Rediscovering Hydro Power

U.S. Looks to Rediscover Hydropower as Untapped Energy Source
-- Popular Mechanics

From the pipes in water-treatment plants to long-forgotten river turbines, overlooked sources of energy throughout the U.S. are poised to be tapped.

From the front, the old brick mill in Middlebury, Vt., looks like any of the other quaint buildings lining the town’s main street. But inside, through yawning gaps in a patchwork floor of long, narrow planks, the gray-green waters of Otter Creek can be seen churning toward a 23-ft. waterfall. Anchored to a stone bridge above the river, the building once had a mill wheel that drove wool-processing equipment; later, a penstock carried water to a turbine, generating electricity for the town’s streetlights.

For the past 42 years, the power of the river has gone untapped—the turbine is long since dismantled—and Middlebury’s electricity now comes from the grid. The only sign of the penstock, the pipe that funneled water to the powerhouse, is a crumbling concrete frame, and the sluice gate that controlled the river diversion is missing its metal plate. Local resident Anders Holm plans to change that.

An ear, nose and throat specialist who grew up in town, Holm was born a few years after the hydropower system was retired. His father purchased the mill in the 1980s and rented it out as commercial space. But changing times—particularly the events of Sept. 11, 2001—convinced Holm to reduce his dependence on foreign oil. He covered his home with solar panels. Then he and his brother, Erik, decided to restore both the mill and the hydropower.

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CERN News Updates -- September 8, 2008

Proton-smashing will start at the 27-kilometer tunnel beneath Switzerland in a month. (Martial Trezzin/Keystone, via The Associated Press)

CERN Fires Up New Atom Smasher To Near Big Bang
-- Yahoo News/AP

GENEVA - It has been called an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe — or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday.

Whatever the case, the most powerful atom-smasher ever built comes online Wednesday, eagerly anticipated by scientists worldwide who have awaited this moment for two decades.

The multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider will explore the tiniest particles and come ever closer to re-enacting the big bang, the theory that a colossal explosion created the universe.

The machine at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, promises scientists a closer look at the makeup of matter, filling in gaps in knowledge or possibly reshaping theories.

The first beams of protons will be fired around the 17-mile tunnel to test the controlling strength of the world's largest superconducting magnets. It will still be about a month before beams traveling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some skeptics fear could create micro "black holes" and endanger the planet.

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More News On CERN

Atom-smasher promises closer look at makeup of matter -- International Herald Tribune
Excitement and Fear Abound Over Super Collider -- Yahoo News/News Factor
CERN fires up new atom smasher to near Big Bang -- San Francisco Chronicle
Next Stop: The Fourth Dimension, With Large Hadron Collider Experiments -- Science Daily
Fingers Crossed, Physicists Are Ready for Collider to Roll -- New York Times Science
Multibillion-dollar experiment to probe nature's mysteries -- New York Sun
60,000 Computers Primed For Big Bang Probe -- CBS News
Global computer network ready for Big Bang probe -- USA Today
'The Grid' will see 80,000 computer network processing data from LHC -- The Telegraph
Super-smasher targets massive mystery -- MSNBC
Discovery or doom? Collider stirs debate -- MSNBC
Fear Looms Over Scientist's Experiment to Uncover Secrets of 'Big Bang' -- FOX News
The Large Hadron Collider: "the most extreme historical reenactment society ever" -- The Guardian
Five Particles; The Making of CERN -- Times Online
World's Biggest Physics Experiment Moves Closer to Completion -- Voice Of America
How the Large Hadron Collider Might Change the Web -- Scientific America
Scientists Get Death Threats Over Big Bang Experiment -- New York Sun
CERN's LHC 'First Beam' to be broadcast live on Wednesday -- Edgadget

Hubble Crew Faces Higher Risk Of Debris Hit: NASA

From Reuters:

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The shuttle crew being dispatched to work on the Hubble Space Telescope faces a higher-than-usual chance of disaster due to orbital debris, the shuttle program manager said on Monday.

NASA is preparing for a fifth and final servicing mission to the orbital observatory next month.

The environment where Hubble flies, about 350 miles (560 km) above the planet, is more littered with shards of exploded spacecraft and rockets than the area around the International Space Station, which orbits about 210 miles above Earth.

The odds of catastrophic damage from an orbital debris strike are 1 in 185 for the Hubble crew, compared with 1 in 300 for missions to the space station, John Shannon, the shuttle program manager, told reporters.

"It's our biggest risk," he said.

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More News On The Space Shuttle's Mission

NASA: Space Debris a Higher Risk for Hubble Shuttle Flight -- Space.com
NASA warns Hubble mission brings greater space debris risk -- AFP
Shuttle Atlantis Faces Debris Danger on Hubble Mission -- The Write Stuff
Hubble shuttle flight faces higher space junk risk -- International Herald Tribune
Atlantis is moved to launch pad -- L.A. Times
Shuttle Launch Dates for 2008 Rescheduled -- Geek Dad

Rosetta Probe Sends Asteroid Images To Earth

The Steins asteroid was slightly larger than first believed, at 3.1 miles in diameter, rather than 3 miles, European space officials say. (ESA / AP)

From San Francisco Chronicle:

(09-07) 04:00 PDT Darmstadt, Germany -- The European deep space probe Rosetta successfully completed a flyby of an asteroid millions of miles from Earth, but its high resolution camera stopped shortly before the closest pass, space officials said Saturday.

Rosetta caught up with the Steins asteroid, also known as Asteroid 2867, just after 8:45 p.m. Friday in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The probe came within 500 miles of the asteroid - which turned out to be slightly larger than scientists expected.

Officials at the European Space Agency were not sure exactly what caused the camera to balk.

"The software switched off automatically," said Gerhard Schwehm, the ESA mission manager and head of solar systems science operations. "The camera has some software limits, and we'll analyze why this happened later."

Another wide angle camera was able to take pictures and send them to the space center, Schwehm said.

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Meet The Real Bionic Women

Claudia Mitchell feels sensations in the hand she is missing thanks to an innovative surgery.

Nerve Surgery Leaves Woman With Feeling in an Arm
That Isn't There -- ABC News

Claudia Mitchell may look like your average 20-something college student. She is anything but.

As a result of an experimental surgery, Mitchell has become the first real "Bionic Woman": part human, part computer.

Mitchell's bionic life began in 2004 with a ride on a friend's motorcycle. The bike suddenly spun out of control, and Mitchell's left arm was severed by a highway divider. After her doctor's attempts to reattach the arm proved unsuccessful, she was outfitted with a standard prosthetic arm.

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How to Navigate the Cold and Flu Aisle

When it comes to choosing the right medicine for your cold and flu symptoms,
a little knowledge can go a long way.

From ABC News:

Doctors Explain What Works, What's Hype, and How to Keep Tiny Tots Safe and Healthy

The moment when people want cold medicines the most, when their heads are stuffed, aching and dizzy, is exactly the worst time to try and decipher what to buy from the rows of cold medicine boxes with small print.

Instead of grabbing the first thing you remember from last night's commercial and ending up unsatisfied or with side effects, you can draw on recommendations from physicians and pediatricians on how to navigate the cold and flu aisle.

"I know this is a chore for patients, and it makes it much more complicated ... but whatever you're taking, make sure you put them all side-by-side and make sure that the ingredients don't overlap," said Dr. Vincenza Snow, director of clinical programs and quality of care at the American College of Physicians.

With lines of symptom-fighting drugs in combinations that could rival a fast-food restaurant menu, Snow said patients often get confused by what to choose. However, many of the over-the-counter cold medicines have the same active ingredients.

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U.K. Bandwidth Problems On The Horizon

'Tough Choices' For UK Broadband -- BBC News (Technology)

The cost of taking fibre-based broadband to every UK home could top £28.8bn, says a report.

Compiled by the government's broadband advisory group, the report details the cost of the different ways to wire the UK for next generation broadband.

Another option, to take the fibres to street-level boxes, would only cost £5.1bn, it said.

Big differences in the cost of updating urban and rural net access will pose difficult choices, says the report.

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Google Reigns As Most Powerful 10-Year-Old

Google Campus

From ABC News:

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. on Sept. 7, 1998, they had little more than their ingenuity, four computers and an investor's $100,000 bet on their belief that an Internet search engine could change the world.

It sounded preposterous 10 years ago, but look now: Google draws upon a gargantuan computer network, nearly 20,000 employees and a $150 billion market value to redefine media, marketing and technology.

Perhaps Google's biggest test in the next decade will be finding a way to pursue its seemingly boundless ambitions without triggering a backlash that derails the company.

"You can't do some of the things that they are trying to do without eventually facing some challenges from the government and your rivals," said Danny Sullivan, who has followed Google since its inception and is now editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.

Google's expanding control over the flow of Internet traffic and advertising already is raising monopoly concerns.

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Global Warming Trends

Scientists say permafrost blanketing the northern hemisphere contains more than twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, making it a potentially mammoth contributor to global climate change depending on how quickly it thaws. (Credit: iStockphoto/Oksana Perkins)

Bad Sign For Global Warming: Thawing Permafrost Holds
Vast Carbon Pool -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Sep. 7, 2008) — Permafrost blanketing the northern hemisphere contains more than twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, making it a potentially mammoth contributor to global climate change depending on how quickly it thaws.

So concludes a group of nearly two dozen scientists in a paper appearing this week in the journal Bioscience. The lead author is Ted Schuur, an associate professor of ecology at the University of Florida.

Previous studies by Schuur and his colleagues elsewhere have estimated the carbon contained in permafrost in northeast Siberia. The new research expands that estimate to the rest of the permafrost-covered northern latitudes of Russia, Europe, Greenland and North America. The estimated 1,672 billion metric tons of carbon locked up in the permafrost is more than double the 780 billion tons in the atmosphere today.

"It's bigger than we thought," Schuur said.

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Warmth Opens Arctic Routes, Scientists Say

From International Herald Tribune:

Leading ice specialists in Europe and the United States have agreed for the first time that a ring of navigable waters has opened all around the fringes of the cap of sea ice drifting on the warming Arctic Ocean.

By many accounts, this is the first time in at least half a century, if not longer, that the Northwest Passage over North America and the Northern Sea Route over Europe and Asia have been open simultaneously.

While currents and winds play a role, specialists say, the expanding open water in the far north provides the latest evidence that the Arctic Ocean, long a frozen region hostile to all but nuclear submariners and seal hunters, is transforming during the summers into more of an open ocean.

Global warming from the continuing buildup of human-generated greenhouse gases is almost certainly contributing to the ice retreats, many Arctic specialists now agree, although they hold a variety of views on how much of the recent big ice retreats is caused by human activity.

Last month, news reports said that satellites showed navigable waters through both fabled Arctic shipping routes.

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Deep Space Probe Completes Asteroid Flyby

From CBS News:

(AP) The Rosetta deep space probe successfully passed close to an asteroid 250 million miles from Earth, the European Space Agency said Friday night.

In a mission that may bring man closer to solving the mystery of the solar system's birth, the craft completed its flyby of the Steins asteroid, also known as Asteroid 2867 - now in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter - at around 3:15 p.m. EDT.

As planned, the spacecraft's signal was lost for about 90 minutes as engineers turned it away from the sun and because the craft was moving too fast for its antennas to transmit.

The resumption of the craft's signal transmission was greeted with cheers from ESA engineers and technicians.

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For Sale: Moon And Mars

If you lived here, you could sell real estate, according to one legal analysis. NASA’s Spirit rover, the current occupant and photographer here in Mars’ Gusev Crater, has not tried subdividing it. (NASA)

From The New York Times Science Blog:

Would you like to buy some real estate on Mars or the Moon?

No, this would not be the equivalent of buying the Brooklyn Bridge, at least according to a review of legal precedents and treaties published in the Journal of Air Law and Commerce (.pdf). The authors, Alan Wasser and Douglas Jobe of the Space Settlement Institute, conclude that the international Outer Space Treaty prohibits nations from claiming sovereignty over the Moon or Mars, it does not preclude private land claims, and they point to legal precedents establishing the necessary condition for anyone making a land claim: living there.

Now, this might seem like a mere academic exercise for lawyers, given the current shortage of people ready to settle down on the Moon or Mars. But Mr. Wasser and Mr. Jobes argue that a formal recognition of the right to claim Alaska-sized chunks of land is the fastest and most practical way to promote extraterrestrial colonies.

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Why The Early Earth Didn't Freeze Solid

From FOX News:

Early in Earth's history, our solar system was a much different place.

When the sun was very young, it was faint and provided little heat for the Earth. However, even in its chilly beginnings, the surface of the Earth was ice-free.

For years, scientists have proposed theories for this "faint young sun problem."

Most of these theories are based on the idea that the early Earth must have had extremely high amounts of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere in order to warm the planet.

According to a team of German scientists, geological evidence of atmospheric CO2 seems to indicate that levels were "far too low to keep the surface from freezing."

However, their new study may provide a new answer to the problem.

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Strange New Comet Explains Old Mystery

This chart shows the orbital paths (looking along the plane of the solar system) for the comet 2008 KV42 as well as other objects in the outer solar system.

Why Does Halley’s Comet Orbit Backwards? New Find Hints
At The Reason -- MSNBC

Halley's Comet, which lights up Earth's sky every 75 years with its glowing tail, is a bit of a scientific mystery.

So far, theories have been at a loss to explain how it acquired its extremely unusual backwards orbit — but the recent discovery of another odd comet orbiting farther out in the solar system may shed light on Halley's origins.

The newly discovered comet, 2008 KV42, circles the sun at a tilt of 104 degrees compared to the main plane in which most of the planets and asteroids travel. The newfound oddball also orbits in reverse compared to almost everything else. Scientists think it might represent an intermediate point between comets like Halley's and their progenitors in the far and totally uncharted reaches of the solar system.

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10 Species You Can Kiss Goodbye

Sumatran Rhinoceros

From Live Science:

Think the polar bear has it bad? Here are 10 critters who are even worse off than our favorite threatened Arctic resident. Listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List as critically endangered, meaning they face an extremely high risk of extinction in the immediate future, these animals may not live to see the end of the next decade without the a similar effort of human intervention that brought them to the brink in the first place.

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Where Have Your Distant Relatives Lived In The World

Putting You On The Map: The Website That Pinpoints Where Your Name Is In The World -- The Independent

It Is a question that not even Google can answer: where in the world are all the other people with my name?

It sounds impossible, but it can now be answered thanks to a remarkable new website launched yesterday, which enables the names of most people in the English-speaking world, and a sizeable chunk of the rest of it, to be tracked to the places they live.

Set up by geographers at University College London (UCL), the site, www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames, will provide a remarkable tool for tracing family history and also a powerful aid for governments to keep track of intra-national and international migrations.

The database behind the site holds 300 million names of people in 26 countries, representing a population of about a billion, or nearly a sixth of the world.

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Update: The Official Site World Names is here.

Hanna-Ike-Josephine Storm Trio Isn't An Anomaly

Hurricanes form through an exchange of warm, humid air and cold,
unstable air between the upper and lower atmosphere.

From The L.A. Times

Global warming can't be blamed for the trifecta -- headed toward the Southeast U.S. -- meteorologists say. It's just 'peak season in an active hurricane cycle.'

Despite the prospect of three major tropical storms heading toward the Southeastern United States, meteorologists say that the conga-line assault is not particularly unusual in the stormy history of the region.

"We're in peak season in an active hurricane cycle, and this is one of the results of that," said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and public affairs officer with the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

"We've had incidents where four or five storms have been stacked up."

The first of the storms, Hanna, was expected to reach the Carolina coast late Friday or early today with sustained winds of 65 mph, according to the National Weather Service.

Hurricane Ike was on a path to reach southern Florida early next week, and Tropical Storm Josephine was on deck between the western coast of Africa and the Caribbean.

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How Did Life on Earth Get Started?

From U.S. News And World Report:

On an arid outcropping of basalt in northwestern Australia, some of the oldest rocks on Earth lie exposed to the fierce sun. Formed at the bottom of an ancient ocean, this volcanic material shelters what one scientist calls the "oldest robust evidence" of life. At a scientific meeting at Rockefeller University in May, Roger Buick of the University of Washington said that the 3.5 billion-year-old rocks hold traces of carbon that once made up living organisms.

Even before Buick's discovery, ample evidence indicated that life on Earth began while our 4.5 billion-year-old planet was very young. Simple organisms certainly flourished between 2 billion and 3 billion years ago, and claims of older evidence of life have periodically surfaced. But none have been universally embraced, and Buick's claim is so new that other scientists haven't fully reviewed it.

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The Incredible Journey Taken By Our Genes

(Click To Enlarge)

From The Guardian:

Project maps humanity's voyage out of Africa to new continents and domination of the world

Sixty thousand years ago, a small group of African men and women took to the Red Sea in tiny boats and crossed the Mandab Strait to Asia. Their journey - of less than 20 miles - marked the moment Homo sapiens left its home continent.

The motive for our ancestors' African exodus is not known, though scientists suspect food shortages, triggered by climate change, were involved. However, its impact cannot be overestimated. Two thousand generations later, descendants of these African emigres have settled our entire planet, wiped out all other hominids including the Neanderthals and have reached a population of 6.5 billion.

Now scientists are completing a massive study of DNA samples from a quarter of a million volunteers in different continents in order to create the most precise map yet of mankind's great diaspora. Last week, in Tallinn, Estonia, they outlined their most recent results. 'As the ultimate ancestor begat son, who begat son and so on, they picked up mutations in their DNA that we can now pinpoint by gene analysis,' said project leader Dr Spencer Wells. 'When we look at these markers' distributions we can see how our ancestors moved about.'

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How Pollution In Asia Affects Everyone

Asia Pollution May Boost U.S. Temperatures -- CNN

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Smog, soot and other particles like the kind often seen hanging over Beijing add to global warming and may raise summer temperatures in the American heartland by three degrees in about 50 years, says a new federal science report released Thursday.

These overlooked, shorter-term pollutants -- mostly from burning wood and kerosene and from driving trucks and cars -- cause more localized warming than once thought, the authors of the report say.

They contend there should be a greater effort to attack this type of pollution for faster results.

For decades, scientists have concentrated on carbon dioxide, the most damaging greenhouse gas because it lingers in the atmosphere for decades. Past studies have barely paid attention to global warming pollution that stays in the air merely for days.

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