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Sea Shepherd with

another new Boat.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society today launched its new interceptor vessel Gojira, named after the widely-feared monster of Japanese film known in English as Godzilla.

The non-for-profit organisation's director Jeff Hansen said the Gojira will be a game-changer in this year's fight against illegal Japanese whaling as it can out-run harpoon vessels.

"This vessel can out-run any Japanese vessel, so it means we'll have the element of surprise and we can find the factory ship," Mr Hansen said.

"The factory ship is the one we're after and if we can find it, we can shut down whaling.

"We save 10 to 12 whales a day by blocking the slipway on the factory ship so really this vessel is going to play a huge part in shutting down the Japanese whaling fleet for the entire summer."

The Gojiraset off from Fremantle today to join the Steve Irwin and Bob Barkerin Hobart before leaving on December 2 to defend the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary. Its captain, Locky MacLean, said having the fast, new vessel combined with Japanese whalers still to leave port, it was anticipated Sea Shepherd would be able to stop all whales from being slaughtered this year.

Lets hope this boat lasts longer than the Ady Gil ship they lost in January of 2010.

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Finally, they can

Reverse the Aging Process

A technique to keep the tips of your chromosomes healthy could reverse tissue ageing. The work, which was done in mice, is yet more evidence of a causal link between chromosome length and age-related disease.

Telomeres, the caps of DNA which protect the ends of chromosomes, shorten every time cells divide. But cells stop dividing and die when telomeres drop below a certain length – a normal part of ageing. The enzyme telomerase slows this degradation by adding new DNA to the ends of telomeres.

Mariela Jaskelioff and her colleagues at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, engineered mice with short telomeres and inactive telomerase to see what would happen when they turned the enzyme back on. These mice had shorter lifespans, atrophied organs and smaller brains than mice that hadn't been engineered.

Four weeks after the team switched on the enzyme, they found that tissue had regenerated in several organs, new brain cells were developing and the mice were living longer.

About time, now time becomes more irrelevant, just like Einstein was trying to accomplish through his laterr theories

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WikiLeaks Steals the Show

 

Soon after, Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters at the Justice Department that the administration would prosecute if violations of federal law are found in a criminal investigation of the incident.

The weekend release of documents reflecting, in some cases, unflattering assessments of world leaders has caused embarrassment to the administration. The director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget, Jacob Lew, said in ordering the agency-wide assessment Monday that the disclosures are unacceptable and will not be tolerated.

Bristling over the unauthorized release of more than a quarter million classified State Department documents, the Obama White House on Monday ordered a government-wide review of how agencies safeguard sensitive information.

It is refreshing to read what is really being discussed by leaders of countries as opposed to the Bull crap that they tell its citizens.  Thanks WikiLeaks!

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Nigel Farage

unwraps the EU problem

Words cannot describe his 3 minute speech, so here is the video.  I only hope every country has someone like this looking out for their citizens.

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The EU President

Says Britain and other

states do not need

to exist

The President of the European Council has ­finally revealed his true colours. ‘The time of the homogeneous nation state is over,’ declared Herman Van Rompuy in Berlin yesterday.

According to Mr Van Rompuy, the idea that a country can survive alone is not merely an illusion: ‘It is a lie!’

He has clearly never heard of the ­Battle of Britain

My first reaction to this latest ­diktat was to laugh out loud. This ­blustering Belgian, the grandest ­panjandrum in Brussels, is straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan.

‘President’ Van Rompuy and his British colleague, the EU ‘High Representative’ Baroness Ashton, cut richly comic figures on the international stage.

It is tempting to dismiss their empire-building as an extravagant but otherwise harmless pastime. The trouble is that these Eurocrats not only waste tens of billions of pounds on their palatial offices and legions of flunkeys — they have real power, too.

The British public watched in dismay as, earlier this month, David Cameron was forced to back down from his promise to stop Brussels from increasing its already bloated budget.

The Prime Minister tried to present the deal he secured — reducing the 6 per cent increase Brussels demanded to 2.9 per cent.

But at a time when Britain is slashing its national budget by at least 25 per cent, even a 2.9 per cent increase in the profligate EU budget is indefensible.

Worse, Mr Cameron agreed to further treaty changes to ­placate the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, without securing any firm promise that there will be no new EU power grab

This Lisbon Treaty that formed most of the EU needs to be looked at and possibly revoked.  It contains many clauses that give power to the EU President, because if a crisi occurs they want a quick response, and the only way to do that is if the President can Act without asking for powers, because as you know, the President will always have the best interest of his people.  Notice, they are HIS people.  That should be enough to disband this whole mess.

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Global Warming has

slowed down over

the past 10 years

The rate at which global temperatures are rising has slowed in the past decade, scientists said today.

An upsurge in industrial emissions such as sulphur which are being pumped into the atmosphere reflects sunlight and could lead to a cooling effect.

In a report published today, the Met Office said the slow in the rate of warming was down to a combination of natural variation in the weather and pollution.

Scientists say one of the major factors is the rise in heavy industry and pollutant 'aerosols', particularly in Asia.  

Changes in the amount of water vapour in the stratosphere may also be a factor, the report suggests.

The admission will be seized upon by climate sceptics as evidence that man-made global warming has been overstated

Well as they say, Science can change to explain one side or another, however; we have seen a warming trend, and now it appears the trend is changing to cooling trend.  Well that sounds like Science, good thing we are not on those Carbon Credits yet.  The next battle ground is Bio Diversity, which is more Science to explain one side of an argument.

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Early universe

recreated

in LHC was

superhot liquid

 

The early universe was an extremely dense and superhot liquid, according to the surprise first findings of the ALICE experimentat the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.

The experiment to probe the early moments of the universe started up on 7 November, smashing together the nuclei of lead atoms inside the LHC's circular tunnel to produce incredibly dense and hot fireballs of subatomic particles at over 10 trillion °C. The idea behind ALICE is to recreate the exotic, primordial "soup of particles" known as quark-gluon plasma that appeared microseconds after the universe's birth. Gluons and quarks went on to become the constitutive "bricks" of neutrons and protons inside atomic nuclei.

Many models have suggested that the flow of particles from these subatomic fireworks produced in high-energy nuclear collisions should behave like a gas and not a liquid. "These observations keep surprising us," says David Evans of the University of Birmingham, UK, a member of the ALICE team.

A further surprise was the density of subatomic particles created by the smash. One major school of thought suggests there is an upper limit on how many interacting gluons can be packed into a given volume: when this saturation point is reached during a collision, no more new debris particles should therefore be produced.

But to the surprise of the ALICE scientists, the lead ions' mini big bang produced more subatomic particles than expected. "This means that if an upper limit exists, it has not yet been reached at the energies used at LHC," says Evans.

Now our LHC investment is paying off.  Fluid matter fixes many of our Theories about the building blocks of the universe.  String Theory even supports this, but it was dismissed as being impossible.

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Milk and Meat from

Clone Animals

Declared Safe to Eat

The UK's Food Standards Agency has finally declared milk and meat from cloned animals and their offspring safe to eat.

Yesterday, the FSA's Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes concluded that:

The evidence showed no differences in composition between the meat and milk of conventional animals, clones or their progeny and is therefore unlikely to present any food safety risk.

But the statement clashes with the European Commission's (EC) position on food products from cloned animals - that they should be banned altogether.

The FSA's chief scientist, Andrew Wadge, said that the EC's position will be taken into account before the UK government is officially advised.

Meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring was declared safe by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2007, and farmers in the US, South America and Asia are free to breed from cloned animals.

In the UK, however, the sale of cloned meat - classed as a novel food - requires special authorisation. So this summer, when The New York Times reported that an unnamed British farmer claimed to be selling milk from cloned animals, the debate over the safety and ethical implications of cloning kicked off.

Despite the FSA's statement, clone critics are sticking to their guns. "There are many unanswered questions on the issue of cloning animals - both ethical and practical - and insufficient regulation," a Soil Association spokeswoman told the BBC. "Not only does cloning have a negative impact on animal welfare, we also have no long-term evidence for the impacts on health.

The UK was our last bastion of safety, this can't be good in the long run, cloning and making copies can only last a few times before the cloning breaks down and causes mutation that we will be consuming.

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Anti-Matter

Trapped at CERN

First Time in History

 

Physicists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, have succeeded in trapping antihydrogen — the antimatter equivalent of the hydrogen atom — a milestone that could soon lead to experiments on a form of matter that disappeared mysteriously shortly after the birth of the universe 14 billion years ago.

The first artificially produced low energy antihydrogen atoms — consisting of a positron, or antimatter electron, orbiting an antiproton nucleus — were created at CERN in 2002, but until now the atoms have struck normal matter and annihilated in a flash of gamma-rays within microseconds of creation.

The ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus) experiment, an international collaboration that includes physicists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), has now trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms, each for more than one-tenth of a second.

Now we are getting our moneys worth out of the LHC, lets hope it does not destroy the earth.

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Seventh Season of

"Poker After Dark"

Confirmed

Earlier today, a press release was circulated by "Poker After Dark" producers that included many details about the seventh season of the show.

POKER PROductions, which is the company that produces "Poker After Dark", also announced that they have reached an agreement with NBC Universal that will see the show remain on the air through 2014.

The seventh season of the show is set to debut on January 3rd, 2011. In total, there will be 13 weeks of new shows broadcast during 2011.

According to the press release, "the emphasis will be on cash games" this season. There will only be three freezeouts this season, with only one being of the traditional $20,000 buy-in variety. The other two freezeouts will look like this:

-"Idol" week with Doyle Brunson, Eric Baldwin, Andrew Lichtenberger, Annette Obrestad, Melanie Weisner and Tom "durrrr" Dwan. This week will feature a $50,000 buy-in with the winner taking home $300,000.

-"Big Heat" week with John Juanda, Erick Lindgren, Phil Ivey, Huck Seed, Tom "durrrr" Dwan and Phil Galfond. This week will feature a $100,000 buy-in with the winner taking home $600,000. This week will kick off the new season on January 3rd, 2011.


The remaining 10 weeks of the season will be nothing but cash games, which should go over very well with the poker community. Each cash game will last two weeks. Four of the five cash games will be NLHE, while the other will feature Pot Limit Omaha as the game of choice. Here are the details:

NLHE, $100,000 minimum Buy-in - Mike Matusow, Chris Ferguson, Michael "The Grinder" Mizrachi, Brandon Adams, Peter Jetten, Jean-Robert Bellande, Phil Hellmuth

NLHE, $100,000 minimum Buy-in - Phil Hellmuth, Andy Bloch, Huck Seed, Antonio Esfandiari, Annette Obrestad, Justin Smith

NLHE, $150,000 minimum Buy-in - Eli Elezra, David Peat, Olivier Busquet, Phil Laak, Greg Mueller, Howard Lederer

NLHE, $200,000 minimum Buy-in - Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan, Patrik Antonius, David Peat, Eli Elezra, David Oppenheim

PLO, $100,000 minimum Buy-in - Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan, Brandon Adams, Brian Hastings, Phil Galfond, Patrik Antonius, Jared Bleznick

The seventh season of the show was filmed at the new Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. According to the press release, the Aria will be the new host of the show through 2013.

Now it looks like Cash Games are Finally taking over the TV.

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Amazing HD Flying Camera

 

With the help of the Swinglet CAM you can create your very own local aerial map a la Google Maps, or monitor wildlife distribution in a given area, or maybe just get a feel for what’s going on in the neighborhood. The small, unmanned aerial vehicle can take off and land on its own and its integrated camera will snap high resolution images along a predetermined flightpath or as directed by remote control.

Swiss sensor manufacturer senseFly sees the Swinglet CAM high resolution aerial photography drone being useful for such things as traffic monitoring, security applications, mapping, crop monitoring and wildlife watching. It comes packed in a suitably-sized case, has a wingspan of 80cm (31.4 inches) and weighs 500g (17.6 ounces). Its Li-polymer battery will power the UAV for 30 minutes which is said to give it an operational range of up to 20km (12.4 miles) and a top speed of 30-50kph (up to 30mph).

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China and Russia Agree on something

To Quit the U.S. Dollar

       

St. Petersburg, Russia – China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday. Chinese experts said the move reflected closer relations between Beijing and Moscow and is not aimed at challenging the dollar, but to protect their domestic economies.

“About trade settlement, we have decided to use our own currencies,” Putin said at a joint news conference with Wen in St. Petersburg.

The two countries were accustomed to using other currencies, especially the dollar, for bilateral trade. Since the financial crisis, however, high-ranking officials on both sides began to explore other possibilities. The yuan has now started trading against the Russian rouble in the Chinese interbank market, while the renminbi will soon be allowed to trade against the rouble in Russia, Putin said.

“That has forged an important step in bilateral trade and it is a result of the consolidated financial systems of world countries,” he said.

Putin made his remarks after a meeting with Wen. They also officiated at a signing ceremony for 12 documents, including energy cooperation. Wen said at the press conference that the partnership between Beijing and Moscow has “reached an unprecedented level” and pledged the two countries will “never become each other’s enemy”.

Over the past year, “our strategic cooperative partnership endured strenuous tests and reached an unprecedented level,” Wen said, adding the two nations are now more confident and determined to defend their mutual interests.

There goes the Dollar, time to go back to the Gold Standard.

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Full Mobile Body Scanners

Near your Home

As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins to simmer, it’s worth noting that courthouses and airport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets.

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mountedin vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.“This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” says Reiss.

Just how your government wants you, with a little dose of Radiation, exposed over and over again.  If you do not fly or have a problem with airport scanners, now they are coming to your neighborhood, to be used over and over again.

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New Bike Design Wins

over the World

Milan-based Danishdesigner Nils Sveje describes Bike 2.0 as the next generation bicycle… hence the name. At first glance, it looks pretty ordinary. Its very Spartan appearance doesn’t exactly turn heads, and in fact it’s the lack of external features that gives away the fact that this is no ordinary bike.

Instead of a chain, the bike has a pedal-powered internal generator that’s wired directly to the rear hub motor. Instead of derailleurs, it has a stepless gearbox. Instead of brake levers and discs, it has a regenerative coaster brake. And, instead of shifters, it has two wireless rings on the handlebar.

Regular propulsion is achieved via the bottom bracket-mounted generator, that creates power which is sent back to the 500 W brushless motor. Using the “superconductor” (which one would assume is a capacitor), however, the rider can get power boosts when needed. An Intelligent Cadence Leveling feature keeps the rider pedaling at the same speed, via a continuously-variable transmission. The rider initially sets their desired cadence using one of the handlebar control rings.

Interesting Design, strange how the basic bike design has not changed in over a 100 years.

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Face Book Tradmarks

 the word "Face" 

 

The United States Patent and Trademark Office is really losing it. The department is granting Facebook a trademark to the word ‘face.’ The social network already owns the word ‘book.’ Facebook received a Notice of Allowance from the USPTO, now all it must do is pay a fee and file a Statement of Use to obtain its trademark.

Luckily the trademark has some limits. According to TG Daily, the trademark covers use of the word for “telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter, none primarily featuring or relating to motoring or to cars.”

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U.S. Chamber of

Commerce seeks

trial on global warming

The nation's largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.

Chamber officials say it would be "the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" -- complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.

"It would be evolution versus creationism," said William Kovacs, the chamber's senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. "It would be the science of climate change on trial."

Maybe some real decisions will come from this.

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Bill Would Give

 

President Control of the

 

Internet and Private

 

Networks

 

 

 

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

Republican, Democrate, it does not matter anymore, they just want control of everything for anything.

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AT&T Regretting

iPhone Deal?

AT&T claims that Iphone customers generate much higher revenue per user than the average, close to $100 a month. However to keep Apple happy, AT&T paid a $400-a-phone subsidy to keep the Iphone cost down for those who signed away their souls on two-year contracts to buy the thing. 

For an Iphone customer to make AT&T any cash they have to pay the telecom firm $2,000 a year. If AT&T is right, on average punters are paying $2,400 during that time. But $400 over two years is nothing, really.

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Call for a Blood Oath

to stop Health Care Reform

In a fiery speech that had her conservative Colorado audience cheering, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann railed against the dangers of health care reform and other Democratic initiatives, warning the proposals “have the strength to destroy this country forever.”

“This cannot pass,” the Minnesota Republican told a crowd at a Denver gathering sponsored by the Independence Institute. “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass…”

In a speech filled with urgent and violent rhetoric, Bachmann — who proudly acknowledges she is the country’s “second-most hated Republican woman,” behind only former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin – drew a clear line on health care reform…

“Right now, we are looking at reaching down the throat and ripping the guts out of freedom,” she said. “And we may never be able to restore it if we don’t man up and take this one on…”

Remember people, This is "Health Insurance", not "Health Care" you are told to fight over.  Health Insurance is where an insurance company worker makes money, by taking money from a customer and not paying anything back to the customer or by paying as little as possible.  It is terrible to see people fight for the right for a private company to make large profits by making people sick and killing their own customers.  It is a strange concept to rally behind. I embrace that fact that government wants to pay for my health insurance, finally I get something I want from the government rather than corporate America.

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First US Internet

Addiction Center Opens

ASSOCIATED PRESS – Alexander, 19, needed help to break an addiction he calls as destructive as alcohol or drugs. He found it in this suburb of high-tech Seattle, where what claims to be the first residential treatment center for Internet addiction in the United States just opened its doors.

The center, called ReSTART, is somewhat ironically located near Redmond, headquarters of Microsoft and a world center of the computer industry. It opened in July and for $14,000 offers a 45-day program intended to help people wean themselves from pathological computer use, which can include obsessive use of video games, texting, Facebook, eBay, Twitter and any other time-killers brought courtesy of technology.

Well this had to happen sooner or later.  Don't know if it can be cured unless it is court ordered, like a computer hacker is ordered to stay off computers for certain length of time.  Time for some of us to get a life and look at our priorities.  Is the IInternet one of those priorities?  If you make your living from the Internet, then YES.