Tag Archives: rob simone

Nobel laureate announces “E-Cat” cold fusion Works! (video)

Dr. Brian Josephson, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on superconductivity, has recently released a YouTube video of an interview of himself conducted by Judith Driscoll, Professor of Materials Science at Cambridge University.

The stated purpose of the video is to wake up the media to the E-Cat story, which has not been widely reported on in the mainstream media of the English-speaking world. While some cold fusion advocates hypothesize the existence of a conspiracy of silence to suppress news with such important implications, Josephson suggests the silence is more due to an unwillingness of the traditional media outlets (both general and scientific) to risk appearing credulous by simply reporting on the story.

The content of the video is not really news for those who have been following the E-Cat story. Josephson himself is not likely privy to secret details of Andrea Rossi’s work, although he has kept up with developments in his capacity as an editor of the “Energy Catalyzer” page on Wikipedia. The video appears intended as an introduction of the energy catalyzer to a general audience including, of course, those in the media. Josephson uses a number of simple analogies and illustrations to explain why he believes the E-Cat could work. One of his analogies addresses the lack of high-energy gamma rays produced by Rossi’s device—a serious objection from a nuclear physics perspective if the device does indeed work by the fusion of nickel and hydrogen.

However, while he gives support for the idea that the E-Cat could work, Josephson doesn’t offer his own hypothesis detailing how he believes it does work. Perhaps optimists and skeptics alike can at least agree that there is still too little known publicly about the E-Cat for anyone (except Rossi, perhaps) to develop a comprehensive theory on how it functions, if indeed it does. A comprehensive theory is not necessary for the commercial success of device: it just needs to work. But, if it does work, there will be a much stronger demand than there is even now among scientists for more details on the process so that it can be researched properly. Rossi’s recent deal with the University of Bologna researchers is a positive development in that respect.

The imprimatur of a Nobel laureate in Physics may prove beneficial to Andrea Rossi, and to cold fusion research in general. In Dr. Josephson’s case that benefit may be tempered by the fact that he has been known as a cold fusion advocate for years. And perhaps it would also be wise to recall that a Nobel laureate in Physics, Sir John Cockcroft, was involved in hot fusion’s version of the Fleischmann-Pons story, so we have evidence, if we needed any, that a Nobel Prize in Physics doesn’t prevent one from drawing wrong conclusions in the field of physics.

Still, if nothing else, Dr. Josephson’s YouTube video and tomorrow’s press conference in Greece may prove to be the catalysts that convince the mainstream media the time is right to start reporting this story. More media reporting on the story means a wider audience, and therefore more people talking about the E-Cat and cold fusion in general, and discussing whether it can be real. That seems to be precisely what Dr. Josephson is hoping to accomplish. We shall see if he is successful.

source: by Ivy Matt for Cold Fusion News Continue reading

NASA: Earth Communications Could be Disrupted by Huge Solar Flare

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An unusual solar flare observed by a NASA space observatory on Tuesday could cause some disruptions to satellite communications and power on Earth over the next day or so, officials said.

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The potent blast from the Sun unleashed a firestorm of radiation on a level not witnessed since 2006, and will likely lead to moderate geomagnetic storm activity by Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.

“This one was rather dramatic,” said Bill Murtagh, program coordinator at the NWS’s Space Weather Prediction Center, describing the M-2 (medium-sized) solar flare that peaked at 1:41 am Eastern time in the United States, or 0541 GMT.

“We saw the initial flare occurring and it wasn’t that big but then the eruption associated with it — we got energy particle radiation flowing in and we got a big coronal mass injection,” he said.

“You can see all the materials blasting up from the Sun so it is quite fantastic to look at.”

NASA’s solar dynamics observatory, which launched last year and provided the high-definition pictures and video of the event, described it as “visually spectacular,” but noted that since the eruption was not pointed directly at Earth, the effects were expected to remain “fairly small.”

“The large cloud of particles mushroomed up and fell back down looking as if it covered an area of almost half the solar surface,” said a NASA statement.

Murtagh said space weather analysts were watching closely to see whether the event would cause any collision of magnetic fields between the Sun and Earth, some 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) apart.

“Part of our job here is to monitor and determine whether it is Earth-directed because essentially that material that is blasting out is gas with magnetic field combined,” he told AFP.

“In a day or so from now we are expecting some of that material to impact us here on Earth and create a geomagnetic storm,” he said.

“We don’t expect it to be any kind of a real severe one but it could be kind of a moderate level storm.”

The Space Weather Prediction Center said the event is “expected to cause G1 (minor) to G2 (moderate) levels of geomagnetic storm activity tomorrow, June 8, beginning around 1800 GMT.”

Any geomagnetic storm activity will likely be over within 12-24 hours.

“The Solar Radiation Storm includes a significant contribution of high energy protons, the first such occurrence of an event of that type since December 2006,” the NWS said.

As many as 12 satellites and spacecraft are monitoring the heliosphere, and one instrument in particular on board NASA’s lunar reconnaissance orbiter is measuring radiation and its effects.

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“Certainly over the (two-year) lifetime of the mission this is the most significant event,” said Harlan Spence, principal investigator for the cosmic ray telescope for the effects of radiation, or CRaTER.

“This is really exciting because ironically when we were developing the mission initially we thought we would be launching closer to a solar maximum when these big solar particle events typically occur,” Spence told AFP.

“Instead we launched into a historic solar minimum that took a long, long time to wake up,” he said.

“This is interesting and significant because it shows the Sun is returning to its more typical active state.”

The resulting geomagnetic storm could cause some disruption in power grids, satellites that operate global positioning systems and other devices, and may lead to some rerouting of flights over the polar regions, Murtagh said.

“Generally it is not going to cause any big problems, it will just have to be managed,” he said.

“If you fly from the United States to Asia, flying over the North Pole, there are well over a dozen flights every day,” he added.

“During these big radiation storms some of these airlines will reroute the flights away from the polar regions for safety reasons to make sure they can maintain communications.

“People operating satellites would keep an eye on this, too, because geomagnetic storming can interfere with satellites in various ways whether it is the satellite itself or the signal coming down from the receiver.”

The aurora borealis (Northern Lights) and aurora australis (Southern Lights) will also likely be visible in the late hours of June 8 or 9, NASA said.

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Actor Jeff Conaway Passes Away from Induced Coma, Bronchitis 1950-2011

My friend, Jeff Conaway passed away today from complications of a lung infection and drug interactions.

Grease star Jeff Conaway, who has battled a long-time addiction to alcohol and drugs, is in a deep coma after succumbing to bronchitis.

Conaway has been battling substance abuse addiction for years, as he even appeared on Celebrity Rehab to battle his demons stemming from cocaine and alcohol abuse. The actor was found unresponsive in his home on May 11 in critical condition and was admitted into an Encino hospital in a coma.

He died today from complications from his condition.

Jeff Conaway Dead

Jeff Conaway and Talk Show Host Rob Simone

Jeff was a friend, and we worked together on the “Dante’s Inferno Documented Project.” He was a fascinating person, interviewee and had an enormous capacity to
feel compassion. His career was a testimony to his extraordinary talent.

He will be missed.

His is survived by his sister.

– Rob Simone

The NSA bypasses the US Constitution to Spy on ANY Americans, Whistle Blower to Stand Trial

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New details about the NSA’s post–Sept. 11 domestic surveillance programs have emerged in a stunning New Yorker article about NSA whistle blower Thomas Drake, who faces trial next month for allegedly leaking information about waste and mismanagement at the agency.

The NSA bypasses the US Constitution to Spy on ANY Americans, Whistle Blower to Stand Trial

The article provides new insight into the warrantless surveillance program exposed by The New York Times in December 2005, including how top officials at the intelligence agency viewed the program. Former NSA Director Michael Hayden, in 2002, reportedly urged a congressional staffer who was concerned about the legality of the program to keep quiet about it, telling her that she could “yell and scream” about the program once the inevitable leaks about it occurred.

nsa operation thinthread classified wire tapping

Asked why the NSA didn’t employ privacy protections in its program, Hayden reportedly told the staffer, “We didn’t need them. We had the power,” and admitted the government was not getting warrants for the domestic surveillance.

Drake tried to get the word out. But now, as a result, he has been charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 and if convicted of all charges could spend the next 35 years of his life in prison. The government says he betrayed his country.

Drake says the only thing he betrayed was NSA mismanagement that undermined national security.

After a long career in U.S. intelligence, Drake never imagined he’d be labeled an enemy of the United States. As a young airman, he flew spy missions in the Cold War; in the Navy, he analyzed intelligence for the joint chiefs at the Pentagon.

Later, he worked for defense contractors in the highly technical world of electronic eavesdropping. He became an expert in sophisticated, top secret computer software programs and ultimately rose, in 2001, to a senior executive job at the NSA.

Part of the failure at the NSA, the largest U.S. intelligence agency, was in its old technology. The agency eavesdrops on the communications of the world. But in the 1990s it was becoming ineffective, overwhelmed by the explosion of digital data.

“Vast volumes of data streaming across all kinds of different networks, wired, wireless, phones, computers, you name it,” Drake explained.

“And what does that look like to NSA? Coming into building in Maryland?”

“Choking on it,” Drake said. “Just incredible amounts. Even just storing it was becoming a challenge.”

Anonymously, Drake contacted Sun reporter Siobhan Gorman and became an unnamed source for her, starting with an article about the failing, over budget NSA programs designed to keep up with growing technology.

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Amazing Lost City-Like Structure Discovered Under the Caribbean Sea

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Herald de Paris: Guarding the location’s coordinates carefully, the project’s leader, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, says the city could be thousands of years old; possibly even pre-dating the ancient Egyptian pyramids, at Giza.

A group of ‘undersea archaeologists’ have become the latest to claim they have uncovered the lost city of Atlantis.

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The scientists – who have refused to identify themselves – have released a series of images taken beneath the Caribbean.

They insist the snaps show what appear to be the ruins of a city that could pre-date Egypt’s pyramids, which appeared after 2600BC. They even told a French newspaper that one of the structures appears to be a pyramid.

Now the anonymous group wants to raise funds to explore the secret location where the images were taken. They would not reveal the exact location, however, saying only that it was somewhere in the Caribbean Sea. The claims have raised eyebrows on the internet, though skeptics refrained from debunking them entirely – just in case.

The legend of Atlantis, a city of astonishing wealth, knowledge and power that sank beneath the ocean waves, has fascinated millions.

Time and time again hopes have been raised that the lost city has been found – only for those hopes to be dashed against the evidence (or lack thereof).

In 2000 a ruined town was found under 300ft of water off the north coast of Turkey in the Black Sea.
The area is thought to have been swamped by a great flood around 5000BC, possibly the floods referred to in the Old Testament.

In 2004 an American architect used sonar to reveal man-made walls a mile deep in the Mediterranean between Cyprus and Syria. In 2007 Swedish researchers claimed the city lay on the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, which was submerged in the Bronze Age.As recently as February of this year, what appeared to be grid-like lines that resembled city streets were spotted on Google Earth – in the ocean off the coast of Africa.

Sadly Google itself quickly debunked the suggestion, explaining that the lines were left by a boat as it collected data for the application.

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NEW Face found on the Surface of Mars

A new feature on the surface of mars that looks quite a bit like a face in profile. Could it be a trick of light and shadow? Is it yet another clue of the ancient race of beings that lived on mars ages ago?

Researcher Mr. Ianneo found this feature while pouring over the
satellite images of the martian surface. it is one in series of rock formations that appear artificial.

There has been pyramids, cities, the big face found in the 70’s and even a monolith on a moon of mars
( see this article for more).

Here are the pictures:

Side note:

Data, recently transferred from the apparatus Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which explores Mars, may indicate the existence of underground life on Mars. This conclusion comes after a high-quality processing and data validation from scientists at the Institute of Planetology, located in Tucson, USA.

Underwater Microphone Captures Japan Earthquake – Listen Here

(VIDEO) Scientists at the NOAA Vents Program at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and Oregon State University heard the March 11, 2011 Honshu, Japan earthquake using a hydrophone located near the Aleutian Islands of Alaska

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Japan’s Nuclear Power Plant Can’t Cool Down after 8.9 Earthquake!

Tokyo (CNN) — Officials ordered an evacuation Friday of residents living near a Japanese nuclear power plant, saying there has been no sign yet of leaks but indicating a struggle to “cool down” one of the atomic facilities.

A 8.9-magnitude earthquake led to cooling problems and a fire at two of Japan’s nuclear plants closest to its epicenter, said government officials.

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Late Friday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters that people within 2 to 3 kilometers (1.2 to 1.8 miles) of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant have been told to leave the area. Those closer by — within 3 to 10 kilometers — were asked to stay home. Japan’s Kyodo News Agency estimated that the evacuation order directly affected about 3,000 people.

“This is a precautionary instruction for people to evacuate,” Edano said. “There is no radioactive leakage at this moment outside of the facility

Yet Edano said the Fukushima Daiichi reactor “remains at a high temperature,” because it “cannot cool down.” The Kyodo agency reported Friday that the radiation level was rising in a turbine building at the plant.

That plant and three others were shut down following the quake, after Japan declared a state of atomic power emergency.

Cham Gallas, a professor of disaster management at the University of Georgia, said that it wouldn’t be surprising if reactors get “both thermally hot and radioactively hot” after the reactors were shut down.

“When they shut down reactors, it takes a long time for them to go down,” said Dallas. “It does not necessarily mean radioactive material got out of the reactor.”

While authorities are “bracing for the scenario,” the minister said, “At this moment, there is no danger to the environment.”

Fire broke out at a second facility, the Onagawa plant, but crews were able to put that fire out, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The trouble at the Fukushima plant happened after the plant successfully shut down, Edano said. Crews had difficulty generating enough electricity to pump water into the facility to cool it, he said.

Janie Eudy told CNN that her husband, Joe, was working at the plant and was injured by falling and shattering glass when the quake struck. As he and others were planning to evacuate, at their managers’ orders, tsunami waves struck and washed buildings from the nearby town past the plant.

“To me, it sounded like hell on earth,” she said, adding that her husband ultimately escaped.

The government said earlier that it was sending senior officials and the defense force’s Chemical Corps to Fukushima power plant, according to the Kyodo news agency.

How Space weather could wreak havoc in gadget-driven world

It Has Benn an Historic Week. A geomagnetic space storm sparked by a solar eruption like the one that flared toward Earth Tuesday is bound to strike again and could wreak havoc across the gadget-happy modern world, experts say.

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What does this mean to me? Contemporary society is increasingly vulnerable to space weather because of our dependence on satellite systems for synchronizing computers, airline navigation, telecommunications networks and other electronic devices.

A potent solar storm could disrupt these technologies, scorch satellites, crash stock markets and cause power outages that last weeks or months, experts said Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting.

The situation will only get more dire because the solar cycle is heading into a period of more intense activity in the coming 11 years.

“This is not a matter of if, it is simply a matter of when and how big,” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administrator Jane Lubchenco.

“The last time we had a maximum in the solar cycle, about 10 years ago, the world was a very different place. Cell phones are now ubiquitous; they were certainly around (before) but we didn’t rely on them for so many different things,” she said.

“Many things that we take for granted today are so much more prone to the process of space weather than was the case in the last solar maximum.”

The experts admitted that currently, little that can be done to predict such a storm, much less shield the world’s electrical grid by doing anything other shutting off power to some of the vulnerable areas until the danger passes.

“Please don’t panic,” said Stephan Lechner, director of the European Commission Joint Research Center, drawing laughter from the scientists and journalists in the audience. “Overreaction will make the situation worse.”

The root of the world’s vulnerability in the modern age is global positioning systems, or GPS devices, that provide navigational help but also serve as time synchronizers for computer networks and electronic equipment, he said.

“GPS helped and created a new dependency,” said Lechner, noting that the technology’s influence extends to aerospace and defense, digital broadcast, financial services and government agencies.

In Europe alone, there are 200 separate telecommunication operators, and “nothing is standardized,” he said.

“We are far from understanding all the implications here,” he said.

World governments are hurrying to work on strategies for cooperation and information sharing ahead of the next anticipated storm, though forecasters admit they are not sure when that may occur.

“Actually we cannot tell if there is going to be a big storm six months from now but we can tell when conditions are ripe for a storm to take place,” said the European Space Agency’s Juha-Pekka Luntama.

On Tuesday at 0156 GMT, a huge solar eruption, the strongest in about five years, sent a torrent of charged plasma particles hurtling toward the Earth at a speed of 560 miles (900 kilometers) per second.

The force of the Class X flash, the most powerful of all solar events, lit up auroras and disrupted some radio communications, but the effects were largely confined to the northern latitudes.

“Actually it turned out that we were well protected this time. The magnetic fields were aligned parallel so not much happened,” said Luntama.

“In another case things might have been different.”

Space storms are not new. The first major solar flare was recorded by British astronomer Richard Carrington in 1859.

Other solar geomagnetic storms have been observed in recent decades. One huge solar flare in 1972 cut off long-distance telephone communication in the midwestern state of Illinois, NASA said.

Another similar flare in 1989 “provoked geomagnetic storms that disrupted electric power transmission” and caused blackouts across the Canadian province of Quebec, the US space agency said.

A panel of NASA-assembled scientists issued a report in 2009 that said a powerful solar flare could overwhelm high-voltage transformers with electrical currents and short-circuit energy grids.

Such a catastrophic event could cost the United States alone up to two trillion dollars in repairs in the first year — and it could take up to 10 years to fully recover, the report said.

by Kerry Sheridan

Central Arkansas rocked by constant earthquakes

Things are still shaking in Arkansas.

More than 500 measurable earthquakes have been reported in central Arkansas since September 20, ranging in magnitude from a barely noticeable 1.8 to a very noticeable 4.0 (recorded on October 11), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

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Geologists can’t say whether they’ll stop anytime soon.

Steve Wilson is looking forward to the quakes going away, he said.

“In the beginning, it was fun, it was neat, it was a cool thing to experience. But now we’re wanting it to go away,” said Wilson, assistant superintendent at Woolly Hallow State Park. “We’ve had all the fun we want.”

Although drilling for natural gas has been ruled out as a cause for the quakes, experts want to continue looking at salt water disposal wells, said Scott Ausbrooks, geohazards supervisor for the Geological Survey. Disposal wells occur when drilling waster is injected back into the earth after drilling.

Earlier this month, the Arkansas Oil and Gas commission issued an emergency moratorium on permits for new disposal wells. The commission will ask for a six-month extension for the moratorium at a January regulatory meeting.

The state also will soon become one of a few to require companies to disclose the chemicals used in fracking fluid, the water-and-chemical solution used in high-pressure drilling operations, said Shane Khoury, deputy director and general counsel for the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission.

“I think everyone recognizes that there is an increased number of seismic events occurring in and around this area. If you look at the maps, at least circumstantially, there appears to be evidence that they may be related to disposal operations,” said Khoury. “But we also know that this is an area that is historically active.”

Meanwhile, Sam Higdon, the mayor Guy, says the quakes’ novelty is worn out.

“I think everyone just kind of figures maybe it’ll just go away,” he said. “And that’s what we’re all hoping.”

repost from cnn