Alton Towers turmoil

Rae Langton, professor of linguistics and philosophy; Mountain daisy is taken off the endangered-species list after a 25-year conservation effort.State
officials are urging that licenses be granted immediately, but other officials and legal experts say such a process could take a month.     “The real question is, ‘How great was Greater India?’” Jagoutz says.
“If you know when India hit, you know the size of Greater India.”By dating the Indian-Eurasian collision to 10 million years later than previous estimates, Jagoutz and his colleagues conclude that Greater India must have been much smaller than scientists have thought. “India moved more than 10 centimeters a year,” Jagoutz says. “Ten million years [later] is 1,000 kilometers less in convergence. That is a real difference.”Leafing
through the literatureTo pinpoint exactly when the Indian-Eurasian collision occurred, the team first looked to a similar but more recent tectonic example. Over the last 2 million years, the Australian continental plate slowly collided with a string of islands known as the Sunda Arc.
Geologists have studied the region as an example of an early-stage continental collision.
Jagoutz and his colleagues reviewed the geologic literature on Oceania’s rock composition. In particular, the team looked for telltale isotopes — chemical elements that morph depending on factors like time and tectonic deformation. The researchers identified two main isotopic systems in the region’s rocks: one in which the element lutetium decays to hafnium, and another in which samarium decays to neodymium. From their analysis of the literature, the researchers found that rocks high in neodymium and hafnium isotopes likely formed before Australia collided with the islands. Rocks low in neodymium and hafnium probably formed after the collision. Heading to the HimalayasOnce the team identified the isotopic signatures for collision, it looked for similar signatures in rocks gathered from the Himalayas. Since 2000, Jagoutz has trekked to the northwest corner of the Himalayas, a region of Pakistan and India called the Kohistan-Ladakh Arc.
This block of mountains is thought to have

been Silver Lotto System review of islands that was sandwiched between the two continents as they collided. Jagoutz traversed the mountainous terrain with pack mules and sledgehammers, carving out rock samples from

the region’s northern and southern borders. His team has brought back three tons of rocks, which he and his colleagues analyzed for signature isotopes. The researchers split the rocks, and separated out more than 3,000 zircons — 100 to 200

micron-long crystals containing isotopic ratios. Jagoutz and his colleagues first determined the age of each zircon using another isotopic system, in which uranium turns slowly to lead with time.
The team then measured the ratios of strontium to neodymium, and lutetium to hafnium, to determine the presence of a collision, keeping track of where each zircon was originally found (along the region’s northern or southern border). The team found a very clear signature: Rocks older than 50 million years contained exactly the same ratio of isotopes in both the northern and southern samples.
However, Jagoutz found that rocks younger than 50 million years, along the southern boundary of the Kohistan-Ladakh Arc, suddenly exhibited a range of isotopic ratios, indicating a dramatic tectonic event. Along the arc’s northern boundary, the same sudden change in isotopes occurs, but only in rocks younger than 40 million years. Taken together, the evidence supports a new timeline of collisional events: Fifty million years ago, India collided with a string of islands, pushing the island arc northward. Ten million years later, India collided with the Eurasian plate, sandwiching the string of islands, now known as the Kohistan-Ladakh Arc, between the massive continents.
Peter Clift, a professor of petroleum geology at Louisiana State University, says it may take a while for his colleagues to embrace this new timeline of

collisional events.
“This paper does a great deal to stir up the debate on the topic of the timing of collision,” says Clift, who was not involved in the research. “I think that a lot of that evidence Forex Megadroid in existence, and that the paper will be seen as

something quite fundamental a few years in the future.”“If
you actually go back in the literature to the 1970s and ’80s, people thought this was the right way,” Jagoutz says.
“Then somehow the literature went in another direction, and people largely forgot this possibility. Now this opens up a lot of new ideas.”This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Three key qualities contribute to the efficiency of heat transfer in such systems: Droplets must

form easily and abundantly on a condenser surface; the area of

contact between the droplet and the surface must be large enough to easily conduct heat; and the droplets must quickly fall away from that surface to allow new droplets to start condensing.While most previous research on improving condensers has focused on the third part, the new work improves all three aspects at once, says associate professor of mechanical engineering Evelyn Wang,

senior author of a paper just published in the journal Scientific Reports. The report was co-authored by Rong Xiao and Nenad Miljkovic, both of whom just completed their PhDs at MIT, and former postdoc Ryan Enright.The
innovation combines two properties: First, a nanopatterned surface, etched with tiny pillars, reduces contact between droplets and the surface. Second, a layer of oil coats the surface, helping droplets to form abundantly on the surface and also making it easy for them to slide off. “We know it’s a combination of these qualities that is optimal,” Wang says.
“We believe the big contribution of this work is to drastically enhance [droplet] densities. … We see [droplets] form on every single one of those pillar tops.”Condensers’ contradictory need to enhance both droplet formation (requiring a hydrophilic surface) and droplet release

(requiring a hydrophobic surface) is satisfied by the combination of nanostructures and an oily surface.
This results in a surface that is locally hydrophilic — attracting droplets to the tops of Penny Stock Prophet review pillars — while still being hydrophobic overall, causing droplets to fall away quickly as they grow in size. The new system produces much greater density of droplets than has been achieved on most other nanopatterned surfaces, Wang says.Because the droplets condense right through the thin

coating of oil, and end up being immersed in oil, the researchers coined the term “immersion condensation” to describe their new system. The new approach can be applied to ordinary copper plates or tubes, typically used in today’s condensers, so it should be relatively easy to incorporate into existing plants, Wang says.The group initially did computer modeling of the system, then carried out experiments to verify the models’ predictions. The

experiments confirmed a 100 percent enhancement of heat-transfer efficiency, compared to untreated copper surfaces. Further research, using different kinds of oil and different texture patterns, could yield even greater improvements, Wang says. “There’s lots of opportunity for optimization of the structures to get better performance,” she says.Anthony
Jacobi, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says this research “is very exciting

to me, because it not only demonstrates the innovative use of surface heterogeneity to promote immersion condensation, but it carries that idea to a potentially scalable and inexpensive deployment that may be useful in real power-generation or water-recovery systems. … The impact on energy efficiency could be tremendous.”This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research and MIT’s Solid State Solar Thermal Energy Conversion Center, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Artist father and actress daughter headline events at "Maximum India" festival. Do you smile when you’re frustrated? Most people think they don’t — but they actually do, a new study from MIT has found. What’s more, it turns out that computers programmed with the latest

information from this research do a better job of differentiating smiles of delight and frustration than human observers do.The
research could pave the way Coffee Shop Millionaire that better assess the emotional states of their users and respond accordingly. It could also help train those who have difficulty interpreting

expressions, such as people with autism, to more accurately gauge the expressions they see.“The
goal is to help people with face-to-face communication,” says Ehsan Hoque, a graduate student in the Affective Computing Group of MIT’s Media Lab who is lead author of a paper just published in the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. Hoque’s co-authors are Rosalind Picard, a professor of media arts and sciences, and Media Lab graduate student Daniel McDuff.In experiments conducted at the Media Lab, people were first asked to act out expressions of delight or frustration, as webcams recorded their expressions. Then, they were either asked to fill out an online form designed to cause

frustration or invited to watch a video designed to elicit a delighted response — also while being recorded.When
asked to feign frustration,

Hoque says, 90 percent of subjects did not smile. But when presented with a task that caused genuine frustration — filling out a detailed online form, only to then find the information deleted after pressing the “submit” button — 90 percent of them did smile, he says.
Still images showed little difference

between these frustrated smiles and the delighted smiles elicited by a video of a cute baby, but video

analysis showed that the progression of the two kinds of smiles was quite different: Often, the happy smiles built up gradually, while frustrated smiles appeared quickly but faded fast. Becky Hammon hits six 3-pointers and scores 30 points to give the Silver Stars a 85-78 victory over the Monarchs in the Western Conference playoff opener.
Police arrest one of two men who escaped when the prison van taking them to court in Manchester was attackedOne of two men who were sprung from a prison van in Salford last week as they

were being transported to court has been arrested, Greater Manchester police have said.Stevie
Forex Growth Bot escaped custody last Tuesday after armed men wearing balaclavas attacked a van carrying him and three other prisoners about half a mile from Manchester crown court and Strangeways prison, was arrested in a car in Lancashire.The
31-year-old had been on trial for conspiracy to kidnap, conspiracy to rob, conspiracy to commit arson and conspiracy to possess firearms.He was arrested on Sunday afternoon in the company of two other men on the A6 in Lancashire, near to Lancaster University.Ryan MacDonald, 20, who was due to be sentenced for conspiracy to commit robbery, also escaped last week but was still at large last night. There is a £10,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.Greater Manchester Police said that

McMullen was arrested on suspicion of escaping from lawful custody while the other men, aged 27 and 25, were arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender.Three men, including one who is believed to have been carrying a sawn-off shotgun, were involved in the attack on the GEOAmey prison transport vehicle last Tuesday.Police had released images of MacDonald and McMullen and warned that the latter, in particular, posed a danger if approached.When he escaped, MacDonald was due to be sentenced for conspiracy to commit robbery and aggravated vehicle taking. He was part of a gang who targeted pawnbrokers in Manchester and Salford where jewellery was stolen in daylight smash-and-grab raids.His delayed hearing was held on Friday at Manchester Crown Court as

he was jailed for seven years and 10 months.
He had pleaded guilty to the offences at an earlier hearing.CrimePoliceBen Quinnguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds     President proposes spending $2 billion from offshore oil revenues on science The play by Jesse Eisenberg, starrting Vanessa Redgrave, is one of the hottest Off Broadway tickets. That's

right, March 14 is international Pi Day. Get it -- pi is google Sniper 2.0 March 14 is 3/14? He's known simply by

his first name -- Jared -- and his claim to fame is being a loser, in fact a super-loser.
Homomorphic encryption is one of the most exciting new research topics in cryptography, which promises to make cloud computing perfectly secure.
With it, a Web user would send encrypted data to a server in the cloud, which would process it without decrypting it and send back a still-encrypted result. Sometimes, however, the server needs to know something about the data it’s handling. Otherwise, some computational tasks become

prohibitively time consuming — if not outright impossible.
Suppose, for instance, that the task you’ve outsourced to the cloud is to search a huge encrypted database for the handful of records that match an encrypted search term. Homomorphic encryption ensures that the server has no idea what the search term is or which records match it. As a consequence, however, it has no choice but to send back information on every record in the database. The user’s computer can decrypt that information to see which records matched and which didn’t, but then it’s

assuming much of the computational burden that it was trying to offload to the cloud in the first place.Last week, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 45th Symposium on the Theory of Computing — the premier conference in theoretical computer science — researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, together with colleagues at the University of Toronto and Microsoft Research, presented a new encryption scheme that solves this problem. Known as a functional-encryption scheme, it allows the cloud server to run a single, specified computation on the homomorphically encrypted result — asking, say, “Is this record a match?” or “Is this email spam?” — without being able to extract any other information about it.“This
is a very, very general paradigm,” says Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, one of the paper’s co-authors and, iPad video Lessons her fellow MIT professor Silvio Micali, the most recent recipient of the Turing Award, the highest award in computer science. “Say we’re talking about the surveillance cameras of the future, which come

up with encrypted images.
Why would we want to do that? It’s a question of liberty versus safety. If you’re looking for a suspect, you might be interested in doing some computations on an encrypted image, to match to the subject. Another possibility would be a medical database, where all the information is encrypted and … someone [runs] a drug study on those blood samples — but just that drug study, nothing else. Our result is in some sense the first result showing that you can do this very generally.”Joining Goldwasser on the paper are Raluca Ada Popa, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, her advisor, associate professor Nickolai Zeldovich, and Yael Kalai of Microsoft Research and Vinod Vaikuntanathan of the University of Toronto, both of whom did their graduate work at MIT with Goldwasser.Near
missesThe researchers built their functional-encryption scheme by fitting together several existing schemes, each of which has vital attributes of functional encryption, but none of which is entirely sufficient in itself. The first of those is homomorphic encryption.Another
is what’s known as a garbled circuit, a technique developed in the mid-1980s and widely used in cryptography.
A garbled circuit lets a user decrypt the result of one cryptographically protected operation on one cryptographically protected data item — say,

“Is this record a match?” The problem is that, if the garbled circuit is used on a second data item — “How about this record?” — the security breaks.Moreover,
a garbled circuit is a so-called private-key system, in which only the holder of a secret cryptographic key can encrypt data.
Homomorphic encryption, by contrast, is

intended as a public-key system — like most of the encryption schemes used to protect financial transactions on the Web. With public-key DotcomSecrets review can encrypt a message using a key that’s published online, but only the holder of the secret key can decrypt it.The final component technique is called attribute-based encryption.
Attribute-based encryption is a public-key system, and it’s reusable.
But unlike garbled circuits and homomorphic encryption, it can’t reveal the output of a function without revealing the input,

too. The new system begins with homomorphic encryption and embeds the decryption algorithm in a garbled circuit. The key to the garbled circuit, in turn, is protected by attribute-based encryption. In some sense, the garbled circuit can, like all garbled circuits, be used only once. But the encryption schemes are layered in such a way that one use grants the server access to a general function rather than a single value.
It can thus ask, of every record in a database, “Is this a match?”Zeldovich points out that since the scheme relies on homomorphic encryption, it shares the major drawback of existing homomorphic schemes: They’re still too computationally intensive to be practical.
On the other hand, he says, “It’s so new, there are so many things that haven’t been explored — like, ‘How do you really implement this correctly?’ ‘What are the right mathematical constructions?’ ‘What are the right parameter settings?’” And, Popa adds, in the four years since the

invention of the first fully homomorphic encryption scheme, “People have been shaving off many orders of magnitude in performance improvements.”Besides,

even a currently impractical functional-encryption scheme is

still a breakthrough.
“Before, we didn’t even know if this was possible,” Popa says.Ran
Canetti, a professor of computer science at Boston University, corroborates that assessment.
“It’s an extremely surprising result,” he says.
“I myself worked on this problem for a while, and I had no idea how to do it. So I was wowed. And it really opens up the door to many other applications.”One of those applications, Canetti says, is what’s known as program obfuscation, or disguising the operational details of a Directory Of Ezines. so that it can’t be reverse-engineered. “Not obfuscating the way that people are doing it now, which is just scrambling up programs and hoping nobody will understand, and eventually, these are broken,” Canetti says, “but really obfuscating so that it’s cryptographically secure.”Canetti acknowledges that the researchers’ scheme won’t be deployed tomorrow. But “I’m sure it’s going to lead to more stuff,” he says. “It’s an enabler, and people will be building on it."
After entering Mercury’s orbit, the spacecraft began measuring the planet’s surface elevations via laser altimetry.
Through radio tracking, the probe estimated the planet’s gravity field. Throughout the one-year mission, the MESSENGER spacecraft battled tides from the sun, which tugged the probe out of its optimal orbit, as well as what Zuber calls “sunlight pressure” — photons or packets of light from the sun that exerted pressure on the spacecraft. The team periodically adjusted the probe’s orbit and made precise corrections to its measurements to account for the sun’s effects, mapping out the gravity field as well as the elevation of the surface of Mercury’s northern hemisphere.
Inside and outThe team’s measurements revealed surprising findings both in the planet’s interior and on its surface.
From the probe’s gravity estimates, the group inferred that Mercury likely has a huge iron core comprising approximately 85 percent of the planet’s radius. (Earth’s core, by comparison, is about half the planet’s radius in size.) This means that Mercury’s mantle and crust occupy only the outer 15 percent or so of the planet’s radius — about as thin as the peel on

an orange, Zuber says.The researchers also reasoned, given Mercury’s gravity field, that just above the outer molten

layer of the planet’s core may be a solid layer of iron and sulfur — a type of layered structure not known to exist on any other planet.
“If the iron and sulfur model is correct, it would have implications for how the dynamo inside Mercury produces the planet's magnetic field,” Covert Cash Conspiracy review Schubert, professor of earth and space sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, who did not participate in the research.
“The dynamo generation process might work differently in Mercury

compared with Earth.”Co-author
Dave Smith, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says the scientific process that

led to the team’s results was a journey

in itself. “We had an idea of the internal structure of Mercury, [but] the initial observations did not fit the theory so we doubted the observations,” Smith says. “We did more work and concluded the observations were correct, and then reworked the theory for the interior of Mercury that fit the observations.
This is how science is supposed to work, and it’s a nice result.”Through

laser measurements of the planet’s surface, researchers mapped out multiple geologic features in Mercury’s northern hemisphere, finding the range of elevations to be smaller than that of Mars or the moon.
They also observed something unexpected in Mercury’s Caloris basin, the largest impact feature on Mercury: Portions of the floor of the crater actually stand higher than its rim, suggesting that forces within the interior pushed the crater up after the initial impact that created it.
Zuber and her team also identified an area of lowlands approximately centered on Mercury’s north

pole that could conceivably have migrated there over the course of the planet’s evolution. Zuber explains that a process called polar wander can cause geological features to shift around on a planet’s surface due to the redistribution of mass on or within a planet by geodynamical processes. One such process of transporting mass in a planet’s interior is convection within the mantle. Viscous material within the mantle circulates and can push fragments of crust up and out, shifting terrain around the globe. Given Mercury’s extremely thin mantle, as revealed by MESSENGER, Zuber says it’s challenging to understand how convection operated to raise broad expanses of terrain to the elevations observed. Micro Niche Finder to think what might be causing the observed deformation,” Zuber says.
“It appears there are some very unusual dynamics going on inside Mercury.”
For women with ectopic pregnancies, surgery to remove a fallopian tube did not affect the ability to become pregnant later any more than more conservative treatments for the condition. Artist Fur TradeSong "Voyager" Album Don't Get Heavy "This song is a perfect example of why we like[...]
Happy realignment day!     French forces have reportedly killed Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, one of the top commanders of Al Qaeda’s North Africa wing, during an operation against Islamist fighters in northern Mali. A research team from MIT and the Consensus Building Institute (CBI) have been jointly awarded a two-year, $637,000 grant to help build role-play simulations to help local residents and community leaders assess the climate change risks facing their communities and determine whether they can reach agreement

on appropriate adaptation measures.The Science Collaborative Program of the National Estuarine Research Reserve System (a partnership of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the coast states), announced the award on Aug. 2 for the project, called “Capacity of Coastal Communities to Address Climate Change Risk Through the Use of Role Play Simulations.”The
principal investigator for the project is Lawrence Susskind, the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning; Danya Rumore, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Urban

Studies and Planning (DUSP), will serve as project manager and collaboration lead.The MIT/CBI team will work in conjunction with reserve managers in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Maine and with public officials in Barnstable, Mass.;
Dover, N.H.; Cranston, R.I.;
and Wells, Maine.
Four MIT graduate students in the Environmental Policy and Planning program in DUSP will serve as staff to the reserves and the town governments involved. The objective of

the grant is to measure the extent to which tailored role-play simulations incorporating the techniques of scenario planning can enhance collaborative efforts to assess climate change risks and build consensus on appropriate adaptation