ovacad's Binder

U.S. stocks fell last week, giving the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index its first two-week decline since July, after gauges of manufacturing and jobless claims missed forecasts, spurring concern that the economy is struggling to recover. The decision by Egyptian officials to virtually shut down Internet access to the country Friday marked an audacious escalation in the battle between authoritarian governments and tech-savvy protesters. It was also a direct challenge to

the Obama administration's attempts to promote Internet freedom.Major League Baseball investigators want to talk with Alex Rodriguez about his cousin and a trainer from the Dominican Republic.
“Miss You Can Do It,” an HBO documentary, looks at a pageant for girls with disabilities.     Celebrate March Madness at old favorites and new spots.
A Brooklyn designer’s latest creation is a twist on an old watering can. Alan Gilbert led the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Bruckner’s Symphony No.
3.     The bones that support our bodies are made of remarkably complex arrangements of materials — so much so that decoding the precise structure responsible for their great strength and resilience has eluded scientists’ best efforts for decades.But
now, a team of researchers at MIT has finally unraveled the structure of bone with almost atom-by-atom precision, after many years of analysis by some of the world’s most powerful computers and comparison with laboratory experiments to confirm the computed results. The findings, from a team led by civil engineer and materials scientist Markus Buehler, are published this week in the journal Nature Communications.Buehler, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) at MIT, says the riddle was to find how two different materials — a soft, flexible biomolecule called collagen and a hard, brittle form of the mineral apatite — combine to form something that is simultaneously hard, tough and slightly flexible.The
constituents are so different that “you can’t take these two materials individually and understand how bone behaves,” Buehler says. Hydroxyapatite is like chalk, he says: “It’s very brittle.
If you try to bend it even a little, it breaks into pieces.” Collagen, on the other hand, is what gelatin is made of — the very epitome of a wobbly substance. Neither material, on its own, could provide adequate structural support for the body. “It takes the best qualities of the two substances,” Buehler says.
“But how this works is the big unknown.”Fitting the pieces to bone’s properties, Buehler says, is in the exact way the two components fit together — which is what’s been so difficult for scientists to figure out. The molecules responsible for these properties can be probed by tools such as atomic force microscopes, but only in two dimensions: on the surface, or in thin slices. But bone is an intricate three-dimensional structure, and there has been no way to image such fine structures in all their complexity.“It’s
easy to get images of bone, but it’s hard to see exactly where the minerals are located inside the collagen,” says Shu-Wei Chang, a CEE graduate student who was a co-author of the paper.That’s
where the computers come in: Buehler explains that even a few years ago, the modeling required to deduce the internal structure of bone would have taken years of computer time on the

most powerful computers. But newer supercomputers can carry out much more detailed computations in a few months.
Still, it took

several iterations, after studying the previous results and probing the material’s response to increasing pressure, to derive an answer, which the team was then able to confirm through comparisons with laboratory tests.One key, they found, is that the hydroxyapatite grains are tiny, thin platelets just a few nanometers (billionths of a meter) across, and are deeply embedded in the collagen matrix. The two constituents are bound together by electrostatic

interactions, which allows them to slip somewhat against each other without breaking. The best of both“In this arrangement of tiny hydroxyapatite grains embedded in the collagen matrix, the two materials can each contribute the best of their properties,” Buehler says. “Hydroxyapatite takes most of the forces in the material, whereas collagen takes most of the stretching.” 
The new understanding of bone’s molecular structure and function could help in unraveling what goes wrong in certain diseases, including osteoporosis and brittle bone disease. “We can use this model to understand how a bone becomes more brittle,” says Arun Nair, a

CEE postdoc who was the first author of the paper.
For example, collagen is

made up of thousands of amino acids, but “if only one of those amino acids is altered, it changes the way the minerals form” inside the bone, Nair says.“That’s why this model is so critical,” he adds.
Without it, you could observe how bone changes as a result of disease, don’t know why. Now, we can see how a very tiny change … changes the way the mineral grows, or how the forces and deformation are distributed.”Ultimately, this work could also lead to the synthesis of new bone-like materials, either as biomedical materials to substitute for bone or as new structural materials for engineering uses.
“We hope we can replicate this in the lab,” Buehler says.Sandra
Shefelbine, an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at

Northeastern University who was not involved in this research, says, “This computational molecular model … is fundamental to understanding the molecular basis for the mechanics of bone.
Computational models can give us insight at length scales that are difficult to probe in experiments.” The MIT team’s analysis

“is exciting in that it provides the molecular basis for the interaction. … This work is cutting-edge in the field of molecular modeling of structural biological tissues.”
Postdoc Alfonso Gautieri was also part of the MIT team.
The work was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the MIT-Italy Program. The research used high-performance computing resources from NSF’s XSEDE program, the CILEA Consortium, the LISA Initiative and the ISCRA Initiative. The president said he would approve the remaining part of the pipeline from Alberta

to Gulf Coast refineries only if it would not “significantly exacerbate” the problem of carbon pollution.    
Silicon, the material of high-tech devices from computer chips to

solar cells, requires a surface coating before use in these applications.
The coating “passivates” the material, tying up loose atomic bonds to prevent oxidation that would ruin its electrical properties. But this passivation process consumes a lot of heat and energy, making it costly and limiting the kinds of materials that can be added to the devices.Now
a team of MIT researchers has found a way to passivate silicon at room temperature, which could be a significant boon to solar-cell production and other silicon-based technologies.The
research, by graduate student Rong Yang and engineering professors Karen Gleason and Tonio Buonassisi, was

recently published online in the journal Advanced Materials.Typically,
silicon surfaces are passivated with a coating of silicon nitride, which requires heating a device to 400 degrees Celsius, explains Gleason, the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser Professor of Chemical Engineering.
By contrast, the process Gleason’s team uses decomposes

organic vapors over wires 300 C, but the silicon itself never goes above 20 C — room temperature. Heating those wires requires much less power than illuminating an ordinary light bulb, so the energy costs of the process are quite low.Conventional silicon-nitride passivation “is one of the more expensive parts, and one of the more finicky parts, in the processing” of silicon for solar cells and other uses, says Buonassisi, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, “so replacing part of silicon nitride’s functionality with a simplified,

robust organic layer has the potential to be a big win.”Essential
processPassivation is essential: Without it, silicon’s surface is oxidized as soon as it’s exposed to air, impeding its performance as a solar cell.
“It would oxidize within minutes,” Yang says.
By contrast, the MIT team has tested silicon chips with the new polymer coating in place for more than

200

hours, observing no degradation at all in performance. “The electrical properties did not change,” she says.The
low temperature of the silicon chip in this process means that it could be combined with other materials, such as organic compounds or polymers, that would be destroyed by the higher temperature of the conventional coating process. This could enable new applications of silicon chips — for example, as biosensors following bonding with compounds that react with specific biological molecules.
“People have grafted DNA and protein antibodies to silicon,” Yang notes.Saving
energyThe energy used in manufacturing

silicon solar cells is a critical concern because every bit of cost savings helps to make them more competitive with other sources of electricity. The lower temperatures could significantly reduce manufacturing

costs, the MIT researchers say.The new process also has an added benefit, providing an anti-reflective coating that improves a solar cell’s overall efficiency, the team says.Both
the conventional process and the new process take place in a vacuum chamber.
Liquid reactants evaporate, then adsorb and react on the surface.
The adsorption step is

much the same as mist forming on a cold bathroom window after you take a shower.The process can easily

be scaled to the size of conventional solar cells, Gleason says. Additionally, the materials involved are all commercially available, so implementing the new method for commercial production could

be a relatively quick process.Buonassisi describes lowering the cost of manufacturing equipment, including that used to apply the passivating and antireflection coating, as “one of the three steps to drive down the price of solar modules to widespread grid competitiveness.” (The other two are improvements in efficiency and reducing the amount of materials used.) The next step for his team is to scale up the

process from laboratory-scale to production levels that could lead to commercialization, he says.The challenge in making this advance, he explains, was found at the atomic level — specifically, at the interface between the organic coating material and the silicon, to ensure that the two bonded solidly.
Tests have shown that the process this team developed has solved that challenge, Buonassisi says.
While the team used one specific polymer for the coating, the process could be replicated using other organic materials.Hideki Matsumara, a professor of materials science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, says he is “very positive” about the results of this research.
He says finding a low-temperature process that works for passivation “is useful, since the quality of silicon wafers is degraded by annealing” in conventional high-temperature processes. In addition, he says, “if it is room-temperature, we can extend the application to

other areas such as organic solar cells.” Overall, he says, this work represents “significant progress in our knowledge, that even organic films can be used as a high-quality passivation layer.”The
research was supported by the Italian energy company Eni S.p.A., under the Eni-MIT Alliance Solar Frontiers Program.
The Culture Project’s main stage theater will be named after the British actress, who performed there several times. An all-new, fully electronic mechanism can lower (or raise) the top remotely using the car’s key fob. Each week we ask readers to tell us about where they go to watch films.
Today, the home of Denmark's national agency for film and cinema culture, in the heart of its capital cityThis week's Clip joint is from Luke Richardson, contributor for culture blog The Frame Loop. Follow him on Twitter @luke_richardson LocationFilmhuset (The Filmhouse), part of the Danish Film Institute, is located in the very heart of Copenhagen: a stone's throw from the Rosenborg Castle Gardens, Round Tower observatory and the colourful Nyhavn harbour.The
buildingThe DFI may not look much from the cycle lane but inside the drab, five-storey office building is a space brimming with film enthusiasm. Designed with industrial structures that could have been borrowed from The Crystal Maze set, Filmhuset (The Filmhouse) has three each named after a leading figure in the Danish film industry: Asta (after silent film star Asta Nielsen), Benjamin (director,

screenwriter and actor Benjamin Christensen) and Carl (filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer). All are kitted out with fantastic surround sound and project films in both digital and film formats.

The projectionists and archivists work tirelessly to make sure that the audiences always have a perfect cinematic experience.The
clienteleFilmhuset attracts a diverse crowd of cinephiles, from pensioners looking for their weekly fix of Greek cinema to fresh-faced students who want to revel in the avant-garde. Denmark has a very relaxed celebrity culture, so you're quite likely to spot a famous face every now and then too.If
you pay the yearly membership fee (the equivalent of £30 for adults, and £16 for students and seniors)

you get 40% discount on all regular ticket prices for you and a friend.The programmeWhat sets Filmhuset apart from the other 10 inner-city cinemas is the calibre of its programme. It showcases forgotten archive favourites on archived stock reels, right up to new indie releases that are yet to be snapped up by European distributors. It also loves a good thematic schedule, ranging from career retrospectives

of Russian visionary Alexander Sukorov to American oddball Tim Burton; from midday children's classics to late-night presentations of notorious Danish porn movies from the seventies.
Fun for all the family.Aside
from the regular programme, Filmhuset is often used as a central space for several Danish film events, including the documentary fest CPH:DOX, LGBT festival

Mix Copenhagen, and the city's own Jewish film festival.Further commentsThere are many hidden treats inside this building.
One can visit the DFI library, containing thousands of film theory books, an extensive DVD library and private screening rooms. Access is available to all, for free.The aforementioned membership brings lots of perks, including discounts at

the cinema bookshop, and 10% off your bill at the adjoining restaurant, Sult (Danish

for "hunger"), which abounds with fusion European cuisine, pastries and good coffee.The best element of the entire DFI is that, while audiences gather to watch brilliant films downstairs, the offices above are filled with financiers, producers and film savants all helping to shape the quality Scandinavian cinema of the future. The building and all the staff are so welcoming that you'll never want to leave.DenmarkGuardian
readersguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or companies.
All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Scripps Networks Interactive, which includes the Food Network and HGTV, hopes to please advertisers seeking original programming with a total of 52 new series.    
Lord Armstrong's monumental estate at Cragside, the first house in the world to have electric power, notches up its 150th birthday this year.

It's getting a new hydro-electric power station as a present.William
Armstrong's Cragside home in Northumberland celebrates its 150th birthday this year by reinstalling a hydroelectricity system originally established by the house's first owner.
Cragside, which now belongs to the National Trust, was built over more than 20 years from 1853, mostly by the architect Norman Shaw, in a partially Tudor style. Set in the Northumberland landscape near the market town of Rothbury, it was called by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner "the most dramatic Victorian mansion

in the North of England."
He added:The site is Wagnerian – and so is Shaw's architectureThe new hydro system will provide enough energy to light the house again. Andrew Sawyer, who is the National Trust's conservation and interpretation officer at Cragside, said: Lord Armstrong was an exceptional man with a genius mind and the prospect of bringing his vision for Cragside into the 21st century is a dream come true. Hydroelectricity is the world's most widely used form of renewable energy, so we are looking forward to sharing this very special part of its heritage. In the year of building dreams

at Cragside, as well as powering the house by Hydroelectricity once more, later in the year we plan to open a new exhibition in the house which tells how the Armstrongs ensured their dreams had a legacy.The Tyneside industrialist ploughed some of the vast profits from his Elswick armaments works – which employed 25,000 people at its height - into building his huge "palace of a modern magician". In the 1860s, Armstrong dammed streams on the estate to create

three lakes.
He originally used water power to run a spit for roasting in the kitchen, as well as laundry equipment and a lift, and one of the country's first flushing lavatories.
By 1878 he had installed a turbine and dynamo to power an arc lamp in the house's gallery, making Cragside almost certainly the first house in the world with electric light, powered world's first hydro-electricity station.
The early arc lamps were highly unsatisfactory and were replaced in 1880 by 45 of Joseph's Swan's newly invented incandescent bulbs – not cheap at 25/- each.
In October 1880, electric light had first been publicly demonstrated by Swan at a lecture at Newcastle's Lit & Phil, of which Armstrong was the president. Although Swan's house

in Gateshead can claim to be the

world's first to be lit by electric bulbs, Swan himself wrote about installing his lights with Armstrong:As far as I know, Cragside was the first house in England properly fitted up with my electric lamps. It was a delightful sensation for both of us when the gallery was first lit upThe

house had Pre-Raphaelite pictures and stained glass alongside a large number of pictures of dogs and works which Pevsner rather sniffily says show "what was permissible to the Victorian nobleman in the way of erotica."
Amongst his better paintings were two important Turner watercolours, and Millais' Chill October, for which he paid £945 at Christie's in 1875 and which was much admired by van Gogh, who wrote in 1884 I for my part always keep thinking about some English paintings - for instance Chill October by Millais. The collection was mostly dispersed after Armstrong's death.
Chill October was sold again in 1991, fetching £370,000 at Sotheby's – it now belongs to Andrew Lloyd-Webber.Also taking place at Cragside in 2013 is an exhibition, Captured on Camera, which will show images from a personal photograph album of Lord Armstrong's great nephew and his family, who took over as owners of Cragside when Lord Armstrong died.
In June, a number of temporary artworks will be installed at various locations on the Cragside estate as part of the Festival of the North East.
The artworks will "give a modern interpretation of the pioneering vision of Lord and Lady Armstrong."Alan Sykes is the Guardian Northerner's roving arts specialist and a sheep farmer in the high Pennines.
He Tweets here.NewcastleEnergyHeritageHeritageNorthumberlandThe National TrustAlan Sykesguardian.co.uk
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.


| Use

of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Quiz: The UN has decreed it International Happiness Day - so here's a literary quiz about happy endings to put a smile on your face The wait for Pixar to greatness continues after this standard buddy-movie prequel Nowadays submitting to Pixar products makes you feel like the letter "I" under the anglepoise lamp in their famous signature ident, getting beaten down and squashed flat.
Twelve years ago, Pixar created a gem with Monsters Inc.,
all about Sulley (voiced by John Goodman) and Mike (Billy Crystal), two wacky-scary creatures who enter human kids' bedrooms at night and use the resulting screams to generate power for their secret monster world.
Now a prequel takes us back to Sulley and Mike's student days at Monsters University: this is a standard buddy movie, sports movie, and campus movie (with, incidentally, an eerie similarity to The Internship). There's a reference to Carrie, which is so blandly non-specific and sanitised that it might

not even count as a reference at all. It is funny.
But the longed-for return to Pixar greatness seems as far away as ever.Rating:
3/5AnimationBilly CrystalJohn GoodmanPeter Bradshawguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions |

More Feeds THE DEPARTMENT of Homeland Security is an MBA's nightmare. When

Congress cobbled DHS together in 2002, it took apart and reassembled elements from disparate federal agencies into an uneasy consolidation, too big and too varied, some say, for even the department's tireless head, Michael Chertoff, to adequately control.
Instead of synergy, a fair measure of incompetence followed, including, The Post reported Wednesday, embarrassingly poor oversight of the billions of dollars the department has paid to private... Computers and cyborgs aren’t

about to render the American worker obsolete.
But they’re tilting the nation’s economy

more and more in favor of the rich and away from the poor and the middle class, new economic research contends.
Read full article >>     AMSTERDAM - Royal Dutch Shell PLC said Tuesday it plans to divert liquefied natural gas and fuel oil to Japan to help replace energy sources damaged in last week's earthquake and tsunami. Charge small fees to boost commitment A team from MIT has advanced to the next stage of the prestigious DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), a competition sponsored by the Department of Defense to promote innovation in robotics technology for disaster-response operations. The MIT team beat out more than one hundred other teams in the first stage of the competition Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) — to

gain one

of seven prized spots in the next stage of the competition, slated for December.
“We are thrilled to have made it this far,” says MIT team leader Seth Teller, a professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).
“Our team hit the ground running, building on the infrastructure that we developed for the DARPA Urban

Driving Challenge back in 2007, which involved developing a self-driving car that could traverse city traffic.”The MIT team is competing in the software development portion of the competition, known as “Track B.” The goal for participating teams is to develop software that can operate a DARPA-supplied humanoid robot across a low-bandwidth network — the only type of network that might be available to first responders in a natural disaster or other type of emergency. In the VRC, each team demonstrated the capability of its system, including its software and human operator interface, by subjecting it to a simulation environment mandated by DARPA. “The disaster response scenario is technically very challenging,” says Russ Tedrake, a professor at EECS and a principal investigator at CSAIL. “It requires the robot and human operator to simultaneously perceive and gain an understanding for a complex,

new environment, and then use that information to perform difficult manipulation tasks and traverse complex terrains.”To address the technical challenges involved in developing disaster response control software, the MIT team is drawing on its expertise in robotic planning and control, as well as machine perception and human-robot interaction.
“Our approach combines the human operator and robot body into a new kind of control system,” Teller says. The robot gathers raw sensor data and shares it with the human operating team. The team then helps the robot interpret its surroundings, and directs the robot to move or manipulate objects.
The team repeatedly asks the robot to share its plan, adjusting its request and guidance until the robot provides a satisfactory answer. Once that happens the team permits the robot to proceed autonomously. "Effectively, we factor the problem of remotely-commanded dexterous manipulation into a human part and a robot part such that the whole system can perform the task end-to-end," Teller says.In
order to qualify for the VRC, MIT researchers first had to complete an of competition in May. There they demonstrated that their software would allow a robot to successfully step across large gaps in terrain, and pick up and move a hand-held drill.
During the VRC, the MIT team successfully operated a robot

through a variety of maneuvers inside DARPA’s virtual simulator, such as walking across muddy, uneven terrain; dragging a fire hose and connecting it to a spigot; and opening a wall-mounted valve. The MIT team

will now adapt its software and interface to a multi-million

dollar humanoid robot, manufactured by Boston Dynamics and provided by DARPA, for use in the competition’s two remaining challenges, which are set for next December and December 2014. The MIT team, based at CSAIL, is drawing on research that is underway in several departments and labs. For example, Teller’s own research group is developing methods that will make it possible for robots to interpret sensor data, allowing them to make sense of their surroundings and understand their movements.
They are also creating human-robot interaction methods by which humans can help robots formulate and carry out plans.
State-of-the-art, real-time planning and control methods that are being developed in Tedrake’s lab make it possible for humanoid robots to balance, walk and climb. The MIT team includes faculty, research and technical staff, postdoctoral associates, PhD students, and undergraduate researchers from across MIT. Dr.
Maurice Fallon of CSAIL leads the team’s perception and infrastructure efforts; Dr.
Scott Kuindersma of CSAIL leads the team’s planning and control work; Dr.
Sisir Karumanchi of the Lab for Manufacturing and Productivity leads development of the team’s manipulation capabilities; Dr. Toby Schneider of the MIT Center for Ocean Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering has incorporated his methods for effective communication across low-bandwidth, high-latency network links, originally developed for underwater vehicles; and Dr.
Matt Antone, an alumnus of the 2007 MIT DARPA Urban Challenge team and an MIT graduate, has returned to MIT to help with the DRC effort.
The team also includes co-investigators Dr.
Karl Iagnemma of the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity, and Professor Julie Shah of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Brazil were booed by their own fans after stumbling to a 2-2 draw with Chile in their first friendly at a 2014 World Cup stadium on Wednesday.     The NFL distributed a document to its teams Monday reiterating its anti-discrimination policy on sexual