Jessica Biel Most 'Dangerous' Celeb In Cyberspace

From CNET:

Through no fault of her own, actress Jessica Biel is now the most hazardous celebrity on the Internet.

Fans searching online for Biel have a one-in-five chance of hitting a Web site with malware, according to McAfee's third annual report listing Hollywood's most "dangerous" online celebrities.

In general, hunting for Hollywood's in-crowd poses a much greater threat than searching for just about anyone else. For example, President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama ranked No. 34 and No. 39, respectively.

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Wikipedia To Launch Page Controls

From The BBC:

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is on the cusp of launching a major revamp to how people contribute to some pages.

The site will require that revisions to pages about living people and some organisations be approved by an editor.

This would be a radical shift for the site, which ostensibly allows anyone to make changes to almost any entry.

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Why Craigslist Is Such A Mess

From Wired News:

The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams? In a design straight from the earliest days of the Web, miscellaneous posts compete for attention on page after page of blue links, undifferentiated by tags or ratings or even usernames. Millions of people apparently believe that love awaits here, but it is well hidden. Is this really the best we can do?

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Hernandez To 'Tweet' From Discovery In Space

From L.A. Times:

If you want to get the latest developments about the launch of the space shuttle Discovery and the adventures of its crew, specifically Jose Hernandez, the California-born son of Mexican immigrants and now a national hero here in Mexico, you can sign up to follow Hernandez's Twitter feed.

Hernandez is already posting updates on the micro-blogging site about his preparations for take-off and developments concerning the delayed launch of the space shuttle in both English and Spanish.

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World's Last Great Forest Under Threat: New Study

Canadian evergreen forest. (Credit: iStockphoto/Stacey Newman)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2009) — The world's last remaining "pristine" forest -- the boreal forest across large stretches of Russia, Canada and other northern countries -- is under increasing threat, a team of international researchers has found.

The researchers from the University of Adelaide in Australia, Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada and the National University of Singapore have called for the urgent preservation of existing boreal forests in order to secure biodiversity and prevent the loss of this major global carbon sink.

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New Theory Questions Why We Sleep

From Live Science:

The purpose of sleep remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in science. Although we spend roughly one-third of life asleep, researchers still do not know why.

While sleep is often thought to have evolved to play an unknown but vital role inside the body, a new theory now suggests it actually developed as a method to better deal with the outside world.

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US Plans For Science Outreach To Muslim World

From Nature:

White House to send scientists as envoys.

The administration of US President Barack Obama is ramping up plans to develop scientific and technological partnerships with Muslim-majority countries.

The move follows a June speech by Obama at Cairo University in Egypt, when he promised to appoint regional science envoys, launch a fund to support technological development and open centres of scientific excellence in Africa, the Middle East and southeast Asia. So far, the science-envoy plan is closest to getting off the ground, say White House officials, who see it as part of a broader drive to improve relations with the Islamic world.

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Shuttle Launch Delayed By Valve Problem

Space Shuttle Discovery sits on launch pad 39-A

From Reuters:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Aug 25 (Reuters) - NASA delayed a Wednesday morning liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery because of a problem with a valve in its fuel tank.

It was the second consecutive delay, after stormy weather postponed a launch attempt early on Tuesday morning. Discovery and its seven-member crew were preparing for a 13-day supply mission to the International Space Station.

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Scientists Design Plant Filtration System That Lets You Drink Your Own SHOWER Water

From The Daily Mail:

Eco-thinkers have come up with an amazing new way to create drinking water - by putting plants in the bottom of a shower.

Designers Jun Yasumoto, Vincent Vandenbrouk, Olivier Pigasse, and Alban Le Henry came up with the concept when looking for new ways to recycle precious H2O.

After you have washed in the special eco-shower the water passes down into a series of physical filters and is treated by plants such as reeds and rushes growing around your feet.

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Survival In A Post-Apocalypse Blackout

Surviving a blackout (Image: WestEnd61/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

NATURAL catastrophes such as asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions or large-scale wildfires would have periodically plunged our planet into abnormal darkness. How did life survive without the sun's life-giving rays during such episodes? With a little help from organisms that can switch to another source of energy while they wait for sunlight to pierce the darkness once more.

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3 New Farm Bots Programmed To Pick, Plant And Drive

From Popular Mechanics:

Intelligent, manned machines aren’t just for warplanes and border guards—they can be found on the farm too. Increasingly, agro-bots are taking laborious tasks out of the farmer’s helper’s hands, and saving time and money in the process. Here are three robotic farm servants who may right now be working in a field near you.

Agricultural robots are already among us: mowing grass, spraying pesticides and monitoring crops. For example, instead of regularly dousing an entire apple orchard with chemicals, towed sensors find diseases or parasites with infrared sensors and cameras, and spray only the affected trees. But could a robot wholly replace a migrant worker?

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Chevron Wants To Power Oil Fields With Solar Energy

Mirror Power: BrightSource Energy

From Popular Science:

In a move that might seem oxymoronic on the surface, Chevron has plans to install a solar steam plant which will power one of their oil fields in Central California. The 29-megawatt power source uses 7,000 mirrors spread across 100-acres to focus light on a boiler tank sitting 323-feet high.

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Why Sleep? Snoozing May Be Strategy To Increase Efficiency, Minimize Risk

New research concludes that sleep's primary function is to increase animals' efficiency and minimize their risk by regulating the duration and timing of their behavior. (Credit: iStockphoto/Justin Horrocks)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 23, 2009) — Bats, birds, box turtles, humans and many other animals share at least one thing in common: They sleep. Humans, in fact, spend roughly one-third of their lives asleep, but sleep researchers still don't know why.

According to the journal Science, the function of sleep is one of the 125 greatest unsolved mysteries in science. Theories range from brain "maintenance" — including memory consolidation and pruning — to reversing damage from oxidative stress suffered while awake, to promoting longevity. None of these theories are well established, and many are mutually exclusive.

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Powerful Ideas: Wind Turbine Blades Change Shape

A prototype morphing helicopter rotor blade. A similar device could help improve wind turbines. Credit: Paul Weaver et al.

From Live Science:

Morphing blades made of advanced composite materials that can rapidly change their shape depending on the wind could help lead to advanced wind turbines that perform better and last longer.

Wind energy is growing more and more popular worldwide. The United States is currently the world's largest generator of wind energy by total megawatts, and by 2030, the Department of Energy predicts that as much as one-fifth of the nation's power might come from wind. On a per capita basis, other nations are even further ahead of the United States — Denmark, for instance, already gets one-fifth of its power from the wind.

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New Google Doodle To Mark 400th Anniversary Of Galileo's Telescope

Google regularly changes its logo to reflect significant
moments in history or notable current events. Photo: GOOGLE

From The Telegraph:

Google has unveiled a new logo to celebrate the 400th anniversary since Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer, showed Venetian merchants his new creation, a telescope.

The image shows the Google logo in brown shaped as a telescope.

Clicking on the link takes web surfers through to a Google results page for searches on the influential physicist and philosopher.

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Jobs, Back At Apple, Focuses On New Tablet

Apple CEO Steve Jobs speaks during a special event in September 2008. Getty Images

From The Wall Street Journal:

Just a few months after Steve Jobs had a liver transplant, the Apple Inc. chief executive is once again managing even the smallest details of his company's products, this time focused on a new tablet device.

Since his return in late June, the 54-year-old has been pouring almost all of his attention into a new touch-screen gadget that Apple is developing, said people familiar with the situation.

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6 More Shuttle Launches Befiore The Fleet Is Retired

Countdown To Discovery Blast-Off -- The Telegraph

Only six more such flights by Nasa remain before its three shuttles are retired from service.

Nasa is counting down to the next journey to the International Space Station (ISS) by the space shuttle Discovery, which after a postponement early this morning is scheduled for another attempt in the small hours of tomorrow.

A crew of seven, including the ISS’s newest astronaut, Nicole Stott, looks 70 per cent certain to head out with 6.8 tonnes of cargo, including an exercise treadmill, with the chance of favourable weather dropping to 60 per cent on Thursday. The weather is the limiting factor.

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Space Shuttle Launch Scrubbed

The space shuttle Discovery astronauts walk out for the ride out to launch pad 39-A.
Photo AFP

From The CBC:

NASA delayed a planned night launch of the space shuttle Discovery early Tuesday because of rain and lightning near the launch site.

Discovery was scheduled to launch at 1:36 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a 13-day flight to the International Space Station.

The space agency rescheduled the launch for 1:10 a.m. ET Wednesday.

Last month's Endeavour mission, carrying Canadian astronaut Julie Payette, was postponed several times because of bad weather at the launch site.

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Update: Storms delay Discovery liftoff -- AFP

Second Robot Deployed To Help Free Stuck Mars Rover

Engineers are deploying a lightweight version of a test rover (foreground) that will better simulate Mars's gravity, which is 38% that of Earth's (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

From New Scientist:

In the struggle to free the Mars rover Spirit from a sand trap, NASA engineers are bringing out the reserve troops. A second, lighter duplicate rover slid into a sandbox for testing this week, delaying any attempt to free Spirit by as much as three weeks, to mid-September.

Spirit has been stuck in a sandpit for nearly four months. Since late June, engineers have been trying to determine the best moves to extricate it by driving a test rover around a sandbox at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.

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The Enduring Mystery of Saturn's Rings

From Space.com:

Saturn's rings have fascinated scientists ever since Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei first spotted them through one of his telescopes in the 17th century. But just how the icy rings came into being remains a mystery that has only deepened with each new scientific finding.

Astronomers now know that the planet hosts multiple rings that consist of roughly 35 trillion-trillion tons of ice, dust and rock. The Cassini spacecraft and its Voyager predecessors have also spotted changing ring patterns, partially formed ring arcs and even a moon spewing out icy particles to form a new ring. All of this suggests that the rings have constantly evolved over time.

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