The iPad Developer's Challenge

Griffin's iTalk app for iPhone
(Credit: Griffin)

From CNET News:

iPhone and iPod Touch owners could breathe a sigh of relief when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad.

Apple's highly anticipated tablet computer would not, after all, require purchasing all new applications. Instead, everything in the App Store would automatically work on the iPad. As Jobs explained, tapping one button on the iPad screen transforms apps made for the 3.1-inch iPhone/iPod Touch screen to a snugger fit on the 9.7-inch iPad.

Simple, right? For the iPad owner, sure. But the iPad means bigger changes for the people who create these apps. Though the iPad has been dismissed by some as an oversized iPod Touch, it's definitely not, as those who attempt to make iPad apps or re-create iPhone apps for it will find out fast.

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SpaceX Fires Up

From Discovery News:

In case you've been wondering, that's what a fully lit Falcon 9 rocket looks like at ignition, which occurred, by the way, for the first time this weekend at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, where SpaceX is preparing for the rocket's debut flight next month.

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Weymouth Ridgeway Skeletons 'Scandinavian Vikings'

From The BBC:

Fifty-one decapitated skeletons found in a burial pit in Dorset were those of Scandinavian Vikings, scientists say.

Mystery has surrounded the identity of the group since they were discovered at Ridgeway Hill, near Weymouth, in June.

Analysis of teeth from 10 of the men revealed they had grown up in countries with a colder climate than Britain's.

Archaeologists from Oxford believe the men were probably executed by local Anglo Saxons in front of an audience sometime between AD 910 and AD 1030.

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Cyberguards To Protect Children

Image: Demand for digital monitors from concerned parents is expected to grow. (Alamy)

From The Independent:

Technology that allows parents to monitor and even block a child’s online and mobile activity is coming to Britain soon.

Do you know what your teenager is doing on the computer in their bedroom? What websites they are visiting and who they are poking on Facebook? American parents do. A raft of new technology designed to enable mums and dads to keep tabs on their children in cyberspace is hitting the market across the Atlantic.

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Babies Are Born To Dance To The Beat

From The Telegraph:

Babies are born to dance and find the rhythm and tempo of music more engaging than speech, research has shown.

A study of infants aged from five months to two years suggests that babies are preprogrammed to move rhythmically in response to music.

Psychologist Marcel Zentner, who led the University of York team, said: "Our research suggests that it is the beat rather than other features of the music, such as the melody, that produces the response in infants.

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Hitwise: Facebook Tops Weekly Ranking, Surpassing Google

From Wall Street Journal:

Facebook Inc. edged past Google Inc. (GOOG) to become the most visited U.S. Web site for the week ended March 13, the first time the Internet giant has been topped since 2007, according to Hitwise.

The data provider said the privately held social-networking site's share was 7.07% for the week, compared with Google's 7.03%. The market share of visits to Facebook nearly tripled from a year earlier for the week, while visits to Google grew 9%.

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Twitter Astronaut Is First To Post Stunning YouTube Videos Direct From Space

From The Daily Mail:

Astronaut Soichi Noguchi has already made his name as a prolific Twitterer, who delights his 125,000 followers with live pictures from the International Space Station.

Now the Japanese engineer has gone one better, posting stunning footage of Earth and the Moon on his own YouTube channel.

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U.S. Army Worried About Wikileaks In Secret Report

From CNET News:

A leaked U.S. Army intelligence report, classified as secret, says the Wikileaks Web site poses a significant "operational security and information security" threat to military operations.

Classified U.S. military information appearing on Wikileaks could "influence operations against the U.S. Army by a variety of domestic and foreign actors," says the report, prepared in 2008 by the Army Counterintelligence Center and apparently disclosed in its entirety on Monday.

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Small Dogs Originated In The Middle East, Genetic Study Finds

Yorkshire terrier. (Credit: iStockphoto/Lenka Dankova)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 13, 2010) — A genetic study has found that small domestic dogs probably originated in the Middle East more than 12,000 years ago. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology traced the evolutionary history of the IGF1 gene, finding that the version of the gene that is a major determinant of small size probably originated as a result of the domestication of the Middle Eastern gray wolf.

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Quest Aims To Create Bigger Atoms And New Kinds Of Matter

Heavy elements like atomic number 118 were created by smashing calcium-48 ions into americium-243 target atoms, shown in this illustration. Credit: Thomas Tegge, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

From Live Science:

A quest is underway to create larger and larger atoms with more protons and neutrons than ever before.

By building these super-heavy elements, scientists are not just creating new kinds of matter – they are probing the subatomic world and learning about the mysterious forces that hold atoms together.

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Opium Poppy's Genes Finally Revealed

Opium crop from the Malwa region of India. Credit: Wikimedia

From Cosmos/AFP:

PARIS: Researchers have discovered the genes that allow the opium poppy to make codeine and morphine, which could lead to genetically engineered plants or microorganisms generating the painkillers.

Codeine is one of the most widely prescribed painkillers in the world, the researchers said. Unlike morphine, codeine cannot be easily converted to heroin.

"The enzymes encoded by these two genes have eluded plant biochemists for a half-century," said Peter Facchini, from the University of Calgary in Canada and co-author of the paper.

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Celebrating The Real Einstein

From New Scientist:

Today is Einstein's birthday - and it's time to celebrate.

Everyone loves to celebrate Einstein. He's a movie, an opera, an asteroid, a cartoon. He's an advertisement for a Danish beer. Rock bands exist with names like Einstein's Sister and Forever Einstein. He graces the periodic table of elements--Einsteinium, atomic number 99. People have designed religions around Einstein. His brain was stolen, sliced up into nearly two hundred and fifty pieces, and sent bit by bit through the mail to the curious around the globe.

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RealNetworks: A Tale Of Opportunities Missed

Rob Glaser with Bill Gates. Glaser left Microsoft in 1994.
(Credit: Microsoft)

From CNET News:

Rob Glaser's 16 years at the helm of RealNetworks started with the pioneering of the early dot-com days and ended with a courtroom drubbing at the hands of the entertainment industry. In between, Glaser, who by most accounts saw the promise of Web video and music long before his peers, proved himself to be a better visionary than executive.

Earlier this month, Real announced it was giving up on attempts to defend its RealDVD technology against a lawsuit filed by the major movie studios. RealDVD is software that enabled users to create copies of their film discs and store the digital versions on hard drives. It was also the backbone of a planned DVD player, code-named Facet. The device would copy and hold 70 digital movies and enable users to instantly jump from film to film and scene to scene.

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Why Do We Have Daylight Savings Time?

From Discovery news:

It's a question people are probably more likely to ask themselves this time of year when we go to bed and then lose an hour. It can feel wildly unfair for the clock to say 7:00 a.m. when it actually feels like 6:00 a.m.

Well, to some degree we may have Benjamin Franklin to thank.

Franklin, who penned the proverb, "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise," was among the first to suggest the idea. In a 1784 essay he wrote that adjusting the clocks in the spring could be a good way to save on candles.

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Obama Nasa Plans 'Catastrophic' Say Moon Astronauts

From The BBC:

Former Nasa astronauts who went to the Moon have told the BBC of their dismay at President Barack Obama's decision to push back further Moon missions.

Jim Lovell, commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, said Mr Obama's decision would have "catastrophic consequences" for US space exploration.

The last man on the Moon, Eugene Cernan, said it was "disappointing".

Last month Mr Obama cancelled Nasa's Constellation Moon landings programme, approved by ex-President George W Bush.

Nasa still aims to send astronauts back to the Moon, but it is likely to take decades and some believe that it will never happen again.

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Orange Dwarf Confirmed To Be On Collision Course With Earth

Gliese 710 Hi there, neighbor! NASA

From Popular Science:

Our solar system's 'hood may get a bit rougher sometime during the next 1.5 million years. An astronomer has given an 86 percent chance for a neighboring star to smash into the frozen Oort Cloud surrounding the outskirts of the solar system, and may scatter some comets toward Earth, Technology Review reports.

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Google Widens Assault On Microsoft's Dominance Of Business Software

From Times Online:

Google is to broaden its assault on Microsoft's dominance of the market for business software by launching on online marketplace for other companies' enterprise products.

The internet search giant wants to convert companies to using applications piped over the internet in a challenge to Microsoft's model of selling licences of its Windows operating system and software programs such as Office.

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Revealed: The 160 Species Living Inside Our Guts

The human gut: home to numerous species of unknown microbes. Science Photo Library

From The Independent:

Scientists have decoded the DNA of the bacteria that take up residence in the typical human body.

Some scientists dream of sending a probe to Mars, others work on ways of exploring the sea bed with robotic submersibles. Now a team of researchers have boldly gone where no human has gone before – they have decoded all the bacterial genes found in the human gut.

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World's Oldest Rivers Mapped Under Huge Desert Dunes

The Simpson desert's fabled dunes block its underground water channels from remote sensing (Image: visionandimagination.com/Getty)

From New Scientist:

A network of ancient rivers and streams that once flowed beneath Australia's Simpson desert – famed for its dune fields – has been mapped in a new study. The map could lead the way to valuable minerals and water resources in this drying continent.

Michael Hutchinson and John Stein of the Australian National University in Canberra extracted data from previous ground surveys to map an ancient river system 35 metres below the surface of the desert. They think the channels are among the world's oldest at 50 million years old, when the now barren land would have been lush and well watered.

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Extinct Elephant Bird Of Madagascar Could Live Again

Egg laid by great elephant bird of Madagascar compared to a hen's egg Photo: JANE MINGAY

From The Telegraph:

Towering 10 feet into the air and weighing more than half a ton, it was the biggest bird that ever lived until French colonists wiped it out more than three hundred years ago.

But the giant elephant bird of Madagascar could be resurrected after scientists discovered how to extract DNA from ancient egg shells.

Genetic material from the bird along with extinct emus of Australia and moas of New Zealand have been collected by a new technique.

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