Small Asteroid to Fly Past Earth Tonight

From Live Science:

A small asteroid will buzz the Earth late Friday EDT (early Saturday GMT), flying just inside the orbit of the moon. It should pass safely by our home planet, according to a crack team of NASA space rock trackers.

The space rock, named 2009 TM8, was just discovered Thursday by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona. It will get within 216,000 miles (348,000 km) of Earth when it zooms by at a speed of about 18,163 mph (29,232 kph).

"That's slightly closer than the orbit of our moon," NASA's Asteroid Watch team said Friday via Twitter.

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Remembering The Man Who Made Jet Fighters Possible

Richard T. Whitcomb solved a problem that had bedeviled aviation engineers, leading to supersonic flight. He died Tuesday at age 88. NASA

He Sparked Supersonic Flight With A Coke Bottle And File -- Wall Street Journal

Richard T. Whitcomb dreamed up techniques that made supersonic flight possible and innovations that endure on passenger jets today.

Mr. Whitcomb, who died Oct. 13 at age 88, solved a problem that had bedeviled aviation engineers, whose designs couldn't achieve supersonic flight even though they seemed to have enough power. Increased wind resistance at speeds approaching the speed of sound was the problem. Engineers took to calling it the "sound barrier."

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My Comment: We have gone a long way since his techniques made supersonic flight possible .... but he was the first to dream of the impossible becoming possible.

The Moon Belongs To No One – Yet

Making the moon mine (Image: View China Photo/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

LAST week, NASA bombed the moon. Or rather, it crashed its Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite into the moon's south pole in a bid to discover reserves of water and other resources.

This was the latest in a veritable flurry of moon missions: between 2007 and 2011 there will have been eight: one from Japan, two from China, one from India, one from Russia and three from the US.

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LHC Gets Colder Than Deep Space

The giant Atlas detector will search for hints of the elusive Higgs boson particle

From The BBC:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has once again become one of the coldest places in the Universe.

All eight sectors of the LHC have now been cooled to their operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.

The large magnets that bend particle beams around the LHC are kept at this frigid temperature using liquid helium.

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How Net Activity Boosted 'Paranormal Activity'

From San Francisco Chronicle:

Fueled by a grassroots Internet campaign that included a "Tweet Your Scream" promotion using Twitter, a low-budget horror film titled "Paranormal Activity" has become a surprise box office hit.

Meanwhile, a more anticipated movie, "Where the Wild Things Are," gained 871,000 fans on its Facebook page last week and now has more than 1.5 million eager devotees even before the film hits screens today.

And the official Twitter account promoting next month's sequel to the romantic vampire movie "Twilight" went live Monday and bit into more than 79,000 followers by Thursday. Its Facebook page already had 3.8 million fans.

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Cheetah, Gecko And Spiders Inspire Robotic Designs

From Gadget Lab:

A cheetah can run faster than any other animal. A gecko’s feet can stick to almost any surface without using liquids or surface tension. And some roaches scurry at nearly 50 times their body length in one second, which, scaled up to human levels, can be around 200 miles an hour.

The wonders of the animal kingdom are not just for fans of National Geographic. Robotic designer Sangbae Kim, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to understand how he can take some of the mechanisms animals use and replicate them in robots.

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Stormy Times For Cloud Computing?

From Times Online:

Concern over data loss and legal uncertainty may delay the development of cloud computing, experts warned on Monday.

Cloud computing involves the storage of data online, rather than on locally networked servers or machines. The best known services are provided by Google and Microsoft.

Last weekend, Microsoft in the United States was forced to admit that it had irretrievably lost all online data belonging to owners of the T-Mobile Sidekick, a smartphone that backs up its data online, in the cloud.

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British Men Have More Stamina In Bed Than Foreigners, Study Finds

British men last longer in bed than their foreign counterparts, a study has found
Photo: GETTY IMAGES

From The Telegraph:

British men have more stamina between the sheets than their foreign counterparts – lasting just 10 minutes, a study has found.

Researchers in Holland measured the sexual performance of nearly 500 men from five countries against the clock.

They found that British men had sex for 10 minutes on average before reaching an orgasm.

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Andromeda Galaxy Captured In Crystal Clear Detail By Nasa's Swift Satellite

The Swift image has revealed new features not seen in previous composites of M31 (pictured)

From The Daily Mail:

Nasa's Swift satellite has captured the highest-resolution view of our neighbouring galaxy Andromeda.

Also known as M31, it contains an incredible one trillion stars and is the largest galaxy in our small section of the Universe.

Swift, which usually searches for distant cosmic explosions, turned its incredibly powerful ultraviolet telescope onto our celestial neighbour to achieve the shot.

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Giant Impact Near India -- Not Mexico -- May Have Doomed Dinosaurs

Three-dimensional reconstruction of the submerged Shiva crater (~500 km diameter) at the Mumbai Offshore Basin, western shelf of India from different cross-sectional and geophysical data. The overlying 4.3-mile-tick Cenozoic strata and water column were removed to show the morphology of the crater. (Credit: Image courtesy of Geological Society Of America)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 15, 2009) — A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.

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Monkey Drumming Suggests The Origin Of Music

An illustration of a rhesus macaque drumming with cage doors.
Credit: K. Lamberty, PNAS.

From Live Science:

When monkeys drum, they activate brain networks linked with communication, new findings that suggest a common origin of primate vocal and nonvocal communication systems and shed light on the origins of language and music.

In the wild, monkeys known as macaques drum by shaking branches or thumping on dead logs. Similar behavior has been seen in non-human primates — for instance, gorillas beat their chests and clap their hands, while chimpanzees drum on tree buttresses.

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Atlantic Salmon Shortage's Ripple Effect

Watch CBS News Videos Online

From CBS News:

(CBS) In Chile's northern Patagonia, in channels sheltered by the Andes Mountains, the salmon are dying, CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports.

At fish farms, divers check for signs of a waterborne virus called ISA: Infectious Salmon Anemia.

Harmless to humans and deadly to Atlantic salmon, it's the mostly popular fresh fish to eat for American consumers.

ISA has killed millions of salmon in Chile.

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Rocking On With Hot Rocks Geothermal Energy

From NOVA:

The world is getting hotter. This is because of the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due mainly to our excessive burning of fossil fuels. We burn them for the energy that is needed increasingly in our daily life – to drive to school, cool ourselves on hot summer days, blow-dry our hair and listen to our music. The resulting greenhouse gases trap radiation from the sun, preventing it from escaping back into space, causing the planet’s temperature to rise. But not all of the planet’s heat comes from the Sun; some of it is within the Earth; and rather than causing global warming it could help to wean us off fossil fuels.

This heat, geothermal energy, lies in abundance beneath our feet. If the energy stored in hot rocks inside the Earth could be tapped and used instead of fossil fuels, it could help to reduce the threat of climate change.

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20 Years After The Bay Area Quake: Are We Better Prepared?

Photo: Repair crews in Oakland, Calif., examine damage to the Cypress Structure during the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. Dave Bartruff / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

The San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics were just about to start Game 3 of the 1989 World Series on Oct. 17 when the shaking began. ABC play-by-play announcer Al Michaels managed to tell viewers, "We're having an earth—" before the signal went dead. The temblor was brief — just 15 seconds — but the damage caused by the 6.9-magnitude quake was impressive. It killed 63 people, injured thousands and caused $7 billion worth of damage throughout California's Bay Area, including major destruction to the Oakland Bay Bridge. "It was a good sized shock," says Peter Yanev, chairman of Risk Solutions International and the author of Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country.

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YouTube’s Bandwidth Bill Is Zero. Welcome To The New Net

From Epicenter:

YouTube may pay less to be online than you do, a new report on internet connectivity suggests, calling into question a recent analysis arguing Google’s popular video service is bleeding money and demonstrating how the internet has continued to morph to fit user’s behavior.

In fact, with YouTube’s help, Google is now responsible for at least 6 percent of the internet’s traffic, and likely more — and may not be paying an ISP at all to serve up all that content and attached ads.

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Are Online Currencies Striking Gold?

Without the gold standard, argues consultant Dave Birch, pounds are no more real than World of Warcraft gold. Photograph: Getty Images

From The Guardian:

Money. The stuff that makes the world go round. Every day we earn it, spend it, exchange it and lose it. But you won't find any Linden dollars, Eve ISK or Facebook credits down the back of the couch.

Virtual currencies like these are used for transactions in online worlds and social networking sites. While real-world currencies are on the slide, many virtual ones are going from strength to strength. In the second quarter of the year the equivalent of $144m (£91m) was traded on the LindeX, the official currency exchange of Second Life, where residents buy and sell Linden dollars for their US counterpart – a 20% increase on the previous quarter, while the US economy shrank by 1%. Trading activity increased by 6% in the last quarter of 2008.

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Carbon Dioxide 'May Improve Taste Of Champagne'

It's all in the fizz-sensing cells found in the tongue Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Carbon dioxide in champagne bubbles may enhance the taste of the drink, scientists revealed today.

A team headed by Charles Zuker, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, found that taste-receptor cells in the tongue respond to carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas that gives sparkling drinks their fizz.

The work showed for the first time that the tongue's fizz-sensing cells are the same taste-receptor cells that detect sourness.

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Seamlessly Melding Man And Machine

Image: Living interface: Muscle cells (shown here) are grown on a biological scaffold. Severed nerves remaining from the lost limb connect to the muscle cells in the interface, which transmits electrical signals that can be used to control the artificial arm. Credit: Paul Cederna

From Technology Review:

Tiny implants that connect to nerve cells could make it easier to control prosthetic limbs.

A novel implant seeded with muscle cells could better integrate prosthetic limbs with the body, allowing amputees greater control over robotic appendages. The construct, developed at the University of Michigan, consists of tiny cups, made from an electrically conductive polymer, that fit on nerve endings and attract the severed nerves. Electrical signals coming from the nerve can then be translated and used to move the limb.

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Throwable Robot And Remote-Controlled Mini-Helicopter Unveiled As Latest Battlefield Surveillance Technology

Eye in the sky: The lightweight helicopter has four cameras and can hover over enemy positions giving the operator real-time intelligence

From The Daily Mail:

Soldiers on the battlefield could soon benefit from new state-of-the-art surveillance equipment that can remotely pinpoint snipers, ambushes and explosive devices.

A throwable wheeled robot and a remote-controlled helicopter were both unveiled at a demonstration at the Defence and Equipment Support at Abbey Wood, near Bristol.

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New Israeli Battery Provides Thousands Of Hours Of Power

Photo: Prof. Yair Ein-Eli in his Technion lab, where he invented a battery that is potentially as eco-friendly as sand. Photo: Technion

From Jerusalem Post:

A new kind of portable electrochemical battery that can produce thousands of hours of power - and soon replace the expensive regular or rechargeable batteries in hearing aids and sensors and eventually in cellphones, laptop computers and even electric cars - has been developed at Haifa's Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

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