Politics

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/04/mars.rovers/index.html Wow, that 400 million dollars wasn't a total waste. I'm happy for the little guy.

JERUSALEM, Dec. 18 -- Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Thursday night that Israel would end negotiations with the Palestinians "in a few months" and unilaterally declare new borders if the Palestinian government did not immediately act to halt terrorism. Sharon proposed what he described as a "disengagement plan" in which Israel would evacuate some Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories and draw a new "security line," largely along the route of the massive fence and wall currently being built by Israel around much of the West Bank. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1802&e=2&u=/washpost/20031219/ts_washpost/a13478_2003dec18 …

ESA PR 83-2003. This morning, ESA's Mars Express flawlessly released the Beagle 2 lander that it has been carrying since its launch on 2 June this year. Beagle 2 is now on its journey towards the surface of Mars, where it is expected to land early in the morning of 25 December. http://www.esa.int/export/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEM2T0374OD_0.html Home of Beagle 2: http://www.beagle2.com/index.htm Events time line http://www.beagle2.com/landing/timeline.htm

Today Col.Gadafi has owned up to weapons of mass destruction projects, including Nuclear and Chemical weapons. He has also stated that ALL work in this area will cease and be closed down as of today, weapons inspectors have been invited to oversee the safe disposal of these weapons, and the 20 year old blocks and sanctions against Libiya will soon be lifted Christmas or What! )

it was officialy announced today that Saddam Hussein has been captured alive, in a 6 to 8 foot deep hole in the ground, he had 2 AK-47`s a Pistol and $750,000 in $100 dollar notes. he`s been held by coalition forces at an undisclosed location, but WILL be tried in an Iraqi court the official words were "We got him" he`s been DNA tested possitive also

Japan has been forced to abandon its first ever interplanetary space mission after failing to correct an onboard electrical fault with its Mars probe Nozomi. Nozomi was scheduled to arrive in orbit around Mars in late December 2003 but will now be manoeuvred away from its target. This is to prevent it from crashing into the planet's surface and potentially contaminating it with Earth microbes. Scientists hope to find evidence that Mars once harboured life, or perhaps even that it still does. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on Tuesday that it had been unable to correct a short circuit aboard Nozomi and would have to forsake its Mars missi…

I find it odd that somehow, in America, media portrayals of violence have become more acceptable than those of sex. Death and dismemberment is a regular occurence on television. Movies containing violence are often rated merely PG-13. Nudity, on the other hand, is never shown on television. Movies that merely show a woman's breasts are automatically rated R. If it is brief enough it might make PG-13 but usually not. And we wonder why we have become such a violent society. Personally, I'll take breasts over guns any day

James Watson, who elucidated the structure of DNA 50 years ago with Francis Crick, has published an opinion advocating the use of gene therapy to eliminate stupidity. This has generated sharp criticism relating to the technological as well as ethical feasability. To date, we do not know enough about the myriad of genes that affect intelligence, and there is also a great amount of environmental factors. Even if we did, people argue improving intelligence by genetic manipulation is not ethically acceptable. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993451 Personally I would love to see this happen. We'd be alot better off if everyone was smarter. Nature ga…

Excerpts From NewScientist 19:00 13 August 03 An exotic kind of nuclear explosive being developed by the US Department of Defense could blur the critical distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons. The work has also raised fears that weapons based on this technology could trigger the next arms race. The explosive works by stimulating the release of energy from the nuclei of certain elements but does not involve nuclear fission or fusion. The energy, emitted as gamma radiation, is thousands of times greater than that from conventional chemical explosives. The technology has already been included in the Department of Defense's Militarily Critical Techn…

From BBC.co.uk: They say that all the necessary technical drawings have now been completed, and - after a few minor niggles have been ironed out - all will be ready for the construction work to begin. But experts are already asking questions about the feasibility of the project. The first extra-terrestrial nuclear power station will serve the permanent research camp which, Russian scientists believe, could be set up on Mars within the next 30 years. Click here to read the full story.

Incase you haven't heard: A bunch of pranksters on the Net have rigged Google. If you search Google on "Miserable Failure" and clikc the "I'm Feeling Lucky" Button, then it will take you directly to George W. Bush's Bio on whitehouse.gov. This comes after Dick Gephardt called Bush a Miserable Failure.

I know this is not a forum for political campaigns. But I don't care. If it gets me thrown off then so what. What is happening here is horrific. Coca Cola are responsible for terrible attrocities in Colombia. Killing union officials is common place. Support your fellow workers and demand an end to the killing. Write or email coca cola and demand they stop this now. http://www.killercoke.org/

I was having a discussion with some people from work about what the turning point in world war 2 was. It was started by an american guy saying "We saved your ass, if it weren't for us blah blah blah" Which to an extent i agree with but you must admit, the allies just about scraped through. If the nazis followed us across the channel after dunkirk then what would have happend? Would the Russians have still beaten back the nazis? If it hadn't have been for the americans, we would of had it. If it hadn't been for the russians, I don't think the nazis would have been defeated. What do you lot think the most significant point of the war was?

So, what would you consider yourself? I'd say I'm more a Republican than a Democrat. I support Bush on the war, and the economy (this whole business of the rich having to pay higher percentages than the middle class and poor really annoys me). But, I'm more a liberal when it comes to human rights, like abortion and gay marraige. And I'm a big non-supporter for universal healthcare, and I'm also not for free college. If your a democrat, what primary candidate are you rooting for?

It's been widely thought of whether everyone has a soulmate or whether it's simply a means of reproduction for finding a mate. This article details what types of chemicals are involved during the love process, and its effects on us. Included in the article are viewpoints and facts presented by various people. http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1069069224695 Source: Toronto Star

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, launched in June 2001 at a cost of $145 million, looked back to the very beginning of the universe by looking at the cosmic microwave background radiation, the energy which keeps the temperature of a vacuum at 2.725K, just above absolute zero. Temperature changes in the CMB were mapped within 35 millionths of a degree, making the pictures 35 times sharper than COBE, MAP's predecessor. The new findings were measured using very different frequencies: K-Band, Ka-Band, Q-Band, V-Band, and W-Band. Age of the Universe The first frame of the picture on the left of of the cosmic microwave background radiation just 379,000 years after the…

The Blaster Virus is due to be triggered tomorow morning to attack Micro$oft on 16/8/03 Saturday. It will also slow down the net and create all the typical virus symptoms on Home computers as well. DO NOT download the patch on the MS site, it will get in that way! a Google search for "Blaster Virus" will tell you more than I can.

"LONDON (Reuters) -- The universe may be finite, spherical and patched together like a soccer ball, according to U.S. and French researchers. Jeffrey Weeks, a MacArthur Fellow based in Canton, New York, and researchers from the University of Paris and Observatory of Paris studied astronomical data which suggests the universe is finite and made of curved pentagons joined together into a sphere. In research reported in the Thursday edition of the science journal Nature, the scientists said data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which maps background radiation left over from the Big Bang, is not consistent with an infinite universe. "Since anti…

The Nobel prize winners were announced recently, and not for the first time there has been some controversary involved [link]. Both the prize for Medicine and for Physics were awarded for contributions to the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Paul Laterbur, and Peter Mansfield, were awarded the prize for Medicine, while the prize for Physics went to Vitaly Ginsburg, Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett. But a US researcher claims "the Nobel committee is rewriting history" [link]. Raymond Damadian is the founder and director of Fonar Corp., which produces MRI scanners. He owns a patent based on his discovery in 1970 that normal and cancerous tissue coul…

According to Nature, a group of physicists from Oxford have proposed a plan to achieved superposition in a large object. And by large, they're referring to a mirror the size of a bacterium. Quantum superposition has been acheived in the past with atoms, but an effect called "decoherence" theoretically prevents the same effect in macroscopic objects. "William Marshall of the University of Oxford and his coworkers outline a scheme for evading decoherence to achieve a quantum superposition of states in an object with around a hundred trillion atoms. This is about a billion times larger than anything demonstrated previously." According to the article, many experiments …

An intact specimen of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni was caught recently in the waters around Antarctica. It is only the seventh specimen of this species ever found, and only the second found outside of a sperm whale. It was first identified in 1925, but virtually nothing is known about it. The mantle of the half-grown squid is 2.5 meters, by comparison the mantle of the giant squid Architeuthis only grows to about 2.25 meters. They estimate a full grown specimen has a mantle around 4 meters long. Full BBC article here

Before taking control of Iraq: We go to war independant of what the UN says. after they went to war: "Members of the United Nations now have an opportunity, and the responsibility, to assume a broader role in assuring that Iraq becomes a free and democratic nation." Since when are the results of his decisions the responsibility of the UN ??? If he was a child you would let him learn the hard way so he wouldn't make the same mistake twice but there are two things why you can't really do that now. 1) a lot of people in iraq suffer from his decision. (This was never his concern the oil was his primary target.) 2) I would be surprised if he learns from…

From BBC.co.uk: The Hubble telescope has discovered the smallest, most distant objects in the solar system - three ice bodies which are relics of the formation of the solar system. Such bodies can become comets if they approach the sun, as the heat form the soalr wind blasts away their surface as a billowing gas. The article states: "The planets formed over four billion years ago from a cloud of gas and dust that surrounded the nascent Sun. Tugged by gravity, the fragments of ice and dust stuck together to form lumps that grew from pebbles to boulders to city- or continent-sized so-called planetesimals. Around 1950, astronomers Gerard Kuiper and Ke…

NASA today announced a major milestone in the development of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the selection of a beryllium-based mirror technology for the telescope's 6.5-meter primary mirror. The JWST prime contractor, Northrop Grumman, Redondo Beach, Calif., recommended to NASA the mirror technology, supplied by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation, Boulder, Colo., be selected for the JWST primary mirror. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/2003/27/text

From BBC.co.uk: Britain is preparing to repel an invasion of midges carrying the bluetongue virus, a disease which can rapidly lead to the death of up to 70% of sheep in an infected herd. The bluetongue virus has been a problem in Africa for many years but recently has begun to spread North as the range of the Culicoides midges which carry it has increased. Efforts are underway to develop more effective vaccines to protect the national stock of sheep in the event that the virus reaches the UK. The virus exists in a wide band up to 40 degrees North and 35 degrees South, but recent outbreaks in Europe as far North as 44 degrees indicate that the range of the carr…