Obama Consigns Moon Landings To History

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, 20 July 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission. Aldrin is among those who support the ending of the planned Moon landing programme. NASA/ AP

From The Independent:

President's vision for Nasa rules out return to lunar surface – and divides Apollo astronauts.

Standing near the spot where the US launched its first space missions, Barack Obama attempted to sell his plans for the future of Nasa last night, predicting that his new programme for the space agency will protect thousands of jobs and send astronauts to Mars within his lifetime.

The President told a crowd of 200 people at the Kennedy Space Centre
at Cape Canaveral that he remains committed to space exploration, despite his controversial decision earlier this year to cancel plans for a new mission to the Moon.

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Why Aviation Industry Has Cloudy Knowledge Of Risks From Volcanic Ash

From The Guardian:

Tests for higher-risk flying conditions may have helped in current crisis but manufacturers said no.

That a cloud of volcanic ash can bring European flights to a standstill has raised serious questions over the aviation industry's efforts to understand the risks of flying in such conditions.

Rules laid down by the International Civil Aviation Organisation prohibit flights through any amount of volcanic ash, but aircraft and engine manufacturers have never fully investigated the effects of flying in ash clouds. What information they have has been gleaned from inspecting planes after they have flown into ash plumes by accident.

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Why Volcanoes Are Dangerous

Ash Cloud Reminds Us That We Should All Be Afraid Of Volcanoes -- The Telegraph

Eyjafjallajökull's giant cloud of ash is a nuisance, but a supervolcano's catastrophic eruption could threaten the fabric of civilisation, says Kate Ravilious.

Every so often the Earth chooses to remind us that we really aren't in control of this planet. The volcanic eruption in Iceland, which began on Wednesday, is just such a reminder. As ash spews out across northern Europe, grounding all flights across Scandinavia and the UK, we begin to realise how powerless we humans are.

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Giant Sequoias Yield Longest Fire History From Tree Rings

This cross-section of a giant sequoia tree shows some of the tree-rings and fire scars. The numbers indicate the year that a particular ring was laid down by the tree. (Credit: Tom Swetnam.)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2010) — A 3,000-year record from 52 of the world's oldest trees shows that California's western Sierra Nevada was droughty and often fiery from 800 to 1300, according to new research.

Scientists reconstructed the 3,000-year history of fire by dating fire scars on ancient giant sequoia trees, Sequoiadendron giganteum, in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park. Individual giant sequoias can live more than 3,000 years.

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Is 3-D TV Dangerous?

From Live Science:

3-D television looks awesome, but can it be hazardous to your health?

That's what many are wondering now that electronics giant Samsung issued guidelines on its Web site warning consumers of potential health risks associated with the emerging technology.

The warning advises parents to monitor their children as they watch 3-D, and cautions that it could trigger seizures:

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Supercomputers Map Pathogens As They Emerge And Evolve

A screenshot from a Supramap study of avian influenza, with red lines representing the spread of drug-resistant strains and the white lines drug susceptible strains. Credit: Ohio Supercomputing Center

From Cosmos:

BRISBANE: Instead of simply focussing on human infections, infectious disease researchers can now track the complex interactions, movement and evolution of the pathogens themselves using supercomputers.

The researchers are using a new program called Supramap, which operates on the computing systems at Ohio State University and the Ohio Supercomputer Center.

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The Coming Tide of Global Climate Lawsuits

From Wired Science:

The Prunerov power station is the Czech Republic’s biggest polluter: Its Its 900-foot-high smokestack pushes a plume of white smoke high above the flat, featureless fields of northern Bohemia. Prunerov reliably wins a place on lists of Europe’s dirtiest power plants, emitting 11.1 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. So when CEZ Group, the state-controlled utility, proposed an overhaul to extend the facility’s life for another quarter of a century, protests flared — including one from a place about as far from the sooty industrial region as you can get, a place of tropical temperatures and turquoise seas with not a smokestack in sight. This January, the Federated States of Micronesia, some 8,000 miles away in the Pacific Ocean, lodged a legal challenge to the Prunerov plant on the grounds that its chronic pollution threatens the island nation’s existence.

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Study: Brain Exercises Don't Improve Cognition

Brain-training tasks improve performance in the trained tasks alone, rather than improving cognitive performance overall. artpartner-images / Photographer's Choice RF / Getty Images

From Time Magazine:

You've probably heard it before: the brain is a muscle that can be strengthened. It's an assumption that has spawned a multimillion-dollar computer game industry of electronic brain-teasers and memory games. But in the largest study of such brain games to date, a team of British researchers has found that healthy adults who undertake computer-based "brain-training" do not improve their mental fitness in any significant way.

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Space Shuttle Discovery Lands (Video)

Revealed: The Hapless Apple Engineer Who Lost Top-Secret 4G iPhone Prototype After A Beer-Fuelled Night Out

Already a T-shirt marking Gray Powell's error is on sale

From The Daily Mail:

It has happened to most of us at some point: you arrive home after a night out and can’t remember what on earth you did with your phone.

But - unluckily for this man - a mobile left behind on a bar stool at a German beer garden in Redwood City, California, has set alarm bells ringing with an intrigue worthy of the Cold War.

For a website is claiming that the forgotten phone wasn’t just any old mobile. Gadget blog Gizmodo says it was a secret prototype of the next generation of the iPhone.

And if so, Apple employee Gray Powell has just made his 27th birthday unforgettable.

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Climate Science Skepticism: 5 Controversial Claims

From ABC News:

Is Earth Really Warming? Are Humans Responsible? Why Climate Skeptics Doubt

As Earth Day approaches, climate change is climbing back into the public consciousness. But though most climatologists agree that humans are driving global warming, surveys suggest that public concern about climate change is waning.

A Gallup poll in March found that 48 percent of Americans believe the global warming issue is "exaggerated," which is up from 41 percent in 2009 and 31 percent in 1997.

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Maxed Out: What's The Human Speed Limit?

Not quite as fast as the speed of light (Image: Seiko Press Service / Getty)

From New Scientist:

Last year, Usain Bolt stunned athletics fans when he hacked 0.11 seconds off his previous world record for the 100-metre sprint. But what's the ultimate human speed limit?

Intrigued by this question, Mark Denny at Stanford University, California, decided to work out how fast a human could possibly sprint 100 metres. He examined previous records for various athletics competitions - and greyhound and horse races for good measure - since the 1920s, and found that performances in many events followed a similar pattern, improving steadily until they reached a plateau. Horses in the Kentucky Derby, for example, appeared to approach their speed limit in 1949. Since then any improvements have become minimal and increasingly rare.

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Report: Global Net Speeds Keep Bumping Up

(Credit: Akamai)

From CNET:

The fastest are getting faster.

Eight of the top 10 countries or regions in terms of Internet speed saw a boost in the final quarter of 2009, according to Akamai's "State of the Internet Report" released Tuesday.

Among those top areas, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan grabbed the best Internet performance globally, averaging connection speeds higher than 7.5 megabits per second (Mbps) in the fourth quarter. Although South Korea actually was hit by a 29 percent decline in performance year over year, it still snagged the No. 1 spot at 11.7 Mbps.

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Routine Lifting May Not Be As Bad For Your Back As Thought, Research Suggests

Tapio Videman is a researcher in the University of Alberta's Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine. (Credit: Photo courtesy the University of Alberta)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 15, 2010) — Tapio Videman says back disorders in the working population are among the most costly illnesses in developed countries around the world. Disc degeneration is the main suspected origin of severe back symptoms and the main target in spine surgery.

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Another Iceland Volcano Under Watch

Visible (left) and infrared (right) images of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano, acquired April 17, 2010, from the Hyperion instrument onboard NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL/EO-1 Mission/GSFC/Ashley Davies

From Live Science:

News reports earlier today that another volcano on Iceland had erupted just as Eyjafjallajokull was beginning to calm down turned out to be false. But scientists are warily keeping their eye on one of Eyjafjallajokull's neighbors, which has been known to erupt following its sister.

An MSNBC Twitter feed and one other news service ran reports that a volcano called Hekla had erupted on Iceland today. Those rumors turned out to be false, but even if Hekla had blown its top today, it would have been "purely coincidental," said Jay Miller, a volcano researcher at Texas A&M University.

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Maxed Out: How Long Can We Concentrate For?

Surgeons have to concentrate for hours on end (Image: OJO Images / Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

It's a challenge that most of us have faced when up against an essay deadline, a late-night crisis in the office or perhaps a long car drive. Just how long can we push ourselves mentally before our brain needs a break?

For people in jobs where concentration is critical, like truck drivers, power-plant operators or airline pilots, a 12-hour shift is the limit for most. But pity doctors: complex surgery can go on for hours longer than that, although the lengthiest operations tend to be shared by more than one team.

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Five Biggest Volcano Eruptions In Recent History

This picture is of a June 12, 1991, eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines – one of the smaller eruptions that preceded the main eruption on June 15. That eruption was the biggest since 1912 – a 6 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. The eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano rates a 2 or 3. Newscom

From Christian Science Monitor:

The eruption at Eyafjallajökull volcano in Iceland has been hugely disruptive to world travel. But as a volcanic event, it's barely worth mentioning.

By the measure of the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) – a sort-of Richter scale for eruptions – the current outburst is probably a 2 or a 3, experts say. In other words, eruptions like Eyjafjallajökull happen virtually every year somewhere in the world.

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Apple Requests Return Of Lost iPhone Prototype

Photo: Gizmodo posts photos of what it says is the next version of the iPhone. (Credit: Screenshot by Erica Ogg/CNET)

From CNET:

Gizmodo said Monday evening it is making arrangements to return an errant device that is believed to be a prototype of the next iPhone, following a request from Apple's legal department, which Gizmodo calls verification of the device's authenticity.

The tech blog site had revealed early Monday that it was in possession of a device it concluded to be a prototype of the unreleased and as-yet-unannounced iPhone 4G. The next-generation device was reportedly found last month on the floor of a San Francisco Bay Area bar after it was apparently left by a customer identified as an Apple employee.

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A Saturn Spectacular, With Gravity’s Help

SEVEN MORE YEARS Brent Buffington, from left, David Seal and John C. Smith arranged models of Jupiter and Saturn in a viewing room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif. Robert Benson for The New York Times

From The New York Times:

When it comes to voyages of discovery, NASA’s venerable Cassini mission is about as good as it gets.

In six years of cruising around the planet Saturn and its neighborhood, the Cassini spacecraft has discovered two new Saturn rings, a bunch of new moons and a whole new class of moonlets. It encountered liquid lakes on the moon Titan, water ice and a particle plume on the moon Enceladus, ridges and ripples on the rings, and cyclones at Saturn’s poles. Cassini also released a European space probe that landed on Titan. And Cassini has sent back enough data to produce more than 1,400 scientific papers — at last count.

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Bureaucracy Linked To A Nation's Growth

Two of the conquest inscriptions on Building J (ca. 100 BC). Each inscription shows an upside down head with closed eyes signifying conquest on the bottom, a "hill" glyph signifying generalized place in the middle, and a third element on top that varies among inscriptions signifying specific place name. (Credit: Charles S. Spencer, AMNH, used with permission)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2010) — "Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work," said Albert Einstein, sharing a popular view about bureaucracy grinding progress to a halt.

But it now appears that the organizing functions of bureaucracy were essential to the progressive growth of the world's first states, and may have helped them conquer surrounding areas much earlier than originally thought. New research conducted in the Valley of Oaxaca near Monte Albán, a large pre-Columbian archaeological site in southern Mexico, also implies that the first bureaucratic systems may have a lasting influence on today's modern states.

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