Space Mission To Mercury: How An Ion Engine Works

Photo courtesy NASA
This image of a xenon ion engine, photographed through a port of the vacuum chamber where it was being tested at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows the faint blue glow of charged atoms being emitted from the engine. The ion propulsion engine is the first non-chemical propulsion to be used as the primary means of propelling a spacecraft.

From The Telegraph:

The solar electric propulsion systems – or ion engines - which will power the next generation of spacecraft to Mercury and beyond are ten times more efficient than conventional rocket engines.

In an ion engine the gas xenon is pumped through a chamber where xenon atoms are stripped of an electron, becoming electrically charged ions, and drift towards two grids a millimetre apart.

The grids are fed with two thousand volts – in space this power will come from paper-thin solar panels spanning 26m. As the ions pass through the electrified grids they accelerate to up to 50km a second and shoot from the rear in a parallel beam.

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First Baby Born From New Egg-Screening Technique

From Breitbart/AFP:

Meet Oliver, the first baby in the world born using a new egg-screening technique that could double the odds of an implanted embryo taking hold in the womb, unveiled by British experts on Wednesday.

Baby Oliver was born in Britain to a 41-year-old woman after 13 failed attempts at in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

The new technique, called array comparative genomic hybridisation (CGH), makes it possible to ensure eggs have a normal number of chromosomes, boosting the likelihood of a successful pregnancy.

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Great Ball Of Fire? No, Just A 'Sun Dog' Scampering Across The Sky

Blazing light: The flash was photographed by Matthew Pinless
near his home in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

From The Daily Mail:

Matthew Pinless was sure that the streak of light he spotted in the sky while walking was more likely to be a meteor than a UFO.

In fact it was neither. The blazing ball hanging above a residential street in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, is thought to be a ‘sun dog’.

The phenomenon occurs when sunlight is refracted by hexagonal-shaped ice crystals in high and cirrus clouds - and is quite common, experts say.

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First Spacewalk Complete

Credit NASA

From Red Orbit:

The first spacewalk of the STS-128 mission came off without a hitch on Tuesday, as spacewalkers Danny Olivas and Nicole Stott completed all the tasks on their to-do list.

Olivas and Stott left the International Space Station at 4:49 p.m. Tuesday, and spent the next 6 hours and 35 minutes outside, working to get cargo that space shuttle Discovery will bring home ready for its return. They started with a depleted ammonia tank assembly on the P1, or port 1, segment of the station’s truss, getting it out of the way in preparation for the installation of a new tank to be installed on Thursday, during the mission’s second spacewalk. The ammonia in the tanks is used to cool the station and expel the heat generated by its residents and systems.

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Maintenance Error Causes Two-Hour Gmail Outage

From ZDNet:

Google's nearly two-hour Gmail outage yesterday was the result of a miscalculation regarding the capacity of its system, the company said late on Tuesday.

Gmail (Google Mail) was down from about 12:30pm PDT (8:30pm BST) Tuesday to about 2:30pm PDT (10:30pm BST), affecting millions of Gmail customers who depend on the service for everything from fantasy football roster updates to business-critical information. The problem was caused by a classic cascade in which servers became overwhelmed with traffic in rapid succession.

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Finding Smells That Repel

Michael C. Witte

From The Wall Street Journal:

If you're one of those people whom mosquitoes tend to favor, maybe it's because you aren't sufficiently stressed-out.

Insects have very keen powers of smell that direct them to their targets. But for researchers trying to figure out what attracts or repels the pests, sorting through the 300 to 400 distinct chemical odors that the human body produces has proved daunting.

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Keeping Genes Out Of Terrorists' Hands

Photo: Low standards could mean that hazardous genes get through screening more easily. W. Philpott/Reuters

From Nature:

Gene-synthesis industry at odds over how to screen DNA orders.

A standards war is brewing in the gene-synthesis industry. At stake is the way that the industry screens orders for hazardous toxins and genes, such as pieces of deadly viruses and bacteria. Two competing groups of companies are now proposing different sets of screening standards, and the results could be crucial for global biosecurity.

"If you have a company that persists with a lower standard, you can drag the industry down to a lower level," says lawyer Stephen Maurer of the University of California, Berkeley, who is studying how the industry is developing responsible practices. "Now we have a standards war that is a race to the bottom."

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My Comment: This is a topic that I am ignorant of. But my brother .... who has a Doctorate in Chemistry and who has worked in the pharmaceutical industry exploring these topics for he past 20 years tells me to be afraid .... be very afraid.

Hmmmm .... OK .... I am afraid.

Global Warming And The Sun -- A Commentary

From L.A. Times:

Recent studies seem to show that there's more to climate change than we know.

Assuming there are no sunspots today, a 96-year record will have been broken: 53 days without any solar blemishes, giant magnetic disruptions on the sun's surface that cause solar flares. That would be the fourth-longest stretch of stellar solar complexion since 1849. Wait, it gets even more exciting.

During what scientist call the Maunder Minimum -- a period of solar inactivity from 1645 to 1715 -- the world experienced the worst of the cold streak dubbed the Little Ice Age. At Christmastime, Londoners ice skated on the Thames, and New Yorkers (then New Amsterdamers) sometimes walked over the Hudson from Manhattan to Staten Island.

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World's Smallest Semiconductor Laser Heralds New Era In Optical Science

Image: The schematic on the left illustrates light being compressed and sustained in the 5 nanometer gap -- smaller than a protein molecule -- between a nanowire and underlying silver surface. To the right is an electron microscope image of the hybrid design shown in the schematic. (Credit: Courtesy of Xiang Zhang Lab, UC Berkeley)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2009) — Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have reached a new milestone in laser physics by creating the world's smallest semiconductor laser, capable of generating visible light in a space smaller than a single protein molecule.

This breakthrough, described in an advanced online publication of the journal Nature on Aug. 30, breaks new ground in the field of optics. The UC Berkeley team not only successfully squeezed light into such a tight space, but found a novel way to keep that light energy from dissipating as it moved along, thereby achieving laser action.

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Why Pacific Hurricanes Hit The Americas So Rarely

Hurricane Jimena was heading west-northwest toward Mexico’s Baja Peninsula on August 30, 2009, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image. Near the time of the image, the storm had sustained winds of 140 mph, making it a Category 4 storm. Clouds from the storm stretch out over western Mexico. Credit: Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center

From Live Science:

Stories of hurricane winds and rain lashing the coasts of Florida, Louisiana and other southeastern states pop up in the news constantly during the summer, but warnings of Pacific storms such as Jimena are few and far between.

In fact, only one hurricane is thought to have ever struck California, and that was clear back in 1858. Could it happen again? Not impossible, but also extremely unlikely in any given year.

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The Race To The Higgs Boson: LHC Versus Tevatron

Tevatron Fermilab

From Popular Science:

While the LHC's in the shop for repairs from its massive breakdown last September, an older particle accelerator might beat them to finding the Higgs boson, the fundamental particle thought to give matter mass.

At a conference last week, Tevatron physicists threw down the gauntlet, vowing that by 2011, the Tevatron accelerator (located at Fermi National Accelerator Lab outside Chicago) will be able to definitively prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson.

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8 Of The Most Dangerous Places (To Live) On The Planet

A monument reading "Polyus Cholada," Russian for "Pole of Cold," stands at the entrance to the city of Verkhoyansk.

From Popular Mechanics:

It’s hurricane season, a time of year when residents in vulnerable areas—like New Orleans—need to hunker down, stock up and prepare for the unforeseen. But there are other places in the world where the dangers are so great that it’s hard to believe anyone is willing to stay put and fight it out with Mother Nature. Here, we have canvassed the globe for 10 places that require fortitude, resourcefulness and a great faith in one’s DIY skills to make it through the year alive.

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Astrophysicists Puzzle Over Planet That's Too Close To Its Sun

From L.A. Times:

Completing an orbit in less than an Earth day, planet Wasp-18b should have burned up, according to accepted theory.

Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn't exist. The finding, they say, could alter our understanding of orbital dynamics, a field considered pretty well settled since the time of astronomer Johannes Kepler 400 years ago.

The planet is known as a "hot Jupiter," a gas giant orbiting the star Wasp-18, about 330 light-years from Earth. The planet, Wasp-18b, is so close to the star that it completes a full orbit (its "year") in less than an Earth day, according to the research, which was published in the journal Nature.

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Social Networking Sites Grab Big Slice Of Web Ads

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - About one of every five Internet display ads in the United States is viewed on a social networking Web site like MySpace and Facebook, according to a new report.

The report by analytics firm comScore underscores the increasing prominence of social media sites in the Internet landscape and broadening acceptance of the sites by brand advertisers.

It also illustrates the increasing competition between social media sites and established Internet companies like Yahoo Inc and Time Warner Inc's AOL which have long billed themselves as the top online destinations for brand advertisers.

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5 Future Robotic Expeditions And What They Could Reveal [Slide Show]

ESA/AOES Medialab

From Scientific American:

Some are already on their way and some are still in the works, but here is what we may see from unmanned exploration of space in the coming years.

Fifty years ago this month, the Soviet Union scored a coup in the space race with a probe called Luna 2. The spacecraft, which resembled a squat, souped-up version of its cousin Sputnik, was launched on September 12, 1959, and two days later reached the lunar surface. By impacting the moon, Luna 2 became the first man-made object to land on a celestial body other than Earth.

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Fahrenheit 747: World’s Biggest Fire Extinguisher Douses L.A. County

From Autopia/Wired Science:

The deadly fires that have blackened more than 105,000 acres around Los Angeles prompted authorities to call in the world’s largest fire extinguisher — a Boeing 747 that can drop 20,000 gallons of retardant over a swath of land three miles long.

The plane made its first-ever drop in the continental United States when fire officials summoned it to the Oak Glen fire east of Los Angeles mid day on Monday. After the successful first drop, the Supertanker was called back into action Monday evening where it made further drops on the massive Station fire north of the city which grew to more than 164 square miles and threatened 10,000 homes. Nearly 2,600 firefighters from as far away as Montana are throwing everything they have at the blaze, and on Monday they called in the biggest tool in their inventory.

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Neuroscientists Find Brain Region Responsible For Our Sense Of Personal Space

Patient SM, a woman with complete bilateral amygdala lesions (red), preferred to stand close to the experimenter (black). On average, control participants (blue) preferred to stand nearly twice as far away from the same experimenter. Images drawn to scale.

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2009) — In a finding that sheds new light on the neural mechanisms involved in social behavior, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have pinpointed the brain structure responsible for our sense of personal space.

The discovery, described in the August 30 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, could offer insight into autism and other disorders where social distance is an issue.

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Why Did People Become White?

A host of evolutionary pressures at work that contributed to the development of lighter skin, but for now, scientists aren't sure exactly what produced white people. Image credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

Humans come in a rainbow of hues, from dark chocolate browns to nearly translucent whites.

This full kaleidoscope of skin colors was a relatively recent evolutionary development, according to biologists, occuring alongside the migration of modern humans out of Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.

The consensus among scientists has always been that lower levels of vitamin D at higher latitudes — where the sun is less intense — caused the lightening effect when modern humans, who began darker-skinned, first migrated north.

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Look Out Mars, India's Gonna Get Ya!

The Red Planet Beckons: India's next target beyond the moon. NASA

From Popular Science:

India terminates its lunar probe and plans to launch its first Mars mission as early as 2013.

India has officially given up on its lunar probe Chandrayaan-1, which launched in 2008 and stayed alive for ten months before mission controllers lost radio contact. But officials are already looking forward to sending a robotic explorer to the red planet.

The nation's state-run space agency announced today a mission to Mars between 2013 and 2015. Xinhua reports that the planning will become reality after India launches its Chandrayaan-2 lunar rover in 2011.

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Mt. Wilson Observatory: Center Of Scientific Breakthroughs

Mt. Wilson Observatory

From The L.A. Times:

The installation of the 100-inch Hooker telescope in 1917 set the stage for two shocking discoveries: The universe was far larger than anyone imagined and it was expanding.

For nearly half a century, the Mt. Wilson Observatory was not only the center of the universe for the study of space science, it taught us just how huge that universe was.

At the eyepiece of the observatory's then-groundbreaking 100-inch Hooker telescope, astronomer Edwin Hubble made two of the most shocking scientific discoveries of the 20th century: The universe was far larger than anyone imagined and it was expanding.

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International Space Updates, September 2009

From Daily Tech:

NASA must use ISS to get to Mars; mice head into space; and two more companies join a Japanese space energy project

Even though NASA reportedly doesn't have necessary funds for deep space missions, NASA scientist Julie Robinson believes extending the International Space Station (ISS)'s mission until 2020 is necessary. After more than 10 years of construction from the United States and 15 other nations, the floating science laboratory is expected to end in 2016.

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The Mystery Of Chernobyl

Nuclear wasteland? The 30-mile exclusion zone around Chernobyl and the abandoned town of Pripyat is now home to animals Photo: Reuters

From The Telegraph:

A bitter dispute is raging over whether the fallout zone is a wasteland or wonderland. Now, a team of scientists is heading back into the contaminated area to find out the truth.

We walked out into a wasteland, grey and desolate. The buildings had deteriorated, windows had been smashed. Trees and weeds had grown over everything: it was a ghost town." It reads like a passage from a post-apocalyptic novel, such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road; in fact, it's how Tim Mousseau describes his first visit to Chernobyl.

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Bionic Brain Chips Could Overcome Paralysis

Regaining control of the body (Image: Daniel Chang)

From New Scientist:

A MONKEY sits on a bench, wires running from its head and wrist into a small box of electronics. At first the wrist lies limp, but within 10 minutes the monkey begins to flex its muscles and move its hand from side to side. The movements are clumsy, but they are enough to justify a rewarding slug of juice. After all, it shouldn't be able to move its wrist at all.

A nerve connection in the monkey's upper arm had previously been blocked with an anaesthetic that prevented signals travelling from its brain to its wrist, leaving the muscles temporarily paralysed. The monkey was only able to move its arm because the wires and the black box bypassed the broken link.

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Engineering Earth 'Is Feasible'

From BBC:

A UK Royal Society study has concluded that many engineering proposals to reduce the impact of climate change are "technically possible".

Such approaches could be effective, the authors said in their report.

But they also stressed that the potential of geo-engineering should not divert governments away from their efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Such engineering projects could either remove carbon dioxide or reflect the Sun's rays away from the planet.

Suggestions range from having giant mirrors in space, to erecting giant CO2 scrubbers that would "clean up" the air.

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Facebook To Tighten Privacy Policies And Give Users More Control Over Personal Data

From Times Online:

Facebook, the world's largest online social network, has bowed to pressure and agreed to tighten up its privacy policies further.

The company will give its 250 million users more control over the personal information they share with third-party applications such as games and quizzes and will clarify what happens to data when a user deactivates an account.

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Eye Say! How The Animal Kingdom Views The World

All-round vision: Tarantulas have eight eyes - two wide ones at the front, with four small ones underneath, and two more small ones on the side of the upper head

From The Daily Mail:

To say they come in all shapes and sizes is an understatement.

Tarantulas boast an eight-pack for all-round vision. Male elephants give off scent from behind theirs' to attract mates. And the octopus relies as much on its tentacles to get around.

These fascinating images give a tantalising glimpse of the wonders nature has evolved to see - and the extra functions they bring.

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Acoustic Tweezers Can Position Tiny Objects

"Acoustic tweezers" enable flexible on-chip manipulation and patterning of cells using standing surface acoustic waves. (Credit: Tony Jun Huang, Jinjie Shi, Penn State)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2009) — Manipulating tiny objects like single cells or nanosized beads often requires relatively large, unwieldy equipment, but now a system that uses sound as a tiny tweezers can be small enough to place on a chip, according to Penn State engineers.

"Current methods for moving individual cells or tiny beads include such devices as optical tweezers, which require a lot of energy and could damage or even kill live cells," said Tony Jun Huang, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics. "Acoustic tweezers are much smaller than optical tweezers and use 500,000 times less energy."

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Coldest, Driest, Calmest Place On Earth Found

From Live Science:

The search for the best observatory site in the world has lead to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth — a place where no human is thought to have ever set foot.

To search for the perfect site to take pictures of the heavens, a U.S.-Australian research team combined data from satellites, ground stations and climate models in a study to assess the many factors that affect astronomy — cloud cover, temperature, sky-brightness, water vapor, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence.

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Opera 10 To Emerge Tuesday

From CNET:

Opera Software will release version 10 of its browser Tuesday, a new version of software that has loyal fans but not as much adoption as several rivals.

The Norwegian company says Opera 10 has better performance, a Turbo mode for slow Internet connections, support for a variety of Web standards such as Web fonts, and improvements to the Opera Mail feature. The company issued two Opera 10 release candidates for the free software in the last week, and spokeswoman Falguni Bhuta announced Monday the final version will arrive September 1.

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7 Equipment Breakthroughs That Shook Up Sports

From Popular Mechanics:

It's one of the most entertaining games of cat and mouse in the sports world. A competitor, or a manufacturer, comes up with a piece of gear that threatens to turn a sport upside down. Then the game's powers that be are faced with a dilemma. Ban it outright? Rewrite the rule book? Or just let it be? Just such a controversy is raging in swimming, where streamlined suits have been banned, but it's important to remember that seeking an edge through better equipment is as old as sport itself. Here are seven pieces of gear that shook up their respective sports and sent officials back to the drawing board.

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Diving Deep For A Living Fossil

Light-equipped booms on Alvin illuminate the sea floor and pillow lava formations created by eruptions on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The Stephen Low Company and Rutgers University

From The New York Times:

For 33 years, Peter A. Rona has pursued an ancient, elusive animal, repeatedly plunging down more than two miles to the muddy seabed of the North Atlantic to search out, and if possible, pry loose his quarry.

Like Ahab, he has failed time and again. Despite access to the world’s best equipment for deep exploration, he has always come back empty-handed, the creature eluding his grip.

The animal is no white whale. And Dr. Rona is no unhinged Captain Ahab, but rather a distinguished oceanographer at Rutgers University. And he has now succeeded in making an intellectual splash with a new research report, written with a team of a dozen colleagues.

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Four Years Later, New Orleans' Green Makeover

A house under construction in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans in the "Make It Right" program is designed to be extremely eco-friendly. Charlie Varley / Sipa

From Time Magazine:

After Hurricane Katrina flattened New Orleans exactly four years ago, on Aug. 29, 2005, the city emerged as an inadvertent symbol of global warming, the first American victim of climate change. Over 200,000 homes were destroyed during the Category 5 hurricane. But in the years since, the Crescent City has quietly embraced a new and unexpected role as a laboratory for green building. Sustainable development groups that range from the international nonprofit Global Green to earth-friendly celebrities like Brad Pitt descended on New Orleans, determined not just to build the city back, but to build it back green. "It's going to come back," says Matt Petersen, the president of Global Green USA. "But we want to build it better than it was before."

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US Scientists Set To Reveal The True Colour Of Dinosaurs

From Independent:

A new technique that identifies the hue of ancient birds may help a Yale team with bigger beasts.

It is a question that has baffled the greatest scientific minds – and those of the average seven-year-old: what colour were dinosaurs?

Now a dramatic breakthrough in fossil examination has sparked a race to discover an answer that may satisfy the scientific community as well as anxious crayon-wielders. A research team at Yale University believes it has established a technique that can identify the colour of fossilised feathers and fur. Preliminary results suggest that the true colours of dinosaurs may soon be revealed.

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In Vino Veritas

Photo: Insectaries are natural habitats for beneficial insects that control pests. The Benziger Family Winery’s main insectary is planted with more than 50 kinds of plants and flowers. Credit: Benziger Family Winery

From Technology Review:

Winemakers disappointed by organic methods have turned to biodynamics as the purest route to wine that's true to soil, grape, and climate.

For years the question in winemaking was how technology could make wine better. This was especially true if the wine was Californian. When California cabernet sauvignon bested the best of Bordeaux--in a legendary blind tasting, the "Judgment of Paris," convened by the English wine merchant Steven ­Spurrier--it was a moment of great national pride at the time of America's Bicentennial, and it was achieved in part because California winemakers had used technology in ways tradition-bound French winemakers would not. As California wine became respectable, Silicon Valley millionaires bought vineyards in Napa and Sonoma counties. California wine and tech soon enjoyed a happy marriage.

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Tumors Feel The Deadly Sting Of Nanobees

Bee on a finger. Researchers have recently harnessed the toxin in bee venom to kill tumor cells. (Credit: iStockphoto/Tatiana Buzuleac)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2009) — When bees sting, they pump poison into their victims. Now the toxin in bee venom has been harnessed to kill tumor cells by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The researchers attached the major component of bee venom to nano-sized spheres that they call nanobees.

In mice, nanobees delivered the bee toxin melittin to tumors while protecting other tissues from the toxin's destructive power. The mice's tumors stopped growing or shrank. The nanobees' effectiveness against cancer in the mice is reported in advance online publication Aug. 10 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

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What Makes A Psychopath? Answers Remain Elusive

Psychopathic behavior can take many forms, not all of it violent. But some common themes underlie the condition, with pieces of a brain's emotional machinery missing. Psychopaths often lack empathy, guilt, conscience or the ability to show remorse. Image credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

As exaggerated as many popular depictions of psychopaths often are, many nevertheless do pose a genuine danger to others. So what makes psychopaths the way they are?

Scientists are now working toward uncovering the roots of this disorder in the brain. Their research could lead to ways to intervene against the disorder and hopefully prevent it from manifesting.

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Banana Diseases Hit African Crops

From The BBC:

Food supplies in several African countries are under threat because two diseases are attacking bananas, food scientists have told the BBC.

Crops are being damaged from Angola through to Uganda - including many areas where bananas are a staple food.

Experts are urging farmers to use pesticides or change to a resistant variety of banana where possible.

Scientists have been meeting in Tanzania to decide how to tackle the diseases, which are spread by insects.

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Find Out How You'll Die, In 4 Easy Online Steps

What Will Finally Do You In?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/44165698@N00/ / CC BY 2.0

From Popular Science:

A new website lets you figure out how you might die, by sorting death data by cause of death, sex, and age. For American males ages 20-29, the most common cause of death is accidents (40.2 percent of deaths), followed by homicide (17.5 percent), and suicide (11.7 percent). Urinary tract infections? 0.3 percent.

The Death Risk Rankings site was compiled by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, and seems to have about a zillion ways to organize the data. It's quite cumbersome to use, so I'm going to save you the effort.

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Laser Tests Could Silence The Dentist's Drill

From New Scientist:

THE dentist's dreaded drill could become a medical relic thanks to laser tests which spot weaknesses in dental enamel in time to repair the surface before more drastic intervention is needed.

Dentists currently check for cavities with X-rays and metal probes, but these cannot detect weaknesses in the enamel while there is still a chance to repair it. David Wang, a graduate student at the University of Sydney in Australia, instead studied whether the propagation of sound waves through the enamel could provide an early warning (Optics Express, vol 17, p 15592).

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Wikipedia To Color Code Untrustworthy Text

From Wired Science:

Starting this fall, you’ll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia: An optional feature called “WikiTrust” will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

More than 60 million people visit the free, open-access encyclopedia each month, searching for knowledge on 12 million pages in 260 languages. But despite its popularity, Wikipedia has long suffered criticism from those who say it’s not reliable. Because anyone with an internet connection can contribute, the site is subject to vandalism, bias and misinformation. And edits are anonymous, so there’s no easy way to separate credible information from fake content created by vandals.

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Space shuttle reaches space station for 9-day stay

The shuttle Discovery, docked to the International Space Station.
(Credit: NASA TV)

From Reuters:

*Three spacewalks planned during shuttle's visit

*Discovery astronaut Nicole Stott to join station crew

*Shuttle delivering more than 7 tons of gear for outpost

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Aug 30 (Reuters) - U.S. space shuttle Discovery arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday with food, equipment and new lab gear for the orbital outpost.

After nearly two days of traveling following its launch late Friday night, Discovery reached the Space Station at 8:54 p.m. EDT (0054 GMT Monday) as it sailed 225 miles (362 km) over the Atlantic.

"The entire rendezvous and docking was smooth as silk," said NASA mission commentator Rob Navias.

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Energy Saving Light Bulbs Offer Dim Future

Light Bulb Test Photo: JULIAN SIMMONDS

From The Telegraph:

Energy saving light bulbs are not as bright as their traditional counterparts and claims about the amount of light they produce are "exaggerated", the European Union has admitted.

Soon they will be the only kind of light bulb allowed, but now officials in Brussels have admitted that energy-saving bulbs are not as bright as the old-fashioned kind they are replacing.

From tomorrow a Europe-wide ban on traditional incandescent bulbs will begin to be rolled out, with a ban on 100W bulbs and old-style frosted or pearled bulbs.

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Three Months From a Climate Summit, Agreement Far Off

Ice sculptures, made from glacial melt water, placed by Greenpeace at the Temple of Earth in Beijing, mark the start of the 100-day countdown to the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Summit and the launch of the Tck Tck Tck campaign. LU GUANG / GREENPEACE INTERNATIONAL / EPA

From Time Magazine:

If you happened on Friday morning to walk into the Temple of Earth in Beijing — the nearly 500-year-old monument where Chinese emperors once prayed for good harvests — you would have noticed a steady drip. The environmental group Greenpeace placed ice sculptures of 100 children — made of the glacial meltwater that feeds China's great rivers — inside the temple, to symbolize the risk that climate change and disappearing ice poses to the more than 1 billion people in Asia threatened by water shortages.

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iPhones For The Blind

Blind Man with Touch Interface: courtesy of Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea

From Popular Science:

Quick, get out your iPhone. Unlock it and slide over to that game you've been playing when your boss isn't looking. Now mute it, put the phone to sleep, close your eyes, and try to do that again. Can you do it? Didn't think so.

There's not a simple way to use touchscreens when you can't see what you're doing, which means 10 million blind and low-vision Americans can't use this ubiquitous technology. But what if you could feel it? What if the "slide to unlock" key was an actual slide? Even better, what if you could have a Braille iPhone?

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Aspirin Does More Harm Than Good In Healthy People: Research

Aspirin: The drug does more harm than good in healthy people,
British researchers have said Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Healthy people who take aspirin to prevent a heart attack are doing themselves more harm than good, researchers have said.

Millions of people - including a substantial number of the "worried well" - take a daily dose of the drug in the belief it will keep them healthy.

But at a conference for leading doctors, British scientists said they have found that for healthy people taking aspirin does not significantly reduce the risk of a heart attack.

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White Europeans 'Only Evolved 5,500 Years Ago After Food Habits Changed'

Photo: People with pale skin like model Lily Cole may be descended from Europeans who dramatically changed their diets

From The Daily Mail:

People in England may have only developed pale skin within the last 5,500 years, according to new research.

Scientists believe that a sudden change in the diet around that time from hunter-gathering to farming may have led to a dramatic change in skin tone to make up for a lack of vitamin D.

Farmed food is lacking in vitamin D and while humans can produce it when exposed to the ultraviolet light in sunlight darker skin is far less efficient at it.

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Social Media As A Paradigm Shift

Photosynthetic Viruses Keep World's Oxygen Levels Up

From New Scientist:

NEXT time you take in a lungful of oxygen, consider this: it was made possible in part by ocean viruses.

The viruses, which infect single-celled algae called cyanobacteria, are hyperefficient photosynthesisers thanks to a unique set of genes.

Previous work had shown that cyanophage viruses have some photosynthesis genes, apparently used to keep the host cyanobacteria on life support during the infection, which otherwise knocks out the cells' basic functions.

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India Loses Moon Satellite Links

From The BBC:

All communication links with the only Indian satellite orbiting the Moon have been lost, India's space agency says.

Radio contact with the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was lost abruptly early on Saturday, said India's Bangalore-based Space Research Organization (Isro).

The unmanned craft was launched last October in what was billed as a two-year mission of exploration.

The launch was regarded as a major step for India as it seeks to keep pace with other space-faring nations in Asia.

Following its launch from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, it was hoped the robotic probe would orbit the Moon, compile a 3-D atlas of the lunar surface and map the distribution of elements and minerals.

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Ancient Skeletons Could Help Solve Mystery Of Rare Disease

Ballyhanna graveyard site at Ballyshannon. Photo from Ask About Ireland

From Independent (Ireland):

TWO ancient skeletons with a rare genetic bone disease unearthed from a medieval Irish graveyard may hold key insights for medical experts.

An archaeologist believes the discovery of the remains -- afflicted by massive bone growths -- could help modern-day clinicians glean more information about that unusual debilitating condition.

There have only been 16 cases of the hereditary bone growth disorder, now known as multiple osteochondromas, identified in ancient remains worldwide. Four of these have been located in Ireland.

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Star-Birth Myth 'Busted'

False-colour images of two galaxies, NGC 1566 (left) and NGC 6902 (right), showing their different proportions of very massive stars. Regions with massive O stars show up as white or pink, while less massive B stars appear in blue. NGC 1566 is much richer in O stars than is NGC 6902. The images combine observations of UV emission by NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer spacecraft and H-alpha observations made with the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) telescope in Chile. NGC 1566 is 68 million light years away in the southern constellation of Dorado. NGC 6902 is about 33 million light years away in the constellation Sagittarius. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHU)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 30, 2009) — An international team of researchers has debunked one of astronomy's long held beliefs about how stars are formed, using a set of galaxies found with CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope.

When a cloud of interstellar gas collapses to form stars, the stars range from massive to minute.

Since the 1950s astronomers have thought that in a family of new-born stars the ratio of massive stars to lighter ones was always pretty much the same — for instance, that for every star 20 times more massive than the Sun or larger, you’d get 500 stars the mass of the Sun or less.

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