August 11, 2008

Elizabeth Edwards has "bad energy," claimed the woman who had an affair with two-time presidential candidate John Edwards, according to Monday's online edition of Newsweek magazine. Rielle Hunter, the mistress at the center of the political storm around Edwards, held the former North Carolina senator in high regard.

However, the party girl-turned-healer-turned-videographer was apparently less generous with her former paramour's wife. "I've only met her once," Hunter told Newsweek reporter Jonathan Darman in late 2006 during a lunch in which she mistakenly cast him as a friend. "She does not give off good energy. She didn't make eye contact with me."

Weeks later, Hunter was fired from her job documenting Edwards on the campaign trail. She called the reporter to tell him, saying Edwards did not defend her when she was relieved of her $1114,000-plus job. But her scorn for Elizabeth Edwards was evident, blaming her for her misfortune. "Someday, the truth about her is going to come out," Hunter told Newsweek.

Darman, who first met Hunter in Iowa in July 2006 while she was filming the documentary series for the Web, said the woman described Edwards as an old soul who had barely tapped into his potential, but had the power to be a "transformational leader" on par with Mahatmas Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

August 11, 2008

BEIJING — By a fingertip, Michael Phelps is still on course for eight gold medals. He can thank Jason Lezak for getting him No. 2.

The oldest man on the U.S. swimming team pulled off one of the great comebacks in Olympic history Monday morning, lunging to the wall just ahead of France's Alain Bernard in a race so fast it actually erased two world records.

Wow! Few sporting events live up the hype — this one exceeded it. The 32-year-old Lezak was nearly a body length behind the massive Bernard as they made the final turn, but the American hugged the lane rope, drafting off the Frenchman and stunningly overtaking him on the very last stroke.

Watching on deck, Phelps let out a resounding "Yeaaaaaah!" and thrust both arms toward the roof of the Water Cube. His quest to break Mark Spitz's record of seven gold medals had survived what will likely be its toughest test. The Americans shattered the world record set by their "B" team the previous evening in the preliminaries, touching with a time of 3 minute, 8.24 seconds — nearly 4 full seconds below the 15-hour-old mark of 3:12.23.

August 11, 2008

TBILISI, Georgia — As Russian troops continue their attacks on Georgia, the world's seven largest economic powers are calling on Russia to accept an immediate cease-fire with Georgia and agree to international mediation over the crisis in Georgia's separatist areas.

A State Department official says Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the other foreign ministers from the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations spoke by telephone on Monday and pledged their support for a negotiated solution to the conflict that has been raging since Friday between the former Soviet state and Russia.

They called on Russia to respect Georgia's borders and expressed deep concern for civilian casualties that have occurred. Georgian President Saakashvili said Monday that he had signed a cease-fire pledge proposed by envoys from the European Union. President Mikhail Saakashvili says he signed the document together with French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and his Finnish counterpart, Alexander Stubb.

Saakashvili says the EU mediators will head to Moscow later Monday to try to persuade Russia to accept the cease-fire. Meanwhile, a senior general says Russia has no plans to move its troops from Georgia's two breakaway provinces into Georgian-controlled territory. Deputy chief of General Staff Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn says Russia does not intend to move deeper into Georgia.

By Chris Lee
August 08, 2008 - 09:16AM CT

The eyes in the living world are pretty amazing. Take the human eye: with a single lens, it achieves a huge effective field of view (around 120 degrees) with a resolution that might make your Nikon SLR turn in its CMOS chip. The reasons for this can be traced back to two simple features: the eye has a curved sensor surface, and it moves continually in tiny, angular steps.

Now, researchers have demonstrated the ability to replicate this in an electronic eye that holds the promise of delivering cheap, small, high-resolution cameras. The key to the technology is in the curved sensor surface. Normally, a single lens with a spherical surface will work best when it projects an image onto a spherical surface. However, most sensor surfaces are flat, resulting in distortions outside of the center of the image.

To overcome this, camera manufacturers use a system of lenses to flatten the projection, making the camera big and expensive. Given that the camera lens is already quite expensive, adding a higher resolution sensor—a sensor with a pixel size matched to the lens resolution is the optimum—has been the cheapest way to boost the resolution of your camera.

Making a curved sensor is not a simple business because the entire semiconductor industry is pretty much devoted to keeping things as flat as possible. A team of scientists from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University have developed a method that uses normal processing technology to make a flat sensor and then deposits that onto a spherical surface.

July 30, 2008

A previously unknown portrait of a woman by Vincent van Gogh has been revealed in a high-tech look beneath another of his paintings, it was announced today. Scientists used a new technique to peer beneath the paint of van Gogh's "Patch of Grass." Already it was known there was something there, likely a portrait of some sort.

Van Gogh was known to paint over his work, perhaps as much as a third of the time. Behind the painting, done mostly in greens and blues, is a portrait of a woman rendered in browns and reds. The new technique is based on "synchrotron radiation induced X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy" and is said to be an improvement on X-ray radiography, which has been used to reveal concealed layers of other famous paintings.

The new method measures chemicals in the pigments. Specifically, mercury and the element antimony were useful in revealing the woman's face. The work was done by researchers at Delft University of Technology in the the Netherlands and the University of Antwerp in Belgium, along with help from other institutions.

"Patch of Grass" was painted by van Gogh in Paris in 1887 and is owned by the Kröller-Müller Museum in the rural eastern Netherlands. The reconstruction enables art historians to understand the evolution of van Gogh’s work better, the researchers said in a statement. And the new technique is expected to pave the way for research into many other concealed paintings.

by Christopher Dawson
July 25th, 2008 @ 9:22 pm

New research published in the journal Science confirms what all of us teachers have known for a long time: girls are just as smart as boys. I hope none of our tax dollars went into that one. A quick quote from the article before I get into the more interesting findings from the researchers:

Overall, the researchers found “no gender difference” in scores among children in grades two through 11. Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests.

So on to the good stuff. The researchers found that most of the standardized tests on which they based their results were omitting difficult math questions. These are the questions that require critical thinking or simply call on higher-level math courses.

As we all know, especially here in the States, teachers everywhere must “teach to the test,” since so much is tied to the standardized testing mandated by No Child Left Behind (anyone here counting down until GW gets left behind, by the way?). Whether it’s graduation, funding, or teacher promotion, a lot rides on these tests.

July 25, 2008 9:43 AM PDT

NASA's fleet of five THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) satellites have discovered what turns on the Northern Lights. Researchers say "an explosion of magnetic energy a third of the way to the moon powers substorms, sudden brightenings, and rapid movements of the aurora borealis" or Northern Lights.

The key to the auroras is magnetic reconnection, which NASA describes as "stressed magnetic field lines that suddenly snap to a new shape, like a rubber band that's been stretched too far," causing a burst of light and movement near the northern and southern poles. "We discovered what makes the Northern Lights dance," said UCLA's Vassilis Angelopoulos, who is the principal investigator for the THEMIS mission.

These substorms often accompany space storms that can disrupt radio communications and GPS location devices, and cause power outages. By knowing more about the process, scientists hope to better predict the power and effect of a magnetic storm.

"As they capture and store energy from the solar wind, the Earth's magnetic field lines stretch far out into space. Magnetic reconnection releases the energy stored within these stretched magnetic field lines, flinging charged particles back toward the Earth's atmosphere," said David Sibeck, THEMIS project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

July 25, 2008

A Beverly Hills hotel security guard told FOXNews.com he intervened this week between a man he identified as former Sen. John Edwards and tabloid reporters who chased down the former presidential hopeful after what they're calling a rendezvous with his mistress and love child.

The Beverly Hilton Hotel guard said he encountered a shaken and ashen-faced Edwards — whom he did not immediately recognize — in a hotel men's room early Tuesday morning in a literal tug-of-war with reporters on the other side of the door. "What are they saying about me?" the guard said Edwards asked.

"His face just went totally white," the guard said, when Edwards was told the reporters were shouting out questions about Edwards and Rielle Hunter, a woman the National Enquirer says is the mother of his child. The guard said he escorted Edwards, who was not a registered guest at the hotel, out of the building after 2 a.m. Edwards did not say anything while he was escorted out, said the guard, adding that at times the reporters on the scene were "rough on him," sticking a camera in his face and shouting questions.

The guard did not recognize Edwards at the time of the incident, but said he concluded it was the 2008 presidential hopeful after hearing reports about the incident and finding an Enquirer reporter's notebook at the scene. The guard said during the chase the reporters had dropped the notebook, which he picked up. "This book has everything in it on him," he said, referring to Edwards.

By Robert McMillan
July 25, 2008

Convicted penny-stock spammer Eddie Davidson has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, apparently after killing his wife and three-year-old daughter in his hometown of Bennet, Colorado, the Department of Justice said Thursday.

Davidson had been a fugitive from the law since walking away from a federal minimum-security prison camp in Florence, Colorado on Sunday. He had been serving a 21 month sentence after pleading guilty to criminal spam charges late last year. Another person, a teenage girl according to local reports, was shot, but survived the incident. Authorities also found an infant, unharmed, at the scene of the shooting.

Davidson's wife had been in the car with him when he left the Florence prison, about 45 miles south of Colorado Springs, on Sunday. He had last been seen in Lakewood, Colorado where he got a change of clothes and cash, according to the Department of Justice. Called the Colorado "Spam King," Davidson earned millions of dollars between 2003 and 2006 by operating a spamming operation, called Power Promoters, out of his home.

He would change the header information in his messages to make it appear as if they had come from legitimate companies such as AOL and then send them out to hundreds of thousands of addresses. Davidson sent the messages on behalf of an unnamed Houston company, court filings state. He was asked to promote about 19 penny-stock companies, including one called Advanced Power Line Technologies in 2006 and 2007.

July 23, 2008

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — Hurricane Dolly slammed into the South Texas coast Wednesday with punishing rain and winds of 100 mph, blowing down signs, peeling off roofs and knocking out power to thousands before weakening over land.

Most of the destruction was on South Padre Island, a beach resort town on a barrier island off the Texas coast where the the storm came ashore as a Category 2 storm. Numerous roofs were ripped off and windows were smashed. The roadways and yards were strewn with trees, fences, power poles and fallen streetlights. Business signs rolled around on the streets like tumbleweeds. The causeway linking the island to the mainland was closed.

But local officials' greatest fear — that the levees holding back the Rio Grande would fail and cause massive flooding — eased when Dolly meandered 35 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border just before coming ashore. About two hours later, Dolly's winds slowed to 95 mph, and the storm was downgraded to a Category 1. "The levees are holding up just fine," said Cameron County Emergency Management Coordinator Johnny Cavazos.

"There is no indication right now that they are going to crest." The storm defied forecasts that it would swarm the mouth of the Rio Grande, pushing its current upstream and causing massive flooding on both sides of the border. But "it's still very early in the storm," cautioned Sally Spener, a spokeswoman with the International Boundary and Water Commission.

July 23, 2008

There was a time when brands like Evian and Perrier conjured up images of purity and luxury. That was before bottlers everywhere got their feet wet, and drinking bottled water became a very easy and healthy way to stay hydrated and refreshed. But now there is a growing backlash against bottled water.

Thanks to a growing green movement, phasing out water bottles — seen as the ultimate symbol of conspicuous consumption — has become the latest fad. Sales of reusable eco-friendly bottles like Sigg or Voss Water have surged. Green-minded Web sites list locations of municipal water fill-up stations. And cities like Chicago have added an extra tax to bottled water to discourage its purchase.

Some critics of bottled water cite concerns over the environmental waste of discarded bottles; others point out that municipal water systems were delivering excellent water long before plastic became all the rage. The latest volley in the war against bottles comes from the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which voted last month to ban bottled water from City Halls across the country, except in emergencies.

From San Francisco, Calif., to Fayetteville, N.C., governments have barred water bottles from official events and even scrubbed them from government cafeterias and vending machines. So does bottled water deserve the bad rap it’s getting? Tara Gidus, spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, says people might not drink as much water when they’re on the go if they can’t reach for a bottle.

July 09, 2008

A man scaled a portion of The New York Times' 52-story headquarters on Wednesday morning, becoming the third person to do so in a span of a few weeks, police said. The climber made it to the 11th floor of the building in midtown Manhattan before descending to a lower floor and spending hours making cell phone calls and talking to police. He was arrested about 5:30 a.m., police said.

At one point, the climber unfurled a banner on the "T" of the Times' sign that referenced Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden, the Times reported on its Web site Wednesday. Dozens of police and firefighters responded about 1:30 a.m. after the man was first spotted climbing the building, police said. Streets were closed off and an inflatable cushion was placed in front of the main entrance of the building.

The Daily News reported on its Web site Wednesday that it had received a call from a man identifying himself as the climber who said he was a 29-year-old college dropout from Connecticut. Police did not immediately confirm those reports. A spokeswoman for the Times, Catherine Mathis, said modifications were made to the building and additional security was added after two climbers managed to scale the building June 5.

Both made it to the top and were charged with reckless endangerment, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. The facade of the newly constructed building, which the Times moved into only last year, is covered with slats that allowed the men to climb the tower like a ladder. Mathis said the company was investigating how the most recent climber was able to overcome the additional obstacles.

July 08, 2008

Global warming is shrinking glaciers all over the world, but the seven tongues of ice creeping down Mount Shasta's flanks are a rare exception: They are the only known glaciers in the continental U.S. that are growing. Reaching more than 14,000 feet above sea level, Mount Shasta is one of the state's tallest peaks, dominating the landscape of high plains and conifer forests in far Northern California.

Nearby Indian tribes referred to its glaciers as the footsteps made by the creator when he descended to Earth. Hikers flock to Shasta's peak every summer to scale them. With glaciers retreating in the Sierra Nevada, the Rocky Mountains and elsewhere in the Cascades, Mount Shasta — the southernmost volcano in the Cascade range — is actually benefiting from changing weather patterns over the Pacific Ocean.

"When people look at glaciers around the world, the majority of them are shrinking," said Slawek Tulaczyk, an assistant professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led a team studying Shasta's glaciers. "These glaciers seem to be benefiting from the warming ocean." Climate change has cut the number of glaciers at Montana's Glacier National Park from 150 to 26 since 1850, and some scientists project there will be none left within a generation.

Lonnie Thompson, a glacier expert at Ohio State University, has projected the storied snows at Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro might disappear by 2015. But for Shasta, about 270 miles north of San Francisco, scientists say a warming Pacific Ocean means more moist air. On the mountain, precipitation falls as snow, adding to the glaciers enough to overcome a 1.8 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature in the last century, scientists say.

By Ryan Paul
July 08, 2008 - 08:55AM CT

Linux filesystem developer Hans Reiser revealed the location of his wife's body to law enforcement officials yesterday. Reiser, who is a well-known figure in the open source software community, was found guilty of murdering his estranged wife, Nina Reiser, in a trial that concluded in April.

Nina Reiser disappeared in 2006 while she was involved in a bitter divorce dispute with Hans over his failure to provide child-care payments. He was arrested and charged with murder after police conducted an extensive investigation that included 24-hour covert surveillance.

Reiser vigorously denied responsibility for the murder during the ensuing trial. But the prosecution presented several key pieces of evidence, including a sleeping bag cover stained with Nina's blood, which was found in Hans Reiser's vehicle with books about murder investigations. The car was found with the passenger seat removed and an inch of standing water on the floor.

When Reiser took the stand in his own defense, his implausible claims and erratic behavior in the courtroom largely undermined his efforts to convince the jury that he was innocent. The location of the body was unknown during the trial, so Reiser repeatedly claimed that Nina had absconded with money from his company and had gone back to her home in Russia.

by Steven Musil
July 6, 2008 8:15 PM PDT

Toyota plans to install solar panels on the roof of the next generation of Prius hybrid cars, according to a report in Monday's edition of the Nikkei newspaper.

The panels, which are expected to begin appearing on the high-end version of the gasoline-hybrid car as early as next spring, will supply part of the two to five kilowatts needed to power the air conditioning, MarketWatch cited the Japanese business daily as reporting. Kyocera will reportedly supply the panels.

The move would make Toyota the first major automaker to incorporate a solar-power generation system into a mass-produced car. Prius was introduced in 1997 and has since sold more than 1 million vehicles worldwide. The car was redesigned in 2003, and a third generation has been widely expected to appear soon.