The solar wind is 303 km/sec and the proton count is down to 1.1 protons/cm3 but that doesn’t mean nothing is happening up there. There are five major sunspot clusters on the Sun at this moment. Sunspot AR1560 has more than quadrupled in size since August 30th, and now the fast growing active region is directly facing our planet: movie. NOAA forecasters estimate a 40% chance of M-class solar fares during the next 48 hours. A filament of magnetism curling around the sun's southeastern limb erupted on August 31st, producing a coronal mass ejection (CME), a C8-class solar flare.
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Remembering the Future
A team of Australian physicists have come up with their own theory on the universe’s creation. Challenging the “Big Bang” model, they now say it was a “Big Chill” – somewhat similar to water first freezing into ice and then cracking upon cooling.
Researchers from the University of Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) brushed away the theory of the start of the universe as being a “big bang”. That model posits that our universe apparently inflated, expanded and cooled, going from very, very small and very, very hot and dense, to the size and temperature of our current universe. The followers of this prevailing theory believe it continues to expand and cool to this day.
The Australian physicists, however, put forward a new concept which suggests that the secret to understanding the origin and nature of the early universe is in the cracks and crevices common to all crystals, including ice.
The idea is that the early universe was liquid-like and it cooled, crystallized, and possibly cracked. Their report was published in the journal Physical Review D.
Their research rests on a school of thought that has emerged recently. A new theory, known as Quantum Graphity, suggests that space may be made up of indivisible building blocks, like tiny atoms. These indivisible blocks can be thought of as similar to the pixels that make up an image on a screen. The challenge however has been that these building blocks of space are very small, and thus impossible to see.
The Australian scientists now believe they may have figured out a way to see these “building blocks” – indirectly.
"Think of the early universe as being like a liquid,” says James Quach, a lead researcher on the project, who did the study as part of his PhD. "As the universe cools, in a similar way that water freezes into ice, structure becomes emergent. You get the 3D space we see around us, but also like water freezing into ice, you get defects."
"The reason we use the water analogy is water is without form,” Quach explained. "In the beginning there wasn't even space. Space did not exist because there was no form."
Just as ice cubes in our fridge crack, so did space, the theory goes.
Quach and colleagues calculated the way light is scattered by these cracks and say that it is now possible for experimental physicists to look for this effect.
"Light and other particles would bend or reflect off such defects, and therefore in theory we should be able to detect these effects," says RMIT University research team member Associate Professor Andrew Greentree.
Quach says this theory would be more complete than the Big Bang theory, which is based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity, but is unable to explain the moment of the Big Bang itself.
"Ancient Greek philosophers wondered what matter was made of: was it made of a continuous substance or was it made of individual atoms? With very powerful microscopes, we now know that matter is made of atoms," said Quach.
"Thousands of years later, Albert Einstein assumed that space and time were continuous and flowed smoothly, but we now believe that this assumption may not be valid at very small scales," he added.
The team now says if their predictions are experimentally verified, the question as to whether space is smooth or constructed out of tiny indivisible parts will be solved once and for all.
A hover bike resembling the ones from ‘Return of the Jedi’ has been developed by a US firm, bringing science fiction to life.
California-based firm Aerofex created an aerial vehicle with two ducted rotors instead of wheels, which originates from a design abandoned in the 1960s because of stability and rollover problems.
The aerospace firm managed to fix the stability issue by creating a mechanical system — controlled by two control bars at knee-level — that allows the vehicle to respond to a human pilot's leaning movements and natural sense of balance, Innovation News daily reports.
"Think of it as lowering the threshold of flight, down to the domain of ATV's [all-terrain vehicles]," said Mark De Roche, an aerospace engineer and founder of Aerofex.
The hover bike does not require special training and could become a useful tool in agriculture, border control and search-and-rescue operations.
“Imagine personal flight as intuitive as riding a bike,” reads the firm's website. “Or transporting a small fleet of first-responder craft in the belly of a passenger transport. Think of the advantages of patrolling borders without first constructing roads.”
Aerofex does not plan on initially developing and selling a human version of the hover vehicle and instead plans to use the aerial vehicle as a test platform for unmanned drones
BERKELEY, Calif. (CBS Seattle) –It sounds like something out of the movie “Johnny Mnemonic,” but scientists have successfully been able to “hack” a brain with a device that’s easilyavailableon the open market.
Researchers from the University of California and University of Oxford in Geneva figured out a way to pluck sensitive information from a person’s head, such as PIN numbers and bank information.
The scientists took an off-the-shelf Emotiv brain-computer interface, a device that costs around $299, which allows users to interact with their computers by thought.
The scientists then sat their subjects in front of a computer screen and showed them images of banks, people, and PIN numbers. They then tracked the readings coming off of the brain, specifically the P300 signal.
The P300 signal is typically given off when a person recognizes something meaningful, such as someone or something they interact with on a regular basis.
Scientists that conducted the experiment found they could reduce the randomness of the images by 15 to 40 percent, giving them a better chance of guessing the correct answer.
Another interesting facet about the experiments is how the P300 signal could be read for lie detection.
In the paper that the scientists released,they state that “the P300 can be used as a discriminative feature in detecting whether or not the relevant information is stored in the subject’s memory.
“For this reason, a GKT based on the P300 has a promising use within interrogation protocols that enable detection of potential criminal details held by the suspect,” the researchers said.
However, scientists say this way of lie detection is “vulnerable to specific countermeasures,” but not as many compared to a traditional lie detector.
This could only be the beginning of a new form of fraud. Scientists say that a person with their guard lowered could be “easily engaged into ‘mind games’ that camouflage the interrogation of the user and make them more cooperative.”
Also, much like other household electronics, “the ever increasing quality of devices, success rates of attacks will likely improve.”
A series of earthquakes measuring up to 5.4 rattled southern California, Arizona and the Mexican border region Sunday, seismologists said, although no damage or injuries were immediately reported.
The small- and medium-level quakes were felt from San Diego and Orange County in California east into Arizona, and swamped the temblor-measuring resources of the US Geological Survey (USGS).
The quakes began around 12:16 pm (2016 GMT) with a magnitude 4 temblor 16 miles (26 km) north of El Centro, California, and lasted more than two hours. The biggest shakes included a magnitude 5.4 at 13:57, with the same epicenter.
The so-called "seismic swarm" is a relatively rare occurrence.
"We haven't seen one of these since the 1970s, and there was another one back in the 1930s," said USGS seismologist Lucy Jones.
"Our system is choking on so many earthquakes."
Buildings were evacuated in Brawley, 115 miles east-northeast of San Diego. "It's pretty bad, we had to evacuate the hotel just for safety," said Rowena Rapoza, office manager at the Best Western Hotel there
Brent crude jumped to $115 a barrel last week. Petrol costs in Germany and across much of Europe are now at record levels in local currencies.
Diesel is above the political pain threshold of $4 a gallon in the US, hence reports circulating last week that the International Energy Agency (IEA) is preparing to release strategic reserves.
Barclays Capital expects a “monster” effect this quarter as the crude market tightens by 2.4m barrels a day (bpd), with little extra supply in sight.
Goldman Sachs said the industry is chronically incapable of meeting global needs. “It is only a matter of time before inventories and OPEC spare capacity become effectively exhausted, requiring higher oil prices to restrain demand,” said its oil guru David Greely.
This is a remarkable state of affairs given the world economy is close to a double-dip slump right now, the latest relapse in our contained global depression.
Britain, the eurozone, and parts of Eastern Europe are in outright recession. China has “hard-landed”, the result of a monetary shock and real M1 contraction last winter. The HSBC manufacturing index fell deeper into contraction in July.
The CPB World Trade Monitor in the Netherlands show that global trade volumes have been shrinking for the last five months. Container shipping volumes from Asia to Europe fell 9pc in June. Iron prices have fallen by 30pc since April to $103 a tonne.
So we face a world where Brent crude trades at over $100 even in recession. Fears of an Israeli strike on Iran may have spiked the price a bit, though Intrade’s contract for an attack is well below levels earlier this year.
Iranian sanctions may have cut supply by more than the extra 900,000 bpd pumped by Saudi Arabia. Japan’s increased reliance on oil since switching off most of its nuclear reactors has played its part.
Yet the deeper force at work is the relentless fall in output from the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, endless disappointment in Russia because of Kremlin pricing policies, and the escalating cost of extraction from deep sea fields.
Nothing has really changed since the IEA warned four years ago that the world must invest $20 trillion in energy projects over the next 25 years to feed the industrial revolutions of Asia and head off an almighty crunch. The urgency has merely been disguised by the Long Slump.
We learned in the 2006-2008 blow-off that China is now the key driver of global oil prices, with consumption rising each year by 0.5m bpd -- now a total 9.2m bpd in a world market of 90m bpd. Demand is broadly flat in Europe and America.
So what will happen when China latest spending blitz gains traction? The regions have unveiled a colossal new spree on airports, roads, aeronautics, and industrial parks: a purported $240bn each for Tianjin and Chongqing, $160bn for Guangdong, $130bn for Changsha, and so forth. Sleepy Guizhou has trumped them all with $470bn. Your mind goes numb.
What will happen too when car sales in China surpass 20m next year, as expected by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers?
Kamakshya Trivedi and Stacy Carlson from Goldman Sachs say a disturbing pattern has emerged where each tentative recovery in the world economy sets off an oil price jump that it turn aborts the process. A two point rise in global manufacturing indexes leads to a 30pc rise in oil prices a few months later.
“Oil has become an increasingly scarce commodity. A tight supply picture means that incremental increases in demand lead to an increase in prices, rather than ramping up production. The price of oil is in effect acting as an automatic stabilizer,” they said. If so, it is “stabilizing” the world economy in perma-slump.
World opinion has swung a little too cavalierly from the Peak Oil panic four years ago to a new consensus that America’s shale revolution -- and what it promises for China, Argentina, and Europe -- has largely solved the problem.
Much has been made of “Oil: The Next Revolution” by Harvard’s Leonardo Maugeri, who forecasts an era of bountiful supply and cheap oil as global output capacity rises by almost 18m bpd to 110m bpd by 2020.
Sadad al-Huseini, former vice-president of Saudi Aramco, has a written a testy rebuttal, arguing that Dr Maugeri assumes a global decline rate of 2pc a year from oil fields compared to the IEA’s estimate of 6.7pc. There alone lies the gap between crunch and glut.
“Much as all the stakeholders in the energy industry would like to be optimistic, it isn’t an oil glut by 2020 that is keeping oil prices as high as they are. It is the reality that the oil sector has been pushed to the limit of its capabilities and that this difficult challenge will dominate energy markets for the rest of the decade,” he said.
The US turn-around has certainly been astonishing. The country now meets 94pc of its natural gas needs. It may ultimately become an exporter. Oil output from North Dakota’s Bakken field and other basins in Texas and Pennsylvania may push US shale/tight oil output to near 5m b/d by 2020, greatly reducing US reliance on imports.