Can you decode our secret message?What’s black and white and read all over? Barcodes. And boy do you people like them.
The Web was buzzing about barcodes today because Google decided to commemorate the 57th anniversary of the first ever patent on them with one of their popular doodles.
A rookery of albatrosseses glide behind a killer whale, which churned up food scraps from the deep
Photo: Rocket science: Franklin Chang Diaz (top) is a former NASA astronaut and founder of Ad Astra Rocket Company. The company has developed a prototype plasma rocket, the VX-200 (bottom), that recently achieved 201 kilowatts of power.
DNA molecules will be held in place by tiny voltages within the nanohole
Every cloud is different from the next. It is therefore important to study the types of cloud systems in which aerosols have the greatest influence. (Credit: Max Planck Institute for Meteorology / Stevens)
This illustration depicts how urban life would be among the water bank canals of an underground city. Credit: Andrew Kudless (Design), Nenad Katic (Visualization), Tan Nguyen, Pia-Jacqlyn Malinis, Jafe Meltesen-Lee, Benjamin Barragan (Model), Matsys Designs
RING LEADER: An artist's conception of the faint, newfound ring around Saturn. The ring dwarfs the scale of the familiar system of rings closer to the planet. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Keck
White Dwarf
The secret of eternal youth? Photo: GETTY/AFP 
From The Daily Mail:
Photo: The Packbot ExploreriRobot, the company that makes military robots as well as the Roomba vacuuming bot, announced last Friday that it will receive funding for several endeavors from the Robotics Technology Consortium (RTC).
One project will see the company develop controllers that give remote robot operators sensory feedback. The US military currently uses iRobot's wheeled PackBot in Iraq and Afghanistan for tasks such as bomb disposal, detecting hazardous materials and carrying equipment.
The Venera missions produced tantalising images of the Venusian surface.
Stratigraphic layers visible in this lower section of the PP5-6 archaeological site at Pinnacle Point, Mossel Bay, date to 79,000 to 86,000 years ago. Credit: Photo by Simen Oestmo/South African Coast Paleoclimate, Paleoenvironment, Paleoecology, Paleoanthropology Project (SACP4)
Dr Dennis Wheeler launches the new project at HMS Trincomalee based at Hartlepool Marina. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Sunderland)
From Scientific American:
From left, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England; Thomas A. Steitz of Yale University; and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel will share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Reuters
Take that: This frame catches the two pals getting to grips mid-air
Members of a British archaeological team stand in newly discovered holes that once held the stones of a circular monument connected to Stonehenge by an avenue. It may have served as a crematory. (Aerial-Cam)
The icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnicov in pack ice off Canada Photo: Daisy Gilardini
Photo: Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in 1969. He believes a new lunar mission would be pointless - even if it were affordable. (Nasa/EPA)
RCWW Inc. / Corbis
Water droplets in clouds generally form around dust and other particles. When clouds evaporate, as they often do naturally, the surface of the particle can become very acidic. This is especially true where the air is polluted. Paradoxically, scientists suggest that large scale industry in countries like China could be combating global warming to some extent by creating more bioavailable iron in the oceans, and therefore increasing carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere. (Credit: Copyright Michele Hogan)
Now, a group of historians has used caches of buried coins to provide an answer to this question.
During the Republican period of Rome (about the fifth to the first centuries B.C), adult male citizens of Rome could be taxed and conscribed into the army and were also given the right to vote. To keep track of this section of the population (and their taxable assets), the Roman state conducted periodic censuses.
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Who's book is it anyway? (Image: Andrzej Krauze) 
Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/C.Canizares, M.Nowak; Optical: NASA/STScI.
From The L.A. Times:
(Click Image to Enlarge)
From Times Online:
Ruediger Knobloch / A.B. / Corbis
HIGH HOPES: Vaccines to decrease cocaine use have been in the works for years, but this new trial has had some encouraging results. ISTOCKPHOTO/MILOSJOKIC
Run Silent Run Deep Submarines of the future could get a communications upgrade
ARS researchers have developed honey bees that more aggressively deal with varroa mites, a parasite that is one of the major problems damaging honey bees today. (Credit: Photo by Stephen Ausmus)
From Live Science:
In the next few years, the VASIMR ion engine could be used to
From The BBC:
Half of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics went to Charles K. Kao, center. The other half of the prize was shared by two researchers at Bell Labs, Willard S. Boyle, left, and George E. Smith. Reuters
From The BBC:
A diver swims inside the passages that lay below Peacock Springs State Park in Florida
Image: Glowing DNA: A CCD camera sensor captures the glow of hairpin-shaped DNA nanosensors when they bind with a target gene sequence of anthrax bacteria. Credit: Benjamin Miller, University of Rochester Medical Center 
The electron density of states on a grain boundary of defects. The arrows (pointing in the reader's direction) indicate the direction of the magnetic moments. (Credit: Kees Flipse, Eindhoven University of Technology)
Chicago's City Hall got a green roof in 2001. The project was designed to test various concepts and methods and to test the benefits. Credit: Wikipedia Commons
