Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/314710723?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Monday, June 24, 2013
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Environmentally friendly battery made from wood
June 19, 2013 ? Taking inspiration from trees, scientists have developed a battery made from a sliver of wood coated with tin that shows promise for becoming a tiny, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly energy source. Their report on the device -- 1,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper -- appears in the journal Nano Letters.
Liangbing Hu, Teng Li and colleagues point out that today's batteries often use stiff, non-flexible substrates, which are too rigid to release the stress that occurs as ions flow through the battery. They knew that wood fibers from trees are supple and naturally designed to hold mineral-rich water, similar to the electrolyte in batteries. They decided to explore use of wood as the base of an experimental sodium-ion battery. Using sodium rather than lithium would make the device environmentally friendly.
Lead author Hongli Zhu and other team members describe lab experiments in which the device performed successfully though 400 charge-discharge cycles, putting it among the longest-lasting of all sodium-ion nanobatteries. Batteries using the new technology would be best suited for large-scale energy storage applications, such as wind farms or solar energy installations, the report indicates.
The authors acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation and the University of Maryland NanoCenter.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by American Chemical Society.
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Journal Reference:
- Hongli Zhu, Zheng Jia, Yuchen Chen, Nicholas Weadock, Jiayu Wan, Oeyvind Vaaland, Xiaogang Han, Teng Li, Liangbing Hu. Tin Anode for Sodium-Ion Batteries Using Natural Wood Fiber as a Mechanical Buffer and Electrolyte Reservoir. Nano Letters, 2013; : 130618094632004 DOI: 10.1021/nl400998t
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/SRMZbis3nxM/130619122205.htm
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Wednesday, June 19, 2013
It's the way you tell em': Study discovers how the brain controls accents and impersonations
June 18, 2013 ? A study, led by Royal Holloway University researcher Carolyn McGettigan, has identified the brain regions and interactions involved in impersonations and accents.
Using an fMRI scanner, the team asked participants, all non-professional impressionists, to repeatedly recite the opening lines of a familiar nursery rhyme either with their normal voice, by impersonating individuals, or by impersonating regional and foreign accents of English.
They found that when a voice is deliberately changed, it brings the left anterior insula and inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) of the brain into play. The researchers also discovered that when comparing impersonations against accents, areas in the posterior superior temporal/inferior parietal cortex and in the right middle/anterior superior temporal sulcus showed greater responses.
"The voice is a powerful channel for the expression of our identity -- it conveys information such as gender, age and place of birth, but crucially, it also expresses who we want to be," said lead author Carolyn McGettigan from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway.
"Consider the difference between talking to a friend on the phone, talking to a police officer who's cautioning you for parking violation, or speaking to a young infant. While the words we use might be different across these settings, another dramatic difference is the tone and style with which we deliver the words we say. We wanted to find out more about this process and how the brain controls it."
While past work has found that listening to voices activates regions of the temporal lobe of the brain, no research had explored the brain regions involved in controlling vocal identity before this study.
"Our aim is to find out more about how the brain controls this very flexible communicative tool, which could potentially lead to new treatments for those looking to recover their own vocal identity following brain injury or a stroke, " said Carolyn.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/u1LhKPniwTY/130618113854.htm
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Monday, April 29, 2013
Amanda Knox opens up about experiences in Italian prison
>>> now to the trial that captivated italy and the book being released. amanda knox "waiting to be heard" she found out next month she will be retried.
>>> joining my nina burly, whose own book chronicled her time. nina , nice to see you. she reveals during her time in prison that doctors lied that she was hiv-positive. she thought about suicide. she fought off advances by a guard. how important to you think it was for her to write this book and get this published?
>> well, it was important for her to get out of jail. i think that was the first thing. the second is what kind of information is in that book, what is it that we're going to learn. from all the accounts that i have read, you know, prison is pretty boring, it's a pretty boring place. so unless she had kind of revealed something about what happened that night that we didn't already know about, or something about the case itself that we didn't already know about, i think we were, you know, we're going to be kind of underwhelm underwhelmed. was it important to write the book? well, you know, for her to have gone through four years in prison without being ability to get compensated for it through the italian system, the fact that harper collins gave her $4 million to write it, reportedly, is some sense of compensation for the time spent in prison.
>> but we have to also remember that a young woman lost her life that day in italy of knox says he wants them to read the book. are they going to get something if they read the book?
>> they're not going to get anything from reading the book, as far as i can tell. that family is very convinced that amanda knox killed their daughter. so they're not going to be reading the book. i think they're very upset about the fact that she got that much money, and one of the reasons why they're not publishing the book in the uk is that there are apparently lots of libel laws, it's easier to file a libel suit there, so they're not going to be satisfied by it.
>> real quick, nina , were you surprised when the high court in italy ordered a retrial?
>> yes, i was, absolutely. i was surprised. there isn't a lot of evidence that these two young people were involved in the case, but then again, the italian system has to work its way through. it's different from ours. it's legitimate for them. the prosecutor can bring an appeal.
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Economic mood in euro zone sours again in April
By Robin Emmott
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Confidence in the euro zone's economy fell further in April, data showed, strengthening the case for a cut in interest rates this week by the European Central Bank.
The euro zone is facing a difficult road out of recession and has seen a souring of the mood among companies and consumers since March, after an optimistic start to the year was disrupted by turmoil in Cyprus and Italy.
Morale in the 17-country bloc slipped 1.5 percentage points to 88.6, the European Commission said on Monday - worse than the decline to 89.3 expected by economists polled by Reuters.
"We are reaching a trough and the market is betting on the ECB cutting rates to lift the economy," said Steen Jakobsen, chief economist at Saxo Bank. "But lower interests won't solve the euro zone's problems, we need structural reforms and for businesses to invest again."
Pessimism set in even in Germany, which has performed better than most during the crisis, with economic sentiment there worsening by 2.3 points. Morale also fell in France and Italy, meaning the euro zone's three largest economies are all witnessing a marked decline in the confidence that is crucial in getting the output in the euro zone growing again.
Confidence fell across the region from industry to retail trade, and sentiment in services fell 4.1 percentage points.
The Commission's measure of the euro zone's business cycle decreased 0.18 points to -0.93, lower than the -0.89 level expected by economists.
Many expect the ECB to cut interest rates to lower the cost of borrowing and help improve morale.
A majority of economists expect a 25 basis point cut this Thursday, according to a Reuters poll last week, to take the bank's main refinancing rate to a record low of 0.5 percent.
RATE CUTS, LESS AUSTERITY
Germany's economic resilience and reforms in southern Europe sowed hope early this year that the bloc could pull out of recession before the end of 2013, but a messy bailout in Cyprus and Italy's inconclusive February election, which failed to yield a government until late April, have weighed on confidence.
France's weak economy and public accounts are also a concern.
Meanwhile, budget cuts have been at the centre of the euro zone's strategy to overcome a three-year public debt crisis but they are also blamed for a damaging cycle where governments cut back, companies lay off staff, Europeans buy less and young people have little hope of finding a job.
Crippling levels of unemployment and outbreaks of violence in southern Europe are now forcing a rethink, but there is division on just how far to soften the targets.
"If the ECB eases monetary policy and the European Commission engineers a slower pace of fiscal consolidation, the euro zone economy may still exit from recession later this year," Martin van Vliet, an economist at ING.
"But the fragility of confidence suggests that any economic recovery would likely be slow, and largely confided to the core countries," he said.
Spain, the euro zone's fourth largest economy, said last week its economy would shrink more than initially expected this year and its budget deficit would be higher than promised.
Growth should return next year, and economic sentiment improved by almost 1 point, the Commission said, in a sign that despite record unemployment, reforms may be helping business.
(Reporting by Robin Emmott; editing by Rex Merrifield and Toby Chopra)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/economic-mood-euro-zone-sours-again-april-090511020.html
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Bringing major corporations to book for their crimes
Two new books tell the complex, fascinating and sometimes frustrating tale of attempts to hold multinationals to account for environmental and social crimes
- Book information
- Just Business: Multinational corporations and human rights by John Gerard Ruggie
- Published by: Norton
- Price: ?14.99
- Book information
- Make It a Green Peace! The rise of countercultural environmentalism by Frank Zelko
- Published by: Oxford University Press
- Price: ?22.50
IT WAS the world's worst industrial accident. More than 3000 people died one winter night in 1984 in the Indian city of Bhopal, poisoned by methyl isocyanate gas belching from an agrochemicals factory owned by US-based Union Carbide. Tens of thousands were disabled. The cause was unambiguous, culpability seemed clear. But how to bring the company to justice?
There was a US parent company, but also an Indian subsidiary. Court cases proliferated in both countries. US judges decreed it was up to the Indian judiciary, but the US government declined to extradite company boss Warren Anderson to face charges there. In the end, the only people convicted were a few lowly Indian managers, who had been given charge of what many said was a defective plant.
The case remains a textbook example of the persistent failure of legal systems to hold multinational corporations to account for their failures. It features in Just Business, John Gerard Ruggie's fascinating account of his journey through the minefield of corporate accountability, on behalf of the UN.
Other examples he discusses include the toxic solvents and child labour used to make fashionable Nike sportswear in the 1990s, and the 60-year battle of the impoverished Ogoni people in Nigeria against Royal Dutch Shell, whose shareholders made billions as the Ogoni forests were poisoned by oil. Then there is Yahoo's widely condemned release of subscriber information to the Chinese authorities, which resulted in a whistle-blowing Chinese journalist receiving a 10-year jail term. Ruggie also points to the existence of child slaves on cocoa farms, recklessly polluting mining companies, and many more corporate villains.
Ruggie found that in each case, there was a failure to manage technology safely, to make proper use of the scientific evidence about toxicity and environmental pollution, or to recognise ethical dilemmas created by new data systems. Those failures were partly due to a global "race to the bottom", as corporations sought to cut costs. In each case, too, national laws seemed incapable of holding the new class of global corporations to account.
Ruggie's task for the UN was not only to try to pin down the issues, but also to find ways to help corporations to recognise that they ultimately had a vested interested in creating and abiding by codes of good citizenship.
Along the way, he devised what are now known as the Ruggie Principles. In essence, these hold that states must protect people against human rights abuses, including environmental abuse, while companies must respect those rights and show due diligence when trading with others, and that those who are harmed must have proper redress.
This is good as far as it goes. But Ruggie recognises that with law mostly constrained by national borders, corporate gunslingers have plenty of places to hide. As jurisprudence falters, public opprobrium may be a more potent weapon. Like capital, it cares little for borders. And while corporations appear strong, their brands ? the crucial interface with their customers ? are uniquely vulnerable to reputational damage. Long before the legal cases over Bhopal, Union Carbide was commercially crippled by the disgust caused by its killing of thousands of Indians. It was eventually bought out by a rival.
These days, to hurry such villains to the gallows, there is a new breed of multinational organisation dedicated to drawing attention to the failings of big corporations. Non-governmental organisations like Global Witness and Greenpeace bring these cases to the court of public opinion.
In Make It a Green Peace!, historian Frank Zelko charts the rise of Greenpeace. It began in the US as a bunch of west-coast hippies who, copies of the I Ching in hand, sailed into nuclear test zones in the Pacific to disrupt whalers. He records its transformation into professional campaigners, using media-savvy PR to wage war on brands they deem responsible for trashing rainforests, releasing toxins or warming the planet.
Early Greenpeace pioneers have written their own entertaining memoirs, but this densely sourced narrative is the definitive independent account, especially of the early years ? and is highly readable. Greenpeace emerges as a kind of green version of the Spanish Inquisition, engaged in crude but effective intimidation of corporate foes. When faced with a media frenzy over their activities, the companies swiftly "find" the road to green salvation.
Of course, the irony is that in the process, Greenpeace, too, has become a brand. It is still tainted, Zelko notes, by some false accusations it made in the 1990s against Shell, when the company ditched a decommissioned oil rig into the Atlantic deeps.
The stakes are high, but the lesson is that when it comes to holding mega-corporations to account, power over global media often trumps national law.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Nowhere to run..."
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Saturday, April 27, 2013
Look Up! Spot a 'Celestial Zoo' in the Night Sky
In the midst of the frantic "doomsday" buzz that swept the United States right before the Mayan calendar reached the end of its 5,000-year cycle in December 2012, I was approached by a person after I had given a presentation at New York?s Hayden Planetarium. They asked:
"If there is no basis to the Mayan prophecy, then how do you explain the sun?s alignment with the center of our galaxy that is predicted to occur on Dec. 21?"?
Putting as earnest a look on my face as possible, I replied, "You?re absolutely correct ? the sun will indeed be aligned with the center of our galaxy on Dec. 21." I then quickly added, "But of course that happens every year on Dec. 21." [End of the World? Top Doomsday Fears]
The look on my inquisitor?s face was priceless. "Really? But how can that be?"
The sun's annual path
As the Earth moves around the sun, we see the sun change its position against the background stars ? a full 360-degree circle around the sky during the course of a year. That apparent path is known to astronomers as the ecliptic, the extension of the plane of Earth?s orbit out toward the sky.
As it turns out, the moon and the seven other planets that comprise the solar system also move in orbits whose planes don?t vary too greatly from that of Earth?s orbit.? As a result, the moon and the other planets also appear to stay relatively close to the ecliptic.
The sun never deviates from the ecliptic and so as Earth travels around it, from our perspective, it will always take the exact same path against the same background stars every year.
Since when we?re looking toward Sagittarius we?re also looking toward the center of the Milky Way, when the sun reaches that same point on the ecliptic in Sagittarius on Dec. 21 every year, the sun and the galaxy?s center are indeed aligned.?
The ecliptic is a very important feature because it marks "the pathway," so to speak, for the sun, moon and planets as they move across the sky. Most sky charts plot the position of the ecliptic for this reason, for it provides sky watchers with a clue as to where one or more of these objects will appear.?
Because they?re not located exactly in the same orbital plane as Earth, the moon and planets usually are not found exactly on the ecliptic line, but rather within several degrees of it. Thus, instead of a line, we find the moon and planets wandering along the sky within a band that encompasses the entire sky, which we call the zodiac.
The ecliptic runs exactly along the middle of that zodiacal band.
The 'classic 12'
The word "zodiac" is derived from the Greek, meaning "animal circle."? A sort of "celestial zoo."
And with the sole exception of one of the "classic 12" constellations that belong to the zodiac, all of the zodiac members refer to living things. Many of these constellations are named for animals, such as Leo, the Lion, Taurus, the Bull and Cancer, the Crab, just to name a few.?
The sole inanimate member is Libra, the Scales.?
All of these names can be readily identified on sky charts and are familiar to millions of horoscope users (who ? ironically ? would be hard pressed to find them in the actual sky.) [Best Beginner Astrophotography Telescopes]
If we could see the stars in the daytime, we would see the sun slowly wander from one constellation of the zodiac to the next, making one complete circle around the sky in one year.?
Ancient astrologers were able to figure out where the sun was on the zodiac by noting the last zodiacal constellation to rise ahead of the sun, or the first to set after it.? Obviously, the sun had to be somewhere in between.
Each month a specific constellation was conferred the title, "house of the sun," and in this manner each month-long period of the year was given its "sign of the zodiac."
Some discrepancies
A couple of years ago, a board member of the Minnesota Planetarium Society caused quite a stir when he pointed out that the zodiacal sign that had been assigned for a given month in the newspaper horoscope is not where the sun actually is for that month.
He pointed out that, in reality, today?s astrologers continue to adhere to star positions that are out of date by at least a millennium. For instance, according to astrology, you?re a Leo if you were born between July 23 and Aug. 22 because that?s the time of year where the sun supposedly is in the zodiac.?
That might have been true 1,000 years ago, but no longer.? In fact, on July 23, the sun is not in Leo, but in Cancer. This discrepancy is due to the "wobble" of the Earth?s axis (known as precession).?
As a consequence, there then came the revelation (even though it has been known by astronomers for a long time) that astrologers continue to adhere to star positions that for all intents and purposes are out of date by 10 centuries or more.
Outcasts of the zodiac
One thing that I have never been able to understand is why astrologers fail to recognize Ophiuchus, the serpent holder. He certainly should be considered as a card-carrying member of the zodiacal fraternity since the sun spends more time traversing through Ophiuchus than Scorpius.
It officially resides in Scorpius for less than a week: from Nov. 23 to 29. It then moves into Ophiuchus on Nov. 30 and remains within its boundaries for more than two weeks ? until Dec. 17.? And yet, the serpent holder is not considered a member of the Zodiac.
In addition, because the moon and planets are often positioned either just to the north or south of the ecliptic, they sometimes appear within the boundaries of several other non-zodiacal star patterns.?
The revered Belgian astronomical calculator Jean Meeus has pointed out that there are actually 22 zodiacal constellations in which the moon and some of the planets from Mercury to Neptune can occasionally enter.
In addition to the 12 classical zodiacal signs and Ophiuchus, we can also add: Auriga, the charioteer; Cetus, the whale; Corvus, the crow; Crater, the cup; Hydra, the water snake; Orion, the hunter; Pegasus, the flying horse; Scutum, the shield; and Sextans, the sextant.
And in case you?re interested, in the upcoming month, the moon will be in Orion on May 13, Sextans on May 19 and Ophiuchus on May 26.?
I guess you can say that so far as the celestial zoo is concerned, these three constellations are on the outside of the cage looking in.
Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for the New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook?and Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.
Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Source: http://news.yahoo.com/look-spot-celestial-zoo-night-sky-213649151.html
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