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Lagoons of Titan: Oily Liquid Confirmed on Saturn Moon

Earthlings might be scrambling to find liquid hydrocarbons buried in our planet, but Saturn's moon Titan has plenty to spare.

Scientists say that a dark, smooth surface feature spotted on the moon last year is definitely a lake filled primarily with liquid ethane, a simple hydrocarbon.

"This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid," said the paper's lead author, University of Arizona professor Robert Brown.

The new observations affirm that Titan is one of the likeliest places to look for life in our solar system. Some astrobiologists have speculated that life could develop in the moon's hydrocarbon lakes, although it would have to be substantially different from known life on Earth, which requires liquid water. More

Two Large Solar Plants Planned in California

Companies will build two solar power plants in California that together will put out more than 12 times as much electricity as the largest such plant today, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale.

The plants will cover 12.5 square miles of central California with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart store.

The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010.

The utility said that it expected the new plants, which will use photovoltaic technology to turn sunlight directly into electricity, to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants, which use the sun’s heat to boil water. More

3-wheelers on patrol

Minutes after expressing doubts about the balance of the newest police vehicles, Officer William Rich tumbled onto the sidewalk.

Rich was fine. He was more concerned that he had hurt the three-wheeled T3 Motion, which looks like a chariot crossed with a Segway. It was fine, too.

The Columbus Division of Police's bicycle day-patrol unit is testing the vehicles in teams and then evaluating them. Two T3 Motions, which sell for $8,988 each, are on loan to the department for testing. Police have yet to buy them.

Powered by two rechargeable batteries, the T3 Motion is equipped with lights and sirens.

"They're fun to ride," Officer Ron Zaleski said. "I'm going to give them a try." More

Humans and machines will merge in future

A group of experts from around the world will hold a first of its kind conference Thursday on global catastrophic risks.

They will discuss what should be done to prevent these risks from becoming realities that could lead to the end of human life on Earth as we know it.

Speakers at the four-day event at Oxford University in Britain will talk about topics including nuclear terrorism and what to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collision course with our planet.

On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference, experts will focus on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of humans. More

Distant solar system body named 'Makemake'

One of the largest objects in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune, has finally gotten a name: Makemake, after a god in the culture of Easter Island. But the International Astronomical Union, which made the decision, may have a far tougher time christening the next dwarf planet because of controversy over who discovered it.

Makemake, formerly known as 2005 FY9, is the first dwarf planet to receive a name since 2006, when its neighbour 2003 UB313 was named Eris after the Greek goddess of discord. It joins Pluto and Eris as the only named 'plutoids', a term devised by the IAU to describe Pluto-like objects beyond Neptune.

The name Makemake belongs to the god who created humanity in the culture of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. The name was suggested by a team led by Mike Brown of Caltech, which discovered the object around Easter time in 2005. More

Hacking fears over wireless pacemakers

It is now possible to hack implanted devices such as pacemakers to obtain patient information or even make them lethal, a study has warned.

Implanted devices are used to keep the heart beating regularly, to shock a heart that is beating chaotically, to stimulate parts of the brain or to deliver drugs. Millions are in use worldwide.

The implants are increasingly equipped with wireless technology, allowing for remote device checks and freeing patients from repeated doctor visits. But a team of researchers in the US warns this convenience may come with unanticipated risks More

Sex invented in Australia

THE history of sex began in South Australia, around 570 million years ago.

Scientists believe they have discovered the earliest evidence of animal sex, between 30cm- long knobby tubular animals which lived on the then sea floor in the Ediacaran Hills within the Flinders Ranges.

Beating the previous record by 30 million years, the earliest known animals to have sex are now Funisia Dorothea, their exploits revealed this week in the international magazine Science.

Funisia Dorothea covered the seafloor of the region during the Neoproterozoic era, a 100-million-year period ending around 540 million years ago. More

Proposed Lunar Telescope Made From Moon Dust

A NASA scientist has a practical idea for building a telescope on the moon. Rather than flying one there, use the lunar soil to make one on site.

"We believe we have found a way to turn moon dust into a telescope," said Peter Chen, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Chen, an inventor who has been working with carbon-fiber materials to produce high-quality telescope mirrors, began experimenting with tiny tubes of carbon, called nanotubes, glue-like epoxies and crushed rock that resembles lunar dust. More

Use GPS to Find Your Dead In New Forest Graveyards

Australia - Relatives and friends will require a satellite navigation device to find graves of loved ones in NSW's first eco-burial site.

The deceased will be buried in biodegradable coffins between gum trees in a protected koala sanctuary.

Reflecting a worldwide trend towards environmentally friendly burials, the site, on bushland attached to Lismore Memorial Park Cemetery in the Northern Rivers region, is due to open on July 1.

"It's an ideal way of utilising land and helping wildlife and vegetation," said Kris Whitney, Lismore Council co-ordinator of cemeteries. "We will allow headstones made from natural rock. For coffins, we'd rather people used woven wicker, plantation pine or recycled cardboard.

"A family can walk around the bushland and pick a site. The body can be oriented in any direction. We promise there will be no internments within five metres." More

Plants 'thrive' on Moon rock diet

Scientists with the European Space Agency (Esa) say the day when flowers bloom on the Moon has come closer.

An Esa-linked team has shown that marigolds can grow in crushed rock very like the lunar surface, with no need for plant food.

Some see growing plants on the Moon as a step towards human habitation.

But the concept is not an official aim of Esa, and one of the agency's senior officials has dismissed the idea as "science fiction".

The new research was presented at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna, the largest annual European gathering of scientists studying the Earth, its climate and its neighbours in space. More

Humans nearly wiped out 70,000 years ago

Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests.

The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis released Thursday.

The report notes that a separate study by researchers at Stanford University estimated that the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.

"This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history," said Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence.

"Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA.". More

US army develops robotic suits

On the big screen, films like Robocop, Universal Soldier and forthcoming release Iron Man show man-machines with superhuman powers. But in Utah they are turning science fiction into reality.

We are at a research facility on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, ringed by beautiful snow-capped mountains. Once they held the Winter Olympics here; now they are testing endurance in other ways.

The aluminium limbs gleam in the brilliant sunshine, as the strange metal skeleton hangs from a safety harness at the outdoor testing site. It seems to be treading water; actually its programme is telling it to keep the hydraulic fluid in its joints moving.

Rex Jameson, a software engineer here at laboratories run by Sarcos, the robotics firm which designed the XOS exoskeleton, steps up and into the suit. More

Old plant smells record

In the middle of the Palm Springs Desert in Southern California, US, the sun beats down at temperatures of over 45 degrees Celsius.

The 160-kilometres-per-hour (100 miles per hour) winds that howl through the nearby mountain pass are so strong that rocks have been polished smooth by the sand carried in the powerful gusts.

But despite all this, scientists believe a group of bushes that have clung to the earth and survived these inhospitable conditions could be the oldest living plant on the planet.

Carbon dating tests are expected to show that the creosote bushes are even older than a gnarled clump of the same plant, said to be almost 11,700 years of age, in the nearby Mojave Desert. More

Mysterious Meteorites Stymie Scientists

A pair of mysterious meteorites discovered in Antarctica is baffling scientists who are struggling to determine the origin of the space rocks.

The meteorites, dubbed GRA 06128 and GRA 06129, were found in the Graves Nunataks region of Antarctica in 2006.

The rocks were oddly rusty and salty and smelled like rotten eggs, its discoverers said.

Initially, a team at the University of New Mexico (UNM) caused a stir when its analysis hinted that the pair may hail from Venus or the moon.

But other teams then hurried to get pieces of the space rocks for analyses of their own—and for the most part, they disagree. More

New Game Controller Reads Your Thoughts and Acts

An EPOC "neuroheadset" from Emotiv Systems reads thoughts and even senses expressions that video-game avatars can display on the screen. The EPOC brain-driven controller uses a gyroscope and Emotiv Systems is working on applications beyond video games. The EPOC headset from Emotiv Systems will sell for just under $300.

Looking like the shell of a high-tech bicycle helmet, the device reads the user's thoughts for such basic commands as "drop," "push," "pull" or "rotate" and wirelessly translates them into those actions on the screen.

The headset reads the mind's signals from 16 sensor points and a gyroscope orients the device to match the user's orientation. Based on noninvasive electroencephalography (EEG), which reads neuron activity in the brain, the device can also sense expressions. More

Jetsons car? Not yet

The Aptera (Greek for “wingless”) is an environmentally-friendly car that’s as clean and green as it is fantastically futuristic. The three-wheeled hybrid, which offers an all-electric or plug-in hybrid option, isn’t just a concept- you can reserve your own with just a $500 deposit. Seating 2.5 with plenty of room for luggage, the Aptera can get up to 230 miles per gallon at 55 miles per hour, and has an (electronically limited) top speed of 95 mph.

The two engine options are eco friendly- you can choose from an all-electric or plug-in hybrid version. The all-electric is powered exclusively with batteries, to last approximately 120 miles. At night you simply plug the Aptera into any standard 110 volt outlet and in just a few hours you will have a fully charged vehicle.

The plug-in series hybrid is powered by an electric drive train, assisted by a fuel efficient gasoline powered generator, stretching the travel range significantly further. In typical driving you may achieve over 300 miles per gallon and you will have range far beyond any passenger vehicle available today. More

NASA Dreams of 'Second Life' for Mars Crew

When NASA begins launching astronaut teams on 800-day missions to Mars, one of the greatest survival tests these explorers will face is the inevitable alienation they'll experience with their remoteness from Earth and the harshness of the frozen Red Planet.

After rocketing halfway around the solar system for 180 nights, these astronauts will start the first of 500 days on the Martian surface observing a cocoa-colored dusk fade into a star-saturated nightfall. Earth, 400 million kilometers away, will appear as just a twinkling blue diamond in the skies. The astronauts will have never felt so alone.

But NASA thinks it has an answer to the psychological challenge of interplanetary isolation. While aerospace engineers are designing the Ares rockets to be deployed in the Mars missions, a more starry-eyed contingent at NASA is testing networking and virtual reality technologies that they think will connect the first wave of Mars pioneers with their families, friends and colleagues back on Earth, in a 3-D virtual world cut from the mold of Second Life or World of Warcraft. More

GPS users hunt for hidden caches worldwide

A lone seeker scans the mushy ground on the edge of a cold forest. Nearby, a family of “muggles” chatter happily, enjoying a hike. The man lifts a device to his ear, pretending to be deep in conversation, as the family continues past him.

The man returns to his task, holding his electronic gizmo above the ground and checking coordinates.

Is he a wizard? A land surveyor? Some kind of weirdo?

Maybe a little of each, but one thing’s for sure: he’s having fun. Geocachers in 224 countries around the globe use their GPS receivers to hunt and find “caches” — hidden treasures — in an activity that guarantees to take you off the beaten path.

“Muggle” is the cachers’ slang term for someone who doesn’t know about geocaching. Much of the fun lies in the mystery — these hidden containers hold log books and token treasures such as toys, stickers, and wooden nickels. More

Russia can be the first to land astronauts on Mars

MOSCOW - Russia is technically ready for a manned flight to Mars in early 2020, Academician Lev Zelyony, the director of the Space Researches Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said.

"It is prestigious and real and it is Russia's priority to land a cosmonaut on Mars. This task can be solved both economically and technically," Zelyony told Interfax-AVN.

If one starts preparing a flight to Mars in the near future, a Russian astronaut could land on Mars in 2023-2025, the academician said.

Russia has done more than any other country, including the United States, as far as such an expedition to Mars is concerned, he said. More

Study Reveals Why Monkeys Shout During Sex

Female monkeys may shout during sex to help their male partners climax, research now reveals.

Without these yells, male Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) almost never ejaculated, scientists found.

Female monkeys often utter loud, distinctive calls before, during or after sex. Their exact function, if any, has remained heavily debated.

To investigate the purpose behind these calls, scientists at the German Primate Center in Göttingen focused on Barbary macaques for two years in a nature reserve in Gibraltar.. More

The Most Important Future Military Technologies

Tanks and missiles are the most obvious fruits of military research, but some defense analysts argue that information technology is the weapon that has most revolutionized warfare. Modern generals never face the command and control problems that plagued, say, Napoleon. Surveillance technologies like radar and spy satellites can warn of an approaching enemy, troops can be given orders in real time from thousands of miles away, and GPS navigation ensures they don’t get lost. These technologies allowed the U.S. military to sweep aside initial opposition in Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to Philip Coyle, senior adviser for the Center for Defense Information and the Defense Department’s top technology tester during the Clinton administration, in recent years the Pentagon has increasingly relied on information. “Basically, you substitute electrons for armor,” he says. “The idea was if you had enough information, that would make up for armor.” More

Researchers: Human Evolution Speeding Up

Science fiction writers have suggested a future Earth populated by a blend of all races into a common human form. In real life, the reverse seems to be happening. People are evolving more rapidly than in the distant past, with residents of various continents becoming increasingly different from one another, researchers say.

"I was raised with the belief that modern humans showed up 40,000 to 50,000 years ago and haven't changed," explained Henry C. Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. "The opposite seems to be true."

"Our species is not static," Harpending added in a telephone interview. More

Big Chunk Of The Universe Is Missing -- Again

Not only has a large chunk of the universe thought to have been found in 2002 apparently gone missing again but it is taking some friends with it, according to new research at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). The new calculations might leave the mass of the universe as much as ten to 20 percent lighter than previously calculated.

The same UAH group that found what was theorized to be a significant fraction of the "missing mass" that binds together the universe has discovered that some x-rays thought to come from intergalactic clouds of "warm" gas are instead probably caused by lightweight electrons.

If the source of so much x-ray energy is tiny electrons instead of hefty atoms, it is as if billions of lights thought to come from billions of aircraft carriers were found instead to come from billions of extremely bright fireflies. More

Led by Robots, Roaches Abandon Instincts

Many a mother has said, with a sigh, “If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump, too?”

The answer, for cockroaches at least, may well be yes. Researchers using robotic roaches were able to persuade real cockroaches to do things that their instincts told them were not the best idea.

This experiment in bug peer pressure combined entomology, robotics and the study of ways that complex and even intelligent patterns can arise from simple behavior.

Animal behavior research shows that swarms working together can prosper where individuals might fail, and robotics researchers have been experimenting with simple robots that, together, act a little like a swarm. More

Rocket Junkyard Fuels Private Space Ventures

Let's say you're trying to build your own rocket, and the budget gets tight — maybe you fail to win an X Prize, or the dotcom mogul you had in your back pocket suddenly gets bored and takes up yacht racing. Where can you go for those pricey liquid oxygen valves and titanium fuel tanks? Norton Sales.

It's easy to find — it's the place with the bomb canisters and missile components in the window. Since the 1960s, Norton has been the premier US dealer of secondhand spaceship parts. The salvage company, located in scruffy North Hollywood, does 70 percent of its business with aerospace companies — both established firms and the new crop of private space ventures, like Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites and Elon Musk's SpaceX. More

Space rocks go under the hammer

Some of the world's most famous meteorites have gone under the hammer at a New York auction house in what is said to be the first sale of its kind.

The pieces were drawn from collections across the world and many examples are richly coloured and intricately patterned, some bearing gemstones.

A piece priced at $1.1m (£0.53m) did not sell but an iron meteorite from Siberia fetched $123,000 (£60,000).

And a US mailbox hit by a meteorite in 1984 sold for $83,000 (£40,000). More

Dramatic Comet Outburst Could Last Weeks

A comet that suddenly brightened earlier this week has astronomers around the globe fascinated. And the show could go on for some time.

Comet Holmes, discovered in 1892, had in recent years been visible only through telescopes until a dramatic outburst made it visible to the naked eye. In fewer than 24 hours, it brightened by a factor of nearly 400,000.

It has now brightened by a factor of a million times what it was before the outburst, a change "absolutely unprecedented in the annals of cometary astronomy," said Joe Rao, SPACE.com's Skywatching Columnist.

The comet is now rivaling some of the brighter stars in the sky. Anyone with a map should be able to spot it now. But Comet Holmes lacks a tail, so it's more like a fuzzy, yellow star, observers report. The view is improved with a small telescope.

"This is a terrific outburst," said Brian Marsden, director emeritus of the Minor Planet Center, which tracks known comets and asteroids. "And since it doesn't have a tail right now, some observers have confused it with a nova. We've had at least two reports of a new star." More

Dragonfly or Insect Spy?

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?'

" That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security. More

Can Ubuntu Linux Really Run My Small Business?

Ubuntu, the three-year-old Linux operating system that fast acquired the status of darling in the open-source community, has had a big 12 months.

Ubuntu released its seventh operating system, Feisty Fawn, in April. In May, Dell Computer, the second largest maker of PCs, began shipping machines with Ubuntu's new OS preinstalled. Worldwide Ubuntu users now exceed eight million; it took Red Hat and Novell much longer to garner as many devotees of their own Linux-based operating systems.

So Ubuntu is hot, but is it good enough to trust with your mission-critical business operations?

Chris Dawson, founder of Box Populi in Portland thinks it is. "Ubuntu is not perfect, but it works better than anything else that?s out there. It?s far superior." More

Verizon Adds iPhone Lookalike In Challenge To Apple

Verizon Wireless unveiled four new mobile phones for the 2007 holiday season, and it hopes that one of them is cool enough to shift the spotlight away from Apple's iPhone.

Attracting the most attention is the Voyager by LG Electronics, which resembles the iPhone in several ways. The Voyager, exclusively offered by Verizon Wireless, has a large external touch-screen that also slides open sideways for a full QWERTY keypad. This gives users a choice on how they access the phone's features, Verizon Wireless said.

The keyboard option is one advantage the Voyager could have over the iPhone's touch-screen only design, in addition to Verizon Wireless' fast 3G data network that the Voyager will use to access the mobile Internet. The iPhone doesn't use 3G technology, instead it uses the slower AT&T Edge data network.

The Shortcut Menu icons that appear on the Voyager's touch screen and another set of icons at the bottom of the screen bear another astonishing similarity to the iPhone. More

"Shot Guard" Underwear Foils Freaky Photographers

Thanks to new "Shot Guard" underwear from Cramer Japan, female athletes, students and children are now protected from infrared photography.

Yes indeed, Japan's legendary "hentai" (perverts) have found a new way to get their jollies: snapping photos of female athletes through their sports wear.

It seems that these Bizarro Superman wannabes are adapting the night-function capabilities of ordinary camcorders to take infrared photos of unsuspecting women & children in the daytime.

Since infrared radiation is emitted by the skin, the modified cameras can record the surface of said skin. The result is kind of dark and grainy, much like the thoughts of the perverted paparazzi. More

A case of Hubble envy?

Can a $20,000 camera coupled to a 60-year-old telescope shoot sharper images than the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope? Absolutely, say astronomers from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology.

To prove their point they suggest looking at the top of the Mount Palomar Observatory near San Diego. This summer a team from both universities grafted their “Lucky imaging” system onto the observatory’s Hale Telescope and aimed it at M13, a star cluster that’s 25,000 light years away. The results were much better than they expected. “What we’ve done for the first time is produce the highest-resolution [images] ever taken--and we took them from the ground,” says Craig Mackay of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, who led the team. “We are getting twice the resolution of Hubble.” More

Beijing Police Launch Virtual Web Patrol

Police in China's capital said Tuesday they will start patrolling the Web using animated beat officers that pop up on a user's browser and walk, bike or drive across the screen warning them to stay away from illegal Internet content.

Starting Sept. 1, the cartoon alerts will appear every half hour on 13 of China's top portals, including Sohu and Sina, and by the end of the year will appear on all Web sites registered with Beijing servers, the Beijing Public Security Ministry said in a statement.

The male and female cartoon officers, designed for the ministry by Sohu, will offer a text warning to surfers to abide by the law and tips on Internet security as they move across the screen in a virtual car, motorcycle or on foot, it said. More

British award given for design of outhouse

In the UK an award was granted for the design of an outhouse.

Outhouses were common in America until the widespread adoption of indoor plumbing in the 20th century, and are currently used mostly by toothless illiterate poor people.

Sheffield City Council and South Yorkshire Forest have received a national award from the Royal Institute of Architects for their unique composting toilet at Ecclesall Woods.

Recycled sawdust and shavings line the bottom of the toilet to catch deposits, producing a rich, harmless (and odourless) compost; no flushing is required.

The toilet uses three large wheelie bin type receptacles, which are rotated. More

Can We Control the Weather?

You may have heard of lake effect snow. You also might have heard of El Niño, a weather phenomena that affects weather around the globe; but have you ever heard of the arch effect? Probably not. The arch effect is one of the strangest occurances in weather. The arch effect is also manmade, and it is very real.

The St. Louis Arch, a 636 ft. monument on the west bank of the Mississippi River, has stood for nearly forty years. It is a shining monument built to convey St. Louis’s role as the Gateway to the West. Only now has the reason for its construction as well as its true purpose been revealed. It seems that some of the same scientists responsible for the doomsday weapon research in the deserts of the Southwest U.S. during the forties, were also interested in controlling the weather. They hoped to use weather control as a means to aid in troop movement and logistics for the Allies, as well as use it as a tactical weapon against the enemy. This, they hoped, would bring about a quick end to the war in Europe.

Thus, the design for the arch was conceived. The stainless steel structure, while able to produce an ionic pulse, is impervious to any lingering affects. Each leg of the arch is able to push positive and negative ions into the air so as to create a positive or negatively charged field that can ‘push’ storms out of the way. During the day this national monument stands as the gateway to the west, but after hours this man-made marvel turns into one of the most powerful weather controlling devices ever conceived. More

'Clear Signs of Water' on Distant Planet

Scientists have found the spectral imprints of water vapor in starlight filtered through the atmosphere of a giant gas planet outside our solar system.

Combined with a study announced earlier this year, the new finding provides strong evidence that extrasolar planets are as rich in water as the worlds in our solar system, scientists say.

The finding is detailed in the July 11 issue of the journal Nature. More

Poor Man's iPhone

The iPhone has proven to be largely a dud. But you still like the idea of a gadget that has those great features.

You can still salve your iPhone lust and envy by taking advantage of features built into your current phone that maybe you didn’t know you had, or by tricking it out with a number of iPhone-like add-ons.

Some were known and familiar, while others were found by searching on the term “iPhone-like” – which produced more than 200,000 hits. Keep in mind that these are just a handful of what’s likely to become a throng of iPhone-inspired add-ons for non-iPhones. More

Weird Stuff happening on seabed

Plunging into the sea takes you into a strange world that is totally unlike the world found on dry land.

This is particularly noticed when you see the creatures found underwater. They are sometimes outright strange in appearance, and their behavior is often a mystery as well..

A strange cephalopod has been found near Keahole Point on the big island of Hawaii. It appears to be a cross between an octopus and a squid, which is being called, you guessed it, an octosquid. The specimen, which has 8 tentacles, an octopus head and squid mantle, was brought up from a depth of 3000 feet by a pipeline operated by Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority. More

Solar Powered Bikini Recharges Mobile Phones

A concept idea has been developed by American designer Andrew Schneider to cover bikini in solar cells and provide it with a socket for recharging a mobile phone while you sunbathe. The iDrink's photovoltaic film panels allow a fashionable fit while supplying the 6.5 volts @ 1.5 Amps needed to power a peltier junction and recharge a mobile phone.

Schneider says that schemed up and thrown-away as an idea in the same 5 minutes, this project is the straight-forward iteration of an idea about harnessing alternative power in interesting ways. It was originally submitted as a final project in Tom Igoe's Sustainable Practices class. More

Compressed Air Powers this Car

India’s largest automaker is set to start producing the world’s first commercial air-powered vehicle. The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre for Luxembourg-based MDI, uses compressed air, as opposed to the gas-and-oxygen explosions of internal-combustion models, to push its engine’s pistons. Some 6000 zero-emissions Air Cars are scheduled to hit Indian streets in August of 2008.

Barring any last-minute design changes on the way to production, the Air Car should be surprisingly practical. The $12,700 CityCAT, one of a handful of planned Air Car models, can hit 68 mph and has a range of 125 miles. It will take only a few minutes for the CityCAT to refuel at gas stations equipped with custom air compressor units; MDI says it should cost around $2 to fill the car’s carbon-fiber tanks with 340 liters of air at 4350 psi. Drivers also will be able to plug into the electrical grid and use the car’s built-in compressor to refill the tanks in about 4 hours. More

Send email to your future self

If you ever want to receive an email from yourself in the past, there is no time like the present to send it. You don't even need a time machine!

Click on over to FutureMe.org and give it a try. This site is one of a handful that let people send e-mails to themselves and others years in the future. A web based form allows you to compose a message, set the email address where it will go, and set a future date when the email will be sent.

It is currently set up to send an email as far in the future as December 31, 2037. You don't even need a flux capacitor or a DeLorean to send it. Send Email to yourself in the future

Spacecraft returns Jupiter images

Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft has returned stunning views of the Jupiter system captured during a recent flyby.

They include huge volcanic eruptions on the surface of the Io moon, as well as the first close-up look at a burgeoning red storm in Jupiter's atmosphere.

The probe passed within 2.3 million km of Jupiter in a gravity kick manoeuvre to pick up speed as it dashes towards its ultimate target of Pluto.

The flyby yielded the first close-up images of the Little Red Spot, an Earth-sized storm twisting and churning in Jupiter's atmosphere.

This feature formed from the merger of three smaller storms between 1998 and 2000. Its "big brother", a gigantic tempest known as the Great Red Spot, has existed on Jupiter for centuries. More

Is it a tree, or cellphone tower?

Throughout northern San Diego County, new trees are springing up everywhere. Unlike most palms and gymnosperms that take many decades to grow, these "new" trees appear within days. They are commonly used in indoor landscaping and to camouflage unsightly communication towers.

In order for us to communicate over cell phones, it is necessary to have a new type of telephone pole called a cell phone tower placed at proper intervals along our highways and byways. The density of these towers is directly proportional to the human population density. This mathematical principle called "cell tower proliferation" is a new subject for urban ecologists. Unlike unsightly telephone poles spanned by wires, cell phone towers are solitary structures.

Different cell phone carriers use separate antennas on the same tower. Rather than have obtrusive towers cluttering our cities and countryside, they are now being disguised in many clever ways. Some of these covert forms include trees, cactus, gas station signs, boulders, and even church steeples. More

Found 20 light years away: the New Earth

It's got the same climate as Earth, plus water and gravity. A newly discovered planet is the most stunning evidence that life - just like us - might be out there.

Above a calm, dark ocean, a huge, bloated red sun rises in the sky - a full ten times the size of our Sun as seen from Earth. Small waves lap at a sandy shore and on the beach, something stirs...

This may be the scene - on what is possibly the most extraordinary world to have been discovered by astronomers: the first truly Earth-like planet to have been found outside our Solar System. More

The 'Highest' Spot on Earth?

We all know that Mount Everest, at 29,035 feet above sea level, is the highest spot on our planet and is likely to remain so for a long, long time… unless we think about the word "highest" in a different way.

Suppose I asked you to find the spot on Earth where you would be closest to the moon, the stars and outer space. In other words, the point on Earth that is closest to "out there."

Most of us, again, would point to Mount Everest. But here's something you may not know: the Earth is not a perfect sphere. So it turns out, It is Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador that is closest to space and to the moon. More

Windows Vista Falls Short of Hype

Microsoft released Windows Vista and Office 2007 to great anticipation and fanfare as the stroke of midnight gave birth to Tuesday, Jan. 31 – or, at least, that’s what Microsoft would like you to believe.

Chairman Bill Gates kicked off the rounds of publicity on Monday, holding a large event at Times Square in New York City with a luncheon, live bands and a family from Maryland being given the command by CEO Steve Ballmer to “launch” the new software.

While Office 2007 has been commended on its new interface and file formats, Vista hasn’t received the same praise. The new “Aero” interface, designed to be brighter and flashier (the desktop background shows through the borders of each window), easier to use and to take advantage of today’s more powerful computers, has been slammed for not only having a style similar to the interface of rival Apple’s Mac OS X, but for only being available on more expensive versions of Vista, and for being automatically disabled on less powerful computers. More

Ubuntu Linux Available for Microsoft Refugees

If you are not ready to buy a system with Vista preinstalled, upgrading hardware to make it Vista ready can be an expensive matter. Licensing and activation can further complicate your choices.

If those options seem too troublesome, then Linux may be an attractive alternative that is low cost or even free.

Ubuntu is a complete desktop Linux operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Manifesto: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customize and alter their software in whatever way they see fit. "Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world. Ubuntu Site

Pillars of Creation Toppled By Stellar Blast

Seattle , WA - They helped open the public's eyes to the wonders of space when they were first photographed in 1995, but a new study suggests the famous Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula might have already been toppled long ago, and that what the Hubble Space Telescope actually captured was only a ghost image.

A new picture of the Eagle Nebula shot by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope show the intact pillars next to a giant cloud of glowing dust scorched by the heat of a massive stellar explosion known as a supernova.

"The pillars have already been destroyed by the shockwave," said study leader Nicolas Flagey of The Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in France. More

Human-Animal Hybrids Approved in UK

London, UK - British researchers would be permitted to create human/animal embryo hybrids using test tube technology, under sweeping new proposals to be introduced by government health officials this week, according to the Sunday Telegraph.

Known as "chimeras", the embryos would be produced by combining human and animal genetic material within a laboratory setting--the North East England Stem Cell Institute has already requested permission to create an embryo that is part human and part cow.

"The overarching aim is to pursue the common good through a system broadly acceptable to society," British Health Minister Caroline Flint said in a report on the policy changes obtained by the Sunday Telegraph.

Other changes include removing the current requirement that a child's need for a father must be considered when a woman seeks fertility treatment. Single women and lesbian couples would have the same access to fertility treatments as heterosexual couples. More

These Boats Swim Like Dolphins

Boats are built for the water, and dolphins are built for the water--but when's the last time you saw a boat built like a dolphin?

This homemade single-seat design from a California company called Innespace Productions can travel both on and under the surface of the water. It does tricks, too, from barrel rolls to leaps above the waves.

The two seat Dolphin was recently selected as one of Time magazine's 2006 Best Inventions. The second model Innespace has designed and built, the new SeaBreacher is fifty percent larger than the original vessel in order to accommodate two full size occupants and larger engine packages. More

Grand Theft Naughty - Adult Gaming

“A little sex toy action might be fun.” Dirty talk is doing it for me. Jenna Jameson, the infamous porn star, wants me to shove a sex toy down her throat and I’m not about to argue. Using my touchpad, I scroll to the sex toy icon on the left side of the screen and drag it to her lips. Instantly, she starts sucking like it’s her last meal. Girlish groans gush from my laptop speakers. “Keep doing it, I really want it!” reads the text bar below a pixel-perfect Jameson.

As you can guess, no females are actually taking part in this encounter. This is a free demo of aVirtually Jenna, an online sex game where you control Jameson any way you want — oral sex, four-way orgies, BDSM, mutual masturbation, you name it.

This game isn’t brand-spanking new, but the concept is gaining momentum: sex as a main function of a video game, rather than a reward for finding a code. Lust takes center stage in a form of entertainment usually stereotyped as child’s play. More

Latest Military Weapon - Silly String

In an age of multimillion-dollar high-tech weapons systems, sometimes it's the simplest ideas that can save lives. Which is why a New Jersey mother is organizing a drive to send cans of Silly String to Iraq.

U.S. troops use the stuff to detect trip wires around bombs, as Marcelle Shriver learned from her son, a soldier in Iraq.

Before entering a building, troops squirt the plastic goo, which can shoot strands about 10 to 12 feet, across the room. If it falls to the ground, no trip wires. If it hangs in the air, they know they have a problem. The wires are otherwise nearly invisible. More

Brokeback Exercise - Japanese Style

Wave after wave of anime has flooded the USA from Japan. Other delights such as karaoke and sushi have followed.

Now a brand new exercise machine is making its way to the U.S. from Japan called Cowboying.

Machines like this are brand new to the United States and are making their way into more and more gyms and some stores.

"It is increasing in popularity in the U.S.," exercise physiologist Chris Mohr said. Mohr says the simulators can help increase metabolism, balance, improve posture, and tone muscles. More

Space Shuttle Grounded for New Year

The NASA space shuttle is an antique. It is so decrepit that NASA has resorted to buying parts on eBay for support equipment to keep the shuttle flying.

Now NASA is closely watching that the launch date of the next shuttle flight is not too late in the year because they are concerned that the shuttle computers aren't designed to make the change from the 365th day of the old year to the first day of the new year while in flight. NASA has never had a shuttle in space on the last day of the year or the first day of the following year.

The problem is that the shuttle's computers do not reset to day one, as ground-based systems that support shuttle navigation do. Instead, after December 31, the 365th day of the year, shuttle computers figure January 1 is just day 366.

"We've just never had the computers up and going when we've transitioned from one year to another," said Discovery astronaut Joan Higginbotham.

"We're not really sure how they're going to operate." More

Scientists Create Cloak of Partial Invisibility

Scientists have created a cloaking device that can reroute certain wavelengths of light, forcing them around objects like water flowing around boulders in a stream. To creatures or machines that see only in microwave light, the cloaked object would appear nearly invisible.

"The microwaves come in and are swept around the cloak and reconstructed on the other side while avoiding the interior region," said study team member David Smith at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering. "So it looks as if they just passed through free space."

The apparatus was made using "metamaterials," artificial materials engineered to have precisely patterned surfaces that interact with and manipulate light in novel ways. More

Raped by Lookalike Foods: Contaminated Rice

There is foul rice coming from the U.S. and flooding Europe, and possibly Asia. It is not Condoleezza Rice, but contaminated genetically modified (GM) rice that has the E.U. in such an uproar.

The world's biggest importer of rice has said it has ceased trading in US-grown rice because of fears about the GM variety, which has not been approved for human use.

Ebro Puleva, the Spanish rice processing company which controls 30% of the EU rice market, said it has stopped all US rice imports because of the threat of contamination by a strain of GM rice grown in crop trials by the GM company Bayer between 1998 and 2001.

The strain, known as LLRICE 601, was never approved for human consumption but has escaped in large quantities into the world food chain. More

Backyard Rocketeers Keeps the Solid Fuel Burning

GERLACH, Nev. — Wedge Oldham, a 49-year-old software engineer from Los Angeles, finds nothing sweeter than spending a fall weekend in the Black Rock desert, barking rocket launching commands like “Are we good to go?” into the hot dusty wind.

Nerves jangling, he awaits the moment when Carpe Diem, his homemade 18-foot-long rocket, hurls itself heavenward with 737 pounds of thrust, shockwaves — or “mach diamonds” — surging from its supersonic exhaust. With dazed exuberance he watches it recede into deep blue sky, and then, with the release of parachutes, gently drift four miles away, preserved for another flight.

From Florham Park, N.J., and as far away as London, 100 launchers came — plumbers, paint contractors, firefighters, bankers and Silicon Valley techies united by their passion for building rockets capable of blasting 94,000 feet into the air, at nearly three-and-one-half times the speed of sound, as one record-setter did this weekend. More

Tooth Rot, brought to you by Meth

Would you like to have a set of teeth like those pictured here? You might, if you get a serious methamphetamine habit going on.

The American Dental Association (ADA) warned users, and potential users, about the perils of methamphetamine to a healthy smile. One consequence of taking the drug called “meth mouth” could lead to rampant tooth decay and teeth that are blackened, rotting, crumbling or falling apart, said ADA president Robert M. Brandjord.

"Meth mouth robs people, especially young people of their teeth and frequently leads to full-mouth extractions and a lifetime of wearing dentures," Brandjord said. More

Crop Circle made by Humans to honor Firefox browser

In M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 thriller “Signs,” Graham Hess and his family aren’t pleased when they step outside their Bucks County, Pa., farm one morning and see crop circles in the fields surrounding the home.

Terry and Monty Woods, however, welcomed the addition of a 220-foot diameter design pressed into their oat field near Amity, knowing it was the work of Oregon State University students and Mozilla Corp. interns, not aliens or pranksters.

John Carey, film afficionado and intern at Mountain View, Calif.-based Mozilla, has long been fascinated with the crop circle phenomenon.

To celebrate Firefox’s recent 200 millionth download, Carey and fellow Mozilla intern Matt Shichtman, a Temple University junior, looked into the possibility of having a crop circle created replicating the Firefox logo. More

Tommy Chong converts 1946 Olds to electric

San Fernando, CA - Tommy Chong, of the Cheech and Chong stoner comedy duo, has been converting his 1946 Oldmobile to run on electricity.

When he finishes outfitting the Olds with a DC motor, enough serial-wired, nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) D-cell batteries to produce 340,000 watts of power, and a computerized controller to connect the two, Chong’s ride will be the first all-electric vehicle to bounce down San Fernando Road competing for glory with the ’60s-era Chevy Impalas of the Imperial Car Club. It will also do speed when necessary. “He’s getting a huge motor,” says Gadget of Chong. “He’ll be able to do burnouts in this car.”

"So what if the electric engine whines more than vrooms? “It’ll be my spaceship,” says Chong, who currently drives a Prius. “These cars glide. The only sound you’ll hear will be the sound system and the air bags.” Plus, he says, “by driving the ultimate electric stoner car, I can get off the titty. You know, the oil titty.”

If you pull up along Mr. Chong's automobile, and smoke is coming out of it, you can be assured the smoke is not coming from the tailpipe. More

Islamic cell phones has Koran and points way to Mecca

SINGAPORE - The world’s first cell phone for Muslims is now on the market. It was introduced in Asia by the Singapore based company Ilkone Asia.

According to the company’s web site, the Ilkone I-800 phone provides Islamic prayer times for users wherever they are in the world and even points them toward Mecca when they select the city and country where they may be.

The phone also contains the full text of the Koran with English translations.

“The objective of the i-800 is to satisfy the needs of specific Muslims around the world, and the Middle East in particular, through a range of phones providing advanced Islamic solutions, applications, and functionality,” Tellawi said. “Ilkone will be a relevant and integral part of the personal lives and practices of modern Muslims everywhere, and the advanced mobile technology of Ilkone phones will meet their practical, technological, and emotional needs.”

The name ‘Ilkone’ comes from the Arabic word meaning “universe. More

Blocking Unwanted Video & Still Photography

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have completed a prototype device that can block digital-camera function in a given area. Commercial versions of the technology could be used to stymie unwanted use of video or still cameras.

The prototype device, produced by a team in the Interactive and Intelligent Computing division of the Georgia Tech College of Computing (COC), uses off-the-shelf equipment – camera-mounted sensors, lighting equipment, a projector and a computer -- to scan for, find and neutralize digital cameras. The system works by looking for the reflectivity and shape of the image-producing sensors used in digital cameras.

Gregory Abowd, an associate professor leading the project, says the new camera-neutralizing technology shows commercial promise in two principal fields – protecting limited areas against clandestine photography or stopping video copying in larger areas such as theaters.. More

The future of transportation on one wheel

On the drawing board at Bombardier, who builds fun stuff like Rotax karts, Ski-Doo and Lynx snowmobiles, Bombardier ATVs, Sea-Doo sport boats and Johnson and Evinrude outboard engines, is an exciting answer to the Segway Human Transporter.

Like the Segway, Bombardier's Embrio concept--a prototype that may or may not make production--uses gyroscope technology to balance riders but adds a dash of flair absent in the Segway.

The Embrio concept also uses one less wheel than the Segway and will attract, Bombardier hopes, a younger demographic. It is a fascinating idea because it combines the simplicity and alternative-fuel technology of forward-thinking commuting vehicles with the excitement of "recreational" products like ATVs. Indeed, the Embrio could attract people who drive a more fun sort of vehicle, what with its motorcycle-derived styling cues and, like an ATV, the fact that you have to lean in order to turn.

The Embrio is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, a technology that creates power by mixing hydrogen and oxygen, ideally resulting in water as the only exhaust. More

Cannabis reduces surgery pain

A cannabis plant extract provides pain relief for patients after major surgery, research has shown.

An Imperial College London team tested the extract - Cannador - on 65 patients after surgery such as knee replacements and found it helped manage pain.

The researchers believe the results could lead to new pain relief drugs, even though the chance of side effects increased with stronger doses. More

'Get More' info on RFID

RFID tags are becoming more common, and will one day replace the Universal Product Code we have all been familiar with for over 30 years.

These microchips each contain a unique ID number that can be linked to a database and accesed over a network.

The database can contain anything, including the product manufacture date, lot number, shipping route and dates, vendor, price, buyer ID, and location in real time each time it passes by a chip reader that is connected to the network.

This lovely lady is going to demonstrate how RFID tagging works with technology that is already implemented today. More

Korean Scientists Develop Female Android

Poontang, Korea - Standing 5.25 feet tall and weighing about 110 pounds, she can understand others, speak, blink with her eyes and makes several facial expressions. But she is not human, rather an android developed by a team of South Korean scientists.

EveR-1, a combination of Eve and robot, looks just like a Korean female in her early 20s including her shape that is benchmarked against the nation's model.

The human-sized robot can understand 400 words and make eye contact while talking via her lips that are synchronized with the pronunciation of words.

The Korean robot can move the upper half of her body such as arms and hands but she cannot travel because her lower half is immobile.

"But we are looking further ahead _ we are working on upgrading the android with the aim of making it move its legs by the end of this year. It will be able to sit down and stand up by then,'' a researcher expects.

Development of a "fully functional" model would lead to great market opportunities in China with its surplus of 15 million men. More

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