Graham Reading Entangled Chapters 1 & 2
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Chapter 1 part 1 & 2

How fast is too fast? According to the laws of physics, the speed of light is a good boundary, as going beyond it opens you up to all sorts of paradoxes and space-time phenomena that are usually the stuff of sci-fi. But a couple of researchers in Austria have come up with a way to compute information faster than the speed of light.

The idea is not quite as crazy as it might sound, though you may wish to limber up your mind before delving deeper. It's based on the same principle as that of quantum entanglement -- the notion that two particles on opposite sides of the universe can be linked through their quantum states such that one cannot be adequately described without the other. That is, an action on one particle instantaneously influences its counterpart, even if they are separated by light years.

Take a huge oceanic catamaran, stick a hydroelectric turbine underneath it, and hitch it to a 6.5 million-square-foot parafoil flying nearly a mile in the air. That’s a Korean research team’s new proposal for generating gigawatts of clean energy.

As the parafoil pulls the boat, seawater would be forced through the turbine, which generates electricity. The 800 megawatts of electricity produced would separate seawater into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, and the hydrogen would then be stored on-board the ships.

ROCKET engines could benefit from a natural Martian lubricant - but not to keep them oiled. A salty sludge that may be lubricating the ice caps of Mars could one day provide fuel.

The ice is too cold to flow normally. But if winds were to carry salty soil particles to the ice cap, they might gradually sink to form a briny bed, kept liquid by the planet's warmth. This could allow the ice cap to flow like a glacier, say David Fisher at the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa, and colleagues.

FROM giant hydraulic oysters that sit on the sea floor, to long rubber snakes that writhe in the ocean swell, there's no shortage of creatures designed to harness the power of the waves. If wave power is to emerge as a viable form of green energy, we need to put them to the test and only the most reliable can expect to survive.

While there's a veritable menagerie of strange beasts taking to the sea, most of them can expect a humdrum life, says John Chaplin, a marine engineer at the University of Southampton in the UK. "The fundamental problem facing wave-power devices is that most of the time the water is moving with rather low velocities," he says.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A pioneering deep-sea exploration robot -- one of the first successful submersible vehicles that was both unmanned and untethered to surface ships -- was lost at sea Friday, March 5, on a research expedition off the coast of Chile. The 15-year-old Autonomous Benthic Explorer, affectionately nicknamed ABE, was launched late Thursday night and had reached the seafloor to begin its 222nd research dive when, in the early hours of Friday morning, all contact with the surface vessel abruptly ceased. All efforts to reestablish contact failed.

The vehicle was designed, built and operated by scientists and engineers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).

One loaf of bread and one jug of beer: that's what Egypt's Queen Behenu was offered during her funeral, according to a translation of hieroglyphics engraved on white stone found in her 4,000-year-old burial chamber this week.

Known as the "Pyramid Texts," these hieroglyphics represent the oldest body of Egyptian religious writings and were widely in use in royal tombs during the 5th and 6th Dynasties of the Old Kingdom.

Egypt will shoulder the costs of restoring the country's Jewish houses of worship said the culture minister Tuesday, two days after a historic synagogue in Cairo's ancient Jewish quarter was rededicated in a private ceremony.

Farouk Hosny said in a statement that his ministry views Jewish sites as much a part of Egypt's culture as Muslim mosques or Coptic churches, and the restorations would not require any foreign funding.

On Sunday, the Ben Maimon synagogue, named after the 12th century rabbi and intellectual Maimonides, was rededicated in a ceremony that included half a dozen Egyptian Jewish families that long ago fled the country.

SAN FRANCISCO: Researchers at IBM on Tuesday said that they have discovered a way to make an Earth-friendly plastic from plants that could replace petroleum-based products, which are tough on the environment.

The breakthrough promises biodegradable plastics made in a way that saves on energy, according to Chandrasekhar "Spike" Narayan, a manager of science and technology at IBM's Almaden Research Center in Northern California.

Almaden and Stanford University researchers said that the discovery could herald an era of sustainability for a plastics industry rife with seemingly eternal products notorious for cramming landfills and littering the planet.

NEW YORK: American scientists have developed a new variety of polythene, the most widely used polymer, that can conduct heat like most metals yet remains an electrical insulator.

The new form of polythene can be used as a cheap alternative to metals in electric applications like a computer processor chip where it is important to draw heat away from an object. Polymers are materials made of long, chain-like molecules.

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in US found that by getting all polythene molecules line up the same way, rather than forming a chaotic tangled mass, as they normally do, the polymer can be changed into heat conductor.

Did the Mediterranean region of megalithic age have any links with the state of Kerala in southern India?

A wide range of megalithic burials recently discovered in some northern districts of Kerala during a research project have thrown light on

possible links between the Mediterranean and Kerala coasts in the prehistoric stone age that occurred between 6000 BC and 2000 BC.

The researchers, however, say further studies and analysis are required to establish the thesis.

Chinese archeologists have identified the route of a 137-km stretch of China's oldest Great Wall in central Henan Province, on which the remnants of 30 km of wall is still standing.

"The wall structure was built no later than 221 B.C. in the Warring States period," said Sun Yingmin, spokesman of the provincial Cultural Relics Bureau, Tuesday.

He said previous to this, only sporadic discoveries of wall remains were found. The actual appearance of the main body of Great Wall of the Chu State was only recorded in historical records.

The primordial soup that gave birth to life on Earth may have had an extra, previously unrecognised ingredient: a "molecular midwife" that played a crucial role in allowing the first large biomolecules to assemble from their building blocks.

The earliest life forms are thought by many to have been based not on DNA but on the closely related molecule RNA, because long strands of RNA can act as rudimentary enzymes. This would have allowed a primitive metabolism to develop before life forms made proteins for this purpose.

New research reveals just how bad an idea it was to colonize Greenland and Iceland more than a millennium ago: average temperatures in Iceland plummeted nearly 6°Celsius in the century that followed the island’s Norse settlement in about A.D. 870, a climate record gleaned from mollusk shells shows.

The record is the most precise year-by-year chronology yet of temperatures experienced by the northern Norse colonies, says William Patterson, an isotope geochemist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, who led the new work. The study will appear online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We’re aware from written documents of the kinds of things that people faced in the North Atlantic over the last 1,000 years,” he says. “This is a way to quantify the experiences they had.”

A scientist and a composer are working together to explore a thousand years of human history through soil samples.

The pair have built an installation in Dundee which tells the story of Viking settlers in Greenland going back to the year 900.

Images of soil samples gathered by Dr Paul Adderley have been set to audio by Dr Michael Young.

Add plumbing to the mysterious arts of the ancient Maya, investigators report. In a Journal of Archaeological Science study, anthropologist Kirk French and civil engineer Christopher Duffy of Penn State report on a conduit designed to deliver pressurized water to Palenque, an urban center in southern Mexico, more than 1,400 years ago.

"The ancient Maya are renowned as great builders, but are rarely regarded as great engineers. Their constructions, though often big and impressive, are generally considered unsophisticated," say the study authors.

Researchers have found that eggshells of extinct bird species are a rich source of preserved DNA.

An international team isolated the delicate DNA molecules of species including the massive "elephant birds" of the genus Aepyorni.

The Proceedings of the Royal Society B research demonstrated the approach also on emu, ducks and the extinct moa.

The team says that the technique will enable researchers to learn more about ancient birds and why they died out.

Deforestation has revealed what could be a giant impact crater in Central Africa, scientists say.

The 36-46km-wide feature, identified in DR Congo, may be one of the largest such structures discovered in the last decade.

Italian researchers considered other origins for the ring, but say these are unlikely.

They presented their findings at the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, US.

The ring shape is clearly visible in the satellite image by TerraMetrics Inc reproduced on this page.

Robots are great for going where humans can't, and the cramped confines of municipal water pipes are the perfect example. A new initiative is working on building robots that can access and repair aging water pipes from the inside.

Old pipes are a pressing issue for many cities. The American Society of Civil Engineers which rates the quality of city infrastructure, including water works, estimates that 6 billion gallons of clean drinking water disappears each day, mostly due to old, leaky pipes and mains. That's enough water to supply all the residents of California for a year.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) must close at the end of 2011 for up to a year to address design issues, according to an LHC director.

Dr Steve Myers told BBC News the faults will delay the machine reaching its full potential for two years.

The atom smasher will reach world record collision energies later this month at 7 trillion electron volts.