Eideard

A man in Egypt has named his newborn daughter “Facebook” in honor of the role the social media network played in bringing about a revolution, according to a new report.

Gamal Ibrahim, a 20-something, gave his daughter the name “to express his joy at the achievements made by the January 25 youth,” according to a report in Al-Ahram, one of Egypt’s most popular newspapers.

Many young people used Facebook and other social media networks to organize the protests, which began January 25 and ultimately led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power.

Rock on, dude! May your daughter enjoy the fruits from the tree of liberty and democracy.

If you wondered why our military sponsors this research?

Once regarded as the stuff of science fiction, antimatter—the mirror image of the ordinary matter in our observable universe—is now the focus of laboratory studies around the world.

While physicists routinely produce antimatter with radioisotopes and particle colliders, cooling these antiparticles and containing them for any length of time is another story. Once antimatter comes into contact with ordinary matter it “annihilates”—or disappears in a flash of gamma radiation.

Clifford Surko, a professor of physics at UC San Diego who is constructing what he hopes will be the world’s largest antimatter container, said physicists have recently developed new methods to make special states of antimatter in which they can create large clouds of antiparticles, compress them and make specially tailored beams for a variety of uses…

Surko said that since “positrons”—the anti-electrons predicted by English physicist Paul Dirac some 80 years ago—disappear in a burst of gamma rays whenever they come in contact with ordinary matter, accumulating and storing these antimatter particles is no small feat. But over the past few years, he added, researchers have developed new techniques to store billions of positrons for hours or more and cool them to low temperatures in order to slow their movements so they can be studied.

Surko said physicists are now able to slow positrons from radioactive sources to low energy and accumulate and store them for days in specially designed ”bottles” that have magnetic and electric fields as walls rather than matter. They have also developed methods to cool them to temperatures as low as that of liquid helium and to compress
them to high densities.

“One can then carefully push them out of the bottle in a thin stream, a beam, much like squeezing a tube of toothpaste,” said Surko, adding that there are a variety of uses for such positrons…

Surko and his colleagues are building the world’s largest trap for low-energy positrons in his laboratory at UC San Diego, capable of storing more than a trillion antimatter particles at one time.

I have to chuckle over this research – since one of the other blogs where I’m an editor is the property of a pundit who denies the existence of antimatter.

And those who deny climate change, as some deny the existence of anti-matter and any number of revelatory advances in science will continue to base that denial on little or nothing of value. Much less scientific methods. Much less reading a report.

Two high-ranking Libyan air force pilots have who fled to Malta in their aircraft are reported to have told officials they escaped rather than carry out orders to bomb civilians.

The officers defected as Libyan diplomats in several countries and international organisations resigned in protest at the regime’s violent response to the deepening crisis. They included Muammar Gaddafi’s ambassadors to China, India, Indonesia and Poland, as well as Libya’s representative to the Arab League and most, if not all, of its mission at the United Nations…

The two Mirage F1 jets touched down in Malta after the pilots said they urgently needed to refuel and sought emergency clearance to land. The Times of Malta reported on its website the pilots had told officials they flew to the island after being ordered to bomb protesters occupying Libya’s second-biggest city of Benghazi.

One report said they had also brought with them two other members of the Libyan armed forces. The pilots – both colonels – said that, after taking off from Okba Ben Nafi base, they flew low through Libyan air space to avoid radar detection.

The pilots were being questioned by Maltese police who were also trying to identify seven other people who landed from Libya in two civilian helicopters shortly before the arrival of the jets. The helicopters took off from Libya without official clearance and a source in Malta said they appeared to have been in haste, with only one of the seven people aboard carrying a passport.

All seven said they were French. The helicopters’ passengers said they were working on an oil platform off Benghazi when the violence in Libya erupted…

A spokesman for Libya’s delegation at the UN told Reuters its members had declared their allegiance to Libya’s people, not the government. The spokesman, Dia al-Hotmani, said: “The members of the Libyan mission are representing only the Libyan people and not anyone else.”

Bravo! Having the courage of your convictions ain’t always easy.

Making to the rank of colonel implies a dedication to your country not required of civilians. To recognize that loyalty as misplaced and reactionary, counter to the needs of your country – and acting upon that conclusion – is an demanding accomplishment requiring great character.

Arabidopsis clones

Plants have for the first time been cloned as seeds. The research by UC Davis plant scientists and their international collaborators…is a major step toward making hybrid crop plants that can retain favorable traits from generation to generation.

Most successful crop varieties are hybrids, said Simon Chan, assistant professor of plant biology at UC Davis and an author of the paper. But when hybrids go through sexual reproduction, their traits, such as fruit size or frost resistance, get scrambled and may be lost.

“We’re trying to make a hybrid that breeds true,” Chan said, so that plants grown from the seed would be genetically identical to one parent.

Some plants, especially fruit trees, can be cloned from cuttings, but this approach is impractical for most crops. Other plants, especially weeds such as hawkweed and dandelions, can produce true seeds that are clones of themselves without sexual reproduction — a still poorly understood process called apomixis.

The new discovery gets to the same result as apomixis, although by a different route, Chan said…

Maruthachalam Ravi described the result as a step on the way toward artificial apomixis. The team hopes to produce crop plants, such as lettuce and tomato, that can fertilize themselves and produce clonal seeds. Applications for provisional patents on the work have been filed.

The work was principally funded by the National Science Foundation. You know, one of those socialist organizations the Republicans and the KoolAid Party wish to destroy.

RTFA for the details of how researchers proceeded. This could be a stellar result benefitting agriculture worldwide.

David Cameron in Tahrir Square
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

David Cameron has met Egypt’s new leaders, as the first world leader to visit the country since President Hosni Mubarak was forced out of office.

The UK prime minister held talks with the head of the armed forces supreme council Mohamed Tantawi and caretaker Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq. He said Egypt had a “great opportunity” to push for democracy.

Mr Cameron also described the violent suppression of protests in neighbouring Libya as “appalling”…

Speaking on the flight to Cairo, Mr Cameron said: “This is a great opportunity for us to go and talk to those currently running Egypt to make sure this really is a genuine transition from military rule to civilian rule, and see what friendly countries like Britain and others in Europe can do to help.”

Part of the prime minister’s agenda will be a call for the lifting of emergency laws, which have been in place for more than 30 years.

After walking through Tahrir Square, Mr Cameron also met figures from the protest movement, although not representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood – the banned Islamic group which is thought to have widespread public support…

He told the BBC that Egypt’s current military rulers had done some good things in terms of setting out the need for constitutional change, a referendum and parliamentary elections.

But he said they need to “do more, more quickly in terms of ending the state of emergency, allowing political parties to register and freeing political prisoners”.

Mr Cameron said he had met “very brave” figures from the protest movement who “don’t yet have confidence that this transition is real”.

“As a friend of Egypt we want this transition to happen we want to help encourage the government to take those steps,” he said.

Meanwhile, the self-assigned world leader in the struggle for democracy – you know, the USA – continues to send emails and phone calls encouraging everyone in Egypt to continue their struggle.

I’m confident of that. Pretty much.

Olkiluoto 3, a Gen 3+ powerplant, online in Finland by the end of 2012

Failure to pursue a program for recycling spent nuclear fuel has put the U.S. far behind other countries and represents a missed opportunity to enhance the nation’s energy security and influence other countries, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.

Dale Klein, Ph.D., Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Texas System, said largely unfounded concerns and “long-held myths” about the reprocessing of spent fuel have prevented the U.S. from tapping into an extremely valuable resource.

Spent nuclear fuel, which includes some plutonium, often is inaccurately referred to as waste, Klein said.

“It is not waste,” he said. “The waste is in our failure to tap into this valuable and abundant domestic source of clean energy in a systematic way. That’s something we can ill-afford to do…”

Compared to other fuels used in the production of electricity, the energy density of uranium is remarkable, Klein said, noting that 95 percent of the energy value in a bundle of spent nuclear fuel rods remains available to be re-used.

“The once-through nuclear fuel cycle, which is our practice in the U.S., is an enormous waste of potential energy,” he said…

While the U.S. has sat on the sidelines, other countries, including France, Japan, the United Kingdom, Russia, India, and China have dedicated significant resources toward their reprocessing programs, Klein added.

“U.S. leadership in this area has been lost, and the underlying technological capability and intellectual capital needed to compete internationally have diminished to near irrelevance.”

I make this point as a comment at one or another website or blog probably once a week. The responses are predictable. The Luddite Left throws up their hands in fear and trembling. The anti-science crowd makes their usual farting noises about freedom and government – as irrelevant as ever. A few who understand that nuclear power plants are a progressive alternative – especially if constructed to current standards – support the idea, especially if they weren’t previously aware of the potential.

The chemistry hasn’t changed much since I worked in the field 50 years ago. All that is required is sensible decision-making in government. Oh.

Children play – outside the City Museum, St. Louis

For those who wonder how college tuition costs manage to keep rising year after year, apparently defying laws of economic gravity, Sewanee, a liberal arts college in Tennessee, has an answer: they can’t.

On Wednesday, Sewanee announced that it will cut its $46,000 annual bill for students by 10 percent in the fall.

The college, formally Sewanee: The University of the South, is betting that the drop in tuition — which at this point it can afford — will help it compete on two fronts: with the public universities that are siphoning off a growing share of the students it accepts, and with other private colleges where tuition is likely to increase by 4 to 5 percent this year, as it has for the last two years…

Sewanee’s move has not been tried by any other institution in the top tier of U.S. News and World Report’s liberal-arts college rankings. And according to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, no college has reduced its tuition this year, and only about a dozen colleges have frozen it.

“Sewanee’s stepping up and out of the box, and it will create some reverberating effects,” said David L. Warren, president of the association. It is a sign of the times — a move prompted not only by the recession, but also by the degree to which small private colleges now compete with large public universities, whose tuition has been rising quickly because money from strapped state governments is declining…

John McCardell, the former president of Middlebury College in Vermont, emphasizes that Sewanee is by no means in dire straits, and the pressures and challenges it faces are much the same as those that many — probably most — other small liberal arts colleges are encountering…

But Mr. McCardell, in a memo to the board of regents broaching the idea of cutting tuition, suggested that other considerations were paramount. The memo read, in part: “If we believe this is the right thing to do; if we believe it will benefit the university in significant, even fundamental, ways; if we believe in the quality of our product; if we believe that all we need to do is bring Sewanee to the attention of a wider audience; and if we believe that there is a value, however computed, to boldness and leadership, then we will figure out how to cover the shortfall.”

Without ever having been near Sewanee, I can guess at one aspect of collegiate life that isn’t there. I’ll bet they aren’t out fundraising for a 9-figure intercollegiate sports program and hiding the rest of the costs of a big-deal national sports team in the corners of the university budget.

That could subsidize a lot of students and some damned good teachers.

A lone man walks along the empty downtown streets of Ciudad Juarez
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Fifty-three people were killed in a 72-hour span in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, making it one of the deadliest three-day periods in recent memory…

Among the dead were four police officers from three different agencies, Arturo Sandoval said…

The bloodshed started on Thursday with 14 people killed, including a municipal police officer.

Friday was the most violent day, leaving 20 people dead. A municipal police officer was killed by an assassin who belonged to a band of carjackers. Hours later, a state police investigator was executed on his drive home.

On Saturday, a highway police officer was killed by a driver who confronted the patrolman after the officer gave him a ticket. The officer was shot 10 times at close range in the middle of the afternoon. In all, 19 people were killed that day in separate shootings throughout the city.

Juarez is one of Mexico’s deadliest cities and an epicenter of drug cartel violence. The Juarez cartel and the Sinaloa cartel are fighting a bloody turf war in the region for lucrative smuggling routes, and for drug-dealing territory in the city.

The sudden spike in violence left the city morgue overwhelmed. There were issues with where to store the bodies…

Logistics is a bear isn’t it.

Status symbol?

Frustrated by students habitually skipping class, police and school officials in Anaheim are turning to GPS tracking to ensure they come to class.

The Anaheim Union High School District is the first in California to test Global Positioning System technology as part of a six-week pilot program that began last week, officials said.

Seventh- and eighth-graders with four unexcused absences or more this school year are assigned to carry a handheld GPS device, about the size of a cell phone.

Each morning on schooldays, they get an automated phone call reminding them that they need to get to school on time.

Then, five times a day, they are required to enter a code that tracks their locations – as they leave for school, when they arrive at school, at lunchtime, when they leave school and at 8 p.m.

The students are also assigned an adult coach who calls them at least three times a week to see how they are doing and help them find effective ways to make sure they get to class on time.

Students and their parents volunteer for the monitoring as a way to avoid continuation school or prosecution with a potential stay in juvenile hall…

The program is paid for by a state grant. Students who routinely skip school are prime candidates to join gangs, police say.

Local school administrators say they are thrilled by the concept.

Parents will be responsible for paying for lost devices. But Miller said that rarely happens. They are tracking devices and typically can be found immediately.

RTFA. More pros than cons. Might be easier if the government just started chipping everyone at birth, right? [Only a modicum of irony there]

The saddest excuse was from parents who thought that letting their kid skip school wasn’t a crime. It is.