Science 8 November 2013:
Vol. 342 no. 6159 pp. 676-677
DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6159.676-b In science news around the world, virologist Ron Fouchier appeals the Dutch government's ruling that he must apply for an export license before publishing research on H5N1, a damaging banana disease spreads beyond Southeast Asia to Jordan, scientists in the United Kingdom establish a British Personal Genome Project, and more.
Showing posts with label World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
[News of the Week] Around the World
Sunday, June 30, 2013
World War Z director Marc Forster takes his zombie cue from animals
NEW YORK — As a boy growing up in Switzerland, director Marc Forster was obsessed with the way fish and birds, moving together, gracefully coalesced into a single organism, the multitudes swarming seamlessly as one.
From such pastoral visions comes the zombie tsunami threatening humanity in Brad Pitt-starrer World War Z.
Once bitten, the victims frenetically convulse and join an undead horde that sprint through city streets like rabid cheetahs, clicking their teeth malevolently and at times swarming terrifyingly en masse.
“They’re like this force of nature coming at you,” Forster said. “I felt like the more I could base it in nature, viscerally, the more scary it will be.”
The animal kingdom figured heavily into his conception of the zombies. In addition to birds and fish, the filmmakers also paid careful attention to the movements of ants. The mandibular mechanics of the zombie bite were informed by police dogs, specifically the way they lead with their mouths and “then bite forward”, Forster said.
As for the clacking teeth, which seem to evoke gorillas or an insect plague, Forster said that aspect was actually his one nod toward the gothic.
“It’s like an empty shell — you feel a hollowness because they’re not human anymore,” he said. “Their souls have left them.” THE NEW YORK TIMES
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LONDON — The first problem you encounter with World War Z, the new action blockbuster starring Brad Pitt, is how to pronounce the damn thing. Should the last letter be said “zee”, to sound like “three”, or “zed”, to sound like “dead”, or “zzz”, to sound like the audience?
Whichever phoneme you plump for, the Z stands for zombie, and the film contains, on a rough estimate, hundreds of thousands of them. It is based on a novel by Max Brooks, son of the filmmaker and humourist Mel, and it follows Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a flaxen-haired former United Nations action man who is recalled to the line of duty when a mysterious pandemic turns citizens of various countries into walking, chomping corpses.
Brooks’s novel was a thinly-veiled parable about American foreign policy and post-millennial anxiety, told from several points of view: in fact, it had much in common with Steven Soderbergh’s terrific 2011 medical thriller Contagion. Marc Forster’s film junks the satire and multiple perspectives, and instead recasts the story as an uncomplicated globe-trotting thriller. On one side we have Lane and a roster of temporary sidekicks, and on the other, an inexhaustible supply of the living dead.
What we get is a collection of moderately violent action set-pieces untroubled by humour or broader coherence. Lane travels from Philadelphia (played on-screen by Glasgow) to Nova Scotia via New York, New Jersey, South Korea, Israel and Wales, and almost nothing that happens along the way has the slightest effect on the film’s final outcome. Perhaps this should come as no surprise: Shortly after filming on World War Z was thought to be complete, seven weeks of extra shooting took place in Budapest, which was followed by the writing and filming of an entirely new third act later in the year. Whatever direction the film was originally headed in, someone important obviously thought better of it.
Forster, who directed the Bond film Quantum Of Solace, has done his best to piece together a story from these incompatible parts, but the final product has an elaborate uselessness about it, like a broken teapot glued back together with the missing pieces replaced by parts of a vacuum cleaner.
The Welsh finale, in particular, looks spectacularly cheap, and the screen-stretching vistas and computer-generated hordes from earlier in the movie are nowhere to be seen. In their place is Peter Capaldi, who plays a World Health Organisation director hiding out in a bunker near Cardiff, and when you first glimpse him in an otherwise empty office you wonder if Malcolm Tucker has somehow saved the day by swearing the zombies into submission.
By that point you’re well-primed for such silliness, as many of the film’s key dramatic moments wouldn’t feel particularly out of place on a horror-themed edition of The Thick Of It. In one early sequence, when Lane tries to creep past a crowd of zombies on a military base, his cover is blown when his wife Karen (Mireille Enos) unexpectedly rings his mobile. Moments earlier, an important character trips up and accidentally shoots himself in the head, and you start to question whether the planet might in fact be safer in the hands of the zombies.
At least the film has one neat trick: in the Israel sequence we see Boschian wide-shots of zombie hordes coursing down streets and sluicing over barriers like a great, monstrous flood. This chimes with the footage of swarming insects in the opening titles, and suggests that the film may have once had a point to make before the rot set in. But there’s no heart to be found amid the guts. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
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Eden - World Builder - Kingly Software Inc
Explore a pristine world of infinite possibility. Eden brings creative sandbox building to the touch screen.
Features:
* Unique, beautifully generated endless worlds to explore, build, and destroy
* Dozens of block types including ice slides, water, lava, glass, ladders, TNT, trampolines, vines, and ramps
* Painting: color everything with a touch
* Destruction: unleash the power of fire and explosives
* Community: share your creations with friends and explore new worlds
* Easy to use controls
*New* Creatures to play with and put in your creations!
"One of the biggest gems on the App Store" - iFans.com
"The gameplay is very smooth and controls are perfect" - getsatisfaction.com
Creatures, music and sound effects!
Friday, April 26, 2013
Eden - World Builder - Kingly Software Inc
Explore a pristine world of infinite possibility. Eden brings creative sandbox building to the touch screen.
Features:
* Unique, beautifully generated endless worlds to explore, build, and destroy
* Dozens of block types including ice slides, water, lava, glass, ladders, TNT, trampolines, vines, and ramps
* Painting: color everything with a touch
* Destruction: unleash the power of fire and explosives
* Community: share your creations with friends and explore new worlds
* Easy to use controls
*New* Creatures to play with and put in your creations!
"One of the biggest gems on the App Store" - iFans.com
"The gameplay is very smooth and controls are perfect" - getsatisfaction.com
Creatures, music and sound effects!
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Eden - World Builder - Kingly Software Inc
Explore a pristine world of infinite possibility. Eden brings creative sandbox building to the touch screen.
Features:
* Unique, beautifully generated endless worlds to explore, build, and destroy
* Dozens of block types including ice slides, water, lava, glass, ladders, TNT, trampolines, vines, and ramps
* Painting: color everything with a touch
* Destruction: unleash the power of fire and explosives
* Community: share your creations with friends and explore new worlds
* Easy to use controls
*New* Creatures to play with and put in your creations!
"One of the biggest gems on the App Store" - iFans.com
"The gameplay is very smooth and controls are perfect" - getsatisfaction.com
Creatures, music and sound effects!
Thursday, April 18, 2013
A primary voltage standard for the whole world
Sam Benz demonstrates the relatively small amount of equipment required for the newly automated voltage standard. The chip containing Josephson junctions is at the lower end of the rod.(Phys.org) —PML researchers are on the verge of reaching a long-sought major goal: Providing the world with a programmable quantum voltage standard that has an uncertainty of less than 1 part per billion, never needs calibration, and is sufficiently automated that it can be used in developing countries by non-experts. 
"Getting to this point has required three decades of extensive research and development in a host of fields, including materials science, microwave engineering, superconducting technology, and electronics and system integration," says Sam Benz, leader of the Quantum Voltage System Development and Dissemination project in the Quantum Electronics and Photonics Division. "And now, finally, we have also been able to incorporate a very high degree of automation as well. These new systems will empower a very wide range of researchers and businesses around the globe."
Already, a very similar – if less user-friendly – version of NIST's programmable Josephson voltage standards (PJVS) have been installed in India, Brazil, and Taiwan; and China is interested in multiple units, says Dave Rudman, leader of PML's Quantum Devices Group.
"The only problem with those is that they require an expert PhD physicist to operate," Rudman says. "We wanted a standard that was considerably easier to use. If dissemination of the new, automated system proceeds as envisioned, then within our lifetimes there will no longer be a need for voltage transfer standards that have to be shipped off periodically for re-calibration. We can make primary standards, programmable from 0 to 10 volts, which are simple and cheap enough that every lab can have one. This is real now."
The extraordinary precision of the standard relies on a quantum-mechanical phenomenon characteristic of Josephson junctions, which consist of two superconductors separated by a thin barrier through which pairs of electrons can tunnel. When the junction is biased with a current to generate a voltage across the junction, it will produce an alternating current at a frequency precisely determined only by the voltage. When microwaves are additionally applied to the junction, the junction oscillations lock to that frequency to produce voltage steps with magnitudes determined only by the microwave frequency. Because microwaves can be controlled to exquisite precision, so can the resulting voltage.
The voltage "quantization" effect is independent of the environment or material composition of the microfabricated junctions. So the Josephson voltage standards (JVS) are truly intrinsic standards. "Every system based on these effects produces exactly the same voltage as every other system," Benz says.
Traditionally, however, the devices have been extraordinarily challenging to make and use. Each individual junction, whose barrier thickness is on the order of 40 nanometers, produces no more than a few tens of microvolts; so arrays of hundreds of thousands of junctions are necessary to generate the voltages relevant to industry and electronics research. Each of those junctions has to be virtually identical and receive nearly the same microwave power; and they all must be addressed uniformly for the device to work.
Not surprisingly, the evolution of the modern Josephson standard has moved through several stages as microfabrication techniques have improved, and scientists have explored different materials and configurations. In 1984, the first 1 V standard was produced, and by the late 1980s array technology was sufficiently advanced that 10 V superconducting integrated circuits had been successfully demonstrated, and JVS systems were at work in major national metrology institutes worldwide. "As a result," Benz says, "agreement of dc voltage measurements made in different labs improved by four orders of magnitude." Those measurements now differ by no more than a few parts in 1010.
The integrated circuit for NIST's programmable AC/DC 10-volt standard. The chip contains about 300,000 superconducting Josephson junctions located along coplanar waveguides which run horizontally. The entire device is 12 mm by 17 mm.
Programmable designs require that the microwave signal be split into multiple channels via waveguides and that junctions must be divided into multiple subarrays, each of which can be addressed independently.
In addition, each junction should be able to switch very fast, and produce accurate voltage steps over a well-defined range of bias current. (Josephson junctions produce both positive and negative voltages at discrete, quantized values.) Benz and colleagues introduced the first programmable 1 V system in 1997, and in 2006 announced a fully functional 10 V system.
In 2008, NIST power meter calibrations were improved 20-fold when the NIST power and voltage teams developed a new measurement technique that exploited stepwise voltages synthesized by the PJVS.
By 2010, the team had arrived at a state-of-the-art 10 V PJVS design for both dc and ac metrology. It contained 32 separate microwave channels addressing approximately 300,000 junctions made from niobium superconductors separated by niobium-doped silicon – a material combination that ensures fast, stable switching and low hysteresis. Enabling improvements to the microwave design included advanced superconducting microwave power dividers and filters that were developed by Mike Elsbury and Paul Dresselhaus.
The first system was shipped to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and there was immediate and widespread demand: Dozens of standards labs, military organizations, and private companies worldwide need high-precision calibration of voltmeters for applications from consumer electronics to missile guidance systems.
"But over the past three years," Benz says, "we've learned that many people who are using PJVS systems for these new applications neglect to ensure that their systems are performing with quantum accuracy. Even with sufficient training equipment, and software tools, additional measurements and extreme care are required to assure optimal performance. Many people do not appreciate that measurements which are both reproducible and of low uncertainty can still be inaccurate.
"Even metrologists want a black box. So we realized that we've got to even further automate these systems to the point where the system continuously checks its quantum behavior and each application has a well-defined measurement circuit and automation software."
For example, the PJVS requires perfect phase-lock synchronization between different inputs. "So we needed to somehow program a system that never lost phase lock for our pulse-driven JVS system," Benz says. "My colleague Steve Waltman found a way to do it in which all the inputs are intrinsically locked to each other because they're all generated with the same clock. It reduced the cost of the instrumentation by a factor of three while solving and simplifying the system integration."
Some fixes required less sophisticated engineering or physics. "We get reports from people who have problems because they have poor local power supplies," Benz says. "We initially delivered our systems with separate components, and people were plugging them into different electrical outlets so the grounding was different. So now we've put everything into a single rack to optimize grounding and we include surge-suppressing power strips."
Just when it appeared that the development phase for the new pulse-driven JVS design was completed, a further innovation turned up. "We were ready to push ahead with an eight-channel system pulse-driven JVS to reach 1V," Benz says, "but I was tuning up the system one day and set the power too high. I noticed that I still had quantum performance in this situation, which produces two Josephson pulses for every one input pulse. Basically, it's doubling the voltage, which means I can get rid of half the inputs.
"We're still trying out different amplifiers to see which works best with this scheme. But now we really do have a chance to produce a practical turnkey pulse-driven system. We've been spending a lot of our time in the last year building that device and integrating it and getting ready to move it forward."
It will be welcomed on arrival. "Right now, there are a lot of people clamoring for these things," Rudman says. "Through a computer interface, you tell the PJVS to generate any voltage you want from 0 to 10 volts, and it will put that out perfectly. And it can move between voltages fast enough so that you can for instance synthesize slow waveforms like 60 Hz at perfect tones."
The whole system consists of the junction chip, mounted at the end of a rod for immersion in liquid helium, and a small rack of electronics. That might seem to be near-ultimate simplicity. But there is always a bit farther to go. "Access to liquid helium is a problem for some of the places these systems most need to go," Rudman says. "So we're already working on two different refrigeration schemes that will make the JVS systems even more like a black box."
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Key find for treating wastewater on World Water Day
A newly developed membrane used to separate waste from water could become key in the treatment of pollutants ranging from acid mine drainage to oil-containing wastewater, as well as in processes ranging from desalination to kidney dialysis. Provided by Wits University
The research was published in Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group) on Friday, 22 March, coinciding with World Water Day and falling within South Africa's National Water Week.
The technology – which was developed by a team of researchers from Wits University, in collaboration with NASA – will make it easier to filter pure water from waste produced during mining, oil and gas exploration and production, and nuclear exploration, to name a few. Even medical purification processes such as kidney dialysis could benefit.
A commercial product will hopefully be developed soon, and there are plans to approach the US government regarding their problems with contaminants such as arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals in their water. Closer to home, the technology could make huge inroads in dealing with the major issue of acid mine drainage.
According to the Head of the Wits School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, Prof. Sunny Iyuke, who developed the product in collaboration with two PhD students, the membrane module (similar to a household water filter) could be used to catch water waste from mines before it entered drains or the water table. Water flow analytics could be used to track the direction and location of any escaped wastewater, where another membrane module (in the form of a borehole) could be stationed.
The nanocomposite membrane gives two products: a smaller amount of concentrated waste and water so clean it could be drinkable. The waste can be reused, as in the case of arsenic, which is used in preservatives for wood and leather, ammunitions manufacturing, and pest control. Even the waste from acid mine drainage could be reused.
"Water is critical to sustaining life, and water scarcity is becoming a huge problem not just in South Africa, but all over the world," said Iyuke. "This technology produces a win win situation, for industry and the environment."
Provided by Wits University
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