Antigravity and carbon sinks

Source: PhysOrg Batten down the hatches, a storm is coming! Well, it's not quite that bad. Scientists predict that Solar Cycle 24, the next period of solar storms, will start in March and continue to increase until it peaks in 2011 or 2012. Scientists are unable to agree as to how strong the next cycle will be, but predict that there will be GPS disruptions and potentially a blackout or two.

Source: PhysOrg Canada's Conservative government has finally decided that greenhouse gas emissions need to be dealt with (really? Who'd a've thunk it!) So are planning to implement measures to curb greenhouse gas generation over the next 5 years before reducing our emission rate by 20 percent of today's emission levels by 2020. Our original Kyoto target was a reduction in emissions to 6 percent below 1990 levels; however, we are already 30 percent above 1990 levels to achieving that has become unrealistic. Another way to read it is that we don't plan to stop increasing emissions until after the end of the NEXT political term, at which point it becomes someone else's problem. Gotta love politics.

Source: PhysOrg Speaking of greenhouse gas emissions, earlier this week was the first successful demonstration of a technology that can "scrub" carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and is the first step toward a commercially-viable technology. The system extracts carbon dioxide from the air and generates a stream of pure carbon dioxide (for industrial use or sequestration) and carbon dioxide-reduced air that is returned to the atmosphere. A device with an opening of 1 square metre can extract 10 tons of carbon dioxide each year.

Source: instructables ztrooper sent me this just as I was writing up this tech post.... a taxidermy project to build a computer mouse out of a dead mouse. Go check out the video and step-by-step instructions.

Source: New Scientist Yet another interesting article noticed by ancalagon_tb. This year's AIAA award winner is a paper calling for testing of a drive based on an obscure physics theory by Burkhard Heim who had proposed a theory that linked general relativity with quantum physics. The theory depends on the existence of 6 (not 4) dimensions and couples gravity with electromagnetism. To the theory's credit, he used it to predict the masses of elementary particles to well within an expected level of error. In fact, updating the equation with more recently-derived cosmological constants only increased the accuracy of the predictions. The experiment? A huge rotating electromagnetic coil placed above a superconductive ring should, according to his theory, experience a reduction in gravitational attraction. The paper theorizes that a spacecraft fitted with the ring-and-coil should be capable of propulsive lift. A far-fetched idea, but I'd still be interested in seeing it test. Give that the theory has demonstrated itself to work as a predictive model, there is a faint chance that he might be right about this. And even if it doesn't work, it demonstrates where the theory breaks down.