School experiment discovers garden cress won’t germinate near a router

Garden cress is a fast growing and edible herb that will sprout in just a small amount of slightly alkaline water. But there is one exception to that rule, and is has scientists scratching their heads.

A group of 5 girls have carried out a science experiment at Hjallerup School in North Jutland, Denmark that saw garden cress seeds placed in 12 tubs and split into two batches. Both batches were placed in different rooms that remained the same temperature, and were given the same amount of water and sunlight over the course of 12 days.

You’d expect both batches of 6 tubs to grow equally well, but one set didn’t even germinate. The reason? They were placed next to two routers. Although it’s unclear exactly why this happened, it is thought that the radiation produced by the routers is what stopped the seeds germinating.

The girls’ experiment was geared towards testing the potential impact of phone radiation on surrounding objects. They didn’t have phones to use though, so decided the routers were a good alternative. The experiment has certainly caught the interest of the international science community and is set to be repeated in a more controlled environment. One of the first controlled experiments will be carried out by Professor Olle Johansson from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Hopefully it will shed more light on why this is happening.

Johansson has said he’s impressed by the girl’s experiment and hopes they will continue into research careers when they are older. For the moment, the girls just find the attention exciting and have all decided not to sleep with a mobile phone anywhere near their beds for fear of it having some negative impact just like with the cress. …

http://www.geek.com/science/school-experiment-discovers-garden-cress-wont-germinate-near-a-router-1555577/

Meteoroid impact triggers bright flash on the moon

An automated telescope monitoring the moon has captured images of an 88-pound (40 kg) rock slamming into the lunar surface, creating a bright flash of light, NASA scientists said on Friday.

The explosion on March 17 was the biggest seen since NASA began watching the moon for meteoroid impacts about eight years ago. So far, more than 300 strikes have been recorded.

“It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before,” Bill Cooke, with NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said in a statement.

A NASA satellite orbiting the moon is now on a hunt for the newly formed crater, which scientists estimate could be as wide as 66 feet (20 meters).

The flash was so bright that anyone looking at the moon at the moment of impact could have seen it without a telescope, NASA said.

After reviewing digital recordings made by one of the program’s telescopes, scientists determined the space rock was about 1 foot (0.3 meters) in diameter, and traveling about 56,000 mph (90,123 kph) when it slammed into the moon and exploded with the force of five tons of TNT.

That same night, cameras detected an unusually high number of meteors blasting through Earth’s atmosphere as well. Most meteors burn up well before reaching the ground.

But not always. In February, an asteroid estimated to be about 66 feet (20 meters) in diameter exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, damaging buildings and shattering glass, leaving more than 1,500 injured. It was the largest object to strike Earth since 1908.

“The Russian fireball was many orders of magnitude larger and possessed 100,000 times more energy,” than the lunar impact, Cooke wrote in an email to Reuters.

He believes the lunar impact and the March 17 meteor shower on Earth are related, the result of both bodies traveling together through a region of space sprinkled with small rocks and dust.

“We’ll be keeping an eye out for signs of a repeat performance next year when the Earth-moon system passes through the same region of space,” Cooke said. (Editing by Kevin Gray and Doina Chiacu)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/17/space-moon

Authorities hunting for nuclear gauge lost in West Virginia

The truck was transporting the device for the Pennsylvania firm Valley Quarries Inc. – a company licensed to possess and use the gauge. The company had been using the instrument in West Virginia at the time it was lost, and is desperately seeking to find it

Department of Environmental Protection officials said Tuesday that after one of its employees was taking a reading with the job, he placed the gauge in his pickup truck to drive to another site.

“Once he arrived, the gauge user realized the truck’s rear gate had opened and the device was missing,”DEP spokeswoman Lisa Kasianowitz told The Times Online. “Further, the gauge was not in its shipping container. The gauge user and a coworker promptly drove back along the route just traveled but were unable to find the device.”

Officials are now warning people to be on the lookout for a device that could pose dangerous health and contamination risks to the public.

“It is critical for anyone who has information about the lost nuclear gauge to contact the Pennsylvania DEP, Nuclear Regulatory Commission or a local law enforcement agency immediately. As long as the device is not tampered with or damaged, it presents no hazard to public safety,” the DEP Bureau of Radiation Protect David Allard said in a press release.

The nuclear density gauge contains radioactive material, which directs particles and counts those that are reflected or passed through material to measure density. In the construction industry, these gauges are used to create suitable soil environments to build roads and structures.

When left intact, the gauges are safe to handle. But anyone who tampers with them risks serious radioactive contamination and exposure.

Police are urging anyone who finds the gauge – which is bright yellow and the size of a shoebox – to call 911 or contact the Pennsylvania DEP. The gauge is a Troxler Model 3430 with serial number 32506. It contains about 8 millicuries of cesium-137 and 40 millicuries of americium-241. Cesium-137 is the principle source of radiation in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which was designated for evacuation and placed under military control after the 1986 nuclear accident.

Valley Quarries is offering an unspecified reward for information leading to the return of their device. One of the company’s safety officer’s told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that he saw someone stop along the road, pick up and drive off with a device that appeared to be a gauge.

http://rt.com/usa/nuclear-gauge-radiation-virginia-321/

Police Arrest 31 People Over $50 Million Brussels Gem Theft

More than 30 people were arrested in coordinated raids across three countries in connection with the February theft of $50 million in diamonds at Brussels Airport.

Belgian police detained 24 people this morning in raids at about 40 homes, mostly in Brussels, Anja Bijnens, a spokeswoman for the Brussels prosecutor’s office, told reporters today in the Belgian capital. Swiss police arrested eight people yesterday, six of whom were later released, according to the Geneva prosecutor’s office. Another person was detained in France yesterday.

Police seized 100,000 Swiss francs ($107,000) in cash and a “large quantity” of diamonds in Switzerland, said Vincent Derouand, a spokesman for the Geneva prosecutor’s office. A “large amount” of money was found in the raids in Belgium, which involved 250 police officers, Bijnens said.

In the Feb. 18 theft, armed gunmen took at least 120 packets of diamonds at Brussels Airport as they were being loaded onto a plane bound for Zurich. The packets contained rough and polished stones valued at $50 million, according to Antwerp World Diamond Centre.

The eight masked men with machine guns and wearing police clothing breached the airport perimeter in two black vehicles with flashing blue lights and drove up to a Helvetic Air plane operated by Swiss International Air Lines Ltd. They stole the gems after they had been transferred from a Brink’s Co. security van into the cargo hold.

‘Well Planned’

“It was very well organized, very swift, efficient and well planned,” Jan Van der Cruysse, a spokesman for the airport, said at the time. The thieves stopped at the plane for just three minutes and the whole operation took just over 10 minutes, he said.

Two out of the eight people arrested in Geneva yesterday are still in police custody and have been charged with handling stolen goods and assisting offenders, Derouand said. One is a businessman and the other is a lawyer working in Geneva, he said, declining to give further details.

Geneva prosecutors and police started investigating after an organized crime member was identified in the city two months ago, Derouand said. That person was arrested in France yesterday, he said. The Belgian authorities have requested the extradition of the French national, Bijnens said.

Trading Hub

Brussels airport is 42 kilometers from Antwerp, Belgium’s second-largest city and the biggest trading hub for rough diamonds, handling four-fifths of the world’s trade.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-08/belgium-says-31-people-arrested-over-50-million-diamond-theft.html

Stark Love: Iron Man Three Grabs the Global Gold

The kids keep pestering Tony Stark about his last adventure, in The Avengers, but he doesn’t want to talk about it: he’s preoccupied with his brand-new world-saving mission. Tony needn’t have worried about the comparisons. Iron Man Three, starring Robert Downey Jr. as the brilliant, arrogant industrialist, earned $175.3 million at North American theaters, according to preliminary estimates by Marvel Studios and its parent company, Disney. That’s the second best-ever weekend debut, behind the $207.5 million for Marvel’s The Avengers exactly a year ago, but ahead of the $169.2 million scored by the previous runner-up, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, in July 2011.

Internationally, the Stark Express was untoppable: $500.4 million in 11 days, beating the $450 million or so that The Avengers opened to last year. IM3 broke records in Russia, and throughout Latin America and East Asia. China alone accounted for $63.5 million since premiering Wednesday — its success spurred by three minutes of additional scenes in Mandarin with Mainland actress Fan Bingbing. When all the dollars, Euros, rubles and Renminbi are counted, and final figures are issued Monday, IM3 may have achieved the strongest worldwide opening of all time….

http://entertainment.time.com/2013/05/05/stark-love-iron-man-three-grabs-the-global-gold/

Iron Man Three was great, I recommend it for high tech, great performances, stunts, and a story with some good plot twists. I don’t understand one thing he did at the end of the movie, however. Sure, I understand the romantic reason for the fireworks, but they could have been created in a less destructive way… Never know what you might need in the future. I’ll just say that it seemed out of character.

“Deathbed testimony” about UFOs given by former CIA official (VIDEO)

Video testimony by an anonymous alleged former CIA official was shown at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on Friday, May 3.

UFO author and historian Richard Dolaninterviewed “Anonymous” on March 5, 2013. Facing impending kidney failure, this individual felt compelled to disclose secret information he feels is too important to keep secret. In the video, he claims to have served in the U.S. Army, worked for the CIA, and worked on the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book–one of the USAF’s official studies of UFOs. And he refers to the project as “partially a fraud.” Asking for clarification, Dolan states, “You’re saying some of the Blue Book cases were completely fictitious?” The anonymous man responds, “Yes.”

Richard Dolan interviewing ‘Anonymous.’ (Credit: Truth Embargo)

“Anonymous” alleges that, after an invasion threat from President Dwight Eisenhower, he and his superior at the CIA were allowed inside the secretive Area 51 in Nevada to gather intel and report back to the president. There, “Anonymous” describes seeing several alien spacecraft, including the craft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. Then, he and his superior were taken to the S-4 facility southwest of Area 51 where they observed live extraterrestrials.

Author and UFO researcher Peter Robbins, who served as a witness at the Citizen Hearing, saw the video testimony as it was presented. He posted his reaction on his Facebook account: “In my opinion, if it can be confirmed by any relevant supporting documentation, this moving and fascinating account does qualify as an authentic ‘death bed’ testimony from an individual who convincingly claims to have been a CIA officer deeply involved in the matter or crashed and/or recovered craft, and at one time a liaison between the Agency and the President (Truman).”

This testimony will be included in an upcoming documentary titled Truth Embargo….

http://www.openminds.tv/deathbed-testimony-about-ufos-given-by-former-cia-official-video-1002/

Psychiatry divided as mental health “bible” denounced

The world’s biggest mental health research institute is abandoning the new version of psychiatry’s “bible” – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , questioning its validity and stating that “patients with mental disorders deserve better”. This bombshell comes just weeks before the publication of the fifth revision of the manual, called DSM-5 .

On 29 April, Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), advocated a major shift away from categorising diseases such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia according to a person’s symptoms. Instead, Insel wants mental disorders to be diagnosed more objectively using genetics, brain scans that show abnormal patterns of activity and cognitive testing.

This would mean abandoning the manual published by the American Psychiatric Association that has been the mainstay of psychiatric research for 60 years.

The DSM has been embroiled in controversy for a number of years. Critics have said that it has outlasted its usefulness, has turned complaints that are not truly illnesses into medical conditions, and has been unduly influenced by pharmaceutical companies looking for new markets for their drugs.

There have also been complaints that widened definitions of several disorder have led to over-diagnosis of conditions such as bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Now, Insel has said in a blog post published by the NIMH that he wants a complete shift to diagnoses based on science not symptoms.

“Unlike our definitions of ischaemic heart disease, lymphoma or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure,” Insel says. “In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain, or the quality of fever.”

Insel says that elsewhere in medicine this type of symptom-based diagnosis been abandoned over the past half-century as scientists have learned that symptoms alone seldom indicate the best choice of treatment.

To accelerate the shift to biologically based diagnosis, Insel favours an approach embodied by a programme launched 18 months ago at the NIMH called the Research Domain Criteria project.

The approach is based on the idea that mental disorders are biological problems involving brain circuits that dictate specific patterns of cognition, emotion and behaviour. Concentrating on treating these problems, rather than symptoms is hoped to provide a better outlook for patients.

“We cannot succeed if we use DSM categories as the gold standard,” says Insel. “That is why NIMH will be reorienting its research away from DSM categories,” says Insel.

Prominent psychiatrists contacted by New Scientist broadly support Insel’s bold initiative. However, they say that given the time it will take to realise Insel’s vision, diagnosis and treatment will continue to be based on symptoms.

Insel is aware that what he is suggesting will take time – probably at least a decade, but sees it as the first step towards delivering the “precision medicine” that he says has transformed cancer diagnosis and treatment. …

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23487-psychiatry-divided-as-mental-health-bible-denounced.html

Good! We need a mental health revolution.

Will antimatter cause antigravity?

Scientists are hoping the experiment will teach them more about how the universe developed after the Big Bang.Physicists with ALPHA Collaboration research group are trying to figure out how antimatter interacts with gravity, and if it produces “antigravity,” says the group’s founder, Jeffrey Hangst.

Their experiment mirrors the way Sir Isaac Newton came up with the law of gravity in the late 17th century.

Legend has it that an apple fell off a tree and hit the English nobleman on the head.

Newton got to thinking how gravity made the apple speed up as it fell.

He postulated that matter attracts matter via gravitational force, which is why an object like an apple would fall toward a larger object: the earth.

So, if matter attracts matter, what happens when antimatter interacts with it?

Will it produce antigravity? And would then a ball of antimatter fall up?

Gravity with a twist

“That would be a revolution,” Hangst says. “That would mean we don’t understand something fundamental about the universe.”

And a big piece of the puzzle is indeed missing, he admits.

Though people live with the effects of gravity every day and Newton’s law of gravity has been around for over 300 years, scientific understanding of gravity is lagging, he says.

“The way planets and stars move, we understand that well.” But how matter attracts matter on a molecular level is still greatly a mystery, Hangst says. The ALPHA Collaboration hopes to raise the level of understanding…

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/02/world/europe/switzerland-antimatter/index.html

How Time Crystals Could Rewrite the Rules of Physics

If you overheard someone talking about time crystals in a bar, you’d think they were mad, or drunk. Or both. These things, theoretically, oscillate for eternity without any energy input whatsoever – and if that sounds like a perpetual motion machine, it’s because it is. Impossible, right? But what if it was a Nobel prize-winning physicists making the suggestion?

Because that’s exactly the situation we find ourselves in. As Wired reports, Frank Wilczek from MIT has taken the rather bold step of announcing to the world that he thinks time crystals could exist. It wasn’t a decision he made lightly – it could well see him ostracized by the wider scientific community – but after months of work, he decided there was nothing else for it. Wired explains his idea:

When matter crystallizes, its atoms spontaneously organize themselves into the rows, columns and stacks of a three-dimensional lattice. An atom occupies each “lattice point,” but the balance of forces between the atoms prevents them from inhabiting the space between. Because the atoms suddenly have a discrete, rather than continuous, set of choices for where to exist, crystals are said to break the spatial symmetry of nature – the usual rule that all places in space are equivalent… Eventually, his equations indicated that atoms could indeed form a regularly repeating lattice in time, returning to their initial arrangement only after discrete (rather than continuous) intervals, thereby breaking time symmetry. Without consuming or producing energy, time crystals would be stable, in what physicists call their “ground state,” despite cyclical variations in structure that scientists say can be interpreted as perpetual motion.

In other words, he’s saying it must be possible to create a crystal that has regular, time-varying motion going on inside – without any energy being dumped into the system. That’s quite a claim. He was right to be unsure though, because he’s now picking up criticism from fellow physicists across the world.

Fortunately, he has at least one team of researchers on his side. After publishing his idea late last year, a team of experimentalists based at Berkeley offered to try and make a crystal that exhibits those very properties. If they can do it – and neither they or Wilczek see why they shouldn’t be able to – the most basic theories of time could be forever rewritten, as time crystals would break the fundamental concept of time symmetry.

The only problem is that progress is slow: the Berkeley researchers have admitted that the project could take “anywhere between three and infinity years” to complete. Until then, a theoretical debate rages on – and if you want to read more about the subtleties of the arguments, you should go read the feature over on Wired…

http://gizmodo.com/how-time-crystals-could-rewrite-the-rules-of-physics-487002510

Ag-Gag Laws Could Make America Sick

Video still of a downed cow forklifted into position at a Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company plant in Chino, California. Filmed in 2008 by an undercover investigator with the Humane Society of the United States, the video led to the largest meat recall in U.S. history.

A wave of laws that target animal welfare activists who take undercover videos at factory farms has been criticized for chilling free speech and allowing cruelty to continue in secret. But it’s not only animal well-being at issue. So is public health.

Some food safety experts say these so-called ag-gag laws will cloak disease-spreading industry practices, such as processing ill cattle and housing poultry in filthy conditions, in secrecy, raising risks of food contamination.

“The ag-gag laws are touted as preventing animal activists from getting access to private places, but there’s a much broader concern the public should have,” said Elisabeth Holmes, a staff attorney at the nonprofit Center for Food Safety. “Public health issues, food safety issues, environmental issues: all those things can be exposed through undercover investigations.”

The first-ever ag-gag prosecution, involving a Utah woman who took roadside videos of cows at a Draper City slaughterhouse, was announced this this week. Charges were soon dropped, but the incident hinted at a future in which farms are largely hidden from public sight.

Ag-gag laws were passed in Iowa, Missouri and Utah in 2011 and 2012, and submitted for consideration in ten state legislatures – Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Wyoming, and Vermont – this year. Broadly speaking, they make it illegal to take photographs or videos without farmer consent, though some go further. Pennsylvania’s proposed law, criminalizes downloading such material over the internet.

“The only glimpse we get is when we see these types of videos. The industry loves to operate in secret.”…

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/ag-gag-public-health/

It is a symptom of a failed democracy when business interests are given higher priority than public safety.