Everything at the Membrane Domain
Researchers at Standford University have invented a small battery that is flexible and can be recharged in one minute.
“Our battery has everything else you’d dream that a battery should have: inexpensive electrodes, good safety, high-speed charging, flexibility and long cycle life. I see this as a new battery in its early days. It’s quite exciting,” Hongjie Dai, a chemistry professor at Stanford said.
NASA reports finding another Earth-like planet:
How many stars like our sun host planets like our Earth? NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope continuously monitored more than 150,000 stars beyond our solar system, and to date has offered scientists an assortment of more than 4,000 candidate planets for further study — the 1,000th of which was recently verified.
Using Kepler data, scientists reached this millenary milestone after validating that eight more candidates spotted by the planet-hunting telescope are, in fact, planets. The Kepler team also has added another 554 candidates to the roll of potential planets, six of which are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of stars similar to our sun.
Three of the newly-validated planets are located in their distant suns’ habitable zone, the range of distances from the host star where liquid water might exist on the surface of an orbiting planet. Of the three, two are likely made of rock, like Earth.
“Each result from the planet-hunting Kepler mission’s treasure trove of data takes us another step closer to answering the question of whether we are alone in the Universe,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “The Kepler team and its science community continue to produce impressive results with the data from this venerable explorer.”
To determine whether a planet is made of rock, water or gas, scientists must know its size and mass. When its mass can’t be directly determined, scientists can infer what the planet is made of based on its size.
Two of the newly validated planets, Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b, are less than 1.5 times the diameter of Earth. Kepler-438b, 475 light-years away, is 12 percent bigger than Earth and orbits its star once every 35.2 days. Kepler-442b, 1,100 light-years away, is 33 percent bigger than Earth and orbits its star once every 112 days.
Both Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b orbit stars smaller and cooler than our sun, making the habitable zone closer to their parent star, in the direction of the constellation Lyra. The research paper reporting this finding has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
“With each new discovery of these small, possibly rocky worlds, our confidence strengthens in the determination of the true frequency of planets like Earth,” said co-author Doug Caldwell, SETI Institute Kepler scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. “The day is on the horizon when we’ll know how common temperate, rocky planets like Earth are.”
With the detection of 554 more planet candidates from Kepler observations conducted May 2009 to April 2013, the Kepler team has raised the candidate count to 4,175. Eight of these new candidates are between one to two times the size of Earth, and orbit in their sun’s habitable zone. Of these eight, six orbit stars that are similar to our sun in size and temperature. All candidates require follow-up observations and analysis to verify they are actual planets.
“Kepler collected data for four years — long enough that we can now tease out the Earth-size candidates in one Earth-year orbits”, said Fergal Mullally, SETI Institute Kepler scientist at Ames who led the analysis of a new candidate catalog. “We’re closer than we’ve ever been to finding Earth twins around other sun-like stars. These are the planets we’re looking for”.
These findings also have been submitted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
Work is underway to translate these recent discoveries into estimates of how often rocky planets appear in the habitable zones of stars like our sun, a key step toward NASA’s goal of understanding our place in the universe.
Scientists also are working on the next catalog release of Kepler’s four-year data set. The analysis will include the final month of data collected by the mission and also will be conducted using sophisticated software that is more sensitive to the tiny telltale signatures of small Earth-size planets than software used in the past.
Ames is responsible for Kepler’s mission operations, ground system development and science data analysis. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado, developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA’s 10th Discovery Mission and was funded by the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
By Daniel Brouse
“Vegans eat only food of plant origin. Because animal products are the only food sources of vitamin B12, vegans must supplement their diets with a source of this vitamin.” — USDA
Lack of B12 and amino acids results in neurological disorders. (eg Brain Damage)
“Also, the vegan diet is a poor choice for growing children. The process of neurodevelopment requires many things. One of those things is cholesterol. It is involved in the myelin sheath. As adults, we make as much, or even more than we need. As children are actively growing myelin, they need more than they can produce. For those infants still nursing, they get it from Mom. Once weened, they need a source for cholesterol. There is no vegetable source of cholesterol. Denying animal-based foods will have a significantly detrimental impact on a growing child’s neurodevelopment,” added Seth Glass.
by Daniel Brouse
1. GMO Foods Are Bad
2. Sandy Hook Was a Drill
3. 9/11 Was a Government Conspiracy
4. Contrails Contain Chemicals (Chemtrails)
5. [Request your myth to be busted.]
1. GMO Foods Are Bad
Humans have been genetically modifying foods for thousands of years. There is no evidence that eating GMO food is more harmful. Recently, GMO plants have been improved significantly and have been purposely modified for increased health benefits. Purple carrots that contain anthocyanins are an example. If you have any concerns about GMO’s, instead of spreading rumors… grow your own food!
2. Sandy Hook Was a Drill
In the aftermath of the Sandy Hill shootings, there was initial oversight by the State Police. This caused some confusion in the mass media with information that was being provided by the local police and the federal agencies. That is not to say that there have not been live action drills in the USA. In 1999, the military lowered armed troops from Blackhawk helicopters into the city of Camden with live ammo. Another example is the coordinated dismantling of Occupy Philly and Occupy Oakland by Homeland Security. The point being — it was obvious to everyone when it was a drill. The eye-witnesses in Sandy Hook make it evident this was not staged by the military.
3. 9/11 Was a Government Conspiracy
The 9/11 conspiracy crowd tends to focus on how buildings in New York collapsed. As far as scientists can tell, they collapsed in ways consistent with the unique event. Those perpetuating the conspiracy myth tend to leave out the other two sites. The plane that came down in Pennsylvania was occupied by the former quarterback of West Chester University. He is the one that yelled “Let’s roll!” before the passengers tried to take the plane back. He has become a local hero. There are also witnesses in Washington at the the Pentagon. If you have a doubt, try explaining Cantor Fitzgerald.
4. Contrails Contain Chemicals (Chemtrails)
The clouds that are formed from air passing through jet engines and being super-cooled are called contrails. They contain only H2O from the atmosphere. That is not to say that chemicals don’t come out of planes. They do. It is known as exhaust and usually can’t be seen with the naked eye. The exhaust comes out of a different part of the plane and is completely separate from the contrails; however, the exhaust from jets is a significant problem and is scheduled to be the first worldwide tax:
International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) — The aviation sector will attempt to negotiate by 2016 a market-based mechanism (taxes, tradeable permits or carbon offsets) to tackle emissions from flying.
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff
and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails.
You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at
night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love,
you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your
honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for
it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is
the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be
tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning
is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
— T.H. White, “The Once and Future King”
The European Space Agency has successfully landed a spaceship on a comet. The Rosetta mission started 10 years ago when Philae was launched into space. An ESA spokesman said, “We are the first to have done that, and that will stay forever.”
A creator wrote to the KingArthur.com research team:
For my senior project, I wanted to see if one could use the Chaos Game to compose music, using the coordinates of notes on a 12-tone Matrix as it’s vertices, and then finding other ways of determining it’s magnification/compression factor, etc.
Your ideas about the connection between music and Chaos Theory are amazing, and I haven’t found many other people who do research on the topic. I would love to hear your ideas or input, and if you know of any resources I could look into, I’d greatly appreciate it!
———————–
We replied…
Dear Birdie,
Thank you for your inquiry.
Your idea sounds very interesting and worth pursuing.
Here is an article that is somewhat related:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/looped
For some musicians, the link between persona and material is as short as a wick. With Taylor Swift or Frank Sinatra, songs and singer line up and suggest a single human being, with the music presented as evidence of lived experience. Other musicians, like actors, create things that bear little relation to what they do offstage. The composer William Basinski falls into this second category. His work resonates with his name—it’s severe and Eastern European, a body of intense and grave music. But Basinski is Billy to his friends, an unshakably cheerful man who seems more like a retired surfer than like a composer. In September, when Basinski performed a version of his forthcoming release, “Cascade,” on the grounds of Olana, the historic home of Frederic Edwin Church, in upstate New York, he showed up in a white raincoat, a black leather cowboy hat, and driving gloves. As mist scrolled over the Hudson, above the bluish Catskills, Basinski sipped beer and played a series of mesmerizing piano loops that suggested worlds crumbling and blooming between the notes. He seemed unbothered that the small crowd was eating sandwiches, chatting, and drinking wine.
Raised in Dallas, Basinski studied saxophone and clarinet at the University of North Texas, in Denton, for two years. In the summer of 1978, he ditched school and travelled around Texas to see bands like the Sex Pistols and Television. He became interested in the music of what he calls “three points to a triangle”: John Cage, Steve Reich, and Brian Eno. He met the man who is still his partner, the visual artist James Elaine, and moved to San Francisco on Halloween of the same year. Basinski began buying cheap tape recorders and creating the work that sustains him today. He captured the sounds of a rented piano, the inside of his freezer, ambient noises of San Francisco—“the clicking electric buses, the grasshopper legs, and the trolleys creaking,” he says—and made physical loops of this material.
In 1980, Basinski and Elaine moved to a loft in downtown Brooklyn. Over the next few years, Basinski made hundreds of loops, which he organized by hanging them from a tree branch that he kept near his mixing desk. Some loops were made from his own playing, others from accidental noises or from radio-station broadcasts bleeding into his amplifiers and tape decks. Though he didn’t release any music, he was gathering material that he “never could have created with pencil and paper,” he says. “I was getting all this great stuff. It was just coming from the sky.”
In 1989, he and Elaine moved to a loft in Williamsburg that became known as Arcadia. Basinski began to play his loops for people at Arcadia, which got a reputation as a place for others, including Antony Hegarty, later of Antony and the Johnsons, to develop their craft.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2001 that Basinski stumbled into the work that brought him out of obscurity. He had decided to start transferring the loops he’d made in the early eighties to CDs, for posterity. Some of the tapes were in terrible shape, and as Basinski let the loops play they fell apart. Magnetic tape stores information on bits of metal affixed to a ribbon. That metal is the music, and the music was crumbling. Basinski copied as many loops as he could, capitalizing on the changes happening to the sounds as the tapes turned into dust.
On September 11, 2001, Basinski had a job interview with the arts organization Creative Time at the World Trade Center. But from his roof he could see a huge cloud of smoke drifting into Brooklyn from lower Manhattan. Downstairs, he played music as loud as he could, until the “disintegration loops” started. He returned to the roof and began videotaping the clouds of debris at Ground Zero as night fell. When he synched the visual with the disintegration loops, something clicked.
Basinski released “The Disintegration Loops” in four volumes, in 2002 and 2003. Antony called them “the most helpful and useful music I have ever known.” The first loop, officially called “dlp 1.1,” was eventually scored by Maxim Moston, of Antony and the Johnsons, for an orchestra and played in the Temple of Dendur, at the Metropolitan Museum, on the tenth anniversary of September 11th. The loop, which is made from a source Basinski can no longer identify, is a sleepwalking mesh of horns and strings that rises and falls, suggesting neither sadness nor ecstasy but a kind of uneasy limbo. After about twenty minutes, the loop begins to audibly decay, and for the next forty minutes the tape edits itself, introducing gaps and bits of silence that create a lopsided rhythm. As the music dies, it emerges.
Basinski’s music is difficult to classify. Minimalist composers and sampling artists are related, but only somewhat. His loops are being voiced neither by humans—who repeat figures in a way that involves a fairly high level of variation—nor by digital devices like samplers and software programs, which come close to no variation at all. Basinski’s music is based on the flutter in the machine. Digital technology flattened out the analog machine: tape-deck speeds vary, but the speed of iTunes doesn’t. Basinski’s innovation was to step back not a hundred years, and pick up a banjo or a steel guitar, but maybe forty or so years, and find the organic change—the aging, if you will—at the heart of early audio machinery. Basinski’s loops are defined by the fact that machines are always in the process of failing, and that change itself is a form of composition. Like hip-hop producers, who develop sample banks of favored snares and hi-hats from old songs, Basinski has built a career from fragments of thirty-year-old tape.
The changes in his loops are infinitesimal and almost imperceptible, very close to the adjustments a musician might make when repeating a phrase, but slightly more dependable. It’s a loose repetition: a train going across the tracks, the sound of coins dropping into a farebox on a city bus, the flutter of an oscillating fan in summer. Basinski’s music celebrates the decay of the ideal copy. Each successive wobble is a compositional change—it builds up or directs the flow of narrative feeling in a piece. Brian Eno once said that “repetition is a form of change,” but Basinski’s tape loops physically revise that and bring the idea back as “repetition is change.”
I first heard “Cascade,” to be released in March, at Issue Project Room, in Brooklyn, in June. As Basinski played, projections—mostly images of rippling water—made by Elaine fell over him and his equipment. Though “The Disintegration Loops” holds gravitas, it is not his most severe or dark work. That prize might go to “Cascade.”
The main loop is something in a minor key that Basinski played on the piano and then modified. A pair of two-note phrases repeat and are answered by two lower notes, rising. The main section of “Cascade” is that loop, burrowing in and beginning to unfold as it is put through various echo units. At Issue Project Room, Basinski played the first loop from an Apple laptop, which he calls a “third deck.” On either side of the laptop were his most important collaborators: two portable reel-to-reel tape decks. Next to each one was a glass jar with tape loops lying at the bottom. (It is important that the tapes not become crinkled or bent, so Basinski transports “the girls,” as he calls them, in jars or lunchboxes.)
The main “Cascade” loop is followed by another, colder piano loop and then a burst of smeared strings reminiscent of the soundtrack of a bad forties melodrama. Basinski plays these on the tape decks, creating a space that feels increasingly claustrophobic, revealing the unexpected nature of looping. How pretty a loop sounds the first time has no bearing on how you will feel after hearing it for thirty minutes. — The New Yorker
Thank you,
Daniel of the Help Desk
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas.
I’m frightened of the old ones.
— John Cage
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
— Albert Einstein
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
— Carl Sagan
Put your brain in gear before starting your mouth in motion.