Full Disklosure

Chile's Chaiten volcano has been placed under red alert due to an increase in seismic activity for three weeks, the Chilean government said.The volcano in southern Chile became active in May 2008 after being dormant for more than 9,000 years.Volcanic activity was on the decline in the past few months until picking back up January 21, the Chilean Interior Ministry said in a news release Monday.The red alert, which indicates activity is above normal levels and an eruption could be imminent, was enacted in large part to protect tourists in the area, said Carmen Fernandez, director of Chile's National Emergency Office.Underground seismic rumblings 1.2 to 5 miles (2 to 8 kilometers) deep in the area around the volcano and constant gas eruptions in the dome indicate "a high grade of instability," the National Emergency Office said.

Göbekli Tepe-the name in Turkish for "potbelly hill"-lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a "Rome of the Ice Age," as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.

Which giant would you prefer to work for: Google or Facebook?It might be a question of personal preference. You can't help but love one company's work more than another, which leads to desire to work for them. Aside from that, you could use some objective measurements in choosing between the two.

Using a carbon nanotube instead of traditional silicon, Cornell researchers have created the basic elements of a solar cell that hopefully will lead to much more efficient ways of converting light to electricity than now used in calculators and on rooftops.

What happens when you throw an elephant into a black hole? It sounds like a bad joke, but it's a question that has been weighing heavily on Leonard Susskind's mind. Susskind, a physicist at Stanford University in California, has been trying to save that elephant for decades. He has finally found a way to do it, but the consequences shake the foundations of what we thought we knew about space and time. If his calculations are correct, the elephant must be in more than one place at the same time. In everyday life, of course, locality is a given. You're over there, I'm over here; neither of us is anywhere else. Even in Einstein's theory of relativity, where distances and timescales can change depending on an observer's reference frame, an object's location in space-time is precisely defined. What Susskind is saying, however, is that locality in this classical sense is a myth. Nothing is what, or rather, where it seems. This is more than just a mind-bending curiosity. It tells us something new about the fundamental workings of the universe. Strange as it may sound, the fate of an elephant in a black hole has deep implications for a "theory of everything" called quantum gravity, which strives to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, the twin pillars of modern physics. Because of their enormous gravity and other unique properties, black holes have been fertile ground for researchers developing these ideas. It all began in the mid-1970s, when Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge showed theoretically that black holes are not truly black, but emit radiation. In fact they evaporate very slowly, disappearing over many billions of years. This "Hawking radiation" comes from quantum phenomena taking place just outside the event horizon, the gravitational point of no return. But, Hawking asked, if a black hole eventually disappears, what happens to all the stuff inside? It can either leak back into the universe along with the radiation, which would seem to r

Our world may be a giant hologram 15 January 2009 by Marcus Chown Magazine issue 2691. Subscribe and get 4 free issues. For similar stories, visit the Cosmology Topic Guide Has GEO600's laser probed the fundamental fuzziness of space-time? (Image: Wolfgang Filser / Max Planck Society) 1 more image DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres. For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century. For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan. If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I su

More is merrier for wireless power supply 10:00 14 February 2010 by Nic Fleming Using magnetic induction to send electricity to devices is more efficient when more than one machine is involved. The notion of transmitting power over the air is at least 100 years old, with methods from high-powered microwaves to focused beams of infrared being tested. But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), led by physicist Marin Soljacic, think using magnetic fields to induce a current in a distant device is the most promising approach. They tune the transmitter and receiver to magnetically resonate at the same frequency to maximise efficiency. Waves carry energy most effectively between objects that resonate at the same frequency, an effect at work when a singer smashes a nearby glass with the right note. Two's better than one In 2007, Soljacic's team reported they could light a 60-watt bulb from across a room. Now the they have shown it is possible to power two devices wirelessly when they are placed on either side of a single 1-square-metre coil. A network analyser measured the efficiency of the power transfer, while the researchers varied the distance between the source and receivers from 1.6 metres to 2.7 metres. The researchers found that power transfer was 10 per cent more efficient with two devices receiving rather than one, regardless of how efficient the transfer was to begin with. Their models suggested that efficiency would be even greater with more devices. Because the efficiency boost is always roughly 10 percentage points, the relative improvement is greatest when a lone device is joined by another, says André Kurs, lead author of a paper on the experiments. Room coverage That makes it possible to power a collection of devices with poor individual links, perhaps because they are scattered across a room far from the coil. "We could have reasonably good efficiency over a room-sized area from a coil embedded in ceiling or a wall in

Global stocks were mixed Friday, with European shares paring earlier gains after preliminary data showed the euro zone economy's recovery faltered in the fourth quarter, on top of investors still uncertain as to what will happen to Greece. Experts told CNBC that given Greece's troubles, investors should get out of stocks and bonds and into something safer, like cash.

A Poor Man's E-Bomb An FCG is an astoundingly simple weapon. It consists of an explosives-packed tube placed inside a slightly larger copper coil, as shown below. The instant before the chemical explosive is detonated, the coil is energized by a bank of capacitors, creating a magnetic field. The explosive charge detonates from the rear forward. As the tube flares outward it touches the edge of the coil, thereby creating a moving short circuit. "The propagating short has the effect of compressing the magnetic field while reducing the inductance of the stator [coil]," says Kopp. "The result is that FCGs will produce a ramping current pulse, which breaks before the final disintegration of the device. Published results suggest ramp times of tens of hundreds of microseconds and peak currents of tens of millions of amps." The pulse that emerges makes a lightning bolt seem like a flashbulb by comparison.

Mr. Gabrielli, the CEO of Petrobras, gave a presentation in December 2009 in which he shows world oil capacity, including biofuels, peaking in 2010 due to oil capacity additions from new projects being unable to offset world oil decline rates. Gabrielli states in his presentation that the world needs oil volumes the equivalent of one Saudi Arabia every two years to offset future world oil decline rates. This is a stronger statement than the one he gave in January 2009 in an interview with Business Week when he said the following. According to the company's projections, production from existing fields will fall from a little over 80 million barrels a day to maybe half of that even if new techniques are used to slow their rate of decline. So just keeping global production flat is going to require lots of new fields and requires the world to replace one Saudi Arabia per three years. Gabrielli is clearly concerned about declining future world oil production. His statements are now in alignment with those of other oil company executives including Sadad al-Husseini, former Aramco executive, who states that world oil production is on a peak plateau, and Total's CEO, Christophe de Margerie who doesn't see global oil production ever exceeding 89 million barrels per day (mbd). World oil production in December 2009 was only slightly lower at 86 mbd.

In an oped in USA Today, John Brennan -- Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism -- responds to critics of the Obama administration's counterterrorism policies by saying "Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda." Brennan writes that, "Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill." In the oped, titled "'We need no lectures': Administration disrupts terrorists' plots, takes fight to them abroad," Brennan writes that politics "should never get in the way of national security. But too many in Washington are now misrepresenting the facts to score political points, instead of coming together to keep us safe." The administration op-ed is in response to a USA Today editorial entitled "National security team fails to inspire confidence; Officials' handling of Christmas Day attack looks like amateur hour." Brennan provides a detailed defense of the administration's handling of failed Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab whom, he says, was "thoroughly interrogated and provided important information." He suggests that many critics are hypocritical and clueless.

Scientists from the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid detector has now totted up all of the resulting particle interactions. They wrote in the Journal of High Energy Physics that the run created more particles than theory predicted. However, the glut of particles should not affect results as the experiment runs to even higher energies this year. The LHC is designed to smash together particles and atoms circling its 27km-tunnel in a bid to find evidence of further particles that underpin the field of physics as it is currently formulated. The December announcement of particle beam energies in excess of one trillion electron volts made the LHC the world's highest-energy particle accelerator.

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Monday that Iran is set to deliver a "punch" that will stun world powers during this week's 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. "The Iranian nation, with its unity and God's grace, will punch the arrogance (Western powers) on the 22nd of Bahman (February 11) in a way that will leave them stunned," Khamenei, who is also Iran's commander-in-chief, told a gathering of air force personnel. The country's top cleric was marking the occasion when Iran's air force gave its support to revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a key event which led to the toppling of the US-backed shah on February 11, 1979.

Anyone with an e-mail account likely knows that police can peek inside it if they have a paper search warrant. But cybercrime investigators are frustrated by the speed of traditional methods of faxing, mailing, or e-mailing companies these documents. They're pushing for the creation of a national Web interface linking police computers with those of Internet and e-mail providers so requests can be sent and received electronically. CNET has reviewed a survey scheduled to be released at a federal task force meeting on Thursday, which says that law enforcement agencies are virtually unanimous in calling for such an interface to be created. Eighty-nine percent of police surveyed, it says, want to be able to "exchange legal process requests and responses to legal process" through an encrypted, police-only "nationwide computer network." (See one excerpt and another.) The survey, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, is part of a broader push from law enforcement agencies to alter the ground rules of online investigations. Other components include renewed calls for laws requiring Internet companies to store data about their users for up to five years and increased pressure on companies to respond to police inquiries in hours instead of days.

A lot of people are very upset about the rapidly increasing U.S. national debt these days and they are  demanding a solution. What they don't realize is that there simply is not a solution under the current U.S. financial system. It is now mathematically impossible for the U.S. government to pay off the U.S. national debt. You see, the truth is that the U.S. government now owes more dollars than actually exist. If the U.S. government went out today and took every single penny from every single American bank, business and taxpayer, they still would not be able to pay off the national debt. And if they did that, obviously American society would stop functioning because nobody would have any money to buy or sell anything.

First, they teleported photons, then atoms and ions. Now one physicist has worked out how to do it with energy, a technique that has profound implications for the future of physics. In 1993, Charlie Bennett at IBM's Watson Research Center in New York State and a few pals showed how to transmit quantum information from one point in space to another without traversing the intervening space. The technique relies on the strange quantum phenomenon called entanglement, in which two particles share the same existence. This deep connection means that a measurement on one particle immediately influences the other, even though they are light-years apart. Bennett and company worked out how to exploit this to send information. (The influence between the particles may be immediate, but the process does not violate relativity because some informatiom has to be sent classically at the speed of light.) They called the technique teleportation.

The United Nations and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are moving forward with their plan to confiscate your guns. The United States joined 152 other countries in support of the Arms Trade Treaty Resolution, which establishes the dates for the 2012 UN conference intended to attack American sovereignty by stripping Americans of the right to keep and bear arms. Working groups of anti-gun countries will begin scripting language for the conference this year, creating a blueprint for other countries when they meet at the full conference. The stakes couldn't be higher.

If we are to believe senator Harry Reid (see video below), the taxation system in the United States is voluntary. Reid admits that if you don't pay your cut to the government you will be fined or arrested and imprisoned, but the system is voluntary in the sense that you are allowed to file tax forms. Other countries, says Reid, just take your money without this formality.

Treasury said it is working closely with Congress to raise the ceiling. The Senate has approved legislation to increase it by $1.9 trillion to $14.3 trillion. A ceiling that high would equal about $45,000 for every American. The House is expected to vote on the increase Thursday.