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n2doc's JournalIndependent women lead exodus of support from Romney
By Morgan Little
April 4, 2012, 1:02 p.m.
It looks like concern within Mitt Romney’s campaign that the prolonged Republican presidential primary could damage his standing among undecided voters has some legitimacy.
A new USA Today/Gallup poll gauging support among independents in swing states finds that President Obama holds a 48% to 39% advantage over the presumptive GOP nominee Romney, a significant change from polling conducted last year.
The poll, conducted before Romney’s primary victories on Tuesday, also places Obama’s overall support in 12 swing states above Romney’s, 51% to 42%.
The key to these results is the sizable departure of independent women from Romney’s camp over the last few months to Obama's. In polls conducted between October and December 2011, Romney led Obama 48% to 43% among independent women. But since then, the aggregated data from February to March bode well for Obama, with independent women now preferring the president 51% to 37%.
That’s a whopping 19% swing – Romney down 11 percentage points and Obama up 8 – and it was seen within the male independent electorate as well, with a 12% swing accounting for Obama’s current slim 46% to 45% lead.
more
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-independent-women-lead-exodus-of-support-from-romney-20120404,0,1272087.story
College president defends pepper spray against 'unlawful' crowd
Santa Monica College officials said Wednesday a police officer was forced to release pepper spray to maintain safety after a large crowd of students tried to force entry into a meeting of the Board of Trustees.
The incident at Tuesday’s board meeting resulted in three people being transported to hospitals for treatment and released and 15 to 30 people treated at the scene by fire department paramedics. No arrests were made.
In a statement, President Chui L. Tsang said police officers exercised restraint even though a segment of students had acted in a unlawful manner, including setting off fire alarms and attempting to disrupt the meeting.
"Santa Monica College regrets that a group of people chose to disrupt a public meeting in an unlawful manner," said Tsang. "The college has launched a full investigation into the matter."
more
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/04/students-unlawful-pepper-spray-santa-monica-college-president.html
Saudi Arabia extracting Water from Syrian Desert
Saudi Arabia is drilling for a resource possibly more precious than oil.
Over the last 24 years, it has tapped hidden reserves of water to grow wheat and other crops in the Syrian Desert. This time series of data shows images acquired by three different Landsat satellites operated by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.
The green fields that dot the desert draw on water that in part was trapped during the last Ice Age. In addition to rainwater that fell over several hundred thousand years, this fossil water filled aquifers that are now buried deep under the desert's shifting sands.
Saudi Arabia reaches these underground rivers and lakes by drilling through the desert floor, directly irrigating the fields with a circular sprinkler system. This technique is called center-pivot irrigation.
Because rainfall in this area is now only a few centimeters (about one inch) each year, water here is a non-renewable resource. Although no one knows how much water is beneath the desert, hydrologists estimate it will only be economical to pump water for about 50 years.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/saudi-green.html
Plasma fusion becomes a reality?
Scientists in a New Jersey laboratory say they are close to a major breakthrough in the field of fusion that they predict will soon allow for an unlimited source of the cheapest, cleanest and safest energy ever.
Researchers at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in Middlesex, NJ have published the results of their recent work in the Physics of Plasmas journal last week, and expect one of their next rounds of testing to finally tackle an issue of energy procurement that would rival anything already available. In their latest breakthrough, fusion researchers at the lab say that they’ve successfully heated and confined an ionized gas at record temperatures which would be high enough to allow for the nuclear fusion of certain elements, including hydrogen and boron. Those elements double as aneutronic fuels — that is, they produce no neutrons during the fusion process — and could thus be quickly converted to electricity without using the expensive and dangerous conversion measures currently available. Scientists say they believe they are close to a breakthrough that will allow them to harness energy from the elements and thus work with an energy source more marketable than anything now available.
According to the scientists, they have identified and emulated two of the three conditions necessary to show energy production with aneutronic fuels. Eric Lerner, a chief scientist for Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, says that figuring out the temperature and confinement necessary for the fusion have been established in their research, and that once the team can determine the necessary conditions for the third variable — density — they will be able to harness energy from plasma.
“We are still far from having sufficient density in the tiny hot regions to get net energy, but that is our next goal,” Lerner says in a press release on the research.
To RT, fellow Lawrenceville researcher Derek Shannon adds, “We are working on the third criterion, density, now, with the goal of demonstrating full scientific feasibility this year.” Shannon also predicts that the research coming out of the New Jersey lab could put the groups as far as decade ahead of competing projects that aim to introduce manageable fusion fuels.
more
http://rt.com/usa/news/plasma-fusion-energy-nuclear-080/
Death knell may sound for Canada's GMO pigs
By Rod Nickel
WINNIPEG, Manitoba | Mon Apr 2, 2012 3:59pm EDT
(Reuters) - Pigs that might have become the world's first genetically modified animals approved for human consumption may instead face an untimely end, as key backers of Canada's "Enviropig" project withdrew their support for the controversial engineered animal.
Scientists at the University of Guelph, 90 km west of Toronto, bred the first GMO pig that was developed to address an environmental problem in 1999. The animal - known as Enviropig - digests its feed more efficiently than naturally bred pigs, resulting in waste that may cause less environmental damage to lakes and rivers.
The project has produced eight generations of Enviropigs, including the current herd of 16 animals. But they may be the last of their kind, after Ontario Pork - an association of hog farmers in the eastern Canadian province - yanked their funding last month.
"We think we took the genetic research as far as it could possibly go," said Keith Robbins, spokesman for Ontario Pork, which funded Enviropig with more than C$1 million ($1 million) since the late 1990s. "It's probably best for industry to take it forward. When you're the first of anything, it's tough to get it out of the gate."
Genetically modified plants and animals intended for the food chain face tough scrutiny from regulators, with some consumers leery of unproven long-term health effects.
more
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/02/canada-us-gmo-canada-pigs-idCABRE83110320120402?sp=true
The Pink Menace
By MARK BITTMAN
Rick Perry — remember him? — was more inspired as a defender of the beef processing industry than he was as a debater. Last week, Perry — along with Iowa’s governor-for-life Terry Branstad and Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas — implored the media to end its “smear campaign” against pink slime, the ammonia-treated burger extender he’d rather have us call by the name used by its producers: Lean Finely Textured Beef.
Whether “pink slime” is a fair handle or not, public outrage has thrown it off a cliff. Some of the country’s largest grocery chains have announced that they will no longer sell products containing it, as did McDonald’s, while Wendy’s emphatically insisted that it never has. The United States Department of Agriculture, a major buyer of pink slime for its National School Lunch Program, has offered participating schools the option to order their beef with or without it, though it will likely remain in many schools.
As a result, the largest producer of the stuff, Beef Products Inc., has suspended operations at three of its four plants for 60 days, by which time it hopes to do some public relations hocus-pocus to restore consumer confidence before resorting to permanent closures. We’ll see.
A little review: Lean Finely Textured Beef was born about 10 years ago, as an attempt to eliminate E. coli from ground beef. Using fatty beef trimmings, which are especially susceptible to E. coli and salmonella contamination, B.P.I. created a product that could be sprayed with ammonia (yes, that stuff, referred to by B.P.I.’s former quality assurance manager as “Mr. Clean,” in this dramatic piece by Michele Simon) to kill the bacteria. It was then mixed with “normal” ground beef. Voilà: safe hamburgers.
Except that despite B.P.I.’s claim that the ammonia treatment killed E. coli and salmonella, and despite the U.S.D.A.’s support for this process, those pathogens have been found in B.P.I. meat.[1] Oops.
more
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/the-pink-menace/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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