Horizontal Perspective 横顾天下

The Telegraph reports on an revolutionary high capacity air battery. The cells are charged in a traditional way but as power is used an open mesh section of battery draws in oxygen from the surrounding air that reacts with a porous carbon component inside, which creates more energy and helps to continually ‘charge’ the cell as it is being discharged. The battery has a greater storage capacity than other similar-sized cells and can emit power up to 10 times longer.

Scientists say the revolutionary ‘STAIR’ (St Andrews Air) battery could now pave the way for a new generation of electric cars, laptops and mobile phones.

The original report from Telegraph (UK).

Technological background from Green Car Congress

‘The key is to use oxygen in the air as a re-agent, rather than carry the necessary chemicals around inside the battery,’ says Professor Peter Bruce of the Chemistry Department at the University of St Andrews. ‘Our target is to get a five to ten fold increase in storage capacity, which is beyond the horizon of current lithium batteries.

Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral has the highest and heaviest ringing peal bells in the world. The 13 bells are arranged around a central ringing bell which weighs more than 14 tonnes and can be heard for miles around.  Lately these bells had rung out the tune of John Lennon’s anti-religious anthem Imagine.

A team of seven volunteer bell ringers played the 1971 song, which begins “Imagine there’s no Heaven”, as part of an arts festival. The cathedral said it had carefully considered the “sensitivities” surrounding the song’s lyrical content.

The cathedral feels this performance has inspired many to think about their relationship with God in their lives.

Ringing the heaviest peal in the world is a challenge in itself but that the team have been able to produce this performance is fantastic.

Source: BBC NEWS Report

I am really impressed by this amazing manifestation of open-mindedness in the Anglican church authority. This underpins the conviction of ordination of women into priesthood as a truly progressive move in step with the time.

The TechFragments website reports today the formal initiation of urine recycling in space. Abstract from original report :

After the astronauts on the International Space Station finished up their communications with Space Shuttle Atlantis yesterday, the crew on the Space Station did something that no other astronaut has ever done before — drank recycled urine and sweat.

The previous shuttle crew that recently returned to Earth brought back samples of the recycled water to make sure it was safe to drink, and all tests came back fine. So on Wednesday, the crew took their recycled urine and said ‘cheers’ together and toasted the researches and scientists that made the Urine Recycler possible. After drinking the water, they said the taste was great! They also said the water came with labels on it that said ‘drink this when real water is over 200 miles away.

We Singaporeans are no strangers to this conservative necessity and had been using NeWater since mid-July 2001. I remember a senior Malaysian politician gleefully remarked then that potential visitors from Malaysia should be aware that they would be ‘drinking recycled urine’ in Singapore. I wonder if he had anything more to add in light of the unabated rise in the number of visitors and this development from NASA.

NEWater:
Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, Singapore
Production Process
Production Process Presentation
NEWater Visitor Centre
Worldwide Accalaim
ADB Feature

The Vatican is going solar in a big way. The tiny state recently announced that it intends to spend 660 million dollars to create Europe’s largest solar power plant. This massive 100 megawatt photovoltaic installation will provide enough energy to make the Vatican the first solar powered nation state in the world! ‘The 100 megawatts unleashed by the station will supply about 40,000 households. That will far outstrip demand by Pope Benedict XVI and the 900 inhabitants of the 0.2 square-mile country nestled across Rome’s Tiber River. The plant will cover nine times the needs of Vatican Radio, whose transmission tower is strong enough to reach 35 countries including Asia.’

You offend God not only by stealing, taking the Lord’s name in vain or coveting your neighbour’s wife but also by wrecking the environment.

- Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary

Source: Bloomberg.com – Pope Pursues Heavenly Power With Plant Harnessing Sun

Keeping the brain active by working later in life may be an effective way to ward off Alzheimer’s disease, research suggests.

The possibility that a person’s cognitive reserve could still be modified later in life adds weight to the ‘use it or lose it’ concept where keeping active later in life has important health benefits, including reducing dementia risk.

Not only can it mean more income, but also social networking and increased activity. We also find that many of today’s older workers are choosing rejecting the cliff edge between work and retirement in favour of a gradual step down. And employers should help them to do this.

Source: BBC NEWS | Health.

An office worker cleaning a fridge full of rotten food created a smell so noxious that it sent seven co-workers to the hospital and made many others ill. Firefighters had to evacuate the AT&T building in downtown San Jose on Tuesday, after the flagrant fumes prompted someone to call 911. A hazmat team was called in.

The worker who cleaned the fridge didn’t need treatment — she didn’t smell  a thing because of an allergic condition.

Source: Associated Press report and video

Being confined to bed, I don’t really have anything of importance to say about the H1N1 swine flu outbreak in the past 2 weeks, and thus intended to steer clear of the topic. However, this allegation, if found to be accurate, would be a new high in the oversight of  bio-hazard control in medical research.

Yesterday Bloomberg reports on claims that the swine flu could have been accidentally made in a lab, which are now being investigated by the World Health Organization.

Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu, said in an interview today that he intends to publish a report suggesting the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drug makers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said that he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus’s origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint. .

Gibbs and two colleagues analyzed the publicly available sequences of hundreds of amino acids coded by each of the flu virus’s eight genes.
Source Bloomberg.com: Swine Flu May Be Human Error.

The Washington Post’s Security Fix blog this week relates a tale that should make any Windows home user cringe. It reported that the latest version of the Zeus Trojan ships with a command that will tell all infected systems to self-destruct. (See original post Security Fix – ZeusTracker and the Nuclear Option). The tech support and sys-admin community (myself included) have much to say about this topic, and some of the views expressed reflects the frustration the end-user support staffs feel about the unsafe practices of the average users (who doesn’t know better) and the general lack of awareness of the seriousness of these infection. In fact, many of the signs and effects are ignored because of the ”If it fails, just reboot” mentality (which originate from Microsoft Certified engineers). So the blame should be shouldered by both sides. In addition, Microsoft’s less than sterling record on software security hasn’t helped.

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MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper (April 2004), Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions – so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule – worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

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Mystery surrounds a feline felon

The owners of a cat with a passion for socks are leafleting their neighbours in the Loughborough area to see if they are missing any. Henry’s owners are baffled as to where he finds his socks.

.. there just seems to this endless supply of neighbourhood socks coming in and we don’t know where they’re coming from.

He steals socks every day.

via BBC NEWS