With the amount of information they’re expected to ingest every day during high school, it’s a small miracle any student is able to remember the combination of their locker padlock. And it doesn’t get any easier the older you get. So instead of numbers, the Image Lock uses simple shapes and images so you can just make up a story to help you recall its combination.
I can’t stop staring at this overwhelming photo of British troops in Afghanistan. Both serene and stressful at the same time, the dusty Chinook silhouette hangs frozen in time over the soldiers’ heads.
There are playmats where you build the roads in seconds, a ballpit where the balls are as big as you, and a drawing-board where your doodles come to life. This is Team Lab’s “Theme Park of the Future” .. but it isn’t really a theme park. It’s an atte…
Introduction
The world community is truly at a crossroads like never before faced in the history of our civilization. If we continue business-as-usual with the consumption of fossil fuels, then, according to the 2014 edition of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s climate change report, grave consequences will almost surely ensue, including rising sea levels, extreme temperatures, flooding, drought, agricultural losses and, quite likely, violent conflicts among human societies. Delays may have already cost the world society USD$8 trillion.
Some who distrust the scientific consensus on climate change have taken heart at an apparent leveling off of world temperatures in the past few years. But it is now clear that this respite is short-lived, since 2014 is on track to be the hottest year on record.
On 12 November 2014, China and the U.S. reached a historic agreement to limit greenhouse gases. Other nations will hopefully follow suit. But even these cuts may not be enough. So how are we going to meet these goals?
Substantial progress has been achieved in photovoltaic (solar panel) technology, and also in wind energy. But these sources cannot be the ultimate answer, since they depend on vagaries of weather and geography. Thus the world community badly needs some other industrial-scale green energy source that is relatively safe and clean.
Fusion energy
Nuclear fusion, the energy that powers the sun and stars, is certainly an attractive option, since the fuel (ordinary water) is free, and it produces neither greenhouse gases nor long-lived radioactive waste.
The problem is that nuclear fusion normally only occurs at extremely high temperatures (millions of degrees). Scientists have been working on taming fusion for decades. The two most common research approaches are tokamak reactors, in which the reaction chamber is shaped like a torus and the nuclear material is heated and confined by magnetic force; and inertial confinement reactors, in which an array of high-powered lasers aimed at a small pellet of hydrogen isotopes heats it, in a tiny fraction of a second, to millions of degrees and initiates nuclear reactions. Billions of dollars have been spent on developing both of these schemes, mostly by large government-funded laboratories, but even the leaders of these projects acknowledge that we are decades away from commercial realization.
In October 2014, U.S. aerospace company Lockheed Martin announced a “technological breakthrough” in developing power based on nuclear fusion, using a magnetic confinement device of a different design than the tokamak. The firm’s current target is to build a 100-megawatt nuclear fusion reactor only about 2 meters by 3 meters (seven feet by 10 feet) in size, within five years. These dimensions are smaller by a factor of ten than the ITER prototype reactor under construction in France by an international government-funded collaboration. Sadly, few details are available, so experts in the field are generally very skeptical that it will work. See our earlier Huffington Post article for additional details.
Low energy nuclear reactions (LENR)
In March 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah announced, in a hastily convened press conference, that they had achieved nuclear fusion (dubbed cold fusion) in a simple tabletop apparatus. But after numerous other research teams failed to replicate their experimental results, and after theoreticians argued that the claimed effects seemingly violated well-known principles of physical theory, Fleischmann and Pons were disgraced, and the episode became a textbook case of bad science. One scientist termed it the scientific fiasco of the [20th] century. Similarly, Time magazine listed “cold fusion” as one of the 100 worst ideas of the [20th] century.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Fleischmann-Pons public hanging. Although the majority of researchers failed to reproduce the claimed anomalous heating effect, a few did observe this, at least in some experimental runs. A small community of researchers have pursued this research (now known as low-energy nuclear reactions or LENR) to the present day, with over 150 peer-reviewed papers reporting excess heating in similar experiments. At the request of some of these researchers, in 2004 the U.S. Department of Energy convened a review panel to consider the more recent evidence, but it concluded that LENR was not yet persuasive enough to initiate a new research program.
In the past few years, activity in the LENR arena has picked up considerably, with over 20 organizations involved, ranging from universities, national laboratories and NASA to corporations such as Mitsubishi and Toyota. Notables such as Bill Gates and former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu have expressed interest. Here are two particularly interesting developments:
Brillouin Energy
Researchers at Brillouin Energy Corp. of Berkeley, California are developing what they term a controlled electron capture reaction (CECR) process. In their experiments, ordinary hydrogen is loaded into a nickel lattice, and then an electronic pulse is passed through the system, using a proprietary control system. They claim that their device converts H-1 (ordinary hydrogen) to H-2 (deuterium), then to H-3 (tritium) and H-4 (quatrium), which then decays to He-4 and releases energy.
In one paper on their website, the Brillouin researchers found that “excess heat is always seen” when tuned pulses are present. They report being able to obtain excess heat using ordinary water with hydrided nickel, palladium or copper. In a second paper, the researchers assert that the excess heat is “measurable and repeatable.”
Additional technical details are given in a Powerpoint presentation, a report summarizing their “quantum reaction hypothesis,” and in a patent application. Their patent application reads, in part, “Embodiments generate thermal energy by neutron generation, neutron capture and subsequent transport of excess binding energy as useful heat for any application.”
Andrea Rossi
In 2011, Andrea Rossi, an Italian entrepreneur with a somewhat checkered past, claimed that he and his research staff had developed a new LENR process, which they called the Energy Catalyzer or E-Cat for short. Their design consists of a ceramic or steel shell, to which a “fuel” consisting of hydrogen, lithium and nickel has been added to a sealed interior chamber. The apparatus is electrically heated from the outside to several hundred degrees Celsius. When this is done, according to Rossi and his research associates, the device produces significantly more heat energy than was input, much more than can be explained by ordinary chemical reactions, and, surprisingly, emits no significant radiation and produces no radioactive byproducts.
In May 2013, a team of Italian and Swedish scientists (not including Rossi) released a technical paper describing an experimental analysis of the E-Cat system. This attracted significant attention, although some criticism as well.
In October 2014, the same team of Italian and Swedish researchers released a new paper, entitled Observation of abundant heat production from a reactor device and of isotopic changes in the fuel. This paper describes a much more sophisticated experiment, with better equipment. It claims substantial power output, with a “coefficient of performance” (ratio of output heat to input power) of up to 3.6. The experiment was performed at an independent laboratory in Lugano, Switzerland.
As we mentioned in a previous Huffington Post article, the most intriguing results in the 2014 Lugano paper are the before-and-after analyses of the “fuel,” which found an “isotopic shift” had occurred in this material. In particular, the team found that lithium-7 had changed into lithium-6, and that nickel-58 and nickel-60 had changed to nickel-62. Here, for example, are the results from the Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry analysis:
| Input “fuel” | Output “ash” | |
| Lithium-6 | 8.6% | 92.1% |
| Lithium-7 | 91.4% | 7.9% |
| Nickel-58 | 67.0% | 0.8% |
| Nickel-60 | 26.3% | 0.5% |
| Nickel-61 | 1.9% | 0.0% |
| Nickel-62 | 3.9% | 98.7% |
Such isotopic changes can ONLY occur if real nuclear reactions are taking place — they do not take place with any ordinary chemistry as we understand it.
A detailed critique of the Lugano report has been posted by Michael McKubre of SRI, a well qualified researcher who has also worked on LENR experiments. Another team of researchers is planning an independent test of some aspects of the experiment.
The latest development here is that a patent application, filed by Rossi and his industrial partner Industrial heat LLC in April 2014, has just been made public. No isotopic results are presented in this document, but it does include some rather startling heat output data, as shown in this table. Here “COP” means “coefficient of performance,” namely the ratio of output heat to input energy.
| Run no. | Description | COP |
| 1 | Single E-Cat | (failed) |
| 2 | Single E-Cat | 5.6 |
| 3 | Single E-Cat | 2.9 |
| 4 | Array of 18 E-Cats | 11.0 |
Needless to say, an eleven-to-one ratio of output power to input power, if it can be confirmed, is a remarkable advance. Some background on Rossi and his work is given in An Impossible Invention by journalist Mats Lewan, and in E-Cat: The New Fire by Vessela Nikolova.
Experiment versus physics
In spite of the results above, how these phenomena can happen is a deep mystery (although possible theoretical explanations have been advanced for both the Brillouin and Rossi experiments). To begin with, the energy levels in the experimental apparatus used in these experiments seem nowhere near high enough to overcome the Coulomb barrier and trigger true fusion reactions as physicists have classically understood them. What’s more, little or no radiation or has been observed, as would normally be expected if true nuclear reactions are taking place.
As the authors of the Lugano paper lamented, “It is certainly most unsatisfying that these results so far have no convincing theoretical explanation,” although they argue that “the experimental results cannot be dismissed or ignored just because of lack of theoretical understanding.”
Indeed, several physicists are skeptical of these results precisely because they appear to contravene physical law.
Reproducibility and the scientific process
The present authors are as intrigued about these results as anyone. If upheld, their significance can hardly be overstated, particularly if they can be parlayed into practical, safe, green energy solutions for the world’s economy. What’s more, many other researchers worldwide can and should participate in learning more about these remarkable phenomena. Clearly there are numerous aspects of these experiments that deserve significantly more study, whether or not true nuclear processes are occurring.
But, as scientists, we have to express strong words of caution. After all, the results mentioned above are, for the most part, still not published in respected, rigorously peer-reviewed journals. Furthermore, although many details are given in the reports and patent applications mentioned above, some key details are missing, making it still difficult to reproduce these results in separate experiments by completely independent research teams.
For example, Rossi and his team have still not stated the precise composition and construction of the “fuel” used in the E-Cat reactors. The Lugano report authors reported that they used a small envelope of fuel provided by Rossi; the report included mass spectrometer analyses of the fuel, but that is all. The same is true for the E-Cat cylinder used in the experiment — this was provided by Rossi, and while some information has been given, there are doubtless details about its construction that remain hidden. Perhaps Rossi is trying to protect some proprietary secrets, but how can other teams hope to reproduce his team’s claimed results without complete details (or at least enough to perform a completely independent experiment)?
Reproducibility is, after all, a key feature of scientific research, and many fields are currently experiencing difficulties in this arena. One issue is the increasingly pervasive practice, certainly present in LENR, of publishing results and theoretical analyses mainly on arxiv.org or other preprint servers, often without rigorous peer review. Another concern is reporting only successful experiments (although we are encouraged to see that in Rossi’s patent application, he mentions that his first run failed). In the pharmaceutical world, these concerns have given rise to the all trials movement, which is encouraging the results of all trials to be publicly posted.
Along this line, even in the field of scientific computing, some are concerned that because of relatively lax standards in the field, large-scale computing experiments are not always reproducible. See our Huffington Post article and a technical paper for further details.
These are not just nit-picking concerns. It is precisely because the recent LENR developments are so potentially important that the well-established scientific protocol of fully-detailed experimental papers, reproducible by others (and successfully reproduced by others), accepted and published in respected peer-reviewed journals, should not be circumvented. As Carl Sagan reminded us in his book A Pale Blue Dot, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Breakthroughs that failed
As one more possibly unwelcome bucket of cold water, we must point out that several very high-profile “breakthroughs” in recent years have at least partially evaporated. Here are three prominent examples:
So being careful is more than just a bucket of cold water. It is good common sense.
Written by Svati Shah
When Gloria Steinem went to India earlier this year, she documented her trip in a series of articles in the New York Times‘s (NYT) India Ink column. They were full of Steinem’s revelations about the existence of feminism in India, and creatively described white guilt as “sybaritic,” as in “My sybaritic guilt is somewhat diminished by the fact that this ayurvedic spa pays well, and the young women seem genuinely content to be here…” It was also peppered with a perspective on prostitution in India that is not only skewed, but ends up playing into age old ideas of powerless women and oppressive men in the Global South, delivered with a twenty-first century twists (such as emphasizing how much locals participate in the anti-trafficking programs Steinem is promoting, along with frequent use of the term ‘grass roots.’) Now that Steinem is a signatory to a letter asking the AP Stylebook to stop using the terms “”sex work” and “sex worker” because they legitimize prostitution as a form of “work” and conceal the violent and exploitative nature of the commercial sex trade,” this may be a good time to revisit Steinem’s trip to India, and to review why her position on abolishing prostitution in India, and everywhere else, is problematic.
When Steinem wore a perfectly tailored sari in March at her gala 80th birthday party in in March of this year, at a celebrity event hosted by the Ms. Foundation in New York, she signaled her commitment to India in ways that underlined her closing sentence in the NYT series.
“But then, India is my life, too.”
Given the press this year around Somaly Mam, a now infamous Cambodian anti-trafficking activist who received millions of dollars in grants to stop ‘sex trafficking’ on the basis of the lie that she had been trafficked into prostitution herself, and given the deluge of stories debating the utility of the term “trafficking” and the politics that it represents this might be a good time to look closer at what constitutes Gloria Steinem’s and feminists interest in trafficking, especially in India.
The NYT series gives a glimpse of how the anti-trafficking message is being put together, with creative uses of both the age-old idea of Indian women being fundamentally oppressed, as well as a newer idea that there is a feminist movement there positioned to resolve sexism, in part by abolishing prostitution. The series chronicles Steinem’s trip in India during February and March 2014 with Ruchira Gupta, the founder and director of Apne Aap, an anti-trafficking organization in India seeking to rescue girls (and women) from prostitution. This was the second of two high profile trips Steinem has made to India over the last few years. Her last trip in 2012 was also focused on spreading the message of stopping trafficking, and of repeating the conservative feminist adage that prostitution is trafficking, because how could anyone possibly consent to selling sex, under any circumstances? Feminists in India who disagreed with Steinem responded in no uncertain terms. Shohini Ghosh, a professor of mass communications and a filmmaker, wrote in the English daily The Hindu, “Gloria Steinem’s “feminist approach” to trafficking and prostitution is not shared by all feminists. Many of us do not believe that abolishing sex work will stop trafficking, nor do we think that the two are synonymous.”
Not only did feminists like Ghosh disagree with Steinem’s take on prostitution, they also pointed to a number of facts about trading sex for money in India that Steinem got wrong. There were mistakes in the NYT series as well, the biggest one being that one of best HIV/AIDS prevention organization in Calcutta’s largest red light district is “an AIDS program funded by an American private foundation pays big salaries to brothel managers and pimps to distribute condoms to customers, though there is little evidence that women have the power to make men use them.” The American private foundation could refer to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the health sector, which has been funding the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, or DMSC, for years. The implication that the project is a failure is baseless, since DMSC’s tactics serve as a model for other HIV/AIDS prevention projects around the world.
Steinem’s series misrepresents several other ideas along the way. They include the assertion that Gayatri Spivak, a famous literary theorist and philosopher at Columbia University, ‘decolonized the humanities’ (despite the huge impact that Spivak has had, the humanities are still fairly ‘colonized,’) the southern India state of Kerala is less sexist than North India (a myth often repeated because of Kerala’s high development indicators and stereotypes about sexist North Indian men), and that people in South India are descendants of indigenous ‘Dravidians,’ while North Indians are descendants of invading ‘Aryans’ who came over the Himalayas and into India (a theory that offers a handy but baseless and fully debunked explanation for why people in North India tend to have lighter skin than people in South India).
These mistakes and misrepresentations provide a context for the main point of the series, which is in showing that organizations like Apne Aap are leading the fight against trafficking in India. Steinem repeatedly calls Apne Aap a ‘grass roots’ organization, which would imply that it has little or no international profile, and primarily works with local people in order to run its programs. Apne Aap, like so many NGOs in India, receives funding from outside India regularly, and Gupta herself is the recipient of the 2009 Clinton Global Citizen Award. If anything, Apne Aap is part of the international trafficking industrial complex, that combination of non-governmental organizations, governments, and money that has enabled the strange rise of the idea that ‘trafficking,’ whatever it may be (chattel slavery, forced prostitution, any prostitution, forced labor, illegal migration, and/or debt bondage) is a universal problem requiring huge resources to resolve. The real aim of the anti-trafficking work that this complex promotes was ventriloquized by Steinem when she quotes a police officer who tells Gupta what will happen if they (Gupta, Steinem and Gupta’s organization) don’t stop prostitution. “Otherwise, daughters of respectable families would be in danger.”
It is odd that a police officer would make this kind of statement, but not nearly as odd as Steinem’s decision to quote the officer, as if to offer a key insight on trafficking from the local context. The idea that prostitution should be stopped by non-sex workers is problematic, to be sure, but the assertion that the work is ultimately being done for the sake of ‘respectable families’ devalues and dehumanizes people who are struggling to make ends meet. Bihar, where this police officer was interviewed, and where Steinem and Gupta spent a good deal of time talking to people with whom Apne Aap works, is a state with poor infrastructure and few resources. Bihar is one of the biggest source areas for day wage labor and construction work in India. People from Bihar become migrant workers living an extremely precarious existence because there are so few opportunities there for education and employment. When any organization, including one like Apne Aap, sets up shop to provide basic education and job training, it offers the rarest of opportunities to people who would otherwise have none, while establishing the organization’s power and unique position in the area. Steinem should know all this, of course, since India is her life too.
Asking why feminists like Gloria Steinem (for whom Rutgers University is about to name a new endowed chair in media studies) are interested in abolishing prostitution in India is part of a broader question of why Western media outlets are taking a keener interest in India over the past few years? Why, for example, doesn’t the NYT have a dedicated column for other countries, as well? What makes India special? That it objectively has a trafficking problem, or that it has one of the biggest consumer markets in the world and, given its pro-business and pro-surveillance politics, would make for a potentially better trading partner for the US than Brazil, China or Russia, the other three of the world’s ’emerging economies’? Asking why Steinem is interested in ‘sex trafficking’ in India opens up a broad set of questions, including why anti-trafficking work has developed such a well-funded infrastructure so quickly. While Steinem-in-India isn’t exactly a replay of the old fashioned First World mission of ‘white women rescuing brown women from brown men’ (as famously articulated by Gayatri Spivak), Steinem’s mission is worrying, as are this generation of globalized anti-sex worker anti-“trafficking” initiatives.
Svati Shah is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai (Duke University Press).
Forget Black Friday and Cyber Monday; it’s time for News Quiz Everyday, which doesn’t make much sense, but take our latest Week to Week news quiz and it will help you make more sense of the world.
Here are some random but real hints: Trump is tougher on his contestants; our gain is their pain; liberal Democrats then needed complete transplants; and the hype is strong with this one. Answers are below the quiz.
1. At least 35 people were killed and 150 injured in an attack where?
a. Ferguson, Missouri
b. Austin, Texas
c. Nako, Nigeria
d. Kiev, Ukraine
2. When Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced his resignation plans, who said it is the “appropriate time for him to complete his service”?
a. Senator John McCain
b. Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
c. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
d. President Barack Obama
3. What is costing Russia up to $100 billion a year?
a. Military assistance to Ukrainian rebels
b. Personal security costs for Russian President Vladimir Putin
c. The falling price of oil
d. Funding cyber-warfare attacks on Western governments and businesses
4. Who used a speech to the European Parliament to complain that Europe was like a “grandmother, no longer fertile and vibrant” and risked “slowly losing its own soul”?
a. Pope Francis
b. German Chancellor Angela Merkel
c. Conservative commentator George Will
d. British Prime Minister David Cameron
5. Who commented on the events in Ferguson by saying “Racial discrimination, racial and ethnic tensions are major challenges to the American democracy, to stability and integrity of the American society”?
a. President Barack Obama
b. Televangelist Pat Robertson
c. Russian human rights envoy Konstantin Dolgov
d. California Governor Jerry Brown
6. Who told a meeting on women and justice that “You cannot put women and men on an equal footing. It is against nature. They were created differently. Their nature is different. Their constitution is different”?
a. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan
b. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel
c. Hugh Hefner
d. Senator Rand Paul
7. Who underwent surgery Wednesday to place a stent in her heart?
a. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
b. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel
c. Conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly
d. Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej
8. How does DNA pioneer James Watson expect to pay for new scientific projects?
a. He is the first-ever Facebook Chair of Applied Physics at Stanford University
b. He expects to raise $3.5 million by selling his Nobel Prize
c. He made an agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin to give that country priority on all discoveries from the projects
d. He has made $16.4 million in stock trading since the Great Recession
9. The European Parliament is considering a proposal to force the breakup of what?
a. The European Union
b. Ukraine
c. Greece
d. Google
10. A gunman was captured after he fired at the Mexican Consulate in what city?
a. Ferguson, Missouri
b. Austin, Texas
c. Nako, Nigeria
d. Kiev, Ukraine
BONUS. On Friday, people around the world were looking for details by studying every second of what short film?
a. Authorities in Texas released a newly discovered film showing the JFK assassination from a hitherto unseen angle
b. The first trailer for Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens
c. Tea party activists released a YouTube video purporting to show Barack Obama’s father celebrating his son’s birth in Kenya
d. The U.S. government shared a video showing dozens of Russian troop transports crossing the Ukrainian border
Want the live news quiz experience? Join me Monday, December 1 in downtown San Francisco for our next live Week to Week political roundtable with a news quiz and a social hour at The Commonwealth Club of California. Panelists include the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Carla Marinucci, KQED’s Scott Shafer, and Hoover Institution’s Bill Whalen.
ANSWERS:
1) c.
2) d.
3) c.
4) a (He added that “The great ideas which once inspired Europe seem to have lost their attraction, only to be replaced by the bureaucratic technicalities of its institutions”).
5) c.
6) a.
7) a.
8) b.
9) d.
10) b.
BONUS) .
Explanations of the hints: Trump is tougher on his contestants: When Barack Obama fired his defense secretary, he did so with official kind words; our gain is their pain: the fall in oil prices has greatly aided Western economies, but it is compounding the economic problems in Russia, which is already hurting from Western sanctions; liberal Democrats then needed complete transplants: the news of Ginsburg’s surgery was not welcomed by liberals who have fretted about her ability to survive until Democrats retake the Senate and regain control over Supreme Court nominations; and the hype is strong with this one: not even a new Zapruder film would be as eagerly anticipated as the next Star Wars feature.
They didn’t count with his craftiness, but Roberto Gómez Bolaños became an unprecedented force of humor and joy in the lives of past and present generations in Latin America.
Bolaños, best known as Chespirito, died on Friday in Cancún, according to several Mexican news outlets. An official cause of death has yet to be reported. He was 85.
Children and adults alike grew up in “la vecindad” (the neighborhood) or waiting on el Chapulín to save the day with his hilarious antics. Whether a fan or not, it’s safe to say that every family in Latin America was touched by the Mexican comedian and his unforgettable characters.
As an homage to the legend and his work, here are Chespirito’s most memorable quotes and characters.
It’s an urban commuter’s dream–a bicycle with all of those little perks that make commuting just a little easier. The Denny by Teague + and Sizemore incorporates features designed to eliminate commuting worries. It is “an everyday bike that removes the barriers to becoming an everyday rider.”
We’ve all heard of invisibility cloaks that can (theoretically) hide objects. But a team of researchers from Purdue University have now built a time cloak that allows them to hide events.
When you’re spending the day with family you probably haven’t seen in a year, nothing is more vital to keeping your sanity than your smartphone. And to ensure it’s got enough charge to keep you busy on Twitter instead of actually having to talk to your cousins, the diminutive but clever Plan V charger accepts common 9-Volt batteries for a quick boost.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
