Photo: Big to small: Cheryl Cole (left) carries a huge Louis Vuitton handbag through LA airport early last year.
New research predicts that expectations about what is going to happen next in a piece of music should be different for people with different musical experience and sheds light on the brain mechanisms involved. (Credit: iStockphoto/Anna Bryukhanova)
The ancient text shown in this drawing was discovered on a shard of pottery in Israel, and turned out to be the earliest known example of Hebrew writing. Credit: University of Haifa
In Fort Detrick's new BSL-4 laboratory, a labyrinth of ducts guides air in the lab through banks of powerful filters, each of which removes more than 99 percent of particles larger than 0.0003 mm. Staff say air leaves the building cleaner than it arrives.
Google Bai Bai AP 
The signature of a mathematical structure called E8 has been seen in the real world for the first time (Illustration: Claudio Rocchini under a creative commons 2.5 licence)
Observations of chimpanzees could shed light on when our human ancestors first controlled fire. Andrew Aiken / Rex Features
Permafrost in Siberia. Methane emissions from the Arctic permafrost increased by 31% from 2003-07, figures show. Photograph: Francis Latreille/Corbis
Photo: Centenarian: The late Queen Mother at St Paul's Cathedral after a service in honour of her 100th birthday in 2000
When scientists melted diamond under high temperatures and pressure and then resolidified, the solid diamond chunks floated on top of liquid diamond. Getty Images
Damage evaluation map based on satellite data over the Port-au-Prince area of Haiti, following a 7.0 magnitude earthquake and several aftershocks that hit the Caribbean nation on 12 January. Map based on data from CNES's SPOT-5, JAXA's ALOS and the U.S.-based GeoEye-1 satellites; processed by SERTIT. (Credit: CNES, JAXA, GeoEye, SERTIT)
You have to question your faith, but hopefully not lose it, a Haitian seminarian said of the earthquake that destroyed the Notre Dame Cathedral of Port-au-Prince. (Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times)
From FOX News:
Howard Carter examining King Tut's sarcophagus. The British archaeologist claimed ancient grave robbers had broken into the boy king's tomb and stolen a number of small treasures. But he had contractual reasons to make up the story. AP
China Begins Monitoring Billions Of Text Messages As Censorship Increases -- The Telegraph
Pixel Qi : Mary Lou Jepson's hybrid computer screen blends the best aspects of both laptop and e-reader displays John B. Carnett
A scanning probe microscope image of human chromosomes.
Female Figurine (Front), Fired Clay. Marius Amarie
From The Economist:
Photo: Tablets on display last week at the Consumer Electronics Show. (Credit: Brooke Crothers)
A 'neuronal thermostat' keeps our energy-hungry brains operating reliably and efficiently while processing a flood of sensory information, new research has found. (Credit: iStockphoto)
Europe's Columbus science module was attached to the ISS in 2008
The skies over Hongdao, China, where the spectacular 'ring of fire' could be seen. The eclipse was annular, meaning the Moon blocked most of the Sun's middle
MULE Gone to the robot junkyard in the sky Lockheed Martin 
Nasonia wasp: The wasps, which all fall in the Nasonia genus,
Patrick McGovern in his laboratory, examining and "sniffing" out a 3,000-year-old millet wine, which was preserved inside a tightly lidded bronze vessel from an elite tomb at the Shang Dynasty capital of Anyang in China. Photograph courtesy of P. Kosty, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Just as iPods replaced your record collection with a click wheel and a pair of white headphones, e-readers now want to digitize your bookcase. The problem is: they all want to do it in different ways. Rich Clabaugh/StaffAt this month’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the biggest tech convention of the year, attendants found a trove of e-reader devices.
Just as iPods replaced your record collection with a click wheel and a pair of white headphones, the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, and untold others now want to digitize your bookcase.
However, they all want to do it in different ways.
Action is needed at the global level to ensure that cyberspace doesn't slip
Artist's concept of the Spirit rover on Mars (before getting stuck in a sand trap).
From Science A Gogo:
Astronomers have detected an extrasolar planet with a mass just four
Human psychology could be making an airport screener's job even harder,
A supply of antiretroviral drugs is prepared for free distribution to HIV patients at the Integrated HIV Service Unit at the Cipto Mangunkusumo government hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia. Romeo Gacad / AFP / Getty
From The BBC:
Devil's punch bowl? The mouth of Albor Tholus, an extinct volcano, is 30km across
From ZNet:Updated: A Google spokesman responds with the following: The premise of Mr. Strassmann’s post is without merit: There’s no need to withdraw servers that store Gmail information from China because there aren’t any there.
Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra has been a consistent advocate of increasing the government’s use of commercially available technologies, such as Gmail. In fact, as the District of Columbia’s chief technology officer, Kundra implemented Google Apps, including Gmail, for all District employees.
A catastrophic collapse is imminent, according to the latest study
On the left, buildings surrounding Haiti's capital are reduced to rubble, and the roof of the capital itself (at top) is crumbled. On the right, the capital building on Sept. 29, 2008. GeoEye Satellite Image
From Popular Mechanics:
From Science Daily:
Desolate: Survivors gather around bodies laid out after being recovered from the wreckage
The first six weeks of scientific data returned by Kepler has already turned up five exoplanets, with many more candidates waiting to be studied. (credit: NASA)
Workers align the space shuttle Discovery's thrusters in Orbiter Processing Facility Bay 3 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in December 2009. A small amount of cocaine was found in a restricted area of the facility on Wednesday, NASA said. NASA
'Electroweak' stars may recreate the conditions of the big bang in an apple-sized region in their cores (Illustration: Casey Reed, courtesy of Penn State)
A destroyed building is seen on January 12, 2010 in Port-au-Prince after a huge earthquake measuring 7.0 rocked the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti. (Photograph by Lisandro Suero/AFP/Getty Images)
