Thunderstorm On Saturn Is A Record-Buster

The moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet.

From AFP:

PARIS — A tempest that erupted on Saturn in January has become the Solar System's longest continuously observed lightning storm, astronomers reported on Tuesday.

The storm broke out in "Storm Alley," a region 35 degrees south of the ringed giant's equator, researchers told the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, near Berlin.

Thunderstorms there can be as big as 3,000 kilometers (nearly 2,000 miles) across.

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New Virus From Rats Can Kill 80 Per Cent Of Human Victims

From Sydney Morning Herald:

A PREVIOUSLY unknown virus that killed four of the five people it struck in an outbreak in South Africa last year has been identified as part of a family of viruses humans can catch from rats.

The virus, named Lujo, is an arenavirus that over nine days caused rash, fever, muscle pain, diarrhoea, severe bleeding, vomiting, organ failure and death, said Nivesh Sewlall, who treated the first patient at Johannesburg's Morningside MediClinic Hospital. He reported the findings at an infectious disease conference in San Francisco yesterday.

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Wine Tasting: Expectations Influence Sense Of Taste, Tests Show

Wine tastes different to those who are given information on the product before a wine tasting, tests where the test people received information on the wine before and after the tasting have shown. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2009) — Wine tastes different to those who are given information on the product before a wine tasting, tests where the test people received information on the wine before and after the tasting have shown.

Many a wine grower trembles at the prospect of a visit from Robert Parker, one of the most famous wine critics in the world. His “Parker Points” have a similar impact to the Roman Emperor’s thumb, deciding the success of a winery instead of life and death. The extent to which product information like Parker’s ratings influence the consumer is revealed in a study by Michael Siegrist, Professor of Consumer Behavior at the Institute for Environmental Decisions, and his post-doc Marie-Eve Cousin from ETH Zurich, which was published in the journal Appetite.

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Do Brains Shrink As We Age?

From Live Science:

As we get older, our brains get smaller, or at least that's what many scientists believe. But a new study contradicts this assumption, concluding that when older brains are "healthy" there is little brain deterioration, and that only when people experience cognitive decline do their brains show significant signs of shrinking.

The results suggest that many previous studies may have overestimated how much our brains shrink as we age, possibly because they failed to exclude people who were starting to develop brain diseases, such as dementia, that would lead to brain decay, or atrophy.

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Google Book Search: Why It Matters

From Times Online:

European publishers and copyright holders gathered in Brussels on Monday to submit their opinions to a European Commission hearing on the American Google Book Search settlement.

In a nutshell, the situation is this: Google has embarked on a project to digitise hundreds of thousands of out-of-print and out-of-copyright books in the United States.

Some of these works are still technically in copyright, and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers took Google to court. A proposed settlement was reached last year, under which Google will essentially agree to pay royalties to anyone whose book they inadvertently put on line.

The settlement will be ratified in a Manhattan court on October 7 this year, by which time any European reservations will need to be registered.

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Splashdown! Cirque du Soleil Founder Prepares For First 'Poetic' Space Mission

Mr Laliberte in a rare serious mood at the Star City training centre

From The Daily Mail:

Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberte made a splash at the space training centre in Star City outside Moscow. He was taking part in emergency landing practice for his trip to the International Space Station next month.

The owner of Cirque du Soleil, is spending £21million to become the world's seventh space tourist, after being slated to travel on a Russian Soyuz space craft at the end of September.

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China's Potent Wind Potential

Photo: Wind power: Wind power plants in Xinjiang, China. Credit: Chris Lim

From Technology Review:

Forecasters see no need for new coal and nuclear power plants.

China has doubled its installed wind power capacity every year for the past five, and is on pace this year to supplant the United States as the world's largest market for new installations. But researchers from Harvard University and Beijing's Tsinghua University suggest that the Chinese wind power industry has hardly begun to tap its potential. According to their meteorological and financial modeling, reported in the journal Science last week, there is enough strong wind in China to profitably satisfy all of the country's electricity demand until at least 2030.

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Space Robot 2.0: Smarter Than The Average Rover

Artist's conception of NASA's planned Mars rover, Curiosity. See other rovers in our gallery (Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech)

From New Scientist:

SOMETHING is moving. Two robots sitting motionless in the dust have spotted it. One, a six-wheeled rover, radios the other perched high on a rocky slope. Should they take a photo and beam it back to mission control? Time is short, they have a list of other tasks to complete, and the juice in their batteries is running low. The robots have seconds to decide. What should they do?

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Jupiter Turned Comet Into "Moon" For 12 Years

Jupiter (shown in a 2006 Hubble Space Telescope picture) captured a comet in 1949, and the "temporary moon" orbited the giant planet for 12 years before being cast aside, astronomers announced in September 2009.Image courtesy NASA via AP

From National Geographic:

Sixty years ago, Jupiter carried on a 12-year fling with an extra "moon" then casually cast it aside—and the gas giant will likely do it again within decades, scientists announced today.

In 1949 the massive planet's gravity pulled in comet 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu and held it in orbit until 1961, according to an international team led by Katsuhito Ohtsuka of the Tokyo Meteor Network.

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Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius Craft Finally Bags $1 Million Lunar Lander Challenge

Scorpius Shoots for the Moon: Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius vehicle completed a mock lunar landing on Earth -- next step, space Armadillo Aerospace

From Popular Science:

Armadillo Aerospace may claim a $1 million prize for completing a mock lunar landing, if no other competitors step up

A future trip to the moon could use a commercial vehicle, if Armadillo Aerospace has anything to say about it. The company's rocket-powered craft pulled off a mock lunar landing on Saturday to qualify for a $1 million purse from NASA's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

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Microsoft Testing 'Visual Search'

Microsoft unveiled a twist on the Internet search experience on Monday with a new feature

From AFP:

WASHINGTON — US software giant Microsoft unveiled a twist on the Internet search experience on Monday with a new feature which allows Web surfers to search using image galleries instead of text links.

Microsoft, which teamed up with Yahoo! in July in a bid to challenge Internet search giant Google, rolled out a beta, or test, version of the feature at the TechCrunch50 technology conference in San Francisco.

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Robots With A Mind Of Their Own

Flash Recovery Of Ammonoids After Most Massive Extinction Of All Time

Asteroceras, a Jurassic ammonite from England.
(Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2009) — After the End-Permian extinction 252.6 million years ago, ammonoids diversified and recovered 10 to 30 times faster than previous estimates. The surprising discovery raises questions about paleontologists' understanding of the dynamics of evolution of species and the functioning of the biosphere after a mass extinction.

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Key Found to Muscle Loss After Age 65

From Live Science:

It’s a sad fact that muscles shrink as adults age. But new studies are starting to unravel how this happens — and what to do about it.

Past research has shown that the bodies of older people build muscle from food less efficiently than young people. Now researchers at the University of Nottingham in England have also found that a mechanism that prevents muscle breakdown works less effectively in people over the age of 65, resulting in a “double whammy” effect.

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How Does the Brain Use So Much Energy? Not in Electrical Signals

From Discover Magazine:

Experiments conducted on squid brains in the early days of neuroscience created misunderstandings about the workings of the human brain that have persisted for 70 years, according to a new study. While the squid experiments did shed light on how messages are transmitted between brain cells with electrochemical signals (and led to a Nobel Prize for the experimenters), researchers are just now realizing that the results gave scientists a confused idea about the efficiency of neurons.

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Navy Green: Military Investigates Biofuels to Power Its Ships and Planes

CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF?: The U.S. Navy has ordered more than 60,000 gallons of alternative fuels derived from weeds and algae--and hopes to power planes and ships with them in the near future. Courtesy of U.S. Navy

From Scientific American:

The U.S. Navy will begin testing biofuels from camelina and algae.

Ships powered by algae and planes flying on weeds: that's part of the future the U.S. Navy hopes to bring to fruition. This week, the seagoing branch of the military purchased 40,000 gallons of jet fuel derived from camelina—a weedy relative of canola—and 20,055 gallons of algae-derived diesellike fuel for ships.

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Cache And Carry: A Review Of The Kindle

From Scientific American:

The best answer yet to what's black and white and read all over.

I’m not your classic “early adopter” when it comes to new electronic gizardry (a word I just made up that means a combination of gizmo and wizardry, with a secondary definition of bird digestion). I’m not even what one ersatz electronics guru referred to as an “early adapter,” although I do sometimes wonder if my purpose in life has been reduced to making sure my various devices are all plugged in correctly.

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China Starts Building New Space Launch Centre

Chinese astronauts at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in a remote desert area of northwest China's Gansu province. The country has begun construction of its fourth space launch centre as the nation gears up for future manned space flights aboard a new generation of carrier rockets, state media has reported. (AFP/Xinhua/File)

From Yahoo News/AFP:

BEIJING (AFP) – China on Monday began the construction of its fourth space launch centre as the nation gears up for future manned space flights aboard a new generation of carrier rockets, state media reported.

Work started on the Wenchang Space Satellite Launch Centre on southern Hainan island, which will become China's first coastal launching pad when completed in 2013, the Hainan Daily reported.

Chang Wanquan, member of the powerful Central Military Commission, and Chen Qiufa, head of the State Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, attended Monday's groundbreaking ceremony, the report said.

China's space programme is run by the nation's military.

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More Efficient, And Cheaper, Solar Cells

Photo: Light trap: Incoming light reflects off grooves in a silver band and is redirected along a glass cover. This light, which is usually lost, can then be absorbed by the solar cell. The grooved band is one of three improvements that could significantly lower the cost of making solar power. Credit: Technology Review

From Technology Review:

New manufacturing techniques could cut solar power costs by 20 percent.

Improvements to conventional solar cell manufacturing that could significantly increase the efficiency of multicrystalline silicon cells and bring down the cost of solar power by about 20 percent have been announced by startup 1366 Technologies of Lexington, MA.

Such cost reduction would make solar power more competitive with conventional sources of electricity. In sunny environments, this could bring the cost of solar down to about 15 or 16 cents per kilowatt hour, says Craig Lund, 1366 Technologies's director of business development. That's cheaper than some conventional sources of electricity, especially those used during times of peak electricity demand.

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Brilliant 360-Degree Panorama Of The Milky Way

From Wired Science:

You can see the entire Milky Way at once in this panorama painstakingly stitched together by French photographers.

A much larger, zoomable version available from the European Southern Observatory lets you visit any part of the galaxy.

Working in the dark, dry highlands of Chile with a Nikon D3 digital camera (50 mm lens open at f5.6), Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier patched together 1,200 photos of the night sky into the composite that you see above.

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