"There's no speed limit on the expansion and contraction of space," White said at the conference. "You can actually find a way to get around what I like to call the 11th commandment: Thou shall not exceed the speed of light."
It's the idea of space warps that inspired physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 to first theorize a mathematical model of a warp drive that would be able to bend space and time. While studying Alcubierre's equations, White decided to design his own retooled version of the Alcubierre Drive. His recently unveiled design has much less empty space than the first concept model, increasing its efficiency.
The warp drive that White's team has been working on would literally transcend space, shortening the distance between two points and allowing the craft to break the speed of light. This would be a spaceship with no speed limit.

The superstitious may want to steer clear of black cats this Friday the 13th, but venturing outside very early in the morning will be worthwhile--you'll be able to catch the spectacular full "honey moon" in the night sky.

The honey moon officially reaches its full moon phase at 12:13 a.m. EDT on Friday morning for eastern North America. But its honey hues will shine most brightly in the early evening.

With the sun's path across the sky at its highest during this month of the summer solstice, the moon is at its lowest, which keeps the lunar orb close to the horizon and makes it appear more amber than other full moons this year.

The amber colors are due to the scattering of longer wavelengths of light by dust and pollution in our atmosphere. "It is a similar phenomenon as seen at sunset, when sunlight is scattered towards the red end of the spectrum, making the sun's disk appear orange-red to the naked-eye," says astronomer Raminder Singh Samra of the H. R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver, Canada.

The most spectacular part of the so-called honey moon begins hours before midnight, due to an illusion by which the moon appears larger to sky-watchers when it's near the horizon than when it hangs high in the sky.

Notice that the recent articles refer to OLD news, recycling old inaccurate horror-stories, or are police-supported efforts.  Notice that many are not new research or experiments, but instead are meta-studies or meta-analysis.  These take OLD experiments and the reported data and reinterpret the old experiments to form "new" conclusions.  That means that the "new" information relies upon the quality of the old underlying experiments and upon the old underlying papers.  Then, they rely upon the paradigms overlaid on the old data to provide "new" material.  This second stage introduces additional room for bad science, bad logic, and underlying agendas to be put in the public eye.  Again, the sexy story controls, and the facts are treated as of no importance unless they add to the sexy story

Pacific Resources Partnership, Inc., a local developers-funded 527-class political action committee whose $3.6 million independent expenditure media campaign against former Hawaii Gov. Ben Cayetano was widely credited with having caused his loss in the 2012 Honolulu mayor's race, has agreed to a settlement with him regarding the defamation lawsuit he filed against the organization in the months just prior to his defeat.

(I'd link to the local article, but the Honolulu Star-Advertiser has a paywall.)

During the campaign, PRP had implied repeatedly on television and radio and in print that Cayetano had been the willing and corrupt recipient of nearly $1 million in illegal campaign contributions from foreign investors during his successful 1998 gubernatorial re-election campaign against then-Maui Mayor (and now former governor as well) Linda Lingle.

PRP's insinuations raised numerous eyebrows around town, including those of yours truly, for while Cayetano has a rather well-deserved reputation as a caustic and curmudgeonly individual, he was also well known to be a politician who was scrupulously honest, a man who spoke his mind to a fault and was a champion of public accountability.

But despite subsequent and numerous public statements repeatedly issued from State Campaign Spending Commission officials that the ads' claims were false and misleading, they continued to run until November 2012, and sad to say, they worked. The allegations ultimately had a very corrosive effect on Cayetano's public credibility as an honest broker and straight shooter. Formerly the frontrunner in the mayor's race, he subsequently lost to current Mayor Kirk Caldwell by 8 percentage points, and in polls afterward, voters who switched their support tended to cite those ads as the primary reason for their change of heart.

Monetary terms of the settlement were not released, per terms of the court agreement. But the real eye-opener, which was made public, is the requirement that PRP take out a full-page ad in the front section of in this coming Sunday's Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and also run prime-time TV spots on all major stations in the Honolulu market over the next week.

In those ads, PRP will admit publicly that they had "maliciously defamed" the former governor during the 2012 mayoral campaign with statements which were "knowingly untrue" -- those are the exact phrases to be used -- for the expressed purpose of causing his defeat in the 2012 mayor's race. Further, the ads will also include a public apology to Cayetano and his family for all the pain and suffering PRP's smear campaign caused them, in large part from the obvious damage to his public reputation, which even with this apology will probably still never be recovered fully.

(No public statement has yet been issued from the man who proved to be the primary beneficiary of the PRP smear campaign, Mayor Caldwell.)

PRP's leadership had first dismissed Gov. Cayetano's defamation suit when it was filed as nothing more than sour grapes from a nasty old man. Political observers asked why he was even bothering, and civil libertarians worried about the possible chilling effect the lawsuit might have on the right to free political speech. But today, the local scuttlebutt also has it that as part of the agreement, PRP's entire leadership team is to be fired, and the organization abolished. In a word: Good.

Congratulations to Ben Cayetano for standing his ground, and winning a big victory for common decency. As he said today, it is his wish that such outside spending groups will now think twice about what they say about other people, before they hit the campaign airwaves. One can only hope.

(Disclosure: PRP's executive director and his wife have long been a close friend of ours, going back 20 years. In 2011, he had approached me about a contract to do opposition research on Gov. Cayetano, but I summarily refused to even consider the offer. When those ads began airing the following year, I was shocked at what I saw and paid him a visit at PRP's offices, which are five floors upstairs from mine. I urged him to cease running them, because I thought they were potentially libelous and could get him into serious trouble personally. Likewise, this time he refused my entreaties, and those ads stayed up for the duration. He may have won that election, but he certainly lost the subsequent lawsuit, big-time, and may well have now rendered himself politically toxic and unemployable out here. Can't say that I didn't warn him.)

By John Ajvide Lindqvist

It was made into two good films.  The first Swedish one of the same title and an English language remake called Let Me In that was surprisingly good.   Either or both films are worth the time but if you saw either and enjoyed it you really should get the book.
It is soooooo much creepier and so much better and takes the story to places that could simply never be made into a movie.  Mostly dealing with the child vampires backstory which is hair raising.

Did not mean to hijack the World Cup thread with my entertainment musings.  Just killing time till the GoT season finale tonight!

Maybe I'm not remembering my reaction correctly, but it think I would have been fine with the Dexter finale if they had left off that last lumberjack scene, if they had left it open needed whether he lived or died, I could have accepted it. (I was not a critic of the Sopranos ending).  In this case with him definitely alive I think it  almost becomes too tempting for them too attempt a lame sequel at some point..

you don't look a day over 30

No street bears her name. No plaques mark where she lived. Although her mysterious smile has enchanted millions, Lisa Gherardini, born on June 15, 1479, is almost invisible in her hometown. After centuries of neglect, Florence is celebrating the 535th birthday of its most famous daughter with a festival this month. But who was the real woman everyone recognizes yet no one knows?

Mona (Madame) Lisa Gherardini descended from an ancient clan of Tuscan knights who lorded over a wide swath of Chianti before taking up residence (and arms) within the walls of Florence. The family -- among the wealthiest and most bellicose feudal warlords -- referred to their fierce temperament as Gherardiname or "Gherardini-ness."

By the time of Lisa's birth, the Gherardini glory had faded. Her first home was a converted wool shop on a squalid street in a working class neighborhood. Lisa's family eventually moved to rented rooms off Via Ghibellina, where her grandparents lived just steps away from Ser Piero da Vinci, father of the renowned artist.