Read moreAny theory of time travel has to confront the devastating “grandfather paradox,” in which a traveler jumps back in time and kills his grandfather, which prevents his own existence, which then prevents the murder in the first place, and so on.
One model, put forth in the early 1990s by Oxford physicist David Deutsch, can allow inconsistencies between the past a traveler remembers and the past he experiences. So a person could remember killing his grandfather without ever having done it. “It has some weird features that don’t square with what we thought time travel might work out as,” Lloyd says.
In contrast, Lloyd prefers a model of time travel that explicitly forbids these inconsistencies. This version, posted at arXiv.org, is called a post-selected model. By going back and outlawing any events that would later prove paradoxical in the future, this theory gets rid of the uncomfortable idea that a time traveler could prevent his own existence. “In our version of time travel, paradoxical situations are censored,” Lloyd says.
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For instance, a bullet-maker would be inordinately more likely to produce a defective bullet if that very bullet was going to be used later to kill a time traveler’s grandfather, or the gun would misfire, or “some little quantum fluctuation has to whisk the bullet away at the last moment,” Lloyd says. In this version of time travel, the grandfather, he says, is “a tough guy to kill.”
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“The discovery improves our knowledge of this species, but we need to focus our efforts on the conservation and restoration of the remaining montane forest (a high density forest) where this species still exists,” conservation biologist Dr. Craig Turner of the Zoological Society of London said in a press release. “Currently this accounts for less than one percent of the land area of Sri Lanka.” (via First pictures of the primate thought to be extinct)
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Now THIS is what I call “must-see TV!” A camera on the next Mars Rover — MSL, also known as Curiosity – will start recording high-definition video about two minutes before the rover lands on Mars, currently scheduled for August 2012. The Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, will provide all of us Martian-wannabes with the first-ever ride along with the landing. And this will be a very unique landing, with the “Sky –Crane” lowering Curiosity to the planet’s surface. The video won’t be live, however – that’s way too much data for the spacecraft to send back to Earth at such an important event, but we will get to see it later. JPL provided a description of what the video should look like: (via Best Reality TV Ever: Camera Will Take Video of Next Mars Rover Landing | Universe Today)
Read moreRead moreAnthony Ward, 50, bought 241,000 tons of cocoa beans and now owns enough to manufacture 5.3 billion quarter-pound chocolate bars.
Mr Ward, who is worth around £36 million, holds so much of the market he could force manufacturers to raise the price of Britain’s favourite chocolate bars.
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Cocoa prices rose by 0.7 per cent as a result of the trade to £2,732 per metric tonne – the highest price for cocoa in Europe since 1977. It follows a series of weak harvests in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, the main areas where the crop is grown.
In 2002 Mr Ward made £40 million in two months after making a similar deal. He bought 204,000 tones of cocoa when West Africa was experiencing poor harvests and political instability in the equatorial area.
He then watched the price of cocoa increase from £1,400 a ton to £1,600 a ton.
Cocoa prices have more than doubled since 2007, following increased demand particularly from China and India, forcing chocolate makers to raise prices and in some cases to change recipes to use less cocoa.
Read moreThe trade took place on the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (Liffe), a market which trades contracts in commodities such as corn, wheat, sugar, coffee and cocoa.
Most of these contracts are “options” or “futures” giving a trader the right to buy these commodities at a certain price at a certain time in the future. What made yesterday’s trade so unusual was that the mystery buyer or buyers took physical delivery of the commodity.
The beans will be stored in one of Liffe’s warehouses in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bremen, Felixstowe, Hamburg, Humberside, Le Havre, Liverpool, London, Rotterdam, or Teesside.
There have been mounting worries that speculators have been distorting the cocoa market in recent weeks, with brokers writing a letter of protest to Liffe earlier this month.
Barbara Crowther, a spokesman at the Fairtrade Foundation, said that no farmers in West Africa would benefit from the higher prices. She said: “This speculation only serves to increase volatility and uncertainty. Part of the problems in rent years have been the lack of investment in improving cocoa farms. But the farmers have already been paid a set price – none of this money will filter down to them.”
Rex – another exoskeleton is coming to market
From gizmag:
REX, an exoskeleton made of strong, lightweight materials that is designed to support and hold a person comfortably as they move. Users strap themselves in to the robotic legs…
Rex – another exoskeleton is coming to market
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For the first time VSS Enterprise flew with crew on board. As planned, the spaceship remained attached to VMS Eve (captive) for the duration of the flight and numerous combined vehicle systems tests were conducted. In addition and for the first time, the two crew members on board VSS Enterprise, evaluated all of the spaceship’s systems and functions from end to end in the air. Objectives achieved. (via News – VSS Enterprise Makes First Crewed Flight | Virgin Galactic)
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 