Mitrione repeatedly referred to Fox as a he and called her as "a lying, sick, sociopathic disgusting freak."
"Because she's not a he. He's a he," he said. "He's chromosomally a man. He had a gender change, not a sex change. He's still a man. He was a man for 31 years. Thirty-one years. That's a couple years younger than I am. He's a man. Six years of taking performance de-hancing drugs, you think is going to change all that? That's ridiculous.
"That is a lying, sick, sociopathic, disgusting freak," Mitrione said. "And I mean that. Because you lied on your license to beat up women. That's disgusting. You should be embarrassed yourself. And the fact that Florida licensed him because California licensed him or whoever the hell did it, it's an embarrassment to us as fighters, as a sport, and we all should protest that. The woman that's fighting him, props to you. I hope you beat his ass, and I hope he gets blackballed and never fights again, because that's disgusting and I'm appalled by that."
The UFC, which announced a fighter code of conduct in January, moved swiftly to suspend Mitrione and denounce his comments.
"The UFC was appalled by the transphobic comments made by heavyweight Matt Mitrione today in an interview on 'The MMA Hour.' The organization finds Mr. Mitrione?s comments offensive and wholly unacceptable and - as a direct result of this significant breach of the UFC?s code of conduct ? Mr. Mitrione?s UFC contract has been suspended and the incident is being investigated. The UFC is a friend and ally of the LGBT community, and expects and requires all 450 of its athletes to treat others with dignity and respect."
The exact length of Mitrione's suspension has yet to be released.
Americans are becoming more concerned about the reality of global warming, according to a new Gallup poll, though they're still not as worried about climate change as they have been in earlier years. ?
Fifty-eight percent of Americans say they worry a great deal or fair amount about global warming, up from 51 percent in 2011, but well below the 72 percent who said the same in 2000, according to Gallup.
The belief that people are contributing to the problem is also back on the rise, the survey found, with 57 percent of Americans saying global warming is caused by human activities, down from the high of 61 percent in 2007, but up from 50 percent in 2010.
A majority (54 percent) believes the effects of climate change are already taking hold, up from a recent low of 49 percent in 2011. And they're less cynical about the portrayal of global warming in the news. In 2010, 48 percent of Americans believed news about global warming was exaggerated, whereas 41 percent said the same this year. That's still higher than the long-term average of 36 percent, according to Gallup.
This year's survey found that 62 percent of Americans now believe scientists agree global warming is occurring. In 2008, 65 percent said the same, but that figure dropped to 52 percent in 2010. (In reality, most scientists agree the planet is warming and humans are the culprits.)
Why all the flip-flopping? ?Gallup pollsters suspect peaks in Americans' concern about global warming (the late 1980s, the late 1990s, 2006-2008) might correspond with effective campaigning to raise awareness about the issue, such as the release of Al Gore's 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Meanwhile, efforts by so-called global warming skeptics to sow doubt about climate change (recall the leaked "Climategate" emails of 2009) may have swayed public opinion at other times, particularly in the past few years.
After the 1997 Kyoto Protocol set targets for countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, the issue has become quite polarizing along political lines. Those with conservative views tend to be more skeptical about climate change.
A recent study presented in December at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union found that conservatives are more likely to accept that humans are altering the climate when they're told that most scientists agree on the subject, rather than when they're presented with supporting scientific evidence.
The Gallup poll was based on telephone interviews conducted March 7-10, with a random sample of 1,022 adults, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The polling agency estimated that the margin of error for the poll was 4 percentage points. The full results can be found on the Gallup website.
Follow Megan Gannon on Twitterand Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China has failed to use its influence to stop North Korea's warlike rhetoric against the United States and U.S.-backed South Korea, despite an escalating crisis that could trigger armed conflict by accident, U.S. lawmakers said on Sunday.
Republican Senator John McCain, a member of the Armed Services Committee, criticized China's "failure to rein in what could be a catastrophic situation," saying Beijing could step up pressure on Pyongyang by using its influence over North Korea's economy.
"China does hold the key to this problem. China could cut off their economy if they want to. Chinese behavior has been very disappointing," McCain said on CBS's "Face the Nation" program.
"More than once, wars have started by accident and this is a very serious situation," he added.
"South Korea would win. We would win if there was an all-out conflict. But the fact is that North Korea could set Seoul on fire. And that obviously would be a catastrophe of enormous proportions," McCain said.
Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat who has been a prominent critic of China's currency policy, said he agreed with McCain.
"The Chinese hold a lot of the cards here. They're by nature cautious. But they're carrying it to an extreme. It's about time they stepped up to the plate and put a little pressure on this North Korean regime," Schumer said on the same program.
North Korea has threatened war against the United States and the South in what analysts and U.S. politicians see as an attempt to wring concessions from the international community and shore up internal support for Pyongyang's 30-year-old leader, Kim Jong-un.
The senators' comments came as China, North Korea's sole financial and diplomatic backer, showed growing irritation with Pyongyang's vitriolic rhetoric toward the West.
Beijing has warned against "trouble making" on its doorstep in an apparent rebuke to North Korea, while Chinese leaders have spoken against provocative words and actions in the region.
On Sunday, the Foreign Ministry expressed "grave concern" and said China had asked North Korea to "ensure the safety of Chinese diplomats in North Korea, in accordance with the Vienna Convention and international laws and norms."
'BOILING POINT'
Meanwhile, the United States has postponed the long-scheduled test of its Minuteman III intercontinental missile to avoid what a defense official called "any misperception or miscalculation."
Former U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman told CNN on Sunday that it was unprecedented for Chinese President Xi Jinping to warn in a recent speech that no country "should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gain."
"It suggests to me, as I've watched the ratcheting up of frustration among Chinese leaders over the last many years, that they've probably hit the 212-degree boiling point as it relates to North Korea," Huntsman said.
The White House on Sunday had no immediate comment on recent Chinese statements.
But White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer told ABC's "This Week" program that North Korea is following a long-standing pattern of "provocative actions, bellicose rhetoric."
"The key here is for the North Koreans to stop their actions, start meeting their international obligations and put themselves in a position where they can achieve what is their stated goal, which is economic development," he said.
China also came under fire from Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a leading voice on foreign policy issues who also sits on the Armed Services Committee.
"I blame the Chinese more than anybody else. They're afraid of reunification. They don't want a democratic Korea next to China, so they are propping up this crazy regime. And they could determine the fate of North Korea better than anybody on the planet," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
(Reporting by David Morgan; Additional reporting by Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Eric Beech)
Contact: Martin Ebner mebner@student.ethz.ch 41-446-324-603 ETH Zurich
This release is available in German.
Mobile phone batteries that last longer, car batteries that enable you to drive further, storage that accumulates a lot of energy from wind and solar generators: many applications require better batteries. The research essentially focuses on three aspects here: researchers want to increase the energy density in other words store more energy in a smaller battery. They are also looking to improve the discharging and charging speed by changing and controlling the material, shape and size of the electrochemically active particles and the structure of the battery electrodes in a targeted fashion. And scientists are working on the durability of the battery in general by trying to understand the degradation mechanisms that shorten the life of batteries. Martin Ebner, a doctoral student from the group headed by Vanessa Wood, a professor at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, has been examining the issue of the discharging and charging speed. In order to understand what influences it, he has been researching the microstructure of the electrodes of commercially available and home-made lithium ion batteries. Knowing this also enables us to understand the charging and discharging mechanism better and endeavour to produce optimised electrodes with more efficient batteries in mind.
Hard-to reach microstructure scanned
"Until now, the microstructure has been neglected in battery research because it was difficult to access experimentally," says Ebner. He has managed able to fill this gap with the aid of synchrotron radiation x-ray tomography and Professor Marco Stampanoni's group, which specialises in working with this particular radiation.
"This radiation, which can be produced at the Swiss Light Source at the Paul Scherrer Institute, is very bright and spectrally pure. This allows many high-resolution experiments in a short space of time," says Ebner. It only took around five minutes to study a sample on the TOMCAT beamline as opposed to up to five hours on conventional devices. This meant that Ebner could x-ray many electrode material samples produced under different conditions.
Using the hundreds of gigabytes of data that the x-ray tomography generated, the electroengineer was ultimately able to reconstruct the three-dimensional electrode structure. His paper was recently published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials and the raw data of the sixteen cathodes studied deposited in a freely accessible open-source database.
Small particles on boundary layer
The computer reconstructions reveal that the electrodes comprise numerous particles of different shapes and sizes. While smaller particles appear on the edge of the cathode, larger ones are mostly present in the interior. Moreover, Ebner was also able to demonstrate that some particles can break under very high pressure during production. While this does not have much of an impact on the electrochemistry of the battery, it needs to be taken into consideration when simulating it on the computer, he stresses.
The size, distribution and configuration of the particles, however, have a major influence on a battery's discharging and charging speed. Smaller particles form a compact structure while the structure in large particles tends to be looser and thus provide more pore space. The porosity of the material ultimately determines the battery's energy density and the speed at which the lithium ions surge through the electrodes during charging or discharging.
The flow behaviour of the lithium ions can be described by what is known as tortuosity the value that indicates the degree of a structure's twistedness. To put it simply, the more twisted the path of the ions through the electrode, the more slowly the battery is charged or discharged and the greater the tortuosity.
Graphite plates hamper ion flow
While round to potato-shaped particles mostly have a positive influence on flow, plate-like ones such as those in the anode, the negative pole, provide unfavourable conditions for rapid charge transport. A lithium battery's anode is mostly made of graphite. This highly conductive material consists of wafer-thin plates that lie on top of one another like roof tiles. Depending on the direction from which the ions hit the graphite plates, the tortuosity can be very high. In order to flow around the tiles, long paths are required, which vastly reduces the discharging and charging speed. Lengthwise, however, the lithium ions cross the graphite without any major detours. The analyses reveal that graphite electrodes already exhibit direction-dependent differences in path length of over 300 per cent with a porosity of forty per cent.
The tortuosity of graphite electrodes might be improved through the use of round graphite particles. The drawback here is that up to seventy per cent of the valuable raw material is wasted during production one reason why many battery manufacturers still use plate-shaped graphite as an anode material.
Optimising established technique
Lithium ion batteries have been in use with more or less the same base materials since the 1980s. The materials can be processed industrially in large quantities and alternatives that are commonly found as raw materials on Earth are gradually catching on. In the long run, researchers want to understand how the microstructure of the electrodes is formed and how you can influence it positively. One idea is to rely on the self-organisation of the materials used. However, the criterion is and will remain whether the method is feasible and affordable for industry. "We mustn't forget that a battery is a mass product that needs to be producible in large quantities," says Ebner.
###
Literature reference:
Ebner M, Geldmacher F, Marone F, Stampanoni M, Wood V. X-Ray Tomography of Porous, Transition Metal Oxide Based Lithium Ion Battery Electrodes. Advanced Energy Materials 2013. Advance online publication, DOI: 10.1002/aenm.201200932
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Contact: Martin Ebner mebner@student.ethz.ch 41-446-324-603 ETH Zurich
This release is available in German.
Mobile phone batteries that last longer, car batteries that enable you to drive further, storage that accumulates a lot of energy from wind and solar generators: many applications require better batteries. The research essentially focuses on three aspects here: researchers want to increase the energy density in other words store more energy in a smaller battery. They are also looking to improve the discharging and charging speed by changing and controlling the material, shape and size of the electrochemically active particles and the structure of the battery electrodes in a targeted fashion. And scientists are working on the durability of the battery in general by trying to understand the degradation mechanisms that shorten the life of batteries. Martin Ebner, a doctoral student from the group headed by Vanessa Wood, a professor at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, has been examining the issue of the discharging and charging speed. In order to understand what influences it, he has been researching the microstructure of the electrodes of commercially available and home-made lithium ion batteries. Knowing this also enables us to understand the charging and discharging mechanism better and endeavour to produce optimised electrodes with more efficient batteries in mind.
Hard-to reach microstructure scanned
"Until now, the microstructure has been neglected in battery research because it was difficult to access experimentally," says Ebner. He has managed able to fill this gap with the aid of synchrotron radiation x-ray tomography and Professor Marco Stampanoni's group, which specialises in working with this particular radiation.
"This radiation, which can be produced at the Swiss Light Source at the Paul Scherrer Institute, is very bright and spectrally pure. This allows many high-resolution experiments in a short space of time," says Ebner. It only took around five minutes to study a sample on the TOMCAT beamline as opposed to up to five hours on conventional devices. This meant that Ebner could x-ray many electrode material samples produced under different conditions.
Using the hundreds of gigabytes of data that the x-ray tomography generated, the electroengineer was ultimately able to reconstruct the three-dimensional electrode structure. His paper was recently published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials and the raw data of the sixteen cathodes studied deposited in a freely accessible open-source database.
Small particles on boundary layer
The computer reconstructions reveal that the electrodes comprise numerous particles of different shapes and sizes. While smaller particles appear on the edge of the cathode, larger ones are mostly present in the interior. Moreover, Ebner was also able to demonstrate that some particles can break under very high pressure during production. While this does not have much of an impact on the electrochemistry of the battery, it needs to be taken into consideration when simulating it on the computer, he stresses.
The size, distribution and configuration of the particles, however, have a major influence on a battery's discharging and charging speed. Smaller particles form a compact structure while the structure in large particles tends to be looser and thus provide more pore space. The porosity of the material ultimately determines the battery's energy density and the speed at which the lithium ions surge through the electrodes during charging or discharging.
The flow behaviour of the lithium ions can be described by what is known as tortuosity the value that indicates the degree of a structure's twistedness. To put it simply, the more twisted the path of the ions through the electrode, the more slowly the battery is charged or discharged and the greater the tortuosity.
Graphite plates hamper ion flow
While round to potato-shaped particles mostly have a positive influence on flow, plate-like ones such as those in the anode, the negative pole, provide unfavourable conditions for rapid charge transport. A lithium battery's anode is mostly made of graphite. This highly conductive material consists of wafer-thin plates that lie on top of one another like roof tiles. Depending on the direction from which the ions hit the graphite plates, the tortuosity can be very high. In order to flow around the tiles, long paths are required, which vastly reduces the discharging and charging speed. Lengthwise, however, the lithium ions cross the graphite without any major detours. The analyses reveal that graphite electrodes already exhibit direction-dependent differences in path length of over 300 per cent with a porosity of forty per cent.
The tortuosity of graphite electrodes might be improved through the use of round graphite particles. The drawback here is that up to seventy per cent of the valuable raw material is wasted during production one reason why many battery manufacturers still use plate-shaped graphite as an anode material.
Optimising established technique
Lithium ion batteries have been in use with more or less the same base materials since the 1980s. The materials can be processed industrially in large quantities and alternatives that are commonly found as raw materials on Earth are gradually catching on. In the long run, researchers want to understand how the microstructure of the electrodes is formed and how you can influence it positively. One idea is to rely on the self-organisation of the materials used. However, the criterion is and will remain whether the method is feasible and affordable for industry. "We mustn't forget that a battery is a mass product that needs to be producible in large quantities," says Ebner.
###
Literature reference:
Ebner M, Geldmacher F, Marone F, Stampanoni M, Wood V. X-Ray Tomography of Porous, Transition Metal Oxide Based Lithium Ion Battery Electrodes. Advanced Energy Materials 2013. Advance online publication, DOI: 10.1002/aenm.201200932
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Hey, T-Mobile subscribers! Eager to get your mitts on the iPhone 5? Sure, the phone isn?t going to be available until April 12, the mobile carrier has begun taking pre-orders on the oh-so-popular smartphone.
It?s important to bear in mind that T-Mobile, a bit of an underdog?among?the major U.S. carriers, recently did away with mobile contracts altogether, in an attempt to draw in more customers, eager to take advantage of the coverage of a major carrier, with the flexibility to up and leave at any time.
Why is this important? Because if you really want the iPhone, you?re going to have to shell out between $580 and $780, the full price of the phones. But don?t worry, you won?t have to do it all at once. If you?re looking for a 16GB unit, you?ll only have to put down $100, and then pay $20/month for the next two years, until you pay off the phone. For the 32GB model, a down payment of $200 is required, and the 64GB phone will set you back $300 initially, both also requiring the same $20/month payment. Black and white options are available for all three variations.
And then, of course, you?ll have your monthly phone plan to pay.
We?re eager to see how well-received this will become. On the one hand, Apple fans are an extremely loyal group of people, and the idea of not being tied down by a contract is pretty appealing. On the other hand, the contracts aren?t so bad, particularly when it means paying a fraction of the cost for a phone.
Would you pay full price for an iPhone, just to escape the clutches of a contract?
TOKYO (Reuters) - Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda played down concerns his unprecedented burst of monetary stimulus would create asset-price bubbles even as it delivered an immediate pay-off in global markets, with government bond yields at a record low, the yen hitting a 3-1/2 year trough and stocks surging to multi-year highs.
The yen weakened past 97 per dollar on Friday for the first time since August 2009, a day after the BOJ vowed to inject about $1.4 trillion into the economy in less than two years in a dose of shock therapy to end two decades of deflation.
The Nikkei share average jumped as much as 4.7 percent, extending Thursday's 2.2 percent rise and breaking through 13,000 points for the first time since August 2008. The 10-year JGB yield fell as much as 12 basis points to a record low of 0.315 percent.
"We will be vigilant of the risk of a bubble. I don't think there's a bond or stock market bubble now and I don't see one emerging any time soon. But we will be vigilant of the risk," Kuroda told the lower house of parliament.
The BOJ's strategy to reach 2 percent inflation within two years was viewed as a radical gamble to revive the economy. It will buy about 7 trillion yen ($73 billion) of bonds per month, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of gross domestic product. By comparison, the U.S. Federal Reserve is buying $85 billion of bonds per month, about 0.6 percent the size of the economy.
The central bank will also increase purchases of exchange-traded funds by 1 trillion yen per year and real-estate trust funds by 30 billion yen per year.
"We think there is a risk of a bubble," said Hiroshi Shiraishi, senior economist at BNP Paribas Securities.
"If these types of asset purchases are going to work, then they work by distorting asset markets."
DEBT BUILD-UP
A falling yen risks upsetting other Asian exporters who may lose competitiveness, and leave Japan open to accusations it is covertly devaluing the currency. Emerging economies will also be concerned about the potential flood of inflows as investors borrow cheaply in yen and then invest elsewhere, as they have done with the U.S. Federal Reserve's quantitative easing.
The Fed and the Bank of England have also embraced large-scale bond purchases in an effort to boost growth, while the European Central Bank said on Thursday it would keep policy loose for as long as necessary to revive the struggling euro zone economy.
"Like other central banks, the BOJ will carefully watch asset price moves, job and wage conditions and other data in striving to achieve price stability," Kuroda said in testimony that was effectively a re-application for his job.
Kuroda's predecessor, Masaaki Shirakawa, was not due to step down until April 8, but decided to leave office in mid-March so the government could appoint a new governor and two deputies at the same time. A procedural quirk meant Kuroda was initially only appointed for the remainder of the Shirakawa's term, and now needs to be voted in again for a full five-year term.
The overhaul of monetary policy means the BOJ's monthly government debt purchases will total about 70 percent of new debt issued by the government. Purchases of this scale will do a lot to keep yields low, but it also raises concerns that the BOJ has basically agreed to bankroll fiscal spending.
At more than twice the size of its $5 trillion economy, Japan's public debt burden is already the worst among major economies. Politicians regularly talk about fiscal discipline, but have made little progress in trimming debt.
Moody's Investors Service said on Friday that while the Japanese government's borrowing costs are likely to remain very low over the next two years, there are concerns about whether domestic savings can finance future government debt.
When the BOJ announced its 2 percent inflation target in January, the government agreed to take steps to ensure sound fiscal policy. But so far, the government has been coy on the specific steps it will take to reign in debt.
"Based on the joint statement, the finance ministry must proceed with firm fiscal plans so as not to damage our relationship with the BOJ," Finance Minister Taro Aso said on Friday.
(Additional reporting by Dominic Lau and Tetsushi Kajimoto; Editing by John Mair)
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Public release date: 8-Apr-2013
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