If you don't find yourself particularly enthralled with the small assortment of pre-assembled quadcopters already on the market, Jasper van Loenen's DIY?or Drone It Yourself?kit lets you turn almost anything into an unmanned aerial vehicle. Or at least anything light enough for its four rotors to lift.
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Top three 'Billboard' positions filled by rappers, with J. Cole topping Kanye West's 'Yeezus' in their second week.
By Gil Kaufman
Wale
Photo: Ronald Martinez/ Getty Images
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1709997/wale-gifted-number-one-debut-billboard-charts.jhtml
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More than 3 million years ago, a strange pouched predator stalked South America with fangs bigger than those of the fearsome saber-toothed cat.
But a new study shows that despite it's imposing dental profile, this ancient carnivore had a bite no stronger than that a house cat ? something the researcher called "embarassing." Instead, it packed most of its power in a robust set of arms, strong neck muscles and knack for precision, researchers say.
Named Thylacosmilus atrox ("pouch saber"), the animal was about the size of a jaguar, but "looked and behaved like nothing alive today," paleontologist Stephen Wroe said in a statement. Superficially, Thylacosmilus resembled the saber-toothed cats of the Pleistocene, like the North American icon, Smilodon fatalis. Both have long canines designed to attack large prey, but the animals were separated by at least 125 million years of evolution, researchers say. [Images: 25 Amazing Ancient Beasts]
Thylacosmilus, a marsupial-like carnivore that carried its young in a pouch, went extinct 3.5 million years ago. It had the largest canines of any known saber-toothed beast; its fangs kept growing throughout its lifetime and had roots extending almost into the animal's braincase. The teeth also fit over long sheath-like ridges that extended down from the animal's lower jaw.
The ancient beasts aren't around today to show off their killing skills, but researchers can reconstruct the force of the predator's bite based on fossilized skulls. Wroe, of the University of New South Wales, and his colleagues made computer models to compare the bite mechanics of Smilodon and Thylacosmilus, as well as a living cat, the leopard.
Previous "crash tests" led by Wroe showed that Smilodon, which vanished only 10,000 years ago, had a rather wimpy bite compared with modern feline predators like the African lion. The new research shows that Thylacosmilus, too, had a weak jaw.
"Frankly, the jaw muscles of Thylacosmilus were embarrassing," Wroe said in a statement. "With its jaws wide open this 80-100 kg [175-220 lbs] 'super-predator' had a bite less powerful than a domestic cat."
To launch an effective attack, Wroe thinks Thylacosmilus must have used "a mix of brute force and delicate precision."
The animal likely used its brawny forearms to clutch and immobilize its prey, Wroe said. The crash tests also showed that Thylacosmilus had stronger neck muscles than Smilodon, which probably helped the pouched predator power its fatal bite. And since its saber-teeth were quite fragile, Thylacosmilus' piercing blow must have been planted carefully, right into the windpipe or major arteries of its prey's neck, Wroe said.
The research was detailed on June 26 in the journal PLOS ONE.
Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Source: http://news.yahoo.com/saber-toothed-predator-had-embarrassing-bite-132353007.html
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Lithium's kind of a big deal. It powers everything from our gadgets to our cars?really our entire modern world. And that's not changing any time soon; some analysts estimate that demand could grow up to 25% over the next several years. But how does one harness the power of a metal that bursts into flame every time it gets wet? How do you even get it out of the ground?
Lithium (Greek for "stone") is the third element on the periodic table, a silvery-white alkali metal that's soft enough to be cut with a table knife. It's also the lightest metal on Earth, as well as the least-dense solid element. It has the equivalent density of a plank of pine wood, and half that of water. It floats in oil (and water too, though that'd end very badly since, you know, alkali go boom), and since it's reactive with moisture in the air, pure lithium is typically stored in anaerobic conditions and covered in either mineral oil, petroleum jelly, or some other such non-reactive liquid.
That's not to say that you can just dig a hole and pull out a chunk of lithium. No, it's far too corrosive and reactive for that; in fact, lithium never occurs freely in nature. Instead it's always found as a compound, often in pegmatitic minerals, as well as in ocean water, brines, and clays. Problem is, even though lithium is relatively abundant?it is the 33rd most common element?it's very diffuse throughout nature, which means that collecting and concentrating it into a commercially viable form is a massive pain.
Johan August Arfwedson first isolated lithium from petalite?a crystalline substance?in 1817. Over the next few decades, a number of researchers teased out the basic physical conditions of the metal. By 1855, chemists Robert Bunsen and Augustus Matthiessen had discovered a means of precipitating large amounts of lithium from lithium chloride via electrolysis, which led to small-scale production in 1916 and commercial-scale lithium production by 1923.
Lithium was used in WWII as a high-temperature grease for aircraft engines, thanks to its high melting point and the fact that it's significantly less corrosive than the calcium soaps used previously. Lithium also played a major role in the Cold War. The lithium-6 and lithium-7 ions were used to create tritium, a boosting compound used to increase the efficiency and yield of hydrogen bombs, as well as a solid fusion fuel itself.
From the late 1950s until the mid-1980s, the US was the dominant global lithium producer. Over roughly a quarter century, the US amassed a stockpile of 42,000 tons of lithium hydroxide from production sites in Nevada and North Carolina. America supplied 80% of the global demand for lithium in 1976, and continued its dominance until 1984, when one of the largest deposits on the planet was discovered in Chile (and again in 1997, when mining began on another massive deposit in Argentina).
Turns out, the US only holds a fraction of the massive lithium deposits of Chile and Argentina. They're the two largest producers, in that order, churning out 60 percent of the world's annual supply. Australia and China combine for another 30 percent. The remaining 10 percent accounts for smaller producers like the US and Russia. The US Geological Survey estimates total worldwide lithium reserves at 13 million tons. interestingly, half of that supply is thought to actually reside in Bolivia, along the eastern face of the Andes. Overall, the USGS estimates there's at least 5.4 million tons of lithium in them thar Bolivian hills.
Historically, lithium has either been mined from brines or from hard rock mining. Hard-rock lithium mining is just like other traditional mining operations: Dig a big hole, pull out the rocks you want, send them off for processing. The problem with applying that to lithium is that extracting the substance from solid rock is an incredibly time-, energy-, and cost-intensive ordeal. Since lithium is so diffuse, you've got to pull a lot of rock out of the ground just to get a little bit of of the good stuff.
Instead, far more economically efficient, brine-based extraction methods have been developed. Both Chile and Argentina (as well as China, Russia, and the US's only operating lithium mine in Clayton Valley, Nevada) use the brine pool method. Brine itself is, as Western Lithium explains:
The brines, volcanic in origin, are present in desert areas and occur in playas and salars where lithium has been concentrated by solar evaporation. In the salars (saline desert basins sometimes known as salt lakes or salt flats), the brine is contained at or below the surface and is pumped into large solar evaporation ponds for concentration prior to processing. When the basin surfaces are predominantly composed of silts and clays with some salt incrustation, they are referred to as playas. If the surface is predominantly salt they are called salars. Although the fundamental character of the deposits is similar, there is great variability in size, surface character, stratigraphy, structure, chemistry, infrastructure and solar evaporation rates.
The largest such brine pool resides in the world?s largest salt flat, Bolivia's Salar de Uyini.
The Foote Mineral company used to operate a lithium brine pool in Silver Peak, Nevada and provides this deeper look as to how lithium is extracted:
The Foote Mineral Company is recovering lithium from solar evaporated saline brines at Silver Peak, Nevada. The brines are pumped from beneath a playa surface inside a closed basin. The playa deposits consists of mixtures of clays, silts, sands, and evaporites, many of which are saturated with saline brines down to known depths of 600 feet. Brines are probably present below this depth, for gravity studies have indicated the unconsolidated sediments reach depths of 1500 feet. The genesis of the Silver Peak deposit is apparently related to volcanic activity and the area is characterized by hot springs, cinder cones, and lava deposits. The brine pumped from wells contains 300 ppm of lithium and 10-15 wt. % of other dissolved solids. The playa surface is well suited for solar evaporation. The brines are pumped into a series of solar evaporation ponds and after they reach saturation a series of salts are precipitated. The sequence of salts precipitated is NaCl, a mixture of NaC1 and glaserite (KNa(SO4 )2 ), and then these two plus Ka As a consequence of the evaporation, the lithium concentration is increased to approximately 5000 ppm. The effective evaporation season at Silver Peak begins in April and commonly continues through October. It is necessary to accumulate sufficient brine by October to operate the processing plant through the winter months. Lithium is recovered from the brine by precipitating lithium carbonate.
Just four companies?Talison Lithium, Rockwood Holdings, Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile, and FMC?account for 95 percent of worldwide lithium production and all use the industry standard method of precipitating pure lithium from molten lithium chloride (LiCl) using electrolysis. This process is of course performed in an air and water free environment to avoid a reaction.
In the video above, Leyden Energy offers us a view inside their li-ion battery plant and a behind the scenes tour of its production facility.
The Science Channel's How It's Made series also walks us through a more general form of the battery production process in the clip above.
We've got roughly 900 million vehicles on the road worldwide, and not enough lithium reserves to replace very many of them with battery-powered alternatives. "Since a vehicle battery requires 100 times as much lithium carbonate as its laptop equivalent, the green-car revolution could make lithium one of the planet's most strategic commodities," says Mary Ann Wright of Johnson Controls-Saft, a lithium-ion battery producer.
"To make just 60 million plug-in hybrid vehicles a year containing a small lithium-ion battery would require 420,000 tons of lithium carbonate - or six times the current global production annually," William Tahil, research director at Meridian International Research, told Barrons. "But in reality, you want a decent-sized battery, so it's more likely you'd have to increase global production tenfold. And this excludes the demand for lithium in portable electronics."
To span that supply shortage, numerous alternative sources for lithium have been explored. One promising system is to use the brine pulled up by geothermal pumps. A cadre of seven geothermal plants in the Salton Sea have been able to pull about 16,000 tons of lithium (as well as a fair amount of zinc) from their pipes annually. It's simply a matter of filtering the dissolved minerals from the water.
[Wikipedia - NBC News - Daily Mail - Rodinal Lithium - Salt Institute - BC Institute of Technology - About - Resilience - Western Lithium - Hardrock mining image: Kamzara / Shutterstock, salt pile image: Vladimir Melnik / Shutterstock, all other images: AP Images]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/where-the-most-important-part-of-your-battery-comes-fro-586442784
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By Tom Costello and Tracy Jarrett, NBC News
Five recent near-misses involving commercial airliners has prompted the National Transportation Safety Board to make recommendations for new rules to avoid such close calls -- even as the agency investigates a new incident over Michigan.
The recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration refer to aircraft arriving at or departing crowded airports and would modify rules for air traffic controllers to ensure the safe separation of planes during "go-around" maneuvers.
The go-around - an aborted landing attempt by an airplane on final approach - can be initiated at the direction of air traffic control or by the flight crew when a determination is made that circumstances are unfavorable for a safe landing.
The safety hazard identified in the five incidents -- two of which happened on the same day last July -- each occurred when an airplane on approach aborted the landing attempt and initiated a go-around maneuver, which put the go-around airplane on a flight path that intersected with that of another airplane that was either departing or arriving on another runway of the same airport.
Although current FAA procedures have specific requirements for ensuring the separation between two airplanes that are departing from different runways but that have intersecting flight paths, they do not prohibit controllers from clearing an airplane to land at a time when it would create a potential collision hazard with another aircraft if the pilots of the landing airplane perform a go-around.?
In such situations, a flight crew performing a go-around may be put into the position of having to execute evasive maneuvers at low altitude and high closing speeds with little time to avoid a mid-air collision.
The NTSB has determined that existing FAA separation standards and operating procedures are inadequate and need to be revised to ensure the safe separation between aircraft near the airport environment.
The NTSB cannot force the FAA to implement any recommendations, but according to a statement from the FAA, ?the FAA's Air Traffic Organization thoroughly investigated the incidents and took aggressive steps to address the causes. The FAA takes NTSB recommendations very seriously and will respond to the board in a timely manner.?
Meanwhile, the NTSB is investigating a close call of a Spirit Airlines flight Sunday that led the Airbus to dive 1,600 feet to avoid a skydiving jump plane.?
The incident took place about 40 miles outside Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport and would not have been affected by the proposed rule modifications.
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The small town of Prescott, Ariz., is grieving after 19 men were lost fighting a massive fire Sunday evening. Fire experts are still "wondering what happened" when the men to be overtaken so quickly. NBC's Miguel Almaguer reports.
By Henry Austin and Matthew DeLuca, NBC News
Grieving fire crews in Arizona headed back into a tempestuous and uncontained wildfire on Tuesday that already has claimed the lives of 19 of their elite colleagues, even as gusty winds and extreme heat fanned the flames.
The Yarnell Hills fire had burned its way across 8,400 acres of dry brush outside Phoenix, Ariz., by Monday evening, when fire officials said that the blaze remained zero percent uncontained. The towns of Yarnell and Peeple?s Valley remained under evacuation orders as flames advanced. More than 200 structures, including many homes, have been turned to cinders by the fire.
Chris Carlson / AP
Firefighters gather during a memorial service in Prescott, Ariz., on Monday.
?The fire was nipping at our heels and we had to get out of there,? Yarnell resident Russ Reason told The Arizona Republic as houses in his neighborhood as the fire encroached on his neighborhood. ?I?m sure my house is gone by now.?
?It looked like hell coming over that ridge,? Yarnell homeowner Annie Gaines told the newspaper. ?There was a towering inferno.?
A dip in the blistering temperatures the area has seen for the last few days could aid firefighters on Tuesday, Weather Channel meteorologist Frank Giannasca said. An early evening thunderstorm might bring some precipitation, he said, but that might be a mixed blessing.
?I would say that at this time if it were to occur, it would be more a hindrance than a help,? Giannasca said. ?If it rains where they need it to rain, then great, but it could produce strong, erratic gusts gusty winds for a short time, which would not help them at all. Often at this time of year you get dry thunderstorms, which only produce lightning and no rain, which are no help at all.?
Firefighters already accustomed to exercising caution in adverse conditions carried the memory of the 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots ? many of them in their 20s, many fathers with young children ? who lost their lives on Sunday.
In Prescott, Ariz., it was supposed to be the biggest week of the year, with the town's annual rodeo getting underway, but now the entire town is grieving for the 19 firefighters who died battling the Yarnell Hill blaze. NBC's Gabe Gutierrez reports.
Those firefighters were remembered for their dedication in the face of blistering fires, Juliann Ashcraft, whose husband Andrew died in the blaze, said on TODAY.
?It was everything to him. Outside of the love he shared for his family members, hotshot firefighting was his life,? Ashcraft said. ?He had his priorities in line, but when he was there, he would tell me, ?They say jump and I?d say, how high.??
?These men worked together,? Ashcraft said. ?They lived together, they fought fires together, and they died together doing what they loved.?
As the community began to mourn the loss of the men described as ?heroes" by President Barack Obama, medical examiners were due to begin carrying out autopsies in the wake of the area's ?largest mass-casualty event in memory.?
A short candelit vigil was held when the Granite Mountain Hotshots' bodies arrived in Phoenix on Monday, and a bell rung after each name was read aloud.
More than 1,000 people also gathered at a Prescott University gym to honor the firefighters' bravery, according to NBC station?KVOA.
The crowd rocked children in their arms, wiped tears away and applauded robustly as a number of people paid tribute to their bravery, the station reported.
The Arizona Forestry Commission will also launch an investigation in what went wrong during the deadly incident, spokesman Mike Reichling confirmed last night.
The 19 firefighters who died in Arizona's Yarnell Hill fire were overrun by flames as they attempted to fight the monster blaze. NBC's Miguel Almaguer reports.
?They were caught in a very bad situation,? he told The Arizona Republic. ?We have to get to the bottom of what went wrong with that particular team.? ?
He added that after the wind changed, each of the firefighters had deployed their emergency shelters -- a flame retardent device designed to deflect the heat and flames.
Not all of the bodies were found inside them. ??
Peter Andersen, a former Yarnell fire chief who was helping the firefighting effort, told Reuters that a ranger helicopter crew flying over the area had spotted the Granite Mountain Hotshots. ?
"There was nothing they [the helicopter crew] could do to get to them," he said.?
Authorities confirmed the victims of Sunday's tragedy were: Anthony Rose, 23; Eric Marsh, 43; Robert Caldwell, 23; Clayton Whitted , 28; Scott Norris, 28; Dustin Deford, 24; Sean Misner, 26; Garret Zuppiger, 27; Travis Carter, 31; Grant McKee, 21; Travis Turbyfill, 27; Jesse Steed, 36; Wade Parker, 22; Joe Thurston, 32; William Warneke, 25; and John Percin, 24; Kevin Woyjeck, 21; Chris MacKenzie, 30; and Andrew Ashcraft, 29.
Reuters contributed to this report.
David Kadlubowski / The Arizona Republic via AP
Nineteen firefighters - all members of an elite response team - were killed Sunday battling a fast-moving wildfire in Arizona, marking the deadliest single incident for firefighters since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, officials said.
Related
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This story was originally published on Tue Jul 2, 2013 5:25 AM EDT
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Many critics of immigration reform claim that opening up pathways for immigrants is unnecessary, will strain an already overburdened government, and take jobs away from native-born Americans. Reich tackles all three 'economic myths.'
Immigrant students join a coalition of immigrant rights supporters on a 24-hour vigil calling on the U.S. Congress to pass immigration reform outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles, Calif. in June 2013. Immigration reform will not hurt Americans or take jobs away from them, Reich argues.
Damian Dovarganes/AP/File
EnlargeThe battle over immigration reform is often about economic fear ? fear that immigrants are hurting the economy for native born Americans. ?But that fear is based on several economic myths:
Skip to next paragraph Robert ReichRobert is chancellor?s professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Clinton. Time Magazine?named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including ?The Work of Nations,? his latest best-seller ?Aftershock: The Next Economy and America?s Future," and a new?e-book, ?Beyond Outrage.??He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
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MYTH ONE:?Immigration reform will strain already overburdened government safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Wrong. ?
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office finds that immigration reform will actually reduce the budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars.
Why is that? Because while they seek citizenship, undocumented workers will be required to pay into Social Security and Medicare even though they won?t be eligible for them.
They?re also younger on average than the typical worker, so even when they?re citizens they?ll be paying into Social Security and Medicare far longer.
MYTH TWO: New immigrants take away jobs from native-born Americans.?
Wrong again.?
The economy doesn?t contain a fixed number of jobs to be divided up among people who need them. As an economy grows, it creates more jobs. And what we?ve seen over the last 200 years is that new immigrants to America fuel that growth, and thereby create more jobs for everyone.?
We?ve also learned that new immigrants are by definition ambitious. They wouldn?t have borne all the risks and hardships of immigrating to the United States if they weren?t. And that ambition and hard work help the economy grow even faster.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that immigration reform will increase economic growth by more than 3 percent 10 years from now, 5 percent in 20 years.
Ambition also helps explain why the children of new immigrants earn more college degrees, on average, than the children of native-born.
And why their incomes are higher than their parent?s incomes.
All of which also helps grow the economy and create more jobs.?
MYTH THREE:?We don?t need new immigrants.
Wrong again.
The American population is aging rapidly. Forty years ago there were five workers for every retiree. Now there are three. If present trends continue, there will be only two workers for every retiree by the year 2030.
No economy can survive on a ratio of 2 workers per retiree.
But because new immigrants are on average younger than native-born Americans, they?ll help bring that ratio back down. They?re needed so we can continue to have a vibrant economy.
Get it? Three wrongs don?t make a right. The right answer is immigration reform is not only good for undocumented workers. It?s also good for the rest of us.?
The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. This post originally ran on www.robertreich.org.
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