The "News" thread.

[gwillybj]

Stars Aligned for Nickel Bull Market
Published Thu, Mar 27, 2014
Tim Maverick, Staff Writer
Wall Street Daily



Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions have certainly stirred the pot in the energy market, as our Investment Director, Karim Rahemtulla, recently pointed out.

And now, the ripples have spread far beyond the energy market to other commodity markets.

You see, the threat of Western sanctions against Russia has put renewed focus on a base metal that’s been in the doldrums for years… nickel.

That’s because the world’s largest producer of the metal, which is used to make stainless steel and nonferrous alloys, happens to be Mother Russia’s Norilsk Nickel (NILSY). NILSY mines a whopping 17% of the world’s nickel each year.

Sanctions against such a huge source of nickel would indeed be a big deal, and share prices are reacting accordingly.

Nickel is suddenly in bull market mode, and prices recently hit their highest level since April at $16,230 per metric ton on the London Metals Exchange (LME). That represents a gain of more than 20% since nickel’s low on January 9, at $13,334 per ton, and meets the technical definition of a bull market.

It also makes nickel the best-performing base metal in 2014. Quite a contrast to 2013, when it was the worst-performing base metal!

But there’s a lot more behind nickel’s story than just Russia.

Indonesia and Nickel

Until recently, Indonesia was the world’s top high-grade nickel ore supplier.

But in early January, the Indonesian government imposed an export ban on some unprocessed mineral ores, including nickel ore.

And here’s the twist: Despite numerous denials, it seems Indonesia instituted the ban at the behest of Putin and Norilsk Nickel. Apparently Russia threatened to put its major Indonesian investment plan on hold if the ban wasn’t instituted.

And now, combined with sanctions against Russia, the Indonesian nickel ore export ban threatens to turn a market in surplus into one with a rapidly shrinking supply. Even some optimistic forecasts say that the surplus will shrink from 207,000 metric tons in 2013 to only a 68,000-ton surplus in 2014.

In other words, if Indonesia’s export ban stays in place, it could be a game-changer in the marketplace for several years.

For example, the high-grade nickel ore needed by Chinese pig iron factories is found mainly in Indonesia and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines. In 2013 alone, Indonesia shipped 45 million tons of nickel ore to China. The shrinking supply could put a huge strain on China’s stainless steel production.

Bottom line: Most estimates say 12% of the world’s nickel supply is threatened by the Indonesian export ban. Add to that the threat of sanctions against Russia, and it’s no wonder nickel prices are soaring.

Nickel ETNs

This situation presents a definite investment opportunity, though not for nickel companies.

As we already discussed, the biggest producer, Norilsk, is Russian. And the number two producer, Vale S.A. (VALE), is having its major Indonesian operations adversely impacted by the export ban.

That does, however, leave two nickel exchange traded notes (ETNs) from iPath.

The two ETNs are the iPath Dow Jones-UBS Nickel Subindex Total Return ETN (JJN) and the iPath Pure Beta ETN (NINI).

Both ETNs are designed to track the performance of a nickel future traded on the LME. The only difference is that NINI is designed to smooth out the price during contract expiration and subsequent rollover into a new contract.

If you’re looking for an opportunity, both ETNs should continue to benefit from Russian mischief-making.

And the “chase” continues,

Tim Maverick

Tim Maverick boasts decades of experience in the investment world. He spent 20 years at a major brokerage firm - as a trading supervisor and broker working directly with clients.

http://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2014/03/27/nickel/

[gwillybj]

CBC News
Technology & Science
Malaysia Airlines MH370: Why Airlines Don't Live-Stream Black Box Data
By Andre Mayer, CBC News
Posted: Mar 28, 2014 5:00 AM ET
Last Updated: Mar 28, 2014 11:28 AM ET

Two Canadian companies have created systems to live-stream flight data.

International teams have spent nearly three weeks looking for evidence of the missing Malaysian Airlines plane, a search that includes the hunt for the aircraft's so-called black box, which holds flight data that would likely explain what caused MH370 to deviate from its course.

But many aviation experts wonder why, in our increasingly networked world, divers are scouring the Indian Ocean for a metal box when technology already exists that would enable planes to stream black box data to the ground in the event of an emergency.

"Look at how much money has been spent, on this crash and others, just to do the post-mortem," says Doug Perovic, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Toronto.

"It's crazy, when the technology [to stream the data] is already there."

By some estimates, it would have cost just a few thousand dollars in satellite time if MH370's black box had been primed to live-stream its data over the estimated seven hours that followed that first dramatic veering off course.

Black boxes have been on planes since the late 1950s, and now every commercial aircraft has two: a flight data recorder (FDR) and a voice recorder. (Although they are referred to as black boxes, they are typically orange in colour, making them easier to spot in murky waters.)

According to standards set by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the FDR must contain a minimum of 88 data "parameters" on the flight conditions of an aircraft, from time of day to altitude, air speed and acceleration.

Housed in a metal shell built to withstand extreme temperatures and pressure, black box recorders are mainly used to investigate the cause of in-flight accidents.

While black boxes are built to survive a crash and long-term submersion in water, they also have a built-in design flaw – if a plane has gone down in the ocean, it can be an enormous challenge to find the device. While each box contains a beacon, the unit only has enough battery power to transmit a signal for 30 days.

After the crash of Air France Flight 447 in the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009, it took divers two years to find the black box.


Flight data recorders, such as this one recovered from an Airbus A340 crash in Toronto on Aug. 4, 2005, are housed in metal casing to withstand extreme temperatures and pressure. (Nicki Corrigall/The Ottawa Citizen-Canwest News Service)

Technology in place now

The disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight, and the thwarted efforts thus far to locate its black boxes, has led some aviation experts to doubt their usefulness.

Pierre Jiennot, a Canadian engineer who helped perfect black box technology while working at Air Canada about 40 years ago, feels that the device, in its current form, is "obsolete."

He started to question its effectiveness more than a decade ago, after seeing the extent of the plane wreckage in the 2001 attacks on the World Trade towers in New York.

"The black boxes were pulverized," he says. He thought back then that it would be far more efficient to be able to transmit that flight data to the ground.

"It seemed obvious to me that we could have had the information piped through a satellite instead of having to … look for a black box," says Jiennot, who is now on the advisory board of Star Navigation Systems Group, a Toronto-based firm that has built a live-streamed black box system.

Calgary-based FLYHT Aerospace Solutions sells a similar system. Called the Automated Flight Information Reporting System (AFIRS), FLYHT's product combines the infrastructure of the internet and the constellation of 66 satellites operated by Virginia-based Iridium Communications.

When a plane experiences an adverse event, AFIRS can send streaming data off the aircraft to one of Iridium's 66 satellites and then down to ground-based servers, where the message is interpreted and sent to the airline.

The infrastructure for this type of system has existed since about 2000, but it wasn't until after the Air France crash that airlines took it seriously, says Richard Hayden, sales director for FLYHT.

"The loss of one of the most sophisticated aircraft in the sky in 2009 [the Airbus A330-203 in the Air France flight from Brazil] basically woke people up to the fact that the tools that were being used at that stage were inadequate for dealing with emergency situations," says Hayden.

Even so, he notes, "aviation doesn't move very quickly to adopt change."

Because of ever-present safety concerns, the industry is highly regulated and new technology is subject to rigorous vetting.

"Some of that inherent caution and conservatism is why airplanes are so safe," Hayden says.

The cost factor

While there is widespread approval of a live-streamed black box system, most airlines see the cost of integrating it prohibitive, says Bill Norwood, vice-president of products and technology for JDA Aviation Technology Solutions, a Maryland-based consultancy firm.

Norwood says that the airline industry is reluctant to add costs that will further erode the bottom line. This is an industry with notoriously low profit margins, he says.

According to The Economist magazine, airlines have average profit margins of just one per cent, and in 2012, "they made profits of only $4 for every passenger carried." This is largely due to the cost of fuel and government fees.

Norwood says the chief cost in using a live-streamed black box system is transmitting the data through satellites, which will have a direct bearing on the cost of every flight.

"In the realm of making the flight profitable or not profitable, if they start [live-streaming black box data], the flight is no longer profitable," he says.

That view reflects a lack of understanding about what the technology is capable of, says Hayden, who adds that FLYHT has sold 350 units of its AFIRS system and has orders for 250 more.

He says the AFIRS system doesn't stream black box data for every hour of every flight. It only begins streaming data once an irregular event has occurred, which reduces the satellite transmission costs significantly.

Hayden says that based on Iridium's pricing, it would cost about $5 to $7 US per minute to transmit black box data via their satellites to the ground.

He estimates that if this technology had been on board the missing Malaysian Airlines flight and live-streaming for the estimated seven hours after the flight first experienced a problem, it would have cost about $3,000.

Given how much time, money and effort has been expended on the luckless search for MH370's black box, the cost of operating a live-streaming version seems like a trifle, says U of T's Perovic.

"I don't think it's a prohibitive cost, particularly with something where the risk factors are high."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/malaysia-airlines-mh370-why-airlines-don-t-live-stream-black-box-data-1.2586966

[gwillybj]

Power Plants Put at Risk by Security Bugs
By Mark Ward
Technology correspondent
BBC News  |  Technology
4 April 2014 Last updated at 05:50 ET

The discovery of bugs in software used to run oil rigs, refineries and power plants has prompted a global push to patch the widely used control system.

The bugs were found by security researchers and, if exploited, could give attackers remote access to control systems for the installations.

The US Department of Homeland Security said an attacker with "low skill" would be able to exploit the bugs.

About 7,600 plants around the world are using the vulnerable software.

"We went from zero to total compromise," said Juan Vazquez, a researcher at security firm Rapid7 who, with colleague Julian Diaz, found several holes in Yokogawa's Centum CS 3000 software.

Critical Path

First released to run on Windows 98, the Centum CS 3000 software is used to monitor and control machinery in many large industrial installations.

"If you are able to exploit the vulnerabilities we have identified you get control of the Human Interface Station," said Mr Diaz. "That's where the operator sits or stands and monitors operational details."

"If you have control of that station as an attacker you have the same level of control as someone standing on the plant floor wearing a security badge," he said.

Rapid7's work prompted the Computer Emergency Response Team of the US Department of Homeland Security that deals with critical infrastructure to issue an alert about the vulnerabilities.

In its alert, ICS-Cert said companies using Centum CS 3000 should evaluate whether they were at risk and apply a patch if it was needed.

"An attacker with a low skill would be able to exploit these vulnerabilities," it said in its alert.

The Rapid7 researchers alerted Yokogawa about their findings before publicising their work to give the company time to produce a patch that can close the loopholes.

"Not all Centum CS 3000 users need to apply this patch immediately," said Yokogawa in a statement. "This depends on how their systems are connected to external networks and on the security measures that are in place."

Yokogawa said it was in the process of contacting customers who might be vulnerable and urging those who were at risk to apply its patch.

Computer Emergency Response Teams (Cert) in several other nations have helped to spread the word about the findings. The UK's newly formed Cert declined to comment on the issue.

However, the BBC understands that an alert has been communicated to organisations in the UK running the parts of the UK's critical national infrastructure that might be at risk. Such alerts are believed to be relatively common and many companies have policies and practices in place to handle updates and changes.

Bug Bonanza

Mr Vazquez said the threat the bugs posed had been proven in the lab but there was no evidence that attackers were seeking to abuse them. He added that anyone who did use them to get access to a control system could still be thwarted because they lacked the specialised knowledge to understand how the power plant, refinery or oil rig worked.

Mark O'Neill, a spokesman for data management firm Axway, said the need for specialised knowledge was no real defence.

"Security through obscurity is really no security at all," he said.

He added that some firms often struggled to update and patch software because of the age of the code and that of the equipment it was helping to keep running. Many were now turning to software "wrappers" that cocooned the old code in another program that was easier to maintain and monitor.

Mr Diaz said the pair chose the Yokogawa control system because it was "emblematic" of the state of software used to control large industrial installations. Such software, called Scada (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) has attracted the attention of security researchers recently worried about its defensibility.

"Unfortunately for the control systems industries, these type of exploits are becoming more and more common," said Billy Rios, a security researcher at Qualys.

The poor security of such software was revealed by a project Mr Rios and a colleague undertook in which they sought to find 100 Scada bugs in 100 days.

"We ended up finding over 1,000 bugs in 100 days," he said. "Scada software security simply hasn't kept up with modern times. The security of software like iTunes is much more robust than the software supporting our critical infrastructure."

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26881970

[gwillybj]

Space Daily
Eclipses
A Tetrad of Lunar Eclipses
by Dr. Tony Phillips for NASA Science News
Huntsville AL (SPX) Mar 31, 2014


A new ScienceCast video explains the lunar eclipse tetrad of 2014-2015.

For people in the United States, an extraordinary series of lunar eclipses is about to begin. The action starts on April 15th when the full Moon passes through the amber shadow of Earth, producing a midnight eclipse visible across North America. So begins a lunar eclipse tetrad-a series of 4 consecutive total eclipses occurring at approximately six month intervals.

The total eclipse of April 15, 2014, will be followed by another on Oct. 8, 2014, and another on April 4, 2015, and another on Sept. 28 2015. "The most unique thing about the 2014-2015 tetrad is that all of them are visible for all or parts of the USA," says longtime NASA eclipse expert Fred Espenak.

On average, lunar eclipses occur about twice a year, but not all of them are total. There are three types:

1. A penumbral eclipse is when the Moon passes through the pale outskirts of Earth's shadow. It's so subtle, sky watchers often don't notice an eclipse is underway.

2. A partial eclipse is more dramatic. The Moon dips into the core of Earth's shadow, but not all the way, so only a fraction of Moon is darkened.

3. A total eclipse, when the entire Moon is shadowed, is best of all. The face of the Moon turns sunset-red for up to an hour or more as the eclipse slowly unfolds.

Usually, lunar eclipses come in no particular order. A partial can be followed by a total, followed by a penumbral, and so on. Anything goes. Occasionally, though, the sequence is more orderly. When four consecutive lunar eclipses are all total, the series is called a tetrad.

"During the 21st century, there are 9 sets of tetrads, so I would describe tetrads as a frequent occurrence in the current pattern of lunar eclipses," says Espenak. "But this has not always been the case. During the three hundred year interval from 1600 to 1900, for instance, there were no tetrads at all."

The April 15th eclipse begins at 2 AM Eastern time when the edge of the Moon first enters the amber core of Earth's shadow. Totality occurs during a 78 minute interval beginning around 3 o'clock in the morning on the east coast, midnight on the west coast. Weather permitting, the red Moon will be easy to see across the entirety of North America.

Why Red?

A quick trip to the Moon provides the answer: Imagine yourself standing on a dusty lunar plain looking up at the sky. Overhead hangs Earth, nightside down, completely hiding the sun behind it. The eclipse is underway.

You might expect Earth seen in this way to be utterly dark, but it's not. The rim of the planet is on fire! As you scan your eye around Earth's circumference, you're seeing every sunrise and every sunset in the world, all of them, all at once. This incredible light beams into the heart of Earth's shadow, filling it with a coppery glow and transforming the Moon into a great red orb.

Mark your calendar for April 15th and let the tetrad begin.

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/A_Tetrad_of_Lunar_Eclipses_999.html

[Rusty Edge]

So, do you have a thread about Sid's Civ Beyond Earth?
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/beyond-earth-takes-civilization-to-the-stars/1100-6418906/

[Buster's Uncle]

We got a whole  SUBFORUM for BE http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?board=27.0  I already posted the Gamespot article.

[Rusty Edge]

I was checking for threads instead of sub forums ... 

[Buster's Uncle]

  That $#@! game has eaten up my entire day.  It BETTER not turn out to suck like ciV...

[Geo]

It BETTER not turn out to suck like ciV...

 

[Unorthodox]

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-find-seven-dead-babies-in-utah-womans-home/

PLEASANT GROVE, Utah - Police arrested a 39-year-old woman Sunday after the bodies of seven infants were found in a home where she used to live.

Megan Huntsman was booked into the Utah County Jail for investigation of six counts of murder, CBS affiliate KUTV in Salt Lake City reported.


pleasantgriove-map.jpg
 CBS NEWS
Hunstman's ex-husband alerted police after finding the body of an infant inside a Pleasant Grove home where the woman had lived untll 2011, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. Pleasant Grove is located about 35 miles south of Salt Lake City.
Police went to the home and found the body of a newborn who appeared to have been full-term. Executing a search warrant, they then discovered the bodies of six additional infants, KUTV reported.

The six tiny bodies were found in separate cardboard boxes inside the garage, police Capt. Michael Roberts told the Tribune.

Police believe that over a 10-year period, from 1996 to 2006, Huntsman gave birth to the infants and then killed them.

Her ex-husband is believed to be the father but investigators are still working on DNA tests, Roberts said.

Police are not pursuing charges against the ex-husband at this point, Roberts said.

The ranch-style home, which is split into two apartments, is owned by the ex-husband's parents, the Tribune said.
Longtime neighbor Sharon Chipman told the newspaper Huntman's three daughters still live in the house. She said the two eldest daughters are around 18 to 20 years old, while the youngest is about 13.

[gwillybj]

Black Hole Pair Caught in Feeding Frenzy
By Matthew R. Francis
1 hour ago
The Daily Beast

In the deep forest of stars that lies at the center of galaxies, a voracious monster lives: a black hole millions or billions of times more massive than the Sun. These cosmic beasts are more ambush predators than hunters, though: they only feed on hapless stars and other objects that get too close. Otherwise, they are content to sit quietly if they can’t get any prey for long times.

Sometimes a quiet black hole will wake up in a dramatic way, when a star, gas cloud, or even a rogue planet comes within gravitational reach. When that happens, forces similar to those that raise tides on Earth shred the unlucky object, eating some of its mass, and spewing the rest back into space. The stuff that doesn’t fall in can emit a lot of light, turning the black hole—perhaps briefly—into a tiger burning bright in the forest of the night.

Now, astronomers F. K. Liu, Shuo Li, and S. Komossa identified a pair of black holes in the act of cooperatively dismantling a defenseless star. Such pairs of black holes are rare, and a star drifting close enough to get shredded is rarer. Not least, this feeding frenzy could provide insight into the way the biggest black holes in the Universe form.

The size of the central black hole is correlated to the size of its galaxy. (More properly, it’s related to the mass of the central region of the galaxy, but that’s a detail.) Big galaxies tend to have huge black holes, just as a larger forest can support larger predators. One extremely massive black hole we know is nearly 7 billion times the mass of the Sun, and the galaxy hosting it—a huge blob of stars known as M87—is one of the biggest we’ve observed. (For comparison, the Milky Way’s black hole is about 4 million times the Sun’s mass.)

Did supermassive black holes like the one in M87 get that way by eating stars? (Lower-mass black holes, such as Cygnus X-1, are the remnants of very massive stars; those are a story for another day.) The answer is no: despite the stereotype, black holes don’t suck everything in around them. Just like anything else, their gravity is strongest close by, and diminishes approximately with the square of the distance. That means twice as far from the black hole, the gravitational force is roughly four times as weak. The Sun doesn’t feel a significant gravitational pull from the Milky Way’s black hole, which is more than 25,000 light-years away. Most any galaxy’s stars are far out of reach.

So could M87’s black hole have been born that way, like Lady Gaga sang? Supermassive black holes have been around for as long as their galaxies: those are the quasars used by BOSS to measure the acceleration of the Universe, as I described in my earlier column. However, early galaxies and their black holes were smaller than their modern cousins, so being born large is only part of the story.

We can learn the rest by studying their host galaxies. Like many others, our Milky Way contains traces of smaller, weaker galaxies it has devoured, and it currently is in the process of stripping material away from the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. And that’s how it seems to work: two smaller galaxies merge, or a big galaxy munches a smaller one. The same principle appears to hold for supermassive black holes too.

Unlike a forest sustaining a small population of predators, most galaxies have only one supermassive black hole. If there is more than one, they tend to merge into a single larger black hole, a trick animals can’t do. (Territorial predators sometimes kill each other, of course, but the result of two lions fighting isn’t a single lion twice as large—though it’s a funny mental image.)

So there we have it: as smaller galaxies merge, so do their black holes. But how can we see that in action? Most galaxies in the nearby Universe, like the Milky Way, have “quiet” black holes: they aren’t actively feeding, so they aren’t bright like quasars. However, astronomers have spotted a few luminous black hole pairs, mostly in chaotic galaxies in the early stages of a merger.

That brings us back to the observation of a pair of black holes in the process of dismembering a star in a distant galaxy. This is the first time astronomers have identified a pair of black holes in a quiet galaxy, but even more excitingly, they are only separated by a distance about the width of the Solar System—much closer together than any other black hole pair we’ve ever seen. The researchers estimate it’s only about 2 million years (a mere cosmic moment!) before they merge entirely.

A pair of black holes in a single quiet galaxy isn’t enough. If we want to understand how the biggest black holes came to be, we need to see pairs at all stages: from separate galaxies, to the point where they are locked in orbit, to the final moments before they become a single black hole.

Like animal predators, these monsters may be rare, but they have their own beauty.

http://news.yahoo.com/black-hole-pair-caught-feeding-frenzy-104500065--politics.html

[gwillybj]

BBC News  |  Science & Environment
12 May 2014 Last updated at 06:16 ET
Nereus Deep Sea Sub 'Implodes' 10km-Down
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News



One of the world's most capable deep-sea research subs has been lost.

The robotic vehicle Nereus went missing while exploring one of the ocean's deepest spots: the Kermadec Trench, which lies north east of New Zealand.

Surface debris was found, suggesting the vessel suffered a catastrophic implosion as a result of the immense pressures where it was operating some 10km (6.2 miles) down.

Nereus was a flagship ocean explorer for the US science community.

"Nereus helped us explore places we've never seen before and ask questions we never thought to ask," said Timothy Shank, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), which managed the sub's activities.

"It was a one-of-a-kind vehicle that even during its brief life brought us amazing insights into the unexplored deep ocean, addressing some of the most fundamental scientific problems of our time about life on Earth."

The $8m (£4.7m) robot was built in 2008 and could operate in an autonomous mode or remotely controlled via a tether to a support ship to explore the Earth's deepest oceanic trenches.

It used a lot of innovative technologies that allowed it to do things and go places that were off-limits to other research submersibles.

These technologies included rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, similar to those used in laptop computers, for extended power, and single-hair's-width fibre-optic cables - borrowed from torpedoes - for control and telemetry.

Leading British oceanographer Jonathan Copley, from the University of Southampton, said the loss of an underwater vehicle was an ever-present risk.

"To obtain some kinds of knowledge - particularly when physical samples are required for analysis - there is no alternative to sending equipment into the deep ocean, because the ocean's watery veil masks its depths from many forms of 'remote sensing'", he wrote on a University of Southampton blog this weekend.

"And although we have learned a lot from a century or so of largely 'blind sampling' by equipment such as trawls and seabed corers (which are still fine for answering some questions in some areas), we now often require more detailed sampling and surveying, using deep-sea vehicles, to answer further questions."

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27374326

[gwillybj]

BBC News  |  Health
25 February 2013
Last updated at 19:28 ET

Bad sleep 'dramatically' alters body
By James Gallagher
Health and science reporter, BBC News

A run of poor sleep can have a potentially profound effect on the internal workings of the human body, say UK researchers.

The activity of hundreds of genes was altered when people's sleep was cut to less than six hours a day for a week.

Writing in the journal PNAS#, the researchers said the results helped explain how poor sleep damaged health.

Heart disease, diabetes, obesity and poor brain function have all been linked to substandard sleep.

What missing hours in bed actually does to alter health, however, is unknown.

So researchers at the University of Surrey analysed the blood of 26 people after they had had plenty of sleep, up to 10 hours each night for a week, and compared the results with samples after a week of fewer than six hours a night.

More than 700 genes were altered by the shift. Each contains the instructions for building a protein, so those that became more active produced more proteins - changing the chemistry of the body.

Meanwhile the natural body clock was disturbed - some genes naturally wax and wane in activity through the day, but this effect was dulled by sleep deprivation.

Prof Colin Smith, from the University of Surrey, told the BBC: "There was quite a dramatic change in activity in many different kinds of genes."

Areas such as the immune system and how the body responds to damage and stress were affected.

Prof Smith added: "Clearly sleep is critical to rebuilding the body and maintaining a functional state, all kinds of damage appear to occur - hinting at what may lead to ill health.

"If we can't actually replenish and replace new cells, then that's going to lead to degenerative diseases."

He said many people may be even more sleep deprived in their daily lives than those in the study - suggesting these changes may be common.

Dr Akhilesh Reddy, a specialist in the body clock at the University of Cambridge, said the study was "interesting".
He said the key findings were the effects on inflammation and the immune system as it was possible to see a link between those effects and health problems such as diabetes.

The findings also tie into research attempting to do away with sleep, such as by finding a drug that could eliminate the effects of sleep deprivation.

Dr Reddy said: "We don't know what the switch is that causes all these changes, but theoretically if you could switch it on or off, you might be able to get away without sleep.

"But my feeling is that sleep is fundamentally important to regenerating all cells."

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-21572686

[gwillybj]

Nuclear testing 1945 - 1998 complete video HD

If you haven't seen this .. it's well worth your time. "2053." This is the number of nuclear explosions conducted in various parts of the globe. Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto created this beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions that took place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade. Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen.

Thanks for the reminder, Timothy Boocock.

http://sulia.com/channel/all-living/f/7d0e4dc2-2064-4a65-b0d3-921e6b83bcf0

Surprising, frightening, sobering. I never knew how many there were.

[Geo]

It looks like the Vela Incident wasn't included.