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Submission + - Border official points gun at Boy Scout (kcci.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A central Iowa Boy Scout troop just returned from a three-week trip they will likely never forget.
Boy Scout Troop 111 Leader Jim Fox spelled out what happened to him and the Mid-Iowa Boy Scout Troop 111 as four van-loads of Scouts and adult volunteers tried to drive from Canada into Alaska.
Fox said one of the Scouts took a picture of a border official, which spurred agents to detain everyone in that van and search them and their belongings.
âoeThe agent immediately confiscated his camera, informed him he would be arrested, fined possibly $10,000 and 10 years in prison,â Fox said.
Another of the Scouts was taking luggage from the top of a van to be searched when something startling happened.
âoeHe hears a snap of a holster, turns around, and hereâ(TM)s this agent, both hands on a loaded pistol, pointing at the young manâ(TM)s head,â Fox explained.

Submission + - Making Simple xylem filter from Pine tree for providing safe drinking water.

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Researchers at MIT have designed a simple water filter by peeling the bark off a small section of white pine, then inserting and securing it within plastic tubing.

So, If you’ve run out of drinking water during a lakeside camping trip, there’s a simple solution: Break off a branch from the nearest pine tree, peel away the bark, and slowly pour lake water through the stick to get the safe drinking water.

This simple xylem filter can filter most types of bacteria, the smallest of which measure about 200 nanometers. However, the filter probably cannot trap most viruses, which are much smaller in size.

Approximately 3 cm3 of sapwood can filter water at the rate of several liters per day, sufficient to meet the clean drinking water needs of one person.

Submission + - Black Holes Not Black After All, Say Theoretical Physicists

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Black holes are singularities in spacetime formed by stars that have collapsed at the end of their lives. But while black holes are one of the best known ideas in cosmology, physicists have never been entirely comfortable with the idea that regions of the universe can become infinitely density. Indeed, they only accept this because they can't think of any reason why it shouldn't happen. But in the last few months, just such a reason has emerged as a result of intense debate about one of cosmology's greatest problems--the information paradox. This is the fundamental tenet in quantum mechanics that all the information about a system is encoded in its wave function and this always evolves in a way that conserves information. The paradox arises when this system falls into a black hole causing the information to devolve into a single state. So information must be lost. Earlier this year, Stephen Hawking proposed a solution. His idea is that gravitational collapse can never continue beyond the so-called event horizon of a black hole beyond which information is lost. Gravitational collapse would approach the boundary but never go beyond it. That solves the information paradox but raises another question instead: if not a black hole, then what? Now one physicist has worked out the answer. His conclusion is that the collapsed star should end up about twice the radius of a conventional black hole but would not be dense enough to trap light forever and therefore would not be black. Indeed, to all intents and purposes, it would look like a large neutron star.

Submission + - Overwhelming majority of UK broadband users opting out of porn filters

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: By all accounts, the UK's national porn filters have been a disaster. The network-level filters were introduced at the insistence of the government, which said that companies could either implement them voluntarily, or face legislation to force them to do so. After their introduction, more tech savvy users were able to avoid the filters entirely by simply using a browser extension. But 'ordinary' users found that many entirely innocent and non-pornographic sites being blocked due to the over-zealous nature of the filtering. Internet service providers (ISPs) didn't want them, many government ministers didn't want them, and now it is clear that the overwhelming majority of users don't want them either, according to the findings of an official study by the UK's telecommunications regulator, Ofcom. On three of the UK's top four ISPs, over 92% of users opted out of the porn filters. Just 5% of users on BT chose to keep the filters in place.

Submission + - The Time The US Blew Up A Passenger Plane — And Tried To Cover It Up

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Fury and frustration still mount over the downing of Malaysia Air Flight 17, and justly so. But before accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of war crimes or dismissing the entire episode as a tragic fluke, it’s worth looking back at another doomed passenger plane—Iran Air Flight 655—shot down on July 3, 1988, not by some scruffy rebel on contested soil but by a U.S. Navy captain in command of an Aegis-class cruiser called the Vincennes. A quarter-century later, the Vincennes is almost completely forgotten, but it still ranks as the world’s seventh deadliest air disaster (Malaysia Air Flight 17 is the sixth) and one of the Pentagon’s most inexcusable disgraces. In several ways, the two calamities are similar. The Malaysian Boeing 777 wandered into a messy civil war in eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border; the Iranian Airbus A300 wandered into a naval skirmish—one of many clashes in the ongoing “Tanker War” (another forgotten conflict)—in the Strait of Hormuz. In 1992, four years after the event (and shortly after I moved on to a different beat), Adm. Crowe admitted on ABC’s Nightline that the Vincennes was in Iranian waters at the time it shot down the plane. Back in 1988, he and others had said that the ship was in international waters. Not long after the shoot-down, Iran asked the United Nations Security Council to censure the United States for its “criminal act” against Iran Air Flight 655. Vice President George H.W. Bush, who was running to succeed Ronald Reagan as president, said on the campaign trail, “I will never apologize for the United States—I don’t care what the facts are.”

Submission + - One trillion Bq released by nuclear debris removal at Fukushima so far

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The operator of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant says more than one trillion becquerels of radioactive substances were released as a result of debris removal work at one of the plant's reactors. Radioactive cesium was detected at levels exceeding the government limit in rice harvested last year in Minami Soma, some 20 kilometers from Fukushima Daiichi. TEPCO presented the Nuclear Regulation Authority with an estimate that the removal work discharged 280 billion becquerels per hour of radioactive substances, or a total of 1.1 trillion becquerels. The plant is believed to be still releasing an average of 10 million becquerels per hour of radioactive material.

Submission + - Four-winged dinosaur is biggest ever (bbc.com)

Submitted by JonnaDelacruz
JonnaDelacruz writes: A new four-winged dinosaur has been discovered, with exceptionally long feathers on its tail and "hindwings".

Changyuraptor yangi was a gliding predator which lived in the Cretaceous period in what is now Liaoning, China.

Its remarkable tail feathers — measuring up to 30cm — are the longest in any non-avian dinosaur.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote

The tail would have acted as a pitch control structure reducing descent speed... which could be critical to a safe landing or precise attack on prey”

Lizhuo Han
Bohai University, China
This unusual plumage helped the creature to slow down during flight and land safely, say scientists writing in Nature Communications.

C. yangi is a new species of microraptorine, a group related to early avians.

These ancient creatures offer clues to the origin of flight — and the transition from feathered dinosaurs to birds.

Palaeontologists once thought that four-winged gliders were a stepping stone in the path to two-winged flight.

But recent fossil discoveries suggest that microraptorines were an evolutionary side-branch.

Flight probably evolved many times in different feathered species — not only the lineage which ultimately became birds.

Submission + - Verizon's offer: Let us track you, get free stuff (cnn.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Are you comfortable having your location and Web browsing tracked for marketing purposes? If so, Verizon's got a deal for you.

The wireless giant announced a new program this week called "Smart Rewards" that offers customers credit card-style perks like discounts for shopping, travel and dining. You accrue points through the program by doing things like signing onto the Verizon website, paying your bill online and participating in the company's trade-in program.

Verizon emphasizes that the data it collects is anonymized before it's shared with third parties.
The program is novel in that offers Verizon users some compensation for the collection of their data, which has become big business for telecom and tech companies. Some privacy advocates have pushed data-collecting companies to reward customers for their personal information in the interest of transparency.

Submission + - Oso disaster had its roots in earlier landslides (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: The disastrous March 22 landslide that killed 43 people in the rural Washington state community of Oso involved the "remobilization" of a 2006 landslide on the same hillside, a new federally sponsored geological study concludes.

The research indicates the landslide, the deadliest in U.S. history, happened in two major stages. The first stage remobilized the 2006 slide, including part of an adjacent forested slope from an ancient slide, and was made up largely or entirely of deposits from previous landslides. The first stage ultimately moved more than six-tenths of a mile across the north fork of the Stillaguamish River and caused nearly all the destruction in the Steelhead Haven neighborhood. The second stage started several minutes later and consisted of ancient landslide and glacial deposits. That material moved into the space vacated by the first stage and moved rapidly until it reached the trailing edge of the first stage, the study found.

The report, released Tuesday on the four-month anniversary of the slide, details an investigation by a team from the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance Association, or GEER. The scientists and engineers determined that intense rainfall in the three weeks before the slide likely was a major issue, but factors such as altered groundwater migration, weakened soil consistency because of previous landslides and changes in hillside stresses played key roles.

"Perhaps the most striking finding is that, while the Oso landslide was a rare geologic occurrence, it was not extraordinary," said Joseph Wartman, a University of Washington associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and a team leader for the study.

"We observed several other older but very similar long-runout landslides in the surrounding Stillaguamish River Valley. This tells us these may be prevalent in this setting over long time frames. Even the apparent trigger of the event – several weeks of intense rainfall – was not truly exceptional for the region," Wartman said.

Submission + - Experiment claiming dark matter detection explained without dark matter

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: The astrophysical evidence for some type of non-baryonic, gravitational source of matter is overwhelming: hence dark mater. For the past two decades, a myriad of experiments searching for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) — the leading dark matter candidate — have come up empty, placing tremendous constraints on whatever properties dark matter can have. But one experiment, DAMA, has seen an annual modulation in its experimental signature that's consistent with dark matter. Other, conventional explanations like nuclear decays, neutrino interactions or atmospheric muons have failed to explain the same observed signal. But a new explanation may have solved the mystery, and provides us with a definitive prediction that should be able to discriminate between dark matter and conventional sources. Very interesting stuff!
Idle

Submission + - Denver Airpot Rental Car Agencies Inundated With Pot Left Behind By Travelers (cbslocal.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Rental car workers at Denver International Airport say pot tourists are regularly leaving them with marijuana that travelers don’t want to try to carry through DIA.

“It happens quite often,” a rental car employee at a national chain told a CBS4 employee. “Every couple of days. I just throw it in the trash.” At another major rental car company, an employee told CBS4 pot is handed over to employees “pretty frequently but depends on if there is an occasion.”

Submission + - New treatment stops type II diabetes (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by multicsfan
multicsfan writes: Injection of protein FGF1 stops weight induced diabetes in its tracks in mice. There appear to be no side effects. The cure lasts 2 days at a time. Future research and human trials are needed to both better understand and create a working drug. There are no signs of hypoglycemia.

Submission + - How Hard Is It to Shoot Down a Plane? (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Ukrainian government officials say Russian-backed rebel forces shot down a Malaysian Airlines flight with 295 passengers and crew over the embattled border region on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The commercial flight was cruising at 33,000 feet, making it too high for a shoulder-launched missile and more likely that it was targeted by a radar-guided missile defense system, according to military experts. “It does seem depressingly likely,” said Mark Galeotti, a professor of global affairs at New York University currently studying Russian security issues in Moscow. “We know the rebels have the Buk missile system. We know they have shot down planes in the past. They may have believed it was a legitimate target.” Although the Buk system is designed to shoot down fast-moving military aircraft, a high-flying jetliner would have been an easy target. And although it would have been carrying a civilian transponder, if the anti-aircraft missile was being operated by a novice controller, mistakes were most likely made.

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