Potential Dark Matter Discovery a Win for Space Station Science

If nature is kind, the first detection of dark matter might be credited to the International Space Station soon.

Today (April 3), researchers announced the first science results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a $2 billion cosmic-ray particle detector mounted on the exterior of the football-field-size International Space Station. The instrument has observed a striking pattern of antimatter particles called positrons that may turn out to be a product of collisions between dark matter particles.

Though the findings are still uncertain, and the signal could also arise from a more mundane source, the data are, nonetheless, groundbreaking, experts said.

"I think it is fair to say that this is the most important physics result thus far to come from the International Space Station,"?theoretical physicist Robert Garisto, who was not involved in the AMS project, wrote today on Twitter. [Photos: See the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer in Space]

Garisto is editor of the physics journal Physical Review Letters, which published the AMS results in a paper released today.

No matter what the AMS measurements ultimately herald ? be it dark matter or something else ? the findings would not have been possible without the platform of the International Space Station, a $100 billion orbiting laboratory staffed full-time by teams of three to six astronauts. AMS collects cosmic-ray particles, which are abundant in space, though largely blocked on Earth by our planet's atmosphere.

In its first 18 months of operations, AMS detected about 30 billion cosmic rays, including 400,000 positrons ? a haul that allowed significantly more precise statistics than experiments conducted on Earth.

"It's a very major step forward by at least an order of magnitude in sensitivity," Brown University physicist Richard Gaitskell told SPACE.com. Gaitskell is a founding investigator on the Large Underground Xenon experiment, which aims to detect dark-matter particles directly underground in South Dakota.

Dark matter is an invisible substance thought to make up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe. The elusive stuff is difficult to detect because it very rarely interacts with normal matter, except through its gravitational pull.

One of the leading explanations for dark matter is that it is made up of particles called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), which may produce a detectable signature when they collide and annihilate each other. This happens because WIMPs are thought to be their own antimatter partner particles. When matter and antimatter meet, they destroy each other, so if two WIMPs were to make contact, they would obliterate one another.

In fact, searching for this signature of WIMPs was one of the main motivations for building the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Whether or not the instrument succeeds in detecting dark matter, scientists say they're happy with the early results from AMS so far.

"I am confident that this is only the first of many scientific discoveries enabled by the station that will change our understanding of the universe," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said today in a statement.

However, the experiment almost never made it to space.

The first space shuttle mission slated to deliver AMS to orbit was canceled in the wake of the 2003 space-shuttle Columbia disaster, and it took a prolonged campaign by scientists to convince NASA to add a final shuttle mission to its schedule before the fleet was retired. Finally, in May 2011, the space-shuttle Endeavour carried AMS to the space station in the second-to-last mission of the 30-year shuttle program.

"I think there's probably a message to all of us: When it looks kind of dark and doesn't look like there's a clear path forward, fix your eyes on that point in the future, and keep moving forward," William Gerstenmaier, NASA's space station program manager, said during a NASA press conference today. The great results from AMS now are perhaps "just a tad sweeter that way" than if the road to this point had been less turbulent, he added.

Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter?and Google+. Follow us?@Spacedotcom, Facebook?and Google+. Original article on?SPACE.com.

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/potential-dark-matter-discovery-win-space-station-science-225142363.html

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BitTorrent Taps A Bigger Role For Books In Its Content Push

Last year, author Tim Ferriss turned to BitTorrent to market his newest book, the Four-Hour Chef, when the biggest bookseller in the U.S., Barnes & Noble, refused to stock the Amazon-published title. Ferriss' campaign proved a success, with the book selling 250,000 copies on the back of some 2 million promotional content bundles -- chapters of the book and supplementary materials -- downloaded on BitTorrent. Now BitTorrent is banking on that success to try to get more authors on to its site.

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Hagel tells military to brace for further belt-tightening

By David Alexander and Phil Stewart

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told the U.S. military on Wednesday to brace for a new round of belt-tightening as he carries out a sweeping review that could slash the number of generals, pare back civilian workers and stem spiraling costs of new weapons.

But Hagel, in his first major policy speech, also warned that the United States could not allow its current fiscal and budgetary crisis to force it to retreat from its role in the world.

"America does not have the luxury of retrenchment - we have too many global interests at stake, including our security, prosperity and future. If we refuse to lead ... someone will fill the vacuum," he said in remarks prepared for delivery to students at the National Defense University in Washington.

But at the same time, he stressed the limits of military power, saying that most of the world's pressing security challenges have political, economic and cultural components and "do not necessarily lend themselves to being resolved by conventional military strength."

Hagel took the helm at the Pentagon in February as it was struggling with $487 billion in budget cuts over a decade beginning last year. An additional $500 billion in cuts over a decade began March 1 under the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration.

Under those cuts, the Pentagon must slash $41 billion by September 30, the end of the 2013 fiscal year. Next year it is facing another $50 billion in cuts unless Congress and the White House agree on alternatives to reduce federal budget shortfalls.

At the same time, Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, is winding down the war in Afghanistan and grappling with a host of security challenges, from North Korea's threats to Iran's nuclear advances and the possibility of cyber attack from several countries.

WILL BUDGET CUTS ENDURE?

Hagel, while maintaining he did not "assume or tacitly accept" that further deep budget cuts would endure, said the Defense Department could not "simply wish or hope our way to carrying out a responsible national security strategy and its implementation."

In looking at areas where the Pentagon needed to further reduce spending, Hagel took aim at some of the key factors that have been driving up costs at an unsustainable pace, including excessive bureaucracy, creeping personnel costs and unwieldy weapons-development programs.

"In many respects, the biggest long-term fiscal challenge facing the department is not the flat or declining top-line budget, it is the growing imbalance in where the money is being spent internally," Hagel said.

He said he was concerned that the military was looking at "systems that are vastly more expensive and technologically risky than what was promised or budgeted for" as it attempts to modernize its weapons.

While recognizing the sacrifices of troops and their families over nearly a dozen years of war, Hagel said "fiscal realities demand" the Pentagon take another look at the number and mix of military and civilian personnel it employs.

"Despite good efforts and intentions, it is still not clear that every option has been exercised or considered to pare back the world's largest back-office," Hagel said, referring to the size of the Pentagon's administrative bureaucracy compared to numbers of combat troops.

He said the military's hierarchies needed further re-examination as well.

"Today the operational forces of the military - measured in battalions, ships and aircraft wings - have shrunk dramatically since the Cold War era," he said. "Yet the three- and four-star command and support structures sitting atop these smaller fighting forces have stayed intact, with minor exceptions, and in some cases they are actually increasing in size and rank."

(Reporting By David Alexander; Editing by Philip Barbara)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hagel-tells-military-brace-further-belt-tightening-165253488--business.html

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North Korea suspends entry by South Koreans to Kaesong industrial zone

Secretary of State John Kerry says recent rhetoric from North Korea is "unacceptable" and that the US will defend itself as well as South Korea from any threat from the North. Watch his entire news conference with South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung Se.

By Andrea Mitchell, Jim Miklaszewski and Ian Johnston, NBC News

North Korean authorities were not allowing South Korean workers into a joint industrial park on Wednesday, South Korea's Unification Ministry said, according to Reuters.

A South Korean official said that hundreds of South Koreans currently in the Kaesong industrial zone would be allowed to leave, but incoming workers would not be granted entry. North Korea had earlier delayed access to the park.

Tuesday, at a joint news conference at the State Department with South Korea's foreign minister, Secretary of State John Kerry issued a stern warning to North Korea - a pledge to defend U.S. interests and its regional treaty allies - and said North Korea knows what it needs to do if it wants to resume dialogue with the rest of the world.

Kerry also denounced North Korea's threatening rhetoric as "unacceptable," and said that the United States will defend its allies, South Korea and Japan, from any threat from the North.

Kerry said he would be visiting Seoul next week - in advance of South Korean President Park Geun-hye's visit to the White House later this spring.

As the U.S. deploys a Navy missile destroyer in case of a launch by North Korea, the country's leader Kim Jong Un has abolished an armistice with South Korea and is now saying he will re-open a nuclear bomb facility that was closed in 2007. NBC's Richard Engel reports.

As tensions continue to flare, the U.S. Navy has deployed a second destroyer in the western Pacific to respond to any missile threats from the North.

The USS Decatur was headed back to San Diego, Calif., when it was given a new mission: to join the USS McCain in a missile defense mission, Pentagon spokesman George Little said Tuesday.

A third destroyer, the USS Fitzgerald, is also available to respond, if necessary, officials said.

---

The rogue communist state continued to make threats Tuesday, and said it would rebuild and restart nuclear facilities, including a mothballed reactor that can make one bomb's worth of plutonium a year.

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the amount of hostility emanating from Pyongyang was alarming.

The U.S., Japan and South Korea had to be ?very firm in sending them a message that we are going to do everything necessary to defend our security and defend our troops,? Panetta?told CNBC in an interview. He said there was a danger of a "miscalculation" that escalated.

?I think we've got to be very concerned about ... the level of provocation that North Korea is engaged in. They are in the process of testing ICBMs [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles]. They've also been testing nuclear weapons,? he said.

?The kind of provocation and bellicosity they're showing now with their rhetoric raises a lot of concern,? he added. ?It just means the United States and our allies Japan and South Korea have to be very firm in sending them a message that we are going to do everything necessary to defend our security and defend our troops.?

NBC's Jim Maceda reports on U.S. Navy movements of destroyers into the Pacific amid threats from North Korea.

A spokesman for the North's General Department of Atomic Energy said restarting its nuclear facilities was part of efforts to resolve the country's acute electricity shortage, but also for "bolstering up the nuclear armed force both in quality and quantity," the official Korean Central News Agency said, according to Reuters.

Pyongyang conducted its third nuclear test in February, prompting a new round of U.N. sanctions that have infuriated its leaders and led to a torrent of threatening rhetoric. The United States has sent nuclear-capable bombers and stealth jets to participate in annual South Korean-U.S. military drills that the allies call routine but that Pyongyang claims are invasion preparations.

United Nations chief Ban Ki-Moon said the crisis ?has already gone too far.?

?Nuclear threats are not a game. Aggressive rhetoric and military posturing only result in counter-actions, and fuel fear and instability," Ban said at a news conference in Andorra, where he was on an official visit.

Ban offered to facilitate peace talks, but how the North would react was not immediately clear. Ban was South Korea's foreign affairs minister before election to his UN post.

Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon expresses great concern over the ongoing nuclear threats being issued by the North Korean government.

KCNA kept up the rhetoric on?its English-language site Tuesday, with an article headlined ?Intensified Anti-U.S. Action Called For.?

It quoted the ?North Side Committee for Implementing the June 15 Joint Declaration? as saying in a statement that the joint U.S. and South Korean military exercise ?clearly proves that the U.S. imperialists' scenario to launch a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula at any cost has reached an extremely reckless phase of its implementation.?

?As already clarified by the DPRK [North Korea], gone are the days when it could have verbal exchange with them,? the statement said.

?To wage a merciless, just, retaliatory war is the only way of rooting out the source of the danger of a nuclear war on this land and build a peaceful and prosperous reunified thriving nation where all Koreans live together,? it added.

Reuters and NBC News' John Newland contributed to this report.

Related:

US Navy shifts destroyer in wake of North Korea missile threats

US official warns North Korea is no 'paper tiger'

Analyst: Threats are predictable, Kim Jong Un is not

This story was originally published on Tue Apr 2, 2013 4:39 AM EDT

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US Patent And Trademark Office Denies Apple's iPad Mini Trademark Application, Deemed ?Merely Descriptive?

Right after it launched the iPad mini, Apple filed a trademark application for the name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As Patently Apple noticed earlier today, however, the USPTO has now refused Apple’s trademark filing because, the reviewer argues, “the applied-for mark merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant?s goods.” The refusal was mailed to Apple on January 24, but only made public in the last few days. “The applied-for mark merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant?s goods.” The word ‘mini,’ the reviewer argues, just describes that the iPad mini is indeed “a small sized handheld tablet computer” and just describes the mini’s features. It is not, the reviewing attorney says, “a unitary mark with a unique, incongruous, or otherwise nondescriptive meaning in relation to the goods and/or services.” The USPTO would only grant apple the trademark to the full iPad mini name if the company coulhow that the word ‘mini’ has now acquired a “distinctiveness.” In addition, Patently Apple also notes, the reviewer also denied the application because Apple should have provided the USPTO with a specimen other than its own product website, even though Apple always uses these for its trademark applications and this was never a reason for a denial before. The reviewer also believes that there is a “likelihood of confusion” between Apple’s existing iPad trademarks and this new iPad? mini application, which, to be honest, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Here is the letter the USPTO sent to Apple in January: USPTO Refuses Apple’s iPad mini Trademark Application

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Obama Family Attends Easter Service at St. John's (ABC News)

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SCHULTE 7115-5613-50 Big Work Hook, Granite Gray

SCHULTE 7115-5613-50 Big Work Hook, Granite Gray

Access the most advanced RSS tools and use them to your advantage. 2013-03-31 03:11:45.057983-04 Category: Tools & Home Improvement Vendor: Heavy duty construction for big storage problems. Securely holds extension ladders, heavy tools, and other problem items. Coate Product Description : From the ManufacturerThe Big Work Hook mounts to the Wire Grid to create a space saving storage area, and can be used as a multi purpose hook for hanging ladders, larger tools and more. The coated hook prevents items from slipping. Each package contains 1 hook with a 75 pound weight capacity. In granite. Product Description : The Garage Big Work Hook is great for reliable hanging storage of large and heavy tools or lawn equipment. This garage storage hook installs onto the Garage Grid or Garage StorWall storage system without the need for tools and features a rugged baked on epoxy coating in a granite finish and non slip rubber arms for a more secure grip. The Big Work Hook offers a 75 pound weight capacity. Garage Grid or StorWall Big Work Hook Features A safe convenient way to store heavy tools like weed whackers leaf blowers sledgehammers and more. Mounts onto the Garage Grid or Garage StorWall storage systems. Constructed from sturdy steel for years of reliable performance. Durable baked epoxy coating resists rust. Granite finish. Non slip rubber coating keeps stored items from slipping off the storage hook. Storage hook is sold individually. Offers a 75 pound weight capacity. Find out more

Source: http://emdryropruth149.blogspot.com/2013/03/schulte-7115-5613-50-big-work-hook.html

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