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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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'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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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:

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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?

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