Space Shuttle Discovery: Launch Delayed To Nov. 30

From ABC News:

Final Flight for Discovery but Ship 'Not Going Out Easy'.

If the space shuttle Discovery had launched on schedule, she would now be in orbit, docked with the International Space Station, her six astronauts joining the six currently on board the station to unload 22,000 earth pounds of equipment.

But as has often happened in 30 years of shuttle flights, Discovery still sits on launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center here in Florida, waiting as mission managers worked their way through a minor helium leak, a minor electrical problem and Florida's famously unpreditable weather.

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Deep Impact Spacecraft Successfully Flies by Comet Hartley 2

This is an image of comet Hartley 2 taken on the closest flyby with the smaller of spacecrafts two telescopes (with cameras) on the University of Maryland-led EPOXI mission. (Credit: Credit: NASA/University of Maryland)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 4, 2010) — The University of Maryland-led EPOXI mission successfully flew by comet Hartley 2 at 10 a.m. EDT Nov. 3, 2010, and the spacecraft has begun returning images. Hartley 2 is the fifth comet nucleus visited by any spacecraft and the second one visited by the Deep Impact spacecraft.

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How Earth May Owe Its Life To Comets

Hubble Space Telescope observations of comet 103P/Hartley 2, taken on Sept. 25, are helping in the planning for a Nov. 4 flyby of the comet by the Deep Impact eXtended Investigation (DIXI) on NASA's EPOXI spacecraft. Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (The Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Lab)

From Live Science:

Comets have inspired both awe and alarm since antiquity, "hairy stars" resembling fiery swords that to many were omens of doom. Nowadays, scientists have found evidence that comets not only may have taken life away through cataclysmic impacts, they may have helped provide life by supplying Earth with vital molecules such as water — possibilities they hope to learn more about from the encounter with Comet Hartley 2 tomorrow (Nov. 4).

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Scientists May Have Discovered A Cure For The Common Cold (And Lots Of Other Viruses)

Virus Attack! Virus (purple) circulating in the bloodstream recognised by antibodies (yellow) of the immune system The Independent

From Popular Science:

Any immunology textbook will tell you that once a virus enters a cell, the only way to knock that virus out is to kill the entire cell. But a new study from the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge has shown a way to kill a virus from within the cell, leaving the virus defeated and the cell victorious and intact. This could be huge--not just a cure for the common cold, but for all kinds of other viruses as well.

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Outback Asteroid Strike Caused Huge Explosion And Left 80km Shock Zone, Studies Reveal

Satellite image showing an asteroid impact crater at Gosses Bluff in the Northern Territory. Source: Supplied

From The Australian:

EVIDENCE has been found of a massive asteroid impact near the Queensland-South Australia border more than 300 million years ago.

The asteroid, which produced a shock zone at least 80km wide, could be the second-largest asteroid ever found in Australia.

University of Queensland geothermal energy researcher Dr Tongu Uysal discovered the asteroid impact during his studies of the Cooper Basin, which is a large geothermal energy resource being developed on the border between Queensland and South Australia.

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Three Questions: The Internet's Next Generation

Photo: photos.com

From Voice of America:

Add this to the list of things you didn't know you had to worry about: the most commonly used version of the Internet is almost out of room.

The global organization that helps coordinate the allocation of Internet addresses is warning only about 200 million are left. That may sound like a lot, but the Number Resource Organization says more than 200 million addresses were assigned in just the last nine months.

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The Other 'G' Spot

From Wall Street Journal:

At the beginning of the 20th century the British psychologist Charles Spearman "discovered" the idea of general intelligence. Spearman observed that students' grades in different subjects, and their scores on various tests, were all positively correlated. He then showed that this pattern could be explained mathematically by assuming that people vary in special abilities for the different tests as well as a single general ability—or "g"—that is used for all of them.

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How One Company Games Google News

Note the second cluster of stories produced by a Google News search for "iTunes" yesterday afternoon. All of those Red Label News stories were basically the same: spammy SEO-keywords alongside Web ads. (Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

From CNET News:

Red Label News is not exactly a household name. But yesterday afternoon, it was one of the top news sources on Google News for stories about Apple's iTunes song previews.

How'd that happen? Red Label News, it appears, is a cleverly designed collection of links and headlines meant to game Google News rankings.

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How To Use Google For Hacking

From Go Hacking:

Google serves almost 80 percent of all search queries on the Internet, proving itself as the most popular search engine. However Google makes it possible to reach not only the publicly available information resources, but also gives access to some of the most confidential information that should never have been revealed. In this post I will show how to use Google for exploiting security vulnerabilities within websites. The following are some of the hacks that can be accomplished using Google.

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Putting Ice On Injuries Could Slow Healing

This discovery turns the conventional wisdom that swelling must be controlled in order to encourage healing and prevent pain Photo: CORBIS

From The Telegraph:

Slapping a packet of frozen peas on a black eye or a sprained ankle may prevent it getting better, new research suggests.

For years, people have been told to freeze torn, bruised or sprained muscles to reduce the swelling.

But now for the first time, researchers have found that it could slow down the healing as it prevents the release of a key repair hormone.

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The Real Reason Women Outlive Men: It's All A Matter Of Breeding

From The Independent:

The reason women live longer than men – and why the final act of sex discrimination favours females over males – may at long last have a scientifically valid explanation.

Scientists believe we are close to understanding why men on average die younger than women. Life expectancy in Britain has risen steadily for both sexes over the past few decades and even though the gender gap has narrowed, women are still significantly more likely to live longer than men.

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Exoskeleton Helps the Paralysed Walk Again

From New Scientist:

Amanda Boxtel, a wheelchair user, is about to stand up. A skiing accident 18 years ago partially severed her spinal cord leaving her paralysed from the waist down. She slowly pushes herself out of the chair with crutches, teeters backward for a second, then leans forward – and takes a step. Soon she is walking around the warehouse in Berkeley, California, under her own direction.

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'Living Dinosaurs' in Space: Galaxies in Today's Universe Thought to Have Existed Only In Distant Past

A simulation of a star forming galaxy similar to those observed. Cold gas (red) flowing onto a spiral galaxy feeds star formation. (Credit: Rob Crain, James Geach, the Virgo Consortium, Andy Green & Swinburne Astronomy Productions)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2010) — Using Australian telescopes, Swinburne University astronomy student Andy Green has found 'living dinosaurs' in space: galaxies in today's Universe that were thought to have existed only in the distant past.

The report of his finding -- Green's first scientific paper -- appears on the cover of the Oct. 7 issue of Nature.

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What Farming Ants Can Teach Us About Bioenergy

A leaf-cutter ant foraging trail. These ants can form foraging trails in the rainforest that are hundreds of meters long containing thousands of workers. Credit: Jarrod Scott, University of Wisconsin-Madison

From Live Science:

What new methods will allow us to create biofuel from plants? Garret Suen, a computational microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) in the Department of Bacteriology is trying to find out. Suen is a post-doctoral researcher working in the lab of Cameron Currie and in January of 2011, he will be joining the faculty in the Department of Bacteriology and starting up his own lab and research program. Suen grew up in Toronto (before moving to Calgary for college), and being from Canada, he thoroughly enjoys Wisconsin winters. Suen’s current work at UW centers on how to convert cellulose found in plants into a fermentable sugar that can be used to make ethanol for fuel.

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'Mini-Pompeii' Found In Norway

From Discovery News:

Norwegian archaeologists have unearthed a Neolithic “mini Pompeii” at a campsite near the North Sea, they announced this week.

Discovered at Hamresanden, not far from Kristiansand’s airport at Kjevik in southern Norway, the settlement has remained undisturbed for 5,500 years, buried under three feet of sand.

“We expected to find an 'ordinary' Scandinavian Stone Age site, badly preserved and small. Instead, we discovered a unique site, buried under a thick sand layer,” lead archaeologist Lars Sundström, of the Museum of Cultural History at the University in Oslo, told Discovery News.

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Giant Moon Collision 'May Have Formed Saturn's Rings'

Saturn's rings are largely made up of icy chunks

From The BBC:

Saturn's rings may have formed when a large moon with an icy mantle and rocky core spiralled into the nascent planet.

A US scientist has suggested that the tidal forces ripped off some of the moon's mantle before the actual impact.

The theory could shed light on the rings' mainly water-ice composition that has puzzled researchers for decades.

The scientist announced her idea at a conference in Pasadena, US.

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TechBytes: Amazon Apps Store

From ABC News:

Amazon is reportedly getting ready to open a new online application store. The Wall Street Journal reports that the apps would be for smartphones running Google's Android software. Google also has its own online store with about 80,000 apps. Apple's store has about 250,000 apps.

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Could An 'Elixir Of Life' Really Increase Your Lifespan?

From New Scientist:

A chemical elixir can add 10 years to your life! According to the media, anyway. How much of the claim that an amino acid cocktail can boost longevity should be taken with a pinch of salt?

For starters, the study was carried out in mice. Giuseppe D'Antona at Pavia University in Italy and his colleagues added a cocktail of three branched-chain amino acids (BCAA) - isoleucine, leucine and valine - to the feed of young nine-month-old mice.

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Video: Apollo 11 Launch At 500 Frames Per Second

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

Volcanoes Wiped out Neanderthals, New Study Suggests

The Semeru volcano in Indonesia. New research suggests that climate change following massive volcanic eruptions drove Neanderthals to extinction and cleared the way for modern humans to thrive in Europe and Asia. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 7, 2010) — New research suggests that climate change following massive volcanic eruptions drove Neanderthals to extinction and cleared the way for modern humans to thrive in Europe and Asia.

The research, led by Liubov Vitaliena Golovanova and Vladimir Borisovich Doronichev of the ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in St. Petersburg, Russia, is reported in the October issue of Current Anthropology.

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