X-Border Incursions: Pakistan arrests 11 Iranian Revolutionary Guards

posted by GeoT

QUETTA, Pakistan – Pakistani police arrested 11 Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers Monday for illegally entering the country, amid tensions over a recent suicide attack that Tehran alleges was carried out by militants backed by Pakistani intelligence officials.
The 11 officers were taken into custody in Mashkel, close to the countries’ border in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, police officer Dadur Raman said. He said officers were interrogating the men and had seized two vehicles.
Another security official said the guards had no travel documents.
“We need to probe that,” said Murtaza Baig, a spokesman for the paramilitary border force.

Iranian Revolutionary Guard

Ties between Pakistan and Iran have been strained since an Oct. 18 suicide attack killed 15 members of the powerful Revolutionary Guard, including five senior commanders, and at least 27 others in the town of Pishin on the Iranian side of the border.
Iranian officials blamed the Sunni rebel group known as Jundallah, or Soldiers of God, in the attack. Iran’s president and the Guard chief have since publicly accused Pakistan’s intelligence service of supporting Jundallah.
Pakistan’s president met with Iran’s interior minister in Islamabad on Sunday to discuss the attack.

President Asif Ali Zardar

President Asif Ali Zardari vowed to cooperate in capturing any attackers and said those behind the blasts “were the enemies of both countries.”
Other Pakistani officials have denied Iranian charges that the leader of Jundallah, Abdulmalik Rigi, is in Pakistan, saying he is in Afghanistan.
Pakistan has been accused of past and ongoing support of militant activities in two of its other neighboring countries, Afghanistan and India, greatly complicating relations with both of them. Tensions with another regional power would only add to the problems facing the country as it battles al-Qaida and the Taliban within its borders.

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Science Faction: Shrimp’s eye points way to better DVDs

posted by GeoT
Shrimp use remarkable light-sensitive cells that rotate the plane of polarization in light as it travels through the eye.

LONDON (Reuters) – The amazing eyes of a giant shrimp living on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef could hold the key to developing a new type of super high-quality DVD player, British scientists said on Sunday.

Mantis Shrimp

Mantis shrimps, dubbed “thumb splitters” by divers because of their vicious claws, have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom.
They can see in 12 primary colors, four times as many as humans, and can also detect different kinds of light polarization — the direction of oscillation in light waves.
Now a team at the University of Bristol have shown how the shrimps do it, using remarkable light-sensitive cells that rotate the plane of polarization in light as it travels through the eye.
Manmade devices do a similar thing in DVD and CD players but they only work well for one color, while the shrimp’s eye operates almost perfectly across the whole visible spectrum from near ultra-violet to infra-red.
Transferring the same multi-color ability into a DVD player would result in a machine capable of handling far more information than a conventional one.
“The mechanism we have found in this eye is unknown to human synthetic devices. It works much, much better than any attempts that we’ve made to construct a device,” researcher Nicholas Roberts told Reuters.
He believes the “beautifully simple” eye system, comprising cell membranes rolled into tubes, could be mimicked in the lab using liquid crystals.
Details of the mantis shrimp research were published in the journal Nature Photonics.
Just why the mantis shrimp needs such a rarefied level of vision is unclear, although researchers suspect it is to do with food and sex.

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It’s the EYES, the EYES….

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