Song Lyrics

Eagle Bayan Care-avan

2011-08-07T16:44:00.007+08:00

Eagle Broadcasting Corporation, owner of Net 25, DZEC 106.2, and Pinas FM 95.5, held a community outreach program yesterday, August 6 called "Eagle Bayan Care-avan." The said event was done simultaneously in 5 different sites: Oreta Amphitheatre, Marikina Sports Complex, San Andres Gym, Amoranto Stadium, and Cuneta Astrodome. More than 10,000 recipients benefited from the said event where they enjoyed free medical, dental, and legal services. Grocery items were also given away to the recipients right after their consultation. Congratulations to all volunteers who showed their unconditional service and love to our countrymen and to Eagle Broadcasting Corporation for such a philantropic and meaningful event.

Eagle Bayan Care-Avan would not be possible without the following Sponsors:
Government
• Dept. of Health – Sec. Enrique Ona, ASEC Elmer Punzalan

NGOs
• Medical Profession
• Philippine Medical Association (PMA)
• National President – Dr. Oscar Tinio
• Chairman, Media – Dr. Mike Aragon
• Valenzuela Medical Society – Dra. Victoria Villarica, President, Dra. Flor Munsayac
• Philippine Dental Association (PDA)
• Philippine Nurses Association (PNA)

Academe
• New Era University – Dr. Cora Osorio, President
• Fatima University & Medical Center – Dr. Vicente Santos, Medical Director

Business
• Food & Beverage
• San Miguel Corporation
• Universal Robina Corporation (URC Foundation)
• Personal Care Products
• Unilever
• Colgate-Palmolive
• Splash Corp.
• Fastfoods & Restaurants
• McDonald’s
• Rai Rai Ken
• Kopiroti
• Baby Products
• Babyflo
• Media
• Business Mirror
• Pharmaceutical
• Abbott
• Banks
• Banco de Oro
• Bank of Commerce
• Food Supplements
• Biocomic

NGO
• Pharmaceutical Association of the Philippines (PHAP)

Other Co-Advocate sponsors
• BOSS
• Synetcom
• Group 5
• Philusa
• JIMM’s Coffee
• RCC Amazing Touch
• RLR Cosmetics
• Ainon Baby Products
• Walter Bread
• Lifestyle
• Home Depot

Prom Queen lyrics by Lil' Wayne

2009-04-11T19:12:00.002+08:00

I loved her fancy underwear
I sit behind her every year
Waitin' for the chance to get
To tell her Im the one she should be with yeah!
Shes popular with all the guys
So innocent in my eye
I could see her in my life
she would’ve had the world if she was mine

But see she had other plans
I could not understand
Her and her stupid friends
Varsity’s biggest fans
Never forget the day
She laughed and walked away
And I couldnt stop her
I guess she had it all

Chorus
She had it all figured out
But she left me with a broken heart
F@#ked around and turned me down
Cause she didn’t think I could play the part
But now the prom queen, the prom queen
is crying senseless outside of my door
She never know how
How everything could turn around

They loved her fancy underwear
Every boyfriend every year
She tried to keep ‘em entertained
When they can hardly remember her name
She did everything she could just to
To make him love and treat her good
She found herself alone
askin herself where did she go wrong

She didn’t realize
She chased the type of guys
That don’t believe in ties
Tryin to apologize
Never forget the day
She laughed and walked away
And I couldn’t stop her
I guess she had it all

Chorus
She had it all figured out
But she left me with a broken heart
F@#ked around and turned me down
Cause she didn’t think I could play the part
But now the prom queen, the prom queen
is crying senseless outside of my door
She never know how
How everything could turn around

Getup!

Chorus
She had it all figured out
But she left me with a broken heart
F@#ked around and turned me down
Cause she didn’t think I could play the part
But now the prom queen, the prom queen
is crying senseless outside of my door
She never know how
How everything could turn around

Love Story by Taylor Swift

2009-04-08T21:05:00.001+08:00

We were both young, when I first saw you.
I close my eyes and the flashback starts-
I'm standing there, on a balcony in summer air.

I see the lights; see the party, the ball gowns.
I see you make your way through the crowd-
You say hello, little did I know...

That you were Romeo, you were throwing pebbles-
And my daddy said "stay away from Juliet"-
And I was crying on the staircase-
begging you, "Please don't go..."
And I said...

Romeo take me somewhere, we can be alone.
I'll be waiting; all there's left to do is run.
You'll be the prince and I'll be the princess,
It's a love story, baby, just say yes.

So I sneak out to the garden to see you.
We keep quiet, because we're dead if they knew-
So close your eyes... escape this town for a little while.
Oh, Oh.

Cause you were Romeo - I was a scarlet letter,
And my daddy said "stay away from Juliet" -
but you were everything to me-
I was begging you, "Please don't go"
And I said...

Romeo take me somewhere, we can be alone.
I'll be waiting; all there's left to do is run.
You'll be the prince and I'll be the princess.
It's a love story, baby, just say yes-

Romeo save me, they're trying to tell me how to feel.
This love is difficult, but it's real.
Don't be afraid, we'll make it out of this mess.
It's a love story, baby, just say yes.
Oh, Oh.

I got tired of waiting.
Wondering if you were ever coming around.
My faith in you was fading-
When I met you on the outskirts of town.
And I said...

Romeo save me, I've been feeling so alone.
I keep waiting, for you but you never come.
Is this in my head, I don't know what to think-
He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring and said...

Marry me Juliet, you'll never have to be alone.
I love you, and that's all I really know.
I talked to your dad -- go pick out a white dress
It's a love story, baby just say... yes.
Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh.

'cause we were both young when I first saw you

You'll Always Find Your Way Back Home by Hannah Montana

2009-04-08T21:01:00.001+08:00

Whoo!

[Verse 1:]
You wake up. It's raining and it's Monday.
Looks like one of those rough days. Time's UP!
You're late again so get out the door. (Get out the door).
Sometimes you feel like runnin'.
Run around and you feel like jumpin'.
Let go, get up and hit the dance floor.
When the lights go down it's another empty show!
And you're feeling like you got no place to go.
Don't you know?

[Chorus:]
You could change your hair,
You could change your clothes.
You could change your mind,
It's just the way it goes.
You could say goodbye and you could say hello.
But you'll always find your way back home.
You could change your style,
You could change your jeans.
You could learn to fly,
And you could chase your dreams.
You can laugh or cry,
Like everybody knows.
You'll always find your way back home.

Huh!

[Verse 2:]
Your best friends
Your little hometown.
Waiting up wherever you go now. (MMM)
You know that you can't always turn around. (Turn around)
Cause this world is big and it's crazy. (It's crazy)
This girl is thinking a maybe.
This life is what some people dream about. (Dream about)
Cause when I'm feeling down and i'm feelin' all alone. (One-one)
I always got a place where I can go.
Cause I know.

[Chorus]

Yeah they know exactly who you are. (Are)
Where the real you is a superstar. (Star)
You know that it's never too far away.

You could change your hair,
You could change your clothes.
You could change your mind
It's just the way it goes.
You could say goodbye and you could say hello.
But you'll always find your way back:

You could change your hair,
You could change your clothes.
You could change your mind
It's just the way it goes.
You could say goodbye and you could say hello.
But you'll always find your way back home.
You could change your style,
You could change your jeans.
You could learn to fly,
You could chase your dreams,
You could laugh or cry.
Like everybody knows.
You'll always find your way back home.
You'll always find your way back home.
You'll always find your way back home.
You'll always find your way back home.
You'll always find your way back home.

Home. Always!
You'll always find your way.
You'll always find your way (back home) back home.

The Best Of Both Worlds: 2009 Movie Mix by Hannah Montana

2009-04-08T20:51:00.001+08:00

Wooah!
Here we go everybody!
Oh yeah!

[Verse 1:]
You get the limo out front,
oo, ah, oo.
Hottest styles, every shoe, every color (color),
yeah when your famous it can be kinda fun,
Its really you but no one ever discovers (covers)

[Opening Chorus:]
In some ways your just like all your friends (like all your friends),
but on the stage your a star...

[Chorus:]
You get the best...
of both worlds,
chill it out,
take it slow,
Then you rock out the show! (yeeah!)

You get the best...
of both worlds,
Mix it altogether and you know that its the best of both worlds.
(the best of both...
worlds)
(Yeah!)

[Verse 2:]
You go to movie premiers (is that Orlando Bloom?),
here your songs on the raidio-o (ooh woah),
Livin' 2 life's is a little weird (yeah),
but school's cool 'cause nobody know-ows (know-ows).

[Opening Chorus 2:]
Yeah you get to be a small town girl (small town girl),
but big time when you play your gutair...

[Chorus 2:]
You get the best...
of both worlds,
chill it out,
take it slow,
Then you rock out the show! (yeah!)

You get the best...
of both worlds,
Mix it all together and you know that its the best of both-

[Bridge:]
Pictures and autographs,
You get your face in all the magazines,
The best part is that,
you get to be whoever you wanna be...

Best, [x2] (yeah the best of both)
Best, [x2] (you got the best of both)
Best, [x2] (come on the best of both)

[Opening Chorus 3:]
Who would of thought that a girl like me?,
would double as a superstar...
(whoa!)

[Chorus 3:]
You get the best... (oh best)
of both worlds,
chill it out,
take it slow,
Then you rock out the show!
You get the best...
of both worlds,
Mix it altogether and you know you got the best of both-

You get the best...
of both worlds,
without/you've got the shades and the hair,
you can go anywhere (where),
You get the best...
of both worlds,
Mix it altogether

Oh yeah,
its so much better 'cuz you know you've got the best of both worlds.

Brad, Carrie, Taylor, Keith, Julianne Rack Up ACMs

2009-04-06T17:47:00.001+08:00

Don't let the 10-gallon hats and odd odes to tractors fool you—the 44th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards knew how to keep it real.

From erstwhile reality show winners Carrie Underwood and Julianne Hough triumphing once more—and with hardware that will no doubt put a certain mirrorball trophy to shame—to surprising, diva-like superstar dropouts (sorry, Tim McGraw fans), to an amazingly topical performance of "Shuttin' Down Detroit" from John Rich, the Reba McEntire-hosted awards show did their best to prove that the current crop of twangers are nothing if not relevant.

Doing their part to keep things modern were Taylor Swift, Keith Urban and arm candy Nicole Kidman and—no awards show would be complete without her—Miley Cyrus.

And while Brad Paisley ended up king of the night, taking home a leading three awards, it was double winner Underwood who proved the evening's queen, becoming the first artist in five years to unseat Kenny Chesney as the fan-voted Entertainer of the Year, the highest honor of the night, and the first female performer to take home the prize since the Dixie Chicks did it way back in 2000.

"I've had a lot of good moments over the past four years," she said. "This one takes the cake."

"Things are changing," presenter Jamie Foxx said later, referencing not Underwood's win, but Darius Rucker's recent foray onto the country charts. "An African-American singing country. Things are changing. Got a black man running the country. Things are changing.

"I mean, what's next, white people going to Tyler Perry movies?"

The night, which took place not in Nashville but Las Vegas, started off with a medley of performances from Underwood, Swift, Sugarland, Rascal Flatts and Brooks & Dunn.

"Now that's what I call a stimulus package," McEntire said of the star-studded opening number, going on to joke about country's recent crossover success.

"It seems like everyone wants to do a country album these days—even Michael Phelps and Willie Nelson are teaming up to do a country album. They're covering the Doobie Brothers."

The show wasted no time in doling out the prizes.

One of the night's big winners, as expected, was Underwood, who in addition to her Entertainer of the Year nod took home the prize for Top Female Vocalist.

"I feel like I won American Idol all over again," she said.

Fellow reality cutie and Dancing With the Stars pro Hough also managed to snag two awards, Top New Artist and Top New Female Artist, and got plenty emotional doing it.

"It's a good thing my dress ripped, cause now I have something else to think about," she said. "I can't thank you guys enough—the fans. You guys are amazing. I would not be here without you."

Country faves Sugarland snagged the Top Vocal Duo Award, while Rascal Flatts, as expected, walked away with the Top Vocal Group Award.

"God, what an amazing ride this has been," bassist Jay DeMarcus said in accepting the nod. "Now I know how Brooks & Dunn feel."

Paisley, who at six nominations had more than any other nominee, took home the award for Top Male Vocalist, albeit remotely. The singer was home with wife Kimberly Williams, who is expected to go into labor, well, any minute now.

"I really want to thank you for this," he said via satellite. "I wish I could be there, but I didn't want to take the chance of missing the birth of our next child."

Despite his absence, Paisley tripled his pleasure at the ACM Awards, taking home Video of the Year for "Waitin' On a Woman," and Vocal Event of the Year, which he shared with Urban for their duet "Start a Band."

Meanwhile, providing the show with its requisite amount of drama was a last-minute pull-out by McGraw, who was due to perform alongside wife Faith Hill. McGraw reportedly backed out after a major disagreement over production design for his planned number. The Tennessean went so far as to claim he walked out of rehearsal Saturday night over the dispute.

As for Cyrus, who got tongues wagging in the run-up to tonight's show that the pop star was fixin' to make her career a little more country, a little less rock 'n roll in the coming years, performed "The Climb." She was introduced by papa Billy Ray who, never missing an opportunity to hype his superstar daughter, let loose with a flurry of release dates and Hannah Montana-type hawking in his preamble to the performance.

Fellow young'un Swift also performed at the show, and after being honored with the Top Album of the Year Award for Fearless, she was presented with a surprise piece of hardware by McEntire.

After her performance of "You're Not Sorry," crossover queen Swift was presented with a special ACM Crystal Mileston Award for bringing so many young people to country music.

"Are you serious?" the clearly surprised Swift asked. "To you guys who come to my show, I have absolutely fallen in love with you and will never forget you, ever."

Here's the complete list of winners for the 44th Annual ACM Awards:

•Entertainer of the Year: Carrie Underwood
•Top Male Vocalist: Brad Paisley
•Top Female Vocalist: Carrie Underwood
•Top Vocal Group: Rascal Flatts
•Top Vocal Duo: Sugarland
•Top New Artist: Julianne Hough
•Top New Male Artist: Jake Owen
•Top New Female Artist: Julianne Hough
•Top New Vocal Duo or Group: Zac Brown Band
•Single Record of the Year: Trace Adkins, "You're Gonna Miss This"
•Top Album of the Year: Taylor Swift, Fearless
•Song of the Year: Jamey Johnson, "In Color"
•Video of the Year: Brad Paisley, "Waitin' On a Woman"
•Vocal Event of the Year: Brad Paisley and Keith Urban, "Start a Band"

by:E! online

Hidden Exoplanet Found In Archival Data

2009-04-06T17:45:00.001+08:00

David Lafreniere of the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, has successfully demonstrated this new strategy for planet hunting by identifying an exoplanet that went undetected in Hubble images taken in 1998 with its Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). In addition to illustrating the power of new data-processing techniques, this finding underscores the value of the Hubble data archive, on which those new techniques can be used.

The planet, estimated to be at least seven times Jupiter's mass, was originally discovered in images taken with the Keck and Gemini North telescopes in 2007 and 2008. It is the outermost of three massive planets known to orbit the dusty young star HR 8799, which is 130 light-years away. NICMOS could not see the other two planets because its coronagraphic spot — a device which blots out the glare of the star — also interferes with observing the two inner planets.

"We've shown that NICMOS is more powerful than previously thought for imaging planets," says Lafreniere. "Our new image-processing technique efficiently subtracts the glare from a star that spills over the coronagraph's edge, allowing us to see planets that are one-tenth the brightness of what could be detected before with Hubble." Lafreniere adapted an image reconstruction technique that was first developed for ground-based observatories.

Using the new technique, he recovered the planet in NICMOS observations taken 10 years before the Keck/Gemini discovery. The Hubble picture not only provides important confirmation of the planet's existence, it provides a longer baseline for demonstrating that the object is in an orbit about the star. "To get a good determination of the orbit we have to wait a very long time because the planet is moving so slowly (it has a 400-year period)," says Lafreniere. "The 10-year-old Hubble data take us that much closer to having a precise measure of the orbit."

NICMOS's view provided new insights into the physical characteristics of the planet, too. This was possible because NICMOS works at near-infrared wavelengths that are severely blocked by Earth's atmosphere due to absorption by water vapor.

"The planet seems to be only partially cloud covered and we could be detecting the absorption of water vapor in the atmosphere," says Travis Barman of Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Ariz. "The infrared light measured from the Hubble data is consistent with a spectrum showing a broad water absorption feature (at 1.4-1.49 microns), but the level of absorption seen is lower than it would be if the photosphere were completely devoid of dust. Dust clouds can smooth out many of the spectral features that would otherwise be there—including water absorption bands," Barman says. "Measuring the water absorption properties will tell us a great deal about the temperatures and pressures in the atmospheres, in addition to the cloud coverage. If we can accurately measure the water absorption features for the outermost planet around HR 8799, we will learn a great deal about their atmospheric properties. Hubble, situated well above the Earth's atmosphere, is excellently located for such a study."

"During the past 10 years Hubble has been used to look at over 200 stars with coronagraphy, looking for planets and disks. We plan to go back and look at all of those archived images and see if anything can be detected that has gone undetected until now," says Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, Victoria, Canada. "We'll need a baseline of a few years for most objects to detect Keplerian motion and hence confirm their status as planets. The hardest part is to find them in the first place."

If his team sees a companion object to a star in more than one NICMOS picture, and it appears to have moved along an orbit, follow-up observations will be made with ground-based telescopes. If they see something once but its brightness and separation from the star would be reasonable for a planet, they will also do follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes.

Taking the image of an exoplanet is not an easy task. Planets can be billions of times fainter than the star around which they orbit and are typically located at separations smaller than 1/2000th the angular size of the full moon from their star. The planet recovered in the NICMOS data is about 100,000 times fainter than the star when viewed in the near-infrared.

"Even when using the best telescopes available, with the best resolution, the light from the bright star spills out in the area where the much fainter planets are located, making them impossible to see. It is essential to subtract out this bright glare of stellar light from the image to see faint dots, i.e., planets, that could be hidden underneath," says Rene Doyon of the University of Montreal.

The stability of how light is scattered in the NICMOS camera, called the point spread function (PSF), is key for using Hubble images to recover planets. This technique works by taking images of different stars and combining them to create a PSF of a star that closely resembles the star that is being studied for planets. This requires a reasonably steady PSF because images of different stars are taken on different days. Atmospheric conditions would vary from day-to-day for ground-based telescopes, but not for a space telescope that enjoys unprecedented image stability over repeated visits to a target.

by:science daily

How Low Can It Go? Sun Plunges Into The Quietest Solar Minimum In A Century

2009-04-06T17:38:00.001+08:00

The year 2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73 percent). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008.

Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87 percent).

It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees forecaster David Hathaway of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Quiet suns come along every 11 years or so. It's a natural part of the sunspot cycle, discovered by German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe in the mid-1800s. Sunspots are planet-sized islands of magnetism on the surface of the sun, and they are sources of solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and intense UV radiation. Plotting sunspot counts, Schwabe saw that peaks of solar activity were always followed by valleys of relative calm—a clockwork pattern that has held true for more than 200 years.

The current solar minimum is part of that pattern. In fact, it's right on time. But is it supposed to be this quiet?

Measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft reveal a 20 percent drop in solar wind pressure since the mid-1990s—the lowest point since such measurements began in the 1960s. The solar wind helps keep galactic cosmic rays out of the inner solar system. With the solar wind flagging, more cosmic rays penetrate the solar system, resulting in increased health hazards for astronauts. Weaker solar wind also means fewer geomagnetic storms and auroras on Earth.

Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft have also shown that the sun's brightness has dimmed by 0.02 percent at visible wavelengths and a whopping 6 percent at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. These changes are not enough to reverse global warming, but there are some other, noticeable side-effects.

Earth's upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less "puffed up." Satellites in Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, space junk also remains in orbit longer, posing an increased threat to useful satellites.

Finally, radio telescopes are recording the dimmest "radio sun" since 1955. After World War II, astronomers began keeping records of the sun's brightness at radio wavelengths, particularly 10.7 cm. Some researchers believe that the lessening of radio emissions during this solar minimum is an indication of weakness in the sun's global magnetic field. No one is certain, however, because the source of these long-monitored radio emissions is not fully understood.

All these lows have sparked a debate about whether the ongoing minimum is extreme or just an overdue market correction following a string of unusually intense solar maxima.

"Since the Space Age began in the 1950s, solar activity has been generally high," notes Hathaway. "Five of the ten most intense solar cycles on record have occurred in the last 50 years. We're just not used to this kind of deep calm."

Deep calm was fairly common a hundred years ago. The solar minima of 1901 and 1913, for instance, were even longer than what we're experiencing now. To match those minima in depth and longevity, the current minimum will have to last at least another year.

In a way, the calm is exciting, says Pesnell. "For the first time in history, we're getting to observe a deep solar minimum." A fleet of spacecraft — including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), the twin probes of the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), and several other satellites — are all studying the sun and its effects on Earth. Using technology that didn't exist 100 years ago, scientists are measuring solar winds, cosmic rays, irradiance and magnetic fields and finding that solar minimum is much more interesting than anyone expected.

Modern technology cannot, however, predict what comes next. Competing models by dozens of solar physicists disagree, sometimes sharply, on when this solar minimum will end and how big the next solar maximum will be. The great uncertainty stems from one simple fact: No one fully understands the underlying physics of the sunspot cycle.

Pesnell believes sunspot counts should pick up again soon, "possibly by the end of the year," to be followed by a solar maximum of below-average intensity in 2012 or 2013.

But like other forecasters, he knows he could be wrong. Bull or bear? Stay tuned for updates.

by:science daily

Michael Jackson will live near haunted caves during London concerts

2009-03-29T09:10:00.001+08:00

The eccentric singer is reported to have paid £1 million to rent a large country house near the edge of an ancient 22-mile maze of haunted passageways.

The undisclosed home is thought to be close to the Chislehurst Caves in Bromley, in the south-east suburbs of London. Ghost sightings have been reported at the caves, which were dug in chalk by the Saxons, Druids and Romans.

A property source told The Sun: "His team signed up this week to stay there. We're not sure if he knows about the caves but they're all around."

The 50-year-old star sent aides to find the perfect country retreat before his first gig in London on July 8.

The three-storey pile – built in the 1800s – has quarters for 20 staff as well as an underground cinema, music room, indoor swimming pool, lake and private wood.

Closed circuit television cameras and state-of-the-art alarm systems will prevent fans getting anywhere near the star during his series of 50 concerts.

It was revealed earlier that Jackson has stumped organisers of his concerts by asking to ride an elephant onto the stage as part of a jungle theme.

He was reported to have asked for a panther, snakes, tropical birds and three monkeys for a set that will have a jungle, circus and weather theme during the shows.

by:telegraph

Prince William elects to fly economy as the recession bites

2009-03-29T09:07:00.002+08:00

"He is determined to get his travelling costs down," a senior courtier tells Mandrake. "Obviously there will be occasions when his security team will advise him against this, but he has told us that his default position from now on will be to turn right when he enters an aircraft. He is acutely aware that this is no time for ostentatious expenditure."

When the 26-year-old prince flew off to Courchevel for a skiing holiday with his girlfriend Kate Middleton and her family earlier this month, it went unreported that the second in line to the throne sat among the economy passengers on the British Airways Heathrow to Geneva flight. "There was a security presence, but it was all very low-key and William sat with Kate, her sister Pippa and a group of friends among the other passengers," the courtier adds.

"I think a lot of people on the flight didn't even realise who they were. William actually hates having a fuss made of him when he travels and said that he found it a lot more relaxing than having the cabin crew all nervously hovering around him at the front of the aircraft."

Michael and Carole Middleton, Kate's parents, elected, interestingly, to travel business class on the flight, but this may have been because Mrs Middleton was entitled to an upgrade with her husband since she is a former BA employee.

This was believed to be the first occasion that the prince had sat in economy, but, even so, the trip garnered some unwelcome headlines for him because he had to break into his 16-month course at the Defence Helicopter Flying School – funded by the taxpayer to the tune of £800,000 – to take the holiday.

Prince William's decision to switch from business and first to economy – a policy that has also been adoped by a great many businesses lately – contrasts with Gordon Brown's increasingly grandiose travel arrangements.

Earlier this month I disclosed how, when the Prime Minister returned from his trip to Washington, his British Airways flight was permitted to taxi directly to Royal Suite One, which is normally reserved for the Queen and senior members of the Royal Family.

A British Airways captain got in touch after the story appeared to tell me that Brown's flight was also accorded the call sign Speedbird One which is considered highly pretentious in aviation circles and was eschewed even by the status-conscious Tony Blair when he travelled as prime minister.

Both BA and Clarence House declined to comment on Prince William's travelling arrangements.

by:telegraph

American Idol Idol: Adam’s Acoustic Comeback!

2009-03-27T09:51:00.002+08:00

The top 10 finalists mined the mammoth Motown catalog of hits Wednesday, with Smokey Robinson serving as a very gentle celebrity mentor. Going in, everyone may have expected Lil Rounds to triumph — “This is your week,” Kara told her — but several other singers ended up supreme.

Adam Lambert dropped his flamboyance to sing a controlled, brooding “Track of My Tears.” You could argue that even in restraint he tends to be over the top, but the judges loved him. Kara actually gave him an ovation — that’s usually Paula’s routine — and called the song “one of the best performances of the night.” Simon went further: “It was the best performance of the night.”

Kris Allen strapped on his guitar and sang a cheerful, synocopated “How Sweet It Is.” Smokey said the interpretation “blew me away.” Kara agreed, saying, “You did everything right” in reinventing the song. Simon’s caveat: “You haven’t got that swagger and confidence” of a star. Just watch Adam!

And Allison Iraheta, the 16-year-old who was nearly eliminated last week, did yet another amazing-far-beyond-her-years performance with “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” Randy saluted her as “one of the dopest singers” in the competition. Kara marveled that America would dare not vote to keep her on. Simon and Paula’s comments, while both favorable, wound up as footnotes to the odd fact that Simon had drawn a mustache on Paula’s face.

Now, what about Lil Rounds? She came out with her hair styled like a classic Motown diva, ready to wow with “Heat Wave,” but she sounded surprisingly harsh. Randy said her vocal, at least at the start, was “tortured” and rushed. Lil rounds promised a slower tempo — if she stays. Which she probably will.

Most likely in trouble:

Scott MacIntyre. He performed “You Can’t Hurry Love” with (so he said) the soul of a single man waiting for love. It came out sounding “a bit cheap,” in the words of Simon.

Michael Sarver. He promised he was going to “church it up” with his version of “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” and ended up shouting. Paula, who gets nervous whenever she has to offer to-the-point criticism, trembled poignantly as she described the turn as “Las Vegas lounge-y.”

Megan Joy. Having survived the flu last week, she tackled “For Once in My Life” with a bizarre interpretation that ranged all over the place. Randy thought her performance was a “trainwreck.” Simon, even blunter, told her: “Whoever is advising you, I would fire.” Then, he warned her to be ready to be sent home. – Tom Gliatto

by:people

Erratic Black Hole Regulates Itself

2009-03-27T09:49:00.001+08:00

New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have made a major advance in explaining how a special class of black holes may shut off the high-speed jets they produce. These results suggest that these black holes have a mechanism for regulating the rate at which they grow.Black holes come in many sizes: the supermassive ones, including those in quasars, which weigh in at millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, and the much smaller stellar-mass black holes which have measured masses in the range of about 7 to 25 times the Sun's mass. Some stellar-mass black holes launch powerful jets of particles and radiation, like seen in quasars, and are called "micro-quasars".

The new study looks at a famous micro-quasar in our own Galaxy, and regions close to its event horizon, or point of no return. This system, GRS 1915+105 (GRS 1915 for short), contains a black hole about 14 times the mass of the Sun that is feeding off material from a nearby companion star. As the material swirls toward the black hole, an accretion disk forms.

This system shows remarkably unpredictable and complicated variability ranging from timescales of seconds to months, including 14 different patterns of variation. These variations are caused by a poorly understood connection between the disk and the radio jet seen in GRS 1915.

Chandra, with its spectrograph, has observed GRS 1915 eleven times since its launch in 1999. These studies reveal that the jet in GRS 1915 may be periodically choked off when a hot wind, seen in X-rays, is driven off the accretion disk around the black hole. The wind is believed to shut down the jet by depriving it of matter that would have otherwise fueled it. Conversely, once the wind dies down, the jet can re-emerge.

"We think the jet and wind around this black hole are in a sort of tug of war," said Joseph Neilsen, Harvard graduate student and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Nature. "Sometimes one is winning and then, for reasons we don't entirely understand, the other one gets the upper hand."

The latest Chandra results also show that the wind and the jet carry about the same amount of matter away from the black hole. This is evidence that the black hole is somehow regulating its accretion rate, which may be related to the toggling between mass expulsion via either a jet or a wind from the accretion disk. Self-regulation is a common topic when discussing supermassive black holes, but this is the first clear evidence for it in stellar-mass black holes.

"It is exciting that we may be on the track of explaining two mysteries at the same time: how black hole jets can be shut down and also how black holes regulate their growth," said co-author Julia Lee, assistant professor in the Astronomy department at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "Maybe black holes can regulate themselves better than the financial markets!"

Although micro-quasars and quasars differ in mass by factors of millions, they should show a similarity in behavior when their very different physical scales are taken into account.

"If quasars and micro-quasars behave very differently, then we have a big problem to figure out why, because gravity treats them the same," said Neilsen. "So, our result is actually very reassuring, because it's one more link between these different types of black holes."

The timescale for changes in behavior of a black hole should vary in proportion to the mass. For example, an hour-long timescale for changes in GRS 1915 would correspond to about 10,000 years for a supermassive black hole that weighs a billion times the mass of the Sun.

"We cannot hope to explore at this level of detail in any single supermassive black hole system," said Lee. "So, we can learn a tremendous amount about black holes by just studying stellar-mass black holes like this one."

It is not known what causes the jet to turn on again once the wind dies down, and this remains one of the major unsolved mysteries in astronomy.

"Every major observatory, ground and space, has been used to study this black hole for the past two decades," said Neilsen. "Although we still don't have all the answers, we think our work is a step in the right direction."

This was work made using Chandra's High Energy Transmission Gratings Spectrometer. These results appear in the March 26th issue of Nature. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

by:science daily

Energy Drinks May Be Harmful To People With Hypertension, Heart Disease

2009-03-27T09:40:00.002+08:00

People who have high blood pressure or heart disease should avoid consuming energy drinks, according to a Henry Ford Hospital study to be published online Wednesday in the Annals of Pharmacotherapy.Researchers found that healthy adults who drank two cans a day of a popular energy drink experienced an increase in their blood pressure and heart rate. No significant changes in EKG measurements were reported.

The increases in blood pressure and heart rate were insignificant for healthy adults, but could prove harmful to people with a heart-related condition, says James Kalus, Pharm.D., senior manager of Patient Care Services at Henry Ford Hospital and lead author of the study.

"Based on our findings, we recommend that people who have hypertension or heart disease and are taking medication for them to avoid consuming energy drinks because of a potential risk to their health," Dr. Kalus says.

Researchers believe the caffeine and taurine levels in energy drinks could be responsible for increases in blood pressure and heart rate. The brand of energy drink used in the study is not being identified because most energy drinks on the market boast similar levels of caffeine and taurine, a non-essential amino acid derivative often found in meat and fish. The caffeine levels in energy drinks are equivalent to at least one to two cups of coffee.

Dr. Kalus says energy drinks should not be confused with sports drinks, which aim to replenish the carbohydrates and electrolytes that a body needs.

"Both caffeine and taurine have been shown to have a direct impact on cardiac function," Dr. Kalus says.

Researchers studied 15 healthy adult participants who abstained from other forms of caffeine for two days prior to and throughout the study. On the first day after a baseline measurement of blood pressure, heart rate and EKG were taken, the adults consumed two cans of the energy drink.

Researchers then measured the participants' blood pressure, heart rate and EKG again at 30 minutes and one, two, three and four hours after consumption. For the next five days, the participants' consumed two cans of the energy drink.

On the study's seventh day, the protocol used on the first day was repeated and the average baseline measurements were compared to the measurements obtained after energy drink consumption. Researchers found that the participants:

* Heart rate increased 7.8 percent the first day and 11 percent the seventh day.
* Blood pressure increased at least 7 percent the first and seventh days.

Dr. Kalus says the participants did not engage in any physical activity during the study, suggesting that the increases could have been higher.

by:science daily

Robin Williams expected to make full recovery after heart surgery

2009-03-25T08:06:00.002+08:00

Funnyman Robin Williams, 57, is currently recovering from heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic, his publicist announced yesterday.

“His heart is strong and he will have normal heart function in the coming weeks with no limitations on what he’ll be able to do,” Dr. A. Marc Gillinov, a cardiothoracic surgeon at the clinic, is quoted as saying by Reuters. “A couple of hours after surgery, he was entertaining the medical team and making us all laugh.”

The surgery, which took place on March 13, was done to replace the comedian’s aortic valve, repair his mitral valve and correct an irregular heartbeat, the news agency reports. He is expected to make a full recovery.

by:hot gossip

What will the Sun look like when it dies?

2009-03-25T08:01:00.001+08:00

Planetary nebulae are the final butterfly-like state that heralds the end of a Sun-like star's energy-generating life. They form when stars up to eight times the mass of the Sun begin to die, bloating into red giants before shedding as much as half their mass as gas and dust nebulae.

The Sun itself will begin its death throes in about 5 billion years, when it starts to swell into a red giant star. Though it's not clear exactly what its planetary nebula will look like – its shape will likely be sculpted by factors such as the Sun's future magnetic field – observations of the 1600 or so known planetary nebulae suggest our star will go out in a blaze of glory.

Lasting no more than a few tens of thousands of years, planetary nebulae help seed space with heavier chemical elements that can be incorporated into the next generation of stars. A new book called Galaxy: Exploring the Milky Way by Stuart Clark features some absolutely spectacular images of these nebulae.

by:new scientist

Moon shadows on Saturn rings are a sign of spring

2009-03-25T07:54:00.001+08:00

The Cassini spacecraft has captured its first snapshots of moon shadows on Saturn's rings. The shadows are a sign that the Sun will soon cross Saturn's equator, bringing spring to the planet's northern hemisphere for the first time in almost 30 years.

Like Earth, Saturn experiences seasons because its equator and rings do not lie in the same plane as its orbit – they are tilted by some 27°. Twice during the planet's 29.5-year orbit, the Sun crosses its equator, illuminating the planet's rings edge-on.

The next such equinox will be on 11 August 2009. But NASA's Cassini spacecraft caught one of the first signs of the coming alignment in January, when it snapped images of moon shadows on the planet's rings. Shadows of Saturn's moons are typically seen on the planet itself.

Cassini's mission was extended to 30 September 2010 in order to watch the equinox, which occurs once every 15 years. The team hopes the change in light will offer new insight into the planet's weather as well as reveal more about Saturn's rings.
Dark silhouettes

Measuring the 3D structure of the planet's main, inner rings is usually difficult. That's because Saturn's F ring, which surrounds them, is thicker in the vertical direction than the inner rings, which are about 10 metres thick, obscuring edge-on views of the inner rings.

During equinoxes, though, when the rings lie edge on as seen from Earth, it is usually difficult to directly image the planet's main, inner rings. That's because Saturn's F ring, which surrounds them, is thicker in the vertical direction than the inner rings, which are about 10 metres thick.

But researchers hope to glean more information about the thickness of the inner rings by observing the shapes that the moon shadows cast on them. Any vertical bumps in the rings should distort the shadows' silhouettes.

"Because we know how big the moons are, and where they are in their orbits around Saturn when they cast these shadows, we have all the information we need to infer any substantial vertical structure that might be present," team member John Weiss of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.
Unique perspective

Although Cassini will have a clear view of the equinox, the event will not be visible from the ground. While Earth and Saturn's rings will be in exactly the same plane on 10 August and 4 September 2009, Saturn will be too close to the Sun to be a good target for skywatchers.

"One of the best things about being in orbit around Saturn are those mind-expanding opportunities that arise every now and again to see some celestial phenomenon you couldn't possibly see here on Earth," said Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team in Boulder, Colorado.

by:new scientist

Lindsay's shocking demise

2009-03-24T09:50:00.001+08:00

After pictures of 22-year-old Lindsay Lohan emerged of the actress looking rail thin, amid rumours of a series of bust-ups with Samantha Ronson, 31, pals of the Mean Girls star revealed that they have begun fearing for her life.

Caught on camera drinking alcohol - despite her admission in August 2007 that "It is clear to me that my life has become completely unmanageable because I am addicted to alcohol and drugs" - friends say Lindsay is taking drugs and self-harming as her career fails and her relationship grows more tempestuous.

Ahlan! stacks up the evidence that shows the star is in very serious trouble...

Self-harming?

Spotted out partying almost every night - favouring travelling with Sam to her DJ gigs and sitting in the booth over staying out of the spotlight to repair her image - Lindsay has become a source of major worry for her close friends and family, after one insisted the actress is cutting herself, saying, "She has fresh scars on her wrists."

Skinny Obsession

Insiders say Lindsay's weight has dropped from 61 kilos to 43 kilos within the past few months, which, at 5ft 6 makes her seriously underweight according to her BMI.

"She looks horribly unhealthy," said a friend, who adds that LiLo's pals are blaming a ‘skinny pact' with Samantha Ronson for the rapid weight loss. "Lindsay is obsessed with her weight."

Vicious Fights With Sam

Neighbours were left shocked, just last weekend, when a huge row broke out at Samantha's Hollywood home between the DJ and Lindsay - with sources saying the warring pair resorted to throwing things at one another.

"The noise was pretty frightening. It was the two of them screeching at one another, and you could hear stuff being banged around too - it sounded like a lovers' quarrel, but a pretty bad one!" revealed one.

And onlookers at the recent ESPN Pre-Super Bowl party revealed, "Lindsay grabbed Sam's blackberry obsessively to check her messages before a row broke out." With a friend adding, "They're always breaking up. Samantha won't let Lindsay go, she doesn't have a career without her."

Her Career's In Meltdown

Almost pathologically jealous of Scarlett Johansson's stellar career - and in 2006, Lindsay scrawled ‘Scarlett is a bloody c***' on the bathroom wall of a New York club during a night out with Kate Moss - the Herbie: Reloaded star recently lamented, "I work just as hard as any other actress around my age, like Scarlett Johansson, but I just don't get the opportunities that they get."

And after Lindsay's character was axed from recurring episodes of Ugly Betty amid rumours of rows with America Ferrera, the struggling actress last week suffered the humiliating blow of losing out to her Mean Girls co-star Amanda Seyfried for the lead role in A Woman Of No Importance - the ‘serious movie Linds had hoped to put her back on the map.

Will Lindsay's Family Intervene?

Desperate to split Sam and Lindsay up, the actress's estranged father, Michael revealed on his blog, "I received a text message from a dear friend of Lindsay's. The text said, ‘From what I hear, from Lindsay's nearest and dearest friends, Lindsay is worse off than ever since she has been with Sam.'"

And although Dina Lohan has stepped out of the spotlight and is now rarely pictured with her eldest daughter, insiders are adamant that behind the scenes, plans are being made to stage an intervention, forcing Lindsay back into rehab for the fourth time.

by:ahlan live.com

Can Robots Be Programmed to Learn from Their Own Experiences?

2009-03-24T09:30:00.002+08:00

It took just a few decades for computers to evolve from room-size vacuum tube–based machines that cost as much as a house to cheap chip-powered desktop models with vastly more processing power. Similarly, the days of "personal robots"—inexpensive machines that can help out at home or the office—may be closer than we think. But first, says Alexander Stoytchev, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State University in Ames, robots have to be taught to do something we know instinctively: how to learn.

"A truly useful personal robot [must have] the ability to learn on its own from interactions with the physical and social environment," says Stoytchev, whose field of developmental robotics combines developmental psychology and neuroscience with artificial intelligence and robotic engineering. "It should not rely on a human programmer once it is purchased. It must be trainable."

Stoytchev and a team of grad students are developing software to teach robots to learn about as well as a two-year-old child. Their platform is a humanoid robot that sprouts two 60-pound (27-kilogram) Whole Arm Manipulators (WAM) made by Cambridge, Mass.,–based Barrett Technology, Inc., each tipped with a 2.6-pound (1.2-kilogram) three-fingered BarrettHand.

In one set of experiments, the robot was presented with 36 different objects, including hockey pucks and Tupperware. It could perform five different actions with each one—grasping, pushing, tapping, shaking and dropping—and had to identify and classify them based only on the sounds they made. After just one action the robot had a 72 percent success rate, but its accuracy soared with each successive action, reaching 99.2 percent after all five. The robot had learned to use a perceptual model to recognize and classify objects—and it could rely on this model to estimate how similar two objects were with only the sounds they made to guide it.

Another set of experiments showed the robot could learn to tell whether or not something was a container. The team presented the machine, topped with a 3-D camera, with objects of different shapes. By dropping a small block on each one and then pushing it, the robot learned to classify objects either as containers—those that moved together with the block ["co-moved"] more often when pushed—or as noncontainers. The robot could then use this knowledge to judge whether unfamiliar objects could hold things; in other words, it had learned, roughly, how to discern the unique characteristics of a container.

When personal robots finally hit retail chains, they might look something like HERB, the "Home Exploring Robotic Butler" created at an Intel lab in Pittsburgh. It is part of the company's Personal Robotics Project, whose goal is to make a truly autonomous robotic assistant that can perform routine tasks at human speeds in cluttered environments like homes or offices.

by:scientific american

After the collapse: Scientists observe the largest exploding star yet seen

2009-03-24T09:24:00.002+08:00

Archival photographs from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have been used to uncover the progenitor star to a supernova that exploded in 2005. To the surprise of astronomers, the progenitor is a rare class of ultra-bright star that, according to theory, shouldn't explode so early in its evolution. [Top Center] This is a 2005 ground-based photograph of the supernova as seen in host galaxy NGC 266, located in the constellation Pisces. Credit: Puckett Observatory [Bottom Left] This is a 1997 Hubble archival visible-light image of the region of the galaxy where the supernova exploded. The white circle marks a star that Hubble measured to have an absolute magnitude of -10.3. This corresponds to the brightness of 1 million suns (at the galaxy's distance of 215 million light-years). Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Gal-Yam (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) [Bottom Center] This is a near-infrared-light photo of the supernova explosion taken on Nov. 11, 2005, with the Keck telescope, using adaptive optics. The blast is centered on the position of the progenitor. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Gal-Yam (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel), D. Leonard (San Diego State University), and D. Fox (Penn State University) [Bottom Right] This is a visible-light Hubble follow-up image taken on September 26, 2007. Note that a bright source near the site of the supernova can be seen in all three panels, but the progenitor star is gone. The Hubble pictures from both epochs were taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Gal-Yam (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)

Scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science and San Diego State University managed to observe a super-sized supernova explosion from start to finish, including the black hole ending. In the first observation if its kind, scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and San Diego State University were able to watch what happens when a star the size of 50 suns explodes. As they continued to track the spectacular event, they found that most of the star's mass collapsed in on itself, resulting in a large black hole.

While exploding stars - supernovae - have been viewed with everything from the naked eye to high-tech research satellites, no one had directly observed what happens when a really huge star blows up. Dr. Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute's Faculty of Physics and Prof. Douglas Leonard of San Diego State University recently located and calculated the mass of a gigantic star on the verge of exploding, following through with observations of the blast and its aftermath. Their findings have lent support to the reigning theory that stars ranging from tens to hundreds of times the mass of our sun all end up as black holes.

A star's end is predetermined from birth by its size and by the 'power plant' that keeps it shining during its lifetime. Stars, among them our sun, are fueled by hydrogen nuclei fusing together into helium in the intense heat and pressure of their inner cores. A helium nucleus is a bit lighter than the sum of the masses of the four hydrogen nuclei that went into making it and, from Einstein's theory of relativity (E=MC2), we know that the missing mass is released as energy.

When stars like our sun finish off their hydrogen fuel, they burn out relatively quietly in a puff of expansion. But a star that's eight or more times larger than the sun makes a much more dramatic exit. Nuclear fusion continues after the hydrogen is exhausted, producing heavier elements in the star's different layers. When this process progresses to the point that the core of the star has turned to iron, another phenomenon takes over: In the enormous heat and pressure in the star's center, the iron nuclei break apart into their component protons and neutrons. At some point, this causes the core and the layer above it to collapse inward, firing the rest of the star's material rapidly out into space in a supernova flash. A supernova releases more energy in a few days than our sun will release over its entire lifetime, and the explosion is so bright that one occurring hundreds of light years away can be seen from Earth even in the daytime. While a supernova's outer layers are lighting up the universe with dazzling fireworks, the star's core collapses further and further inward. The gravity created in this collapse becomes so strong that the protons and electrons are squeezed together to form neutrons, and the star's core is reduced from a sphere 10,000 kilometers around to one with a circumference of a mere 10 kilometers. Just a crate-full of this star's material weighs as much as our entire Earth. But when the exploding star is 20 times the mass of our sun or more, say the scientists, its gravitational pull becomes so powerful that even light waves are held in place. Such a star - a black hole - is invisible for all intents and purposes.

Until now, none of the supernovae stars that scientists had managed to measure had exceeded a mass of 20 suns. Gal-Yam and Leonard were looking at a specific region in space using the Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope. Identifying the about-to-explode star, they calculated its mass to be equal to 50-100 suns. Continued observation revealed that only a small part of the star's mass was flung off in the explosion. Most of the material, says Gal-Yam, was drawn into the collapsing core as its gravitational pull mounted. Indeed, in subsequent telescope images of that section of the sky, the star seems to have disappeared. In other words, the star has now become a black hole - so dense that light can't escape.

by:physorg

Pink elephant is caught on camera

2009-03-23T10:46:00.002+08:00

A pink baby elephant has been caught on camera in Botswana.

A wildlife cameraman took pictures of the calf when he spotted it among a herd of about 80 elephants in the Okavango Delta.

Experts believe it is probably an albino, which is an extremely rare phenomenon in African elephants.

They are unsure of its chances of long-term survival - the blazing African sunlight may cause blindness and skin problems for the calf.

Mike Holding, who spotted the baby while filming for a BBC wildlife programme, said: "We only saw it for a couple of minutes as the herd crossed the river. "This was a really exciting moment for everyone in camp. We knew it was a rare sighting - no-one could believe their eyes."

Documented evidence

Albino elephants are not usually white, but instead they have more of a reddish-brown or pink hue.

While albinism is thought to be fairly common in Asian elephants, it is much less common in the larger African species. Ecologist Dr Mike Chase, who runs conservation charity Elephants Without Borders, said: "I have only come across three references to albino calves, which have occurred in Kruger National Park in South Africa.

"This is probably the first documented sighting of an albino elephant in northern Botswana.

"We have been studying elephants in the region for nearly 10 years now, and this is the first documented evidence of an albino calf that I have come across."

He said that the condition might make it difficult for the calf to survive into adulthood.

"What happens to these young albino calves remains a mystery," said Dr Chase.

"Surviving this very rare phenomenon is very difficult in the harsh African bush. The glaring sun may cause blindness and skin problems."

However, he told BBC News that there might be a ray of hope for the pink calf as it already seemed to be learning to adapt to its condition. Dr Chase explained: "Because this elephant calf was sighted in the Okavango Delta, he may have a greater chance of survival. He can seek refuge under the large trees and cake himself in a thick mud, which will protect him from the Sun.

"Already the two-to-three-month-old calf seems to be walking in the shade of its mother.

"This behaviour suggests it is aware of its susceptibility to the harsh African sun, and adapted a unique behaviour to improve its chances of survival."

He added: "I have learned that elephants are highly adaptable, intelligent and masters of survival."

by:bbc news

Criticizing Robert Pattinson, Humility for Twilight and New Moon Star

2009-03-23T10:36:00.002+08:00

Robert Pattinson looks dreamy and smolderingly sexy on the cover of GQ Magazine and on the set of his upcoming film New Moon. His brief trip into Hollywood for the Academy Awards sent sweethearts like Natalie Portman swooning (at least according to an E! Online report) and reports of many other women desperately seeking Robert Pattinson. So who is the chief critic of Rob? It appears he is pretty hard on himself.According to this week's In Touch, on the commentary track to the Twilight DVD (big splash release on Friday night at midnight) Pattinson rips on his looks. A story titled "Robert Thinks He's Ugly" is based on the DVD commentary from Pattinson and he makes comments such as, "Sometimes I think I look as if I've had facial reconstructive surgery. After burns or something. My whole head looks like it's had a face lift. A really bad one!" He also says he has a "butt chin."
In Touch examines a bit deeper and asks why is the actor being so self-deprecating? "He may be insecure and doubting himself," the magazine cites Dr. Cynthia Cardinal (who the report notes has not treated robe) for the quote and she tells the weekly celebrity magazine, "Just because you're loved by millions doesn't mean you can love yourself."

Another possible reason cited in the article, a touch of humility. "Also humbling himself makes him more lovable - he doesn't want to come off as snobby." Pattinson seems far from that. Is he being too tough on himself, or is he just this humble?

by:national ledger

Two Dying Red Supergiant Stars Produced Supernovae

2009-03-21T19:56:00.001+08:00

A star is a large ball of hot gas and in its incredibly hot interior hydrogen atoms combine to form helium, which subsequently forms carbon, other heavier elements and finally iron. When all the atoms in the centre have turned to iron the fuel is depleted and the star dies. When very large and massive stars, that are at least about eight times as massive as our sun, die, they explode as supernovae.

Enormous swollen stars

But some massive stars become red supergiant stars first, which is an intermediate phase where, after the fuel in the centre is used up, energy is still produced in shells surrounding the now dead core. In this phase, the star swells up to an enormous size, approximately 1500 times larger than the sun, and emits as much light as a hundred thousand suns. But there has been doubt over whether red supergiants explode as supernovae.

Using images from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Observatory, Justyn R. Maund, astrophysicist at the Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen and astrophysicist Stephen J. Smartt, Queens University Belfast, have observed two stars that exploded as supernovae. By analysing archival images of the same section of the sky from long before the explosions, the researchers could see which stars might have gone supernova. But picking out individual stars in the distant universe is difficult, and pinpointing exactly which star it was that exploded is a huge challenge.

Stars became supernovae

A supernova is visible in the sky for some time after its explosion before its giant dust- and gas clouds are blown clear. The researchers can then observe the region around the position of the supernova several years after the supernova explosion and can then see exactly which star has disappeared.

For one of the supernovae, SN1993J (which exploded in 1993) they found that a red supergiant no longer exists, but that its neighboring star remained. In addition, they found that the red supergiant that was postulated to have caused the supernova SN2003gd has also disappeared. This simple but very time intensive method, establishes that it was these two red supergiant stars that produced the supernovae 2003J and 2003gd, and confirms that red supergiant stars create type II supernovae.

Maund and Smartt have found the missing link between red supergiant stars and their supernovae, giving astronomers a greater understanding of how massive stars die. Stellar death is a process crucial for understanding the origin of the chemical elements in the Universe, a precursor necessary ultimately to the formation of planets and life.

Teeth Of Columbus' Crew Flesh Out Tale Of New World Discovery

2009-03-21T19:46:00.001+08:00

Now, however, science is taking interrogation of the dead to new heights. In a study that promises fresh and perhaps personal insight into some of the earliest European visitors to the New World, a team or researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is extracting the chemical details of life history from the teeth of crew members Christopher Columbus left on the island of Hispaniola after his second voyage to America in 1493-94.

"This is telling us about where people came from and what they ate as children," explains T. Douglas Price, a UW-Madison professor of anthropology and the leader of the team conducting an analysis of the tooth enamel of three individuals from a larger group excavated almost 20 years ago from shallow graves at the site of La Isabela, founded by Columbus.

Price and colleague James Burton, in collaboration with researchers from the Autonomous University of the Yucatan in Mexico, are attempting to flesh out the details of a colony that lasted less than five years. The human remains used in the study were buried without the formalities of coffins or shrouds, and were excavated from what was once the church graveyard of the town Columbus established. Headstones and other identifying markers have long since faded to nothing or have been lost entirely during the 500 years since the bodies were first interred.

Despite its brief existence, historians and archaeologists believe La Isabela was a substantial settlement with a church, public buildings such as a customhouse and storehouse, private dwellings and fortifications. It is also the only known settlement in America where Columbus actually lived.

Although the town has been the subject of previous archaeological studies, the work by Price, Burton and their colleague Vera Tiesler and Andrea Cucina of the Autonomous University of the Yucatan is revealing new insight into the people who lived and sailed with Columbus, and who died on the shores of a strange and exotic new world.

Histories of La Isabela, named after Spain's queen and Columbus's patron and located in what is today the Dominican Republic, suggest its population was made up only of men from the fleet of 17 vessels that comprised Columbus's second visit to the New World. But the first analysis of the remains of 20 individuals excavated two decades ago by Italian and Dominican archaeologists portray a different picture, suggesting that living among the Spaniards at La Isabela were native Taínos, women and children, and possibly individuals of African origin. If confirmed, that would put Africans in the New World as contemporaries of Columbus and decades before they were believed to have first arrived as slaves.

The study conducted by the Wisconsin researchers relied on isotopic analysis of three elements: carbon, oxygen and strontium.

Carbon isotope ratios provide reliable evidence of diet at the time an individual's adult teeth emerge in childhood. For example, people who eat maize, as opposed to those who consume wheat or rice, have different carbon isotope ratio profiles locked in their tooth enamel.

"Heavy carbon means you were eating tropical grasses such as maize, found only in the New World, or millet in Africa, neither of which was consumed in Europe" at the time, says Burton.

Oxygen isotopes provide information about water consumption and also can say something about geography as the isotopic composition of water changes in relation to latitude and proximity to the ocean. Strontium is a chemical found in bedrock and that enters the body through the food chain as nutrients pass from bedrock to soil and water and, ultimately, to plants and animals. The strontium isotopes found in tooth enamel, the most stable and durable material in the human body, thus constitute an indelible signature of where someone lived as a child.

Three of the individuals whose teeth were subjected to isotopic analysis by the Wisconsin group were males under the age of 40 and who had carbon isotope profiles far different from the rest, suggesting an Old World origin. "I would bet money this person was an African," Price says of one of the three individuals whose teeth were subjected to analysis.

It was known that Columbus had a personal African slave on his voyages of discovery. The new analysis could mean that Africans played a much larger role in the first documented explorations of America.

The strontium isotope analysis, Price notes, is not yet complete, as samples from the teeth of the presumed sailors remain to be matched with strontium profiles of Spanish soils. However, such matches could open an intriguing window to the personal identities of individuals buried in La Isabela.

"All of these sailors — their place of birth, their age — were recorded in Seville before they left on the second voyage," Price explains. "One of the things we're hoping to do with the strontium is identify individuals."

The skeletons also exhibit evidence of scurvy, a common affliction of 15th century sailors who lacked vitamin C on their long voyages, as well as signs of malnutrition and physical stress. Chronicles of the voyage noted that most of the Europeans, including Columbus himself, fell sick shortly after landfall on Hispaniola, and many subsequently died, perhaps becoming the first to be buried in the La Isabela church graveyard.

by:science daily

Copy-and-paste ability to be added to iPhone

2009-03-18T08:21:00.002+08:00

At long last, Apple will be adding copy-and-paste for text to its iPhone, something customers have clamored for, and something that is commonly featured on almost all other smartphones.

Scott Forstall, Apple's senior vice president of iPhone software, unveiled the new feature today along with others for the phone at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

"We've been working really hard to design an easy-to use interface for this on our touchscreen display," he said.

The new features of what is called iPhone 3.0 Operating System software will be available this summer, probably when a new version of the device itself is released. The software upgrade will be free to iPhone owners, and cost $9.95 for those who own the iPod touch, which does not have a phone, and uses wireless networks to connect to the Internet.

The ability to cut, copy and paste text will be available for e-mails, Web pages and other programs on the device, as will another key feature: the ability to send photos — but not videos — using text messaging. Photos can now be sent by e-mail using the iPhone, but not text messaging, or MMS, as it is called.

Users will be able to view e-mails and documents in "landscape," or horizontal, mode, as well as portrait mode with the new software, and will also be able to search contacts and e-mails much as they would on a computer.

Some of the programs announced yesterday, including MMS, will not work on first-generation iPhones, those released in 2007, and only with the second-generation iPhone 3G, which came out last July, because of the phones' different hardware.

"The new iPhone OS 3.0 is a major software release packed with incredible new features and innovations for iPhone customers and developers alike," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing in a statement. "It will keep us years ahead of the competition."

The iPhone 3G has a GPS chip which has been used for providing location-based services and for mapping, but no programs with voice-based, turn-by-turn directions have been available. That should change with the new software upgrade, Forstall said.

Apple is broadening the ways that third-party software programmers can sell content on the iPhone.

The company says software developers now will be able to create applications that have items for sale within them, such as electronic books, subscriptions to magazines or newspapers or additional levels of a video game.

In addition, peer-to-peer connectivity, allowing gamers to wirelessly find other gamers using an iPhone or iPod touch will be among the new features of iPhone 3.0 software. Connections will be made using Bluetooth, a short-range wireless technology, instead of Wi-Fi.

Examples of two games, "Touch Pet" and "LiveFire" were shown, with "push" notification being available to connect with other players.

Another new feature will allow streaming of ESPN video using a new media player that automatically adjusts the video's quality based on the "bandwidth," or connection a user has.

While the changes announced are welcomed by iPhone users, "Apple delivered no 'knock-out' blows to competitors with this release," said Avi Greengart, Current Analysis research direction for consumer devices.

"It’s hard to get too excited about cut-and-paste — a feature that should have been there in the first place," he said. "Indeed, many of the features announced today are just catching up with what Windows Mobile, Symbian, and RIM (BlackBerry) phones have provided for years."

However, he added, "Lost in all the features checklists is the impact that this release is likely to have on application development — and here is where iPhone 3.0 really does keep Apple in the forefront. Consumers are increasingly looking at smartphones as a platform investment that increases in value over time as applications are added."

Another analyst, Kevin Burden, director of mobile devices research, said that "Even though the iPhone reset the bar for every other mobile phone manufacturer, this version of its OS shows just how much catch-up Apple itself needed to do.

"Cut-and-paste and MMS messaging have been expected functionality — and not just on high-end phones, either."

Apple also said at the announcement that it sold 13.7 million iPhones in 2008, exceeding its goal of 10 million, and that from June, 2007 to December, 2008, a total of 17 million iPhones were sold.

by:msnbc

Saturn photographed with four moons

2009-03-18T08:11:00.000+08:00

A new Hubble photograph captured a rare alignment of four of Saturn's moons lining up in front of their planet.

The snapshot, taken on Feb. 24 with the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the moons transiting in front of Saturn. The moons, from far left to right, are the white icy moons Enceladus and Dione, the large orange moon Titan, and icy Mimas. Due to the angle of the sun, they are each preceded by their own shadow.

These rare moon transits only happen when the tilt of Saturn's ring plane is nearly "edge on" as seen from the Earth. Saturn's rings will be perfectly edge on to our line of sight on Aug. 10 and Sept. 4, 2009. Unfortunately, Saturn will be too close to the sun to be seen by viewers on Earth at that time. This "ring plane crossing" occurs every 14-15 years. In 1995-96 Hubble witnessed the previous ring plane crossing, as well as many moon transits, and helped to discover several new moons of Saturn.

Early 2009 was a favorable time for viewers with small telescopes to watch moon and shadow transits crossing the face of Saturn. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, crossed Saturn on four separate occasions: Jan. 24, Feb. 9, Feb. 24 and March 12, although not all events were visible from all locations on Earth.

Italian Galileo Galilei — often referred to as the father of astronomy — was the first to observe Saturn through a telescope in 1610. Dutch mathematician and astronomer Christian Huygens discovered Titan in 1655 and, 350 years later, the ESA probe named for him touched down on Titan (on Jan. 14, 2005), giving the world its first views of the surface of the mysterious, icy world. Giovanni Domenico Cassini, a French/Italian astronomer, discovered Dione (in addition to others) and the German-born Englishman, William Herschel, discovered Mimas and Enceladus.

These pictures were taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 when Saturn was at a distance of roughly 780 million miles (1.25 billion kilometers) from Earth. Hubble can see details as small as 190 miles (300 kilometers) across on Saturn. The dark band running across the face of the planet slightly above the rings is the shadow of the rings cast on the planet.

by:msnbc

Judge quashes arrest warrant for Lohan

2009-03-17T07:46:00.000+08:00

Lindsay Lohan’s next appearance won’t be in jail garb.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge on Monday quashed an arrest warrant that was issued Friday for the 22-year-old “Mean Girls” star.

Judge Marsha N. Revel determined that the actress has been complying with the terms of her probation but needs to show her treatment program better documentation to avoid future court problems. The judge also noted that Lohan has not failed any drug or alcohol tests.Lohan’s attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley, presented Revel with documentation Monday morning that her client had not violated her probation. She said after the hearing that the confusion stemmed from the actress switching treatment programs.

“As you saw in court, this was really much ado about nothing,” Holley told reporters after the hearing. She said she expects Lohan to successfully complete her probation.

Lohan pleaded guilty in August 2007 to two misdemeanor counts of being under the influence of cocaine; no contest to two counts of driving with a blood-alcohol level above 0.08 percent and one count of reckless driving. She was sentenced to three years of probation.

The plea came after a pair of high-profile arrests in 2007.

Lohan was arrested Memorial Day weekend 2007 after her Mercedes-Benz hit a tree in Beverly Hills. She was arrested in Santa Monica a few weeks later after the mother of her former personal assistant called 911 to report that her car was being chased by an SUV driven by Lohan.

Lohan spent 84 minutes in jail and had to perform community service and undergo drug-rehabilitation treatment.

Lohan had a tumultuous weekend after the warrant was issued. According to People.com, Lohan was spotted at Hollywood hotspot Chateau Marmont on Friday night around 8 p.m. with three female friends, drinking water and an “unidentified drink” in a cocktail glass. Hours later, Lohan reportedly arrived at the home of Jack Nicholson around 1:45 a.m.. According to People sources, she buzzed the intercom several times and asked for “Jack” to open the gate before being let inside. A bodyguard picked her up at 4:30 a.m. and brought her to Ronson’s Beachwood Canyon home in Los Angeles.

by:msnbc

Facebook can be used to serve legal papers, rules New Zealand judge

2009-03-17T07:42:00.000+08:00

The High Court in Wellington was told that there were "difficulties" serving papers on Craig Axe because his exact whereabouts in Britain was not known, but that he has a Facebook page.

Mr Axe is being sued in a civil case by his family's firm, Axe Market Garden, which is run by his father John. The court papers allege that he drew £89,000 pounds from the company's account.

Daniel Vincent, counsel for the company, told the court a family dispute predated the alleged taking of money from the account via the internet while Mr Axe was in Britain.

Requesting the order, he told the judge that all conventional methods of informing Mr Axe that he was being sued were likely to prove ineffective, frustrating the case.

Justice David Gendall granted approval, the first time a New Zealand court has allowed such a step. Facebook was also used by police in the New Zealand alpine resort of Queenstown in January when they posted surveillance camera footage of a bungling burglar.

A man was later arrested as a result of the publicity.

Facebook has become hugely popular since it was launched in 2004 and claims more than 140 million users worldwide.

by:telegraph

Japanese catwalk robot unveiled

2009-03-17T07:35:00.000+08:00

The female humanoid with slightly oversized eyes, a tiny nose and shoulder-length hair boasts 42 motion motors programmed to mimic the movements of flesh-and-blood fashion models.

"Hello everybody, I am cybernetic human HRP-4C," said the futuristic fashionista, opening her media premiere at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology outside Tokyo.
The fashion-bot is 5ft 2 ins, the average height of young Japanese women, but weighs in at a waiflike 95 pounds (43 kilos) – including batteries.

Appearing before photographers and television crews, the seductive cyborg struck poses, flashed smiles and pouted sulkily according to commands transmitted wirelessly via bluetooth devices.

The performance fell short of flawless when she occasionally mixed up her facial expressions – a mistake the inventors put down to a case of the nerves as a hail of camera shutters confused her sound recognition sensors.

She has a slightly manga-inspired human face but a silver metallic body.

"If we had made the robot too similar to a real human, it would have been uncanny," said one of the inventors, humanoid research leader Shuji Kajita. "We have deliberately leant toward an anime style."

The institute said the robot "has been developed mainly for use in the entertainment industry" but is not for sale at the moment.

"We unveiled this to attract attention in society," said Junji Ito, a senior official at the institute, who said he saw the HRP-4C as a stepping stone toward creating a humanoid industry.

"It's important that people feel good about humanoids and want to work with them," he said. "We shifted from a dry mechanical image to a very human image."

The preview was a warm-up for the robot's appearance at a Tokyo fashion show on March 23.

Like her real-life counterparts, HRP-4C commands a hefty price – the institute said developing and building her cost more than 200 million yen (£1.4 million).

Hirohisa Hirukawa, another researcher, said the institute hoped to commercialise the humanoid in future.

by:telegraph

New 'dracula' fish discovered

2009-03-16T10:53:00.001+08:00

Zoologists say that the bones which hang down from the mouth of the miniature fish make it unique among the 3,700 known species of carp-like fishes, which lost their jaw teeth 50 million years ago.

The fish, which measures just over 16 millimetres in length, was discovered near Mogaung in Burma, the only place in the world it has been found. Scientists have described its features as "extraordinary" and believe it is one of the most interesting vertebrates to be identified in recent decades.

Named after Count Dracula, from the Bram Stoker's novel, it is the only one of its kind to have bones which project through the skin, looking like real teeth.

Colourless and with a largely tanslucent body, the Danionella dracula is also missing more than 40 bones which would normally be found in the Cypriniform group of carp-like fishes.

Dr Ralf Britz, a zoologist at the Natural History Museum, in London, said: "This fish is one of the most extraordinary vertebrates discovered in the last few decades.

"The teeth that Danionella dracula has are very surprising because none of the other 3,700 species in the Cypriniform group have any teeth in their jaws.

"In fact, they lost their jaw teeth about 50 million years ago in the Upper Eocene Period. Danionella dracula, however, evolved its own dracula-like teeth structures by growing them from the jaw bones rather than re-evolving jaw teeth."

His team worked with researchers from St Louis University in Missouri to analyse the fish.

Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal.

by:telegraph

Shoe-thrower fans unite online

2009-03-16T10:50:00.002+08:00

They've sung his praises on social networking pages, calling him a "hero," "the greatest man of our time," "a legend." They've said he deserves to be knighted and should be decorated with medals. They've cried out for his amnesty and have even proposed serving time for him. The man many hundreds of thousands of Facebook users honor is no other than Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison for hurling his shoes at then-U.S. President George W. Bush.

The double-whammy size 10 shoe toss, neither of which hit Bush, took place in December at a news conference in Baghdad, Iraq. In many traditional Middle East circles, throwing shoes at someone is considered a grave insult.

To do this to an American president surrounded by Secret Service agents, no less, was as shocking to riveted viewers who watched the footage later as it was to the president himself.

"First of all, it's got to be one of the most weird moments of my presidency," Bush said later. "Here I am getting ready to answer questions from the free press in a democratic Iraq, and a guy stands up and throws his shoe. ... I'm not angry with the system. I believe that a free society is emerging, and a free society is necessary for our own security and peace."

Expressing their own freedom on Facebook, a worldwide fan base rose up to laud al-Zaidi's actions. They formed hundreds of fan pages and groups, big and small, serious and light. One is even called the "Shoe-Throwing Appreciation Society."

Mike Trainor, 28, was watching a football game when a news break brought footage of the incident across his TV screen.

"I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen," said Trainor, a Queens, New York, stand-up comedian behind "Guy Who Threw His Shoes at Bush," which has attracted nearly 270,000 fans.

The comedian may have created the post for laughs, but he quickly learned how loaded the issue was.

"It grew into this crazy thing," in which Bush supporters began to weigh in on message boards calling al-Zaidi supporters "a threat to America" and insults in reaction flew, he said. "It shows people have a lot of passionate feelings about it, that's for sure."

One message board on his page, titled "YOU GUYS HATE AMERICA," drew 384 posts in reaction. The creator started it with these words: "seriously you guys are all a**holes. why would you be happy about some freaking foreigner throwing his shoes at the leader of the free world? I don't care if he's dumb he's my president of my wonderful country [sic]."

And interspersed amid the groups of fans were those that spoke out against the al-Zaidi worship. "That shoe thrower is not a hero," attracted 94 members, many of them with Arabic names.

One London poster said the shoe thrower "did nothing but bring shame upon us iraqis [sic]," and another from Halifax, Nova Scotia added, "I dont care about bush but this guy was very disrespectful to the Iraqi Prime minister who was standing right next to him [sic]."

But the shoe-thrower fans, at least in the world of Facebook, seem to far outweigh those who decried his actions.

"This site is intended to express the appreciation of those who share the frustration and anger that you expressed when you blew Mr Bush those boot-kisses [sic]," reads the description on "Thank you Muntadhar al-Zaidi," a nearly 500-member page created by a teacher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Protests of the journalist's arrest and now sentence brought Arab and Muslim demonstrators to the streets. But what Facebook has shown is that al-Zaidi's angry expression resonated with those beyond his religion and region. From England and Uruguay to China and Bush's own red, white and blue, supporters have made noise, at least virtually.

"We're talking about a common man, like me and you," who was "tired of years of lies from a self-called 'freedom saver,' " said Matteo Ferigo of Padova, Italy, the 30-year-old creator behind "Save Muntadhar al-Zaidi," which has 116 members. "I understand that his act was not so civil, polite or 'politically correct,' but I also understand how Iraqi people can see George Bush and what he represents to them."

Ari Vais, the creator of the page, "Free the Iraqi shoe throwing journalist!," said his own history taught him the value of free expression.

"I was born in the Soviet Union, where dissent like this was cracked down on severely," said Vais, a 39-year-old Queens, New York, musician. "We came to America when I was a boy because we knew that people should be free."

What al-Zaidi did was a reflection of the democracy Vais thought Bush intended to spread.

"We were supposed to be liberators, and what America stands for is freedom of self-expression and human rights," he said. "All he did was throw a couple shoes. And he missed! It was political theater and not jail-time stuff."

But it was serious business. Anyone, no matter where they live, would be tackled by Secret Service and face charges for such an attempted assault on the president. And if al-Zaidi had done this to Saddam Hussein, one has to wonder what would have come of the man who's now celebrated.

The shoe throwing, because it was so shocking, proved great fodder for late-night talk shows. Comedians, beyond Trainor, had a field day with this one. It inspired online games for people who wanted to play al-Zaidi.

Matt Love of Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada called the Iraqi journalist's move "an act of great courage" and said that in showing his disdain for Bush, "He spoke for many millions of people."

The 52-year-old retired Washington state department of transportation worker believes everyone can learn from the shoe thrower.

Commenting Thursday on several fan pages, including one calling for a Nobel Peace Prize for al-Zaidi, Love suggested that people turn out for Bush's March 17 speech at the TELUS Convention Centre in Calgary.

"Lets [sic] show some solidarity...and lob some loafers," he wrote. "Will the Canadian government lock us up for 3 years? Let's find out." Reached later in the day, however, he assured CNN that this was written tongue-in-cheek.

"Let me be clear," Love said. "I won't be throwing shoes at anyone."

by:CNN

A Scary 13th: 20 Years Ago, Earth Was Blasted with a Massive Plume of Solar Plasma

2009-03-16T09:54:00.001+08:00

Though triskaidekaphobes—those who fear the number 13—recoil over today's date (and a Friday the 13th at that), they can take solace knowing that there is only a very low probability that the sun will bombard Earth today like it did on March 13, 1989. Unless, that is, this writing jinxes it (speaking of superstition).

Two decades ago, one of the most extreme examples of space weather in modern times wracked the planet. Space weather comes primarily from the sun, which constantly sends particles and energy Earth's way via the so-called solar wind.

But like conventional terrestrial weather, storms and other disruptions on the sun occur. The sun frequently emits bursts of matter and energy called flares, which are triggered by a star's natural magnetic turbulence. Occasionally, however, the sun also belches a billion-ton plume of superheated plasma (ionized gas), known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). If this massive bubble of plasma and radiation is aimed right at Earth, it can pose a serious threat to satellite operations and even to power grids on the ground, along with modern civilization that depends on their electricity.

Slide Show: Space Weather

On March 10, 1989, a CME about the size of 36 Earths erupted from the sun's roiling surface and ripped through space at a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) per hour. Two days later, the torrid gas cloud crashed against Earth's magnetosphere—the magnetic field generated by the planet's spinning molten iron core that helps deflect the solar wind and more potent solar jetsam. This blast from the sun severely disrupted the magnetosphere and set off a geomagnetic superstorm.

As Sten Odenwald, an astrophysicist at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., relates in his book The 23rd Cycle, what ensued was one of the grandest displays of auroras—usually manifested as the aurora borealis (northern lights) or aurora australis (southern lights)—in recent times. Auroras form when Earth's magnetic field funnels highly energetic particles toward the poles where the field emanates. There, the charged particles strike molecules in Earth's atmosphere that release photons of various colors (red hues come from oxygen, for example) and light up polar regions in frequent auroral displays.

But the event of March 13 (the date fell on a Monday that year) was no mere breath of solar wind or a flare that kindled a transient, flickering light show. Undulating, multicolored auroras spread as far south as Texas and Cuba, and a red glow appeared in the night sky over most of the world. Some startled people who had never seen an aurora before even feared that nuclear war had broken out, Odenwald recounts.

Some satellites, the closest to the action, suffered electronic glitches. "That wasn't so much an issue then, as there were far fewer satellites in orbit compared to now," Odenwald says. The space storm's effects extended all the way to Earth's surface and even below it in the form of geomagnetically induced currents (GICs). These electrical surges infiltrated power grids all over North America and northern Europe, and even destroyed a transformer at a nuclear power plant in New Jersey.

Most significantly, at about 2:45 A.M. local time on Monday, March 13, Canada's Hydro-Québec power utility's grid crashed when safety systems sensed a power overload caused by the currents pulsing through the ground. The failure knocked out electricity to six million people in northeastern Canada for as long as nine hours—the biggest outage ever caused by a geomagnetic storm.

Of course, electrical generation for distribution to homes and businesses is not even 130 years old. And far bigger geomagnetic storms have struck in the recent past (in 1859 and 1921, most prominently), and are all but certain to in the future.
The sun currently is experiencing what is called the solar minimum—the least magnetically active period of an 11-year cycle. As telltale dark blotches on its surface called sunspots multiply, indicating magnetic upswells, solar flares and CMEs grow in frequency, peaking just after the solar maximum. The next such tempestuous season is slated for 2012 or so.

Anticipating this next round of solar monsoons, the National Academy of Sciences recently released a study based on a workshop in summer 2008 that broadly addressed many of the socioeconomic ramifications of space storms. "There's been no other report like this for space weather," says lead study author Daniel Baker, a space physicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). "And what we found was that space weather affects many industries in some surprising ways."

The chances of a truly devastating power outage from space weather remain low, the report says. But should one occur, it warns, modern society's dependence on electrical power to maintain everything from banking systems to potable water supplies could indeed cause a national—if not international—emergency costing trillions of dollars over years of recovery.

"People are of a mind that because nothing too terrible has happened in the past, that something won't now," Odenwald says. "We've heard that kind of logic before, and we got Hurricane Katrina. The cost of not preparing for extreme space weather could be dramatic."

Space weather's effects on energy infrastructure are not just limited to the power grid. It also contributes to rust and corrosion in oil and gas pipelines. In much the same way that power lines are affected, long connected structures can experience large voltage differentials from one area to the next, leading to the flow of unwanted electrical current. "A person or even something the size of a house is not affected by these ground currents because they're too small," Odenwald says. "But if you were somehow holding hands with another person a hundred kilometers away, say, then you would have a voltage difference." In Alaska, engineers have found that the Trans-Alaska Pipeline degrades faster than expected due to the frequent ground currents in northern latitudes.

On flights over polar regions during geomagnetic events, airplanes can experience radio blackouts and equipment disruptions. And satellites can go haywire, upsetting prosaic pursuits like watching television, or more crucially disturbing the global positioning system (GPS). Numerous industries rely on GPS for accurate navigation and orientation, and the military uses GPS for key purposes, including missile tracking and guidance.

In light of these far-flung effects of inclement space weather, concerned experts have called for expanding our prediction capabilities. The current fleet of government science satellites can forecast the possibility of a major space storm only a few days out. (One craft, the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), can fire off critical alerts if a CME is within 45 minutes of striking Earth.) Civilian space weather alerts come courtesy of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center. Other organizations offer daily forecasts, much like your local weather report, including the Space Weather Web site (today: Clear, with no sunspots, and a solar breeze of 236 miles per second (380 kilometers per second))

And for the heliophobes out there, you can count down the days to solar maximum on Odenwald's www.solarstorms.org page as well. As of March the 13th, 2009, it's 717.

by:scientific american

Baby gorilla rejected by mom, named by dad

2009-03-15T07:43:00.000+08:00

The father of a 3-month-old western lowland gorilla abandoned by its mother at the San Francisco Zoo has picked a handsome name for his son.

Zookeepers on Wednesday set up five different melons in the father gorilla's enclosure, each one representing a different name.

Oscar Jonesy, the father, chose the melon for "Hasani," which means "handsome" in Swahili.
The zoo says Hasani has been under human care after his mother left their nest and refused to return to nurse.

The zoo chose the five finalists for the name from 5,300 entries. The winning name was suggested by Amanda Verploeg of Oskaloosa, Iowa.

by:msnbc

Metal Discovered To Become Transparent Under High Pressure

2009-03-15T07:40:00.002+08:00

An international team of scientists have discovered a transparent form of the element sodium (Na). The team, led by Artem Oganov, Professor of Theoretical Crystallography at Stony Brook University, and Yanming Ma, the lead author and professor of physics at Jilin University in China, was able to demonstrate that sodium defies normal physical expectations by going transparent under pressure.“It is well known that at sufficiently high compression all materials must go metallic,” said Oganov. “This is seen in the metallization of hydrogen at high pressures and temperatures inside planets Jupiter and Saturn.”

However, as the researchers found, element sodium does just the opposite. A perfect white metal at atmospheric pressure, on increasing pressure sodium first turns black, then (at the pressure of 2 million atmospheres) red transparent, and eventually becomes a colorless transparent material – just like glass.

“This fundamental result is important for understanding properties of highly compressed matter, particularly within stars and giant planets,” said Oganov.

The unexpected transformation was first predicted by Professor Ma. His sophisticated calculations clearly indicated that sodium adopts unusual crystal structures and becomes an insulator at high pressures. Together with Professor Oganov, Ma was able to demonstrate that, at very high compressions, overlapping sodium atoms force their outer electrons into the “holes” between the atoms.

“In these holes electrons demonstrate an extremely localized behavior, responsible for the collapse of the metallic state,” said Ma. “These electrons behave as ‘fake atoms,’ just like in electrides - ionic compounds where the role of the anion is played by localized electrons.”

To test this unexpected prediction, Ma and Oganov contacted Mikhail Eremets, the leader of an experimental group at Max Planck Institute of Chemistry, Mainz (Germany). Eremets was initially skeptical of the Ma-Oganov predictions, yet he was undeterred by extreme technical challenges of reaching pressures of over 2 million atmospheres. Eremets and his group initiated a cohort of several extremely difficult experiments, using a tiny micrometer-size sample. Through these experiments, the group was able to confirm the predictions of a new structure and transparency of sodium.

“What fascinated us most is that the pressures at which this transformation was predicted were experimentally reachable,” Oganov said, “and that at these conditions such a remarkable change of chemistry occurs”.

The results are published last March 12 edition of the journal Nature.

Wind Shifts May Stir Carbon Dioxide From Antarctic Depths, Amplifying Global Warming

2009-03-15T07:36:00.001+08:00

Natural releases of carbon dioxide from the Southern Ocean due to shifting wind patterns could have amplified global warming at the end of the last ice age--and could be repeated as manmade warming proceeds, a new paper in the journal Science suggests.
Many scientists think that the end of the last ice age was triggered by a change in Earth's orbit that caused the northern part of the planet to warm. This partial climate shift was accompanied by rising levels of the greenhouse gas CO2, ice core records show, which could have intensified the warming around the globe. A team of scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory now offers one explanation for the mysterious rise in CO2: the orbital shift triggered a southward displacement in westerly winds, which caused heavy mixing in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, pumping dissolved carbon dioxide from the water into the air.

"The faster the ocean turns over, the more deep water rises to the surface to release CO2," said lead author Robert Anderson, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty. "It's this rate of overturning that regulates CO2 in the atmosphere." In the last 40 years, the winds have shifted south much as they did 17,000 years ago, said Anderson. If they end up venting more CO2 into the air, manmade warming underway now could be intensified.

Scientists have been studying the oceans for more than 25 years to understand their influence on CO2 levels and the glacial cycles that have periodically heated and chilled the planet for more than 600,000 years. Ice cores show that the ends of other ice ages also were marked by rises in CO2.

Two years ago, J.R. Toggweiler, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), proposed that westerly winds in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica may have undergone a major shift at the end of the last ice age. This shift would have raised more CO2-rich deep water to the surface, and thus amplified warming already taking place due to the earth's new orbital position. Anderson and his colleagues are the first to test that theory by studying sediments from the bottom of the Southern Ocean to measure the rate of overturning.

The scientists say that changes in the westerlies may have been triggered by two competing events in the northern hemisphere about 17,000 years ago. The earth's orbit shifted, causing more sunlight to fall in the north, partially melting the ice sheets that then covered parts of the United States, Canada and Europe. Paradoxically, the melting may also have spurred sea-ice formation in the North Atlantic Ocean, creating a cooling effect there. Both events would have caused the westerly winds to shift south, toward the Southern Ocean. The winds simultaneously warmed Antarctica and stirred the waters around it. The resulting upwelling of CO2 would have caused the entire globe to heat.

Anderson and his colleagues measured the rate of upwelling by analyzing sediment cores from the Southern Ocean. When deep water is vented, it brings not only CO2 to the surface but nutrients. Phytoplankton consume the extra nutrients and multiply.

In the cores, Anderson and his colleagues say spikes in plankton growth between roughly 17,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago indicate added upwelling. By comparing those spikes with ice core records, the scientists realized the added upwelling coincided with hotter temperatures in Antarctica as well as rising CO2 levels.

In the same issue of Science, Toggweiler writes a column commenting on the work. "Now I think this really starts to lock up how the CO2 changed globally," he said in an interview. "Here's a mechanism that can explain the warming of Antarctica and the rise in CO2. It's being forced by the north, via this change in the winds."

At least one model supports the evidence. Richard Matear, a researcher at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, describes a scenario in which winds shift south and produce an increase in CO2 venting in the Southern Ocean. Plants, which incorporate CO2 during photosynthesis, are unable to absorb all the added nutrients, causing atmospheric CO2 to rise.

Some other climate models disagree. In those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the westerly winds do not simply shift north-south. "It's more complicated than this," said Axel Timmermann, a climate modeler at the University of Hawaii. Even if the winds did shift south, Timmermann argues, upwelling in the Southern Ocean would not have raised CO2 levels in the air. Instead, he says, the intensification of the westerlies would have increased upwelling and plant growth in the Southeastern Pacific, and this would have absorbed enough atmospheric CO2 to compensate for the added upwelling in the Southern Ocean.

"Differences among model results illustrate a critical need for further research," said Anderson. These, include "measurements that document the ongoing physical and biogeochemical changes in the Southern Ocean, and improvements in the models used to simulate these processes and project their impact on atmospheric CO2 levels over the next century."

Anderson says that if his theory is correct, the impact of upwelling "will be dwarfed by the accelerating rate at which humans are burning fossil fuels." But, he said, "It could well be large enough to offset some of the mitigation strategies that are being proposed to counteract rising CO2, so it should not be neglected."

In addition to Anderson, the paper was coauthored by Simon Nielsen of Florida State University, and five Lamont-Doherty researchers: Shahla Ali, Louisa Bradtmiller, Martin Fleisher, Brenton Anderson and Lloyd Burckle. The study was funded by NOAA, the National Science Foundation, Norwegian Research Council and Norwegian Polar Institute.

by:science daily

Madonna pays visit to Britney’s ‘Circus’

2009-03-13T08:41:00.001+08:00

After Britney showed up at Madonna’s tour in Los Angeles last November, the material mom returned the favor showing up at the pop princesses’ sold-out “Circus” tour stop Wednesday night in New York City — but just as a spectator.

According to Us Weekly, Madonna took in Spears' show with her manager Guy Oseary — along with multiple bodyguards — from a VIP suite at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.

“She purposely walked up the main stairs in front of everybody so they would all notice her,” an concert source told the mag. “Celebrities definitely don’t need to go up the main stairs to get to their suites.”

Madonna reportedly left just before Spears' encore of “Womanizer,” which caused quite the scene.

As she made her way out of the venue, fans gathered around Madonna screaming. The fan frenzy reportedly made Madonna smirk as she exited.

On Spears' Web site, the “Circus” star’s team thanked Madonna for coming, saying; “Britney was thrilled to have her there!”

The “Circus” tour will continue on Friday in Newark, N.J.

by:msnbc

Maya myth revealed

2009-03-13T08:36:00.001+08:00

Archaeologists have unearthed a pair of monumental stucco panels in Guatemala that appear to depict one of the New World's oldest-known creation myths, going back thousands of years to what experts call "the cradle of Maya civilization." The discovery suggests that the myth, known as the Popol Vuh, was a centerpiece of Maya religious beliefs for well more than a millennium and stands as one of the world's great creation stories.

The Popol Vuh chronicles how the Maya gods created the world and made several attempts to fashion people to live in it - starting with animals, "mud people" and "wooden people." Finally, the gods got it right, creating the people who inhabited the urban site now known as El Mirador - where the panels were found - and the hundreds of thousands of acres comprising the Serpent Kingdom.

A Quiche Maya text of the Popol Vuh was found in the highland town of Chichicastenango in 1700 and transcribed by a Dominican monk named Francisco Ximenez. The myth's two main characters are the Hero Twins, named Hunahpu and Xbanlanque, who are sort of like a double dose of Hercules.

The 26-foot-long (8-meter-long) El Mirador panels were made of carved and modeled lime plaster, and lined a water collection system in a part of the city known as the Central Acropolis. They date back to the Late Preclassic period of Maya culture, which goes from about 300 B.C. to the time of Jesus, according to an account of the find from Idaho State University.

The amazing thing about the panels is that they show a pair of swimmers, framed by cosmic monsters including an undulating serpent and an old-man deity with outstretched wings. Idaho State University's Richard Hansen, president of the Idaho-based FARES Foundation, said the swimmers appear to represent the fabled Hero Twins.

"One of the swimmers has a decapitated head on his flanks, which is likely the decapitated head of his father, who was known in Maya mythology as Hun Hunahpu," Hansen is quoted as saying in the university's account. The other swimmer wears a jaguar headdress, which would typically be associated with Xbalanque ("Young Jaguar Sun.").

"All in all, the scene is a complex blend of early Maya mythology and cosmology," Hansen said.

Hector Escobedo, Guatemala's vice minister of culture, said the find "suggests that the antiquity of the Popol Vuh as an authentic creation story extends far into the Preclassic eras." The find also adds to the importance attached to the Mirador Basin as a center of ancient Maya culture.

Hansen has been doing research for years in the remote Mirador Basin, which is at the center of a major forest conservation program established by the Guatemalan government. The Idaho researcher served as a consultant to actor/director Mel Gibson on the controversial movie "Apocalypto." And although that film is now far back on the DVD shelves, Gibson is still taking an interest in Mirador. Recently, he called the site "arguably the greatest archaeological find in the Western Hemisphere."

by:msnbc

Global skies becoming dimmer: study

2009-03-13T08:34:00.001+08:00

Visibility on clear days has declined in much of the world since the 1970s thanks to a rise in airborne pollutants, say scientists.

In a study appearing in the today's issue of Science, the researchers describe a 'global dimming' in particular over south and east Asia, South America, Australia and Africa.

They add visibility remained relatively stable over North America and had improved over Europe.

Aerosols, tiny particles or liquid droplets belched into the air by the burning of fossil fuels and other sources, are responsible for the dimming, the researchers write.

"Aerosols are going up over a lot of the world, especially Asia," says study co-author Professor Robert Dickinson of the University of Texas.

Dickinson and colleagues from the University of Maryland tracked measurements of visibility - the distance someone can see on clear days - taken from 1973 to 2007, at 3250 meteorological stations worldwide.

They say aerosols like soot, dust and sulfur dioxide particles all harmed visibility.

The researchers used recent satellite data to confirm that the visibility measurements from the meteorological stations were a good indicator of aerosol concentrations in the air.

The aerosols from burning coal, industrial processes and the burning of tropical forests can influence the climate and be a detriment to health, say the researchers.

Other pollutants such as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are transparent and do not affect visibility.
Tracking changes

The data will help researchers understand long-term changes in air pollution and how these are associated with climate change, says Dr Kaicun Wang of the University of Maryland.

"This study provides basic information for future climate studies," says Wang.

The scientists highlight increased industrial activity in places like China and India for some of the decreased visibility.

They add air quality regulations in Europe helped improve visibility there since the mid-1980s.

Aerosols can have variable cooling and heating effects on surface temperatures, reflecting light back into space and reducing solar radiation at the earth's surface or absorbing solar radiation and heating the atmosphere, the researchers say.

by:ABC Science

Michael Jackson to rent Rod Stewart’s Essex mansion

2009-03-12T09:15:00.001+08:00

Rod Stewart is leasing his Essex mansion to Michael Jackson while he’s in the UK.

The Thriller star will stage 10 gigs at The O2 over the summer, his first concerts since 1997.

Michael plans to use 64-year-old Rod’s lavish property, which boasts its own five-a-side football pitch, as his base.

Jacko, 50, has been working on new material and is considering giving away a new album to the lucky fans who attend the shows.

‘There will be a new Michael Jackson single before the first date,’ concert promoter Randy Phillips tells The Sun.

‘Michael has got some new music and he is looking for a new way of disseminating his material to his fans.’

Tickets for the gigs, which run from 8 July until 28 July, go on sale on Friday.

by:NOW

Rising Sea Levels Set To Have Major Impacts Around The World

2009-03-12T09:11:00.001+08:00

Research presented March 10 at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen shows that the upper range of sea level rise by 2100 could be in the range of about one meter, or possibly more. In the lower end of the spectrum it looks increasingly unlikely that sea level rise will be much less than 50 cm by 2100.

This means that if emissions of greenhouse gases is not reduced quickly and substantially, even the best case scenario will hit low lying coastal areas housing one in ten humans on the planet hard.

Dr John Church of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia and the lead speaker in the sea level session, told the conference, "The most recent satellite and ground based observations show that sea-level rise is continuing to rise at 3 mm/yr or more since 1993, a rate well above the 20th century average. The oceans are continuing to warm and expand, the melting of mountain glacier has increased and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are also contributing to sea level rise."

New insights reported include the loss of ice from the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets. "The ice loss in Greenland has accelerated over the last decade. The upper range of sea level rise by 2100 might be above 1m or more on a global average, with large regional differences depending where the source of ice loss occurs", says Konrad Steffen, Director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado, Boulder and co-chair of the congress session on sea level rise.

The last assessment report from the IPCC from 2007 projected a sea level rise of 18 - 59 centimeter. However the report also clearly stated that not all factors contributing to sea level rise could be calculated at that time. The uncertainty was centered on the ice sheets, how they react to the effects of a warmer climate and how they interact with the oceans, explains Eric Rignot, Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California Irvine and Senior Research Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"The numbers from the last IPCC are a lower bound because it was recognized at the time that there was a lot of uncertainty about ice sheets. The numerical models used at the time did not have a complete representation of outlet glaciers and their interactions with the ocean. The results gathered in the last 2-3 years show that these are fundamental aspects that cannot be overlooked. As a result of the acceleration of outlet glaciers over large regions, the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are already contributing more and faster to sea level rise than anticipated. If this trend continues, we are likely to witness sea level rise one meter or more by year 2100", he says.

"Unless we undertake urgent and significant mitigation actions, the climate could cross a threshold during the 21st century committing the world to a sea level rise of metres", said John Church.

"Measurements around the world show that sea level has risen almost 20 centimeters since 1880," explains Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who will give the plenary speech on sea level rise at the congress. These data also reveal that the rate of sea level rise is closely linked to temperature: sea level rises faster the warmer it gets. "If sea level keeps rising at a constant pace, we will end up in the middle of that 18-59 cm IPCC range by 2100," says Rahmstorf. "But based on past experience I expect that sea level rise will accelerate as the planet gets hotter."

The impacts of sea level rise - even in the lower ranges of the current predictions - looks to be severe. Approximately ten percent of the worlds population - 600 million people - live in low lying areas in danger of being flooded. A previously released study led by John Church, shows that even a modest sea level rise of 50 centimeters will result in a major increase in the number of coastal flooding events.

"Our study centered on Australia showed that coastal flooding events that today we expect only once every hundred years will happen several times a year by 2100", says John Church.

John Church also brings new results of the current sea level rise to the congress, "Sea level is currently rising at a rate that is above any of the model projections of 18 to 59 cm".

"Different groups may come to slightly different projections, but differences in the details of the projections should not cloud the overall picture where even the lower end of the projections looks to have very serious effects," says Konrad Steffen.

by:sciencedaily

Dead Gene Comes Back To Life In Humans

2009-03-12T09:07:00.002+08:00

Researchers have discovered that a long-defunct gene was resurrected during the course of human evolution. This is believed to be the first evidence of a doomed gene – infection-fighting human IRGM – making a comeback in the human/great ape lineage. The study, led by Evan Eichler's genome science laboratory at the University of Washington and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is published March 6 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

The truncated IRGM gene is one of only two genes of its type remaining in humans. The genes are Immune-Related GTPases, a kind of gene that helps mammals resist germs like tuberculosis and salmonella that try to invade cells. Unlike humans, most other mammals have several genes of this type. Mice, for example, have 21 Immune-Related GTPases. Medical interest in this gene ignited recently, when scientists associated specific IRGM mutations with the risk of Crohn's disease, an inflammatory digestive disorder.

In this latest study, the researchers reconstructed the evolutionary history of the IRGM locus within primates. They found that most of the gene cluster was eliminated by going from multiple copies to a sole copy early in primate evolution, approximately 50 million years ago. Comparisons of Old World and New World monkey species suggest that the remaining copy died in their common ancestor.

The gene remnant continued to be inherited through millions of years of evolution. Then, in the common ancestor of humans and great apes, something unexpected happened. Once again the gene could be read to produce proteins. Evidence suggests that this change coincided with a retrovirus insertion in the ancestral genome.

"The IRGM gene was dead and later resurrected through a complex series of structural events," Eichler said. "These findings tell us that we shouldn't count a gene out until it is completely deleted."

The structural analysis, he added, also suggests a remarkable functional plasticity in genes that experience a variety of evolutionary pressures over time. Such malleability may be especially useful for genes that help in the fight against new or newly resistant infectious agents.

by:sciencedaily

Catch Venus before it disappears

2009-03-10T08:28:00.001+08:00

In about three weeks, we will lose a brilliant luminary that has been so much a part of our evening sky since the end of last summer.

The planet Venus, which shone so high and bright in the western sky during February, is now moving steadily lower with each passing night; it has begun its plunge down toward the sunset, soon to make its most dramatic exit from the evening sky since 2001.

Currently Venus is setting just under three hours after the sun in a dark sky. You can't miss it. Simply go out just after sunset and look West.

By March 12, Venus will follow the sun by only about two hours and on March 21 by just an hour. And by March 25 it will lie only 9 degrees to the upper-right of the setting sun (your clenched fist measures roughly 10 degrees at arm's length) and follows it down by only about a half an hour.

The reason for Venus' rapid fall toward the sun is that the planet will pass inferior conjunction on March 27. That means Venus, which orbits the sun well inside Earth's orbit, will be between us and the sun. The setup causes Venus to go through phases, much like our moon.

For several weeks before and after March 27, Venus is relatively close to Earth, and its thin, backlighted crescent becomes large enough to resolve in steadily-held 7-power binoculars. The planet's narrowing crescent is best seen right around sunset or in bright twilight when a bright sky helps to reduce the planet's brilliant glare.

As it swings close to Earth in the coming weeks it will grow to nearly 1/30 of the apparent diameter of the Moon — a waning crescent visible with telescopes, binoculars, and just possibly even with the naked eye.

But the crescent is also thinning, so its magnitude fades during the month from -4.6 to -4.0. In daylight, with a telescope and really clear, steady air, you might even observe the cusps of the crescent extending all the way around to form a ring. This effect results from sunlight diffused and scattered through Venus' upper atmosphere.

On March 6, the disk of Venus was 14 percent illuminated, but by March 21 the planet will have grown 16 percent larger while its phase will have thinned to a striking 2 percent. By March 25, look for it to twinkle in the twilight because its crescent is so thin! A telescope will reveal it to be a hairline sickle by then, only 1 percent sunlit.

Venus goes through an eight-year cycle of apparitions, meaning its behavior this year closely duplicates that in 2001, 1993, 1985, and on back.

And only once per cycle do we in the Northern Hemisphere get a brief window of opportunity to glimpse Venus both at dusk and dawn on the same day.

This happens because at this particular apparition Venus passes widely north of the sun at conjunction, so observers at mid-northern latitudes can pick it up as a morning object before it disappears from the evening sky.

by:msnbc

Kindle for iPhone not the only e-book reader

2009-03-10T08:21:00.003+08:00

The new Kindle program for the iPhone and iPod touch is almost as good as the Kindle itself, a device from Amazon dedicated to reading electronic books. But Kindle for iPhone is by no means the only e-book reader, and not necessarily the best.

Another free program, Stanza, by Lexcycle, seems easier to use. With Kindle for the iPhone, even after you’ve downloaded Amazon’s e-reader to the phone, you still need to go to Amazon’s Web site to buy books from Kindle’s creator.

In contrast, Stanza offers easy-to-download titles from within the program’s list of “merchants,” including the Fictionwise Book Store (just purchased by Barnes & Noble), BooksOnBoard eBook Shop, Random House and Harlequin’s free libraries, as well as free books from Feedbooks.

Fictionwise has owned eReader.com, another popular electronic book reader program for the iPhone. It, too, can be used without a special trip to a Web site, and it runs on other smartphone devices that use the Palm, Symbian and Microsoft Windows operating systems. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

Kindle will also be available for other types of phones in the future. The iPhone is merely the first to get it.
All the rage now
It seems that e-readers are all the rage right now, a possible antidote to the continuing slide faced by the publishing industry. E-readers are not only used for books, but also for newspapers and magazines. The Hearst Corp., for example, which publishes both, plans to create its own e-reader device.

Kindle has kindled huge interest and devoted fans that swear by its utility and value, even at its cost of $359.

A good friend of mine, a voracious reader, couldn’t wait to get her Kindle 2 recently, and happily carries the 10-ounce device in her purse at all times. Birthday cash donations from other friends made her purchase possible, and she is thrilled. She already has six books loaded up and started.

She doesn’t have an iPhone, so I was a little worried when Amazon announced Kindle for the iPhone within 10 days of releasing the updated device. I thought her money might have been better spent on Apple’s popular phone or iPod touch, and she could still use Kindle.

I can tell her — and you — that Kindle for the iPhone, while good, likely won't be a threat to the success of Amazon’s device itself.

And why would it be? Amazon would be shooting itself in the foot otherwise. What Kindle for the iPhone will do is encourage buying from Amazon, quite a smart move from a smart company.

That's where readers will find at least one difference among e-reader programs. Kindle, Stanza and eReader all provide easy-on-the-eyes formats, with font sizes that can be quickly adjusted to please. But when it comes to pricing on books, it does pay to shop around.

For example, Malcolm Gladwell’s e-book version of “The Tipping Point” goes for $8.99 at Amazon, $8.79 from BooksOnBoard and $10.99 from Fictionwise, with the latter two both being offered through the Stanza application, or “app” for the iPhone.

Availability is another issue. Gladwell’s newest book, “Outliers,” costs $9.99 from Amazon, $19.21 from BooksOnBoard but is not offered by Fictionwise at all.

Battery life winner: Kindle 2
Another big difference between a dedicated e-reader and using one on a phone is battery life. Both Kindle and Sony’s Reader Digital Book are built to judiciously sip battery power.

The Kindle 2 has an estimated battery life of up to two weeks, and up to four days with the wireless radio turned on for downloads and book browsing at Amazon’s site. The iPhone 3G is good for five hours of talk time, and less or more depending on what other tasks you’re using it for.

Cell phones, as we know, can be notorious guzzlers of power, and there’s no way a smartphone — with the interruptions of e-mail, text-messaging alerts and yes, even phone calls — can match that of a dedicated reading device.

So if having a stretch of hours and hours of uninterrupted reading time is important to you, you’re better off with a dedicated device. If you’re a cafeteria-style reader — a little of this, a little of that and while waiting to board a plane — Kindle or any reading program on the iPhone will do you just fine.

With Kindle for iPhone, you won’t get the dictionary or the text-to-speech feature that you do with the Kindle itself, although Amazon is no longer making text-to-speech available for all books, based on protests from some authors.

Some shared features
Shared features for both Kindle and Kindle for the iPhone include being able to add bookmarks, view notes and highlights, as well as view your library of previously purchased Kindle books, stored on Amazon’s servers. With Kindle, the user has six different type sizes to choose from; the version for the iPhone has five.

Kindle for iPhone doesn’t take advantage of the phone’s accelerometer, or motion sensor, which lets users switch from vertical to horizontal mode. That would have been a nice feature, especially for reading lines of “type,” but it’s not crucial.

Still, there’s definitely a difference between reading on the iPhone’s 3.5-screen, as good as it is, and Kindle’s 6-inch screen, more eye-friendly and easier to follow. That may give Kindle the device a big edge, especially for hard-core readers.

Kindle 2 displays in 16 shades of gray, a big improvement from the original Kindle’s four. Kindle for the iPhone can show books in color if they’re developed that way, which is a very nice plus.

Kindle for iPhone is not necessarily THE program to have, but it’s a welcome addition to an already strong group of e-readers. Now, users just have to …read. That may be the biggest challenge of all.

by:msnbc

‘Twilight’ ladies talk Pattinson, Lautner

2009-03-10T08:14:00.000+08:00

“Twilight” stars Nikki Reed and Rachelle Lefevre paid a visit to Access Hollywood, where the stars dished on their male co-stars.

“Quite frankly, I’m tired of being asked about Rob (Pattinson),” Reed joked.

According to the British-born heartthrob’s co-stars, there is a side of the actor that the public rarely hears about.
“He’s really talented, he’s really smart, he’s really musical, he’s an intellectual, he reads,” Reed said. “That’s the side that I wish people would (ask about). I don’t know if anyone necessarily even knows him … that side of him.”

Lefevre agreed, saying Pattinson’s new superstar status hasn’t affected how any of his fellow “Twilight” co-stars treat him.

“We got to know him in a different environment,” she explained. “I don’t feel any differently about Rob than I do about the rest of the cast.”

Except for maybe Taylor Lautner, who they both admitted to being “in love” with — at least when it comes to his acting chops and career tenacity.

“Taylor’s my fave!” Reed exclaimed when the topic turned to their co-star who worked hard — packing on pounds of new muscle — to reprise his role of werewolf Jacob Black.

“I already adopted him, back off!” Lefevre playfully snapped.

New ripped body aside, Lautner’s co-stars said they admire him for his drive and passion for the project.

“His commitment is unbelievable,” Lefevre said.

“I would’ve ran away … I would’ve been terrified. He had to screen test again,” Reed said of Taylor’s struggle to keep his role in “New Moon.”

“He’s such a man,” Lefevre noted. “He was so grounded, he had so much grace.”

And when it comes to reports of romances brewing between fellow “Twilight” cast members, Reed and Lefevre said it’s all just gossip.

“We’re such a scandal-free, uninteresting cast,” Lefevre said.

“Which is pretty amazing because there are so many of us,” Reed added.

“New Moon,” with newly cast co-star Dakota Fanning, is slated for a Nov. 20 release date.

by:msnbc

Mediaeval 'vampire' skull found in near Venice

2009-03-09T11:26:00.000+08:00

Scientists found the skull, with its mouth agape and a large slab of rock forced into its mouth, while excavating a mass grave dating from the Middle Ages on an island near Venice.

Female "vampires" were often blamed for spreading the plague epidemics through Europe, said Matteo Borrini of Florence University.

Wedging a rock or brick into the mouth of a suspected vampire was a way of preventing the person from feeding on the bodies of other plague victims and rising from the grave to attack the living, he told a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Denver last week.

The idea that plague victims might also be vampires may have arisen because blood often dribbled from the mouths of those who died from the disease.

The woman's skeleton was found in a mass grave which was established on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, in Venice's lagoon, when plague swept the city in 1576.

Dr Borrini said gravediggers shoved the brick into the woman's mouth with such force that it broke some of her teeth.

Gravediggers would check corpses for any sign that they had bitten or chewed on their shrouds – a sure sign of vampirism, he said.

Venice was particularly hard hit by the plague – when a later wave of the Black Death swept through the city between 1630 and 1631, the epidemic killed 50,000 out of the population of 150,000.

The skull could be the first such "vampire" to have been forensically examined, Mr Borrini said.

However, another expert in the field said he had found similar skeletons in Poland.

While the discovery was exciting, "claiming it as the first vampire is a little ridiculous" Peer Moore-Jansen of Wichita State University in Kansas told New Scientist magazine.

by:telegraph

Prince Charles: 100 months to save the world

2009-03-09T11:22:00.000+08:00

Prince Charles will say that the need to tackle global warming is more urgent than ever before and that, even in a global recession, the world must not lose sight of the "bigger picture".

His warning will be delivered on Thursday in a keynote speech in Rio de Janeiro.

Aides believe it will echo one he gave in Sao Paulo in 1991 at the start of the last recession, when he warned that caring for the world's long term welfare must not become a "luxury".

The intervention will help to put the environment at the top of the political agenda ahead of the meeting of G20 leaders in London next month.

The Prince starts a ten-day tour of South America today during which he will be playing an elevated role as an international statesman working on behalf of the Government to support British interests on key issues.

Senior sources have revealed that Gordon Brown's Government wants to make more use on the foreign stage of Prince Charles's experience, expertise and contacts, particularly on climate change.

Government officials believe that the Prince's passion to protect the environment is hugely respected abroad and that he can play an increasing important role as he inevitably moves closer to becoming king.

Some believe he is an "asset" that has been underused in the past and they want to use him more in a role of "soft diplomacy".

In Thursday's speech, the Prince will warn that a failure to act in the next eight years will have catastrophic effects for the planet.

In the country that is home to the world's largest rainforest, Prince Charles will urge world unity to combat deforestation in the run-up to the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen in December this year.

He will say there is not necessarily a clash between the needs of big business and the environment. He will argue that being green can be good for businesses and can create jobs.

The Prince will say that tackling deforestation in the 3.5 billion acres of rainforest on the planet is a key priority.

According to royal aides, Prince Charles will tell business leaders that he is in South America to "listen and learn" and that he believes that Brazil and other neighbouring countries must lead the way in moves to save the rainforests.

The Prince will also visit the Amazon rainforest, the world's largest rainforest, on Saturday.

The Prince's tour to Chile, Brazil and Ecuador (including the Galapagos Islands), when he will be accompanied by the Duchess of Cornwall, will see a greater emphasis than ever before on him becoming involved in talks with prime ministers, presidents and senior politicians, in a move aimed at promoting British interests abroad.

It is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), not the Prince himself, which chooses the location for his royal tours and South America is considered the ideal platform for his views.

One Government source said: "The Prince's visit to South America is very much in tune with the priorities that we have.

"Given both the Prince's position as a future head of state and his personal commitment to protecting the environment, we believe he can have a real impact abroad"

In a possible sign of his elevated role, Prince Charles will meet Barack Obama when the new US President comes to Britain next month for the G20 London summit.

They will meet at, or even before, a Buckingham Palace reception when the Prince is expected to raise climate change issues with the President.

Royal aides have welcomed the opportunity for the Prince to expand his role on behalf of the Government. One senior official said: "It could be argued that he has already established a role as an international statesman, especially on green issues.

"This is one of the reasons why Government has asked him to go to South America. He will be conducting Government business and one of his roles is to support the UK's environmental objectives."

This is the major royal overseas tour for the first half of the year. He will be meeting the presidents and heads of governments in each of the three countries for talks.

"In Chile and Brazil, he will host a "round table" meeting for corporate leaders aimed at encouraging businesses to do more to tackle climate change.

"This is about soft diplomacy," said a senior aide. "The Prince of Wales is not a politician who sits down with a world leader and hammers out an agreement.

"But what he can do is show support and get over the message that Britain wants to stand shoulder to shoulder with these countries in the fight against climate change, and bring his own experience and knowledge to bear."

Courtiers at Clarence House dislike suggestions that the Prince of Wales, who was 60 last year, is a "shadow king" keen to take on duties from his mother, who is 82.

However, one Government source said: "There is no plan for Prince to take over specific duties from the Queen but common sense dictates that as she gets older her diary will be tailored accordingly."

The Prince is likely eventually to take on more of the long, arduous overseas tours stand in for her at more investitures.

One senior FCO official said: "We are hugely supportive of this visit. The Prince's commitment to sustainable development is very much in line with one of our main priorities.

"The Prince's visit will advance that agenda in terms of both UK interests and the engagement of other countries in pursuing it.

"The real personal commitment that Prince Charles has to environmental issues and his interest in sustainable development really resonates with people, both at Government level and ordinary individuals."

by:telegraph

Nasa launches Kepler rocket into space 'to search for worlds like ours'

2009-03-09T11:19:00.000+08:00

Kepler, a sophisticated space telescope, blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the early hours of the morning, and separated from its carrier, a Delta II rocket, nearly 450 miles above the earth.

Its three and a half year mission is to find – if they exist – other planets capable of sustaining life in the Milky Way galaxy. If it succeeds it will be a sensational discovery in space exploration, raising the possibility that there are places out there where life could evolve. If it fails, however, scientists admit it will effectively symbolise "the end of Star Trek" for the time being.

"It's not just a science mission, it's a historic mission," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

Kepler, named after the German 17th century astrophysicist, will not be looking for signs of life. That job remains for future space missions.

Instead, the telescope will spent its entire mission staring at the same point in the hope of finding a planet in the so-called "habitable zone" around a star, where scientists believe water could be present. It will aim to detect tiny fluctuations in the brightness of stars, which would indicate a planet passing in from of them. That in turn will allow scientists to calculate and orbit of the planet, and whether it has the potential to sustain life.

Its fixed gaze will be through lenses so powerful that they can detect from space a human being on Earth turning on and off an outside light at night. That will enable it to scan up to 100,000 stars near the Cygnus and Lyra constellations, which are between 600 and 3,000 light years away.

Every 30 minutes it will record the brightness of the stars using a 95 megapixel camera, which is around ten times the capacity of a professional photographer's camera. It is the largest and most powerful piece of photographic equipment ever sent into space. "Finding Earth-sized planets is like trying to detect a very tiny flea." said Kepler's project manager, James Fanson.

At a cost of almost $600m (£425m), it is Nasa's first mission in search of Earth-like planets. Those which would be capable of supporting life would be expected to orbit suns similar to ours, at exactly the right distance and temperature for life-sustaining water to exist.

Astronomers have found more than 300 planets orbiting other stars, but they are mainly inhospitable gas-based giants similar to Jupiter.

At best, scientists hope Kepler will discover relatively small planets that are neither too hot nor too cold, and are rocky – similar to Earth.

"If we find that many, it certainly will mean that life may well be common throughout our galaxy, that there is an opportunity for life to have a place to evolve," Kepler's principal investigator, William Borucki, said.

"If none or only a few of these planets are found, it might suggest that habitable planets like Earth are very rare and that Earth may be a lonely outpost for life. In fact, it will be the end of 'Star Trek'."

by:telegraph

Amazon drought reduces carbon sinks

2009-03-08T10:16:00.001+08:00

Drought is killing off trees in Brazil's fragile Amazon rainforest and depleting the region's carbon reservoirs - an ecological double-whammy with devastating implications, according to a new study.

The Amazon's lush vegetation in a typical year absorbs nearly two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

But a 30-year study published by the journal Science found that the world's largest tropical rain forest is surprisingly sensitive to drought, and that the resulting loss of vegetation will have a greater-than-anticipated effect in causing a sharp spike in greenhouse gases.

The Amazon tree canopy, which absorbs massive amounts of greenhouse gases, often succumbs to the effects of dryness, thereby accelerating global warming by not absorbing CO2, say scientists.

Drought also accelerates the depletion of the region's carbon sinks, natural reservoirs that accumulate and store the chemical compound for an indefinite period.
Massive release

The research from more than 40 institutions around the world was gathered during the particularly harsh 2005 drought, which had a severe impact on the flora of the Amazon.

Researchers say the total impact of the drought was an additional five billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - more than the combined annual emissions of Europe and Japan.

The drought that year dramatically reversed decades of carbon absorption, the researchers say.

"For years, the Amazon forest has been helping to slow down climate change. But relying on this subsidy from nature is extremely dangerous," says Professor Oliver Phillips of the University of Leeds, the lead author of the study.

"If the earth's carbon sinks slow or go into reverse, as our results show is possible, carbon dioxide levels will rise even faster. Deeper cuts in emissions will be required to stabilize our climate."

Visually, most of the Amazon showed little effects of the drought. "But our records prove tree death rates accelerated," says Phillips.

"Because the region is so vast, even small ecological effects can scale-up to a large impact on the planet's carbon cycle."
Vicious cycle

Scientists say the Amazon accounts for more than half of the world's rainforest, covering an area almost three-quarters the size of Australia.

The study, which involved 68 scientists from 13 countries, found that various species of tropical palm trees are particularly vulnerable to drought, which highlights the risk to biodiversity caused by climate change.

The findings are especially sobering because climatologists predict the creation of a potentially devastating cycle, in which the Amazon's hotter and more intense dry seasons lead to more greenhouse gas emissions and even more drought.

by:ABC Science

Japanese astronaut to fly 'magic carpet'

2009-03-08T10:09:00.001+08:00

A Japanese astronaut going to space this month will try to fly on a carpet, use eyedrops in microgravity and meet a series of other off-beat challenges, according to a space agency official.

Koichi Wakata will perform 16 tasks chosen from 1597 suggested by hundreds of people, from nursery school pupils to a 90-year-old man, says the official from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Wakata will travel to the ISS on board the space shuttle Discovery, which is scheduled for launch no earlier than 12 March (AEST).

He will try "a magic carpet that floats in the air" after he reaches the Japanese laboratory Kibo (Hope) at the International Space Station (ISS) later in March for a stay of more than three months, says a JAXA report.

"It is a fantasy on earth, but can humans fly in space?" the report asks.

Wakata will also attempt to fold clothes, do push-ups and backflips, arm-wrestle another astronaut and "shoot liquid out of the straw of a drink container to see what happens", says the space agency.
Rent an astronaut

Wakata, a 45-year-old former Japan Airlines engineer, joined previous NASA space shuttle missions in 1996 and 2000.

On his first space trip he and a fellow astronaut became the first to play the board game Go in space, using a special set.

In another initiative, the Japanese space agency has invited companies to rent an astronaut by the hour in the ISS space lab to perform desired tasks, which could include advertisements or science experiments.

The hourly charge for an astronaut is 5.5 million yen (A$87,970) - plus an extra fee to transport any required items into space of 3.3 million yen (A$52,780) per kilogram.

by:ABC Science

Oprah Shares “O” Cover With First Lady

2009-03-08T09:57:00.001+08:00

Oprah Winfrey will be sharing the cover of “O” magazine for the first time in nine years with first lady Michelle Obama. Oprah displayed the cover of the April issue on her show on Friday. The issue goes on sale on March 17 and includes an interview with the first lady about topics including decorating philophy and her plan to help other women. This info was provided by the AP, who also provided the cover photo.

by:celebrity oops

Eye-socket camera films from inside the head

2009-03-07T11:08:00.000+08:00

here's a blurred line between challenge and opportunity.

Having lost his eye in a childhood accident and suffered a lot of pain, Rob Spense, a 36-year-old filmmaker, has decided to do something that'll put filming and seeing into just one eye, quite literally.

His work is called the Eyeborg project, and involves his friend Kosta Grammatis, a photographer/engineer, and a team of ocularists, inventors, and engineering specialists. The team is building a prosthetic eye that can capture and transmit video.

While the idea is simple, it's a great engineering challenge. For the project to be successful, the smallest, lightest, most power-efficient technologies have to be found and implemented.

The team is using the world's smallest CMOS camera for the project. This device is about 1.5 millimeters squared. It's so small that if you sneeze while it's resting on your open palm, you might never find it again.

The eye camera captures and sends video signal wirelessly using an RF transmitter as small as the tip of a pencil. According to Kosta, the data will be sent to a recorder placed in a backpack. The eye-socket camera is powered by a lithium polymer battery that fits inside the prosthesis.

Rob and the team are currently working on a documentary about the Eyeborg Project and the experience of living with a bionic eye.

Their work could ultimately help San Francisco artist Tanya Vlach who is looking for technology to use for her own bionic eye-cam.

by:cnet news

President Barack Obama dislikes Britain, but he's keen to meet the Queen

2009-03-07T11:03:00.000+08:00

President Obama has been rudeness personified towards Britain this week. His handling of the visit of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to Washington was appalling. First Brown wasn't granted a press conference with flags, then one was hastily arranged in the Oval office after the Brits had to beg. Obama looked like he would rather have been anywhere else than welcoming the British leader to his office and topped it all with his choice of present (*) for the PM. A box of 25 DVDS including ET, the Wizard of Oz and Star Wars? Oh, give me strength. We do have television and DVD stores on this side of the Atlantic. Even Gordon Brown will have seen those films too often already.

This was coupled with Michelle Obama's casual choice of gifts for the Brown sons - matching models of the helicopter which ferry her husband around. While Sarah Brown had spent time choosing gifts for the Obama girls, Michelle had clearly sent an aide to the White House gift shop at the last moment.

All in all, he doesn't think much of us, as I explained in my post here earlier this week.

But what's this? Something, suddenly, seems to have made the Obama White House perk up and start to take an interest in the Brits. The Queen has invited the President to tea when he's here for the G20 in April. And he's in through the front door of Buckingham Palace faster than a Harley Davidson roaring along Route 66.

Note how the coolness of Team Obama disappears when a bit of regal glamour is introduced into the equation. He might not like the Brits, but he can recognise a global superstar when he encounters one. He wants to be associated with her. He's shameless.

(*) If Obama, or someone in his inner circle, had spent two minutes thinking about what present to get Brown then they could easily have come up with something appropriate. He likes books. He loves American history. Get him a signed first edition of a good Robert Dallek book such as the brilliant Flawed Giant on LBJ. Come to think of it, Obama should read it too, if he hasn't yet, as it reveals a great deal about how a Presidency can go so wrong.

by:telegraph

Swift-ly avoids 'doing a Britney'

2009-03-07T10:48:00.000+08:00

GOLDEN girl of pop TAYLOR SWIFT knows it's only a matter of time before she 'does a BRITNEY' and goes off the rails.

And the 19-year-old, relishing in her 10th week at No1 on the US charts, says the snappers can't wait to capture her falling out of clubs drunk.

She said: "I definitely think there are a lot of people who are waiting for me to do something wrong and I think it's inevitable that in my life I'm going to eventually. People do things wrong.

"I'm just going to try and make it as graceful a mistake as possible when it happens. I try to make the right choices and I'm never going to sit here and guarantee that I'm not going to do something stupid because I'm very capable of that.

"But I'm going to try as hard as possible not to."

The country star, who hails LEANN RIMES and SHANIA TWAIN as her heroines, also counts a certain Brit musician among her idols.

Taylor said: "Meeting CHRIS MARTIN from COLDPLAY at the Grammys was amazing. He was so incredible and so nice.

"People like that really set a good example for newer artists because he's as big as it gets with his career and he's still the most down to earth person."

She added: "I also had the dressing room next to KATY PERRY. We'd been talking that day, she came by and sat down and hung out for a while and then later on when I was getting ready for red carpet, putting my dress on, getting my make-up done she walks in with a pair of scissors.

"And she says, 'Hey, is it cool if I cut a piece of your hair?' And I was like,'Umm, yeah sure, why?' She said, 'Well, I'm going to carry a heart-shaped purse down the red carpet and when people say, 'Katy, what's in your heart-shaped purse? I'm just going to say a lock of Taylor Swift's hair.'"

Another famous friend in her telephone is Disney favourite MILEY CYRUS.

The girls both dated JONAS BROTHERS boys and star in the upcoming Hannah Montana movie together.

Taylor said: "I play a song in the film, so it's not exactly an acting cameo but it is a cameo.

"I get along great with Miley, we've been friends for a long time so we just goof around... She's so much fun to be around so it's not hard at all.

"The one thing that is very similar about me and Miley is that we're both just trying to be as normal as possible and that's how we can relate."

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Although the country girl is yet to hit her twenties, she is wise beyond her years.

Taylor said: "I've always wanted this and everything that comes along with it. All the stress and the hard work. I asked for all of this and getting to live this dream is such a privilege and such a blessing.

"I really like doing things myself and I'm very involved in the production and business decisions and planning the stage, planning the tour and all that stuff.

"Sometimes there's a lot, but I'd rather be in charge than hand off these decisions to someone else."

She added: "I feel like my music is my diary. I write all about what happens to me and my personal experiences.

"Singing songs live, I definitely try to go back to that place where I was when I wrote it because I try to give the crowd more than they're going to get than just by hearing the song on a radio."

by:the sun

3D TV: Television with a new dimension

2009-03-06T08:32:00.000+08:00

The pace of technological change can seem overwhelming. Gadgets that were once the preserve of science fiction films – watch phones, pocket computers, even flying cars – are slowly filtering down into modern life. Next on the list could be 3D television, with some of the biggest electronics companies convinced that this will be the next big thing.

Film makers, broadcasters and manufacturers are all throwing their weight behind 3D television. Sky has claimed that the technology could be in UK homes in time for the London Olympics, while at January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, every manufacturer from Sony to LG was showing off 3D sets.

And this week, at another gadget showcase in Germany, researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications have demonstrated a 3D television that can be controlled by gestures. Viewers of the iPoint 3D TV don’t need to wear silly glasses to watch, and can change channels simply by flicking a finger towards the screen.

There’s real momentum building behind 3D. Movie studios are investing heavily, particularly in animated films. The recent Disney movie Bolt was shot in 3D, and forthcoming releases Shrek Goes Fourth and Toy Story 3 will also get the three-dimensional treatment. Even older films are being buffed up to cash in – reversioned re-releases of Chicken Little and The Nightmare Before Christmas made significant profits.

But it’s not just animated films that are going 3D. Director James Cameron is rumoured to be working on a live action 3D movie, believing it to be the ultimate way to enjoy a film. “When you are viewing 'in stereo’, more neurons are firing, more blood is pumping through the brain,” he says. “This is the ultimate immersive media.”

Watching television in three dimensions seems a natural evolution. After all, we see the world in 3D. The difficulty is that, even despite recent advances, some elements of the viewing experience are less than ideal.

While the red-and-blue 3D specs of the 1950s have made way for slightly more sophisticated polarised glasses, the fact remains that in order to watch most 3D televisions, you have to wear special headgear. That’s because in order to experience 3D, each eye needs to see the image slightly differently, as in real life, to build a multidimensional picture.

Not only that, but the viewing angle for many 3D televisions is quite restrictive, with viewers needing to sit face-on at the correct range in order to see the three-dimensional image clearly. Although this works fine in cinemas, it’s less appropriate for living rooms.

Some companies, such as Philips, are attempting to overcome this hurdle by developing screens that don’t require glasses. The prototype Philips WOWvx television, for example, produces a 3D image that can be comfortably viewed from a variety of positions and angles by using a lenticular lens over the TV’s LCD panel.

The question is, of course, whether consumers – many of whom have only just splashed out on the latest high-definition flat-screen televisions – are willing to upgrade to 3D sets, particularly in the current economic climate.

The lack of 3D material is also a problem. Movies aside, broadcasters are yet to agree on a common standard for filming and transmitting in 3D, and for many, the cost of the equipment needed to capture and generate 3D footage is prohibitive. Filming a sporting event in 3D, for instance, would require two cameras, placed closely together to mimic the alignment of human eyes, for every desired camera angle.

“I think it will be a long time before 3D television is cheap or compelling enough to be mass market,” warns Tom Dunmore, editor-in-chief of gadget magazine Stuff. “The technology is almost there, but I’m not sure the interest is.”

It's coming right at you

The biggest barrier to the success of 3D television in the home is not the glasses or the cost of having to buy a new TV — it’s persuading people that the technology is worth having. For that, there’s no substitute for seeing 3D in action, which is why Panasonic spent £14,000 shipping its 103in prototype to Amsterdam for a European premiere.

It’s only after you’ve seen all the old 3D tricks – balls whizzing at your head so fast you duck, for instance – that its qualities become compelling. A state-of-the-art 3D TV doesn’t give you a headache like previous models and, for the first time, it doesn’t feel like a gimmick.

Panasonic showed footage from the Olympics – lines of Chinese drummers streaming off into the distance – and also from a football match. If there was a shock, it was simply in how much it felt like being there, although the size of the massive TV screen helped.

Panasonic uses high-definition Blu-ray technology for its 3D system, and the company hopes to bring the TV manufacturers and Hollywood studios together to deliver the common, open technical standard that’s crucial for commercial success.

The system offers full high-definition resolution, but the company says that represents a fairly minor tweak of pre-existing technology. With the standards of HDMI cables and Blu-ray DVDs already well established, this new system represents a lesser challenge than, say, developing DVDs to replace video. None the less, producing products ready to go on sale next year, as Panasonic hopes, is remarkably ambitious.

Why is it pushing a new technology so hard? Hollywood studios reckon, privately, that there is three times as much profit in a 3D DVD than in a conventional one. Live 3D TV, however, remains some way off.

by:telegraph

Dancing black hole twins spotted

2009-03-06T08:26:00.001+08:00

Researchers have seen the best evidence yet for a pair of black holes orbiting each other within the same galaxy.

While such "binary systems" have been postulated before, none has ever been conclusively shown to exist.

The new black hole pair is dancing significantly closer than the prior best binary system candidate.

The work, published in the journal Nature, is in line with the theory of the growth of galaxies, each with a black hole at their centre.

The theory has it that as galaxies near one another, their central black holes should orbit each other until merging together.

But evidence for black holes nearing and orbiting has so far been scant.

Dancing cheek-to-cheek

As matter falls into black holes, it emits light of a characteristic colour that in turn gives information about the direction in which the black hole is moving.

In a binary system, two beams should be emitted, each a slightly different colour.
Todd Boroson and Tod Lauer of the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory analysed some 17,500 spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and have now found just such a pair of emissions coming from a distant quasar.

The researchers estimate that the two light sources come from black holes between 20 million and one billion times more massive than our Sun.

The black holes are separated by an estimated distance of less than a third of a light-year - cheek-to-cheek by black hole standards and significantly closer than the postulated binary system spotted by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2003.

The pair are estimated to dance around one another every 100 years.

Because they are moving with respect to the Earth as well as to each other, observations of their movement over the next few years should prove beyond question that they are indeed the first partnered pair of black holes.

"Previous work has identified potential examples of black holes on their way to merging, but the case presented by Boroson and Lauer is special because the pairing is tighter and the evidence much stronger," said Jon Miller, an astronomer at the University of Michigan.

by:bbc news

Miley Cyrus’ School Days

2009-03-06T08:08:00.000+08:00

The ‘Hannah Montana’ star was bullied so badly when she was being educated in Tennessee she believed she would be physically harmed.

Writing in her new book ‘Miley Cyrus: Miles To Go’, she revealed: “The girls took it beyond normal bullying. These were big, tough girls. I was scrawny and short. They were fully capable of doing me bodily harm.”

The singer-and-actress - who was once locked in a bathroom by her tormentors - says ‘The Anti-Miley Club’ even challenged her to a fight, which had to be halted by the school principal.

She explained: “Three girls strutted up and stood towering over me. My stomach churned. I clutched my grilled cheese sandwich like it was the hand of my best friend. It pretty much was my best friend those days. I was done for.

“They started cussing me and telling me to get up. I sat there, frozen. I didn’t know what to do. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood up, still a foot shorter then they were, and said, ‘What’s your problem? What did I ever do to you?’ ”

In the tome, the 16-year-old star also speaks of “the hardest day ever” - when she split from Jonas Brothers star Nick Jonas, who she refers to as Prince Charming.

Explaining why the ended their relationship, she wrote: “Deep down I know we weren’t being our best selves. And that was what I wanted - and thought I deserved - in a relationship.”

The Disney star is now dating underwear model Justin Gaston.

by:celebrity news

Gullies on Mars suggest running water on planet in 'recent' past

2009-03-04T09:35:00.003+08:00

The discovery increases the chances of life existing on the planet in the recent past, or even surviving today.

Scientists have identified fan-like gullies inside a crater that appear to be younger than 1.25 million years old.

They believe the channels must have been sculpted by surface water from melting ice.

There is evidence of waterborne sediments being carried down from high ground and deposited in low-lying alluvial fans.

Professor James Head, from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who with colleagues reported on the discovery in the journal Geology, said: "We think there was recent water on Mars. This is a big step in the direction to proving that."

The gully system is in Promethal Terra, an area of cratered highlands south of the Martian equator.

A powerful camera on the American space agency Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft was able to distinguish four individual lobes of deposited material in the fan system.

One was pockmarked with small craters linked to a rayed crater 80 kilometres away known to be 1.25m years old.

This lobe was likely to be about the same age. The other three lobes were unblemished and therefore had to be younger, said the scientists.

They believe the best explanation for the gullies is melting snow and ice rather than groundwater bubbling up to the surface.

The finding follows discoveries of water-bearing minerals such as opals and carbonates on Mars.

Experts now think the planet was occasionally wet for far longer than was previously believed.

by:telegraph

Fish with human faces spotted in South Korea

2009-03-04T09:31:00.001+08:00

The "humanoid" carp are attracting attention in the town of Chongju in the centre of the country where they live in a small pond.

They are believed to be hybrid descendants of two carp species – the carp and the leather carp, also known as a tangerine fish.

Both fish are females and more than three feet long. They appear to have distinctive human noses, eyes and lips.

The fish live in a pond behind the home of a 64-year old South Korean man and have been there since 1986 although their looks are only just starting to attract attention.

"My fish have been getting more and more human for the past couple of years," the owner said.

He added that he knows of other fish with similar features, and as they are both females it will be impossible for them to breed and have fish-faced offspring.

This is the second time in recent months that carp have made headlines in Asia. Last November a shoal of the fish in Changsha, in China's Hunan Province turned on a duck who landed on their lake looking for food.

The Koi carp took exception to the intruder and fought back, bunching together into a seething mass to assert their authority, forcing the duck to fly away.

by:telegraph

Pink dolphin appears in US lake

2009-03-04T09:10:00.002+08:00

Charter boat captain Erik Rue, 42, photographed the animal, which is actually an albino, when he began studying it after the mammal first surfaced in Lake Calcasieu, an inland saltwater estuary, north of the Gulf of Mexico in southwestern USA.

Capt Rue originally saw the dolphin, which also has reddish eyes, swimming with a pod of four other dolphins, with one appearing to be its mother which never left its side.

He said: "I just happened to see a little pod of dolphins, and I noticed one that was a little lighter.

"It was absolutely stunningly pink.

"I had never seen anything like it. It's the same color throughout the whole body and it looks like it just came out of a paint booth.

"The dolphin appears to be healthy and normal other than its coloration, which is quite beautiful and stunningly pink.

"The mammal is entirely pink from tip to tail and has reddish eyes indicating it's albinism. The skin appears smooth, glossy pink and without flaws.

"I have personally spotted the pink dolphin 40 to 50 times in the time since the original sighting as it has apparently taken up residence with its family in the Calcasieu ship channel.

"As time has passed the young mammal has grown and sometimes ventures away from its mother to feed and play but always remains in the vicinity of the pod.

"Surprisingly, it does not appear to be drastically affected by the environment or sunlight as might be expected considering its condition, although it tends to remain below the surface a little more than the others in the pod."

Regina Asmutis-Silvia, senior biologist with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, said: "I have never seen a dolphin coloured in this way in all my career.

"It is a truly beautiful dolphin but people should be careful, as with any dolphins, to respect it - observe from a distance, limit their time watching, don't chase or harass it

"While this animal looks pink, it is an albino which you can notice in the pink eyes.

"Albinism is a genetic trait and it unclear as to the type of albinism this animal inherited."

A close relation of dolphins, the Amazon River Botos, called pink dolphins, live in South America in the Amazon.

by:telegraph

Spacecraft Sees Spectacular Solar Eclipse on Moon

2009-03-02T09:23:00.001+08:00

There was a solar eclipse earlier this month — but it wasn't visible anywhere on Earth.

Rather, a Japanese space probe in orbit around the moon got spectacular high-definition video of the sun being blocked — by the Earth, producing an otherworldly "diamond-ring" eclipse.

It may be only the third time such an eclipse has been viewed by terrestrials, human or otherwise.

An American lunar lander got a blurry snapshot of a solar eclipse in 1967, and two years later Apollo 12 astronauts got treated to the same thing on their way back from the moon.

The Kaguya, or Selene, probe was traveling from the dark to the light side of the moon on Feb. 9.

The sun rose over the moon's surface, as usual, but on Feb. 9 it was just a thin ring surrounding darkness.

(The Earth's disk is a bit smaller than the sun's when viewed from the moon; on Earth, the moon just about covers the sun.)

In the video, only a small semi-circle is visible at first as the sun rises over the horizon. The circle quickly expands, but before it's complete the sun suddenly breaks forth from the lower right corner of the circle, filling the screen with light.

by:FOXNews

Sidekicks popular among teenagers, thieves

2009-03-02T09:14:00.002+08:00

Nisha Taylor was just about to put her beloved T-Mobile Sidekick in her bag. She thought the cell phone would be safer there than in her pocket. In the few seconds it took for the 18-year-old to unwind the string loop that held the Sidekick to her wrist, someone else eyed the device and made off with it.

"He just runs and he hits the phone," Taylor said. "The string pops. The phone goes up in the air. He catches it and he runs."

Although the Sidekicks — which have flashy flip screens and the youthful cachet of endorsements by rapper Snoop Dogg and basketball star Dwyane Wade — aren't among the country's best-selling phones, they might be the most stolen ones.

Boston police reported more than 300 stolen Sidekicks in 2008, accounting for 14 percent of all robberies in the city. New York City saw a 59 percent surge in subway robberies in December compared with the previous year, driven largely by thieves targeting high-end cell phones, especially the Sidekick.

And Adrian Portlock, whose company Checkmend.com tracks stolen cell phones, ranks the phone among the most-taken worldwide, even though the Sidekick's primary market is the United States, where it is available for $100 after a rebate.

Thieves have long targeted trendy items, from Air Jordans and Starter jackets to iPods and GPS units. But the Sidekick is not ubiquitous — it has never cracked the list of the five top-selling cell phones since the consumer research firm NPD Group began the ranking in 2005. Instead, thieves target Sidekicks because of their urban hipness quotient, and because they're easy to resell.

All T-Mobile phones use a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card, a small computer chip usually stored behind the phone's battery that holds the owner's personal information, such as account data and phone contacts.

SIM cards are convenient for cell phone users because to switch to a new device, they simply pop out the chips and put them into another phone that employs the same technology. All the consumer's saved information moves to the new phone.

But the reverse also is true: By removing a SIM card, a thief can quickly and cleanly erase the owner from the phone.

"It's more attractive to a thief if it's a SIM card-enabled cell phone," said Portlock, the chief executive of Recipero, whose Checkmend service charges customers to check whether electronic goods they want to buy or sell have serial numbers that are on a list of stolen or counterfeit goods.

Crafty thieves have learned how to manipulate the Sidekick so it can be used on other networks that also use SIM cards, such as the one run by AT&T Inc. Certain features — such as AOL Instant Messaging — may not work on the rival networks, but the limitations do little to discourage the switch.

And unlike in Europe, cell phone companies don't share information when a phone is stolen, so rival companies may never know if one of their customers is using a stolen phone from another network, Portlock said.

Once a Sidekicks is unlocked, thieves often scratch out the phone's identification number and sell the device on Web sites such as Craigslist or eBay.

"They have the maximum ability to turn them into cash," Portlock said. "It's that young market, Internet savvy, trend-driven market where they'll buy a used cell phone, no questions asked."

For its part, T-Mobile says it has "a long history of working with law enforcement agencies across the country on their investigations."

In Providence, R.I., where a majority of the roughly 190 cell phone thefts last year were of the Sidekick, Police Lt. Robert Lepre said the Sidekicks' physical design makes users vulnerable. Most people hold the phone with two hands out in front of their body, using their thumbs to text or instant message on the full keyboard.

"When the kid's sitting there texting, it's pretty obvious what he's doing," Lepre said. "We've had kids that have definitely been followed and had their Sidekicks stolen."

The problem has become so pronounced that the Boston Police Department teamed with students from the Boston Arts Academy to create a poster — the winning one is emblazoned with the words "Hold on to Your Kick" — reminding young people to keep their phones close and avoid openly texting.

For Tatiana Mesa, the Sidekick's popularity — among her classmates and thieves — eventually turned her off. The 17-year-old student at the Boston Arts Academy recently switched to a BlackBerry Curve — after her Sidekick was taken while she was in class.

"I was like, I need something new," she said. "Let's see if it gets stolen."

by:msnbc

Slumdog Millionaire star falls ill

2009-03-02T09:04:00.002+08:00

Slumdog Millionaire child star Azharuddin Ismail has fallen ill as fears grow about the psychological state of the two young Indian actors.

Azhar, 10, spent the weekend vomiting and has developed a temperature of 103 degrees since returning home last week after travelling to the Oscars with co-star Rubina Ali, 9.

He has been prescribed antibiotics by doctors, who said he is suffering from fever and exhaustion, but his condition has continued to worsen.

Azhar's neighbours have also rallied round to build an 8ft by 5ft metal structure for him to sleep under out of the sun.

The families of the two child stars have said their children are not readjusting to life back in the slums after five days of glitz and glamour in Los Angeles.

Mother Shameem Ismail said: "It has all become too much for him. He is very ill and has not recovered from going to America and all the media interest since we got back."

Rubina's father Rafiq Qureshi said. "Getting used to life back here in the slum again is proving tough for her and she has not wanted to see her friends since she got back. She just wants to spend all her time away from the slum now and I just hope we get the flat that has been promised to us.":

Both the Mumbai housing authority and Slumdog's producer Christian Colson have said they are going to provide proper flats for the two families. However, as yet the families have been told nothing and remain in the deprived slum.

Azhar, cuddling his new pet guinea pig, said: "I am very sad. I feel sleepy, hot and sick all the time. I can't get to sleep here – there are too many mosquitoes and it is so hot. I just wish I was in America still."

Having flown in a plane, slept in a soft bed and used a clean and functioning bathroom for the first time in their lives at a five-star hotel, the kids say they have now realised what life is like on the other side of the coin and the reality of being back in the slum is hitting them hard.

"I don't want to live here in the slum anymore," Rubina said, wearing the dirt stained ball gown that she has not wanted to take off since Oscars night. "I don't want to sleep on the floor anymore. I want a proper bed and live where the air does not smell of poo. I have seen what it is like in America. Here, there is garbage everywhere, people get angry, swear and shout. I have realised how bad life is here. I just want to get out."

Social workers have called for the children to be placed in care and state that they need to be given protection – either from Danny Boyle and the film production company or the Indian authorities.

"I cannot believe these kids have just been left like this after being taken to Hollywood. It is bound to affect them psychologically," said social worker Sanjay Bhatia, who works in the slum.

India's Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chowdhary is "appalled" at the beating that Azhar took at the hands of his father on Friday. Azhar was thrashed for saying he wanted to sleep rather than talk to a journalist who had offered money to his father.

by:telegraph

Leonardo da Vinci self portrait discovered hidden in manuscript

2009-03-01T08:31:00.002+08:00

Italian researchers believe they have unearthed a previously unknown self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci drawn when the artist was a young man.

The faint pencil sketch has emerged after being hidden for 500 years in one of the Renaissance genius’s most famous manuscripts, the “Codex on the Flight of Birds”, written between 1490 and 1505.

In a discovery that could have come from the script of a Dan Brown thriller, an Italian scientific journalist studying the document noticed the faint outline of a human nose hidden underneath lines of ink handwriting, It struck him as being similar in shape and drawing style to a later self-portrait of Leonardo.

It is thought that Leonardo first made the drawing in the 1480s, then later reused the same piece of paper when he came to write his codex - a Latin term for manuscript - on bird flight.

The journalist, Piero Angela, enlisted the help of art historians, Carabinieri police forensic experts and graphic artists to tease out more detail from the ghostly image.

Over months of micro-pixel work, graphic designers gradually “removed” the text by making it white instead of black, revealing the drawing beneath.

What emerged was the face of a young to middle-aged man with long hair, a short beard and a pensive gaze.

Mr Angela was struck by similarities to a famous self-portrait of Leonardo, made when the artist was an old man around 1512. The portrait, in red chalk, is kept in Turin’s Biblioteca Reale, or Royal Library.

The research team used criminal investigation techniques to digitally correlate the newly-discovered sketch with the well-known portrait.

They employed facial reconfiguration technology to age the drawing of the younger man, hollowing the cheeks, darkening the eyes and furrowing the brow.

The two portraits were so similar “that we may regard the hypothesis that the images portray the same person as reasonable”, police photo-fit experts declared.

To make doubly sure, the ageing process was reversed, with researchers using a digital “facelift” to rejuvenate the older self-portrait.

After removing the older Leonardo’s wrinkles and filling out his cheeks, the image that emerged was almost identical to the newly discovered sketch.

“When I actually tried to age the face [of the newly discovered portrait], and to put the hair and the beard of the famous self-portrait around it, a shiver ran down my spine,” said Mr Angelo. “It resembled Leonardo like a twin brother. To uncover a new Leonardo drawing was astonishing.”

The similarities were also studied by a facial reconstruction surgeon in Rome. “[He] said the two faces could well belong to the same man at different times in his life”, said Mr Angelo.

A world expert on Leonardo, Carlo Pedretti from the University of California, described the sketch as “one of the most important acquisitions in the study of Leonardo, in the study of his image, and in the study of his thought too”.

The unusual find comes after an Italian historian this week claimed to have discovered a portrait of Leonardo while studying the picture collection of a family in Acerenza in southern Italy. But other experts have dismissed the claim.

by:telegraph

Robot replica of Albert Einstein

2009-03-01T08:21:00.001+08:00

The ground-breaking model, which recognises and responds to human emotions, uses 31 motors and a patented flesh-like material called Frubber to make lifelike facial expressions.

Scientists hope it will defy the perception that human-like robots are "creepy" and could be the first step to making robots emotionally sensitive, preventing a "Matrix"-style war between man and machine.

Einstein, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist noted for his theory of relativity, was chosen for the model because he appears "lovable and emotionally accessible", as well as being a universally esteemed scientist.

They say the robot, designed by Texas-based Hanson Robotics, can interact "naturally" with humans and could be used to teach autistic children how to perceive emotion.

David Hanson, the robot's designer, told UC San Diego News: "Some scientists believe strongly that very human-like robots are so inherently creepy that people can never get over it and interact with them normally.

"But these are some of the questions we're trying to address with the Einstein robot. Does software engage people more when you have a robot that's more aware of you?

"We're trying to get past the novelty of the technology to a certain extent so that people can socially engage with the robots and get lost in that social engagement.

"But it's very important that we develop empathetic machines, machines that have compassion, machines that understand what you're feeling.

"If these robots do become as intelligent as human beings, we want this infrastructure of compassion and empathy to be in place so the machines are prepared to use their intellectual powers for the good of civilisation. In a way, we're planting the seeds for the survival of humanity."

The robot uses facial recognition software that understands hundreds of human expressions such as sadness, anger, fear, happiness and confusion, as well as age and gender.

The flesh-like material that makes up the robot's face, Frubber, was designed and patented by Dr Hanson and is so detailed it even includes realistic skin pores.

Scientists at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at UC San Diego wrote the facial recognition software that enables the head-and-shoulders model to interact with people.

Javier Movellan, who designed the software, said: "Developing a robot like this one teaches us how sensitive we are to biological movement and facial expressions, and when we get it right, it's really astonishing.

"Although we're thinking of Einstein as a tool for science right now, in the future I could see it being used in museums or as a way to teach people from other cultures how to interact with one another.

"We're also exploring the use of the robot for children with autism. It could be used as a way to teach them facial expression recognition."

For now, the cost of robots – 75,000 US dollars (£52,000) for one as sophisticated as Einstein – prohibit them being so widely used, but Mr Hanson hopes mass production could eventually drive the cost down to 200 dollars.

Dr Movellan added that the production of a robot with a "complete mind" could be just 10 years away.

by:telegraph

Buckle Up, Simon!

2009-03-01T08:12:00.005+08:00

Simon Cowell was pulled over by police in Los Angeles on Friday for two different violations. Failure to display a front license plate and for not wearing a seatbelt!!

How stupid!

The American Idol judge laughed off the incident, but not wearing a seatbelt is just ridiculous!!

Luckily for him, he was able to sweet talk his way out of a ticket!

by:perezhilton

Earliest 'human footprints' found

2009-02-28T12:32:00.003+08:00

The earliest footprints showing evidence of modern human foot anatomy and gait have been unearthed in Kenya.

The 1.5-million-year-old footprints display signs of a pronounced arch and short, aligned toes, in contrast to older footprints.

The size and spacing of the Kenyan markings - attributed to Homo erectus - reflect the height, weight, and walking style of modern humans.

The findings have been published in the journal Science.

The footprints are not the oldest belonging to a member of the human lineage. That title belongs to the 3.7 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis prints found in Laetoli, Tanzania, in 1978.

Those prints, however, showed comparatively flat feet and a significantly higher angle between the big toe and the other toes, representative of a foot still adapted to grasping.

Exactly how that more ape-like foot developed into its modern version has remained unclear.

The fossil record is distinctly lacking in foot and hand bones, according to lead author Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University, UK.

"The reason is that carnivores like to eat hands and feet," Professor Bennett told BBC News.

"Once the flesh is gone there's a lot of little bones that don't get preserved, so we know very little about the evolution of hands and feet on our ancestors."
The footprints were found near Ileret in northern Kenya. The site, on a small hill, is made up of metres of sediment which the researchers carefully cleared away.

What they found was two sets of footprints, one five metres deeper than the other, separated by sand, silt, and volcanic ash.

The team dated the surrounding sediment by comparing it with well-known radioisotope-dated samples from the region, finding that the two layers of prints were made at least 10,000 years apart.

Another critical feature that the series of footprints makes clear is how Homo erectus walked.

There is evidence of a heavy landing on the heel with weight transferred along the outer edge of the foot, progressing to the ball of the foot and lifting off with the toes.

"That's very diagnostic of the modern style of walking, and the Laetoli prints don't give that same character," Professor Bennett said.

The finding is a critical clue for mapping out the evolution of modern humans, both in terms of physiology and also how H. erectus fared in its environment.

H. erectus was a great leap in evolution, showing increased variety of diet and of habitat, and was the first Homo species to make the journey out of Africa.

"There's some suggestion out there that Homo erectus was able to scour the landscape for carcasses and meat...and was able to get there very quickly, had longer limbs and was much more efficient in terms of long distance travel," Professor Bennett added.

"Now we're also saying it had an essentially modern foot anatomy and function, which also adds to that story."

by:bbc news

I have a Kindle 2. Jealous much?

2009-02-28T12:26:00.002+08:00

Amazon’s upgraded e-book reader, Kindle 2, has many attributes that gadget freaks will find irresistible. It’s got wireless 3G. (Ooh!) It’s slim and elegant. (Ah!) It’s got a luscious, 16-shade display and can handle 1,500 books at a time. (Wow!)

Hands down, though, the very best feature of this hotly anticipated gadget is the ability to lord it over your envious friends. I just hooked up with Kindle 2 this morning, and already I’m insufferable. Just ask my co-workers.

Thanks to the intuitive navigation, QWERTY keyboard and lightning-quick downloads, I’m quoting text from books I’ve never read. What’s more, the Oxford Dictionary tool quickly defines words on the page so that I sort of even know what I’m talking about. Why, I’ve never sounded so smart or pompous! Bragging rights aside, there is the product itself ... the super awesome feather-light product I have locked in a lovesick gaze even as I type. True, at $359, Kindle 2 is a pricey bit of technology, especially for something that excels at just one thing — book readin’. That puts it in the same neighborhood as a multi-tasking iPhone (sans service contract), and still too expensive to risk reading in the bathroom or on the beach. But you know what they say: You can never be too expensive or too thin … if you’re an e-reader, that is.

Not all the tech geeks see Kindle 2 as worthy of love or money — at least that’s what they say. I suspect they’re all jealous. For example, NBC news Web producer and Clicked blogger Will Femia grumbled that he couldn’t imagine Kindle replacing the stack of disheveled newspapers on the counter of his morning coffee shop. Scoop columnist and original-recipe Kindle owner Courtney Hazlett took one look at K2 (my pet name) and declared, "I am in a legitimate love affair with my Kindle, and I now have no plans to break up."

Hazlett’s beef? She prefers the iPod-like wheel navigation of the earlier model over K2’s joystick-style toggle switch. I admit that the joystick is less receptive than the original’s navigational wheel. It also seems less durable and a magnet for crumbs, dust and peanut butter. (Yes, peanut butter. I’m a slob. Shut up.)

Know-it-all interactive editor Phil Zepeda (who builds iPhone apps in his spare time — geek!) gripes that the dual "next page" buttons on either side of the lovely, symmetrical K2 weren't responsive to a normal amount of pressure. And two "next page" options are confusing to fingers, causing accidental "next page" turns when you mean to go back, and vice versa. I grudgingly agree, the K2 should have a "next page" button on one side and "previous page" button on the other.

(And no, the Kindle 2 does not feature a touch screen — something I found out the hard way after jamming my finger into the six-inch screen repeatedly.)

Whatever. At least office I.T. guy Mike Gee isn’t a hater. He described K2 as "easier to navigate than (an) actual book; an improvement on book technology." The search function allows you to instantly find words or phrases rather than tediously flipping around for the part you underlined. And that’s another thing, corporeal book fans: Kindle 2 lets you to save book passages and add notes on individual pages.

Unfortunately, the lovely white case (with brushed metal backing) surrounding the screen will surely fall victim to grubby finger splotches, and as with the original model, K2 is not dishwasher safe.

If the K2 does get too filthy to look at, however, I can always shut my eyes as it reads to me via the text-to-voice function. Sure, the headphone jack is at the top the device, making the cord a source of irritation while looking at the screen. (Hello, Amazon! Who designed this thing?) But the K2 has two decent-sounding speakers in the back.

OK, K2’s speaking voice — available in male and female — is just a tad more animated than Stephen Hawking reading you a bedtime story. And it sure as heck won’t replace Stephen Colbert’s recitation of his own best seller, "I Am America (And So Can You!)" or any of the Harry Potter tomes narrated by Jim Dale (not that any Harry Potter books are available yet for Kindle, another frustration). Still, it’s a function that can come in handy — though I wouldn’t recommend the sleep-inducing drone if you’re going to be driving.

Those who insist on finding flaw with perfection may whine about the fact that despite the K2’s extra shades of gray — 16 over the original model’s four — it doesn’t display illustrations worth beans. That’s no matter to me, as I wasn’t getting rid of my first edition "Watchmen" graphic novel anyway. For straight up, no-diagram-needing reading, Kindle’s electronic ink display is a delight for the eyes. E Ink technology looks eerily similar to actual ink on paper. If your gripe with Kindle 2 is that you don’t want to stare at a computer all day at work and then a Kindle screen at home, never fear. Unlike LCD screens used on computers and cell phones, E Ink reflects light, and once the text is on the screen, it's not constantly refreshing pixels. That saves your optic nerves as well as a ton of power, reducing the need to recharge K2 as frequently as a laptop or cell phone.

Not everyone sees E Ink as perfection. Bedtime readers may lament the lack of backlighting, ignoring the fact that the K2 is just looking out for your eyes. The other thing is, each page does not refresh instantly as you flip through. There’s a few seconds of lag time as the screen blacks out and reloads — a tic common to all E Ink e-books, and something that probably needs to change before Kindle conquers the world.

How does K2 compare to other e-readers? Who cares? Part of K2’s appeal is its prestige factor as "the iPod of books." At $299, the Sony Reader, released last year, remains Kindle 2’s main competition, but what it saves in money it lacks in convenience. Books must be downloaded manually to the Sony model. Meanwhile, K2, thanks to its 3G access provided by Sprint, downloads books immediately either through the device or your online Amazon account.

So why does Kindle 2 cost just so darn much? When you take into account what you get for the money, it starts to make sense — almost. There’s no charge for the 3G wireless. While you can’t text or make calls, K2 does allow MP3 downloads, mobile-style Web surfing and will receive e-mails for a nominal fee. If you’re big into the latest best sellers, Amazon offers Kindle versions for $9.99, as well as Kindle subscriptions to newspapers (including The New York Times) and popular blogs for $1.99 a month each.

Still, even with Amazon’s discounted e-books, the hold-steady $359 cost of the actual hardware assures that the Kindle 2 is a toy for the economically fortunate and foolish — and not something meant for someone in the habit of leaving electronics on the bus. But until this Kindle 2 joins two iPods, one cell phone and my favorite pink and black stripy scarf in the Bronx/Manhattan Express netherworld, I have one and it’s awesome.

by:msnbc

Look out, Pattinson: ‘New Moon’ has new hunk

2009-02-28T12:18:00.002+08:00

Move over, Robert Pattinson. A new supernatural heartthrob is set to hit the big screen. Pattinson, who starred as “Twilight’s” leading man, vampire Edward Cullen, skips town after just two scenes in the franchise’s sequel, “New Moon,” making way for Taylor Lautner’s werewolf, Jacob Black, to romance Kristen Stewart’s character, Bella.

“I wanted to get ‘Twilight’ over with, let Edward have his time with Bella and get moving with ‘New Moon,’” Lautner, 17, told Life & Style. “It’s about time Jacob got in there.”

The clean-cut Lautner added 30 pounds to his frame to help him unseat Pattinson and appear worthy of Bella’s affections. “Taylor’s very serious about forming a connection with Kristen,” Rachelle Lefevre, who plays evil vamp Victoria, told Life & Style. “He’ll make sure his relationship with her is just as intense and has just as much chemistry as Rob’s. I think Rob should watch out!”

by:msnbc

Eye of God pictured in space

2009-02-27T09:15:00.002+08:00

European astronomers have taken a stunning photo of a Big Brother-style cosmic eye, nicknamed the Eye of God, staring down from space.

The bright blue pupil and the white of the eye are fringed by flesh-coloured eyelids - but this eye is so big that it light takes two and a half years to cross from one side to the other.

The object is actually a shell of gas and dust that has been blown off by a faint central star. Our own solar system will meet a similar fate five billion years in the future.

It lies around 700 light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius, and can be dimly seen in small backyard telescopes by amateur astronomers who call it the Helix nebula. It covers an area of sky around a quarter the size of the full moon.

The photo was taken with a giant telescope at the European Southern Observatory, high on a mountaintop at La Silla in Chile. It is so detailed that a close-up reveals distant galaxies within the central eyeball.

by:telegraph

Cell phone stories writing new chapter in print publishing

2009-02-27T08:55:00.002+08:00

Yume-Hotaru's first novel was a best-seller in Japanese bookstores, and he wrote it entirely with his thumbs. The 22-year-old who would rather be identified by his pen name than his real one (Yume-Hotaru means "Dreaming Firefly" in Japanese) started composing the novel on his cell phone in 2007.

Between classes, on the bus or before going to bed at night, he would type single sentences into his phone's tiny keypad, uploading each one straight to the mobile social networking site Mobage-town.

The more Yume-Hotaru posted, the more popular his story became. It won a prize and soon publishers approached him, asking if he wanted to turn his digital book into a paper one. By early 2008, his novel "First Experience," a story about love and sex in high school, was a top title in one of Tokyo's biggest bookstores.

Since it emerged in Japan nearly a decade ago, the cell phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, has moved from a little-known subgenre to a mainstream literary phenomenon. Keitai shosetsu sites boast billions of monthly users while publishers sell millions of copies of cellular stories taken from phones and turned into paperback.

It is even spreading to other countries as other cultures start to take part in a type of composition long considered purely Japanese.

As the name suggests, cell phone novels are written entirely on handsets and posted on sites like Maho no i-rando (Magic Island), the first and largest mobile novel portal in Japan. The site has a million titles, 3.5 billion monthly visitors and six million registered users, according to the company. Mobile readers instantly see new chapters as they are added, often adding comments about the direction they think a novel should take.

The diary-like stories are written and read mostly by young women in their teens and 20's. Many authors use pen names and claim their stories are at least partially autobiographical. The novels often center on themes that are rarely discussed aloud in Japanese society -- drugs, sex, pregnancy, abortion, rape and disease.

"When they write those novels, they share their secret, personal problems, and when they read by mobile phones, they can hide what they are reading," explained Toshie Takahashi, an associate professor of media studies at Rikkyo University in Tokyo.

"They are also involved and engaged with their mobile phones very strongly," added Takahashi, noting that 96 percent of high school students own a cell phone in Japan.

"The mobile phone itself is embedded in young people's everyday lives very deeply and also emotionally and physically."

Despite its popularity among young women, a male writer known as Yoshi, widely considered the first cellular novelist, brought the burgeoning genre to light when he self-published "Deep Love" in 2002. The story about a prostitute in Tokyo sold nearly 3 million copies and was adapted for film, television and Manga, or Japanese comics.

Publishing phenomenon

A struggling Japanese publishing industry was quick to take notice of the growing popularity of keitai shosetsu, especially early works like Yoshi's "Deep Love." Many of the popular cell phone novels have since been turned into paperbacks, and bookstores across Japan now have entire sections devoted to the digital-age literary genre.

By 2007, half of the country's 10 best-selling novels were written on cell phones, according to book distributor Tohan while last year mobile novels and comics were a $240 million market in Japan, which is over 5 percent of the country's $4.5 billion total mobile content market, according to Japan's Mobile Content Forum.

In January 2009, three Japanese mobile phone novel publishers reported collective sales of 1.7 million copies. Publishers, like Goma Books, one of the first to print cell phone novels, have also launched their own keitai shosetsu sites, which they use to sift through for talent whose work will be marketable on bookshelves.

Goma's mobile story site Orion carries 20,000 novels and has approximately two million monthly users, according to the company. Goma has also published several top-selling keitai shosetsu, including "The Red Thread," by Mei (also a pen name).

Since it was released in 2007, the story, which revolves around the romance of two middle school students, has sold nearly 2 million copies and was adapted for a TV series and movie last December. The publishing house now prints a new mobile novel every month.

Some literary purist don't think the cell phone novels constitute real literature, but their popularity is undeniable. "The sentences may be a bit immature. It doesn't have a major plot line sometimes. It is just love stories of ordinary high school girls, said Aya Tanaka, a spokesperson for Goma. "But it is kind of like popular comics, it is what the teenagers want to read, and for the publishers, it is quite a big market and it does sell."

Michael Keferl, a trend consultant with Cscout Japan in Tokyo, believes that "[readers] are participating in the creation of the novel, which is one of the reasons why they buy it afterwards. They are helping to write it and are also witnessing it being written."

Crossing cultures

However some believe the future of keitai shosetsu as one that is quickly following in the footsteps of most teenage fads: A sudden and rapid rise to mass popularity followed by a slow but steady decline to the fringes of the not-so-cool.

Last year few mobile novels appeared on best-seller lists while new stories published online have lost their characteristic edginess, said Chiaki Ishihara, a Japanese literature expert at Waseda University in Tokyo who has studied cell phone novels.

"Keitai shosetsu is rapidly declining at this point," Ishihara told CNN. "In a few years, it may not even be considered a subculture."

Others see the cell phone novel moving from an initial boom that peaked around 2007 to a period of market stabilization.

"You are not going to have as many of the big hits as you had before because there are so many titles out," said Keferl. "Things are leveling out now."

While the cell phone novel market may be cooling in Japan, it is just starting to emerge in other countries, like the United States, where faster networks and cheaper data plans are leading more consumers to use handsets in ways similar to people in Japan.

Many companies are starting to launch mobile web sites in the U.S., including DeNA, the Japanese firm that owns Mobage-town, the site where Yume-Hotaru writes his keitai shosetsu.

"What has surprised us is users in America are behaving in a similar way to the Japanese," said Dai Watanabe, president of DeNA Global, Inc. "They are writing about things that are very close to their actual lives. I was surprised to see it is very similar with what is happening in Japan."

Julian Knighten, a 22-year-old who works three jobs, writes his cell phone stories while lying in bed at night in his home outside of Dallas, Texas.

He said he had never heard of keitai shosetsu before but likes writing cell phone novels because of the relationship he has with readers and the feedback they give him about his stories.

"It encourages me to write," said Knighten. "And it gives me the chance to escape reality."

by:cnn

Ice Declining Faster Than Expected In Both Arctic And Antarctic Glaciers

2009-02-27T08:44:00.001+08:00

Multidisciplinary research from the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008 provides new evidence of the widespread effects of global warming in the polar regions. Snow and ice are declining in both polar regions, affecting human livelihoods as well as local plant and animal life in the Arctic, as well as global ocean and atmospheric circulation and sea level.

These are but a few findings reported in “State of Polar Research”, released February 25 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the International Council for Science (ICSU). In addition to lending insight into climate change, IPY has aided our understanding of pollutant transport, species’ evolution, and storm formation, among many other areas.

The wide-ranging IPY findings result from more than 160 endorsed science projects assembled from researchers in more than 60 countries. Launched in March 2007, the IPY covers a two-year period to March 2009 to allow for observations during the alternate seasons in both polar regions. A joint project of WMO and ICSU, IPY spearheaded efforts to better monitor and understand the Arctic and Antarctic regions, with international funding support of about US$ 1.2 billion over the two-year period.

IPY has provided a critical boost to polar research during a time in which the global environment is changing faster than ever in human history. It now appears clear that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass contributing to sea level rise. Warming in the Antarctic is much more widespread than it was thought prior to the IPY, and it now appears that the rate of ice loss from Greenland is increasing.

Researchers also found that in the Arctic, during the summers of 2007 and 2008, the minimum extent of year-round sea ice decreased to its lowest level since satellite records began 30 years ago. IPY expeditions recorded an unprecedented rate of sea-ice drift in the Arctic as well. Due to global warming, the types and extent of vegetation in the Arctic shifted, affecting grazing animals and hunting.

Other evidence for global warming comes from IPY research vessels that have confirmed above-global-average warming in the Southern Ocean. A freshening of the bottom water near Antarctica is consistent with increased ice melt from Antarctica and could affect ocean circulation. Global warming is thus affecting Antarctica in ways not previously identified.

IPY research has also identified large pools of carbon stored as methane in permafrost. Thawing permafrost threatens to destabilize the stored methane -a greenhouse gas- and send it into the atmosphere. Indeed, IPY researchers along the Siberian coast observed substantial emissions of methane from ocean sediments.

In the area of biodiversity, surveys of the Southern Ocean have uncovered a remarkably rich, colourful and complex range of life. Some species appear to be migrating poleward in response to global warming. Other IPY studies reveal interesting evolutionary trends such as many present-day deep-sea octopuses having originated from common ancestor species that still survive in the Southern Ocean.

IPY has also given atmospheric research new insight. Researchers have discovered that North Atlantic storms are major sources of heat and moisture for the polar regions. Understanding these mechanisms will improve forecasts of the path and intensity of storms. Studies of the ozone hole have benefited from IPY research as well, with new connections identified between the ozone concentrations above Antarctica and wind and storm conditions over the Southern Ocean. This information will improve predictions of climate and ozone depletion.

Many Arctic residents, including indigenous communities, participated in IPY’s projects. Over 30 of these projects addressed Arctic social and human science issues, including food security, pollution, and other health issues, and will bring new understanding to addressing these pressing challenges. “IPY has been the catalyst for the development and strengthening of community monitoring networks across the North” said David Carlson, Director of the IPY International Programme Office. “These networks stimulate the information flow among communities and back and forth from science to communities.”

The increased threats posed by climate change make polar research a special priority. The “State of Polar Research” document not only describes some of the striking discoveries during IPY, it also recommends priorities for future action to ensure that society is best informed about ongoing polar change and its likely future evolution and global impacts. A major IPY science conference will take place in Oslo in June 2010.

by:sciencedaily

Rare crab spotted in British waters for just third time in century

2009-02-26T08:25:00.001+08:00

The Corrugated Crab, which is named after the distinctive ridges on its shell, was found in a prawn pot 90 feet underwater by Tim Bailey, a fisherman.

It was discovered in the Fal Estuary in Cornwall, the first time the species has been recorded there for more than 25 years.

The crab has only ever been found in British waters 11 times, nine of which were before 1907.

It is now recovering at the Blue Reef Aquarium in Newquay, Cornwall. The species is native to Britain but is rarely seen because it is nocturnal and a swimming crab, which does not often come to shore.

A spokesman at the aquarium said: "As a crustacean enthusiast it is exciting to finally get to see this particular type of crab in the flesh rather than just in textbooks."

The species, Liocarcinus Corrugatus, grows to a maximum of 6cm, and is reddish-brown in colour, and is nocturnal.

It is also known as the wrinkled swimming crab and it can be aggressive. It has been known to attack divers with its sharp claws.

The spokesman added: "They are native to Britain and to a large part of the globe. They live away from the shores as they are a swimming crab.

"We are hoping to have this one on display. It is actually so feisty that we are keeping it in quarantine. We are trying to recreate the habitat it likes."

by:telegraph

Bentley shows environmental awareness

2009-02-26T08:16:00.003+08:00

Who says luxury car makers aren't heeding environmental concerns? Bentley will introduce its fastest, most powerful model, which bizarrely also happens to be its greenest, at the Geneva motor show in March.

The Continental Supersports develops 621bhp, accelerates to 60mph in 3.7 seconds and has a top speed of 204mph, and yet it marks Bentley's first FlexFuel model, as it can run on both petrol and biofuel. Bentley plans to make its entire range compatible with renewable fuels by 2012.

It will go on sale here in the autumn, with prices announced nearer the time, but as it sits "at the pinnacle of the Continental range", don't expect much change from £150,000. It will be able to run on petrol, E85 biofuel (a mixture of 85 per cent bioethanol and 15 per cent petrol, available from Morrisons) or a mixture of both from launch.

A Bentley engineer said: "A sophisticated fuel-sensing system ensures that power and torque remain constant irrespective of the fuel ratio to deliver seamless power delivery in the Bentley tradition."

Underneath the bonnet sits the company's six-litre, twin-turbocharged W12 engine mated to a revised ZF "Quickshift" six-speed transmission that cuts the shift time by 50 per cent and enables double downshifts. A measure of the speed on offer is the carbon ceramic brakes, which are the largest and most powerful ever fitted to a production car. Overall, the Supersports has lost 110kg compared with its GT Speed sister model.

OK, so it's not going to save the world: petrol-only consumption figures are still an eye-watering 11.5mpg on the EU Urban cycle, with CO2 emissions of 388g/km, and you can probably count on one hand the customers who will bother filling it with E85 biofuel, so it might seem like a two-fingered salute to the environment, but it's the faintest of nods in the right direction for one of Britain's luxury car makers and, let's face it, a 1.3-litre diesel engine isn't really an option.

by:telegraph

Twitter: Top 20 tools

2009-02-26T08:12:00.002+08:00

* TwitterFox: If you’re a Firefox user, and need an unobtrusive Twitter app to keep you abreast of news but not take up half your computer screen, then TwitterFox is for you. Simple if imperfect.
* Twitterific: Ideal for Mac and iPhone or iPod touch users, Twitterific works well on mobile devices, and has a small desktop footprint. Built in support for TwitPic is a nice touch.
* TweetDeck: Powerhouse Twitter app that makes it easy to break feeds into manageable chunks, and even categorise replies. Requires a computer running Adobe Air, but works on both PCs and Macs.
* Tweetie: Tweetie works really well on the iPhone and iPod touch, enabling users to handle multiple Twitter accounts through one interface, easily follow and unfollow people, and navigate @replies in the form of threaded conversations.
* Twibble: It’s not just iPhone users who can log in to Twitter on their phones – those who own Java-enabled smartphones, including Nokia, BlackBerry and Sony Ericsson, can get in on the action too. There’s built-in TwitPic support, too, and a desktop version is also available.
* TwitterBerry: Alternatively, CrackBerry addicts can turn to TwitterBerry, a streamlined, simple application that can be downloaded over the air to your phone. Does the basics well.
* SocialScope: This software, currently in invitation-only alpha testing, is another app aimed at BlackBerry users, and it offers a few more bells and whistles than TwitterBerry, including the ability to easily access and update your Facebook account, and near real-time notifications of @replies and direct messages.
* TwitterFon: This client, aimed at iPhone and iPod touch users, boasts a lovely, easy to follow interface, and the ability to search tweets by keyword, location of users, and even hot trends.
* TwitterFall: Brilliant website, founded by two British students no less, that provides a rolling, visual guides to the latest tweets. You can filter messages by hot search topics or custom terms, as well as view your own timeline. Invaluable for knowing what’s hot and what’s not in the Twitterverse.
* Mr Tweet: Knowing who to follow on Twitter can be tricky. Thankfully, help is at hand from Mr Tweet. Follow Mr Tweet on Twitter, and he will recommend people you should be following, help you uncover other networks and groups that may be relevant to your needs and interests, and even help you power-up your Twitter performance with some useful usage stats and handy pointers.
* TwitterSheep: This neat website will build a “tag cloud” from the biographical information of your Twitter followers. Essentially, this is a visual representation of the topics and conversations that most interest your followers. Perhaps somewhat tellingly, most of my followers seem to be interested in PR, with technology a close second. Hmm.
* #hashtags: “Hash tags” – that’s a word prefixed with the # symbol – are used by Twitterers to make it easier for people to follow key topics on Twitter. For instance, users who were tweeting about the heavy snowfall in the UK earlier this month added the “#uksnow” hash tag to their tweets, while those discussing the Mumbai terrorist attacks last year used “#mumbai”. This website provides an at-a-glance running ticker of popular hash tags, to help Twitter users keep up to speed with hot topics.
* Twitter Search: It’s impossible to keep up with all the conversations on Twitter, so using a search service like this one can be really useful. You can search by hash tag, or by keywords, and it supports Boolean queries. Helpfully, it also provides a running list of “trending topics”, as well as an advanced search facility.
* HootSuite: The self-styled “ultimate Twitter toolbox” is a fantastic resource. It allows you to manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule and automate your tweets to other services, such as RSS feeds, and even gives some useful stats to help you hone your Twitter performance.
* Twhirl: This smart desktop Twitter client uses the Adobe Air platform to embed a neat, unobtrusive window on your computer that enables you to keep up to speed with not only Twitter activity, but also your FriendFeed and Seesmic streams, among others. It automatically shortens long URLs and can cross-post tweets to other sites, such as Facebook and Ping.fm, should you so desire.
* Twitt (url) y: According to Hitwise, more than 10 per cent of downlinks from Twitter – that’s website addresses included in messages – go to news and media sites. Twitturly does a great job of tracking what stories and sites people are using Twitter to link to, be it photos, videos or blogs.
* Twistori: This strangely compelling website tracks tweets that contain the words love, hate, think, believe, feel or wish, and presents those messages in a constant, rolling, technicolour ticker, providing an intriguing insight into the emotions of the Twitterverse.
* TweetBeep: TweetBeep is a really neat tool that sends you an email alert every hour, giving you a breakdown of all @replies directed at you, as well as instances where your website, blog, company name, favourite hobby or band, and even customised keywords are mentioned in tweets. Ideal for online reputation management, and identifying new ways to get your message across on Twitter.
* HelloTwitFace: Windows Mobile users should give HelloTwitFace a try. It’s been optimised for devices running the Windows Mobile platform, and has a simple user interface and some nice features, including a “De-Scobleizer” tab (named after prolific Twitter user Robert Scoble) to easily filter out tweets from individual users.
* TwitScoop: This website provides a real-time visualisation of hot trending topics, as well as links to the most recent tweets that mention that keyword.

by:telegraph

Scientists Say Water May Exist on Mars

2009-02-25T09:18:00.003+08:00

Droplets seen on the landing struts of the Phoenix Mars Lander could be water, according to a new report.

Images taken of the legs of the lander in the days after its landing on May 28, 2008, show what appear to be drops of liquid.

Over the course of the next Martian month, the drops grew, merged and dripped down the lander's legs, Study leader and co-investigator Nilton Renno of the University of Michigan told National Geographic News that the substance was probably saline mud that splashed when the lander touched down.

Renno and his team will present their findings next month at the 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

The mud likely stays liquid in the Martian cold because it contains high levels of perchlorates, a salt that has "properties like the antifreeze used to melt snow here in Michigan," Renno told National Geographic News.

High perchlorate content makes water able to stay in its liquid form in sub-zero temperatures.The photographs show the substance behaving like liquid water, Renno said.

"As it cooled down toward the end of the mission and we're seeing the formation of frost everywhere, the drops almost disappeared," he said. "This is consistent with [liquid] drops freezing and losing water to the atmosphere as it gets colder."

The droplets also started sliding down the lander's leg, "consistent with ice melting," Renno told National Geographic News.

Harvard University geochemist Nicholas Tosca told National Geographic News that it is possible water exists on Mars, and that in the presence of perchlorate, the planet could support liquid water at temperatures as low as minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, near the lowest temperature recorded at the lander's legs.

Tosca said Renno's report makes a case for water on Mars, but the cold and high salt content are not likely hospitable to life."If you make the case that life could have started on Mars and could be hiding out somewhere," Tosca told National Geographic News, "it's not likely to be in this cold, salty water."

by:foxnews

Cell Phone Models

2009-02-25T08:48:00.002+08:00

The BlackBerry Curve 8900, one of RIM's newest and slickest smartphones, became available from T-Mobile just a few weeks ago. But even in the days leading up to its release, there already was Net buzz about the 8900's successor, the 9300, which is supposed to have an even bigger screen and other improvements — and is not due out until the end of this year.

It seems like cell phones have a market lifespan as long as the average American's attention span, especially for cell phoneaholics who dream in CDMA and GSM.

"The life cycle is definitely longer than the rumor cycle," said David Chamberlain, principal wireless analyst for In-Stat Research. "Lots of (the Net buzz) is wishful thinking."
Chamberlain says most phones have a market life cycle of nine to 12 months. Go into a phone store and look for a model, say, X-7543-a, and if you don't get it that day, chances are the next time you look, the phone is gone, but there's a similar one called the X-7553-c. It still looks like the original — kind of — but it has a few new features.

Or, try finding a battery for your mobile a year after you buy it and odds are you'll be hunting for one on the Web, and that your wireless carrier has long since moved on to newer models and doesn't carry a replacement battery in stock.

Kevin Burden, ABI Research's mobile devices director, says a particular model can be available for between 18 and 24 months. But because phones "take a beating," and also are "visible extensions of our personalities" for most users, it's an item that "easily justifiable to replace every couple of years."

In the United States, wireless carriers' policies of heavily subsidizing phones when customers sign up for one- or two-year contracts, reinforces the idea of change, even if you're perfectly happy with the phone you have been using.

"Operators do this where they can because they know if the subscriber has a better phone, he or she is more likely to use services, which more than pay for the difference in cost on the phone," said Allen Nogee, In-Stat's wireless infrastructure and technology analyst.

Different story elsewhere
Tina Teng, iSuppli Corp.'s senior analyst, wireless communications, notes that "North America has a shorter replacement cycle" of less than two years for cell phones when compared to other countries where "the replacement cycle can go up to four to five years," something that is "definitely difficult to imagine for us."

"In developing countries, with voice-centric phones and low incomes, people keep phones a long time," said Nogee.

"Up until recently in Japan, a country where the phone is status and technology, replacement frequency was often." However, phone subsidies in Japan "are being phased out, and phone sales have dropped like a rock," he said.

Phone sales may not drop like a rock in the United States, but there's no question they're being hurt, along with just about everything else, by the economy.

In 2008 worldwide, 1.8 billion phones were shipped, 3.5 percent more than in 2007, according to IDC's Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker. But the fourth quarter of 2008 saw a 12.6 percent decline in shipments.

The "one bright spot," IDC said: smartphones, which handle e-mail, Web surfing and video, as well as some word processing and spreadsheet programs.

In North America last year, the smartphone market grew 70 percent, and in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, it increased 25 percent, IDC said.

Smartphones: Less incentive to switch
Unlike their voice-centric counterparts, smartphones require more of a financial investment — with many subsidized models costing between $100 and $200 — and monthly voice and data plans starting at between $60 and $70.

There's also the learning curve investment. Using a smartphone is not as simple as a more traditional voice-oriented phone. Smartphones mean getting to know an operating system, something that takes time and patience, which along with money these days, many of us find to be in short supply.

It will be interesting to see how frequently smartphone users upgrade to new models or even change to phones with a different operating system, say going from an iPhone to a BlackBerry or vice-versa.

We're certainly seeing new models being cranked out that are variations on recent themes, not entirely new to learn but tweaked in the looks department. The handsome Samsung Behold, for example, is a startling look-alike of the Samsung Instinct, one of the company's flagship phones introduced in mid-2008.

Samsung also recently released an Instinct in pink, an alternative to the original black Instinct.

At the recent Mobile World Congress in Spain, "Nokia announced the 6700, which is absolutely based on the very successful 6200," said Chamberlain. Phone manufacturers update their models, adding new features and paying close attention to the "external styling," he said.

"It's not all that different from the 'planned obsolescence' brought to car styling in the mid-1950s," he said.

In the BlackBerry Curve's case, the new 8900 runs on a second-generation, or 2G wireless network, which can be slower for Web browsing than third-generation, or 3G. The next Curve iteration, the 9300, may come with 3G, a bigger screen and slightly different keyboard.

'Tweaks,' rather than changes
It can take up to two years to develop a phone, but most phones today are "not built from scratch," said Nogee. "Rather, tweaks are usually made to existing features," something that can be done in months, with the aim of having "new models come out several times a year," he said.

Phones that are especially "complicated with a totally new platform — hardware and software — can take more than two years" to develop, said Teng of iSuppli.

"The best example would be the Android-based handset," she said, referring to the first Google phone, or G1 as it's known, which was made by HTC and released last year.

"Hardware vendors, Google, original equipment manufacturers started to collaborate two years before their announcement (of the phone's release) last year," she said.

"In any industry, time to market is important. (Manufacturers) don’t want to spend too much time on developing and planning. They often use the same platform with a little tweak here and there to spin out a different model. In that case, if there are only minor changes in the hardware, the developing time can be much shorter —as little as four months."

by:msnbc

For the vampire buffs, here's an origin story

2009-02-25T08:32:00.002+08:00

You don't expect to learn about vampires at a forensics meeting, but they were a hot topic of conversation at the American Academy of Forensics annual meeting in Denver last week.

I'd never really thought about where the original vampire legend might have emerged from, but the appearance of bodies as they decompose might have been one source of inspiration.

Here are some gruesome things that happen to bodies as they begin to decompose:
1) Blood and other bodily fluids leak out of the mouth and nose

2) Bacterial activity causes the stomach and intestines to bloat

3) Guttural sounds sometimes emanate from the corpse triggered by the release of gases - these have been described as groaning or sighing sounds

4) Nails and beard appear to continue to grow after death (it's actually a myth that growth continues: the extension of hair and nails is an illusion)

Put these things together, and you might interpret the dead being not so dead after all, and before you know it, you'd be concluding that the corpses are bloated from gorging on the blood of the living. Add to this the possibility that comatose or unconscious patients may have been mistakenly buried alive, and you have the "dead" rising again - when they woke up and realised there had been a terrible error of judgement.

Fear of vampires is still strong in some rural parts of Romania. In 2005, forensic scientists were called to a cemetery in the Romanian village of Marotinul de Sus, to examine a mutilated corpse. Plagued by sickness and nightmares after the death of their relative, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher, a family had exhumed his corpse, driven a pitchfork into his chest, and then removed his heart.

This was then burned and the ashes mixed with peppermint schnapps, which the family drank. The corpse was then stabbed with wooden stakes, and garlic sprinkled over the body.

The six family members who participated in this "vampire slaying" were eventually caught and jailed, greatly angering the local villagers, who believed that they had performed a great service. The leader of the gang told police that the corpse had blood around his mouth, and had moaned when they stabbed him.

by:newscientist

Government 'Twittercrat' to be paid more than Lord Chancellor

2009-02-24T08:58:00.001+08:00

The Director of Digital Engagement role requires the successful candidate to develop strategies to communicate with people on popular internet sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Twitter.

The Senior Civil Service position has a starting salary of £120,000 plus 30 days annual holiday but could rise to £160,000 - more than the Chief Whip, Cabinet Minister and Lord Chancellor get before allowances.

Susie Squire, the TaxPayers' Alliance campaign manager, said: "The Government should not be spending money on a Twittercrat during a recession.

"The public sector should be tightening its belt during times of economic hardship, not wasting tens of thousands of pounds on what seems like a PR stunt to boosts its image."

Conservative Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude said: "Hard pressed families struggling as the recession bites will find it hard to understand how Labour can so freely spend their money on peddling their own propaganda."

The job advertisement comes as new guidance from the information Commissioner's Office said senior public officials' salary bands should be publicly available as a matter of routine.

Gerrard Tracey, Assistant Information Commissioner, said: "Those who are paid from the public purse should expect information on their salaries to be made public."

by:telegraph

The next generation of mirrors

2009-02-24T08:39:00.007+08:00

Non-reversing mirror

This mirror does not produce a "mirror" image, making it possible to read reflected text normally.

Hicks, a mathematician at Drexel University, Philadelphia, used computer algorithms to generate the mirror's bizarre surface, which curves and bends in different directions. The curves direct rays from an object across the mirror's face before sending them back to the viewer, flipping the conventional mirror image.

As well as neat tricks like this, Hicks' models make it possible to design mirrors that provide wide angled-views or eliminate distortion.
Driver-side mirror

Hicks' take on the driver-side mirror (top) provides much more information than the conventional kind.

The new design provides a massive 45° field of view compared to typical driver-side mirrors, which provide drivers with only a 17° field of view.

US regulations ban driver-side mirrors with a curved surface, but Hicks is hoping to sell his designs in markets such as Europe where they are permitted.
Parabolic mirror

Any shiny convex surface, like a Christmas tree bauble, can reflect a wide panoramic image. But objects are distorted so that they change size as they move across the reflection, even if their distance from the reflecting surface is constant.

This panoramic mirror reflects a full 360° along the horizon view without any distortion. As long as an object is at the same distance from the mirror, it appears the same size wherever it is reflected.
Perspective rectifying mirror

This mirror reflects a wide-angled view without distortion - straight lines in the real world translate to straight lines on the convex surface.

It was made for a stair-climbing robot at the University of Pennsylvania.

A camera pointed at the mirror can see a very wide-angled view in which the stairs appear straight, making navigation easier.
Infrared mirror

Mirrors may be used for reflecting any wavelength of electromagnetic radiation. This one reflects infrared light using a thin coating invisible to the eye.

It is designed for an imaging system that takes wide-angle infrared images of humans, revealing heat loss and even body temperature at a distance.
Cylinder mirror

Mirrored cylinders like this one are used in a painting technique called anamorphosis, which creates images that are only visible from a certain viewpoint, or through a distorting mirror.

by:newscientist

Most Detailed Lunar Map Suggests Little Water Inside Moon

2009-02-24T08:34:00.001+08:00

The map is also revealing secrets about the Moon's interior -- and hinting about Mars's interior as well.

C.K. Shum, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University, is part of the international research team that published the map in the February 13 issue of the journal Science.

"The surface can tell us a lot about what's happening inside the Moon, but until now mapping has been very limited," Shum said. "For instance, with this new high-resolution map, we can confirm that there is very little water on the Moon today, even deep in the interior. And we can use that information to think about water on other planets, including Mars."

Using the laser altimeter (LALT) instrument on board the Japanese Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE) satellite, the researchers mapped the Moon at an unprecedented 15-kilometer (9-mile) resolution.

The principal investigator of the LALT instrument is Hiroshi Araki of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and he is the lead author of the study. Shum is a member of the LALT science team.

The map is the first to cover the Moon from pole to pole, with detailed measures of surface topography, on the dark side of the moon as well as the near side. The highest point -- on the rim of the Dririchlet-Jackson basin near the equator -- rises 11 kilometers (more than 6.5 miles) high, while the lowest point -- the bottom of Antoniadi crater near the south pole -- rests 9 kilometers (more than 5.5 miles) deep.

In part, the new map will serve as a guide for future lunar rovers, which will scour the surface for geological resources.

But Araki and his colleagues did something more with the map: they measured the roughness of the lunar surface, and used that information to calculate the stiffness of the crust.

If water flowed beneath the lunar surface, the crust would be somewhat flexible, but it wasn't. The surface was too rigid to allow for any liquid water, even deep within the Moon.

Earth's surface is more flexible, by contrast, with the surface rising or falling as water flows above or below ground. Even our planet's plate tectonics is due in part to water lubricating the crust.

And Mars? On a scale of surface roughness, it falls somewhere between the Earth and the Moon, which indicates that there may have once been liquid water, but that the surface is now very dry.

No surprise there.

But Mars' roughness coupled with the complete absence of plate tectonics suggests that if there is water in the red planet's interior, it is not located near the surface, where it could lubricate the crust, Shum explained.

The LALT map is the most detailed lunar map ever created. The last three Apollo missions mapped part of the surface in the early 1970s, and the 1994 Clementine mission in offered a resolution between 20-60 kilometers in certain locations, but not the entire surface.

The SELENE mission offers 15-kilometer resolution consistently over the entire surface, because it features two smaller sub-satellites which closely track the main satellite.

"This design significantly improved our ability to model gravity fields on the moon, and let us compute the main satellite's orbit more accurately than was possible before, especially over the far side the Moon. That led to more accurate measurement of the lunar topography using LALT," Shum said.

The map revealed several small craters at the north and south poles that hadn't been seen before. For example, a 15-kilometer-wide crater can be seen inside the much larger de Gerlache crater at the south pole.

Araki and Shum's coauthors on the paper hail from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the Geographical Survey Institute of Japan, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the German Aerospace Center. At Ohio State, research scientist Yuchan Yi and doctoral student Hoksum Fok worked on lunar data processing.

by:science daily

Octuplet mom patterning self on Angelina Jolie

2009-02-23T08:57:00.002+08:00

Two pouty brunettes, one an Oscar-winning philanthropist and the other a single mother of 14, have captured America’s attention. Now, they share a magazine cover.

Life & Style has heard your worried cries that Nadya Suleman, the Whittier, Calif., woman who recently gave birth to octuplets, is morphing into Angelina Jolie, and has researched the resemblance.

“The similarities between Nadya and Angelina are uncanny,” plastic surgeon Dr. Anthony Youn told Life & Style. “Their brows are almost identical, and they both have nice smooth foreheads.”

Youn, who obviously has not treated Suleman, said the megamom appears to have undergone surgical procedures, including lip augmentation and rhinoplasty, which make her resemble Jolie.

Video
Octuplet mom defends herself
Feb. 11: Nadya Suleman, the mother of octuplets and six other children, responds to some of the critical reactions to her unfolding story. NBC’s Ann Curry reports.

Today show
The similarities are more than skin deep. Both Suleman and Jolie are 33. Both are raising large broods of children (Angie’s is only up to six, but she says it’s still growing.)

But without an eight-figure income or Oscar-nominated partner, can Suleman provide Jolie’s hands-on brand of mothering to her new litter?

A neighbor in Whittier told Life & Style, “I just hope her 14 children get as much care and affection as Angelina gives to her family.”

On an interview Tuesday night on "Dateline NBC," Suleman had this to say: "I have never thought of Angelina Jolie except the last time I saw one of her movies. I think that was years ago. It is so far away from the place I'm in right now to think of think of any celebrity."

She also denied having her lips cosmetically changed.

OK! sales decline despite dearth of competition
Much of the celeb weekly world braced for a tough sales weekend, thanks to a standoff between publishers and distributors that resulted in many Wal-Mart stores not carrying copies People, In Touch, Life & Style, and other titles.

The flip side of the situation: there was little competition for Us Weekly and the troubled OK!, which were the only big-name celeb weekly options in many stores, and hoped for big numbers as a result. Us Weekly fared quite well, selling “well above average” according to a source. (The source says an average week would see sales in the high 900,000s.)

OK! magazine underperformed, however, with below-average sales according to several sources. OK!’s rep Brian Strong is no longer commenting on newsstand numbers.

But the message to advertisers and consumers was clear, few chose to buy OK!, and its confusing Angelina Jolie cover “New Baby Diet” cover, could be to blame. “Was OK! telling me that Angie’s twins were on a diet? It makes no sense,” said one magazine industry insider.

Drug use at ‘America’s Next Top Model’?
Cigarettes have been banned from the “America’s Next Top Model” house, but what about roofies? One former contestant may have drugged a fellow model with the date-rape drug as a teenager.

“My roommate actually roofied me, because I wouldn’t do the things she wanted me to,” Sierra Reed, a “Survivor Tocantins” cast member, told RealityBlurred.com about a model she lived with years ago in Taiwan, who went on to appear on “Top Model.”

Reed did not positively identify her former roommate but said she “ruined my life. I hate her. She stole my clothes. We got into a brawl. She told my boyfriend there that I said he raped me.”

Tyra would be so disappointed. He just might be into you, Jen
Jennifer Aniston is back with fair-weather boyfriend John Mayer, just in time to be serenaded for her 40th birthday Feb. 11.

“He did write a special song just for her for her birthday,” a source told People magazine.

Aniston hosted her own star-studded celebration Feb. 7 at her new Beverly Hills estate, with Courteney Cox, Oprah Winfrey and Nicole Kidman in attendance. Mayer brought her a gift, but “there wasn’t much interaction with Jen,” a source told Us Weekly.

Sources told E! another story — that the pair danced and huddled close all night. “She looked hot, and she and John looked really happy,” a source said.

by:msnbc

X-rays Used To Reveal Secrets Of Famous 'Dinobird' Fossil

2009-02-23T08:54:00.001+08:00

About 150 million years ago, an evolutionarily hybrid creature, a dinosaur on its way to becoming a bird, died in what is now Germany, and become fossilized in limestone.About 150 years ago, the fossil of this "dinobird" was discovered and celebrated as proof of Charles Darwin's new theory of evolution.

Now fast word to a few weeks ago: The famous fossil, the Thermopolis specimen of Archaeopteryx lithographica, made its way by truck from the Wyoming Dinosaur Center to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource in California, where it was meticulously scanned by one of the world's most powerful X-ray machines, a building-sized device created for physics research.

By looking for traces of specific elements left in the slab of limestone as the bird decomposed, the researchers hope to uncover heretofore-unseen details of the soft tissue that once surrounded the well-preserved bones.

The X-rays, generated by SSRL's high-speed electrons as they race around a 260-foot-diameter ring, cause the elements to glow, revealing the ghost of soft tissue or feathers.

"If you want to find a single fossil which is a missing link in the evolution of dinosaurs into birds, this is it," said University of Manchester paleontologist Phil Manning, a member of the research team. "It's a bird with sharp teeth, claws and a long bony tail. If you were to freeze-frame evolution, you would end up with Archaeopteryx."

"What you normally can't see are the chemical elements from the original organism that might still be present in the fossil," said SSRL scientist Uwe Bergmann. "Using X-ray fluorescence imaging, we can bring these elements to light, getting a better look at the fossil and learning more about the original animal."

"These X-rays work a thousand time better than what you could do with a commercial X-ray machine. Only a synchrotron can do this," Bergmann said. SSRL is part of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which is operated by Stanford University for the Department of Energy.

In addition to offering a new view of a long-extinct animal, this work may also reveal more about fossilization itself. By understanding how fossilization occurs and what exactly is preserved in the process, researchers will be able to deduce much more about ancient organisms and evolution.

The Archaeopteryx fossil holds a unique place in history. It was brought to London soon after Darwin published his stunning On the Origin of Species in 1859. With perfect timing, the old bones played a major roll in the controversy Darwin had stirred up.

"This fossil was the savior of Darwin," Manning said. "As soon as it arrived in London, all of Darwin's supporters realized that this was an intermediate animal, an evolutionary freak that they needed to study. It was half way between dinosaur and bird. This is the single most important fossil in paleontology for that simple reason.

" It was used to beat the living daylights out of the nonsense which had been put forward as to the reason for why animals were present on this planet. Here, Darwin's theory of descendant with modification was hammered home with this one example of transitionary form, of an animal between dinosaur and bird."

The fossil research is one example of how the SSRL is shining new light on fields as diverse as paleontology, medicine, and the history of mathematics. The SSRL's hair-thin X-ray beam has been used, for example, to make visible the hidden writing in a medieval copy of a mathematical treatise from the Greek mathematician Archimedes. Tuned to specific energies, the X-rays produced images of phosphorus and calcium from the ink used on the papyrus document, which had been covered with paint.

Earlier this year, at the request of Stanford library officials and an academic researcher, the laser-like X-ray beam was used to scan a score by the Italian composer Luigi Cherubini (1760 – 1842). Portions of the work had been covered over with carbon-black ink, but after the scan, "The researcher was able to look right through the ink and read the score," said Mary Miller, a Stanford preservation librarian. "I think he was thrilled."

"This is the very infancy of this new scientific method," said paleontologist Peter Larson of the Black Hills Institute in South Dakota. "We don't even know enough about this to know the right questions to ask yet. All of a sudden, we can look at fossils in a very different and new way."

by:science daily

Life Forms May Have Evolved In Ancient Hot Springs On Mars

2009-02-23T08:46:00.003+08:00

Data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) suggest the discovery of ancient springs in the Vernal Crater, sites where life forms may have evolved on Mars, according to a new report.Hot springs have great astrobiological significance, as the closest relatives of many of the most ancient organisms on Earth can thrive in and around hydrothermal springs. If life forms have ever been present on Mars, hot spring deposits would be ideal locations to search for physical or chemical evidence of these organisms and could be target areas for future exploratory missions.

Carlton C. Allen and Dorothy Z. Oehler, from the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate at the NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, propose that new image data from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on MRO depict structures in Vernal Crater that appear to have arisen as part of a major area of ancient spring activity. The data suggest that the southern part of Vernal Crater has experienced episodes of water flow from underground to the surface and may be a site where martian life could have developed.

"Hot spring deposits are key target areas for future Mars missions," says Sherry L. Cady, PhD, Editor of Astrobiology and Associate Professor in the Department of Geology at Portland State University.

"Such deposits on Earth preserve evidence of the fossilized remains of the microbial communities that inhabited the hot springs over a wide range of spatial scales. The potential to find key evidence indicative of life––biofabrics, microbial remains, chemical fossils in minerals––is high when sedimentary deposits form from hydrothermal fluids. Hot spring fluids are typically laden with dissolved mineral ions that, when they precipitate out and create the hydrothermal deposit, enhance fossilization of all types of biosignatures."

by:science daily

Catherine Zeta-Jones: Michael and I collect houses

2009-02-22T09:00:00.001+08:00

Catherine Zeta-Jones and husband Michael Douglas are always house-hunting - because they want to find the perfect view.

The couple have homes in Bermuda, Majorca, Manhattan, Canada and Swansea.

'Some people collect art or lots of money,' says Catherine. 'We collect houses because if we have to look at something, we prefer the view.

'When I want solace, I look out at my piece of art - which is nature. That's where I find peace.'

But having so many properties can be problematic for Catherine, 39.

'The worst thing about having all these houses is that when I have an outfit and I think it's going to look great with a certain pair of shoes, I remember they're in...some place I'm not,' she tells The Sunday Mirror Magazine.

'So that’s why I have to buy duplicates.'

by:NOW

Firefox 3.1 delivery slips; developers question TraceMonkey progress

2009-02-22T08:52:00.002+08:00

Some Mozilla Corp. developers have recommended that the company consider yanking the new JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, from Firefox 3.1 to get the browser back on track and out the door.

Their comments came as Mozilla's head of engineering acknowledged that the browser's final delivery date will slip.

In a message posted to a company message forum, Firefox developer David Baron wondered how long Firefox 3.1 should be held up by TraceMonkey problems. "Without TraceMonkey, we probably could have shipped 3.1 final by now, or, if not now, within the next month," Baron said. "I think there should be a limit to the amount we're willing to slip 3.1 to accommodate TraceMonkey, and I think we should decide what that limit is."

Graydon Hoare, a Mozilla developer who works on TraceMonkey, agreed. "I have to concur here," he said in a message on the same forum thread. "TraceMonkey is really cool tech, and a remarkably quick initial development, but it's not the whole enchilada of the browser." Hoare, however, said it made more sense to disable TraceMonkey by default -- an approach used through Beta 1 -- rather than pull it from the product.

Mozilla has made much of TraceMonkey, and the performance boost it gives Firefox, since it introduced the new JavaScript engine last summer. But TraceMonkey bugs, and the slow pace in patching them, were responsible for delays last month, and for a three-week stretch this month when Mozilla put off scheduling the next preview, Beta 3.

The biggest bug now delaying Beta 3's release is a TraceMonkey issue.

But Mozilla will probably not pull the engine, said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, in an interview Saturday. "We're always looking at all of our choices, but I don't think it's likely," he said. "TraceMonkey is a big part of Firefox 3.1, and a big part of what we want to have for users."

Saying that Firefox 3.1 in its current form is "quite a stable product," Shaver said patience is a development virtue. "We're taking the time to get this worked out," he said. "No one will remember when Firefox 3.1 shipped other than the guy who writes the Wikipedia entry. But people will remember how Firefox 3.1 runs."

Comments by developers such as Baron and Hoare are in no way a "revolt" by programmers, said Shaver, who added that such discussions are normal at Mozilla, and during software development in general. "There's always talk about what we should trade off," he said.

Mozilla conceived Firefox 3.1 as a "fast-track" update to June 2008's Firefox 3.0, but the new browser's progress has been much slower than originally planned. At one point, Mozilla was shooting for a final release as early as the last months of 2008, and hinted that it would use just a single beta to do so.

But Firefox 3.1 has been pushed back several times to allow Mozilla to add more features -- TraceMonkey and a private browsing mode among them -- and for additional testing. In November, for example, Mozilla slipped in a third beta to get a better handle on bugs.

"We wanted to be able to develop faster, and see how that manifested on the product side," said Shaver about Firefox 3.1's pace. "Even if we get it out in Q2, we'd be looking at about a year after Firefox 3.0, and that's still faster than we've usually done."

Shaver said he has no regrets about Firefox 3.1's progress. "I'm very happy with how 3.1 is shaping up."

But it's unlikely that Firefox 3.1 will ship this quarter -- for months the broad target Mozilla was touting. "To make it in Q1, we'd have to rush it more than we want to," Shaver said. The schedule being considered now "would put it out of Q1," he added.

There's a possibility that Mozilla will, in fact, slate a fourth beta before it moves on to a "release candidate" build. "We do betas until we're confident we're done with them," Shaver said.

Although Mozilla faces renewed pressure from Microsoft Corp., which may wrap up Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) as quickly as next month, Shaver rejects the idea that Firefox is in a race. "No, I don't think it is important," he said when asked whether Mozilla needs to get Firefox 3.1 out the door before IE8. "We're eager to get a high-quality Firefox 3.1," he said. "This is much more about having the product done right than getting it out fast."

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, still the newest public release of the browser, debuted in early December 2008. It can be downloaded from Mozilla's site in versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

by:computerworld

Obamas take break for Sasha's basketball game

2009-02-22T08:33:00.001+08:00

He's got a financial summit Monday and a big speech to Congress on Tuesday, so what better way for President Barack Obama to take a break than by watching daughter Sasha play basketball?

The president and first lady Michelle Obama took a motorcade from the White House to an elementary school in Kensington, Md., to watch their 7-year-old daughter play.

It was about a 20-mile drive from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to the school. The Obamas stayed for more than an hour at Kensington Parkwood Elementary School, located in a Maryland neighborhood.

The president, wearing khakis, and the first lady went for a low-key arrival. Soon after the family arrived at the school, only a small crowd of parents stood with children, some bouncing basketballs on the school's driveway. But people soon caught on — by the time the Obamas' were leaving, dozens were lined up along the driveway to see them depart.

The Kensington school isn't far from Sasha's school, the Sidwell Friends School in nearby Bethesda, where she's in the second grade. Older daughter Malia is a fifth-grader at Sidwell's middle school in the District of Columbia.

In a television interview earlier this month, Obama said Sasha decided she wanted to join a basketball team, sharing the love of the sport with her father. The president regularly plays the sport in his free time.

by:msnbc