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Archive for June 9, 2011

Does the Chicken in Your Refrigerator Contain Arsenic?

June 9, 2011 Comments off

webwire

EMSL Analytical provides food testing services to detect contaminants and pathogens in the nation’s food supply.

Cinnaminson, NJ

The last few weeks have been filled with media reports about the E. coli outbreak in Europe that has so far claimed 27 lives and sickened thousands. Now the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that low levels of arsenic may be in some products that contain chicken meat.

According to the FDA, “Arsenic is in the environment as a naturally occurring substance or as a contaminant and is found in water, air, soil, and food. Published scientific reports have indicated that organic arsenic, a less toxic form of arsenic and the form present in 3-Nitro® (roxarsone), an approved animal drug, could transform into inorganic arsenic.”

The study that identified the issue looked at the livers of 100 chickens. The chickens that had consumed the product had higher levels of Read more…

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All Eyes on the U.S. Dollar: Danielle Park

June 9, 2011 Comments off
Categories: Dollar, United States Tags: , , , , ,

Study finds global warming over past 400 years was due to increased Solar activity

June 9, 2011 Comments off

joannenova

Apparently previous studies of the sun-climate connection looked at the equatorial polar magnetic field which produces sun spots, but they did not consider the polar magnetic component of the solar dynamo. The polar fields are less strong than the equatorial fields, but it is claimed that the total magnetic fluxes of both fields are comparable. With proxy data they derive an empirical relation between tropospherical temperatures and solar equatorial and polar magnetic fields. The polar field could contribute about Read more…

Categories: Earth, Earth changes, Sun Tags: , , , , ,

Next generation Internet addresses tested on global scale

June 9, 2011 Comments off

rawstory

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A worldwide test was under way on Wednesday of the next generation of Internet addresses designed to replace the dwindling pool of 4.3 billion unique identifiers in the original system.

Hundreds of companies, organizations and institutions around the world are taking part in “World IPv6 Day,” including Internet giants such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!

Internet Protocol version 6 is the new system of unique identifying numbers for websites, computers and other Internet-connected gadgets and is replacing the original addressing system, IPv4, which is nearing exhaustion.

IPv6 provides more than four billion Read more…

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Wallow Fire Threatening Power Supplies to New Mexico and Texas

June 9, 2011 Comments off

christianpost

Firefighters have battled through the night in an attempt to protect numerous Arizona mountain communities from the spreading Wallow fire that has forced thousands to evacuate and flee their homes.

(Photo: Reuters/Joshua Lott)Arizona Department of Trasportation workers prepare to close off a section of U.S. Highway 60 due to the Wallow Wildfire in Springerville, Arizona June 8, 2011. A wildfire believed sparked by inattentive campers blazed unchecked for an 11th day in eastern Arizona on Wednesday, leaving at least 600 square miles of pine forest blackened and menacing several mountain towns near the New Mexico border.

The fire has now become the second largest ever seen in Arizona, and is threatening electricity supplies as far away as Texas.

The fire, which during Wednesday night was being reported as covering 607-square miles, is expected to reach power lines by early Friday. It is feared that if lines are damaged, hundreds of thousands in New Mexico and Texas would face rolling blackouts.

For the early part of this week driving winds have Read more…

Categories: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas Tags: , , , , ,

Analysts raise alarm on Facebook expansion of facial recognition technology

June 9, 2011 Comments off

smartcompany

The expansion of Facebook’s facial recognition technology into Australia has raised privacy and security concerns, with local analysts warning information accumulated by the social networking giant could be used for malicious purposes.

In a statement on its blog on Tuesday, Facebook announced it had launched the feature beyond North America into most countries. The feature uses facial recognition technology to speed up the process of tagging friends in photos.

The technology scans new uploaded photos and determines if the faces in these new images resemble those in previously tagged photos. If they do, the feature will suggest friends to tag. Previously, users had to tag photos manually, without suggestions.

According to the social network’s blog, more than 100 million photos per day are uploaded to Facebook and the goal of the feature is to Read more…

Categories: Biometrics, Facebook Tags: , , , ,

Russia may develop nuclear offensive, arms race – Serdyukov

June 9, 2011 Comments off

en.rian.ru

Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov

Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov on Wednesday said that Russia would develop its own offensive nuclear force if NATO fails to come to agreement over the European defense shield.

“We have no other way, otherwise we’ll just have to develop an arms race,” Serdyukov said after a Russia-NATO meeting in Brussels.

The talks in Brussels, he said, did not result in the solution of conceptual approaches and the Russia-NATO working group on the missile shield issue only managed to agree on the plan of work for 2011.

“We failed to agree on conceptual approaches… Our dialogue must Read more…

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Two New Elements Added To Periodic Table: Ununquadium And Ununhexium-Elements with Atomic Number 114 and 116

June 9, 2011 2 comments

iupac

Two new elements have been added to the periodic table after a three-year review by the governing bodies of chemistry and physics.

The elements are currently unnamed, but they are both highly radioactive and exist for less than a second before decaying into lighter atoms. The table is the official compedium of known elements, organised according to properties of their atomic structure.

Details have been published in the journal Pure and Applied Chemistry. The review was conducted by a joint working party of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).

In recent years, there have been several claims by laboratories for the discovery of new chemical elements at positions 113, 114, 115, 116 and 118 on the periodic table. The working party concluded that elements 114 and 116 fulfilled criteria for official inclusion in the table. The others, as yet, do not.

The new elements have temporary titles of ununquadium and ununhexium, but final names have Read more…

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The Netherlands Second Country to Codify Net Neutrality After Chile

June 9, 2011 Comments off

osnews

I’ve been keeping you up to date about the situation around net neutrality in The Netherlands – and today, everything finally came to its logical conclusion. During a debate in our lower house, most of the kinks were ironed out, and our minister of economic affairs, Maxime Verhagen, will now turn net neutrality into law. This means that after Chile, The Netherlands will be the second country in the world to do so.

I already told you that Verhagen wished to comply with the lower house’s demands, but I failed to make the clarification that he just wanted to prohibit carriers and ISPs from throttling and blocking, without actually turning it into a law. During today’s debate, he faced an almost unanimous lower house asking for net neutrality to actually become a full-grown, big-boy law.

The only party against net neutrality was the Read more…

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