Funeral home introduces cremation alternative with machine that dissolves body
Windsor Genova – AHN News News Writer St. Petersburg, FL, United States (AHN) – A funeral home in St. Petersburg, Florida is introducing non-toxic alternative to cremation with the installation of a machine that dissolves human remains in a solution of water and potassium hydroxide. The installation of the so-called Resomator at the Anderson-McQueen funeral home came after the Florida legislature legalized the technology developed by the Glasgow-based Resomation Ltd. Resomation claims the new body disposal process is pollution-free, uses less energy and safely gets rid of mercury present in dental amalgam. In contrast, cremation vaporizes mercury from amalgam and produces toxic mercury emissions. The resomation machine works by dissolving body tissue in a pressurized and heated solution of water and potassium hydroxide. After about three hours, the liquid is disposed through the municipal water system. According to Resomation founder Sandy Sullivan, who is a trained biochemist, the liquid does not pose health risk to humans and does not harm the environment because it is sterile and DNA-free. After the liquefaction of body tissue, bones from the body are then grounded in a cremulator, a crematoria machine that crushes bone fragments into ash. Metals and mercury in artificial joints and implants are then safely recovered. It was not the first time that the alkaline hydrolysis machine was used in disposing human bodies. A similar machine was used in Australia last year and in Ohio early this year. The one in Ohio, however, was disallowed for not complying with state law. Article © AHN – All Rights Reserved
Russia postpones launch of mission to restock ISS
Ayinde O. Chase – AHN News Staff Moscow, Russian Federation (AHN) – Russia’s space agency announced on Monday that officials were postponing the launch of a new mission to the International Space Station. The reason for the delay is a direct result of last week’s accident in which a cargo craft fell back to Earth and was lost. The Progress space truck was to deliver over 2.6 tons of cargo to the ISS, including water, food, oxygen, fuel. Alexei Krasnov of the space agency, Roscosmos, said the new mission originally slated to take off on September 22 is now scheduled for being in late October or early November. A commission is now tasked with determining the new launch date for the manned mission. However ahead of that mission, Roscosmos will make two unmanned Soyuz launches, “either an automated one or a freighter or both,” he said in a RIA Novosti report. The space agency said when it launches another Progress cargo ship it will be a first-stage test flight and for the second test it will launch six communication satellites. On Aug. 24, a Progress M-12M cargo ship failed to reach the orbit after the engine of a Soyuz-U carrier rocket powered down during lift off. Currently six astronauts are at the space station — three from Russia, two from the United States and one from Japan. Article © AHN – All Rights Reserved
How to Defrag a Mac Hard Drive
Defragging a Mac hard drive is a thing of the past because of the way that OS X manages files. After installing system updates or new applications, the computer will optimize itself. There are ways to periodically clean up your computer and defrag a Mac hard drive, but it can take a few hours and [...]
U.S. military’s hypersonic plane lost again in test flight
Windsor Genova – AHN News News Writer Los Angeles, CA, United States (AHN) – The much hyped hypersonic plane of the U.S. military disappeared again during a test flight Friday just like what happened to the first one in April. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is conducting the test, launched the unmanned Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2 from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 7:45 a.m. PDT to put it in suborbital space. The plane was to reenter the atmosphere and glide at 13,000 mph or 20 times the speed of sound. But DARPA, in a Tweet post, said it and other monitoring stations on the ground and sea lost contact 36 minutes into the flight, when the plane is in glide phase to check its maneuverability at Mach 20 speed. The test flight was supposed to end with the Falcon HTV 2 crashing itself into the Pacific Ocean. In April 2010, DARPA also tested the first Falcon HTV but lost communication with the plane nine minutes into its flight or shortly after separating from a rocket booster. The test flights were conducted because flight engineers cannot do an aerodynamic performance test on the ground. Article © AHN – All Rights Reserved
Battleship Movie Trailer Released
Yes, this Battleship movie is actually based on the Hasbro game, but don’t expect the authentic 1989 Electronic Talking Battleship to make a guest appearance. It’s slated for release next summer. Continue reading for the trailer. Sources Allthingsd
FAA Layoffs Attend Tower Work at Gulfport Airport
GULFPORT, Mississippi – Construction on the nearly completed air traffic control tower at the Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport has been halted because Congress failed to pass legislation to keep the Federal Aviation Administration operating. The action doesn’t stop flights at the airport. The FAA told contractors to quit work on the nearly $12 million project in Gulfport and other modernization projects at dozens of airports across the country. Air traffic controllers have remained on the job, as well as FAA employees who inspect the safety of planes and test pilots. Nearly 4,000 FAA employees in 35 states, and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have been furloughed.
Hubble’s lenses focus on new moon around Pluto
Ayinde O. Chase – AHN News Staff Washington, D.C, United States (AHN) – Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a fourth moon orbiting the planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite orbiting the icy dwarf planet has been temporarily designated, P4 — was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet. The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. Interestingly it was found as Hubble was searching for rings around the planet. The newly discovered moon has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles. Contrasting, Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, is 648 miles across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter “I find it remarkable that Hubble’s cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km),” said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who led this observing program with Hubble. The finding is a result of ongoing work to support NASA’s New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015. The mission is designed to provide new insights about worlds at the edge of our solar system. “This is a fantastic discovery,” said NASA’s New Horizons’ principal investigator Alan Stern. “Now that we know there’s another moon in the Pluto system, we can plan close-up observations of it during our flyby.” The New Horizons mission is slated to fly through the Pluto system in 2015. The mission is designed to provide new insights about worlds at the edge of our solar system. Hubble’s mapping of Pluto’s surface and discovery of its satellites have been an integral part in planning for the New Horizons’ close encounter. The new moon is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, which Hubble discovered in 2005. Scientists believe Pluto’s entire moon system likely formed by a collision between Pluto and another planet-sized body early in the history of the solar system. The collision threw material that later formed into the various satellites observed around Pluto. Lunar rocks returned to Earth from the Apollo missions led to the theory that our moon was the result of a similar collision between Earth and a Mars-sized body 4.4 billion years ago. Article © AHN – All Rights Reserved
Major Net Slowdown May Be Hours Away
Stephen Shankland – A planned 24-hour test of a network overhaul may wind up slowing your Internet connection to a crawl. The computing industry has begun a major 24-hour test today to work the kinks out of IPv6, a disruptive but necessary overhaul of the Internet’s inner workings. Starting at midnight, Universal Coordinated Time on June 8–or 5 p.m. PT today–dozens of companies lit up servers, Web sites, and network infrastructure that communicate using Internet Protocol version 6. The test, called World IPv6 Day, provides a bit of deadline, albeit one that’s more artificial and less pressing than the Y2K bug’s January 1, 2000, zero hour. Unfortunately, the IPv6 test could disrupt the Net for some people who have badly configured hardware or software, with a Web site taking more than two minutes to load instead of a few seconds. Fortunately, though, the problem probably won’t affect very many people, and the test will help identify any trouble spots. Yahoo estimates 0.05 percent of visitors to its Web site will see very slow response when their computers request IPv6 information that can’t actually be received. That’s a tiny percentage, but multiplied by Yahoo’s huge traffic, it’s still something like 30,000 to 50,000 people a day, said Adam Bechtel, the vice president for Yahoo’s Infrastructure Group, who’s overseeing the company’s IPv6 transition. “It is significant. We have been notifying users,” for example, by adding a notice on the Yahoo home page to notify users if their network connection may be broken, Bechtel said. “We’ve had over a million hits to our IPv6 help page.” What will the network look like for those who are affected? “These users will experience a range of symptoms which could include slow page load times–really slow, like several minutes, not just a little slow,” said Owen DeLong, who runs the professional services division at Hurricane Electric, a back-end Internet service provider that has had a concentrated IPv6 program for years. “In fact, the most common characteristic symptom is that a page element will stall for 90 seconds, then load at normal speed at the end of that pause. In some cases, the pause could be as much as three minutes. Other symptoms could include simply being unable to reach certain Web sites and other intermittent connection issues. “These users should contact their …
Congress Goes Quiet on Twitter in Wake of Scandal
WASHINGTON, D.C. – In the days following the initial reports of Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner’s lewd messages on Twitter, there was a noticeable drop in the number of messages members of Congress published on the social networking site. In the days following the initial reports of Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner’s lewd messages on Twitter, there was a noticeable drop in the number of messages members of Congress published on the social networking site, according to a study by the site TweetCongress. Weiner’s troubles started when he accidentally tweeted a picture of his crotch over the Memorial Day weekend. The following week, May 30 through June 3, questions grew as to whether or not Weiner sent the picture himself, until he admitted doing so the following Monday. Most of Weiner’s congressional colleagues refused to comment on case that week — and it turns out they were quiet on Twitter as well, tweeting 28 percent less than the previous week, the Hill reports. On June 6, the day Weiner confessed to having “inappropriate” online relationships with various women, there were just 120 Democratic tweets — about 30 percent less than two Mondays before. Among Republicans, there were 338 tweets, representing an 18 point drop. There’s no proof that the decline in tweets was related to Weiner’s Twitter scandal. It’s clear, however, that as lawmakers integrate social media into their regular communications, they’re still grappling with the risks. Of the 535 members of Congress, all but a handful use Twitter, CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes reports, and Weiner certainly isn’t the first to flub up on the site. Even when lawmakers deal with controversy unrelated to the Internet, reporters and pundits have learned to track that lawmaker’s tweets for developments in a story. Weiner, usually a prolific tweeter, hasn’t tweeted since June 1. After quickly deleting the message that got him into hot water, he continued to use the social media site for a of couple days, while curious Twitter users started “following” him. Before the scandal, Weiner had around 40,000 followers; he now has more than 75,000. Meanwhile, while many were initially reluctant to comment, a growing number of lawmakers are now calling on Weiner to resign. At least six Democrats in Congress are calling on him to step down, including Rep. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., who also announced last night he is donating to charity the $5,000 he received from Weiner’s campaign committee. “His actions have disgraced the Congress,” Donnelly said in a statement. “Everyone should be
“Five Things You Should Know This Week” - June 10, 2011
FIVE THINGS – It’s Friday and that means it’s time to find out five new things you should know this week. There’s lots trending around the world and around the web; everything from the E3 video game super conference to a digital Les Paul guitar. 1. Apple’s WWDC – This week all eyes in the tech world were on Apple. As expected, the computer giant previewed their iCloud service during their annual conference in San Francisco. CEO Steve Jobs personally intoduced the new feature, which lets Apple customers store music and documents on the Internet instead of a physical device. The company is confident this new music streaming tool will change the way people listen to digital music. 2. E3 – The Super Bowl of gaming wrapped up yesterday in Los Angeles, but the event was packed with announcements and releases that didn’t disappoint gamers. The three major console makers held showy press conferences. Nintendo’s new console wowed the audience, as did the Wii U and Sony’s PlayStation Vita. Experts say those devices are a sign that gaming is going mainstream. 3. Facebook Knows Your Face – Facebook is making it easier to “Tag” your friend in pictures, but not everyone’s happy about it. The social network giant is rolling out their new facial-recognition feature worldwide in the upcoming weeks. But some people are saying that it’s an invasion of privacy. It uses a program to suggest the names of people in the photos. But if you’re uncomfortable with that, you do have the option to opt-out. 4. Citi Group Gets Hacked – On Thursday, banking giant Citi Group announced that hackers stole information from hundreds of thousands of their North American customers last month. The company won’t say how much money was lost. They say the hackers didn’t see social security numbers, dates-of-birth or card-security codes, but did view customers’ names, account numbers, and contact information. 5. Google’s Les Paul Guitar – Google may just have the coolest doodle in search engine history. If you’ve visited their site lately, you’ve probably seen Google’s interactive Les Paul guitar. It was created to honor what would have been the electric guitar legend’s 96th birthday. And users can’t get enough. The feature lets you play the strings and record a song to playback later – just like the real thing. Google left it up one more day because of the overwhelming response.