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Forests of "fake trees" should be planted across the country to reduce the impact of climate change, according to a study. Experts claim the devices would be able to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 100,000 of them would remove the carbon emissions of every car, lorry and bus in Britain. The scientists argue that a single synthetic tree, which would be two-thirds as tall as a wind turbine, could capture ten tons of carbon dioxide from the air every day, making it thousands of times more efficient at absorbing CO2 than a real tree. The study, by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, into how technology could prevent climate change argues that using technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere could buy the world vital time. The trees, which would cost around £15,000, would be coated with synthetic materials that absorb CO2, which would then be removed and stored underground in depleted oil and natural gas reservoirs. The study also calls for pots of algae that absorb CO2 from the atmosphere to be used to line buildings. The algae could then be used as green biofuels for cars. Painting buildings white can also help reduce the amount of solar radiation absorbed by the Earth, keeping it cool. The institution wants millions of pounds to be invested in research on technology to beat the threat of global warming to Britain. Dr Tim Fox, one of the report's authors, said: "Geo-engineering may give us those extra few years of transition to a low- carbon world and prevent any one of the future climate change scenarios we all fear." The report also claims that unless we act soon global warming will continue unabated and predicts that global temperatures could increase as much as 6c by 2100, creating food and water shortages, sea level rises and massive refugee crises. Source
It's the age old question that every woman has put to her partner at one time or another - but now gals can make up their own minds. With those famous words "Does my bum butt look big in this?" in mind, retailer Jeans West has rolled out the first of its butt cams, The Daily Telegraph reports. The camera snaps an image of your backside on your own personal screen in the change room so you no longer have to venture into the main store and run the gauntlet of unflattering light and mirrors. Jeanswest CEO Stephen Younane said the camera was a "way to bring some fitting room fun to the experience of purchasing a pair of jeans"and alter the once daunting fitting room experience. But leading retail consultant Stephen Kulmar, of Retail Oasis, said change room novelties such as the butt cam have more to do with securing sales and offering service as retail stores cut down staff numbers. "For males the change room is where the sale is made," Mr Kulmar said. "Men don't like going shopping so if you can get them into the change room this is where the sale is made. And for women in particular, if they think their behind looks good in something, they'll buy it." Mr Kulmar said developments such as the butt cam also compensated for decreasing numbers of sales staff. "Instead of adding staff, they are re-organizing their service," he said. While Jeans West was the first to offer the service in Australia, technology has been lurking in change rooms internationally for several years. British chain Ted Baker installed cameras along with video screens showing films to coax its customers to buy up. US jeanswear giant GAP trialled clothes with a radio frequency that could be "read" when brought into the change room and then offered accessorizing suggestions on a personal video screen. Source
CHINA'S military is harvesting organs from unwilling live prison inmates, mostly Falungong practitioners, for transplants on a large scale - including to foreign recipients- according to a study. The report's authors - Canada's former secretary of state for the Asia Pacific region David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas - implicated dozens of hospitals and jails throughout China in July, after a two-month investigation. Chinese officials denied those allegations. Mr Matas and Mr Kilgour's second report, released today, includes interviews with organ recipients in 30 countries and Canadian hospital staff who cared for more than 100 patients who had undergone suspicious transplant surgeries in China. "The involvement of the People's Liberation Army in these transplants is widespread,'' Mr Kilgour said at a press conference. Like many civilian hospitals in rural China, military hospitals turned to selling organs to make up for government funding cuts in the 1980s, the report said. But military personnel could operate with much more secrecy, it said. "Recipients often tell us that even when they receive transplants at civilian hospitals, those conducting the operation are military personnel,'' the report said. Hospitals in Canada's biggest cities - Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto - confirmed "a substantial number'' of Canadians had travelled to China for dubious organ transplants, Mr Kilgour said. "We're in the three digits, up over 100 (from Canada each year), and the trend is accelerating,'' Mr Matas said. To curb what they called a "disgusting form of evil", the pair asked pharmaceutical firms to stop selling organ anti-rejection drugs to China. They also asked countries to post travel advisories warning about China's alleged organ harvest, asked states to cease offering follow-up care for patients who had dubious organ transplants in China and asked foreign doctors to cut ties with their Chinese counterparts suspected of such practices. The authors said states should enact legislation to ban citizens from traveling to China for organ transplants from unwilling donors, although they admitted that such cases would be difficult to prosecute. Source
A man whose bowel was damaged in a motorcycle crash has been given a bionic bottom. Ged Galvin, 55, now presses a remote control to open his bowels and go to the toilet. The IT project manager from Barnsley, south Yorkshire, almost died when an off-duty police officer pulled out in front of him in her car. Mr Galvin suffered massive internal injuries and had to be fitted with a colostomy bag until surgeons at the Royal London Hospital could perform the complex operation to rebuild his bottom. The medical team took a muscle from above his knee, wrapped it around his sphincter, and then attached electrodes to the nerves. These are now operated by a palm-sized remote control that he carries in his pocket. “It’s like a chubby little mobile phone,” he said. “You switch it on and off, just like switching on the TV. “They call me the man with the bionic bottom, but that doesn’t bother me. My gratitude to the surgeons is endless because what they have done is a miracle.” Mr Galvin, who had previously endured the indignity of carrying a colostomy bag, added: “I thought that in these days of modern medicine surely there was something they could do. They'd mended everything else - why not this? Anything was better than a colostomy bag. “The operation changed my life and gave me back my pride and confidence. Because of the remote control I can lead a normal life again.” The father-of-two is resigned to having the muscles in his bionic bottom replaced every five years. Source
Software giant Microsoft has apologized for editing a photo to change a black man's head to that of a white man. The picture, showing employees sitting around a desk, appeared unaltered on the firm's US website. But on the website of its Polish business unit the black man's head was replaced with a white face, although the color of his hands was unchanged. Microsoft said it had pulled the image and would be investigating who made the changes. It apologized for the gaffe. The altered image, which also featured an Asian man and a white woman, was quickly circulated online. Bloggers have had a field day with the story, with some suggesting Microsoft was attempting to please all markets by having a man with both a white face and a black hand. "The white head and black hand actually symbolize interracial harmony. It is supposed to show that a person can be white and black, old and young at the same time," said one blogger on the Photoshop Disasters blog. Others have suggested the ethnic make-up of the Polish population, which is predominantly white, may have played a part in the decision to change the photo. Source
Article Submitted by ShapeSphere. A Formula 3 racing car with a top speed of 145mph has been unveiled, which is made of vegetables and powered by chocolate. The British-built ecoF3 racing car has a steering wheel made from carrots, a bodywork crafted from potatoes and a soya bean seat. It uses plant oil-based lubricants to grease its moving parts and boasts a biodiesel engine capable of running on chocolate extracts and vegetable oil. The car's bodywork was made by mixing vegetable fibres with resins and it is the first Formula 3 car built from eco-friendly materials. But the ecoF3 is currently ineligible to compete in next season's championship because the engine's unusual fuel means it fails to meet regulations. James Meredith, project manager of the WorldFirst team from Warwick University, in Coventry, West Mids, which designed and built the car, said the car breaks new ground. He added: "It's been very exciting working on the project and important for our team to develop a working example of a truly green motor racing car. "The WorldFirst project expels the myth that performance needs to be compromised when developing the sustainable motor vehicles of the future." Source
Firefox has gained a lot of popularity among the Internet community because of many useful extensions. One of them is called AdBlock, essential to anyone browsing the Internet today who wishes to remove all the intrusive and flashy ads. Is it considered stealing potential revenue from a website when you block their ads? Or is it a user right to do so? One popular filehost site Mediafire seems to disagree. A Firefox add-on has forced this company to give Mozilla a takedown notice. There have also been continued threats from some website owners to target Firefox users and block them. However, this has yet to be followed through by anyone. Source, Source,Source,
Article Submitted by Henri_. Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered. The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It's the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk. Astronomers have decided to call the star "Lucy" after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. "You would need a jeweller's loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond," says astronomer Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team of researchers that discovered it. The diamond star completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 546-carat Golden Jubilee which was cut from a stone brought out of the Premier mine in South Africa. The huge cosmic diamond - technically known as BPM 37093 - is actually a crystallised white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon. For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallised, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently. The white dwarf is not only radiant but also rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations. "By measuring those pulsations, we were able to study the hidden interior of the white dwarf, just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth. "We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy's largest diamond," says Metcalfe. Astronomers expect our Sun will become a white dwarf when it dies 5 billion years from now. Some two billion years after that, the Sun's ember core will crystallise as well, leaving a giant diamond in the centre of the solar system. "Our Sun will become a diamond that truly is forever," says Metcalfe. Source, Source, Source
Article Submitted by ug7433. Brian Krebs from the Washington Post: A U.S. based Web hosting firm that security experts say was responsible for facilitating more than 75 percent of the junk e-mail blasted out each day globally has been knocked offline following reports from Security Fix on evidence gathered about suspicious activity emanating from the network. For the past four months, Security Fix has been gathering data from the security industry about McColo Corp., a San Jose, Calif., based Web hosting service whose client list experts say includes some of the most disreputable cyber-criminal gangs in business today. On Monday, Security Fix contacted the Internet providers that manage more than 90 percent of the company's connection to the larger Internet, sending them information about badness at McColo as documented by the security industry. On Tuesday afternoon, I heard back from Global Crossing, one of McColo's major Internet providers. Their spokesman declined to discuss the matter, except to say that Global Crossing communicates and cooperates fully with law enforcement, their peers, and security researchers to address malicious activity. Two hours later, I heard from Benny Ng, director of marketing for Hurricane Electric, the Fremont, Calif., company that was the other major Internet provider for McColo. Hurricane Electric took a much stronger public stance: "We shut them down," Ng said. "We looked into it a bit, saw the size and scope of the problem you were reporting and said 'Holy cow! Within the hour we had terminated all of our connections to them." As of this writing, McColo's Web site is no longer available. In fact, I pinged no fewer than three different researchers who have tracked activity at McColo for many months: None could find a single Internet address assigned to the hosting provider that was still reachable. Officials from McColo did not respond to multiple e-mails, phone calls and instant messages left at the contact points listed on the company's Web site before the site was taken offline. There's more to come with details about this story later tonight or early tomorrow, but I wanted to get this post published before we got scooped on our own story. Source
Article Submitted by Henri_. A man cut off his finger tip while working on a model plane. His brother, a medical research scientist, sent him a vial containing powdered pig bladder and told him to sprinkle on the severed finger tip. It grew back -- "flesh, blood, vessels and nail" -- in four weeks. That powder is a substance made from pig bladders called extracellular matrix. It is a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons and it holds some of the secrets behind the emerging new science of regenerative medicine. "It tells the body, start that process of tissue regrowth," said Badylak. Badlayk is one of the many scientists who now believe every tissue in the body has cells which are capable of regeneration. All scientists have to do is find enough of those cells and "direct" them to grow. "Somehow the matrix summons the cells and tell them what to do," Badylak explained. "It helps instruct them in terms of where they need to go, how they need to differentiate - should I become a blood vessel, a nerve, a muscle cell or whatever." Be sure to check out this CBSnews Article for more information about re-growing organs... including: Ink Jet Heart Cells And Custom-Made Body Parts Source, Source
