Science & Technology
"We need a partner that has an agreement on industrial assembly, and KAMAZ has it," said Mercedes-Benz Russia CEO Jan Madeja in an interview with Vedomosti daily.
Daimler and the Russian truck maker already have a joint venture Daimler KAMAZ Rus that has a state subsidy on the import of auto components in return for increased capacity and localized production in Russia.
At present, the joint venture produces Mercedes-Benz and Fuso trucks, and is also constructing a factory to make bodies for trucks. Daimler has a 15 percent stake in KAMAZ.
Nine of Rosetta's instruments, including its cameras, dust collectors, and gas and plasma analysers, were monitoring the comet from about 35 km in a coordinated planned sequence when the outburst happened on 19 February.
"Over the last year, Rosetta has shown that although activity can be prolonged, when it comes to outbursts, the timing is highly unpredictable, so catching an event like this was pure luck," says Matt Taylor, ESA's Rosetta project scientist.
"By happy coincidence, we were pointing the majority of instruments at the comet at this time, and having these simultaneous measurements provides us with the most complete set of data on an outburst ever collected."
The data were sent to Earth only a few days after the outburst, but subsequent analysis has allowed a clear chain of events to be reconstructed, as described in a paper led by Eberhard Grün of the Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics, Heidelberg, accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The current liquid fuel engines used by rockets to get to space have reached their maximum capabilities, according to the FPI. Instead, a pulse-detonation engine that uses high thermodynamic efficiency will allow spacecraft to reach previously unattainable performance. It would also result in additional workload for rockets and the reduction of cost for orbital deliveries. "We took up the challenge - to prove the possibility to create a detonation in oxygen-kerosene rocket engines. And now we can firmly say that this is possible, and we know how to do it," Igor Denisov, the FPI's deputy director, said in comments on the successful tests.
Comment: In June 2008, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled Blackswift, which was intended to use this technology to reach speeds of up to Mach 6. However the project was reported cancelled soon afterward, in October 2008.
See also:
- Space success: Russia launches new Angara space rocket
- Sanctions apply only when they suit Western interests: Washington lifts ban on Russian rocket engines
- Pipe dream: Russia envisions asteroid-smashing rocket

A new piece of artwork by Sigalit Landau shows what happens when objects are submerged in the salty waters of the Dead Sea. The sparkly salt sculpture shown here was originally a black dress that was submerged in the Dead Sea for two months. Images of the project are on exhibit at the Marlobrough Contemporary until Sept. 3, 2016.
Artist Sigalit Landau submerged a 1920s-style long black dress in Israel's Dead Sea for two months in 2014. When the dress was lifted from the salty waters, it was a sparkling, crystalline sculpture formed from salt. The images capturing this chemical transformation are now on exhibit at the Marlborough Contemporary museum in London, England, until Sept. 3. [See Images of the Salt Crystal Wedding Dress]
Landau has been inspired by the Dead Sea's unique environment for past artwork, including salt crystal-encrusted lamps, a salty hangman's noose and a crystalline island made of shoes, according to her website.
The current exhibit uses a dress that is a replica of the long, black one worn by a character in the classic Hasidic Jewish ghost-story called "The Dybbuk." In that story, the bride, Leah, is possessed by the evil spirit of her dead suitor, who died before they could marry. The dress was worn during the 1920s production of the play.
"Over the years, I learnt more and more about this low and strange place. Still the magic is there waiting for us: new experiments, ideas and understandings. It is like meeting with a different time system, a different logic, another planet. It looks like snow, like sugar, like death's embrace; solid tears, like a white surrender to fire and water combined," Landau said in a statement.
'No one is safe': Expert warns of overdue high magnitude earthquakes along earth's major fault lines

Houses were swallowed by tsunami waves and burned in Natori, Miyagi Prefecture (state) after Japan was struck by a strong earthquake off its northeastern coast on March 11, 2011.
UTS Geotechnical and Earthquake Engineering senior lecturer Dr Behzad Fatahi said "no one in the world is safe" from the looming natural disasters of potentially apocalyptic proportions.
"There are a lot of magnitude 6-plus earthquakes overdue in the Middle East, India, China, Japan and the US," Dr Fatahi told news.com.au.
"There are some fault lines that have not released their energy for a while.
"There are at least 5-10 that are overdue, but we don't know when they're going to happen.
"The question is not will they be activated. The question is when."
Dr Fatahi said there was a "return period" for earthquakes and those that didn't strike within the expected time frame only came back stronger. He said an example of this was the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Nepal that left more than 8000 people dead in April last year.
"You expect a particular fault line will be activated every 100 years or 500 years," he said.
"If the period is longer we expect higher magnitude earthquakes ... looking at the history of some of those major fault lines, some are very overdue.
Energy from wind is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the world, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental and social research institution. This development of wind power has mostly taken place on a large scale, usually by utility companies providing power to a grid of millions of customers. That's because wind energy is most efficient when it's capturing very strong winds, more common in remote areas and at heights greater than 50 feet off the ground. Those turbines need to be as tall as a five-story building, and they take up a lot of horizontal room, too—several hundred feet per turbine, in many cases. They also require more maintenance than solar panels.
The findings, published in the US journal Science, could help experts learn more about the Earth's inner structure and improve detection of earthquakes and oceanic storms.
The storm in the North Atlantic was known as a "weather bomb," a small but potent storm that gains punch as pressure quickly mounts. Groups of waves sloshed and pounded the ocean floor during the storm, which struck between Greenland and Iceland.
Using seismic equipment on land and on the seafloor that usually detects the Earth's crust crumbling during earthquakes, researchers found something they had not detected before -- a tremor known as an S wave microseism.
Microseisms are very faint tremors. Another kind of tremor, known as P waves, or primary wave microseisms, can be detected during major hurricanes. P waves are fast-moving, and animals can often sense them just before an earthquake hits. The elusive S waves, or secondary waves, are slower, and move only through rock, not liquid. Humans feel them during earthquakes.
Getting drugs to where they need to be exactly when you want them is a challenge. Most drugs diffuse through the blood stream over time - and you're stuck with the side effects until the drug wears off.
Now, a team at the Interdisciplinary Center, in Herzliya, and Bar Ilan University, in Ramat Gan, both in Israel, have developed a system that allows precise control over when a drug is active in the body.
The group has built nanorobots out of DNA, forming shell-like shapes that drugs can be tethered to. The bots also have a gate, which has a lock made from iron oxide nanoparticles. The lock opens when heated using electromagnetic energy, exposing the drug to the environment. Because the drug remains tethered to the DNA parcel, a body's exposure to the drug can be controlled by closing and opening the gate.
Mind medicine
To get the DNA bots to respond to a person's thoughts, the team trained a computer algorithm to distinguish between a person's brain activity when resting and when doing mental arithmetic.
The team then attached a fluorescent drug to the bots and injected them into a cockroach that sat inside an electromagnetic coil. A person wearing an EEG cap that measures brain activity was then instructed either to do mental calculations, or rest. The cap was connected to the electromagnetic coil, switching it on when the man was calculating and off when he was resting. By examining when fluorescence appeared inside different cockroaches, the team confirmed that this worked.
The device, which is the size of a coffee cup saucer, focuses acoustic energy on a specific region of the brain, stimulating it. For the new study, it was aimed at the thalamus of a 25-year-old man recovering from a coma. The procedure took 10 minutes, during which the patient received ten 30-second stimulating impulses.
The Thalamus is a structure located between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain that acts as a relay for information. It processes signals from all senses, apart from smell, to other regions of the brain. In people suffering from reduced mental function after a coma, the thalamus typically performs worse than in healthy individuals. However, stimulating it with electrodes requires risky surgery, while medications can only target it indirectly.

The US Air Force has granted contracts to three research teams, with hopes that CubeSats could carry massive amounts of ionized gas to the ionosphere to create radio-reflecting plasma. An artist's impression of a CubeSat is pictured above
The US Air Force has granted contracts to three research teams to develop the technology needed to do this, with hopes that CubeSats could carry massive amounts of ionized gas to the ionosphere to create radio-reflecting plasma.
The ionosphere begins roughly 40 miles above the surface and becomes denser with charged particles at night, allowing signals to travel much farther.
Ground-based radio signals are limited by the curvature of Earth's surface, and those travelling more than about 44 miles are typically stopped if they aren't given a boost, according to New Scientist.












Comment: When scientists begin to embrace the winning Electric Universe theory, it will assist their understanding of outbursts, dramatic and rapid surface changes and sinkhole formations on comets; and they need not be 'puzzled' by the 'bright spots' on Ceres, the alignment of quasars won't seem so 'spooky', and the giant ice mountains and 'bizarre' terrain on Pluto may not be so 'perplexing'.
The Electric Universe model is clearly explained, with a lot more relevant information, in the book Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection by Pierre Lescaudron and Laura Knight-Jadczyk.