JULY 2006

SCIENCES:
Cloaking devices, a staple of science fiction stories

BBC:Researchers in the US and Britain have unveiled their blueprints for building a cloaking device.

So far, cloaking has been confined to science fiction; in Star Trek it is used to render spacecraft invisible. Professor Sir John Pendry says a simple demonstration model that could work for radar might be possible within 18 months' time.

These research papers present the maths required to verify that the concept could work. But developing an invisibility cloak is likely to pose significant challenges. They propose methods using the unusual properties of so-called "metamaterials" to build a cloak. These metamaterials can be designed to induce a desired change in the direction of electromagnetic waves, such as light. This is done by tinkering with the nano-scale structure of the metamaterial, not by altering its chemistry.

MSNBC: Unlike those tales of fictional invisibility, the real-life technologies usually have a catch. Nevertheless, limited forms of invisibility might be available to the military sooner than you think.

"We're very confident that at radar frequencies, these materials can be implemented on a time scale of 18 months or so," John Pendry of Imperial College London told MSNBC.com.


This diagram shows how light rays could theoretically be bent around a concealed object, making it seem as if an observer were looking straight through the object.

"The cloak would act like you've opened up a hole in space," Duke University's David Smith, one of Pendry's co-authors, explained in a news release. "All light or other electromagnetic waves are swept around the area, guided by the metamaterial to emerge on the other side as if they had passed through an empty volume of space."

More mundane applications also include hiding obstacles -- "for example, one may wish to put a cloak over the refinery that is blocking your view of the bay," said researcher David Schurig, a physicist at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Moreover, objects invisible to electromagnetic fields are isolated from them as well. "You may want to protect something from electromagnetic interference," he added. .............These devices would not require power to work.

Imagine making a hole in space the right size to fit a desired object. "This hole is akin to one that can be opened up in a woven cloth by sticking a pointed object between the threads and compressing the fibers radially outward," Schurig explained. "In essence, the electromagnetic fields are confined to the 'threads of the cloth' and cannot reach an object placed in the 'hole.' Outside the compressed region the 'threads' and the fields are returned to their original paths, undisturbed."

Of course, there are some scientific catches that the tale-tellers never had to worry about:

• For a total invisibility effect, the waves passing closest to the cloaked object would have to be bent in such a way that they would appear to exceed relativity's light speed limit. Fortunately, there's a loophole in Albert Einstein's rules of the road that allows smooth pulses of light to undergo just such a phase shift.
  

  Score one for Einstein: Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, right?        Try telling that to Scottie on “Star Trek,” or to those who claim that, under special circumstances, information can be transmitted faster than 186,000 miles per second, the speed of light in a vacuum. Such a situation would break the rules of relativity and could open the door to sci-fi effects like time travel and “Back to the Future” causality paradoxes.        But in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, a research team says their “fast-light” experiment shows that, even in those special circumstances, the speed of information is slower than the speed of light — meaning Einstein was right again.        The newly reported experiment follows up on three-year-old research into light waves that were sent through a specially prepared chamber of pumped-up cesium gas. The chamber had the strange effect of shifting the peaks of the waves, so that it looked as if the peak popped out of the far side of the chamber before it entered the chamber’s near side.        Many of the popular reports at the time hinted that this might open the way to some sort of faster-than-light information transfer: Could you, for example, code a message so that a “yes or no” answer could be instantly zapped from Vulcan to an earthbound speculator about a downturn in the dilithium crystal market?        The answer is no, as the original researchers noted three years ago. What they did was merely shift the pattern of a smooth wave, which carries no true information — just as one unchanging tone cannot carry a meaningful message. You need some stops and starts to send Morse code, or some ups and downs to play a tune. And Einstein’s theory of special relativity says those discontinuities can’t travel any faster than the speed of light — even though the “phase velocity” of the wave crests may seem to break the cosmic speed limit.        That’s pretty much what researchers from the University of Arizona and Duke University reported in this week’s Nature: They used a similar chamber, filled with pumped potassium vapor, and introduced slight changes in the pulses of light that were beamed through the chamber. Then they measured how quickly the changes were observed on the other side of the chamber.        “The time to detect information propagating through a fast light medium is slightly longer than the time required to detect the same information traveling through a vacuum,” the researchers reported.        In a news release on the experiment, Mark Neifeld, a professor of electrical engineering and optical sciences at the University of Arizona, says the experiment demonstrated that the “velocities of smooth pulses and of light pulses that carry information are distinct.” Translation: Einstein rules, even though it sometimes takes a physicist to see it.

• 
  The invisibility effect would work only for a specific range of wavelengths. "There is a price to be paid if you want a thin cloak, in that it operates only over a narrow range of frequencies," Pendry said.
• The cloak could be made to cover a volume of any shape, but "you can't flap your cloak," Pendry said. Moving the material around would spoil the effect.
• The tiny structures embedded in the metamaterial would have to be smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic rays you wanted to bend. That's a tall order for optical invisibility, because the structures would have to be on the scale of nanometers, or billionths of a meter. It's far easier to create radar invisibility, Pendry said: "You're talking millimeters" — that is, thousandths of a meter.

The radar application is of great interest to military outfits such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funded Pendry's team. "Radar is a defense technology, and if you wish to hide from it, this sort of cloak would be a good way of doing it," he said. Such a technology would be "far superior to stealth," he said.If optical cloaks could be designed, that would be of interest to the military as well. "One obvious thing would be that you could construct a hutch in which you could hide a tank, and the hutch would make it appear as though the tank wasn't there. ... You could also think of weightier things, like submarines or battleships, where you might want to put some of this stuff," Pendry said.

Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told MSNBC.com that "potentially a mixture of the two schemes will lead to a practical design." He said the paper from Pendry's team gave him some additional ideas to work with."I read it for the first time just last Friday, and I've come up already with something new," he said.

Fluoride conference reveals fraudulent science behind mass fluoridation; fluoride policy is a public fraud.
http://www.newstarget.com/001807.html   Originally published August 8 2004

Fluoride conference reveals fraudulent science behind mass fluoridation; fluoride policy is a public fraud

The First Citizens' Conference on Fluoride was recently held in Canton, New York, and it revealed some astonishing new research about the dangers of fluoride and why the current political position on fluoridation of public water supplies is based on fraudulent science.

The fluoridation of public water is something that has been highly debated for decades -- and yet the practice continues today, despite the growing body of evidence showing that fluoridation causes untold human suffering and disease. Some of the research presented at the conference showed, for example, that it damages the brain, increases levels of lead in children's blood and therefore leads to behavioral disorders and brain damage. It also showed that humans are accumulating it in their bones, that fluoride's toxicity is systemic in the human body, and that the current safe drinking water standards for fluoride were fraudulently authored by officials at the Environmental Protection Agency who were under pressure.

These findings were presented by a variety of scientists and researchers, including a senior EPA scientist and a doctor of the Forsyth Dental Center. Not surprisingly, both of these individuals have been fired and have had their careers jeopardized after participating in this conference.

The conference also featured author Christopher Bryson, who wrote the book The Fluoride Deception, who said, "Fluoride science is corporate science, fluoride science is DDT science, it's asbestos science, it's tobacco science."

If you're new to this debate on fluoride, you might find some of this information shocking. But I've been covering fluoride for several years, and have fought hard at both the local and national level to educate people about the dangers of fluoridation.

First off, there's the idea that fluoride is a so-called "naturally occurring substance in water." That's the lie propagated by dentists and the American Dental Association to try to convince people that simply "adjusting the naturally occurring levels" is somehow a good thing to do.

But all of this is based on a distortion. In reality, the fluoride added to the public water supplies in the United States is not organic fluoride at all. It is in fact fluorosilicic acid, which is purchased in bulk from chemical companies, who must be laughing loudly at the idea that they can actually sell this toxic waste product. Why? Because if cities weren't buying it and putting it into the public water supply, these industrial companies would have to spend millions of dollars disposing of fluorosilicic acid because it is an EPA regulated toxic waste.

Let me put this another way -- fluorosilicic acid is a toxic waste byproduct that is produced by various chemical companies. It represents such a health hazard to us that it is regulated by the EPA, and must be disposed of as a toxic waste. And yet, municipalities throughout the United States actually purchase this product and then drip it into the public water supply, and simultaneously call it "fluoride."

Fluorosilicic acid is not fluoride, it is something very different, and it strikes me as downright bizarre that it is perfectly legal to dump this toxic waste product into the rivers and streams as long as it passes through the bodies of human beings first. It's illegal to take a bucket of fluorosilicic acid and dump it into a stream, but it is perfectly legal to dump it into the bodies of human beings, whose waste products will subsequently enter those same streams and rivers.

All of this is done under the guise of distorted scientific evidence that claims the mass consumption of fluorosilicic acid somehow improves the dental health . And yet there is no credible evidence that this is the case.

Across America today, you see the effects of mass fluoridation all around you -- you see children with darkened teeth from fluoridosis, you see elderly people breaking their bones because fluoridation of the water supplies contributes to brittle bones. You see children with behavioral disorders that are multiplied by the effects of lead in their bloodstream, and lead uptake is enhanced in the presence of fluoride in public water.

Beyond all of this, there's the important question of why dentists and public health officials think the public water supply is an acceptable medium through which to mass medicate the population in the first place. Some individuals might be using fluoridated toothpaste, and thus if they're drinking fluoridated water, they could easily be getting too much fluoride and suffer from fluoridosis.

One of the other things I find so interesting about this debate on fluoride is that dentists and doctors will leap to defend this practice at every opportunity -- and why? Is it because there's good scientific evidence that fluoridination is somehow beneficial to the public? No, it's because they've been told to support it by their associations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Dental Association.

Dentists and doctors promote this as a nutritional prevention strategy -- they're talking about fluoride as being essential nutrition for the human body, and therefore we should put it into the water supply. And yet, if you mention that the most common nutritional deficiencies are in fact magnesium, zinc, vitamin D, and the B vitamins, they will look at you as if you are speaking some kind of alien tongue.

This is essentially a mass experiment , and I think we are seeing some the effects of this in the worsening health statistics in this country.

Now what does all of this mean for you, as consumer? What should you do to protect yourself from fluoride? First off, you should never use products that contain fluoride. That is, don't use toothpaste or mouthwashes that contain fluoride. Also, don't purchase bottled water that has added fluoride in it. I think that's a ridiculous product to have on the shelves.

Don't drink from the public water supply. Of course, if you're drinking tap water right now, you probably need to step back and question your judgment anyway -- tap water contains so many toxic chemicals (such as chlorine) that it represents a risk to human health even without the fluoride. One of the simplest and most important things you can do to protect your health and the health of your family is to get yourself a faucet-mounted water filter such as a Britta filer or a PUR filter that uses carbon-block filtration to remove fluoride, chlorine, and other water contaminants. Better yet, drink water that is filtered through reverse osmosis or is distilled.

Best of all, if you can afford it, drink spring water as your primary source of water.

ALASKA OIL SPILL

They estimate that up to 267,000 gallons (one million litres) of crude leaked from a corroded transit pipeline at the state's northern tip.

The spill was detected on 2 March and plugged. Local environmentalists have described it as "a catastrophe".

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez shipping disaster spilled 11m gallons (42m litres) of oil onto the Alaskan coast.

'Painful reminder'

"I can confirm it's the largest spill of crude oil on the North Slope that we have record of," Linda Giguere from Alaska's state department of environmental conservation was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

The estimate is based on a survey conducted several days ago at the site where the leak was discovered, officials say.

The spill covers about two acres (one hectare) of the snow-covered tundra in the sparsely-populated region on Alaska's north coast

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