Ahead of Schedule, H1N1 Flu Season Arrives In The U.S.

A dose of flu vaccination is administered at TC Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., on Sept. 11, 2009. Win McNamee / Getty

From Time Magazine:

On the edge of the Western plains, in Spokane, Wash., the reports of significant student sickness started coming in this week. By Thursday morning, nine of the area's roughly 300 schools were reporting absentee rates in excess of 10%. H1N1 had arrived with the end of summer, just as expected.

"This would be comparable to what we would see in a moderate flu season in January or February," says Mark Springer, the Spokane Regional Health District's epidemiologist. "This is just a snapshot in time. We would anticipate increases."

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Ancestral Populations Of India And Relationships To Modern Groups Revealed

A map showing the groups across India included in the Nature study. (Credit: Photo courtesy of D. Reich, K. Thangaraj, N. Patterson, A. Price and L. Singh)

From Science Daily:

In a study published in the September 24th issue of Nature, an international team describes how they harnessed modern genomic technology to explore the ancient history of India, the world's second most populous nation.

The new research reveals that nearly all Indians carry genomic contributions from two distinct ancestral populations. Following this ancient mixture, many groups experienced periods of genetic isolation from each other for thousands of years. The study, which has medical implications for people of Indian descent, was led by scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, India together with US researchers at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

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Moon Myths: The Truth About Lunar Effects On You

This photograph of the full Moon was taken from Apollo 11 during its trip back to Earth. The round smooth area just above the center of the disk is Mare Crisium, left of that is Mare Tranquilitatis. The Apollo 11 landing site is along the left side of Tranquilitatis. Credit: NASA

From Live Science:

The moon holds a mystical place in the history of human culture, so it's no wonder that many myths — from werewolves to induced lunacy to epileptic seizures — have built up regarding its supposed effects on us.

"It must be a full moon," is a phrase heard whenever crazy things happen and is said by researchers to be muttered commonly by late-night cops, psychiatry staff and emergency room personnel.

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The Big Question: What Might The Existence Of Water On The Moon Mean For Space Travel?

From The Independent:

Why are we asking this now?

The American space agency Nasa announced yesterday that three separate missions examining the Moon have found clear evidence of water there. The discovery has huge implications not only for science, but geopolitics as well.

Water, as on Earth? Water you could float a boat in?

No. We are not talking oceans here, or rivers, or lakes or even puddles. What researchers claim to have found are molecules of water and hydroxyl (hydrogen and oxygen) that interact with molecules of rock and dust in the top millimetres of the Moon's surface – in essence, water-bearing minerals, rather than water that is in any way free flowing. But water is water. And water is the essential element for life on earth.

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No Need For Panic About "Toxic" Shower Heads: Reality Check

(Photograph by stevendepolo via Flickr, shared under a Creative Commons license)

From Popular Mechanics:

Prompted by a study tracing bacterial contamination to shower heads, news outlets across the globe have broadcast panicked reports proclaiming that shower heads harbor a bounty of germs, that shower heads may deliver a blast of bacteria, and that a long, hot shower "can kill you." Really? PM's investigation throws cold water on the claims.

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General Electric Gives Gearless Wind Turbines A Big Boost

Gearless Wind Power The winds of change could soon shake up traditional gearbox turbines GE

From Popular Science:

Magnet-based wind turbine tech moves forward with GE investment.

Conventional wind turbines have an Achilles heel in the form of their clunky and expensive gearboxes. But that could change with GE's recent purchase of a company that has developed gearless turbine technology based on magnets.

Gearboxes act as the middleman to convert the slow rotations of wind turbine blades into the faster rotations needed for generators to create electricity. The downside of such gears comes from their high-maintenance requirements due to constant stress from wind turbulence.

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Get Nervous: Rusty Soviet Doomsday System Still Turned On

From Gizmodo:

Wired Magazine has a fascinating article on the doomsday system that was built by the Soviets 25 years ago. It was designed to obliterate the US no matter what happened to the USSR—and it still works today. Shiver.

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

Read more ....

Related Article: Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine -- Wired News

My Comment: One thing that I am always trying to do in this blog is to find additional articles/opinions that relate to the main story. But for this story .... I have found nothing. Kudos to the Danger Room/Wired for getting some basic information that gives us a general outline of this "Doomsday Machine" story.

Feathered Fossils Prove Birds Evolved From Dinosaurs, Say Chinese Scientists

Discovery: An illustration of a feathered dinosaur, Anchiornis huxleyi,
the fossils of which have been found in China

From The Daily Mail:

A new species of feathered dinosaurs provides hard evidence the prehistoric creatures evolved into birds, a group of Chinese scientists has claimed.

The fossils represent five different species from two different rock sequences in north-eastern China and all have feathers or feather-like structures.

The new finds are 'indisputably' older than archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird, which scientists claim provides exceptional evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

Read more ....

Asteroid Attack: Putting Earth's Defences To The Test

From New Scientist:

T LOOKS inconsequential enough, the faint little spot moving leisurely across the sky. The mountain-top telescope that just detected it is taking it very seriously, though. It is an asteroid, one never seen before. Rapid-survey telescopes discover thousands of asteroids every year, but there's something very particular about this one. The telescope's software decides to wake several human astronomers with a text message they hoped they would never receive. The asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. It is the size of a skyscraper and it's big enough to raze a city to the ground. Oh, and it will be here in three days.

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Making Realistic Skin for Robots

From Technology Review:

Without realistic synthetic skin, robots will never be entirely accepted socially. Yet even measuring what it means for skin to be humanlike is proving tough.

When it comes to building realistic robots, it's not just the way they look that's important. It's also the way they feel to the touch, says John-John Cabibihan at the National University of Singapore and pals. They argue that if robots are ever to be accepted socially, they will need to have humanlike skin so that actions such as handshakes can be made as realistic as possible.

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Future Is TV-Shaped, Says Intel

From BBC:

The world's biggest chip maker predicts that by 2015 there will be 12 billion devices capable of connecting to 500 billion hours of TV and video content.

Intel said its vision of TV everywhere will be more personal, social, ubiquitous and informative.

"TV is out of the box and off the wall," Intel's chief technology officer Justin Rattner told BBC News.

"TV will remain at the centre of our lives and you will be able to watch what you want where you want.

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Suspected Trojan war-era couple found

The finding is 'electrifying', say experts (Source: Reuters / Ho New )

From ABC News (Australia):

Excavations in the ancient city of Troy in Turkey have found the remains of a man and a woman believed to have died in 1200 BC, at the time of the legendary Trojan war, says a German archaeologist.

Dr Ernst Pernicka, a University of Tubingen professor of archaeometry, who is leading excavations on the site in northwestern Turkey, says the bodies were found near a defence line within the city built in the late Bronze Age.

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Superheavy Element 114 Confirmed: A Stepping Stone To The 'Island Of Stability'

Members of the group that confirmed the production of element 114 in front of the Berkeley Gas-filled Separator at the 88-Inch Cyclotron, from left: Jan Dvorak, Zuzana Dvorakova, Paul Ellison, Irena Dragojevic, Heino Nitsche, Mitch Andre Garcia, and Ken Gregorich. Not pictured is Liv Stavestra. (Credit: Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Creative Services Office)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2009) — Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been able to confirm the production of the superheavy element 114, ten years after a group in Russia, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, first claimed to have made it. The search for 114 has long been a key part of the quest for nuclear science’s hoped-for Island of Stability.

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The Truth About Lying

From Live Science:

While American folklore tells us that George Washington never told a lie, the topic of lying on Capitol Hill, at work, or at home is big news.

For instance, President Barak Obama is charged with telling lies. A popular TV show, Lie to Me, conducts a poll that shows the average person lies 42 times a week. And the concept for a new movie, The Invention of Lying, is that no one is able to tell a lie.

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Monarch Butterflies Navigate With Sun-Sensing Antennae

From Discover Magazine:

A new experiment has shed light on how the monarch butterfly executes its impressive 2,000-mile migration every fall, and all it took was a lick of paint.

Researchers already knew that the butterflies use the sun to guide them to the exact same wintering spot in central Mexico. But because the sun is a moving target, changing position throughout the day, biologists have long speculated that in addition to having a “sun compass” in their brains, butterflies must use some kind of 24-hour clock to guide their migration [Wired.com]. In a new study, published in Science, researchers determined that the butterflies have a second circadian clock in their antennae, which sense light.

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NASA/Ames-Controlled Moon Mission Will Add To New Discovery Of Water

From Mercury News:

A probe controlled from Ames Research Center that will hit the moon in two weeks may help unlock a major new scientific riddle, following NASA's stunning announcement Wednesday that the lunar surface is laced with water.

LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite), a mission controlled from Moffett Field in Mountain View, is scheduled to smash into a crater near the moon's south pole in the early hours of Oct. 9. Scientists will analyze the resulting debris plume for signs of large amounts of ice that may have persisted for eons in the extreme cold of perpetually shadowed craters.

The LCROSS mission had been about human exploration, trying to answer the question of whether there is enough ice on the moon to aid human exploration. The components of water — hydrogen and oxygen — could be used for life support or rocket fuel, if and when NASA returns astronauts to the moon.

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How to Get Your Gadgets Off The Grid

From Popular Mechanics:

PM's October issue is all about how to survive disasters, including tales of off-the-grid homesteaders and stories of men who showed remarkable self-reliance in the face of hurricanes, blizzards and tornadoes. But surviving the aftermath of a major disaster without any electricity sounds pretty boring to PM senior technology editor Glenn Derene—what would he do without his LCD TV, wii, Internet access or power tools? In this “electric cold-beer gadget test,” Derene shows that with a small wind turbine, generator, solar charging kit and two very powerful batteries, you won’t have to abandon your gadgets (or beer fridge) after an emergency.

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India Successfully Launches Seven Satellites With a Single Rocket

India Lifts Off India launches a satellite into space in January 2008. The country's space agency put seven satellites in orbit today, including six from foreign nations. PhysOrg

From Popular Science:

It’s been a busy day for India’s space agency. Underscoring the world’s largest democracy’s desire to become a serious player in the space business, the Indian Space Research Organisation launched seven satellites today, six of which belong to foreign nations.

India’s satellite, Oceansat-2, will enhance the ocean monitoring capabilities of the original Oceansat, which launched in 1999. Four of the other six satellites were German, while one was Turkish and one Swedish. Each of those carries a university-funded payload designed to conduct research on various new technologies.

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Russia Hopes U.S. to Extend Shuttle Operations

From ABC News:

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia hopes the United States will extend the deadline to retire its space shuttles beyond 2011 and has heard unofficially it is possible, the head of Russia's space agency was quoted as saying on Friday.

The U.S. space agency NASA plans six more missions by its fleet of aging space shuttles by late next year or early 2011 after the construction of the $100 billion International Space Station (ISS) is completed. The shuttles will then be retired.

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The Field Of Gold: How Jobless Treasure Hunter Unearthed Greatest Ever Haul Of Saxon Artefacts With £2.50 Metal Detector

Discovery of a lifetime: Metal detecting fan Terry Herbert found the amazing haul in a Staffordshire field

From The Daily Mail:

It will revolutionise our understanding of the Dark Ages, bring delight to millions and make two men very rich indeed.

Archaeologists yesterday unveiled the largest and most valuable hoard of Saxon gold in history – 1,500 pieces of treasure unearthed from a farmer’s field by a man with a metal detector.

The haul includes beautiful gold sword hilts, jewels from Sri Lanka, exquisitely carved helmet decorations and early Christian crosses.

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The World's Best Impact Craters

Also known as the "eye of Quebec", Manicougan Crater in Canada is one the Earth's oldest known impact craters, and is about 200 million years old. Today it contains a 70-kilometre hydroelectric reservoir along its edge. The island in the centre of the crater was formed by post-impact uplift of the land. Also visible in the bottom left-hand corner is the fin of the space shuttle from which this image was taken.(Image: LSTS-9 Crew/NASA/GSFC)

From The New Scientist:

Approximately 150 impact craters are known on Earth, but most are severely eroded or hidden beneath tonnes of rock. Still, a few spectacular examples are visible with aerial photography, satellites or instruments that can peek beneath the surface.

Read more ....

HIV Vaccine 'Reduces Infection'

From the BBC:

An experimental HIV vaccine has for the first time cut the risk of infection, researchers say.

The vaccine - a combination of two earlier experimental vaccines - was given to 16,000 people in Thailand, in the largest ever such vaccine trial.

Researchers found that it reduced by nearly a third the risk of contracting HIV, the virus that leads to Aids.

It has been hailed as a significant, scientific breakthrough, but a global vaccine is still some way off.

Read more ....

Mutations Make Evolution Irreversible: By Resurrecting Ancient Proteins, Researchers Find That Evolution Can Only Go Forward

Fish fossil. Researchers resurrected and manipulate the gene for a key hormone receptor as it existed in our earliest vertebrate ancestors more than 400 million years ago. Over a rapid period of time, five random mutations made subtle modifications in the protein's structure that were utterly incompatible with the receptor's primordial form. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

A University of Oregon research team has found that evolution can never go backwards, because the paths to the genes once present in our ancestors are forever blocked. The findings -- the result of the first rigorous study of reverse evolution at the molecular level -- appear in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature.

Read more ....

Full Moon Does Not Affect Surgery Outcomes

From Live Science:

While a full moon can tug on ocean tides and make for a romantic setting, scientists have found no reliable evidence that it triggers suicides or hospital admissions, or facilitates conception, the transformation of werewolves or any of a host of other phenomena often blamed on it.

Evidence is mounting, however, for things on which the moon has no impact.

Read more ....

Roaches Hold Their Breath To Stay Alive

Cockroaches hold their breath when they need to stop water loss more than they need oxygen
(Source: Philip Matthews )

From ABC News (Australia):

Australian scientists have discovered another reason why cockroaches might well inherit the earth after humans are long gone.

Animal physiologist Dr Craig White of the University of Queensland in Brisbane and colleagues report their findings in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

"Several decades ago, scientists discovered that some insects hold their breath," says White.

"But it's not been clear why they do this."

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NASA Finds Water Ice In Mars Craters

An image by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on the NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows Sawtooth Pattern in Carbon Dioxide Ice on Mars recorded during the month of April through early August 2009. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been studying Mars with an advanced set of instruments since 2006. (University of Arizona/JPL/NASA/Reuters)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

NASA's Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter spotted ice just below the surface that was exposed by fresh meteor crashes, not far from where the Viking 2 Lander looked in 1976.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found water ice much closer to the planet’s equator than scientists believed possible.

And it’s far purer than they expected, suggesting that in the recent past, the planet’s climate was far more humid than models of Mars’s climate history suggested.

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The Australian Dust Storm As Seen From Space – Dry lake Eyre Not Global Warming?

From Watts Up With That?

There’s been quite a bit of buzz about the dust storm in Australia that hit Queensland, New South Wales, and NSW city Sydney on September 23rd. Pictures like the ones below have been all over the web.

But it is the photos taken from space that are the most interesting I think. NASA’s Earth Observatory captured a truly amazing photo that shows the dust storm front as it swept across the continent and headed out to sea over eastern Australia where the borders of Queensland and NSW meet.

Read more ....

Quantum Chip Helps Crack Code

Photo: Jonathan Matthews/University of Bristol

From IEEE Spectrum:

Experimental chip does part of code-cracking quantum algorithm.

3 September 2009—Modern cryptography relies on the extreme difficulty computers have in factoring huge numbers, but an algorithm that works only on a quantum computer finds factors easily. Today in Science, researchers at the University of Bristol, in England, report the first factoring using this method—called Shor’s algorithm—on a chip-scale quantum computer, bringing the field a tiny step closer to realizing practical quantum computation and code cracking.

Read more ....

Update: Quantum Computer Factors the Number 15 -- Scheneider Security

Guinness Facts: In Black And White

A pint of Guinness settling

From The Telegraph:

As millions of people toast the birth of the world's most famous stout, members of the Guinness family will remember how a blessed inheritance to their forefather Arthur changed their fortunes.

– Arthur Guinness set up his first brewery in Leixlip, Co Kildare, in 1756 after he was left a £100 inheritance by his godfather, Archbishop Arthur Price.

– He later handed the business to his brother and, in 1759, signed a 9,000 year lease on the St James's Gate Brewery for an annual fee of £45.

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iRex Announces e-Reader with Barnes & Noble Catalog, Verizon 3G

iRex Reader

From Popular Science:

With a larger screen and 400,000 more titles, iRex's DR800SG forces a standoff against the Kindle and the Sony Reader.

Barnes and Noble first tipped their hand in July, when they announed their new e-book store and its 700,000 titles would be made available on the iPhone and BlackBerry platforms. Then in August, the bookseller announced a partnership with e-reader maker iRex, in addition to love for Plastic Logic and their devices. And today (drumroll, please) the company officially announced the iRex DR800SG reader, the first e-book reader with access to the Barnes and Noble catalog.

Read more ....

US Dirty Bomb Attack Would Bring Clean-Up Chaos

From New Scientist:

A dirty bomb attack on the US would find the country ill-prepared to clean up the resulting radioactive mess, a government watchdog has warned – and hasty attempts at cleaning up could make things worse.

Building a true nuclear bomb requires expert knowledge and possession of plutonium or enriched uranium, which governments keep under tight security. But more widely available radioactive materials, intended for applications such as medical imaging, could be used to construct a "dirty bomb" detonated a conventional explosives such as dynamite.

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Mysterious Ruins May Help Explain Mayan Collapse

This is one of the exceptionally well preserved buildings discovered at Kiuic. This building dates to the Late/Terminal Classic (A.D. 800-1000) and is part of the later major royal Palace discovered at the site.By Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project.

From USA Today:

Ringing two abandoned pyramids are nine palaces "frozen in time" that may help unravel the mystery of the ancient Maya, reports an archaeological team.

Hidden in the hilly jungle, the ancient site of Kiuic (KIE-yuk) was one of dozens of ancient Maya centers abandoned in the Puuc region of Mexico's Yucatan about 10 centuries ago. The latest discoveries from the site may capture the moment of departure.

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Voters choose 'Embracing The Hope' Setting For Famed Diamond

From The L.A. Times:

Last month we mentioned that, as a PR stunt for a Smithsonian Channel documentary, you had a chance to vote on which of three Harry Winston settings the famous Hope Diamond should temporarily reside. And, based on the number of comments All The Rage received (and we weren't even the ones tallying the votes), folks had some pretty strong opinions on the topic -- though most of you said you would prefer it remain in its traditional setting (to which it will return by the end of next year).

Read more ....

Genetic Discovery Could Break Wine Industry Bottleneck, Accelerate Grapevine Breeding

From Science Daily:

One of the best known episodes in the 8000-year history of grapevine cultivation led to biological changes that have not been well understood – until now. Through biomolecular detective work, German researchers have uncovered new details about the heredity of Vitis varieties in cultivation today. In the process, they have opened the way to more meaningful classification, accelerated breeding, and more accurate evaluation of the results, potentially breaking a bottleneck in the progress of the wine industry.

Read more ....

What Seniors Need To Know About The Flu

From Live Science:

Flu season in the northern hemisphere can range from as early as November to as late as May. The peak month usually is February.

However, this coming season is expected to be unpredictable because of the emergence of the H1N1 influenza virus or swine flu. The H1N1 has caused the first global outbreak — pandemic — of influenza in more than four decades.

Read more ....

Water Found On The Moon

How So Much Water? Some Ideas...
A stream of charged hydrogen ions carried from the sun by the solar wind. One possible scenario to explain the new finding of water on the lunar surface is that during the daytime, when the moon is exposed to the solar wind, hydrogen ions liberate oxygen from lunar minerals to form OH and H2O, which are then weakly held to the surface. At high temperatures (red-yellow) more molecules are released than adsorbed. University of Maryland/F. Merlin/McREL

From Discovery News:

Shattering a long-held belief that Earth's moon is a dead and dry world, a trio of spacecraft uncovered clear evidence of water and hydrogen-oxygen molecules throughout the lunar surface.

"There's no question that there is OH [hydroxyl, which is made up of one hydrogen atom and one oxygen atom] and H2O on the moon," University of Maryland senior research scientist Jessica Sunshine told Discovery News.

Read more ....

The Coming Ebook Reader Flood

The Microsoft Courier leads the way in the coming onslaught of ebook readers.
(Screen shot from YouTube)

From Christian Science Monitor:

The Amazon Kindle ignited an ebook reader industry and created many rivals for itself.

“Kindle” indeed.

Amazon’s popular Kindle ebook reader has sparked some fiery competition. Several companies recently announced plans to produce their own ereader-like device, and signs point to more on the horizon.

Read more ....

Michael Faraday Voted Britain's Greatest Inventor

Faraday finished ahead of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and William Caxton

From The Telegraph:

Michael Faraday, the scientist whose discoveries led to the development of the electric motor, has been hailed as the greatest inventor in British history, a survey revealed today.

Faraday, who is credited with the harnessing of electric power, won a quarter of the vote in the poll of more than 1,200 people.

He was followed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel (13%), who designed the first propeller-driven steamship, and William Caxton (9%) who introduced the printing press to England.

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India’s Lunar Mission Finds Evidence Of Water On The Moon

From The Independent:

Dreams of establishing a manned Moon base could become reality within two decades after India’s first lunar mission found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface.

Data from Chandrayaan-1 also suggests that water is still being formed on the Moon. Scientists said the breakthrough — to be announced by Nasa at a press conference today — would change the face of lunar exploration.

Read more ....

Satellite To Begin Gravity Quest

From The BBC:

A European spacecraft will begin its quest this week to make the most detailed global map of the Earth's gravity field.

The arrow-shaped Goce satellite can sense tiny variations in the planet's tug as it sweeps around the world at the very low altitude of just 255km.

The map will help scientists understand better how the oceans move.

It should also give them a universal reference to compare heights anywhere across the globe.

Read more ....

Wasted Space: U.S. Military Looking For Ideas On How To Curb The Threat Of Orbiting Junk

CLOUD OF CLUTTER: A visualization of the population of tracked objects, primarily debris, in low Earth orbit. The objects are not scaled with respect to Earth. NASA

From Scientific American:

DARPA is soliciting pitches on how best to remove orbital debris.

Gazing up into the sky on a clear night, the heavens can appear as pristine as a mountain stream. But in truth, at least in Earth's vicinity, the trash factor in space may be more akin to what is found in New York City's East River. The region known as low Earth orbit (extending from 160 to 2,000 kilometers above Earth's surface), which is where many satellites spend their lives and "afterlives," has a litter problem caused by decades of neglect, and it's one that currently lacks an expedient solution.

Read more ....

Drinking Alcohol May Make Head Injuries Less Harmful

Alcohol: Having a little alcohol in your blood could be a life-saver

From Popular Science:

Patients with alcohol in their blood are less likely to die from head injuries, according to a new study in Archives of Surgery, a JAMA/Archives journal.

The researchers found that the patients who tested positive for alcohol were less likely to die than patients who had no alcohol in their bloodstream. They were also generally younger and had less severe injuries. But patients who had drunk alcohol did suffer more medical complications during their stay in the hospital.

Read more ....

Asteroid Attack: Putting Earth's Defences To The Test

Are we prepared for an asteroid strike? (Image: Don Davis/NASA)

From The New Scientist:

IT LOOKS inconsequential enough, the faint little spot moving leisurely across the sky. The mountain-top telescope that just detected it is taking it very seriously, though. It is an asteroid, one never seen before. Rapid-survey telescopes discover thousands of asteroids every year, but there's something very particular about this one. The telescope's software decides to wake several human astronomers with a text message they hoped they would never receive. The asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. It is the size of a skyscraper and it's big enough to raze a city to the ground. Oh, and it will be here in three days.

Read more ....

Mathematicians Solve 'Trillion Triangle' Problem

The 3-4-5 triangle has area 6.
(Credit: Image courtesy of American Institute of Mathematics)

From Science Daily:

Mathematicians from North America, Europe, Australia, and South America have resolved the first one trillion cases of an ancient mathematics problem. The advance was made possible by a clever technique for multiplying large numbers. The numbers involved are so enormous that if their digits were written out by hand they would stretch to the moon and back. The biggest challenge was that these numbers could not even fit into the main memory of the available computers, so the researchers had to make extensive use of the computers' hard drives.

Read more ....

Powerful Ideas: River Turbines Could Electrify New York City

An NJIT architecture professor with an architecture student has designed a network of modular floating docks to harness clean energy for New York City. The proposal was featured this week in Metropolis magazine. Credit: Sarah Parsons

From Live Science:

A network of floating docks could harness clean energy for New York City and provide new space for parks, researchers now propose.

Each dock could generate power off the city's river currents. Three vertical turbines fastened out of sight to the underside of each station would harness the 4 mph currents, with each module generating up to 24 kilowatts of constant energy from the Hudson and East Rivers.

Read more ....

Baidu CEO Touts Growth Of China's Search Engine

Photo: Baidu CEO Robin Li advised Stanford students to make sure they understand the Chinese market if they want to do business there. (Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)

From CNET:

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Baidu CEO Robin Li, on a rare visit to Silicon Valley Wednesday, explained the rise of his company's search engine in China before a group of students more interested in entrepreneurial tips than censorship.

Li ended a trip to the U.S. Wednesday at Stanford University, speaking to a crowd of several hundred students about the lessons he learned shepherding Baidu through the first dot-com bust and growing it into the Google of China. Baidu has 76 percent of the Chinese search market, he said, which consists of 338 million Internet users: larger than the entire population of the U.S.

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Smoking Bans May Reduce Heart Attacks By More Than A Third

Smoking bans were introduced in pubs and other public places in England and Wales in 2007. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

From The Guardian:

The number of heart attacks has fallen steeply in countries where bans on smoking in public places have been introduced, according to two independent reviews.

The ban on smoking in public places could reduce heart attacks by more than a third in some parts of the world, say researchers.

Two independent health reviews have found that heart attack rates dropped steeply in areas where bans have been introduced, with one reporting 36% fewer cases three years after smoke-free legislation came in.

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Pictured: Giant Squid Accidentally Caught In Gulf of Mexico

Researchers pose with the 19.5-foot creature after netting it in July

From The Daily Mail:

This group of American scientists were studying the diet of sperm whales.

But even so they were taken off guard when this astonishing haul appeared in their net.

Researchers from America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) were shocked discover they had inadvertently caught a rare giant squid as they were trawling through the Gulf of Mexico.

Read more ....

Seismic Bangs 'Block' Whale Calls

From The BBC:

Scientists have turned up new evidence showing that ocean noise can affect the communication of whales.

Studying blue whales off the eastern Canadian coast, they found the animals changed their vocalisations in response to an underwater seismic survey.

The survey was conducted using gear considered to have a low impact.

Read more ....

Swine Flu Vaccine--Too Little, Too Late

Matt Collins

From Scientific American:

Long-standing liability issues leave us unprepared for a pandemic.

As health care workers in the U.S. gear up for the flu season, they facea paradox: on the one hand, they will have too little vaccine against the novel influenza A (H1N1) strain to protect the entire population; on the other, some people will resist the shots that are offered to them. Sadly, both problems can be traced, at least in part, to the last time “swine flu” loomed. The 1976 national vaccination campaign against a pandemic that never materialized left the public with lingering doubts about whether the inoculations harmed some recipients and spawned lawsuits that cost the federal government nearly $100 million.

Read more ....

Fresh From Skunkworks, Hints of Microsoft's Own Secret Tablet

Microsoft's Courier

From Popular Science:

While drool over Apple's tablet is starting to accumulate in unsightly lakes and ponds across the web, little old Microsoft has been hard at work on Courier--an as-yet conceptual tablet of its own that our friends at Gizmodo unearthed last night. It's a totally different approach from what most are expecting from Apple, and in this concept video, it certainly looks pretty hot.

Read more ....