Check this out on the Wolfram Demonstrations Project:

http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/BetaCube/

* Contributed by: Michael Trott
     * Suggested by: Stephen Wolfram
     * Based on work by: Roger Bagula


Respectfully, Roger L. Bagula
11759 Waterhill Road, Lakeside,Ca 92040-2905,tel: 619-5610814 :
http://www.google.com/profiles/Roger.Bagula
alternative email: roger.bagula@...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8367214.stm

Tests loom for record solar plane
Solar Impulse plane
This week has already seen full-power tests of the engines

The prototype of a solar-powered plane destined for a record round-the-world
journey will make its first trip across a runway on Thursday and Friday.

This week saw the Solar Impulse plane outside its hangar for the first time,
with tests of its engines and computer.

The plane's maiden flight is scheduled for February, and a final version will
attempt to cross the Atlantic in 2012.

As wide as a jumbo jet but weighing just 1,500 kg, it will be piloted by Swiss
adventurer Bertrand Piccard.

"It's very exciting, we are moving now toward a very concrete phase," said Solar
Impulse chief executive Andre Borschberg.

"You have to realise this airplane is quite special and you cannot just put it
on the runway, apply full power and go in the air - it has to be done really
step-by-step," he told BBC News.

Wright stuff

To that end, the team has spent several days ramping the plane's engines up to
full power, and the "taxiing tests" of Thursday and Friday will give the test
pilot a feel for how the plane moves on the ground.

If the tests are successful, the next step will be a short hop in about two
weeks' time.

"We'll take off at the beginning of the runway, fly a few metres above it - a
little bit like the Wright brothers did in 1903 - and then land again, to see
how it behaves at the beginning of the flight.

"If this is satisfactory, we will dismantle it and transport it to [Payerne air
force base in western Switzerland] where will we do the real first flight of
about two hours, in February."

But each step will be a careful one, Mr Borschberg stressed.

"This is truly a new design - an airplane the size of an Airbus and the weight
of a mid-sized car - so we're not taking risks by not understanding something."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8367933.stm

Energy-saving bulbs 'get dimmer'
A low energy bulb
Energy-saving bulbs use up to 80% less electricity than traditional bulbs

Energy-efficient light bulbs lose on average 22% of their brightness over their
lifetime, a study has found.

In some cases they emit just 60% as much light as traditional models which are
being phased out of shops, it says.

The study in Engineering and Technology magazine concluded that consumers were
being misled by the bulbs' packaging.

Of the 18 energy-saving bulbs tested over 10,000 hours by the Institution of
Engineering and Technology, three stopped altogether.

'Migraines'

The magazine's editor, Dickon Ross, told the BBC that packaging claims about the
power of the bulbs did not live up to what they delivered in terms of people's
perceptions of light.

He said: "It may not be deliberate, but because of the standards set, you end up
with figures that are exaggerated compared to what people really experience."

Traditional bulbs lose no more than 7% of their brightness by the time they burn
out - equivalent to about 2,000 hours from first use.

But the new energy-saving models, known as compact fluorescent bulbs, use up to
80% less electricity than traditional bulbs and could save up to £37 a year on
energy bills.

Critics, however, claim they can trigger migraines, make skin conditions worse
and lead to other health problems.

EU Countries started the mandatory phase-out of 100W and frosted incandescent
light bulbs earlier this year.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49737/title/Revving_up_particles_in_t\
he_cosmos

  Revving up particles in the cosmos
Gamma rays from microquasar found to precede radio-wave blast
By Ron Cowen
Web edition : Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
font_down font_up Text Size
access
Enlargemagnify
JET SETTERResearchers have now made the first definitive detections of gamma
rays from Cygnus X-3, shown here in a portrait taken a decade ago by the Chandra
X-ray Observatory (The sharp horizontal line is an artifact). Detecting gamma
rays from the microquasar hints at how it accelerates particles to high energies
and throws off radio-emitting blobs of material at nearly the speed of
light.NASA, SRON, MPE

Some 30,000 light-years from Earth, a tiny gravitational monster is tearing
material from a companion star, blasting X-rays into space and sporadically
hurling out jets of radio-wave-emitting blobs at close to the speed of light.

Known as Cygnus X-3, this mercurial star system — thought to be either a small
black hole or a neutron star orbiting an ordinary partner — has fascinated
astronomers for more than four decades with its surprisingly bright X-ray
emissions. Now, two teams of researchers have made the first definitive
detection of high-energy gamma rays, the most powerful type of electromagnetic
radiation, from this small but nearby stellar system.

The findings may provide a new window on how this beast accelerates charged
particles to enormous energies, researchers reported in early November at the
2009 Fermi Symposium in Washington, D.C.

Detecting the gamma rays from Cygnus X-3 was a feat in itself, made possible by
sensitive detectors on two flying observatories, the researchers note. But both
teams note that they are most excited about the unexpected clockwork pattern of
the gamma-ray emission, which always seems to occur during a lull in high-energy
X-rays and just before the onset of the powerful radio jets.

The gamma rays, generated by the acceleration of charged particles to extreme
energies in the system, may be signaling “the preparation, the storage of energy
for the major radio flares,” says Marco Tavani of Italy’s Space Astrophysics and
Cosmic Physics Institute and the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, who led one of
the two studies “Just one day after the gamma-ray flare — boom! It makes this
very major radio flare,” says Tavani, describing a pattern he and his
collaborators have seen three times since April 2008.

The new gamma-ray findings are expected to shed light not only on how Cygnus X-3
accelerates particles to enormous energies but also how distant quasars, powered
by supermassive black holes, pump even greater amounts of energy into space.
“Microquasars such as Cygnus X-3 are the ideal laboratory for studying the jet
phenomena that dominate the most luminous quasars' emission,” comments X-ray
astronomer Josh Grindlay of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in
Cambridge, Mass. Because the emissions from microquasars vary on time scales of
days to weeks rather than decades like quasar emissions, systems such as Cygnus
X-3 “are the test bed of choice” for probing quasar activity, he says.

Tavani’s team, which has used the Italian Space Agency’s AGILE spacecraft to
monitor gamma-ray emissions from Cygnus X-3 for the past two years, has also
posted its findings online. The study is scheduled to appear in an upcoming
Nature.

Several members of the other team, which used the Fermi Gamma-ray Space
Telescope to observe Cygnus X-3, declined to comment on their work because it’s
scheduled to be published in Science. The Fermi team’s findings “are completely
consistent” with those recorded by AGILE and show a similar pattern, Tavani
says.

The gamma rays observed by AGILE were in the form of flares at energies of about
100 million electron volts. Follow-up radio observations by Tavani’s team, along
with comparisons with X-ray observations recorded by NASA’s Swift satellite
revealed that the flares preceded radio jets and occurred during a decline in
high-energy X-rays from Cygnus X-3.

“This is a complete change from previous models,” Tavani asserts. Neutron stars
and black holes (both thought to power microquasars) have strong magnetic
fields, and Tavani envisions a mechanism in which a magnetic field stores an
enormous amount of energy. This stored energy first accelerates charged
particles and prompts them to emit gamma rays. Then the magnetic gate opens, and
radio-emitting blobs are pushed out of the system. “The radio jets are the
manifestation of what happened before” with the gamma rays, he suggests.

In addition, the high-resolution Fermi observations show that the intensity of
the gamma rays varies on a 4.8-hour cycle, known from years of X-ray
observations to be the time it takes for the ultradense member of the Cygnus X-3
system to orbit its partner star. The 4.8-hour signature confirms that the gamma
rays are coming from Cygnus X-3 rather than from another source in the same
patch of sky.

Both the radio jets and the gamma-ray flares are infrequent, notes Tavani. That
could explain why telescope observations of the Cygnus region in the 1980s
revealed gamma rays at energies of 10 trillion eV but were never confirmed, he
says. It now seems possible that these telescopes detected something real that
was associated with strong but fleeting flares, says Grindlay.

The study by Tavani and his colleagues plausibly argues “that there are
gamma-ray flares associated with the switching on of the radio emission,
presumably the jet, and showing that it is apparently related to the processes
that energize the jet,” comments Tod Strohmayer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Md. “It is an interesting result, but I also think that
it's still not clear in detail how the gammas are produced,” he adds.
“Nevertheless, it is giving us another tool to study these extremely energetic
beasts, and that's exciting.”

I ran across a unique derivation of a Binet sequence in a Dover book I
got for reviewing:

http://www.amazon.com/Optimal-Control-Theory-Course-Automatic/dp/0486639258/ref=\
cm_cr-mr-img
Optimal Control Theory: A Course in Automatic Control Theory
by Robert Pallu De LA Barriere
Edition: Paperback
Availability: Out of Print--Limited Availability

15 used & new from $1.94


4.0 out of 5 stars A very good approach to systems engineering
mathematics, November 19, 2009

A lot of the old linear systems control books are thought to be antiques
since people have turned so much to microprocessor digital control.
What I thought was good about this book was that it started at
topological vectors spaces
as Banach spaces and Frechet spaces and used that Mathematics to build a
foundation for
systems control.
In about the middle of the book is takes a Fibonacci like sequence,
gets a polynomial for it,
does the Binet solution and then does the Laplace transforms to give
a serve system transfer function.
Then he generalizes that Cyclotomic types with roots less than or equal
to one
can produce stable system control and stuff like Pisots and Salems
will produce quasi-stable control systems.
The result is that a lot of OEIS sequences of this sort based on
Fibonacci like sequences
or polynomial expansions come off having applications
in control theory.
Since I found what I think of as an error in this same section of the book
I can't give the result my highest review,
but I like the book and hope to be able to get more out of it by study.

%I A168175
%S A168175 1,4,9,8,31,180,503,752,513,7316,25673,51480,26209,255524,1205559,
%T A168175 3033568,3695359,6453540,51681673,161551912,284435937,6880364,
%U A168175 1963530103,7902282960,17864421119,16141703756,60484132809
%V A168175
1,4,9,8,-31,-180,-503,-752,513,7316,25673,51480,26209,-255524,-1205559,
%W A168175 -3033568,-3695359,6453540,51681673,161551912,284435937,6880364,
%X A168175 -1963530103,-7902282960,-17864421119,-16141703756,60484132809
%N A168175 Binet's sequence:f(n) = (1/2 - I/Sqrt[3])*(2 + I*Sqrt[3])^n + (1/2 +
I/Sqrt[3])*(2 - I*Sqrt[3])^n
%C A168175 The characteristic polynomial is 7 - 4 x + x^2.
%C A168175 Four different calculation methods are given in Mathematica.
%C A168175 From the section on "Discrete Servo Systems" in the reference
%C A168175 as related to transfer functions and Laplace transforms
%C A168175 used in control systems technology.
%D A168175 R. Pallu de la Barriere, Optimal Control Theory,Dover Publications,
New York,1967,pages 266-7
%F A168175 f(n) = (1/2 - I/Sqrt[3])*(2 + I*Sqrt[3])^n + (1/2 + I/Sqrt[3])*(2 -
I*Sqrt[3])^n
%t A168175 Clear[f, n, a, a0, q, x, t, v];
%t A168175 (*Binet*) f[n_] = (1/2 - I/Sqrt[3])*(2 + I*Sqrt[3])^n + (1/2 +
I/Sqrt[3])*(2 - I*Sqrt[3])^n;
%t A168175 a0 = Table[FullSimplify[f[n]], {n, 0, 30}]
%t A168175 (* linear recursion *)
%t A168175 a[0] = 1; a[1] = 4;
%t A168175 a[n_] := a[n] = 4*a[n - 1] - 7*a[n - 2];
%t A168175 Table[a[n], {n, 0, 30}]
%t A168175 (* polynomial expansion with scale 7*)
%t A168175 q[x_] = 1/(x^2 - 4*x + 7);
%t A168175 Table[7^(n + 1)*SeriesCoefficient[ Series[q[t], {t, 0, 60}], n], {n,
0, 30}]
%t A168175 (* Matrix Markov recursion*)
%t A168175 v[0] = {1, 4};
%t A168175 m = {{0, 1}, {-7, 4}};
%t A168175 v[n_] := v[n] = m.v[n - 1];
%t A168175 Table[v[n][[1]], {n, 0, 30}]
%K A168175 sign
%O A168175 0,2
%A A168175 Roger L. Bagula (rlbagulatftn(AT)yahoo.com), Nov 19 2009

Mathematica:
Clear[f, n, a, a0, q, x, t, v]
f[n_] = (1/2 - I/Sqrt[3])*(2 +
I*Sqrt[3])^n + (1/2 + I/Sqrt[3])*(2 - I*Sqrt[3])^n
a0 = Table[FullSimplify[f[n]], {n, 0, 30}]
a[0] = 1; a[1] = 4;
a[n_] := a[n] = 4*a[n - 1] - 7*a[n - 2]
Table[a[n], {n, 0, 30}]
q[x_] = 1/(x^2 - 4*x + 7)
Table[7^(n + 1)*SeriesCoefficient[
       Series[q[t], {t, 0, 60}], n], {n, 0, 30}]
v[0] = {1, 4};
m = {{0, 1}, {-7, 4}}
v[n_] := v[n] = m.v[n - 1]
Table[v[n][[1]], {n, 0, 30}]
CharacteristicPolynomial[m, x]
Table[N[a0[[n]]/a0[[n - 1]]], {n, 2, Length[a0]}]
Respectfully, Roger L. Bagula
11759 Waterhill Road, Lakeside,Ca 92040-2905,tel: 619-5610814 :
http://www.google.com/profiles/Roger.Bagula
alternative email: roger.bagula@...

--- In physical_sciences@yahoogroups.com, "Robert Karl Stonjek" <stonjek@...>
wrote:

Turning heat to electricity... efficiently
November 18th, 2009 in Physics / General Physics
Enlarge

(PhysOrg.com) -- In everything from computer processor chips to car engines to
electric powerplants, the need to get rid of excess heat creates a major source
of inefficiency. But new research points the way to a technology that might make
it possible to harvest much of that wasted heat and turn it into usable
electricity.

That kind of waste-energy harvesting might, for example, lead to cellphones with
double the talk time, laptop computers that can operate twice as long before
needing to be plugged in, or power plants that put out more electricity for a
given amount of fuel, says Peter Hagelstein, co-author of a paper on the new
concept appearing this month in the Journal of Applied Physics.

Hagelstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT, says
existing solid-state devices to convert heat into electricity are not very
efficient. The new research, carried out with graduate student Dennis Wu as part
of his doctoral thesis, aimed to find how close realistic technology could come
to achieving the theoretical limits for the efficiency of such conversion.

Theory says that such energy conversion can never exceed a specific value called
the Carnot Limit, based on a 19th-century formula for determining the maximum
efficiency that any device can achieve in converting heat into work. But current
commercial thermoelectric devices only achieve about one-tenth of that limit,
Hagelstein says. In experiments involving a different new technology, thermal
diodes, Hagelstein worked with Yan Kucherov, now a consultant for the Naval
Research Laboratory, and coworkers to demonstrate efficiency as high as 40
percent of the Carnot Limit. Moreover, the calculations show that this new kind
of system could ultimately reach as much as 90 percent of that ceiling.

Hagelstein, Wu and others started from scratch rather than trying to improve the
performance of existing devices. They carried out their analysis using a very
simple system in which power was generated by a single quantum-dot device — a
type of semiconductor in which the electrons and holes, which carry the
electrical charges in the device, are very tightly confined in all three
dimensions. By controlling all aspects of the device, they hoped to better
understand how to design the ideal thermal-to-electric converter.

Hagelstein says that with present systems it's possible to efficiently convert
heat into electricity, but with very little power. It's also possible to get
plenty of electrical power — what is known as high-throughput power — from a
less efficient, and therefore larger and more expensive system. "It's a
tradeoff. You either get high efficiency or high throughput," says Hagelstein.
But the team found that using their new system, it would be possible to get both
at once, he says.

A key to the improved throughput was reducing the separation between the hot
surface and the conversion device. A recent paper by MIT professor Gang Chen
reported on an analysis showing that heat transfer could take place between very
closely spaced surfaces at a rate that is orders of magnitude higher than
predicted by theory. The new report takes that finding a step further, showing
how the heat can not only be transferred, but converted into electricity so that
it can be harnessed.

A company called MTPV Corp. (for Micron-gap Thermal Photo-Voltaics), founded by
Robert DiMatteo SM '96, MBA `06, is already working on the development of "a new
technology closely related to the work described in this paper," Hagelstein
says.

DiMatteo says he hopes eventually to commercialize Hagelstein's new idea. In the
meantime, he says the technology now being developed by his company, which he
expects to have on the market next year, could produce a tenfold improvement in
throughput power over existing photovoltaic devices, while the further advance
described in this new paper could make an additional tenfold or greater
improvement possible. The work described in this paper "is potentially a major
finding," he says.

DiMatteo says that worldwide, about 60 percent of all the energy produced by
burning fuels or generated in powerplants is wasted, mostly as excess heat, and
that this technology could "make it possible to reclaim a significant fraction
of that wasted energy."

When this work began around 2002, Hagelstein says, such devices "clearly could
not be built. We started this as purely a theoretical exercise." But
developments since then have brought it much closer to reality.

While it may take a few years for the necessary technology for building
affordable quantum-dot devices to reach commercialization, Hagelstein says,
"there's no reason, in principle, you couldn't get another order of magnitude or
more" improvement in throughput power, as well as an improvement in efficiency.

"There's a gold mine in waste heat, if you could convert it," he says. The first
applications are likely to be in high-value systems such as computer chips, he
says, but ultimately it could be useful in a wide variety of applications,
including cars, planes and boats. "A lot of heat is generated to go places, and
a lot is lost. If you could recover that, your transportation technology is
going to work better."

More information: "Quantum-coupled single-electron thermal to electric
conversion scheme" by D. M. Wu, P. L. Hagelstein, P. Chen, K. P. Sinha,3 and A.
Meulenberg, in Journal of Applied Physics, published online Nov. 13, 2009,
http://link.aip.org/link/?JAPIAU/106/094315/1

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news : web)
http://www.physorg.com/news177761180.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

--- End forwarded message ---

--- In physical_sciences@yahoogroups.com, "Robert Karl Stonjek" <stonjek@...>
wrote:

The race to build a 1000 mph car
   a.. 18 November 2009 by David Cohen
   b.. Magazine issue 2735. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
   c.. For similar stories, visit the Cars and Motoring Topic Guide



The race is on (Image: Curventa/Mike Annear/Rachel Shadle/North American Eagle)

5 more images

Editorial: A spectacle to inspire engineers of the future

Time = 0
Strapped into a custom built seat, Andy Green prepares for the ride of his life.
The pancake-flat desert stretches out for miles ahead. The computer indicates
all systems are normal. He eases off the brakes and puts his foot down on the
throttle. The jet engine roars into life. In precisely 42.5 seconds he'll be
travelling 1000 mph. In a car.

"It's almost impossible to tell the difference between going supersonic in a car
and in an aircraft," says Green. He is the only person on Earth who can say that
from personal experience. Green was a fighter pilot for the UK Royal Air Force
for 20 years, and he is also the fastest man on wheels. In 1997, driving a
vehicle called ThrustSSC, he set the world land speed record of 763 miles per
hour, becoming the first and only person to break the sound barrier in a car
(761 mph under standard conditions). Now, together with the Bloodhound SSC
design team, he's attempting to do it all over again, and then some.

This time there's competition. A three-way race is developing, with two other
teams, one from North America and the other from Australia, vying to wrest the
record from the Brits. The first step will be to break the existing record and
get past 800 mph. If that succeeds, the next stage is to attempt 1000 mph (1609
kilometres per hour). "That's what we're designing the car for," says Ron Ayers,
chief aeronautic engineer on the Bloodhound project.

All three competing vehicles have wheels, brakes and a steering wheel, but
that's pretty much where the similarity with conventional cars ends. Getting up
to the speed of sound and beyond poses challenges that a normal car will never
encounter, requiring some radical design and engineering.

For example, the wheels of a 1000 mph car will need to rotate at over 10,000
revolutions per minute, many times faster than on an ordinary car. This rate of
spin entails an acceleration of almost 50,000 g at the rim, generating forces
that would easily tear conventional wheels apart. Instead, this car will need
wheels of solid titanium, or more likely carbon-reinforced aluminium. What's
more, as the vehicle approaches the speed of sound, it produces a frontal shock
wave which liquefies the earth ahead, so the wheels end up carving through
ground, rather than simply rolling over it. On top of all that, beyond 250 mph,
airflow starts to become a more important consideration in controlling the
vehicle than traction on the ground. At this speed, the wheels begin to behave
like rudders or aerofoils, and driving the car becomes more like controlling a
speedboat or flying an aircraft. "Our biggest single concern is to make sure the
vehicle stays on the ground," says Green.

As the car approaches the speed of sound, it produces a shock wave which
liquefies the earth ahead
Creating a "car" that takes account of all these factors means exploring
unchartered territory in aerodynamics and vehicle mechanics. "No one has ever
designed a car to go this fast before," says Green, "so we've got to develop and
test, develop and test... it's an ongoing research project."

Time = 10 seconds
Green hits 79 mph. At this stage he would be eating the dust of an average
sports car, but Bloodhound is an automotive wolf in sheep's clothing. Green
holds steady, and 5 seconds later unleashes the first of his secret weapons: an
afterburner which dumps extra fuel into the jet engine, stoking it up to full
power.

Bloodhound SSC will use a retired Eurofighter jet engine to provide the
first-stage thrust for the car. In that respect it resembles ThrustSSC, which
was powered entirely by two jet engines. But according to Ayers, that set-up
won't be good enough to reach 1000 mph. "The large front inlets [for the jet
engines to take in air] on ThrustSSC produced huge shock waves at supersonic
speed," he says. "This means we couldn't get any more than a 5 per cent increase
in speed using that design."

The joint US-Canadian team, North American Eagle, begs to differ. They are going
entirely with jets. Instead of designing a car from scratch, they have taken the
fuselage of a scrapped F-104 Starfighter aircraft, added the engine from an F-4
Phantom supersonic fighter-bomber bought from a surplus seller, and bolted on
some wheels. "We know the aircraft can do around 1500 mph, so if we can do just
half of that on land we're already pretty close to the record," says Ed Shadle,
the car's driver and co-owner.

Unlike their competitors, North American Eagle is already built and rolling.
Shadle has done 27 runs so far, pushing the car to 400 mph to test the parachute
systems and brakes, and to collect data to model what will happen at higher
speeds. He is now refining the wheels and aerodynamics. "We're hoping to go
after the record on the Fourth of July 2010," he says.

As yet he doesn't know where that attempt will be made, because his decision to
go with jets alone has presented him with a very difficult problem: the sheer
length of track he will need to accelerate to 1000 mph and then decelerate to a
stop. The terrain has to be as flat as glass; any bumps might send the car
off-track with disastrous consequences. Shadle is looking for a site with around
14 miles of uninterrupted flatness. Ayers and the Bloodhound team aren't
convinced that will be easy to find.

Their approach is to shorten the run as much as possible by going for more
thrust. They are designing for a 10-mile run, a constraint that has led them to
make a radical choice: instead of two jet engines, they will use one jet for the
initial acceleration and then boost to full speed with a rocket.

Building both types of engine into the car has been no mean feat. The team
initially wanted the rocket to sit above the jet engine, as this would lower the
centre of gravity of the car and make it more stable. But this configuration led
to the risk of oversteer, so they reluctantly swapped the engines around.

It may seem a trivial decision, but the change has far-reaching consequences. It
alters not only the internal design of the car but also the aerodynamics, and it
dramatically affects the distribution of forces across the front and back
wheels, presenting a whole new set of problems. But control ultimately governs
the top speed, so jet over rocket is their only option.

Time = 23 seconds
Travelling at 269 mph, Bloodhound is now speeding faster than a Formula 1 car at
top whack. Green braces himself, then pushes a button that fires the rocket. In
an instant he is pushed back in his seat as the car's acceleration ramps up to
2.3 g.

Rocket powered cars are not a common sight even in land-speed record attempts,
because the thrust from a rocket is so huge, rapid and hard to control. That's
why just about the only vehicles powered by rockets are drag cars.

Huge, rapid and hard to control thrust is no bother to Rosco McGlashan, an
Australian drag racer who has set up a rival team to Bloodhound and North
American Eagle. His car, Aussie Invader, will also be propelled by rockets - in
fact, nothing but rockets.

"I think the Bloodhound project is a great idea, but it's too complicated," he
says. "I believe in keeping it as simple as possible. An all-rocket design is as
simple as it gets." If all goes to plan, Aussie Invader will reach the 1000 mph
target thanks to four rockets which will give it more than 200 times the power
of a Formula 1 car.

Rocket-based cars do have one significant downside, however: the exhaust plume
is so fierce that it is likely to excavate a ditch behind the car. That's not a
problem for a one-way journey. To meet the official requirements for the record,
however, a car has to not only cover 1 mile in under 3.6 seconds, but also
repeat the feat in the opposite direction along a parallel track within the
hour. If the car veers off course for any reason, the last thing the driver
wants to have to contend with is a nearby ditch.

Time = 42.5 seconds
4.2 miles down the track, Green hits 1000 mph. In less than 2 seconds his
official 1-mile run will start; 3.5 seconds later it will be over and he could
be halfway to setting a new record.

With all that rocket power at its disposal, the Australian car is the hare to
Bloodhound's tortoise. "We reach 1000 mph in 19 seconds," says McGlashan. That's
over twice as fast as Bloodhound, meaning McGlashan will reach top speed just 3
miles down the track.

Rocket-powered cars come with other problems, though. For a start, the rate at
which they burn fuel is enormous. Aussie Invader will consume almost 3 tonnes of
fuel and oxidiser to reach top speed, which is delivered through a system of
pressurised gas cylinders. Though Bloodhound's fuel consumption is lower, its
rocket still requires fuel to be delivered at a phenomenal rate. It achieves
this thanks to a 4.2-litre internal-combustion engine whose sole function is to
keep the oxidant flowing in.

With all this power and speed, you might wonder what safety systems have been
built in. The answer: surprisingly little. All the cockpits are reinforced, and
there are seat belts and emergency kill switches for the engines, but none of
the three cars has an ejector seat. According to Green, this is "by far the
safest" arrangement. "Designing an ejector system is a multi-million-pound
project in its own right that could be fraught with problems itself. If we can
keep the wheels on the ground, why would you want to leave the car?"

None of the three cars has an ejector seat. This is by far the safest
arrangement
For McGlashan, the local wildlife probably represent the greatest threat.
"Imagine a kangaroo running across the track while you're travelling at 1000
mph. They could appear from out of nowhere - that's probably the biggest danger
in Australia," he says.

Imagine a kangaroo running across the track while you're travelling at 1000 mph
Then there is the minor issue of stopping.

Time = 47.6 seconds
Green completes the measured mile, cuts the rocket and jet, and is thrown
forward in his seat as the car lurches from 2 g of acceleration to 3 g of
deceleration. In 9 seconds the first parachute will be deployed, followed 7
seconds later by a second. Then it will be time to slam on the brakes.

It won't be that straightforward for McGlashan. "We can't just flick a switch
and kill the engines or we'll get 16 g of deceleration," he says. That would put
him at serious risk of injury: even highly trained fighter pilots like Green
pull no more than 12 g during aerobatic manoeuvres.

So McGlashan has to turn the rockets off in stages. Two rockets are
automatically cut as he enters his measured mile, the other two around 2 seconds
later. At this point he is still moving too fast to fire a parachute, so he
deploys a "stinger" - a 50-metre metal cable that creates plenty of air drag as
it trails behind the car, while helping to keep the car in a straight line.
Three seconds later his speed should have fallen to around 700 mph and he can
deploy a chute. "When I hit 500 mph, it's time to lean hard on the carbon-fibre
brakes", he says. Those brakes will burn up and need replacing at the end of the
run.

To find a suitably long and flat track for the Bloodhound team, Green has been
to Turkey, the US, Australia and South Africa to check out salt pans and mud
flats. The two different surfaces each have pros and cons. Salt pans are
unforgivingly hard and slippery, but tend to be glassy flat and clear of debris.
Mud flats are more forgiving but they are often covered in rocks or stones. "We
will need to sweep an area 18 kilometres by 500 metres to clear enough space for
the tracks," says Green.

Mud flats pose another unexpected problem, says Ayers. The supersonic shock wave
throws up a spray of dust, altering the flow of air around the car and creating
"spray drag". McGlashan points out that the dust might present an additional
problem for the air-breathing jet engines. "With a rocket you don't have an air
intake, so you don't have that problem."

McGlashan is exploring a radical solution to the problem. "We're talking to some
people in Dubai who have suggested building a dedicated track for us." Whether
the money to do it is made available remains to be seen.

So who is going to be first to have a shot at the record? Green is by far the
most experienced when it comes to supersonic cars, and his team has the most
technical prowess. But while Bloodhound's design is progressing apace, they
don't expect to make their first attempt for at least another 18 months. North
American Eagle is up and running, and McGlashan has finished building the body
of Aussie Invader and is just awaiting delivery of the rockets. "I don't want to
blow smoke up anyone's bum, but with luck we might make an attempt in 12
months," says McGlashan.

Time = 95.8 seconds
Green pulls to a halt. He has covered nearly 10 miles in just over 90 seconds.
His average speed over the measured mile is 1013 mph. The record is there for
the taking. All he has to do is turn around and do it all over again.

Editorial: A spectacle to inspire engineers of the future

David Cohen is a feature editor at New Scientist

Source: NewScientist
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427356.000-the-race-to-build-a-1000-mph-\
car.html?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg20427356.000

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

--- End forwarded message ---

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8364926.stm

6 degree C=11.2 degrees F
http://www.temperatureworld.com/ctable1.htm

  BBC NEWS
Earth 'heading for 6C' of warming
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

Average global temperatures are on course to rise by up to 6C without urgent
action to curb CO2 emissions, the lead author of a new analysis says.

Emissions rose by 29% between 2000 and 2008, says the Global Carbon Project.

All of that growth came in developing countries, but a quarter of it came
through production of goods for consumption in industrialised nations.

The study comes against a backdrop of mixed messages on the chances of a new
deal at next month's UN climate summit.

According to lead scientist Corinne Le Quere, the new findings should add
urgency to the political discussions.
“ If we want to be staying below 2C then it's true to say we've only got a few
years to curb emissions ”
Richard Betts, UK Met Office

"Based on our knowledge of recent trends and the time it takes to change energy
infrastructure, I think that the Copenhagen conference next month is our last
chance to stabilise at 2C in a smooth and organised way," she told BBC News.

"If the agreement is too weak or if the commitments are not respected, it's not
two and a half or three degrees that we will get, it's five or six - that's the
path that we are on right now."

Professor Le Quere, who holds posts at the UK's University of East Anglia and
the British Antarctic Survey, is lead author on the study that is published in
the journal Nature Geoscience.

Rising sinks

The Global Carbon Project (GCP) is a network of scientists in academic
institutions around the world.

It uses just about every source of data available, from atmospheric observations
to business inventories, to build up a detailed picture of carbon dioxide
emissions, carbon sinks, and trends.

Before about 2002, global emissions grew by about 1% per year.

Then the rate increased to about 3% per year, the change coming mainly from a
ramping up in China's economic output, before falling slightly in 2008 as the
global economy dipped towards recession.

Endorsing similar projections from the International Energy Agency, the GCP
suggests emissions will fall by about 3% during 2009 before resuming their rise
as the recession ends.

Concentrations in the atmosphere also show an upward trend - as monitored at
stations such as Mauna Loa in Hawaii - but at a lower rate.

The team believes that carbon sinks - the oceans and plants - are probably
absorbing a slightly lower proportion of the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel
emissions than they were 50 years ago, although researchers admit that
uncertainty about the behaviour of sinks remains high.
“ In one sense, the developed world owns a large fraction of the developing
world's emissions ”
John Finnegan, CSIRO

Industrial emissions have climbed, but those from land use change have remains
constant.

As a consequence, the proportion of global emissions coming from deforestation
has fallen - about 12% now compared with 20% in the 1990s.

"One implication of this low fraction is that there is only limited scope for
rich nations to offset emissions by supporting avoidance of deforestation in
tropical countries like Indonesia and Brazil," observed Michael Rapauch from the
Australian government research agency CSIRO and co-chair of the GCP.

A mechanism for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation
(REDD) is due to be concluded at next month's summit.

Future plans

Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the UK Met Office and an author on the
chapter of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report
dealing with the effects of a changing atmosphere, suggested the report ought to
be of interest to policymakers in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit.

"It's an important step towards understanding what we're doing to the world's
carbon budget," he said.

However, he questioned the conclusion that society is necessarily on a
trajectory leading towards 6C.

The IPCC plots out a number of "scenarios" - visions of how society might
develop in terms of the size of the human population, economic growth and energy
use - each of which comes with projected ranges of temperature rise.

Although the GCP study suggests society is on one of the high emission (and
therefore high temperature rise) pathways, Dr Betts cautioned that it was too
soon to discern a long-term trend.

"Year-to-year changes in the global economy have quite an effect, and it's too
early to discern longer term, robust changes," he said.

"However, if we continue to let emissions rise without mitigation, there's a
strong chance we'll hit 4C and beyond.

"If we want to be staying below 2C then it's true to say we've only got a few
years to curb emissions."

These temperature rises - measured against a 19th Century baseline - would be
expected to occur around the end of this century or the middle of next century,
said Professor Le Quere.

Border controls

One of the most intriguing findings from the study is the difference between the
emissions produced directly by a given nation and the emissions generated
through production of the goods and services consumed by its citizens.

Emissions from within the UK's borders, for example, fell by 5% between 1992 and
2004, says the GCP analysis.

However, emissions from goods and services consumed in the UK rose by 12% over
the same period.

"The developed world has exported to the developing world the emissions it would
have produced had it met its growing appetite for consumer goods itself for the
last two decades," said CSIRO's John Finnegan.

"In one sense, the developed world owns a large fraction of the developing
world's emissions."

Another of the analyses shows that per-capita emissions across the globe are
rising.

On average, each human now consumes goods and services "worth" 1.3 tonnes of
carbon - up from 1.1 tonnes in 2000.

The GCP analysis suggests that constraining the global temperature rise to 2C
would entail reducing per-capita emissions to 0.3 tonnes by 2050.

Richard.Black-INTERNET@...
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8364926.stm

Published: 2009/11/17 20:20:06 GMT

© BBC MMIX

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http://www.dailyemerald.com/science-and-stouts-1.896823

Science and stouts
OMSI’s Science Pub provides perfect cocktail of learning and alcohol

By Anna Helland | News reporter



Updated: Thursday, November 12, 2009
091112 3

Ivar Vong

This plot of the Julia set was created using a program called FractalWorks.
Fractals exhibit the similar patterns on all scales. The algorithm computes a
set of line boundaries based on initial values then colors the fractal based on
a color palette.

Beer and science.

These two seemingly disconnected subjects come together every first Thursday of
the month across the state at an event that gives listeners a chance to eat,
drink and learn in a relaxed setting with leading researchers and scientists in
the state.

Amanda Thomas, coordinator of adult learning programs at the Oregon Museum of
Science and Industry, created Science Pub in August 2006 after realizing that
Oregon was a prime place for beer and science.

“Oregon is such a beer-friendly state,” Thomas said. “I also came to the
conclusion that adults really enjoy a space where children are not involved and
they can enjoy a good glass of wine or beer.”

Thomas said that Science Pub grew from its initial spot in Portland to two other
locations in Corvallis and Eugene.

“The idea started from Science Cafes on the East Coast, and it proved to be
ridiculously popular in Portland,” Thomas said. “Around June of 2007, Science
Pub grew to Eugene and it’s been going gangbusters since.”

Tonight’s event, featuring physics and psychology professor Richard Taylor,
explores the reason why fractals, repeating patterns in nature, seem to reduce
stress.

Taylor has spent his time studying images people see in the wispy edges of
clouds, in intricate branches of trees, or in the jagged peaks of mountain
ranges. He found that the images were more than a “haphazard mess devoid of any
pattern,” but a clue into human life.

“In this talk, I will explore some of the intriguing properties of fractals by
taking a visual journey through the diverse disciplines I have worked in,
including the collapsing ice shelves of the Antarctic and the deteriorating
brain structure of Alzheimer’s victims,” Taylor said. “Along the way, I will
describe how we can learn valuable lessons from nature by incorporating fractals
into man-made devices, such as cell phones, retinal implants and future
computers based on the brain’s fractal circuits.”

Taylor gave his talk, “Snowflakes, Stress, and Semiconductors: Do You See A
Pattern Here?” last January in Portland to a standing room only crowd, Thomas
said.

Brad Pitcher, who graduated from the University last spring with a bachelor’s
degree in computer and information science, has only been to two Science Pub
events in Eugene, but he plans to attend more for the intriguing content and the
accompanying beer.

“I love going because I love the information presented, and I love getting to
drink while I do it,” Pitcher said. “I think (the setting) makes science seem a
bit more friendly.”

Elizabeth Culp is a diehard Science Pub fan.

“I think I have been to about 10 Science Pub events over the past year or so. I
will be there (tonight), so make it 11,” Culp said.

The molecular and cell biologist and self-proclaimed “huge science nerd” said
she loves “learning about other scientific fields outside of my specialized
area. If it was possible, I would have stayed in school forever just to learn
more about all the different science disciplines.”

For Culp, a 2006 University graduate in biology, Science Pub makes her
appreciate science even more.

“It’s a lot easier to be open-minded and perceptive to new ideas when you’re
away from work and life, hanging out with friends and colleagues, having a beer
(while) listening to passionate articulate experts speak about their fields of
research,” Culp said. “Being in a relaxed, open environment allows not just
scientists like myself to attend and learn, but people from all occupations and
backgrounds to learn and ask questions about these exciting topics of research.”

Like Pitcher, Culp likes to sit and listen with her drink of choice: Ninkasi
Total Domination IPA.

“Sitting in a room of people who are all there for the express purpose of
voluntarily and excitedly learning new things is a much more conducive
environment than sitting in a cold lecture hall simply to fulfill a course
prerequisite,” Culp said.

ahelland@...

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49572/title/New_device_can_use_noise_\
to_store_one_bit

  New device can use noise to store one bit
Data storage system employs a resonance effect to do work
By Lisa Grossman
Web edition : Friday, November 13th, 2009
font_down font_up Text Size

Studying with the radio on may not be the best way to remember what you’ve read.
But scientists have now built a data storage device whose memory gets a boost
from noise.

The device can store one bit of information, such as a 0 or a 1, only when
surrounded by electronic noise, which is normally a problem in computer
circuits. The experiment was published November 4 on ArXiv.org.

“The whole thing works very well with some amount of noise,” says Diego Grosz of
the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires, a coauthor of the study. “If you
remove the noise, it doesn’t store the bit at all.”

Noise in the form of stray electrons and heat plagues computer circuits. As
transistors get smaller, noise becomes more of a problem, and the computer’s
error rate goes up.

To get around this problem, some engineers are trying to take advantage of a
phenomenon called stochastic resonance, in which a system uses noise to perform
better. The effect has long been observed in neural systems. Earlier studies
have suggested that systems using stochastic resonance could encode basic logic
operations, or even embed information in the noise itself.

“Noise is everywhere, you cannot avoid having noise,” Grosz says. “We thought,
‘How can you put that to good use?’ ”

Grosz and his colleagues built a system of two oscillators that can hold a
harmonic wave at a specific voltage representing a 1 in the logical language of
computers. Without noise, the wave disappeared quickly. But with noise, it
persisted at that voltage for a long time, even when the power source driving
the wave was turned off.

The right amount of noise helped hold the oscillators at their peak performance
level, similar to how pushing a swing at the right time makes it go higher and
higher.

The researchers found that there was an optimum amount of noise that made the
wave last longest at the right voltage. Any other voltage was considered an
error.

Though the system Grosz and colleagues built for this experiment is about 12
centimeters long (about the size of a reporter’s notebook), Grosz says in
principle it could be made small enough to be used in computers.

“You should be able to do this with very small transistors, the ones you have in
CPUs,” he says. “We didn’t do it, but it can be done.”

Laszlo Kish of Texas A&M University says that “it’s an interesting effect, but
it’s not for practical use.” He points out that even though the error rate in
the new device is lower, it doesn’t carry as much information as a noiseless
circuit would.

“It’s like how the food industry adds chemicals to make food keep for a long
time,” he says. There’s an optimum amount of chemicals for preserving food, just
like there’s an optimum amount of noise for stochastic resonance. “But fresh
food is still the best.”

Grosz isn’t certain his circuit is ready for prime time, either. “Is this thing
going to see the light of day? Is this going to be inside a computer at some
point? I surely hope so, but I don’t know,” he says. “We’ll keep trying.”

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49561/title/For_Hadza%2C_build_and_br\
awn_dont_matter_for_choosing_mates

  For Hadza, build and brawn don't matter for choosing mates
Study of hunter-gatherer community in Tanzania shows that, across human groups,
mating criteria vary
By Bruce Bower
Web edition : Friday, November 13th, 2009
font_down font_up Text Size
access
Enlargemagnify
SIZING UP MATESA new study suggests that Hadza men and women, shown above, don't
consider height, weight or strength in determining whom to marry, Among the
Hadza, researchers say, knowing a potential mate's lifetime health history may
prove far more informative.Idobi/ Wikimedia Commons

Unlike most Western guys and gals looking for love, Africa’s Hadza foragers pair
up without regard to each other’s size and strength, a new study finds. And that
stature-may-care approach underscores the often unappreciated variety of human
mating strategies, the researchers say.

Hadza marriages don’t tend to consist of individuals with similar heights,
weights, body mass indexes, body-fat percentages or grip strengths, say
behavioral ecologist Rebecca Sear of the London School of Economics and
anthropologist Frank Marlowe of Florida State University in Tallahassee. Neither
do Hadza couples feature a disproportionate percentage of husbands taller than
their wives, as has been documented in some Western nations, the researchers
report in the Oct. 23 Biology Letters.

Almost no Hadza individuals mention height or size when asked to explain what
makes for an attractive mate, Sear and Marlowe add.

People everywhere seek healthy, fertile marriage partners, Sear proposes. “But I
suspect there may not be a preference for one particular signal of health in
mates across every population,” she says.

Among the roughly 1,000 Hadza scraping out a living in rural Tanzania, knowledge
of a potential mate’s health history may render that person’s height and weight
irrelevant, the researchers suggest. Also, any health benefits of being big may
get nullified by the difficulty of maintaining a large body during periodic food
shortages endured by the Hadza.

Sear and Marlowe criticize evolutionary psychologists who have argued that
physical size influences mating decisions in all societies. That argument rests
largely on self-reports of Western college students and analyses of personal
advertisements in U.S. newspapers for dating partners, they say.

Other researchers suspect that cultural evolution over the past 50,000 years,
not genetic evolution during the Stone Age, has allowed human mating strategies
to become increasingly diverse (SN: 5/23/09, p. 5).

“Cross-cultural data are hard to come by, and this is a valuable contribution,”
comments psychologist Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia. But he argues that the Hadza findings do fit with evolutionary
psychologists’ proposal that genetically ingrained, universal mating strategies
get triggered in different ways depending on social and ecological conditions.

In large societies, where people know little about one another’s health history
and food is plentiful, height and weight may be reasonable initial indicators of
a healthy mate, he suggests.

But increasing familiarity with a romantic partner breeds a more discriminating
eye, remarks anthropologist Boguslaw Pawlowski of the Polish Academy of Sciences
in Wroclaw.

Sear and Marlowe analyzed evidence for mating based on size and strength in 185
to 236 Hadza couples, the number of couples depending on the particular measure.
A team led by Marlowe gathered this evidence from 2001 to 2006. Nearly all
couples who were married during that period participated in the study.

Among the Hadza, women marry at around age 18 and men at age 20. After a sexual
liaison, a couple will begin sleeping at the same hearth and is considered
married. Only a small minority of men have more than one wife. Divorce is
common, though, and most people get married many times.

In 8.2 percent of Hadza marriages, the wife was taller than the husband. That’s
no different than the frequency of female-taller marriages expected to occur by
chance, Sear says. In a 2006 investigation, she also found a random-chance level
of female-taller marriages in an African farming community.

In contrast, the proportion of female-taller marriages in England is
substantially lower than expected by chance, signaling a male-taller preference,
she says.

This video is explain about solid state chemistry.

Solid-state chemistry is the study of the synthesis, structure, and physical
properties of solid materials. It therefore has a strong overlap with
solid-state physics, mineralogy, crystallography, ceramics, metallurgy,
thermodynamics, materials science and electronics with a focus on the synthesis
of novel materials and their characterization.


http://scientific-resources.blogspot.com/2009/11/introduction-to-solid-state-che\
mistry.html

--- In physical_sciences@yahoogroups.com, "Robert Karl Stonjek" <stonjek@...>
wrote:

Scientists demonstrate 'universal' programmable quantum processor
November 15th, 2009 in Physics / Quantum Physics
NIST postdoctoral researcher David Hanneke at the laser table used to
demonstrate the first universal programmable processor for a potential quantum
computer. A pair of beryllium ions (charged atoms) that hold information in the
processor are trapped inside the cylinder at the lower right. A colorized image
of the two ions is displayed on the monitor in the background. Credit: J.
Burrus/NIST
Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have
demonstrated the first "universal" programmable quantum information processor
able to run any program allowed by quantum mechanics -- the rules governing the
submicroscopic world -- using two quantum bits (qubits) of information. The
processor could be a module in a future quantum computer, which theoretically
could solve some important problems that are intractable today.

The NIST demonstration, described in Nature Physics, marks the first time any
research group has moved beyond demonstrating individual tasks for a quantum
processor—as done previously at NIST and elsewhere—to perform programmable
processing, combining enough inputs and continuous steps to run any possible
two-qubit program.

The NIST team also analyzed the quantum processor with the methods used in
traditional computer science and electronics by creating a diagram of the
processing circuit and mathematically determining the 15 different starting
values and sequences of processing operations needed to run a given program.
"This is the first time anyone has demonstrated a programmable quantum processor
for more than one qubit," says NIST postdoctoral researcher David Hanneke, first
author of the paper. "It's a step toward the big goal of doing calculations with
lots and lots of qubits. The idea is you'd have lots of these processors, and
you'd link them together."

The NIST processor stores binary information (1s and 0s) in two beryllium ions
(electrically charged atoms), which are held in an electromagnetic trap and
manipulated with ultraviolet lasers. Two magnesium ions in the trap help cool
the beryllium ions.

NIST scientists can manipulate the states of each beryllium qubit, including
placing the ions in a "superposition" of both 1 and 0 values at the same time, a
significant potential advantage of information processing in the quantum world.
Scientists also can "entangle" the two qubits, a quantum phenomenon that links
the pair's properties even when the ions are physically separated.

With these capabilities, the NIST team performed 160 different processing
routines on the two qubits. Although there are an infinite number of possible
two-qubit programs, this set of 160 is large and diverse enough to fairly
represent them, Hanneke says, making the processor "universal." Key to the
experimental design was use of a random number generator to select the
particular routines that would be executed, so all possible programs had an
equal chance of selection. This approach was chosen to avoid bias in testing the
processor, in the event that some programs ran better or produced more accurate
outputs than others.

Ions are among several promising types of qubits for a quantum computer. If they
can be built, quantum computers have many possible applications such as breaking
today's most widely used encryption codes, such as those that protect electronic
financial transactions. In addition to its possible use as a module of a quantum
computer, the new processor might be used as a miniature simulator for
interactions in any quantum system that employs two energy levels, such as the
two-level ion qubit systems that represent energy levels as 0s and 1s. Large
quantum simulators could, for example, help explain the mystery of
high-temperature superconductivity, the transmission of electricity with zero
resistance at temperatures that may be practical for efficient storage and
distribution of electric power.

The new paper is the same NIST research group's third major paper published this
year based on data from experiments with trapped ions. They previously
demonstrated sustained quantum information processing and entanglement in a
mechanical system similar to those in the macroscopic everyday world. NIST
quantum computing research contributes to advances in national priority areas,
such as information security, as well as NIST mission work in precision
measurement and atomic clocks.

In the latest NIST experiments reported in Nature Physics, each program
consisted of 31 logic operations, 15 of which were varied in the programming
process. A logic operation is a rule specifying a particular manipulation of one
or two qubits. In traditional computers, these operations are written into
software code and performed by hardware.

The programs did not perform easily described mathematical calculations. Rather,
they involved various single-qubit "rotations" and two-qubit entanglements. As
an example of a rotation, if a qubit is envisioned as a dot on a sphere at the
north pole for 0, at the south pole for 1, or on the equator for a balanced
superposition of 0 and 1, the dot might be rotated to a different point on the
sphere, perhaps from the northern to the southern hemisphere, making it more of
a 1 than a 0.

Each program operated accurately an average of 79 percent of the time across 900
runs, each run lasting about 37 milliseconds. To evaluate the processor and the
quality of its operation, NIST scientists compared the measured outputs of the
programs to idealized, theoretical results. They also performed extra
measurements on 11 of the 160 programs, to more fully reconstruct how they ran
and double-check the outputs.

As noted in the paper, many more qubits and logic operations will be required to
solve large problems. A significant challenge for future research will be
reducing the errors that build up during successive operations. Program accuracy
rates will need to be boosted substantially, both to achieve fault-tolerant
computing and to reduce the computational "overhead" needed to correct errors
after they occur, according to the paper.

As a non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, NIST promotes
U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science,
standards and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our
quality of life.

More information: D. Hanneke, J.P. Home, J.D. Jost, J.M. Amini, D. Leibfried &
D.J. Wineland. 2009. Realization of a programmable two-qubit quantum processor.
Nature Physics. Posted online Nov. 15.

Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology (news : web)
http://www.physorg.com/news177515046.html

Comment:
Maybe one of these things will go to Russian mafia computer hackers, but who
else?  It looks like quantum processors are not about to revolutionise
anything...

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

--- End forwarded message ---

--- In physical_sciences@yahoogroups.com, "Robert Karl Stonjek" <stonjek@...>
wrote:


No entry. A scanning electron microscope image of the gold film, which didn't
let much light through its holes.
Credit: J. Braun et al.
A Physics Paradox: Holes That Block Light
By Karen Fox
ScienceNOW Daily News
13 November 2009

The way light moves, with its fixed speed and its ability to act like either a
wave or a particle, often leads to some of the most curious paradoxes of
physics. A new one has just been found: Make holes in a film of gold so thin
that it's already semitransparent, and less light gets through.
Because of its wave nature, light generally can't squeeze through a hole whose
width is smaller than the wavelength of the light. In 1998, however, researchers
discovered that light could zip through certain patterns of such holes punched
into thin metal plates. Physicists figured out that the light created waves in
the metal's electrons--called plasmons--that move across the material's surface
in much the same way that ripples move through water. The plasmons, which have
wavelengths much shorter than light, couple with each other across the tiny
holes and pull the light along for the ride. One possible application is to use
plasmons to build better light-based integrated circuits that would be as fast
as fiber optics but less bulky.

Toward this end, researchers from the University of Stuttgart in Germany laid
very thin films of gold onto pieces of glass and then used ion beams to etch the
film with holes arranged in a regular, square array. These holes were smaller
than the wavelength of light and, despite being so tiny, are just the kind of
openings that have been shown to let light through the thicker, opaque film used
in the 1998 experiment. But in the new experiment, the gold film was so
thin--only 20 nanometers--that light could already shine through it. And
surprisingly, less light went through the holey gold than through the original
semitransparent film.

Why? The researchers blame the semitransparent nature of the gold film, which
allows 40% of the light to flow directly through it, preventing it from stopping
at the surface to help form plasmons. Plasmons are formed by the kick of energy
they get from the incoming light, combined with how the electron waves of the
plasmons skitter around the hole geometry, so the light needs to be tuned to the
specific hole geometry to maximize plasmons. In this case, that leftover 60% of
the light simply doesn't combine with the geometry to create plasmons that can
cross through the gold holes, the team reports this week in Physical Review
Letters.

Physicist Martin P. van Exter of Leiden University in the Netherlands says that
interference between hole geometry and light transmission is expected, so the
results shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. However, he also points out
that gold always absorbs light in peculiar ways--indeed, this is what leads to
its golden color instead of most metals' more typical silver--and it's possible
that this contributed to the results.

Team member Bruno Gompf says that the next step is to see whether other hole
patterns--hexagonal, rectangular, aperiodic--show the same effect. Perhaps a
particular pattern could serve as a filter to block certain wavelengths of light
in those future plasmonic integrated chips, he says.

Source: Science
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1113/3?etoc

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

--- End forwarded message ---

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8359744.stm

'Significant' water found on Moon
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

LCROSS (Nasa ARC)
A camera on the probe shows the ejecta plume about 20 seconds after impact

Nasa's experiment last month to find water on the Moon was a major success, US
scientists have announced.

The space agency smashed a rocket and a probe into a large crater at the lunar
south pole, hoping to kick up ice.

Scientists who have studied the data now say instruments trained on the impact
plume saw copious quantities of water-ice and water vapour.

One researcher described this as the equivalent of "a dozen two-gallon buckets"
of water.

"We didn't just find a little bit; we found a significant amount," said Anthony
Colaprete, chief scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing
Satellite (LCROSS) mission.

No doubt

October's experiment involved driving a 2,200kg Centaur rocket stage into the
100km-wide Cabeus Crater, a permanently shadowed depression at the Moon's far
south.

At the time, scientists were hoping for a big plume of debris some 10km high
which could be seen by Earth telescopes.
LCROSS (Nasa)
The following probe was designed to analyse the debris plume

The actual debris cloud was much smaller, about 1.6km high, but sufficiently
large to betray the evidence researchers were seeking.

The near-infrared spectrometer on the LCROSS probe that followed the rocket into
the crater detected water-ice and water vapour. The ultraviolet-visible
spectrometer provided additional confirmation by identifying the hydroxyl (OH)
molecule, which arises when water is broken apart in sunlight.

"We were able to match the spectra from LCROSS data only when we inserted the
spectra for water," Dr Colaprete said.

"No other reasonable combination of other compounds that we tried matched the
observations. The possibility of contamination from the Centaur also was ruled
out."

Useful resource

The total quantity of H2O spied by the instruments was more than 100kg. It came
out of a 20m-30m wide hole dug up by the impacting Centaur rocket.

The LCROSS scientists stressed that the results presented on Friday were
preliminary findings only, and further analysis could raise the final assessment
of the amount of water in Cabeus.

Peter Schultz, from Brown University and a co-investigator on the LCROSS
mission, said: "What's really exciting is we've only hit one spot. It's kind of
like when you're drilling for oil. Once you find it in one place, there's a
greater chance you'll find more nearby."

The regular surface of the Moon as seen from Earth is drier than any desert on
our planet. But researchers have long speculated that some permanently shadowed
places might harbour considerable stores of water, perhaps delivered by
impacting comets billions of years ago.

If future investigations find the quantities to be particularly large, this
water could become a useful resource for any astronauts who might base
themselves at the lunar poles.

"It can be used for drinking water," said Mike Wargo, Nasa's chief lunar
scientist for exploration systems.

"You can break it down and have breathable air for crews. But also, if you have
significant quantities of this stuff, you have the constituents of one of the
most potent rocket fuels - oxygen and hydrogen."

Centaur crater (Nasa)
The Centaur dug out a hole 20m-30m wide

In September, data from three spacecraft, including India's Chandrayaan probe,
showed that very fine films of H2O coat the particles that make up lunar soil.

Scientists behind that finding speculated that this water might migrate to the
even cooler poles, much as water vapour on Earth will condense on a cold
surface.

This cold sink effect could be supplementing any water delivered by comets, they
said.

If cometary material did reside in places like Cabeus Crater it would be
fascinating to examine it, commented Greg Delory, from the University of
California, Berkeley.

"The surfaces in these permanently shadowed areas, such as the one LCROSS
impacted, are very cold," he told reporters.

"That means that they tend to trap and keep things that encounter them -
compounds, atoms and so forth. And so they act as record keepers over periods as
long as several billion years. They have a story to tell about the history of
the Moon and the Solar System."

LCROSS was launched by Nasa on 18 June as part of a double mission which
included the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

The latter, which continues to circle the Moon, measured a temperature of minus
230 Celsius at the base of Cabeus Crater.

--- In physical_sciences@yahoogroups.com, "Robert Karl Stonjek" <stonjek@...>
wrote:

In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for
   a.. 11 November 2009 by Anil Ananthaswamy
   b.. Magazine issue 2734. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
   c.. For similar stories, visit the Cosmology , Quantum World and The Large
Hadron Collider Topic Guides

This image shows the decay of a neutralino into a Z particle and a lightest
supersymmetric particle (LSP). The Z decays into two muons. This experiment was
from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at CERN (Image: Maria Spiropulu; Stephan
Wynhoff)


This simulation depicts the decay of a Higgs particle following a collision of
two protons in the CMS experiment (Image: CMS)
AS DAMP squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony
- not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh -
the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's mightiest particle smasher, fired
up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic
leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.

Now for take two. Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start
racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the LHC's home on the
outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is worried. It's not that he thinks the LHC will
create a black hole that will engulf the planet, or even that the restart will
end in a technical debacle like last year's. No: he's actually worried that the
LHC will find what some call the "God particle", the popular and embarrassingly
grandiose moniker for the hitherto undetected Higgs boson.

"I'm terrified," he says. "Discovering just the Higgs would really be a crisis."

Why so? Evidence for the Higgs would be the capstone of an edifice that particle
physicists have been building for half a century - the phenomenally successful
theory known simply as the standard model. It describes all known particles, as
well as three of the four forces that act on them: electromagnetism and the weak
and strong nuclear forces.

It is also manifestly incomplete. We know from what the theory doesn't explain
that it must be just part of something much bigger. So if the LHC finds the
Higgs and nothing but the Higgs, the standard model will be sewn up. But then
particle physics will be at a dead end, with no clues where to turn next.

Hence Weinberg's fears. However, if the theorists are right, before it ever
finds the Higgs, the LHC will see the first outline of something far bigger: the
grand, overarching theory known as supersymmetry. SUSY, as it is endearingly
called, is a daring theory that doubles the number of particles needed to
explain the world. And it could be just what particle physicists need to set
them on the path to fresh enlightenment.

So what's so wrong with the standard model? First off, there are some obvious
sins of omission. It has nothing whatsoever to say about the fourth fundamental
force of nature, gravity, and it is also silent on the nature of dark matter.
Dark matter is no trivial matter: if our interpretation of certain astronomical
observations is correct, the stuff outweighs conventional matter in the cosmos
by more than 4 to 1.

Ironically enough, though, the real trouble begins with the Higgs. The Higgs
came about to solve a truly massive problem: the fact that the basic building
blocks of ordinary matter (things such as electrons and quarks, collectively
known as fermions) and the particles that carry forces (collectively called
bosons) all have a property we call mass. Theories could see no rhyme or reason
in particles' masses and could not predict them; they had to be measured in
experiments and added into the theory by hand.

These "free parameters" were embarrassing loose threads in the theories that
were being woven together to form what eventually became the standard model. In
1964, Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and François Englert and
Robert Brout of the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in Belgium independently
hit upon a way to tie them up.

That mechanism was an unseen quantum field that suffuses the entire cosmos.
Later dubbed the Higgs field, it imparts mass to all particles. The mass an
elementary particle such as an electron or quark acquires depends on the
strength of its interactions with the Higgs field, whose "quanta" are Higgs
bosons.

Fields like this are key to the standard model as they describe how the
electromagnetic and the weak and strong nuclear forces act on particles through
the exchange of various bosons - the W and Z particles, gluons and photons. But
the Higgs theory, though elegant, comes with a nasty sting in its tail: what is
the mass of the Higgs itself? It should consist of a core mass plus
contributions from its interactions with all the other elementary particles.
When you tot up those contributions, the Higgs mass balloons out of control.

The experimental clues we already have suggest that the Higgs's mass should lie
somewhere between 114 and 180 gigaelectronvolts - between 120 and 190 times the
mass of a proton or neutron, and easily the sort of energy the LHC can reach.
Theory, however, comes up with values 17 or 18 orders of magnitude greater - a
catastrophic discrepancy dubbed "the hierarchy problem". The only way to get rid
of it in the standard model is to fine-tune certain parameters with an accuracy
of 1 part in 1034, something that physicists find unnatural and abhorrent.

Three into one
The hierarchy problem is not the only defect in the standard model. There is
also the problem of how to reunite all the forces. In today's universe, the
three forces dealt with by the standard model have very different strengths and
ranges. At a subatomic level, the strong force is the strongest, the weak the
weakest and the electromagnetic force somewhere in between.

Towards the end of the 1960s, though, Weinberg, then at Harvard University,
showed with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow that this hadn't always been the
case. At the kind of high energies prevalent in the early universe, the weak and
electromagnetic forces have one and the same strength; in fact they unify into
one force. The expectation was that if you extrapolated back far enough towards
the big bang, the strong force would also succumb, and be unified with the
electromagnetic and weak force in one single super-force (see graph below).



In 1974 Weinberg and his colleagues Helen Quinn and Howard Georgi showed that
the standard model could indeed make that happen - but only approximately.
Hailed initially as a great success, this not-so-exact reunification soon began
to bug physicists working on "grand unified theories" of nature's interactions.

It was around this time that supersymmetry made its appearance, debuting in the
work of Soviet physicists Yuri Golfand and Evgeny Likhtman that never quite made
it to the west. It was left to Julius Wess of Karlsruhe University in Germany
and Bruno Zumino of the University of California, Berkeley, to bring its radical
prescriptions to wider attention a few years later.

Wess and Zumino were trying to apply physicists' favourite simplifying
principle, symmetry, to the zoo of subatomic particles. Their aim was to show
that the division of the particle domain into fermions and bosons is the result
of a lost symmetry that existed in the early universe.

According to supersymmetry, each fermion is paired with a more massive
supersymmetric boson, and each boson with a fermionic super-sibling. For
example, the electron has the selectron (a boson) as its supersymmetric partner,
while the photon is partnered with the photino (a fermion). In essence, the
particles we know now are merely the runts of a litter double the size (see
diagram).



The key to the theory is that in the high-energy soup of the early universe,
particles and their super-partners were indistinguishable. Each pair co-existed
as single massless entities. As the universe expanded and cooled, though, this
supersymmetry broke down. Partners and super-partners went their separate ways,
becoming individual particles with a distinctive mass all their own.

Supersymmetry was a bold idea, but one with seemingly little to commend it other
than its appeal to the symmetry fetishists. Until, that is, you apply it to the
hierarchy problem. It turned out that supersymmetry could tame all the pesky
contributions from the Higgs's interactions with elementary particles, the ones
that cause its mass to run out of control. They are simply cancelled out by
contributions from their supersymmetric partners. "Supersymmetry makes the
cancellation very natural," says Nathan Seiberg of Princeton University.

That wasn't all. In 1981 Georgi, together with Savas Dimopoulos of Stanford
University, redid the force reunification calculations that he had done with
Weinberg and Quinn, but with supersymmetry added to the mix. They found that the
curves representing the strengths of all three forces could be made to come
together with stunning accuracy in the early universe. "If you have two curves,
it's not surprising that they intersect somewhere," says Weinberg. "But if you
have three curves that intersect at the same point, then that's not trivial."

This second strike for supersymmetry was enough to convert many physicists into
true believers. But it was when they began studying some of the questions raised
by the new theory that things became really interesting.

One pressing question concerned the present-day whereabouts of supersymmetric
particles. Electrons, photons and the like are all around us, but of selectrons
and photinos there is no sign, either in nature or in any high-energy
accelerator experiments so far. If such particles exist, they must be extremely
massive indeed, requiring huge amounts of energy to fabricate.

Such huge particles would long since have decayed into a residue of the
lightest, stable supersymmetric particles, dubbed neutralinos. Still massive,
the neutralino has no electric charge and interacts with normal matter extremely
timorously by means of the weak nuclear force. No surprise then that it is has
eluded detection so far.

When physicists calculated exactly how much of the neutralino residue there
should be, they were taken aback. It was a huge amount - far more than all the
normal matter in the universe.

Beginning to sound familiar? Yes, indeed: it seemed that neutralinos fulfilled
all the requirements for the dark matter that astronomical observations persuade
us must dominate the cosmos. A third strike for supersymmetry.

Each of the three questions that supersymmetry purports to solve - the hierarchy
problem, the reunification problem and the dark-matter problem - might have its
own unique answer. But physicists are always inclined to favour an all-purpose
theory if they can find one. "It's really reassuring that there is one idea that
solves these three logically independent things," says Seiberg.

Supersymmetry solves problems with the standard model, helps to unify nature's
forces and explains the origin of dark matter
Supersymmetry's scope does not end there. As Seiberg and his Princeton colleague
Edward Witten have shown, the theory can also explain why quarks are never seen
on their own, but are always corralled together by the strong force into larger
particles such as protons and neutrons. In the standard model, there is no
mathematical indication why that should be; with supersymmetry, it drops out of
the equations naturally. Similarly, mathematics derived from supersymmetry can
tell you how many ways can you fold a four-dimensional surface, an otherwise
intractable problem in topology.

All this seems to point to some fundamental truth locked up within the theory.
"When something has applications beyond those that you designed it for, then you
say, 'well this looks deep'," says Seiberg. "The beauty of supersymmetry is
really overwhelming."

Sadly, neither mathematical beauty nor promise are enough on their own. You also
need experimental evidence. "It is embarrassing," says Michael Dine of the
University of California, Santa Cruz. "It is a lot of paper expended on
something that is holding on by these threads."

Circumstantial evidence for supersymmetry might be found in various experiments
designed to find and characterise dark matter in cosmic rays passing through
Earth. These include the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment inside the
Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota and the Xenon experiment beneath the Gran
Sasso mountain in central Italy. Space probes like NASA's Fermi satellite are
also scouring the Milky Way for the telltale signs expected to be produced when
two neutralinos meet and annihilate.

The best proof would come, however, if we could produce neutralinos directly
through collisions in an accelerator. The trouble is that we are not entirely
sure how muscular that accelerator would need to be. The mass of the
super-partners depends on precisely when supersymmetry broke apart as the
universe cooled and the standard particles and their super-partners parted
company. Various versions of the theory have not come up with a consistent
timing. Some variants even suggest that certain super-partners are light enough
to have already turned up in accelerators such as the Large Electron-Positron
collider - the LHC's predecessor at CERN - or the Tevatron collider in Batavia,
Illinois. Yet neither accelerator found anything.

The reason physicists are so excited about the LHC, though, is that the kind of
supersymmetry that best solves the hierarchy problem will become visible at the
higher energies the LHC will explore. Similarly, if neutralinos have the right
mass to make up dark matter, they should be produced in great numbers at the
LHC.

Since the accident during the accelerator's commissioning last year, CERN has
adopted a softly-softly approach to the LHC's restart. For the first year it
will smash together two beams of protons with a total energy of 7
teraelectronvolts (TeV), half its design energy. Even that is quite a step up
from the 1.96 TeV that the Tevatron, the previous record holder, could manage.
"If the heaviest supersymmetric particles weigh less than a teraelectronvolt,
then they could be produced quite copiously in the early stages of LHC's
running," says CERN theorist John Ellis.

If that is so, events after the accelerator is fired up again could take a
paradoxical turn. The protons that the LHC smashes together are composite
particles made up of quarks and gluons, and produce extremely messy debris. It
could take rather a long time to dig the Higgs out of the rubble, says Ellis.

Any supersymmetric particles, on the other hand, will decay in as little as
10-16seconds into a slew of secondary particles, culminating in a cascade of
neutralinos. Because neutralinos barely interact with other particles, they will
evade the LHC's detectors. Paradoxically, this may make them relatively easy to
find as the energy and momentum they carry will appear to be missing. "This, in
principle, is something quite distinctive," says Ellis.

So if evidence for supersymmetry does exist in the form most theorists expect,
it could be discovered well before the Higgs particle, whose problems SUSY
purports to solve. Any sighting of something that looks like a neutralino would
be very big news indeed. At the very least it would be the best sighting yet of
a dark-matter particle. Even better, it would tell us that nature is
fundamentally supersymmetric.

There is a palpable sense of excitement about what the LHC might find in the
coming years. "I'll be delighted if it is supersymmetry," says Seiberg. "But
I'll also be delighted if it is something else. We need more clues from nature.
The LHC will give us these clues."

Blood brothers?
String theory and supersymmetry are two as-yet unproved theories about the
make-up of the universe. But they are not necessarily related.

It is true that most popular variants of string theory take a supersymmetric
universe as their starting point. String theorists, who have taken considerable
flak for advocating a theory that has consistently struggled to make testable
predictions, will breathe a huge sigh of relief if supersymmetry is found.

That might be premature: the universe could still be supersymmetric without
string theory being correct. Conversely, at the kind of energies probed by the
LHC, it is not clear that supersymmetry is a precondition for string theory. "It
is easier to understand string theory if there is supersymmetry at the LHC,"
says Edward Witten, a theorist at Princeton University, "but it is not clear
that it is a logical requirement."

If supersymmetry does smooth the way for string theory, however, that could be a
decisive step towards a theory that solves the greatest unsolved problem of
physics: why gravity seems so different to all the rest of the forces in nature.
If so, supersymmetry really could have all the answers.

Source: NewScientist
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427341.200-in-susy-we-trust-what-the-lhc\
-is-really-looking-for.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

--- End forwarded message ---

--- In physical_sciences@yahoogroups.com, "Robert Karl Stonjek" <stonjek@...>
wrote:

Nature 462, 170-171 (12 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/462170a; Published online
11 November 2009
Condensed-matter physics: Dirac electrons broken to pieces
Alberto F. Morpurgo

Abstract
Graphene continues to surprise physicists with its remarkable electronic
properties. Experiments now show that electrons in the material can team up to
behave as if they are only fragments of themselves.

The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) is a fascinating form of collective
electronic behaviour. It arises when electrons in a strong magnetic field —
applied at a right angle to the plane in which the electrons flow — act together
to behave like particles with a charge that is a fraction of an electron's
charge.

Source: Nature
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7270/full/462170a.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

--- End forwarded message ---

I spent a lot of time trying to get simple infinite sums like:
Sum[(1+k)^n*x^k,{k,0,Infinity}]/(x*(1-x)^n+1))
Eulerian numbers
or
Sum[(1+2*k)^n*x^k,{k,0,Infinity}]/((1-x)^n+1))
MacMahon numbers
but failed for the General Pascal Recursion level {1,8,1}.
Here I went backwards: knowing the polynomials
I solved for the z transform infinite sums.
The {1,8,1} and {1,10,1} levels are very similar
but not simple.
This method is important  since with this z transform
you can get infinite sums for other well known triangular sequences as well.
There seem to be some puzzling results for Stirling S1 and S2 numbers
and Narayana numbers, too.


%I A167786
%S A167786
0,3,3,6,9,45,45,27,234,540,360,27,315,1305,1980,990,81,1026,6750,18360,
%T A167786 20790,8316,243,3807,26379,115830,234630,212058,70686,243,7938,37800,
%U A167786 177660,582120,939708,706860,201960,729,26001,280827,873180,3087315
%N A167786 Triangle of z Transform coefficients from General Pascal [1,8,1}
A142458 polynomials multiplied by factor 3^Floor[(2*k - 1)/3].
%C A167786 Row sums are:
%C A167786 {0, 3, 9, 99, 1161, 4617, 55323, 663633, 2654289, 31850739,
382206681...}
%C A167786 These are a sequence of Infinite sums that give A142458.
%C A167786 Even terms are factored by (1+2*n) which is the MacMahon (1+2*n)^k
,but the polynomials seem fundamental
%C A167786 other than that.
%C A167786 A060187 MacMahon gives A013609 Triangle of coefficients in expansion
of (1 + 2x)^n.
%C A167786 I looked for a simple infinite sum for the {1,8,1} and failed.
%C A167786 This reasoning comes from finding that the general z Transform
polynomials are
%C A167786 related to the Eulerian: in fact this type of Eulerian polynomials
A008292 gives (1+n)^k binomial.
%C A167786 The polynomials given here form a set of infinite sum sequences.
%F A167786 m=3;
%F A167786 A(n,k)= (m*n - m*k + 1)A(n - 1, k - 1} + (m*k - (m - 1))A(n - 1, k)
%F A167786 q(n,k)=InverseZTransform[x*Sum[a[[n, k]]*x^(k - 1), {k, 1, n}]/(x -
1)^n, x, k]
%F A167786 out_n,k=3^Floor[(2*k - 1)/3]*coefficients(q[n,k])
%e A167786 {0},
%e A167786 {3},
%e A167786 {3, 6},
%e A167786 {9, 45, 45},
%e A167786 {27, 234, 540, 360},
%e A167786 {27, 315, 1305, 1980, 990},
%e A167786 {81, 1026, 6750, 18360, 20790, 8316},
%e A167786 {243, 3807, 26379, 115830, 234630, 212058, 70686},
%e A167786 {243, 7938, 37800, 177660, 582120, 939708, 706860, 201960},
%e A167786 {729, 26001, 280827, 873180, 3087315, 8058204, 10814958, 6967620,
1741905},
%e A167786 {2187, -308610, 1076490, 7334820, 17120565, 48411594, 104968710,
120570120, 67934295, 15096510}
%t A167786 m = 3 A[n_, 1] := 1 A[n_, n_] := 1
%t A167786 A[n_, k_] := (m*n - m*k + 1)A[n - 1, k - 1] + (m*k - (m - 1))A[n - 1,
k]
%t A167786 a = Table[A[n, k], {n, 10}, {k, n}]
%t A167786 p[x_, n_] = x*Sum[a[[n, k]]*x^(k - 1), {k, 1, n}]/(x - 1)
%t A167786 b = Table[p[x, n], {n, 0, 10}]
%t A167786 Table[3^Floor[(2*k - 1)/3]*CoefficientList[ExpandAll[
InverseZTransform[b[[k]], x, n] /. UnitStep[-1 + n] -> 1], n], {k, 1,
Length[b]}]
%Y A167786 A142458,A060187, A008292
%K A167786 nonn
%O A167786 0,2
%A A167786 Roger L. Bagula (rlbagulatftn(AT)yahoo.com), Nov 12 2009




%I A167787
%S A167787 0,3,3,6,9,54,54,27,324,810,540,27,432,2322,3780,1890,81,810,12150,
%T A167787
42120,51030,20412,243,3402,27216,272160,697410,673596,224532,243,34020,
%U A167787
40824,244944,1786050,3633336,2918916,833976,729,104976,1583388,1224720
%N A167787 Triangle of z Transform coefficients from General Pascal [1,10,1}
A142459 polynomials multiplied by factor 3^Floor[(2*k - 1)/3].
%C A167787 Row sums are:
%C A167787 {0, 3, 9, 117, 1701, 8451, 126603, 1898559, 9492309, 142383177,
2135743281...}
%F A167787 m=4;
%F A167787 A(n,k)= (m*n - m*k + 1)A(n - 1, k - 1} + (m*k - (m - 1))A(n - 1, k)
%F A167787 q(n,k)=InverseZTransform[x*Sum[a[[n, k]]*x^(k - 1), {k, 1, n}]/(x -
1)^n, x, k]
%F A167787 out_n,k=3^Floor[(2*k - 1)/3]*coefficients(q[n,k])
%e A167787 {0},
%e A167787 {3},
%e A167787 {3, 6},
%e A167787 {9, 54, 54},
%e A167787 {27, 324, 810, 540},
%e A167787 {27, 432, 2322, 3780, 1890},
%e A167787 {81, 810, 12150, 42120, 51030, 20412},
%e A167787 {243, 3402, 27216, 272160, 697410, 673596, 224532},
%e A167787 {243, 34020, 40824, 244944, 1786050, 3633336, 2918916, 833976},
%e A167787 {729, 104976, 1583388, 1224720, 5664330, 32332608, 54561276,
37528920, 9382230},
%e A167787 {2187, -5734314, 6009876, 53905176, 31689630, 117756828, 551675124,
795613104, 478493730, 106331940}
%t A167787 m = 4; A[n_, 1] := 1; A[n_, n_] := 1
%t A167787 A[n_, k_] := (m*n - m*k + 1)A[n - 1, k - 1] + (m*k - (m - 1))A[n - 1,
k]
%t A167787 a = Table[A[n, k], {n, 10}, {k, n}]
%t A167787 p[x_, n_] = x*Sum[a[[n, k]]*x^(k - 1), {k, 1, n}]/(x - 1)
%t A167787 b = Table[p[x, n], {n, 0, 10}]
%t A167787 Table[3^Floor[(2*k - 1)/3]*CoefficientList[ExpandAll[
InverseZTransform[b[[k]], x, n] /. UnitStep[-1 + n] -> 1], n], {k, 1,
Length[b]}]
%Y A167787 A142458,A060187, A008292,A142459
%K A167787 nonn
%O A167787 0,2
%A A167787 Roger L. Bagula (rlbagulatftn(AT)yahoo.com), Nov 12 2009



--
Respectfully, Roger L. Bagula
11759 Waterhill Road, Lakeside,Ca 92040-2905,tel: 619-5610814 :
http://www.google.com/profiles/Roger.Bagula
alternative email: roger.bagula@...

http://dictionary.sensagent.com/list+of+fractals+by+hausdorff+dimension/en-en/

List of fractals by Hausdorff dimension
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A fractal is a geometric object whose Hausdorff dimension (δ) strictly exceeds
its topological dimension. Presented here is a list of fractals ordered by
increasing Hausdorff dimension, with the purpose of visualizing what it means
for a fractal to have a low or a high dimension.
Contents

     * 1 Deterministic fractals
     * 2 Random and natural fractals
     * 3 References
     * 4 See also
           o 4.1 Bibliography
           o 4.2 Internal links
           o 4.3 External links

Deterministic fractals
δ
(exact value)  δ
(value)  Name  Illustration  Remarks
	 0.4498?  Logistic equation bifurcations 	 In the bifurcation diagram, when
approaching the chaotic zone, a succession of period doubling appears, in a
geometric progression tending to 1/δ. (δ=Feigenbaum constant=4.6692).
	 0.6309  Cantor set 	 Built by removing the central third at each iteration.
Nowhere dense and not a countable set
	 1  Smith-Volterra-Cantor set 	 Built by removing a central interval of length
1/2^{2n} of each remaining interval at the nth iteration. Nowhere dense but has
a Lebesgue measure of ½.
	 1.0686  Gosper island
	 1.26  Hénon map 	 The canonical Hénon map (with parameters a = 1.4 and b =
0.3) has Hausdorff dimension δ = 1.261 ± 0.003. Different parameters yield
different δ values.
	 1.2619  Von Koch curve 	 3 von Koch curves form the Koch snowflake or the
anti-snowflake.
	 1.2619  boundary of Terdragon curve 	 L-system: same as dragon curve with
angle=30°. The Fudgeflake is based on 3 initial segments placed in a triangle.
	 1.2619  2D Cantor dust 	 Cantor set in 2 dimensions.
	 1.3057  Apollonian gasket
	 1.4649  Box fractal 	 Built by exchanging iteratively each square by a cross of
5 squares.
	 1.4649  Quadratic von Koch curve (type 1) 	 One can recognize the pattern of
the box fractal (above).
	 1.5000  Quadratic von Koch curve (type 2) 	 Also called "Minkowski sausage".
	 1.5236  Dragon curve boundary 	 Cf Chang & Zhang[1].
	 1.5850  3-branches tree 	 Each branch carries 3 branches. (here 90° and 60°).
The fractal dimension of the entire tree is the fractal dimension of the
terminal branches. NB: the 2-branches tree has a fractal dimension of only 1.
	 1.5850  Sierpinski triangle 	 It’s also the triangle of Pascal modulo 2.
	 1.5850  Arrowhead Sierpinski curve 	 Same limit as the triangle (above) but
built with a one-dimensional curve.
	 1.6309  Pascal triangle modulo 3 	 For a triangle modulo k, if k is prime, the
fractal dimension is (Cf Stephen Wolfram [2])
	 1.6826  Pascal triangle modulo 5 	 For a triangle modulo k, if k is prime, the
fractal dimension is (Cf Stephen Wolfram [3])
	 1.7712  Hexaflake 	 Built by exchanging iterativelly each hexagon by a flake of
7 hexagons. Its boundary is the von Koch flake and contains an infinity of Koch
snowflakes (black or white).
	 1.7848  Von Koch curve 85°, Cesaro fractal 	 Generalizing the von Koch curve
with an angle a chosen between 0 and 90°. The fractal dimension is then . The
Cesaro fractal is based on this pattern.
	 1.8617  Pentaflake 	 Built by exchanging iteratively each pentagon by a flake
of 6 pentagons. φ = golden number =
	 1.8928  Sierpinski carpet
	 1.8928  3D Cantor dust 	 Cantor set in 3 dimensions.
Estimated  1.9340  Boundary of the Lévy C curve 	 Estimated by Duvall and
Keesling (1999). The curve itself has a fractal dimension of 2.
	 1.974  Penrose tiling 	 See Ramachandrarao, Sinha & Sanyal[4]
	 2  Mandelbrot set 	 Any plane object containing a disk has Hausdorff dimension
δ = 2. However, note that the boundary of the Mandelbrot set also has Hausdorff
dimension δ = 2.
	 2  Sierpiński curve 	 Every Peano curve filling the plane has a Hausdorff
dimension of 2.
	 2  Hilbert curve 	 Built in a similar way: the Moore curve
	 2  Peano curve 	 And a family of curves built in a similar way, such as the
Wunderlich curves.
	 2  Lebesgue curve or z-order curve 	 Unlike the previous ones this
space-filling curve is differentiable almost everywhere. Another type can be
defined in 2D. Like the Hilbert Curve it can be extended in 3D[5].
	 2  Dragon curve 	 And its boundary has a fractal dimension of 1.5236.
	 2  Terdragon curve 	 L-System : F-> F+F-F. angle=120°.
	 2  T-Square
	 2  Gosper curve 	 Its boundary is the Gosper island.
	 2  Sierpinski tetrahedron 	 Each tetrahedron is replaced by 4 tetrahedrons.
	 2  H-fractal 	 Also the « Mandelbrot tree » which has a similar pattern.
	 2  2D greek cross fractal 	 Each segment is replaced by a cross formed by 4
segments.
	 2.06  Lorenz attractor 	 For precise values of parameters.
	 2.3296  Dodecahedron fractal 	 Each dodecahedron is replaced by 20
dodecahedrons.
	 2.3347  3D quadratic Koch surface (type 1) 	 Extension in 3D of the quadratic
Koch curve (type 1). The illustration shows the second iteration.
	 2.4739  Apollonian sphere packing 	 The interstice left by the apollolian
spheres. Apollonian gasket in 3D. Dimension calculated by M. Borkovec, W. De
Paris, and R. Peikert [6].
	 2.50  3D quadratic Koch surface (type 2) 	 Extension in 3D of the quadratic
Koch curve (type 2). The illustration shows the first iteration.
	 2.5237  Cantor hypercube 	 Cantor set in 4 dimensions. Generalization : in a
space of dimension n, the Cantor set has a Hausdorff dimension of
	 2.5819  Icosahedron fractal 	 Each icosahedron is replaced by 12 icosahedrons.
	 2.5849  3D greek cross fractal 	 Each segment is replaced by a cross formed by
6 segments.
	 2.5849  Octahedron fractal 	 Each octahedron is replaced by 6 octahedrons.
	 2.7268  Menger sponge 	 And its surface has a fractal dimension of .
	 3  3D Hilbert curve 	 A Hilbert curve extended to 3 dimensions.
	 3  3D Lebesgue curve 	 A Lebesgue curve extended to 3 dimensions.

Random and natural fractals
δ
(exact value)  δ
(value)  Name  Illustration  Remarks
Measured  1.24  Coastline of Great Britain
	 1.33  Boundary of Brownian motion 	 (Cf Wendelin Werner)[7].
	 1.33  2D Polymer 	 Similar to the brownian motion in 2D with non
self-intersection. (Cf Sapoval).
	 1.33  Percolation front in 2D, Corrosion front in 2D 	 Fractal dimension of the
percolation-by-invasion front, at the percolation threshold (59.3%). It’s also
the fractal dimension of a stopped corrosion front (Cf Sapoval).
	 1.40  Clusters of clusters 2D 	 When limited by diffusion, clusters combine
progressively to a unique cluster of dimension 1.4. (Cf Sapoval)
Measured  1.52  Coastline of Norway
Measured  1.55  Random walk with no self-intersection 	 Self-avoiding random
walk in a square lattice, with a « go-back » routine for avoiding dead ends.
	 1.66  3D Polymer 	 Similar to the brownian motion in a cubic lattice, but
without self-intersection (Cf Sapoval).
	 1.70  2D DLA Cluster 	 In 2 dimensions, clusters formed by diffusion-limited
aggregation, have a fractal dimension of around 1.70 (Cf Sapoval).
	 1.8958  2D Percolation cluster 	 Under the percolation threshold (59.3%) the
percolation-by-invasion cluster has a fractal dimension of 91/48 (Cf Sapoval).
Beyond that threshold, le cluster is infinite and 91/48 becomes the fractal
dimension of the « clearings ».
	 2  Brownian motion 	 Or random walk. The Hausdorff dimensions equals 2 in 2D,
in 3D and in all greater dimensions (K.Falconer "The geometry of fractal sets").
	 2.33  Cauliflower 	 Every branch carries around 13 branches 3 times smaller.
	 2.5  Balls of crumpled paper 	 When crumpling sheets of different sizes but
made of the same type of paper and with the same aspect ratio (for example,
different sizes in the ISO 216 A series), then the diameter of the balls so
obtained elevated to a non-integer exponent between 2 and 3 will be
approximately proportional to the area of the sheets from which the balls have
been made. [1] Creases will form at all size scales (see Universality (dynamical
systems)).
	 2.50  3D DLA Cluster 	 In 3 dimensions, clusters formed by diffusion-limited
aggregation, have a fractal dimension of around 2.50 (Cf Sapoval).
Measured  2.66  Broccoli 	 [8]
	 2.79  Surface of human brain 	 [9]
	 2.97  Lung surface 	 The alveoli of a lung form a fractal surface close to 3
(Cf Sapoval).

References

    1. ^ Fractal dimension of the boundary of the dragon fractal
    2. ^ Fractal dimension of the Pascal triangle modulo k
    3. ^ Fractal dimension of the Pascal triangle modulo k
    4. ^ Fractal dimension of a penrose tiling
    5. ^ Lebesgue curve variants
    6. ^ Fractal dimension of the apollonian sphere packing
    7. ^ Fractal dimension of the brownian motion boundary
    8. ^ Fractal dimension of the broccoli
    9. ^ Fractal dimension of the surface of the human brain

See also

Bibliography

     * 1Kenneth Falconer, Fractal Geometry, John Wiley & Son Ltd; ISBN
0-471-92287-0 (March 1990)
     * Benoît Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, W. H. Freeman & Co;
ISBN 0-7167-1186-9 (September 1982).
     * Heinz-Otto Peitgen, The Science of Fractal Images, Dietmar Saupe (editor),
Springer Verlag, ISBN 0-387-96608-0 (August 1988)
     * Michael F. Barnsley, Fractals Everywhere, Morgan Kaufmann; ISBN
0-12-079061-0
     * Bernard Sapoval, « Universalités et fractales », collection Champs,
Flammarion.

Internal links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
fractals

     * Fractal
     * Fractal dimension
     * Hausdorff dimension
     * Scale invariance

External links

     * The fractals on Mathworld
     * Other fractals on Paul Bourke's website
     * Soler's Gallery
     * Fractals on mathcurve.com
     * 1000fractales.free.fr - Project gathering fractals created with various
softwares
     * Fractals unleashed

Retrieved from
"http://en.wikipedia.org../../../l/i/s/List_of_fractals_by_Hausdorff_dimension_4\
645.html"

Categories: Fractals | Fractal curves | Mathematics-related lists

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may
not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer) . Donate to
wikipedia.

Licence : Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation
License.

--- In physical_sciences@yahoogroups.com, "Robert Karl Stonjek" <stonjek@...>
wrote:

Solving big problems with new quantum algorithm
November 9th, 2009 in Physics / Quantum Physics
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a recently published paper, Aram Harrow at the University of
Bristol and colleagues from MIT in the United States have discovered a quantum
algorithm that solves large problems much faster than conventional computers
can.
One of the most basic problems in maths is solving very large linear equations.
There's nothing mysterious about them, they simply take time and the more
variables there are, the longer it takes. Even a supercomputer would struggle to
solve a system of equations that has a trillion variables.

However, in a new paper recently published in Physical Review Letters, Aram
Harrow at the University of Bristol and colleagues from MIT in the United States
have discovered a quantum algorithm that solves the problem much faster than
conventional computers can. And the larger the problem, the greater the speedup.

To understand how the quantum algorithm works, think of a digital equaliser in a
stereo CD player. The equaliser needs to amplify some components of the signal
and attenuate others. Ordinary equalisers employ classical computer algorithms
that treat each component of the sound one at a time.

By contrast, a quantum equaliser could employ a quantum algorithm that treats
all components together at once (a trick called 'quantum parallelism'). The
result is a huge reduction in the difficulty of signal processing.

"Large-scale linear systems of equations exist in many fields, such as weather
prediction, engineering, and computer vision", says Harrow. "Quantum computers
could supply serious improvements for these and many other problems. For
example, a trillion-variable problem would take a classical computer at least a
hundred trillion steps to solve, but using the new algorithm, a quantum computer
could solve the problem in just a few hundred steps".

The solution could also be applied to other complex processes such as image and
video processing, genetic analyses and even Internet traffic control.

More information: Quantum Algorithm for Linear Systems of Equations, Phys. Rev.
Lett. 103, 150502 (2009), DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.150502

Provided by University of Bristol (news : web)
http://www.physorg.com/news177011105.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

--- End forwarded message ---

--- In physical_sciences@yahoogroups.com, "Robert Karl Stonjek" <stonjek@...>
wrote:

Atomic Particles Help Solve Planetary Puzzle
November 10th, 2009 in Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
(PhysOrg.com) -- A University of Arkansas professor and his colleagues have
shown that the Earth's mantle contains the same isotopic signatures from
magnesium as meteorites do, suggesting that the planet formed from meteoritic
material. This resolves a long-standing debate in the field over the planet's
origins.
Fangzhen Teng, assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Arkansas,
and Wei Yang and Hong-Fu Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences report their
findings in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The researchers examined magnesium isotopes in chondrites - meteorites
containing elements formed from the condensation of hot gases in the solar
system. They also looked at samples from different depths in the Earth's mantle.
Isotopes have the same chemical properties, but different weights, so some
processes cause what looks like the same material to behave differently. The
different proportions of isotopes within a rock can tell scientists something
about the original source of the material.

Magnesium makes a particularly good marker for planetary origins because, first,
isotopes of magnesium can be separated during evaporation and condensation in
the solar system and, second and more uniquely, one isotope of magnesium, Mg26,
is a decay product of Al26, which existed in the early solar system for less
than 5 million years. Thus, materials with different origins and ages contain
different amounts of Al26, which results in different amounts of magnesium
isotope.

"Isotopes are very sensitive to sources of material," Teng said. "We can use
isotopes as a tool to further understand planetary origins."

Teng's group analyzed different types of rocks from different depths of the
Earth's mantle from a site in North China and compared the results to those of
samples from chondritic meteorites. They looked at magnesium isotopes in samples
from the whole rock, but they also separated out minerals from the rocks and
examined the magnesium isotope composition of these minerals as well.

"The samples from Earth were slightly different from one another," Teng said.
Their compositions also matched closely with those of the meteorites, the
researchers report.

"That's very strong evidence that Earth has a chondritic magnesium composition,"
Teng said.

Provided by University of Arkansas (news : web)
http://www.physorg.com/news177097140.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

--- End forwarded message ---

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49288/title/Signature_of_antimatter_d\
etected_in_lightning

  Signature of antimatter detected in lightning
Fermi telescope finds evidence that positrons, not just electrons, are in storms
on Earth
By Ron Cowen
Web edition : Friday, November 6th, 2009
font_down font_up Text Size
access
Enlargemagnify
Antimatter lightningDuring two recent lightning storms, the Fermi telescope
found evidence that positrons, not just electrons, are in storms on Earth.Axel
Rouvin/Flickr

WASHINGTON — Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years
beyond the solar system for gamma rays, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has
also picked up a shocking vibe from Earth. During its first 14 months of
operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated
with terrestrial storms — and some of those flashes have contained a surprising
signature of antimatter.

During two recent lightning storms, Fermi recorded gamma-ray emissions of a
particular energy that could have been produced only by the decay of energetic
positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons. The observations are the
first of their kind for lightning storms. Michael Briggs of the University of
Alabama in Huntsville announced the puzzling findings November 5 at the 2009
Fermi Symposium.

It’s a surprise to have found the signature of positrons during a lightning
storm, Briggs said.

The 17 flashes Fermi detected occurred just before, during and immediately after
lightning strikes, as tracked by the World Wide Lightning Location Network.

During lightning storms previously observed by other spacecraft, energetic
electrons moving toward the craft slowed down and produced gamma rays. The
unusual positron signature seen by Fermi suggests that the normal orientation
for an electric field associated with a lightning storm somehow reversed, Briggs
said. Modelers are now working to figure out how the field reversal could have
occurred. But for now, he said, the answer is up in the air.

Recording gamma-ray flashes — which have the potential to harm airplanes in
storms — isn’t new. The first were found by NASA’s Compton Gamma-ray Observatory
in the early 1990s. NASA’s RHESSI satellite, which primarily looks at X-ray and
gamma-ray emissions from the sun, has found some 800 terrestrial gamma-ray
flashes, Briggs noted.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49418/title/Asteroid_impact_could_hav\
e_stirred_the_ocean

  Asteroid impact could have stirred the ocean
Model offers one explanation for sudden change in deep-ocean chemistry almost 2
billion years ago
By Sid Perkins
Web edition : 9:26 am
font_down font_up Text Size

The collision of a large extraterrestrial object with Earth almost 2 billion
years ago may have stirred the seas worldwide and delivered a huge serving of
oxygen to the deep ocean.

The Sudbury impact, named after the Canadian city located near the center of
what remains of the ancient crater, happened around 1.85 billion years ago (SN:
6/15/02, p. 378). Despite erosion since then, the impact structure —at least 200
kilometers across — is recognized to be the second-largest on the face of the
planet, says William Cannon, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in
Reston, Va., and coauthor on a paper in the November Geology. The event
fundamentally affected the concentrations of dissolved oxygen in the deep sea —
enough to almost instantly shut down the accumulation of marine sediments known
as banded iron formations, report Cannon and coauthor John F. Slack, also of the
USGS in Reston.

Banded iron formations, massive deposits rich in iron oxides, have accumulated
at several periods in Earth’s long-distant geological past, mostly when
atmospheric concentrations of oxygen were low (SN: 6/20/09, p. 24).

One extended episode of banded iron formation (or BIF) buildup suddenly — and
without an obvious explanation — ended about 1.85 billion years ago, says
Cannon. Over a very short interval, he notes, “the environment shifted from one
happily making banded iron to one that wasn’t.”

In northern Minnesota and other areas nearby, the formations lie directly
underneath a thick layer of material only recently recognized as ejecta from the
Sudbury impact. Mark Jirsa, a geologist with the Minnesota Geological Survey in
St. Paul, was a member of the team that identified the ejecta layer. “We
intuitively connected the Sudbury impact with the shutdown of BIF accumulation,”
he says. “But now [Cannon and Slack] have come up with a model for how that
might have happened.”

About 1.85 billion years ago, Earth’s now separate landmasses were joined in a
single supercontinent. That also means there was one large ocean, says Cannon.
Many scientists suggest that the object that slammed into Earth then — probably
an asteroid abut 10 kilometers across — splashed down in that ocean, in waters
about 1 kilometer deep on the shallow shelf surrounding the supercontinent.
Models hint that the tsunami spawned by the event would have been 1 kilometer
tall at the impact site and remained at least 100 meters tall about 3,000
kilometers away, Cannon adds.

Those immense waves and large underwater landslides triggered by the impact
stirred the ocean, bringing oxygenated waters from the surface down to the ocean
floor, the researchers propose. Sediments deposited on the seafloor before the
impact, including BIFs, contained little if any iron in its Fe(III) form but
were high in Fe(II), a sign that most parts of the ocean were oxygen-free. But
marine sediments deposited after the impact included substantial amounts of
Fe(III) but very little Fe(II) — and, therefore, sizable amounts of dissolved
oxygen. The team’s analyses suggest that after the impact, dissolved iron spewed
into the deepest parts of the ocean by hydrothermal vents would have reacted
with oxygen within a day or so, thereby choking off most of the supply of Fe(II)
to shallower waters where BIFs typically accumulated.

While Cannon and Slack’s model explains how BIF accumulation might have suddenly
ceased 1.85 billion years ago, it doesn’t prove that’s how it happened, Jirsa
warns. Nevertheless, he notes, “scientists are closer to an explanation than we
previously were.” The geological record suggests that environmental changes were
happening in oceans worldwide even before the Sudbury impact, he adds, “and the
role that the impact played, if any, in shutting down BIF accumulation isn’t
well understood.”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fractalmusic/?saved=1

Some simple paper folding gives a level 2 von Koch 3
type surface.
I took a flat piece of cardboard to give the base wing
and stapled the folded surface to that.
I made a triangular cardboard body with a triangular
rudder and attacked the wing to the front of that.
I, then, adjusted the center of gravity by weighting the front.
so that the the wing was basically over the center of gravity.
That it flew at all is a wonder
and I have no way of measuring comparative lift.

The basic idea is that the fractal drum like interaction with the
flow of air  should produce lift.
That tetrahedral-Sierpinski like kites do  provide lift
is evidence that fractal roughness can be used aerodynamically.

--
Respectfully, Roger L. Bagula
11759 Waterhill Road, Lakeside,Ca 92040-2905,tel: 619-5610814 :
http://www.google.com/profiles/Roger.Bagula
alternative email: roger.bagula@...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8346635.stm

Plant experts unveil DNA barcode
By Mark Kinver
Science and environment reporter, BBC News

Graphic of a DNA sequence (Image: Science Photo Library)
Identifying a plant's DNA "barcode" will help tell is if it is being illegally
traded

Hundreds of experts from 50 nations are set to agree on a "DNA barcode" system
that gives every plant on Earth a unique genetic fingerprint.

The technology will be used in a number of ways, including identifying the
illegal trade in endangered species.

The data will be stored on a global database that will be available to
scientists around the world.

The agreement will be signed at the third International Barcode of Life
conference in Mexico City on Tuesday.

"Barcoding is a tool to identify species faster, more cheaply and more precisely
than traditional methods, " explained Patricia Escalante, head of the zoology
department at Mexico's National University (UNAM), which is hosting the
gathering.

In an effort to limit the impact on the planet's biodiversity, Dr Escalante said
it was vital to establish a reliable monitoring system.

"We need an accurate inventory," she observed, "to recognize parasites of
medical, economic or ecological importance."

Mexican researchers, she added, were involved in a network to produce barcodes
in key taxonomic groups , such as trees, fungi, bees and aquatic insects.

Cracking the code

"Biodiversity scientists are using DNA technology to unravel mysteries, much
like detectives use it to solve crimes," said David Schindel, executive
secretary for the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (COBL).

If the process is working, then you will get identical sequences or very, very
similar sequences for the same species
Dr David Schindel,
COBL executive director

"You start with a specimen that has been identified by a specialist, so you have
a known species," he explained.

"You then take a tiny piece of tissue; let's say we are dealing with a mosquito,
we'd take half of one leg, put it in a little tube and grind it up. You'd then
extract the DNA.

"We are only looking at a tiny, tiny part of the whole genome - just 650 base
pairs. In comparison, the human genome has three billion base pairs.

"So the next stage is finding that tiny little region, cutting it out and making
millions of copies - which is known as magnifying - in order to analyse the
region.

"What you get out of that process is a string of 650 letters - and if the
process is working then you will get identical sequences or very, very similar
sequences for the same species."

The information is then added to a global database, which can be accessed by
scientists around the globe.

DNA breakthrough

Researchers have been able to use this technique to identify animal species
since 2003. But, until now, the system has not worked for plant species.

It has been necessary to identify a different region of DNA that also provided a
number of important characteristics. These characteristics included:

• technologically easy to process

• readily obtainable from degraded material

• variable between species, but not too variable

A team of researchers had been assessing seven potential barcodes. This was then
narrowed down to just two possibilities.

The announcement in Mexico will mark the end of the process, with the
international biodiversity scientific community reaching an agreement on the
best way to identify plants.

Dr Schindel said one of the benefits of the technology was the speed and ease of
identifying species.

"Now - within just a few hours - you can get an answer," he told BBC News.

This would lead to much more effective use of resources when it came to tackling
problems such as crop pests or the spread of diseases, he explained.

It would no longer be necessary to wait for a specialist botanist to examine the
sample in order to get an accurate identification of the species.

The technology would also allow species to be identified from a fragment of
material.

Illegally harvested timber is often processed into furniture before being
shipped overseas, making it very difficult to assess the origin of the wood.

However, identifying the timber's "DNA barcode" would quickly reveal whether the
wood was sourced from a legitimate source.

As part of the International Barcode of Life Project, scientists hope that five
million specimens from 500,000 species will be catalogued in the next five
years.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091106-2012-end-of-world-myths.h\
tml

2012: Six End-of-the-World Myths Debunked
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
November 6, 2009

ON TV 2012: Countdown to Armageddon airs Sunday, November 8, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on
the National Geographic Channel. Preview >>

The end of the world is near—December 21, 2012, to be exact—according to
theories based on a purported ancient Maya prediction and fanned by the
marketing machine behind the soon-to-be-released 2012 movie.

2012 end of the world myths story picture - movie still

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     * ''Doomsday'' Seed Vault Opens Near North Pole
     * Magnetic-Shield Cracks Found; Big Solar Storms Expected in 2012
     * Beyond 2012: How Earth Could End

But could humankind really meet its end in 2012—drowned in apocalyptic floods,
walloped by a secret planet, seared by an angry sun, or thrown overboard by
speeding continents?

And did the ancient Maya—whose empire peaked between A.D. 250 and 900 in what is
now Mexico and Central America—really predict the end of the world in 2012?

At least one aspect of the 2012, end-of-the-world hype is, for some people, all
too real: the fear.

NASA's Ask an Astrobiologist Web site, for example, has received thousands of
questions regarding the 2012 doomsday predictions—some of them disturbing,
according to David Morrison, senior scientist with the NASA Astrobiology
Institute.

"A lot of [the submitters] are people who are genuinely frightened," Morrison
said.

"I've had two teenagers who were considering killing themselves, because they
didn't want to be around when the world ends," he said. "Two women in the last
two weeks said they were contemplating killing their children and themselves so
they wouldn't have to suffer through the end of the world."

(Related gallery: "Apocalypse Pictures—Ten Failed Doomsday Prophecies.")

Fortunately, with the help of scientists like Morrison, most of the predicted
2012 cataclysms are easily explained away.

2012 MYTH 1
Maya Predicted End of the World in 2012

The Maya calendar doesn't end in 2012, as some have said, and the ancients never
viewed that year as the time of the end of the world, archaeologists say.

But December 21, 2012, (give or take a day) was nonetheless momentous to the
Maya.

"It's the time when the largest grand cycle in the Mayan calendar—1,872,000 days
or 5,125.37 years—overturns and a new cycle begins," said Anthony Aveni, a Maya
expert and archaeoastronomer at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.

The Maya kept time on a scale few other cultures have considered.

During the empire's heyday, the Maya invented the Long Count—a lengthy circular
calendar that "transplanted the roots of Maya culture all the way back to
creation itself," Aveni said.

During the 2012 winter solstice, time runs out on the current era of the Long
Count calendar, which began at what the Maya saw as the dawn of the last
creation period: August 11, 3114 B.C. The Maya wrote that date, which preceded
their civilization by thousands of years, as Day Zero, or 13.0.0.0.0.

In December 2012 the lengthy era ends and the complicated, cyclical calendar
will roll over again to Day Zero, beginning another enormous cycle.

"The idea is that time gets renewed, that the world gets renewed all over
again—often after a period of stress—the same way we renew time on New Year's
Day or even on Monday morning," said Aveni, author of The End of Time: The Maya
Mystery of 2012.

2012 MYTH 2
Breakaway Continents Will Destroy Civilization

In some 2012 doomsday prophecies, the Earth becomes a deathtrap as it undergoes
a "pole shift."

The planet's crust and mantle will suddenly shift, spinning around Earth's
liquid-iron outer core like an orange's peel spinning around its fleshy fruit.
(See what Einstein had to say about pole shifts.)

2012, the movie, envisions a Maya-predicted pole shift, triggered by an extreme
gravitational pull on the planet—courtesy of a rare "galactic alignment"—and by
massive solar radiation destabilizing the inner Earth by heating it.

Breakaway oceans and continents dump cities into the sea, thrust palm trees to
the poles, and spawn earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and other
disasters. (Interactive: pole shift theories illustrated.)

Scientists dismiss such drastic scenarios, but some researchers have speculated
that a subtler shift could occur—for example, if the distribution of mass on or
inside the planet changed radically, due to, say, the melting of ice caps.

Princeton University geologist Adam Maloof has extensively studied pole shifts,
and tackles this 2012 myth in 2012: Countdown to Armageddon, a National
Geographic Channel documentary airing Sunday, November 8. (The National
Geographic Society owns National Geographic News and part-owns the National
Geographic Channel.)

Maloof says magnetic evidence in rocks confirm that continents have undergone
such drastic rearrangement, but the process took millions of years—slow enough
that humanity wouldn't have felt the motion (quick guide to plate tectonics).

2012 MYTH 3
Galactic Alignment Spells Doom

Some sky-watchers believe 2012 will close with a "galactic alignment," which
will occur for the first time in 26,000 years (for example, see the Web site
Alignment 2012).

In this scenario, the path of the sun in the sky would appear to cross through
what, from Earth, looks to be the midpoint of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which
in good viewing conditions appears as a cloudy stripe across the night sky.

Some fear that the lineup will somehow expose Earth to powerful unknown galactic
forces that will hasten its doom—perhaps through a "pole shift" (see above) or
the stirring of the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's heart.

Others see the purported event in a positive light, as heralding the dawn of a
new era in human consciousness.

NASA's Morrison has a different view.

"There is no 'galactic alignment' in 2012," he said, "or at least nothing out of
the ordinary."

He explained that a type of "alignment" occurs during every winter solstice,
when the sun, as seen from Earth, appears in the sky near what looks to be the
midpoint of the Milky Way.

Horoscope writers may be excited by alignments, Morrison said. But "the reality
is that alignments are of no interest to science. They mean nothing," he said.
They create no changes in gravitational pull, solar radiation, planetary orbits,
or anything else that would impact life on Earth.

The speculation over alignments isn't surprising, though, he said.

"Ordinary astronomical phenomena are imbued with a sense of threat by people who
already think the world is going to end."

Regarding galactic alignments, University of Texas Maya expert David Stuart
writes on his blog that "no ancient Maya text or artwork makes reference to
anything of the kind."

Even so, the end date of the current Long Count cycle—winter solstice 2012—may
be evidence of Maya astronomical skill, said Aveni, the archaeoastronomer.

"I don't rule out the likelihood that astronomy played a role" in the selection
of 2012 as the cycle's terminus, he said.

Maya astronomers built observatories and, by observing the night skies and using
mathematics, learned to accurately predict eclipses and other celestial
phenomena. Aveni notes that the start date of the current cycle was likely tied
to a solar zenith passage, when the sun crosses directly overhead, and its
terminal date will fall on a December solstice, perhaps by design.

(Take a Maya Empire quiz.)

These choices, he said, may indicate that the Maya calendar is tied to seasonal
agricultural cycles central to ancient survival.

2012 MYTH 4
Planet X Is on a Collision Course With Earth

Some say it's out there: a mysterious Planet X, aka Nibiru, on a collision
course with Earth—or at least a disruptive flyby.

A direct hit would obliterate Earth, it's said. Even a near miss, some fear,
could shower Earth with deadly asteroid impacts hurled our way by the planet's
gravitational wake.

Could such an unknown planet really be headed our way in 2012, even just a
little bit?

Well, no.

"There is no object out there," NASA astrobiologist Morrison said. "That's
probably the most straightforward thing to say."

The origins of this theory actually predate widespread interest in 2012.
Popularized in part by a woman who claims to receive messages from
extraterrestrials, the Nibiru doomsday was originally predicted for 2003.

"If there were a planet or a brown dwarf or whatever that was going to be in the
inner solar system three years from now, astronomers would have been studying it
for the past decade and it would be visible to the naked eye by now," Morrison
said.

"It's not there."

2012 MYTH 5
Solar Storms to Savage Earth

In some 2012 disaster scenarios, our own sun is the enemy.

Our friendly neighborhood star, it's rumored, will produce lethal eruptions of
solar flares, turning up the heat on Earthlings.

Solar activity waxes and wanes according to approximately 11-year cycles. Big
flares can indeed damage communications and other Earthly systems, but
scientists have no indications the sun, at least in the short term, will unleash
storms strong enough to fry the planet.

"As it turns out the sun isn't on schedule anyway," NASA astronomer Morrison
said. "We expect that this cycle probably won't peak in 2012 but a year or two
later." (See "Sun Oddly Quiet—Hints at Next 'Little Ice Age'?")

2012 MYTH 6
Maya Had Clear Predictions for 2012

If the Maya didn't expect the end of time in 2012, what exactly did they predict
for that year?

Many scholars who've pored over the scattered evidence on Maya monuments say the
empire didn't leave a clear record predicting that anything specific would
happen in 2012.

The Maya did pass down a graphic—though undated—end-of-the-world scenario,
described on the final page of a circa-1100 text known as the Dresden Codex. The
document describes a world destroyed by flood, a scenario imagined in many
cultures and probably experienced, on a less apocalyptic scale, by ancient
peoples (more on the Dresden Codex).

Aveni, the archaeoastronomer, said the scenario is not meant to be read
literally—but as a lesson about human behavior.

He likens the cycles to our own New Year period, when the closing of an era is
accompanied by frenetic activities and stress, followed by a rebirth period,
when many people take stock and resolve to begin living better.

In fact, Aveni says, the Maya weren't much for predictions.

"The whole timekeeping scale is very past directed, not future directed," he
said. "What you read on these monuments of the Long Count are events that
connected Maya rulers with ancestors and the divine.

"The farther back you can plant your roots in deep time the better argument you
can make that you're legit," Aveni said. "And I think that's why these Maya
rulers were using Long Count time.

"It's not about a fixed prediction about what's going to happen."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8349923.stm

Road trains' get ready to roll
How a road train could work

road train image
     The driver's sat-nav indicates that there is a road train ahead that is
following some of his/her planned journey.

road train image
     The driver approaches the road train, which is controlled by a professional
driver at the front, and indicates that he/she wishes to join.

road train image
     The road train takes control of the extra car, pulling it close to cut air
drag and save about 20% in fuel consumption.

road train image
     The drivers can relax until they wish to leave the road train, at which
point they signal their intention to the driver at the front.

road train image
     A bigger gap will be made to allow the car to leave and control of the
vehicle will be returned to that driver.

BACK 5 of 5 NEXT


Road trains that link vehicles together using wireless sensors could soon be on
European roads.

An EU-financed research project is looking at inexpensive ways of getting
vehicles to travel in a 'platoon' on Europe's motorways.

Each road train could include up to eight separate vehicles - cars, buses and
trucks will be mixed in each one.

The EU hopes to cut fuel consumption, journey times and congestion by linking
vehicles together.

Early work on the idea suggests that fuel consumption could be cut by 20% among
those cars and trucks travelling behind the lead vehicle.

Spanish trials

The lead vehicle would be handled by a professional driver who would monitor the
status of the road train. Those in following vehicles could take their hands off
the wheel, read a book or watch TV, while they travel along the motorway. Their
vehicle would be controlled by the lead vehicle.

Funded under the European Commission's Framework 7 research plan, Sartre (Safe
Road Trains for the Environment) is aimed at commuters in cars who travel long
distances to work every day but will also look at ways to involve commercial
vehicles.

Tom Robinson, project co-ordinator at engineering firm Ricardo, said the idea
was to use off-the-shelf components to make it possible for cars, buses and
trucks to join the road train.
A driverless car
Many researchers are developing cars that drive themselves

"The goal is to try and introduce a step change in transport methods," he said.

"We're looking at what it would take to get platooning on public highways
without making big changes to the public highways themselves," said Mr Robinson.

A system that involved wiring up motorways with sensors to help control the road
trains would be prohibitively expensive, he said.

"Each of the vehicles will have their own control and software monitoring
system," said Mr Robinson. "There may well be a platoon sensor envelope that
collates information and presents it to the lead vehicle so it can understand
what is happening around all the vehicles."

The idea is to make platoons active so vehicles can join and leave as they need.
Mr Robinson speculated that those joining a platoon or road train may one day
pay for the privilege of someone else effectively driving them closer to their
destination.

Sartre will run for three years. The project partners are currently doing
preliminary research to find out all the elements needed for a working system
and the situations in which it might be used.

There were also behavioural elements to consider, said Mr Robinson, such as
whether all the vehicles will need to have their hazard lights on while in a
platoon.

Also, he said, there had to be a way to ensure the vehicles in a platoon are
organised to make drivers feel safe.

"Car drivers do not want to be between trucks," he said.

Towards the end of the research project trials will be held on test tracks in
the UK, Spain and Sweden. There are also plans for public road trials in Spain.
The first platoon will involve two trucks and three cars.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8349760.stm

W Australia sea level rising fast
By Phil Mercer
BBC News, Sydney

Cottesloe Beach, Perth, WA, 2007
Perth's beaches are key to city life, but sea levels are rising fast

New figures have revealed that sea levels along the coast of Western Australia
are rising at a rate double that of the world average.

Statistics from Australia's National Tidal Centre show levels have increased by
8.6mm a year off the coast of the state capital Perth.

That compares to a global average of just over 3mm.

Scientists have said that man-made climate change has played a significant role
in the rise.

Climatologists have said that a combination of natural variability and man-made
pollution have caused sea levels to rise around the world.

Double trouble

For much of the past century there were average increases of 1.7mm per year,
while that rate doubled after 1993.

Some regions, however, have suffered more than others.

New figures show that the sea level rose off Perth in Western Australia and in
the Kimberley region to the north by more than 8mm.

Dr John Church, from Australia's government-funded science and research body,
the CSIRO, says these are worrying signs.

"Man's role is making a significant contribution to this global average rise,"
he said.

"I think the fact that sea levels are rising is a major reason for concern and
it's a combination of the global average rise together with the natural
variability leading to larger regional rises over certain periods and extreme
events as in storm surges which will have the most impact…and, of course, sea
level rise will not stop in 2100, it will continue for many centuries," he
added.

About 80% of Australians live in coastal areas.

There are fears that vulnerable low-lying communities may have to be abandoned
in years to come because of flooding and erosion.

CSIRO scientists have said that warming temperatures, which cause water to
expand, have been a major trigger for sea-level rises in the 20th Century.

They have also blamed the melting of the world's icecaps and glaciers.

The son published the manuscript his father
left him, so it lacks reference to some of the modern
global warming data, but he really gets some stuff right.
Here are some of my ideas ( from email correspondence) on the subject.

The system we have is deeply flawed
and I doubt that it can be reformed enough before
these forces of nature catch up with it.
My own experience is that people don't want to hear
that we are headed for a collapse.
There is too much wealth here
  and too much of going on living life as usual...
They are just going to say he is another "doom and gloom"
author, no matter how well thought out the book is.
.

I have been studying the Roman Empire
and what Christianity meant to it.
A new religion that revived the morality of
Christianity might be a good idea in practical terms.
Since he uses "revolution" and "commandments",
  some are going to attack him as "subversive".
"Uncle Tom's cabin" had a deep
impact in the 1850's,
so one book can have a difference.


With Al Gore getting a Nobel Prize at least
some recognition for the "doom and gloom" school
of thought.
Geologists seem to be one of the sciences that take
systems theory, fractals and chaos theory seriously
as they have "geological" time scales in their text books.
And earthquakes as an ordinary problem...

The idea that we can engineer the future, just as Obama
did the financial market collapse is not a new one.
Issac Asimov made it part of his sci fi time-line
after the Foundation trilogy: called it psychohistory.
The idea that by understanding the mathematical historical trends
we can "help" the future by applying forces where needed.
We need more Martin Luther King's and fewer George Bush's, ha, ha...

Your father put his finger on a lot of our cultural decay.
When Donald Trump is held up as a figure to emulate,
you know something is really wrong.

How can his father's three commandments be socially engineered?
In physical systems there are "tipping" points:
socially there are also places where a little help causes a lot of
difference.
The ideas implanted in children before the age of ten
are probably the most effective way to change the future.
If we could implant in young people:
1) thrift ( anti-waste)
2) honor (or giving others a fair shake )
3) problem solving ( using you head)
That would go a long way toward making you father's ideas come to
life.
Organizations like Sunday schools, and the boy scouts have in the past
helped generations of young people.

The way that you can most effectively change the future
is to change the attitudes of those people who will
live in the future.
Morality has been pretty much enforced in the past by religion,
but that religion is not necessary to morality is important.
One of the human problem even in religious regulated
societies has been that only about 50% ever take
the morality they are supposed to behave in to heart.
At present with the abject decline in religion
the culture is in near full decline toward
some less advanced level of society.
Some philosopher or historian said if there wasn't a God
that it might be necessary to invent him
so that society would have a moral compass?

As scientists one might think
that a return religious myths would be a step backward,
but the suggestion of a culture in moral decline
due a lapse in faith may be a worse result?
I suggest that maybe a new mythology of some sort will naturally
replace
the old as Christianity replaced the Greco-Roman Pantheon of gods?
Per Bak suggests that we ( as a race of human beings)
are being shaped by self-organizational
forces of nature. I think your father would have like Per Bak's ideas.
Nature doesn't have a concept of honor, good or thrift,
but does do very well at problem solving by "experiments"
in species.

If a transhuman species does come out of a collapse
that we idealists have failed to prevent,
then they will probably eliminate
what anatomically modern humans/ Homo Sapiens  remain?
Just as the Neanderthals were eliminated before,
after the last big ice age. Humans didn't give Neanderthals a "fair
shake".
Since humans seem to be responsible for the dying out of cave bears,
mammoths
giant sloths and several species in this time period,
they were not "thrifty" about their environment or hunting.
They killed whole herds just to get enough meat for one tribe for one
winter.
So evolution has only one of your father's commandments built in:
"use your head" or solve problems that involve survival.

One of my friends in the mathematics community
who is Russian ( has emigrated  from that country)
has pretty much given up on Homo Sapiens :
thinks their days are numbered.
Thinks maybe the future would be better off without them...
Since he is a Russian Jew,
I guess he has a point.
European Jews in general don't see mankind as a hopeful
thing after generations of prejudice and persecution.

I think if we don't manage to wipe us all out,
those that survive and thrive won't be the current sort of human.

Another engineer -programmer see the population -resource problem as
impossible
even if we get fusion powerplants going in time,
because we have wasted so much and damaged the
atmosphere so badly.

The sci fi futurist point of view is that we should get fusion powered
space ships
and start searching for
planets in near by solar systems that can be reached by generation
ships, while the earth still has resources left.
In several generations we will be limited to coal powered
technology as oil is getting near pumped out.
Start colonies on the Moon and Mars as fast as humanly possible...

I personally try to work toward reforming our current system
  so that our culture can survive the global warming collapse
that seems to be looming very fast.
Respectfully, Roger L. Bagula
11759 Waterhill Road, Lakeside,Ca 92040-2905,tel: 619-5610814 :
http://www.google.com/profiles/Roger.Bagula
alternative email: roger.bagula@...