Gangs Turn To Social Networking Sites To Recruit...(Drudge)
Gangs, clubs, what's the difference?
5-legged cat gets 2 useless legs cut off (CNN)
If you let the word get around, pretty soon everybody is going to want one.
Kissing cousins have more kids (MSNBC)
Well, yeah.
And you thought “power to the people” was just a slogan
Knee dynamo taps 'people power'
By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
A stroll around the park may soon be enough to charge the raft of batteries needed in today's power-hungry gadgets.
US and Canadian scientists have built a novel device that effortlessly harvests energy from human movements.
The adapted knee brace, outlined in the journal Science, can generate enough energy to power a mobile phone for 30 minutes from one minute of walking.
The first people to benefit could be amputees who are being fitted with increasingly sophisticated prosthetics.
"All of the new developments in prosthetics require large power budgets," Dr Douglas Weber of the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the authors of the paper, told BBC News.
"You need power to run your neural interface; you need it to run your powered joint, and so on.
Biomechanical energy harvester
"Getting that power is going to be really important."
Walk and talk
The new device generates power by a process known as "generative braking", analogous to the braking systems found in hybrid-electric cars such as the Toyota Prius.
"Walking is a lot like stop-and-go driving," explained Dr Max Donelan of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, lead author of the paper.
"Within each stride muscles are continuously accelerating and decelerating the body.
Hybrid electric cars take advantage of stop-and-go driving using so-called "regenerative braking" where the energy normally dissipated as heat is used to drive a generator.
"We have essentially applied the same principle to walking."
Using a series of gears, the knee brace assists the hamstring in slowing the body just before the foot hits the ground, whilst simultaneously generating electricity.
Sensors on the device switch the generator off for the remainder of each step.
In this way, the device puts less strain on the wearer than if it was constantly producing energy.
Tests of the 1.6kg device produced an average of 5 watts of electricity from a slow walk.
"We also explored ways of generating more electricity and found that we can get as much as 13 watts from walking," said Dr Donelan.
"13 watts is enough to power about 30 minutes of talk time on a typical mobile phone from just one minute of walking."
Enlarge Image
However, to generate this amount of power the generator had to be constantly switched on, which required more effort from the wearer.
Battery pack
The knee brace is the latest development in a field known as "energy harvesting".
The field seeks to develop devices and mechanisms to recover otherwise-wasted energy and convert it into useful electrical energy.
"We're pretty effective batteries," Dr Donelan told BBC News. "In our fat we store the equivalent of about a 1,000kg battery."
Tapping this power source is not a new idea and has been exploited in everyday devices such as wind-up radios and self-winding watches.
The US defence research agency Darpa has a long-standing project to tap energy from "heel-strike" generators implanted in soldier's boots and powered through the pumping motion of a footstep.
And in 2005, US scientists showed off an energy-harvesting backpack which used a suspended load to convert movement into electrical energy.
However, heel-strike devices generate relatively little energy whilst people using the backpack have to bear the burden of carrying the bag.
"It requires a relatively heavy load - around 38kg - to get a substantial amount of power," said Dr Donelan.
Simulations showed that a soldier carrying the pack and walking at a relatively brisk pace could generate around 7.4 watts of power. "It's about the same amount of power as [the knee braces] produce," said Dr Donelan.
South African amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius
The technology could be used to make "smart prosthetics"
Kit list
The team believes the new device could have many uses.
"I think the early adopters will be people whose lives depend on portable power," he told BBC News.
"On the medical front, portable power is used by those who have amputated limbs to charge their powered prosthetic limbs," he said.
However, Dr Art Kuo at the University of Michigan does not believe it will be simply a case of strapping the device on to an existing prosthetic.
"It would probably involve building a new [prosthetic] knee that uses some existing ideas and then also tries to harvest energy using these principles," he said.
The team also hope the device could be useful for people who have suffered a stroke or spinal chord injury who wear an "exoskeleton" to help them move.
"The current and future emphasis is on powered exoskeletons," said Dr Donelan.
Soldiers may also benefit from wearing the knee brace to power the multitude of devices they now carry ,such as night vision goggles and GPS.
"They treat batteries like they treat food and water - they are so essential to what they do," he said.
Dr Donelan has now set up a spin-out company to exploit the technology and believes it will eventually be possible to develop a small device that can be fitted internally across different joints.
However, in the short term he has his sights set on a light weight, slim-line version of the knee brace.
"That's about 18 months away, so it's not science fiction far in the future stuff," he said.
Yeah, it's all fun and games until somebody gets a hand chopped off.
Adoption of Islamic Sharia law in Britain is "unavoidable" says Archbishop of Canterbury
Rowan Williams told BBC Radio 4's World At One that the UK has to "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.
He says that Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court. He added Muslims should not have to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty".
Dr Williams said there was a place for finding a "constructive accommodation" in areas such as marriage - allowing Muslim women to avoid Western divorce proceedings.
Other religions enjoyed such tolerance of their own laws, he pointed out, but stressed that it could never be allowed to take precedence over an individual's rights as a citizen.
He said it would also require a change in perception of what Sharia involved beyond the "inhumanity" of extreme punishments and attitudes to women seen in some Islamic states.
Dr Williams said: "It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system.
"We already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justifying conscientious objections in certain circumstances."
He added: "There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law as we already do with aspects of other kinds of religious law.
"It would be quite wrong to say that we could ever license a system of law for some community which gave people no right of appeal, no way of exercising the rights that are guaranteed to them as citizens in general.
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Sharia law in Britain would provide Muslims with an alternative to our divorce courts
"But there are ways of looking at marital disputes, for example, which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them.
"In some cultural and religious settings, they would seem more appropriate."
But his views were condemned today by senior Tory MP Peter Luff, who said: "This is a very dangerous route which we should not go down. You can't be a little bit pregnant. You can't have a little bit of sharia law.
"We should not start introducing new different legal systems alongside ours."
But the Archbishop defended his position saying people people needed to look at Islamic law "with a clear eye."
"They should not imagine, either, that we know exactly what we mean by Sharia and just associate it with ... Saudi Arabia, or whatever," he continued.
"Nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that has sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states: the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women."
There were questions about how it interacted with human rights, he said.
"But I do not think we should instantly spring to the conclusion that the whole of that world of jurisprudence and practice is somehow monstrously incompatible with human rights just because it doesn't immediately fit with how we understand it."
Dr Williams said Orthodox Jewish courts already operated in the UK, and anti-abortion views of Catholics and other Christians were "accommodated within the law".
"The whole idea that there are perfectly proper ways the law of the land pays respect to custom and community, that's already there."
He said the issue of whether Catholic adoption agencies would be forced under equality laws to accept gay parents showed there was confusion on the matter.
"That principle that there is only one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western democracy.
"But I think it is a misunderstanding to suppose that means people don't have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and that the law needs to take some account of that."
He said he accepted people might be surprised by his call but urged them to consider the wider question.
"What we don't want is a stand-off where the law squares up to people's religious consciences, on something like abortion or indeed by forcing a vote on some aspects of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in the Commons ... we don't either want a situation where, because there's no legal way of monitoring what communities do, making them part of the public process, people do what they like in private in such a way that that becomes another way of intensifying oppression within a community."
Sharia law was originally more enlightened in its attitude to women than other legal systems, he pointed out, but did now have to be brought up to date.
"But you have to translate that into a setting where that whole area of the rights and liberties of women has moved on.
"The principle and the vision which animates the whole Islamic legal provision needs broadening because of that."
Responding to comments by one of his senior bishops that Islamic extremism was creating communities with "no-go areas" for non-Muslims, he said it was "not at all the case that we have absolute social exclusion.
"But we do have a lot of social suspicion, a lot of distance and we just have to go on working at how that shared citizenship comes through."
The Bishop of Rochester, The Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, said last month that non-Muslims faced a hostile reception in places dominated by the ideology of Islamic radicals.
Dr Williams said the use of the phrase "no-go areas" had sparked controversy because it reminded people of Northern Ireland.
"I don't think that was at all what was intended; I think it was meant to point to the silo problem, the sense of communities not communicating with each other.
"Many Muslims would say that they feel bits of British society are no-go areas for them."
Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Ramadhan Foundation, welcomed the comments.
"These comments further underline the attempts by both our great faiths to build respect and tolerance.
"Sharia law for civil matters is something which has been introduced in some Western countries with much success; I believe that Muslims would take huge comfort from the Government allowing civil matters being resolved according to their faith.
"We are however disappointed that the Archbishop of Canterbury was silent when Mr Nazir-Ali was promoting intolerance and lying about no-go areas for Christians in the UK by Muslim extremists.
"Unless he speaks out against this intolerance, Muslims will take his silence as authorisation and support for such comments.
"The Ramadhan Foundation will continue to work with the Church of England to build understanding and respect for our two communities."
Dr Williams's comments are likely to fuel the debate over multiculturalism in the UK.
But he insists that Sharia law needs to be better understood.
At the moment, he says "sensational reporting of opinion polls" clouds the issue.
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