The possibility of going back in time only to kill your ancestors and prevent your own birth has posed a serious problem for potential time travelers, not even considering the technical details of building a time machine. But a new theory proposed by physicists at MIT suggests that this grandfather paradox could be avoided by using quantum teleportation and “post-selecting” what a time traveler could and could not do. So while murdering one’s relatives is unfortunately possible in the present time, such actions would be strictly forbidden if you were to try them during a trip to the past.

The model of time travel proposed by Seth Lloyd, et al., in a recent paper at arXiv.org arises from their investigation of the quantum mechanics of closed timelike curves (CTCs) and search for a theory of gravity. In simple terms, a CTC is a path of spacetime that returns to its starting point. The existence of CTCs is allowed by Einstein’s general relativity, although it was Gödel who first discovered them. As with other implications of his theories, Einstein was a bit disturbed by CTCs.

In the new paper, the scientists explore a particular version of CTCs based on combining quantum teleportation with post-selection, resulting in a theory of post-selected CTCs (P-CTCs). In quantum teleportation, quantum states are entangled so that one state can be transmitted to the other in a different location. The scientists then applied the concept of post-selection, which is the ability to make a computation automatically accept only certain results and disregard others. In this way, post-selection could ensure that only a certain type of state can be teleported. The states that “qualify” to be teleported are those that have been post-selected to be self-consistent prior to being teleported. Only after it has been identified and approved can the state be teleported, so that, in effect, the state is traveling back in time. Under these conditions, time travel could only occur in a self-consistent, non-paradoxical way.

Hayden’s Note:

For you non-geeks out there, this article is saying - in part - that by utilizing quantum teleportation, you are in fact altering the “state” of a particular object in the present – but because of the entanglement theory – you are also effecting it in the past and over an infinite distance.  I suppose a refresher course on entanglement theory is needed for many.   

“The formalism of P-CTCs shows that such quantum time travel can be thought of as a kind of quantum tunneling backwards in time, which can take place even in the absence of a classical path from future to past,” the researchers write in their paper. “Because the theory of P-CTCs relies on post-selection, it provides self-consistent resolutions to such paradoxes: anything that happens in a P-CTC can also happen in conventional quantum mechanics with some probability.”

However, the scientists note that prohibiting paradoxical events would cause unlikely events to happen more often. These “strange and counterintuitive effects” arise due to the nonlinear nature of P-CTCs. Like a movie hero who always manages to escape seemingly imminent death, the grandfather would always somehow manage to survive his grandchild’s murderous plots. “Some little quantum fluctuation would whisk the bullet away at the last moment,” Lloyd explained.

In addition to prohibiting the grandfather paradox, the P-CTC theory also has the advantage that it doesn’t require the distortions of spacetime that traditional time travel theories rely on. These spacetime distortions probably only exist in extreme environments such as inside black holes, making these theories nearly impossible to realize.

Although post-selected computations are nonlinear and have not yet been shown to be possible, some studies have shown that quantum mechanics may be nonlinear and allow post-selected computations, which would potentially make quantum computing a very powerful technique. Such a computer could more efficiently solve a complex problem containing lots of variables by running all possible combinations of values and post-selecting only the combinations that solve the problem. This strategy would work much better than the classical strategy of trying different combinations until you get one that works. On the other hand, other studies suggest that quantum mechanics must be linear, in part due to the seemingly impossible things that post-selection allows.

Still, the scientists hope that future investigations will reveal whether or not their theory is correct. They explain that the effect of P-CTCs can be tested by performing quantum teleportation experiments, and by post-selecting only the results that correspond to the desired entangled-state output.

“P-CTCs might also allow time travel in spacetimes without general-relativistic closed timelike curves,” they conclude. “If nature somehow provides the nonlinear dynamics afforded by final-state projection, then it is possible for particles (and, in principle, people) to tunnel from the future to the past.”

More information: Seth Lloyd, et al. “The quantum mechanics of time travel through post-selected teleportation.” arXiv:1007.2615v2
via: The Physics ArXiv Blog and Science News

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UPDATE: 11:14PM Eastern: BP has now posted the “original” photo, they claim. Except – surprise – they are refusing to post the high-resolution version of the new “original” photo. They posted the high-res version of the altered photo earlier, and in fact, that version is still live via a link below the new photo. Why not post the high-res version of the new “original” photo? Afraid someone is going to enlarge it and find out it’s fake too?

UPDATE 10:37PM Eastern: The Washington Post has the story now. Oddly, BP is now claiming that the photo is real – but it showed blank screens, and rather than show blank screens at AP’s crisis center, they instead put fake content-filled screens in the photo. Uh, a few questions.

1) Why were the screens in the crisis center blank in the middle of the crisis? Coffee break?
2) The BP spokesman claims that the photographer photoshopped the changes. Really? A professional photographer hired by BP Photoshops so poorly that a 12 year old kid could do a better job. Really? Let me show you what BP said exactly, and then the photo that supposedly this “professional” edited:

Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP, said that there was nothing sinister in the photo alteration and provided the original unaltered version. He said that a photographer working for the company had inserted the three images in spots where the video screens were blank.

Now here is the Photoshop job that the “professional” photographer did – this is just one part of the photo that he screwed up:

Anyone who has ever used Photoshop knows that this is an incredibly amateur job. I can do far better than this, and I tend to play with Photoshop for fun. We’re to believe that a professional photographer did this poor a job, for pay, for a huge corporate client? Really? No one would hire this photographer again if this is true. Oh, and the photographer added the fake screens to the photo, what, without BP’s permission? That’s what they’re implying, “the photographer did it.”

3) Why does the meta data show that the photo was actually taken on March 6, 2001? Or is BP next going to tell us that their professional photographer has never set the time and date stamp on his multi-thousand dollar camera? Because then all of his photos for all of his clients will be screwed up. Really?
______________________________________

UPDATE: The photo contains data suggesting it was taken in 2001, not July of 2010 as claimed on BP’s Web site. That would suggest, at least one possibility is, that BP took an old photo and Photoshopped new pictures of the oil spill over it, to make it look “new.” More on this at the end of the post.

I guess if you’re doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center. Why do they need a fake photo at all? Don’t they have a real crisis response center they could have used?

Original BP Photo that is linked off of this page, with a snippet of the photo:

Note the bad Photoshop job on the parts I cropped and blew up – click on each photo to see the larger version, which makes it painfully clear that they faked the photo (poorly, at that):

UPDATE: BP has apologized for the Photoshopped version of its command center, and it has just released this new, unedited version.

In all seriousness, an astute reader noticed that the meta info for the photo says it was created in 2001, not July 16, 2010 as claimed on BP’s site. It looks like BP took a photo from 2001, and in order to make it look like the command center in July of 2010, they pasted pictures of the oil well leaking over the old photo.

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Recently Pilots For 9/11 Truth have analyzed the speeds reported for the aircraft utilized on 9/11. Numerous aviation experts have voiced their concerns regarding the extremely excessive speeds reported above Maximum Operating for the 757 and 767, particularly, United and American Airlines 757/767 Captains who have actual flight time in all 4 aircraft reportedly used on 9/11. These experts state the speeds are impossible to achieve near sea level in thick air if the aircraft were a standard 757/767 as reported. Combined with the fact the airplane which was reported to strike the south tower of the World Trade Center was also producing high G Loading while turning and pulling out from a dive, the whole issue becomes incomprehensible to fathom a standard 767 can perform such maneuvers at such intense speeds exceeding Maximum Operating limits of the aircraft. Especially for those who research the topic thoroughly and have expertise in aviation.

Co-Founder of Pilots For 9/11 Truth Rob Balsamo recently interviewed a former NASA Flight Director in charge of flight control systems at the NASA Dryden Flight Research facility who is also speaking out after viewing the latest presentation by Pilots For 9/11 Truth – “9/11: World Trade Center Attack”.

Retired NASA Senior Executive Dwain Deets published his concerns on the matter at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) as follows: 

A Responsibility to Explain an Aeronautical Improbability
Dwain Deets
NASA Dryden Flight Research Center (Senior Executive Service – retired)
AIAA Associate Fellow

The airplane was UA175, a Boeing 767-200, shortly before crashing into World Trade Center Tower 2. Based on analysis of radar data, the National Transportation and Safety Board reported the groundspeed just before impact as 510 knots. This is well beyond the maximum operating velocity of 360 knots, and maximum dive velocity of 410 knots. The possibilities as I see them are: (1) this wasn’t a standard 767-200; (2) the radar data was compromised in some manner; (3) the NTSB analysis was erroneous; or (4) the 767 flew well beyond its flight envelope, was controllable, and managed to hit a relatively small target. Which organization has the greater responsibility for acknowledging the elephant in the room? The NTSB, NASA, Boeing, or the AIAA? Have engineers authored papers, but the AIAA or NASA won’t publish them? Or, does the ethical responsibility lie not with organizations, but with individual aeronautical engineers? Have engineers just looked the other way?

The above entry remained at the moderated AIAA Aerospace America Forum for approximately two weeks before being removed without explanation. Click “Who is Ethically Responsible” submitted by Dwain Deets at the Pilots For 9/11 Truth Forum for discussion on this entry at AIAA.

Dwain Deets credentials and experience are as follows:

Dwain Deets
MS Physics, MS Eng
Former Director, Aerospace Projects, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center
Served as Director, Research Engineering Division at Dryden
Recipient of the NASA Exceptional Service Award
Presidential Meritorious Rank Award in the Senior Executive Service (1988)
Selected presenter of the Wright Brothers Lectureship in Aeronautics
Associate Fellow – American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)
Included in “Who’s Who in Science and Engineering” 1993 – 2000
Former Chairman of the Aerospace Control and Guidance Systems
- Committee of the Society of Automotive Engineers
Former Member, AIAA Committee on Society and Aerospace Technology
37 year NASA career

It is established based on corroborated expert statements, raw data, and precedent, that the extremely excessive speed reported for the 9/11 aircraft is truly the “Elephant In The Room” and needs to be thoroughly investigated.

For summary of speed analysis, please see article 9/11: Speeds Reported For World Trade Center Attack Aircraft Analyzed.

To view the scene from “9/11: World Trade Center Attack” analyzing the reported speeds in more detail, please click here.

For full detailed analysis covering the events which took place in New York City on September 11, 2001, interviews with experts, including analysis of “Hijacker” pilot skill, Black Box recovery and more… please view the latest presentation from Pilots For 9/11 Truth, “9/11: World Trade Center Attack“.

Founded in August 2006, Pilots For 9/11 Truth is a growing organization of aviation professionals from around the globe. The organization has also analyzed Flight Data provided by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for the Pentagon Attack and the events in Shanksville, PA. The data does not support the government story. The NTSB/FBI refuse to comment. Pilots For 9/11 Truth do not offer theory or point blame at this point in time. However, there is a growing mountain of conflicting information and data in which government agencies and officials refuse to acknowledge. Pilots For 9/11 Truth Core member list continues to grow.

http://pilotsfor911truth.org/core.html for full member list.

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Solid-state lighting holds the promise of huge energy savings and long-lasting light sources. But before it comes to market, the products, like LED lights, have to get better, cheaper and easier to make. Here’s how the U.S. Department of Energy is investing in a future illuminated by light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs).

Over the next decade, the familiar ways we light our world, from incandescent light bulbs to overhead fluorescent tubes, may go the way of the oil lamp.

At least that’s the future envisioned by the Department of Energy (DOE). The agency announced $37 million in grants earlier this month in its sixth round of funding for solid-state lighting. The cash will go toward basic research, product development and manufacturing of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and carbon-containing organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs).

Together, these light sources offer huge advantages over conventional lighting. “[LEDs and OLEDs] can be more efficient than any light source available,” says Jim Brodrick, lighting program manager for the DOE’s office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). Compared to incandescent bulbs, solid-state lighting can be 10 times as energy-efficient and last hundreds of times longer. And LEDs can already easily triple the 10,000 hours or so of lifetime for compact fluorescent light bulbs, which are in today’s lighting vanguard. Meanwhile, extending the life of OLEDs is a hot area of study that the DOE’s grants will intensify.

LEDs and OLEDs are also durable, unlike incandescent lights with their fragile, superhot tungsten filament surrounded by glass bulbs, or fluorescent lighting’s glass tubes that contain small amounts of energized mercury vapor. Most LEDs and OLEDs are tiny wafers—”they look like a squashed pea,” says Brodrick—made of semiconducting metallic compounds, usually surrounded by hard plastics. “Solid-state lighting gets away from the motif of lighting as breakable,” Brodrick says.

Beyond toughness and cost savings, the environment stands to gain from mercury-free solid-state lighting as well. Widespread deployment by 2030 could cut U.S. electricity use for lighting by a third, according to the DOE, and thus make a big dent in energy-related carbon emissions.

Given these major benefits, LEDs are already the light of choice for traffic signals and flashlights. (They have actually been used as red indicator lights on remote controls for decades.) But LEDs and OLEDs have so far failed to make serious inroads into residential and commercial lighting primarily because of cost and color.

Solid-state lighting available on the market today costs roughly three times as much as other lighting options, Brodrick says. This is largely due to the materials involved and the limited economies of scale compared to the long-established techniques for manufacturing incandescents and fluorescents by the hundreds of millions every year.

LEDs also have problems with light color—their whites appear too bluish and thereby render other colors poorly compared to traditional bulbs.

To address these issues, the 17 solid-state lighting grants issued by the DOE were awarded based on three categories. Core Technology grants totaling $4 million intend to fill in key technology gaps and expand the knowledge base. The DOE will sink $10.3 million into product development to refine products to be more functional, market-friendly and commercially viable. And for the first time, the DOE solid-state lighting grants will include a manufacturing category with $23.5 million to dole out.

Collectively, these grants seek to drive down costs while improving quality and developing new product-making techniques. The chosen companies will also chip in large sums of cash on their projects, bringing the whole solid-state research program to upwards of $66 million.

Here’s a breakdown of how some of these 17 projects will bring about the next generation in lighting.

Core Technology ///

Cheaper Electrodes

The Cambrios company, out of Sunnyvale, Calif., is hoping to develop a new electrode for energizing OLEDs that’s cheaper and better than the indium tin oxide used now. The trick will be finding “a new substance that’s transparent and also conducts electricity,” Brodrick says.

Evenly Dispersed Electrons

Another technical challenge will be spreading electrons that are introduced at the corner of an OLED square evenly across the whole sheet of material. The University of Rochester will tackle this problem with an emphasis on improving light extraction from OLEDs with new materials. Just like regular LEDs, these thin lighting sources absorb some of the photons (particles of light) they produce, so different coatings and structural add-ons—such as “photonic lattices” which are full of holes that channel light out—continue to be investigated.

Higher Output

To boost output from the rest of a light-emitting fixture, the Delaware-based company WhiteOptics makes a special plastic that reflects 97 percent of light in a diffuse, eye-friendly manner. This could be significant for LEDs because they are typically point-sources of light, cranking out a lot of lumens from a bright, hot area that is mere millimeters square, says Eric Teather, founder and president of WhiteOptics. Lighting designers often place multiple LEDs in clusters to produce the equivalent of other lighting sources, but this can give the light a piercing, pixelated appearance. “People are not used to seeing dots; they want to see uniform, well-distributed light,” Teather says. Lenses are sometimes placed over the top of the LEDs to direct and disperse the light, but these can cut into output, Teather says.

The DOE grant to WhiteOptics will go toward improving the reflectivity of the company’s proprietary material, which can further reduce the number of individual LED chips needed in a fixture. Teather says he has concept materials that reflect 99 percent of incident light. WhiteOptics has previously demonstrated that its reflective plastics can improve lighting efficiency by 15 to 20 percent. These efficiency gains cut almost dollar-for-dollar into overall costs, Teather says, because the most expensive part of an LED fixture is the LEDs themselves, with the reflective plastic coating just a fraction of the overall price. In addition, the reflective plastic will be geared for long life—50,000 hours, or pushing six years—and will be low-cost. Teather expects to deliver on this technology in about three years.

Product Development ///

Taking the Heat out of Home Fixtures

The grant awarded to Cree, in Durham, N.C., will help the company further develop “ultra-compact” LEDs that could screw into existing home light fixtures while maintaining colors and high efficiency. The difficulties in making LEDs compatible with everyday fixtures is that their heat is not sent “forward” along with their pure visible-spectrum light. Instead, the heat comes out the back of the LED where it must be absorbed in a heat-sink material, such as aluminum, and dissipated.

Less Heat, More Energy

Similarly, with one of its grants, Philips Lumileds Lighting Company will tackle heat issues—making use of excess temperatures to increase the electrical current for increased lumen output. (A lumen is a measure of light as perceived by the human eye. The efficiency of a bulb is scored as the amount of lumens that can be gleaned from a single watt, or unit of energy conversion.) Philips Lumileds’ project aims for a hefty 130 lumens per watt. In comparison, Brodrick says standard incandescent bulbs put out about 12 to 15 lumens per watt. That’s because about 90 percent of the energy that goes into them is wasted as heat. And while fluorescent tube lamps and twisty compact fluorescent lights perform much better, they’ve reached their physical limitations, Brodrick says, and any efficiency gains won’t be able to match solid-state lighting.

Color Corrections

The lighting-color problems that have plagued less efficient fluorescents have also dogged LEDs, and several grants seek to address this deficiency. The majority of LED fixtures and devices make icy white-blue light, “and things don’t look that vibrant under that white light,” says Anant Setlur, a materials scientist at General Electric. However, these white-light LEDs very efficiently convert electrical energy into light. So the goal is to lower blue LEDs’ color temperature into more reddish and warm values.

To do this, some awards, including one of GE’s, go toward developing the next generation of phosphors. These are substances that absorb light produced by a source and then re-emit light out of the product with desired lighting characteristics. For example, phosphors are what make the invisible, harmful ultraviolet light generated by energized mercury vapor in fluorescent lights come out instead as a safe, if somewhat sterile, white-blue that we can see. GE will investigate both novel phosphors and mixes of existing phosphors (turning some blue light to green on into yellow, for example) to achieve final desired lighting color.

Everlasting LED

Osram Sylvania’s grant will be applied to with replacing the 3- to 4-foot long, linear fluorescent tubes that hum above many office workers’ desks with long-life LEDs. These lamps will be manufactured to last up to 100,000 hours, or over 11 years. The lights would be part of an intelligent system that dims or turns off based on where employees are located in the office. Motion-sensor systems now in use with existing fluorescents don’t have much resolution: Walk toward your cubicle after-hours and an entire darkened wing of the office might light up. To fix this, Osram Sylvania plans to place more sensors on-site and link them up with better software. This advanced “cloud dimming” system can’t work for fluorescent lights because their lifetimes degrade with every on-off event. With LEDs, however, such a system would actually “improve life because when they’re off they’re not aging,” says Jim Frey, part of the DOE LED project team at Osram Sylvania. Although pricey up front, this lighting system solution would pay for itself within several years, says Rob Harrison also of Osram Sylvania. Such a system could come be on the market toward the end of the project’s two-year timeline.

Manufacturing ///

Grant Recipient	Project Description	DOE $	Total Project Value
Applied Materials, Inc. Santa Clara, CA	Advanced Epi Tools for Gallium Nitride LED Devices. This project seeks to develop an advanced multichamber hybrid epitaxial growth system for LED manufacturers that has the potential to decrease operating costs, increase efficiency of LEDs, and improve binning yields.	$3,993,911	$8,718,911
GE Global Research Niskayuna, NY	Roll-to-Roll Solution-Processable Small-Molecule OLEDs. This project seeks to upgrade GE’s prepilot OLED roll-to-roll manufacturing line through improved high-performance phosphorescent small-molecule OLED materials, advanced OLED device architectures, plastic ultra-high barrier films, and an advanced encapsulation scheme.	$3,999,966	$7,999,932
GE Lumination Valley View, OH	Development of Advanced Manufacturing Methods for Warm-White LEDs for General Lighting. This project seeks to develop precise and efficient manufacturing techniques for GE Lumination’s “remote phosphor” platform of warm-white LED products named Vio™. The approach drives significant materials, labor, and capital productivity to achieve approximately 53% reduction in overall cost, while minimizing color variation in the Vio platform.	$772,425	$1,544,850
KLA-Tencor Corporation Milpitas, CA	Automated Yield Management and Defect Source Analysis Inspection Tooling and Software for LED Manufacturing. This project seeks to improve the product yield for high-brightness LEDs by developing an automated optical defect detection and classification system that identifies and distinguishes harmful defects from benign defects. The proposed approach allows for traceability in defect origin and includes the hardware and correlated software package development.	$3,484,045	$6,968,091
Philips Lumileds Lighting Company, LLC San Jose, CA	Low-Cost Illumination-Grade LEDs. This project seeks to realize a 30% yield improvement and 60% reduction in epitaxy manufacturing costs for highpower LEDs through the implementation of silicon-based epitaxial processes on large-diameter substrates. The use of silicon replaces the industry standard sapphire or silicon-carbide substrates. The process will be developed using Philips Lumileds’s proven LUXEON® Rebel LED.	$1,907,963	$3,815,926
Ultratech, Inc. San Jose, CA	A Low-Cost Lithography Tool for High-Brightness LED Manufacturing. This project seeks to develop a lithographic manufacturing tool having the benefits of higher throughput, greater yields, lower initial capital cost, and lower cost of ownership. A projection stepper process will be modified and optimized for LED manufacturing. The proposed system will be able to accommodate a variety of wafer sizes and thicknesses and handle the wafer warpage typically associated with larger-diameter substrates.	$1,295,634	$2,364,327
Universal Display Corporation (UDC) Ewing, NJ	Creation of a U.S. Phosphorescent OLED Lighting Panel Manufacturing Facility. This project seeks to design and set up two pilot phosphorescent OLED (PHOLED) manufacturing lines. The team will implement UDC’s PHOLED technology and provide prototype lighting panels to U.S. luminaire manufacturers to incorporate into products, to facilitate testing of design, and to gauge customer acceptance.	$4,000,000	$8,304,470
Veeco Instruments Somerset, NJ	Implementation of Process-Simulation Tools and Temperature-Control Methods for High-Yield Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) Growth. This project seeks to develop a complementary set of high-resolution short-wavelength and infra-red in-situ monitoring tools for accurate substrate temperature measurement and growth rate monitoring. Philips Lumileds will test the resulting tool in the processing of LEDs. The approach is anticipated to result in a 100% improvement in wavelength yield and a 75% cost reduction for LED epitaxy.	$4,000,000	$8,000,000

Home-Grown LEDs

Cost reduction is the name of the game for all of the projects in the DOE’s manufacturing grants. To do this companies can find cheaper materials or, as Applied Materials in Santa Clara, Calif., plans to do, can work on making the manufacturing process cheaper. Applied Materials is looking into an epitaxial method for “growing” LED chips layer by layer in a multichamber system that will increase throughput, to turn around a batch of LED wafers much more quickly than is currently possible.

The Silicon Solution

Philips Lumileds, another nearby Silicon Valley firm referenced previously, is also looking to upgrade epitaxy. They plan to replace industry-standard sapphire and silicon-carbide substrates for LED wafers with much cheaper silicon. LED makers currently use wafers around 2 inches in diameter, like the fledgling computer microchip industry did back in the 1970s. Nowadays, microchip manufacturers have vastly increased yield per wafer by working their way up to 12-inch and even 16-inch wafers; LED makers look to do the same, but will have to work within silicon’s crystal structure, Brodrick says. “A number of groups have taken a crack at silicon,” he says, without much success.

Defect Finder

For quality control of these future silicon and current sapphire wafers, KLA-Tencor was awarded half of a $7 million project to build an automated optical-defect detection system. The system is basically an electronic “eye” that spots damage on substrates down to billionths of an inch prior to beginning the manufacturing process. This weeding out will avoid time and money wasted building an LED on a faulty substrate while ensuring that the ultimate product works to specs.

Paper-Thin OLEDs

Back east in Niskayuna, N.Y., at GE’s global research headquarters, the company plans to take advantage of LEDs’ less expensive, organic cousins, OLEDs, which can be made paper-thin and in long, bendable sheets. Two years ago, GE, in collaboration with the government and another company, showed that these OLEDs can be manufactured roll-to-roll, much like a newspaper printing press. Essentially tied with the largest of the DOE grants at a hair shy of $4 million, these funds will help GE improve its manufacturing line in the hopes of cranking out thin sheets that illuminate with the application of an electric charge. According to a video on GE’s Edison’s Desk blog, applications include light-up wallpaper plus glowing decals and light strips that can be contoured to fit pretty much anywhere.

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A science historian at The University of Manchester has cracked “The Plato Code” – the long disputed secret messages hidden in the great philosopher’s writings.

Plato was the Einstein of Greece’s Golden Age and his work founded Western culture and science. Dr Jay Kennedy’s findings are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.

Dr Kennedy, whose findings are published in the leading US journal Apeiron, reveals that Plato used a regular pattern of symbols, inherited from the ancient followers of Pythagoras, to give his books a musical structure. A century earlier, Pythagoras had declared that the planets and stars made an inaudible music, a ‘harmony of the spheres’. Plato imitated this hidden music in his books.

The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea – the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. The decoded messages also open up a surprising way to unite science and religion. The awe and beauty we feel in nature, Plato says, shows that it is divine; discovering the scientific order of nature is getting closer to God. This could transform today’s culture wars between science and religion.

“Plato’s books played a major role in founding Western culture but they are mysterious and end in riddles,” Dr Kennedy, at Manchester’s Faculty of Life Sciences explains.

“In antiquity, many of his followers said the books contained hidden layers of meaning and secret codes, but this was rejected by modern scholars.

“It is a long and exciting story, but basically I cracked the code. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato.

“This is a true discovery, not simply reinterpretation.”

This will transform the early history of Western thought, and especially the histories of ancient science, mathematics, music, and philosophy.

Dr Kennedy spent five years studying Plato’s writing and found that in his best-known work the Republic he placed clusters of words related to music after each twelfth of the text – at one-twelfth, two-twelfths, etc. This regular pattern represented the twelve notes of a Greek musical scale. Some notes were harmonic, others dissonant. At the locations of the harmonic notes he described sounds associated with love or laughter, while the locations of dissonant notes were marked with screeching sounds or war or death. This musical code was key to cracking Plato’s entire symbolic system.

Dr Kennedy, a researcher in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, says: “As we read his books, our emotions follow the ups and downs of a musical scale. Plato plays his readers like musical instruments.”

However Plato did not design his secret patterns purely for pleasure – it was for his own safety. Plato’s ideas were a dangerous threat to Greek religion. He said that mathematical laws and not the gods controlled the universe. Plato’s own teacher had been executed for heresy. Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death. Encoding his ideas in secret patterns was the only way to be safe.

Plato led a dramatic and fascinating life. Born four centuries before Christ, when Sparta defeated plague-ravaged Athens, he wrote 30 books and founded the world’s first university, called the Academy. He was a feminist, allowing women to study at the Academy, the first great defender of romantic love (as opposed to marriages arranged for political or financial reasons) and defended homosexuality in his books. In addition, he was captured by pirates and sold into slavery before being ransomed by friends.

Dr Kennedy explains: “Plato’s importance cannot be overstated. He shifted humanity from a warrior society to a wisdom society. Today our heroes are Einstein and Shakespeare – and not knights in shining armour – because of him.”

Over the years Dr Kennedy carefully peeled back layer after symbolic layer, sharing each step in lectures in Manchester and with experts in the UK and US.

He recalls: “There was no Rosetta Stone. To announce a result like this I needed rigorous, independent proofs based on crystal-clear evidence.

“The result was amazing – it was like opening a tomb and finding new set of gospels written by Jesus Christ himself.

“Plato is smiling. He sent us a time capsule.”

Dr Kennedy’s findings are not only surprising and important; they overthrow conventional wisdom on Plato. Modern historians have always denied that there were codes; now Dr Kennedy has proved otherwise.

He adds: “This is the beginning of something big. It will take a generation to work out the implications. All 2,000 pages contain undetected symbols.”

Plato quoted:

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”

“Ignorance: the root of all evil.”

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

“The price good men pay for indifference to publiuc affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.”

Provided by University of Manchester

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Scientists with the Joint BioEnergy Institute have identified a trio of bacterial enzymes that can catalyze key steps in the conversion of plant sugars into hydrocarbon compounds for the production of green transportation fuels.

If concerns for global climate change and ever-increasing costs weren’t enough, the disastrous Gulf oil spill makes an even more compelling case for the development of transportation fuels that are renewable, can be produced in a sustainable fashion, and do not put the environment at risk. Liquid fuels derived from plant biomass have the potential to be used as direct replacements for gasoline, diesel and jet fuels if cost-effective means of commercial production can be found.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have identified a trio of bacterial enzymes that can catalyze key steps in the conversion of plant sugars into hydrocarbon compounds for the production of green transportation fuels.

Harry Beller, an environmental microbiologist who directs the Biofuels Pathways department for JBEI’s Fuels Synthesis Division, led a study in which a three-gene cluster from the bacterium Micrococcus luteus was introduced into the bacterium Escherichia coli. The enzymes produced by this trio of genes enabled the E. coli to synthesize from glucose long-chain alkene hydrocarbons. These long-chain alkenes can then be reduced in size – a process called “cracking” – to obtain shorter hydrocarbons that are compatible with today’s engines and favored for the production of advanced lignocellulosic biofuels.

“In order to engineer microorganisms to make biofuels efficiently, we need to know the applicable gene sequences and specific metabolic steps involved in the biosynthesis pathway,” Beller says. “We have now identified three genes encoding enzymes that are essential for the bacterial synthesis of alkenes. With this information we were able to convert an E. coli strain that normally cannot make long-chain alkenes into an alkene producer.”

Working with Beller on this study were Ee-Been Goh and Jay Keasling. The three were the co-authors of a paper that appeared earlier this year in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, titled “Genes Involved in Long-Chain Alkene Biosynthesis in Micrococcus luteus.”

It has long been known that certain types of bacteria are able to synthesize aliphatic hydrocarbons, which makes them promising sources of the enzymes needed to convert lignocellulose into advanced biofuels. However, until recently, little was known about the bacterial biosynthesis of non-isoprenoid hydrocarbons beyond a hypothesis that fatty acids are precursors. JBEI researchers in the Fuels Synthesis Division, which is headed by co-author Keasling, are using the tools of synthetic biology, and mathematical models of metabolism and gene regulation to engineer new microbes that can quickly and efficiently produce advanced biofuel molecules. E.coli is one of the model organisms being used in this effort because it is a well-studied microbe that is exceptionally amenable to genetic manipulation.

“We chose to work with M. luteus because a close bacterial relative was well-documented to synthesize alkenes and because a draft genome sequence of M. luteus was available,” Beller says. “The first thing we did was to confirm that M. luteus also produces alkenes.”

Beller and his colleagues worked from a hypothesis that known enzymes capable of catalyzing both decarboxylation and condensation should be good models for the kind of enzymes that might catalyze alkene synthesis from fatty acids. Using condensing enzymes as models, the scientists identified several candidate genes in M. luteus, including Mlut_13230. When expressed in E. coli together with the two adjacent genes – Mlut_13240 and 13250 – this trio of enzymes catalyzed the synthesis of alkenes from glucose. Observations were made both in vivo and in vitro.

“This group of enzymes can be used to make aliphatic hydrocarbons in an appropriate microbial host but the resulting alkenes are too long to be used directly as liquid fuels,” Beller says. “However, these long-chain alkenes can be cracked – a technique routinely used in oil refineries – to create hydrocarbons of an appropriate length for diesel fuel.”

The next step Beller says is to learn more about how these three enzymes work, particularly Mlut_13230 (also called OleA), which catalyzes the key step in the alkene biosynthesis pathway – the condensation of fatty acids.

“We’re also studying other pathways that can produce aliphatic hydrocarbons of an appropriate length for diesel fuels without the need for cracking,” Beller says. “Nature has devised a number of biocatalysts to produce hydrocarbons, and our goal is to learn more about them for the production of green transportation fuels.”

More information: For more information about JBEI, visit the Website at http://www.jbei.org

Provided by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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Astronomers say they have followed, for the first time, an extra-solar planet in orbit around a young white star.

The team used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to track the motion of a gas giant Beta Pictoris b.

The planet’s “sun” is also believed to be the youngest star to host a planet.

The find shows that Jupiter-like giants can form near stars in much shorter time-spans than previously thought, the scientists report in Science journal.

Astronomers have so far spotted some 450 extra-solar planets (exoplanets).

But Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant about nine times the mass of Jupiter, is one of only a few to be detected by direct imaging.

It is also the youngest of them, a co-author of the study, Dr Markus Kasper from the European Southern Observatory, told BBC News.

Its host star, which has a similar name, Beta Pictoris, is very young as well, he said.

It is believed to be around 12 million years old, less than three-thousandths of the age of our Sun.

The new find has the smallest orbit of all known exoplanets and is located at a distance of 8-15 AU (Astronomical Units) from its parent star – equivalent to the distance of Saturn from the Sun.

This means the scientists should be able to record its full orbit within 15-20 years, said a co-author of the study Mickael Bonnefoy, a student researcher from the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France.

“Further studies of Beta Pictoris b will provide invaluable insights into the physics and chemistry of a young giant planet’s atmosphere.”

First images

The exoplanet’s star is some 60 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Pictar.

Surrounding it is a debris disk – a dusty gas-rich disk composed of tiny particles that mainly come from collisions of comets with the star.

The team leader Dr Anne-Maris Lagrange from the University Joseph Fourier said astronomers had suspected there was a planet in the disk long before she set out to produce the proof.

She and her team noticed a warp in the disk, a secondary inclined disk and comets close to the star.

“Those were indirect, but tell-tale signs that strongly suggested the presence of a massive planet, and our new observations now definitively prove this,” she said.

The latest results also show that debris disks around young stars disappear within just a few million years – meaning that giant planets can form within these disks a lot faster that previously assumed.

“The presence of an exoplanet around Beta Pic proves that [gas giants] of about nine Jupiter masses form on a time scale of 10 to 12 million years – very early in the formation of the stars themselves,” said Dr Kasper.

The first images of a point-like source in the star’s debris disk were obtained back in 2003, but the data was not sufficient to confirm that it was indeed a planet.

The astronomers used the ultra-precise NaCo instrument of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to take more pictures of the disk in 2008 and early 2009 – only to find that the source had disappeared.

It “re-emerged” several months later – on the other side of the disk.

The astronomers then concluded that the “source” was indeed a new giant gas planet bound to Beta Pictoris.

It was not visible during the earlier observations simply because of its constant orbital movement – it was hiding either behind its “sun” or in its glare in front of it.

Important results

Dr Lagrange said the results of the research give vital clues about the formation of gas giants, both in our Solar System and beyond.

“The recent direct images of exoplanets… illustrate the diversity of planetary systems,” she said.

“Among those, Beta Pictoris b is the most promising case of a planet that could have formed in the same way as the giant planets in our Solar System.”

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To see the accompanying videos and pictures, hit the source link.

Earth and space are about to come into contact in a way that’s new to human history. To make preparations, authorities in Washington DC are holding a meeting: The Space Weather Enterprise Forum at the National Press Club on June 8th.

Richard Fisher, head of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, explains what it’s all about:

“The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.”

The National Academy of Sciences framed the problem two years ago in a landmark report entitled “Severe Space Weather Events—Societal and Economic Impacts.” It noted how people of the 21st-century rely on high-tech systems for the basics of daily life. Smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity. A century-class solar storm, the Academy warned, could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.

Much of the damage can be mitigated if managers know a storm is coming. Putting satellites in ‘safe mode’ and disconnecting transformers can protect these assets from damaging electrical surges. Preventative action, however, requires accurate forecasting—a job that has been assigned to NOAA.

“Space weather forecasting is still in its infancy, but we’re making rapid progress,” says Thomas Bogdan, director of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.

Bogdan sees the collaboration between NASA and NOAA as key. “NASA’s fleet of heliophysics research spacecraft provides us with up-to-the-minute information about what’s happening on the sun. They are an important complement to our own GOES and POES satellites, which focus more on the near-Earth environment.”

Among dozens of NASA spacecraft, he notes three of special significance: STEREO, SDO and ACE.

STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) is a pair of spacecraft stationed on opposite sides of the sun with a combined view of 90% of the stellar surface. In the past, active sunspots could hide out on the sun’s farside, invisible from Earth, and then suddenly emerge over the limb spitting flares and CMEs. STEREO makes such surprise attacks impossible.

SDO (the Solar Dynamics Observatory) is the newest addition to NASA’s fleet. Just launched in February, it is able to photograph solar active regions with unprecedented spectral, temporal and spatial resolution. Researchers can now study eruptions in exquisite detail, raising hopes that they will learn how flares work and how to predict them. SDO also monitors the sun’s extreme UV output, which controls the response of Earth’s atmosphere to solar variability.

Bogdan’s favorite NASA satellite, however, is an old one: the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) launched in 1997. “Where would we be without it?” he wonders. ACE is a solar wind monitor. It sits upstream between the sun and Earth, detecting solar wind gusts, billion-ton CMEs, and radiation storms as much as 30 minutes before they hit our planet.

“ACE is our best early warning system,” says Bogdan. “It allows us to notify utility and satellite operators when a storm is about to hit.”

NASA spacecraft were not originally intended for operational forecasting—”but it turns out that our data have practical economic and civil uses,” notes Fisher. “This is a good example of space science supporting modern society.”

2010 marks the 4th year in a row that policymakers, researchers, legislators and reporters have gathered in Washington DC to share ideas about space weather. This year, forum organizers plan to sharpen the focus on critical infrastructure protection. The ultimate goal is to improve the nation’s ability to prepare, mitigate, and respond to potentially devastating space weather events.

“I believe we’re on the threshold of a new era in which space weather can be as influential in our daily lives as ordinary terrestrial weather.” Fisher concludes. “We take this very seriously indeed.”

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A new study done by Russian scientists suggests that Genetically Modified Food may cause long term sterility, that is, sterility in second and third generations. The scientists used hamsters for this research and divided them into groups. One group of hamsters was fed a normal diet without any soy products, a second group was fed non-GMO (genetically modified organism) soy, the third ate GM soy and the fourth group was fed an even higher amount of GM soy than the third.

Each group produced about seven to eight litters of baby hamsters each without any problems. But when the researchers selected new breeding pairs from the offspring, the second generation had a slower growth rate and reached their sexual maturity later than normal. They also had a mortality rate, five times higher than the hamsters who didn’t eat soy. Even more shocking was the fact that nearly all of the third generation GM soy eating hamsters were sterile and also experienced hair growing inside their mouths.

Genetically modified food has received much criticism earlier too, with studies linking them to problems with birth weight and infant mortality.

Organic Consumers Association: Genetically Modified Foods Could Cause Long-Term Sterility

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An experimental aircraft has set a record for hypersonic flight, flying more than 3 minutes at Mach 6 – six times the speed of sound.

Hayden’s Note:

I’ve stuck this article in Science & Technology because I think it has wide implications that extend beyond typical military purposes… but can you imagine a Predator Drone rocking Mach 6 over Pakistan?  The local village people truly WON’T know what hit them when it dumps it’s 1,500 lb payload on their house while “looking for terrorist activity” over a broad spectrum of quansi-huts and shacks.

The X-51A Waverider was released from a B-52 Stratofortress off the southern California coast Wednesday morning, the Air Force reported on its website. Its scramjet engine accelerated the vehicle to Mach 6, and it flew autonomously for 200 seconds before losing acceleration. At that point the test was terminated.

The Air Force said the previous record for a hypersonic scramjet burn was 12 seconds.

“We are ecstatic to have accomplished many of the X-51A test points during its first hypersonic mission,” said Charlie Brink, an X-51A program manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

“We equate this leap in engine technology as equivalent to the post-World War II jump from propeller-driven aircraft to jet engines,” Brink said.

The Waverider was built for the Air Force by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and Boeing Co.

Joe Vogel, Boeing’s director of hypersonics, said, “This is a new world record and sets the foundation for several hypersonic applications, including access to space, reconnaissance, strike, global reach and commercial transportation.”

Four X-51A cruisers have been built for the Air Force, and the remaining three will be tested this fall.

“No test is perfect,” Brink said, “and I’m sure we will find anomalies that we will need to address before the next flight.”

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