Powerful Ideas: Beer Waste Makes Fuel

From Live Science:

After beer is made, the waste from breweries could help generate power, researchers now suggest.

One problem brewers face is what to do with the thousands of tons of grain left over at the end of the brewing process. In the past, they just sold the waste to farmers who either fed it to their animals or spread it on their fields as fertilizer. However, in Europe, given reductions in cattle breeding and stricter regulations on what waste is allowed on land, neither option is as easy anymore.

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NASA Clears Shuttle Discovery for Tuesday Launch

Space Shuttle Discovery on launch pad: Photo courtesy NASA

From Space.com:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA officials today cleared the space shuttle Discovery to blast off Tuesday as the weather outlook improved for the planned predawn launch.

Mike Moses, head of Discovery's mission management team, said the shuttle and its seven-astronaut crew are ready for their 1:36 a.m. EDT (0536 GMT) launch toward the International Space Station on Tuesday.

"We are go for launch," Moses told SPACE.com late Sunday.

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Will Antitrust Probe Keep Microsoft, Yahoo Apart?

From The Miami Herald/AP:

WASHINGTON -- Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. hope that by joining forces, they can tilt the balance of power in Internet search away from Google Inc. First, however, Yahoo and Microsoft have to convince regulators that their plan won't hurt online advertisers and consumers.

As the U.S. Justice Department reviews the proposed partnership, approval figures to hinge on this question: Will the online ad market be healthier if Google's dominance is challenged by a single, more muscular rival instead of two scrawnier foes?

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Cutting The Cord: America Loses Its Landlines

From The Economist:

Ever greater numbers of Americans are disconnecting their home telephones, with momentous consequences.

MUCH has been made of the precipitous decline of America’s newspapers. According to one much-cited calculation, the country’s last printed newspaper will land on a doorstep sometime in the first quarter of 2043. That is a positively healthy outlook, however, compared with another staple of American life: the home telephone. Telecoms operators are seeing customers abandon landlines at a rate of 700,000 per month. Some analysts now estimate that 25% of households in America rely entirely on mobile phones (or cellphones, as Americans call them)—a share that could double within the next three years. If the decline of the landline continues at its current rate, the last cord will be cut sometime in 2025.

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Northwest Fears That Invasive Mussels Are Headed Its Way

(Click Image to Enlarge)

From McClatchy News:

WASHINGTON — Highly invasive mussels are lurking on the Northwest's doorstep, threatening to gum up the dams that produce the region's cheap electricity, clog drinking water and irrigation systems, jeopardize aquatic ecosystems and upset efforts to revive such endangered species as salmon.

Despite efforts to stop them, the arrival of zebra and quagga mussels may be inevitable.

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Moonquake Mystery Deepens

From Earth Magazine:

Between 1969 and 1972, five Apollo missions installed seismic stations at their landing sites on the nearside of the moon. Because the moon was thought to be seismically dead, the instruments were left almost as an afterthought to detect meteor strikes. But from the time the stations were switched on until they were decommissioned in 1977, they recorded hundreds of internally generated moonquakes, some as strong as magnitude 5.5 on the Richter scale.

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New Way To Reproduce A Black Hole?

Illustration of a binary black hole system. (Credit: NASA/JPL)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 22, 2009) — Despite their popularity in the science fiction genre, there is much to be learned about black holes, the mysterious regions in space once thought to be absent of light. In a paper published in the August 20 issue of Physical Review Letters, Dartmouth researchers propose a new way of creating a reproduction black hole in the laboratory on a much-tinier scale than their celestial counterparts.

The new method to create a tiny quantum sized black hole would allow researchers to better understand what physicist Stephen Hawking proposed more than 35 years ago: black holes are not totally void of activity; they emit photons, which is now known as Hawking radiation.

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Gigantic Lightning Jets Shoot From Clouds To Space

A series of still images from a captured video sequence of a gigantic jet observed near Duke University. The thunderstorm that produced this jet was about 200 miles away and is below the visible horizon. Credit: Steven Cummer

From Live Science:

Strokes of lightning flashing down towards the ground are a familiar sight during summer thunderstorms, but scientists have capture an image of a rare lightning bolt shooting out upwards from a cloud, almost to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere.

These bolts of upwards lightning, one type among a variety of electrical discharges now known to occur above thunderstaorms, are called gigantic jets, and were only first discovered in 2001.

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Four Ways to Fight Back Against Cyber Attacks

From Popular Mechanics:

This week, prosecutors indicted notorious hacker Albert Gonzalez. He's accused of having masterminded a scheme to steal more than 130 million credit card numbers. Gonzalez may be behind bars, but his trial underscores the fact that your personal and financial information are vulnerable to attack from thieves in cyberspace. Here are four ways to fight back.

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NASA May Outsource Amid Budget Woes

From Wall Street Journal:

For the first time since the advent of manned space exploration, the U.S. appears ready to outsource to private companies everything from transporting astronauts to ferrying cargo into orbit.

Proposals gaining momentum in Washington call for contractors to build and run competing systems under commercial contracts, according to federal officials, aerospace-industry officials and others familiar with the discussions.

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Steve Jobs's New Trick: The Apple Tablet

A design concept for the Apple tablet.

From The Guardian:

Rumours are rife that Steve Jobs is about to unveil a revolutionary touchscreen gadget.

Feverish speculation all over the internet, gadget shoppers nearing mass hysteria and pundits predicting our lives will never be the same. It must mean that an Apple product launch is on the way.

The company that makes the Mac computer, iPod music player and iPhone is reportedly poised to launch a tablet computer – small enough to carry in a handbag or briefcase but big enough to comfortably surf the web, read newspapers and watch films. It could be Apple's latest billion-dollar jackpot.

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Ten Days Left To Buy Traditional Lightbulbs: EU Ban Means Only Low-Energy Ones Will Be On Sale

Photo: Banned: Pearl, incandescent lightbulbs are being cleared from shelves in a bid to slash energy bills and carbon dioxide emissions

From The Daily Mail:

Traditional lightbulbs will disappear from our shops in just ten days.

All conventional pearl, incandescent lightbulbs are being banned by the European Union to slash energy bills and carbon dioxide emissions.

The move covers every type of frosted traditional bulb, from the 60 watt pearl bulbs used in table lamps to more specialised opaque 25 and 40 watt bulbs shaped like golf balls and candles.

Clear and frosted 100 watt lightbulbs will also not be on sale from September 1.

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Expanding Waistlines May Cause Shrinking Brains

From New Scientist:

BRAIN regions key to cognition are smaller in older people who are obese compared with their leaner peers, making their brains look up to 16 years older than their true age. As brain shrinkage is linked to dementia, this adds weight to the suspicion that piling on the pounds may up a person's risk of the brain condition.
The brains of elderly obese people looked 16 years older than the brains of those who were lean

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My Comment: Does this mean that "skinny" people are smarter?

Phones, PCs Put E-Book Within Reach Of Kindle-Less

Many phones are now sophisticated enough, and have good enough screens, that they can be used as e-book reading devices. They can now rival the Kindle, pictured. (Mark Lennihan/AP)

From Christian Science Monitor:

Amazon's pioneering device may not dominate the market for long. Many phones are now sophisticated enough to be used as e-book reading devices.

A few weeks ago, Pasquale Castaldo was waiting at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport for a delayed flight, when a man sitting across from him pulled out an Amazon Kindle book-reading device.

“Gee, maybe I should think about e-books myself,” Castaldo thought.

He didn’t have a Kindle, but he did have a BlackBerry. He pulled it out and looked for available applications. Sure enough, Barnes & Noble Inc. had just put up an e-reading program. Castaldo, 54, downloaded it, and within a minute, began reading Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

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Learning To Live Without The Net

From The BBC:

Bill Thompson feels the pain of the digitally dispossessed.

I have just endured a week of limited connectivity and it has given me a salutary lesson in what life is like for the digitally dispossessed here in the UK and around the world.

I have been driven to searching for open wireless access points so that I can download my e-mail, sometimes wandering the beach looking for elusive 3G signals just to get my Facebook status updated.

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How Do Scientists Really Use Computers?

From American Scientist:

Computers are now essential tools in every branch of science, but we know remarkably little about how—or how well—scientists use them. Do most scientists use off-the-shelf software or write their own? Do they really need state-of-the-art supercomputers to solve their problems, or can they do most of what they need to on desktop machines? And how much time do grad students really spend patching their supervisors’ crusty old Fortran programs?

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First Avatar Trailer Reveals Pandora’s Intoxicating Alien World

From Underwire/Wired Science:

The new Avatar trailer gives the world its first glimpse of the alien world dreamed up by James Cameron for his coming sci-fi epic.

The fast-paced clip is short on dialogue and long on brief flashes of the dazzling flora and fauna that inhabit Pandora, the distant moon where the movie’s sweeping action unfolds.

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Mysterious Origins: 8 Phenomena That Defy Explanation

Photo: A UNIVERSE OF MYSTERIES: Why aren't there suns, planets and galaxies made of antimatter? NASA

From Scientific American:

The unknown origins behind language, handedness, flu seasons, superconductivity, antimatter, proton spin, cosmic rays and sex.

Our September 2009 special issue on origins contains articles on 57 innovations and insights that shape our world today. They include some big ones, like the origin of life, the universe and the mind; sobering stories, like mad cow disease and HIV; and whimsical tales, like paper clips and cupcakes. This past week, we've posted a dozen additional online-only origins: the open-plan office space, fruit ripening, malaria, the computer mouse, atmospheric oxygen, hatred, wine, dogs, rubber boots, zero and, of course, Scientific American.

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Engineers Develop Flexible, Inorganic LED Display

Flexible Inorganic LED Pacific Northwest National Lab via Ars Technica

From Popular Science:

The promise of OLED technology is that, unlike its inorganic counterpart, it can be used to create flexible and nearly transparent ultra-thin screens, opening up myriad possibilities for what we can do with displays and lighting. But just as market-ready OLED technology suffered a setback as Sony delayed its latest OLED television this week (only the world’s second commercial OLED TV, after Sony's XEL-1 set), engineers have devised a way to make cheaper, more efficient inorganic LED technology bend to their whims. Literally.

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The Crew Of STS-128

STS128-S-002 (30 Jan. 2009) --- Attired in training versions of their shuttle launch and entry suits, these seven astronauts take a break from training to pose for the STS-128 crew portrait. Seated are NASA astronauts Rick Sturckow (right), commander; and Kevin Ford, pilot. From the left (standing) are astronauts Jose Hernandez, John "Danny" Olivas, Nicole Stott, European Space Agency's Christer Fuglesang and Patrick Forrester, all mission specialists. Stott is scheduled to join Expedition 20 as flight engineer after launching to the International Space Station on STS-128.

From Yahoo News/Space:

A former off-road racer, a Swedish physicist and three tweeting astronauts form just part of the eclectic crew poised to blast off Tuesday aboard NASA's space shuttle Discovery.

Discovery's six-man, one-woman crew is slated to launch on a 13-day mission to the International Space Station, where they astronauts will deliver vital supplies and experiments, as well as a new crewmember for the orbiting laboratory.

"This is a great crew," said Discovery commander Rick Sturckow in a NASA interview. "I think from the very beginning we got off to a good start and we've maintained a good pace throughout the training ... and still manage to have fun together doing it, so I've really enjoyed training with this crew."

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