(Reuters) – A meteorite streaked across the sky and exploded over central Russia on Friday, raining fireballs over a vast area and causing a shock wave that smashed windows, damaged buildings and injured 1,200 people.

People heading to work in Chelyabinsk heard what sounded like an explosion, saw a bright light and then felt the shock wave, according to a Reuters correspondent in the industrial city 1,500 km (950 miles) east of Moscow.

The fireball, travelling at a speed of 30 km (19 miles) per second according to Russian space agency Roscosmos, had blazed across the horizon, leaving a long white trail that could be seen as far as 200 km (125 miles) away.

Car alarms went off, thousands of windows shattered and mobile phone networks were disrupted. The Interior Ministry said the meteorite explosion, a very rare spectacle, also unleashed a sonic boom.

“I was driving to work, it was quite dark, but it suddenly became as bright as if it were day,” said Viktor Prokofiev, 36, a resident of Yekaterinburg in the Urals Mountains.

“I felt like I was blinded by headlights.”

The meteorite, which weighed about 10 metric tons and may have been made of iron, entered Earth’s atmosphere and broke apart 30-50 km (19-31 miles) above ground, according to Russia’s Academy of Sciences.

The energy released when it entered the Earth’s atmosphere was equivalent to a few kilotonnes, the academy said, the power of a small atomic weapon exploding.

No deaths were reported but the Emergencies Ministry said 20,000 rescue and clean-up workers were sent to the region after President Vladimir Putin told Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov to ease the disruption and help the victims.

The Interior Ministry said about 1,200 people had been injured, at least 200 of them children, and most from shards of glass.

WINDOWS BLOWN OUT

The early-morning blast and ensuing shock wave blew out windows on Chelyabinsk’s central Lenin Street, buckled some shop fronts, rattled apartment buildings in the city center and blew out windows.

“I was standing at a bus stop, seeing off my girlfriend,” said Andrei, a local resident who did not give his second name. “Then there was a flash and I saw a trail of smoke across the sky and felt a shock wave that smashed windows.”

A wall and roof were badly damaged at the Chelyabinsk Zinc Plant but a spokeswoman said no environmental threat resulted.

One piece of meteorite broke through the ice the Cherbakul Lake near Chelyabinsk, leaving a hole several meters (yards) wide.

The region has long been a hub for the Russian military and defense industry, and it is often the site where artillery shells are decommissioned.

A local Emergencies Ministry official said meteorite storms were extremely rare and Friday’s incident may have been connected with an asteroid the size of an Olympic swimming pool that was due to pass Earth…..Read More

Austrian pilot and sky diver Felix Baumgartner set a world record Sunday for the highest parachute jump, safely landing after leaping from a capsule carried by a helium balloon to an altitude of 128,100 feet, some 24 miles up.

He also broke the sound barrier during his free fall, as he had hoped, reaching a velocity of 833.9 miles an hour—about Mach 1.24—mission officials said. He apparently failed to break the record for the longest free fall.

Riding a red and white parasail, Mr. Baumgartner, 43 years old, touched down on a patch of scrubland near Roswell, N.M. He landed on his feet, then dropped to his knees and pumped his fists in triumph, after breaking the jump record that had stood for 52 years.

The previous high-jump and free-fall records had been set by Joe Kittinger, who jumped safely from a balloon from an altitude of 19.5 miles in 1960.

Mr. Baumgartner’s ascent Sunday on the 55-story-tall helium balloon took more than two hours and set a record for the highest manned balloon ascent, the mission organizers said Sunday. The previous highest altitude for a manned balloon flight was 113,740 feet, set by two U.S. Navy aerialists in 1961.

The jump, sponsored by the Austrian beverage company Red Bull, had been postponed twice in the past week due to high winds. On Sunday, a minor heating problem with the protective face mask on Mr. Baumgartner’s pressure suit had mission controllers briefly worried they might have to abort a third time……Learn More

H.A.A.R.P. – The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is an ionospheric research program jointly funded by the US Air Force, the US Navy, the University of Alaska and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).Its purpose is to analyze the ionosphere and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance purposes. The HAARP program operates a major Arctic facility, known as the HAARP Research Station, on an Air Force owned site near Gakona, Alaska.

The most prominent instrument at the HAARP Station is the Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), a high power radio frequency transmitter facility operating in the high frequency (HF) band. The IRI is used to temporarily excite a limited area of the ionosphere. Other instruments, such as a VHF and a UHF radar, a fluxgate magnetometer, a digisonde and an induction magnetometer, are used to study the physical processes that occur in the excited region. Work on the HAARP Station began in 1993. The current working IRI was completed in 2007 and its prime contractor was BAE Systems Advanced Technologies. As of 2008, HAARP had incurred around $250 million in tax-funded construction and operating costs.

Born an ethnic Serb, Tesla was a subject of the Austrian Empire by birth and later became an American citizen. He pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. Tesla demonstrated wireless energy transfer to power electronic devices as early as 1893, and aspired to intercontinental wireless transmission of industrial power in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project…….Read More

Changes in the speed that ice travels in more than 200 outlet glaciers indicates that Greenland’s contribution to rising sea level in the 21st century might be significantly less than the upper limits some scientists thought possible, a new study shows. “So far, on average we’re seeing about a 30 percent speedup in 10 years,” said Twila Moon, a University of Washington doctoral student in Earth and space sciences and lead author of a paper documenting the observations published May 4 in Science.

The faster the glaciers move, the more ice and meltwater they release into the ocean. In a previous study, scientists trying to understand the contribution of melting ice to rising sea level in a warming world considered a scenario in which the Greenland glaciers would double their velocity between 2000 and 2010 and then stabilize at the higher speed, and another scenario in which the speeds would increase tenfold and then stabilize.

At the lower rate, Greenland ice would contribute about four inches to rising sea level by 2100 and at the higher rate the contribution would be nearly 19 inches by the end of this century. But the researchers who conducted that study had little precise data available for how major ice regions, primarily in Greenland and Antarctica, were behaving in the face of climate change.

In the new study, the scientists created a decade-long record of changes in Greenland outlet glaciers by producing velocity maps using data from the Canadian Space Agency’s Radarsat-1 satellite, Germany’s TerraSar-X satellite and Japan’s Advanced Land Observation Satellite. They started with the winter of 2000-01 and then repeated the process for each winter from 2005-06 through 2010-11, and found that the outlet glaciers had not increased in velocity as much as had been speculated.

“In some sense, this raises as many questions as it answers. It shows there’s a lot of variability,” said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist in the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory who is a coauthor of the Science paper and is Moon’s doctoral adviser.

Other coauthors are Benjamin Smith of the UW Applied Physics Laboratory and Ian Howat, an assistant professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University. The research was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

The scientists saw no clear indication in the new research that the glaciers will stop gaining speed during the rest of the century, and so by 2100 they could reach or exceed the scenario in which they contribute four inches to sea level rise……Read More

A heavily subsidized solar company received a U.S. taxpayer loan guarantee to sell solar panels to itself.

First Solar is the company. The subsidy came from the Export-Import Bank, which President Obama and Harry Reid are currently fighting to extend and expand. The underlying issue is how Obama’s insistence on green-energy subsidies and export subsidies manifests itself as rank corporate welfare.

Here’s the road of subsidies these solar panels followed from Perrysburg, Ohio, to St. Clair, Ontario.

First Solar is an Arizona-based manufacturer of solar panels. In 2010, the Obama administration awarded the company $16.3 million to expand its factory in Ohio — a subsidy Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland touted in his failed re-election bid that year.

Five weeks before the 2010 election, Strickland announced more than a million dollars in job training grants to First Solar. The Ohio Department of Development also lent First Solar $5 million, and the state’s Air Quality Development Authority gave the company an additional $10 million loan.

After First Solar pocketed this $17.3 million in government grants and $15 million in government loans, Ex-Im entered the scene.

In September 2011, Ex-Im approved $455.7 million in loan guarantees to subsidize the sale of solar panels to two solar farms in Canada. That means if the solar farm ever defaults, the taxpayers pick up the tab, ensuring First Solar gets paid.

But the buyer, in this case, was First Solar.

A small corporation called St. Clair Solar owned the solar farm and was the Canadian company buying First Solar’s panels. But St. Clair Solar was a wholly owned subsidiary of First Solar. So, basically, First Solar was shipping its own solar panels from Ohio to a solar farm it owned in Canada, and the U.S. taxpayers were subsidizing this “export.”

First Solar spokesman Alan Bernheimer defended this maneuver, saying this really was an export, pointing out that First Solar paid sales taxes on the transaction.

But this subsidy undermines the arguments for Ex-Im’s existence. Ex-Im, whose authorization expires May 31, is supposed to be a job creator, helping U.S. manufacturers beat foreign manufacturers by having U.S. taxpayers backstop the financing.

“It is critical that we encourage more American companies to compete in the global marketplace,” Ex-Im Chairman Fred Hochberg said about the First Solar deal, saying the subsidy “will boost Ohio’s economy, create hundreds of local jobs and move us closer to President Obama’s goal of doubling U.S. exports by the end of 2014.”

The implication here is that First Solar was “competing” with foreign solar panel makers in order to sell solar panels — to First Solar……Learn More

Ecotourism activities that use food to attract and concentrate wildlife for viewing have become a controversial topic in ecological studies. This debate is best exemplified by the shark dive tourism industry, a highly lucrative and booming global market. Use of chum or food to attract big sharks to areas where divers can view the dwindling populations of these animals has generated significant criticism because of the potential for ecological and behavioral impacts to the species. However, the debate has been largely rhetorical due to a lack of sufficient data to make any conclusions either way. Five University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science researchers, Drs. Neil Hammerschlag, Jerald S. Ault and Jiangang Luo, and graduate students Austin Gallagher and Julia Wester, combined efforts to tackle this issue. In a paper published in the British Ecological Society’s Functional Ecology titled, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds: Assessing ecological impacts of provisioning ecotourism on an apex marine predator,” the team conducted the first satellite tagging study to examine the long-term and long range movement patterns of tiger sharks (the largest apex predator in tropical waters) in response to dive tourism.

“We studied two separate populations of tiger sharks: one that originated in Florida and the other in the Bahamas,” says Hammerschlag. At the Bahamas site, nicknamed Tiger Beach, chum is widely used to attract sharks for dive tourism purposes. In contrast, shark feeding for ecotourism in Florida waters is illegal……Read More

Magnetic fields are everywhere, but few organisms can sense them. Those that do, such as birds and butterflies, use magnetic sensitivity as a kind of natural global positioning system to guide them along migratory routes. How these few magnetically aware organisms gain their magnetism remains one of biology’s unsolved mysteries.

Researchers Pamela Silver, Ph.D., and Keiji Nishida, Ph.D., were able to imbue yeast with similar properties. Silver, the principal investigator, is a founding core faculty member at the Wyss Institute and a professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Nishida is a research fellow in Systems Biology at HMS. “Magnetism in nature is a unique and mysterious biological function that very few living systems exploit,” said Silver. “So while magnetic yeast may not sound like a serious scientific breakthrough, it’s actually a highly significant first step toward harnessing this natural phenomenon and applying it to all sorts of important practical purposes.”…...Read More

VANCOUVER — An implanted microchip that releases medication on command from wireless signals has been demonstrated in people for the first time using a drug for osteoporosis.

This tiny device, implanted under the skin, could be useful in treating many diseases that require taking medication regularly, scientists reported February 16 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“This opens up profound possibilities for improving the treatment of patients and the potential of telemedicine,” said Robert Farra, president of MicroCHIPS Inc., the company that funded and conducted part of the study. A paper describing the results was also published online February 16 in Science Translational Medicine by collaborators from MicroCHIPS, MIT, Harvard and Case Western University.

The idea behind a microchip that could release chemicals in the body at precise times was first developed by MIT scientists over a decade ago. But researchers needed to make sure that medications were well stored in the device. Also, the immune system tends to create a barrier of collagen around implanted devices, which could make it difficult for the drug to make it into the bloodstream…….Read More

“I think this is a terrific advance for the field,” said Dr. Ronald G. Crystal, a gene therapist at Weill Cornell Medical College. “After all the hype in the early 1990s, I think the field is really coming back now.”

Gene therapy has had minor successes in very rare diseases but suffered a major setback in 1999 with the death of a patient in a clinical trial at the University of Pennsylvania. Another gene therapy trial treated an immune deficiency but caused cancer in some patients.

The general concept of gene therapy — replacing the defective gene in any genetic disease with the intact version — has long been alluring. But carrying it out in practice, usually by loading the replacement gene onto a virus that introduces it into human cells, has been a struggle.

The immune system is all too effective at killing the viruses before the genes can take effect……Read More

Carbon dioxide may be public enemy number one in the fight against global warming. But taking aim at methane and soot has a better chance of keeping the planet cooler in the short run, a new study finds.

Cutting the amounts of these two pollutants that are poured into the sky would diminish warming by half a degree Celsius by 2050, researchers report in the Jan. 13 Science. That could buy a little time for the world — slowing sea level rise, glacial melting and other problems caused by rising temperatures. Targeting these agents of climate change would also improve air quality, potentially preventing up to 4.7 million premature deaths every year, the researchers calculate.

“These are really the low-hanging fruit both for mitigating climate change and improving air quality,” says study leader Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.

Shindell and his colleagues put 400 known pollution controls to test, selecting 14 interventions that had the greatest impact on warming in a computer simulation. These measures work quickly because methane and soot don’t hang around in the atmosphere for very long — about 12 years for methane and weeks for soot. Cut emissions, and levels of methane and soot drop rapidly. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, can linger high above for centuries.

Seven of the proposed controls focus on methane, a greenhouse gas that’s about 21 times more potent at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Implementing interventions already being used in some parts of the world can prevent methane from reaching the atmosphere by filtering it out of air rising from coal mines, livestock manure, landfills and other sources……Read More

The giant keyhole limpet’s hemolymph carries a protein that is the essential component of a new cancer vaccine. Keyhole limpet hemocyanin (KLH) carries oxygen in limpet blood. It is an unusually large protein—near virus size—and contains many epitopes, which trigger our body to produce antibodies. When doctors inject KLH into the human bloodstream, it provokes a powerful immune response. If markers for a certain cancer are attached to KLH, the immune system can be stimulated to attack them. Unlike some synthetic alternatives, KLH is nontoxic. Researchers use the protein in cancer vaccines to “break tolerance,” says Frank Oakes, the CEO of Stellar Biotechnologies, which grows limpets in a business park for aquaculture next to the Pacific Ocean in Port Hueneme, California. “Your body tolerates the cancer cell because the body believes it is a part of you,” he says.

Breaking tolerance can also be used to treat addiction. Down the coast from Stellar’s lot, in La Jolla, scientists at Scripps Research Institute used KLH to make a vaccine that cuts out the euphoric effects of a heroin high. In their experiment, researchers gave addicted rats a cocktail of heroin-like molecules attached to KLH. Like the cancer vaccine, the protein provoked an immune response to suppress the high. Later, given the option to self-administer heroin, most rats stopped using the drug. Human trials are under way for a similar KLH-based vaccine to treat addiction to nicotine and cocaine.

KLH is too big and complicated to synthesize, so giant keyhole limpets still offer the best, most stable supply of the protein. Before extraction, Stellar employees move the limpets to tanks indoors. Researchers use a syringe to extract the limpet’s blood and then isolate KLH using a centrifuge. It takes about 16 weeks before the mollusk has fully recuperated and is ready for its next extraction. Limpets can also be harvested in the wild, but they die during the extraction process. There aren’t enough limpets in the sea to keep up this method…..Read More

The description of most of these series-type of programs have absolutely nothing to do with Science. Take a look at this link and learn more. Not to mention, the typical “Science” Documentary has become too slow moving for the new audience to focus on. So for this reason Discovery Communications, who runs the Science Channel, has opted out and taken the route of “Reality TV.” It’s a shame to the quality of programing in general but even more disturbing, to the importance of Science. The Science documentary is becoming a thing of the past because of the nature of competition between the TV networks. Instead of encouraging our youth with meaningful education, the powers to be, are only concerned about their pockets. Pounding useless reality shows and reducing the TV audience into complete imbeciles. It seems that controlling and brainwashing is their top priority. I don’t mind a series but they must deal with “Science.” It is a dangerous growing trend and must be stopped. The network providers are not at all interested in any change, so the public (viewers) must complain. Sadly, there are few who have put forward their criticism and everything will continue to deteriorate unless many more decide to be heard. For starters and in this particular case, we should simply ask Discovery Communications to rename this channel to the “The Science Reality Channel” or any other name that would accurately describe the programs aired there……Read More

‘Here is a staggering fact,” marvels John Lechleiter, the CEO and chairman of the drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. “In 1960 the average life expectancy in East Asia was 39. Thirty-nine! In 1990, 30 years later, it was 67. Think about that. Does that explain the Asian economic boom? I think it might go a long way.”

Longer, healthier, more productive lives, and more of them; more workers; an expanding middle class; more opportunities for the formation of capital—this virtuous medical-economic cycle, as Mr. Lechleiter sees it, is helping to generate the equally staggering growth in China and elsewhere in the region. “Wealth follows health, and it ain’t the other way around,” he says earlier this week, as the dawn catches the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses here in his office atop Lilly’s sprawling research campus.

Mr. Lechleiter’s thoughts are in Asia not merely because he just returned from a trans-Pacific trade summit, or because emerging markets make up an increasing share of the pharmaceutical industry’s business. Amid fears of American decline, Mr. Lechleiter wonders, “What is it about this country, what do we need to do today not only to pull ourselves out of the vestiges or the grips of recession, but resume the strong economic growth that we need to provide the jobs that I reckon are our biggest current problem.”

Mr. Lechleiter has a few reforms in mind. The corporate tax code contains “one of if not the highest marginal tax rates in the world” and nicks income earned abroad when it returns to the U.S. “We need to move to a territorial system, period. Yes, companies like Lilly have a lot of cash outside the U.S. The question isn’t repatriation, the question is why that is happening in the first place. Those tens of millions of dollars, probably hundreds of millions of dollars depending on how you care to count, could be used to invest in this country and put people back to work.”

More broadly, Mr. Lechleiter says, prosperity depends “on the free movement of capital and talent, human capital.” More trade, for example, both foreign and domestic: He points out that Indiana is the country’s third largest exporter of medical products, after California and Texas. Stronger intellectual property protection is another, as is more immigration: He thinks every advanced degree in math, science, engineering or technology should come with “a green card stapled to the diploma. . . . The fact is, we go to Harvard University and hire a Chinese scientist and we have to work damn hard to keep that person here. That’s hurting this country.”….Read More

It’s hard to believe that only last week we were getting excited for Russia’s first interplanetary mission in 15 years to launch. By now, we should be happy in the knowledge that the ambitious — and awesome — mission is powering through space, toward the Martian moon Phobos.

The reality is that we are now discussing uncontrolled reentry scenarios.

As if that wasn’t enough bad news, we are looking at an uncontrolled toxic reentry scenario. Phobos-Grunt — correctly written “Fobos-Grunt,” meaning “Phobos-Soil” or “Phobos-Ground” — is fully-laden with unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide; that’s ten tons of fuel and oxidizer. The probe itself weighs-in at only three tons.

ANALYSIS: Time Running Short for Stranded Mars Probe

The majority of the fuel will likely vaporize during reentry, but everyone will be hoping for a splash-down in an ocean (which covers two-thirds of Earth, fortunately), as the wreckage will still be hazardous. There’s also a small quantity of radioactive cobalt-57 in one of the science missions housed in the probe — a fact that will most likely cause a media frenzy.

It is for these reasons that the Russian media is dubbing Phobos-Grunt “Most toxic falling satellite ever.”

(NOTE: At time of writing, there is no official word from the Russian space agency about the Phobos-Grunt situation.)

Though Russian mission controllers are frantically trying to regain control of the craft, it’s not looking good. Today’s efforts are widely regarded as a last-ditch attempt to salvage the mission. Other space agencies such as NASA and ESA have offered to assist, but it’s looking like the probe is quickly becoming unrecoverable.

“Last night there were several attempts to obtain telemetry information from the unit. All of them ended with a zero result. The probability of saving the (probe) is very, very small,” an anonymous industry source told Interfax (translated from Russian).

Since Phobos-Grunt was placed in low-Earth orbit (LEO) on Tuesday, and the probe successfully separated from its booster rocket, its attached cruise stage rocket has yet to light up, providing a critical two burns to blast the probe away from Earth to begin its planned 10-month journey to the Red Planet.

ANALYSIS: Russia’s Mars Mission May Be In Trouble

It is unknown whether there’s a software error or hardware glitch, but attempts to upload new commands to the on board computers have so far failed to change the situation. Phobos-Grunt’s batteries are draining and its orbit is degrading. It looks as if the probe will reenter later this month/early December. NORAD is putting a Nov. 26 reentry date on Phobos-Grunt.

And guess what? This will be the third large piece of space junk to reenter in an uncontrolled manner this year. In September, NASA’s 6-ton UARS atmospheric satellite burned-up over the Pacific. In October, the German 2.4-ton ROSAT X-ray space mission reentered over the Bay of Bengal. Could November be the third consecutive reentry month?…..Learn More

What if every light bulb in the world could also transmit data? At TEDGlobal, Harald Haas demonstrates, for the first time, a device that could do exactly that. By flickering the light from a single LED, a change too quick for the human eye to detect, he can transmit far more data than a cellular tower — and do it in a way that’s more efficient, secure and widespread…..Go to Link :

The ability to see through walls is no longer the stuff of science fiction, thanks to new radar technology developed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. Much as humans and other animals see via waves of visible light that bounce off objects and then strike our eyes’ retinas, radar “sees” by sending out radio waves that bounce off targets and return to the radar’s receivers. But just as light can’t pass through solid objects in quantities large enough for the eye to detect, it’s hard to build radar that can penetrate walls well enough to show what’s happening behind. Now, Lincoln Lab researchers have built a system that can see through walls from some distance away, giving an instantaneous picture of the activity on the other side.

The researchers’ device is an unassuming array of antenna arranged into two rows — eight receiving elements on top, 13 transmitting ones below — and some computing equipment, all mounted onto a movable cart. But it has powerful implications for military operations, especially “urban combat situations,” says Gregory Charvat, technical staff at Lincoln Lab and the leader of the project.

Waves through walls

Walls, by definition, are solid, and that’s certainly true of the four- and eight-inch-thick concrete walls on which the researchers tested their system.

At first, their radar functions as any other: Transmitters emit waves of a certain frequency in the direction of the target. But in this case, each time the waves hit the wall, the concrete blocks more than 99 percent of them from passing through. And that’s only half the battle: Once the waves bounce off any targets, they must pass back through the wall to reach the radar’s receivers — and again, 99 percent don’t make it. By the time it hits the receivers, the signal is reduced to about 0.0025 percent of its original strength…….Learn More

Researchers have shown for the first time that the protein fortilin promotes growth of cancer cells by binding to and rendering inert protein p53, a known tumor suppressor. This finding by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch may lead to treatments for a range of cancers and atherosclerosis, which p53 also helps prevent, and appears in the current print issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. “The p53 protein is a critical defense against cancer because it activates genes that induce apoptosis, or the death of cells. However, p53 can be made powerless by mutations and inhibitors like fortilin,” said Dr. Ken Fujise, lead author of the study and director, Division of Cardiology at UTMB.

Fortilin, an amino acid polypeptide protein, works in direct opposition to p53, protecting cells from apoptosis. Fujise discovered fortilin in 2000 and the protein has become a central focus of his research. This study marks the first time that scientists have been able to show the exact mechanism whereby fortilin exerts its anti-apoptotic activity.

Fujise and his team used cell cultures and animal models to show that fortilin binds to and inhibits p53, preventing it from activating genes, such as BAX and Noxa, that facilitate cell death. Thus, cells that would be killed are allowed to proliferate.

“When normal cells become cancer cells, our bodies’ natural biological response is to activate p53, which eliminates the hopelessly damaged cells,” said Fujise. “This process explains why the majority of people are able to stay cancer-free for most of their lives. Conversely, mutated p53 genes are seen in more than half of all human cancers, making them the most frequently observed genetic abnormality in cancer.”….Read More

When it comes to futuristic space travel, few concepts are more romantic than sailing on sunlight. Soar above Earth, unfurl a jib and tack your way through the solar system all the way to interstellar space.

Solar sails have been a mainstay of dreamers since Johannes Kepler, who speculated four centuries ago that ships would one day be powered by “heavenly air.” But sun sailing is no longer fanciful fodder for visionaries. Recent technological advances have moved solar sailing from science fiction to science fact.

Last year, Japan’s space agency launched the world’s first solar sail into interplanetary space; its metal-coated membrane unfurled and caught the light to begin sunjamming. And with help from tiny “nanosatellites” that allow scientists to pack folded-up sails in spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread, NASA this year sent its first sail skipping through Earth orbit.

Look overhead at the right time of night, and you can spot the gleaming streak of NASA’s NanoSail-D as it tumbles closer to Earth, mission accomplished. Within the next few months it will incinerate in the atmosphere in a bright flash.

In addition to the Japanese and U.S. efforts, the privately funded Planetary Society expects to launch its own sail next year, as does a satellite design team based at the University of Surrey in England.

Solar sail enthusiasts have waited decades to see such flights. And one day, they hope, solar sails will perform tasks other spacecraft cannot: hover above Earth’s poles to monitor climate change, flit near the sun to watch for solar storms, drag space junk out of orbit like a cosmic maid or even journey to a nearby star.

“As far as solar sails go, we are on the cusp of history,” says Dean Alhorn, an engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., who leads the NanoSail-D mission. “We are ready now with the technology to make these happen.”…..Read More

The Geophysical Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic says it has recorded almost 10,000 earthquakes during the last three days in West Bohemia, a region located close to the Czech Republic’s western border with Germany. The earthquake swarm started late on Tuesday and continued through Friday. While many have gone unnoticed by the local population some of the larger tremors, including eight quakes exceeding 3 magnitude have been felt in the towns of Chemnitz, Karlovy Vary, Birch, and Luby. The most recent earthquake measured 3.6 magnitude on the Richter Scale and hit at 0645hrs GMT on Friday at a shallow depth of three miles. The quake epicentre was located 81 miles (129 km) NE of Nürnberg 82 miles (131 km) SW of Dresden, 90 miles (144 km) W of Praha, 128 miles (204 km) NW of Budejovice, 131 miles (210 km) NNW of Schärding, and 227 miles (364 km) NW of Wien. Commenting on the latest earthquake swarm, the Geophysical Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic stated: “The activity started in the evening of 23 August and is almost continuous till now (26 August morning). Almost 10 000 events were recorded in total up to now. Already eight events M>3.0 and 200 M>2.0 occurred. The location of hypocenters directly below the NKC station, so it appears a new patch of the fault plane is being activated.” In recent years, scientists have noted an increase in the movement of magma towards the earth’s surface in the Cheb Basin, western Czech Republic. They say rising magma could be one of the causes of the earthquake swarms, which regularly occur in the Vogtland, North-West Bohemia, the Fichtelgebirge and the Upper Palatinate. The last earthquake swarm to occur before this week’s activity was in 2008…..Learn More

There’s just no getting ahead when you’re a hobbit. Anthropologists are arguing yet again over whether a tiny 18,000-year-old Indonesian skull represents a separate species of little human cousins, or an ordinary Homo sapiens with an abnormally small head.

New data compare the fossil to a large group of modern humans with microcephaly, a genetic condition that makes the head smaller than usual. Measurements of the hobbit skull suggest its proportions fall within the range of microcephalic Homo sapiens, researchers report August 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Previously published papers that seemed to show that it can’t be a microcephalic are open to doubt,” says coauthor Ralph Holloway, an anthropologist at Columbia University in New York.

The hobbit story began in 2003, when archaeologists unearthed the skull and other bones of a female hominid on the island of Flores. Her discoverers argued she represented a member of a human genus that had survived until relatively recently, and dubbed it Homo floresiensis.

But some scientists charged that because the hobbit’s skull is so small, it might have just been a microcephalic Homo sapiens. To test that question, anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee compared the skull’s internal dimensions to those of nine microcephalic humans and 10 normal humans. In a 2007 paper, she concluded the hobbit skull was still best assigned to its own species….Read More

A Purdue University scientist is urging federal officials to decide whether genetically engineered salmon would be allowed for U.S. consumption and arguing that not doing so may set back scientific efforts to increase food production. William Muir, a professor of animal sciences, said that based on data made available by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, AquAdvantage (AA) salmon poses little real risk to the environment or human health. AA salmon were given a gene from Chinook salmon that speeds growth and improves feed efficiency in farm-raised fish. Developed by AquaBounty Technologies, the fish would be spawned in Canada and grown to full size in Panama, both of which are land-based, contained facilities.

“We realize that any new technology can have risks, and those risks need to be assessed in a thorough and convincing manner,” Muir said. “However, once the assessment has been completed and the agency concludes from the weight of evidence that risks of harm, either to the environment or to consumers, is negligible, the next step, which is to allow production and sale of the product, needs to be taken.”

Muir and Alison L. Van Eenennaam, an animal genomics and biotechnology Extension specialist at the University of California Davis, made the call for FDA approval in a peer-reviewed commentary in the early online version of the journal Nature Biotechnology.

The salmon would be the first genetically engineered animal used as a food in the United States, but it has been tied up in FDA regulatory proceedings since 1995. Muir said that becomes a disincentive for those working to increase food supplies for a growing world population.

“This tells us that no entrepreneur is going to invest in these new projects because they can’t get them approved,” Muir said.

Muir has not received any funding or support from AquaBounty Technologies……Learn More

Elk Creek, Neb. (population 112), may not be so tiny much longer. Reports suggest that the southeastern Nebraska hamlet may be sitting on the world’s largest untapped deposit of “rare earth” minerals, which have proved to be indispensable to a slew of high-tech and military applications such as laser pointers, stadium lighting, electric car batteries and sophisticated missile-guidance systems.

Canada-based Quantum Rare Earths Developments Corp. last week received preliminary results from test drilling in the area, showing “significant” proportions of “rare earth” minerals and niobium.

The only people more excited than Quantum? The residents of Elk Creek, where nearly one in seven people live under the poverty line, but whose economy has been booming ever since the company showed up late last year to start laying the groundwork for a possible mining bonanza.

“It’s been a very, very positive experience for our community,” said state Sen. Lavon Heidemann, an Elk Creek farmer. “When Quantum came in here, they put money in the local community. And any time you have money flowing in a small town, that’s a positive.”

The potential mining operation, the first in the U.S. in a decade, could have an international impact as well. U.S. officials and lawmakers in Congress have been eager to break the near monopoly on global production of the 17 rare-earth elements in China, which has shown its willingness to use its power in the market for political ends.

Quantum acquired a circular piece of land – a bit more than 4 miles in diameter – near Elk Creek late last year. The land, which the U.S. Geological Survey projects may have one of the world’s largest deposits of niobium and rare earths, has since been poked, prodded and drilled to determine whether it held any niobium, which has never been mined in the U.S., or rare earths, which the U.S. has not mined in almost 10 years.

The local buzz

Boom times based on natural-resource strikes can disrupt a community and its economy, but it’s hard to find anyone in Elk Creek bad-mouthing the potential rare-earth bonanza.

“The whole community is behind Quantum,” said Greg Krueger, a local contractor. “When the drillers showed up this spring, people just opened their arms up.”……Read More

An international team of researchers has combined data from multiple sources to provide the clearest account yet of how much glacial ice surges into the sea following the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves. The work by researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), the Laboratoire d’Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Toulouse, France, and the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder, Colo. details recent ice losses while promising to sharpen future predictions of further ice loss and sea level rise likely to result from ongoing changes along the Antarctic Peninsula.

“Not only do you get an initial loss of glacial ice when adjacent ice shelves collapse, but you get continued ice losses for many years — even decades — to come,” says Christopher Shuman, a researcher at UMBC’s Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Shuman is lead author of the study published online July 25 in the Journal of Glaciology. “This further demonstrates how important ice shelves are to Antarctic glaciers.”

An ice shelf is a thick floating tongue of ice, fed by a tributary glacier, extending into the sea off a land mass. Previous research showed that the recent collapse of several ice shelves in Antarctica led to acceleration of the glaciers that feed into them. Combining satellite data from NASA and the French space agency CNES, along with measurements collected during aircraft missions similar to ongoing NASA IceBridge flights, Shuman, Etienne Berthier of the University of Toulouse and Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado produced detailed ice loss maps from 2001 to 2009 for the main tributary glaciers of the Larsen A and B ice shelves, which collapsed in 1995 and 2002, respectively.

“The approach we took drew on the strengths of each data source to produce the most complete picture yet of how these glaciers are changing,” Berthier said, noting that the study relied on easy access to remote sensing information provided by NASA and CNES. The team used data from NASA sources including the MODerate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments and the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat).

The analysis reveals rapid elevation decreases of more than 500 feet for some glaciers, and it puts the total ice loss from 2001 to 2006 squarely between the widely varying and less certain estimates produced using an approach that relies on assumptions about a glacier’s mass budget.

The authors’ analysis shows ice loss in the study area of at least 11.2 gigatons per year from 2001 to 2006. Their ongoing work shows ice loss from 2006 to 2010 was almost as large, averaging 10.2 gigatons per year…….Read More

Membership in Google+, which was launched only about three weeks ago, is soaring.

Calculations by Comscore indicate the service had 20 million visitors in just 21 days.

Meanwhile, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is reported to be preparing to add a social gaming feature to the Google+ service in order to attract even more subscribers and pose a stronger challenge to its primary target, Facebook.

However, the addition of social gaming may bring with it more problems about user privacy.

Facebook has been criticized for sharing subscriber information with makers of social gaming apps; could Google, which hasn’t exactly proved to be a bastion of privacy itself, also be plagued by this?

Fly, Google+, Fly

Comscore tracked unique visitors to Google+ from June 29 to July 19, and it found that the service had racked up about 20 million visitors worldwide.

To drive home the point of the service’s rapid growth, the July 19 figure was 82 percent higher than that of the previous week and 561 percent more than that of two weeks previously.

The number of subscribers in the United States exceeded 5 million by July 19 — up 81 percent from the previous week and 723 percent from two weeks before.

Most importantly, Comscore was tracking visitors, which are different from users in that visitors may not sign up for the service. Also, Comscore was measuring behavior from people who visited the Google+ website pages, which means those who came in through the Google+ bar at the top of most Google pages weren’t counted.

With a built-in visitor base of more than 1 billion worldwide, Google has the potential to convert a high number of users to Google+, Comscore suggested.

Gaming at Google

Several moves by Google indicate it might be moving into the social gaming market.

In April, Google advertised a job for a product manager of games.

Google recruited gaming industry veteran Mark DeLoura, whose history included stints at Ubisoft and Nintendo, as developer advocate back in 2010. However, DeLoura left after about four months…….Learn More

ScienceDaily (July 22, 2011) — Water really is everywhere. Two teams of astronomers, each led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. Looking from a distance of 30 billion trillion miles away into a quasar — one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos — the researchers have found a mass of water vapor that’s at least 140 trillion times that of all the water in the world’s oceans combined, and 100,000 times more massive than the sun.

Because the quasar is so far away, its light has taken 12 billion years to reach Earth. The observations therefore reveal a time when the universe was just 1.6 billion years old. “The environment around this quasar is unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” says Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and a visiting associate at Caltech. “It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.” Bradford leads one of two international teams of astronomers that have described their quasar findings in separate papers that have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that is steadily consuming a surrounding disk of gas and dust; as it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy. Both groups of astronomers studied a particular quasar called APM 08279+5255, which harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.

Since astronomers expected water vapor to be present even in the early universe, the discovery of water is not itself a surprise, Bradford says. There’s water vapor in the Milky Way, although the total amount is 4,000 times less massive than in the quasar, as most of the Milky Way’s water is frozen in the form of ice…….Learn More

What does society do when one person’s behavior puts the greater community at risk? That’s a no-brainer, right? We make them stop. We pass laws, or impose economic rules, or find other way to discourage individual behaviors that threaten the greater common good. You don’t get to drive drunk. You don’t get to smoke in public places. You don’t even get to leave your house if you catch some particularly infectious disease.

Then what should we do about people who decline vaccination for themselves or their children, and put the greater public at risk by fueling the resurgence of nearly eradicated diseases? Isn’t this the same thing, one person’s perception of risk producing behaviors that put others at risk? Of course it is. Isn’t it time for society to say that in the greater public interest, we need to regulate the risk created by the fear of vaccines? Yes. It is.

The evidence is overwhelming that declining vaccination rates are contributing to outbreaks of disease. Take just one example, measles. The WHO reports outbreaks in many countries where vaccination rates have gone down: As of June – France (12,699 cases in 2011, more than in all of 2010 already, including six deaths), Spain (2,261), Italy (1,500), Germany (1,193, one death), Switzerland (580), Romania, Belgium, Denmark, and Turkey. There have already been 550 measles cases in England and Wales this year compared with 33 all of last year.

The U.S. has seen 156 cases as of mid-June, compared to a total of 56 cases per year from 2001-2008. The CDC has an emergency health advisory out for measles, a disease officially declared eradicated in the United States in 2000.

Small numbers, you say? True, but consider their cost (beyond the suffering of the patients). Measles is ferociously infectious, and potentially deadly to the young or old or people with weakened immune systems, so it requires an intense response from the medical and public health communities. Consider just one small outbreak: When a woman from Switzerland who had not been vaccinated for measles visited Tucson and became symptomatic, she went in to a local hospital for medical attention and three months later at least 14 people, including seven kids, had gotten measles. Seven of the victims caught the disease while visiting health care facilities. Four people had to be hospitalized. The outbreak cost two local hospitals a total of nearly $800,000, and the state and local health departments tens of thousands more, to track down the cases, quarantine and treat the sick, and notify the thousands of people who might have been exposed.

Fueling the spread? None of the victims had been vaccinated, and, remarkably, 25% of the workers in the health care facilities where the patients were treated had no immunity to measles (either they had not been vaccinated or the antibodies from an earlier vaccination could no longer be detected in their blood stream.) One health care worker got the disease, and gave it to two other people.

That’s just one example of the growing threat to public health caused by people worried that vaccines will cause autism and other harms, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In many places, particularly in affluent, liberal, educated communities (Boulder, San Diego), unvaccinated people are catching diseases that vaccines can prevent, like measles, whooping cough, and meningitis. In 2010 as California suffered its worst whooping cough outbreak in more than 60 years (more than 9,000 cases, 10 infant deaths), Marin County, one of the richest and most educated areas in California, had one of the lowest rates of vaccination statewide and the second highest rate of whopping cough. A 2008 study in Michigan found that areas with “exemption clusters” of parents who didn’t vaccinate their kids were three times more likely to have outbreaks of whooping cough than where vaccination rates matched the state average….Learn More

Trees’ mighty appetite

Forests across the globe sop up an estimated 2.4 billion metric tons of carbon per year from the atmosphere, a new calculation shows, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide. But because many existing forest stands get harvested each year and release their stored carbon, the net result is slightly more than 1 billion tons more carbon entering forests than leaving it, an international team of researchers reports online July 14 in Science. Although the amount of carbon capture within the environment was known to be large, exactly how much was stored in the environment and where — such as in trees — has been uncertain. —Janet Raloff

A growing climate paradox

The release of two climate-warming gases will accelerate in response to growing carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide fertilizes plant growth, which ties up the gas in plant tissues and soils. This environmental carbon capture should slow the expected acceleration of global warming. However, measurements by scientists in the United States and Ireland now show that carbon’s fertilizing effect can also boost soils’ release of nitrous oxide and wetlands’ release of methane, both greenhouse gases. Such emissions could erase more than 16 percent of the climate benefits expected from carbon’s capture by plants and soil, the scientists report July 14 in Nature. —Janet Raloff

Plastics compound may slow boys’ development

The higher a pregnant woman’s exposure to phthalates —compounds used in plastics and as solvents — the more likely her son will score somewhat low on standard indices of mental and motor development by 6 months old……Learn More

Polar bears’ “mitochondrial Eve,” the female from whom all of today’s polar bears are descended, was not a polar bear at all.

On July 7 researchers published their findings about the species history of polar bears in Current Biology. One of their discoveries was that the mitochondrial DNA in the cells of every polar bear’s body originated in the cells of a female brown bear that lived in the neighborhood of Britain and Ireland during the era when Neandertals’ numbers began go dwindle.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed on directly from mother to offspring—unmixed with any male input, unlike the DNA found in the cell nucleus—which means researchers can use it to trace the maternal line back through history.

By comparing the sequences in the mitochondrial DNA of 242 bears, ranging from living animals to fossils (living over a period of time spanning 120,000 years), from all across the globe, researchers could discover when and where modern polar bears’ mitochondrial lineage originated. This photograph shows one of the Irish caves where bear fossils were found.

In the past 100,000 years, matings among brown and polar bears have successfully produced hybrid offspring, the analysis revealed. One of these matings occurred 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, and the entire modern population of polar bears is descended from the female half. The brown bears that shared the mitochondrial lineage of this polar bear ancestress have since died out, as have polar bears whose mitochondrial DNA stemmed from a different source.

The interspecies hybridization that begat today’s polar bears was possible because of climate fluctuations. Although brown bears need habitats with a warmer climate than their polar cousins, shifts in temperature could push the two populations into proximity by rendering their natural habitats unlivable. For example, an increase in……Learn More

After launching from Kennedy Space Center’s historic Launch Pad 39A at 11:29 a.m. EDT, space shuttle Atlantis’ crew has begun orbit operations in earnest, preparing to dock to the International Space Station at 11:06 a.m. Sunday morning. Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot Doug Hurley, and Mission Specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim are activating and checking out the shuttle robotic arm this evening in preparation for a standard survey of Atlantis’ Orbital Maneuvering System pods at 6:49 p.m. EDT. Prior to that, at 6:44 p.m., the crew will play back video they recorded from Atlantis’ window 4 of the external tank separation. The crew sleep period begins at 7:59 p.m.

NASA Television also will air two special videos this evening……Learn More

Videos:

“Taken together, these findings strongly suggest that celecoxib can be used as a chemopreventive agent in these high-risk groups,” said Jenny Mao, M.D., a professor of medicine at the University of New Mexico and section chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the New Mexico VA Health System.

Mao cautioned, however, that both the current study, where she was the lead researcher, and the Feb. 2010 study were phase II trials, and that large phase III trials are still needed to confirm the findings.

J. Jack Lee, Ph.D., a professor of biostatistics at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and the statistical editor of Cancer Prevention Research, estimates that there are currently 45 million former smokers and 45 million current smokers in the United States alone……Learn More

This colourful shrimp sports not only good looks, but a natural pair of 3D glasses. It is one of only a few animals that can process circularly polarised light, the special light used to create 3D movies. Now Pennsylvania State University researcher Akhlesh Lakhtakia and his colleagues at National Taipei University of Technology in Taiwan have mimicked the peacock mantis shrimp’s design.

Copying the multilayered structure of the shrimp’s lens, Lakhtakia and his team developed a material that could one day be used to filter a broader spectrum of light than the optical devices inside today’s DVD players….Learn More

The largest fire in the history of the state of Arizona continues to burn and emergency managers and responders are using satellite data from a variety of instruments to plan their firefighting containment strategies and mitigation efforts once the fires are out.

The Landsat 5 satellite captured images of the Wallow North and Horseshoe 2 fires burning in eastern Arizona on June 15, 2011 at 19:54:23 Zulu (3:54 p.m. EDT). Both images are false-colored to allow ease of identification of various objects that will help firefighters and emergency managers. In the images burn scars appear in red and ongoing fire in bright red. Vegetation is colored green, smoke is colored blue and bare ground is tan-colored. The Landsat 5 image is a false color image with a 7, 4, 2 band combination.

The Wallow fire began May 29, 2011 in the Bear Wallow Wilderness area located in eastern Arizona. High winds and low humidity meant that by June 14, 2011 the Wallow Fire became Arizona’s largest wildfire to date with over 487,016 acres burned. On the morning of June 16 the fire is now 29 percent contained, according to Inciweb. Inciweb, the “Incident Information System” website, (www.inciweb.org) is an interagency all-risk incident information management system.

The National Weather Service has posted a Red Flag Warning for June 16 and 17. The warning forecasts strong winds from the southwest with gusts to between 35 and 45 mph…..Learn More

Since 1611, humans have recorded the comings and goings of black spots on the sun. The number of these sunspots wax and wane over approximately an 11-year cycle — more sunspots generally mean more activity and eruptions on the sun and vice versa. The number of sunspots can change from cycle to cycle and 2008 saw the longest and weakest solar minimum since scientists have been monitoring the sun with space-based instruments. Observations have shown, however, that magnetic effects on Earth due to the sun, effects that cause the aurora to appear, did not go down in synch with the cycle of low magnetism on the sun. Now, a paper in Annales Geophysicae that appeared on May 16, 2011 reports that these effects on Earth did in fact reach a minimum — indeed they attained their lowest levels of the century — but some eight months later. The scientists believe that factors in the speed of the solar wind, and the strength and direction of the magnetic fields embedded within it, helped produce this anomalous low.

“Historically, the solar minimum is defined by sunspot number,” says space weather scientist Bruce Tsurutani at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., who is first author on the paper. “Based on that, 2008 was identified as the period of solar minimum. But the geomagnetic effects on Earth reached their minimum quite some time later in 2009. So we decided to look at what caused the geomagnetic minimum.”

Geomagnetic effects basically amount to any magnetic changes on Earth due to the sun, and they’re measured by magnetometer readings on the surface of the Earth. Such effects are usually harmless, the only obvious sign of their presence being the appearance of auroras near the poles. However, in extreme cases, they can cause power grid failures on Earth or induce dangerous currents in long pipelines, so it is valuable to know how the geomagnetic effects vary with the sun……Read more

London –  An entirely new super-toxic bug is causing the frightening food poisoning outbreak that has sickened at least 1,600 people and killed 18, researchers and global health officials said Thursday.

The DNA of the new E. coli strain, believed to have contaminated salad vegetables, was analyzed by Chinese and German scientists. It contains several genes that cause antibiotic resistance and is similar to a strain that causes serious diarrhea and is found in the Central African Republic, according to a statement from the Shenzhen, China-based laboratory, BGI. Those scientists were working together with the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

“This is a unique strain that has never been isolated from patients before,” Hilde Kruse, a food safety expert at the World Health Organization, told The Associated Press. The new strain has “various characteristics that make it more virulent and toxin-producing” than the many E. coli strains people naturally carry in their intestines.

Preliminary genetic sequencing suggests the strain is a never before seen combination of two different E. coli bacteria, with aggressive genes that could explain why the outbreak appears to be so massive and dangerous, the agency said.

Researchers have so far been unable to pinpoint the food source of the illness, which has now spread to at least 10 European countries and fanned uncertainty about eating tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce. The germ has caused 499 to develop a kidney failure complication……Read More

An old design for shuttle’s replacement

NASA has designated a successor to the space shuttle based on a design that was originally created to carry astronauts back to the moon, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced May 24. The space agency said it didn’t know when the proposed 23-ton vehicle, which could carry a four-person crew beyond low-Earth orbit for missions up to 21 days, would be ready to fly. With the space shuttle set for retirement in July, the agency will lack its own means to transport humans into space for at least several years and will reach the International Space Station by purchasing seats on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. —Ron Cowen

New way to find habitable planets

Astronomers have discovered a method for verifying the presence of Earthlike habitable planets that otherwise would be too tiny to confirm. Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and his colleagues used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to examine a candidate planet initially detected by Kepler spacecraft. The Spitzer observations show….Read More

Have you ever heard of Nikola Tesla? Or maybe you have heard of the invention of AC (Alternate Current) generator. I heard of him and have been learning much more of his work with electricity and with his mechanical ingenuity. All those interesting  and so-called weird experiments he conducted. But even more disappointingly, the ones he never was allowed to finish. It is nothing else but tragic, the credit and recognition he has never received and desperately deserves. Information concerning this so-called radical pioneer is not readily available for everyone to absorb. To learn more of him can be very painstaking for the searcher but by just taking some time to understand the importance of his inventions, one would understand more of the physical world around them. Taking a good 2 hours to learn more of his work would only reward the searcher with a completely new perspective on life. Then again, looking deeper into the search results and following through with all the new links presented will. There will be many dead ends but there will be more interesting links with real shocking importance.

It’s because of this, I find it very necessary and even urgent, to gather as much information concerning this forgotten genius, as I can. Nikola Tesla, one of the most important inventors that ever lived. I personally would go as far as placing him above Mr. Einstein himself. But it was Tesla’s radical, original and ultra-advanced ideas that actually contributed to his downfall and it’s so disgraceful to me. How a man with so much to offer to society could be purposely ignored. I guess the world was simply not ready for Tesla, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. If he were alive now and had introduced all these inventions, he would be considered a hero. But all the visions Tesla already had in the very beginning of the 20th century have been introduced to the world now, 90 years too late…..Read More

On Sunday May 22, 2011, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite captured an image of the rainfall rate in the supercell thunderstorm that generated the deadly twister that struck Joplin, Missouri. TRMM is a satellite that is managed by both NASA and the Japanese Space Agency, and monitors rainfall rates in the tropics. It’s often used for hurricane research, but also calculates rain rates in other weather systems. On May 22 at 2042 UTC (3:42 p.m. CDT), about two hours before the deadly tornado touched down in Joplin, Missouri, TRMM captured rainfall rates in a supercell thunderstorm that was approaching Joplin from the west. A supercell, also known as a rotating thunderstorm, is a thunderstorm with a deep, continuously-rotating updraft.

“This supercell contained a deadly tornado as it moved into southwestern Missouri a few hours later and hit Joplin, Missouri,” said Hal Pierce, meteorologist on NASA’s TRMM team who created images using TRMM rainfall imagery. TRMM’s Microwave Imager (TMI) and Precipitation Radar (PR) were used to create images that showed an analysis of rainfall in the vicinity of the storm. TRMM data revealed a large area of heavy rainfall, where rainfall rates were more than 2 inches (50 millimeters) per hour……Read More

Discovery’s Storm Chasers explain why and how there have been so many killer tornadoes this year in an all-new world premiere special: “Tornado Rampage 2011″ on Sunday, May 22, 2011, at 9 PM (ET/PT) on Discovery Channel…Watch Videos

(CNN) — This just in: Doomsday is doomed. And the world is still here.

After months of warnings and fear, the Day of Rapture, as predicted by apocalyptic Christian broadcaster Harold Camping, passed without apparent calamity. Judgment Day was to have started at 6 p.m., but as darkness fell on many parts of the world, it appeared that heaven could wait.

At this writing, there have been no reports of people soaring upward to the skies, but plenty of folks are talking about it.

Jim Brenneman, a cartoonist and CNN iReporter in Marcellus, New York, said he expects to remain on Earth, but you never know.

“Although I assume that I’ve lived a sinful life and will probably be here on Sunday, there is a small chance that maybe I was better than I thought and might get sucked up into the heavens on Saturday with all the other self-righteous wing nuts,” he said. “If that happens, feel free to have my stuff. But probably not! Let the Looting Begin! HAPPY APOCALYPSE EVERYONE!!”

Many had looked Down Under to find relief. If Australia — 12 to 14 hours ahead of Eastern daylight time — survived, then maybe we all had a chance.

“Rapture deadline passes, world still here” screamed a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald…….Read More

Efficiency is a problem with today’s solar panels; they only collect about 20 percent of available light. Now, a University of Missouri engineer has developed a flexible solar sheet that captures more than 90 percent of available light, and he plans to make prototypes available to consumers within the next five years. Patrick Pinhero, an associate professor in the MU Chemical Engineering Department, says energy generated using traditional photovoltaic (PV) methods of solar collection is inefficient and neglects much of the available solar electromagnetic (sunlight) spectrum. The device his team has developed – essentially a thin, moldable sheet of small antennas called nantenna – can harvest the heat from industrial processes and convert it into usable electricity. Their ambition is to extend this concept to a direct solar facing nantenna device capable of collecting solar irradiation in the near infrared and optical regions of the solar spectrum.

Working with his former team at the Idaho National Laboratory and Garrett Moddel, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Colorado, Pinhero and his team have now developed a way to extract electricity from the collected heat and sunlight using special high-speed electrical circuitry. This team also partners with Dennis Slafer of MicroContinuum, Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., to immediately port laboratory bench-scale technologies into manufacturable devices that can be inexpensively mass-produced.

“Our overall goal is to collect and utilize as much solar energy as is theoretically possible and bring it to the commercial market in an inexpensive package that is accessible to everyone,” Pinhero said. “If successful, this product will put us orders of magnitudes ahead of the current solar energy technologies we have available to us today.”…..Read More