The Moon Walkers: Twelve Men Who Have Visited Another World

Neil Armstrong in the Eagle after his historic moonwalk. Photograph: Nasa

From The Guardian:

What did it take to become a member of the most exclusive club in human history?

The 12 members of the most exclusive club in human history had many things in common.

All came from a highly technical background and all but one studied aeronautical or astronautical engineering. Growing up, many had been Boy Scouts and even more were active members of their University fraternities. They all went on to study for further degrees – many at military test pilot schools – and almost all of them saw active service in cold war skies, often flying nuclear weapons behind enemy lines.

These high-risk professions often claimed the lives of those to the left and right of them and frequently it was only luck that kept them alive long enough to apply to Nasa.

We might expect such parallel lives in men picked through a selection process devised to seek out "the right stuff". But despite the similarities in their CVs, no two men were from the same mould, as became evident in the years after Apollo.

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Why New Chrome OS Won't Turn Google Into a Monopoly: Analysis

From Popular Mechanics:

As Google announces its intention to create a full Web-based operating system, senior technology editor Glenn Derene has a flashback to the late '90s—when the Justice Department brought an antitrust action against Microsoft. Could Google's new browser-as-operating system kill competition?

In 1998, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) brought an antitrust action against Microsoft for a variety of anti-competitive practices in the software industry—chief among them the bundling of the company's Internet Explorer browser into its dominant Windows operating system. The trial revealed plenty of bare-knuckled tactics and market manipulation on behalf of Microsoft, and stained the company's brand for years (perhaps forever, frankly) as a corporate bully. But the central argument from Microsoft was that, with the ascent of the Internet, the browser had become an integral part of the OS, and that competing stand-alone browsers such as Netscape and Opera were moribund products from a transition era. Microsoft contended that it needed to evolve the OS to adapt to the Internet-based era just to stay competitive as a company—a claim that seemed ludicrous back in the '90s, when the software giant seemed to have indomitable market power.

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When Galaxies Collide, 280 Million Light Years Away

Stephan's Quintent, Colliding: NASA

From Popsci.com:

A new image using data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory captures Stephan's Quintet in a new light.

130 years ago, astronomers discovered Stephan's Quintent--a compact group of galaxies 280 million light years from Earth. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured the X-rays generated by the interstellar collision, as one of the galaxies is sucked through the center of the group at 2 million miles per hour.

The ridge of blue in the center represent the X-rays emitted by the collision, as shock wave heats the galaxy's gasses.

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100 Essential Skills for Geeks

From Geek Dad/Wired:

As Geeks we are expected to have a certain set of skills that the majority of the population does not possess. This list is by no means complete, but I think it is a good sample of the skills required to be a true geek. I won’t pretend to have all the skills listed here. I even had to Google a few of them.

Like all good Geeks you should be able to utilize resources to accomplish any of these things. Knowing where to look for the knowledge is as good as having it so give yourself points if you are certain that you could Google the knowledge necessary for a skill.

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U.S. Science Is Tops, But Most Americans Don't Think It Is, A New Survey Finds.

From Scientific American:

Today the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Pew Research Center released results of a survey examining the attitudes of the general public and the scientific community as they regard to science.

The results, collected from 2,553 AAAS members and 2,001 public respondents, suggest that although average Americans hold a positive view of scientists and support the funding of research, they do not share the same perspectives as the scientific community on a variety of science issues.

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How To Ensure Lost Wallets Are Returned

Wallets containing the picture of an infant were most likely to
trigger an honest reaction from the finder Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Lost wallets which contain a snapshot of a baby are more likely to be returned to their owners, scientists have discovered.

Researchers left 240 wallets on the streets of Edinburgh last year to see how many were returned to their owners. Some of the wallets contained one of four photographs – the baby, a cute puppy, a family and a portrait of an elderly couple.

Other wallets contained a card suggesting the owner had recently made a charity donation, while a control batch contained no additional items.

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Reduced Diet Thwarts Aging, Disease In Monkeys

Rhesus monkeys, left to right, Canto, 27, and on a restricted diet, and Owen, 29, and a control subject on an unrestricted diet, are pictured at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on May 28, 2009. The two are among the oldest surviving subjects in a pioneering long-term study of the links between diet and aging in Rhesus macaque monkeys, which have an average life span of about 27 years in captivity. Lead researcher Richard Weindruch, a professor of medicine in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and co-author Ricki Colman, associate scientist at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, report new findings in the journal Science that a nutritious, but reduced-calorie, diet blunts aging and delays the onset of such aged-related disorders as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and brain atrophy. (Credit: Jeff Miller)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 10, 2009) — The bottom-line message from a decades-long study of monkeys on a restricted diet is simple: Consuming fewer calories leads to a longer, healthier life.

Writing July 10 in the journal Science, a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital reports that a nutritious but reduced-calorie diet blunts aging and significantly delays the onset of such age-related disorders as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and brain atrophy.

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Birds Fireproof Their Homes

Photo: This somewhat fireproof next is a courting zone of a male great bowerbird. Credit: Tomoki Okida, Japan Ethological Society and Springer Japan

From Live Science:

To beguile females, some males build mansions, others build bowers.

Male great bowerbirds (Chlamydera nuchalis) of northern Australia erect two walls of twigs partially flanking a six-foot-long passageway that they pave with conspicuous bits of bones, stones, shells, and fruits. There, the males strut their stuff, inviting females over for a tryst.

Bower construction takes a week or longer, so it's no fun when brush fire sweeps through the savanna and threatens the males' handiwork.

Yet, as a new study shows, the bowers seem strangely immune to fire.

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Rival Designs Race To Harness Ocean Energy

Photo: SeaGen was installed in the tidal currents of Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland in 2008. However, there is a suite of rival designs racing to harness ocean energy (Image: SeaGen / David Erwin)

From New Scientist:

A bout of gawky prototypes have taken to the water for the first time in recent weeks, signalling a new assault on a decades-old problem: how to generate power from the oceans.

While most wind turbines look much the same, the contest to tap that power is more like wacky races than Formula 1. A suite of varied designs are under development in an attempt to work out the most efficient way to generate juice in the harsh chemical and physical environment of the waves and tides.

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Fate Of The Potato May Foretell The Future Of Food

From The Detroit News:

A tale from history offers us a prediction about the future of food.

The wonder crop is new and unfamiliar, lauded by scientists and politicians as having the potential to end famine and feed the poor. But the public is skeptical, regarding this new food as unnatural and dangerous. The reaction to genetically modified crops today? In fact, this is what happened when potatoes were introduced into Europe from the Americas in the 1500s and 1600s.

Scientists were enamored with this new foodstuff because it had several valuable properties. Potatoes thrive even in years when the wheat crop has failed, noted a committee of the Royal Society, Britain's pioneering scientific association, in the 1660s. Better still, potatoes can be grown in almost any kind of soil and take only three to four months to mature, against 10 for cereal grains. And potatoes produce two to four times as many calories per acre as wheat, rye or oats. The case for widespread adoption of the potato, the scientists argued, was obvious.

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The Wonder Of Mars In Its Seasonal Glory

These images of sand dunes in Proctor Crater were taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

From The Independent:

The astonishing diversity of the Red Planet's landscape is captured by the world's most powerful camera, reports Science Editor Steve Connor.

The most powerful camera that has ever been used to survey another planet is capturing spectacular pictures of the surface of Mars to reveal a rich tapestry of geological features. Located on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a Nasa probe launched in 2005, the HiRise camera has already taken detailed images of the outlines of ancient extra-terrestrial seas and rivers – the first unambiguous evidence that shorelines once existed on the Red Planet.

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Did an Ancient Volcano Freeze Earth?

Remnant. Toba today comprises a caldera lake, a newly arising cone (central island), and a pip-squeak of a volcanic progeny named Pusukbukit (left). Credit: NASA

From Science Now:

One fine day about 74,000 years ago, a giant volcano on Sumatra blew its top. The volcano, named Toba, may have ejected 1000 times more rock and other material than Mount St. Helens in Washington state did in 1980. In the process, it cooled the climate by at least 10°C, causing a global famine. But could the aftermath have been even worse? A new study puts to rest questions about whether Toba plunged Earth into a 1000-year deep freeze and whether an equivalent event today could jump-start a new, millennia-long ice age.

Giant volcanic eruptions such as Toba briefly cause the opposite of global warming. Although eruptions do emit greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, volcanoes also spew sulfur dioxide. Combined with water vapor, sulfur dioxide forms sulfate aerosols, which can spread around the globe, blocking solar radiation and chilling the air before becoming acid rain and snow.

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New Kind Of Astronomical Object Around Black Hole: Living Fossil Records 'Supermassive' Kick

This artist's conception shows a rogue black hole that has been kicked out from the center of two merging galaxies. The black hole is surrounded by a cluster of stars that were ripped from the galaxies. New calculations by David Merritt, from Rochester Institute of Technology, Jeremy Schnittman, from Johns Hopkins University, and Stefanie Komossa, from the Max-Planck-Institut for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany suggest that hundreds of massive black holes, left over from the epoch of galaxy formation, are waiting to be detected in the nearby universe. (Credit: Space Telescope Science Institute)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 10, 2009) — The tight cluster of stars surrounding a supermassive black hole after it has been violently kicked out of a galaxy represents a new kind of astronomical object and a fossil record of the kick.

A paper published in the July 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal discusses the theoretical properties of “hypercompact stellar systems” and suggests that hundreds of these faint star clusters might be detected at optical wavelengths in our immediate cosmic environment. Some of these objects may already have been picked up in astronomical surveys, reports David Merritt, from Rochester Institute of Technology, Jeremy Schnittman, from Johns Hopkins University, and Stefanie Komossa, from the Max-Planck-Institut for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

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Could Michael Jackson Have Been Cloned?

Dolly, right, the first cloned sheep produced through nuclear transfer from differentiated adult sheep cells, and Polly, the world's first transgenic lamb, are in their pen at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, in early December, 1997. Scientists at the Roslin Institute produced Molly and Polly cloned with a human gene so that their milk will contain a blood clotting protein that can be extracted for use in treating human hemophilia. Ian Wilmut's technique motivated many governments to ban research on human cloning. Dolly was later naturally mated and gave birth to a healthy lamb. (AP Photo/John Chadwick)

From Live Science:

Michael Jackson reportedly was very interested in being cloned.

"I really want to do it Uri, and I don’t care how much it costs," he is said to have told Uri Geller, a self-proclaimed psychic who claims to bend spoons with his mind (boy, if I had that power I'd sure use it for something besides spoon-bending!).

Whether the news report is accurate or not, the fact is the science didn't advance soon enough for Jackson. There have been no substantiated claims of cloned human embryos grown into fetal stages and beyond, despite rumors to the contrary. The capability to so do is near, however.

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My Comment: When stories like this one start to come out .... you know that the Michael Jackson story has been beaten to death.

10 Wind Turbines That Push the Limits of Design

From Popular Mechanics:

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) released their 20% Wind Report Card on July 8, following up on a study in which the Department of Energy proposed a goal where 20 percent of U.S. electricity comes from wind energy by 2030. The AWEA gave the overall U.S. push for wind power a “solid B”—high marks from an advocacy group that grades U.S. infrastructure. The highest letter in the report was an A- awarded for “Technology Development.” This is no big surprise—for years now, the government, alternative-energy researchers and entrepreneurs have been putting time and money into making better tech for cleaner, more efficient energy production. Here are 10 wind turbine designs that push the limits of the current design and may help the U.S. get back to being an A student by 2030.

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This Message Will Self Destruct: Scientists Develop Programmable, Self-Erasing Documents

Self-Erasing Documents Powered By Disappearing Nanoparticles

From Popsci.com:

Researchers are harnessing nanoparticle properties to develop fading ink.

Remember when, as a kid, you would pass “top-secret” notes written in lemon juice that your friends could only read in the right light? Well, in light of new nanotechnology research, this now sounds absurdly antiquated, like cave painting in the modern era. Instead, the youth of the future (and adults, too) could have to option to communicate via documents that self-erase at a programmed time.

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Ball Aerospace: Where Satellites Come From

Space-Based Surveillance Satellite courtesy Ball Aerospace & Technologies

From Popsci.com:

PopSci visits the Colorado facility of the company that makes satellites, advanced instruments, and mason jars.

When it comes to space, what goes up must be sturdy, safe and secure if it's to live very long. Satellites must survive the bone-rattling jostle and pressure of launch, and once they reach orbit, they've got to weather the vast temperature changes they experience with every sunrise and sunset. Their skins must be thick enough to survive pummeling by micro-debris, and they'd better have trusty gyroscopes to be able to change directions or keep their balance.

That's why space-bound objects undergo thorough testing at firms like Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., builders of satellite skeletons, gyroscopes, advanced instruments, and mason jars. (Well, that's a different division.)

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California Gives Desalination Plants a Fresh Look

From The Wall Street Journal:

Process to Make Seawater Drinkable Gains Traction, but Environmentalists Object to Heavy Energy Use, Harm to Marine Life.

Early next year, the Southern California town of Carlsbad will break ground on a plant that each day will turn 50 million gallons of seawater into fresh drinking water.

The $320 million project, which would be the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere, was held up in the planning stages for years. But a protracted drought helped propel the project to its approval in May -- a sign of how worried local authorities are about water supplies.

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Phantom Menace To Dark Matter Theory

Image: The answer to the riddle of dark matter could be found in our own solar system (Image: NASA)

From New Scientist:

A SUBTLE anomaly in the orbit of the planets in our solar system could prove a controversial idea that goes beyond Einstein.

The orbit of the innermost planet, Mercury, departs from what it should be under Newton's laws. A century ago, when Einstein explained this anomaly, it confirmed his theory of gravity - the general theory of relativity.

Now an Israeli physicist predicts that a similar but far more subtle anomaly in the orbits of the planets, if detected, might prove his own theory, known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND. This provides an alternative theory to dark matter to explain why stars orbiting at the edge of spiral galaxies are not flung out into space. These stars are travelling at speeds too fast for conventional gravity from the mass at the heart of a spiral galaxy to hold them in their orbits, so something else must be keeping them on track.

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New Wonder Material, One-Atom Thick, Has Scientists Abuzz

Graphene has been described as a carbon nanotube unrolled. Its two-dimensional sheet is made up of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern like a honeycomb. Electrons can move ballistically through these sheets even at room temperature, making graphene a prime target of the electronics industry. image from Science@Berkeley Lab

From McClatchy News/Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON — Imagine a carbon sheet that's only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips.

That's graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It's creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers.

"It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured," Andre Geim , a physicist at the University of Manchester, England , wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science.

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