Former employees of the mysterious Area 51 are breaking their silence 13 .4 .2009 MSNBC news

[yunowu]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_Z09cIdNbY&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fufoblogger%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F&feature=player_embedded

[yunowu]

Utility to buy orbit-generated electricity from Solaren in 2016, at no risk


California's biggest energy utility announced a deal Monday to purchase 200 megawatts of electricity from a startup company that plans to beam the power down to Earth from outer space, beginning in 2016.

San Francisco-based Pacific Gas & Electric said it was seeking approval from state regulators for an agreement to purchase power over a 15-year period from Solaren Corp., an 8-year-old company based in Manhattan Beach, Calif. The agreement was first reported in a posting to Next100, a Weblog produced by PG&E.

Solaren would generate the power using solar panels in Earth orbit and convert it to radio-frequency transmissions that would be beamed down to a receiving station in Fresno, PG&E said. From there, the energy would be converted into electricity and fed into PG&E's power grid.
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PG&E is pledging to buy the power at an agreed-upon rate, comparable to the rate specified in other agreements for renewable-energy purchases, company spokesman Jonathan Marshall said. Neither PG&E nor Solaren would say what that rate was, due to the proprietary nature of the agreement. However, Marshall emphasized that PG&E would make no up-front investment in Solaren's venture.

"We've been very careful not to bear risk in this," Marshall told msnbc.com.

Solaren's chief executive officer, Gary Spirnak, said the project would be the first real-world application of space solar power, a technology that has been talked about for decades but never turned into reality.

"While a system of this scale and exact configuration has not been built, the underlying technology is very mature and is based on communications satellite technology," he said in a Q&A posted by PG&E. A study drawn up for the Pentagon came to a similar conclusion in 2007. However, that study also said the cost of satellite-beamed power would likely be significantly higher than market rates, at least at first.

In contrast, Spirnak said Solaren's system would be "competitive both in terms of performance and cost with other sources of baseload power generation."

Solaren's director for energy services, Cal Boerman, said he was confident his company would be able to deliver the power starting in mid-2016, as specified in the agreement. "There are huge penalties associated with not performing," he told msnbc.com. He said PG&E would be "our first client" but was not expected to be the only one.

The biggest questions surrounding the deal have to do with whether Solaren has the wherewithal, the expertise and the regulatory support to get a space-based solar power system up and running in seven years. "Quite a few hurdles there to leap," Clark Lindsey of RLV and Space Transport News observed.

In the Q&A, Spirnak said his company currently consists of about 10 engineers and scientists, and plans to employ more than 100 people a year from now. He said each member of the Solaren team had at least 20 years of experience in the aerospace industry, primarily with Hughes Aircraft Co. and the U.S. Air Force. Spirnak himself is a former Air Force spacecraft project engineer with experience at Boeing Satellite Systems as well.

"The impetus for forming Solaren was the convergence of improved high-energy conversion devices, heavy-launch vehicle developments, and a revolutionary Solaren-patented SSP [space solar power] design that is a significant departure from past efforts and makes SSP not only technically but economically viable," Spirnak said.

Boerman said Solaren's plan called for four or five heavy-lift launches that would put the elements of the power-generating facility in orbit. Those elements would dock automatically in space to create the satellite system. Boerman declined to describe the elements in detail but noted that each heavy-lift launch could put 25 tons of payload into orbit.

"We've talked with United Launch Alliance, and gotten an idea of what's involved and what the cost is," he said.

The plan would have to be cleared by the Federal Aviation Administration as well as the Federal Communications Commission and federal and state safety officials, Boerman said.

In the nearer term, PG&E's deal would have to be approved by the California Public Utilities Commission, Marshall said.

He said the space-power agreement was part of PG&E's effort to forge long-term deals for renewable energy, including deals for terrestrial-based solar power. Marshall pointed out that space-based and terrestrial-based solar power generation were "really very different animals."

Unlike ground-based solar arrays, space satellites could generate power 24 hours a day, unaffected by cloudy weather or Earth's day-night cycle. The capacity factor for a ground-based solar is typically less than 25 percent. In contrast, the capacity factor for a power-generating satellite is expected to be 97 percent, Marshall said.

"The potential for generating much larger amounts of power in space for any given area of solar cells makes this a very promising opportunity," Marshall said.

He said the agreement called for 800 gigawatt-hours of electricity to be provided during the first year of operation, and 1,700 gigawatt-hours for subsequent years. The larger figure is roughly equal to the annual consumption of 250,000 average homes.

PG&E has 5.1 million electric customer accounts and 4.2 million natural-gas customer accounts in Northern and Central California.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30198977/

[yunowu]

Size matters in particle physics: The bigger the machine, the more violently physicists can smash atoms together and break open the deepest mysteries of the subatomic world. But a revolutionary new technology could eventually render some gargantuan particle accelerators passé.

Using simulations, a team of German and Russian physicists have pioneered a new technique for particle acceleration, called proton-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration (PWFA). The technique may one day allow machines a fraction of the size of today's accelerators to create the highest-energy particles ever.

"This could be a major step forward," says Allen Caldwell of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, coauthor of the study, which appeared in Nature Physics Sunday. "The dream is that it will lead to much more compact — and therefore much cheaper — electron accelerators."

Progress in particle physics is contingent on the power of particle accelerators, and as particle colliders grow, the price tag and bureaucratic hurdles grow with them. Government pocketbooks are becoming increasingly tight — in December both the U.S. and the U.K. pulled out of the proposed $7 billion International Linear Collider, which may never actually be built. So to continue searching for answers to physics' greatest questions — dark matter, extra dimensions, supersymmetry — physicists may have to find a fundamentally new way to accelerate particles. Caldwell and his colleagues hope proton-driven PWFA will pave the way.

Giant particle accelerators work by smashing subatomic particles such as electrons or protons together at high energies. This transforms the particles into energy, which then converts back into matter, potentially revealing new particles and advancing understanding of old ones. Over the past half century, particle accelerators have thoroughly probed the lower energy levels. The next frontier is the land of the teraelectronvolt (TeV, or a million million electronvolts).

There are only two ways for accelerators to increase the power: create a stronger electric field, or increase the distance over which particles are accelerated. We've already pretty much maxed out the strength of electric fields that can be contained without ripping electrons off the walls and essentially melting the inside of the accelerator. The other option is to create ever larger accelerators.

Building bigger proton accelerators, such as Fermilab's Tevatron in Illinois and the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, is still possible because protons can be accelerated to very high energies in a circle. But the highest-energy electrons need linear tracks such as that of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory or the proposed International Linear Collider.

While proton accelerators are more powerful because of the continuous circular acceleration, electron accelerators are important because they are more precise. This is where plasma-wakefield acceleration may be able to help.

This radically new kind of acceleration skirts the electric field issue by using plasma — gas in which electrons have been ripped from their nuclei. This soup of ionized gas can handle electric fields about a thousand times stronger than can conventional accelerators, meaning the accelerators can potentially be a thousand times shorter.

In PWFA, tightly-packed bunches of electrons are fired into the plasma like bullets from a machine gun, blowing the plasma's electrons away in all directions leaving the heavier plasma nuclei behind. These positively charged nuclei form a bubble of electron-free plasma behind the particle bullet. The negatively charged expelled electrons are drawn back toward the positively charged bubble.

But as the electrons snap back toward the bubble, they overshoot their original positions. So the particle bullet leaves behind a wake of mispositioned electrons, creating an intense electric field. By riding in this wake, the electrons can reach very high energies in a very short distance.

In 2007, a collaboration between SLAC, UCLA, and USC demonstrated PWFA's potential: In a single meter, they were able to boost electrons zooming down SLAC's linear track to twice what they can achieve over the entire two-mile-long accelerator.

But this strategy also has its limits. The maximum energy of the accelerated electrons depends on the energy of the particle bunches. SLAC currently produces the highest-energy electrons of any accelerator, at 50 gigaelectronvolts (GeV, or a thousand million electronvolts).

So Caldwell and his colleagues decided to give plasma-wakefield acceleration a new twist by blasting the plasma with protons instead of electrons. Today's accelerators can bring protons to much higher energies than they can electrons. Protons at the Tevatron can hit 1 TeV (hence the name), and those at the LHC will be seven times as energetic.

"This would be a tool to transfer that energy from the protons to the electrons, via the plasma, in a single stage," says Caldwell.

In a numerical simulation, the team used proton-driven PWFA to accelerate electron bunches to 500 GeV in 300 meters of plasma. Compare that to the proposed $7 billion International Linear Collider (ILC), which will need at least nine miles to hit the same target, and SLAC's linear accelerator, which needed 10 times the distance to reach a tenth of the energy. Combining the new proton-driven PWFA with the LHC's powerful proton beam, Caldwell says it might be possible to accelerate electrons to several TeV, so that physicists can have their power, and their precision too.

"I look forward to watching these ideas continue to develop," says Mark Hogan, a member of the electron-driven PWFA team at SLAC. "There is still a lot of research and development needed to nurture these ideas. But in the not too distant future, we may find that ideas such as this have transformed the field of particle accelerators to make future machines that are both smaller and more affordable to society."

Electron acceleration by proton-driven PWFA is in its earliest theoretical stages — this study is the first to describe the concept — and is far from experimental verification. Perhaps the biggest issue is the proton bunch length, which must be very small to allow the electrons to overshoot and create the wakefield.

"It's easy to do for electron bunches," says co-author Frank Simon of the Max Planck Institute. "But hadron colliders have bunches that are centimeters in length. We need bunches that are a hundred micrometers in length. We're still looking at how to test the idea with present technology."

As governments put a stranglehold on spending, advancements in PWFA may be the best hope for refining the discoveries expected to be made at the LHC.

"In the past, opening up energy frontiers allowed us to discover new particles and to understand the basic forces," says Caldwell. "Today, there are new theories around that we want to test which predict new particles. But the basic reason is to just see what's there."
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/tinyaccelerator.html

[yunowu]

2009-04-12
A 64-year-old woman has reported to doctors at Geneva University Hospital the presence of a pale, milky-white and translucent third arm.

After examining the case, the woman's neurologist, Asaid Khateb of the hospital's experimental neurophysiology laboratory, called the rare phenomenon credible.

The arm appeared to the woman a few days after suffering a stroke, doctors said.

But this case of what is known as a supernumerary phantom limb (SPL) is a genuine head-scratcher.

The upshot is that the woman can use the apparitional extremity to relieve very real itches on the cheek. It cannot penetrate solid objects.

She does not always perceive the arm but "retrieves" it when needed, doctors told the Swiss news agency.

It is nevertheless the first case known to doctors of a person being able to feel, see and deliberately move a limb that doesn't exist. The findings are published in the Annals of Neurology.
Pinpointing

Khateb and his colleagues examined the patient's brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a tool that allows doctors to see whether the brain is truly stimulated, and to pinpoint where. In this case, the investigations revealed that the woman actually experienced what she described.

Researchers instructed the woman to move her right hand. As expected, the motor cortex and visual processing areas in the left side of her brain became mobilised.

The same effects were observed to a lesser extent when the woman simply imagined moving her right hand. Imaginary movements of the woman's paralysed left hand prompted the same activity in the brain, but on the right side.

But when doctors asked her to move her phantom arm, her brain reacted as though the arm really existed and could be moved. In addition, the patient's visual cortex was also activated, indicating the she actually saw the imaginary limb.

And when she was instructed to scratch her cheek, regions of the brain relating to touch were activated.
Mystery

Khateb said the exact cause of the imaginary arm remains a mystery. Supernumerary limbs are rare. There are only nine known cases of a patient both feeling and seeing an arm.

"Existing evidence from stroke-elicited SPLs convincingly implicates the mismatch between the subject's well-established sensorimotor representations and a suddenly aberrant pattern of communication between the brain and the paralysed limb," the authors wrote.

They said it could represent a missing link between classical phantom limbs and phenomena such as out-of-body experiences.

Phantom limbs are more commonly associated with people who have had an amputation – between 50 and 80 per cent of people who have had body parts removed suffer from it. In most cases it is painful, according to a 1984 article published in a scientific journal called the Clinical Journal of Pain.

"Ultimately however these conditions might offer a unique way to understand how the brain constructs a normal experience of bodily awareness and the self," they concluded.
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/front/Doctors_confirm_woman_s_imaginary_third_arm.html?s iteSect=105&sid=10522330&rss=true&ty=st&ref=ti_spa

[yunowu]

2009-04-11
Scientists from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia have helped unveil the birthplaces of ancient stars using a two-tonne telescope carried by a balloon the size of a 33-storey building.

After two years spent analyzing data from the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope (BLAST) project, an international group of astronomers and astrophysicists from Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. reveals today in the journal Nature that half of the starlight of the Universe comes from young, star-forming galaxies several billion light years away.

"While those familiar optical images of the night sky contain many fascinating and beautiful objects, they are missing half of the picture in describing the cosmic history of star formation," says UBC Astronomy Prof. Douglas Scott.

"Stars are born in clouds of gas and dust," says Barth Netterfield, a cosmologist in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at U of T. "The dust absorbs the starlight, hiding the young stars from view. The brightest stars in the Universe are also the shortest lived and many never leave their stellar nursery. However, the warmed dust emits light at far-infrared and submillimetre wavelengths - invisible to the human eye, but visible to the sensitive thermo-detectors on BLAST."

"The history of star formation in the universe is written out in our data. It is beautiful. And it is just a taste of things to come," says UBC Prof. Mark Halpern, part of the UBC team that also includes post-doctoral fellows Ed Chapin and Gaelen Marsden.

In the 1990s, NASA's COBE satellite discovered a nearly uniform glow of submillimetre light, known as the Far Infrared Background. It had been expected that this radiation was coming from warmed dust enshrouding bright young stars, but the nature of the galaxies which contain the dust had remained a mystery.

The Nature study combines BLAST submillimetre observations at wavelengths around 0.3 mm - between infrared and microwave wavelengths - with data at much shorter infrared wavelengths from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to confirm that all of the Far Infrared Background comes from individual distant galaxies, answering a decade-old question of the radiation's origin.

In addition to leading the data analysis, the Canadian scientists also constructed much of the hardware that made BLAST a reality. The aluminum gondola was designed to protect the telescope, the onboard computers and data upon landing. The motorized pointing system controlled the 2,000 kilogram payload with its two-metre-in-diameter telescope - the largest of its kind - to one one-hundredth of a degree in precision. The complex electronics monitored and recorded nearly 1,000 sensors while the software - nearly 300,000 lines of code - controlled the payload during its long flight 39 kilometres above the Earth.

Flying the telescope above much of the atmosphere allowed the BLAST team to peer out into the distant Universe at wavelengths nearly unattainable from the ground, and uncover dust-enshrouded galaxies that hide about half of the starlight in the Universe.

"Over the last decade, submillimetre telescopes on the ground have produced several 'black and white' images no larger than the size of a fingernail at the end of your outstretched arm," says Chapin. "In a single 11-day flight BLAST has taken a huge leap forward, producing colour images the size of your hand."

BLAST has acted as a pathfinder for the SPIRE (Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver) instrument on the upcoming Herschel satellite, in which Canadians are also involved. Using the same detectors as SPIRE, BLAST has provided an invaluable first look at the submillimetre sky.

"BLAST has given us a new view of the Universe," says Netterfield, whose U of T colleagues on the project include department chair Peter G. Martin and graduate students Marco P. Viero, Donald V. Wiebe (now a post-doc at UBC) and Enzo Pascale (now a faculty member at Cardiff University). "The data we collected enable us to make discoveries in topics ranging from the formation of stars to the evolution of distant galaxies."

BLAST is also uniquely capable of studying the earliest stages of star formation locally, in the Milky Way Galaxy. The BLAST collaboration is also releasing a study, submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, of the largest survey to date of the earliest stages of star formation. This study documents the existence of a large population of cold clouds of gas and dust, many of which have cooled to less than -260 C. These cold cores, which exist for millions of years, are the birthplaces of stars.

"Over the last nine years, I've followed BLAST from Vancouver to Toronto, Philadelphia, New Mexico, Texas, northern Sweden and Antarctica, and it feels great for us to finally announce the results," says Marsden. "These results are a very big step forward in submillimetre astronomy."

"The world-leading scientific success of Canadian graduate students and post-docs working on BLAST has been very impressive and, speaking as an educator, very gratifying," says Halpern.
http://www.physorg.com/news158416076.html

[yunowu]

2009-04-14
A recent study by UK scientists discovered that a common soil bacteria activates cells in the brain to produce serotonin and can alter behavior similar to antidepressants.

“These studies help us understand how the body communicates with the brain and why a healthy immune system is important for maintaining mental health. They also leave us wondering if we shouldn’t all be spending more time playing in the dirt.” - Dr Chris Lowry, Bristol University

The research, published in the journal Neuroscience by collaborators at Bristol University and University College London, used lab mice treated with Mycobacterium vaccae and found that it activated a specific group of neurons in the brain that produce serotonin.

Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, or 5-HT) is an important neurotransmitter which plays a role regulating mood, metabolism, anger, aggression, sleep, and appetite, and is found in the brain, gut, and blood. A number of ailments are linked to low levels of serotonin, including anxiety and depression, bipolar disorders, and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Many antidepressants work with serotonin pathways to affect moods and anxiety, so finding a natural, commonly available substance that activates serotonin production could lead to new treatments for those suffering from depression.

While I don’t see that doctors are going to start prescribing spoonfuls of dirt for clinical depression, this study affirms what many parents already know: Getting dirty is good for you.
http://ecochildsplay.com/2009/04/12/common-soil-bacteria-can-have-antidepressant-effects/