This awesome educational short from animators Laura Sicouri and Kadavre Exquis is equal parts School House Rock and Magical Mystery Tour.
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The UK's recent run of damp summers could be down to a cyclical warming of the Atlantic Ocean.
That was the view of scientists and meteorologists who gathered at the Met Office to discuss the unusual weather patterns of recent years.
They said that this 10 to 20 year pattern of Atlantic warming was shifting the jet stream, leading to washouts in six of the last seven summers.
But they suggested that the pattern would change at some point in the next decade.
The researchers said the location of the fast moving winds of the jet stream was critical to the UK's weather.
When it becomes fixed in position south of the British Isles, low pressure systems can get stuck in the peaks and troughs that form along the edge of the stream, leading to the seemingly endless rainy days that have characterised our summers in recent years.
Even the buzz of the London Olympics could not disguise the washout that was last summer, the second wettest for the UK since records began.
What the scientists meeting in Exeter were hoping to understand were the underlying factors that move the jet stream south of the UK .
Prof Stephen Belcher from the Met Office Hadley Centre, who lead the discussions said that changes in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), as the ocean current is called, was one of the prime factors.
Professor Stephen Belcher: "We need to know what's loading the dice for the position of the jet stream"
"It's the pattern of warm and cold water, it's the contrast of the warm and the cold, when that sits in the right place beneath the jet stream, it can kind of steer the jet stream and influence where it goes," he said.
"I'm excited about this work, it's a new thing that we didn't really know about."
Basket casesThe scientists said that the AMO phenomenon had occurred in the 1880s, the 1950s and in the early 1960s. The most recent research was published last year by a team at Reading University.
Explaining the cold winters of 2010/11 and this past spring were more of a challenge, said the scientists. Dr James Screen from the University of Exeter said that a more complicated basket of factors was involved.
"The cycle we've been talking about in the north Atlantic seems to be more important for controlling summer weather in the UK, our current understanding of the role of Arctic sea ice is that it is more important in controlling winter weather."
The researchers say that the glimmer of good news is that the AMO might change in five to 10 years, and warmer summers might return. However the winter was more difficult to predict said Prof Belcher.
"There are hints we are coming to the end of the cycle. With the cold winter weather, the loadings of the dice don't seem to follow cycles," he said.
As to the current summer season, according to Dr Adam Scaife from the Hadley Centre, you'd be wise to keep an umbrella handy.
"In 2012, like the previous few summers, we've had conditions in the northernmost Atlantic that were much warmer than normal.
"So that pre-conditioning was there this year and that shifts the odds slightly in favour of this summer being wetter than the historical average."
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22959578#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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Google Glass and the enterprise may not be an ideal match ? I've personally met it with a good hearty dose of skepticism?after my try-out with the technology ??but that's not to say there aren't people out there giving it a go anyway.
One Manassas, Virginia-based technology company aims to have a series of enterprise apps for Google Glass available by early 2014, and recommends that other businesses should at least jump on the internal testing bandwagon sooner rather than later.
In a video interview with the IDG News Service,?Dan McNelis, co-founder of Dito, which specializes in providing services for Google applications, said his company is in the?"early stages with customers on identifying the specific requirements and use cases where they're going to want to develop applications for Glass."
Dito is also developing "Glassware," the sort of apps that plug directly into the Glass API and function like any other Glass app.?
Currently, McNelis' firm is working with an unnamed construction company that is interested in building business information modeling applications.?A finished app could offer a first-person point-of-view that allows a construction worker to move around a site in a virtual three-dimensions simulator, he described. In such a scenario, because Google Glass is modular, it could be integrated with hard safety?hats for those working on industrial sites.
McNelis said for others who are considering developing apps for the new wearable technology, "be wary of the fact that especially if you're building enterprise applications, it's smart to start thinking about it"?
"But I wouldn't recommend an organization pushes all in and makes it a core part of their business around apps. It's still early days for that."
Once things become more mature in terms of ecosystem and the technology becomes more developed, McNelis said, it would be an ideal time to begin "dogfooding" their own apps within their enterprise setting?for their own internal testing, to determine the benefits or drawbacks of the gadget.
(via PC World)
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zdnet/thebigquestion/~3/C21XYNPnnwU/
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LAGOS (Reuters) - Nigerian authorities dropped charges on Tuesday against eight Russian sailors suspected of trafficking arms, their lawyer said, but another seven will face trial.
The 15 Russian sailors were charged with illegally bringing weapons into Nigeria last year, after Nigerian authorities intercepted a ship on October 23, saying they had found several guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
The court case has raised tensions between Nigeria and Russia, whose Foreign Ministry has spoken out against the charges. Russian media have reported assurances from Nigeria that the sailors would be allowed to return home. Nigeria has not commented on this alleged promise.
Their defense lawyer Abubakar Onegbu told reporters outside the court that the charges had been dropped because they had not been on the ship when it was detained, but had arrived by air to carry out a crew change. The prosecuting counsel was not available for comment.
Justice James Soho adjourned the trial of the others until Friday. They are free on bail.
"In general we regard this development a positive step," Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday evening. "We expect a similar decision to be taken (in regard to seven remaining sailors) at the upcoming court sitting."
Arms smuggling to and through Nigeria is rife. Demand for weapons is high because of an Islamist rebellion in the north, armed robbery and kidnapping by gangs in the south and oil theft and piracy in the southeast.
The country is also sometimes used as a conduit for shipping arms to other conflict-ridden parts of West Africa.
(Reporting Angela Ukomadu, additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska in Moscow, Writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by Michael Roddy)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nigeria-drops-charges-against-russian-arms-suspects-164440471.html
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May 21, 2013 ? Duke University engineers have developed a novel method for producing clean hydrogen, which could prove essential to weaning society off of fossil fuels and their environmental implications.
While hydrogen is ubiquitous in the environment, producing and collecting molecular hydrogen for transportation and industrial uses is expensive and complicated. Just as importantly, a byproduct of most current methods of producing hydrogen is carbon monoxide, which is toxic to humans and animals.
The Duke engineers, using a new catalytic approach, have shown in the laboratory that they can reduce carbon monoxide levels to nearly zero in the presence of hydrogen and the harmless byproducts of carbon dioxide and water. They also demonstrated that they could produce hydrogen by reforming fuel at much lower temperatures than conventional methods, which makes it a more practical option.
Catalysts are agents added to promote chemical reactions. In this case, the catalysts were nanoparticle combinations of gold and iron oxide (rust), but not in the traditional sense. Current methods depend on gold nanoparticles ability to drive the process as the sole catalyst, while the Duke researchers made both the iron oxide and the gold the focus of the catalytic process.
The study appears online in the May issue of the Journal of Catalysis.
"Our ultimate goal is to be able to produce hydrogen for use in fuel cells," said Titilayo "Titi" Shodiya, a graduate student working in the laboratory of senior researcher Nico Hotz, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering. "Everyone is interested in sustainable and non-polluting ways of producing useful energy without fossil fuels," said Shodiya, the paper's first author.
Fuel cells produce electricity through chemical reactions, most commonly involving hydrogen. Also, many industrial processes require hydrogen as a chemical reagent and vehicles are beginning to use hydrogen as a primary fuel source.
"We were able through our system to consistently produce hydrogen with less than 0.002 percent (20 parts per million) of carbon monoxide," Shodiya said.
The Duke researchers achieved these levels by switching the recipe for the nanoparticles used as catalysts for the reactions to oxidize carbon monoxide in hydrogen-rich gases. Traditional methods of cleaning hydrogen, which are not nearly as efficient as this new approach, also involve gold-iron oxide nanoparticles as the catalyst, the researchers said.
"It had been assumed that the iron oxide nanoparticles were only 'scaffolds' holding the gold nanoparticles together, and that the gold was responsible for the chemical reactions," Sodiya said. "However, we found that increasing the surface area of the iron oxide dramatically increased the catalytic activity of the gold."
One of the newest approaches to producing renewable energy is the use of biomass-derived alcohol-based sources, such as methanol. When methanol is treated with steam, or reformed, it creates a hydrogen-rich mixture that can be used in fuel cells.
"The main problem with this approach is that it also produces carbon monoxide, which is not only toxic to life, but also quickly damages the catalyst on fuel cell membranes that are crucial to the functioning of a fuel cell," Hotz said. "It doesn't take much carbon monoxide to ruin these membranes."
The researchers ran the reaction for more than 200 hours and found no reduction in the ability of the catalyst to reduce the amount of carbon monoxide in the hydrogen gas.
"The mechanism for this is not exactly understood yet. However, while current thinking is that the size of the gold particles is key, we believe the emphasis of further research should focus on iron oxide's role in the process," Shodiya said.
The Duke team's research was supported by the California Energy Commission and the Oak Ridge Associated Universities. Duke postdoctoral associates Oliver Schmidt and Wen Peng were also part of the research team.
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Today is turning out to be quite a memorable Monday -- hot on the heels of Yahoo's Tumblr acquisition announcement, online food ordering services GrubHub and Seamless have officially confirmed that the two companies will merge into one as we previously reported.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5uWlEXdvXYk/
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