Sunday, June 15, 2014

Steintrikes Wild Wave , by Bike Revolution






Sustainable nuclear energy for a new generation

May 30th, 2014 James Caron

Scientist puts forward a sustainable energy plan where nuclear fuel is created using magnetic or laser fusion. News accounts are coming in daily confirming that the reliance on fossil fuels for energy is adversely affecting the world we live in: the National Climate Assessment detailed how climate change is creating havoc with our planet today and lists the burning of fossil fuels as the predominate cause; two teams of scientists just reported the irreversible glacial collapse of an Antarctic ice sheet as a result of warming ocean temperatures; and California's record drought and heat are producing wildfires and driving up food prices. It is evident that we must invest in alternative methods of energy production as soon as possible. Nuclear energy produces carbon free energy, and is responsible for 13% of the world's electricity today, but fission-based reactors present environmental hazards and utilize less than 1% of the fuel. Nuclear fusion has held promise that the process will provide clean energy with a limitless supply of fuel. However, decades of research have not produced a viable nuclear fusion power plant. Is there another path forward? In the June issue of the Journal of Fusion Energy, Dr. Wallace Manheimer has laid out a plan that would enable Fusion Breeding as a means to meet mid-century energy needs, based on the scientific underpinnings of current fusion technology and on current nuclear infrastructure. In this approach, a Fusion Reactor is designed to not only produce electricity, but also to create nuclear fuel that can run thermal nuclear reactors. A fusion breeder is about ten times as a prolific a fuel producer as a fission breeder, i.e. a fast neutron fission reactor such as the Integral Fast Reactor. The process, called Fusion Breeding, uses the energetic fusion neutrons to create fuel as well as heat water for the production of electricity. A Deuterium-Tritium fusion reactor is surrounded by a blanket that contains Thorium-232 and other materials to slow and multiply the neutrons. The additional neutrons can be used to breed uranium-233, an especially good nuclear fuel that can be used in today's light water reactors. The waste products from the U233 reactor come in two forms; fission products like strontium 90 which have half lives of about 30 years, and actinides like plutonium which have half lives of 24,000 years. The fission products could be stored for a few hundred years until they become inert. However the actinides, which would have to be stored for hundreds of thousands of years, can serve as fuel for an Integral Fast Reactor. The fuel produced by a single Fusion Breeder could supply at least 5 thermal nuclear reactors of equal power, and a single IFR could burn the plutonium waste of about conventional 5 light water reactors. This is the basis of the mid-century energy architecture suggested in the paper. The requirements for creating a fusion breeder in regards to power multiplication, wall materials and fractional on time are considerably relaxed when compared to a pure fusion reactor. Even making the most optimistic assumptions about pure fusion, fusion breeding would be achieved decades earlier and could serve as a bridge technology of real economic value. Dr. Manheimer's plan would leverage current research facilities, such as ITER in Southern France and the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to facilitate an energy source that is sustainable, proliferation resistant, safe, and economically and environmentally sound. Dr. Manheimer, currently a consultant for Research Support Instruments in Lanham, Maryland, has gained extensive knowledge of both magnetic and laser fusion during his 44 years as a scientist for the Naval Research Laboratory. This paper represents 15 years of researching a more practical approach to fusion energy production. The paper is open access and can be read at on the Journal of Fusion Energy website. More information: Manheimer, Wallace. "Fusion Breeding for Mid-Century Sustainable Power." Journal of Fusion Energy 33, no. 3 (2014): 199-234. Provided by Research Support Instruments

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Monday, June 09, 2014

Asus PB287Q 28-Inch 4K Monitor Review: Ultra HD For $650

28-Inch 4K Monitor Review

Compared to the 32-inch screens we looked at a few months ago, the PB287Q is more refined, especially when it comes to signal handling. Because we're dealing with a single scaler, the dual-HDMI option available on Asus' tiled PQ321Q is no longer available. Rather, if you want to run at 3840x2160 at 60 Hz, you need to use DisplayPort 1.2. I had no problems getting the monitor to work with my Radeon HD 7770 graphics card, which isn't even officially rated to support a resolution that high. If you're using a multi-GPU setup from Nvidia, make sure you have the company's newest driver first. The monitor's performance is generally good, especially considering Asus' price point. Color, grayscale, and gamma results are on par with other gaming screens and a tad below much more expensive professional displays. Even though contrast is decent compared to the average IPS monitor, we were hoping to see the greater dynamic range offered by the other TN panels we’ve reviewed. Our conclusion for now is that the extra pixel density of Ultra HD seems to lessen the contrast advantage of a TN-based product. We're glad to see a breakaway from the typical 6-bit with FRC bandwidth limitation of nearly every TN screen out there. The PB287Q uses an 8-bit/FRC panel, which means it can render 1.07 billion colors either by up-sampling an 8-bit signal or passing a 10-bit one. While this feature is of greater interest to photographers and graphics professionals, it's good to know you can have greater bit-depth and greater resolution in one product. It seems to us that the PB287Q is best suited for gaming. Its most attractive performance attributes surface in the response and input lag tests. Don't expect the PB287Q to match the speeds of a 144 Hz display; however, it competes quite favorably with the 60 Hz BenQ RL2460HT gaming monitor. We also like the inclusion of GamePlus, which we first saw on the VG248QE. Hardware-based aiming reticules are always a handy option, especially when they don’t introduce any processing overhead. If your gaming rig is well-equipped for high resolutions, but you can't fathom doubling its price (or more) with a first-gen 4K monitor, Asus' new PB287Q has to be looking tantalizing right about now. Really, it represents a new reason to get excited about Ultra HD, which was previously fun to read about, but prohibitively expensive. All of a sudden, testing high-end graphics configurations at 3840x2160 is going to become a lot more important, as the audience previously interested in QHD shifts focus to 4K. For its unprecedented value and respectable performance, we’re giving Asus' PB287Q our Tom's Hardware Smart Buy award.

広島風お好み焼きの作り方 - How to make hiroshima-style okonomiyaki.






Sunday, June 08, 2014

How a TDI engine VNT turbo works and how they fail and cause limp mode o...






GOP Opposed Commerce Department Because It Was Run By "A Black Democrat"

Clinton's diatribe immediately followed a discussion of how he should pitch the successful outcomes of the administration's crime policy, which dovetailed into a larger discussion of Republican opposition to Clinton's administration. "I mean, they've taken a laundry list, and everything we did, if it's really working, they really want to get rid of it," Clinton said. That's when the president began griping about the Republicans targeting the Commerce Department for possible elimination, indicating that race was a factor. "They will get rid of the Department of Commerce so they'll never have to remember that Ron Brown, a black Democrat, was better than all their big, corporate muckety-mucks that make American jobs. I mean, it's crazy. It's unbelievable." An unnamed aide asked Clinton if that sentence should go into the State of the Union address. There was laughter in the room. "No," Clinton responded, "but I mean, they need a rabies shot."

Fasting triggers stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system

In the first evidence of a natural intervention triggering stem cell-based regeneration of an organ or system, a study in the June 5 issue of the Cell Stem Cell shows that cycles of prolonged fasting not only protect against immune system damage — a major side effect of chemotherapy — but also induce immune system regeneration, shifting stem cells from a dormant state to a state of self-renewal.

In both mice and a Phase 1 human clinical trial, long periods of not eating significantly lowered white blood cell counts. In mice, fasting cycles then “flipped a regenerative switch,” changing the signaling pathways for hematopoietic stem cells, which are responsible for the generation of blood and immune systems, the research showed.

The study has major implications for healthier aging, in which immune system decline contributes to increased susceptibility to disease as people age. By outlining how prolonged fasting cycles — periods of no food for two to four days at a time over the course of six months — kill older and damaged immune cells and generate new ones, the research also has implications for chemotherapy tolerance and for those with a wide range of immune system deficiencies, including autoimmunity disorders.

“We could not predict that prolonged fasting would have such a remarkable effect in promoting stem cell-based regeneration of the hematopoietic system,” said corresponding author Valter Longo, Edna M. Jones Professor of Gerontology and the Biological Sciences at the USC Davis School of Gerontology and director of the USC Longevity Institute. Longo has a joint appointment at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

“When you starve, the system tries to save energy, and one of the things it can do to save energy is to recycle a lot of the immune cells that are not needed, especially those that may be damaged,” Longo said. “What we started noticing in both our human work and animal work is that the white blood cell count goes down with prolonged fasting. Then when you re-feed, the blood cells come back. So we started thinking, well, where does it come from?”

Fasting cycles

Prolonged fasting forces the body to use stores of glucose, fat and ketones, but it also breaks down a significant portion of white blood cells. Longo likens the effect to lightening a plane of excess cargo.

During each cycle of fasting, this depletion of white blood cells induces changes that trigger stem cell-based regeneration of new immune system cells. In particular, prolonged fasting reduced the enzyme PKA, an effect previously discovered by the Longo team to extend longevity in simple organisms and which has been linked in other research to the regulation of stem cell self-renewal and pluripotency — that is, the potential for one cell to develop into many different cell types. Prolonged fasting also lowered levels of IGF-1, a growth-factor hormone that Longo and others have linked to aging, tumor progression and cancer risk.

“PKA is the key gene that needs to shut down in order for these stem cells to switch into regenerative mode. It gives the OK for stem cells to go ahead and begin proliferating and rebuild the entire system,” explained Longo, noting the potential of clinical applications that mimic the effects of prolonged fasting to rejuvenate the immune system. “And the good news is that the body got rid of the parts of the system that might be damaged or old, the inefficient parts, during the fasting. Now, if you start with a system heavily damaged by chemotherapy or aging, fasting cycles can generate, literally, a new immune system.”

Prolonged fasting also protected against toxicity in a pilot clinical trial in which a small group of patients fasted for a 72-hour period prior to chemotherapy, extending Longo’s influential past research.

“While chemotherapy saves lives, it causes significant collateral damage to the immune system. The results of this study suggest that fasting may mitigate some of the harmful effects of chemotherapy,” said co-author Tanya Dorff, assistant professor of clinical medicine at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and Hospital. “More clinical studies are needed, and any such dietary intervention should be undertaken only under the guidance of a physician.”

“We are investigating the possibility that these effects are applicable to many different systems and organs, not just the immune system,” said Longo, whose lab is in the process of conducting further research on controlled dietary interventions and stem cell regeneration in both animal and clinical studies.

The study was supported by the National Institute of Aging of the National Institutes of Health (grant numbers AG20642, AG025135, P01AG34906). The clinical trial was supported by the V Foundation and the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (P30CA014089).

Chia Wei-Cheng of USC Davis was first author of the study. Gregor Adams, Xiaoying Zhou and Ben Lam of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC; Laura Perin and Stefano Da Sacco of the Saban Research Institute at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles; Min Wei of USC Davis; Mario Mirisola of the University of Palermo; Dorff and David Quinn of the Keck School of Medicine of USC; and John Kopchick of Ohio University were co-authors of the study.

joan jett - crimson and clover 1983.avi






Sunday, June 01, 2014

Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq

At A congressional hearing examining the march to war in Iraq, Republican congressman Walter Jones posed "a very simple question" about the administration's manipulation of intelligence: "How could the professionals see what was happening and nobody speak out?" Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, responded with an equally simple answer: "The vice president."

Net Neutrality is Heading For the Grave Yard - GB LIve 136






Edward A. Villarreal. Powered by Blogger.

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