"Cyber ShockWave": The U.S. Fails In Cyberwar Game

West Wing Situation Room Planning for a hopefully better tomorrow Christopher Morris/White House Museum

U.S. Wargamers Wrap Up Massive Cyberattack Drill: "We Are Not Prepared" -- Popular Science

Washington insiders recently sweated out a real-time war game where a cyberattack crippled cell phone service, Internet and even electrical grids across the U.S. The unscripted, dynamic simulation allowed former White House officials and the Bipartisan Policy Center to study the problems that might arise during a real cyberattack emergency, according to Aviation Week's Ares Defense Blog.

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More News On The Recent Cyberattack Drill

War game reveals U.S. lacks cyber-crisis skills -- Washington Post
Cyberattack Drill Shows U.S. Unprepared -- Information Week
U.S. Government Defends Against Simulated Cyberattack on U.S. Targets -- Daily Tech
Washington Group Tests Security in ‘Cyber ShockWave’ -- Wall Street Journal
War game simulates cyberattack -- Politico
Cyber ShockWave cripples computers nationwide (sorta) -- Christian Science Monitor
Security Experts Wrestle With Cyberattack Scenario -- PC World
U.S. Isn’t Prepared for Massive Cyber Attack, Ex-Officials Say -- Business Week
US Cybersecurity Hypothetically Pathetic -- Tech News World
Simulated Cyberwar Hits DC -- Ares/Aviation Week
Unconstrained Cyberspace Domain -- Defense Tech
3 Ways Cyber Warriors Could Cripple the U.S. -- Atlantic Wire
Is The U.S. Ready For A Cyberwar? -- NPR
In a doomsday cyber attack scenario, answers are unsettling -- L.A. Times

A Ping-Pong-Playing Terminator

Match Point: Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

From Popular Science:

Meet TOPIO 3.0, the ping-pong-playing robot. Made by Vietnam’s first-ever robotics firm, TOSY, the bipedal humanoid uses two 200-fps cameras to detect the ball as it leaves the opponent’s paddle.

TOPIO’s brain—processors and an artificial neural network—analyzes the ball’s path to choose the best return. Last fall, TOPIO 3.0 debuted at the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo.

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Concrete Phase Of Runway Begins At Spaceport America

From Space Daily:

The first batch of concrete was poured Thursday, February 11, marking the start of the final concrete finish phase of the runway construction at Spaceport America, the world's first purposebuilt commercial spaceport. The runway project, which began in August 2009, is expected to be completed this summer, according to the New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA).

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Particle May Be Leading Candidate For Mysterious Dark Matter

Closeup of a CDMS detector, made of crystal germanium.
(Credit: DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 16, 2010) — Physicists may have glimpsed a particle that is a leading candidate for mysterious dark matter but say conclusive evidence remains elusive.

A 9-year search from a unique observatory in an old iron mine 2,000 feet underground has yielded two possible detections of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. But physicists, who include two University of Florida researchers, say there is about a one in four chance that the detections were merely background noise -- meaning that a worldwide hunt involving at least two dozen different observatories and hundreds of scientists will continue.

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Why People Fake Illness

From Live Science:

In 2008, a Baltimore woman named Dina Leone shared shocking news with her friends and family: she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. She wrote blogs and Facebook notes, updating everyone on her treatment and progress. The 37-year-old mother of two received more than an outpouring of support and get-well cards; she also got money to help pay for her treatments and fulfill her dying wishes.

It was all very tragic – and it was also a hoax. Police investigated her claims and soon her story unraveled when the hospitals she claimed to have visited had no record of her. Leone eventually admitted that she had pretended to be sick for over three years. She was recently indicted on charges of theft and conspiracy.

But why would someone lie about having cancer?

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Digital Handcuffs For Apple Ebooks?

From L.A. Times:

Apple's old digital rights management software (DRM), FairPlay, is slated to make a comeback with the e-books it will be selling on its iBook Store. While music users have been free of these "digital handcuffs" for the last year, Alex Pham reports that readers will not be.

When Apple launches its iBook store to sell titles for its new iPad device in March, many of its titles are expected to come with a set of handsome digital locks designed to deter piracy....

Next month, Apple will be dusting off those digital cuffs for books, according to sources in the publishing industry.

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Adam Aims To Take Bite Out Of Apple In iPad War

From Times Online:

It has already brought the world a £1,400 car, now India is set to release an “iPad for the masses” — a new tablet computer that technology experts say could mount a challenge to Apple’s latest gadget.

The new device, called the Adam, has been designed by Notion Ink, a start-up based in the technology hub of Hyderabad. The company was founded by three 24-year-old graduates from India’s elite technical universities who have relied on family and friends for seed funding.

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How The MP3 Became A Combat Weapon

From The Guardian:

Aditya Chakrabortty on the platoons' playlists on the Iraq frontline.

CJ Grisham and his friends used to love Eminem – especially his song, Go To Sleep. "We'd blare that and we'd all scream the lyrics." An all-American ritual – except that Grisham was a ­sergeant in the US offensive on ­Fallujah, and Eminem was his anthem for ­facing the Iraqis. As he puts it: "I'm going to have to shoot at someone today, so might as well get pumped up for it." And so his platoon would shriek along: "Go to sleep, bitch/Die, motherfucker, die/Time's up, bitch, close your eyes."

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Parents To Blame For Women 'Unlucky In Love', Claim Scientists

The study could explain why some women such as Jennifer Aniston,
remain unlucky in love. Photo: Reuters

From The Telegraph:

The reason why some women remain without a long-term boyfriend appears to have been solved by Australian scientists.

Researchers from the University of Western Australia reportedly claim some of the secrets of attraction appear to be hidden in certain immune system genes inherited from our parents.

They found that a woman's appearance or sweat contains clues to the genetic make-up of her immune system.

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Mystery Of The Giant Honeycomb Built In A Wood By Thousands Of Bees In Freezing February

Sweet success: The incredible honeycomb built by bees despite the
freezing weather at Holly Hill, Fareham, Hampshire

From The Daily Mail:

If you go down to these woods today you are sure of a sweet surprise - bees swarming in sub-zero temperatures around a giant honeycomb.

Even Sir David Attenborough would be stumped by the discovery as thousands of bees have constructed the comb in an oak tree at Holly Hill Country Park, Fareham, Hants.

The hardy workers have created the giant two-foot long structure and have been spotted by walkers and winter wildlife spotters more used to seeing deer and badgers at this time of year.

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Nasa Rides 'Bucking Bronco' To Mars

From The BBC:

It weighs almost a tonne, has cost more than $2bn and, in 2013, it will be lowered on to the surface of Mars with a landing system that has never been tried before.

The Mars Science Laboratory will "revolutionise investigations in science on other planets", says Doug McCuistion, director of Nasa's Mars exploration programme.

It will, he says, lay the foundations for future missions that will eventually bring pieces of the Red Planet back home to Earth.

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US Networks And Power Grid Under (Mock) Cyber-Attack

Under attack (Image: James Schnepf / Getty)

From New Scientist:

Unknown hackers have taken out US cellphone networks in an ongoing cyber-attack that will soon knock out parts of the nation's electricity grid – say the officials who helped plan today's mock assault on the nation's defences.

The 3-hour event began at 10 am EST (3 pm GMT) and will quickly escalate from cellphone networks to attack the US power supply by taking advantage of vulnerabilities in smart grid technologies, says Matthew Stern, head of cyber accounts for defence contractor General Dynamics.

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Are Criminals Born Bad?

From Times Online:

The field of neurocriminology is reviving some controversial ideas. Can criminal urges really be blamed on the brain?

We are used to hearing talk of “the criminal mind”. In future we can expect to hear more about “the criminal brain”. Recent scientific research suggests that criminality may be a trait tha t some people are born with or acquire very early in life. It’s an unsettling thought: examine the prefrontal cortex in the brain of a gurgling infant and you may see the signs of a potential future murderer.

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New Supercomputer Uses Water-Cooled Technology To Save Energy

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 16, 2010) — Nanyang Technological University (NTU) February 11 opens its much-anticipated High Performance Computing (HPC) Centre to support the university's growing international research profile and capacity, especially in the area of sustainability.

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Happiest States: Hawaii Moves Into First Place

From Live Science:

If you needed an extra twist of the arm to set off on a Hawaii vacation, here it is: The big-wave state was the happiest place to live in 2009, according to a newly released national survey.

Topping the well-being list among all 50 states, Hawaii pulled ahead of the 2008 leader Utah. But Utah and its neighbors still have plenty to smile about. Nine of the top 10 well-being states reside in the Midwest and the West. The south didn't fare so well, taking seven of the 11 lowest well-being spots on the list.

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Super Velcro

Image: Reusable superglue: An atomic force microscope image shows the surface of a shape memory polymer that has been treated to make a strong reusable adhesive. Two pieces of the polymer stick together when heated, stay stuck when cooled down, and come apart when heated again. Credit: Tao Xie, GM Research and Development Center

From Technology Review:

A novel adhesive is extremely strong, and its stickiness is reversible.

General Motors researchers have made an extremely strong adhesive that comes apart when heated. The adhesive is 10 times stickier than Velcro and the reusable gecko-inspired glues that many research groups have been trying to perfect.

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Life From A Test Tube? The Real Promise Of Synthetic Biology

Image: Matt Collins

From Scientific American:

Scientists are closing in on the ability to make life from scratch, with potential consequences both good and bad.

I have seen the future, and it is now.

Those words came to mind again as I recently listened to Craig Venter, one of those leading the new areas of synthetic genomics and synthetic biology. Every time I hear a talk on this subject, it seems a new threshold in the artificial manipulation and, ultimately, creation of life has been passed.

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Scientists Get Closer To Understanding Why We Age

Biologists have observed that people's cells often age at different rates.
Image Source / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

Time waits for no man, the old truism goes, but in recent years scientists have shown that it does seem to move more slowly for some. Molecular biologists have observed that people's cells often age at different rates, leading them to make a distinction between "chronological" and "biological age."

But the reason for the difference remains only vaguely understood. Environmental factors such as smoking, stress and regular exercise all seem to influence the rate at which our cells age. Now, for the first time, researchers have found a genetic link to cellular aging — a finding that suggests new treatments for a variety of age-related diseases and cancers.

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In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break A Law Of Nature

HOT A computer rendition of 4-trillion-degree Celsius quark-gluon plasma created in a demonstration of what scientists suspect shaped cosmic history. Brookhaven National Laboratory

From The New York Times:

Physicists said Monday that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort the laws of physics, providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history.

The blow was delivered in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where, since 2000, physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their constituents — quarks and gluons. The goal has been a state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the universe was only a microsecond old.

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'Star Wars' Is A Mere Phantom Menace To Missiles

From New Scientist:

The US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has finally shot down a moving missile with an airborne laser – but military experts say the system is not good enough for combat.

A liquid-fuelled rocket – thought to be a Scud-B, similar to those being developed by Iran and North Korea – was fired from a ship off the coast California on 11 February.

Within the next 20 seconds, the "airborne laser testbed" onboard a modified Boeing 747 locked-on to it with two low-powered tracking lasers, then a laser beam of several megawatts, to heat-damage the missile's skin. If such damage is done while booster rockets are still firing, the stresses caused by the acceleration can destroy the missile, as this clip of the test shows.

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Special Ops Gunships To Get Pain-Inducing Weapons

1. An electron gun fires a particle beam through a vacuum tube wrapped with strong magnets.
2. As the beam meets the magnetic field, the electrons bunch up and gyrate, producing high-power microwaves at set frequencies.
3. Mirrors steer the microwaves through a window made of diamond. The gem is used for its resistance to heat and for its clarity.
4. The electron beam’s excess energy is deposited in the coils of a collector.

From Popular Mechanics:

Nonlethal energy-beam blasters that cause pain without killing their targets could finally find a home—inside special operations gunships. Here's how they work.

The Pentagon has been researching nonlethal pain rays since the mid-’90s, but finding a vehicle to carry them has proven to be a challenge. Researchers have mounted these microwave weapons—which repel people by heating water molecules just under the skin, reportedly without damaging tissue—on trucks, guard towers and Humvees, but the U.S. military has never deployed them for real-world use. (Using such weapons on civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan is not seen as a good way to win hearts and minds.)

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My Comment: Ouch.

E-Books: Publishers Poised For Victory In Latest Battle

Photo: Google is thought to be offering the book trade more from e-book sales

From Times Online:

Publishers look set to win the latest round in the battle for supremacy on electronic books, with Google ready to offer major concessions as it prepares to enter the increasingly competitive e-book market.

Following the unveiling of Apple’s iPad, which will feature an electronic bookstore when it launches next month, and Amazon’s humiliation last week by a book publisher in a prices row, Google is thought to have given in to the book industry by offering it a higher share of the sale of e-books.

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Red Wine, Chocolate Among Foods That Fight Cancer

More great news for chocolate lovers: it helps fight cancer. Source: The Australian

From The Australian/AFP:

CABERNET and chocolate are potent medicine for killing cancer, according to new research.

Red grapes and dark chocolate join blueberries, garlic, soy, and teas as ingredients that starve cancer while feeding bodies, Angiogenesis Foundation head William Li said at the Technology Entertainment Design Conference in Long Beach, California.

``We are rating foods based on their cancer-fighting qualities,'' Li said. ``What we eat is really our chemotherapy three times a day.''

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Diamond Nanowire Device Could Lead To New Class Of Diamond Nanomaterials

A diamond-based nanowire device. Researchers used a top-down nanofabrication technique to embed color centers into a variety of machined structures. By creating large device arrays rather than just "one-of-a-kind" designs, the realization of quantum networks and systems, which require the integration and manipulation of many devices in parallel, is more likely. (Credit: Illustrated by Jay Penni.)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 15, 2010) — By creating diamond-based nanowire devices, a team at Harvard has taken another step towards making applications based on quantum science and technology possible.

The new device offers a bright, stable source of single photons at room temperature, an essential element in making fast and secure computing with light practical.

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King Tut's Mom And Dad ID'ed

From Live Science:

Candidates for King Tut's mother and father have been identified using DNA analyses from royal Egyptian mummies.

King Tutankhamun ruled from 1333 to 1324 B.C., during the period of ancient Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom.

Though he is possibly the most well-known of the Egyptian pharaohs, many mysteries still exist about the life, death and parentage of King Tut. But new DNA tests may have helped answer the question of what killed Tut, as well as exactly who his parents were.

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King Tut Died Of Malaria, Had A Club Foot: New Study

The removal of the lid of the sarcophagus of the mummy of King Tutankhamen in his underground tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor November 4, 2007. Reuters/Ben Curtis/Pool

From The National Post:

WASHINGTON -- The celebrated pharaoh Tutankhamun had a club foot, walked with a cane and was killed by malaria, a study showed on Tuesday.

Researchers from Egypt, Italy and Germany used DNA testing to draw "the most plausible" family tree to date for Tutankhamun and computerized tomography (CT) scans to determine that the pharaoh and his forebears were unlikely to have had the feminine physiques they are depicted with in 3,000-year-old artifacts.

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A Faster Wireless Web

Mobile speed: Fasp-AIR will make its first appearance in the wild as an iPhone application designed to speed media uploads over wireless networks. Credit: Aspera

From Technology Review:

A new protocol called fasp-AIR promises speedier mobile downloads.

Transfers of large amounts of data across the Internet to wireless devices suffer from a key problem: The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) used to send and receive that data can be unnecessarily slow.

A company called Aspera has now announced an alternative protocol designed to accelerate wireless transfer speeds. Called fasp-AIR, it includes new proprietary approaches to addressing problems of data transfer that are unique to wireless communications. The original fasp protocol is already used to boost regular Internet transfers. It was used, for instance, to speed up the transfer of files from New Zealand to the U.S. during production of the movie Avatar.

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'Climategate' Scientist Speaks Out

Professor Phil Jones. Photograph: University of East Anglia

From Scientific American:

Climatologist Phil Jones answers his critics in an exclusive interview with.

Phil Jones holds himself defensively, his arms crossed tightly in front of his chest as if shielding himself from attack. Little wonder: Jones has spent the past three months being vilified for his central role in what is now called "climategate."

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Why Google Wants A Faster Internet

Scott Barbour / Getty Images

From Time Magazine:

There was no lack of, well, buzz about Google's new Buzz social-media platform last week, but more important were a series of moves that suggest the search giant is ready to take a tentative step toward fixing one of its longest-held gripes: the speed of Internet connections in the U.S.

In a blog post on Feb. 10, Google product managers Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly laid out the company's plan to provide as many as 500,000 people in a small number of locales with fiber-optic Internet connections capable of one gigabit per second (Gbps), more than 100 times faster than the typical U.S. broadband connection speed today. It would be a blazing-fast upgrade, capable of downloading a full-length HD movie in under 90 seconds.

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Scientists Discover The Secret Of Ageing

From The Financial Times:

One of the biggest puzzles in biology – how and why living cells age – has been solved by an international team based at Newcastle University, in north-east England.

The answer is complex, and will not produce an elixir of eternal life in the foreseeable future.

But the scientists expect better drugs for age-related illnesses, such as diabetes and heart disease, to emerge from their discovery of the biochemical pathway involved in ageing.

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Did 'Dark Stars' Spawn Supermassive Black Holes?

A massive dark star voraciously eating matter and dark matter until it is well over 100,000 times the mass of the sun (NASA/Ian O'Neill).

From Discover Magazine:

Approximately 200 million years after the Big Bang, the universe was a very different place.

For starters, there was no starlight as there were no stars. This period was known descriptively as the "Dark Ages." As there were no stars, only clouds of the most basic elements persisted, fogging up the cosmos.

Although it's believed the first stars (known as "Population III stars") were sparked when hydrogen and helium gases cooled enough to clump together, collapsing under gravity and initiating nuclear fusion in the star cores (thus generating heavier elements), there's another possibility.

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A Gene For Alzheimer's Makes You Smarter

An intellectual advantage (Image: Joerg Sarbach/AP/PA)

From The New Scientist:

A GENE variant that ups your risk of developing Alzheimer's disease in old age may not be all bad. It seems that young people with the variant tend to be smarter, more educated and have better memories than their peers.

The discovery may improve the variant's negative image (see "Yes or no"). It also suggests why the variant is common despite its debilitating effects in old age. Carriers of the variant may have an advantage earlier in life, allowing them to reproduce and pass on the variant before its negative effects kick in. "From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense," says Duke Han at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

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Why Does Time Fly When You Are Having Fun?

From The BBC News:

It might seem like a bit of an odd question, but what speed does time travel at?

The obvious answer is that it ticks by at exactly the rate of 60 seconds every minute. But new research into our perception of time shows that for us humans, time is a lot more complicated.

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Cameras of the Future: Heart Researchers Create Revolutionary Photographic Technique

The image shows a drop of milk falling into a beaker of water. A video was made at the same time, using the same camera, and represents the same image data. The still image has a 16 fold greater spatial resolution (see swirls of milk in the beaker), and it can be decoded into the video frames played in sequence to reveal the high-speed motion content. (Credit: Copyright Dr Gil Bub, University of Oxford)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 15, 2010) — Scientists at the University of Oxford have developed a revolutionary way of capturing a high-resolution still image alongside very high-speed video -- a new technology that is attractive for science, industry and consumer sectors alike.

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Why Is The Sun's Atmosphere So Hot?

A schematic diagram of the cycle of mass in the solar atmosphere. High speed upflows seen in the magnetic upper chromosphere as Type-II spicules, get thrust into the corona; this material is visible at a wide range of temperatures, and some of it becomes entrained in the coronal magnetic field. Later, this material falls out along the same magnetic field lines, most likely as a phenomena called "coronal rain."

From Live Science:

The 2006 launch of the multinational Hinode satellite changed the picture of the Sun for astrophysicists. For two astrophysicists in particular, the resulting imagery offered a voyage of discovery and the thrill of unraveling a long-held solar mystery.

Earth's atmosphere can obscure the view of unaided ground-based telescopes, but, unimpeded by this problem, the high-resolution telescope flying on Hinode captures images of the Sun in unparalleled detail.

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The Car In front Will Be Carbon Fibre

Volkswagen AG's carbon-fibre sports car prototype, at the Tokyo Motor Show in 2005. The cars of the future will be like this with knobs on. Photo: Reuters/ERIKO SUGITA

From The Telegraph:

A nano-scale material developed in Britain may one day yield wafer-thin cellphones and light-weight, long-range electric cars powered by the roof, boot and doors, according to researchers.

For now, the new technology - which is a patented mix of carbon fibre and polymer resin that can charge and release electricity just like a regular battery - has not gone beyond a successful laboratory experiment.

But if scaled up, it could hold several advantages over existing energy sources for hybrid and electric cars, according to the scientists at Imperial College London who developed it.

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Bay Window View Installed On Space Station

From CBS News:

Astronauts Attach Cupola to New Tranquility Module.

(CBS) A multi-window cupola was successfully moved Monday from the new Tranquility module's outboard port to an Earth-facing hatch where the observation deck will provide bay-window views.

After resolving problems with jammed bolts and sticky latches, Astronauts Kay Hire and Terry Virts - operating the space station's robot arm - moved the cupola into position for attachment at Tranquility's nadir port.

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Why I'm An ebook Convert -- Commentary

The Kindle . . . ideal for a furtive read of celebrity memoirs.
Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

From The Guardian:

A Kindle or ebook won't have that 'new book smell' – but no one's going to judge you by its cover.

Following my blithering about the iPad the other week, I found myself thinking about ebooks. That's my life for you. A rollercoaster. Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the "physical pleasure of turning actual pages" and how ebook will "never replace the real thing". Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They're only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.

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Google Street View Snowmobile Gives A Slopes-Eye-View Of Winter Olympics Resort

From The Daily Mail:

First there was the Google car, which roamed the roads of Britain to build up a Street View perspective of the nation.

Then came the Google Trike, powered by super-strong employees to chart harder to reach areas such as Stone Henge.

Now the internet search giant has headed to the mountains with the Google snowmobile.

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The Hottest Science Experiment On The Planet

Brookhaven National Laboratory

From Discover Magazine:

In a Long Island lab, gold particles collide to form a subatomic stew far hotter than the sun.

Rocking the thermometer at 4 trillion degrees Celsius, a subatomic soup that might reflect the state of matter shortly after the Big Bang has set a new world record: It's the hottest substance ever created in a lab. The previous record, recorded at Sandia National Lab in 2006, was a balmy 2 billion degrees Celsius. The core of the sun burns at a chill 15 million degrees.

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Primordial Giant: The Star That Time Forgot

Messages from a long-lost universe (Image: Tim Gravestock)

From New Scientist:

At first, there didn't seem anything earth-shattering about the tiny point of light that pricked the southern Californian sky on a mild night in early April 2007. Only the robotic eyes of the Nearby Supernova Factory, a project designed to spy out distant stellar explosions, spotted it from the Palomar Observatory, high in the hills between Los Angeles and San Diego.

The project's computers automatically forwarded the images to a data server to await analysis. The same routine kicks in scores of times each year when a far-off star in its death throes explodes onto the night sky, before fading back to obscurity once more.

But this one did not fade away. It got brighter. And brighter. That's when human eyes became alert.

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Giant Redwoods May Dry Out; Warming To Blame?

Fog shrouds redwoods in California's Humboldt Redwoods State Park.
Photograph by Michael Nichols, National Geographic Stock

From The National Geographic:

Declining fog cover on California's coast could leave the state's famous redwoods high and dry, a new study says.

Among the tallest and longest-lived trees on Earth, redwoods depend on summertime's moisture-rich fog to replenish their water reserves.

But climate change may be reducing this crucial fog cover. Though still poorly understood, climate change may be contributing to a decline in a high-pressure climatic system that usually "pinches itself" against the coast, creating fog, said study co-author James Johnstone, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Space Rock Contains Organic Molecular Feast

Photo: The Murchison meteorite came down in Australia in 1969

From The BBC:

Scientists say they have confirmed that a meteorite that crashed into earth 40 years ago contains millions of different organic compounds.

It is thought the Murchison meteorite could be even older than the Sun.

"Having this information means you can tell what was happening during the birth of the Solar System," said lead researcher Dr Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin.

The results of the meteorite study are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Nanoparticles To Clean Drinking Water

Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos:

BEIJING: Scientists have developed nanotechnology that purifies water using only visible light, it continues working in the dark and it kills the tougher microbes to boot.

Light is often used as a water purifier and existing methods rely on processes stimulated by ultraviolet (UV) light.

But UV accounts for just 5% of daylight so a method using visible light — which accounts for almost half — is more desirable.

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Scientists Synthesize Unique Family of Anti-Cancer Compounds

Image of one of the kinamycin compounds synthesized by Yale researchers destroying ovarian cancer cells (the spherical objects) in less than 48 hours in lab tests. (Credit: Gil Mor)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 13, 2010) — Yale University scientists have streamlined the process for synthesizing a family of compounds with the potential to kill cancer and other diseased cells, and have found that they represent a unique category of anti-cancer agents. Their discovery appears in this week's online edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

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Year Of The Tiger: All About The Chinese Zodiac

From Live Science:

This Sunday, Feb. 14, marks a new year according to the Chinese calendar, which will be moving from the reign of the Ox to the year of the Tiger.

Each year on the Chinese calendar is assigned an animal from the Chinese zodiac, which rotates on a 12-year cycle. People born during a specific year are thought to have attributes of their animal — tigers are confident, daring and unpredictable, for example.

The Chinese calendar is thought to have been formulated around 500 B.C., though elements of it date back at least to the Shang Dynasty around 1,000 B.C.

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Mobile Operators Join Forces To Develop Open Apps Platform

From Wall Street Journal:

BARCELONA—Twenty-four mobile operators Monday said they had formed an alliance to build an open platform to deliver applications to all mobile phone users, in an attempt to emulate the runaway success of Apple Inc.'s App Store.

The initiative shows how even fierce rivals are coming together to try to capture the mass market in mobile Internet services.

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Climategate Academic Professor Phil Jones Admits He 'Lost Track' Of Vital Data

Professor Phil Jones from the Climate Researh Unit University of East Anglia

From The Telegraph:

Professor Phil Jones, the academic at the centre of the “climategate” scandal, has admitted he had difficulty “keeping track” of vital data used to back up global warming claims.

Prof Jones stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s climate change unit in December after leaked emails appeared to show academics were manipulating data to bolster claims that global warming is caused by humans.

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CSI Cairo: How Science Will Solve The Mystery Of Tutankhamun

DNA samples have been taken from Tutankhamun and other mummies from the 18th dynasty of rulers in an attempt to establish his family lineage. Getty Images

From The Independent:

New technology is helping answer the riddles in the life, and death, of the boy pharaoh. And it's cracked other historical puzzles too.

His golden funeral mask with its striped headdress has become the symbol of Egypt's ancient grandeur. Yet for all the fame that surrounds the boy King Tutankhamun, no one really knows who he was.

Now, the mystery of King Tut's lineage has finally been solved. It will be revealed to the world on Wednesday, more than 30 centuries after the pharaoh was sealed in a gold coffin.

Read more ....

Online Voyeurs Flock to The Random Thrills Of Chatroulette

From The Guardian:

An addictive new website that links strangers' webcams is gaining popularity – and notoriety.

A new website that has been described as "surreal", "addictive" and "frightening" is proving a sensation around the world – and attracting a reputation as a haven for no-holds-barred, explicit material.

Chatroulette, which was launched in November, has rocketed in popularity thanks to its simple premise: internet video chats with ­random strangers.

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There Has Been No Global Warming Since 1995

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From The Daily Mail:

* Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

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Robot Hand Could Protect Soldiers On The Battlefield

The 'intelligent' substance d3o at the display

From The Telegraph:

A robot hand that could defuse bombs, luminous goo that flows around soldiers’ moving bodies but hardens to protect them if they are hit and a uniform that conducts electricity are among the first fruits of the Ministry of Defence’s version of the Dragons’ Den.

The Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) in Harwell, Oxfordshire, is an initiative that aims to harness British scientific innovation for rapid use on the battlefield. Ministers also hope to temper the MoD’s reputation for laborious and costly procurements that arrive in service years after they have ceased to be useful.

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Google Shuts Down Music Blogs Without Warning

Music blog Gorilla Vs Bear was concerned by Google's actions

From The Guardian:

Bloggers told they have violated terms without further explanation, as years of archives are wiped off the internet.

In what critics are calling "musicblogocide 2010", Google has deleted at least six popular music blogs that it claims violated copyright law. These sites, hosted by Google's Blogger and Blogspot services, received notices only after their sites – and years of archives – were wiped from the internet.

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Hubble Telescope Captures Saturn's Eerie Twin Aurorae

Astronomers had a rare chance to view Saturn with its rings edge on. It meant they could study the planet's Northern and Southern lights

From The Daily Mail:

A spectacular light show on Saturn has been captured in unique new photos of the ringed planet.

The aurora images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) were made possible by a rare chance to see the planet with its rings edge-on and both poles in view.

It takes Saturn almost 30 years to orbit the Sun, and during that time such a picture opportunity occurs only twice.

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