World’s first manned flight with an electric multicopter – YouTube

On October 21st, 2011, Thomas Senkel of e-volo made the first manned flight with an electric multicopter, the so called volocopter VC1, at an airstrip in the southwest of Germany. The flight lasted 90 seconds, after which the constructor and test pilot stated: “The flight characteristics are good natured. Without any steering input it would just hover there on the spot”. This could be the future of flight, piloting a device as easy as a car.

World’s first manned flight with an electric multicopter – YouTube.

T-shirts developed that could charge mobile phones

Scientists at the University of South Carolina have found a way to use a cheap T-shirt to store electrical power.

It could pave the way for clothes that are able to charge phones and other devices.

Experts predict that new technologies including roll-up smartphones and laptops will be on the market soon.

These developments would spur on the need for “flexible energy storage”, said the professor behind the project.

Xiaodong Li, a professor of mechanical engineering at the university teamed up with post-doctorate researcher Lihong Bao to find a solution.

The pair wrote up their findings for the Advanced Materials journal.

They used a T-shirt bought from a local discount store, which was soaked in a solution of fluoride, dried and then baked in an oxygen-free environment at high temperature.

Hybrid fabric

The fibres in the fabric converted from cellulose to activated carbon during the process, but the material remained flexible.

By using small parts of the fabric as an electrode, the researchers showed that the material could be made to act as a capacitor.

Capacitors store an electrical charge and are components of nearly every electronic device on the market.

By coating the individual fibres of the carbonised fabric with manganese oxide just a nanometre thick, the electrode performance of the fabric was further enhanced.

“This created a stable, high-performing supercapacitor,” said Prof Li.

The hybrid supercapacitors proved resilient – even after thousands of charge-discharge cycles their performance did not diminish more than 5%, the researchers said.

“By stacking these supercapacitors up, we should be able to charge portable electronic devices such as cell phones,” Prof Li added.

“We wear fabric every day. One day our cotton T-shirts could have more functions; for example, a flexible energy storage device that could charge your cell phone or your iPad.” …

via BBC News – T-shirts developed that could charge mobile phones.

Human corpses harvested in multimillion-dollar trade

‘Photo: ‘I was in shock” … Kateryna Rahulina says she did not give permission for the body of her mother Olha to be harvested. 

On February 24, Ukrainian authorities made an alarming discovery: bones and other human tissues crammed into coolers in a grimy white minibus.

Investigators grew even more intrigued when they found, amid the body parts, envelopes stuffed with cash and autopsy results written in English.

What the security service had disrupted was not the work of a serial killer but part of an international pipeline of ingredients for medical and dental products that are routinely implanted into people around the world.

The seized documents suggested that the remains of dead Ukrainians were destined for a factory in Germany belonging to the subsidiary of a US medical products company, Florida-based RTI Biologics.

RTI is one of a growing industry of companies that make profits by turning mortal remains into everything from dental implants to bladder slings to wrinkle cures. The industry has flourished even as its practices have roused concerns about how tissues are obtained and how well grieving families and transplant patients are informed about the realities and risks of the business.

In the US alone, the biggest market and the biggest supplier, an estimated two million products derived from human tissue are sold each year, a figure that has doubled over the past decade.

It is an industry that promotes treatments and products that literally allow the blind to see (through cornea transplants) and the lame to walk (by recycling tendons and ligaments for use in knee repairs). It’s also an industry fuelled by powerful appetites for bottom-line profits and fresh human bodies.

In the Ukraine, for example, the security service believes that bodies passing through a morgue in the Nikolaev district, the gritty shipbuilding region located near the Black Sea, may have been feeding the trade, leaving behind what investigators described as potentially dozens of “human sock puppets” — corpses stripped of their reusable parts.

Industry officials argue that such alleged abuses are rare, and that the industry operates safely and responsibly.

For its part, RTI didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions provided a month before this publication. …

via Human corpses harvested in multimillion-dollar trade.

Nasa may miss Curiosity Mars rover’s landing signal

Nasa might not be able to follow the progress of its big Mars rover all the way to the surface when it attempts to land on the planet on 6 August (GMT).

The Curiosity vehicle is aiming for a deep depression known as Gale Crater.

The US space agency will be tracking the descent with satellites, but its prime craft for the task may not now be in the correct place in the sky.

Engineers have been tackling a fault on the Odyssey satellite and it is no longer in the best observational orbit.

Unless it can be moved back in the next three weeks, Nasa will lose signal to the rover just as it is about to touch down.

This will not affect the outcome of the landing because Curiosity’s descent manoeuvres are all performed autonomously, but it will give rise to some high anxiety as everyone awaits confirmation that the $2.5bn mission is safely on the surface.

“Odyssey right now looks like it may not be in the same spot that we’d expected it to be,” said Doug McCuistion, the director of Nasa’s Mars exploration programme.

“There may be some changes in real-time communication. We’ll let you know as this develops; we still have more work to do. But keep in mind, there is no risk to [Curiosity] landing. It does not have an effect on that.”

The 900kg robot’s entry, descent and landing (EDL) will be the most dangerous aspect of the entire mission.

The rover, in its protective capsule, will hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at 20,000km/h (13,000mph) and attempt to slow to just one metre per second to execute a soft touchdown.

This rapid deceleration must be achieved in about seven minutes or Curiosity will smash into the ground.

Engineers have built a complex EDL system that includes a supersonic parachute and a rocket-powered crane. Everything must work on cue and in sequence.

It was expected that the Odyssey orbiter would track the whole descent, relaying UHF signals from the rover right up to the landing and for a few minutes beyond.

But the spacecraft recently experienced a reaction wheel failure.

This device is used to manage the satellite’s orientatation and momentum in space, and because engineers have been investigating the issue they have not as yet moved Odyssey back into the correct orbit to see the full landing sequence – and they may not do so.

This would leave Nasa blind for the final, nail-biting two minutes of the landing operation. …

via BBC News – Nasa may miss Curiosity Mars rover’s landing signal.

Stubbs the cat celebrates 15th year as mayor of Alaska town Talkeetna

Residents thought the candidates running for mayor weren’t up to scratch so campaigned to get the 15-year-old part-Manx the honorary position with a write-in campaign after he was born.

The feline has now become one of the longest-serving mayors in America.

The moggy is a celebrity in Talkeetna – where he’s also the cat’s pyjamas at promoting tourism – and has around 1,000 friends on Facebook, which is more people than the population of the town (900).

Local worker Lauri Stec’s store Nagley’s General, which doubles up as Stubbs’ town hall, has benefited from the popularity of the cat.

‘He was just in the Alaska Magazine, and he’s been featured in a few different things,’ she told KTUU.

Apparently the shop, where Stubbs spends most of his time, receives many letters and cards from around the world addressed to him.

‘Oh my gosh, we probably have 30 to 40 people a day come in who are tourists wanting to see him,’ she added.

via Stubbs the cat celebrates 15th year as mayor of Alaska town Talkeetna | Metro.co.uk.

Supercomputer mimics common cold in search for way to treat it

AUSTRALIAN scientists have used a new supercomputer to simulate the movement of the virus that causes the common cold for the first time.

The breakthrough opens up new targets for potentially life-saving drug treatments.

While the common cold does not cause much harm to healthy individuals, it often exacerbates lung conditions such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, causing hospitalisations and deaths.

For this reason, scientists are trying to find new treatments for rhinovirus, the most frequent cause of the common cold.

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The deputy director of St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Professor Michael Parker, said he and his team had been working with the pharmaceutical company Biota Holdings to understand the rhinovirus, in an effort to develop a new drug to treat it in vulnerable people.

His team had used Melbourne’s synchrotron microscope to look at the three-dimensional structure of the virus and the supercomputer to show how the virus moves.

”If you consider a virus as an organism, this is the first simulation of a whole organism, which is pretty exciting,” he said.

”No one has been able to do this before. It helps us understand how the virus works.”

Professor Parker said the information was useful for Biota, which has its drug in phase two trials, but would also be published so scientists worldwide could use it.

”For some people, it could be the difference between life and death,” he said.

Professor Parker said the simulation had also raised hopes that they could do the same for other viruses including polio and meningitis.

”All this work we’re doing now with the supercomputer will hopefully open up new paths for drug discovery,” he said.

Professor James McCluskey, the deputy vice-chancellor for research at the University of Melbourne, where the supercomputer is based, said it was a ”terrific facility for Victorian life science researchers”.

via Supercomputer mimics common cold in search for way to treat it.

Canadian bills: Melting in the heat?

They were tested in extreme temperatures, ranging from 140°C and to -75°C.

But now, it seems, the new Canadian 50 and 100 dollar bills can’t take the heat. In fact, in some cases, the polymer bills have been shrivelling up like a piece of cooked bacon.

As the Toronto Star reported this week, some Canadians have been shocked to discover that their so-called indestructible new bills are being damaged by heat. Cases of the 50′s and 100′s being “fried” in hot cars, on top of toaster ovens and close to heaters have all been reported.

Recent heat waves and days of scorching temperatures aren’t helping matters, either.

Last November, when the new $50 and $100′s were put into circulation by the Bank of Canada, spokesperson Julie Girard told The Weather Network that the bills were designed to withstand the elements.

“We wanted to make sure that the transition to polymer would meet all of the requirements of Canada, including extreme weather shifts from one season to the next or one region to the next.”

And tests demonstrated that the bill “weathered” very well in all of the different Canadian conditions.

“We put them in boiling water and we also put them in a chamber that went all the way down to -61°C to make sure they resisted very well.”

Only a small number of notes have been damaged by the heat overall, but the Bank of Canada is investigating. They say they will also redeem damaged notes after they’ve examined them at their laboratory in Ottawa.

via Canadian bills: Melting in the heat? – The Weather Network.

80% of immune system is in your gut, so eat fermented foods

You’ve probably heard that about 80 percent of your immune system resides in your gut, and the next study underscores this fact. It also provides yet another clue as to the kind of constant pressure your gut bacteria is under to keep your immune system humming.

The study, featured in Genome Researchiii, looked at a common set of viruses linked to gut bacteria in humans. These viruses, which feed off bacteria, are called phages, and they pose a constant threat to the health of the bacterial community living in your gut.

Phages can actually outnumber bacteria 10 to 1, which in itself is a testament to the power of your beneficial gut bacteria (and by extension your immune system) to keep disease at bay. But it also helps explain why just a few days of careless eating can sometimes make you feel a bit listless, or why chronic poor health is at such epidemic levels.

Between chemical assaults, inadequate nutrition, excessive sugar consumption and an overabundance of natural viral “co-hosts,” your microflora has one heck of a job to maintain order and balance… And as soon as that balance is thrown off kilter, it will begin to reflect in your immune function.

Here, the scientists wondered how they might identify viruses that target gut microbiota; whether these viral communities differ between individuals and global populations; and how this might relate to human health and disease.

As reported by Medical News Todayiv:

“Israeli researchers decided to use coded information from a bacterial immune system to get to the bottom of these questions. They discovered a process… to identify and evaluate phages in European individual’s gut microbiota, discovering that almost 80 percent of phages are shared between two or more individuals. They then compared their data to samples they took previously from American and Japanese individuals and to their surprise, they also discovered phages that exist in their European data set.

According to [senior author Rotem] Sorek, this means that people’s gut microbiota are repeatedly infected with hundreds of virus’ types. “These viruses can kill some of our gut bacteria. It is therefore likely that these viruses can influence human health,” he said. The researchers highlight that it is of key importance to gain a better understanding of the amount of pressure that is placed on the ‘good’ bacteria, which is crucial to maintain health…

Scientists are now able to investigate how phage functions in the gut change over time and what impact this may have on diseases like inflammatory bowel disease, as well as finding more effective methods to treat these diseases.” [Emphasis mine] …

Maintaining optimal gut flora, and ‘reseeding’ your gut with fermented foods and probiotics when you’re taking an antibiotic, may be one of the most important steps you can take to improve your health. If you aren’t eating fermented foods, you most likely need to supplement with a probiotic on a regular basis, especially if you’re eating a lot of processed foods. Poor diet in general, and each course of antibiotics extols a heavy price, as it tends to wipe out the beneficial bacteria in your gut, giving pathogens free rein to proliferate unchecked.

Historically, people used to get large quantities of beneficial bacteria, i.e. probiotics, straight from their diet in the form of fermented or cultured foods, which were invented long before the advent of refrigeration and other forms of food preservation. As a result, they didn’t suffer the same kinds of problems with their gut health as so many do today.

It’s worth noting that each mouthful of fermented food can provide trillions of beneficial bacteria—far more than you can get from a probiotics supplement, which will typically provide you with colony-forming units in the billions. I thought this would be a good analysis, so I tested fermented vegetables produced with our probiotic starter culture to determine their probiotic potency and was astounded to discover they had 10 trillion colony-forming units of bacteria. Literally, one serving of vegetables was equal to an entire bottle of a high potency probiotic!

Fermented foods also give you a wider variety of beneficial bacteria, so all in all, it’s a more cost effective alternative. Fermenting your own foods can provide even greater savings, and is actually easier than you might think. To learn more, please listen to my interview with Caroline Barringer, a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP) who has been involved with nutrition for about 20 years. She’s now one of Dr. Campbell-McBride’s chief training partners, helping people understand the food preparation process….

Via Mercola

“Examples of fermented foods include sauerkraut, kimchi, chutney, unpasteurized cheese, sour cream, pickles, yogurt, olives, buttermilk, kombucha, miso, tempeh and kefir. … It’s easy to make fermented foods – but there are a few things a beginner should watch out for (it’s easy to make a bad batch when you first start).  Pick up your copy of Wild Fermentation, a book written by Sandor Ellix Katz.  This author is dedicated to the discussion of fermentation and provides over 100 basic delicious recipes that are easy to make at home.  www.wildfermentation.com is an excellent website that offers additional useful resources, including a fermentation support forum.

Via LiberationWellnessBlog

A World Without Coral Reefs

IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem — with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor — will cease to be.

Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are pushing coral reefs into oblivion. Each of those forces alone is fully capable of causing the global collapse of coral reefs; together, they assure it. The scientific evidence for this is compelling and unequivocal, but there seems to be a collective reluctance to accept the logical conclusion — that there is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem.

What we hear instead is an airbrushed view of the crisis — a view endorsed by coral reef scientists, amplified by environmentalists and accepted by governments. Coral reefs, like rain forests, are a symbol of biodiversity. And, like rain forests, they are portrayed as existentially threatened — but salvageable. The message is: “There is yet hope.”

Indeed, this view is echoed in the “consensus statement” of the just-concluded International Coral Reef Symposium, which called “on all governments to ensure the future of coral reefs.” It was signed by more than 2,000 scientists, officials and conservationists.

This is less a conspiracy than a sort of institutional inertia. Governments don’t want to be blamed for disasters on their watch, conservationists apparently value hope over truth, and scientists often don’t see the reefs for the corals.

But by persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their collapse. Money isn’t spent to study what to do after the reefs are gone — on what sort of ecosystems will replace coral reefs and what opportunities there will be to nudge these into providing people with food and other useful ecosystem products and services. Nor is money spent to preserve some of the genetic resources of coral reefs by transferring them into systems that are not coral reefs. And money isn’t spent to make the economic structural adjustment that communities and industries that depend on coral reefs urgently need. We have focused too much on the state of the reefs rather than the rate of the processes killing them.

Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution have two features in common. First, they are accelerating. They are growing broadly in line with global economic growth, so they can double in size every couple of decades. Second, they have extreme inertia — there is no real prospect of changing their trajectories in less than 20 to 50 years. In short, these forces are unstoppable and irreversible. And it is these two features — acceleration and inertia — that have blindsided us.

Overfishing can bring down reefs because fish are one of the key functional groups that hold reefs together. Detailed forensic studies of the global fish catch by Daniel Pauly’s lab at the University of British Columbia confirm that global fishing pressure is still accelerating even as the global fish catch is declining. Overfishing is already damaging reefs worldwide, and it is set to double and double again over the next few decades. …

via A World Without Coral Reefs – NYTimes.com.

Two Chicken Vaccines Have Combined To Create A New Strain Of Virus

Two chicken vaccines have recombined to produce more virulent viruses in Sydney and Melbourne, research has found, prompting the regulator to examine new controls over the approval and use of veterinary vaccines.

A study by a team from the Asia-Pacific Centre for Animal Health at the University of Melbourne and NICTA found that two different vaccine viruses used to control a chicken respiratory disease — the herpesvirus infectious laryngotracheitis (ILT) — have recombined, or crossed, to form two new virulent forms of the ILT virus.

The findings are published today in the journal Science.

As a result of the discovery, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) is considering new measures to regulate the use of vaccines in animals, the body said. …

via Two Chicken Vaccines Have Combined To Create A New Strain Of Virus | Gizmodo Australia.