‘Waterboarding is torture,’ says Obama

Waterboarding, an interrogation technique that stimulates drowning, was endorsed by Republican presidential candidates Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. ‘They’re wrong,’ said Obama in a press conference. ‘Waterboarding is torture.’

via ‘Waterboarding is torture,’ says Obama – CSMonitor.com.

Waterboarding is suffocation torture. Torture is a crime. It is years past time to hold the criminals accountable. No new laws would be needed. Just close Gitmo, arrest everyone responsible for the crime of torture, from prison guards who participated all the way up to Bush and Cheney. Then hold a fair trial before the eyes of the world, and implement checks and balances so no agency of the government rises to the status of being above the law, as some now are.  This would be a great step in the evolution of our country.

The U.S. Military Code specifies that it is a crime to violate the Geneva convention:  “Whoever, … commits a war crime, … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, … and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death. … Definition: As used in this section the term ‘war crime’ means … a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949 [or acts] prohibited by Article 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed 18 October 1907 … ” (Section 2441: U.S. Military Code on War Crimes)

1945 Nuremberg Principles: After WWII, the U.S. led the formation of the ‘Nuremberg Principles,’ which form the United Nations Charter. Every country in the world is bound by that Charter. 
Defines as a crime: “Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;”

… January 25, 2002  White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales writes a memo urging President George Bush to declare the war in Afghanistan exempt from the Geneva convention. In the memo,  the White House lawyer references a 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that law banned any Americans from committing war crimes – defined in part as “grave breaches” of the Geneva convention. The memo warns that the law applies to “U.S.  officials” and that punishments for violators “include the death penalty.” [PDF of Gonzales memo] (NewsWeek, May 17, 2004)

Subsequent to January 25, 2002  Secretary Powell writes a memo arguing that Alberto Gonzales’ attempt to declare the war in Afghanistan exempt from the Geneva convention undermines more than a century of U.S. policy and practice. “It will reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice in supporting the Geneva conventions and undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops, both in this specific conflict and in general. … It may provoke some individual foreign prosecutors to investigate and prosecute our officials and troops. … We will be challenged in international fora (UN Commission on Human Rights; World Court; etc.).” (Powell memo)

…March 19, 2003 Bush declares pre-emptive war in Iraq which constitutes a “grave breach” of the Geneva convention as Iraq posed no “imminent threat” to the U.S. “Law enforcement officials shall not use firearms against persons except in self-defence or defence of others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury, to prevent the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life, to arrest a person presenting such a danger and resisting their authority, or to prevent his or her escape, and only when less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives. In any event, intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.” (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Fall 1990)

… October 11 , 2002  Department of Defense writes a memo which authorizes interrogation tactics for use at Guantanamo … Department of Defense approved: … Use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation.” (Torture memos) …

October 25, 2002 Memo written by a U.S. Army General in response to the torture memo put out by the Department of Defense. “I am particularly troubled by the use of implied expressed threats of death of the detainee or his family.” James T. Hill, General, U.S. Army Commander (Torture memos)

November 27, 2002  An FBI agent at Guantanamo writes a memo warning FBI legal counsel that many of the interrogation methods proposed on October 11, 2002 for use at Guantanamo violate the prohibition on torture. The first quote is one of the techniques being approved by the Department of Defense. (FBI warning memo) “Detainee will be sent off GTMO, either temporarily or permanently to Jordan, Egypt, or another third country to allow those countries to employ interrogation techniques that will enable them to obtain the requisite information.”  “It is a per se violation of the U.S. Torture Statute. Discussing any plan which includes this category, could be seen as a conspiracy to violate 18 U.S.C. s. 2340. Any person who takes any action in furtherance of implementing such a plan, would inculcate all persons who were involved in creating this plan. This technique can not be utilized without violating U.S. Federal law.”
via ImpeachForPeace

 

Better batteries

Megan Fellman – Imagine a cellphone battery that stayed charged for more than a week and recharged in just 15 minutes. That dream battery could be closer to reality thanks to Northwestern University research.

A team of engineers has created an electrode for lithium-ion batteries — rechargeable batteries such as those found in cellphones and iPods — that allows the batteries to hold a charge up to 10 times greater than current technology. Batteries with the new electrode also can charge 10 times faster than current batteries.

The researchers combined two chemical engineering approaches to address two major battery limitations — energy capacity and charge rate — in one fell swoop. In addition to better batteries for cellphones and iPods, the technology could pave the way for more efficient, smaller batteries for electric cars.

The technology could be seen in the marketplace in the next three to five years, the researchers said.

A paper describing the research is published by the journal Advanced Energy Materials.

… With current technology, the performance of a lithium-ion battery is limited in two ways. Its energy capacity — how long a battery can maintain its charge — is limited by the charge density, or how many lithium ions can be packed into the anode or cathode. Meanwhile, a battery’s charge rate — the speed at which it recharges — is limited by another factor: the speed at which the lithium ions can make their way from the electrolyte into the anode.

In current rechargeable batteries, the anode — made of layer upon layer of carbon-based graphene sheets — can only accommodate one lithium atom for every six carbon atoms. To increase energy capacity, scientists have previously experimented with replacing the carbon with silicon, as silicon can accommodate much more lithium: four lithium atoms for every silicon atom. However, silicon expands and contracts dramatically in the charging process, causing fragmentation and losing its charge capacity rapidly.

Currently, the speed of a battery’s charge rate is hindered by the shape of the graphene sheets: they are extremely thin — just one carbon atom thick — but by comparison, very long. During the charging process, a lithium ion must travel all the way to the outer edges of the graphene sheet before entering and coming to rest between the sheets. And because it takes so long for lithium to travel to the middle of the graphene sheet, a sort of ionic traffic jam occurs around the edges of the material.

Now, Kung’s research team has combined two techniques to combat both these problems. First, to stabilize the silicon in order to maintain maximum charge capacity, they sandwiched clusters of silicon between the graphene sheets. This allowed for a greater number of lithium atoms in the electrode while utilizing the flexibility of graphene sheets to accommodate the volume changes of silicon during use.

“Now we almost have the best of both worlds,” Kung said. “We have much higher energy density because of the silicon, and the sandwiching reduces the capacity loss caused by the silicon expanding and contracting. Even if the silicon clusters break up, the silicon won’t be lost.”

Kung’s team also used a chemical oxidation process to create miniscule holes (10 to 20 nanometers) in the graphene sheets — termed “in-plane defects” — so the lithium ions would have a “shortcut” into the anode and be stored there by reaction with silicon. This reduced the time it takes the battery to recharge by up to 10 times.

This research was all focused on the anode; next, the researchers will begin studying changes in the cathode that could further increase effectiveness of the batteries. They also will look into developing an electrolyte system that will allow the battery to automatically and reversibly shut off at high temperatures — a safety mechanism that could prove vital in electric car applications. …

via Better batteries.

Warren Buffett buys $10bn IBM stake

Low-tech stock guru Warren Buffett drops long-standing antipathy to IT sector by buying 5% of IBM, saying he had been ‘hit between the eyes’ by its competitive advantages

The billionaire investor Warren Buffett has ended his moratorium on investing in technology by taking a $12bn (£7.5bn) stake in IBM, the 100-year-old tech firm.

Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway investment firm has been buying shares in IBM since March and now owns 64m shares, or about 5.4% of the outstanding stock, Buffett said in an interview on Monday on the financial news channel CNBC.

The investor was given permission by securities regulators to keep the purchases secret for several months but now that Berkshire has finalised its purchase the firm is expected to disclose the details in a regulatory filing expected after the close of trading on Monday, Buffett said. …

via Warren Buffett buys $10bn IBM stake | Business | The Guardian.

Ancient bronze artifact from East Asia unearthed at Alaska archaeology site

 

John Hoffecker – A team of researchers led by the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered the first prehistoric bronze artifact made from a cast ever found in Alaska, a small, buckle-like object found in an ancient Eskimo dwelling and which likely originated in East Asia.

The artifact consists of two parts — a rectangular bar, connected to an apparently broken circular ring, said CU-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker, who is leading the excavation project. The object, about 2 inches by 1 inch and less than 1 inch thick, was found in August by a team excavating a roughly 1,000-year-old house that had been dug into the side of a beach ridge by early Inupiat Eskimos at Cape Espenberg on the Seward Peninsula, which lies within the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve.

Both sections of the artifact are beveled on one side and concave on the other side, indicating it was manufactured in a mold, said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. A small piece of leather found wrapped around the rectangular bar by the research team yielded a radiocarbon date of roughly A.D. 600, which does not necessarily indicate the age of the object, he said.

“I was totally astonished,” said Hoffecker. “The object appears to be older than the house we were excavating by at least a few hundred years.”

Hoffecker and his CU-Boulder colleague Owen Mason said the bronze object resembles a belt buckle and may have been used as part of a harness or horse ornament prior to its arrival in Alaska. While they speculated the Inupiat Eskimos could have used the artifact as a clasp for human clothing or perhaps as part of a shaman’s regalia, its function on both continents still remains a puzzle, they said.

Since bronze metallurgy from Alaska is unknown, the artifact likely was produced in East Asia and reflects long-distance trade from production centers in either Korea, China, Manchuria or southern Siberia, according to Mason. It conceivably could have been traded from the steppe region of southern Siberia, said Hoffecker, where people began casting bronze several thousand years ago.

Alternatively, some of the earliest Inupiat Eskimos in northwest Alaska — the direct ancestors of modern Eskimos thought to have migrated into Alaska from adjacent Siberia some 1,500 years ago — might have brought the object with them from the other side of the Bering Strait. “It was possibly valuable enough so that people hung onto it for generations, passing it down through families,” said Mason, an INSTAAR affiliate and co-investigator on the Cape Espenberg excavations. …

via Ancient bronze artifact from East Asia unearthed at Alaska archaeology site.

Air Pollution a Culprit in Worsening Drought and Flooding

A radar image of clouds; data from a decade of time played an important role in the results.

Increases in air pollution and other particulate matter in the atmosphere can strongly affect cloud development in ways that reduce precipitation in dry regions or seasons.

This while increasing rain, snowfall and the intensity of severe storms in wet regions or seasons, according to results of a new study.

The research provides the first clear evidence of how aerosols–soot, dust and other particulates in the atmosphere–may affect weather and climate.

The findings have important implications for the availability, management and use of water resources in regions across the United States and around the world.

“Using a 10-year dataset of atmospheric measurements, we have uncovered the long-term, net impact of aerosols on cloud height and thickness and the resulting changes in precipitation frequency and intensity,” says Zhanqing Li, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland and lead author of a paper reporting the results.

The paper was published today in the journal Nature Geoscience. …

via nsf.gov – National Science Foundation (NSF) News – Air Pollution a Culprit in Worsening Drought and Flooding – US National Science Foundation (NSF).

Researchers uncover why the body can’t defend against tuberculosis

Lisa Carver – Tuberculosis, which kills over 2 million people each year, is caused primarily by infectious bacteria known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis – or Mtb. Mtb targets human immune cells as part of its strategy to avoid detection, effectively neutralizing the body’s immune response.

Up until now, scientists had a general understanding of the process, but researchers in the Immunity and Infection Research Centre at Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and the University of British Columbia have shown Mtb produces a specific protein that allows it to defuse and bypass the body’s security system. The results are published today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and provide a pathway for improved treatments against this disease.

“TB has been able to completely mislead our immune systems, convincing our body it isn’t there, which is why it is such an effective killer,” says Dr. Yossef Av-Gay, research scientist with the Immunity and Infection Research Centre at the Vancouver Coastal Research Institute and professor in the Division of Infectious Disease at UBC Faculty of Medicine. “We discovered that the cells in charge of targeting and destroying invading bacteria are being fooled by a special protein that blocks the immune cells ability to recognize and destroy it.”

Here is how it works. Macrophages are dedicated human immune cells with the role of identifying and defeating dangerous microorganisms. Normally, macrophages engulf bacteria, or other infectious agents, and contain them in an enclosed secluded environment. Then, special components of the cell (cellular organelles) move to the controlled area and release acid enzymes that dissolve the bacteria. The system works beautifully against most infectious agents. However, as Dr. Av-Gay’s team found, Mtb operates in a stealth manner, turning off this immune response.

In the case of Mtb, once the bacteria become engulfed by macrophages, they secrete a protein named PtpA that disables the two separate mechanisms required for making the acidic environment that normally targets them. The end result is that Mtb lives comfortably in the immune cells, like a Trojan horse, hidden from the rest of the immune system. The bacteria then multiply inside the macrophage, and when released, they attack the body.

“We have been engaged in studying the interaction between the TB bacterium and the human macrophage over the past decade,” says Dr. Av-Gay. “We are delighted with this discovery. Through learning about the tricks it uses, we now have new targets, so that we can develop better drugs against this devastating disease.”

TB is the leading cause of death among infectious diseases in the world today and is responsible for one in four adult preventable deaths, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Every 20 seconds TB kills someone, with approximately 4400 people dying every day. The WHO estimates that one-third of the world’s population is infected. ….

via Researchers uncover why the body can’t defend against tuberculosis.

Mayo Clinic study confirms smoke-free workplaces reduce heart attacks

Mayo Clinic researchers have amassed additional evidence that secondhand smoke kills and smoke-free workplace laws save lives. The study will be presented to the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions on Monday in Orlando.Their research shows that the incidence of heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths was cut in half among Olmsted County, Minn., residents after a smoke-free ordinance took effect. Adult smoking dropped 23 percent during the same time frame, as the rates of other risk factors such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity remained stable or increased.”This study adds to the observation that smoke-free workplace laws help reduce the chances of having a heart attack, but for the first time we report these laws also reduce the chances of sudden cardiac death,” says Richard Hurt, M.D., director of Mayo Clinic’s Nicotine Dependence Center. “The study shows that everyone, especially people with known coronary artery disease, should avoid contact with secondhand smoke. They should have no — literally no — exposure to secondhand smoke because it is too dangerous to their health.”Dr. Hurt played an instrumental role in the passage of smoke-free ordinances in Olmsted County and the state of Minnesota. He says evidence from this new study will strengthen efforts by the Global Smoke-Free Worksite Challenge, a recently formed tobacco control advocacy collaboration that debuted at a Clinton Global Initiative event. The Challenge will encourage other countries and employers to expand the number of employees able to work in smoke-free environments. …

via Mayo Clinic study confirms smoke-free workplaces reduce heart attacks.

Pristine Gas Clouds Reveal New Data About Universe’s Origin

Image Credit: Simulation by Ceverino, Dekel & Primack

New research published in the journal Science reveals a cosmological discovery that astrophysicists didn’t think existed: gas clouds that remain in a pristine form that existed immediately after the Big Bang. … John O’Meara, a physics professor at Saint Michael’s College,… discovered the gas clouds 11 billion light years away …

via Vermont Edition: Pristine Gas Clouds Reveal New Data About Universe’s Origin.

Is there any place in space which hasn’t been affected by time? The answer is yes. Thanks to some very awesome research, the W. M. Keck Observatory and a team of scientists have recently located two clumps of primordial gas which may very well have had its origin within minutes of the Big Bang.

How do we know these gas clouds are so special? In this case, they are simply too disseminated to enable stellar birth and contain no heavy metals which would support it. These diaphanous regions are pure hydrogen and helium… along with a heavier isotope, deuterium. This combination could mean the two billion year old regions are pure – never involved in the star-forming process. An exciting discovery? You bet. The clouds could have possibly survived in an unchanged state – giving us a look at what may have occurred at the dawn of time.

“Despite decades of effort to find anything metal-free in the universe, Nature has previously set a limit to enrichment at no less than one-thousandth that found in the Sun,” said astronomer J. Xavier Prochaska of the University of California Observatories-Lick Observatory, U.C. Santa Cruz. “These clouds are at least 10 times lower than that limit and are the most pristine gas discovered in our universe.”

Prochaska is part of the Keck team and has coauthored a paper reporting on the discovery with Michele Fumagalli of the U.C. Santa Cruz and John O’Meara of Saint Michael’s College in Vermont. “We’ve searched carefully for oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and silicon – the things that are found on Earth and the Sun in abundance,” Fumagalli said. “We don’t find a trace of anything other than hydrogen and deuterium.”

According to the Keck Observatory news release exactly how they can detect dark, cold, diffuse gas about 12 billion light-years away is a story in itself.

“In this case we actually have to do a bit of a trick,” Prochaska explained. “We study the gas in silhouette.” A more distant quasar provides the light for this. The quasar light shines though the gas and the elements in the gas absorb very specific wavelengths of light, which can only be found by splitting the light into very detailed spectra to reveal the dark lines of missing light. …

via UniverseToday

AMD’s 16-core Opteron Chips Arrive After Wait

After a brief delay and more than a year of chatter, Advanced Micro Devices on Monday announced the availability of its first 16-core Opteron server chips, which pack the largest number of cores available on x86 chips today.

The new Opteron 6200 chips, code-named Interlagos, are 25 percent to 30 percent faster than their predecessors, the 12-core Opteron 6100 chips, said John Fruehe, director of product marketing at AMD.

The chips are shipping now and will be available in servers from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cray and Acer in the coming weeks, Fruehe said. The processors are based on AMD’s new chip design called Bulldozer, which provides bandwidth and performance improvements while saving on power. …

via AMD’s 16-core Opteron Chips Arrive After Wait | PCWorld.

Spontaneous conduction: The music man with no written plan

 

Imagine conducting an orchestra without following any sheet music. It’s an art that Lawrence “Butch” Morris has been working on for 26 years – called conduction.

Morris improvises using a series of signs and gestures to communicate with the musicians. They don’t follow any particular music. There are also no songs, just sets.

Morris has travelled all over the world conducting symphonic orchestras, jazz musicians, and even indigenous musicians.

Every Monday in November in a small cabaret in the East Village of New York City, you can find Morris conducting the Lucky Cheng Orchestra.

via BBC News – Spontaneous conduction: The music man with no written plan.

Fun stuff if you are in the mood for it: