Leviathan bones land at local school

As a cattle rancher, San Gregorio resident Erik Markegard stakes his profession on his ability to move large mammals.

But last month the self-proclaimed cowboy received an odd challenge. Could he and his pickup truck move the remains of the biggest animal on Earth?

That animal, a dead blue whale, washed up on the shores of Bean Hollow State Beach in October after a watercraft is believed to have struck it. After a set of lengthy permits last month filed by science teacher Dan Sudran, the largest bones of the leviathan have been approved to be mounted at Pescadero Elementary School.

But Sudran had a problem -— how do you carefully haul a 1,500-pound mandible, a jawbone as heavy as Half Moon Bay’s heftiest pumpkin? He was considering hiring a helicopter, but then he decided to call up Markegard.

“I haul a lot of heavy stuff, but I’ve never hauled anything like a whale bone,” he said. “I went down there to look at it, I told him let’s try to cowboy up. … Let’s try it the old-fashioned way.”

That meant tying ropes around the huge bone and getting a team of helpers to move it inch by inch from the freezing ocean water. It took hours to coordinate, but the 14-person team was able to lug the bone over to Markegard’s truck and eventually lift it into the bed.

“It was pure caveman physics,” Sudran said. “It was like two and two and two came together. It was perfect.”

Sudran teaches in San Francisco through the Mission Science Workshop, a hands-on nonprofit laboratory for students that he founded in 1991.

Living in Pescadero, Sudran explained that he has amassed a small collection of bones from his regular hikes in the area, which he uses to teach children about biology. When the dead whale washed ashore near Pescadero — the first since 1979 — Sudran realized bones of the creature would be perfect for local education.

“I thought it would be amazing what the kids could learn from a skeleton like that,” Sudran said. “It dawned on me that if I could figure it out logically and get permits, I could get these bones.”

It felt appropriate, Sudran said, to have the whale bones that washed up at Pescadero stay in the local community.

The remains of sea mammals are tightly restricted under federal and state law, making it a crime to take any part of a whale that washes ashore. In Northern California, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco typically has first dibs on any sea carcass, and more than a half dozen other agencies usually claim samples, leaving few opportunities for anyone else.

But Sudran saw his chance when he noticed that most of the usual science institutions weren’t pouncing on this whale. Most of the other organizations explained they already had plenty of whale bones.

So Sudran decided to make a go for it, and he applied for permits through a hodgepodge of agencies. He also brought up the idea to Pescadero Elementary School Principal Pat Talbot.

“I told her it’s probably crazy, but this huge whale bone could be in front of your school,” he recalled.

Talbot agreed the bones would be a powerful tool for teaching because most of the student body was already interested in the huge whale that washed up on their shores. Everyone could smell the rotting carcass, and many students had visited the beach to see the whale firsthand.

“There was a real local connection,” Talbot said. “This wasn’t just a whale bone in a museum. This was one they saw, and certainly smelled, from the beginning.”

In the end, the small South Coast school received approval to take the huge mandible — part of which was broken. Sudran took other various bones including ribs and vertebrae and has been donating them to other researchers and educators.

For now, the bones are actually in Sudran’s backyard. He lives right in the neighborhood of Pescadero Elementary. The hauling team brought the bones to Sudran’s backyard to let the largest bones dry out before bringing them out to the school, which should lighten the weight of the bones considerably.

As its largest bone, the mandible of a blue whale is crucial for drawing in huge amounts of seawater and krill to feed the gentle beast. The blue doesn’t have teeth on its jaws, but rather baleen, which are used like a sieve to expel water but retain krill.

The jawbone will be mounted at the school by the start of the next academic year. Talbot has suggested that the school could develop some teaching curriculum around it. Off the cuff, she proposed students could learn math by calculating the krill a whale would need to eat, or learn writing by composing stories about the whale journeying across the sea.

Sudran proposed the jawbone could also make an excellent addition to the school playground — it’s large, sturdy, easily climbable and not sharp at all.

Markegard, the cowboy hauler, says he was happy to use his pickup truck to help the kids at Pescadero Elementary, and he’s reminded of it every time he gets behind the steering wheel.

“My truck, my clothes, everything still reeks of dead whale,” he said. “I’m lucky I’m married, otherwise I’d never get a date.”

Smart Skin for Land, Sea and Air Vehicles

Dumb skin is inadequate

Today, the shell of a vehicle is dumb: it is no more than packaging made of bent metal, glass and shaped plastic that protects and streamlines the clever stuff inside. However, the space inside is needed for passengers and cargo. Bulky batteries and motors inside vehicles overheat, needing expensive and unreliable cooling - often water cooling. And we need many more functions such as solar power and external sensing and lighting that cannot be performed efficiently from within the vehicle. For example, the US Department of Defense has a program to develop real time monitoring of the structural integrity of the whole of the outside of its aircraft using smart skin. It envisages doing the same with aircrew.

Many inventions become appropriate

A large number of appropriate technologies are being adopted that can later become smart skin - multilayer, conformal electrics and electronics over wide areas. Flat electric motors and localised suspension and controls in the wheels have been rendered more practicable using thin film and printed technology. Mechanical linkages and drive trains are eliminated, saving cost and space and improving reliability.

The same can be said of the multilayer printing replacing heavy, expensive copper wire electrics in vehicles and making the bulky, heavy ceiling and dashboard clusters in a car into multilayered laminate, where T-Ink is a leader. Schreiner already makes printed decals for BMW cars that light when the door is opened and BMW is preparing laminar Automotive Thermoelectric Generators ATEGs that will harvest heat from the engine and exhaust. Light emitting diodes in car lights have improved lifetime tenfold: now we have laminar conformal LED arrays that use light guides or large numbers of very thin LEDs. Indeed, LEDs only 20 microns thick have been made and the thinnest LCD TVs are LED backlit. The lifetime limitations of printed large area ac electroluminescent and OLED (organic light emitting display) lighting and display are gradually being overcome.

Smart skin performs better than conventional components

Thin film batteries used in electronics can support faster charge and discharge, last longer and work even when a nail is driven through them. Solicore and others have demonstrated this: it contrasts with some bulk lithium-ion traction batteries exploding when penetrated. Some thin batteries are printed and conformal, with solid state electrolytes and therefore no possibility of leakage. Wider area versions are now being prepared by Planar Energy, The Paper Battery Company and others. Indeed, thin large area batteries have recently been a great success in several pure electric aircraft that have employed conformal thin film photovoltaics to provide the power. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, AeroVironment and Aurora Flight Sciences each have contracts up to $530 million to make various dirigibles and aircraft based on a laminar coating of photovoltaics for power.

Alternatively, the "molecular switch" printed layer of the University of Texas at Austin potentially mimics the ability of plants to harvest light and convert it to energy. Laminar power could be produced directly from the sun, rather than inefficient power through a plant mediator, such as corn used for biofuels.

New magic

Take all this together and we clearly have a route to smart skin on land, sea and air vehicles saving huge amounts of space, cost, weight and energy but also adding many new functions. For example, if the whole truck or aircraft glowed in the dark it would be much easier to identify and avoid. If the whole of the outside of the car generated electricity, it would be at ten times the power generated by the small rigid solar panel on the top of some cars today.

Invisible vehicle skin

We can generate electricity from printed laminate over the windows and lights of a car if the layer is transparent. Laboratories in Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere have demonstrated both inorganic and organic printed photovoltaics that is transparent and others have translucent versions. This is also important for smart skin on, say the wings and body of an aircraft. We are no longer limited to one optically active layer - the one on the outside.

Already some printed photovoltaics has transparent transistors on the outside for controlling spectral response. Transparent photovoltaics can be layered over transparent light emitting surfaces which are over transparent wide area sensors - all have been demonstrated. NEC in Japan is developing transparent rechargeable battery layers and many OLED displays are transparent and conveniently work at or near the low DC voltages generated by transparent photovoltaics.

All that makes us think of invisible smart skin that does not detract from the conventional livery and signage on a vehicle, product or package. Some will even be capable of sound - spoken warnings, information and so on. On the other hand, printed and thin film electronics is giving us stretchable electronics, as with an OLED film stretched over a raw egg without breaking it, and costs low enough for some smart skin to be disposable.

Avoiding vulnerability

Although, at first sight, it may seem bad practice to put the brains and the power of a vehicle on the outside facing any impact, this is not as bad as it sounds. With wet electrolytes being eliminated, the danger from wet chemicals is removed. That applies to some printed Dye Sensitised Solar Cells DSSC, supercapacitors and hybrid supercapacitor-battery constructions called supercabatteries plus laminar batteries themselves. The use of toxic materials is also becoming a thing of the past.

Biomimetics is being brought to bear - just as the human brain has redundancy - duplication for security of service - so we shall have more of the redundancy of power and circuitry typically seen in a military ship or civil aircraft today. Most of these laminar components are much more damage tolerant anyway, just as a bird can still fly with a few feathers missing and a human hand can still have a sense of touch if part of it is out of action.

Missile destroying skin

So what about vehicle skin that disables incoming missiles? A recent European study has shown that "electric armor" can be a cost-effective way of protecting a vehicle against penetrating explosive devices. It follows earlier work in Russia and the USA with a skin of explosive that destroys incoming ordnance. Traditional thick steel armor plates are replaced by a capacitor layer - two conducting layers separated by an insulating one. When a shaped charge penetrates the smart skin it closes the circuit to discharge the capacitor to diffuse the attack. The work was carried out by BMT Defence Services in the UK for the European Defence Agency. This recent study looked at relevant work across Europe and its application to the new electric military vehicles which have little or no heat or sound signature for missiles to home in on but must be lightweight to provide adequate range. A generic electric armor system for a 30 tonne vehicle was developed and a roadmap for key technologies. New armored vehicles for the British Army are likely to include electric armor from the national Defence Science and Technology Laboratory DSTL to address the threat from rocket-propelled grenades. DSTL has already developed a system weighing only two tonnes but with the protective effect of carrying an extra 10-20 tonnes of steel armor, yet reducing the effect of impacts by rocket propelled grenades to almost zero. Clearly we shall hear of more magic made possible by various forms of smart skin on land, sea and air vehicles.

Leading event on the subject

Printed and potentially printed thin film electronics and electrics are now a subject in their own right. The world's leading event on the subject is Printed Electronics & Photovoltaics Europe where those providing and using the key enabling technologies for smart skin and other breakthrough applications will be exhibiting, presenting and demonstrating. That includes NanoMas Technologies, intrinsiq, HC Starck and others making printable nano metal and conductive polymer inks that can be annealed without damaging low temperature, low cost substrates. They also use less material. Global leader in appropriate polymer film, DuPont Teijin, ink jet printing experts Fuji Dimatix and the leaders in test equipment, materials and other aspects will also be exhibiting or sponsoring including Beneq, Innovation Laboratory, ImageExpert, Pall Corp., Chisso and InCore Systems. A large number of first announcements will be made. This event will be taking place 5-6 April in Dusseldorf, Germany.

For full event details, visit www.IDTechEx.com/peEUROPE. 

Source  http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=41351

"'I Am Ozzy' available on paperback." – Book Review

Last year I picked up Ozzy Osbourne’s autobiography “I Am Ozzy.” Whenever I read a rock autobiography I usually read the book with the artist’s voice in my mind while I read. That was the weirdest thing about the Ozzy bio, if you read it with his voice in mind you wouldn’t be able to understand him. Which makes you wonder, how good could this autobiography actually be? We’ve all seen the reality show and interviews with Ozzy…can he really write a book?

“I Am Ozzy” is not the best rock bio ever…not by a mile, but that said it is very interesting. You can definitely hear Ozzy’s voice in the words, but it makes for some good stories. It doesn’t glorify the debauchery like “The Dirt” (Motley Crue’s Autobiography) or “Walk This Way” (Aerosmith’s Autobiography) and it’s not really about too much more than the rock n roll life style than “Hit Hard” (Joey Kramer of Aerosmith) or “The Heroin Diaries” (Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue). It’s really just a simple story of Ozzy’s take on several events that have happened in his life.

If I had to compare it to another rock bio, I’d compare it to “Slash.” It is what it is. I didn’t really gain anything from reading the book, but when I was reading it I couldn’t put it down. It was definitely a very good interesting read. While “I Am Ozzy” is mainly for Ozzy’s many fans, I think even those that dislike Ozzy would find it an interesting read. Ozzy may play a dumb guy on TV he definitely has a solid head on his shoulders. No seriously, the guy should have died years ago; he must be doing something right.


BYLINE:

Bob Zerull is the Managing Editor of Zoiks! Online. He writes pop culture commentary, does interviews with bands, and reviews music and stand-up concerts. He also administers Zoiks! Online's Facebook page. Follow Bob on twitter at bzerull. Email Bob at bob@zoiksonline.com.


Read more: http://www.zoiksonline.com/2011/01/i-am-ozzy-available-on-paperback-book.html#ixzz1A8zfgQR7

Killing of 112 boys spread azadi fire in Kashmir, says report

Top politicians and civil society members of the country feel the death of 112 boys in action by security forces during the recent unrest stoked the azadi fire in Kashmir.

Delhi-based think-tank Centre for Policy Analysis (CPA), which led a 10-member team of parliamentarians and civil society members on a three-day fact-finding mission to the Valley early this month has come up with a damning report.

The team comprising parliamentarian Ram Vilas Paswan, filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt and journalist Seema Mustafa, among others, met the family of Tufail Matoo, the first victim of the unrest, Hurriyat leaders Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti and others from December 3.

“The situation in Kashmir has worsened dramatically and the death of 112 boys at the hands of security forces and the mass arrests of young people that are still continuing have virtually helped seal the alienation, giving the slogan for azadi popular and widespread support,” the report says.

It punctures the Center’s ‘Mission Kashmir’, saying the three-member committee of interlocutors does not have the support of the people.

The only silver lining for the government is that there is anger against Pakistan, it says.

“The current movement is spontaneous, with strong anger against Pakistan making that state irrelevant in the Valley,” the report says, recommending revocation of Disturbed Areas Act, phased withdrawal of Armed Forces Special Powers Act from Srinagar and other urban centres, review of all cases of detention under Public Safety Act and release of political prisoners not facing serious criminal charges.

Source http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_killing-of-112-boys-spread-azadi-fire-in-kashmir-says-report_1487447

Senate Delivers Success to Obama by Clearing Russia Arms Treaty

President Barack Obama scored a win on a key foreign-policy initiative after the U.S. Senate approved a treaty with Russia that cuts nuclear arms and renews weapons inspections on the last day of the 111th Congress.

After eight days of debate, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty cleared its final hurdle and was approved 71-26, exceeding the minimum threshold of 67 votes needed to secure its passage. Thirteen Republicans joined 56 Democrats and two independents in the final vote held yesterday.

“Democrats and Republicans came together to approve my top national security priority,” Obama said yesterday at a year-end press conference at the White House. “With this treaty, our inspectors will also be back on the ground at Russian nuclear bases, so we will be able to trust, but verify.”

The positive outcome caps Obama’s victories in the post- election lame-duck session. Other successes include the repeal of a law that banned gays from serving openly in the military, and on the economic front, an $858 billion deal to extend tax cuts and unemployment assistance for the long-term jobless.

The timing for the ratification for New Start was critical. A reduced Democratic majority in the chamber in January, the result of last month’s elections, would have made the vote more tenuous and hurt the president’s credibility abroad.

‘Enormously Important’

“It is an enormously important measure of credibility for the president,” Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters after the vote. “It’s critical” for any U.S. president to be able “to sit down with leaders in another country and to say to them, if we agree to X, Y and Z, I can deliver.”

Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the accord in April as part of a push to restore relations between the two former Cold War rivals and reduce the spread of nuclear weapons worldwide.

The treaty, replacing an agreement that expired last December, limits each side’s strategic warheads to no more than 1,550, from 2,200 allowed previously, and sets a maximum of 800 land-, air- and sea-based launchers.

“Obama’s ambitions for nuclear reductions were pared down at the negotiating table, but he succeeded in bringing home an agreement that further reduced nuclear forces in a structured, verifiable way,” said Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, in an e-mail.

Russian Hurdle

Having cleared the U.S. Senate, the treaty now must be approved by Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma. Andrei Klimov, deputy head of the Duma’s foreign affairs committee, said it could be passed tomorrow in the last full session of the year.

With Vice President Joe Biden in the chair, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked the chamber, greeting former Senate colleagues and shaking hands. She spent much of her time on the Republican side of the aisle, talking with Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, a treaty supporter, and Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, who helped spearhead the ratification drive as the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Opponents argued that the treaty limits U.S. options for developing missile defenses, a project Russia has opposed. They also contend that the new accord’s verification standards aren’t strong enough and that Obama hasn’t made sufficient assurances that the existing U.S. arsenal will be adequately maintained.

In an effort to whittle down opposition to the treaty, the administration added $5 billion in recent weeks to its 10-year, $80 billion plan unveiled earlier this year.

McCain Opposes

That succeeded in winning over some Republicans but not Arizona Senators John McCain and Jon Kyl, among the sternest critics seeking to postpone the vote. Both declined to comment on the passage of the treaty.

“This was contentious,” said Lugar, who had worked to gather Republican support.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said New Start would improve security. It requires lower numbers of weapons, provides a “rigorous” inspection system and offers the flexibility the U.S. needs to pursue missile defenses against attacks from potential adversaries, such as Iran, he said.

Military commanders and defense and nuclear officials have testified that the accord doesn’t limit missile-defense options and that it improves the ability to verify Russia’s adherence to agreed weapons thresholds.

Former President George H.W. Bush, current and former U.S. military commanders and Cabinet secretaries, including Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell all supported ratification.

The Senate approved the original Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1992 by a vote of 93-6. Four years later, Start II won approval, 87-4. The 2002 Moscow Treaty, which drew on the same verification procedures as in Start, was approved 95-0.

--With assistance from Kate Andersen Brower, Mark Drajem, Ryan Donmoyer, Roger Runningen, Flavia Krause-Jackson, David Lerman and Nicholas Johnston in Washington, Balazs Penz in Budapest and Henry Meyer in Moscow. Editors: Steven Komarow, Bill Austin

Source  http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-12-23/senate-delivers-success-to-obama-by-clearing-russia-arms-treaty.html