QED: Question. Explore. Discover.
” ‘QED: Question. Explore. Discover.’ proudly announces 10 of the spectacular speakers who are taking to the stage in front of 500 skeptics and fans of science in The Piccadilly Hotel, Manchester (UK) on the 5th and 6th of February, 2011.
George Hrab
Eugenie Scott
Jon Ronson
Kat Akingbade
Bruce Hood
Wendy Grossman
Chris Atkins
Colin Wright
Simon Singh
Jim Al-Khalili
The above list is enough to sate the needs of any hungry rationalist, while the bar will take care of their thirst… but this newly established feature of the skeptical and science festival calendar has one more, unique feature to introduce to the thousands of people who are already keenly following what QED has to offer: The amazing price.
Standard: £99
Students: £75
Gala Dinner with Celebrity Special Guests: £45
QED is affordable by all, easily accessible from every part of the country by road, rail or air and, even with the cost at an incredibly low level, it will raise a significant sum for two amazing causes that are much in the minds of anyone with an interest in science, rationalism and skepticism: Sense About Science and the National Autism Society.
Tickets can be purchased from the QED website from:
http://www.qedcon.org/tickets/ ”
9.2 Million Adults In The UK Have Never Been Online
“A whopping 9.2 million UK adults have never been online according to data released by the Office of National Statistics, out of a population of around 62 million or one out of every seven Britons.
The ONS figures show some pretty interesting trends; more than one million UK citizens have used the internet for the first time over the last 12 months, although the OAPs, low income earners and those without qualifications represent an overwhelming portion of those who never used the internet.
97 per cent of those with a degree have used the internet while 98 per cent of those earning over £41,600 have been connected to the web at least once.
More than 30 million UK adults use the internet every day with another eight million being regular internet users instead and nearly a third connecting to the internet though a mobile handset.
A spokesperson for the Office for National Statistics said that “Since 2006 we have seen a significant increase in the number of people using the Internet, with the number of adults accessing the Internet every day almost doubling to just over 30 million, though the UK is some way off from being completely online.”
Notably, 2.7 million people access the internet regularly though Wi-Fi hotspots commonly used at cafes, restaurants, libraries and other public places.”
Read more at IT Pro Portal (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
1.25 Gigawatts of Solar Thermal Power Approved in California in Past Two Days Will Double US Capacity
“There’ve been multiple gigawatts of solar thermal power plants planned for various places in the California desert for some time, but finally some more of them are getting the approvals need so that construction can start: The US Bureau of Land Management has issued a final environmental impact statement for the 1,000 MW Blythe Solar Power Project; and the 250 MW Beacon Solar Energy project has received final California state approval as well.
The smaller of the two first: Renewable Energy World reports NextEra Energy Resources has been given the green light by the California Energy Commission to begin construction on the 250 MW Beacon Solar Energy project.
The $1 billion, 2,000 acre solar thermal power plant will use parabolic troughs to concentrate sunlight and generate electricity. NextEra expects the power plant to come online within the next three years, though as yet it has no power purchase agreement in place. In other words, no electric utility has yet committed to buy the power the plant produces.
And the larger of the two: With the final BLM environmental impact statement completed, and the CEC already saying it will approve the project once public comment closes next month, Solar Millennium Inc. will soon begin construction on the 1,000 MW Blythe Solar Power Project.
The 7,025 acre project, also using parabolic trough technology, is expected to produce enough power for approximately 800,000 homes, and alone will nearly double the installed commercial solar power capacity in the United States.
The price tag and time til completion: $6 billion and six years once construction actually begins.”
Read more at Tree Hugger
Rare fire tornado caught on film
“Severe drought and strong dry winds in Sao Paolo have caused a rare fire tornado in the northwest city of Aracatuba. A three month drought in the region has led to brush fires across Brazil, creating the conditions for the fire tornado. Fire tornados, also known colloquially as fire devils, happen when a fire acquires a vertical rotating column of air. Some can be more than a half a mile tall and contain winds over 100 mph.
In 1923, Great Kanto earthquake in Japan, ignited a firestorm that raged through the city and produced a gigantic fire tornado that killed 38,000 in 15 minutes in the Hifukusho-Ato region of Tokyo.”
Read more at The Telegraph (Thanks @whispywolf)
Tiny apartment shows the value of a good fit
“WE SIT IN the “cafe area” of Steve Sauer’s minuscule apartment enjoying the view from the home’s only window, street level. Dogs on leashes and legs on humans pass by on a warm Lower Queen Anne evening.
Sauer stands up. This is to demonstrate that at 6-foot-2 he has a no-more-than-needed 2-inch clearance between his head and the ceiling.
Sauer likes this precision. Awkward spaces, wasted places annoy him. Two alarm clocks, two music sources, extra furniture. Needless, needless, needless.
“What I really wanted was one place with exactly what I needed and wanted. Quality is more important than quantity for me, and extra space only a problem,” he has written, describing his nearby too-big-for-him, one-bedroom condo.
To me he says, “I tend to like things in their place.”
And that explains it: The uber-cool, fully functional 182-square-foot home for two on the basement floor of a 102-year-old apartment building that Sauer is finishing after seven years of work. It could also have something to do with his line of work — airplane interiors engineering for Boeing. And education — a master’s degree in whole-systems design.
Sauer’s tiny Seattle home is remarkable.”
Read more at The Seattle Times (Thanks Christopher C)
Scheme to ‘pull electricity from the air’ sparks debate
“Tiny charges gathered directly from humid air could be harnessed to generate electricity, researchers say. Dr Fernando Galembeck told the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston that the technique exploited a little-known atmospheric effect. Tests had shown that metals could be used to gather the charges, he said, opening up a potential energy source in humid climates. However, experts disagree about the mechanism and the scale of the effect.
“The basic idea is that when you have any solid or liquid in a humid environment, you have absorption of water at the surface,” Dr Galembeck, from the University of Campinas in Brazil, told BBC News. “The work I’m presenting here shows that metals placed under a wet environment actually become charged.”
Dr Galembeck and his colleagues isolated various metals and pairs of metals separated by a non-conducting separator – a capacitor, in effect – and allowed nitrogen gas with varying amounts of water vapour to pass over them. What the team found was that charge built up on the metals – in varying amounts, and either positive or negative. Such charge could be connected to a circuit periodically to create useful electricity. The effect is incredibly small – gathering an amount of charge 100 million times smaller over a given area than a solar cell produces – but seems to represent a means of charge accumulation that has been overlooked until now.
Dr Galembeck suggests that with further development, the principle could be extended to become a renewable energy resource in humid parts of the world, such as the tropics.”
Read more at BBC News (Thanks @UKgnome)
New Solar System Discovered
“European astronomers on Tuesday said they had found a distant star orbited by at least five planets in the biggest discovery of so-called exoplanets since the first was logged 15 years ago.
The star is similar to our sun and its planetary lineup has an intriguing parallel with own solar system, although no clue has so far been found to suggest it could be a home from home, they said.
The star they studied, HD 10180, is located 127 light-years away in the southern constellation of Hydrus, the male water snake, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said in a press release.
The planets were detected over six years using the world’s most powerful spectograph, an instrument to capture and analyze light signatures, at ESO’s telescope at La Silla, Chile.
The method consists of observing a star and seeing how the light that reaches Earth “wobbles” as a result of the gravitational pull of a passing planet.
The tiny fluctuation in light can then be used as a telltale to calculate the mass of the transiting planet.
The five detected planets are big, being the size of Neptune, although they orbit at a far closer range than our own gas giant, with a “year” ranging from between six and 600 days.
The astronomers also found tantalizing evidence that two other candidate planets are out there.
One would be a very large planet, the size of our Saturn, orbiting in 2,200 days.
The other would be 1.4 times the mass of Earth, making it the smallest exoplanet yet to be discovered. It orbits HD 10180 at a scorchingly close range, taking a mere 1.18 Earth days to zip around the star.”
Read more at Discovery (Thanks IndyAdvant)
Micro Frog Discovered Inside Bornean Pitcher Plants
Scientists have discovered the Old World’s smallest species of frog living inside pitcher plants in the jungles of Southeast Asia’s Borneo.
The micro frogs, named Microhyla nepenthicola, grow to only 0.4 to 0.5 inches long — about the size of a pea. It was discovered living along the edge of a road in Kubah National Park in Borneo by a team of scientists searching for the world’s lost amphibians, species considered to be extinct that may still have remnant populations.
“I saw some specimens in museum collections that are over 100 years old,” biologist Indraneil Das, one of frog discovers, said in a press release. “Scientists presumably thought they were juveniles of other species, but it turns out they are adults of this newly-discovered micro species.”
Read more at Wired (Thanks @UKgnome and @XxLadyClaireXx)
Fate of Universe revealed by galactic lens
“A “galactic lens” has revealed that the Universe will probably expand forever. Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos. Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the Universe. Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the Universe was to keep on expanding. It will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say.
The study, conducted by an international team led by Professor Eric Jullo of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is published in the journal Science. Dark energy makes up three-quarters of our Universe but is totally invisible. We only know it exists because of its effect on the expansion of the Universe. To work out how dark energy is spread through space, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the way that light from distant stars was distorted around Abell 1689, a nearby cluster of galaxies.
Abell 1689, found in the constellation of Virgo, is one of the biggest galactic clusters known to science. Because of its huge mass, the cluster acts as a cosmic magnifying glass, causing light to bend around it. The way in which light is distorted by this cosmic lens depends on three factors: how far away the distant object is; the mass of Abell 1689; and the distribution of dark energy. The astronomers were able to measure the first two variables using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, enabling them to calculate this crucial third factor.”
Read more at BBC News (Thanks Tracey)
London’s Foursquare hotspots mapped
“A PhD student named Anil Bawa-Cavia has created some lovely visualisations of the data from location-based social network Foursquare, showing where the greatest activity in London is in a number of different categories.
Bawa-Cavia created the maps as part of his research into cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. He sifted through the city’s Foursquare checkins, and then broke down the results into different categories.
For example, the nightlife map is well distributed among a number of venues, with the Hospital Club proving the most popular check-in location. There are far fewer arts venues, however, with the O2 arena proving the most popular.
Regent’s Park is the most difficult green space in London to become the mayor of, but it should be relatively trivial in comparison to get the top spot for Camden Lock, which was top of the listing of shops.
The dataset used contained 162,068 check-ins at 7,191 venues. That suggests that every location that’s been checked-in to at least once has an average of 23 check-ins — a surprisingly high figure.
As for locations, the most popular places to check in were Shoreditch, London Fields, Covent Garden, the South Bank, the O2, Angel, Regent’s Park, Kensington, King’s Cross and Camden Town. Areas south of the river were extremely underrepresented, with most of the activity taking place in central, east and north London. Of course, that probably says more about the demographics of Foursquare users than the demographics of Londoners.”
Read more at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
