Scientists have been working to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion and energy gain in the laboratory for more than half a century. Ignition experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are now bringing that long-sought goal much closer to realization.

NIF's 192 giant lasers, housed in a ten-story building the size of three football fields, will deliver at least 60 times more energy than any previous laser system. NIF will focus more than one million joules of ultraviolet laser energy on a tiny target in the center of its target chamber—creating conditions similar to those that exist only in the cores of stars and giant planets and inside a nuclear weapon. The resulting fusion reaction will release many times more energy than the laser energy required to initiate the reaction.

Experiments conducted on NIF will make significant contributions to national and global security, could lead to practical fusion energy, and will help the nation maintain its leadership in basic science and technology. The project is a national collaboration among government, academia, and many industrial partners throughout the nation.

MIT OCW Celebrating a Decade of Open Sharing:
2001-2011

On April 4, 2001, MIT announced it would publish educational materials from all of its courses freely and openly on the Internet. Ten years later, OCW has shared materials from more than 2000 courses with an estimated 100 million individuals worldwide. Join us in celebrating the 10th anniversary of this groundbreaking effort.

» Read the 2001 announcement in the New York Times.
» Read news and reflections on 10 years of OpenCourseWare

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OCW's Next Decade: Reaching One Billion Minds

MIT's goal for the next decade is to increase our reach ten-fold: to reach a billion minds. We aspire by 2021 to make open educational resources like MIT OpenCourseWare the tools to bridge the global gap between human potential and opportunity, so that motivated people everywhere can improve their lives and change the world.

» Here's how

Human potential is universal; opportunity is not. MIT OpenCourseWare began with the vision that the teaching tools of the world's top learning institutions should be freely available to all humanity: to study, to share, to build upon.

In our first 10 years, MIT has been delivering on that vision. We've reached 100 million individuals to date, people with the ideas, talents and motivation to have enormous impact on their communities, given the opportunity to do so.

MIT's goal for the next decade is to increase our reach ten-fold: to reach a billion minds. We aspire by 2021 to make open educational resources like MIT OpenCourseWare the tools to bridge the global gap between human potential and opportunity, so that motivated people everywhere can improve their lives and change the world.

The Plan

How will we do this? First and foremost, we’ll continue to improve the depth and quality of our core publication, and to improve our site. In addition, we’ve identified four focus areas with the potential to help us reach our goal:

Placing OCW everywhere - We'll make OCW content easy to find, adapt OCW materials to distribution methods such as mobile phones, and develop new approaches to reaching under served populations.

Reaching key audiences - For more people to get the most out of OCW, we have to put more in. We'll customize OCW to meet the needs of people across a wide range of cultures and backgrounds.

Creating communities of open learning - We'll create an ecosystem for open learning that goes beyond content. Over the next decade, we'll take advantage of new technologies to ensure people can interact around OCW, increasing their understanding of the material.

Empowering educators worldwide - Educators are a key multiplier for us. By bringing OCW materials into their classrooms, they share our content with millions. We will strive to provide edu or cators everywhere with the tools they need to serve these students.

Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything @ http://ervinlaszlo.com/notebook/ or Amazon.com

 Presents the unifying world-concept long sought by scientists, mystics, and sages: an Integral Theory of Everything

• Explains how modern science has rediscovered the Akashic Field of perennial philosophy

• New edition updates ongoing scientific studies, presents new research inspired by the first edition, and includes new case studies and a section on animal telepathy

Mystics and sages have long maintained that there exists an interconnecting cosmic field at the roots of reality that conserves and conveys information, a field known as the Akashic record. Recent discoveries in vacuum physics show that this Akashic Field is real and has its equivalent in science’s zero-point field that underlies space itself. This field consists of a subtle sea of fluctuating energies from which all things arise: atoms and galaxies, stars and planets, living beings, and even consciousness. This zero-point Akashic Field is the constant and enduring memory of the universe. It holds the record of all that has happened on Earth and in the cosmos and relates it to all that is yet to happen.

In Science and the Akashic Field, philosopher and scientist Ervin Laszlo conveys the essential element of this information field in language that is accessible and clear. From the world of science he confirms our deepest intuitions of the oneness of creation in the Integral Theory of Everything. We discover that, as philosopher William James stated, “We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”   

Cultural Creatives 1.0 - The (R)evolution. Watch the Movie @

 http://culturalcreatives.cc/. Featuring many key figures from Europe and the U.S., this is the first documentary film to look with scientific thoroughness at the world of Cultural Creatives. It shows that a great mass of people think differently from the way propagated by the media and promoted by the establishment. By the end of the film it becomes evident that this huge mass, were it to become aware of its power, could change the world. Because Cultural Creatives are unstoppable and their number is continuously rising, the values they champion could soon become core values for human civilization generally.

Cultural Creatives are emerging without anybody organizing their presence, without anyone seeking to create political power from their existence, and without any group having any interest in them. They are emerging simply because in real historical development the growth of human consciousness can not be stopped, no matter how much today's establishments and intellectual elites try to ignore and even hide their appearance.

So they are all here, among and around us: 80 million Cultural Creatives in the United States and 120 million in Europe, all with a similar mindset -- the citizens of a new world. They are the ones who are really preparing the future and its new social structures for us, and are doing so right now. They are the ones who anticipate the future as an astonishing opportunity never before available to mankind throughout the whole course of its history here on earth. Their message: The time is ripe to take the shaping of social life into our own hands.

Frigyes Fogel
http://www.CulturalCreatives.CC