What is an Indigo Child, their mission and challenges

and for the French speaking people (first French post)

Indigo Child Matias De Stefano.

Indigo kids, indigo adults. They exist, they are special, they come to earth to raise our consciousness. Matías De Stefano is an Argentinian 22 year old, who could be described as an Indigo child. He has been allowed to activate the area of the brain where all the Cosmic memory is registed. His purpose in life is to share his memories with the people, helping these to organize their own information. I´m still subtitling the rest of the videos, so soon the rest of the parts will be added.

Lego Antikythera Mechanism

The Antikythera Mechanism: http://bit.ly/fm4oFK is the oldest known scientific computer, built in Greece at around 100 BCE. Lost for 2000 years, it was recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. But not until a century later was its purpose understood: an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary precision. 

In 2010, we built a fully-functional replica out of Lego. 

Sponsored by Digital Science: http://www.digital-science.com/ a new division of Macmillan Publishers that provides technology solutions for researchers. Available under a CC-BY-3.0-Unported license.

A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Trading in Derivatives

On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in Midtown Manhattan.

The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential.

Drawn from giants like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the bankers form a powerful committee that helps oversee trading in derivatives, instruments which, like insurance, are used to hedge risk.

In theory, this group exists to safeguard the integrity of the multitrillion-dollar market. In practice, it also defends the dominance of the big banks.

The banks in this group, which is affiliated with a new derivatives clearinghouse, have fought to block other banks from entering the market, and they are also trying to thwart efforts to make full information on prices and fees freely available.

Banks’ influence over this market, and over clearinghouses like the one this select group advises, has costly implications for businesses large and small, like Dan Singer’s home heating-oil company in Westchester County, north of New York City.

This fall, many of Mr. Singer’s customers purchased fixed-rate plans to lock in winter heating oil at around $3 a gallon. While that price was above the prevailing $2.80 a gallon then, the contracts will protect homeowners if bitterly cold weather pushes the price higher.

But Mr. Singer wonders if his company, Robison Oil, should be getting a better deal. He uses derivatives like swaps and options to create his fixed plans. But he has no idea how much lower his prices — and his customers’ prices — could be, he says, because banks don’t disclose fees associated with the derivatives.

“At the end of the day, I don’t know if I got a fair price, or what they’re charging me,” Mr. Singer said.

Derivatives shift risk from one party to another, and they offer many benefits, like enabling Mr. Singer to sell his fixed plans without having to bear all the risk that oil prices could suddenly rise. Derivatives are also big business on Wall Street. Banks collect many billions of dollars annually in undisclosed fees associated with these instruments — an amount that almost certainly would be lower if there were more competition and transparent prices.

Just how much derivatives trading costs ordinary Americans is uncertain. The size and reach of this market has grown rapidly over the past two decades. Pension funds today use derivatives to hedge investments. States and cities use them to try to hold down borrowing costs. Airlines use them to secure steady fuel prices. Food companies use them to lock in prices of commodities like wheat or beef.

The marketplace as it functions now “adds up to higher costs to all Americans,” said Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates most derivatives. More oversight of the banks in this market is needed, he said.

But big banks influence the rules governing derivatives through a variety of industry groups. The banks’ latest point of influence are clearinghouses like ICE Trust, which holds the monthly meetings with the nine bankers in New York.

Under the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, many derivatives will be traded via such clearinghouses. Mr. Gensler wants to lessen banks’ control over these new institutions. But Republican lawmakers, many of whom received large campaign contributions from bankers who want to influence how the derivatives rules are written, say they plan to push back against much of the coming reform. On Thursday, the commission canceled a vote over a proposal to make prices more transparent, raising speculation that Mr. Gensler did not have enough support from his fellow commissioners.

The Department of Justice is looking into derivatives, too. The department’s antitrust unit is actively investigating “the possibility of anticompetitive practices in the credit derivatives clearing, trading and information services industries,” according to a department spokeswoman.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/business/12advantage.html?_r=1

Scientists find natural photovoltaic cell in hornet, and copy it

An Oriental hornet, whose yellow and brown exoskeleton is able to turn sunlight into electricity (Photo: Matti Paavola)

It’s no big mystery why turtles and other reptiles bask in the sun – being cold-blooded animals, they’re gathering heat to warm their bodies, so they can be active. Recently, however, scientists from Israel and the UK discovered that the Oriental hornet has been putting a “high-tech” spin on that model… the outer layers of its body work as a natural photovoltaic cell, converting sunlight to electricity. The scientists then proceeded to create a cell of their own, using the hornet as their inspiration.

The study was led by Dr. Marian Plotkin of Tel-Aviv University. It had been observed that the hornets’ underground nest-digging activity increased with the intensity of the sunlight, whereas most wasps tend to be more active in the early morning. This caused the late Prof. Jacob S. Ishay to suspect that the insects were utilizing solar radiation.

Plotkin’s team discovered that the secret lies in the hornets’ outer body shell, or exoskeleton. They found that the cuticle material making up the brown portions of the shell consists of an array of grooves, each one 160 nanometers high. The yellow parts of the body, however, are made up of cuticle material bearing a series of interlocking 50nm-tall oval-shaped protrusions, each one housing a pinhole-sized depression.

The antireflective brown material splits any sunlight that hits it into several diverging beams. These beams proceed into the cuticle, where they encounter a several-layer-thick sheet-like structure. Within each layer are rod-like structures embedded in a protein matrix, the rods made from chains of the polymer chitin. It is this complex structure that keeps the solar light beams trapped within the cuticle, bouncing between layers – the team noted that some man-made solar cells use a similar technique, in which light is bounced back and forth between layers of nanorods.

So, why the yellow? The yellow cuticle takes its coloration from the pigment xanthopterin, and it turns out that xanthopterin has the ability to change light into electrical energy. In other words, the brown areas trap the light, while the yellow areas allow it to be turned into energy.

To prove their theory, the team made a dye-sensitized solar cell, which used xanthopterin as a light-harvesting molecule. While it only had a conversion efficiency of 0.335 percent, it still did work, and could pave the way for further advances in the field.

The research was recently published in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

Via BBC Earth News

Source: http://www.gizmag.com/hornet-harvests-electricity-from-sunlight/17194/?utm_source=PESWiki.com