Europe vs. Google: The Next Chapter

A scanner passes over a book as part of Google Inc.'s project to create digital versions of all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world. Carlos Osorio / AP

From Time Magazine:

Google may be valued at more than $185 billion and boast millions of users, but that doesn't mean the Internet giant is any match for the diminutive French President Nicolas Sarkozy. On Dec. 8, Sarkozy warned Google he would not allow France to be "stripped" of its literary heritage, an apparent reference to Google's enormous book-digitizing project. "We won't let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is," Sarkozy said during a round-table discussion in eastern France. "We are not going to be stripped of what generations and generations have produced in the French language, just because we weren't capable of funding our own digitization project."

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Geminid Meteor Shower Set To Light Up The Sky With Spectacular Display

Photo: The hidden fires of the Flame Nebula: meteor showers will be spectacular this weekend

From Times Online:

Wrap up warm and look at the night sky this weekend for the most spectacular meteor shower of the year — although you will need to brave some cold temperatures hovering around freezing.

The Geminid meteor shower appears every year about this time and is our best shooting star display, with more than 100 meteors appearing each hour. This year’s spectacle is especially good because it is close to a new moon so there is no moonlight to interfere with the view.

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NASA Comet Hunter Set For Monday Launch

From Information Week:

Weekend liftoff of WISE space telescope scrubbed due to faulty steering engine.

NASA delayed until Monday the launch of a space telescope designed to create a highly detailed map of the heavens and spot comets and asteroids that could pose a threat to life on Earth.

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, was slated to lift off from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base atop a Delta II rocket Friday, but a balky booster steering engine forced the delay.

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2010: The Year Of The Tablet Computer?

From PC World:

In China, 2010 will be the year of the Tiger. In the tech world, 2010 will be the year of the Tablet -- or so it seems. A bevy of tech companies have teased, talked, and have not denied rumors that they are working on a fabled tablet computer. Here is a look back at 2009 tablet buzz with a look forward to 2010 -- the year of the Tablet.

Asustek is rumored to be working on an Eee Pad, according to Digitimes. Rumors of a Dell tablet won't go away. Earlier this year, rumors of a Microsoft two-panel tablet appeared after Gizmodo got its hands on one of Redmond's concept videos. And starting Friday, the JooJoo Web tablet is supposed to go on sale for $499 at thejoojoo.com. And of course there is the ever-present Apple rumor that "soon" it will introduce a tablet.

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Final NASA Spending Bill Includes Protections For Moon Program

From Space.com:

WASHINGTON — House and Senate negotiators reached agreement this week on a 2010 omnibus spending bill that includes $18.7 billion for NASA — a $942 million increase over the agency's 2009 budget — and includes a provision that would prevent the agency from scaling back or canceling its current human spaceflight activities in the absence of formal legislative approval from congressional appropriators.

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The H1N1 Pandemic: Is A Second Wave Possible?

A woman wears a mask in Beijing on Dec. 2, 2009. Peter Parks / AFP / Getty

From Time Magazine:

Since early November, cases of H1N1 have continued to decline nationwide, and scientists keeping track of the numbers say that as pandemics go, 2009 H1N1 may turn out to be a mild one — at least for the time being.

The question now on health officials' minds is: Will there be a second wave of cases in the new year? The answer depends on whom you ask. "We took an informal poll of about a dozen of some of the world's leading experts in influenza," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told reporters recently. "About half of them said, Yes, we think it's likely that we'll have another surge in cases. About half said, No, we think it's not likely. And one said, Flip a coin."

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Earth's Atmosphere Came From Outer Space

Photo: REUTERS

From The Telegraph:

The Earth's atmosphere and oceans which gave rise to life came from outer space probably on the back of meteorites or comets, scientists now believe.

Previously it was thought that the gases and minerals were locked deep within the Earth's crust and only released in huge volcanic eruptions.

But now researchers have proved that they must have come from outer space billions of years after the Earth was first formed.

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Large Hadron Collider Creates World-Record Energy Collisions As It Gears Up For Big Bang Test

This image provided by CERN shows particle tracks as protons collided in CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Physicists hope those collisions will help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter

From The Daily Mail:

The world's largest atom smasher has smashed particles together at the highest energy achieved in a laboratory, a spokeswoman has confirmed.

The Large Hadron Collider recorded its first high-energy collisions of protons on Tuesday evening, as it underwent test runs in preparation for full-scale operations next year.

More than 10 billion protons per bunch collided at a total energy of 2.36 trillion electron volts (TeV) per collision.

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First Evidence Of Brain Rewiring in Children: Reading Remediation Positively Alters Brain Tissue

A still from a movie from Cassini, made possible only as Saturn's north pole emerged from winter darkness, showing new details of a jet stream that follows a hexagon-shaped path and has long puzzled scientists.

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 10, 2009) — After waiting years for the sun to illuminate Saturn's north pole again, cameras aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft have captured the most detailed images yet of the intriguing hexagon shape crowning the planet.

The new images of the hexagon, whose shape is the path of a jet stream flowing around the north pole, reveal concentric circles, curlicues, walls and streamers not seen in previous images. Images and the three-frame animation are available at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org.

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Using Airplane Know-How To Harness Wave Energy

This fleshed-out reconstruction of a newly identified theropod dinosaur, called Tawa hallae, shows the dog-sized beast had claws for snagging meaty prey. Credit: Jorge Gonzalez.

From Live Science:

Long, long ago, some of the first dinosaurs walked the Earth. But scientists have not known with any confidence where those initial dino prints were made. Much more recently, hikers stumbled across a few bits of bone at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, leading to the discovery of a game-changing dinosaur that reveals where it all began.

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Rare Words 'Author's Fingerprint'

From The BBC:

Analyses of classic authors' works provide a way to "linguistically fingerprint" them, researchers say.

The relationship between the number of words an author uses only once and the length of a work forms an identifier for them, they argue.

Analyses of works by Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and DH Lawrence showed these "unique word" charts are specific to each author.

The work is published in the New Journal of Physics.

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From Minnie To Mickey (And All They Did Was Turn Off A Gene)

The cells of the female ovary were transformed into cells normally found in male testes by turning off a gene during the development of the mouse embryo. Alamy

From The Independent:

Simple technique changes sex of a mouse – and reveals the gender war that rages in all of us.

The battle of the sexes is a never-ending war waged within ourselves as male and female elements of our own bodies continually fight each other for supremacy. This is the astonishing implication of a pioneering study showing that it is possible to flick a genetic switch that turns female ovary cells into male testicular tissue.

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Super Soldier Updates

From the Next Big Future:

DARPA has a program that is spending about $3 billion to create super soldiers. Here is an update of technology that is ready or is becoming deployable or usable for the purpose of creating super soldiers. Much of it is not from DARPA.

Exoskeletons
1. The Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC™) exoskeleton runs on Li-ion batteries, driving lightweight hydraulic legs with titanium structure. A wearer can hang a 200lb backpack from the back frame and heavy chest armour and kit from shoulder extensions.

According to Lockheed reps the HULC isn't ready for prime time yet, being still "in ruggedisation". However the company would envisage giving it to actual soldiers so as to get their input from the summer of 2010.

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My Comment: An excellent summary from the "Next Big Future".

What NASA's WISE Space Mapper Will Look For In The Sky

The 40 cm diameter WISE telescope is an all aluminum optical system that will produce images of the sky with 2.75 arcsec resolution in four infrared spectral bands. Here the lead optical test engineer attaches the back-end imager optics to the afocal. This entire telescope will be mounted inside the WISE cryostat and cooled to about 17K. The WISE telescope was developed by L3 Communications-SSG.

From Popular Mechanics:

Early on Friday, NASA will launch its newest satellite, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Its mission: To catalogue the murky parts of our universe in never-before-seen detail. As the craft orbits Earth, it will capture images of the sky with an infrared digital camera that snaps pictures every 11 seconds. So what's out there that WISE's team of astronomers are so eager to see? Here's a list.

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Darpa's Cyborg Insect Spies, Now Nuclear-Powered

From Popular Science:

When you write for Popular Science, it's easy to become desensitized to wild and crazy future tech. To wit: When I first heard that Darpa wanted to develop cyborg insects to carry surveillance equipment, I thought "ok, cyborg insect spies are pretty cool, but not blowing me away."

Then today, Cornell researchers working on the program unveiled a prototype transmitter for the cyborg bugs that runs on radioactive isotopes. Nuclear powered cyborg insect spies? Ok, now you have my attention.

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First-Born Children Are More Successful But Less Trusting

From The Telegraph:

First-born children are more likely to achieve greatness but at the cost of being less co-operative and less trusting than their younger siblings.

Research suggests that first borns are generally smarter and more likely to become leaders compared to their younger brothers and sisters.

However this appears to make them more cynical and less likely to trust others or co-operate with them, according to research.

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Mediterranean Was Created In Earth's Biggest Deluge

The deluge that formed the Mediterranean. Photograph: Roger Pibernat

From The Guardian:

Catastrophic flooding caused sea levels to rise by 10 metres a day, according to new research.

The Mediterranean Sea was formed by the most spectacular flood in Earth's history when water from the Atlantic Ocean breached the mountain range joining Europe and Africa with the force of a thousand Amazon rivers, scientists say.

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The 21st-Century Radio Revolution As 17m Tune In Online

Breaking with tradition: One third of radio listeners now tune in online

From The Daily Mail:

One third of the population chooses to listen to the radio on the internet rather than on a traditional receiver.

Figures show that the trend for accessing stations online is rapidly growing in popularity with 17.4million listeners doing so this month.

The web audience has increased by about three million in 18 months.

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Deepwater Wind To Build First U.S. Ocean Wind Farm

From CNET News/Reuters:

The tiniest state in the nation may build the first U.S. offshore wind farm, after privately held Deepwater Wind on Thursday landed a deal to sell power from the first phase of a Rhode Island project that eventually could supply 15 percent of the state's electricity.

Under a 20-year power purchase agreement, developer Deepwater Wind will sell electricity from up to 8 turbines producing 28 megawatts to National Grid.

Earlier this year Rhode Island set a target to obtain 20 percent of its electricity from renewable resources by 2015.

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Why Cancer Cells Just Won't Die: Researcher Identifies Protein Which Regulates Cell Suicide

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 10, 2009) — When cells experience DNA damage, they'll try to repair it. But if that fails, the damaged cells are supposed to self-destruct, a process called apoptosis. A cancer researcher at Robarts Research Institute at The University of Western Ontario has identified a protein that regulates apoptosis, a new discovery which has implications for both the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

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