See How The Earth Moves

(Click Above Image to Enlarge)
The image above shows an interferogram, a map of ground movements produced with measurements made remotely by Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), plotted atop digital topography. United Kingdom geophysicists Richard Walters and John Elliott used measurements acquired by a European Space Agency satellite on February 1 and April 12 to capture ground movements from the April 6 earthquake in central Italy. The color bands (red through blue) represent contours of ground motion toward or away from the satellite, within its line of sight. Moving towards the center of each lobe, each contour represents an additional 2.8 centimeters of ground motion. The image shows that during the earthquake, the region to the northeast of the Paganica fault moved toward the satellite by about 8 centimeters, whereas the region to the southwest moved away by about 25 centimeters. Each pixel in the interferogram represents an area of about 80 meters squared. Walters’ and Elliott’s research is funded by the United Kingdom’s Natural Environmental Research Council. The ESA data is copyrighted.

From The American Scientist:

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) measurements, collected by satellites circling Earth, can provide big insights into major earthquakes. Richard Walters and John Elliott demonstrated this after a 6.3-magnitude quake struck central Italy in April, killing close to 300 people and severely damaging the medieval town of L’Aquila. By comparing measurements taken before and after the earthquake, the geophysicists pinpointed the responsible fault, measured changes aboveground and calculated likely shifts underground. Walters and Elliott are researchers at the University of Oxford and the United Kingdom’s National Centre for Earth Observation. In an e-mail exchange, Walters explained their studies to American Scientist associate editor Catherine Clabby.

Read more ....

The Lost Prestige of Nuclear Physics

From The New Atlantis:

By the second quarter of the twentieth century, one of the world’s most revered figures was a long-haired, somewhat rumpled European refugee. His public persona combined a Gandhi-like saintliness with the awesome impression that his sleepy-looking, baggy eyes gazed not on the everyday world of ordinary mortals but into far vistas of space and time unseen by others. This suggestion of contact with transcendent reality was central to Albert Einstein’s charisma. It arose from his success in opening the door of human imagination to previously unknown concepts of time and space.

Read more ....

Commandos Field Test ‘Plasma Knife’

Photo: Quickparts

From The Danger Room:

Nobody ever said the Light Saber was a practical weapon – it’s no match for a good blaster, if you ask me – but it exerts a powerful fascination. Special Operations Command have “completed ongoing testing and field evaluation studies” of the next best thing, according to a Pentagon budget document. It’s a Plasma Knife which cuts through flesh with a “blade” of glowing ionized gas. But rather than being a weapon, the Plasma Knife is a surgical instrument that could save lives.

Read more ....

Labs-On-A-Chip That You Can Shrink To Fit

Shrinking down to size (Image: Maggie Bartlett, NHGRI)

From New Scientist:

INTEL's latest microchip technology has created transistors 22 nanometres wide - a mere 200 times the width of a hydrogen molecule. Carving such tiny features is devilishly difficult and expensive, but in another realm of microchips altogether, something odd is happening: chips are being made on an outsized scale and then shrunk to the required size, avoiding much fiddly hassle.

The shrinking innovation is happening in the field of the "lab-on-a-chip". Such chips are typically plastic slivers scored with serried ranks of fluid-filled microchannels and recessed pools for chemical reactions to occur in; they are often replete with deposits of chemicals, cells and proteins of interest.

Read more ....

New View Of The Heliosphere: Cassini Helps Redraw Shape Of Solar System

Images from the Ion and Neutral Camera (INCA), part of the Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument on NASA's Cassini spacecraft, suggest that the heliosphere may not have the comet-like shape predicted by existing models. The instrument imaged a population of hot particles that resides just beyond the boundary of where the solar wind collides with the interstellar medium, forming a termination shock. (Credit: JHU Applied Physics Laboratory)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 18, 2009) — In a paper published Oct. 15 in Science, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) present a new view of the region of the sun’s influence, or heliosphere, and the forces that shape it. Images from one of the Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument’s sensors, the Ion and Neutral Camera (MIMI/INCA), on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft suggest that the heliosphere may not have the comet-like shape predicted by existing models.

Read more ....

High-Speed 'Other' Internet Goes Global

A newly expanded global Internet, to focus solely on science and education, now includes half of the world's countries. The high-speed fiber-optic network connects users at speeds of 10 Gbps. Credit: GLORIAD.

From Live Science:

A super high-speed global Internet devoted solely to science and education has just expanded to include half the countries of the world, and yes, you at home can be jealous.

The Taj network, funded by the National Science Foundation, now connects India, Singapore, Vietnam and Egypt to the larger Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development (GLORIAD) global infrastructure, and "dramatically improves existing U.S. network links with China and the Nordic region," according to an NSF statement.

Read more ....

Clean Tech's Hot New Tool

Image: Beaming in: Electron-beam sterilization of the inside of a beverage bottle causes the walls of the bottle to fluoresce when exposed to electron emissions. Credit: Advanced Electron Beams

From Technology Review:

Smaller and more practical electron-beam emitters could save millions of tons of C02 emissions.

Electron-beam emitters that are one-hundreth the size and cost of conventional electron emitters could usher in a wide array of new uses for the devices that could dramatically cut the energy use of industrial processes. Advanced Electron Beams (AEB), a Wilmington, MA, startup, has developed a small, low-powered electron emitter that is the size of a microwave oven, compared to the conference-room equipment now needed for electron-beam processes.

Read more ....

Mars Missions Boosted By Communication Breakthrough

From the Telegraph:

Engineers have found a way to communicate continuously with Mars in a research project to help manned space missions.

Communication with Mars had not been possible for several weeks at a time when the Sun obscured the Earth's view of the planet.

But the University of Strathclyde researchers found a way to allow continuous communication with just one spacecraft.

Read more ....

Scientists Develop 'Marilyn Monroe' Gene To Make You Irresistible (But Sorry, It Only Works On Fruit Flies)

Photo: Researchers have found a way of turning females into the equivalent of Marilyn Monroe by tampering with pheromones

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists have developed a way of turning ordinary males into irresistible sex gods and females into the equivalent of Marilyn Monroe.

The effect is so strong it has been likened to a 'sexual tsunami'.

Males and females that were altered in the experiment even managed to turn their heterosexual peers gay.

Researchers discovered the secret to sex appeal by tampering with pheromones.

There is only one catch - so far, it only works on flies.

Read more ....

Newly Discovered Magnetic Monopole Particles Flow Like Electric Currents

Dy2Ti2O7: This rare, "spin ice", crystal contains the atomic monopoles needed to create magnetricity. via Muon Science Laboratory

From Popular Science:

They're calling it "magnetricity" -- catchy, eh?

In 1931, physicist Paul Dirac hypothesized that on the quantum level, magnetic charge must exist in discrete packets, or quanta, in the same way that electric energy exists in a photon. This implies the existence of magnetic monopoles: particles that have a single magnetic charge, or polar identity -- north or south.

For 78 years, Dirac's speculation interested only hardcore theorists, because the conjecture failed to find any expression in observed phenomena. All magnets had two poles, one north and one south, inextricably attached to each other.

Read more ....

Bites Of Passage

From The National:

In the past few decades, the Asian tiger mosquito has travelled from its natural home in Southeast Asia to the ends of the earth, becoming one of the world’s most invasive species. Tom Scocca reports from the frontlines of the battle to halt the winged invasion.

The picnic cooler, resting up against the back side of a row house in Trenton, New Jersey, was an artefact designed solely for the use of human beings. It had been invented to meet a particular and exclusive set of needs, unique to 21st-century Homo sapiens: to allow the transport of cold beverages to locales without refrigeration – and, once there, to allow those humans, while drinking, to free up their opposable thumbs by setting their beverages down in the wilderness without a spill. For this, humans needed more than a picnic cooler; they needed one whose lid was inset with four cup holders.

Read more ....

There’s No Place Like Home

From Newsweek:

Fewer Americans are relocating than at any time since 1962. That's good news for families, communities ... and even the environment.

On almost any night of the week, Churchill's Restaurant is hopping. The 10-year-old hot spot in Rockville Centre, Long Island, is packed with locals drinking beer and eating burgers, with some customers spilling over onto the street. "We have lots of regulars—people who are recognized when they come in," says co-owner Kevin Culhane. In fact, regulars make up more than 80 percent of the restaurant's customers. "People feel comfortable and safe here," Culhane says. "This is their place."

Read more ....

A World Redrawn When America Showed Up On A Map, It Was The Universe That Got Transformed

Image: Nicholas Copernicus (Getty Images)

From Boston.com:

NEARLY FIVE CENTURIES ago, the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus went public with one of the most important arguments ever made in the history of ideas. The earth did not sit immobile at the center of the universe, he wrote. It revolved around the sun.

It was the mother of all paradigm shifts, dismantling a model of the universe that had been dogma since antiquity. When he published his theory, in “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” (1543), Copernicus provided a wealth of data on the movements of celestial bodies in support of his case. But what’s often overlooked is that he began his argument from the ground up, by focusing not on the heavens but the earth. In particular, he began with a geographical revelation, prompted by something he had recently come across on a new map.

Read more ....

Bouncing Back: How We Deal With Bereavement

Bouncing back (Image: Michael Blann/Stone)

From New Scientist:

WHAT is the best way of coping with the death of a loved one? Why do some people grieve more intensely than others? Such questions are traditionally left to counsellors and self-help gurus, but George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University in New York, is on a mission to answer them empirically. He has done a good job, interviewing thousands of bereaved people over decades and monitoring how they get through their troubled times.

Yet Bonanno's bottom line - that people are often much more resilient than we're led to believe - is rather unremarkable. Studies of Londoners during the Blitz and New Yorkers after 9/11 showed that few people suffer serious reactions to traumatic events.

Read more ....

Suppose 21st Century Disasters Like 19th Century

Redoubt Volcano from the east, with a massive eruption plume produced by pyroclastic flows on April 21, 1990(photo by R. Clucas)

From Future Pundit:

We remember the 20th century because we've all lived in some part of it (unless of course a 9 year older is reading this) and seen lots of video about it. The century was well covered by modern media. We know less of the 19th century and some of its major natural events are not widely known.

As compared to the 19th century the 20th century was pretty calm from the standpoint of big natural changes. What I'm going to do with this post: Imagine that the 21st century turns out to be like the 19th century in terms of the severity of climate, volcanic, and other natural events.

Read more ....

Technology Brings New Insights To One Of The Oldest Middle Eastern Languages Still Spoken

Tablets uncovered at Persepolis in Iran are covered with writing in Aramaic. The archive, being studied at the University of Chicago, provides new insights on the language, which has been written and spoken in the Middle East continuously since ancient times. (Credit: Oriental Institute, University of Chicago)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 16, 2009) — New technologies and academic collaborations are helping scholars at the University of Chicago analyze hundreds of ancient documents in Aramaic, one of the Middle East’s oldest continuously spoken and written languages.

Read more ....

Brilliant! Roof Tiles Change Color To Save Energy

A blast from a heat gun has turned most of the black tile in this image white. The prototype tile, developed by recent MIT graduates, is designed to turn dark in cold weather and white in warm weather. Credit: Patrick Gillooly

From Live Science:

On a blazing summer day, a black roof gets miserably hot, while a white roof reflects the sun and keeps a home cooler. In winter, the warmth generated by a solar-radiation-absorbing black roof can save energy.

That's well-known and simple enough. Unfortunately, you can't have it both ways. Well ...

Read more ....

Quantcast New Technology Aimed At Increasing Oil Production

From US News And World Report/AP:

HOUSTON—Imagine having a nice ripe orange, ready for squeezing, but being able to get out only a small amount of juice. There's got to be more, you just can't get at it.

That's the frustration of the global oil business.

Read more ....

Merging Video With Maps

Image: Drive-through: New navigation software uses panoramic images to create a video preview of the route. As the video plays, users can also follow the route on the map (shown here in green and on the next page, larger image). Credit: Microsoft

From Technology Review:

A new system uses panoramic images to create navigation videos that highlight turns and landmarks.

A novel navigation system under development at Microsoft aims to tweak users' visual memory with carefully chosen video clips of a route. Developed with researchers from the University of Konstanz in Germany, the software creates video using 360-degree panoramic images of the street that are strung together. Such images have already been gathered by several different mapping companies for many roads around the world. The navigation system, called Videomap, adjusts the speed of the video and the picture to highlight key areas along the route.

Read more ....

Britain Will Starve Without GM Crops, Says Major Report

Oilseed rape, one of the four main commercial genetically modified crops Photo: EPA

From The Telegraph:

A new row over genetically modified foods being introduced into our shops has broken out after a Royal Society report recommended GM crops should be grown in Britain.

The study concluded that GM crops are needed to prevent a catastrophic food crisis by 2050.

But the report has sparked a backlash from opponents of GM foods who say they present a threat to the livelihood of small farmers.

Read more ....

Great Ball Of Fire! Video Reveals Explosive Magnetic Power Of The Sun

The solar prominence is viewed in profile from Stereo Ahead (which did not photograph the whole star), while the filament is shown as a dark patch from Stereo Behind

From The Daily Mail:

Dramatic eruptions on the Sun have been captured in rare footage by two Nasa spacecraft.

Filmed over two days, the images show large glowing clouds of gas bursting from the Sun's surface and held aloft by the star's twisted magnetic fields.

These huge solar prominences are several times larger than the Earth and are caused by the solar activity cycle. It is one of the most spectacular events that the twin STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) craft have observed.

Read more ....

Biggest Obstacle To Global Climate Deal May Be How To Pay For It

China’s president, Hu Jintao, seated at center, at a United Nations climate debate last month. Todd Heisler/The New York Times

From The New York Times:

As world leaders struggle to hash out a new global climate deal by December, they face a hurdle perhaps more formidable than getting big polluters like the United States and China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: how to pay for the new accord.

The price tag for a new climate agreement will be a staggering $100 billion a year by 2020, many economists estimate; some put the cost at closer to $1 trillion. That money is needed to help fast-developing countries like India and Brazil convert to costly but cleaner technologies as they industrialize, as well as to assist the poorest countries in coping with the consequences of climate change, like droughts and rising seas.

Read more ....

Climate Change May Mean Slower Winds

Sensitive Scaling: The amount of power a typical wind turbine produces increases exponentially with the speed of the wind. David McNew Getty Images

From Scientific American:

This summer scientists published the first study that comprehensively explored the effect of climate change on wind speeds in the U.S. The report was not encouraging. Three decades’ worth of data seemed to point to a future where global warming lowers wind speeds enough to handicap the nascent wind industry. But the real story, like so much in climate science, is far more complex.

Read more ....

China Designs Indigenous UAV Stealth Fighter, And Bootlegs Some US Models

China's Dark Sword UAV Stealth Fighter via Defense Professionals

From Popular Science:

When I hear the phrase "knock-off Chinese products", I usually think of either the bootleg DVDs I get on the subway or the cheap electronics I get in Midtown. But a new report in Defense Professionals notes that the Chinese military has channeled that same skill for replication towards closing their UAV technology gap. By simply copying US technology, China has created a stock of advanced drones, and gained the technical knowledge to create some interesting native UAVs as well.

Read more ....

Sea Levels Rose Two Feet This Summer In U.S. East

High tides lash a Destin, Florida, pavilion—usually on dry land—ahead of tropical storm Claudette on August 17, 2009. Aside from such short-term events as storms, anomalous wind and ocean patterns caused a sustained and unexpected rise in sea levels on the U.S. East Coast through much of summer 2009, according to a September 2009 report. Photograph by Mari Darr-Welch/AP

From National Geographic:

Sea levels rose as much as 2 feet (60 centimeters) higher than predicted this summer along the U.S. East Coast, surprising scientists who forecast such periodic fluctuations.

The immediate cause of the unexpected rise has now been solved, U.S. officials say in a new report (hint: it wasn't global warming). But the underlying reason remains a mystery.

Read more ....

World's Oldest Submerged Town Dates Back 5,000 Years

Underwater archaeologists at Pavlopetri. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Nottingham)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 16, 2009) — Archaeologists surveying the world’s oldest submerged town have found ceramics dating back to the Final Neolithic. Their discovery suggests that Pavlopetri, off the southern Laconia coast of Greece, was occupied some 5,000 years ago — at least 1,200 years earlier than originally thought.

These remarkable findings have been made public by the Greek government after the start of a five year collaborative project involving the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and The University of Nottingham.

Read more ....

Speed of Thought-to-Speech Traced in Brain

This is a brain scan showing electrodes that surgeons use to find and remove the source of seizures (to cure epilepsy) while sparing the source of mental functions like language. Credit: Illustration: Ned T. Sahin, Ph.D.. Brain Image Reconstruction: Sean McInerney.

From Live Science:

In just 600 milliseconds, the human brain can think of a word, apply the rules of grammar to it and send it to the mouth to be spoken. For the first time, researchers have traced this lightning-fast sequence and broken it down into distinct steps.

Researchers got this rare glimpse into the fine-tuned workings of the brain from the signals sent by electrodes implanted in the brains of epileptics. The electrodes help surgeons locate the parts of the brain that cause epileptic seizures so they can be removed, and also help keep surgeons from removing critical parts of the brain

Read more ....

Solving The Crystal Maze: The Secrets Of Structure

What makes graphite like this? (Image: Walden)

From New Scientist:

CRYSTALS are objects of true and profound mystery. That's not because they channel occult energies, or hold misty hints of the future in their limpid depths. Their puzzle is much less esoteric: why are they as they are?

It is an incredibly basic question, yet physicists still struggle with it. Can we say why a given group of atoms prefers one particular arrangement over another? Can we predict how a crystal will be structured, and so deduce what properties it will have?

Read more ....

Barnacles' Sticky Secret Revealed

Inside out, a cross section of a barnacle

From the BBC:

Barnacles are able to attach themselves to almost anything.

They are found clinging to the hulls of ships, the sides of rock pools and even to the skin of whales.

Just how they stick so steadfastly whilst underwater has remained a biochemical puzzle for scientists for many years.

Now researchers have solved this mystery, showing that barnacle glue binds together exactly the same way as human blood does when it clots.

Read more ....

NASA Moon Crash Did Kick Up Debris Plume As Hoped

A satellite camera picks up a plume of debris, circled above, seconds after a rocket smashed into the Cabeus crater. NASA estimates the dust went up about a mile. (NASA)

From The L.A. Times:

Images are released showing that the lunar mission may be more successful than it first appeared. Scientists are 'are blown away by the data returned.'

NASA's recent lunar-punch mission apparently was not the high-profile flop it first appeared.

Officials at Ames Research Center in Northern California, which managed the mission, released images Friday that clearly show a plume of debris from the Cabeus crater shortly after the space agency's rocket plowed into it.

The plume reached an estimated mile above the lunar surface.

Read more ....

The Collider, The Particle And A Theory About Fate

SUICIDE MISSION? The core of the superconducting solenoid magnet at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto Agency

From The International Herald Tribune:

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Read more ....

New Software Could Smooth Supercomputing Speed Bumps

ONE SIZE DOESN'T FIT ALL: Researchers are increasingly turning to computers powered by a combination of graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units (CPUs), but they're looking for a better way to write software for these systems. © FOTOIE, VIA ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

From Scientific American:

Researchers turn to the Open Computing Language as a way to get graphics and general-purpose computer processors on the same page for more powerful number crunching

Supercomputers have long been an indispensable, albeit expensive, tool for researchers who need to make sense of vast amounts of data. One way that researchers have begun to make high-speed computing more powerful and also more affordable is to build systems that split up workloads among fast, highly parallel graphics processing units (GPUs) and general-purpose central processing units (CPUs).

Read more ....

The Dissection: A Home Electric Meter

Electric Meter An unsuspecting electric meter, waiting to be dissected. Vin Marshall

From Popular Science:

A peek inside the simple gears and complicated math that make up one of the coolest devices in your house.

You remember calculus, right? In a time before mechanized computing was performed by computers, complex (or sometimes just clever) machines were used to automate calculations. One example that has always impressed and fascinated me is the wheel-and-disk integrator, a simple machine capable of solving the calculus equations you labored over in high school without breaking a sweat. While this concept was used most impressively in Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, an analog computer built in 1931, the chances are good that you've seen one in a more mundane application around your house: the power meter. Click on the photo gallery to see inside one and how it works, and follow the jump for more in-depth electro-geekery.

Read more ...

Digital Rosetta Stone For Digital Storage For 1000 years

From The Next Big Future:

Tadahiro Kuroda, an electrical engineering professor at Keio University in Japan, has invented what he calls a "Digital Rosetta Stone," a wireless memory chip sealed in silicon that he says can store data for 1,000 years.

Currently long term data storage requires: Data typically has to be put on new storage systems every 20 years or less for it to be accessible. The digital migration costs time and money. Storing and maintaining a digital master of a very high-resolution movie, for example, costs $12,500 a year; archiving a standard film costs $1,000 a year.

Read more ....

Exact Date Pinned To Great Pyramid's Construction?

The setting sun casts a golden hue over the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt in an undated picture. Construction of the Great Pyramid (right), the tomb of the pharaoh Khufu, started on August 23, 2470 B.C., according to controversial new research announced in August 2009. Photograph by Kenneth Garrett/NGS

From National Geographic:

The Egyptians started building the Great Pyramid of Giza on August 23, 2470 B.C., according to controversial new research that attempts to place an exact date on the start of the ancient construction project.

A team of Egyptian researchers arrived at the date based on calculations of historical appearances of the star Sothis—today called Sirius.

Read more ....

More Than 4735 Deaths So Far From H1N1 Flu

Shortage Of Shots As More Kids Die Of Swine Flu -- MSNBC

CDC: H1N1 virus causing unprecedented number of infections for early fall

WASHINGTON - Even as swine flu infections are causing an unprecedented amount of illness for this time of year — and a growing number of deaths, particularly among children — supplies of vaccine to protect against it will be delayed, government health officials said Friday.

Read more ....

200,000-Year-Old Cut Of Meat: Archaeologists Shed Light On Life, Diet And Society Before The Delicatessen

A bone from the Qesem Cave showing irregular cutmarks. (Credit: Photo by Dr. Mary Stiner)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 15, 2009) — Contestants on TV shows like Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen know that their meat-cutting skills will be scrutinized by a panel of unforgiving judges. Now, new archaeological evidence is getting the same scrutiny by scientists at Tel Aviv University and the University of Arizona.

Their research is providing new clues about how, where and when our communal habits of butchering meat developed, and they're changing the way anthropologists, zoologists and archaeologists think about our evolutionary development, economics and social behaviors through the millennia.

Read more ....

Small Asteroid to Fly Past Earth Tonight

From Live Science:

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

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

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

Read more ....

Remembering The Man Who Made Jet Fighters Possible

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

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

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

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

Read more ....

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

The Moon Belongs To No One – Yet

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

From New Scientist:

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

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

Read more ....

LHC Gets Colder Than Deep Space

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

From The BBC:

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

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

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

Read more ....

How Net Activity Boosted 'Paranormal Activity'

From San Francisco Chronicle:

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

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

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

Read more ....

Cheetah, Gecko And Spiders Inspire Robotic Designs

From Gadget Lab:

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

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

Read more ....

Stormy Times For Cloud Computing?

From Times Online:

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

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

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

Read more ....

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

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

From The Telegraph:

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

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

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

Read more ....

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

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

From The Daily Mail:

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

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

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

Read more ....

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

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

From Science Daily:

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

Read more ....

Monkey Drumming Suggests The Origin Of Music

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

From Live Science:

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

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

Read more ....

Atlantic Salmon Shortage's Ripple Effect

Watch CBS News Videos Online

From CBS News:

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

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

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

ISA has killed millions of salmon in Chile.

Read more ....

Rocking On With Hot Rocks Geothermal Energy

From NOVA:

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

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

Read more ....

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

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

From Time Magazine:

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

Read more ....