RECYCLED NEWS

Arrests in Critical Mass bike ride near Olympic Park

Joel Benjamin, who has been on several Critical Mass bike rides previously, said: "Usually there is a light police presence.

"[On Friday, the day of the London Olympics opening ceremony,] there were far more police than I've seen before."

He and Mr White said police used a sound system to tell cyclists there were restrictions placed on the ride but not what it meant.

Mr Benjamin, who was not arrested, said: "Basically, they didn't want us to go north of the river. I saw several cases of the police being aggressive and physical, dragging people off their bikes to the ground.

"I guess there were people there who are against the Olympics, but Critical Mass is really a celebration of cycling, there was no need to get so heavy handed."

GUN LOVE

Mass shootings in the US since 1990

The recent massacre at a movie theatre in Colorado was the latest in a long series of mass shootings in the United States.

The map shows the locations of some of America's worst shooting attacks since 1990.

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Capitalism's "Sacrifice Zones": Communities Destroyed for Profit

"It's the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings... And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state."

THE QUICKENING

Greenland ice sheet melts at unprecedented rate

 

Scientists at Nasa admitted they thought satellite readings were a mistake after images showed 97% surface melt over four days

 

The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.

 

The rapid melting over just four days was captured by three satellites. It has stunned and alarmed scientists, and deepened fears about the pace and future consequences of climate change.

SPEED OF LIGHT

Researchers were able to twist together eight different beams of visible light using OAM resulting in 320GB/s data transmission. Roughly seven Blu-ray movies per second.

Twisting light signals into a vortex for fast wireless connection

By twisting radio waves into a threaded vortex, an international team of researchers has beamed data through the air at 2.5 terabits per second, creating what has to be the fastest wireless network ever created. Moreover, the technique used to create this effect has no real theoretical ceiling, ExtremeTech reports. That means - in theory - that an infinite number of these vortex beams could be threaded together to add infinite capacity to conventional transmission protocols.

These new, high-capacity vortex beams tap a characteristic known as orbital angular momentum (OAM). Right now, conventional transmission protocols like Wi-Fi or LTE modulate the spin angular momentum (SAM) but not the OAM. You can think of SAM as the spin of a signal, like a bullet (or a tightly spiraling football) twisting as it carves a direct path through the air. So to borrow ExtremeTech's analogy, if SAM is the earth rotating on its axis, then OAM is its movement around the sun - not just rotation, but actual movement in space.

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Radioactive polonium found in Arafat's clothes

New radiation tests on the clothes and belongings of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat have led to speculation he died from poisoning by polonium.

Dr Francois Bochud, the head of the Institute of Radiation Physics at Lausanne in Switzerland says his team measured an unexplained, elevated level of unsupported polonium-210.

"The conclusion was that we did find some significant polonium that was present in these samples," he told Al Jazeera.

Mr Arafat's death at the age of 75 in a French hospital was surrounded by mystery and allegations he had been poisoned.

Litvinenko

Polonium was used to kill Russian former spy turned Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, who died in 2006 after drinking tea laced with the radioactive substance at a London hotel.

"If we take the scenario of Mr Litvinenko, one gigabecquerel at the beginning would come to about 10 millibecquerel," Dr Bochud told Al Jazeera. "What was astonishing in our case was that we found values in the samples of Mr Arafat that were in the same order of magnitude."

Al Jazeera's documentary claims unsupported polonium is the kind made in a nuclear reactor and even the tiniest amount, not even visible to the naked eye, is enough to kill.