Neutrinos still faster than light in latest version of experiment

Finding that contradicts Einstein's theory of special relativity is repeated with fine-tuned procedures and equipment

guardian.co.uk, Alok Jha, science correspondent, Friday 18 November 2011 

Scientists from Cern have repeated their finding of neutrinos travelling
faster than the speed of light. Photograph: Cern/Science Photo Library

The scientists who appeared to have found in September that certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light have ruled out one potential source of error in their measurements after completing a second, fine-tuned version of their experiment.

Their results, posted on the ArXiv preprint server on Friday morning and submitted for peer review in the Journal of High Energy Physics, confirmed earlier measurements that neutrinos, sent through the ground from Cern near Geneva to the Gran Sasso lab in Italy 450 miles (720km) away seemed to travel faster than light.

The finding that neutrinos might break one of the most fundamental laws of physics sent scientists into a frenzy when it was first reported in September. Not only because it appeared to go against Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity but, if correct, the finding opened up the troubling possibility of being able to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.

The physicist and TV presenter Professor Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey expressed the incredulity of many in the field when he said that if the findings "prove to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV".

In their original experiment scientists fired beams of neutrinos from Cern to the Gran Sasso lab and the neutrinos seemed to arrive sixty billionths of a second earlier than they should if travelling at the speed of light in a vacuum.

One potential source of error pointed out by other scientists was that the pulses of neutrinos sent by Cern were relatively long, around 10 microseconds each, so measuring the exact arrival time of the particles at Gran Sasso could have relatively large errors. To account for this potential problem in the latest version of the test, the beams sent by Cern were thousands of times shorter – around three nanoseconds – with large gaps of 524 nanoseconds between them. This allowed scientists to time the arrival of the neutrinos at Gran Sasso with greater accuracy.

Writing on his blog when the fine-tuned experiment started last month, Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University, said the shorter pulses of neutrinos being sent from Cern to Gran Sasso would remove the need to measure the shape and duration of the beam. "It's like sending a series of loud and isolated clicks instead of a long blast on a horn," he said. "In the latter case you have to figure out exactly when the horn starts and stops, but in the former you just hear each click and then it's already over. In other words, with the short pulses you don't need to know the pulse shape, just the pulse time."

"And you also don't need to measure thousands of neutrinos in order to reproduce the pulse shape, getting the leading and trailing edges just right; you just need a small number – maybe even as few as 10 or so – to check the timing of just those few pulses for which a neutrino makes a splash in Opera."

Around 20 neutrino events have been eventually measured at the Gran Sasso lab in the fine-tuned version of the experiment in the past few weeks, each one precisely associated with a pulse leaving Cern. The scientists concluded from the new measurements that the neutrinos still appeared to be arriving earlier than they should.

"With the new type of beam produced by Cern's accelerators we've been able to to measure with accuracy the time of flight of neutrinos one by one," said Dario Autiero of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). "The 20 neutrinos we recorded provide comparable accuracy to the 15,000 on which our original measurement was based. In addition their analysis is simpler and less dependent on the measurement of the time structure of the proton pulses and its relation to the neutrinos production mechanism."

In a statement released on Friday, Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, said: "A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny. The experiment Opera, thanks to a specially adapted Cern beam, has made an important test of consistency of its result. The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world".

Since the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) team at Gran Sasso announced its results, physicists around the world have published scores of online papers trying to explain the strange finding as either the result of a trivial mistake or evidence for new physics.

Dr Carlo Contaldi of Imperial College London suggested that different gravitational effects at Cern and Gran Sasso could have affected the clocks used to measure the neutrinos. Others have come up with ideas about new physics that modify special relativity by taking the unexpected effects of higher dimensions into account.

Despite the latest result, said Autiero, the observed faster-than-light anomaly in the neutrinos' speed from Cern to Gran Sasso needed further scrutiny and independent tests before it could be refuted or confirmed definitively. The Opera experiment will continue to take data with a new muon detector well into next year, to improve the accuracy of the results.

The search for errors is not yet over, according to Jacques Martino, director of the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics at CNRS. He said that more checks would be under way in future, including ensuring that the clocks at Cern and Gran Sasso were properly synchronised, perhaps by using an optical fibre as opposed to the GPS system used at the moment. This would remove any potential errors that might occur due to the effects of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which says that clocks tick at different rates depending on the amount of gravitational force they experience – clocks closer to the surface of the Earth tick slower than those further away.

Even a tiny discrepancy between the clocks at Cern and Gran Sasso could be at the root of the faster-than-light results seen in September.

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Puma aiming to produce compostable trainers and T-shirts

German sportswear manufacturer working on designs for shoes and clothing that can be buried at the bottom of the garden

guardian.co.uk, Louise Osborne in Berlin, Sunday 13 November 2011

Along with the leftovers, you may soon be able to add your old trainers to
the compost heap. Photograph: Kathy De Witt/Alamy

Your flowers love it, it's environmentally friendly and saves on rubbish collection. And soon you will be able to add your worn-out trainers and T-shirts to the carrot peels, potato skins and eggshells on the compost heap at the end of your garden, if German sportswear manufacturer Puma gets its way.

"We are confident that in the near future we will be able to bring the first shoes, T-shirts and bags, that are either compostable or recyclable, to the market," Puma boss Franz Koch told the German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche.

He explained that the company was working with partners on developing products on the principle of the "cradle-to-cradle" design. "It follows two circuits, the technical and the biological: I can use old shoes to make new ones or something completely different, such as car tyres," said Koch, who has led the sports clothing company since July.

"In the biological cycle, I can make shoes and shirts that are compostable so I can shred them and bury them in the back garden. We are working on products that meet these two criteria."

Last year the sportswear company revealed its five-year sustainability strategy with the unveiling of its Clever Little Bag, a reusable bag produced to replace shoeboxes and made from 65% less paper as well as having a reduced water, energy and diesel consumption.

The developments come at a time when there has been a trend towards the creation of green fashion in the form of ecological and sustainable clothing.

German fashion designer and microbiologist Anke Domaske has produced organic chemical-free clothing using milk to create the first manmade, industrial-strength fibre at the Hanover-based company Qmilch.

And earlier this year, Harry Potter actor Emma Watson teamed up with Italian designer Alberta Ferretti to launch a collection made entirely from environmentallyfriendly materials.

Heineken to invest in green initiatives

RNW, 10 November 2011

Dutch beer giant Heineken is making efforts to become a greener brand. According to the financial daily Financieel Dagblad, the brewery is considering involvement in the construction of a wind farm in the central Dutch province of Flevoland.

Heineken also has plans to re-design its Zoeterwoude brewery to run partly on energy generated from its own windmills.

“Investments like these fit into our plans for using renewable energy as an alternative to our current power consumption,” a spokesperson told the newspaper.

Negotiations between Heineken and wind farm project leaders are still in the exploratory phase.

Morocco to host first solar farm in €400bn renewables network

The vast solar and windfarm project across North Africa and the Middle East may provide 15% of Europe's electricity by 2050 

guardian.co.uk, Leo Hickman in Cairo, Wednesday 2 November 2011

Morocco has been chosen as the first location for a project to build a vast
network of solar and windfarms. Photograph: Michael Melford/NGS/Corbis

Morocco has been chosen as the first location for a German-led, €400bn project to build a vast network of solar and windfarms across North Africa and the Middle East to provide 15% of Europe's electricity supply by 2050.

The Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII), a coalition of companies including E.ON, Siemens, Munich Re and Deutsche Bank, announced at its annual conference being held in Cairo on Wednesday that "all systems are go in Morocco", with construction of the first phase of a 500 MW solar farm scheduled to start next year. The precise location of the €2bn plant is yet to be finalised, but it is expected to be built near the desert city of Ouarzazate. It will use parabolic mirrors to generate heat for conventional steam turbines, as opposed to the photovoltaic cells used in the UK.

The 12 square kilometre Moroccan solar farm will, said Paul van Son, Dii's CEO, be a "reference project" to prove to investors and policy makers in both Europe and the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region that the Desertec vision is not a dream-like mirage, but one that can be a major source of renewable electricity in the decades ahead.

Van Son described Desertec as a "win-win" for both Europe and MENA, adding that the Arab spring had created both opportunities and "questions" for the ambitious project. Discussions are already underway with the Tunisian government about building a solar farm, he said, and Algeria is the next "obvious" country, due to its close proximity to western Europe's grid. Countries such as Libya, Egypt, Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia are predicted to start joining the network from 2020, as a network of high voltage direct current cables are built and extended across the wider region.

German companies and policy-makers have dominated the Dii conference, reflecting the nation's recent decision to totally phase out nuclear power by 2022 in reaction, in part, to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March. By comparison, not a single representative from the UK was at the conference.

Jochen Homann, the state secretary at Germany's Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology, told the conference: "We undertook major reforms in German energy policy this summer and Desertec opens up an opportunity for us. We want to enter the age of renewables with sustainable sources of electricity supplying 80% of our power generation by 2050. As we accelerate our phase-out of nuclear power, we need to safeguard an affordable supply of electricity and we will be interested in importing renewables supplies in the future. Germany's government will continue to support Desertec. It is an inspiring vision which is good for foreign, climate and economic policies."

But Homann stressed there would be "pre-conditions" for guaranteeing long-term support from the Germany government. He said there must be "liberalisation" of the energy markets across the MENA region: "North Africa still provides huge subsidies for fossil fuels. There will need to be regulatory improvements. Only then will renewables be able to compete and a common market created. And other European states must participate, too."

Hassan Younes, Egypt's minister of electricity and energy, told the conference that Egypt was keen to participate and that it hoped to have a 1,000MW wind farm built by 2016 in the Gulf of Suez, adding to the 150MW "hybrid" gas/solar power plant that opened 100km south of Cairo earlier this year.

The conference was told via a Dii promotional video that the network of solar and wind farms across the MENA region would help to "halt migration" into Europe, by fast-tracking the rise of the region's youthful population out of poverty and unemployment.

'Speculation on basic foodstuffs is catastrophic'

Deutsche Welle, 16 October 2011  

Ziegler: Death by starvation is murder

To mark World Food Day on 16 October 2011, DW-World presents an exclusive interview held earlier this month with Jean Ziegler, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, about the causes of world hunger.

Jean Ziegler, a former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, is a stark advocate of the right of every individual to have access to food. Since 2008, Ziegler has been a member of the Advisory Committee to the UN Human Rights Council. He spoke to Deutsche Welle in Geneva about the current global food situation.

Deutsche Welle: All people have a right to food, but food has also become a speculative commodity on the world's stock markets. Where do you see the reasons for this, and what effects does it have?

Jean Ziegler: Financial speculation on basic foodstuffs is completely catastrophic. In the first place, the big hedge funds, large banks and large-scale speculators moved to the commodities exchanges, particularly the food stock markets, after the financial crash and are now making astronomical profits, quite legally, with forward transactions. The result is that corn has become 93 percent more expensive in the past 18 months. The price of rice has gone up 110 percent. And the third basic foodstuff is wheat. A ton of wheat now costs 271 euros ($372), exactly twice as much as last year. Why is that a catastrophe? If you take the example of developing countries such as the 53 countries in Africa, 37 of them have to import food in normal periods, not just when there is famine, and they can't do that if the prizes explode. That is why stock market speculation on basic foodstuffs should be banned.

One of the biggest obstacles in the fight against hunger is that poor countries in particular are dependent on food imports. How could this development be reversed? How can countries regain some degree of the food security that they once had?

More than 10 million people are affected
 by the current food crisis in parts of Africa

By canceling their foreign debt. If developing countries spend everything they earn in the way of foreign currency to pay off interest or to pay back creditor banks in Frankfurt, London, Paris or New York, they don't have any money. Take Ethiopia as an example: this huge country of a million square kilometers, with 70 million inhabitants, has 3.8 percent of arable land. Because there is no investment, no fertilizer or selected seeds, and no market development, productivity is low. In normal periods, in the Sahel, Burkina Faso or Niger, they harvest 600 to 700 kilograms (1,300 to 1,500 pounds) per hectare (2.47 acres). In Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany, they get ten tons, or ten thousand kilograms (22,000 pounds), not because the farmers in Baden-Württemberg are so much cleverer or work so much more than farmers in the Sahel, but because farmers in the Sahel have no investments. No draft animals, so no natural fertilizer, no seed, selected seed, no pesticides, no irrigation. The only thing they have is the same short-handled hoe they have had for three thousand years, and they use rain-based agricultural methods, totally dependent on weather conditions that have gone mad.

You have said that death by starvation is murder. Who is the murderer?

The recently released World Food Report says that a child of under 10 years of age dies every five seconds. Some 37,000 people die of hunger every day. The same World Food Report says world agriculture could feed 12 billion people without any problems. There is no objective lack of food any more.

A child that dies of starvation these days has been murdered. The murderer is the cannibalistic world order. That world order is dominated by multinational corporations. The global agricultural market is dominated by some 10 multinational companies that function according the principle of profit maximization; that's completely normal. It's not a matter of attacking them. What matters here is the structural violence of a cannibalistic order. Last year, Cargil controlled 26 percent of the entire global wheat trade. Monsanto controls 85 percent of all seed, both genetically modified and normal selected seed. Archer Midland, Louis Dreifus control the rice market and decide every day who on this planet will live and who will die.

According to the human rights organization FIAN, chronic hunger results above all from the fact that the perpetrators are not punished. Is that how you see it, and who could bring them to trial?

Huge quantities of grain are needed
to make bioethanol

Last year, the Americans burnt 138 million tons of corn and hundreds of millions of tons of wheat to produce bioethanol and biodiesel. The production and import of bioethanol and biodiesel have to be banned. Stock market speculation on basic foodstuffs must and can be banned. The 27 states of the EU pay billions in production and export subventions and swamp the African markets with cheap products, completely ruining the local farming industry. This form of dumping can and must be stopped. The foreign debt of the poorest countries must be canceled so that these countries can invest in subsistence farming. And land-grabbing has to stop, it must be banned. All of these are very concrete demands that a democratic public sphere could implement today, now.

What demands would we have to make on global agricultural production to be able to feed nine billion people in the long run?

The world could feed 12 billion people already today. It's a problem of distribution.

It's not just raw agricultural products that are being destroyed - you spoke about wheat and corn from the USA - but we also hear that around a third of all food on offer is wasted here in Europe. What can be done there? Who is to blame?

Millions of tons of food are thrown away by supermarkets, by bakeries. That is the consumption mania, the neoliberal consumption mania that we have, the total lack of responsibility for people. It isn't a matter of transporting the bread that is thrown away here as dry bread for Somali refugees. That is nonsense, complete nonsense. It is a matter of wresting the structures of production and consumptions away from the corporations; of saying: there is a right to food, it is produced and the amount of food is distributed in such a way that everyone has access to the food that gives and preserves life.

The tyranny of the oligarchy of globalized financial capital has existed for 20 years. Things have been liberalized and privatized as never before in the history of humankind. Nation-states are like snowmen in summer; every week they lose more sovereign rights. And hunger is growing. Minimum wages for farmers, land rights, rights to seed, rights to fertilizers, the legally protected access of people to sufficient food: these are things we can achieve - it isn't a utopian dream.

Author: Andreas Zumach / tj

Editor: Sean Sinico

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UN chief calls for universal access to energy

Google/AFP, Oct 10, 2011 

About 1.3 bn of the world's 7bn people have no access to energy 

(AFP/File, Jay Directo)

OSLO — UN chief Ban Ki-moon, who himself studied by candlelight as a child, pleaded on Monday for universal access to clean energy, a privilege denied to more than half the world population.

"We need an energy revolution," Ban said at an energy conference in Oslo.

"We need energy not only to be universal, we need it to be clean and sustainable as well," he added.

Improving access to energy was key to addressing global challenges like poverty, climate change, water scarcity, lacking health care and food shortages, Ban said.

About 1.3 billion of the world's seven billion people have no access to energy, while another 2.7 billion are without clean cooking facilities, using coal and wood for domestic tasks, according to a study published Monday by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

"For me, this is anything but academic. It is how I grew up in Korea. I studied by candlelight. Refrigerators, air-conditioning or a simple fan were just a far-off luxury that didn't touch our lives," Ban, 67, said.

"When I was growing up, Korea had to go through the Korean war and abject poverty," he said.

The Oslo conference, organised by Norway and the IEA and attended by representatives of more than 70 countries, is looking at ways to finance clean energy for all people in developing countries.

The UN has set three goals to be achieved by 2030, Ban recalled: universal access to modern energy services, a 40 percent improvement in energy efficiency, and a doubling of renewable energy.

The IEA study shows that 48 billion dollars would be needed per year to guarantee access to modern energy services by 2030, or a little more than five times the amount currently earmarked.

"This is really a small amount," IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said, adding: "It is only three percent of the global energy investments."

Birol said the use of dirty fuels for cooking was the second-leading cause of premature death behind AIDS, responsible for killing 1.5 million women and children each year.

"If you don't find a solution to this problem, very soon it will be the primary source of premature death worldwide..., which is unacceptable," he said.

Financially feasible, universal access to energy would only lead to a 1.1 percent rise in global energy demand, since poor households would still be limited in their consumption, and a 0.7 percent rise in greenhouse gas emissions, according to the IEA.

"The implications are very small. There are no real tensions between the targets of providing energy access and the issues of energy security and climate change," Birol concluded.

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New study connects sun to harsher winters

Deutsche Welle, 10 Oct 2011  

The findings may help in predicting weather,
especially for the northern hemisphere

A new study shows periods of low solar radiation could cause colder winters in northern Europe and the continental United States, helping to explain recent cold winters there despite growing greenhouse gas emissions.

Cyclical changes in the amount of radiation emitted from the sun affect weather patterns in the northern hemisphere, according to a study published on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Researchers analyzed recent satellite data to conclude that when ultraviolet emissions from the sun drop, parts of Europe and North America experience harsher winters.

Sunspot cycles

Bitter weather caused chaos on the
eastern seaboard last winter

Scientists have known for some time that radiation from the sun peaks and falls in a cycle that runs around 10 or 11 years.

Sunspots are an indicator of solar activity, and ultraviolet radiation varies in concert with these cycles of activity.

The new study relies on fresh data that suggests this activity is more variable than previously thought.

"We're actually measuring the direct amount of ultraviolet radiation that's reaching the Earth," said Jeff Knight of the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, one of the study's authors.

The scientists found that a reduction in ultraviolet light from the sun makes cold air form in the atmosphere about 40 kilometers above the tropics.

"It kicks off a chain of influences that lead to a reduction of the westerly winds that blow across the Atlantic into Europe in the winter," Knight told Deutsche Welle.

In a normal winter, Europe receives westerly winds that cause a warming influence.

"When we lose those winds, you lose that warming influence, bringing that cold, Siberian-type of wind into northern Europe," Knight said.

These frigid winds are part of a larger circulation that reaches all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, to the Eastern seaboard of the United States. "So you get similar types of weather in that region too – as demonstrated last winter," Knight said.

During this time of absent westerly winds, Canada and the Mediterranean experience milder weather.

Periods of stronger solar radiation, the scientists believe, cause the opposite effect.

Predicting the weather

The study could assist long-term predictions for winter weather around the world by helping illuminate the sun's impact on climate.

"We can't draw a direct one-to-one parallel between the sun and our weather – it's more complicated," Knight said.

He added that the study has more relevance for the northern hemisphere and mid-latitudes of the Earth.

Some skeptics of man-made global warming have pointed to variations in solar activity as an alternative explanation for climate change.

Knight said the new study did not challenge the role of greenhouse gases in affecting the climate.

"This study doesn't say anything at all about global climate," Knight emphasized. "Air is being moved around, not changed – it's just a rearrangement."

Knight said he and other researchers planned to look into speculation that the sun may be entering a period of prolonged relative inactivity, like what happened during the "little ice age," between the 16th and 19th centuries. 

NASA captured this image of a solar flare on the Sun in 2008

Satellite data

The study was made possible thanks to new satellite data from 2004 that has been able to measure the ultra violate radiation levels more accurately than before.

The researchers ran the new data through computer models that simulate interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean. Their findings were able to account for the extreme winters experienced in parts of Europe and North America in recent years.

The relatively small size of the data sample spells a potentially high rate of statistical uncertainty. The scientists hope to complete further studies as more data become available.

The paper involved five researchers with the Met Office (the UK public weather service), one with the University of Oxford and the other with the University of London.

Author: Sonya Angelica Diehn

Editor: Nathan Witkop

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Solar plant first to generate energy AT NIGHT - in a glowing 'lightbulb' tower hot enough to melt salt

Daily Mail, by ROBWAUGH, 6th October 2011

• Solar plant 'boils' salt using 2,600 mirrors
• Can store power for 15 hours without sunshine and work for 24 hours

The first solar plant that can operate without the sun has been officially opened.

The £260million Germasolar power plant has been designed to work even through the night and can store heat to power turbines for 15 hours without exposure to sunlight.

The plant - a tower with a glowing 'bulb' surrounded by 2,600 mirrors - is situated near Seville, one of the hottest places on the European mainland.

The plant is a heliostatic solar plant - a solar furnace - which uses mirrors to concentrate the intense heat onto two salt tanks. The 900C heat melts the salt, boiling water around it to drive turbines.

This blinding light is the world's first 24-hour solar plant in action - during the
day it 'stores' heat in tanks of molten salt, which then drives steam
turbines through the night

'Renewable' technology such as wind turbines is often hobbled by the fact that mankind is not master of the elements. If the wind dies down, the power goes off. The heat-storage of Germasolar's tanks can clear this hurdle.

Makers Torresol say, 'The salts are stored in a hot tank, saving the heat to be used when solar radiation is low. The salts transfer the stored heat and continue to generate electrical power through the night.'

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Enqrique Sendagorta, of the engineering company behind the plant says, 'We want to become a global company that develops the use of concentrated solar power. The start up of this plant is a first decisive step.'

The salts - a combination of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate - always remain in liquid form. The plant is not at full capacity yet - it's projected to reach 70 per cent capacity by next year.

The £260 million Gemasolar Power Plant in AndalucÌa, Spain, is made
 of 2,650 panels spread across 185 hectares. The mirrors focus 95 per
cent of the sun's radiation on to a giant receiver at the centre of the plant

Seville's climate, of course, is uniquely adapted to solar power - and not every nation has the time, or the budget, or the space for 2,600 mirrors angled towards a central tower.

There are very few such plants around the world - and Torresol's is the only  one built with 24-hour capacity in mind.

The plant began production in May, and hit 24-hour production during a sunny spell earlier this summer. Feasibility studies have been carried out into an even bigger solar plant to be built in South Africa.

Environmentalists have hailed it as a vindication of solar technology, 'The ability to generate electricity even after dark is a monumental milestone for solar technology. No longer hamstrung by sunset, the Germasolar plant should be a competitive and comparable alternative to conventional power plants,' says Chris Haslam, author of How to Stop Climate Change.