The Edge Of The Solar System Is A Weird And Erratic Place

From Discover Magazine:

The edge of the solar system is not some static line on a map. The boundary between the heliosphere in which we live and the vastness of interstellar space beyond is in flux, stretching and shifting more rapidly than astronomers ever knew, according to David McComas.

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Ancient Streetview: Now Google Can Take You To The Historic Pavements Of Pompeii And Stonehenge

Internet users can look at Pompeii's ancient streets from the comfort of their own homes

From The Daily Mail:

They are some of the most spectacular and unique places on the planet.

Now Google has taken tourism to the next level by allowing people from around the world to see monuments like Stonehenge, the streets of Pompeii and the remote landscapes of Antarctica from the comfort of their own living room.

But instead of the usual Google Streetview cars which have become a familiar sight on British streets, the new snaps were taken using a special Google tricycle.

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Social Sensitivity Trumps IQ In Group Intelligence

Greater than the sum of its parts (Image: WestEnd61/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

If you're a headhunter looking for someone to work in a group, you might want to stop chasing down the most intelligent candidates. Group intelligence depends less on how smart individuals are and more on their social sensitivity, ability to take turns speaking, and the number of women in the group.

So says Anita Woolley from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and colleagues, having measured group intelligence and the influences that individuals have on it.

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Darpa's Self-Aiming "One Shot" Sniper Rifle Scheduled For Next Year

Snipers An Army sniper team in Afghanistan. Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Army

From Popular Science:

A sniper crouches near an open window and zooms in on his target, who sits a half-mile away. He peers through a scope and holds his breath, preparing to squeeze the trigger. But it’s windy outside, and he can't afford a miss. What to do?

A new DARPA-funded electro-optical system will calculate the ballistics for him, telling him where to aim and ensuring a perfect shot, no matter the weather conditions.

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My Comment: One shot, one kill .... regardless of the weather. Now we are talking about the ultimate sniper weapon .... and one that (unfortunately) will end up being used against us.

At The Paris Auto Show, Supercars And Stylish Concepts

Kia Pop Concept Jon Alain Guzik

From Popular Science:

In 1898 the world's first auto show was held in Paris at the Tuilleries Gardens. Only a few vehicles were on display, and people were so skeptical of this new mode of transportation -- Le Car -- that exhibitors had to drive their automobiles from Versailles to Paris to prove their validity.

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Photo: The latest launch, to test key technologies and gather data, is China's second lunar mission

From The BBC:

A Chinese rocket carrying a probe destined for the Moon has blasted into space.

A Long March 3C rocket with the Chang'e-2 probe took off from Xichang launch centre at about 1100 GMT.

The rocket will shoot the craft into the trans-lunar orbit, after which the satellite is expected to reach the Moon in about five days.

Chang'e-2 will be used to test key technologies and collect data for future landings.

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The Flintstones Turns 50: The Five Dumbest Moments

From The Christian Science Monitor:

The Flintstones is a classic. Fifty years after the show first aired, Fred, Wilma, and the gang are still popular enough to gain a seat atop Google's homepage. But their place in the cartoon pantheon doesn't mean that they're infallible. The Flintstones did some pretty stupid things in their day. Here are five of the dumbest. Click through to read them all.

- Chris Gaylord

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Faces Of Facebook: Who's Who In 'The Social Network'?

From ABC News:

Hollywood Film About Mark Zuckerberg and Friends Opens Nationally Today.

Mark Zuckerberg may the biggest face attached to Facebook, but he's not the only one. "The Social Network," the controversial story about the world's most powerful social network, has a colorful cast of characters -- on screen and off.

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It's The End Of The World: 8 Potential Armageddons

From FOX News:

Oil plumes threaten to choke the oceans and methane gas explosions shoot sky high -- and those are hardly the biggest threats facing the Earth. From cosmic rays to asteroid impacts to the threat of general destruction, our planet may be less safe than you think.

Here are the top eight risks to life as we know it, detailed by scientists and science fiction writers -- and whether it's even possible to save ourselves.

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Surprise: Solar System "Force Field" Shrinks Fast

Shown in a Hubble Space Telescope image, the "astrosphere" around the star L.L. Orionis approximates the heliosphere around our solar system. Image courtesy ESA/NASA

From The National Geographic:

NASA craft reveals unexpected unpredictability of our protective bubble.

It's cold, dusty, and bereft of planets, but the outskirts of our solar system are anything but dull, according to increasing evidence from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) craft.

As charged particles flow out from the sun, they eventually bump up against interstellar medium—the relatively empty areas between stars. These interactions "inflate" a protective bubble that shields Earth and the entire solar system from potentially harmful cosmic rays (solar system pictures).

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NASA's Future Looks Bleak Amid Policy Shift

From The L.A. Times:

The demise of the Constellation moon rocket means 7,000 job losses in a year. Funding for a heavy-lift rocket for asteroid missions will be comparably less than that for the moon rocket.

Reporting from Washington — A new law passed by Congress this week finally gives NASA some badly needed direction, but the future of the space agency remains bleak — at least in the near term.

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Reports From The Hive, Where The Swarm Concurs

The author, on Appledore Island, watching a swarm launch into flight from the vertical board that he uses as a swarm mount. The two feeder bottles on the mount provide sugar syrup to keep the swarm well fed. From the book “Honeybee Democracy” by Thomas D. Seeley

From The New York Times:

What can we learn from the bees? Honeybees practice a kind of consensus democracy similar to what happens at a New England town meeting, says Thomas D. Seeley, author of “Honeybee Democracy.” A group comes to a decision through a consideration of options and a process of elimination.

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Ray Kurzweil’s Blio E-Book Launch Met With Confusion, Controversy

From Gadget Lab:

This week, K-NFB, an e-reading company founded by Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation for the Blind, launched its much-anticipated Blio reading app and e-book store. Blio was immediately and widely panned by publishers, developers and readers.

“Many of the failures are fundamentally at odds with the one thing that Kurzweil was touting above all else: accessibility,” wrote Laura Dawson, a digital reading industry consultant, formerly of BarnesAndNoble.com. K-NFB initially promised to make e-books more accessible to blind readers; yet Windows, currently its only enhanced books platform, has known text-to-speech conversion issues.

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Scribd Facebook Instant Personalization Is A Privacy Nightmare

From Epicenter:

Online document sharing site Scribd hooked up with Facebook to create “instant personalization” so Scribd users can get reading recommendations based on their Facebook likes and what their friends are sharing. Sounds interesting, right?

But the document sharing and embedding service has created a privacy nightmare that involves drafting users who are already logged into Facebook without offering a clear opt out process either on the site or through e-mail.

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How To Cyber Attack A Nuclear Plant

Photo: Going nuclear: The Stuxnet computer worm may have designed to infiltrate an Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz, 180 miles south of Tehran. Credit: Getty Images

A Way To Attack Nuclear Plants -- Technology Review

Industrial computer systems are typically far less secure than they should be, experts say.

For the last few months, a sophisticated computer worm has wriggled its way between some of the most critical control systems in the world.

The timing of the worm's release, combined with several clues buried in its code, has led some experts to speculate that the worm, dubbed Stuxnet, was originally designed to sabotage an Iranian nuclear facility, possibly the enrichment plant in Natanz, roughly 180 miles south of Tehran. This week, officials in Iran confirmed that Stuxnet had been found on systems inside the plant, although they denied that it had caused any harm.

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The Supernova's Secrets Cracked At Last?

Hank Childs / Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

From Time Magazine:

Most stars end their lives in a whimper — our own sun will almost certainly be one of them — but the most massive stars go out with an impressive bang. When that happens, creating what's known as a Type II supernova, the associated blast of energy is so brilliant that it can briefly outshine an entire galaxy, give birth to ultra-dense neutron stars or black holes, and forge atoms so heavy that even the Big Bang wasn't powerful enough to create them. If supernovas didn't exist, neither would gold, silver, platinum or uranium. The last time a supernova went off close enough to earth to be visible without a telescope, back in 1987, it made the cover of TIME.

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Budget Deal Propels NASA On New Path

From Wall Street Journal:

House's Passage of $58 Billion Compromise Bill Funds Commercial Space Travel, More Robotic Deep-Space Missions.

In unusual bipartisan fashion, the House on Wednesday approved a three-year $58-billion compromise bill intended to revive NASA's manned-exploration programs while funding plans for pioneering private rockets able to blast astronauts into orbit.

Capping nearly a year of intense industry turmoil, agency uncertainty and congressional debate, the vote reflected last-minute decisions by House leaders from both parties to embrace a previously-passed Senate blueprint for NASA, though it doesn't completely satisfy any of the rival interest groups or regional factions maneuvering to shape the agency's future.

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Google Launches Latin Translation Tool

Google has added Latin to its list of languages on Google Translate

From The Telegraph:

Google Translate, a service that can instantly translate entire web pages or chunks of text in to another language, has added Latin to its list.

Google Translate supports more than 50 languages, including minority languages such as Welsh and Haitian Creole, and the addition of Latin is sure to please scholars and traditionalists.

In a blog post, written entirely in Latin, Jakob Uszkoreit, a senior engineer at Google, said that Latin was far from a “dead language”.

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Heard For The First Time In 2,000 years: Scientists Post Readings Of Ancient Babylonian Poems Online

A clay tablet known as the Jursa tablet that proves the existence of a Babylonian official in the Bible

From The Daily Mail:

The ancient language of Babylonian can be heard for the first time in almost 2,000 years after Cambridge University scholars posted readings and poems online.

Babylonian, one of the chief languages of Ancient Mesopotamia, dates back as far as the second millennium BC but died out around 2,000 years ago.

However, Cambridge historians have resurrected the ancient tongue by discovering how the language was pronounced and spoken.

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Rivers Threatened Around The World

From New Scientist:

The water supplying 80 per cent of the world's population is exposed to "high levels of threat". That's the conclusion of a study that surveys the status of rivers throughout the world, and looks at their effects on both humans and the ecosystem at large.

Writing in this week's Nature (vol 467, p 555), Charles Vorosmarty of the City College of New York and colleagues pull together a swathe of data on factors affecting water security, from dams that reduce river flow to the pollution and destruction of wetlands.

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