By Daniel Boffey in Utrecht
It’s an idea whose adherents over the centuries have ranged from socialists to libertarians to far-right mavericks. It was first proposed by Thomas Paine in his 1797 pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, as a system in which at the “age of majority” everyone would receive an equal capital grant, a “basic income” handed over by the state to each and all, no questions asked, to do with what they wanted.
Read more » The guardian
The Netherlands Is Set To Open The World’s First Solar Bike Lane
The Netherlands is opening up the world’s first stretch of road made with solar cells this week. And in keeping with the road’s environmentally-friendly message — and the cycling culture of the Netherlands — the road is built for bikes, not cars.
The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research and the Dutch province of North Holland will open a 230-foot stretch of the project, dubbed SolaRoad, on November 12. The stretch of bike lane contains solar cells that are protected by two layers of safety glass and which can generate enough energy to power about three Dutch homes.
Read more » ThinkProgress
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/11/3591195/netherlands-solar-road/
(Phys.org) —A team of researchers at Delft University in the Netherlands is reporting in a paper they have had published in the journal Science, that they have successfully used entanglement as a means of communication, over a distance of ten feet (three meters). Furthermore, they note, they did so with 100 percent reliability and without altering the spin state of the quantum bits (qubits) involved.
Teleportation, is of course, a means of moving an object from one place to another without it having to travel between them. Thus far examples of it have only been seen in science fiction movies. The idea of moving information in similar fashion, however, has met with some, albeit limited success. The idea is to use the concept of entanglement of particles as a means of conveyance. It’s supposed to work because of the strange interconnectedness of the two particles—whatever happens to one, automatically happens to the other, regardless of the distance between them. Such a property should allow then, for the exchange of information. If the spin state of one qubit is altered, then it should be automatically altered in the other qubit—a form of information exchange which can be counted as a message of sorts if a string of such transactions can be carried out.
To date, scientists have struggled to use entanglement as a means of communication—it’s been achieved but the error rate has been so great that it would be unfeasible as a real-world application. In this new effort, the researchers claim to have solved the error rate problem—they’ve brought it down to zero percent. They did it, they report, by trapping electrons in diamonds at very low temperatures and shooting them with lasers, resulting in the creation of qubits. The diamonds, the team reports, serve as really tiny prisons, holding the electrons in place. Held as they were, the researchers were able to cause a spin state to exist and then to read it at both locations, which meant that information had been conveyed.
The research team next plans to extend the distance between the qubits to 1,300 meters, while others presumably will attempt to replicate the first result—if the claims prove true, the breakthrough could mark the first stage of a the development of a true quantum computer, or network.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-05-team-accurately-teleported-quantum-ten.html#jCp
Conference Board report card gives Canada a B, ranked 7th out of 17 developed countries
Canada isn’t living up to its potential or its reputation when it comes to societal issues like poverty, government and inequality, according to the Conference Board of Canada.
The group gave Canada a ‘B’, good for a 7th place ranking out of 17 developed countries, but it said the “middle-of-the-pack” ranking leaves room for improvement.
Getting an ‘A’ at the top of the rankings were the Scandinavian nations (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland) as well as the Netherlands and Austria. …
Read more » CBC
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/02/01/business-canada-society-report-card.html
– Scientists often have a funny way of talking about religion.
By Louis Ruprecht
A case in point concerns a new study that was discussed at the American Physical Society meetings in Dallas, Texas, in late March. Religion, it seems, is going extinct. You heard me: extinct. Dead and gone. Like the dinosaurs.
The data that a team of mathematicians used to reach this rather surprising conclusion were census reports of religious affiliation. Using a complicated means of mathematical analysis called “nonlinear dynamics”—complicated, ironically, because its purpose is to make complicated things simpler by reducing them to one variable—the team attempted to extrapolate from data on religious affiliation in nine countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.
Turns out, every case of self-reported religious affiliation is trending downward: 40% self-identify as religiously non-affiliated in the Netherlands, as do 60% in the Czech Republic. The mathematicians seem far more surprised by these numbers than most religionists would be. ….
Read more : Alternet.org
Andres Iniesta scored a goal deep into extra time to give Spain the World Cup for the first time with a 1-0 win over Netherlands ..
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