Get Nervous: Rusty Soviet Doomsday System Still Turned On

From Gizmodo:

Wired Magazine has a fascinating article on the doomsday system that was built by the Soviets 25 years ago. It was designed to obliterate the US no matter what happened to the USSR—and it still works today. Shiver.

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

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Related Article: Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine -- Wired News

My Comment: One thing that I am always trying to do in this blog is to find additional articles/opinions that relate to the main story. But for this story .... I have found nothing. Kudos to the Danger Room/Wired for getting some basic information that gives us a general outline of this "Doomsday Machine" story.

Feathered Fossils Prove Birds Evolved From Dinosaurs, Say Chinese Scientists

Discovery: An illustration of a feathered dinosaur, Anchiornis huxleyi,
the fossils of which have been found in China

From The Daily Mail:

A new species of feathered dinosaurs provides hard evidence the prehistoric creatures evolved into birds, a group of Chinese scientists has claimed.

The fossils represent five different species from two different rock sequences in north-eastern China and all have feathers or feather-like structures.

The new finds are 'indisputably' older than archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird, which scientists claim provides exceptional evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

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Asteroid Attack: Putting Earth's Defences To The Test

From New Scientist:

T LOOKS inconsequential enough, the faint little spot moving leisurely across the sky. The mountain-top telescope that just detected it is taking it very seriously, though. It is an asteroid, one never seen before. Rapid-survey telescopes discover thousands of asteroids every year, but there's something very particular about this one. The telescope's software decides to wake several human astronomers with a text message they hoped they would never receive. The asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. It is the size of a skyscraper and it's big enough to raze a city to the ground. Oh, and it will be here in three days.

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Making Realistic Skin for Robots

From Technology Review:

Without realistic synthetic skin, robots will never be entirely accepted socially. Yet even measuring what it means for skin to be humanlike is proving tough.

When it comes to building realistic robots, it's not just the way they look that's important. It's also the way they feel to the touch, says John-John Cabibihan at the National University of Singapore and pals. They argue that if robots are ever to be accepted socially, they will need to have humanlike skin so that actions such as handshakes can be made as realistic as possible.

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Future Is TV-Shaped, Says Intel

From BBC:

The world's biggest chip maker predicts that by 2015 there will be 12 billion devices capable of connecting to 500 billion hours of TV and video content.

Intel said its vision of TV everywhere will be more personal, social, ubiquitous and informative.

"TV is out of the box and off the wall," Intel's chief technology officer Justin Rattner told BBC News.

"TV will remain at the centre of our lives and you will be able to watch what you want where you want.

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Suspected Trojan war-era couple found

The finding is 'electrifying', say experts (Source: Reuters / Ho New )

From ABC News (Australia):

Excavations in the ancient city of Troy in Turkey have found the remains of a man and a woman believed to have died in 1200 BC, at the time of the legendary Trojan war, says a German archaeologist.

Dr Ernst Pernicka, a University of Tubingen professor of archaeometry, who is leading excavations on the site in northwestern Turkey, says the bodies were found near a defence line within the city built in the late Bronze Age.

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Superheavy Element 114 Confirmed: A Stepping Stone To The 'Island Of Stability'

Members of the group that confirmed the production of element 114 in front of the Berkeley Gas-filled Separator at the 88-Inch Cyclotron, from left: Jan Dvorak, Zuzana Dvorakova, Paul Ellison, Irena Dragojevic, Heino Nitsche, Mitch Andre Garcia, and Ken Gregorich. Not pictured is Liv Stavestra. (Credit: Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Creative Services Office)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2009) — Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been able to confirm the production of the superheavy element 114, ten years after a group in Russia, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, first claimed to have made it. The search for 114 has long been a key part of the quest for nuclear science’s hoped-for Island of Stability.

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The Truth About Lying

From Live Science:

While American folklore tells us that George Washington never told a lie, the topic of lying on Capitol Hill, at work, or at home is big news.

For instance, President Barak Obama is charged with telling lies. A popular TV show, Lie to Me, conducts a poll that shows the average person lies 42 times a week. And the concept for a new movie, The Invention of Lying, is that no one is able to tell a lie.

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Monarch Butterflies Navigate With Sun-Sensing Antennae

From Discover Magazine:

A new experiment has shed light on how the monarch butterfly executes its impressive 2,000-mile migration every fall, and all it took was a lick of paint.

Researchers already knew that the butterflies use the sun to guide them to the exact same wintering spot in central Mexico. But because the sun is a moving target, changing position throughout the day, biologists have long speculated that in addition to having a “sun compass” in their brains, butterflies must use some kind of 24-hour clock to guide their migration [Wired.com]. In a new study, published in Science, researchers determined that the butterflies have a second circadian clock in their antennae, which sense light.

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NASA/Ames-Controlled Moon Mission Will Add To New Discovery Of Water

From Mercury News:

A probe controlled from Ames Research Center that will hit the moon in two weeks may help unlock a major new scientific riddle, following NASA's stunning announcement Wednesday that the lunar surface is laced with water.

LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite), a mission controlled from Moffett Field in Mountain View, is scheduled to smash into a crater near the moon's south pole in the early hours of Oct. 9. Scientists will analyze the resulting debris plume for signs of large amounts of ice that may have persisted for eons in the extreme cold of perpetually shadowed craters.

The LCROSS mission had been about human exploration, trying to answer the question of whether there is enough ice on the moon to aid human exploration. The components of water — hydrogen and oxygen — could be used for life support or rocket fuel, if and when NASA returns astronauts to the moon.

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How to Get Your Gadgets Off The Grid

From Popular Mechanics:

PM's October issue is all about how to survive disasters, including tales of off-the-grid homesteaders and stories of men who showed remarkable self-reliance in the face of hurricanes, blizzards and tornadoes. But surviving the aftermath of a major disaster without any electricity sounds pretty boring to PM senior technology editor Glenn Derene—what would he do without his LCD TV, wii, Internet access or power tools? In this “electric cold-beer gadget test,” Derene shows that with a small wind turbine, generator, solar charging kit and two very powerful batteries, you won’t have to abandon your gadgets (or beer fridge) after an emergency.

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India Successfully Launches Seven Satellites With a Single Rocket

India Lifts Off India launches a satellite into space in January 2008. The country's space agency put seven satellites in orbit today, including six from foreign nations. PhysOrg

From Popular Science:

It’s been a busy day for India’s space agency. Underscoring the world’s largest democracy’s desire to become a serious player in the space business, the Indian Space Research Organisation launched seven satellites today, six of which belong to foreign nations.

India’s satellite, Oceansat-2, will enhance the ocean monitoring capabilities of the original Oceansat, which launched in 1999. Four of the other six satellites were German, while one was Turkish and one Swedish. Each of those carries a university-funded payload designed to conduct research on various new technologies.

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Russia Hopes U.S. to Extend Shuttle Operations

From ABC News:

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia hopes the United States will extend the deadline to retire its space shuttles beyond 2011 and has heard unofficially it is possible, the head of Russia's space agency was quoted as saying on Friday.

The U.S. space agency NASA plans six more missions by its fleet of aging space shuttles by late next year or early 2011 after the construction of the $100 billion International Space Station (ISS) is completed. The shuttles will then be retired.

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The Field Of Gold: How Jobless Treasure Hunter Unearthed Greatest Ever Haul Of Saxon Artefacts With £2.50 Metal Detector

Discovery of a lifetime: Metal detecting fan Terry Herbert found the amazing haul in a Staffordshire field

From The Daily Mail:

It will revolutionise our understanding of the Dark Ages, bring delight to millions and make two men very rich indeed.

Archaeologists yesterday unveiled the largest and most valuable hoard of Saxon gold in history – 1,500 pieces of treasure unearthed from a farmer’s field by a man with a metal detector.

The haul includes beautiful gold sword hilts, jewels from Sri Lanka, exquisitely carved helmet decorations and early Christian crosses.

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The World's Best Impact Craters

Also known as the "eye of Quebec", Manicougan Crater in Canada is one the Earth's oldest known impact craters, and is about 200 million years old. Today it contains a 70-kilometre hydroelectric reservoir along its edge. The island in the centre of the crater was formed by post-impact uplift of the land. Also visible in the bottom left-hand corner is the fin of the space shuttle from which this image was taken.(Image: LSTS-9 Crew/NASA/GSFC)

From The New Scientist:

Approximately 150 impact craters are known on Earth, but most are severely eroded or hidden beneath tonnes of rock. Still, a few spectacular examples are visible with aerial photography, satellites or instruments that can peek beneath the surface.

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HIV Vaccine 'Reduces Infection'

From the BBC:

An experimental HIV vaccine has for the first time cut the risk of infection, researchers say.

The vaccine - a combination of two earlier experimental vaccines - was given to 16,000 people in Thailand, in the largest ever such vaccine trial.

Researchers found that it reduced by nearly a third the risk of contracting HIV, the virus that leads to Aids.

It has been hailed as a significant, scientific breakthrough, but a global vaccine is still some way off.

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Mutations Make Evolution Irreversible: By Resurrecting Ancient Proteins, Researchers Find That Evolution Can Only Go Forward

Fish fossil. Researchers resurrected and manipulate the gene for a key hormone receptor as it existed in our earliest vertebrate ancestors more than 400 million years ago. Over a rapid period of time, five random mutations made subtle modifications in the protein's structure that were utterly incompatible with the receptor's primordial form. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

A University of Oregon research team has found that evolution can never go backwards, because the paths to the genes once present in our ancestors are forever blocked. The findings -- the result of the first rigorous study of reverse evolution at the molecular level -- appear in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature.

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Full Moon Does Not Affect Surgery Outcomes

From Live Science:

While a full moon can tug on ocean tides and make for a romantic setting, scientists have found no reliable evidence that it triggers suicides or hospital admissions, or facilitates conception, the transformation of werewolves or any of a host of other phenomena often blamed on it.

Evidence is mounting, however, for things on which the moon has no impact.

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Roaches Hold Their Breath To Stay Alive

Cockroaches hold their breath when they need to stop water loss more than they need oxygen
(Source: Philip Matthews )

From ABC News (Australia):

Australian scientists have discovered another reason why cockroaches might well inherit the earth after humans are long gone.

Animal physiologist Dr Craig White of the University of Queensland in Brisbane and colleagues report their findings in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

"Several decades ago, scientists discovered that some insects hold their breath," says White.

"But it's not been clear why they do this."

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NASA Finds Water Ice In Mars Craters

An image by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on the NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows Sawtooth Pattern in Carbon Dioxide Ice on Mars recorded during the month of April through early August 2009. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been studying Mars with an advanced set of instruments since 2006. (University of Arizona/JPL/NASA/Reuters)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

NASA's Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter spotted ice just below the surface that was exposed by fresh meteor crashes, not far from where the Viking 2 Lander looked in 1976.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found water ice much closer to the planet’s equator than scientists believed possible.

And it’s far purer than they expected, suggesting that in the recent past, the planet’s climate was far more humid than models of Mars’s climate history suggested.

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