Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, March 20, 2012.
OND is a regular
community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Creation and early water-bearing of the OND concept came from our very own Magnifico - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Time Is Tight by Booker T. & the M.G.'s
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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Top News |
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White House slams GOP budget plan
By (UPI)
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The White House Tuesday slammed a budget plan proposed by U.S. House Republicans, saying it would "end Medicare as we know it."
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In response to reporters' questions, Carney said the plan is "essentially a shift of money from the middle class, seniors and lower-income Americans, disabled Americans, to the wealthiest Americans -- the wealthiest among us -- [with a] $150,000 on average tax cut, additional tax cut, for the wealthiest Americans; a program that would voucherize Medicare and end Medicare as we know it, and create a system in Medicare where seniors are progressively basically priced out of the market."
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Asked whether Obama believes oil companies and hedge fund managers are hurting the economy, Carney said, "The president believes that the tax breaks, the loopholes and subsidies that exist that provide $4 billion in taxpayer money to oil and gas companies, for example, or provide untold millions and billions in tax benefits to some of the wealthiest Americans who take advantage of the carried interest rule -- that those provisions are not helpful to the economy and they are not fair, and that removing them would create benefits for the economy ... "
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Oil from Deepwater Horizon Disaster Entered Food Chain in the Gulf of Mexico
By (ScienceDaily)
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Since the explosion on the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, scientists have been working to understand the impact that this disaster has had on the environment. For months, crude oil gushed into the water at a rate of approximately 53,000 barrels per day before the well was capped on July 15, 2010. A new study confirms that oil from the Macondo well made it into the ocean's food chain through the tiniest of organisms, zooplankton.
Tiny drifting animals in the ocean, zooplankton are useful to track oil-derived pollution. They serve as food for baby fish and shrimp and act as conduits for the movement of oil contamination and pollutants into the food chain. The study confirms that not only did oil affect the ecosystem in the Gulf during the blowout, but it was still entering the food web after the well was capped.
Oil, which is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons and other chemicals, contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which can be used to fingerprint oil and determine its provenance. . .
The team's research indicates that the fingerprint of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill could be found in some zooplankton in the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem at low levels, as much as a month after the leaking wellhead was capped. In addition, the extent of the contamination seemed to be patchy. Some zooplankton at certain locations far removed from the spill showed evidence of contamination, whereas zooplankton in other locations, sometimes near the spill, showed lower indications of exposure to the oil-derived pollutants.
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Radioactive tissue boxes raise fears about nuclear waste disposal
By Amy Silverstein
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World leaders attending a nuclear security meeting in Seoul this month will try to tackle the problem of discarding old atomic material, Bloomberg News reported.
. . .
A new Bloomberg News investigation on atomic waste disposal shows that the problem has no easy fix. More than 120 shipments of contaminated goods were denied entry into the US between 2003 and 2008, Bloomberg found. The discarded waste ends up in scrap metal yards. One Dutch company found 145 nuclear items in scrap last year.
India and China have been the two major sources of radioactive goods shipped to the US, Bloomberg found. One Indian employee working at a scrap metal yard died when he took apart an X-ray machine.
In January, Bed, Bath & Beyond recalled tissue boxes from 200 stores because one of the box's materials emitted low levels of radiation, Reuters reported.
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US Nuke Stockpile Control Systems Are "Under Constant Attack"
By Andrew Tarantola
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You may never have heard of the National Nuclear Security Administration but that doesn't mean foreign agents haven't. The agency tasked with protecting America's nukes and nuclear secrets has disclosed that its computer systems are attacked as many as 10 MILLION times a day.
According to the department's head, Thomas D'Agostino, the NNSA's security systems are constantly being probed by all sorts of hackers, "They're from other countries' [governments], but we also get fairly sophisticated non-state actors as well," he told US News. "The [nuclear] labs are under constant attack, the Department of Energy is under constant attack."
. . .
And the threat of a Stuxnet-style attack is an ever-present concern. "Stuxnet showed that airgapping is not a perfect defense," Segal says. "Even in secure systems, people stick in their thumb drives, they go back and forth between computers. They can find vulnerabilities that way. If people put enough attention to it, they can possibly be penetrated."
The NNSA was formed in 2000 in response to the Wen Ho Lee spying scandal in which sensitive nuclear intel was passed along to the Chinese. This sub-agency of the Department of Energy is tasked with moving and recovering nuclear material around the country and operates with a $9 billion budget. The agency hopes for a budget increase of $25 million to better fortify its systems.
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Daily aspirin 'prevents and possibly treats cancer'
By Michelle Roberts
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Taking a low dose of aspirin every day can prevent and possibly even treat cancer, fresh evidence suggests.
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Prof Peter Rothwell, from Oxford University, and colleagues, who carried out the latest work, had already linked aspirin with a lower risk of certain cancers, particularly bowel cancer.
But their previous work suggested people needed to take the drug for about 10 years to get any protection.
Now the same experts believe the protective effect occurs much sooner - within three to five years - based on a new analysis of data from 51 trials involving more than 77,000 patients.
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International |
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No fatalities in strongest quake to hit Mexico City since 1985
By Tim Johnson
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A powerful earthquake in southern Mexico shook buildings in this megacity Tuesday, sending objects tumbling from shelves, cracking walls and emptying buildings of millions of frightened residents fleeing to the streets.
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Damage appeared to have been greater nearer the epicenter. The governor of Guerrero state said 800 houses had been affected by the quake, the official Notimex news agency reported, and five people were injured in Oaxaca, according to Laura Gurza, the chief of Mexico's civil defense system. Two people were injured in Mexico City, she added.
Because the quake took place under land, there was no threat of a tsunami.
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Badger cull in Wales scrapped for vaccination programme
By Damian Carrington and agencies
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A controversial cull of badgers in Wales aimed at cutting TB in cattle will no longer go ahead, Welsh environment minister John Griffiths announced on Tuesday, with the plan replaced by a multimillion-pound vaccination programme.
The decision was met with delight from animal rights groups, and came following a review of the science behind an original government study saying the cull should go ahead. Farming groups and rival politicians have accused the government of "betraying" the rural community with the U-turn. Bovine tuberculosis leads to the slaughter of thousand of cattle a year and costs taxpayers millions. England is pushing ahead with culling plans, which environment secretary Caroline Spelman argues may reduce infections in culling areas by 16%.
But Griffiths, who stressed he was "personally committed" to the eradication of TB in cattle in Wales, told the Press Association he was not satisfied that the mass killing of badgers, who can carry the disease, would bring a major halt to its spread. "Bovine TB has a significant financial and social impact on farmers and the wider community in Wales," he said. "Last year alone, the Welsh government paid out just over £12m in compensation for cattle slaughtered. But I am not at present satisfied a cull of badgers would be necessary to bring about a substantial reduction in the incidence of bovine TB in cattle."
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In economically devastated Greece, internet-enabled barter economy rises
By Xeni Jardin
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An interesting piece in the Guardian this week about cashless commerce in Greece, where the currency crisis has prompted citizens to take unusual measures to obtain essential goods. One exchange website in particular is cited, and a unit of barter known as "tems." The network has been online for about a year and a half. Snip from a portion of Jon Henley's report about the open-air markets where tems are exchanged for daily neccessities:
“They’re quite joyous occasions,” she said. “It’s very liberating, not using money.” At one market, she said, she approached a woman who had come along with three large trays of homemade cakes and was selling them for a unit a cake. “I asked her: ‘Do you think that’s enough? After all, you had the cost of the ingredients, the electricity to cook …’
. . .
What rules the system has are designed to ensure the tems continue “to circulate, and work hard as a currency”, said Christos Pappionannou, a mechanical engineer who runs the network’s website using open-source software. No one may hold more than 1,200 tems in the account “so people don’t start hoarding; once you reach the top limit you have to start using them.” And no one may owe more than 300, so people “can’t get into debt, and have to start offering something.
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US imposes solar duties on China
By (BBC)
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The US has imposed duties on Chinese solar panel manufacturers after it said that they received unfair subsidies.
Chinese exporters into the US - including Suntech - will now face customs tariffs of between 2.9% and 4.73%, the Commerce Department said.
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The price of solar panels dropped more than 30% last year, mainly linked to cheaper panels made in China.
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Sharp increase in Palestinian deaths in 2011
By (Al Jazeera)
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The past year saw a sharp rise in the number of civilians killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a human rights group said.
An annual report from the Jerusalem-based B'Tselem showed that in 2011 Israeli security forces killed a total of 105 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, of whom 37 were confirmed as non-combatants.
"The picture is harsh, not because of dramatic events or a sudden deterioration, but precisely because of the routine," the report said.
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Israel captured the West Bank, the Golan Heights, mainly Arab east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip during the 1967 Six-Day War, but pulled its settlers and soldiers out of Gaza in 2005. It still occupies the other areas until today.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Twitter health-reporting app sought
By (UPI)
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U.S federal officials have announced a contest for developers to design Web-based applications that use Twitter to track health trends in real time.
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Health officials say they may be able to use knowledge of these trends as an early indicator of emerging health issues and a warning of public health emergencies in a community.
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To win the challenge, officials said, the application must be innovative, scalable, dynamic and user-friendly, and must use open-source Twitter data to automatically deliver a list of the top five trending illnesses over a 24-hour period in a specified geographic region.
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Top Court's Patent Rejection Alarms the Biotech Industry
By BRENT KENDALL, JONATHAN D. ROCKOFF AND CHRISTOPHER WEAVER
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The Supreme Court jolted the biotechnology industry with a unanimous ruling that threw out two medical-testing patents and suggested companies need to do more to prove their discoveries are really new.
The ruling sparked uncertainty about the booming field of personalized medicine, in which some of the world's largest drug companies are vying to tailor treatments to patients' unique makeups by using diagnostic tests.
The court, in the latest legal opinion tightening patent rules, said that merely telling doctors of a new scientific discovery and recommending they use it to treat patients is not patentable.
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Kyle Tasker, New Hampshire State Legislator, Drops Gun During Committee Meeting
By John Celock
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A Republican member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives who once posted a comment on Facebook about shooting at police officers accidentally dropped one of his guns on the floor at the start of a committee meeting Tuesday morning.
State Rep. Kyle Tasker (R-Nottingham) explained to onlookers that he had donated blood that morning and the effects caused him to drop his gun at the start of a House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee meeting. The committee was meeting to amend an abortion bill pending in the Legislature. The gun did not fire.
State Rep. Steve Shurtleff (D-Concord), a member of the committee, said that he was sitting three seats away from Tasker in the committee room when he heard "a clang" and saw that t
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
Random notes related to this video:
Booker T. & the M.G.'s is an instrumental R&B band that was influential in shaping the sound of southern soul and Memphis soul. . . As originators of the unique Stax sound, the group was one of the most prolific, respected, and imitated of their era. By the mid-1960s, bands on both sides of the Atlantic were trying to sound like Booker T. & the M.G.'s.
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Having two white members (Cropper and Dunn), Booker T. & the M.G.'s was one of the first racially integrated rock groups, at a time when soul music, and the Memphis music scene in particular, were generally considered the preserve of black culture.
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In 1969, Duck Dunn and Booker T. Jones, in particular, had become enamored with The Beatles, especially their work on Abbey Road. The appreciation was mutual, as The Beatles had patterned a lot of what they did on the M.G.'s. John Lennon was a huge Stax fan who fondly called the group, “Book a Table and the Maitre D's”. Paul McCartney, like Dunn, played bass melodically, without straying from the rhythm or the groove. It was obvious through each of their playing that they admired one another. After being locked away in the Memphis studio, when the company embarked on the “Hit the Road, Stax!” tour of 1967, The Beatles sent limos to the airport and bent down to kiss Steve Cropper's ring.[citation needed] The M.G.'s had no idea, until then, of the impact they were having on the rest of the world. Lennon was quoted as saying he always wanted to write an instrumental for the M.G.'s.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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USDA Not Changing Policy on Environmental Review for Rural Loans
By Kate Sheppard
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Currently, lands where an oil or gas company has a leases to drill are granted what's known as a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act, a law that requires environmental review on any federal projects. The article over the weekend indicated that USDA was considering requiring this NEPA review before granting loans and loan guarantees through the Rural Housing Service and the Rural Business and Cooperative program, two USDA efforts designed to help rural homeowners and businesses, respectively by providing low-interest loans. The USDA provides a total of $165 billion in loans and loan guarantees, and a lot of that money goes to states where oil and gas leases are becoming more common.
If the USDA did decide to enforce NEPA review on properties with oil and gas drilling leases, it would likely have had broad implications for anyone seeking a loan for property on that land, as it could affect property and resale values. It would have meant closer scrutiny of potential environmental impacts, and would have made it more difficult—if not impossible—to obtain these rural loans on leased land if the review cited major impacts, as the Times piece noted.
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Environmental groups that have been following concerns related to fracking expressed disappointment on Tuesday about the USDA's decision not to enforce NEPA on these loans."We'd hope Secretary Vilsack would stand by the assessment of his colleagues at USDA who believe a full, thorough environmental review of these leases take place first," said Environmental Working Group spokesman Alex Formuzis. "The potential risks fracking poses to our land, air and water demands the government take the necessary precautions at its desposal when possible."
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Fracking emissions may affect health
By (UPI)
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Air pollution due to hydraulic fracturing might add to acute or chronic health issues for those living near natural gas drilling sites, U.S. researchers said.
Lead author Lisa McKenzie of Colorado School of Public Health said the findings, based on three years of monitoring, found a number of potentially toxic petroleum hydrocarbons -- including benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, xylene, heptane, octane and diethylbenzene -- in the air near wells.
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"Our data show that it is important to include air pollution in the national dialogue on natural gas development that has focused largely on water exposures to hydraulic fracturing," McKenzie said in a statement. "Our results show that the non-cancer health impacts from air emissions due to natural gas development is greater for residents living closer to wells. The greatest health impact corresponds to the relatively short-term, but high emission, well completion period."
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Pig ears and donkey butts: 5 foods that could save the world
By Sarah Parsons
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Andrew Zimmern, host of the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods, eats some pretty strange dishes. Now, he wants you to do the same in the name of saving the world:
You can change the world one plate at a time. If we can take better advantage of the global pantry and eat from a wider variety of choices we would do more to combat food poverty, our damaged food production system, obesity and other systemic health and wellness issues than any one single act I can imagine. Here are some suggestions, but be creative. It works.
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Many of these suggestions make a lot of sense, especially growing your own veggies and switching to more sustainable fish species. But while Zimmern’s suggestions are well-intentioned, I’m not sure most Americans will embrace ordering up a pig scrotum and donkey sandwich at the deli anytime soon.
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Mike Daisey, climate, and greater truths
By David Roberts
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. . .
Daisey did something as old as theater itself: manipulated facts in service of narrative. He rearranged events, put himself in scenes he never actually witnessed, and collapsed people into composite characters, all in the name of telling a gripping and meaningful story. That’s all fine, of course, if you’re just doing theater and the audience knows what it’s getting. The problem, as Ira Glass points out in This American Life‘s extraordinary retraction episode (and as New York Times media critic David Carr echoes), is that the people who went to see Daisey’s show, or heard it on TAL, were under the impression that they were hearing an exposé, a piece of personal journalism. They thought they were hearing about stuff that really happened to Daisey. And he let them think that, even encouraged them to. He shouldn’t have done that! (As usual, James Fallows puts it best.)
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It’s a weird and naive notion that there is a bright line between objective and subjective, fact and opinion, reality and narrative. Post-war journalism in the U.S. has been besotted with this kind of technocratic positivism, the notion that a reporter’s job is to convey facts and that anything else is personal opinion, bias, or outright deception.
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One of the striking things about climate change is that majorities of Americans accept it, on some level or other, but it is those who reject it, largely in the conservative base, who display the most intensity. They’re the ones who call their representatives and go to town halls and write letters to the editor and get in a reactionary fury over f’ing light bulbs. Why is that? One reason is that conservatives have been told a story. They have not been given science lectures by Al Gore and James Hansen, instructed on ocean pH and ice sheet volumes and parts per million of CO2. They’ve been told by their media outlets, analysts, and politicians what climate change means: It is part of the liberal plan to control your behavior and expand government. It is elite condescension, high taxes, and global governance. That’s a story that carries great emotional resonance for its audience.
What story have those outside the conservative base been told?
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Illegal logging makes billions for gangs, report says
By Richard Black
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Illegal logging generates $10-15bn (£7.5-11bn) around the world, according to new analysis from the World Bank.
Its report, Justice for Forests, says that most illegal logging operations are run by organised crime, and much of the profit goes to corrupt officials.
Countries affected include Indonesia, Madagascar and several in West Africa.
The bank says that pursuing loggers through the criminal justice system has made a major impact in some nations, and urges others to do the same.
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Science and Health |
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Astronomers Discover Rectangular Galaxy
By The Physics arXiv Blog
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Galaxies essentially have three different shapes. The vast majority are flattened discs, often with spiral arms; some are ellipsoids, like rugby balls; and a few are completely irregular with no symmetry.
So the discovery of a galaxy with an entirely different shape is bound to generate a flutter of interest.
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The obvious question is how did it form. Graham and co think the emerald cut galaxy formed from the merger of two disc galaxies, like a couple of pancakes on top of each other. From the side, this looks rectangular.
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Better Organic Electronics: Researchers Show the Way Forward for Improving Organic and Molecular Electronic Devices
By (ScienceDaily)
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Future prospects for superior new organic electronic devices are brighter now thanks to a new study by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Working at the Lab's Molecular Foundry, a DOE nanoscience center, the team has provided the first experimental determination of the pathways by which electrical charge is transported from molecule-to-molecule in an organic thin film. Their results also show how such organic films can be chemically modified to improve conductance.
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Organic electronics, also known as plastic or polymer electronics, are devices that utilize carbon-based molecules as conductors rather than metals or semiconductors. They are prized for their low costs, light weight and rubbery flexibility. Organic electronics are also expected to play a big role in molecular computing, but to date their use has been hampered by low electrical conductance in comparison to metals and semiconductors.
"Chemists and engineers have been using their intuition and trial-and-error testing to make progress in the field but at some point you hit a wall unless you understand what is going on at the molecular level, for example, how electrons or holes flow through or across molecules, how the charge transport depends on the structure of the organic layers and the orientation of the molecules, and how the charge transport responds to mechanical forces and chemical inputs," Salmeron says. "With our experimental results, we have shown that we can now provide answers for these questions."
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Women can have sexual orgasm exercising
By (UPI)
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U.S. researchers confirmed anecdotal evidence that some women experience sexual pleasure or even an orgasm while exercising.
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"The most common exercises associated with exercise-induced orgasm were abdominal exercises, climbing poles or ropes, biking/spinning and weight lifting," Herbenick said in a statement. "These data are interesting because they suggest that orgasm is not necessarily a sexual event, and they may also teach us more about the bodily processes underlying women's experiences of orgasm."
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Most women reporting exercise-induced orgasms said they were not fantasizing sexually or thinking about anyone they were attracted to during their experiences, Herbenick said.
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The Hazards of Fast Science
By Françoise Baylis
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A recent editorial in Nature lauds the U.S. government for its efforts to promote open communication between government scientists and journalists, but it condemns the Canadian government for its opposing efforts to limit what federal scientists can freely communicate to journalists. The Nature criticisms of the Harper government are well-founded. But the problem for science in Canada extends far beyond the “tightening of media protocols for federal scientists and other government workers.” More worrisome is the now dominant philosophy of trickle-down economics for science which drives science funding in this country.
In Canada, increasingly, the federal government’s funding strategy for science is one that narrowly celebrates “P3 science” – science funded through public-private partnerships. The guiding philosophy for this strategy is a sort of trickle-down economics for science, which presumes that commercialized science benefits society by improving the economy.
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Increasingly, and as a direct result of the federal government’s funding philosophy of trickle-down economics for science, science that doesn’t support the “knowledge economy” is science that won’t get funded. The same is true for peripherally related research in the humanities and social sciences. As concerns research in bioethics, for example, there will be funding to answer the “how to” questions: “How can we do X ethically?” There will be no funding for the logically prior question: “Is it ethical to do X?” The underlying assumption is that if the research will contribute to the economy by creating new products, new services, and new jobs, then the research should be pursued – the faster, the better.
. . .
Beyond this, however, the proponents of slow science explicitly recognize that “Science needs time to think” alongside time to read, time to dialogue with the humanities and social sciences, time to digest, and time to fail. “Science does not always know what it might be at right now. Science develops unsteadily, with jerky moves and unpredictable leaps forward,” the manifesto continues, “at the same time, however, it creeps about on a very slow time scale, for which there must be room and to which justice must be done.”
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Technology |
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Fiber optic cables to span Arctic Ocean
By (UPI)
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The construction of the first submarine fiber-optic cables to cross the Arctic Ocean will improve Internet performance between Europe and Asia, researchers say.
With the retreat of arctic sea ice with global warming, two cables are planned through the Northwest Passage above North America, while a third is planned along the Russian arctic coast, NewScientist.com reported Tuesday.
Cables laid in the arctic will have some advantages over cables in warmer water, industry experts say, where fishing nets and ship anchor cables can snag and break cables, disrupting Internet traffic.
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Digital Technologies Give Dying Languages New Life
By Tom Banse
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There are some 7,000 spoken languages in the world, and linguists project that as many as half may disappear by the end of the century. That works out to one language going extinct about every two weeks. Now, digital technology is coming to the rescue of some of those ancient tongues.
Members of the Native American Siletz tribe in Oregon say their native language, also called "Siletz," "is as old as time itself." But today, you can count the number of fluent speakers on one hand. Siletz Tribal Council Vice Chairman Bud Lane is one of them.
. . .
"This is what I like to call the flip side of globalization, or the positive value of globalization," Harrison says. "We hear a lot about how globalization exerts negative pressures on small cultures to assimilate." But he says language activists now have modern digital tools with which to go on the offensive, including iPhone apps, YouTube videos and Facebook pages.
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Lane says he has seen signs that the tide is turning — tribal youth are now texting each other in Siletz.
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Rick Perry's Facebook page flooded with angry women
By Sarah Wolfe
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Women are flooding Rick Perry's presidential campaign Facebook page with angry comments over his efforts to defund Planned Parenthood.
. . .
The mocking comments are in response to Perry’s highly visible role in cutting off federal Medicaid money for the Texas Women’s Health Program, the Post reported.
Although Texas has previously accepted $31 million per year in federal funds for the program, Perry and state Republican lawmakers said they can no longer abide that money flowing through Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas, even though participating clinics don’t provide abortions, according to the Post.
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Nissan Leaf to Get 25-Mile Range Boost in Cold Weather Due to New Heater Design
By Brandon Hill
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Since the Chevrolet Volt has been getting the bulk of the attention -- and criticism -- in recent months, it's rather easy to overlook the Nissan Leaf. The Leaf, unlike the Volt, is a pure electric vehicle and doesn't have a gasoline engine/generator to fall back on once its battery pack is depleted.
The Leaf currently has an EPA rating of 99 miles per gallon equivalent (MPGe) and an EPA driving range of 73 miles, although Nissan still says that the Leaf can travel up to 100 miles depending on the driving conditions. The company is now reporting that the observed range of the 2013 Leaf will increase in at least one environmental condition that traditionally saps power from electric vehicles: cold weather.
Nissan says that 2013 model year Leafs will have a more efficient heating system that will reduce energy consumption. As a result, drivers will see cold-weather driving range increase by 20 to 25 miles according to The Detroit News. Mark Perry, Nissans' director of product and advanced planning, says that it's currently unclear if the EPA ratings for the Leaf will change as a result, but the mileage boost drivers would see will be there nonetheless.
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Vibrating tattoo alerts patent filed by Nokia in US
By (BBC)
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Vibrating magnetic tattoos may one day be used to alert mobile phone users to phone calls and text messages if Nokia follows up a patent application.
The Finnish company has described the idea in a filing to the US Patent and Trademark Office.
It describes tattooing, stamping or spraying "ferromagnetic" material onto a user's skin and then pairing it with a mobile device.
It suggests different vibrations could be used to create a range of alerts.
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Cultural |
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Explore Einstein’s Brain Through His Notes and Letters
By Mario Aguilar
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More than ten years after its inception, the online archive of Albert Einstein's life and work relaunched this week with tons of new content—including more than 2000 high-resolution documents. Nerds, have at it!
The massive, rebooted archive is administered by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and includes thousands of documents that were previously only available in collected volumes. Highlights like the orignal handwritten manuscript in which Einstein proposes his theory of mass-energy equivalence are available in a gallery along with personal effects. For example, Einstein wrote the postcard above recounting his observations about the solar eclipse in May 1919 to his mother. (Don't worry, the documents are translated and explained in case you don't speak German...or physics.)
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UK journalists held in Libya after Welsh mistaken for Hebrew
By (BBC)
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Two UK journalists were labelled "spies" after a militia in Libya confused the Welsh language with Hebrew.
Gareth Montgomery-Johnson, from Carmarthen, and Nicholas Davies-Jones, from Berkshire, were picked up by the Misrata Brigade in Tripoli last month.
They were carrying medical supplies which had Welsh words printed on them.
Mr Montgomery-Johnson told the BBC: "They thought this was Hebrew and we were Israeli spies."
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The rise of Mormon feminist bloggers
By Frieda Klotz
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On her 30th birthday, which she celebrated in New York City, D'Arcy Benincosa did the wildest thing she could think of: she ordered a cup of coffee. The friend who was with her freaked out. They were Mormons, and coffee is forbidden; but both were on the brink of leaving the church. Later that day, Benincosa sampled a cocktail, and within a few months she had sex for the first time. "On my 30th birthday, I made the decision," Benincosa, now 34, tells me over the phone. "I'm done."
A teacher and photographer who lives in Salt Lake City, she is no longer active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She describes herself as culturally Mormon and is one of more than 20 women who write for the Mormon feminist blog, the Exponent. Some of its contributors are still in the church, and it is part of a growing trend of Mormon feminist expression online.
Along with the Exponent, there are Feminist Mormon Housewives, Women Advocating for Voice and Equality (Wave), and a literary group called Segullah. In the past it was hard for Mormon women who struggled with the status quo to locate kindred spirits, but the internet allows them to find each other. When Benincosa came across the Exponent, she stayed up all night reading post after post. "I just cried because I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm not alone.'"
. . .
Blogging suits Mormon practices because it draws on the tradition of keeping a journal, and church leaders have explicitly encouraged it – three years ago, Elder M Russell Ballard made a speech urging Mormons to use new media to share the Gospel. The church's official website, Mormon.org, is a pretty exceptional example of persuasive use of social media; and on the wider web a "Bloggernacle" flourishes, with conversations running the gamut from orthodoxy to dissidence.
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Meteor Blades is known to offer an enlightening Evening Open Diary - you might consider checking that out tonight if you haven't already. |