NY tower plans found in rubbish

The Freedom Tower will be the tallest building in New York

A homeless man has found confidential blueprints for New York’s new Freedom Tower dumped in a city rubbish bin.

Mike Fleming handed the documents – marked “Secure Document – Confidential” in to the New York Post newspaper.

The Freedom Tower is being built at Ground Zero, to replace the World Trade Centre towers destroyed on 9/11.

A spokeswoman apologised for the security breach and said that anyone found responsible would be liable for “serious disciplinary action”.

‘Game plan’

Mr Fleming said he was concerned that the documents might fall into the wrong hands.

“I was outraged, because this is priceless,” he told the New York Post.

“This could have ended up on eBay or gotten to al-Qaeda.”

The blueprints reveal details of the new building’s floor plans, along with the specifications of its concrete walls and its heating and ventilation systems.

Steve Yang, an architect who spoke to the New York Post, said that the plans would have been helpful for a terrorist planning an attack.

“An expert in explosives, demolition or biological weapons certainly could glean enough here to develop a game plan,” he said.

However, Candace McAdams, a spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, said that the plans were “not very detailed” and available to anyone bidding on contracts.

The Port Authority will now conduct an inquiry to find out how the breach occurred.

Man hypnotises himself before op

Alex Lenkei has been practising hypnosis since the age of 16 Going under and ‘feeling ace’

A hypnotist from West Sussex has undergone surgery on his right hand without a general anaesthetic.

Alex Lenkei, 61, from Worthing, chose to sedate himself by hypnosis before undergoing the 83-minute operation.

He said he was fully aware of everything going on around him during the procedure but was free from pain.

The operation at Worthing Hospital involved removing some bone in the base of the thumb and fusing some joints in an attempt to improve his arthritis.

Consultant orthopaedic surgeon David Llewellyn-Clark said he was happy in agreeing to the unusual sedation on Mr Lenkei, a registered hypnotist who has been practising since the age of 16.

At one stage a hammer and chisel was used as well as a surgical saw, but I felt no pain Alex Lenkei

 

Mr Lenkei said Wednesday’s surgery “went amazingly well”.

“It took between 30 seconds to a minute for me to place myself under hypnosis, and from that point I felt a very deep relaxation.

“I was aware of everything around me, from people talking and at one stage a hammer and chisel was used as well as a surgical saw, but I felt no pain.”

Throughout the operation, an anaesthetist was on standby to administer an anaesthetic if necessary.

Mr Llewellyn-Clark said he had been confident that Mr Lenkei was a skilled hypnotist and was “delighted all went well”.

Governmentium – Described as an Element on Periodic Table

The element, Governmentium (Gv),

Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2- 6 years; It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.

When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

Fake Food: A Baby’s Perspective

It is almost humorous when you see someone grab a piece of fake fruit or pastry and attempt to take a bite. Some fake foods look and feel so real you can hardly tell them apart, until you try to sink your teeth in.

This poor kid just wants a nice afternoon snack, until he is completely fooled by this fake food display.

We just hope his mother was nice enough to give him a real snack afterwards.

Scientists say Midwest quakes poorly understood

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Scientists say they know far too little about Midwestern seismic zones like the one that rumbled to life under southern Illinois Friday morning, but some of what they do know is unnerving.

The fault zones beneath the Mississippi River Valley have produced some of the largest modern U.S. quakes east of the Rockies, a region covered with old buildings not built to withstand seismic activity.

And, when quakes happen, they’re felt far and wide, their vibrations propagated over hundreds of miles of bedrock.

Friday’s quake shook things up from Nebraska to Atlanta, rattling nerves but doing little damage and seriously hurting no one. It was a magnitude 5.2 temblor centered just outside West Salem in southeastern Illinois, a largely rural region of small towns that sit over the Wabash fault zone. The area has produced moderately strong quakes as recently as 2002.

But it hasn’t been studied to nearly the degree of quake-prone areas west of the Rockies, particularly along the heavily scrutinized Pacific coast.

“We don’t have as many opportunities as in California,” said Genda Chen, associate professor of engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla, which sits near the well-known and very active New Madrid fault zone.

“We cannot even borrow on the knowledge they learn on the West Coast” because quakes that happen in California — where tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface collide — are so different from Midwestern quakes that happen far away from the edges of the nearest plates.

It isn’t entirely clear, for instance, whether the Wabash faults are related to the New Madrid faults or not.

Some scientists say they are related, noting that the Wabash faults, which roughly parallel the river of the same name in southern Illinois and Indiana, are a northern extension of the New Madrid zone. Others say they’re not.

The New Madrid fault zone produced a series of quakes in 1811 and 1812 that reached an estimated magnitude 7.0, putting them among the strongest known quakes to have occurred east of the Rockies. The quakes changed the course of the Mississippi River and were felt in New England.

That distance of well over a thousand miles sounds impressive, but experts say quakes that happen in the Midwest commonly radiate out for hundreds of miles because of the bedrock beneath much of the eastern United States.

“Our bedrock here is old, really rigid and sends those waves a long way,” said Bob Bauer, a geologist with the Illinois State Geological Survey who works in Champaign.

He compared the underground rock, which in much of the Midwest lies anywhere from a few thousand feet to just a few feet below the earth’s surface, to a bell that very efficiently transmits seismic waves like sound.

“California is young bedrock,” he explained. “It’s broken up … like a cracked bell. You ring that, the waves don’t go as far.”

The question of whether Friday’s quake was centered along a branch of the New Madrid zone or not is of more than academic interest. The area even now produces smaller, very regular quakes, and experts say it still has the potential to produce a quake that could devastate the region.

The Wabash faults have the potential to do the same, at least based on distant history, said Columbia University seismologist Won-Young Kim.

The strongest quake produced in recent history by the Wabash was a magnitude 5.3 in southern Illinois in 1968, but researchers have found evidence that 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, much stronger quakes shook the region, Kim said, as strong as magnitude 7.0 or more.

A similar quake is still possible, if the region is given time to build up enough energy, Kim said. But knowledge about the area is too thin to say whether that’s likely, he added.

Solved: mystery of the disappearing lake

The sudden and dramatic disappearance of a large lake which had formed on the surface of a melting ice sheet in Greenland has been documented for the first time by scientists who estimated that its outflow was greater than that of Niagara Falls.

 

Rising temperatures in the Arctic are causing more meltwater lakes to form on top of the Greenland ice sheet and satellite pictures have shown that they can disappear almost overnight for no apparent reason.

Thousands of the “supra-glacial” lakes form each summer – and last year was one of the warmest on record in the region – but scientists have little understanding of how the lakes can suddenly disappear or how far down the water flows into the 3,200ft (975m) deep ice sheet.

Now scientists have seen how they fall through the ice as a result of giant cracks that suddenly open up under the lake bottom, causing millions of tons of water to flow down to the base of the thick ice sheet where it grinds against the bedrock.

Instruments placed around the lake, which covered an area of 2.2sq miles and was up to 40ft deep, found that a huge crack or “moulin” (from the French for mill) opened up in the ice which allowed about 11.6 billion gallons of water to flow down to the bedrock in under 24 hours.

The pressure of the liquid water flowing between the ice sheet and the bedrock lifted the surface of the ice sheet by up to 20 feet at the point where the lake had formed in the summer of 2006, according to the findings of the study published in the journal Science.

The research is important because one of the questions scientists want answered is whether these huge volumes of water falling to the base of the ice sheet can lubricate its movement, so sending it faster towards the coast, where icebergs break off and contribute to a rise in global sea levels.

“We found clear evidence that supraglacial lakes – the pools of meltwater that form on the surface in summer – can drive a crack through the ice sheet in a process called hydrofracture,” said Sarah Das of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

“If there is a crack or defect in the surface that is large enough, and a sufficient reservoir of water to keep that crack filled, it can create a conduit all the way down the bed of the ice sheet,” Ms Das said.

“It’s hard to envision how a trickle or a pool of meltwater from the surface could cut through thick, cold ice all the way to the bed. For that reason, there has been a debate as to whether such processes could exist, even though some theoretical work has hypothesised this for decades,” she said.

The scientists believe that the lake emptied like a bathtub once the crack had formed, with much of the water disappearing in a cataclysmic outflow lasting about 90 minutes – a flow rate greater than the average flow rate of Niagara Falls.

Global positioning instruments recording the horizontal movements over the ice sheet found that the ice in the region of the lake began to move faster towards the ocean at about double the normal speed.

However, the scientists also found that the speed of movement of the ice sheet nearer the coastline was not affected significantly, indicating that the disappearance of the summer meltwater lakes may not influence the more complex dynamics that determine the rate at which icebergs “calve” from the ice sheet.

“We set out to examine whether the melting at the surface – which is sensitive to climate change – could influence how fast the ice can flow… if the ice sheet is frozen to the bedrock or has very little water available, then it will flow much more slowly than if it has a lubricating and pressurised layer of water underneath to reduce friction,” Ms Das said.

Ian Jouglin, of Washington University, said: “Considered together, the new findings indicate that, while surface melt plays a substantial role in ice-sheet dynamics, it may not produce large instabilities leading to sea level rise.”

Whiten Your Teeth the Natural Way

White teeth and strawberries may not sound like they go hand in hand, but it turns out the berries can actually lighten your smile.

The secret to this inexpensive home whitening method is malic acid, which acts as an astringent to remove surface discoloration. Combined with baking soda, strawberries become a natural tooth-cleanser, buffing away stains from coffee, red wine, and dark sodas. While it’s no replacement for a bleaching treatment at your dentist’s office, “this is a fast, cheap way to brighten your smile,” says Adina Carrel, DMD, a dentist in private practice at Manhattan Dental Arts in New York. “Be careful not to use this too often, though, as the acid could damage the enamel on your teeth.”

You need:
1 ripe strawberry
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Directions: Crush the strawberry to a pulp, then mix with the baking powder until blended. Use a soft toothbrush to spread the mixture onto your teeth. Leave on for 5 minutes, then brush thoroughly with toothpaste to remove the berry–baking powder mix. Rinse. (A little floss will help get rid of any strawberry seeds.) Carrel says you can apply once a week.

THE WORLD IN 2058

Masumi Yajima / Univ. of Calgary / AFP file A researcher checks a 3-D model of the human body, projected from the walls and floor of a virtual-reality room at the University of Calgary. Such blends of medical and cybernetic innovation are likely to become more widespread in the next 50 years. Click on the image for a larger version.

How will the world look in the year 2058? Sixty thinkers from around the world rise to that challenge in “The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today,” a collection of essays edited by longtime journalist Mike Wallace.

The consensus view is that we’ll muddle through many of the issues that vex us today – including climate change and terror threats. And we’ll hit upon so many medical and technological wonders that today’s 50-year-olds will have a fair chance of finding out firsthand how the world will look in 2058.

The problem with having so many predictions of the future is that they can look like a collection of to-do lists: The most popular item on the checklist would be getting your complete genetic code analyzed, so that the doctors can give you custom-made medications for what ails you (or what might have ailed you without the drugs). And don’t forget the cyber-implants: Several essayists, including inventor-futurist Ray Kurzweil, heralded the day when nanomachines would merge with our own bodies.

In addition to those well-traveled themes, “50 Years From Today” is jam-packed with nuggets of less conventional wisdom from experts in fields ranging from bioethics to counterterrorism. Here are a few examples:

• Diseases ranging from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder will be shown to be caused by infectious agents that take advantage of genetic predisposition, says psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, president of the Treatment Advocacy Center. Researchers will be surprised to find that many of those infectious agents are being transmitted from animals to humans. As a result, it will be uncommon to keep cats, birds or hamsters as pets – but we’ll still have dogs around, because they’ve been “man’s best friend” for so long that we’ve already adjusted to their infectious agents.
• International terrorism will be brought under control because governments will realize counterterrorism is primarily a police function rather than a job for the military, says Ronald Noble, the secretary-general of Interpol. Passports and IDs will be linked to a global monitoring system, much as credit cards are today. “People will no longer be able to travel and engage in transactions with anonymity,” thanks to surveillance and biometrics, he says. All this will pose “thorny issues” for a post-privacy era.
• Several essayists said water will become as big a resource issue as petroleum is today. “We cannot go green without thinking blue,” former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta and former Energy Secretary James Watkins say. Norman Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” in agriculture, says there will have to be a “Blue Revolution” to provide enough water for the planet’s burgeoning population. Thus, cleaning up the oceans and providing fresh water should rank right up there with controlling greenhouse gases.
• The outlook for longer life spans is a mixed bag: Kurzweil says the pace of life extension will outrun the passage of years, offering at least the possibility of an indeterminate life span 50 years from now. But trends also point to a decline in average life expectancy, due to the increased incidence of obesity among today’s young people, says Wanda Jones, director of the Office on Women’s Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Pros and cons for longer life
Arthur Caplan, a columnist for msnbc.com and director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics, takes something of a middle road: In his essay, written from the point of view of his grandchild, he foresees a world where people can look forward to 140 years of high-quality life. (In a comic twist, the essay also bemoans Caplan’s death, “frail and decrepit,” at the young age of 80.) 

Caplan, who is 58, told me he bases his prediction on the promise of regenerative medicine, as well as a better understanding of how lifestyle and genetics affect health. All these new technologies will raise new ethical issues, he acknowledged – for example, whether future generations will be genetically modified to fix defects and even introduce enhancements.

“People will have to think harder about whether they want to have kids the old-fashioned way,” he said. “Why would you choose to take a random chance, knowing that your child would have a chance of having a defect but going ahead anyway? You start to get into blame and guilt about disability in a way that we don’t really do now.”

Greater longevity will also have social implications, he said. “You’re not going to just have people living till 140 without changing your ideas about retirement, career, education, leisure, marriage, childrearing – also, even eligibility for social benefits. My hunch is that you’re going to have to tack on a few more years before you get that senior discount card.”

We should all have such problems, right?

The bad, the good and the ugly
In his essay, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss sorts through the “bad, the good and the ugly.” For Krauss, the “bad” issues that have to be dealt with focus on climate change, energy shortages and nuclear weapons – and the “good” technologies ahead include medical breakthroughs, computer intelligence and virtual reality.

Dealing with the bad and taking advantage of the good will depend on whether society can bring an end to today’s “ugly” struggle between science and religion, Krauss said. That observation is particularly apt for a week in which this year’s presidential candidates passed up an opportunity to attend Science Debate 2008 - and in which a new movie titled “Expelled” renews the creationism-vs.-evolution argument.

“If we allow nonsense to be purveyed with impunity, then I think it feeds down – it’s a slippery slope,” Krauss told me. “We can’t honestly address the serious problems we’re going to face in the next 50 years until we’re willing to accept the world the way it really is, without fear.”

The next-to-the-last word
In “50 Years From Now,” the first essayist to have his say is Vint Cerf, who was one of the founding fathers of the Internet almost 40 years ago. Today, he’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, and one of the world’s most widely consulted technological seers. He’ll get the next-to-the-last word here.

Cerf foresees a world in which the infrastructure used today for transporting oil has been replaced by water tankers and water pipelines. The energy for a global electrical grid is provided by solar, wind and nuclear plants. Outposts are taking root on Mars and Titan, knit together by an Interplanetary Internet. And discoveries about the Higgs field and the nature of mass, pioneered by the Large Hadron Collider, are raising the possibility of inertialess travel at the speed of light.

Here’s the e-mail exchange I had with Cerf this week, while he was traveling in Spain:

Q: A lot of the essays in the book, yours included, refer to the global warming / energy issue but imply that the problems have been overcome without putting a crimp in technological development. Why is your projection of life 50 years from now so optimistic on the rising technological trend line?

Vinton Cerf: I am an optimist by nature and believe strongly that technology can be brought to bear to create alternatives, even in crisis situations.

I just spent a half-day at the Bletchley Park museum near London. As you will recall, it was at Bletchley Park that a remarkable and diverse group of Britons produced some of the most critical intelligence of World War II through the use of the Bombe and Colossus special-purpose computers. They created alternatives where there were none before, as did the Americans with the Manhattan Project. I believe that the problem of global climate change will ultimately spur our global society to respond and while the condition does not appear to be reversible, we will find ways to adapt to it.

That there will be many negative side effects is not in dispute. Ways of life will change and in some cases degrade, but I believe that we will find ways to adapt. We may find that we have to move into underwater habitats. We will need to invest massively in more environmentally responsible energy production. And the world’s ecological and economic systems will almost certainly change, too. But we will survive.

Q: I’m interested in your reference to the Higgs field and potential implications for new technologies, obviously because of the imminent startup of the Large Hadron Collider. You mention the E.E. Smith inertialess drive, which is really quite intriguing – that’s something I hadn’t heard before in reference to the LHC. Could you expand a bit on how understanding the theoretical underpinnings of inertial mass might lead to propulsion technologies (even in hand-waving terms)?

A: I am only a layman in this area, but it is my understanding that the Higgs field is what imbues other atomic particles with mass and that the Higgs boson is the particle that delivers the force of the field. If we had a way to manipulate the Higgs field, we might be able to establish inertialess conditions that could overcome Einstein’s fundamental speed limitations.

Q: Could you provide a brief update on the Interplanetary Internet project?

A: The project is in its 10th year and it is now planned to carry out tests of the Interplanetary Protocols using the Deep Impact spacecraft that launched a probe into Comet Tempel 1 in October 2006. The spacecraft is still operational, and the plan is to upload the Delay Tolerant Networking protocols onto the onboard computer. NASA has given the project permission to test these protocols from Earth. A successful test will qualify the protocol for future deployments on production space missions. We also hope to carry out demonstrations and tests on board the international space station.

Q: Any thoughts on Ray Kurzweil’s singularity? I’m not sure if you’ve seen his essay in the book, but it makes clear he thinks that the machines we build 50 years from now will be … us. In your estimation, will artificial implants and enhancements have a significant impact on how we think of ourselves in 2058, or will it not be that big of a deal?

A: I continue to worry about the potential to upload ourselves into a silicon analog. I think Kurzweil could be right about the relative intelligence of the computers of the distant future, but a machine intelligence may not be commensurate with instantiation of a biological intelligence within the silicon version. However, I do agree that artificial implants will provide us with supranormal capabilities that are presently inaccessible to most humans today.

Q: I like the idea that trying to explain the new jobs of the future would be as difficult as trying to explain what a Webmaster does to the man in the 1950s gray flannel suit. Nevertheless, do you have any thoughts on what any of those jobs might be, even in very general terms? (E.g., virtual-worldmaster…)

A: I can imagine people actually working in virtual environments where productive, cooperative work is undertaken, and I think we will find people helping others to take advantage of masses of information that are inaccessible or too vast to process in real time today. With billions of Internet-enabled devices or at least programmable devices on the network, there seems to be ample room for new services that manage these devices to be developed. “Hi, I’m your virtual entertainment manager! What movies would you like to watch next week?”

Q: Do you think imagining the future, as you and your colleagues have done in this book, will help shape that future – or do you see this exercise as merely a fun, readable exercise of the imagination?

A: I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the future – what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can figure out how to build. I hope that reading these essays, there will be a few young people who will realize some of the speculative ideas or discover more interesting ones of their own.

I said that Cerf would have the next-to-the-last word – and that’s because, as always, it’s you who have the last word. Feel free to pass along your predictions about the world in 2058 as comments below. If we can carry these electronic bits from one generation of the Internet to the next, there’s a good chance we’ll be able to find out who came closest to the truth.