Cheaper Solar Thermal Power

Sun catchers: This is the latest design of a system for focusing sunlight on a Stirling engine to generate electricity. Credit: Sandia National Laboratories/Randy Montoya

From Technology Review:

A simpler design could reduce the cost of solar power generated by concentrating sunlight on Stirling engines.

Stirling Energy Systems (SES), based in Phoenix, has decreased the complexity and cost of its technology for converting the heat in sunlight into electricity, allowing for high-volume production. It will begin building very large solar-power plants using its equipment as soon as next year.

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Kenya To Build Africa's Biggest Windfarm

A wind farm in the Ngong hills on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya
Photograph: Stephen Morrison/EPA

From The Guardian:

With surging demand for power and blackouts common across the continent, Africa is looking to solar, wind and geothermal technologies to meet its energy needs.

One of the hottest places in the world is set to become the site of Africa's most ambitious venture in the battle against global warming.

Some 365 giant wind turbines are to be installed in desert around Lake Turkana in northern Kenya – used as a backdrop for the film The Constant Gardener – creating the biggest windfarm on the continent. When complete in 2012, the £533m project will have a capacity of 300MW, a quarter of Kenya's current installed power and one of the highest proportions of wind energy to be fed in a national grid anywhere in the world.

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Imaginary Friends: Television Programs Can Fend Off Loneliness

Photo: By yourself, but not alone Flickering friends count for something. Lukasz Laska/iStock

From Scientific American:

Stomach growling, but have no time for a meal? A snack will do. Drowsy and unable to concentrate? A short nap can be reviving when a good night’s rest is unavailable. But what should you do when you are alone and feeling lonely?

New psychological research suggests that loneliness can be alleviated by simply turning on your favorite TV show. In the same way that a snack can satiate hunger in lieu of a meal, it seems that watching favorite TV shows can provide the experience of belonging without a true interpersonal interaction.

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Finding King Herod's Tomb

Herod built an elaborate palace fortress on the 300-foot mountain, Herodium, to commemorate his victory in a crucial battle. Duby Tal / Albatross / IsraelImages

From Smithsonian:

After a 35-year search, an Israeli archaeologist is certain he has solved the mystery of the biblical figure’s final resting place.

Shielding my eyes from the glare of the morning sun, I look toward the horizon and the small mountain that is my destination: Herodium, site of the fortified palace of King Herod the Great. I'm about seven miles south of Jerusalem, not far from the birthplace of the biblical prophet Amos, who declared: "Let justice stream forth like water." Herod's reign over Judea from 37 to 4 B.C. is not remembered for justice but for its indiscriminate cruelty. His most notorious act was the murder of all male infants in Bethlehem to prevent the fulfillment of a prophecy heralding the birth of the Messiah. There is no record of the decree other than the Gospel of Matthew, and biblical scholars debate whether it actually took place, but the story is in keeping with a man who arranged the murders of, among others, three of his own sons and a beloved wife.

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Hydrocarbons In The Deep Earth?

This artistic view of the Earth's interior shows hydrocarbons forming in the upper mantle and transported through deep faults to shallower depths in the Earth's crust. The inset shows a snapshot of the methane dissociation reaction studied in this work. (Credit: Image courtesy A. Kolesnikov and V. Kutcherov)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 27, 2009) — The oil and gas that fuels our homes and cars started out as living organisms that died, were compressed, and heated under heavy layers of sediments in the Earth's crust. Scientists have debated for years whether some of these hydrocarbons could also have been created deeper in the Earth and formed without organic matter. Now for the first time, scientists have found that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be synthesized under the pressure-temperature conditions of the upper mantle —the layer of Earth under the crust and on top of the core.

The research was conducted by scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory, with colleagues from Russia and Sweden, and is published in the July 26, advanced online issue of Nature Geoscience.

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Brain's Potential Explained by Big New Idea

From Live Magazine:

Different species and individuals have limits as to what they can learn. For instance, you can't teach your dog to read. But what sets these boundaries?

According to a new hypothesis, components of an organism's brain cortex may help determine how well that organism — be it dog, monkey or human — learns and improves its cognitive skills.
The cortex is your brain's outer layer — the exterior part you can see if you look at a picture of the whole organ.

The new idea posits that small sets of neuronal cells in the cortex, called cortical modules, determine our "cognitive plasticity," that is, our capacity to learn new ways of thinking, or improve upon old ones.

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Food Dye 'May Ease Spinal Injury'

From The BBC:

A dye similar to that used in sweets may potentially minimise the severity of spinal cord injuries.

A cascade of molecular changes triggered in the hours following an initial injury can cause further severe damage to the spinal cord.

But US researchers found this can be halted by using a dye known as Brilliant Blue G (BBG).

However, rats given the treatment in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study turned blue.

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Like Tarzan, Orangutans Glide Through Trees

DLILLC / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

Husky and hairy, with the flaming orange coloring of a bad dye job, the orangutan doesn't look like the most agile of primates. But in fact these great apes, native to the jungles of Malaysia and Indonesia, climb and swing nimbly through the canopy more than 100 feet in the air, their fleet-footed acrobatics allowing them to make their home in the treetops and access remote food sources, like the fruit at the very ends of branches.

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One Quarter Of Giant Panda Habitat Lost In Sichuan Quake

From CNN:

(CNN) -- The earthquake in Sichuan, southwestern China, last May left around 69,000 people dead and 15 million people displaced. Now ecologists have assessed the earthquake's impact on biodiversity and the habitat for some of the last existing wild giant pandas.

According to the report published in "Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment", 23 percent of the pandas' habitat in the study area was destroyed, and fragmentation of the remaining habitat could hinder panda reproduction.

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Sleeping in Space is Easy, But There's No Shower

From Space:

Astronauts may have some tough jobs in orbit - like building a $100 billion International Space Station - but apparently getting a goodnight's sleep isn't one of them.

In fact, sleeping is pretty comfy in space because you can slumber without gravity's incessant pull, according to Canadian astronaut Julie Payette, who has been living aboard the linked space station and shuttle Endeavour for more than a week.

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Crowd Sees Spaceship Launcher Fly

WhiteKnightTwo follows two photos planes as it circles Monday, July 27, 2009 above the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual AirVenture convention in Oshkosh, Wis. British billionaire Sir Richard Branson hopes to use WhiteKnightTwo to carry a spaceship into the upper atmosphere. The spaceship would then detach and rocket into space. Branson hopes to use the system to create a commercial space travel business. (AP Photo/Mike Roemer)

From Yahoo News/AP:

OSHKOSH, Wis. – Hundreds of earthlings turned their faces to the sky Monday to see an airplane built to launch a ship into space, watching the gleaming white craft soar overhead.

The twin-fuselage craft named WhiteKnightTwo, looking like two planes connected at the wing tips, circled the runway several times before touching down at the Experimental Aircraft Association's Air Venture annual gathering.

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Australia's Swine Flu Fight Holds Lessons For World, Say Scientists

Credit: AFP

From COSMOS:

MELBOURNE: Hard-hit Australia has become a global case study for swine flu, with Europe and the United States watching closely as it battles the disease in the southern hemisphere winter.

The outbreak began here in early May, as Australia was entering its annual flu season, speeding up infections so much that in a month Melbourne was the world's 'swine flu capital' with the highest number of cases per capita in the world.

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Photo: Docked Space Shuttle And Station Cross The Sun

From Wired News:

A photographer has captured a stunning photo of the space shuttle Endeavor docked with the International Space Station crossing the face of the sun.

You couldn’t just aim your digital camera at the sky and get results like this. Thierry Legault, who is known for his amazing astronomical imagery, uses specialized solar filters to capture the images.

When the shuttle docked with the ISS on July 15, the combined crews set a new record for space-vehicle occupancy. The 13 people aboard the station are the most that have been aboard the same vehicle in space. The astronauts have installed a “porch” on the space station for space-exposed experiments. The new addition effectively completes the Japanese Kibo laboratory.

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Fertile Crescent 'Will Disappear This Century'

Photo: The Fertile Crescent is left dry as Turkish dams reduce the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to a trickle (Image: AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

From The New Scientist:

Is it the final curtain for the Fertile Crescent? This summer, as Turkish dams reduce the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to a trickle, farmers abandon their desiccated fields across Iraq and Syria, and efforts to revive the Mesopotamian marshes appear to be abandoned, climate modellers are warning that the current drought is likely to become permanent. The Mesopotamian cradle of civilisation seems to be returning to desert.

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Containing The Sahara With Bacteria-Built Walls

From Popsci.com:

Bacteria that construct walls out of sand could save a third of the world's population from desertification

The Sahara, as well as other deserts around the world, is growing, in a process called desertification that ends up displacing people and crops. The situation has become drastic in a number of sub-Saharan countries. One suggestion from architect Magnus Larsson at the recent TED Global conference suggests constructing a massive wall, 3,700 miles long -- built from the sand itself. The trick would be to use bacterial labor to build it.

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Transparent Aluminum Is ‘New State Of Matter’

Experimental set-up at the FLASH laser used to discover the new state of matter. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oxford)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 27, 2009) — Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminium’ previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.

In the journal Nature Physics an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

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Divorce Hurts Health Even After Remarriage

From Live Science:

Divorce can wreak havoc on a person's health, even after remarriage, a new study finds.

Scientists have known that marriage can boost a man's health and augment a women's purse. The new study shows that divorce or losing a spouse to death can exact an immediate and long-lasting toll on those mental and physical gains.

"That period during the time that this event is taking place is extremely stressful," said study researcher Linda Waite, a sociologist and director of the Center on Aging at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. "People ignore their health; they're stressed, which is itself a health risk; they're less likely to go to the doctor; they're less likely to exercise; they're sleeping poorly."

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My Comment: My friends who are divorce will probably agree with this.

Gray Hair Caused by Stress (Cell Stress, That Is)

DNA damage from chemicals, ultraviolet light, and ionizing radiation can turn hair gray (above, an elderly man in Lincoln, Nebraska), according a June 2009 study that examined hair color cells in mice. Photograph by Joel Sartore/NGS

From National Geographic:

Work or personal stress may make you want to pull your hair out, but it's cellular stress that actually turns it gray, a new study has found.

That's because DNA is "under constant attack" by damaging agents, such as chemicals, ultraviolet light, and ionizing radiation, according to study lead author Emi Nishimura of Tokyo Medical and Dental University.

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Gentlemen, You've Never Had It So Good: Women Are Getting More Attractive In Evolutionary 'Beauty Race'

From The Daily Mail:

They are called the fairer sex – and it appears it is becoming increasingly true.

Women are gradually becoming more attractive in an evolutionary ‘beauty race’, according to scientific research.

Beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts, and a higher proportion of those children are girls, a study claims.

These daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so the pattern continues.

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A Vaccine For Colon Cancer

Colon cancer: This x-ray image shows a barium enema in a patient with cancer of the bowel. Credit: Centers for Disease Control

From Technology Review:

A new approach to preventing cancer teaches the immune system to seek and destroy emerging tumors.

A cancer vaccine with a twist is making headway in clinical trials at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Rather than targeting a cancer-related virus--the way Gardasil targets human papillomavirus to prevent some cervical cancers--the new vaccine triggers the immune system to attack a faulty protein that's often abundant in colorectal cancer tissue and precancerous tissue.

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Human History Written in Stone and Blood

Figure 1. Hunter-gatherer people living in southern Africa in the Middle Stone Age left behind artifacts in natural rock shelters and caves. At top is Sibudu Cave, located about 40 kilometers north of Durban. Below that is Ntloana Tsoana, a rock shelter located on the south bank of the Phuthiatsana River in the Lesotho highlands. At bottom, right of center in the photo, is Blombos Cave, located about 300 kilometers east of Cape Town. That’s where archaeologists found artifacts representing innovative behavior previously thought to have emerged in Europe much later. Improved dating of such artifacts helped the authors evaluate what contemporary factors might have contributed to the origins of modern human behavior.

Top photograph courtesy of Lyn Wadley. Middle photograph courtesy of Richard Roberts. Bottom photograph courtesy of Chris Henshilwood.

From American Scientist:

Two bursts of human innovation in southern Africa during the Middle Stone Age may be linked to population growth and early migration off the continent.

In the past decade it has become clear that symbolic expression associated with modern human behavior began in Africa, not Europe. And it occurred tens of thousands of years earlier than was once thought. Answering why is difficult. A first step was more reliable dating of when culturally and technologically advanced people lived during the Middle Stone Age in the south of Africa. Zenobia Jacobs and Richard G. Roberts accomplished that dating, which prompted them to reject climate change as a primary cause for the advancements. Instead, drawing on genetic research, they embrace population growth as a likely, key influence.

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GM Crop Trials Start Again In Britain In 'Secret': Report

Photo illustration of potatoes. Genetically modified crops are being grown in Britain for the first time in 12 months after controversial trials were resumed without alerting the public, a newspaper reported Monday. (AFP/File/Omar Torres)

From Yahoo News/AFP:

LONDON (AFP) – Genetically modified crops are being grown in Britain for the first time in 12 months after controversial trials were resumed without alerting the public, a newspaper reported Monday.

Cultivation of a field of potatoes designed to be resistant to pests was abandoned more than a year ago when environmental protesters ripped up the crop, the Daily Telegraph said.

But, without alerting the public, the project near Tadcaster in northern England has been restarted, prompting warnings from green groups that local farms and residents could be put at risk, the newspaper said.

One group accused the government of trying to "slip it under the radar."

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Red Wine Increases Women's Sexual Desire

Chemical compounds found in red wine may improve blood flow Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

A glass or two of red wine may increase a woman's libido, a scientific study has found.

Researchers concluded that levels of sexual desire were higher in women who were moderate drinkers of red wine than in their counterparts who preferred other alcoholic drinks, or were teetotal.

One theory put forward by the team of Italian doctors who carried out the study is that chemical compounds found in red wine may improve sexual functioning by increasing blood flow to key areas of the body.

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Climate Study Puts Incas’ Success Down To 400 Years Of Warm Weather

The Inca City of Machu Picchu was built during the 400-year warm spell,
scientists say. (Paolo Aguilar/EPA)

From Times Online:

Supreme military organisation and a flair for agricultural invention are traditionally credited for the rise of the Incas. However, their success may have owed more to a spell of good weather — a spell that lasted for more than 400 years.

According to new research, an increase in temperature of several degrees between AD1100 and 1533 allowed vast areas of mountain land to be used for agriculture for the first time. This fuelled the territorial expansion of the Incas, which at its peak stretched from the modern Colombian border to the middle of Chile.

“Yes, they were highly organised, and they had a sophisticated hierarchical system, but it wouldn’t have counted a jot without being underpinned by the warming of the climate,” says Dr Alex Chepstow-Lusty, a palaeo-ecologist from the French Institute for Andean Studies in Lima, Peru.

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Bacteria Make Computers Look Like Pocket Calculators

Scanning electron micrograph of E. coli bacteria. A rapidly growing colony can be programmed to act as a hugely powerful parallel computer. Photograph: Getty

From The Guardian:

Biologists have created a living computer from E. coli bacteria that can solve complex mathematical problems.

Computers are evolving – literally. While the tech world argues netbooks vs notebooks, synthetic biologists are leaving traditional computers behind altogether. A team of US scientists have engineered bacteria that can solve complex mathematical problems faster than anything made from silicon.

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Race Is On For Space-Junk Alarm System

Image: Keeping an eye on the increasing amount of space debris is no easy task (Image: European Space Agency / Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

A WORLDWIDE network of radar stations could tackle the ever-growing problem of space debris - the remains of old rockets and satellites that pose an increasing threat to spacecraft.

The US government is launching a competition, which will run until the end of 2010, to find the best way of tracking pieces of junk down to the size of a pool ball. Three aerospace companies - Northrop Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon - have each been awarded $30 million by US Air Force Space Command to design a "space fence" that will constantly report the motion of all objects 5 centimetres wide and larger in medium and low-Earth orbits.

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China Web Users Outnumber US Population: Report

From Breitbart/AFP:

The number of Internet users in China is now greater than the entire population of the United States, after rising to 338 million by the end of June, state media reported Sunday.

China's online population, the largest in the world, rose by 40 million in the first six months of 2009, the official Xinhua news agency reported, citing a report by the China Internet Network Information Center.

The number of broadband Internet connections rose by 10 million to 93.5 million in the first half of the year, the report said.

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Silicon With Afterburners: New Process Could Be Boon To Electronics Manufacturer

Image: Scientists at Rice University and North Carolina State University have found a method of attaching molecules to semiconducting silicon that may help manufacturers reach beyond the current limits of Moore's Law as they make microprocessors both smaller and more powerful. (Credit: Image courtesy of Rice University)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 24, 2009) — Scientists at Rice University and North Carolina State University have found a method of attaching molecules to semiconducting silicon that may help manufacturers reach beyond the current limits of Moore's Law as they make microprocessors both smaller and more powerful.

Moore's Law, suggested by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, said the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. But even Moore has said the law cannot be sustained indefinitely.

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Why Raindrops Fall In Different Sizes

Fragmentation of a 5 millimeters in diameter drop falling by its own weight relative to an ascending stream of air. The overall sequence lasts for 60 milliseconds. This process is responsible for the formation of the raindrops which wet the ground. Credit: Emmanuel Villermaux

From Live Science:

The raindrops that patter onto roofs, sidewalks and umbrellas during a shower or storm fall in a wide range of sizes, as anyone who pays attention can see. The explanation for this variety turns out to be much simpler than scientists thought.

Experts have long thought that the size differences observed in natural raindrops was due to the same complex interactions of droplets that form raindrops in clouds. But a new study finds that the best explanation for the motley size assortment is that the raindrops released from the clouds break up into smaller drops as they fall.

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Splashdown! The Ship That Picked Up the Apollo 11 Astronauts

From Wired Science:

ALAMEDA — The USS Hornet was on hand 40 years ago to pick up the Apollo 11 astronauts after their Columbia Command Module splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969.

Today, the aircraft carrier is preserved as a museum in Alameda, California. Its main deck is littered with historic warplanes and space artifacts including an Apollo command module and Mobile Quarantine Facility from subsequent missions, pictured below. The first footsteps the Apollo 11 crew took on Earth after walking on the moon are traced on the deck.

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Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man

This personal robot plugs itself in when it needs a charge. Servant now, master later?
Ken Conley/Willow Garage

From The New York Times:

A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously.

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

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What And When Is Death?

From The New Atlantis:

All living things die. This is not new and it has nothing to do with technology. What is new in our technological age, however, is an uncertainty about when death has come for some human beings. These human beings, as an unintended consequence of efforts to prevent death, are left suspended at its threshold. Observing them in this state of suspension, we, the living, have a very hard time knowing what to think: Is the living being still among us? Is there still a present for this person or has the long reign of the past tense begun: Is he or was he? The phenomenon is popularly known as “brain death,” but the name is misleading. Death accepts no modifiers. There is only one death. Has it occurred or not? Alive or dead?

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Bluefin Tuna Species Racing Toward Extinction

Bluefin Tuna

From Future Pundit:

A Wired article reports on efforts of scientists to breed and raise tuna in captivity in order to save wild tuna from extinction. While the scientific results in Australia and elsewhere look promising the news about tuna in the wild looks pretty grim.

News of breeding success comes with the three bluefin species — Northern, Southern and Pacific — speeding towards extinction, the victim of something close to a marine version of the 19th century buffalo slaughter. In the last 30 years, bluefin populations around the world have collapsed. Fishing fleets with spotter planes have chased ever-smaller, ever-younger fish, catching them at sea and hauling them to shoreline pens to be fattened and killed before they’re even old enough to reproduce.

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New Flu Treatment Outsmarts Mutations

Candy Coated: A new treatment targets “lollipop” molecules on the flu’s surface. Russell Kightley/Photo Researchers

From Popsci.com:

A new drug could foil any outbreak.

Before swine flu swept through the U.S., the virus had bounced around South America undetected for years. The H1N1 strain caught scientists by surprise, and without a vaccine. But a few weeks before the first North American case popped up, researchers successfully tested a therapy that could knock out almost any flu, and possibly any virus.

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Beyond The Moon: A Chat With Buzz Aldrin

Preparing for an Apollo 11 Countdown Test: NASA

From Popsci.com:

The 79-year-old astronaut says: Enough about the moon; let's go to Mars.

It's been 40 years since Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin landed the Apollo 11 lunar module in the Sea of Tranquility. Aldrin, now 79 years old, recalls that fateful day with clarity. Alarms were sounding inside the space capsule during their speedy descent, and even down to the last seconds, the astronauts were uncertain whether they would need to abort the landing. Millions of Earthlings watched on television as the Eagle touched down.

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My Comment: Still a dreamer at 79 .... and he is right.

For 13 Astronauts, A Day Off In Space

International Space Station

From Yahoo News/Space.com:

The 13 people living on the International Space Station took some hard-earned time off Saturday, a welcome relief after a hectic week of orbital construction.

It's a rare rest day for the station's six-man crew and seven visiting astronauts from the space shuttle Endeavour, who have plowed through a week packed with four spacewalks and robotic arm work to upgrade the orbiting laboratory with new batteries, spare parts and - their crown jewel - a brand new Japanese porch, complete with experiments.

"On a very long mission like this, it's really important that they get some time to recuperate and recover and really just enjoy being on orbit as the first 13-person crew," space station flight director Holly Ridings told reporters late Friday.

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Building NASA's Future

Photo: Steel pieces that make up most of Ares I-X are clustered in High Bay 4 of the assembly building. The five cylinders represent the interstage and upper stage of Ares I; the final piece is the dart-shaped mock-up of the crew capsule. Credit: John Loomis

From Technology Review:

The U.S. space agency readies the first test flight of the vehicle destined for the moon.

One of the largest structures in the world, the vehicle assembly building at Kenned­y Space Center in Florida is the last stop for the space shuttle before it is rolled out to the launch pad. But with the shuttles scheduled to retire in 2010, the massive building has already become home to NASA's next launch vehicle.

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Massive Impact On Jupiter Recorded -- News Updates July 25, 2009

Closeup view of the new dark spot on Jupiter taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on July 23, 2009. (IBTimes / NASA, ESA, H. Hammel (Space Sc)

Jupiter: Our Cosmic Protector? -- The New York Times

Jupiter took a bullet for us last weekend.

An object, probably a comet that nobody saw coming, plowed into the giant planet’s colorful cloud tops sometime Sunday, splashing up debris and leaving a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean. This was the second time in 15 years that this had happened. The whole world was watching when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fell apart and its pieces crashed into Jupiter in 1994, leaving Earth-size marks that persisted up to a year.

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More News On Jupiter's Collision

Hubble Snaps Sharpest Image Yet of Jupiter Impact -- Wired Science
Hubble image shows debris from Jupiter collision -- AP
See Jupiter's Great Black Spot -- MSNBC
Hubble restarted, captures images of Jupiter 'scar' -- International Herald Tribune
Hubble pictures Jupiter's 'scar' -- BBC
The Bruise Heard Round the World -- New York Times
Jupiter collision packed a huge wallop -- Christian Science Monitor

Europe's Mars Rover Slips To 2018

From The BBC:

Europe's flagship robotic rover mission to Mars now looks certain to leave Earth in 2018, two years later than recently proposed, the BBC understands.

The ExoMars vehicle is intended to search the Red Planet for signs of past or present life.

The delay is the third for the mission originally planned to launch in 2011.

While the switch will disappoint many people, officials say the change will open up a greatly expanded programme of exploration at the Red Planet.

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Strong Evidence That Cloud Changes May Exacerbate Global Warming

This image shows unique cloud patterns over the Pacific Ocean of the coast of Baja California, an area of great interest to Amy Clement and Robert Burgman of the University of Miami and Joel Norris of Scripps Oceanography, as they study the role of low-level clouds in climate change. (Credit: NASA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 24, 2009) — The role of clouds in climate change has been a major question for decades. As the earth warms under increasing greenhouse gases, it is not known whether clouds will dissipate, letting in more of the sun's heat energy and making the earth warm even faster, or whether cloud cover will increase, blocking the Sun's rays and actually slowing down global warming.

In a study published in the July 24 issue of Science, researchers Amy Clement and Robert Burgman from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and Joel Norris from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego begin to unravel this mystery. Using observational data collected over the last 50 years and complex climate models, the team has established that low-level stratiform clouds appear to dissipate as the ocean warms, indicating that changes in these clouds may enhance the warming of the planet.

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Permafrost Could Be Climate's Ticking Time Bomb

Gregory Lehn , a Ph. D. student in the department of Earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University on the left, and Matt Khosh, Ph.D. student in the department of marine sciences at the University of Texas, Austin on the right, talk with Jim McClelland, professor in the department of marine sciences at the University of Texas, Austin, a co-principal investigator on the project, in the center. Credit: Andrew D. Jacobson, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University

From Live Science:

The terrain of the North Slope of Alaska is not steep, but Andrew Jacobson still has difficulty as he hikes along the spongy tundra, which is riddled with rocks and masks multitudes of mosquitoes.

Jacobson, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University, extracts soil and water samples in search of clues to one of global warming's biggest ticking time bombs: the melting of permafrost.

Permafrost, or frozen ground, covers approximately 20 to 25 percent of the land-surface area in the northern hemisphere, and is estimated to contain up to 1,600 gigatons of carbon, primarily in the form of organic matter. (One gigaton is equivalent to one billion tons.)

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Monolayer Nanotechnology Will Enable Silicon to Maintain Conductance for Smaller Devices And Sustain Moore's Law Progress

From The Next Big Future:

Scientists at Rice University and North Carolina State University have found a method of attaching molecules to semiconducting silicon that may help manufacturers reach beyond the current limits of Moore's Law as they make microprocessors both smaller and more powerful.

Read more ....

Traffic Hydrocarbons Linked To Lower IQs In Kids

From Science News:

Prenatal exposures to common air pollutants correlate with drop in intelligence scores.

Here’s a dirty little secret about polluted urban air: It can shave almost 5 points off of a young child’s IQ, a new report suggests.

That’s no small loss, says Kimberly Gray, whose federal agency cofinanced the study, to appear in the August Pediatrics.

Normally, baseline environmental exposures to a pollutant yield at most a subtle change — one that is hard to detect and with impacts that are hard to gauge, says Gray, of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, N.C. But the new study shows that children heavily exposed in the womb to common combustion pollutants known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons had, by kindergarten age, an IQ some 4.5 points lower than that of kids with minimal fetal exposures.

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Apollo 11 Experiment Still Going After 40 Years

Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment

From Yahoo News/Space:

The Apollo 11 astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago today, but they left behind more than footprints. An experiment they placed on the moon's surface is still running to this day.

The Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment is the only moon investigation to continuously operate since the Apollo 11 mission. The experiment studies the Earth-Moon system and beams the data to labs around the world, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

"Yes, we are still going," said James Williams, a JPL scientist involved with the experiment, in an e-mail interview.

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Is the Sun Missing Its Spots?

SUN GAZING These photos show sunspots near solar maximum on July 19, 2000, and near solar minimum on March 18, 2009. Some global warming skeptics speculate that the Sun may be on the verge of an extended slumber. NASA

From The New York Times:

The Sun is still blank (mostly).

Ever since Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, a German astronomer, first noted in 1843 that sunspots burgeon and wane over a roughly 11-year cycle, scientists have carefully watched the Sun’s activity. In the latest lull, the Sun should have reached its calmest, least pockmarked state last fall.

Indeed, last year marked the blankest year of the Sun in the last half-century — 266 days with not a single sunspot visible from Earth. Then, in the first four months of 2009, the Sun became even more blank, the pace of sunspots slowing more.

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Alien-Wasp Swarms Devouring Birds, Bugs in Hawaii

Invasive western yellowjacket wasps in Hawaii (above, a wasp eats an unidentified insect near another wasp) are munching their way through an "astonishing diversity" of creatures, from caterpillars to ring-necked pheasants, a July 2009 study says. The voracious wasps, which have exploded in their new habitat, can wipe out whole swaths of prey insects surrounding their nests. Photograph courtesy Erin Wilson

From National Geographic:

Attacking from nests as big as pickup-truck beds, invasive western yellowjacket wasps in Hawaii are munching their way through an "astonishing diversity" of creatures, from caterpillars to pheasants, a new study says.

Adult yellowjackets consume only nectar. But they kill or scavenge prey to deliver needed protein to their growing broods.

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Nasa Finds Monster Black Hole Sucking Up Gas, Dust And Stars At Centre Of Galaxy

The galaxy NGC-1097 with a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars at its centre
Photo: REUTERS / NASA

From The Telegraph:

Nasa has found a monster black hole 100 million times the mass of the Sun feeding off gas, dust and stars at the centre of a galaxy 50 million light-years away.

The star-ringed black hole forms the eye of a galaxy called NGC-1097 which was photographed by the US space agency's Spitzer Space Telescope in California.

A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational pull is so powerful that nothing, including whole planets, can escape being sucked in if they come within its reach.

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Sensational Collection Of Satellite Images Captures Earth's Natural Wonders From Space

This image shows how dust from the Sahara desert blew all the way over the British Isles

From The Daily Mail:

For decades, man has gazed up at the stars and marvelled at the wonders of the universe.

But, as this amazing selection of images shows, there are many mind-blowing sights to behold from the other direction.

Pictures taken by astronauts and Nasa satellites give a fascinating bird's-eye view of Earth's natural wonders - including hurricanes, volcanoes and other powerful weather formations - from space.

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What NASA's Return To The Moon May Look Like

To explore the lunar surface, NASA envisions a pressurised rover that will act as a mobile habitat, allowing astronauts to explore the lunar surface for weeks at a time without returning to their base. If supply depots are scattered along the way, these rovers could potentially have a range of hundreds of kilometres. (Image: Regan Geeseman)

From New Scientist:

The Apollo era may have ended as funding fizzled, and the programme's astronauts may be bigger fans of Mars, but the hope of returning to the moon never really went away.

Twenty years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, then-President George H. W. Bush proposed that the US build a base on the moon and send an expedition to Mars. The call fell flat with Congress, which never provided the funding to back up the plan.

But a decade and a half later, his son, President George W. Bush, articulated a similar vision with a clear deadline – an aim to return humans to the moon by 2020, as a stepping-stone on the way to Mars.

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Wireless Power System Shown Off

From BBC:

A system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires has been shown off at a hi-tech conference.

The technique exploits simple physics and can be used to charge a range of electronic devices over many metres.

Eric Giler, chief executive of US firm Witricity, showed mobile phones and televisions charging wirelessly at the TED Global conference in Oxford.

He said the system could replace the miles of expensive power cables and billions of disposable batteries.

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China Announces First Panda From Frozen Sperm

From Yahoo News/AP:

BEIJING – China announced the first successful birth of a panda cub from artificial insemination using frozen sperm, giving a new option for the notoriously poor breeders, officials said Friday.

Panda females have only three days a year in which they can conceive — one reason their species is endangered.

Female panda You You (pronounced Yo Yo) gave birth to the new cub Thursday morning at the Wolong Giant Panda Research Center in southwestern Sichuan. It is You You's third baby, and the 10th panda cub born at Wolong this year.

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