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REMEMBER: WATT IS THE UNIT OF POWER By   Dave Gershgorn   Posted  Yesterday at 9:47pm The Asahi Shimbun The LFEX petawatt laser. Researchers at Osaka University  are claiming  to have fired the most powerful laser in the world. The 2-petawatt (two quadrillion watt) pulse lasted just one picosecond (a trillionth of a second). For a rough comparison, in 2013, a 50 kilowatt (50,000 watt) laser  shot down a drone two kilometers away . Osaka's mega-powerful laser is called  LFEX , or Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments, and measures more than 300 feet long. While two petawatts is a formidable amount of power, the idea of a petawatt laser isn’t new. The United States has a few of their own, notably a  one-petawatt laser  at the University of Texas at Austin. Michael Donovan, associate director for the Texas Petawatt, says that it’s important to remember when talking about lasers of this size that, while the power ...

By   Bronnie Ware Wake Up World For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who  had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared.  I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their  lives. People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learnt never to underestimate someone’s capacity for growth. Some  changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as  expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually  acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they  departed though, every one of them. When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would  do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the  most common five: 1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the  life others expected of me. This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that...

John Kerry and Javad Zarif 15th July 2015 at 3:25 pm   Opinion Posted by  5Pillars Veteran Arab journalist  Abdel Bari Atwan  argues that Iran and the US will gain much from the historic nuclear deal signed yesterday, while Israel and the Gulf monarchies stand to lose. Yesterday, in Vienna, Iran and the 5+1 world powers reached agreement on a historic deal which will see Iran guarantee to limit its nuclear capabilities in exchange for crippling sanctions against it being lifted. The immediate results, not related to the content of the agreement nor its terms and disclaimers, were as follows: First: a mile-wide grin on the face of Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iranian Foreign Minister who even cracked a joke, drawing wary laughter from his western counterparts. Second: an hysterical, furious outburst from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who immediately declared the agreement to be a catastrophic “historic mistake for the world.”...

AP Photo Shane Harris DEVIL’S DUE 07.14.15 7:00 PM ET John Kerry denied it. So did Iran’s foreign minister. But the world’s most notorious spymaster stands to benefit—big time—from the accord with Tehran. Among the big winners in the  agreement  to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, count a notorious and shadowy Iranian general who helped Shiite militias in Iraq kill American soldiers and who has come to the rescue of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. You’ll find his name,  Qasem Soleimani , buried in an annex ( PDF ) of the unremittingly dense  Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action , along with some of his colleagues from the senior ranks of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as its various divisions and corporate fronts. They’ll all be granted some sanctions relief as part of the U.S.-brokered deal to  curtail Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon . That Soleimani—who runs Iran’s elite paramilitary and covert operations group, the Quds F...

A worker supervises a copper pipe spool at NEC's OCC's plant in Kitakyushu, Japan, where cable for the Google-backed FASTER transpacific Internet cable is being manufactured.  Credit:  Tim Hornyak By  Tim Hornyak   IDG News Service   |   Jul 14, 2015  Undersea cables carry virtually all transoceanic Internet data these days, replacing satellites as the preferred medium. Google and some telecom companies have invested in one of them, called FASTER, that will stretch 9,000 kilometers (5,592 miles) between the U.S. and Japan and is due to go into operation next year. With six fiber-pairs in the cable, each carrying 100 wavelengths at 100 gigabits per second, it will have a peak capacity of 60 terabits per second (Tbps). That's about  10 million times faster than a standard cable modem . Here are some facts about undersea cables -- and about the FASTER system in particular. 1. About 99% of all transoceanic Int...