Arizona lawmakers appear close to sending to Gov. Jan Brewer a tea party-backed bill that proponents say would stop a United Nations takeover conspiracy but that critics claim could end state and cities’ pollution-fighting efforts and even dismantle the state unemployment office.

A final legislative vote is expected Monday on a bill that would outlaw government support of any of the 27 principles contained in the 1992 United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, also sometimes referred to as Agenda 21.

Senate Bill 1507 was passed by the state Senate last month and received an initial House affirmation Wednesday. It is sponsored by state Sen. Judy Burges, R-Sun City West, who also sponsored a state birther bill that Brewer vetoed last year.

“The bill is designed to protect the rights of Arizona citizens and prevent encroachment on those rights by international institutions,” Burges told msnbc.com in an email. ”We have three branches of government and when one branch preempts the process through executive orders, the balance of power is lost in the process. It is that simple — no more, no less.”

At a March 15 hearing on the bill, Burges said an executive order signed by then-President Bill Clinton in 1993 started the implementation of Agenda 21 after the Senate refused to pass a treaty ratifying it.

“Any way you want to describe it, Agenda 21 is a direct attack on the middle class and working poor” through “social engineering of our citizens” in “every aspect” of their lives,” she told the hearing.

But House Minority Leader Chad Campbell, D-Phoenix, has a different view.

“It’s the most poorly crafted bill in this state,” Campbell told msnbc.com. “It’s so broad and overreaching, we’re not sure what it could impact.”

Among the U.N. declaration’s non-binding principles are calls for sustainable development, environmental protection, eradicating poverty, eliminating unsustainable production and consumption patterns, economic growth and the participation of women in government decisions.

“We wouldn’t be able to use CFL light bulbs in state buildings because that would be considered energy efficiency,” Campbell said.

Campbell also said that the state’s Economic Security Department, which handles unemployment and welfare benefits, could be outlawed because it has to do with eradicating poverty.

Also, Arizona universities have sustainability programs that could be banned if the bill becomes law, Campbell warned.

Arizona State University has a School of Sustainability, Northern Arizona University offers a master’s in sustainable communities, and the University of Arizona has an environment and sustainability portal.

Brewer, who last spring vetoed Burges’ bill to require presidential candidates to prove their U.S. citizenship, typically does not comment on legislation until it reaches her desk, her spokesperson told msnbc.com Thursday.

About the Rio declaration, SB1507 says “the United Nations has enlisted the support of numerous independent, shadow organizations to surreptitiously implement this agenda around the world.”

Rep. Terri Proud, R-Tucson, told supporters in an email that the U.N. declaration “will take away our rights as Americans by allowing the United Nations to mandate laws on our soil,” the AzCapitolTimes.com reported. “It’s very real and it is happening.”

The Times also reported that during House debate Wednesday, Rep. Jack Harper, R-Surprise, said the declaration is connected to the “occult” of sustainability.

“The tea party and conspiracy theorists run the state now, Campbell told msnbc.com.

The Berkeley team will present its findings at the Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics (CLEO: 2012), to be held May 6-11 in San Jose, Calif.

“What we demonstrated is that the better a solar cell is at emitting photons, the higher its voltage and the greater the efficiency it can produce,” says Eli Yablonovitch, principal researcher and UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering.

Since 1961, scientists have known that, under ideal conditions, there is a limit to the amount of electrical energy that can be harvested from sunlight hitting a typical solar cell. This absolute limit is, theoretically, about 33.5 percent. That means that at most 33.5 percent of the energy from incoming photons will be absorbed and converted into useful electrical energy.

Yet for five decades, researchers were unable to come close to achieving this efficiency: as of 2010, the highest anyone had come was just more than 26 percent. (This is for flat-plate, “single junction” solar cells, which absorb light waves above a specific frequency. “Multi-junction” cells, which have multiple layers and absorb multiple frequencies, are able to achieve higher efficiencies.)

More recently, Yablonovitch and his colleagues were trying to understand why there has been such a large gap between the theoretical limit and the limit that researchers have been able to achieve. As they worked, a “coherent picture emerged,” says Owen Miller, a graduate student at UC Berkeley and a member of Yablonovitch’s group. They came across a relatively simple, if perhaps counterintuitive, solution based on a mathematical connection between absorption and emission of light.

“Fundamentally, it’s because there’s a thermodynamic link between absorption and emission,” Miller says. Designing solar cells to emit light — so that photons do not become “lost” within a cell — has the natural effect of increasing the voltage produced by the solar cell. “If you have a solar cell that is a good emitter of light, it also makes it produce a higher voltage,” which in turn increases the amount of electrical energy that can be harvested from the cell for each unit of sunlight, Miller says.

The theory that luminescent emission and voltage go hand in hand is not new. But the idea had never been considered for the design of solar cells before now, Miller continues.

This past year, a Bay area-based company called Alta Devices, co-founded by Yablonovitch, used the new concept to create a prototype solar cell made of gallium arsenide (GaAs), a material often used to make solar cells in satellites. The prototype broke the record, jumping from 26 percent to 28.3 percent efficiency. The company achieved this milestone, in part, by designing the cell to allow light to escape as easily as possible from the cell — using techniques that include, for example, increasing the reflectivity of the rear mirror, which sends incoming photons back out through the front of the device.

Solar cells produce electricity when photons from the Sun hit the semiconductor material within a cell. The energy from the photons knocks electrons loose from this material, allowing the electrons to flow freely. But the process of knocking electrons free can also generate new photons, in a process called luminescence. The idea behind the novel solar cell design is that these new photons — which do not come directly from the Sun — should be allowed to escape from the cell as easily as possible.

“The first reaction is usually, why does it help [to let these photons escape]?” Miller says. “Don’t you want to keep [the photons] in, where maybe they could create more electrons?” However, mathematically, allowing the new photons to escape increases the voltage that the cell is able to produce.

The work is “a good, useful way” of determining how scientists can improve the performance of solar cells, as well as of finding creative new ways to test and study solar cells, says Leo Schowalter of Crystal IS, Inc. and visiting professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who is chairman of the CLEO committee on LEDs, photovoltaics, and energy-efficient photonics.

Yablonovitch says he hopes researchers will be able to use this technique to achieve efficiencies close to 30 percent in the coming years. And since the work applies to all types of solar cells, the findings have implications throughout the field.

In a study published online April 15 in Nature Medicine, a team led by Sam Gambhir, MD, PhD, professor and chair of radiology, showed that the minuscule nanoparticles engineered in his lab homed in on and highlighted brain tumors, precisely delineating their boundaries and greatly easing their complete removal. The new technique could someday help improve the prognosis of patients with deadly brain cancers.

About 14,000 people are diagnosed annually with brain cancer in the United States. Of those cases, about 3,000 are glioblastomas, the most aggressive form of brain tumor. The prognosis for glioblastoma is bleak: the median survival time without treatment is three months. Surgical removal of such tumors — a virtual imperative whenever possible — prolongs the typical patient’s survival by less than a year. One big reason for this is that it is almost impossible for even the most skilled neurosurgeon to remove the entire tumor while sparing normal brain.

“With brain tumors, surgeons don’t have the luxury of removing large amounts of surrounding normal brain tissue to be sure no cancer cells are left,” said Gambhir, who is the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor for Clinical Investigation in Cancer Research and director of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford. “You clearly have to leave as much of the healthy brain intact as you possibly can.”

This is a real problem for glioblastomas, which are particularly rough-edged tumors. In these tumors, tiny fingerlike projections commonly infiltrate healthy tissues, following the paths of blood vessels and nerve tracts. An additional challenge is posed by micrometastases: minuscule tumor patches caused by the migration and replication of cells from the primary tumor. Micrometastases dotting otherwise healthy nearby tissue but invisible to the surgeon’s naked eye can burgeon into new tumors.

Although brain surgery today tends to be guided by the surgeon’s naked eye, new molecular imaging methods could change that, and this study demonstrates the potential of using high-technology nanoparticles to highlight tumor tissue before and during brain surgery.

The nanoparticles used in the study are essentially tiny gold balls coated with imaging reagents. Each nanoparticle measures less than five one-millionths of an inch in diameter — about one-sixtieth that of a human red blood cell.

“We hypothesized that these particles, injected intravenously, would preferentially home in on tumors but not healthy brain tissue,” said Gambhir, who is also a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute. “The tiny blood vessels that feed a brain tumor are leaky, so we hoped that the spheres would bleed out of these vessels and lodge in nearby tumor material.” The particles’ gold cores, enhanced as they are by specialized coatings, would then render the particles simultaneously visible to three distinct methods of imaging, each contributing uniquely to an improved surgical outcome.

One of those methods, magnetic resonance imaging, is already frequently used to give surgeons an idea of where in the brain the tumor resides before they operate. MRI is well-equipped to determine a tumor’s boundaries, but when used preoperatively it can’t perfectly describe an aggressively growing tumor’s position within a subtly dynamic brain at the time the operation itself takes place.

The Gambhir team’s nanoparticles are coated with gadolinium, an MRI contrast agent, in a way that keeps them stably attached to the relatively inert spheres in a blood-like environment. (In a 2011 study published in Science Translational Medicine, Gambhir and his colleagues showed in small animal models that nanoparticles similar to those used in this new study, but not containing gadolinium, were nontoxic.)

A second, newer method is photoacoustic imaging, in which pulses of light are absorbed by materials such as the nanoparticles’ gold cores. The particles heat up slightly, producing detectable ultrasound signals from which a three-dimensional image of the tumor can be computed. Because this mode of imaging has high depth penetration and is highly sensitive to the presence of the gold particles, it can be useful in guiding removal of the bulk of a tumor during surgery.

The third method, called Raman imaging, leverages the capacity of certain materials (included in a layer coating the gold spheres) to give off almost undetectable amounts of light in a signature pattern consisting of several distinct wavelengths. The gold cores’ surfaces amplify the feeble Raman signals so they can be captured by a special microscope.

To demonstrate the utility of their approach, the investigators first showed via various methods that the lab’s nanoparticles specifically targeted tumor tissue, and only tumor tissue.

Next, they implanted several different types of human glioblastoma cells deep into the brains of laboratory mice. After injecting the imaging-enhancing nanoparticles into the mice’s tail veins, they were able to visualize, with all three imaging modes, the tumors that the glioblastoma cells had spawned.

The MRI scans provided good preoperative images of tumors’ general shapes and locations. And during the operation itself, photoacoustic imaging permitted accurate, real-time visualization of tumors’ edges, enhancing surgical precision.

But neither MRI nor photoacoustic imaging by themselves can distinguish healthy from cancerous tissue at a sufficiently minute level to identify every last bit of a tumor. Here, the third method, Raman imaging, proved crucial. In the study, Raman signals emanated only from tumor-ensconced nanoparticles, never from nanoparticle-free healthy tissue. So, after the bulk of an animal’s tumor had been cleared, the highly sensitive Raman-imaging technique was extremely accurate in flagging residual micrometastases and tiny fingerlike tumor projections still holed up in adjacent normal tissue that had been missed on visual inspection. This, in turn, enabled these dangerous remnants’ removal.

“Now we can learn the tumor’s extent before we go into the operating room, be guided with molecular precision during the excision procedure itself and then immediately afterward be able to ‘see’ once-invisible residual tumor material and take that out, too,” said Gambhir, who suggested that the nanoparticles’ propensity to heat up on photoacoustic stimulation, combined with their tumor specificity, might also make it possible for them to be used to selectively destroy tumors. He also expressed optimism that this kind of precision could eventually be brought to bear on other tumor types.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, the Ben and Catherine Ivy Foundation, the Canary Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation.

Even though the overall level of violence has dropped, escalating regime attacks over the weekend raised new doubts about President Bashar Assad’s commitment to a plan by special envoy Kofi Annan to end 13 months of violence and launch talks on Syria’s political future.

Assad accepted the truce deal at the prodding of his main ally, Russia, but his compliance has been limited. He has halted shelling of rebel-held neighborhoods, with the exception of Homs, but ignored calls to pull troops out of urban centers, apparently for fear of losing control over a country his family has ruled for four decades. Rebel fighters have also kept up attacks, including shooting ambushes.

The international community hopes U.N. observers will be able to stabilize the cease-fire, which formally took effect Thursday. A six-member advance team of U.N. observers headed to Damascus on Sunday, a day after an unanimous U.N. Security Council approved such a mission. A larger team of 250 observers requires more negotiations between the U.N. and the Syrian government next week.

With Assad seen as a reluctant participant in Annan’s plan, the observers’ success will depend on how much access they can negotiate in Syria and how quickly the team can grow to a full contingent, analysts said.

The Security Council demanded freedom of movement for the U.N. team, but the regime could try to create obstacles; the failure of an Arab League observer mission earlier this year was blamed in part on regime restrictions imposed on the visitors.

“This will be a serious cat-and-mouse game between the government and the U.N. for weeks to come,” George Lopez, a professor of peace studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana said of the new observer mission. Buying time is in Assad’s interest, he said.

However, a reassuring presence of monitors could also enable Syria’s opposition to return to staging mass marches, common in the early days of the anti-Assad uprising that erupted in March 2011. In response to a violent regime crackdown on such protests, the turnout for weekly anti-regime marches has decreased. The opposition resorted more and more to armed attacks in recent months. By returning to peaceful protests, it would be able to regain some of the moral high ground it lost as the conflict became increasingly violent.

Since the cease-fire began, each side has accused the other of violations.

Syria’s state-run news agency SANA has reported rebel attacks targeting checkpoints and army officers, while opposition activists said regime troops and their allied Shabiha militiamen continued arrest raids and mistreatment of those in detention.

The city of Homs, Syria’s third-largest, was the main flashpoint of violence again Sunday. The city had been battered by daily regime shelling for three weeks before the cease-fire, and shelling resumed late Friday, less than 48 hours after the truce took effect, residents said.

“What cease-fire? There’s an explosion every five to six minutes,” a Homs-based activist, identified only as Yazan, said via Skype.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said two men and a woman were killed by shelling in Homs on Sunday, and that three more bodies were found in the city. Rami Abdul-Rahman, head of the group, said Sunday’s shelling was more intense than the attacks of the previous day.

Another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees, put the death toll in Homs at 11. It said the day started with a barrage of shells that fell at the rate of six each minute, shaking the neighborhood of Khaldiyeh for the second consecutive day.

In amateur videos posted by activists Sunday, explosions and gunfire could be heard as parts of Khaldiyeh were engulfed in gray smoke. Shells could be heard whistling overhead before crashing near residential buildings. A tree burst into flames after a shell exploded.

“Intense shelling on the neighborhood since early hours of the morning,” said a man narrating the video. “Where are the Muslims and Arabs?” he said, referring to the decision of the international community, including the Arab world, not to intervene directly in Syria as it did last year in Libya. “See the columns of fire rising from the district,” he wailed. “Mortar shells are falling on us while you watch.”

“If you saw Homs right now, you wouldn’t recognize it,” added Yazan, the activist, who only gave his first name for fear of regime retribution. “You walk around, and it’s not unusual to find dead people in cars on the street,” he said, describing rubble-strewn streets and badly damaged buildings.

Overall, the Observatory reported the deaths of 10 civilians Sunday, including the three killed in Homs, a shooting death near Damascus and the discovery of six bodies. The LCC put the death toll on the opposition side at 23. Since the start of the cease-fire, the daily death toll has been significantly lower than in the preceding weeks, when dozens were reported killed every day.

The regime has portrayed the uprising as a foreign-led conspiracy of criminals and Islamic militants, denying it has widespread popular support.

On Sunday, Syria’s official news agency reported several bombings and shootings by “armed terrorists” that it said killed a member of the security forces in the province of Idlib, two civilians in the central Hama region and a security guard in the southern Daraa district.

The U.N. observers are to arrive in Damascus late Sunday and will be “on the ground in blue helmets tomorrow,” said Annan’s spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi. He said the team will quickly grow to between 25-30, drawn from the region and elsewhere. However, the terms of deployment of the larger contingent of 250 still have to be negotiated, he said.

Annan’s peace plan says a truce and the deployment of observers must be followed by talks between the regime and the opposition about Syria’s political future. It’s the first peace initiative to have broad backing, including from Russia and China which shielded the regime from Security Council condemnation in the past.

Syrian officials said Foreign Minister Walid Moallem would arrive in China on Tuesday for a two-day visit. Last week, Moallem met with his Russian counterpart in Moscow.

Many remain skeptical about Assad’s intentions and said he’d like try to sabotage the peace plan whenever possible. Opposition leaders argue that if Assad were to comply fully, including by withdrawing troops and allowing peaceful political protests, he could quickly lose control and speed up his political demise.

“It appears that Assad will be able to finesse the situation by agreeing to cease-fires, using the period before the cease-fire takes effect to pummel the opposition strongholds, and then stonewall on negotiations once they begin,” said William Keylor of Boston University.

“Speed has been the main problem, the bottleneck, when it comes to creating perfect artificial photosynthesis,” says Licheng Sun, professor of organic chemistry at KTH.

But now, together with research colleagues, he has imitated natural photosynthesis and created a record-fast molecular catalyzer. The speed with which natural photosynthesis occurs is about 100 to 400 turnovers per seconds. The KTH have now reached over 300 turnovers per seconds with their artificial photosynthesis.

“This is clearly a world record, and a breakthrough regarding a molecular catalyzer in artificial photosynthesis,” says Licheng Sun.

The fact that the KTH researchers are now close to nature’s own photosynthesis regarding speed opens up many new possibilities, especially for renewable energy sources.

“This speed makes it possible in the future to create large-scale facilities for producing hydrogen in the Sahara, where there’s an abundance of sunshine. Or to attain much more efficient solar energy conversion to electricity, combining this with traditional solar cells, than is possible today,” says Licheng Sun.

He points to the problem of skyrocketing gasoline prices, and these advances with the rapid molecular catalyzers can in turn lay the groundwork for many important changes. They make it possible to use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into various fuels, such as methanol. And, technology can be created to convert solar energy directly into hydrogen. Licheng Sun adds that he and his research colleagues are working hard and pursing intensive research to make this technology reasonably inexpensive.

“I’m convinced that it will be possible in ten years to produce technology based on this type of research that is sufficiently cheap to compete with carbon-based fuels. This explains why Barack Obama is investing billions of dollars in this type of research,” says Licheng Sun.
He has conducted research in this field for nearly twenty years, more than half of that time at KTH, and adds that he and many other researchers see efficient catalyzers for oxidation of water as key to solving the solar energy problem.

“When it comes to renewable energy sources, using the sun is one of the best ways to go,” says Sun.

The research findings are of such importance that they have recently attracted the attention of the scientific journal Nature Chemistry.

The research pursued by Licheng Sun and his colleagues is funded by the Wallenberg Foundation and the Swedish Energy Agency. They collaborate with researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University, and, together with Professor Lars Kloo at KTH, they run a joint research center involving KTH and Dalian University of Technology (DUT) in China.

The Telegraph

If Kim Jong Un is planning on somehow opening up the dark anachronistic pit that is North Korea, things will get equally worse in the short term. In this writers opinion, the Arab Spring heralds the eventual end of all dictatorships around the world. This will probably not happen until around 2020, but I still believe that most dictatorship’s days are numbered, even if it takes until 2030. The most painful of these totalitarian implosions will probably be North Korea. While authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are falling apart at the seams because of an educated middle class that simply demands the dignity of either liberty or death, things aren’t quite the same in Pyongyang.

The North Korean people are still under enormous pressure as is the government, but when things fall apart, which they will eventually do, there will be millions of brainwashed North Koreans that are going to get very violent. It would be nothing short of a miracle for there to be a peaceful transition to democracy in North Korea. The North Korean military and state apparatus has been preparing for this since its founding in the dark days after WWII. Even if Kim Jong Un loses control, the regime will go down kicking and screaming. This will mean a very quick, but extremely violent war that will remind the world what warfare was like during the WWII years. The good news is that by the time 2020 – 2030 rolls around, the world will be unrecognizable and most people on earth will live free, but the birth of this new world will be incredibly painful, especially for those who are not yet living free. The most painful example of this impending dynamic will not be Iran, it will be North Korea.