Europe's Mars Rover Slips To 2018

From The BBC:

Europe's flagship robotic rover mission to Mars now looks certain to leave Earth in 2018, two years later than recently proposed, the BBC understands.

The ExoMars vehicle is intended to search the Red Planet for signs of past or present life.

The delay is the third for the mission originally planned to launch in 2011.

While the switch will disappoint many people, officials say the change will open up a greatly expanded programme of exploration at the Red Planet.

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Strong Evidence That Cloud Changes May Exacerbate Global Warming

This image shows unique cloud patterns over the Pacific Ocean of the coast of Baja California, an area of great interest to Amy Clement and Robert Burgman of the University of Miami and Joel Norris of Scripps Oceanography, as they study the role of low-level clouds in climate change. (Credit: NASA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 24, 2009) — The role of clouds in climate change has been a major question for decades. As the earth warms under increasing greenhouse gases, it is not known whether clouds will dissipate, letting in more of the sun's heat energy and making the earth warm even faster, or whether cloud cover will increase, blocking the Sun's rays and actually slowing down global warming.

In a study published in the July 24 issue of Science, researchers Amy Clement and Robert Burgman from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and Joel Norris from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego begin to unravel this mystery. Using observational data collected over the last 50 years and complex climate models, the team has established that low-level stratiform clouds appear to dissipate as the ocean warms, indicating that changes in these clouds may enhance the warming of the planet.

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Permafrost Could Be Climate's Ticking Time Bomb

Gregory Lehn , a Ph. D. student in the department of Earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University on the left, and Matt Khosh, Ph.D. student in the department of marine sciences at the University of Texas, Austin on the right, talk with Jim McClelland, professor in the department of marine sciences at the University of Texas, Austin, a co-principal investigator on the project, in the center. Credit: Andrew D. Jacobson, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University

From Live Science:

The terrain of the North Slope of Alaska is not steep, but Andrew Jacobson still has difficulty as he hikes along the spongy tundra, which is riddled with rocks and masks multitudes of mosquitoes.

Jacobson, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University, extracts soil and water samples in search of clues to one of global warming's biggest ticking time bombs: the melting of permafrost.

Permafrost, or frozen ground, covers approximately 20 to 25 percent of the land-surface area in the northern hemisphere, and is estimated to contain up to 1,600 gigatons of carbon, primarily in the form of organic matter. (One gigaton is equivalent to one billion tons.)

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Monolayer Nanotechnology Will Enable Silicon to Maintain Conductance for Smaller Devices And Sustain Moore's Law Progress

From The Next Big Future:

Scientists at Rice University and North Carolina State University have found a method of attaching molecules to semiconducting silicon that may help manufacturers reach beyond the current limits of Moore's Law as they make microprocessors both smaller and more powerful.

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Traffic Hydrocarbons Linked To Lower IQs In Kids

From Science News:

Prenatal exposures to common air pollutants correlate with drop in intelligence scores.

Here’s a dirty little secret about polluted urban air: It can shave almost 5 points off of a young child’s IQ, a new report suggests.

That’s no small loss, says Kimberly Gray, whose federal agency cofinanced the study, to appear in the August Pediatrics.

Normally, baseline environmental exposures to a pollutant yield at most a subtle change — one that is hard to detect and with impacts that are hard to gauge, says Gray, of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, N.C. But the new study shows that children heavily exposed in the womb to common combustion pollutants known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons had, by kindergarten age, an IQ some 4.5 points lower than that of kids with minimal fetal exposures.

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Apollo 11 Experiment Still Going After 40 Years

Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment

From Yahoo News/Space:

The Apollo 11 astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago today, but they left behind more than footprints. An experiment they placed on the moon's surface is still running to this day.

The Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment is the only moon investigation to continuously operate since the Apollo 11 mission. The experiment studies the Earth-Moon system and beams the data to labs around the world, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

"Yes, we are still going," said James Williams, a JPL scientist involved with the experiment, in an e-mail interview.

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Is the Sun Missing Its Spots?

SUN GAZING These photos show sunspots near solar maximum on July 19, 2000, and near solar minimum on March 18, 2009. Some global warming skeptics speculate that the Sun may be on the verge of an extended slumber. NASA

From The New York Times:

The Sun is still blank (mostly).

Ever since Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, a German astronomer, first noted in 1843 that sunspots burgeon and wane over a roughly 11-year cycle, scientists have carefully watched the Sun’s activity. In the latest lull, the Sun should have reached its calmest, least pockmarked state last fall.

Indeed, last year marked the blankest year of the Sun in the last half-century — 266 days with not a single sunspot visible from Earth. Then, in the first four months of 2009, the Sun became even more blank, the pace of sunspots slowing more.

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Alien-Wasp Swarms Devouring Birds, Bugs in Hawaii

Invasive western yellowjacket wasps in Hawaii (above, a wasp eats an unidentified insect near another wasp) are munching their way through an "astonishing diversity" of creatures, from caterpillars to ring-necked pheasants, a July 2009 study says. The voracious wasps, which have exploded in their new habitat, can wipe out whole swaths of prey insects surrounding their nests. Photograph courtesy Erin Wilson

From National Geographic:

Attacking from nests as big as pickup-truck beds, invasive western yellowjacket wasps in Hawaii are munching their way through an "astonishing diversity" of creatures, from caterpillars to pheasants, a new study says.

Adult yellowjackets consume only nectar. But they kill or scavenge prey to deliver needed protein to their growing broods.

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Nasa Finds Monster Black Hole Sucking Up Gas, Dust And Stars At Centre Of Galaxy

The galaxy NGC-1097 with a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars at its centre
Photo: REUTERS / NASA

From The Telegraph:

Nasa has found a monster black hole 100 million times the mass of the Sun feeding off gas, dust and stars at the centre of a galaxy 50 million light-years away.

The star-ringed black hole forms the eye of a galaxy called NGC-1097 which was photographed by the US space agency's Spitzer Space Telescope in California.

A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational pull is so powerful that nothing, including whole planets, can escape being sucked in if they come within its reach.

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Sensational Collection Of Satellite Images Captures Earth's Natural Wonders From Space

This image shows how dust from the Sahara desert blew all the way over the British Isles

From The Daily Mail:

For decades, man has gazed up at the stars and marvelled at the wonders of the universe.

But, as this amazing selection of images shows, there are many mind-blowing sights to behold from the other direction.

Pictures taken by astronauts and Nasa satellites give a fascinating bird's-eye view of Earth's natural wonders - including hurricanes, volcanoes and other powerful weather formations - from space.

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What NASA's Return To The Moon May Look Like

To explore the lunar surface, NASA envisions a pressurised rover that will act as a mobile habitat, allowing astronauts to explore the lunar surface for weeks at a time without returning to their base. If supply depots are scattered along the way, these rovers could potentially have a range of hundreds of kilometres. (Image: Regan Geeseman)

From New Scientist:

The Apollo era may have ended as funding fizzled, and the programme's astronauts may be bigger fans of Mars, but the hope of returning to the moon never really went away.

Twenty years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, then-President George H. W. Bush proposed that the US build a base on the moon and send an expedition to Mars. The call fell flat with Congress, which never provided the funding to back up the plan.

But a decade and a half later, his son, President George W. Bush, articulated a similar vision with a clear deadline – an aim to return humans to the moon by 2020, as a stepping-stone on the way to Mars.

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Wireless Power System Shown Off

From BBC:

A system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires has been shown off at a hi-tech conference.

The technique exploits simple physics and can be used to charge a range of electronic devices over many metres.

Eric Giler, chief executive of US firm Witricity, showed mobile phones and televisions charging wirelessly at the TED Global conference in Oxford.

He said the system could replace the miles of expensive power cables and billions of disposable batteries.

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China Announces First Panda From Frozen Sperm

From Yahoo News/AP:

BEIJING – China announced the first successful birth of a panda cub from artificial insemination using frozen sperm, giving a new option for the notoriously poor breeders, officials said Friday.

Panda females have only three days a year in which they can conceive — one reason their species is endangered.

Female panda You You (pronounced Yo Yo) gave birth to the new cub Thursday morning at the Wolong Giant Panda Research Center in southwestern Sichuan. It is You You's third baby, and the 10th panda cub born at Wolong this year.

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Auroras In Northern And Southern Hemispheres Are Not Identical

Asymmetric aurora. (Credit: Polar VIS Earth (J. B. Sigwarth) and IMAGE WIC (S. B. Mende))

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 24, 2009) — Norwegian researchers have shown that the auroras in the Northern and the Southern hemispheres can be totally asymmetric. These findings contradict the commonly made assumption of aurora being mirror images of each other.

The study was performed by PhD student Karl Magnus Laundal and professor Nikolai Østgaard at the Institute of Physics and Technology at the University of Bergen.

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Money Relieves Pain

Money dulls physical pain and eases the sting of rejection, new research shows.

From Live Science:

Money dulls physical pain and eases the sting of social rejection, new research shows.

Through six experiments, psychologists and a marketing professor probed the power of money as a proxy for social acceptance. Among their results, they found that merely touching bills or thinking about expenses paid affected the participants both physically and emotionally.

Because it affects pain, money may be a clue to how the brain evolved to process social interactions, the researchers wrote in a paper published in the June edition of the journal Psychological Science.

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My Comment: And a lack of money causes a lot of pain and grief. Tell me sonething that I do not know.

New NASA Administrator Delays Ares Launch, Decries "Path We Are On"

Bolden Looks Ahead: NASA administrator Charles Bolden testifies at his confirmation hearing before the Senate on July 8, 2009. NASA/Bill Ingalls

From Popsci.com:

Charlie Bolden rips off the Spock mask, and the space agency delays its new rocket test until Halloween

Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin once likened himself to Spock in his rational, emotionally-detached approach. Now Griffin's replacement, Charles Bolden, seems ready to inject new passion into a space agency that is struggling to reevaluate both long term goals and its vision for space exploration.

The new administrator choked up five times during a speech to agency employees on Tuesday where he pushed back against criticism that President Obama is uncommitted to space exploration, according to the Washington Post. Part of that emotional upwelling came as Bolden described meeting with the Apollo 11 astronauts on the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.

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100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About

From Geek Dad/Wired Science:

There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.

That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typewriters, slide rules and encyclopedias …

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CSI Stone Age: Did Humans Kill Neanderthals?

A painting imagines the world of Neanderthal men
Mansell / Time Life Pictures / Getty

From Time Magazine:

It is one of the world's oldest cold cases. Sometime between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago, a Neanderthal male known to scientists as Shanidar 3 received a wound to his torso, limped back to his cave in what is now Iraq and died several weeks later. When his skeleton was pieced together in the late 1950s and early '60s, scientists were stumped by a rib wound that almost surely killed him, hypothesizing that it could have been caused by a hunting accident or even a fellow Neanderthal. New research suggests that Shanidar 3 may have had a more familiar killer: a human being.

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Historic Snow Event In South America

In Bahia Blanca, a coastal city in the Southern part of the Buenos Aires, the snow storm is heavy and local authorities describe it as the worst snow event in 50 years. Roads are already blocked by snow and ice in the regional. TN news channel reports some areas of the Sierra de La Ventana could pick up even 3 feet of snow, unimaginable to the region.

From Watts Up With That:

Early this Wednesday afternoon, satellite pictures were showing a band of clouds advancing to the North and snow precipitation could no be ruled out in the capital Buenos Aires. In July 9th and 10th 2007 it snowed in the city of Buenos Aires for the first time in 89 years and it could snow again just two years later. Snow was also reported in the capital of Chile Santiago. MetSul Weather Center is not ruling out snow also in Uruguay.

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New Discovery Suggests Trees Evolved Camouflage Defense Against Long Extinct Predator

Pseudopanax crassifolius, adult foliage and developing fruit, Mangaweka, Central North Island, New Zealand. The Araliaceae tree has several defences which researchers suggest are linked to the historic presence of moa. Seedlings produce small narrow leaves, which appear mottled to the human eye. Saplings meanwhile produce larger, more elongated leaves with thorn-like dentitions. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain Image)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 23, 2009) — Many animal species such as snakes, insects and fish have evolved camouflage defences to deter attack from their predators. However research published in New Phytologist has discovered that trees in New Zealand have evolved a similar defence to protect themselves from extinct giant birds, providing the first evidence of this strategy in plant life.

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