‘As of the year 2000, there were seven countries without a Rothschild-owned Central Bank:
Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Iran
Then along came the convenient terror of 9-11 and soon Iraq and Afghanistan had been added to the list, leaving only five countries without a Central Bank owned by the Rothschild Family:
Sudan, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Iran
We all know how fast the Central Bank of Benghazi was set up.
The only countries left in 2011 without a Central Bank owned by the Rothschild Family are:
Cuba, North Korea, Iran.
And these mono-maniacal speculators in the west, via their nuke-weaponed ally Israel, are blatantly gagging to get that “Central Bank of Iran” set up… you know it.’
It's no wonder that the judges of the Building to Building Pedestrian Bridge International Challenge awarded this mind-blowing, shape-shifting helix bridge by Sanzpont first place. Featuring a tensile fabric that allows the bridge to move as visitors walk across it, it also captures energy from the sun. If that's not enough goodness for our strictest technophiles, check this out: the bridge also lights up at night with linear LED technology, and purifies the air in its immediate environment.
How does a moving bridge produce energy? With foldable photovoltaic panels of course; but Sanzpont, which has been featured on Inhabitat several times in the past, is never satisfied with the bare minimum, so they raised this design’s artistic appeal and sustainbability a few notches.
A bridge with many personalities, the daytime energy-generator acts as a night time art exhibit when linear LED lights illuminate the bridge, giving it a low-energy, futuristic glow. And then, just in case we become too techy and alienated from nature, Sanzpont has incorporated plants into the design to ensure that the bridge would also purify the air in its surrounding environment. This final touch rounds off the design’s low environmental impact, albeit at what must be a staggering financial cost. Even so, Sanzpont has knocked our socks off once again with their incredible vision.
When Rick Simpson first announced he had cured cancer by using his home-grown cannabis oil, it would have been fair to expect fanfares and Nobel prizes at the very least.
Rick Simpson and his home grown cancer treatment
With Cancer expected to directly impact on 1 in 3 of our lives at some stage, it is in its self a huge proportion of the entire healthcare spend. So to suggest here was a substance which could reduce tumors for just a few pence/cents a dose, was big news. Or so you would have thought.
What actually happened beggars belief. Rick Simpson was arrested, branded a snake oil peddlar and cast off from his native Canadian homeland, forced to live in the US under the threat of re-arrest should he return to Canada.
Today however its been announced the cannabis extract marketed by UK based biotech GW Pharmaceuticals is expected to achieve universal approval in the treatment of (wait for it) cancer. Sativex was initially brought to market as a treatment for the spasticity associated with Multiple Sclerosis. But as more evidence becomes available its becoming apparent Rick Simpson was onto something with his cancer treatment.
And with sales for the treatment of cancer expected to double the Ł150 million pounds it made as a MS treatment when licensing is completed, that would be a fair assumption.
So are the cannabis laws really in place to 'save our children'? Or is there another, entirely more sinister agenda in play?
Read the entire Rick Simpson story, including step-by-step instructions on how to make your own cancer medicine at http://phoenixtears.ca/
Although not as efficient as their sailboat, the fourth upgrade to this 1960s hexagonal building in the Netherlands (hence its name Villa 4.0) does ensure that the building's heating, cooling, and lighting will be achieved with the lowest possible energy consumption while also re-establishing its intimacy with the surrounding green plot. More details about the numerous adaptations applied to this naturally illuminated family home after the jump.
The architects stuck to the existing materials as much as possible though certain interventions, such as upgrading the outer walls and roofs, were necessary, as was insulating the building to improve its thermal efficiency. Some windows were also replaced, and inner walls were gutted to set the gaping living room free. The bedroom floors were replaced with bamboo, and skylights filter throughout the house.
Water is heated by the sun and the home via underfloor heating, as well as a very efficient wood-fired stove that is also used for cooking. All of the incandescent lamps were replaced with LED lighting that uses 90% less energy, punching a serious hole in the home’s overall carbon footprint. And for a final unique touch, a pump was installed to extract water from a nearby brook that is then splashed onto Villa 4.0?s roof, cooling the house down before the water loops back to the brook. We haven’t said much about the garden upgrades, but suffice to say this last renovation is certain to last a very long time.
The mammoth 800-plus meter (2625 ft) tall tower will instantly become one of the world's tallest buildings. Its 200-megawatt power generation capacity will reliably feed the grid with enough power for 150,000 US homes, and once it's built, it can be expected to more or less sit there producing clean, renewable power with virtually no maintenance until it's more than 80 years old. In the video after the jump, EnviroMission CEO Roger Davey explains the solar tower technology, the Arizona project and why he couldn't get it built at home in Australia.
How Solar Towers Work
Enviromission's solar tower is a simple idea taken to gigantic proportions. The sun beats down on a large covered greenhouse area at the bottom, warming the air underneath it. Hot air wants to rise, so there's a central point for it to rush towards and escape; the tower in the middle. And there's a bunch of turbines at the base of the tower that generate electricity from that natural updraft.
It's hard to envisage that sort of system working effectively until you tweak the temperature variables and scale the whole thing up. Put this tower in a hot desert area, where the daytime surface temperature sits at around 40 degrees Celsius (104 F), and add in the greenhouse effect and you've got a temperature under your collector somewhere around 80-90 degrees (176-194 F). Scale your collector greenhouse out to a several hundred-meter radius around the tower, and you're generating a substantial volume of hot air.
Then, raise that tower up so that it's hundreds of meters in the air - because for every hundred metres you go up from the surface, the ambient temperature drops by about 1 degree. The greater the temperature differential, the harder the tower sucks up that hot air at the bottom - and the more energy you can generate through the turbines.
The advantages of this kind of power source are clear:
Because it works on temperature differential, not absolute temperature, it works in any weather;
Because the heat of the day warms the ground up so much, it continues working at night;
Because you want large tracts of hot, dry land for best results, you can build it on more or less useless land in the desert;
It requires virtually no maintenance - apart from a bit of turbine servicing now and then, the tower "just works" once it's going, and lasts as long as its structure stays standing;
It uses no 'feed stock' - no coal, no uranium, nothing but air and sunlight;
It emits absolutely no pollution - the only emission is warm air at the top of the tower. In fact, because you're creating a greenhouse underneath, it actually turns out to be remarkably good for growing vegetation under there.
For humans, it's easy to understand what is meant, but computers struggle, and existing gesture-based interfaces only use set movements that translate into particular instructions. Now a system called Data Miming can recognise objects from gestures without the user having to memorise a "vocabulary" of specific movements.
"Starting from the observation that humans can effortlessly understand which objects are being described when hand motions are used, we asked why computers can't do the same thing," says Christian Holz of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany who developed the system with Andy Wilson at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.
Holz observed how volunteers described objects like tables or chairs using gestures, by tracing important components repeatedly with their hands and maintaining relative proportions throughout their mime.
Data Miming uses a Microsoft Kinect motion-capture camera to create a 3D representation of a user's hand movements. Voxels, or pixels in three dimensions, are activated when users pass their hands through the space represented by each voxel. And when a user encircles their fingers to indicate a table leg, say, the system can also identify that all of the enclosed space should be included in the representation. It then compares user-generated representations with a database of objects in voxel form and selects the closest match.
In tests the system correctly recognised three-quarters of descriptions, and the intended item was in the top three matches from its database 98 per cent of the time. Holz presented his findings at the CHI 2011 meeting in Vancouver, Canada, in May.
The system could be incorporated into online shopping so users could gesture to describe the type of product they want and have the system make a suggestion. Or, says Holz: "Imagine you want a funky breakfast-bar stool. Instead of wandering around and searching Ikea for half an hour, you walk up to an in-store kiosk and describe the stool using gestures, which takes seconds. The computer responds immediately, saying you probably want the Funkomatic Breakfast Stool-o-rama, and it lives in row 7a."
We don't mean to trade in your gas-guzzler for a high mileage vehicle, or swap your Toyota Prius for a Nissan Leaf, or even agree to trundling around in a G-Wiz. In this case, we're talking going automotive cold turkey. What would it take for you to make that jump? Would a lifetime of free public transportation do it for you?
Well, this is what the city of Murcia, Spain is offering. The city is trying to lure residents into a unique trade-in offer: turn over your car, and you get an unlimited pass to the city's new public transportation system.
Like many cities in Europe, Murcia has become a constant traffic jam. Car owners are also finding it harder and harder to find a place to park. City planners in the U.S. might prescribe construction of additional parking lots and new highway lanes as the solution, but Murcia is taking this other route. Sound like a deal?
To look at the Russian RadioAstron spacecraft, which launched from Kazakhstan in July, it doesn't seem particularly record-breaking. Its 10-meter (33-foot) antenna is certainly no match for those on earthbound radio telescopes, which can be up to 300 meters (984 feet) across. Once in orbit, however, its signal will join forces with those from ground-based telescopes to form one giant virtual telescope. Using a process known as interferometry, they will form the equivalent of a single radio telescope dish that at over 350,000 kilometers (217,480 miles) across is almost 30 times wider than the Earth. Although it's not actually one physical object, it is nonetheless being heralded as the largest telescope ever created.
Interferometry itself is nothing new, having been around since the 1960s. Very basically speaking, it involves combining the output of two or more geographically-separated telescopes to obtain one image with a resolution higher than either telescope could achieve on its own.
While radio telescopes have been sent into space for this purpose before, the plan is for RadioAstron's oval-shaped orbit to take it up to ten times farther than any of those other spacecraft have traveled, at 10,000 to 390,000 kilometers (6,214 to 242,335 miles) from Earth. Working with telescopes in locations such as West Virginia, Germany and Puerto Rico, it should be able to capture details at 10,000 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Plans for its use include the observation of a huge black hole at the center of a nearby galaxy, M87.
Although already launched, it will still be a few months before the spacecraft reaches the starting point of its orbit, and then goes through a check-out period with its ground control team at Russia's Lebedev Physical Institute Astro Space Center. Once it starts receiving and transmitting data ... well, there will be a lot of it. It's estimated that RadioAstron will be taking in up to 144 megabits per second, which will be continuously relayed to the ground.
So far, however, there is only one 22-meter (72-foot) dish set up to receive that data, near Moscow. This means that much of the data will simply be lost. It is hoped that throughout RadioAstron's five-year mission, more receiving stations can be set up.
Designers from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design and engineers from Toyota have been working together and have come up with a unique and innovative concept they call the "Window to the Word" where the window of the back seat of an automobile is converted into a see-through touch-screen device capable of allowing people, likely children, to draw images with their finger, magnify objects they see outside the car, learn by having objects they touch converted into another language, get distance for objects seen and be given information about objects they see.
Watching the video the team has created of a child using the new technology is both awe inspiring and head scratching. On the one hand, you have to give the designers and engineers credit for even thinking of such a thing, and for portraying it in such a beautiful and simplistic way. But, on the other, the practicalities of such a technology soon surpass the feelings of wonder at this new demonstration of the power of applied technology. Would window smudging ruin the effect after awhile, for example, or would a child bother with it if buckled in so tight that turning to use the window would become a strenuous activity; or would kids prefer to just have a tablet computer on their lap, etc.
Using the new technology, which was demoed at the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association meeting last month, in Belgium, appears to be straightforward and simple. To zoom in on an object, two fingers are spread outwardly from a single point, as on a tablet device. To draw, a single finger is pressed against the window and moved about, again, similar to any other touch-screen. Menuing is controlled via a designated area in the lower left corner of the window. One truly interesting feature is that objects drawn on the window appear to move out of the framed window at the same rate as the car is moving, giving the illusion that the object drawn was actually part of the outside landscape and is being left behind as the car heads off.
Whether or not the “Window to the World” concept ever makes it to real world vehicles, the ideas behind it demonstrate that car manufacturers are intent on using every bit of available technology to make driving, or riding in cars in the future, a better experience for all of us.
The steel for each part of the car has been carefully selected and optimised. It is important, for example, that all parts are as light as possible because of the fuel consumption, whereas other parts of the car have to be super strong in order to protect passengers in a collision.
Super strong nanostructured metals are now entering the scene, aimed at making cars even lighter, enabling them to stand collisions in a better way without fatal consequences for the passengers. Research into this field is being conducted worldwide. Recently, a young PhD student from the Materials Research Division at Risø DTU took research a step further by discovering a new phenomenon. The new discovery could speed up the practical application of strong nanometals and has been published in the highly esteemed journal "Proceedings of the Royal Society" in London in the form of a paper of approx. 30 pages written by three authors from Risø DTU.
The research task of the young student, Tianbo Yu, is to determine the stability in new nanostructured metals, which are indeed very strong, but also tend to become softer, even at low temperatures. This is due to the fact that microscopic metal grains of nanostructured metals are not stable - a problem of which Tianbo Yu's discovery now provides an explanation.
The fine structure consists of many small metal grains. The boundaries between these metal grains can move, also at room temperature. At the same time a coarsening of the structure takes place and the strength of the nanometal is consequently weakened. Tianbo Yu's has now shown that the boundaries of the grains can be locked, when small particles are present and that the solution is technologically feasible. This has paved the way for car components to be made of nanometals.
"We are cooperating with a Danish company and also a Danish consulting engineering company with the purpose of developing light and strong aluminium materials with a view to their application in light vehicles where especially deformation at high rate as in a collision is in focus. The new findings will be included in this work," says Dorte Juul Jensen, head of division and Dr. Techn. She is happy that the excellent findings also have practical applications.
Tianbo Yu comes from Tsinghua University in Beijing – a leading university within technical scientific research. His studies in Denmark have been financed by the Danish National Research Foundation, which also supports a Danish-Chinese basic research centre in the Materials Research Division, where Tianbo Yu is now employed. Tianbo Yu is a dedicated and talented researcher, who wishes to pursue a research career in Denmark. His wife is a student at RU (Roskilde University) and along with their studies, they both have decided to put a lot of effort into learning Danish; and they have become good at it. – All in all, a success for science as well as globalisation.
Smaller metal grains result in stronger metals
Nanometals contain very small metal grains - from 10 to 1,000 nanometers. One nanometer is a millionth of a millimetre. The smaller the metal grains become, the stronger the metal becomes. The metal becomes twice as strong, for example, if the individual metal grains are made four times smaller. That is why the materials scientists work to reduce the size of the individual metal grains. In steel and aluminium, the particles have been reduced to below 1 micrometre, which is one thousandth of a millimetre. There is a great interest in nanometals worldwide. Nanometals are super strong and their super strength can be combined with other desired properties, too.
A good example of a super strong nanometal is the thin steel wires used in grand pianos and for strengthening lorry tyres and containers, which have to withstand an extremely high pressure. Actually, they have been known for many years, but now they have become the subject of scientists' renewed and strong interest.
Scientists are not only interested in the size of the metal grains. The interfaces between the individual metal grains are also important to a number of properties. A special type of grain boundaries, so-called twin boundaries, provides both strength and good electrical conductivity. This paves the way for producing thinner wires, thereby reducing material consumption.
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