New Material Is A Breakthrough In Magnetism; Step Closer to 'Magnetic Monopole'

Physicists have created a structure that acts like a single pole of a magnet -- a step closer to isolating a 'magnetic monopole.' (Credit: Image courtesy of Imperial College London)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2010) — Researchers from Imperial College London have created a structure that acts like a single pole of a magnet, a feat that has evaded scientists for decades.

The researchers say their new Nature Physics study takes them a step closer to isolating a 'magnetic monopole.'

Read more ....

Navy SEALs Recognize Anger More Quickly

From Live Science:

The brains of elite soldiers can respond faster to signs of anger than normal, which could help them detect threats and make the difference between life and death when under fire.

The differences in the brains of those who excel in extreme circumstances are poorly understood. Such research might help improve military performance, explained neuroscientist Alan Simmons at the University of California at San Diego.

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Body Heat: Sweden's New Green Energy Source

Commuters at Stockholm's Central station. Jim Stenman

From Time Magazine:

It's 7:30 a.m. on a wintry morning in downtown Stockholm and a sea of Swedes are flooding Central Station to catch a train to work. The station is toasty thanks to the busy shops and restaurants and the body heat being generated by the 250,000 commuters who crowd Scandinavia's busiest travel hub each day. This heat used to be lost by the end of the morning rush hour. Now, however, engineers have figured out a way to harness it and transfer it to a newly refurbished office building down the block. Unbeknownst to them, these sweaty Swedes have become a green energy source: "They're cheap and renewable," says Karl Sundholm, a project manager at Jernhusen, a Stockholm real estate company, and one of the creators of the system.

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On Its Way To Britain: The Killer Asian Hornet Which Threatens Our Native Honeybees

An Asian hornet is seen in a beehive in south western France. The pest has decimated hives in Europe and is on its way to Britain

From The Daily Mail:

Giant hornets with a searing sting and a hearty appetite for honeybees are making a beeline for Britain.

The Asian hornet is four times the size of our native honeybees and is armed with a sting that has been compared to a hot nail being hammered into the body.

Aggressive and belligerent, it preys on honeybees, 'picking them off' as they leave their hive, until the colony is so exhausted that the hornets can move in and ransack it.

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Yahoo, Feds Battle Over E-Mail Privacy

From Threat Level:

Yahoo and federal prosecutors in Colorado are embroiled in a privacy battle that’s testing whether the Constitution’s warrant requirements apply to Americans’ e-mail.

The legal dust-up, unsealed late Tuesday, concerns a 1986 law that already allows the government to obtain a suspect’s e-mail from an ISP or webmail provider without a probable-cause warrant, once it’s been stored for 180 days or more. The government now contends it can get e-mail under 180-days old if that e-mail has been read by the owner, and the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply.

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Congress To Archive Every Tweet Ever Posted Publicly

From The BBC:

The Library of Congress is to archive every single public tweet ever made.

Twitter says since they started in 2006, billions of tweets have been created and 55m are sent every day.

The digital archive will include tweets from President Barack Obama on the day he was elected as well as the first tweet from co-founder Jack Dorsey.

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Quiet Sun Puts Europe On Ice

Harsh but fair in the UK (Image: Peter Henry/Flickr/Getty)

From New Scientist:

BRACE yourself for more winters like the last one, northern Europe. Freezing conditions could become more likely: winter temperatures may even plummet to depths last seen at the end of the 17th century, a time known as the Little Ice Age. That's the message from a new study that identifies a compelling link between solar activity and winter temperatures in northern Europe.

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NASA's Orion Capsule To Be Reborn As Escape Pod For Space Station

Orion Reborn A mock-up of Orion lies on the ground after a test set-up chute failed on July 31, 2008 NASA

From Popular Science:

President Obama also promised to commit to a new supersized rocket by 2015.

NASA's Orion crew capsule, which was part of the cancelled Constellation program, has been revived as an escape pod for the International Space Station. A smaller version of the capsule could launch on an Atlas or Delta rocket and eliminate the need to buy a multimillion-dollar Russian Soyuz spacecraft for emergency crew escape, Florida Today reports.

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Small, Ground-Based Telescope Images Three Exoplanets

This image shows the light from three planets orbiting a star 120 light-years away. The planets' star, called HR8799, is located at the spot marked with an 'X.' (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Palomar Observatory)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2010) — Astronomers have snapped a picture of three planets orbiting a star beyond our own using a modest-sized telescope on the ground. The surprising feat was accomplished by a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using a small portion of the Palomar Observatory's Hale Telescope, north of San Diego.

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Supervolcano: How Humanity Survived Its Darkest Hour

From New Scientist:

THE first sign that something had gone terribly wrong was a deep rumbling roar. Hours later the choking ash arrived, falling like snow in a relentless storm that raged for over two weeks. Despite being more than 2000 kilometres from the eruption, hominins living as far away as eastern India would have felt Toba's fury.

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Giant Natural Particle Accelerator Above Thunderclouds

A lightning researcher at the University of Bath has discovered that during thunderstorms, giant natural particle accelerators can form 40 km above the surface of the Earth. On Wednesday 14th April Dr. Martin Fullekrug will present his new work at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2010) in Glasgow. The image shows a transient airglow or 'sprite' above a thunderstorm in France in September 2009. (Credit: Serge Soula / Oscar van der Velde)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2010) — A lightning researcher at the University of Bath has discovered that during thunderstorms, giant natural particle accelerators can form 40 kilometers above the surface of the Earth.

On April 14, Dr. Martin Fullekrug presented his new work at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2010) in Glasgow.

Read more ....

Is Earth Shaking More?

From Live Science:

As the numbers of buried or dead continue to climb from today's 6.9-magnitude earthquake in China, an event so close on the heels of the devastating Chile and Haiti earthquakes, you might wonder if Earth is shaking more lately. Perhaps, scientists say, but not unusually so.

Seismic activity may be higher in recent years than the long-term average, but it's still not out of the normal range, the experts contend.

Read more ....

NSA On The Flash-Media Hunt

From Next Gov.:

Shh, the National Security Agency has developed a software tool that detects thumb drives or other flash media connected to a network, and any federal agency can get a copy free -- no box tops or coupons required.

The NSA provided a brief tantalizing description of its USBDetect 3.0 Computer Network Defense Tool in the unclassified part of its fiscal 2011 budget request.

Read more ....

Space Storms Could Knock Out National Grid And Sat Navs

From The Telegraph:

Space storms caused by the Sun could knock out power supplies and satellite navigation systems in Britain, claim scientists.

The solar flares and sunspots throw massive clouds of electrically charged gas at the Earth which cause power surges and throw compasses into disarray.

The weather in space has been through an unprecedented calm period in the last century but the researchers believe we could be entering a more volatile period.

Read more ....

Spectacular Sunsets, Blue Moons And Possibility Of a Gloomy Summer As Volcanic Ash Drifts Across Britain

From The Daily Mail:

The cloud of volcanic ash drifting across the UK from Iceland is set to produce some of the most spectacular sunsets in recent history.

Skywatchers can look forward to stunning light displays and other effects as ash spreads high in the atmosphere. However, experts fear the eruption could spark off a larger volcano nearby, causing a cold and gloomy summer.

Read more ....

Scientists Reveal Gene-Swapping Technique To Thwart Inherited Diseases

Fertility treatment in action.
Photograph: Zephyr/SPL/Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF

From The Guardian:

Transfer of healthy material from fertilised to donated eggs could stop women passing on incurable illnesses

Scientists today offered new hope for women at risk of passing on certain inherited diseases to their children, in the form of a pioneering technique to move healthy genetic material from fertilised eggs into donated ones.

Read more ....

Venus 'Still Volcanically Active'

Volcanic peak Idunn Mons. Bright colours indicate recent flow

From The BBC:

Data from Europe's Venus Express probe suggests that Earth's neighbour may still be able to erupt volcanoes.

Relatively young lava flows have been identified on the planet's surface by the spacecraft's infrared instrument.

The flows show up as having a different composition to the surrounding surface material.

Read more ....

Entangle Qubits For A True Random Number Machine

From New Scientist:

PURE randomness is surprisingly difficult to create, even if you draw on the inherent randomness of quantum mechanics. Now, though, a "true" random number generator is on the cards, which may help create the ultimate cryptographic messages.

Existing quantum random number generators are only as reliable as their parts. For example, some devices send single photons through a beam-splitter and record the path taken, but a pattern could emerge over time if the beam-splitter comes to favour one direction or the materials degrade. A new number generator produces random strings of numbers without the worry of such flaws, because it relies on the inherently random behaviour of two quantum-entangled objects.

Read more ....

Evidence Of First Virus That Infects Both Plants And Humans

Tree Afflicted With Chestnut Blight Don't worry. Far as anyone knows, blight still isn't contagious for humans. James Bowe, via Flickr.com

From Popular Science:

From rabies to bird flu to HIV, diseases passing from animals to humans is a well-known phenomenon. But a virus jumping from plants to humans? Never. At least, that's what doctors thought until Didier Raoult of the University of the Mediterranean in Marseilles, France, discovered that the mild mottle virus found in peppers may be causing fever, aches, and itching in humans. If validated, this would mark the first time a plant virus has been found to cause problems in people.

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Cockroach Ancestor Predates Dinosaurs

(Credit: Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum)

From Discovery News:

If it seems like cockroaches have been around forever, they nearly have. Check out this 300-million-year-old cockroach ancestor that lived several million years before the world's first dinosaurs emerged.

A new 3-D virtual model of the insect is described in the journal Biology Letters.

Imperial College London scientists created the model, which you'll view shortly, to show all of the details on Archimylacris eggintoni, which is an ancient ancestor of modern cockroaches, mantises and termites. This insect scuttled around early forests during the Carboniferous period 359 - 299 million years ago, which was a time when life had recently emerged from the oceans to live on land.

Read more ....

Solar Explosion Tracked All The Way From The Sun To Earth

The Sun imaged with the EIT instrument on the SOHO spacecraft. The eruption event studied by the team originated in the brighter active region slightly above and to the left of centre. (Credit: CDAW/ESA/NASA/Solar Physics)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2010) — An international group of solar and space scientists has built the most complete picture yet of the full impact of a large solar eruption, using instruments on the ground and in space to trace its journey from the Sun to Earth.

Dr Mario Bisi of Aberystwyth University presented the team's results, which include detailed images, on the 13th of April at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow.

Read more ....

Why Women Stay In Abusive Relationships

From Live Science:

A new study provides insights into the behavior of women entrenched in an abusive relationship with their male partner.

Researchers discovered that many who live with chronic psychological abuse still see certain positive traits in their abusers — such as dependability and being affectionate — which may partly explain why they stay.

Read more ....

Stellar 'Pollution' May Be Remains Of Watery Planets

Sucking up rocky pollutants (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

From New Scientist:

A lost generation of planets may now be no more than a whiff of pollution in the atmospheres of their dead parent stars. If so, it would suggest that rocky planets are common, and hints that most such planets have water.

White dwarfs – the dense remnants of ordinary stars – usually have very pure atmospheres dominated by the lightweight elements hydrogen and helium, because heavier elements tend to sink into a star's interior. But about 20 per cent of white dwarfs are tainted by traces of heavier elements.

Read more ....

Jumbo Planets Spotted Orbiting Backwards Around Nearby Stars

ESO/L. Calçada

From USA Today:

Wrong way planets -- two of nine jumbo planets reported Tuesday by European astronomers -- orbit opposite their star's rotation, unlike our own solar system.

The discovery means six of 27 "hot Jupiters", gas giant worlds orbiting close-in to their stars reported in recent years by the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) team, orbit the wrong way around stars. The WASP team searches for "transit" planets, ones that cause dips in the light from their stars, revealing their orbit's characteristics.

Read more ....

Facebook Announces New Safety Measures But No Panic Button

From The Guardian:

The social networking site will introduce a 24-hour police hotline, awareness campaign and a new system of reporting abuse.

Facebook has responded to calls for increased online safety by announcing a range of new measures including a 24-hour police hotline, a £5m education and awareness campaign and a redesigned abuse reporting system, but has declined to add a logo linking to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre.

Read more ....

Can The Mobile Phone Chips Of The Future Kill The Desktop Computer?

Texas Instruments Blaze TI's reference design runs two touchscreen monitors at once. TI

From Popular Science:

If you have a smartphone, you're just as likely to Google from your handset as you are from a PC-based Web browser. That's because, in some cases, a high-end smartphone is just as powerful and rich a media experience as a computer. The pocketable, always-on, always-connected computer has long been the dream, and now, it's the reality. But the next generation of mobile phone brains promises to take the smartphone paradigm even further--maybe even so far that it replaces your desktop machine.

Read more ....

Mummy Of A 'Tiny, Wide-Eyed Woman' Discovered In Egyptian Oasis

A gypsum mask unearthed alongside a sarcophagus recently discovered in Bahariya

From The Daily Mail:

Egyptian archaeologists discovered an intricately carved plaster sarcophagus portraying a tiny, wide-eyed woman dressed in a tunic in a newly uncovered complex of tombs at a remote desert oasis.

It is the first Roman-style mummy found in Bahariya Oasis some 186 miles southwest of Cairo, said archaeologist Mahmoud Afifi, who led the dig.

The find was part of a cemetery dating back to the Greco-Roman period containing 14 tombs.

Read more ....

The Rise Of The App Entrepreneur

From The BBC:

The soaring popularity of smart phones has created a new type of entrepreneur - the "app developer".

Whether it is finding ladies' toilets on the London underground, identifying bird songs, forecasting snow conditions at ski resorts or just buying stuff online, somebody, somewhere has come up with a clever little computer program that lets you do the task from your handset.

The industry has grown up around the iPhone. More than 140,000 different iPhone applications have appeared since Apple opened its Apps Store on iTunes to outside developers in July 2008.

Read more ....

Twitter Has 105M Users, Says Co-Founder Biz Stone

From Computer World:

IDG News Service - Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams shared some long-awaited usage figures for the service and sought to assure developers that Twitter is becoming a stable platform for building applications, as they kicked off its first developer conference today in San Francisco.

Twitter has 105 million registered users, with 300,000 new users signing up every day, Stone said, opening Twitter's Chirp conference at the Palace of Fine Arts before an audience just shy of 1,000 developers. That user figure is more than a recent estimate from comScore, which pegged Twitter's user base at 65 million.

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Are Water Filters Worth It?

From Discovery News:

As clean as the drinking water is in the United States compared to other countries, it still contains trace amounts of cancer-causing contaminants.

But this past March, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that advances in science and technology were allowing them to define stricter regulations on four chemicals: tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene, which are used in industrial and textile processing, and epichlorohydrin and acrylamide, which ironically can be introduced into drinking water during the water treatment process.

Read more ....

Your Bionic Brain: The Merging Of Brain And Machine

Flickr/illuminaut

From FOX News:

The six-million dollar man was pure fantasy in the 70s -- but largely realistic technology today. And the future of this tech is even wilder: Implantable brain electrodes may be just around the corner.

Futurists and science-fiction writers have long speculated about merging human and machine, especially human brains and computers. These dreams are slowly becoming reality: The deaf are hearing with bionic "ears," the blind see with the aid of electrodes, an amputee is moving a prosthetic arm by thought, a man paralyzed with locked-in syndrome is "speaking" through a brain electrode connected to a computerized synthesizer.

Read more ....

First Direct Recording Made Of Mirror Neurons In Human Brain

Mirror neurons, many say, are what make us human. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Los Angeles)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 13, 2010) — Mirror neurons, many say, are what make us human. They are the cells in the brain that fire not only when we perform a particular action but also when we watch someone else perform that same action.

Neuroscientists believe this "mirroring" is the mechanism by which we can "read" the minds of others and empathize with them. It's how we "feel" someone's pain, how we discern a grimace from a grin, a smirk from a smile.

Read more ....

U.S. Military Supply of Rare Earth Elements Not Secure

From Live Science:

U.S. military technologies such as guided bombs and night vision rely heavily upon rare earth elements supplied by China, and rebuilding an independent U.S. supply chain to wean the country off that foreign dependency could take up to 15 years, according to a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

Read more ....

Polluted Old Stars Suggest Earth-like Worlds May Be Common

From Space.com:

Earth-like planets should be a fairly common feature of other solar systems in our galaxy, a new study of stellar senior citizens suggests.

More than 90 percent of stars in the Milky Way, including our own sun, end their lives as a white dwarfs. Traditionally, these dense stellar remains haven't been the first place that astronomers look for signs of planets outside our own solar system. Instead, exoplanet searches have focused on stars like our own sun.

Read more ....

Mysterious Radio Waves Emitted From Nearby Galaxy

Something in there is producing an unusually regular radio signal
(Image: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA)

From New Scientist:

There is something strange in the cosmic neighbourhood. An unknown object in the nearby galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before.

"We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK.

Read more ....

First Man On The Moon Neil Armstrong Blasts Obama's Space Plans

Neil Armstrong Blasts Obama’s ‘Devastating’ Nasa Cuts -- Times Online

Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, has launched an unprecedented attack on President Obama’s plans to dismantle Nasa’s manned space exploration programme.

The world’s best-known astronaut, who has traditionally avoided controversy and rarely seeks the limelight despite his feat 41 years ago, warned that Mr Obama risks blasting American space superiority on a “long downhill slide to mediocrity”.

The decision to cancel Constellation, the project to send astronauts to the Moon again by 2020 and Mars by 2030, was “devastating”, Mr Armstrong said in a powerful open letter to the President.

Read more ....

More News On Protests Against President Obama's NASA Plans

Space Fight: President Obama's Plans for NASA Attacked By Former Astronauts -- ABC News
Moon vets say Obama's NASA cuts would ground U.S. -- USA Today
White House Moves to Placate Critics of its NASA Plan -- Wall Street Journal
Put NASA on a Diet?! Them's Fightin' Words, Mr. President -- Newsweek
Obama's Revised Space Plan: Build Rocket, Save Orion -- NPR

iPad International Launch Delayed As Apple Blames 'Runaway' Demand

Apple's iPad shipped more than half a million units in its first week, the company says. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

From The Guardian:

Apple iPad pre-orders to begin internationally on 10 May, with pricing to be revealed then, after 'surprisingly strong' US orders.

Apple has delayed the international launch of its iPad computer for a month, blaming "surprisingly strong US demand" that has outstripped its ability to produce them.

More than 500,000, it says, have been delivered to retailers and customers in its first week on sale.

Read more ....

New LOFAR Telescope Network Probes Universe's Low-Frequency Radiation To Look For Oldest Regions And Alien Civilizations

LOFAR's View of The Super Massive Black Hole In The 3C61.1 Galaxy via Alpha Galileo

From The Telegraph:

Until recently, radio astronomers have concentrated almost exclusively on the high-energy radiation streaming in towards Earth from exotic stellar bodies like pulsars, quasars, and super-massive black holes. But now, a new European observatory called the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) has begun releasing data on the low-energy radiation that permeates the Universe.

Read more ....

The Woman Photographer Who Braves Temperatures Of MINUS 20 To Take Stunning Pictures Of Northern Lights

Linda Drake uses a variety of different camera exposure times to photograph the spectacular lights

From The Daily Mail:

A photographer has captured some of the most stunning examples of the Northern Lights ever seen.

Travelling each year to Northern Manitoba in Canada to capture the Aurora Borealis, Linda Drake braves temperatures of minus 20 degrees in search of that elusive perfect shot.

Making the pilgrimage to just south of the Arctic Circle, in March each year, the 40-year-old has developed a passion for the heavenly phenomenon.

Read more ....

'Climategate' Panel Set To Report

From The BBC:

The second of three reviews into hacked climate e-mails from the University of East Anglia (UEA) is set to be released later.

It has examined scientific papers published over 20 years by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the heart of the e-mail controversy.

The panel was nominated by the Royal Society, and climate sceptics forecast it would defend establishment science.

But the BBC understands the panel has taken a hard look at CRU methodology.

Read more ....

Twitter To Have Paid Tweets Show Up In Searches

From ABC News:

Twitter introduces tweets paid for by advertisers, to show up first in search results.

Twitter announced Tuesday that it is introducing advertising by allowing companies to pay to have their messages show up first in searches on its site.

The debut of "Promoted Tweets" comes as Twitter increasingly faces questions about how it can turn its wide usage into profits.

Read more ....

Inexpensive Highly Efficient Solar Cells Possible

Researchers have come up with solutions for two problems that, for the last twenty years, have been hampering the development of efficient and affordable solar cells. (Credit: iStockphoto/Kyu Oh)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 12, 2010) — Thanks to two technologies developed by Professor Benoît Marsan and his team at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) Chemistry Department, the scientific and commercial future of solar cells could be totally transformed. Professor Marsan has come up with solutions for two problems that, for the last twenty years, have been hampering the development of efficient and affordable solar cells.

Read more ....

One Mystery of Sandstorm Lightning Explained

From Live Science:

Sandstorms can generate spectacular lightning displays, but how they do so is a mystery.

By unlocking the secrets of how sparks come to fly in these storms as researchers are now doing, scientists could help grapple with all kinds of problems, from charged particle clouds that can cause devastating explosions in the food, drug and coal industries to charged dust that could obscure vital solar panels on missions to the moon or Mars.

Read more ....

Twitter Reveals Business Model

From Technology Review:

"Promoted Tweets" will bring ads into the stream of real-time conversation.

At long last, Twitter has announced its business model. The company has grown explosively since its launch in 2007 and there has been intense speculation about how it could make its popular service profitable. The plan is to use an advertising model that it calls "Promoted Tweets."

Read more ....

The Apollo Hoax Theories

Neil Armstrong/Keystone/Getty Images

From The Independent:

It is 40 years since the drama of the Apollo 13 mission turned an aborted mission to the moon from potential disaster into a celebrated recovery.

But doubts still linger about the moon landings. 9/11 and Kennedy aside, no event in world history has generated quite so many conspiracy theories than the Apollo moon landings. Do they stand up? Here are the best reasons why it couldn’t have happened, and the rebuttals. Of course, you may disagree.

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Meet The New Head Of DARPA

LEADER Regina Dugan of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Michael Temchine for The New York Times

New Force Behind Agency of Wonder -- New York Times

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is different from other federal agencies. For one thing, the agency, known as Darpa, created the Internet (really). For another, it is probably the only agency ever to offer a $40,000 prize for a balloon hunt, a contest that was inspired by Regina Dugan, a 47-year-old expert in mine detection, who took over last summer as its director.

Dr. Dugan, who has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, is the first woman to be the director of Darpa, and those who know her say she has a knack for inspiring, and indeed insisting on, creative thinking.

Read more ....

Copyright Violation Alert Ransomware In The Wild

From ZNET:

A currently ongoing ransomware campaign is using a novel approach to extort money from end users whose PCs have been locked down.

By pretending to be the fake ICPP Foundation (icpp-online.com), the ransomware locks down the user’s desktop issuing a “Copyright violation: copyrighted content detected” message, which lists torrent files found on the infected PC, and forces the user to pay $400 for the copyright holder’s fine, emphasizing on the fact that “the maximum penalties can be five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.

More details on the campaign:

Read more ....

Can Mozilla Be Bigger Than Facebook?

From CNET:

Mozilla has made a name for itself by taking on Microsoft Internet Explorer in the browser market, claiming as much as 30 percent of the global market with its open-source Firefox browser. Mozilla's second act, however, promises to be much more difficult, with increased competition from Microsoft but also from open-source competitors like Google Chrome.

What should Mozilla do next?

Read more ....

Pluto Joined By Up To 50 More Dwarf Planets

Comparative sizes of four dwarf planets, which may be joined by up to 50 more objects. Credit: Hubble Space Telescope

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: The status of former planet Pluto has taken another blow, with new research suggesting up to 50 known objects may also meet the criteria to be dwarf planets.

To be labelled as a dwarf planet, an object must meet two criteria, as determined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU): they must be 'nearly round' and they must orbit the Sun.

Read more ....

Does Stress Feed Cancer?

PUSHING IT: Stress is linked indirectly to the immune system's anti-tumor defenses, but it can also affect anoikis--a type of cell death that cancer cells bypass. iStockphoto

From Scientific American:

A new study shows stress hormones make it easier for malignant tumors to grow and spread.

A little stress can do us good—it pushes us to compete and innovate. But chronic stress can increase the risk of diseases such as depression, heart disease and even cancer. Studies have shown that stress might promote cancer indirectly by weakening the immune system's anti-tumor defense or by encouraging new tumor-feeding blood vessels to form. But a new study published April 12 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that stress hormones, such as adrenaline, can directly support tumor growth and spread.

Read more ....

Astronauts Take 3rd, Final Spacewalk; Valve Stuck

From ABC News:

Astronauts take 3rd, final spacewalk to finish installing tank; stuck valve threatens cooling.

A pair of spacewalking astronauts finished installing a fresh storage tank outside the International Space Station on Tuesday, but a stuck valve was threatening to jeopardize half of the cooling system.

No sooner had Rick Mastracchio hooked up the fluid valves for the new ammonia tank on the third and final spacewalk of shuttle Discovery's flight, then flight controllers encountered the valve trouble in a separate pressurizing unit.

Read more ....

40 Yard Dash: Average Dude Vs Pro Athlete

Video from the NFL Combine showing just how fast prospective NFL players can run compared to normal people.

It is almost unbelievable how quickly Jacoby Ford (the top performer in the 40 this year) covers that distance.

Above video from Kottke.org

Hat Tip: Geek Press

Turning Planetary Theory Upside Down: Nine New Exoplanets Found, Some With Retrograde Orbits

Exoplanets, discovered by WASP together with ESO telescopes, that unexpectedly have been found to have retrograde orbits are shown here. In all cases the star is shown to scale, with its rotation axis pointing up and with realistic colours. The exoplanets are shown during the transit of their parent star, just before mid-transit. The last object at the lower right is for comparison and has a “normal” orbital direction. The size of each image is three solar diameters. (Credit: ESO/A. C. Cameron)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 13, 2010) — The discovery of nine new transiting exoplanets has been announced at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting. When these new results were combined with earlier observations of transiting exoplanets astronomers were surprised to find that six out of a larger sample of 27 were found to be orbiting in the opposite direction to the rotation of their host star -- the exact reverse of what is seen in our own solar system.

Read more ....

Alzheimer's Self Test Works Surprisingly Well

From Live Science:

A newly developed handwritten test designed to assess cognitive abilities in older adults could one day serve as a tool to help detect Alzheimer's disease in its early stages, new research suggests.

While previous pen-and-paper tests have been developed to help identify memory problems, most of them require a doctor to administer it. The new test, on the other hand, is self-administered.

Read more ....

2010 Forecast As Busy Year For Hurricanes

From USA Today:

The Atlantic basin is facing a busier-than-usual hurricane season, in part because of record warm water in the ocean, according to the latest hurricane forecast.

Colorado State University's forecast, released Wednesday, calls for 15 named tropical storms this year in the Atlantic basin, which includes the Carribean and Gulf of Mexico. The team says eight will become hurricanes, with sustained winds reaching 74 mph. Four are expected to be major hurricanes — Categories 3, 4 or 5 — with maximum wind speeds of 111 mph or greater.

Read more ....