Headlines

Concorde in the dust as new super sonic jet takes off. Full Article, New Scientist

New discoveries in deep space, question black hole theory. Full Article, New Scientist

"Nessie" Fosssils found in Australia, evidence suggests.

    The large, carnivorous reptiles lived 115 million years ago, during the age of the dinosaurs, when much of the continent was covered in water.

Fossils of two new species of plesiosaur were discovered near Coober Pedy in South Australia.

Plesiosaurs are popular in science fiction and are said to resemble Scotland's mythical Loch Ness monster.

The Australian specimens are described in recent editions of the journals Biology Letters and Palaeontology.

One, known as Umoonasaurus demoscyllus, was about 2.4m (7.2ft) long and had crests on its head, perhaps for display or mating purposes.

"Imagine a compact body with four flippers, a reasonably long neck, small head and short tail, much like a reptilian seal," said the lead author of the two papers, Dr Benjamin Kear of the University of Adelaide.

The other species, Opallionectes andamookaensis, grew to about 5m (16ft) long and had small needle-like teeth.

Treasure trove

Some 30 fossils were discovered at an opal mine near the outback mining town of Coober Pedy.

They are made up of the mineral opal, which filled the spaces left by bones when the original fossil-bearing rock was dissolved away by acidic ground water.

The fossils include several skeletons and a complete skull of Umoonasaurus, and a partial skeleton of Opallionectes.

They are thought to be of juvenile animals, suggesting the lake was a breeding and nursery ground.

Scientists believe sea-dwelling adults returned to the shallow inland waters to breed and raise their young.

At the time, Australia was much colder, and the inland ocean would have frozen over in places during the winter.

Scientists believe the creatures might have evolved mechanisms to cope with the harsh climate, such as a faster metabolic rate. They were carnivorous, feeding on fish and squid.

Source:BBC News

New Bird Flu vaccine promising new hope to curb Pandemic

LONDON -- A British company reported yesterday it had achieved the best results ever seen on an experimental human vaccine for bird flu and said mass production might be possible by 2007.

A global health official called GlaxoSmithKline's early results ``an exciting piece of science." If further tests are as promising, it would be a major step in the frustrating campaign to protect people from a possible deadly flu pandemic.

The US government's chief infectious disease scientist also was very optimistic.

``The data are really very impressive," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. ``It changes the whole complexion of the issue that we have to face of getting enough vaccine for people who might need it in a pandemic."

Glaxo's results came from tests on 400 people in Belgium, most of whom developed strong immune responses from very low doses of the prototype vaccine.

Success from wider tests of the vaccine could intensify competition with Sanofi-Aventis SA, whose vaccine unit, Sanofi Pasteur, reported disappointing results in March on its experimental product. It protected only about half of those who got two shots with a very high dose -- 90 micrograms of the key ingredient.

Glaxo said two shots of its vaccine provoked strong responses in more than 80 percent of people tested at lower doses than other experimental bird flu vaccines use. Some received as little as 3.8 micrograms, said Fauci, who has seen the test results.

The Glaxo vaccine includes an immune-system booster that allows it to use less of the main active ingredient, meaning that greater quantities could be produced if the H5N1 bird virus mutates into a form that spreads easily among people and causes a global epidemic. The vaccine uses an inactive version of the newer strain of H5N1, which was isolated in Indonesia last year

Source: Boston Globe

Headlines

Mystery woman helps dozens of Americans to safety. Full Article, CBS News

Chad and Sudan sign peace agreement. Full Article Global Good News

Russia offers amnesty to Chechens. Full Article Global Good News

Internet billionaire to build spaceport in Texas. Full Article, New Scientist

Nitric Oxide good for brain? Nitrous Oxide Bad! Full Article, New Scientist

Electricity helps heal wounds faster. Full Article, New Scientist

Global warming helped species evolve. Full Article, Science A Go Go

New hope for those suffering. Drug cocktail "stops MS in it's tracks"

    Multiple sclerosis sufferers have been offered hope of a normal life after doctors pioneered a wonder drug treatment.

A five-year study, due to be published in August's Journal of Neurology, found that patients with the aggressive form of MS had a reduced relapse rate of 90% under the regime. The drastic reduction means that patients who would have faced bedridden lives will now be able to work and raise families uninterrupted.

The treatment, which was tested at the Walton Centre for Neurology in Liverpool, involves a limited course of the cancer drug Mitoxantrone, followed by the disease-moderating drug Copaxone. Results were so successful that a full study is now being initiated at 10 centres across the UK, for which volunteers are being sought.

Dr Mike Boggild, the consultant neurologist who led the research, said the two drugs appeared to have a powerful combined effect. "This regime has proved remarkably effective. Though there are certain risks, associated particularly with use of Mitoxantrone we have been able to limit these by using this agent for just a short induction period. Balanced against the high risk of early disability for these patients, the outcomes appear to justify this approach," he said.

Karen Ayres, 28, was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of MS in 2002. She was treated by Dr Boggild and has not suffered a single relapse.

Miss Ayres, of Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, said: "During my second relapse, which was when I came into Dr Boggild's care, I couldn't walk or feed myself. Since then I have led a completely normal life. I have travelled to all five continents and I'm now doing a PhD in psychology at Leeds University."

Source: Guardian Unlimited

Headlines

The last few days I have been sick, so the site hasnt been updated, but the good news is, I'm feeling better! And theres more good news..

Tropical storm Beryl weakens. Full Article, Reuters

Police make arrests in Mumbai Blast. Full Article, Reuters

Americans catching on to Hydrogen vehicles. Full Article, Global Good News

China to invest $175 Billion for environmental clean-up. Full Article, Global Good News

Delay funding group ordered to shut down and pay fine. Full Article, Reuters

Tiger out of the woods and in the lead in British Open. Full Article, Breitbart

German scientists launch project to decipher the genetic code of the Neanderthal. Full Article, ABC News

Study shows playtime is a good time for kid's health. Full Article, Breitbart

Newly developed fiber at MIT can detect light waves.. It sees everything!

     Throw away those cumbersome camera lenses, as MIT has just developed a new and amazing lightweight web fiber that can "see". The new light detecting material, featured in the journal Nature Materials, is expected to have a myriad of uses, from aiding the visually impaired, to outfitting soldiers on the battlefield. And maybe the technology could extend to chic urbane fashions, so you really could have eyes in the back of your head.

The optical system is comprised of mesh-like webs of light-detecting fibers, which can calculate the direction, intensity and characteristic properties of the light wave being detected. MIT researchers consider this latest technology to be an improvement upon traditional optical technologies, such as lenses, filters and detector arrays that are based on the eye and its retina. While the clarity of images sourced from traditional lens technologies is excellent, they do have a number of drawbacks, such as their unidirectional perspective, size, weight, and their susceptibility to damage. By comparison, the optical web is lightweight, flexible, and if shaped as a sphere, the web can detect the entire environment in which it resides.

"When you're looking at something with your eyes, there's a particular direction you're looking in," explains MIT researcher Ayman Abouraddy. "The field of view is defined around that direction. Depending on the lens, you may be able to capture a certain field of view around that direction, but that's it. Until now, most every optical system was limited by an optical axis or direction."

Working in unison at their points of intersection, a spherical array of the 1-millimeter diameter fibers (consisting of a photoconductive glass core encased in a transparent polymer insulator) can pinpoint the exact source of incoming light anywhere along their length. Fink's team has also experimented with flat panel versions of the fibers that when placed in parallel to one another can generate crude computer images of backlit shapes and letters of the alphabet. The computer images are constructed from calculations based on the light intensity distributions detected by the fibers. Researchers suggest that the fibers could be woven into a textile, and a small CPU could provide information about a user's surrounds audibly or on a display screen (Spidey senses tingling!).

The technology could be improved and honed even further if the diameter of the fibers was reduced and the density of the web increased, but the team is more reserved when asked if the web will ever rival the human eye. "Just the idea of imaging with a transparent object is a true eye opener," said team leader, Professor Yoel Fink.

The new optical web system could enhance pre-existing technologies like space telescopes, and lead to a variety of new applications aimed at helping the visually impaired or providing a tactical advantage to soldiers on the battlefield. Researchers say that the transparent web fibers are even capable of interacting with giant computer screens, which could be activated with light beams rather than touch. "It's intriguing - the idea of touching with light. We could use light to enhance interaction with computers and even gaming systems," said Fink.

A web fiber equipped business suit comes highly recommended for those politicians and corporate execs wishing to avoid being stabbed in the back - where "et tu, brut?" becomes "I saw you coming."

Source: Science a Go Go

New Giant Telescope will see 10 times sharper than Hubble's

    A giant telescope with a mirror up to 60 metres wide is being planned by the European Southern Observatory. The telescope would be able to detect Earth-like planets around other stars and spot the universe's first galaxies.

The ESO has created a new office to design the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). "ESO aims to put the E-ELT on a fast track," says Roberto Gilmozzi, the principal investigator for the project.

Project managers have not yet chosen the size of the mirror but say it could range from 30 to 60 metres wide. ESO had previously been considering a 100-metre telescope called the OverWhelmingly Large telescope (OWL). But a review of the concept concluded that the project would be too risky and would take too long to build, Gilmozzi says.

"The advice was to go for a smaller telescope so that there was less risk and so it could be built in a shorter time," he told New Scientist.

International partnerships

Their goal is to build it for €750 million ($950 million) and have it ready to observe by 2015. Gilmozzi says ESO will likely provide about half the funds needed, with more coming from individual ESO member countries. Other funds could come from possible partnerships with non-European countries like the US or Japan, he said.

Two other groups are also pushing forward with plans for giant telescopes. A US-Australian consortium is planning a 24.5-metre instrument called the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) to be built by 2016 (see World's largest telescope begins with a spin). And a US-Canadian group is planning the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), also to be built by 2016.

The huge mirrors used for these projects will be assembled from smaller segments. "That's way cheaper than trying to build a single big mirror," says TMT team member Ray Carlberg of the University of Toronto, Canada.

The other crucial ingredient is a technology called adaptive optics, which compensates for the way light is blurred by Earth's atmosphere. This involves bouncing light from the telescope off a small corrector mirror, whose shape can change to counteract atmospheric distortion.

New vistas

While space-based telescopes enjoy crystal-clear views, ground-based telescopes have their own advantages. "For a given budget, ground-based telescopes can be much larger than telescopes in space," says GMT project manager Matt Johns of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Observatories in Pasadena, California, US.

The giant ground-based telescopes will have vision roughly four times sharper than the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that will replace Hubble, he says.

That powerful vision should open new vistas for astronomy. "The TMT, along with other telescopes, is largely going to figure out how galaxies form, how stars form and how planets form," says Carlberg.

As supporting technology such as adaptive optics improves, the new telescopes could eventually analyse the gases in the atmospheres of other Earth-like planets.

"Almost everyone is really excited about this planet stuff," Carlberg told New Scientist. "There's a whole vast new area of discovery there."

Source: New Scientist

Headlines

GOT GOOD NEWS?

Shuttle lands safely. Full Article, New Scientist

Tagged surgical equipment helps solve a deadly problem. Full Article Medical News Today

Sleep crucial to learning and memory. Full Article, Global Good News

Japan completes troop withdrawl from Iraq. Full Article, Global Good News

Virtual walking made possible by powered shoes. Full Article, New Scientist

High hopes for high altitude broadband. Full Article, Science a Gogo

Headlines

Shuttle lands safely. Is NASA back? Full Article, Breitbart

Plane built to flight with AA batteries. Full Article, Reuters

Organ doners and those in need now have an online ally in form of a website. Full Article, CBS News

20 Filipino seaman were released from Somalian Pirates after negotiating. Full Article, Global Good News

Invention: Device measures, Percentage of body fat. Full Aritcle, New Scientist

Rare lobster pulled from east coast waters

BAR HARBOR - The newest addition to the Mount Desert Oceanarium's lobster colony looks half-baked.

But it's nothing personal.

The rare 1-pound crustacean, caught earlier this week in Steuben, is a genetic mutation with a two-toned shell.

One side is the usual mottled dark green. The other side is the orange-red shade of a lobster that's already spent some time in the hot pot.

The odds of this kind of mutation occurring are very rare - something like one in 50 million to 100 million, according to oceanarium staff. The chance of finding a blue lobster is far more common, at one in a million.

"Isn't he pretty?" Bette Spurling of Southwest Harbor cooed Thursday as she stroked the lobster's shell to calm him down. "It's quite a drawing card for people because they're quite unusual."

Spurling is the wife of a lobsterman and works part time at the oceanarium. She explained that lobster shells are usually a blend of the three primary colors - red, yellow and blue. Those colors mix to form the greenish-brown of most lobsters. This lobster, though, has no blue in half of its shell.

That was a shock to longtime lobsterman Alan Robinson, who hauled him out of Dyer's Bay in Steuben.

"I didn't know what to think," Robinson said. "I thought somebody was playing a joke on me. Once I saw what it was ... it was worth seeing. I've caught a blue one before. But they claim this is rarer than the blue ones."

In his 20-plus years of fishing, he has never seen a lobster like this one.

"It was something with the line drawn so straight like that," Robinson said.

Bernard Arseneau, the former manager at the oceanarium's affiliated lobster hatchery, drove to Lubec on Wednesday to pick up the two-toned creature. He explained that lobsters have a growth pattern in which the two sides develop independently of each other.

"Even regular colored ones have a left-right sort of growth," Arseneau said.

Children visiting the oceanarium were struck right away by the unusual coloration.

"Dude, it's half orange and half, like, regular color for a lobster," exclaimed Alyssa Bonin, 12, of Webster, Mass.

Robinson donated the colorful crustacean to the oceanarium, which often is the beneficiary of strange things that fishermen pull up from the sea. It has received only three two-toned lobsters in its 35 years of existence, officials said.

"Fishermen have been super to us over the years, bringing things in to us," said David Mills, the co-director and owner of the oceanarium. "Our charge is to teach people about the marine life and commercial fishing in Maine."

Mills intends to keep the two-toned lobster over the winter and have him on display for educational purposes, though he has no plans to name him.

"Lobsters are interesting but not personable," he said.

Source: Bangor News

Tiny radio chip can store video clips

    A radio chip the size of a grain of rice that holds up to half a megabyte of video has been developed at Hewlett Packard's research labs in the UK.

The chip, called a Memory Spot, is small enough to be attached to a postcard or a photograph and could be used to append video, audio or hundreds of pages of text to all sorts of everyday objects. In hospitals, for example, the chips could allow doctors to add detailed medical records to a patient’s plastic wristband.

Details of the chip were revealed at an event held in London on Monday. A Memory Spot can be read by a specialised device or an appropriately modified cellphone or PDA. It does not require a battery as it draws power from the reading device's radio field.

Existing radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can store up to a few kilobytes of data and transmit this wirelessly over a range of a few metres. They are often used to add information to a product for tracking or identification purposes.

Reading speed

Hewlett-Packard's new chip provides much more memory – between 32 and 500 kilobytes – and can be read at about 10 megabits per second, fast enough to download everything from a 500 kilobyte chip in one-third of a second and about 10 times faster than a typical RFID chip.

"A Memory Spot uses similar principles to RFID but significantly extends them in terms of reading speed and memory capacity," says Huw Robson, director of media technologies at Hewlett-Packard's labs in Bristol, UK. "We can move up to higher memory densities."

In addition, unlike RFID tags, the new chips can be made rewritable and perform simple processing tasks for themselves, such as data encryption. However, instead of beaming the data out over several metres, a Memory Spot can only be read from a distance of 1.5 millimetres or less. The term for this is "near field communications".

Plans for the technology were hatched two years ago when HP was searching for a way to add audio data to photographs, Robson says. HP sees a future in which its colour printers will be able to add video, audio and text to a chip already embedded in a printed document.

Major players

"Memory spot technology is a very interesting development," says Heikke Huomo, technical director of Innovision Research and Technology in Cirencester, UK, a firm that makes custom microchips.

Hewlett-Packard hopes to persuade cellphone and PDA makers to enable their products to read the chips. "We have started discussions with the major players," Robson says. "We need the reader to be built into a ubiquitous application, something the user carries all the time, like a phone."

In Japan, cellphone company NTT DoCoMo already makes devices that can wirelessly make payments, using a near field communications chip developed by Sony, called Felica. "It makes sense to make a small corner of a phone's main processor handle near field communications applications," Huomo says. "Setting up a connection is simple and automatic."

Full Article, New Scientist

Headlines

Move over disneyland, Vanuatu happiest place on earth. Full Article, Global Good News

Next Martian lander taking shape. Full Article, Science A Go Go

Device designed to display feeling. Full Article, New Scientist

New law asks state to study use of alternative medicine. Full Article, Global Good News

Seaweed compound blocks cervical cancer. Full Article, New Scientist

Host of new creatures discovered in Deep-Sea Abyss

These five stunning images of a host of bizarre beasts were among those unveiled at the 11^th International Deep-Sea Biology Symposium, held this week in Southampton, UK. Scroll down for more pictures.

Annelid Worm

Nereis species found at a deep-sea vent.

Piglet Squid

Perhaps a species of Helicocranchia. Its cartoon-character appearance is a result of its habit of swimming upside down, which makes its tentacles look like hair.

Dumbo Octopus

Stauroteuthis syrtensis, a deep-sea cirrate octopus. Also known as the Dumbo octopus due to the ear-like fins above the eyes. One of only two octopus species known to bioluminesce, it swims in a bell shape at depths of up to 4000 metres in the North Atlantic.

Cirrate Octopod

Probably Vampyroteuthis infernalis, meaning "vampire squid from hell". It has a skirt-like skin membrane around its legs, and ear-like fins above the eyes. It is covered in light-producing organs called photophores, which generate a bluish light that makes it difficult to see against the faint light from the sky.

Deep Sea Physonect

A siphonophore from the Arctic Ocean, related to jellyfish. Each polyp along the orange stalk is an individual animal, and the colony swims as the individuals undulate their bodies. The colony is bioluminescent, and the orange "flames" at the base of the structure are feeding tentacles.

Mysteries of the Deep Sea -The deep sea is one of the harshest habitats on Earth, but is home to many remarkable creatures. Learn more in our comprehensive special report.

Source: New Scientist

KV-63 the first tomb discovered in Eygpt's Valley of the Kings in 84 years unlike any other

    It is barely 7:30 a.m. in the Valley of the Kings, and tourists are already milling just beyond the yellow police tape like passersby at a traffic accident. I step over the tape and show my pass to a guard, who motions for me to climb down a wooden ladder sticking out of a small, nearly square hole in the ground. Eighteen feet down a vertical shaft, the blazing Egyptian sun is gone, the crowd's hum is muted and the air is cool. In a small chamber lit by fluorescent lamps, a half-dozen archaeologists are measuring, drawing and gently probing relics in the first tomb to be found in the Valley of the Kings, more than 400 miles up the Nile from Cairo, since the resting place of King Tutankhamen was discovered here 84 years ago.

A jumble of seven wooden coffins of various sizes fills one corner of the room. Termites have turned parts of some of them into powder, while others have suffered only a thin layer of dust. Edwin Brock, an Egyptologist formerly at the American University of Cairo, is on his knees, cataloging the contents of a coffin filled with a strange assortment of pottery, rocks, cloth and natron—the powdery substance used to dry mummies. A couple of yards away, University of Chicago archaeological artist Susan Osgood intently sketches the serene yellow face painted on a partially intact coffin. It was likely built for a woman; men's faces were typically rendered a sunburned red. Deeper in the pile, a child-size casket is nestled between two full-sized ones. Something resembling a pillow seems to bulge out of another casket. The 17-foot-long space, which has plain limestone walls, also holds a number of knee-high ceramic storage jars, most still sealed.

Nervous about bumping into someone—or worse, something—I make my way back out to the narrow shaft and climb to the surface with Otto Schaden, the dig's director. Until this past February, he had worked in obscurity, splitting his time between studying a minor Pharaoh's tomb nearby and playing bass fluegelhorn in a Chicago band. Back up amid the heat and tourists, the 68-year-old archaeologist pulls out tobacco and bread crumbs, thrusting the first into a pipe and flinging the second onto the ground for some twittering finches. Just yards away, visitors in shorts and hats are lining up to get into King Tut's cramped tomb, named KV-62 because it was the 62nd tomb found in the Valley of the Kings.

Accordingly, Schaden's newly opened chamber is KV-63. Unlike Tut's, it contains neither gold statues and funerary furniture nor, as of early June, the mummified body of a long-dead Pharaoh. Despite the coffins, this probably isn't even a gravesite. Still, the discovery, announced in February, was trumpeted worldwide, because most archaeologists had long ago given up hope of finding significant discoveries in the valley. More remarkably, the artifacts appear to have been undisturbed for more than three millennia, not since one of Egypt's most fascinating periods—just after the death of the heretic king Akhenaten, who, unlike his predecessors, worshiped a single deity, the sun god Aten.

The child-size coffin in KV-63 held the flashiest artifact: a second, nested coffin coated in gold leaf. It was empty. Instead of the usual mummies, the other coffins opened so far contain only a bizarre assortment of what appears to be debris and constitute a 3,000-year-old mystery: Why fill coffins and jars with rocks and broken pottery, then carefully seal them up? Why hew out a subterranean chamber only to turn it into a storeroom? And who went to all this effort? "It may not be the most glamorous find," says Betsy Bryan, an Egyptologist at Johns Hopkins University, "but it is a whole new kind of entombment—which raises all kinds of questions."

Full Article: Smithsonian

Bush has hands full as he meets with German Chancellor Angela Merkel

     It was supposed to be a light-hearted photo opportunity showing the gentle side of the world's most powerful man.

Unfortunately, nobody told the baby.

Despite being closely vetted by both the U.S. secret service and German intelligence agents, the startled infant voiced a noisy protest as it was handed to George Bush.

Unable to placate the wailing child - despite all his skills of diplomacy - President Bush was forced to hand it back to its waiting mother.

And the baby, whose parents are German, was not the only one unhappy with Mr Bush's presence in the village of Trinwillershagen, in the former East Germany.

Around 5,000 protesters did their best to interrupt the outdoor meeting and meal between the president and Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel. Eventually shielded from the noise by 40 tons of barbed wire and 12,000 policemen, the pair sat down to dine on a roasted wild boar slaughtered earlier that day, uninterrupted by protesters. Or babies.

Source: Daily Mail

Picture of the Day!

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Headlines

House renews Voting Rights Act. Full Article, NY Times

White House agrees to review surveillance program. Full Article, NY Times

Fire fox making big gains against Internet Explorer. Full Article, IT Wire

Bird in Galapagos Islands prove Darwin right. Full Article, Breirbart

Shady Enron bankers extradited to face justice. Full Article, Reuters

Inflatable Space craft in orbit and operational. Full Article, New Scientist

Mysteries in venus. Full Article, New Scientist

Rainbow and lightning bolts!

    When a rainbow formed in the sky people stopped and stared at the natural wonder.

But then lightning sparked across the evening panorama as two of nature's most spectacular phenomenon created an unusual alliance.

See more incredible storms and lightning pictures here

The clash of weather was seen above the affluent city of Fort Smith, in the Southern state Arkansas.

One onlooker said: "It was awe inspiring. The lightning made a huge rumbling sound and when you looked up there was also this incredible rainbow forming on the horizon."

The intracloud lightning, known as an anvil crawler, is the most common form of lightning, with the electrical charge contained within a single cumulonimbus cloud.

Lightning often occurs during heavy storms while rainbows are generally formed after the rain has stopped, making an appearance of both simultaneously relatively rare.

The actual electric charge in a flash of lightning comes from particles from the sun sent out in the solar wind which gather in the outer atmospheric layers before creating a strike.

Scientists are still divided by what actually causes lightning, with one theory suggesting falling droplets of ice and rain become electrically polarised as they fall through the natural electric field in the Earth's atmosphere.

This would explain why lightning often accompanies storms and heavy rain. The same droplets also cause the rainbow, when light from the sun is refracted by the water to cause a spectrum.

Source: Daily Mail

Plame sues Rove and Cheney

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA officer whose identity was leaked to reporters sued Vice President Dick Cheney, his former top aide and presidential adviser Karl Rove on Thursday, accusing them and other White House officials of conspiring to destroy her career.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, accused Cheney, Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of revealing Plame's CIA identity in seeking revenge against Wilson for criticizing the Bush administration's motives in Iraq.

ON DEADLINE: Read the complaint

Several news organizations wrote about Plame after syndicated columnist Robert Novak named her in a column on July 14, 2003. Novak's column appeared eight days after Wilson alleged in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.

The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in early 2002 to determine whether there was any truth to reports that Saddam Hussein's government had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon. Wilson discounted the reports, but the allegation nevertheless wound up in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.

The lawsuit accuses Cheney, Libby, Rove and 10 unnamed administration officials or political operatives of putting the Wilsons and their children's lives at risk by exposing Plame.

"This lawsuit concerns the intentional and malicious exposure by senior officials of the federal government of ... (Plame), whose job it was to gather intelligence to make the nation safer and who risked her life for her country," the Wilsons' lawyers said in the lawsuit.

Libby is the only administration official charged in connection with the leak investigation. He faces trial in January on perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges, accused of lying to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about when he learned Plame's identity and what he subsequently told reporters.

Source: USA today

Headlines

New Firefox 2.0 released for beta testing. Full Article, ABC News

Microsoft to Release 1980's games on XBOX 360. Full Article, Washington Post

Brain sensors allow parapalegic to function computers and artificial limbs. Full Article, BBC

Army to end exclusive contract with Haliburton. Full Article, Washington Post

Inflatable space hotel set to launch. Full Article, New Scientist

Routine excersize may extend life. Full Article, Food Consumer

Chavez says No to genetically engineered foods. Full Article, Global Good News

Shootings down 16% in Canada. Full article Canada Free Press

European economies doing better than expected. Full Article, Global Good News

Giant catfish finally protected from Thai fishing

    In honor of the King of Thailand's 60th year on the throne, fishers in northern Thailand have promised to stop catching the critically endangered Mekong giant catfish. The largest freshwater fish in the world, the giant catfish can grow up to 10 feet (3 meters) long and weigh 650 pounds (300 kilograms).

It is found only in the Mekong River system, which runs through China, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
(See Thailand map.)

More than 60 fishers made the pledge to stop catching the giant fish at a ceremony held last month in the northern city of Chiang Kong. It was one of several events to celebrate Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej's reign.

Fishers in neighboring Laos have also vowed to stop hunting the giant fish.

"[This] is the most significant development in the conservation of the Mekong giant catfish in the last ten years," said Zeb Hogan, an associate research biologist at the Mekong Wetlands Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Use Program.

Conservationists say that while the ban is an important step toward saving the giant catfish, more has to be done before the unique species is off the hook.

As part of that effort, Hogan runs a tracking program in which he tags the fish to discover their spawning grounds and to study their migration patterns.

(Watch video: "Tracking Asia's Giant Catfish.")

"This project is the first ever large-scale attempt to use underwater biotelemetry to study fish migrations in the Mekong River Basin," Hogan said.

Hogan's research is funded in part by the National Geographic Society. (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.)

Full Article, National Geographic

Spiders use silk as parachutes to travel over oceans

    The mystery of how spiders use silk “parachutes” to carry them hundreds of miles – sometimes across open ocean - may have been explained by a new model.

Spiders use simple parachutes to ride the wind wherever it may take them. The tiny creatures, weighing only a few milligrams, typically crawl up to the edge of a blade of grass, stick their backside in the air and release a thin line of silk, like that used to build their webs.

This “dragline silk” is so fine that it encounters an unusual amount of air friction and, as a result, it acts like a parachute. Each gust of wind can pull the spiders, such as Erigone atra and Tenuiphantes tenius, further into the air.

Researchers previously used mathematical models to estimate how far the spiders could travel using dragline silk. But these simulations could not explain the long distances spiders can travel: they are often the first species to colonise new volcanic islands, sometimes isolated from other land by as much as 200 miles.

Nor could the older models explain why parachuting spiders are found at remarkable heights, typically occupied by high altitude aircraft.

Silky skills

Part of the problem is that previous models do not take into account the flexibility of the spiders’ silk draglines, explains Dave Bohan of Rothamsted Research, an agricultural science institute in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, UK.

His team re-modelled the equations to take this flexibility into account. The revamped models treat the dragline similarly to a yo-yo string instead of as a fixed-length thread. And these simulations seem to match up with the long-distance reality of spider travel.

While most of this work is theoretical, the team is currently measuring the flexibility of real silk draglines. They hope to plug this real-world information into the revamped equations to calculate a limit on how far parachuting spiders can travel.

Bohan believes that understanding the way spiders can parachute into areas could one day even help reduce farmers’ pesticide use as spiders are prime predators of bugs such as aphids, which devastate food crops.

Source: New Scientist

Headlines

Breakthrough in magnetic memory chips keep Moore's law intact. Full Article, Computer Business Review

Telsa, one of worlds most greatest inventors honored for 150th anniversary of his birth. Full Article, BBC

Palestine has right to defend itself. World criticizes Israels state sponsored Terror. Full Article, Center for Research on Globalization

Fish oil shown to help save eyesight. Full Article, News Target

US finally admits Gitmo is not immune to Geneva convention. Full Article, Al-Jazeera

Tests underway to answer question:"Are we the first intellegent species on earth" Full Article, Wired

Scientists conclude taking psilocybin, induces profound mystical experience

    “Magic” mushrooms really do have a spiritual effect on people, according to the most rigorous look yet at this aspect of the fungus's active ingredient.

About one-third of volunteers in the carefully controlled new study had a “complete” mystical experience after taking psilocybin, with half of them describing their encounter as the single most spiritually significant experience in their lifetimes.

However, psilocybin use has been associated with side effects such as severe paranoia, nervousness and unwanted flashbacks and so experts warn against experimentation. “Once you’ve started down the path, you might not like where it ends,” comments Herbert Kleber, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, US. “These are powerful agents that are just as likely to do harm as to do good.”

Psilocybin is found in mushrooms such as the liberty cap (Psilocybe semilanceata and about 186 other species. Hippies embraced the compound during the 1960s, after its mind-altering potential was touted by Timothy Leary, then a researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But as its use grew, US lawmakers took action. It is now generally illegal to sell or possess psilocybin drugs in the US.

Demonised compound

But Roland Griffiths, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, US, and his colleagues believe there is a need to revisit the biological effects of psilocybin, which have been virtually ignored by the scientific community for about 40 years. “It so traumatised our society that we’ve demonised this compound,” he says.

Griffiths's team recruited 36 healthy volunteers who had not experimented with the drug before. They were informed that they would receive a hallucinogen but did not know in which of two or three sessions they would receive it. Each session was separated by two months.

They either received a substantial dose – about 30 milligrams – of psilocybin or a similar dose of an "active" placebo, Ritalin. The latter has a stimulating effect but is not known as a hallucinogen. An inactive placebo would be easy to identify by the volunteers when compared to psilocybin, which could bias the experiences they reported.

The researchers used psychological questionnaires and found that 22 of the 36 volunteers had a “complete” mystical experience after taking psilocybin – far more than the four who reported this type of experience after taking Ritalin.

More than one-third of the volunteers said that their encounter with psilocybin was the single most spiritually significant experience in their lifetimes – no person given Ritalin said the same. Experts say the study is the most rigorous study of psilocybin’s potential to elicit spiritual feelings because it is the first to use an active control.

Spiritual shortcut

However, more than 20% of the participants described their psilocybin sessions as dominated by negative feelings such as anxiety. And while psilocybin appears to mimic the brain signalling-chemical serotonin, its precise action on mind function remains elusive.

Griffiths says that in the future psilocybin might have a therapeutic use, perhaps helping people who have just learned they have cancer come to terms with the news. But he is quick to add that “the therapeutic application is very speculative”.

“My guess is that there will be people saying ‘You’re looking for a spiritual shortcut’” says Griffiths. He stresses that the drug is no replacement for the mental health benefits of continuous personal reflection: “There’s all the difference in the world between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life.”

Source: New Scientist

Mystery object found in center of Supernova

    Embedded in the heart of a supernova remnant 10,000 light-years away is a stellar object the likes of which astronomers have never seen before in our galaxy.

At first glance, the object looks like a densely packed stellar corpse known as a neutron star surrounded by a bubble of ejected stellar material, exactly what would be expected in the wake of a supernova explosion.

However, a closer 24.5-hour examination with the European Space Agency's XMM Newton X-ray satellite reveals that the energetic X-ray emissions of the blue, point-like object cycles every 6.7 hours—tens of thousands of times longer than expected for a freshly created neutron star.

It is behavior that's more commonly seen in neutron stars that have been around for several million years, researchers say.

"The behavior we see is especially puzzling in view of its young age, less than 2,000 years," said study leader Andrea De Luca of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Milan. "For years we have had a sense that the object is different, but we never knew how different until now," De Luca said.

The finding is detailed in the July 7 issue of the journal Science.

Full article, Space.com

Headlines

Reparations. Is it payback time? Full Article, Breitbart

Invention: New design of speaker breaks previous mold. Full Article, New Scientist

Entire building collapses from a gas explosion in Manhattan,Miracle? No one Dies! Full Article, Reuters

Rare artificially inseminated giant Panda born in captivity turns 1! Full Article, Yahoo News

Mini Solar system created to study origins and new dimensions. Full Article, New Scientist

First test tube baby, now pregnant. Full Article, Daily Mail

Shuttle heat shield looks ok for re-entry. Full Article, New Scientist

Bush changes stance. End of Cowboy diplomacy says TIME. Full article, CNN

"In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?"

NEW YORK (AP) — Some questions even stump Stephen Hawking.

    The famed British astrophysicist and best-selling author has turned to Yahoo Answers, a new feature in which anyone can pose a question for fellow Internet users to try to answer. By Friday afternoon, nearly 17,000 Yahoo Inc. users had responded.

Hawking's question: "In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?"

Some of the answers were short — "get rid of nuclear weapons" — and others vague — "Somehow we will." Many were doubtful: "I don't think it is possible unless we expand into space," one user wrote.

A number of people suggested thinking differently, ending bickering or fostering cooperation.

Officials at the University of Cambridge, where Hawking is a mathematics professor, confirmed that Hawking wrote the message but said he would have no further comment.

Hawking's groundbreaking research on black holes and the origins of the universe has made him one of the best-known theoretical physicists of his generation. Author of the global best seller A Brief History of Time, Hawking is known for proposing that space and time have no beginning and no end.

Lately, he's been pondering about the fate of humans.

In a June 13 speech in Hong Kong, Hawking said the survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth.

He said that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

Hawking is one of 10 celebrity questioners Yahoo solicited as part of its "Ask The Planet" campaign.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet company spent weeks trying to track Hawking down but got his participation within a day of reaching the correct assistant, said Patrick Crane, vice president of marketing for Yahoo Search.

The question was submitted a few days before the Hong Kong speech and posted this past Wednesday.

Over the next week, Yahoo employees are expected to work with Hawking to sift through the answers and select one or several to highlight as best responses.

Yahoo Answers, like an offering from Google Inc. and one planned by Microsoft Corp., is among the services aimed at tapping the collective intelligence. It's based on the premise that humans as a group can do a better job at finding information than machines or any single person can.

Anyone can ask or answer a question, regardless of expertise, although Yahoo will eventually implement a rating system meant to elevate users with better reputations, based on their past questions and answers.

Questions typically get 6 to 10 answers.

Past celebrity participants include Donald Trump, Isaiah Washington, Al Gore and "Click & Clack," the hosts of NPR's Car Talk. U2 lead singer Bono closed the celebrity series Friday by asking, "What can we do to make poverty history?"

Source: USA today

Sandton ice ball fell out of clear sky, says scientist

by Karyn Maughan

The giant ice ball that fell from the Douglasdale sky has put the suburb on the meteorological map.

Research conducted by a Nasa- affiliated scientist suggests that the frozen object that plummeted from the clear sky last Friday morning was one of the first "megacryometeors" to be recorded in Africa.

And Professor Jesus Martinez-Frias, head of the Planetary Geology Laboratory at the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid, has warned that the microwave oven-sized ice object could be a portent of "serious environmental problems".

Frias is an authority in the megacryometeor phenomenon, having written a number of research papers on possible reasons for its development. According to his research, falling ice balls have been recorded since the 19th century.

And, six years ago, a plague of falling ice balls caused extensive damage to cars and an industrial storage facility in the Iberian Peninsula.

Fortunately, Africa's first recorded ice ball was far less destructive, melting almost immediately after it shattered on its pavement landing area

Frias agreed with security guard Sizwe Sofika, who witnessed the frozen object plummet from the sky, that the ice ball was not frozen human waste ejected from a plane.

Sofika and guard S'Wester Moya were sitting in a security booth outside the Fontana de la Vita complex when they saw a white object plunge from the sky.

The impact of the ice ball's fall created a small crater on the pavement, which was covered with pieces of broken ice.

"Megacryometeors are not the classical big hailstones, ice from aircraft (waste water or tank leakage), nor the simple result of icing processes at high altitudes," Frias said.

"The term 'megacryometeor' was recently coined to name large atmospheric ice conglomerations, which, despite sharing many textural, hydrochemical and isotopic features detected in large hailstones, are formed under clear-sky conditions," he said.

Source: The Star

More info on Megacryometeors

Headlines

FBI disrupts terror plot. Full Article, Forbes

Teen lives through lighting strike sporting iPod. Full Article, The Denver Channel

Scientists able to track space junk in near Earth orbit. A lot of it!

     Imagine floating around inside the International Space Station (ISS), getting along swimmingly with your colleagues, when all of a sudden you all hear a loud "thud". The noise sounded like something hitting the station's exterior. "Who could that be?" you wonder, before feeling very silly. This event actually happened. The thud was believed to be a tiny piece of orbiting space debris, which had possibly broken away from a decommissioned satellite or the like. This event led to the fitting of a higher-frequency radar unit to one of the ground antennas to detect small but potentially deadly pieces of man-made space junk; enabling it to track objects between five and ten centimeters (2-4 inches) in size.

With the increasing number of satellites, and who knows what else, being shot into space, the problem of space-junk is getting worse - fast. NASA says that along with naturally occurring meteoroids, our near-Earth space orbit has become so cluttered with man made debris that it poses a very real danger to future missions (which, of course, are also likely to leave behind their fair share of junk). It seems that when a satellite deteriorates, malfunctions or becomes obsolete, the boys at ground control just hit the off-switch and replace it with another, leaving the old one to continue aimlessly orbiting the Earth.

And it's not just decommissioned satellites. According to Australian Government astronomer, Dr. James Biggs, other types of debris have appeared over the years due to, well, our rather cavalier approach to space activities. Biggs says that extra-vehicular activity (EVA), repairs to spacecraft, nuclear testing and crude anti-satellite technology tested during the 80s and 90s have all contributed to the rocket casings, fairings, nuts and bolts, flecks of paint, gloves, tools and other potentially lethal bits of shrapnel currently orbiting the Earth.

Some environment projection studies carried out between 1991 and 2001 indicate that after accounting for future launch rates; "the debris populations at some altitudes in low Earth orbit (LEO) will become unstable. Collisions will take over as the dominant debris generation mechanism, and the debris generated will feed back to the environment and induce more collisions," according to NASA's rather dryly titled Orbital Debris Quarterly News. But it gets worse.

A paper appearing in the journal Science earlier this year summarized research conducted by NASA over the years, and its findings make chilling reading for anyone contemplating a jaunt into orbit. "Currently more than 9000 objects, with a combined mass exceeding 5 million kilograms, are tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network," said lead authors J. C. Liou and N. L. Johnson. The paper shows that these debris levels will remain constant up until 2055, after which time they will increase. In order to avoid various uncertainties, the study (obviously incorrectly) assumed a launch cut-off point from January 2005. But even with this imaginary cut-off date, the study found that: "Debris populations in this 'red zone' [900 to 1000 km altitude] will approximately triple in the next 200 years, leading to a factor-of-10 increase in collision probability. In reality, the future debris environment is likely to be worse than the study suggested, as satellites continue to be launched into space." Both NASA and the authors of the study recommend that a plan aimed at removing this space junk should be implemented as soon as possible.

If you are unsure as to how many satellites and other spacecraft currently exist up there (the ones we do know about, that is), then a visit to www.n2yo.com should be enlightening. The site is an amalgamation of Google Maps and satellite data that allows you to track the location of a large number of spacecraft. But you may be wondering that if there are so many bits and bobs floating around out there, why don't we hear of more collisions and space disasters? Is NASA overreacting? The answer is no, they are not, and the danger, especially to manned missions, is all too real.

It's not so much the size of the debris that is of concern, but rather the velocity at which the debris travels. If one of these tiny bits of junk were to collide with a spacecraft the result could be anything from inconvenient to catastrophic. Of course, running headlong into a satellite coming from the opposite direction wouldn't be a barrel of laughs either, but it would also be a highly unlikely scenario. According to Dr. Biggs, the orbits of larger debris are relatively easy to track, and therefore easy to avoid. But just what size are we talking about here? Biggs says that debris measuring 5cm (2 inches) can be tracked at distances of thousands of kilometers into space, and once the orbit has been determined they are quite easy to avoid. So in regard to the recent Shuttle launch, the known orbits of debris could be factored in to their calculations, says Biggs. However, there have been occasions when NASA has had to adjust the Shuttle's flight path many times during a mission to avoid debris.

Biggs says "it's the stuff we don't know about" that presents the most danger, as he recalls how just a tiny fleck of paint was cause for concern during one of the earlier Shuttle missions. As an astronaut on board the aforementioned Shuttle flight, Sally Ride also remembers the incident. "About halfway through the flight there was a small pit in the window of the space shuttle and we didn't know what it was. An awful lot of analysis was done while we were in orbit to make sure that the strength of the window would sustain reentry. It did. We were all fine. But the analysis afterward showed that our window had been hit by an orbiting fleck of paint, and the relative velocities were enough that the paint actually made a small but visible gouge in the window," said Ride, during a lecture she gave at Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation in 2002. Stories such as this highlight NASA's worry that as orbit zones become even more cluttered there is a greater chance of collision; and a greater likelihood that undetectable particles will be formed and jettisoned into new and deadly orbits.

At present, NASA is working to avoid adding to the vast amount of space litter by implementing a strategy they call "Orbital Debris Mitigation." Some of the measures proposed include: "designing satellites to withstand impacts by small debris, and implementing operational procedures ranging from utilizing orbital regimes with less debris, adopting specific spacecraft altitudes, and even maneuvering to avoid collisions with debris." Biggs also suggests equipping satellites with enough power to send them back toward earth once they have expired. But this may involve coming up with innovative ways of transcending weight restrictions and, of course, the added cost. Maybe they should incorporate the satellite tracking system with the retro videogame Asteroids. That way, the online gaming community could make sure that any approaching space junk could be destroyed before inflicting damage on future missions.

Check out some pics of space debris and the damage it causes: http://www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/photogallery/photogallery.html

New pictures of Saturn, breath taking

As Cassini beams back a sequence of new images, NASA imaging team members are receiving yet more clues about the formation and structure of Saturn's G and E rings. The team has confirmed that a bright arc located on the inside edge of the G ring seems to be an established feature, which may be held in position by a nearby moon that also influences Neptune's rings. This latest series of images are of a resolution not previously seen, but the new clarity appears to raise more questions than it answers.

Viewed as a short film, Cassini's latest images show an arc of illuminated material winding its way around the inside edge of Saturn's G ring. First viewed during Cassini's orbit insertion, the G ring is a 4,400-mile wide band of icy dust particles that lies 16,800 miles beyond the F ring. The team had already seen the G ring's arc in 2005, but this latest viewing seems to confirm that the arc is a permanent fixture. "We have seen the arc a handful of times over the past year," said Dr. Matt Hedman, Cassini imaging team associate working at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "It always appears to be a few times brighter than the rest of the G ring and very tightly confined to a narrow strip along the inside edge of the 'normal' G ring."

The team thinks that the arc feature may have remained due to some resonant influence of the moon Mimas, which is also responsible for Neptune's ring arcs. "We've known since the days of Voyager that we had Jovian-type and Uranian-type rings within the rings of Saturn," said Cassini imaging team leader Dr. Carolyn Porco in Boulder, Colorado, who was the first to discover the dynamics of the Neptunian arcs based on Voyager's observations. "Now it appears that Saturn may be home to Neptunian-type rings as well. Saturn's rings have it all!"

The team is still unsure how the bright arc formed, but one hypothesis is that a cloud of fine particles formed after the collision of icy, meter-sized objects, which later came under the influence of Mimas. But this theory raises more questions than it answers, as it suggests that the main G ring could be the result of particles seeping from and drifting out from the arc.

The team also had some prior speculations confirmed in regard to Saturn's E ring. Using enhanced, high-resolution imaging, the team showed that there was indeed a relationship between Enceladus's south polar geysers and Saturn's E ring particles. Cassini was positioned in relation to Saturn so that the ring was viewed edge-on, giving the ring a double-banded effect. This effect can occur when the particles circling Saturn are on inclined and restricted orbits; an effect also associated with Jupiter's gossamer ring. The reason for this special circumstance is not exactly known, but it could be the result of two factors. The first hypothesis is that the restricted particle orbits may be determined by the velocity at which they are ejected out of Enceladus. The second possibility is that while particles may begin with a large range of orbits, those orbiting very close to the ring plane get gravitationally scattered and removed from that region.

The team hopes that more clues will be forthcoming after the next imaging run of Saturn's G and E rings. Further studies will incorporate observational and dynamical models that should explain many of the questions raised by the current images. "We'll want images from a few other vantage points to be sure of the structure, and then we can test several models to see why these ring particles end up in such a distinct configuration," said Cassini imaging team member Dr. Joseph Burns, also of Cornell.

Source: Science a Go Go

Headlines

Russian President raises eyebrows. "I just wanted to pet him like a kitten" kisses boys on stomach. Full Article, BBC

Atlantic City Reopens after cripling shotdown. Full Article, The Daily Record

France parties in streets on news of World Cup win. Full Article, BBC

UN human rights council declares Israel in breach of international humanitarian law

Discovery docks with spacestation. Full article, The Seattle Times

Dark matter discovery could be beginning of a galaxy. Full Article, New Scientist

Good vibes regrow teeth

    A nifty gadget promises to give gap-toothed hockey and rugby players a healthy new smile. It's an ultrasound transmitter that fits neatly inside a person's mouth like a brace and could help to regrow damaged teeth.

Jie Chen and Ying Tsui, engineers at the University of Alberta in Canada, developed the miniature device after ultrasound stimulation encouraged damaged teeth and jawbone tissue to regrow in animals.

Tarek El-Bialy, who works in Alberta's medical faculty, was able to regrow teeth in rabbits with a larger device, but only when some tooth root remained in place.

The ultrasound device could help those who have had their teeth broken while playing high impact sports such as ice hockey and rugby. The tooth brace sends low-power ultrasound pulses to the damaged tooth over many months. A piezoelectric crystal generates the ultrasound by vibrating at frequencies above 20 kilohertz when fed an alternating voltage from an oscillator charged by a battery.

Physiotherapists often use ultrasound to help broken bones knit back together, although the healing mechanism is not precisely understood. One theory is that pressure waves mimic the effect of strenuous exercise, loading a bone and tricking it into generating more bone cells - a process called osteogenesis. El-Bialy's work on rabbits in 2003 (American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics, vol 124, p 427) first showed that low-power ultrasound also encourages growth of dental tissue.

Source: New Scientist

Giant parasol might help see past light pollution

Astronomers could soon be using a gigantic space-parasol to block out starlight that interferes with the view of planets in other solar systems. The daisy-shaped space shield could be used in conjunction with an orbiting telescope get clear images of the more than 175 planets that have been discovered orbiting other stars, say the authors of a University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) study, just published in Nature.

Made of thin plastic, the "starshade" would allow a telescope trailing thousands of miles behind it to image light from distant planets skimming by the giant petals without being swamped by light from the parent stars, explained CU's Professor Webster Cash. This would allow astronomers to then identify planetary features like oceans, continents, polar caps and cloud banks and even detect biomarkers like methane, oxygen and water if they exist.

"We think this is a compelling concept, particularly because it can be built today with existing technology," said Cash. "We will be able to study Earth-like planets tens of trillions of miles away and chemically analyze their atmospheres for signs of life."

It's envisaged that the telescope and starshade - dubbed the New Worlds Imager - would be launched together into an orbit roughly 1 million miles from Earth. The starshade would then be unfurled and small thrusters would move it into the lines of sight of nearby stars thought to harbor planets. The thrusters would be intermittently turned on to hold the starshade steady during the observations of the planets, which would appear as bright specks. The paper includes solutions to optical challenges like the bending and scattering of light between the pliable, 50-yard-in-diameter starshade and the space telescope, which would orbit in tandem roughly 15,000 miles apart.

Other proposals for imaging distant planets involve suppressing parent starlight once it has entered the telescope - an enormously complicated exercise. "In contrast, this is a very clean and simple optical concept, and may be the most promising idea yet on how to directly image our Earth-like neighbors," said Marc Kuchner, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center's Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory.

An even more advanced version of the imaging system might involve a ring of telescopes placed on the moon beneath a fleet of orbiting starshades that would allow scientists to actually photograph distant, Earth-like planets, Cash speculated. "There is a bit of Buck Rogers in the New Worlds Imager concept, but seeking and mapping new lands is something that seems to ring deep in the human psyche."

Full Article, Science a GoGo

Headlines

Man's brain rewires itself after 20 year. Full Article, Breibart

Scientists have technology to mend metal to skin and make real bionic limbs. Full Article, The Daily Mail

New drug quadruples success, quitting smoking. Full Article, Forbes

Shuttle blasts into orbit on third try

    NASA lit the country's biggest firework for Independence Day as the space shuttle Discovery returned to space on Tuesday, following almost a year on the ground.

The seven astronauts aboard are scheduled to meet up with the International Space Station on Thursday. They will deliver supplies and conduct repairs during their 12-day flight.

This is NASA's first space shuttle launch on Independence Day and only the second launch since the Columbia disaster in 2003.

"For all the folks in the Florida east coast, we hope to very soon get you an up-close-and-personal look at the rocket's red glare," Discovery commander Steve Lindsey said from the launch pad before launch.

Discovery launched at 1438 EDT (1838 GMT) and reached orbit 8 minutes and 40 seconds later. Weather was remarkably well behaved on Tuesday after two weather-related launch delays over the weekend (see Shuttle launch postponed again). Ultimately, the clouds and storms stayed clear at launch time.

Camera views

Image analysts are now poring over video and still pictures to see how much foam insulation came off the external fuel tank during launch. They will also be checking to see whether any of those pieces struck the orbiter, which is what happened during Columbia's launch three years ago.

During Discovery's last launch in July 2005, these new camera views showed several pieces of foam shedding from the tank. The biggest piece was 0.4 kilograms (1 pound). NASA does not expect to see any pieces that large this time because they removed the protuberance air load (PAL) ramp, the part that shed the largest foam chunk last year.

NASA is scheduled to hold a briefing later today to give reporters its initial interpretation of some of the camera views.

Discovery is scheduled to stay in space for 12 days with a landing on 16 July, but the mission could be extended for several days to either embark on a third spacewalk or to allow time for weather to clear at the shuttle's three possible landing sites in Florida, California and New Mexico, US.

Last-minute glitches

The mission is significant because it will deliver European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter to the ISS, boosting the station crew to three. The crew was downsized to two after the Columbia accident because the shuttles were grounded and could not deliver enough supplies to support three people.

Commander Steve Lindsey, pilot Mark Kelly and astronauts Mike Fossum, Piers Sellers, Lisa Nowak and Stephanie Wilson round out Discovery's crew.

As is fairly common for shuttle launches, last-minute technical glitches threatened to delay liftoff. On Saturday morning, the shuttle faced a problem with a heater on one of its in-space thrusters, designated L5L. The thruster's thermostat was not working, but mission managers determined they could fly the shuttle without that heater.

Then after Sunday's launch attempt, an inspection team on the launch pad found foam that had fallen off the external tank. Engineers believe that the foam came off because rainwater froze near a bracket on the tank and then melted when the cryogenic fuel in the tank was drained. The bracket helps to keep a liquid oxygen feedline – which funnels cryogenic oxygen into the tank – in place.

NASA's Mission Management Team decided that the missing foam would not cause a dangerous amount of ice to form in that region from condensation in the humid air (see Shuttle to lift off despite foam loss).

Full Article, New Scientist

Discovery: Why mosquitoes dont like some people, but love others.

    Some unfortunate people are irresistible to mosquitoes, while the scent of some lucky individuals drives the blood-suckers away. Now the smelly chemicals from the sweat of these lucky people have been identified by researchers, who are testing its effectiveness as a natural mosquito repellent.

Everybody produces a mixture of odorous chemicals in their sweat, some of which attract biting insects, such as lactic acid. But people who do not get bitten also produce smelly chemicals that appear to mask the scent of the attractive chemicals.

This masking can offer an effective camouflage against mosquitoes, explains James Logan, who carried out the research with John Pickett at Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, and colleagues at the University of Aberdeen, both in the UK.

These helpful chemicals probably occur naturally in everybody’s sweat but some people have a much higher ratio than others, Logan says.

What is more, the same benign sweat chemicals that repel the tropical mosquitoes Aedes aegypti – responsible for spreading yellow fever throughout Africa and South America – appear also to disgust the persistent biting midge that terrorises the west coast of Scotland, the researchers discovered.

Sweat collectors

Logan constructed a Y-shaped chamber and wafted the scent of different people down two of the branches by getting volunteers to place their hands at the ends. The blood-sucking insects flew from the thin end of the "Y" towards the human hand they preferred.

He then analysed the body odour of those individuals found to be unattractive by sealing their bodies in a foil sack, tied under the chin, and collecting and distilling the sweat that poured off them.

The most potent repellent chemical were then isolated by strapping miniature electrodes to the antennae of female mosquitoes and checking their responses to specific compounds. Logan will not divulge the names of the chemicals until they are patented. But he does reveal that although the scent of the chemicals is normally undetectable by humans, they have a fruity smell when highly concentrated.

Food additive

“It’s very exciting," Logan told New Scientist, "because these are totally natural chemicals with an effectiveness that compares favourably to harsher chemicals such as DEET, which is the best repellent available but has unwanted effects, including dissolving plastics.”

A key chemical identified by Logan as a repellent is also "a natural food additive, so has proven safety", he says. "And because it can be made by plants, it may one day be possible to mass produce it cheaply.”

The repellent is currently being trialled with 16 volunteers in Africa. Meanwhile, the researchers are testing the repellent against other biting insects, including malaria carrying mosquitoes.

The research was presented at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in London, UK, and has been submitted to a leading peer review journal for publication.

Source, New Scientist

Headlines

Italian man begs to go back to jail instead of house arrest with Gramps. Full Article, Reuters

Lieberman to try as independant, if all else fails seeks senate seat. Full Article, Reuters

Monkey on the run.. Escapes Zoo. Full Article, CNN

Jelly fish key to keeping greenhouse gases at bay. Full Article, Science a Go Go

Ancient Eygptian discovery "It's very rare _ there's nothing like it in any museum. We've seen things like it in drawings, but we've never seen this before in real life _ it's magnificent,"

Shiney rocks could hold secrets to life on Mars. Full Article, Imperial College London

Throw-away parachutes help make humanitarian drops less expensive

    Dropping emergency food and supplies into disaster zones may be humanitarian, but it is too expensive, says the US government’s Army Soldier Systems Centre in Natick, Maryland. Money is wasted on costly parachutes which cannot be recovered for re-use.

So the ASSC has developed a disposable chute which is as effective at cushioning a dropped cargo as existing designs, but at one-third of the cost.

Conventional parachutes are made by laboriously sewing several dozen suspension ropes to a large "umbrella sheet" of nylon, which is itself made by sewing many smaller sheets together.

In contrast, the new chute is put together using a dozen strips of polypropylene, each a metre wide and 30 metres long. The strips are arranged in a square criss-cross, like a giant raffia mat, and lightly stitched together where they cross.

The ends of each strip are tied to a short rope, and all the rope ends are gathered together and tied to the load. When the cargo is thrown from a plane the contraption billows into an umbrella chute.

Tests with cargo loads dropped from C-130 aircraft demonstrated that the budget chutes descend at well below the safe rate, of 25 metres per second.

Read the cost-cutting parachute patent.

Ding-dong merrily

It’s like Dance Dance Revolution for bell ringers: a system that tells players when to shake their instruments.

In a handbell choir each member holds two bells which produce different notes when shaken. To play melodies and chords the choir must learn which bells to shake and when. This takes time and skill, limiting the number of tunes choirs can learn and deterring children from joining choirs.

Now three American inventors have developed an electronic system that they claim will help old-fashioned bell choirs stay in tune, and allow players to learn more melodies, more quickly.

Each time a note is played on an electric piano, the system converts it into a digital code describing its pitch and timing. This information is sent to a wristband worn by each player using radio or infra-red signals. Vibrating pads and flashing LEDs on their wristbands tell the players when to shake and when to stop.

The code can be easily recorded onto a memory chip or disc, allowing the choirmaster to leave the piano and join in with the bell ringing while the recording sends out coded instructions.

The same system could also be used to liven up church bell ringing, the developers claim. Hallelujah!

Read the electronic bells patent.

Quill-inspired printer

The quill pen may be a few hundred years out of date as far as writing implements go, but Xerox believes it could be the future of printing technology.

Ink jet printers use a lot of power to push ink through tiny nozzles. This means the batteries in portable printers quickly go flat, while the nozzles can become clogged if the ink does not have exactly the right viscosity.

So the Palo Alto Research Centre in California (PARC), run by Xerox, has developed a new type of printer with tiny cantilever arms that flip between an ink reservoir and the paper, picking up and depositing a speck of ink powder or drop of liquid ink.

The cantilever arm is around 2 millimetres long and is flipped using electrostatic forces. The main stem of the arm is coated with Teflon, with a bare metal tip that is slit like a fountain-pen nib so that it picks up and deposits a few pico-litres of ink every time it flips.

Multiple arms can be used to deposit different coloured inks, and making the nibs smaller would increases the printer’s resolution.

PARC says the same system can also be used to transfer precise doses of drugs into pills or to automate the analysis of very small DNA samples.

Full Article, New Scientist