65272043
submission
The Grim Reefer writes:
Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark have synthesized crystalline materials that can bind and store oxygen in high concentrations. Just one spoon of the substance is enough to absorb all the oxygen in a room. The stored oxygen can be released again when and where it is needed.
We do fine with the 21 per cent oxygen in the air around us. But sometimes we need oxygen in higher concentrations; for example lung patients must carry heavy oxygen tanks, cars using fuel cells need a regulated oxygen supply. Perhaps one day in the future even sunlight-driven "reversible" fuel cells will be made. With these we will have to separate oxygen from hydrogen in order to recombine them in order to get energy.
Now Professor Christine McKenzie and postdoc Jonas Sundberg, Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Southern Denmark have synthesized a material that absorb oxygen in large quantities and store it.
"In the lab, we saw how this material took up oxygen from the air around us", says Christine McKenzie.
The new material is crystalline, and using x-ray diffraction the researchers have studied the arrangement of atoms inside the material when it was filled with oxygen, and when it was emptied of oxygen.
61372547
submission
The Grim Reefer writes:
Today many plastic products, from sippy cups and blenders to Tupperware containers, are marketed as BPA-free. But CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner's findings—some of which have been confirmed by other scientists—suggest that many of these alternatives share the qualities that make BPA so potentially harmful.
Those startling results set off a bitter fight with the $375-billion-a-year plastics industry. The American Chemistry Council, which lobbies for plastics makers and has sought to refute the science linking BPA to health problems, has teamed up with Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical—the maker of Tritan, a widely used plastic marketed as being free of estrogenic activity—in a campaign to discredit Bittner and his research. The company has gone so far as to tell corporate customers that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rejected Bittner's testing methods. (It hasn't.) Eastman also sued CertiChem and its sister company, PlastiPure, to prevent them from publicizing their findings that Tritan is estrogenic, convincing a jury that its product displayed no estrogenic activity. And it launched a PR blitz touting Tritan's safety, targeting the group most vulnerable to synthetic estrogens: families with young children. "It can be difficult for consumers to tell what is really safe," the vice president of Eastman's specialty plastics division, Lucian Boldea, said in one web video, before an image of a pregnant woman flickered across the screen. With Tritan, he added, "consumers can feel confident that the material used in their products is free of estrogenic activity."
56819261
submission
The Grim Reefer writes:
The Arctic isn't nearly as bright and white as it used to be because of more ice melting in the ocean, and that's turning out to be a global problem, a new study says.
With more dark, open water in the summer, less of the sun's heat is reflected back into space. So the entire Earth is absorbing more heat than expected, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That extra absorbed energy is so big that it measures about one-quarter of the entire heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide, said the study's lead author, Ian Eisenman, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.
The Arctic grew 8 per cent darker between 1979 and 2011, Eisenman found, measuring how much sunlight is reflected back into space.
"Basically, it means more warming," Eisenman said in an interview.
56802455
submission
The Grim Reefer writes:
Groupon is honoring Presidents Day by giving customers an Alexander Hamilton — $10 off $40 spent on a deal for any local business.The promotion, which began this weekend, allows customers to "honor our money-minded Commander-In-Chief."
"The $10 bill, as everyone knows, features President Alexander Hamilton — undeniably one of our greatest presidents and most widely recognized for establishing the country's financial system," Chicago-based Groupon says on its webpage.
But, there's just one flaw in the promotional plan: Hamilton was never president.
Hamilton is considered a Founding Father and was the country's first Secretary of the Treasury. He led the development of the economic policies of President George Washington, one of today's actual honorees, and the nascent nation.
It's just too bad there isn't Treasury Secretary Day to have sales in his honor.
An inquiry on Monday morning garnered this response from a spokesman:
"Groupon is always very serious about helping our customers save money, and saving $10 is no laughing matter."
The spokesman later confirmed the mistake was an intentional stunt.
55402013
submission
The Grim Reefer writes:
A retired cop, irked that the couple in front of him were texting at a Mark Wahlberg war movie, opened fire in a Florida theater Monday, killing the man and wounding his wife, authorities said.
Curtis Reeves Jr., 71, was charged with second-degree homicide in the death of Chad Oulson, 43, Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco said late Monday afternoon. The theater was evacuated and remained closed after the shooting, which occurred about 1:20 p.m. ET.
Oulson was shot in the chest after a verbal and physical confrontation with Reeves, and his wife, Nichole Oulson, was shot in the hand. Chad Oulson was pronounced dead at a hospital, and his wife was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.
55333595
submission
The Grim Reefer writes:
For five decades ILC Dover, an engineering firm in Delaware farm country, has been outfitting astronauts for space — everyone from Neil Armstrong to Sunita Williams, who performed a space walk outside the International Space Station (ISS) in 2012. And yet ILC (which was founded as International Latex Corp.) has never before embarked on its latest mission: to make a fashion-forward suit for NASA.
The prototype is called Z-2. A new palette will be chosen when, early this year, NASA unveils three designs by Philadelphia University fashion and industrial design students. The public gets to pick a winner. Each design will draw on one of three themes: NASA's history, sports and superheroes, and nature. NASA officials hope that the campaign will rekindle excitement for the space program. "Part of this came from the fact that commercial space flight is gearing up," says Amy Ross, a top space-suit engineer at NASA, "and part of what they want is for their space suits to look cool."
52545539
submission
The Grim Reefer writes:
Before the transcontinental race in "Cannonball Run," the starter tells the gathered racers, "You all are certainly the most distinguished group of highway scofflaws and degenerates ever gathered together in one place."
Ed Bolian prefers the term "fraternity of lunatics."
Where the 1981 Burt Reynolds classic was a comedic twist on a race inspired by real-life rebellion over the mandated 55-mph speed limits of the 1970s, Bolian set out on a serious mission to beat the record for driving from New York to Los Angeles.
The mark? Alex Roy and David Maher's cross-country record of 31 hours and 4 minutes, which they set in a modified BMW M5 in 2006.
Bolian, a 28-year-old Atlanta native, had long dreamed of racing from East Coast to West. A decade ago, for a high school assignment, Bolian interviewed Brock Yates, who conceived the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, aka the Cannonball Run.
44876849
submission
The Grim Reefer writes:
(CNN) — Internet users around the globe are facing slowed-down service, thanks to what's being called the biggest cyberattack in history.
The prolonged denial-of-service assault is targeting The Spamhaus Project, a European spam-fighting group that has gone after CyberBunker, a data-storage company that offers to host any content "except child porn and anything related to terrorism."
The organization has been in a long-running feud with CyberBunker and claims spammers use it as a host from which to spray junk mail across the Web.
Internet security firm CloudFlare said Spamhaus contacted it last week, saying it had been hit with an attack big enough to knock its site offline.
Security experts say the attack uses more sophisticated techniques than most DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks and targets the Web's infrastructure, which has led to other sites performing slowly.
27887312
submission
The Grim Reefer writes:
The new research builds on recent demonstrations of "invisibility cloaks" that can make objects seem to disappear by bending waves of visible light.
The idea is that, if light moves around an object instead of striking it, that light doesn't get scattered and reflected back to an observer, making the object essentially invisible.
Now Cornell University scientists have used a similar concept to create a hole in time, albeit a very short one: The effect lasts around 40 trillionths of a second.
"Imagine that you could divert light in time—slow it down, speed it up—so that you create a gap in the light beam in time," said study co-author and Cornell physicist Alex Gaeta.
"In this case, any event that occurs at that instant of time won't lead to scattering of light. It appears as if the event never occurred."
