Maintenance Error Causes Two-Hour Gmail Outage

From ZDNet:

Google's nearly two-hour Gmail outage yesterday was the result of a miscalculation regarding the capacity of its system, the company said late on Tuesday.

Gmail (Google Mail) was down from about 12:30pm PDT (8:30pm BST) Tuesday to about 2:30pm PDT (10:30pm BST), affecting millions of Gmail customers who depend on the service for everything from fantasy football roster updates to business-critical information. The problem was caused by a classic cascade in which servers became overwhelmed with traffic in rapid succession.

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Finding Smells That Repel

Michael C. Witte

From The Wall Street Journal:

If you're one of those people whom mosquitoes tend to favor, maybe it's because you aren't sufficiently stressed-out.

Insects have very keen powers of smell that direct them to their targets. But for researchers trying to figure out what attracts or repels the pests, sorting through the 300 to 400 distinct chemical odors that the human body produces has proved daunting.

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Keeping Genes Out Of Terrorists' Hands

Photo: Low standards could mean that hazardous genes get through screening more easily. W. Philpott/Reuters

From Nature:

Gene-synthesis industry at odds over how to screen DNA orders.

A standards war is brewing in the gene-synthesis industry. At stake is the way that the industry screens orders for hazardous toxins and genes, such as pieces of deadly viruses and bacteria. Two competing groups of companies are now proposing different sets of screening standards, and the results could be crucial for global biosecurity.

"If you have a company that persists with a lower standard, you can drag the industry down to a lower level," says lawyer Stephen Maurer of the University of California, Berkeley, who is studying how the industry is developing responsible practices. "Now we have a standards war that is a race to the bottom."

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My Comment: This is a topic that I am ignorant of. But my brother .... who has a Doctorate in Chemistry and who has worked in the pharmaceutical industry exploring these topics for he past 20 years tells me to be afraid .... be very afraid.

Hmmmm .... OK .... I am afraid.

Global Warming And The Sun -- A Commentary

From L.A. Times:

Recent studies seem to show that there's more to climate change than we know.

Assuming there are no sunspots today, a 96-year record will have been broken: 53 days without any solar blemishes, giant magnetic disruptions on the sun's surface that cause solar flares. That would be the fourth-longest stretch of stellar solar complexion since 1849. Wait, it gets even more exciting.

During what scientist call the Maunder Minimum -- a period of solar inactivity from 1645 to 1715 -- the world experienced the worst of the cold streak dubbed the Little Ice Age. At Christmastime, Londoners ice skated on the Thames, and New Yorkers (then New Amsterdamers) sometimes walked over the Hudson from Manhattan to Staten Island.

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World's Smallest Semiconductor Laser Heralds New Era In Optical Science

Image: The schematic on the left illustrates light being compressed and sustained in the 5 nanometer gap -- smaller than a protein molecule -- between a nanowire and underlying silver surface. To the right is an electron microscope image of the hybrid design shown in the schematic. (Credit: Courtesy of Xiang Zhang Lab, UC Berkeley)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2009) — Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have reached a new milestone in laser physics by creating the world's smallest semiconductor laser, capable of generating visible light in a space smaller than a single protein molecule.

This breakthrough, described in an advanced online publication of the journal Nature on Aug. 30, breaks new ground in the field of optics. The UC Berkeley team not only successfully squeezed light into such a tight space, but found a novel way to keep that light energy from dissipating as it moved along, thereby achieving laser action.

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Why Pacific Hurricanes Hit The Americas So Rarely

Hurricane Jimena was heading west-northwest toward Mexico’s Baja Peninsula on August 30, 2009, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image. Near the time of the image, the storm had sustained winds of 140 mph, making it a Category 4 storm. Clouds from the storm stretch out over western Mexico. Credit: Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center

From Live Science:

Stories of hurricane winds and rain lashing the coasts of Florida, Louisiana and other southeastern states pop up in the news constantly during the summer, but warnings of Pacific storms such as Jimena are few and far between.

In fact, only one hurricane is thought to have ever struck California, and that was clear back in 1858. Could it happen again? Not impossible, but also extremely unlikely in any given year.

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The Race To The Higgs Boson: LHC Versus Tevatron

Tevatron Fermilab

From Popular Science:

While the LHC's in the shop for repairs from its massive breakdown last September, an older particle accelerator might beat them to finding the Higgs boson, the fundamental particle thought to give matter mass.

At a conference last week, Tevatron physicists threw down the gauntlet, vowing that by 2011, the Tevatron accelerator (located at Fermi National Accelerator Lab outside Chicago) will be able to definitively prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson.

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8 Of The Most Dangerous Places (To Live) On The Planet

A monument reading "Polyus Cholada," Russian for "Pole of Cold," stands at the entrance to the city of Verkhoyansk.

From Popular Mechanics:

It’s hurricane season, a time of year when residents in vulnerable areas—like New Orleans—need to hunker down, stock up and prepare for the unforeseen. But there are other places in the world where the dangers are so great that it’s hard to believe anyone is willing to stay put and fight it out with Mother Nature. Here, we have canvassed the globe for 10 places that require fortitude, resourcefulness and a great faith in one’s DIY skills to make it through the year alive.

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Astrophysicists Puzzle Over Planet That's Too Close To Its Sun

From L.A. Times:

Completing an orbit in less than an Earth day, planet Wasp-18b should have burned up, according to accepted theory.

Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn't exist. The finding, they say, could alter our understanding of orbital dynamics, a field considered pretty well settled since the time of astronomer Johannes Kepler 400 years ago.

The planet is known as a "hot Jupiter," a gas giant orbiting the star Wasp-18, about 330 light-years from Earth. The planet, Wasp-18b, is so close to the star that it completes a full orbit (its "year") in less than an Earth day, according to the research, which was published in the journal Nature.

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Social Networking Sites Grab Big Slice Of Web Ads

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - About one of every five Internet display ads in the United States is viewed on a social networking Web site like MySpace and Facebook, according to a new report.

The report by analytics firm comScore underscores the increasing prominence of social media sites in the Internet landscape and broadening acceptance of the sites by brand advertisers.

It also illustrates the increasing competition between social media sites and established Internet companies like Yahoo Inc and Time Warner Inc's AOL which have long billed themselves as the top online destinations for brand advertisers.

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5 Future Robotic Expeditions And What They Could Reveal [Slide Show]

ESA/AOES Medialab

From Scientific American:

Some are already on their way and some are still in the works, but here is what we may see from unmanned exploration of space in the coming years.

Fifty years ago this month, the Soviet Union scored a coup in the space race with a probe called Luna 2. The spacecraft, which resembled a squat, souped-up version of its cousin Sputnik, was launched on September 12, 1959, and two days later reached the lunar surface. By impacting the moon, Luna 2 became the first man-made object to land on a celestial body other than Earth.

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Fahrenheit 747: World’s Biggest Fire Extinguisher Douses L.A. County

From Autopia/Wired Science:

The deadly fires that have blackened more than 105,000 acres around Los Angeles prompted authorities to call in the world’s largest fire extinguisher — a Boeing 747 that can drop 20,000 gallons of retardant over a swath of land three miles long.

The plane made its first-ever drop in the continental United States when fire officials summoned it to the Oak Glen fire east of Los Angeles mid day on Monday. After the successful first drop, the Supertanker was called back into action Monday evening where it made further drops on the massive Station fire north of the city which grew to more than 164 square miles and threatened 10,000 homes. Nearly 2,600 firefighters from as far away as Montana are throwing everything they have at the blaze, and on Monday they called in the biggest tool in their inventory.

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Neuroscientists Find Brain Region Responsible For Our Sense Of Personal Space

Patient SM, a woman with complete bilateral amygdala lesions (red), preferred to stand close to the experimenter (black). On average, control participants (blue) preferred to stand nearly twice as far away from the same experimenter. Images drawn to scale.

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2009) — In a finding that sheds new light on the neural mechanisms involved in social behavior, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have pinpointed the brain structure responsible for our sense of personal space.

The discovery, described in the August 30 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, could offer insight into autism and other disorders where social distance is an issue.

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Why Did People Become White?

A host of evolutionary pressures at work that contributed to the development of lighter skin, but for now, scientists aren't sure exactly what produced white people. Image credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

Humans come in a rainbow of hues, from dark chocolate browns to nearly translucent whites.

This full kaleidoscope of skin colors was a relatively recent evolutionary development, according to biologists, occuring alongside the migration of modern humans out of Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.

The consensus among scientists has always been that lower levels of vitamin D at higher latitudes — where the sun is less intense — caused the lightening effect when modern humans, who began darker-skinned, first migrated north.

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Look Out Mars, India's Gonna Get Ya!

The Red Planet Beckons: India's next target beyond the moon. NASA

From Popular Science:

India terminates its lunar probe and plans to launch its first Mars mission as early as 2013.

India has officially given up on its lunar probe Chandrayaan-1, which launched in 2008 and stayed alive for ten months before mission controllers lost radio contact. But officials are already looking forward to sending a robotic explorer to the red planet.

The nation's state-run space agency announced today a mission to Mars between 2013 and 2015. Xinhua reports that the planning will become reality after India launches its Chandrayaan-2 lunar rover in 2011.

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Mt. Wilson Observatory: Center Of Scientific Breakthroughs

Mt. Wilson Observatory

From The L.A. Times:

The installation of the 100-inch Hooker telescope in 1917 set the stage for two shocking discoveries: The universe was far larger than anyone imagined and it was expanding.

For nearly half a century, the Mt. Wilson Observatory was not only the center of the universe for the study of space science, it taught us just how huge that universe was.

At the eyepiece of the observatory's then-groundbreaking 100-inch Hooker telescope, astronomer Edwin Hubble made two of the most shocking scientific discoveries of the 20th century: The universe was far larger than anyone imagined and it was expanding.

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International Space Updates, September 2009

From Daily Tech:

NASA must use ISS to get to Mars; mice head into space; and two more companies join a Japanese space energy project

Even though NASA reportedly doesn't have necessary funds for deep space missions, NASA scientist Julie Robinson believes extending the International Space Station (ISS)'s mission until 2020 is necessary. After more than 10 years of construction from the United States and 15 other nations, the floating science laboratory is expected to end in 2016.

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The Mystery Of Chernobyl

Nuclear wasteland? The 30-mile exclusion zone around Chernobyl and the abandoned town of Pripyat is now home to animals Photo: Reuters

From The Telegraph:

A bitter dispute is raging over whether the fallout zone is a wasteland or wonderland. Now, a team of scientists is heading back into the contaminated area to find out the truth.

We walked out into a wasteland, grey and desolate. The buildings had deteriorated, windows had been smashed. Trees and weeds had grown over everything: it was a ghost town." It reads like a passage from a post-apocalyptic novel, such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road; in fact, it's how Tim Mousseau describes his first visit to Chernobyl.

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Bionic Brain Chips Could Overcome Paralysis

Regaining control of the body (Image: Daniel Chang)

From New Scientist:

A MONKEY sits on a bench, wires running from its head and wrist into a small box of electronics. At first the wrist lies limp, but within 10 minutes the monkey begins to flex its muscles and move its hand from side to side. The movements are clumsy, but they are enough to justify a rewarding slug of juice. After all, it shouldn't be able to move its wrist at all.

A nerve connection in the monkey's upper arm had previously been blocked with an anaesthetic that prevented signals travelling from its brain to its wrist, leaving the muscles temporarily paralysed. The monkey was only able to move its arm because the wires and the black box bypassed the broken link.

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Engineering Earth 'Is Feasible'

From BBC:

A UK Royal Society study has concluded that many engineering proposals to reduce the impact of climate change are "technically possible".

Such approaches could be effective, the authors said in their report.

But they also stressed that the potential of geo-engineering should not divert governments away from their efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Such engineering projects could either remove carbon dioxide or reflect the Sun's rays away from the planet.

Suggestions range from having giant mirrors in space, to erecting giant CO2 scrubbers that would "clean up" the air.

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