China unveils ‘world’s fastest train link’ Full Story

BEIJING (AFP) – China on Friday unveiled what they see as the fastest in the world – a train that links the modern cities of Guangzhou and Wuhan always with an average speed of 350 km (217 miles) per hour of charge.

The super-high speed reduces the 1069 km long trip to three hours of driving and reduce the current travel time by more than seven and a half, the official Xinhua news agency.

Work on the project began in 2005 as part of expansion plans of a high-speed network linking Guangzhou, finally, a business center in southern China near Hong Kong, with its capital Beijing will have, Xinhua News Agency.

“The train journey is 394.2 kilometers per hour, is the fastest train service in the world,” said Zhang Shuguang, head of traffic at the Ministry of Railways, under the news’ Xinhua.

Operational testing for the service began in December and the connection is officially in operation when the first train would leave the eastern city of Wuhan on Saturday.......

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Underwear Bomber Renews Calls for Naked Scanners

After an alleged terrorist unsuccessfully tried to detonate his explosive underwear on a Christmas Day flight to Detroit, current and former American officials are now using the failed attack to push for more airport scanners to spot such explosives and a lot more.
The Transportation Security Administration in recent years has tried out a series of whole-body imagers to look for threats that typical metal detectors can´t find. These systems are the only way that smuggled explosives, like the one officials say was brought on the Christmas flight, can be reliably found.
You´ve got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren´t easy to get at, a former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told The Washington Post. It is s either pat-downs or imaging

The problem, privacy advocates say, is that a zap from one of the devices amounts to a digital strip search from a system designed to capture, record, and store detailed images of individuals undressed

TSA has worked with two basic technologies to upgrade its passenger screening systems. Millimeter-wave sensors emit radio frequencies, and measure the differences in radiated energy. The result is a detailed, 3-D image of the passenger that looks sort of like a photo negative.

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Taliban claims responsibility for bombing

The Taliban has claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing Wednesday that killed eight Americans believed to be CIA employees.
In a message posted on its Web site, the Taliban said an Afghan National Army soldier detonated his explosives-packed vest, killing 20 people and injuring 25 others.
A spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force's (ISAF) Joint Command would not comment on the claim that a soldier was involved, saying the force was still gathering information.
The Taliban routinely offers a higher casualty count, accounting for the discrepancy in their claim and the official death toll.

Pi calculated to 'record number' of digits

A computer scientist claims to have computed the mathematical constant pi to nearly 2.7 trillion digits, some 123 billion more than the previous record.
Fabrice Bellard used a desktop computer to perform the calculation, taking a total of 131 days to complete and check the result.
This version of pi takes over a terabyte of hard disk space to store.
Previous records were established using supercomputers, but Mr Bellard claims his method is 20 times more efficient.
The prior record of about 2.6 trillion digits, set in August 2009 by Daisuke Takahashi at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, took just 29 hours.
However, that work employed a supercomputer 2,000 times faster and thousands of times more expensive than the desktop, running Linux, that Mr Bellard employed.....