Rejection is disturbing trend

It likely won't be the last. Already, Senate Republicans are threatening to hold up Obama's nominees to a number of posts overseeing elections, labor law and health care and in each case, they aim to kill the agency outright. Senate Republicans say refusing to confirm a nominee is the only recourse they have left after Democrats pushed through legislation without listening to GOP concerns about transparency and accountability. Part of the problem is that Democrats have "created so many new agencies without Republican input," said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. "There's a whole bunch of new nominees or confirmable spots to have a debate over."


By law, only the bureau's director can exercise the new powers granted under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act last year. Without one, the bureau can't regulate payday lenders, debt collectors and credit-reporting agencies, for example.

Confirmation battles in the Senate are nothing new, but the reasoning is. Never before had the Senate explicitly blocked a nominee to shut down an agency's business, says Don Ritchie, the Senate's official historian. "Nonsense," counters Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala. Both parties have routinely held up nominations for exactly that reason, he says. "The only thing different in this particular case is that it is completely transparent. … We are right here in the open." If your view is that an agency shouldn't exist, and so you're going to use your one vote against a nominee, that's fine. But using the filibuster to raise the bar to 60 (votes), not because they're awful people, but because you're trying to delegitimize an agency, that's very far over the line," says Norm Ornstein of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. The Senate hasn't filibustered Obama's nominees to the Election Assistance Commission, but they are stuck in committee with the same effect. The four-member commission has been two members short for a year now leaving it short of the three members required by law to conduct business. The remaining two members are leaving this month. Also, the executive director has left, and the general counsel is acting in his place. He, in turn, has been nominated to another federal post. If he leaves, there will be no one running the agency day-to-day. It's a "slow death," says Gracia Hillman, a former Democratic commissioner. "One by one by one the vacancies have been languishing and languishing and languishing," she says. Republicans have "attacked that agency every way they could." Rep. Gregg Harper, R-Miss., calls the EAC a "zombie agency" that continues to exist even after its original mission  to dispense $3.1 billion in federal election aid to states was accomplished by 2006. Since then, its staff has grown from 21 to as high as 37. It now has 31 full-time employees and a $16.2 million annual budget. The House has passed a Harper bill to kill the EAC directly. But the Obama administration supports the agency, saying it "continues to perform crucial statutory responsibilities" like voting machine certification, disabled access to polls and national voter registration. Obama has nominated three people to the commission, but they're stuck in a Senate committee. Those nominees, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said, are "very well qualified" but they should find another government job where they would have "something to do. The five-member National Labor Relations Board, which oversees labor law, already has two vacancies. Another seat will come open in January, because Obama named Craig Becker as a recess appointment and his term ends when the Senate adjourns. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the NLRB needs at least three members to decide cases so another vacancy would effectively shut it down. Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., has pledged to block all nominations to the board, even after the NLRB dropped its complaint against Boeing for attempting to open a factory in South Carolina, a non-union state. The Independent Payment Advisory Board, a cost-containment panel set up by last year's health care overhaul, is supposed to be up and running by 2014 with a 15-member board to recommend Medicare cost savings for an up-or-down vote by Congress.

how humans are able to

The next time you watch that guy on the dance floor do the robot to Mr. Roboto, his automatonic, jerky moves will speak to a surprising part of your brain: a region scientists thought was reserved for making sense of actions by others that you too are able to perform. New experiments challenge a common view of this “mirror system” by showing that it’s not just a copycat, but is able to respond to a much wider range of actions than what an observer can perform himself.

This broadened capacity of the brain system may help explain how humans are able to quickly and effortlessly understand other people’s (and robot’s) actions, study coauthor Emily Cross of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands said April 2 in a presentation at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. If you think about watching a gymnast at the Olympics, watching a break dancer, or even watching Star Wars or Wall-E, we see all sorts of actions and agents that we can’t readily map onto our own motor systems.” To see just how the mirror systems responded to unnatural movements, Cross and her colleagues scanned the brains of 22 people as they watched a video of a man performing a natural, fluid dance or a machinelike robot dance. Researchers thought that parts of the mirror system, which includes parts of the parietal lobe at the top back of the head and the premotor cortex just in front of that, would show higher activation in an fMRI scan when the subjects watched the natural dance. She and her team next tested whether the identity of the dancer made a difference by recording a video of a Lego figurine named Gresh, who performed the same dances as the original human dancer. Again, contrary to what the researchers expected, the mirror system regions in 23 new participants were more strongly activated by the robotic dance moves regardless of who was dancing. The find that a weird robot doing a weird dance can activate the mirror system runs contrary to the notion that it is able to respond only to things that a person can do himself. “This is a very seductive hypothesis, that we use our own motor systems to understand the actions of others,” Cross says. Nevertheless, the findings “do make a lot of sense,” said neuroscientist Lisa Aziz-Zadeh of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Figuring out just how the mirror system works will be “important for understanding the way we process individuals who differ from ourselves,” Aziz-Zadeh said. Seeing what happens when the brain is confronted with different types of dissimilarity, including race, personality, religion or body type, for instance will be important, she said.

Bioluminescent bacteria glow in the ocean

Bioluminescent bacteria glow in the ocean for the same reason roadside eateries display neon signs: They want to attract hungry diners. New laboratory experiments bolster the longstanding theory that marine bacteria light up to get themselves a free ride to other parts of the ocean in the digestive tracts of larger beasts, scientists from Israel and Germany report online December 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many deep-sea creatures, from bacteria to fish to squid, are bioluminescent — meaning they generate light inside their bodies through chemical reactions. Different organisms glow for different reasons; the anglerfish, for instance, can light up a lure to attract prey, while some plankton glow to signal possible danger when a boat or swimmer passes nearby. Bioluminescent bacteria live throughout the ocean, and may have several reasons to explain their built-in glow. More than three decades ago, researchers suggested that one such reason could be to mark the presence of a floating food particle, so that a passing fish would see it and eat it. But no one had tracked this idea all the way to its logical conclusion, until now. Margarita Zarubin, a graduate student at the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat, Israel, started with a type of luminescent bacteria, Photobacterium leiognathi, found 600 meters deep in the Red Sea. She put one bag of glowing bacteria at one end of a seawater tank, and at the other end she put another bag of bacteria that had a genetic change that kept the microbes dark. Shrimp and other small animals clustered around only the glowing bacteria. Next she let brine shrimp swim in water with the luminescent bacteria. After two and a half hours, the shrimp themselves began to glow from their microbial dinner. “We could see the luminescence from inside their guts,” says Zarubin, who did the work while at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and is now with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Then she dropped both glowing and dark shrimp into a flume so they were swept past a hungry cardinalfish; the fish ate only the luminescent shrimp. Finally, the scientists tested the fish feces, and found that the bacteria had passed unscathed through the fish guts and came out intact. The whole process spreads the bacteria through the water faster than they could move otherwise, Zarubin says. But in deep dark waters where food is scarce, the advantage of getting a snack probably outweighs the disadvantage of potentially being eaten, Zarubin says. Some animals have pigment in their guts that can block light emission as they digest glowing particles, says Michael Latz, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. Only when the animal pops out a glowing fecal pellet do the bacteria become visible again, signaling another creature to eat them and keep the microbes on the move. Such deep-sea bacterial recycling could be important for more than just understanding bioluminescence, Latz says. The guts of shrimp and other small marine creatures may serve as a highway for spreading bacterial pathogens throughout the sea, like the one that causes cholera.

Bigest ships

I remember seeing similar illustrations in some vintage popular science magazine, depicting a floating city concept in a truly mind-boggling way. Little did I think that I might live to see similar projects given serious consideration, and some virtually on the brink of being built.

According to the official site the projected "Freedom Ship" may look something like this: Imagine a mile-long stretch of 25-story-tall buildings stacked close to each other; now imagine that floating on the water.

"The Freedom Ship has little in common with a conventional ship; it is actually nothing more than a big barge...But what if this tremendous barge was assigned a voyage that required slowly cruising around the world, hugging the shoreline, and completing one revolution every 3 years?" There is even talk about making this city an independent country.


Incidentally, the "Freedom Ship" could also end up to be the largest man-made structure on Earth, which puts it in the same category as the Tower of Babel. It would be extremely vulnerable to some spectacular downfall, even if it were by some miracle actually built (the last update on their site is from February 2005, when everything still revolved around financing) For now we can just dream on, wistfully looking at the pictureNotice the similarity of the above concept with the 1928 model of an airport on top of a giant building! Los Angeles architects expected private planes to replace automobiles in a near future; hence this 300m-long roof-top airstrip:

Also, check out these futuristic "Airport Docks for New York" dreamed up by architect Harry B. Brainerd:

Misperception: "Freedom Ship" aircraft flight deck can accept 747 aircraft.
Facts: The largest aircraft this flight deck can accept are turboprop aircraft in the 38 to 40-passenger range. (Oh well, there goes the "wow" factor...)
More on this titanic undertaking here and
here, where you can also trace the evolution of its design.


2. More Cruise Ship Concepts:
some of them will dwarf any other ship in existence

- Kvaerner Masa-Yards' Super-Large Cruise Ship (on the left) and The Nova, a Panamax-Max ship displacing more than 100,000 GT (on the right):


- This article speaks about "Project Genesis" - Royal Caribbean's largest-ever cruise ship with capacity of 5,400 passengers:



To give you an idea of modern cruise ships' scale, here's a comparison with the Statue of Liberty:

The new liner (due sometime in 2009), code-named "Project Genesis", will dwarf the "Freedom of the Seas", measuring 220,000 tons (about 100,000 tons based on displacement — a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier comes in at about 97,000 tons)


3. The Biggest Ships Ever Constructed - Supertankers Extraordinaire!

The biggest ships ever constructed were four supertankers built in France at the end of the seventies, having a 555.000 DWT and a 414 meters length. They launched from the shipyard Chantiers de l'Atlantique at Saint Nazaire. The only larger ship was the super sized "Knock Nevis"; ex "Jahre Viking", ex "Seawise Giant", ex "Porthos", in 1981 (see entry in Part 2). However, the Batillus class had the greater gross tonnage per ship, and it could be argued that they were, in fact, larger than the Knock Nevis.

* Batillus, built in 1976, scrapped in 1985.
* Bellamya, built in 1976, scrapped in 1986.
* Pierre Guillaumat, built in 1977, scrapped in 1983.
* Prairial, built in 1979,
(also as "Hellas Fos" and "Sea Giant") scrapped in 2003