US warns Wikileaks’ Assange on possible leak

The US has written to the founder of whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, Julian Assange, urging him not release a batch of diplomatic files.

The release of classified state department documents is against US law and will put “countless” lives at risk, the letter warns.

Wikileaks says it is set to unveil a new set of documents, bigger than past releases on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr Assange has said the US authorities are afraid of being held to account.

The latest leak is expected to include documents covering US dealings and diplomats’ confidential views of countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, Israel, Russia and Turkey.

“The material that we are about to release covers essentially every major issue in every country in the world,” Mr Assange told reporters by video link.

A journalist with Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which has been working with Wikileaks on publishing the files, said they would include an unflattering US assessment of UK PM David Cameron. …

via BBC News – US warns Wikileaks’ Assange on possible leak.

India’s Ambani hosts party for ‘world’s priciest home’

Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani has hosted a lavish house-warming for his new 27-storey residence, believed to be the world’s most expensive home.

About 80 people attended the party in Mumbai on Friday, reported the Times of India. One guest described the house as “the Taj Mahal of the 21st Century”.

Mr Ambani, said to be India’s richest man, moved into the house last month with his wife and three children.

Reports suggest the residence is worth more than $1bn (£630m).

The skyscraper in Mumbai (Bombay), which overlooks sprawling slums, is said to have a cinema, swimming pools and a helicopter pad, and is named “Antilia” after a mythical Atlantic island.

Local newspapers said the house would require 600 members of staff to maintain it, and according to the Times of India, the first electricity bill, for September, is costing Mr Ambani 7m rupees (£98,000).

The house has sparked some controversy, with anti-poverty campaigners underlining the contrast between the luxury of the house and the plight of those who live in Mumbai’s slums, which house about half of the city’s 18 million people. …

via BBC News – India’s Ambani hosts party for ‘world’s priciest home’.

I dislike this design. It looks like a super slum.

Gravitational Constant : Variations in Gravitational Constant G

… This is a photograph of a simple big G apparatus used to indirectly determine the value for G. The value of the fundamental constant G has been of great interest for physicists for over 300 years and it has the longest history of measurements after the speed of light. In spite of the central importance of the universal gravitational constant, it is the least well defined of all the fundamental constants. Despite our modern technology, almost all measurements of G have used variations of the classical torsion balance technique as engineered by Cavendish during the 17th century.

The usual torsion balance basically consists of two masses connected by a horizontal rod suspended by a very thin fibre, referred to as the dumbbell. When two heavy attracting bodies are placed on opposite sides of the dumbbell, the dumbbell twists by a very small amount. The attracting bodies are then moved to the other side of the dumbbell and the dumbbell twists in the opposite direction. The magnitude of these twists is used to find G. Another common set-up variation to this technique, is to set the dumbbell into an oscillatory motion and measure the frequency of oscillation. The gravitational interaction between the dumbbell and the attracting bodies causes the oscillation frequency to change slightly when the attractors are moved to a different position and this frequency change determines G. This frequency shift method was used in the most precise measurement of G to date (reported in 1982) by Gabe Luther and William Towler from the National Bureau of Standards and the University of Virginia. Based on their measurement, CoData now lists G = 6.6742E-11Nm²/Kg² and assigned a quite conservative uncertainty of 0.015%. Comparing this constant to other well known units of physics, the fractional uncertainty in G is still thousands of times larger. As a result, the mass of the Earth, the sun, the moon and all celestial bodies cannot be known to an accuracy greater than that of G, since all these quantities have been derived from the experimental G. The units of G are m³/Kg/sec², so any error in the Kg unit will show up as an error in G. An uncertainty of 0.015% might seem quite small, but when applied to masses under consideration, for example earth’s mass with a nominal mass of 5.972E24 Kg, it means that the actual mass could be higher by as much as 8.958E20 kg!, and that’s why the mass of earth can only be given to three decimal places.

Variation evidence from readings spanning over 200 years

Data Set number	Author	Year	G (x10-11 m3Kg-1s-2)	Accuracy	% Deviation from CODATA
1	Cavendish H.	1798	6.74	±0.05	+0.986
2	Reich F.	1838	6.63	±0.06	-0.662
3	Baily F.	1843	6.62	±0.07	-0.812
4	Cornu A, Baille J.	1873	6.63	±0.017	-0.662
5	Jolly Ph.	1878	6.46	±0.11	-3.209
6	Wilsing J.	1889	6.594	±0.015	-1.202
7	Poynting J.H.	1891	6.70	±0.04	+0.387
8	Boys C.V.	1895	6.658	±0.007	-0.243
9	Eotvos R.	1896	6.657	±0.013	-0.258
10	Brayn C.A.	1897	6.658	±0.007	-0.243
11	Richarz F. & Krigar-Menzel O.	1898	6.683	±0.011	+0.132
12	Burgess G.K.	1902	6.64	±0.04	-0.512
13	Heyl P.R.	1928	6.6721	±0.0073	-0.031
14	Heyl P.R.	1930	6.670	±0.005	-0.063
15	Zaradnicek J.	1933	6.66	±0.04	-0.213
16	Heyl P.,Chrzanowski	1942	6.673	±0.003	-0.018
17	Rose R.D. et al.	1969	6.674	±0.004	-0.003
18	Facy L., Pontikis C.	1972	6.6714	±0.0006	-0.042
19	Renner Ya.	1974	6.670	±0.008	-0.063
20	Karagioz et al	1975	6.668	±0.002	-0.093
21	Luther et al	1975	6.6699	±0.0014	-0.064
22	Koldewyn W., Faller J.	1976	6.57	±0.17	-1.561
23	Sagitov M.U. et al	1977	6.6745	±0.0008	+0.004
24	Luther G., Towler W.	1982	6.6726	±0.0005	-0.024
25	Karagioz et al	1985	6.6730	±0.0005	-0.018
26	Dousse & Rheme	1986	6.6722	±0.0051	-0.030
27	Boer H. et al	1987	6.667	±0.0007	-0.108
28	Karagioz et al	1986	6.6730	±0.0003	-0.018
29	Karagioz et al	1987	6.6730	±0.0005	-0.018
30	Karagioz et al	1988	6.6728	±0.0003	-0.021
31	Karagioz et al	1989	6.6729	±0.0002	-0.019
32	Saulnier M.S., Frisch D.	1989	6.65	±0.09	-0.363
33	Karagioz et al	1990	6.6730	±0.00009	-0.018
34	Schurr et al	1991	6.6613	±0.0093	-0.193
35	Hubler et al	1992	6.6737	±0.0051	-0.008
36	Izmailov et al	1992	6.6771	±0.0004	+0.043
37	Michaelis et al	1993	6.71540	±0.00008	+0.617
38	Hubler et al	1993	6.6698	±0.0013	-0.066
39	Karagioz et al	1993	6.6729	±0.0002	-0.019
40	Walesch et al	1994	6.6719	±0.0008	-0.035
41	Fitzgerald & Armstrong	1994	6.6746	±0.001	+0.006
42	Hubler et al	1994	6.6607	±0.0032	-0.202
43	Hubler et al	1994	6.6779	±0.0063	+0.055
44	Karagioz et al	1994	6.67285	±0.00008	-0.020
45	Fitzgerald & Armstrong	1995	6.6656	±0.0009	-0.129
46	Karagioz et al	1995	6.6729	±0.0002	-0.019
47	Walesch et al	1995	6.6685	±0.0011	-0.085
48	Michaelis et al	1996	6.7154	±0.0008	+0.617
49	Karagioz et al	1996	6.6729	±0.0005	-0.019
50	Bagley & Luther	1997	6.6740	±0.0007	-0.003
51	Schurr, Nolting et al	1997	6.6754	±0.0014	+0.018
52	Luo et al	1997	6.6699	±0.0007	-0.064
53	Schwarz W. et al	1998	6.6873	±0.0094	+0.196
54	Kleinvoss et al	1998	6.6735	±0.0004	-0.011
55	Richman et al	1998	6.683	±0.011	+0.132
56	Luo et al	1999	6.6699	±0.0007	-0.064
57	Fitzgerald & Armstrong	1999	6.6742	±0.0007	±0.01
58	Richman S.J. et al	1999	6.6830	±0.0011	+0.132
59	Schurr, Noltting et al	1999	6.6754	±0.0015	+0.018
60	Gundlach & Merkowitz	1999	6.67422	±0.00009	+0.0003
61	Quinn et al	2000	6.67559	±0.00027	+0.021
–	PRESENT CODATA VALUE	2004	6.6742	±0.001	±0.0150

The official CODATA value for G in 1986 was given as G= (6,67259±0.00085)x10^-11 m³Kg^-1s^-2 and was based on the Luther and Towler determination in 1982. However, the value of G has been recently called into question by new measurements from respected research teams in Germany, New Zealand, and Russia in order to try to settle this issue. The new values using the best laboratory equipment to-date disagreed wildly to the point that many are doubting about the constancy of this parameter and some are even postulating entirely new forces to explain these gravitational anomalies. For example, in 1996, a team from the German Institute of Standards led by W. Michaelis obtained a value for G that is 0.6% higher than the accepted value; another group from the University of Wuppertal in Germany led by Hinrich Meyer found a value that is 0.06% lower, and in 1995, Mark Fitzgerald and collaborators at Measurement Standards Laboratory of New Zealand measured a value that is 0.13% lower. The Russian group found a curious space and time variation of G of up to +0.7%. In the early 1980s, Frank Stacey and his colleagues measured G in deep mines and bore holes in Australia. Their value was about 1% higher than currently accepted. …

Interestingly, I was just reading about the large mammals that cropped up when the dinosaurs died out and I was wondering why they didn’t get crushed under their own weight. Here’s a strange idea that offers an explanation for that and a few other mysteries:

Dinosaurs would be crushed by their own weight under our present gravitational force

Interesting claim. I don’t know about that… They had pretty strong bones. Anyway, this web site proposes periodic large fast changes in the force of gravity (G).

Another consequence of such big variation in mass of all objects within the solar system, is that while the planets themselves increase in mass, gravity can possibly crush them into higher density planets. Bigger animals will have less chance to survive as their bodies collapse due to their weight, and animals start getting smaller. In the case where the value of G changes abruptly, only the small ‘versions’ survive. Scientists are now convinced that what we refer to as birds, are in fact the survivors of the small scale dinasours. This can also explain a lot of known history of unsolved evolution facts. When on the next 112 million year cycle, mass starts to diminish again, Earth’s density will decrease, possibly Earth itself would expand in radius, explaining why continents’ coastlines are almost a perfect fit to each other, and could once cover the whole surface of a smaller earth. Animals grow taller and bigger as their muscles would be able to lift bigger bodies, and for us humans, building up temples with huge rocks, without any impossible machinery, would be like playing with blocks! Does this solve another mystery?

via Gravitational Constant : Variations in Gravitational Constant G.

For those who don’t know me, I don’t believe everything I post on this blog. I post things I want to check out, things I find interesting, and things I’d like feedback on from the experts out there who stop by.

What do you think about this variable G idea?

Flat Earth, old myth. Flat Universe, new physics

Jason Palmer – Researchers have developed a simple technique that adds evidence to the theory that the Universe is flat.

Moreover, the method – developed by revisiting a 30-year-old idea – confirms that “dark energy” makes up nearly three-quarters of the Universe.

The research, published in Nature, uses existing data and relies on fewer assumptions than current approaches.

Author Christian Marinoni says the idea turns estimating the Universe’s shape into “primary school” geometry.

While the idea of the Earth being flat preoccupied the first philosophers millennia ago, the question of whether the Universe itself is flat remains a debatable topic.

The degree to which the Universe is curved has an effect on what astronomers see when they look into the cosmos.

A telescope on or near Earth may see an image of a celestial object differently from how the object actually looks, because the very fabric of space and time bends the light coming from it.

Christian Marinoni and Adeline Buzzi of the University of Provence have made use of this phenomenon in their technique.

Dark prospect

The current model of cosmology holds that only 4% of what makes up our Universe is normal matter – the stuff of stars and planets with which we are familiar, and that astronomers can see directly. …

The overwhelming majority of the Universe, the theory holds, is composed of dark matter and dark energy. They are “dark” because they evidently do not absorb, emit and reflect light like normal matter, making direct views impossible.

Dark energy – purported to make up 73% of the known Universe – was proposed as the source of the ongoing expansion of everything in the cosmos. Astronomers have also observed that this expansion of the Universe seems to be accelerating.

Even though gravity holds that everything should attract everything else, in every direction astronomers look there is evidence that things are in fact moving apart – with those objects further away moving faster. …

“In general relativity, there is a direct connection between geometry and dynamics,” Professor Marinoni explained, “so that once you measure the abundance of matter and energy in the Universe, you have direct information on its geometry; you can do geometry as we learn in primary school.”

The team’s conclusions suggest the Universe is indeed flat – an assumption first put forth by Albert Einstein and seemingly confirmed by more recent observations but that remains one of the most difficult ideas to put on solid theoretical footing.

Alan Heavens, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Edinburgh, said that the strength of the result lies in that it requires few assumptions about the nature of the cosmos. …

via BBC News – Dark energy and flat Universe exposed by simple method.

Ships and buoys made global warming look slower

Image via Vanity Fair

Claims that global warming has slowed down over the past decade were partly based on faulty data. Instead, the rate of global warming was underestimated because of a new way of measuring sea-surface temperatures, suggests a new study.

Since the 1970s average global temperatures have risen by 0.16 °C per decade, but over the past decade they seemed to rise by only 0.09 °C, an apparent slowdown of 0.07 °C. John Kennedy and colleagues at the UK Met Office have now found that the real slowdown was smaller.

Over the past decade, sea-surface temperature has mostly been measured by thermometers on buoys, whereas previously it was measured aboard ships. Ship measurements tend to be too high because the water warms up as it is taken on board.

So although the newer buoy measurements are more accurate, the switch in method has erroneously shown sea-surface temperatures appearing to level off.

“Compared with ships, buoys show cooler temperatures,” says Vicky Pope at the Met Office. “You have to be careful of false signals.”

Record for 2010?

Kennedy says the underestimation of the change in sea-surface temperature could account for up to 0.03 °C of the apparent slowdown in global temperatures. The correction could mean that 2010 will be the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998 and 2005. …

via Ships and buoys made global warming look slower – environment – 26 November 2010 – New Scientist.

Glowing trees could light up city streets

IMAGINE taking a midnight stroll, your route lit by row upon row of trees glowing a ghostly blue. If work by a team of undergraduates at the University of Cambridge pans out, bioluminescent trees could one day be giving our streets this dreamlike look. The students have taken the first step on this road by developing genetic tools that allow bioluminescence traits to be easily transferred into an organism.

Nature is full of glow-in-the-dark critters, but their shine is feeble – far too weak to read by, for example. To boost this light, the team, who were participating in the annual International Genetically Engineered Machines competition (iGEM), modified genetic material from fireflies and the luminescent marine bacterium Vibrio fischeri to boost the production and activity of light-yielding enzymes. They then made further modifications to create genetic components or “BioBricks” that can be inserted into a genome.

The team managed to produce a range of colours by putting these genes into the Escherichia coli bacterium. They found that a volume of bacterial culture about the size of a regular wine bottle gave off enough light to read by.

“We didn’t end up making bioluminescent trees, which was the inspiration for the project,” says team member Theo Sanderson, who is studying genetics. “But we decided to make a set of parts that would allow future researchers to use bioluminescence more effectively.” The team presented its findings earlier this month at the iGEM Jamboree, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

One major obstacle to harnessing bioluminescence is that the process relies on a class of compounds called luciferins. They emit light and are then converted into oxyluciferin, which cannot produce light. To counter this, the Cambridge team found a way to engineer BioBricks that would enable organisms to produce enzymes to recycle oxyluciferin.

Bioluminescent plants could appeal especially to people whose homes are not wired up to the electricity grid. These living lights have no breakable parts, and new lights can be made simply by growing more of them. The team calculates that for a bioluminescent tree to compete with a street light, only 0.02 per cent of the energy absorbed for photosynthesis would need to be diverted into light production. …

via Glowing trees could light up city streets – environment – 25 November 2010 – New Scientist.

I hope we will see a large number of non-violent transformations like this as steps to becoming energy independent. Related:

Sweden has moved to the forefront of the world’s “green” nations by setting an ambitious goal to achieve a completely oil-free economy by 2020—and without building more nuclear power plants.

Motivated by global warming and rising oil prices, the Swedish government says it intends to replace all fossil fuels with renewable alternatives before climate change undermines national economies worldwide and diminishing oil supplies force astronomical price increases.

“Our dependency on oil should be broken by 2020,” said Mona Sahlin, minister of sustainable development, in an interview with The Guardian newspaper. “There shall always be better alternatives to oil, which means no house should need oil for heating, and no driver should need to turn solely to gasoline.”

Even Skeptics Cheer Sweden’s Goal to End Oil Dependency
Not everyone believes Sweden’s goal to free itself from oil by 2020 is achievable, but even critics applaud the country for setting such a compelling and motivating goal, which could also inspire other nations to make dramatic efforts to reduce their dependency on fossil fuels.

via About.com

 

Sunken supertankers could spot rogue nuclear reactors

French scientists have invented a new way to determine if nations are developing clandestine nuclear facilities — sink supertankers off their coastlines.

Physicist Thierry Lasserre of the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission and his team have developed a new technique using antineutrinos (antimatter particles released whenever a proton is turned into an electron) to detect nuclear facilities from afar.

“This detection technique is not that novel,” says Dr. Pekka Sinervo, a professor of physics at the University of Toronto and senior vice-president of research at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

He points out that the “Snow Lab” 2 km beneath Sudbury, Ont., has been detecting neutrinos emitted by the Sun for 20 years. “That said, it is still a difficult experiment to complete and control,” he adds.

Nuclear fission reactors produce vast amounts of antineutrinos, but these weak particles are hard to detect without large volumes of matter.

In the past, scientists have filled giant swimming pools with water and waited for antineutrinos to hit the water’s protons, emitting a positron and a neutron, to detect them. Thierry’s idea would allow scientists to pick up antineutrinos without setting up a pool next to a reactor.

His plan is to turn a supertanker into an antineutrino detector by filling it with a massive number of protons in the form of 138,000 tons of linear alkyl benzene. Named the Secret Neutrino Interactions Finder (SNIF) the ship could then be sailed near a nation’s coastline and sunk under 4 km of water, turning it into a massive antineutrinos detector. …

via Sunken supertankers could spot rogue nuclear reactors, scientist says – thestar.com.

Size of mammals exploded after dinosaur extinction

The largest land mammals that ever lived, Indricotherium and Deinotherium, would have towered over the living African elephant. The tallest on diagram, Indricotherium, an extinct rhino relative, lived during the Eocene to the Oligocene Epoch (37 to 23 million years ago) and reached a mass of 15,000 kg, while Deinotherium (an extinct proboscidean, related to modern elephants) was around from the late-Miocene until the early Pleistocene (8.5 to 2.7 million years ago) and weighed as much as 17,000 kg. Credit: Alison Boyer/Yale University

Researchers demonstrate that the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago made way for mammals to get bigger – about a thousand times bigger than they had been. The study, which is published in the prestigious journal Science, is the first to show this new pattern of increased body size of mammals after the exit of the dinosaurs.

“Basically, the dinosaurs disappear and all of a sudden there is nobody else eating the vegetation. That’s an open food source and mammals start going for it, and it’s more efficient to be an herbivore when you’re big,” says paper co-author Dr. Jessica Theodor, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary.

Theodor says as well as confirming the dramatic growth in mammalian size after the dinosaurs, the study shows that the ecosystem is able to reset itself relatively quickly.

“You lose dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and within 25 million years the system is reset to a new maximum for the animals that are there in terms of body size. That’s actually a pretty short time frame, geologically speaking,” she says. “That’s really rapid evolution.” …

via Size of mammals exploded after dinosaur extinction | PhysOrg.

UFO Hacker Gary McKinnon may foil US prosecutors

Autistic hacker Gary McKinnon will get another chance to beat his US extradition order next week when the UK Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee considers his plight again.

The Committee will consider the case against the 2003 Extradition Act under which the US placed an order for McKinnon’s arrest after he was caught hacking into military computers in 2001.

The Government began a review of UK extradition law in September after widespread complaints that people like McKinnon were being removed from their home country to face foreign prosecutors on the basis of flimsy evidence.

The committee will also consider the plight of those whose extraditions are still being processed despite the government’s review.

The Home Office said in September that it would not freeze extraditions while it considered whether the process was unjust. It refused to freeze McKinnon’s extradition despite his case having significant influence over its decision to review the Extradition Act.

This created the possibility that people would be extradited on conditions subsequently found unsound by the government’s review.

McKinnon’s extradition is, however, on hold while Teresa May, Home Secretary, considers the possibility that the poor state of his mental health may be cause to prevent his removal. The Home Secretary has taken an unprecedentedly long time over the matter since she agreed to consider it in May.

McKinnon’s extradition has also been undermined by accusations that the US charges against the hacker were trumped up, by the possibility that he might be tried in the UK for a crime he committed using a computer in his girlfriend’s flat in North London in 2001, and by his Asperger’s Syndrome, an autistic condition characterised by social vulnerability that has created a strong medical and moral case for a UK trial. …

via Hacker gets another chance to foil US prosecutors | THINQ.co.uk.

Information-powered device manages to cheat the laws of thermodynamics

The laws of thermodynamics tell us that all work requires energy. But a recent demonstration used only information, not energy, to control electric potential, apparently violating the laws of thermodynamics. Here’s how they did it.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that, over time in a closed system, differences in pressure, temperature, and chemical potential will even out to a general equilibrium. It also suggests that, in a closed system, entropy will never decrease, meaning it always involves a net loss of useful energy to do work.

Legendary Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell played around with the law in an 1871 thought experiment that later became known as Maxwell’s Demon. He imagined gas molecules in thermal equilibrium placed in an isolated container. This has a divider in the middle of it, and there are trapdoors on the divider. The molecules then start moving around, but unless one of the trapdoors is opened when a molecule’s trajectory would take it toward it, the gases will never leave their side of the divider.

Maxwell imagined what he termed a “finite being” that had senses far more advanced than ours. Its heightened senses would allow it to perceive which molecules were moving faster and which were moving slower and where all the different molecules were. Based on this, it could open the trapdoors at precise moments to let the slower molecules pass to one side and the faster molecules to move to the other. Because the velocity of a molecule corresponds to temperature, the side with the slower molecules will become colder while the side with the faster molecules will become hotter. That seemingly violates the second law of thermodynamics. …

Japanese researchers built  … an electric field that varies sequentially so that it resembles a sort of tiny, particle-sized spiral staircase. The difference in electric potential between different steps of the staircase is small enough that fluctuating particle can occasionally move from one step to another. Most of the time, it would jump down a step, but every once in a while it would jump up a level. The researchers exerted a little control by placing a barrier in the way of the particle, preventing it from moving back down a level once it had moved up. If repeated long enough, the particle would get all the way up the staircase.

That may not appear to involve any thermodynamic trickery, but the devil – or, in this case, the Maxwell’s Demon – is in the details. The electric field caused the particle to rotate in one direction which, under normal circumstances, would cause it to slowly move back down the potential energy steps of the spiral staircase. This couldn’t happen because of the barriers the researchers put in the way, but normally the particle would just keep rotating on its same step forever. However, the particle was placed in an aqueous solution that worked against that effect, and every once in a while it started rotating in the opposite direction, which allowed it to move up a step.

All the while, the researchers tracked the particle’s motion using a video camera, which allowed them to know when it had rotated against the field. Whenever this occurred, they immediately put the barrier in place, keeping the particle on the higher level before it could rotate back down. This rather circuitous process allowed them to increase the potential of the particle without ever actually imparting it with additional energy. Thus, the researchers have become Maxwell’s Demon.

Of course, there’s no violation of the laws of thermodynamics here, as the energy needed to run all the macroscopic devices far, far outstrips the microscopic gains in electric potential. That said, the microscopic gains are a real breakthrough – on the nanoscale, the researchers had tapped into a full quarter of the information’s energy content, by far the most ever accessed in one experiment, and the first real practical demonstration of the energy-information equivalence. …

via Information-powered device manages to cheat the laws of thermodynamics.