Germany to phase out nuclear power by 2022

Chancellor Angela Merkel

After the reunification in 1990, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to phase out the use of all nuclear power by 2022 will yet be another best that will ever happen to this economically strong German state.

The Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, considered the world’s worst nuclear accident that killed, endangered and displaced hundreds of thousands of people and vastly contaminated pristine forests and farmlands from its radioactive fallout may have haunted the German government no end.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan brought about by a powerful earthquake, which in turn caused giant tsunami, may very well have sealed its fate to have nuclear power plants mothballed in all of Germany.

According to The New York Times, Germany shut down seven plants in March after the Fukushima nuclear explosion and will close down its remaining plants during the next ten years.

It will be noted that after the Japanese crisis, Germany’s seven oldest reactors went into close scrutiny for safety review and was later decided not to operate them anymore. An eighth nuclear plant called the Kruemmel in northern Germany, which has not been operating because of plaguing technical problem, has also been decommissioned for good.

There are six operational plants that is being planned to go offline by 2011and the three newest by 2022.

The negative public opinion shown by the German people following Japan’s nuclear crisis coupled with the assurance by the Ethics Commission for Secure Energy that an alternative source of energy can be put in place during the next ten years has hasten the decision to renounce nuclear energy for good.

Renewable energy resources

The renewable sources of energy being studied and planned for use in the very near future is a combination of wind, solar, and water power, and the harnessing of geothermal energy, and biomass energy from waste.

The transition to alternative and renewable energy, thus, makes Germany the first industrialized nation to reject the further use of nuclear power plants and embrace with determination and commitment the use of renewable and environmentally friendly energy to fuel the economy of the future.

“We want the electricity of the future to be safe, but also to remain reliable and affordable,” Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a statement.

Japanese invents internet ‘kissing’

Nobuhiro Takahashi with his 'Kiss Transmission Devise'

If there is anything made and sold for titillating human senses, you can bet your last penny that a Japanese is on the forefront of it.

Just like the Japanese sex dolls that were initially made for handicapped men who might have problems finding a partner, but are now being hotly availed of by normal people, a new Japanese erotic invention is now in the offing.

Researchers at Tokyo’s Kajimoto Laboratory explained that their study is more intended for lovers who are separated, for one reason or another, but still would like to feel and experience their ‘presence’ somehow.

They call their invention a remote “kissing machine!”

Nobuhiro Takahashi, a graduate student and researcher at The University of Electro-Communications, says, the “Kiss Transmission Device” allows a user to manipulate the plastic tube or straw with his tongue, simulating for instance a “French kiss,” and causes a similar devise elsewhere to move the same way.

The sending and receiving devises are linked by a program that transmits the movements to mimic the kind of kiss you are giving that is being felt in someone else’s mouth.

According to Takahashi this is only the beginning and that refinements of the program can be done.

“The elements of a kiss include the sense of taste, the manner of breathing and the moistness of the tongue,” Takahashi said. “If we can re-create all of those, I think it will be a really powerful device.”

Messenger probe sends back images of Mercury

 

Messenger spacecraft above Mercury

Mercury is the smallest of the eight planets in our solar system and orbits the Sun every 87.969 Earth days. It is also the planet closest to the Sun.

On August 3, 2004, Messenger ((short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) was launched atop NASA’s Delta 2 rocket.

After about six-and-a-half years of voyage into the inner solar system, the spacecraft positioned itself for a looping orbit around infernal Mercury for an scheduled year-long probing mission.

The 485kg robotic probe is to begin continuous mapping of Mercury that will take it as close as 124 miles (200km) from the planet’s surface.

The inhospitable planet has been little explored because of the difficulties posed by the enormous gravitational pull of the Sun and massively high levels of radiation. It has an extremely high daytime temperature of 427C that plummets to -150C at night.

According to William Harwood, in his The Space Shot column, among the questions the $446 million Messenger mission hopes to answer are the following:

• How did Mercury, believed to be 60 percent iron, end up with an oversize core, a thin shell of a crust and the highest density in the solar system? Was its crust blasted away in the distant past by a cataclysmic impact? Was it boiled away in the extreme heat of the young, nearby sun? Or were metals for some reason concentrated in the inner region of the solar nebula that coalesced to form the sun and planets?
• What is the nature of Mercury’s crust? What elements are present and in what concentrations?
• Is Mercury’s magnetic field, the only one in the inner solar system similar to Earth’s, the result of a dynamo in the planet’s still-molten outer core or is the core solid and the field “frozen” in place? If the field is active, is it driven by a fluid outer core like Earth’s? Or is the core solid and the field the result of some other process?
• How does Mercury’s magnetosphere interact with the solar wind and the tenuous, ultra-thin “atmosphere” of the planet? What is the nature of that atmosphere, more properly known as an exosphere, and what are its constituents?
• Does water ice, the result of comet impacts, exist today in the basins of permanently shadowed craters near the planet’s poles as radar data suggests?

This interesting news about Mercury is, indeed, a whiff of fresh air after months of continuing turmoil in some parts of planet Earth.

 

Assange calls the Internet “the greatest spying machine”

 

Julian Assange, the celebrated Australian whistleblower of WikiLeaks has just made known to the world that the Internet was the “greatest spying machine the world has ever seen.”

The former computer hacker told students of Cambridge University in Britain that while the Internet has the ability to keep us all knowledgeable and informed about anything, particularly its social networking sites such as Facebook, the downside of the technology is that it is also used wickedly by government for snooping at the enemies of the state, stifling free expression and blatantly violating human rights

“It is not a technology that favors freedom of speech.”

“It is not a technology that favors human rights.

“Rather it is a technology that can be used to set up a totalitarian spying regime, the likes of which we have never seen.”

These revelations are intimidating and chilling and used with impunity during the Egypt uprising.

Certainly, Assange knows whereof he speaks.

The 39-year-old Assange is currently fighting extradition to Sweden over allegations of sex offenses.

No PCOS machines for poll protests and recounts

Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr.

My understanding on the latest move by the Commission on Election (Comelec) headed by the new chairman, Sixto Brillantes Jr., is that there shall still be an automated polls, but that the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) will not be used for handling poll protests and recounts.

It would be recalled that in November 2010, Comelec issued a resolution providing for the use of PCOS machines in dealing with election protests.

While former Comelec chairman Jose Melo favored the use of the electronic machines to validate poll winners and to “avoid bringing back the human intervention problem,” Brillantes, on the other hand, demur its use claiming that  the result is nothing but an automated revision as opposed to the manual procedure where, he says, “you are giving the losers a chance to look at the actual ballots.”

This is now a classic example of one step forward and two steps backward.

Why validate the results of the PCOS count if  the inserted compact flash cards containing the software commands have been programmed the way Comelec wants it to be so that it will yield accurate figures, precisely to avoid poll protests?

PCOS machine

Admittedly, the PCOS machines gave credibility to the national elections of 2010 as it performed more than expectations of many.

There was not only a high turnout of voters, but Filipinos were amazed, nay impressed, at their hands-on involvement with the machine when it accepted their ballots after they themselves inserted it to the machine.

The more we became inspired by the machine’s reliability when it started counting the votes and electronically transmitting the numbers to the national tabulation center in so short a time.

Needless to say that the PCOS was also instrumental in bringing about a successful, clean, and peaceful electoral process in the country.

Is the PCOS machine the best in the market and the most appropriate for our needs? Not necessarily, for there are now more advanced voting machines used around the world.

But, if Comelec insists on using PCOS again, all they have to do is go over the flaws that the machine exhibited and correct it.

What is important in the electoral process, as we have started to automate our polls, are for candidates to accept their failure to win  and be magnanimous in defeat.

There is less tampering that can be done with the machine compared to what people can do manually, tallying and counting the votes when the polls are closed and even during recounting when protests by losers are made.

Contesting poll results and asking for recount is a waste of time and money.

Dog sees for the first time after ‘facelift’

 

Molly, a Shar Pei, has been blinded by the fold of her skin since birth a year ago. This condition, according to vets, is called entropion where folds of skin rub against the eyes.

The only way for Molly to have her eyesight restored is to have a ‘facelift.’

Recently, the dog’s owner Louise Walsh, from Romford in Essex, brought Molly to Dr. Richard Marks for a successful operation that cost the owner £720 in vet bills ($1,151.00).

It entailed two operations, one for each eye, where the offending skin was removed and stitched to the back of her head.

Dr. Marks says this disorder is caused by severe inbreeding

 

The man behind Chile’s mine rescue capsule

 

When the Chilean rescue authorities finally decided on the best possible plan to reach the 33 miners trapped 2,400 feet below the mine area, they turned to NASA for help. By then they had not yet figured out how to transport the men back up to the surface.

NASA dispatched a four-man team of two doctors and a psychologist and a man named Clinton Cragg, a 55-year old engineer, who was with the troubleshooting safety team during the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.

“NASA is in the business of building unique, one-of-a-kind vehicles,” Cragg said. “I thought we could help.”

Cragg thought it would be the smallest possible vehicle for the job, a capsule that would fit into a hole the size of a bicycle tire, with no wasted space for luxury, no elbow room for comfort.

After making his observation, Cragg went back to his office at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia and met about 20 NASA engineers to come up with a design.

The design called for a capsule that has to be operated by a single person because the last guy has to take care of securing himself inside.

It had to have wheels attached outside of the capsule and preferably Teflon coated to withstand the friction of repeated travelling up and down the mine shaft.

“Metal scraping on rock would not last,” Cragg said.

The capsule also had to have an escape hatch, in case it got stuck in the shaft. It also got a safety harness, a clock and a means to communicate with the miner inside.

NASA’s medical experts included an oxygen tank, a light and a flat space in the bottom of the capsule for miners to stretch their legs.

Cragg then turned over the list of design elements down to Chile and heard back that most of them were incorporated into the final design.

He called the 13 feet long and 926 pounds torpedo-looking contraption the Escape Vehicle, a typical NASA-like name, but the Chilean naval engineers who refined it named it the Rescue Capsule.

The rest is history.

Chile rescue operation captivates world

Mision cumplido Chile.

This Chilean phrase was what was caught by the underground camera written on the placard held by the brave unsung rescuers who went down the subterranean hell to assist the 33 trapped miners mount the one-man torpedo-shaped capsule emerge to the surface after enduring 69 days of hellish condition 2,300 feet below ground level.

Mission completed Chile.

The whole saga was about survival that was not meant for the fainthearted. It was about grit, hope and love of family. It was about having a strong belief that God would answer sincere pleas and prayers.

The rescue operation was emotional, yet very impressive and incredible!  It was a rescue unprecedented in its preciseness and success. It could only happen in Chile!

It all started when a main ramp in the San Jose Mine, near Copiapo, Chile, collapsed on Aug. 5, 2010, putting the lives of 33 miners in jeopardy about half a mile below the surface. For days, anxious relatives braced for the worst, not knowing the fate of their love ones. They never ceased to pray as they gathered around the mine with rescuers trying to locate the miners to no avail. Then on Aug. 22, a note was attached to a drill bit that got thrusted to the surface saying: “Estamos bien en el refugio los 33” (The 33 of us are all well in the shelter).

Plans of action were immediately drawn up like drilling holes to reach them for communication, ventilation and food. The last and the most important one is drilling a bigger hole for the rescue process and this involved digging towards where the miners were trapped, at an angle.

This has now become the story of the indomitable spirit of the Chilean miners who are now back with their respective family.

From darkness to light.

From isolation to freedom.

From obscurity to fame.

33 seem to be a magic number. It is appearing in everything.

“The work took 33 days total, one day a man,” said Mikhail Proestakis, manager of Driller Supply Company, which participated in the drilling of the rescue shaft with a diameter of 66 centimeters, which is 33 times two.

Even Chile President Sebastian Pinera pointed out also that the rescue efforts began on October 10, 2010 which can be written as 13/10/10 and which when added is 33.

“All thirty three of us are in the shelter” contains 33 characters, too.

Chi! Chi! Chi! Le! Le!Le! los mineros de Chile!

Richest self-made women are Chinese

Whatever genre we are talking about these days, the Chinese always seem to be at the top of the list.

We have seen it in sports, in product manufacturing and even in economic development.

Now we are hearing that more than half of the 20 richest self-made women in the world are Chinese.

According to the Shanghai-based Hurun Report, through its founder Rupert Hoogewerf who compiles data on wealthy individuals, of the 20 richest self-made female billionaires, 11 are Chinese with an average wealth of 2.6 billion dollars.

Topping the list is Zhang Yin, a paper-recycling magnet, who is said to have amassed a personal fortune of 5.6 billion dollars.

The list includes three billionaires from the United States, three from Britain and one each from Italy, Russia and Spain.

Noted US talk show host Oprah Winfrey is ranked ninth with 2.3 billion dollars and JK Rowling, author of the wildly popular Harry Potter books, was at the bottom of the list, with one billion dollars.

One important factor that has contributed to the success of Chinese women in business, according to Hoogewerf, is the government’s one-child policy, not to mention that many grandparents are the ones taking care of the welfare of the children, thus, enabling the parents to spend time building up their wealth.

Israel unveils spy drone

What kind of aerial vehicle is it that hovers like a helicopter and flies like an airplane?

Well, it’s the Panther – the name given by the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to their latest drone which they are publicizing as one that could take off without a runway and could stay up flying for six hours.

The Panther is a smaller version of the American V-22 Osprey with a tilt-rotor mounted on the end of its wings that can rotate, enabling it to take off like a helicopter and then fly like fixed-wing airplane.

While the V-22 Osprey is used for transporting troops, the Panther, which is said to be only over 140 pounds, has been designed for spying purposes. It’s intended to land quietly on enemy territory, conduct surveillance and take off right away as soon as done.

IAI’s new unmanned aerial vehicle will be exhibited for the first time internationally at a U.S. Army trade show in Washington D.C., later this month.