WISE Satellite Set To Map The Infrared Universe

Photo: EYE FOR THE INVISIBLE: Technicians prepare the WISE satellite for launch. NASA

From Scientific American:

NASA's latest space surveyor should be able to peer at distant galaxies and uncover dim objects right in our own celestial backyard.

Nestled into the payload of a Delta 2 rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is a satellite that should open new targets for astronomical study both near and far. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), slated for launch no earlier than 6:09 A.M. Pacific Standard Time on December 11, is charged with mapping the sky in the mid-infrared to create an atlas of objects whose emitted light is invisible to human eyes and largely absorbed by Earth's atmosphere.

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Cheap, Plastic Memory For Flexible Devices

Photo: Flexible flash: This plastic sheet is arrayed with 676 flash memory cells. Credit: Science/AAAS

From Technology Review:

A new type of flash could be used in e-readers.

Cheap and plastic aren't words often associated with cutting-edge technology. But researchers in Tokyo have created a new kind of plastic low-cost flash memory that could find its way into novel flexible electronics.

Flash memory stores data electrically, in specially designed silicon transistors. Information can be recorded and read quickly and is retained even when the power is off. This makes flash ideal for MP3 players, cameras, memory cards, and USB drives. But the technology is still more expensive than conventional hard disks.

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Video: NASA Drops A Helicopter From Midair To Test New Anti-Crash Tech

From Popular Science:

No stranger to rough landings, NASA just engineered a crash of its own design to test a new crash countermeasure for helicopters. NASA dropped a donated Army MD-500 carrying four crash test dummies from 35 feet, to determine whether a new honeycomb cushion made of Kevlar strapped to the bottom of the copter could absorb the brunt of the impact. The result: a more or less intact MD-500, and the cool impact video below.

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Modern Life Causes Brain Overload, Study Finds

People are bombarded with the equivalent of 34 gigabytes of information a day.

From the Telegraph:

The wealth of media in modern life means the average person is bombarded with enough information every day to overload a laptop computer, a study has found.

Through email, the internet, television and other media, people are deluged with around 100,500 words a day – equivalent to 23 words per second, researchers claim.

Scientists from the University of San Diego, California, who conducted the research, believe that the information overload may be having a detrimental effect on our brains.

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Three Years Late, 'The Grizzly' Military Transport Plane Finally Takes To The Skies

(Click Image to Enlarge)
We have lift-off: The A400 Airbus finally gets into the sky, and the design specifications that make it so special

From The Daily Mail:

Heading into the blue three years late, Airbus's troubled A400M 'flying truck' military transport plane lifts off for its maiden flight.

The plane took off from Seville, in Spain, yesterday, with the flags of nine countries emblazoned on its side - the seven Nato nations plus Malaysia, which has ordered several planes, and South Africa, which recently pulled out of its order.

Britain has ordered up to 20 of the planes but the project has been dogged by delays and cost-overuns.

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Suzaku Catches Retreat Of A Black Hole's Disk

Image: GX 339-4, illustrated here, is among the most dynamic binaries in the sky, with four major outbursts in the past seven years. In the system, an evolved star no more massive than the sun orbits a black hole estimated at 10 solar masses. (Credit: ESO/L. Calçada)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 12, 2009) — Studies of one of the galaxy's most active black-hole binaries reveal a dramatic change that will help scientists better understand how these systems expel fast-moving particle jets.

Binary systems where a normal star is paired with a black hole often produce large swings in X-ray emission and blast jets of gas at speeds exceeding one-third that of light. What fuels this activity is gas pulled from the normal star, which spirals toward the black hole and piles up in a dense accretion disk.

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Titan: A Climate Out Of This World

Titan in Saturn’s system: Titan (top) emerges from behind its parent planet, Saturn. Another satellite, Tethys, is visible at the bottom left of the picture. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

From Live Science:

Our knowledge of Titan has improved considerably over the last five years. Before that, Saturn's largest satellite had only been hastily approached by a handful of space probes.

In 1980, the Voyager-1 spacecraft took advantage of a flyby to take a few mysterious, yet frustrating close-ups of Titan's opaque, rusty atmosphere. Despite its color, Titan actually seemed to look a lot like the early Earth.

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Legal Battles Rage Over E-Book Rights To Old Books

From CNET News:

William Styron may have been one of the leading literary lions of recent decades, but his books are not selling much these days. Now his family has a plan to lure digital-age readers with e-book versions of titles like "Sophie's Choice," "The Confessions of Nat Turner" and Styron's memoir of depression, "Darkness Visible."

But the question of exactly who owns the electronic rights to such older titles is in dispute, making it a rising source of conflict in one of the publishing industry's last remaining areas of growth.

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Genetic 'Map' Of Asia's Diversity

The study indicates that all of Asia was populated through one migration event.

From The BBC:

An international scientific effort has revealed the genetics behind Asia's diversity.

The Human Genome Organisation's (HUGO) Pan-Asian SNP Consortium carried out a study of almost 2,000 people across the continent.

Their findings support the hypothesis that Asia was populated primarily through a single migration event from the south.

The researchers described their findings in the journal Science.

They found genetic similarities between populations throughout Asia and an increase in genetic diversity from northern to southern latitudes.

The team screened genetic samples from 73 Asian populations for more than 50,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).

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Geminid Meteor Shower 2009: Where To Watch, What To Bring

From L.A. Times:

Sky-watchers, get ready for another late-night adventure. The Geminid meteor shower is to be at its peak tonight and into the wee hours of Monday morning. Though not as popular as the Perseids, these meteors generally put on a great show when they appear in our skies annually in December.

When you spot the Geminids, which emanate from the constellation Gemini (hence, their name), you will be observing debris from an extinct comet by the name of 3200 Phaethon. “It is, basically, the rocky skeleton of a comet that lost its ice after too many close encounters with the sun,” writes Tony Phillips in a NASA blog.

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Getting Power From Coal Without Digging It Up

Photo: Truly clean coal: Swan Hills Synfuels generates a clean-burning gas mixture from coal at its underground gasification plant northwest of Edmonton. The company plans to generate 300 megawatts of power with the gas, while storing the resulting carbon dioxide in Alberta’s oil fields. Credit: Swan Hills Synfuels

From Technology Review:

An Alberta project will transform coal deep beneath the ground into gas.

Converting coal in the ground directly into clean-burning gases could have huge environmental benefits--not the least of which would be the avoidance of destructive mining operations. The problem is, technology for underground coal gasification is still in its early stages.

Now the government of Alberta says it will give C$285 million ($271 million) to a coal gasification project by Calgary-based Swan Hills Synfuels that involves the deepest-ever operation to generate power from coal--without digging it up.

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Troops Strike Up A Tune To Repair The Damage Of Brain Injuries

Band Aid Music could provide relief to hundreds of brain-injured veterans.
Hanan Isachar/Superstock

From Popular Science:

The opening riff of “Takin’ Care of Business” thumps rhythmically from an iPod as a room full of middle-aged military veterans tap in time on drums. This is the sound of brain rehab.

Studies show that music can promote new neural connections, which Colorado State University neuroscientist Michael Thaut theorized could help overcome common symptoms of traumatic brain injury (TBI), such as short-term memory loss and impaired decision-making skills. Thaut and his colleagues enrolled 31 veterans suffering from TBI in a “neurologic music therapy” study where each drummer matches rhythms and tempos set by a bandleader. Last summer, they published results that show that after several 30-minute sessions, the group performed better on standard decision-making tests.

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Three New Planets Found Orbiting Star Similar To Sun

From The Telegraph:

Three new planets have been found orbiting a nearby star that is almost identical to the Sun.

The planets, forming a mini-solar system, circle the star 61 Virginis which is just 27.8 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye.

They have masses ranging from 5.3 to 24.9 times that of the Earth.

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Trying To Stop An International "Arms Race" In Cyberspace

In Shift, U.S. Talks To Russia On Internet Security -- New York Times

The United States has begun talks with Russia and a United Nations arms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting military use of cyberspace.

American and Russian officials have different interpretations of the talks so far, but the mere fact that the United States is participating represents a significant policy shift after years of rejecting Russia’s overtures. Officials familiar with the talks said the Obama administration realized that more nations were developing cyberweapons and that a new approach was needed to blunt an international arms race.

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My Comment: This is a major policy shift for the U.S. The key paragraph in this report is the following:

The mere fact that the United States is participating represents a significant policy shift after years of rejecting Russia’s overtures. Officials familiar with the talks said the Obama administration realized that more nations were developing cyberweapons and that a new approach was needed to blunt an international arms race.

The problem is that I do not see how it is possible to regulate and blunt the development of software that may (or may not) contravene any future agreements .... let alone establishing a monitoring agency that will have the resources to verify compliance for any future agreement.

Climate Change Emails Row Deepens As Russians Admit They DID Come From Their Siberian Server

Agenda: An Iceberg projection highlighting the Copenhagen UN summit shows the high level of political interest in climate change - and why scientists may be desperate to prove it is a man-made problem we can solve

From The Daily Mail:

The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now ‘likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years’.

As its authors from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must have expected, it made headlines around the world.

Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts.

In the words of one, David Rind from the US space agency Nasa, it ‘looks like there were years around 1000AD that could have been just as warm’.

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Do Truth Serums Work?

The Straight Dope:

Truth serums are based on a phenomenon known since ancient times, when Pliny the Elder coined the phrase in vino veritas: "in wine, truth." He meant anything that lowers your inhibitions is likely to cause you to say things you'd normally keep secret. Unfortunately for cops and CIA interrogators, what you spill isn't necessarily the truth.

Although people have been plying one another with liquor for centuries, the earliest confession induced using something stronger was reported in a 1903 criminal case involving a New York cop. He admitted under ether that he'd faked insanity when accused of killing his wife.

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Bacteria Engineered To Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Liquid Fuel

Genetically engineered strains of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus in a Petri dish. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Los Angeles)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2009) — Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels.

In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.

Read more ....

Wild Dingos Remember Human Gestures

A female dingo, Queensland, Australia. Research shows that although dingos are no longer domesticated, they still retain the ability to read human gestures. Credit: Bradley Smith

From Live Science:

Dingoes were semidomesticated village dogs once, in Southeast Asia. Then, about 4,000 years ago, they got loose in Australia, where their behavior reverted to that of their ancestor, the wolf. They howl, live in packs, and fear humans.

But even after so long on the lam they’ve retained at least one mark of domestication: an ability to read human gestures.

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Leasing The Sun

Workers for Solar City help to install solar panels on a Westminster, Calif., home. The company leases solar panels to homeowners in California and Arizona. Newscom/File

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Discount deals and tax incentives help homeowners go solar.

If faced with a $700-a-month electric bill, one might be inclined to cast one’s eyes heavenward. So it wasn’t surprising that Lisa Max took a good hard look at rooftop solar panels as a possible solution to her soaring energy costs. But the estimates “shocked” the San Rafael, Calif., homeowner.

It’s a typical scenario faced by US homeowners who are eyeing solar energy as a way to help the environment and save themselves some cash at the same time. When they crunch the numbers, the financial clouds descend.

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How To Fix Facebook's New Privacy Settings

How Facebook said good morning today.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

From CNET:

When logging in to Facebook Thursday, I, like millions of other people, got the directive to update my privacy settings to fit in to the new, "simplified," scheme.

But at their core, the Facebook privacy settings have not been simplified. Beyond the set-up page, Facebook's privacy controls are now more complex and more powerful. The new set-up page seems more designed to pry this privacy from you than give you access to the new, and excellent, controls that Facebook has put in place.

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Aid Agencies 'Must Use New Tools'

Photo: Ushahidi is a free and open-source information-sharing platform

From The BBC:

The "crowd-sourced" data that comes from victims of natural disasters and conflicts is now a crucial part in disaster management, says a new report.

The UN Foundation/Vodafone Foundation Partnership report outlines examples of new technologies that mitigate conflicts and save lives worldwide.

A report author said it reveals that aid agencies "fail to take advantage" of new tools available.

It says a number of challenges remain to maximise the tools' potential.

The partnership is a $30m, 5-year plan that joins the humanitarian arms of each group, with a focus on the technological aspects of aid.

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Drought Turns Governments To Cloud Seeding

Image: (CBS/iStockphoto)

From CBS News:

U.S. Behind Tide of Countries Increasingly Dealing with Water Shortages by Trying to Force Rain Fall.

(AP) On a mountaintop clearing in the Sierra Nevada stands a tall metal platform holding a crude furnace and a box of silver iodide solution that some scientists believe could help offer relief from searing droughts.

This is a cloud-seeding machine designed to increase rainfall by spraying a chemical vapor into the clouds. Under the right conditions, it can help water droplets grow heavy, coalesce and fall to the ground.

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NASA To Get Budget Boost For Exploration, Says Analyst

From New Scientist:

NASA is sure to get an injection of cash to rescue its faltering human space exploration programme, says a well-connected space policy analyst.

In October, a report by a White House panel headed by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine said NASA would be unable to support meaningful human space exploration without at least $3 billion more per year.

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Piercing The Plasma: Ideas To Beat The Communications Blackout Of Reentry

HOT STUFF COMING THROUGH: Computer modeling by Krishnendu Sinha of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay shows the heat flow a space capsule might generate during reentry. Hottest regions exceed 6,000 degrees Celsius (white, purple and red), coolest regions a few hundred (blue). Krishnendu Sinha Itt Bombay

From Scientific American:

Anticipating novel spacecraft and Mach 10 missiles, the U.S. Air Force considers new ways around an old problem.

The frustrating communications blackout that can occur when a spacecraft reenters the atmosphere caused some tense moments in the earlier years of the space age—perhaps most memorably during the crippled Apollo 13 mission. But the phenomenon could also affect communications with new aircraft and weapons systems being contemplated now by the U.S. Air Force, which hopes to find ways to pierce the blackout.

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Panhandling Hits The Internet

From Discovery News:

It's a recession Christmas. Even though retail and online sales improved this year over last year, the unemployment rate in the country was at 10 percent as of November. During the same month, the average duration a person remained unemployed was 28.5 weeks.
People are not rolling in dough.

In tough times, people sometimes reach out to friends, family, church or their community for help. Some take to streets and panhandle.

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Boeing's 787 Dreamliner To Attempt First Flight Next Week

Dreamliner in Hangar Aviation Explorer

From Popular Science:

Boeing announced early this morning that its next generation airliner, the 787 Dreamliner, will take to the skies next Tuesday, December 15 at the company's Everett, WA proving grounds--if the Pacific Northwest's finicky weather cooperates.

The plane, the first with an airframe made of primarily composite materials, has faced numerous delays, putting the program a full two years behind schedule. Most recently, a structural fault was found in the side-of-body portion of the airframe that connects to the wings, causing the initial first flight planned for July to be canceled just a week before it was scheduled to take place.

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Super-Massive Black Holes Observed At The Center of Galaxies

UKIRT infrared images of the four target galaxies show them in near-infrared color, where the images at different infrared wavelengths are assigned to represent red, green and blue colors. Observations with the Keck Interferometer have resolved the inner structure of the bright nucleus in all the four galaxies. The inferred ring-like structure obtained for NGC 4151 at the top-left is depicted in the top-right panel. The ring radius is 0.13 light years, corresponding to an extremely small ~0.5 milli-arcsecond angular size on the sky. The distance to each galaxy is indicated in million light-years, together with the redshift (z) of each galaxy. (Credit: M. Kishimoto, MPIfR)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 11, 2009) — An international team of scientists has observed four super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies, which may provide new information on how these central black hole systems operate.

Their findings are published in December's first issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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Did Ancient Sicilians Build Temples to 'Fit In?'

A Greek temple dating from the fifth century BC. It's more likely to have been dedicated to the Dioscuri (the Gemini twins) than Concord. Some researchers theorize that such temples on Sicily were built facing east as to adhere to Greek conventions. Credit: Dr. Alun Salt

From Live Science:

Ancient Greeks living in Sicily built their sacred temples to face the rising sun, new research suggests.

Almost all of the temples constructed on the island of Sicily during its Greek period over 2,500 years ago are oriented toward the eastern horizon, according to a new study by Alun Salt, an archaeoastronomer with the University of Leicester, in England.

Though many temples on mainland Greece also line up with the sunrise, it is less frequent on the mainland than on outlying colonies, implying an effort by outlying colonies to strengthen their ties to the home territory, Salt told LiveScience.

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Extreme Fear: Could You Handle It?

Illustration: Matt Murphy

From The Guardian:

When disaster strikes, whether you live or die depends on how you react to the crisis…

If you suddenly found yourself in a life-or-death crisis and had to make a decision that would either save your life or end it, are you confident you'd make the right one? People in the state of Victoria, Australia, faced just such a decision in February and March this year. For five weeks, catastrophic brush fires swept across the state. Government policy held that when fire threatened a neighbourhood, homeowners were to make a choice: stay and fight to save their houses, or evacuate early. They were explicitly instructed not to wait until the flames were close. Trying to run from an advancing wildfire is the surest way to die in it.

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DIY Book Scanners Turn Your Books Into Bytes

From Gadget Lab:

For nearly two years, Daniel Reetz dreamed of a book scanner that could crunch textbooks and spit out digital files he could then read on his PC.

Book scanners, like the ones Google is using in its Google Books project, run into thousands of dollars, putting them out of the reach of a graduate student like Reetz. But in January, when textbook prices for the semester were listed, Reetz decided he would make a book scanner that would cost a fraction of commercially available products.

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Top 10 Yahoo! Internet Searches Of 2009

Photo: Britney Spears -- who dominated Yahoo!'s Top 10 Overall Searches for the past four years -- dropped from the No. 1 position to No. 5 this year. (CBS)

From CBS News:

Yahoo! Web Life Editor Shares the Hottest Internet Topics of the Year.

(CBS) One of the most telling ways to assess our national interest in economics, politics, and entertainment is to analyze the top web searches of the year. So what are the most searched topics on Yahoo! this year?

Heather Cabot, Yahoo! Web life editor, shared on "The Early Show" what the hottest web topics were in 2009 and what they say about Americans and our national consciousness.

TOP TEN OVERALL YAHOO! SEARCHES FOR 2009
1. Michael Jackson
2. Twilight
3. WWE
4. Megan Fox
5. Britney Spears
6. Naruto (Japanese Anime)
7. American Idol
8. Kim Kardashian
9. NASCAR
10. Runescape

So what overall does this list tells us?

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The Perfect Way To Slice A Pizza

Solving essential life problems (Image: Eric Savage/Getty)

From The New Scientist:

LUNCH with a colleague from work should be a time to unwind - the most taxing task being to decide what to eat, drink and choose for dessert. For Rick Mabry and Paul Deiermann it has never been that simple. They can't think about sharing a pizza, for example, without falling headlong into the mathematics of how to slice it up. "We went to lunch together at least once a week," says Mabry, recalling the early 1990s when they were both at Louisiana State University, Shreveport. "One of us would bring a notebook, and we'd draw pictures while our food was getting cold."

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Subsurface Gas Deposit Could Deflate Theory Of How Earth's Atmosphere Formed

LIFE LINE: Earth's atmosphere, as seen from space, allowed life to thrive on the planet, but how it originated and evolved remains an open question. NASA

From Scientific American:

Krypton trapped in Earth's mantle appears not to have been captured from the sun, as some models would predict.

A precision analysis of gases from Earth's mantle collected at a geologic formation in the U.S. Southwest points to a source for the gas that more closely resembles carbonaceous meteorites than it does the sun. If confirmed by further research, the new study would challenge a theoretical model for atmosphere formation in which Earth began with two reservoirs of solar gas captured during the planet's formation and youth—one surrounding the planet, the other buried beneath the surface.

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Massive Camera Sharpens Our View Of The Universe : Big Pic Gallery

The Beast -- A portrait of VISTA, a system developed by a consortium of 18 universities in the United Kingdom led by Queen Mary, University of London. This is the biggest survey telescope of its kind, revolutionizing ESO's capability of observing the southern skies, combining outstanding photographic capabilities with a huge light-collecting mirror. Image credit: ESO/Y. Beletsky

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Intense Geminid Meteor Shower Peaks Sunday

The annual Geminid meteor shower lights up the sky over the 1600-year old fire temple of Niasar in Iran in a December 14, 2008 photograph. Photograph by Oshin Zakarian, TWAN

From National Geographic:

Late Sunday night is the peak of the year's most prolific annual cosmic fireworks show—the Geminid meteor shower (Geminids picture).

The meteor shower has been growing in intensity in recent decades and should be an even better holiday treat than usual this year, since it's falling in a nearly moonless week.

Coming fast on the heels of its more famous cousin the Leonid meteor shower—which peaked less than a month ago—the Geminid show should feature as many as 140 shooting stars per hour between Sunday evening and Monday morning.

The Geminids are slow meteors that create beautiful long arcs across the sky—many lasting a second or two.

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SCARE" Software Predicts Insurgent Weapons Cache Locations Based On IED Attacks

Cutting Down IED Attacks IED attacks such as these can provide basic intel for SCARE to predict weapons cache locations U.S. Army

From Popular Science:

The program generates hypotheses from available intel to finger IED weapons caches within a half a mile of actual locations.

Improvised explosives used by insurgents represent the top killer for warfighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now soldiers have a new tool for hunting down IED weapons caches. A new software package, called SCARE, can whip up a best hypothesis for possible locations, based on locations of past improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and, somewhat surprisingly, the Shiite vs. Sunni makeup of neighborhoods.

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Map Of Every Nuclear Explosions Since 1945

Our Century of Fallout: Every Nuclear Detonation, Mapped -- Gizmodo

Everyone's got a notion of how the last century went, in terms of nuclear explosions. There was Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. There were some nuclear tests out in the desert, and the ocean. But would you believe there've been over 2000?

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CSN Editor: A full sized version is here.

Sea Level Is Rising Along US Atlantic Coast, Say Environmental Scientists

New Jersey coast. New research shows that sea-level rise along the Atlantic Coast of the United States was 2 millimeters faster in the 20th century than at any time in the past 4,000 years. (Credit: iStockphoto/Daniel Nydick)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 11, 2009) — An international team of environmental scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that sea-level rise along the Atlantic Coast of the United States was 2 millimeters faster in the 20th century than at any time in the past 4,000 years.

Sea-level rise prior to the 20th century is attributed to coastal subsidence. Put simply, land is being lost to subsidence as the earth continues to rise in response to the removal of the huge weight of ice sheets during the last glacial period. Using sediment cores from the U.S. Atlantic coast, researchers found significant spatial variations in land movement, with the mid-Atlantic coastlines of New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland subsiding twice as much as areas to the north and south. Coastal subsidence enhances sea-level rise, which leads to shoreline erosion and loss of wetlands and threatens coastal populations.

Read more ....

New Device Makes Guns More Accurate

Timothy Kraft using opti-sight. Credit: University of Alabama, Birmingham

From Live Science:

A new technology may make it easier for gun owners to improve their marksmanship.

Opti-sight, a new pistol-aiming device, was developed to reduce the time law enforcement, professional and amateur shooters need for target practice to get better results at the firing range.

Read more .....

Europe vs. Google: The Next Chapter

A scanner passes over a book as part of Google Inc.'s project to create digital versions of all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world. Carlos Osorio / AP

From Time Magazine:

Google may be valued at more than $185 billion and boast millions of users, but that doesn't mean the Internet giant is any match for the diminutive French President Nicolas Sarkozy. On Dec. 8, Sarkozy warned Google he would not allow France to be "stripped" of its literary heritage, an apparent reference to Google's enormous book-digitizing project. "We won't let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is," Sarkozy said during a round-table discussion in eastern France. "We are not going to be stripped of what generations and generations have produced in the French language, just because we weren't capable of funding our own digitization project."

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Geminid Meteor Shower Set To Light Up The Sky With Spectacular Display

Photo: The hidden fires of the Flame Nebula: meteor showers will be spectacular this weekend

From Times Online:

Wrap up warm and look at the night sky this weekend for the most spectacular meteor shower of the year — although you will need to brave some cold temperatures hovering around freezing.

The Geminid meteor shower appears every year about this time and is our best shooting star display, with more than 100 meteors appearing each hour. This year’s spectacle is especially good because it is close to a new moon so there is no moonlight to interfere with the view.

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NASA Comet Hunter Set For Monday Launch

From Information Week:

Weekend liftoff of WISE space telescope scrubbed due to faulty steering engine.

NASA delayed until Monday the launch of a space telescope designed to create a highly detailed map of the heavens and spot comets and asteroids that could pose a threat to life on Earth.

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, was slated to lift off from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base atop a Delta II rocket Friday, but a balky booster steering engine forced the delay.

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2010: The Year Of The Tablet Computer?

From PC World:

In China, 2010 will be the year of the Tiger. In the tech world, 2010 will be the year of the Tablet -- or so it seems. A bevy of tech companies have teased, talked, and have not denied rumors that they are working on a fabled tablet computer. Here is a look back at 2009 tablet buzz with a look forward to 2010 -- the year of the Tablet.

Asustek is rumored to be working on an Eee Pad, according to Digitimes. Rumors of a Dell tablet won't go away. Earlier this year, rumors of a Microsoft two-panel tablet appeared after Gizmodo got its hands on one of Redmond's concept videos. And starting Friday, the JooJoo Web tablet is supposed to go on sale for $499 at thejoojoo.com. And of course there is the ever-present Apple rumor that "soon" it will introduce a tablet.

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Final NASA Spending Bill Includes Protections For Moon Program

From Space.com:

WASHINGTON — House and Senate negotiators reached agreement this week on a 2010 omnibus spending bill that includes $18.7 billion for NASA — a $942 million increase over the agency's 2009 budget — and includes a provision that would prevent the agency from scaling back or canceling its current human spaceflight activities in the absence of formal legislative approval from congressional appropriators.

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The H1N1 Pandemic: Is A Second Wave Possible?

A woman wears a mask in Beijing on Dec. 2, 2009. Peter Parks / AFP / Getty

From Time Magazine:

Since early November, cases of H1N1 have continued to decline nationwide, and scientists keeping track of the numbers say that as pandemics go, 2009 H1N1 may turn out to be a mild one — at least for the time being.

The question now on health officials' minds is: Will there be a second wave of cases in the new year? The answer depends on whom you ask. "We took an informal poll of about a dozen of some of the world's leading experts in influenza," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told reporters recently. "About half of them said, Yes, we think it's likely that we'll have another surge in cases. About half said, No, we think it's not likely. And one said, Flip a coin."

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Earth's Atmosphere Came From Outer Space

Photo: REUTERS

From The Telegraph:

The Earth's atmosphere and oceans which gave rise to life came from outer space probably on the back of meteorites or comets, scientists now believe.

Previously it was thought that the gases and minerals were locked deep within the Earth's crust and only released in huge volcanic eruptions.

But now researchers have proved that they must have come from outer space billions of years after the Earth was first formed.

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Large Hadron Collider Creates World-Record Energy Collisions As It Gears Up For Big Bang Test

This image provided by CERN shows particle tracks as protons collided in CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Physicists hope those collisions will help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter

From The Daily Mail:

The world's largest atom smasher has smashed particles together at the highest energy achieved in a laboratory, a spokeswoman has confirmed.

The Large Hadron Collider recorded its first high-energy collisions of protons on Tuesday evening, as it underwent test runs in preparation for full-scale operations next year.

More than 10 billion protons per bunch collided at a total energy of 2.36 trillion electron volts (TeV) per collision.

Read more ....

First Evidence Of Brain Rewiring in Children: Reading Remediation Positively Alters Brain Tissue

A still from a movie from Cassini, made possible only as Saturn's north pole emerged from winter darkness, showing new details of a jet stream that follows a hexagon-shaped path and has long puzzled scientists.

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 10, 2009) — After waiting years for the sun to illuminate Saturn's north pole again, cameras aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft have captured the most detailed images yet of the intriguing hexagon shape crowning the planet.

The new images of the hexagon, whose shape is the path of a jet stream flowing around the north pole, reveal concentric circles, curlicues, walls and streamers not seen in previous images. Images and the three-frame animation are available at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org.

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Using Airplane Know-How To Harness Wave Energy

This fleshed-out reconstruction of a newly identified theropod dinosaur, called Tawa hallae, shows the dog-sized beast had claws for snagging meaty prey. Credit: Jorge Gonzalez.

From Live Science:

Long, long ago, some of the first dinosaurs walked the Earth. But scientists have not known with any confidence where those initial dino prints were made. Much more recently, hikers stumbled across a few bits of bone at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, leading to the discovery of a game-changing dinosaur that reveals where it all began.

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Rare Words 'Author's Fingerprint'

From The BBC:

Analyses of classic authors' works provide a way to "linguistically fingerprint" them, researchers say.

The relationship between the number of words an author uses only once and the length of a work forms an identifier for them, they argue.

Analyses of works by Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and DH Lawrence showed these "unique word" charts are specific to each author.

The work is published in the New Journal of Physics.

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From Minnie To Mickey (And All They Did Was Turn Off A Gene)

The cells of the female ovary were transformed into cells normally found in male testes by turning off a gene during the development of the mouse embryo. Alamy

From The Independent:

Simple technique changes sex of a mouse – and reveals the gender war that rages in all of us.

The battle of the sexes is a never-ending war waged within ourselves as male and female elements of our own bodies continually fight each other for supremacy. This is the astonishing implication of a pioneering study showing that it is possible to flick a genetic switch that turns female ovary cells into male testicular tissue.

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Super Soldier Updates

From the Next Big Future:

DARPA has a program that is spending about $3 billion to create super soldiers. Here is an update of technology that is ready or is becoming deployable or usable for the purpose of creating super soldiers. Much of it is not from DARPA.

Exoskeletons
1. The Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC™) exoskeleton runs on Li-ion batteries, driving lightweight hydraulic legs with titanium structure. A wearer can hang a 200lb backpack from the back frame and heavy chest armour and kit from shoulder extensions.

According to Lockheed reps the HULC isn't ready for prime time yet, being still "in ruggedisation". However the company would envisage giving it to actual soldiers so as to get their input from the summer of 2010.

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My Comment: An excellent summary from the "Next Big Future".