any better?

1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2) If it takes five machines 5 minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of it?

For answers, highlight the area below:

Answers: 1) 5 cents, 2) 5 minutes, 3) 47 days

Highlight the area above for the answers.

via Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart – life – 02 November 2009 – New Scientist.

I found many scam sites which seem to be IQ tests, but ask for personal information which will probably be used for identity theft.  Don’t get phished.

How Will “Augmented Reality” Affect Your Business?

From advertisements that allow a customer to buy products by scanning a code with their phone’s camera, to virtual instruction manuals projected onto the product itself, augmented reality has a wide range of potential business uses …

My colleague Anand and I think that augmented reality is going to be a big deal for businesses. What is it? It is the idea that locations, devices, even the human body will be “augmented” by linking and overlaying additional information on top of “regular” reality.

For example, this month’s Esquire will have visual codes embedded in the text — even on the cover — which you can hold up to your computer’s camera. The computer will read the codes, and take you to a video or other information linked to that magazine “location.” Is this just a gimmick? After all, the physical magazine is a great way to create a link to more comprehensive content. The magazine cannot afford to put too much information between its covers, but it can put as many pointers as it wants to more content. This basic notion is very, very powerful. (See the great post on this topic by Gary Hayes which inspired our thinking.)

via How Will “Augmented Reality” Affect Your Business? – John Sviokla – HarvardBusiness.org.

Giant Crack in Africa Will Create a New Ocean

A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now CONFIRM. The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, OPENed in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.

A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region s future. The same rift activity is slowly parting the Red Sea, too. Using newly gathered seismic data from 2005, researchers reconstructed the event to show the rift tore OPEN along its entire 35-mile length in just days.

Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began unzipping the rift in both directions, the researchers explained in a statement today. We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break OPEN at once like this, said Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study. The result shows that highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory held. And such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, Ebinger said.

The whole point of this study is to learn whether what is happening in Ethiopia is like what is happening at the bottom of the ocean where it s almost impossible for us to go, says Ebinger. We knew that if we could establish that, then Ethiopia would essentially be a unique and superb ocean-ridge laboratory for us. Because of the unprecedented cross-border collaboration behind this research, we now know that the answer is yes, it is analogous. The African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia and have been spreading apart in a rifting process — at a speed of less than 1 inch per year — for the past 30 million years. This rifting formed the 186-mile Afar depression and the Red Sea. The thinking is that the Red Sea will eventually pour into the new sea in a million years or so. The new ocean would connect to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, an arm of the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa.

via Giant Crack in Africa Will Create a New Ocean | LiveScience.

Over logging ’caused Nazca collapse’

The ancient Nazca people of Peru are famous for the lines they drew in the desert depicting strange animal forms.

A further mystery is what happened to this once great civilisation, which suddenly vanished 1,500 years ago.

Now a team of archaeologists have found the demise of the Nazca society was linked in part to the fate of a tree.

Analysing plant remains they reveal how the destruction of forests containing the huarango tree crossed a tipping point, causing ecological collapse.

The team have published their findings in the journal of Latin American Antiquity.

“These were very special forests,” says Dr David Beresford-Jones from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, UK who led the team.

The huarango tree (Prosopis pallida) is a unique tree with many qualities and played a vital role in the habitat, protecting the fragile desert ecosystem, the scientists say.

“It is the ecological keystone species in the desert zone enhancing soil fertility and moisture and underpinning the floodplain with one of the deepest root systems of any tree known,” Dr Beresford-Jones says.

The tree was also a useful resource.

“This remarkable nitrogen-fixing tree was an important source of food, forage timber and fuel for the local people.”

Researchers have previously found evidence that suggests the disappearance of the Nazca society was a due to catastrophic flooding event as a result of El Nino around 500 AD. …

“Our research contradicts the popular view that Native American peoples always lived in harmony with their environment until the Spanish Conquest,” Dr Beresford-Jones says.

Dr Beresford-Jones explains that with sufficient huarango cover, El Ninos were in fact not great disasters and actually created years of abundance replenishing water aquifers.

Once too much clearance had occurred the landscape was exposed to the effects of the El Nino floods.

“The river down cut into its floodplain and that floodplain narrowed hugely, irrigation systems were left high and dry,” he says.

“Human induced gradual change is just as important to the full story of Nazca collapse as the major climatic impacts that eventually precipitated them.”

via BBC – Earth News – Logging ’caused Nazca collapse’.

Space hotel says it’s on schedule to open in 2012

A company behind plans to open the first hotel in space says it is on target to accept its first paying guests in 2012 despite critics questioning the investment and time frame for the multi-billion dollar project.

The Barcelona-based architects of The Galactic Suite Space Resort say it will cost $4.4 million for a three-night stay at the hotel, with this price including an eight-week training course on a tropical island.

During their stay, guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and travel around the world every 80 minutes. They would wear Velcro suits so they can crawl around their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls like Spiderman.

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Galactic Suite Ltd’s CEO Xavier Claramunt, a former aerospace engineer, said the project will put his company at the forefront of an infant industry with a huge future ahead of it, and forecast space travel will become common in the future.

“It’s very normal to think that your children, possibly within 15 years, could spend a weekend in space,” he told Reuters Television … It will take a day and a half to reach the pod — which Claramunt compared to a mountain retreat, with no staff to greet the traveler.

“When the passengers arrive in the rocket, they will join it for three days, rocket and capsule. With this we create in the tourist a confidence that he hasn’t been abandoned. After three days the passenger returns to the transport rocket and returns to earth,” he said.

More than 200 people have expressed an interest in traveling to the space hotel and at least 43 people have already reserved.

The numbers are similar for Virgin Galactic with 300 people already paid or signed up for the trip but unlike Branson, Galactic Suite say they will use Russian rockets to transport their guests into space from a spaceport to be build on an island in the Caribbean.

via Space hotel says it’s on schedule to open in 2012 – Space- msnbc.com.

Oh My God… Armageddon-Worthy Cloud

In hill country from Iowa to the Scottish Highlands, sky-gazers have reported some strange, ominous-looking clouds of late. Dubbed undulatus asperatus (turbulent undulation), the atmospheric anomaly could be headed where only 80-odd clouds have gone before: into the International Cloud Atlas. If it makes the cut, asperatus will be the first new addition in more than 50 years.

Where did it come from? Gavin Pretor-Pinney, president of the UK-based Cloud Appreciation Society, has a theory: “It’s warmer, moister air above and colder, drier air below, with an abrupt boundary in between.” Add wind passing over rolling terrain and “you get the same wavy effect as on the surface of water.”

The formation has probably been around for a long time, but it’s only now getting attention: “Before the Internet and digicams, people might have mentioned it to a few friends and that would be it,” Pretor-Pinney says. “Once the news got out, I was inundated with emails saying, ‘I saw it three years ago; here’s the picture!’” He’s charting those images against atmospheric conditions to document the cloud’s unique characteristics. The next step: Storm Geneva to seek formal recognition from the World Meteorological Organization.

via Weather Geeks Champion New Armageddon-Worthy Cloud.

Looks like our gravity is getting messed up. Clouds are going nuts at random places  around the planet.

Magnetic ‘eyesight’ helps birds find their way

BIRDS that navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field rely more on their eyes than on the magnetic particles in their nostrils, an experiment on robins suggests.

Rival theories of bird navigation have suggested both mechanisms. Now Henrik Mouritsen at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, and his team have show that eyes could be key. In one group of robins, the team removed cluster N, a brain region involved in processing signals from the “pair-forming photopigments” in the eyes thought to relay magnetic compass information. In another group, the team cut the trigeminal nerve, which sends signals to the brain from the magnetic particles in the nostrils.

The researchers then exposed the surgically treated and untreated robins to the Earth’s natural magnetic field, and also to a field which artificially rotated magnetic north 120 degrees anticlockwise. The robins lacking their nostril-to-brain connection weren’t tricked, locating the true and artificial magnetic norths just as well as the controls. But the robins without cluster N were unable to navigate. “The results raise the distinct possibility that this part of the visual system enables birds to ‘see’ magnetic compass information,” conclude the researchers (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08528).

“It goes a long way to demonstrating that the magnetic compass response is mediated by the eye,” says Verner Bingman of Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

via Magnetic ‘eyesight’ helps birds find their way – life – 01 November 2009 – New Scientist.

Bacteria Could Survive in Martian Soil

Multiple missions have been sent to Mars with the hopes of testing the surface of the planet for life – or the conditions that could create life – on the Red Planet. The question of whether life in the form of bacteria or something even more exotic! exists on Mars is hotly debated, and still requires a resolute yes or no. Experiments done right here on Earth that simulate the conditions on Mars and their effects on terrestrial bacteria show that it is entirely possible for certain strains of bacteria to weather the harsh environment of Mars.

A team led by Giuseppe Galletta of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Padova simulated the conditions present on Mars, and then introduced several strains of bacteria into the simulator to record their survival rate. The simulator – named LISA Laboratorio Italiano Simulazione Ambienti – reproduced surface conditions on Mars, with temperatures ranging from +23 to -80 degrees Celsius 73 to -112 Fahrenheit, a 95% CO2 atmosphere at low pressures of 6 to 9 millibars, and very strong ultraviolet radiation. The results – some of the strains of bacteria were shown to survive up to 28 hours under these conditions, an amazing feat given that there is nowhere on the surface of the Earth where the temperatures get this low or the ultraviolet radiation is as strong as on Mars.

Two of the strains of bacteria tested – Bacillus pumilus and Bacillus Nealsonii – are both commonly used in laboratory tests of extreme environmental factors and their effects on bacteria because of their ability to produce endospores when stressed. Endospores are internal structures of the bacteria that encapsulate the DNA and part of the cytoplasm in a thick wall, to prevent the DNA from being damaged.

Galletta’s team found that the vegetative cells of the bacteria died after only a few minutes, due to the low water content and high UV radiation. The endospores, however, were able to survive between 4 and 28 hours, even when exposed directly to the UV light. The researchers simulated the dusty surface of Mars by blowing volcanic ash or dust of red iron oxide on the samples. When covered with the dust, the samples showed an even higher percentage of survival, meaning that it’s possible for a hardy bacterial strain to survive underneath the surface of the soil for very long periods of time. The deeper underneath the soil an organism is, the more hospitable the conditions become; water content increases, and the UV radiation is absorbed from the soil above. …

via Bacteria Could Survive in Martian Soil | Universe Today.

Warship Built with Twin Tower Steel in NYC

The USS New York is 684 feet long and can carry as many as 800 Marines. Its flight deck that can handle helicopters and the MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

The new Navy assault ship USS New York, built with World Trade Center steel, arrived in its namesake city Monday with a 21-gun salute near the site of the 2001 terrorist attack.

First responders, families of Sept. 11 victims and the public gathered Monday at a waterfront viewing area, where they could see the crew standing at attention along the deck of the battleship gray vessel.

The big ship paused. Then the shots were fired, with a cracking sound, in three bursts.

The bow of the $1 billion ship, built in Louisiana, contains about 7.5 tons of steel from the fallen towers.

“It’s a transformation … from something really twisted and ugly,” said Rosaleen Tallon, who lost her firefighter brother, Sean, on 9/11. “I’m proud that our military is using that steel.”

Tallon said her brother, who was also was a Marine, would have been proud.

The symbolism was lost on none of the sailors or Marines on board, reports CBS News correspondent Jim Axelrod.

“I will never forget what that felt like, standing on the flight deck, coming up the Hudson river, passing right by the statue of liberty, paying honor at ground zero,” said Capt. Jim Pekula.

JoAnn Atlas, of Howells, N.Y., who lost her husband, fire Lt. Gregg Atlas, draped a flag-themed banner along the fence. The names of emergency workers who died were written on the red stripes.

“We have to remember. It’s a way to honor them,” she said.

via Warship Built with Twin Tower Steel in NYC – CBS News.