Thế giới của Sao

Thứ Tư, 15 tháng 5, 2013

Behind the wheel of 'The Beast'

President Obama's limousine.General Motors

When it comes to transportation for the President of the United States, few details are left to chance and compromise. For long-haul travel by air, the President has Air Force One, supported by the Marine One helicopter for shorter trips.

On the ground, the preferred method for transporting the president is The Beast: a bespoke Cadillac limousine designed to securely transport the leader of the free world and his entourage in comfort and extreme safety.

To experience what it might be like to chauffeur the president, Fox News was invited to take the wheel of The Beast.

No, not the real one, but a custom-built replica created for the upcoming summer blockbuster "White House Down," an action-packed thriller starring Jamie Foxx, Channing Tatum and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

The project to build The Beast was headed by Cyril O’Neil of Ghostlight Industries, a company that produces stunt cars for Hollywood, and the film’s action sequence supervisor Graham Kelly. Even for this experienced team, trying to recreate the most top secret Cadillac in the world presented its challenges.

“No one knew what it looked like inside,” Kelly said. “We had one photograph of the door open with the president getting out.”

According to O’Neil, “a good friend of mine, relatively high up the food chain at the FBI, called a good friend of his at the Secret Service.” After repeated pleading for information, however, the Feds remained circumspect on details of the president’s limousine, which debuted in 2009. So they winged it as best they could.

“We made the assumption that the headlight was the same as in a 2007 Cadillac Escalade,” O’Neil said. “From that, we measured its headlight, and were able to extrapolate just how big the rest of the car would be.”

Starting with the underpinnings of a Chevrolet Suburban, the crew designed a fiberglass body reminiscent of the presidential limousine. Although the real Beast is believed to ride on the chassis of the larger Chevrolet Topkick medium-duty truck, the result of their efforts looks convincingly real.

Its true size reveals itself only as you approach it, when it becomes clear that The Beast is far larger than its sedan-like shape implies from a distance.

“It’s been so well designed proportionally that, when you see it without any reference to anything beside it, it looks like a Cadillac,” Kelly said.

From the outside, The Beast replica looks every bit the real thing, from its dwarfing length and height to its shockingly large 35-inch wheels. While the stunt car does not feature true armor-plating or bulletproof glass, its doors and window panes are appropriately thick. A fuel tank specifically designed for the rigors of stunt work is mounted in the trunk.

The sparsely equipped interior features rear-facing jump seats, as The Beast is presumed to have, along with a mock-up of the backseat telephone fitted with direct lines to key political figures. The non-working instrument panel and secondary controls and nicked blue vinyl upholstery are the most telling indicators that this is not, in fact, the president’s real ride.

Unlike President Obama’s reportedly diesel-fueled monster, the movie car is powered by a Chevrolet-sourced LS3 V-8 engine tasked with hauling around its 9,500-pound weight.

During a brief stint behind the wheel, on the back lot of Sony Picture Studios in Culver City, The Beast lived up to its nickname and felt positively ponderous to drive. At startup, the protester-quieting roar from the engine was loud enough to be heard on the next soundstage. Steering and braking feel was remarkably light for such a heavy vehicle, but taking a corner was similar to maneuvering a slipping Zamboni, requiring advanced planning and a fair amount of courage.

While the nearly 5-ton Beast seemed to take forever to accelerate on the short course provided, it had enough oomph to convince that it could reach and cruise at highway speeds, which Kelly was happy to confirm.

“Once you get it going, it will do 100 mph comfortably,” Kelly said. “It’s just about getting it there.”

Kelly and O’Neil were mum on specific stunts performed by the Beast and three identical vehicles constructed for the yet-to-be released film, but alluded to high-speed drifting and jump sequences.

“It was used in anger in the film,” Kelly said. “We did some pretty fast drifting on mud. We turned it into a rally car.”

While boisterous driving is far from the modus operandi of the president’s driver, a rally car as presidential transportation is an idea enthusiasts from both the left and right side of the road could get behind.

"White House Down" premieres nationwide on June 28.

View the original article here

Scandals prompt comparisons between Nixon, Obama administrations

In this split image, former U.S. President Richard M. Nixon gives his farewell speech to members of his cabinet and staff in the East Room of the White House, following his resignation Aug. 9, 1974. And President Barack Obama speaks on the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups for extra tax scrutiny in the East Room of the White House in Washington, May 15, 2013Reuters/AP

The chorus of comparisons between President Obama and the only president to resign in disgrace is growing by the day, as the administration’s scandals appear to pile up.

Whether the comparisons are fair or not, columnist George Will perhaps led the charge -- after citing the Article of Impeachment against President Nixon in an opinion piece this week.

Will recalled the line: "He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."

Scores of websites and blogs have since invoked the Nixon comparison, as did Sen. Orrin Hatch, who speaking to reporters about the IRS scandal said Tuesday, "I've never seen anything quite like this, except in the past during the Nixon years."

The Boston Herald's front page on Tuesday was also emblazoned with the headline, "I Know Nothing," with a sub-headline reading: "(coincidentally, that's what Nixon said.)”

The president is dealing with several scandals at once, including the fallout from the Benghazi terror attack, the Justice Department’s seizing of phone records from the Associated Press and the IRS’ program of singling out Tea Party and other groups for scrutiny.

While Obama has called the IRS targeting of conservatives "outrageous," and late Wednesday announced the resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, investigations are just now getting under way.

There is no evidence, as of yet, that the scandal leads to the Oval Office. But the comparisons to Nixon are inevitable. While the disgraced Nixon did, indeed, use the IRS to target political enemies, he may have been seeking to avenge friends and supporters who, themselves, had been targeted by the IRS in earlier presidencies -- among them Elvis Presley, Billy Graham and John Wayne.

Regardless of the motive, one thing separates today’s IRS from that of earlier administrations -- its technological capability.

The IRS's mainframe computer in Martinsburg, W.Va., is among the world’s most powerful. As of October 2010, the Internal Revenue Service had the capability to sift through emailing patterns associated with millions of individual Internet addresses.

Sources tell Fox News the IRS continues to collect tax data, but they also are now acquiring huge volumes of personal information on taxpayers’ digital activities, from eBay auctions, Facebook posts, and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records.

And unlike in the Nixon administration, the IRS is, under the Obama Administration, set to expand its workforce by 15,000 to collect health information in accordance with provisions of the president's Affordable Care Act by the end of this year.

Jennifer Stefano, a member of Americans for Prosperity -- who gave up her own quest to form a Tea Party group with friends in 2010 after the IRS threatened to examine her emails, Facebook and Twitter accounts -- voiced concern of a scenario that was perhaps more Orwellian than Nixonian.

“What my concern is, is that four years after the IRS has expanded to police the nation's health care law, how many stories of abuse are going to emerge from this and what will be the impact? It will be far greater than sidelining political voices. It will affect their lives and their health. This is wrong,” she said.

View the original article here

Benghazi emails show State Department had heavy hand in watering down account of attack

- Benghazi investigation:Questions that still need to be asked
- Where is Benghazi scandal headed?

WASHINGTON – State Department officials repeatedly objected to -- and tried to water down -- references to Al Qaeda and prior security warnings in the administration's initial internal story-line on the Benghazi attack, according to dozens of emails and notes released by the White House late Wednesday.

The documents also showed the White House, along with several other departments, played a role in editing the so-called "talking points," despite claims from the White House that it was barely involved. And they showed then-CIA Director David Petraeus objected to the watered-down version that would ultimately be used as the basis for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's flawed comments on several TV shows the Sunday after the attack.

The documents were released under pressure after whistle-blowers testified on the Hill and some email excerpts leaked to the media last week. The 100-page file showed that State Department officials were even more heavily involved in editing the "talking points" than was previously known.

One email sent the night of the Friday after the attack from an unknown official said: "The State Department had major reservations with much or most of the document."

Individual emails leading up to that assessment show State officials repeatedly objecting to the intelligence community's early version of events.

The early versions stated that "Islamic extremists with ties to Al Qaeda" participated in the assault and discussed links to militant group Ansar al Sharia -- and referenced prior attacks against western targets in Benghazi.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland complained that she had "serious concerns" about "arming members of Congress" to make assertions the administration was not making. "In same vein, why do we want Hill to be fingering Ansar al Sharia, when we aren't doing that ourselves until we have investigation results ... and the penultimate point could be abused by Members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings so why do we want to feed that either? Concerned ..."

She also wrote that the line saying the administration knows there were extremists among the demonstrators "will come back to us at podium."

In response to her concerns, Assistant Secretary of State David S. Adams voiced agreement. He said the line about prior incidents "will read to members like we had been repeatedly warned."

The White House had until now declined to make the documents public and had let congressional investigators review the documents without making copies.

The documents describe how the administration developed "talking points" to describe what the administration wanted to discuss publicly immediately after the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Related Interactive

White House's Benghazi documents

View the original article here

Meet the teenager who designed a safer nuclear power plant

Do nuclear power plants need a redesign? Critics of nuclear energy seem to think so, and so does nuclear energy advocate, Taylor Wilson. A physics wunderkind, Wilson became the youngest person to ever create fusion at age 14. And since graduating from high school last year, he's devoted himself to finding innovative solutions to the world's biggest problems.

The now nineteen-year-old Wilson recently spoke to a TED audience about his design for a small, modular fission reactor that is both less expensive and much safer to operate than today's nuclear reactors.

Its assembly-line construction, 30-year fuel life and low usage cost make Wilson's reactor an ideal source of electricity for both developing nations and space explorers, according to the young scientist.

To get an idea of how today's nuclear reactors work, Wilson first explained to his listeners at TED how electricity is produced using a steam turbine. In a steam turbine system, water boils and turns to steam, which turns the turbine and creates electricity.

Nuclear fission, Wilson said, is really just a fancy tool for getting the water in a steam turbine system to boil quickly and steadily.

Today's nuclear power plants produce steam for their turbines using pressurized-water reactors — or big pots of water under high pressure — which are heated up with help from uranium dioxide fuel rods encased in zirconium. These rods control and maintain the nuclear fission reaction.

When nuclear power was first used to heat water in a turbine system, it was a big advancement in existing technology. But Wilson said his idea for a redesign stemmed from the suspicion that it wasn't really the best way to do it.

"Is fission kind of played out, or is there something left to innovate here?" Wilson said he asked himself. "And I realized that I had hit upon something that I think has this huge potential to change the world."

Instead of finding a new way to boil water, Wilson's compact, molten salt reactor found a way to heat up gas. That is, really heat it up.

Wilson's fission reactor operates at 600 to 700 degrees Celsius. And because the laws of thermodynamics say that high temperatures lead to high efficiencies, this reactor is 45 to 50 percent efficient.

Traditional steam turbine systems are only 30 to 35 percent efficient because their reactors run at low temperatures of about 200 to 300 degrees Celsius.

And Wilson's reactor isn't just hot, it's also powerful. Despite its small size, the reactor generates between 50 and 100 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 homes, according to Wilson.

Another innovative component of Wilson's take on nuclear fission is its source of fuel. The molten salt reactor runs off of "down-blended weapons pits." In other words, all the highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium collecting dust since the Cold War could be put to use for peaceful purposes.

And unlike traditional nuclear power plants, Wilson's miniature power plants would be buried below ground, making them a boon for security advocates.

According to Wilson, his reactor only needs to be refueled every 30 years, compared to the 18-month fuel cycle of most power plants. This means they can be sealed up underground for a long time, decreasing the risk of proliferation.

Wilson's reactor is also less prone to proliferation because it doesn't operate at high pressure like today's pressurized-water reactors or use ceramic control rods, which release hydrogen when heated and lead to explosions during nuclear power plant accidents, like the one at Fukushima in 2011.

In the event of an accident in one of Wilson's reactors, the fuel from the core would drain into a "sub-critical" setting- or tank- underneath the reactor, which neutralizes the reaction. The worst that could happen, according to Wilson, is that the reactor is destroyed.

"But we're not going to contaminate large quantities of land," said Wilson. "So I really think that in the, say, 20 years it's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality, this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity."

Wilson said his idea could help combat climate change, bring affordable power to the developing world and power rockets to explore space.

"There's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars," Wilson said, "Because the stars are giant fusion reactors. They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky ... there's something poetic about perfecting nuclear fission and using it as a future source of innovative energy."

Email asklizzyp@gmail.com or follow her @techEpalermo. Follow us @TechNewsDaily, on Facebook or on Google+.

View the original article here

Burma's president to visit White House on Monday

Published May 15, 2013

Associated Press

President Obama is set to welcome Burmese President Thein Sein to the White House Monday.

It will be the first visit by a Burma head of state in nearly 47 years and a sign of warming ties between the countries.

Last November, Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the country. The trip was a step in administration efforts to end Burma's decades of diplomatic isolation and reward its shift from authoritarian rule.

White House press secretary Jay Carney says Obama looks forward to discussing the country's democratic transition, communal and ethnic tensions and providing economic opportunity for Burma's people.

An aide to Thein Sein said a cyclone due to hit western Burma on Friday could affect his decision to travel.

View the original article here

Farming on Mars? NASA ponders food supply for 2030 mission

Future astronauts may grow some of their meals inside greenhouses, such as this Martian growth chamber, where fruits and vegetables could be grown hydroponically, without soil.Pat Rawlings/NASA
Food container for use aboard the International Space Station. Food not only provides nutrition for astronauts, but also enhances the psychological well-being of the crew by establishing a familiar element in an unfamiliar and hostile environmeNASA

Next Slide Previous Slide

The first humans to live on Mars might not identify as astronauts, but farmers. To establish a sustainable settlement on Earth's solar system neighbor, space travelers will have to learn how to grow food on Mars — a job that could turn out to be one of the most vital, challenging and labor-intensive tasks at hand, experts say.

"One of the things that every gardener on the planet will know is producing food is hard — it is a non-trivial thing," Penelope Boston, director of the Cave and Karst Studies program at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, said May 7 at the Humans 2 Mars Summit at George Washington University. "Up until several hundred years ago it occupied most of us for most of the time."

Early Mars colonists may have to revert to this mode of life to ensure their own survival, she suggested. [Cooking Lessons for Mock Mars Mission (Photos)]

Space settlers
NASA is actively engaged in researching how to farm on Mars and in space, as the agency is targeting its first manned Mars landing in the mid-2030s. And some NASA officials are wondering if that mission ought to be of long duration, rather than a short visit, given the difficulty of getting there and the possible benefits of an extended stay. "Sustained human presence — should that be our goal? I think that's a good discussion," Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator of NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, said May 6.

'Gardening in a pressure suit is going to be a real trick.'

- Taber MacCallum, Paragon Space Development Corp. CEO

Yet growing food on Mars presents several significant challenges. While research on the International Space Station suggests plants can grow in microgravity, scientists don't know how the reduced gravity on Mars might affect different Earth crops. Mars' surface receives about half the sunlight Earth does, and any pressurized greenhouse enclosure will further block the light reaching plants, so supplemental light will be needed. Supplying that light requires a significant amount of power.

"In terms of the systems engineering required, it's not an insignificant challenge," said D. Marshall Porterfield, Life and Physical Sciences division director at NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. NASA has been studying using LED lighting to give plants only the wavelengths of light they need to boost efficiency, he said.

Researchers are also studying whether plants can survive under lower pressures than on Earth, because the more pressure inside a greenhouse, the more massive that greenhouse must be to contain it.

"You don't have to inflate that greenhouse to Earth-normal pressure in order for plants to grow," said Robert Ferl, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research at the University of Florida. "Maintaining a full atmosphere of pressure is difficult on a planetary surface. You can take plants down to a tenth of an atmosphere and they'll still function."

However, then, the greenhouse must be sealed off from the crew's living quarters.

"Gardening in a pressure suit is going to be a real trick," said Taber MacCallum, chief executive officer of Paragon Space Development Corp.

Radiation danger
Martian farmers must also contend with the issue of radiation. Mars lacks Earth's thick protective atmosphere, so particles from space reach its surface that would be damaging to both people and plants. Thus, some kind of shielding or mitigation will be necessary.

"To maintain the infrastructure is the expensive part to grow plants, coupled with the need for redundancy if something fails," MacCallum said. In fact, so much mass must be launched from Earth to Mars to establish a Martian garden that if missions last less than 15 to 20 years, it might require less mass to simply send along food, he said.

Despite the challenges, though, scientists said farming on Mars will eventually be achieved.

"Every great migration in history happened because we took our agriculture with us," Ferl said. "When you learn to take your plants with you, you can not only go to visit, you can go there to stay and live."

View the original article here

Can you train your brain? Lumosity, BrainHQ say yes

Call it the great brain train.

Baby boomers, students, and the elderly all share at least one anxiety: Are my mental abilities holding me back? So it's not surprising that online cognitive exercises, or brain training, are finding a particularly receptive audience these days.

One popular service from Lumosity now has 40 million members. Its exercises are generally entertaining -- if a little humbling at first. New users fill out a very simple questionnaire about their concerns and focus (do you want to better remember people's names or improve your concentration and avoid distractions). Then Lumosity creates a daily regime of exercises for you.

Typical tasks include remembering ever more complex patterns, visual positions, or recalling multiple symbols or images in quick succession. The idea is to continually challenge the user in an attempt to increase particular mental functions, including working memory and executive function. Lumosity is $14.95 a month. A similar program, Posit Science's BrainHQ, is $14 a month. I've tried both and found them each to be engaging -- at least for 20 minutes a day.

'It's still the early days [in cognitive training research].'

- Dr. Joe Hardy, vice president of research and development at Lumosity

With Angelina Jolie' revelations about her breast cancer risk this week, it's particularly interesting to note a new study also released this week of women who had undergone breast cancer treatment. Dr. Shelli Kesler, a neuropsychologist at Stanford University, used a subset of Lumosity's exercises to work with 41 breast cancers survivors in order to see if it could help them overcome what can be the mentally enervating effects of cancer treatment. She focused on executive functions, the ability to make decisions.

"This approach has the advantage of adapting and changing the difficulty level," Dr. Kesler told FoxNews.com of the computer-based training, which the patients performed on their own, "but were highly motivated." She said most patients exhibited significant improvement in executive functions after the 20- to 30-minute sessions, which occurred 4 times a week for 12 weeks.

In spite of several studies that show brain training can be effective -- including a large study know as ACTIVE or the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly that showed it can be effective even years after the training is finished -- such cognitive exercises have been controversial. A recent overview of research conducted by professors at the University of Oslo concluded that the exercises only made people better at...doing the exercises. However, the Oslo study only looked at one aspect, working memory, and did not take into account the tremendous variance in the ages of the participants in the studies. In other words, it cast a skeptical eye on cognitive training but was not by any means conclusive.

There is always reason for some skepticism. Even in research that yields positive results, not every person experiences gains. And it can vary depending on the goal. It helped women subjected to chemotherapy but does it help students with learning issues? Can people in their 50's experience improvement or is it too late? (Please don't say it's too late.)

"It's still early days," in cognitive training research Dr. Joe Hardy, vice president of research and development at Lumosity told FoxNews.com. Consequently, the company is committed to doing further studies and continually improving its exercises based on new data. He said that's why Lumosity is involved in 38 different university research projects at the moment.

True, other popular, supposedly intelligence enhancing techniques have fallen flat. Crossword puzzles, for example, were supposed to boost our intellectual prowess. However, a recent National Institutes of Health funded study of over 600 individuals demonstrated no appreciable gains from doing the Sunday puzzles, whereas cognitive training exercises did show some positive results.

It's obvious that at a very fundamental level you can train your brain. You can learn a new language or learn how to play the clarinet. But the issue isn't whether practicing an instrument makes you better at playing an instrument. The question is, can brain games make you better at other intellectual endeavors?

In at least one specific area I've found it personally effective: Driving. So-called useful field of view exercises do seem to increase awareness on the road. I found that regular training gave me a heightened focus while behind the wheel, especially in city traffic, and independent studies seem to confirm the effect.

In an era in which healthy kids are taking ADHD drugs just to get better scores on their SATs, online cognitive training looks harmless and possibly quite beneficial. But it's important to note that another factor plays an extremely important role in intelligence and mental alacrity: Exercise. Dr. Kesler emphasizes that exercise is essential in creating new neurons.

Of course, just as all the weight training and cardio workouts in the world won't turn me into Roger Federer, simply exercising your brain on Lumosity won't help you pass a test in American history if you didn't study the revolutionary war. You've got to do some work on your own.

So keep your expectations in check. Remember: Flash cards do make you better at performing mathematical calculations, just don't expect them to turn you into Einstein.

Follow John R. Quain on Twitter @jqontech or find more tech coverage at J-Q.com.

View the original article here