Worlds Most Efficient Insulation

Over 70 years ago, scientists invented aerogel, the least dense solid known to man, and an insulator four times more efficient than fiberglass or foam. Famously, according to Dr. Peter Tsou of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “you could take a two- or three-bedroom house, insulate it with aerogel, and you could heat the house with a candle. But eventually the house would become too hot.”

Unfortunately, aerogels remained so expensive and unwieldy that only NASA used them with any regularity. However, thanks to recent production advances, aerogel insulation is now available and affordable for consumer purchase.

Aerogel Insulation :  Aspen Aerogels, via CNET

Even after the price drop, aerogels remain more expensive than common insulating materials. But since aerogels are more plastic than fiberglass or foam, permeable to water vapor, and flameproof, the extra cost may well be worth the investment when insulating masonry, shingles, or curved surfaces. Plus, since they’re so light and efficient, aerogels reduce other building costs as well.

Aerogels are made by constructing a conventional gel, and then removing the liquid though supercritical drying. The resultant material is 90 percent air, but retains the structure and rigidity of the non-liquid gel components.

911 Truth: Connecting the Dots

This is a very good article by Edward Brotherton documenting his disciplined and effective effort to get his Congressman’s office to acknowledge that the science indicating ongoing 9/11 treason exists, even if they continue, like Senator Lindsey Graham and his office, to stick with NIST and the 9/11 Commission.

This article has been sent far and wide to those in the political realm and media. If you can help spread it, please do so.

the PDF of this article is linked to from HERE
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I have written an article for your knowledge and distribution as you deem fit about my dealings with Congressman’s Brad Sherman’s office. This is an issue of national importance as it relates to our national security. If you watch the short video’s below then read the PDF documents in the order listed you will get a very clear picture of what is going on.

This is the first article I’ve ever written so please be easy on me. It is primarily for your education and publication if you deem it neccessary. Personally there are several worthy and bigger stories within this article. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me.

This video is a must see. You can actually hear the explosions very clearly.
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The video below is John Gross (one of the lead NIST investigators) telling a physics teacher that he knows of no evidence of molten metal found in the WTC site in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. It is important to point that when John told this teacher to send him the NASA images showing temperatures reaching in excess of 2000 degrees, he later refused to give him his email address to send him the pictures.
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This is a video interview of Barry Jennings talking about the explosions he heard while being trapped inside building 7 before mysteriously dying at age 53.
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October 30, 2009

By Edward Brotherton

After a 20-minute conversation with Congressman Brad Sherman’s office on Friday, October 10, 2009, I hung up the phone not believing what I had just heard. Congressman Brad Sherman represents the 27th district, one of the geographically largest districts in Southern California representing around 600,000 constituents. The congressman’s policy advisor in Washington, Erin Prangley, ignores the question as to how they got there. She kept repeating that the Congressman’s position is expressed by the report published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), as recommended by the San Fernando Valley chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

When it comes to the subject of the September 11th terrorist attacks, it appears that many political offices become a Bermuda triangle, where reports are lost and never seen again along with common sense, logic, basic math skills and the desire to protect the rights of the American people. To be fair however this political black hole wasn’t created after 9/11. On September 10th 2001 Donald Rumsfeld gave a press conference where he told the American people that the Pentagon could not account for $2.3 trillion dollars. That is no typo – that’s trillion with a “t”. Of course, the next day almost 3000 Americans lives were lost, along with the World Trade Center ,and the issue of the missing $2.3 trillion got sucked away into the 9/11 black hole.
… Continue Reading

Confirmation of Water on the Moon

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This video shows how we might get to and use the water on the Lunar surface, plus shows some really cool but expensive hardware.

Three different spacecraft have confirmed there is water on the Moon. It hasn’t been found in deep dark craters or hidden underground. Data indicate that water exists diffusely across the moon as hydroxyl or water molecules — or both — adhering to the surface in low concentrations. Additionally, there may be a water cycle in which the molecules are broken down and reformulated over a two week cycle, which is the length of a lunar day.  This does not constitute ice sheets or frozen lakes: the amounts of water in a given location on the Moon aren’t much more than what is found in a desert here on Earth. But there’s more water on the Moon than originally thought.

Obviously an artists representation of 'water on the Moon'

The Moon was believed to extremely dry since the return of lunar samples from the Apollo and Luna programs. Many Apollo samples contain some trace water or minor hydrous minerals, but these have typically been attributed to terrestrial contamination since most of the boxes used to bring the Moon rocks to Earth leaked. This led the scientists to assume that the trace amounts of water they found came from Earth air that had entered the containers. The assumption remained that, outside of possible ice at the moon’s poles, there was no water on the moon.

Forty years later, an instrument on board the ill-fated Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M cubed) found that infrared light was being absorbed near the lunar poles at wavelengths consistent with hydroxyl- and water-bearing materials.

M3 analyzes the way that light from the sun reflects off the lunar surface to understand what materials comprise the lunar soil. Light is reflected in different wavelengths off of different minerals, and specifically, the instrument detected wavelengths of reflected light that would indicate a chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen. Given water’s well-known chemical symbol, H2O, which represents two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom, this discovery was a source of great interest to the researchers.

The instrument can only see the very uppermost layers of the lunar soil – perhaps to a few centimeters below the surface. The scientists were looking for a signature of water in the craters near the poles, but found evidence for water instead on the sunlit portions of the moon. This was certainly unexpected and the science team from M3 looked and re-looked at their data for several months.

Confirmation came from a recent flyby of the re-purposed Deep Impact probe, on its way to rendezvous with another comet in 2010. In June of 2009, the spectrometer on board also showed strong evidence that water is ubiquitous over the surface of the moon.

Jessica Sunshine and colleagues with Deep Impact also found the presence of bound water or hydroxyl in trace amounts over much of the Moon’s surface. Their results suggest that the formation and retention of these molecules is an ongoing process on the lunar surface – and that solar wind could be responsible for forming them.

Still another spacecraft, the Cassini spacecraft while on its way to Saturn, also flew by the Moon in 1999. Roger Clark, a U.S. Geological Survey spectroscopist on the M3 team, reanalyzed archival data from Cassini, and that data as well agreed with the finding that water appears to be widespread across the lunar surface.

There are potentially two types of water on the moon: exogenic, meaning water from outside sources, such as comets striking the moon’s surface, and endogenic, meaning water that originates on the moon. The M3 research team, which includes Larry Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, suspect that the water they’re seeing in the moon’s surface is endogenic.

But where did the water come from?

The team from M3 believe it may come from the solar wind.

As the sun undergoes nuclear fusion, it constantly emits a stream of particles, mostly protons, which are positively charged hydrogen atoms. On Earth, the atmosphere and magnetism prevent us from being bombarded by these protons, but the moon lacks that protection, meaning the oxygen-rich minerals and glasses on the surface of the moon are constantly pounded by hydrogen in the form of protons, moving at velocities of one-third the speed of light.

When those protons hit the lunar surface with enough force, suspects Taylor, they break apart oxygen bonds in soil materials, and where free oxygen and hydrogen are together, there’s a high chance that trace amounts of water will be formed. These traces are thought to be about a quart of water per ton of soil.

“The isotopes of oxygen that exist on the moon are the same as those that exist on Earth, so it was difficult if not impossible to tell the difference between water from the moon and water from Earth,” said Taylor. “Since the early soil samples only had trace amounts of water, it was easy to make the mistake of attributing it to contamination.”

Sensitive US Defense Contract Information Surfaces in Ghana

A team of journalists investigating the global electronic waste business has unearthed a security problem too. In a Ghana market, they bought a computer hard drive containing sensitive documents belonging to U.S. government contractor Northrop Grumman.

The drive had belonged to a Fairfax, Virginia, employee who still works for the company and contained “hundreds and hundreds of documents about government contracts,” said Peter Klein, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia, who led the investigation for the Public Broadcasting Service show Frontline. He would not disclose details of the documents, but he said that they were marked “competitive sensitive” and covered company contracts with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Transportation Security Agency.

The data was unencrypted, Klein said in an interview. The cost? US$40.

Northrop Grumman is not sure how the drive ended up in a Ghana market, but apparently the company had hired an outside vendor to dispose of the PC. “Based on the documents we were shown, we believe this hard drive may have been stolen after one of our asset-disposal vendors took possession of the unit,” the Northrop Grumman said in a statement. “Despite sophisticated safeguards, no company can inoculate itself completely against crime.”

A Northrop Grumman spokesman would not say who was responsible for disposing of the drive, but in its statement the company noted that “the fact that this information is outside our control is disconcerting.”

Some of the documents talked about how to recruit airport screeners and several of them even covered data security practices, Klein said. “It was a wonderful, ironic twist,” Klein said. “Here were these contracts being awarded based on their ability to keep the data safe.”

According to Klein, it’s common for old computers and electronic devices to be improperly dumped in developing countries such as Ghana and China, where locals scavenge the material for components, often under horrific working conditions.

Last year the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that a substantial amount of the country’s e-waste ended up in developing countries, where it was often dangerously disposed of.

The reporters bought seven hard drives, Klein said. The other drives contained sensitive information about their previous owners, including credit-card numbers, resumes and online account information.

Off-camera, sources in Ghana told the reporters that data thieves routinely scour these hard drives for sensitive information, Klein said.

Although that may be worrying to some, security experts say that there is already a vast quantity of this type of information available online from criminals who have stolen it from hacked computers.

Compared to hacking, stealing data from old hard drives is pretty inefficient, said Scott Moulton, an Atlanta data-recovery expert who teaches classes on data recovery. “It’s a tremendous amount of work, so it’s only going to be the bottom-of-the-barrel guys who would do that,” he said. “It’s happening on a small scale.”

Still, it’s easy for criminals to find data on drives, even when they’ve been legitimately wiped clean, Moulton said. He buys used hard drives by the hundreds for his classes. These drives have been professionally wiped, but his students always find at least one drive in each class with information still on it.

That’s because it’s easy for a drive to get missed during the wiping process or improperly wiped. Compounding the problem, the software that some recycling companies use doesn’t actually remove all data from the drive, especially data that may be hidden on corrupted parts of the hard drive known as bad blocks, he explained.

The surest way to get your data off of a hard drive is to physically destroy it, Moulton said.

Preparations for the Computational Singularity

NASA and Google are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

To be housed at Nasa’s Ames Research Center, a stone’s-throw from the Googleplex, the Singularity University will offer courses on biotechnology, nano-technology and artificial intelligence.

The so-called “singularity” is a theorized period of rapid technological progress in the near future. Mr Kurzweil, an American inventor, popularized the term in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”.

Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.

Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.

Mr Kurzweil said the university was launching now because many technologies were approaching a moment of radical advancement. “We’re getting to the steep part of the curve,” said Mr Kurzweil. “It’s not just electronics and computers. It’s any technology where we can measure the information content, like genetics.”

The school is backed by Larry Page, Google co-founder, and Peter Diamandis, chief executive of X-Prize, an organisation which provides grants to support technological change.

“We are anchoring the university in what is in the lab today, with an understanding of what’s in the realm of possibility in the future,” said Mr Diamandis, who will be vice-chancellor. “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”

Despite its title, the school will not be an accredited university. Instead, it will be modelled on the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, the interdisciplinary, multi-cultural school that Mr Diamandis helped establish in 1987.