March 3rd Lunar Eclipse

Lucky skywatchers will witness a total lunar eclipse on Saturday evening, March 3rd. However, where you live will dictate whether you'll get to enjoy this grand celestial spectacle in prime time -- or watch the full Moon rise after it's all over. In the U.S. and Canada, the eclipse strongly favors those east of the Mississippi River, who'll see the Moon completely engulfed by Earth's shadow as night falls. Farther west, the Moon is only partly in shadow by the time it rises (at sunset).

Unfortunately, for anyone west of the Rockies, even the event's partial phase ends before moonrise. Only in New England, Quebec, and the Maritime Provinces does the sky become fully dark with the Moon still totally eclipsed. Farther east, the entire eclipse can be viewed from Europe, Africa, and western Asia, where it occurs late at night or before dawn on March 4th.

Below are key event times for the eclipse, given for five North American time zones; compare these with your times of local sunset and moonrise, which depend on your location (dashes: event not visible):

                             AST         EST         CST         MST       PST
Partial eclipse begins     5:30 p.m.      --          --          --        --
Total eclipse begins       6:44 p.m.   5:44 p.m.      --          --        --
Total eclipse ends         7:58 p.m.   6:58 p.m.   5:58 p.m.      --        --
Partial eclipse ends       9:12 p.m.   8:12 p.m.   7:12 p.m.   6:12 p.m.    --
Last shading visible?      9:50 p.m.   8:50 p.m.   7:50 p.m.   6:50 p.m.    --

A total lunar eclipse occurs when the Sun, Earth, and Moon form a nearly straight line in space, so that the full Moon passes through Earth's shadow. Unlike a solar eclipse, which requires special equipment to observe safely, you can watch a lunar eclipse with your unaided eyes. Binoculars or a telescope will enhance the view dramatically. The outer part of Earth's shadow, called the penumbra, creates only a slight dusky shading on the lunar disk. But as the Moon begins to move into the central and darkest part of Earth's shadow, the umbra, there's an obvious and ever-larger "bite" in the full Moon. The partial eclipse is then under way.

The total eclipse begins when the Moon is fully within the umbra. On March 3rd, totality lasts 1 hour 14 minutes. But the Moon likely won't disappear completely. It usually glows as an eerie, coppery red disk in the sky, as sunlight scattered around the edge of our atmosphere paints the lunar surface with a warm glow. This is light from all the sunrises and sunsets that are
in progress around Earth at the time.

It's been 2.5 years since the last total lunar eclipse, on October 27, 2004. The next one, on August 28, 2007, will favor skywatchers in western North America over those in the east.

How irises 'reveal personalities'

Patterns in the iris can give away the secrets of your personality

It may be possible to read a person's personality through their eyes, Swedish researchers have said.

They have detected patterns which show warm-heartedness and trust or neuroticism and impulsiveness.

The team from Orebro University read pits and lines in the irises of 428 people.

Experts said the study in Biological Psychology showed that at least some aspects of personality were determined by genetics.

Close-up pictures were taken of the study participants' irises, and they also filled out a questionnaire about their personalities.

The researchers looked at crypts (pits) and contraction furrows (lines curving around the outer edge of the iris), which are formed when pupils dilate.

It was found that those with more crypts were likely to be tender, warm and trusting, while those with more furrows were more likely to be neurotic, impulsive and give in to cravings.

'Trajectories'

The researchers suggest that a neurodevelopmental gene called PAX6 could also play a major role.

It is known to help control the development of the iris in an embryo.

Previous research has also shown that a mutation of PAX6 is linked to impulsiveness and poor social skills.

The team, led by Dr Matt Larsson a behavioural scientist, said: "These findings support the notion that people with different iris configurations tend to develop along different trajectories in regards to personality.

"Differences in the iris can be used as a biomarker that reflects differences between people."

Dr George Fieldman, principal lecturer in psychology at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, said: "This is very interesting. It shows that some aspects of personality have a genetic base and to identify them in the eye in this fascinating way is significant.

"It is surprising that this is possible. But it seems that the old aphorism that 'the eyes are the window to the soul' has some genetic basis."

He said it opened up the possibility that security services could one day use the technique to analyse people.

Airports, including Heathrow, Manchester and Gatwick are already testing iris scanning to identify people - but are not to check personality traits.

But Dr Fieldman added: "Security services would have to use such technologies with some caution. You would not want to arrest somebody on the basis of their iris."

source: bbc.co.uk

Politicians sign new climate pact

The climate debate is over, said US presidential candidate John McCain

Leading international politicians have reached a new agreement on tackling climate change, at a Washington summit.

Delegates agreed that developing countries would also have to meet targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, as well as rich countries.

The informal meeting also agreed that a global market should be formed to cap and trade carbon dioxide emissions.

The non-binding declaration is seen as vital in influencing a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, correspondents say.

The forum's closing statement said man-made climate change was now "beyond doubt".

"Climate change is a global issue and there is an obligation on us all to take action, in line with our capabilities and historic responsibilities," said the statement from the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment (Globe).

'Tipping point'

The two-day meeting brought together legislators from countries including the Group of Eight rich nations, plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa.

Climate science: what's new? Hard bargaining for deal Send us your comments

The BBC's environment analyst Roger Harrabin was at the meeting and says that although the declaration carries no formal weight, it indicates a real change in mood.

The legislators agreed that developing countries had to face targets on greenhouse gas emissions, in the same way rich countries do.

They said they wanted a successor to the Kyoto Protocol - which expires in 2012 - in place by 2009.

US senator Joe Lieberman forecast that the US Congress would enact a law on cutting emissions by the end of next year, possibly this year.

And presidential candidate John McCain, who is co-sponsoring climate legislation with Mr Lieberman, was emphatic on the need for new initiatives.

"I am convinced that we have reached the tipping point and that the Congress of the United States will act, with the agreement of the administration," he told the forum.

But Dr John Holdren, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), said President George W Bush needed to appreciate that the US economy would not suffer unnecessarily if emission were capped.

"The economic damage from not addressing climate change is much larger than the economic cost of addressing it," he said.

Canada re-opens Kyoto row

Meanwhile, the Canadian parliament moved to force the government to meet its Kyoto Protocol target for reducing emissions.

The ruling Conservative party argues that meeting the target, of reducing emissions by 6% from 1990 levels by the period 2008-2012, is impossible.

The parliamentary vote gives the government 60 days to formulate a plan for getting back on track.

With United Nations climate negotiations in December failing to agree a timetable for mandating new cuts in emissions when the current Kyoto targets expire in 2012, the British-led Globe set up the Washington meeting in the hope of stimulating progress in a less formal setting.

The UN's panel on climate change said earlier this month that higher global temperatures caused by man-made pollution would melt polar ice, worsen floods and droughts and cause more devastating storms.

source: bbc.co.uk

New finds at Egypt's city of dead

A wooden statue is removed from the scribe's mud tomb

Archaeologists have been unveiling the latest discoveries from the Saqqara necropolis, or city of the dead, south of Egypt's capital, Cairo.

Two tombs dating from between 3,000 and 4,200 years ago are of a royal scribe and a butler.

Another find is of the sarcophagi of a priest and his female companion from the 12th dynasty (1991-1786 BC).

Saqqara holds a number of temples and tombs. Officials say perhaps only 30% of its treasures have been discovered.

Well-preserved

The tomb of the royal scribe dates to the period of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who was known for discarding Egypt's old gods.

His rule was between 1379 and 1362 BC, shortly before Tutankhamen.

A restoration worker with the butler's tomb at Saqqara

Egypt's antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass, said: "It doesn't look great because it was built from mud brick and not built of limestone, but I really believe that this tomb is very important."

The tomb's dark wooden door bears hieroglyphics of the scribe and his wife.

The second tomb belongs to a butler who died 3,350 years ago and contains well-preserved blue and orange paints with scenes of animals and rituals.

It is thought the discoveries show that nearby Memphis was still functioning as the capital, despite the official capital being Luxor in the south.

The second find was of the 4,000-year-old anthropoid, or humanlike, wooden coffins of the priest Sobek Hat and his female companion.

Their coffins are painted in light orange and have blue hieroglyphics. They have not yet been opened and the mummies inside remain intact.

The anthropoids were said to act as a substitute body for the dead.

source: bbc.co.uk

EU reaches deal on emissions cuts

The EU wants the rest of the developed world to follow its lead

EU environment ministers have agreed in principle to cut greenhouse emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020.

The ministers, meeting in Brussels, also agreed to seek a 30% cut worldwide if matched by other developed nations.

The proposals, outlined by the European Commission in January, are seen as a key measure to curb climate change.

The EU must still decide how to make cuts, allowing for a possible compromise with member states opposed to mandatory targets.

Hungary and Poland, who joined the EU in 2004, are said to have opposed the cuts.

Finland has also reportedly voiced opposition to the Commission's targets.

But German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said his country was prepared to go further and cut emissions by 40%.

"There will be some countries like Germany that will see a steeper reduction in greenhouse gases," he said, quoted by the Associated Press news agency.

Struggle for consensus

On Sunday, environment ministers from the UK, Spain and Slovenia urged the 27-member block to endorse the 30% target.

In an article for the BBC News website, they said that failure to act would threaten efforts to persuade nations such as the US and China to agree to cap emissions.

In January, Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas urged "the rest of the developed world to follow our lead, match our reductions and accelerate progress towards an international agreement on the global emission reductions".

However, international negotiations on the shape of the framework to replace the current Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, have struggled to reach a consensus.

A number of nations have voiced doubts about the effectiveness of national emission limits.

source: bbc.co.uk

Eskimo Nebula

In 1787, astronomer William Herschel discovered the Eskimo Nebula, which from the ground resembles a person's head surrounded by a parka hood. In 2000, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged the nebula that displays gas clouds so complex they are not fully understood. The Eskimo Nebula is clearly a planetary nebula, and the gas seen above composed the outer layers of a sun-like star only 10,000 years ago. The inner filaments visible above are being ejected by strong wind of particles from the central star. The outer disk contains unusual light-year long orange filaments.

Image credit: NASA/Andrew Fruchter (STScI)

Satellite could see shadow of extra dimensions

A satellite to be launched next year could see signs of extra dimensions in the afterglow of the big bang, a new study says.

Some theories – such as string theory – that attempt to unify all known forces into a single "theory of everything" posit the existence of extra spatial dimensions beyond the three familiar ones.

But string theory has proven stubbornly resistant to experimental tests (although some physicists say it could be tested in the Large Hadron Collider scheduled to open by the end of 2007).

Now, Gary Shiu and Bret Underwood, both physicists at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, US, say the shape of the extra dimensions could leave an imprint in the afterglow of the big bang. This glow, called the cosmic microwave background, reveals the structure of the universe about 370,000 years after the big bang.

They use a popular model of the universe's early growth called Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) inflation, which is inspired by string theory. It is one of a class of ideas called braneworld models, which state that our universe is like a sheet of paper floating in a higher dimensional space.

full story @ newscientist.com

The Big Bang and the Bucks Set to Collide in Inner Space

The International Linear Collider

At a news conference in Beijing, an international consortium of physicists released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the Next Big Thing in physics: a machine 20 miles long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy recreating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old.

It would cost about $6.7 billion and 13,000 person-years of labor to build the machine, the group reported. And that does not include the cafeteria and parking.

In an e-mail interview before the announcement, Barry Barish, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology and chairman of the design team, said, “The good thing is that we have developed a design that can address the challenging physics goals and meet the technical requirements, and we have worked very hard to cost-optimize it, yet it (not surprisingly) does remain expensive.” The design team includes 60 scientists from around the world.

The location of the announcement yesterday, the Institute for High Energy Physics in Beijing, underscores the growing role and ambition of Asia, particularly Japan and China, to become major players in high-energy physics, a field that has been dominated by the United States and Europe in the last century.

In its initial phase, the International Linear Collider would be 20 miles long and hurl electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons, together with energies of 500 billion electron volts. Later the collider could be extended to 31 miles and a trillion electron volts.

The proposed machine, physicists say, is needed to complement the Large Hadron Collider now under construction at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside Geneva. That machine will be the world’s most powerful when it goes into operation this fall, eventually colliding beams of protons with 7 trillion electron volts of energy each. Physicists hope that by using it, they will detect a long-sought particle known as the Higgs boson, which is thought to endow all the other constituents of nature with mass. They hope, too, to discover new laws and forms of matter and even perhaps new dimensions of spacetime.

But protons are bags of smaller particles called quarks and gluons, and their collisions tend to be messy and wasteful. Because electrons and positrons have no innards, their collisions are cleaner, so they can be used to create and study with precision whatever new particles are found at CERN.

The hitch is that until the Hadron Collider proves its worth by actually finding something new, the governments of the world are unlikely to sign on to contribute a share of the billions needed for the new machine.

Particle accelerators derive their punch from Einstein’s equation of mass and energy. The more energy they can pack into their little fireballs, the farther back in time they can go, closer and closer to the Big Bang and perhaps ultimate truth about nature, allowing particles and laws that once ruled the cosmos, but have since vanished more completely than the dinosaurs, to briefly strut their stuff again. But as physicists have pushed inward and backward, their machines have gotten bigger and more expensive. Competitions between universities and laboratories turned into races between countries and then continents.

The Large Hadron Collider cost about $3.77 billion, according to CERN. But that total did not include the cost of digging the collider’s 18-mile-circumference tunnel, which had been used for a previous machine, the detectors, which cost upward of $1 billion, or most of the above-ground CERN complex, which has been a particle physics center for decades.

A proton collider that would have been bigger, the Superconducting SuperCollider, was canceled by the United States Congress in 1993. At the time its estimated cost had ballooned to $10.3 billion in 2007 dollars, according to Robin Staffin, associate director for high energy physics at the Department of Energy.

The International Linear Collider collaboration, led by a steering group that is headed by Shin-ichi Kurokawa, of Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, consists of 1,000 scientists and engineers from 100 countries.

Physicists acknowledge that it could be years before the world commits to building the International Linear Collider, although jockeying for the costly privilege of playing its host has begun.

The committee priced three sites: near CERN in Switzerland, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and in the mountains of Japan, and found that so-called site-specific costs, like digging tunnels and shafts and supplying water and electricity, were nearly the same in each case, about $1.8 billion.

Shadow of a Martian Robot

What if you saw your shadow on Mars and it wasn't human? Then you might be the Opportunity rover currently exploring Mars. Opportunity and sister robot Spirit have been probing the red planet since early 2004, finding evidence of ancient water, and sending breathtaking images across the inner Solar System. Pictured above, Opportunity looks opposite the Sun into Endurance Crater and sees its own shadow. Two wheels are visible on the lower left and right, while the floor and walls of the unusual crater are visible in the background. Opportunity and Spirit have now spent over three years exploring the red world, find new clues into the wet ancient past of our Solar System's second most habitable planet.

Flame Nebula

Of course, the Flame Nebula is not on fire. Also known as NGC 2024, the nebula's suggestive reddish color is due to the glow of hydrogen atoms at the edge of the giant Orion molecular cloud complex some 1,500 light-years away. The hydrogen atoms have been ionized, or stripped of their electrons, and glow as the atoms and electrons recombine. But what ionizes the hydrogen atoms? In this close-up view, a dark lane of absorbing interstellar dust stands out in silhouette against the hydrogen glow and actually hides the true source of the Flame Nebula's energy from optical telescopes. Behind the dark lane lies a cluster of hot, young stars, seen at infrared wavelengths through the obscuring dust. A young, massive star in that cluster is the likely source of energetic ultraviolet radiation that ionizes the hydrogen gas in the Flame Nebula.

Chavez gets sweeping new powers

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been granted new special powers after an extraordinary assembly vote in the main square of the capital, Caracas.

Mr Chavez will now be able to rule by decree for the next 18 months.

His planned reforms will affect the energy sector, telecommunications, the economy and defence, among others.

Mr Chavez has said the legislation will transform the country into a socialist society. Opponents describe the new law as an abuse of power.

In the open-air public ceremony in the capital, lawmakers voted unanimously to grant the Venezuelan leader the new powers, shouting: "Long live Socialism."

He has been trying to export his kind of radical populism and I think his behaviour is threatening to democracies in the region US deputy secretary of state John Negroponte

Congressional Vice President Roberto Hernandez said the assembly passed the law so Mr Chavez could "urgently set up the framework for resolving the grave problems we have".

According to the so-called enabling law, the president can remake laws for "the construction of a new, sustainable economic and social model" to achieve an equal distribution of wealth.

Mr Chavez will be able to effect change by presidential decree in 11 broad areas.

Commanding position

It is expected that President Chavez will, in effect, nationalise the oil and gas industries, taking a majority share in their ownership.

Mr Chavez has huge assembly support after an opposition boycott

The move will involve companies like Exxon, BP and Chevron but it is uncertain what, if any, form of compensation those companies might receive.

Mr Chavez has popular support after his re-election victory last year, the assembly has been on his side since the opposition boycotted parliamentary elections in 2005, and Venezuela is reaping huge revenues from high oil prices.

He wants to scrap presidential term limits and rewrite the constitution to build what he calls "socialism for the 21st Century".

Officials say he has no intention of turning Venezuela into a communist state, arguing that freedom of speech and religion will all be safe.

But the US has again been critical of his leadership.

John Negroponte told a hearing to confirm his position as the new deputy secretary of state that Mr Chavez has not been a "constructive force in the hemisphere".

"He has been trying to export his kind of radical populism and I think that his behaviour is threatening to democracies in the region," Mr Negroponte said.

source: bbc.co.uk

Scientists allege White House pressure

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. scientists felt pressured to tailor their writings on global warming to fit the Bush administration's skepticism, in some cases at the behest of an ex-oil industry lobbyist, a congressional committee heard on Tuesday.

"Our investigations found high-quality science struggling to get out," Francesca Grifo of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

A survey by the group found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years, for a total of at least 435 incidents.

"Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change,' 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," Grifo said.

Rick Piltz, a former U.S. government scientist who said he resigned in 2005 after pressure to soft-pedal findings on global warming, told the committee in prepared testimony that former White House official Phil Cooney took an active role in casting doubt on the consequences of global climate change.

Cooney, who was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute before becoming chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, resigned in 2005 to work for oil giant ExxonMobil.

Documents on global climate change required Cooney's review and approval, Piltz said.

"His edits of program reports, which had been drafted and approved by career science program managers, had the cumulative effect of adding an enhanced sense of scientific uncertainty about global warming and minimizing its likely consequences," Piltz said.

The hearing was one of two on Tuesday spotlighting global climate change; a Senate forum featured testimony from members of that chamber, including presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois among Democrats and Republican John McCain of Arizona.

Stonehenge builders' houses found

Archaeologists say they have found a huge ancient settlement used by the people who built Stonehenge.

Excavations at Durrington Walls, near the legendary Salisbury Plain monument, uncovered remains of ancient houses.

People seem to have occupied the sites seasonally, using them for ritual feasting and funeral ceremonies.

In ancient times, this settlement would have housed hundreds of people, making it the largest Neolithic village ever found in Britain.

The dwellings date back to 2,600-2,500 BC, the same period that Stonehenge was built.

"In what were houses, we have excavated the outlines on the floors of box beds and wooden dressers or cupboards," said archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of Sheffield University.

He said he based this on the fact that these abodes had exactly the same layout as Neolithic houses at Skara Brae in Orkney, which have survived intact because - unlike these dwellings - they were made of stone.

The researchers have excavated eight houses in total that belonged to the Durrington settlement. But they have identified many other probable dwellings using geophysical surveying equipment.

The archaeologists think there could have been at least one hundred houses.

full story @ bbc.co.uk

Japanese marine park captures rare shark on film

TOKYO (Reuters) - A species of shark rarely seen alive because its natural habitat is 600 meters (2,000 ft) or more under the sea was captured on film by staff at a Japanese marine park this week.

The Awashima Marine Park in Shizuoka, south of Tokyo, was alerted by a fisherman at a nearby port on Sunday that he had spotted an odd-looking eel-like creature with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth.

Marine park staff caught the 1.6 meter (5 ft) long creature, which they identified as a female frilled shark, sometimes referred to as a "living fossil" because it is a primitive species that has changed little since prehistoric times.

The shark appeared to be in poor condition when park staff moved it to a seawater pool where they filmed it swimming and opening its jaws.

"We believe moving pictures of a live specimen are extremely rare," said an official at the park. "They live between 600 and 1,000 meters under the water, which is deeper than humans can go."

"We think it may have come close to the surface because it was sick, or else it was weakened because it was in shallow waters," the official said.

The shark died a few hours after being caught.

Frilled sharks, which feed on other sharks and sea creatures, are sometimes caught in the nets of trawlers but are rarely seen alive.

The Sombrero Galaxy in Infrared

This floating ring is the size of a galaxy. In fact, it is part of the photogenic Sombrero Galaxy, one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The dark band of dust that obscures the mid-section of the Sombrero Galaxy in optical light actually glows brightly in infrared light. The above image shows the infrared glow, recently recorded by the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, superposed in false-color on an existing image taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in optical light. The Sombrero Galaxy, also known as M104, spans about 50,000 light years across and lies 28 million light years away. M104 can be seen with a small telescope in the direction of the constellation Virgo.

Orion's Cradle

Cradled in glowing hydrogen, stellar nurseries in Orion lie at the edge of a giant molecular cloud some 1,500 light-years away. This breath-taking view spans about 13 degrees across the center of the well-known constellation with the Great Orion Nebula, the closest large star forming region, just right of center. The deep mosaic also includes (left of center), the Horsehead Nebula, the Flame Nebula, and Orion's belt stars. Image data acquired with a hydrogen alpha filter adds other remarkable features to this wide angle cosmic vista -- pervasive tendrils of energized atomic hydrogen gas and portions of the surrounding Barnard's Loop. While the Orion Nebula and belt stars are easy to see with the unaided eye, emission from the extensive interstellar gas is faint and much harder to record, even in telescopic views of the nebula-rich complex.

Chinese Professor Cracks Fifth Data Security Algorithm

TAIPEI—Within four years, the U.S. government will cease to use SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm) for digital signatures, and convert to a new and more advanced "hash" algorithm, according to the article "Security Cracked!" from New Scientist

. The reason for this change is that associate professor Wang Xiaoyun of Beijing's Tsinghua University and Shandong University of Technology, and her associates, have already cracked SHA-1.

Wang also cracked MD5 (Message Digest 5), the hash algorithm most commonly used before SHA-1 became popular. Previous attacks on MD5 required over a million years of supercomputer time, but Wang and her research team obtained results using ordinary personal computers.

In early 2005, Wang and her research team announced that they had succeeded in cracking SHA-1. In addition to the U.S. government, well-known companies like Microsoft, Sun, Atmel, and others have also announced that they will no longer be using SHA-1.

Two years ago, Wang announced at an international data security conference that her team had successfully cracked four well-known hash algorithms—MD5, HAVAL-128, MD4, and RIPEMD—within ten years.

A few months later, she cracked the even more robust SHA-1.

full story @ epochtime.com

Saturnian Psychedelia

This psychedelic view of Saturn and its rings is a composite made from images taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728, 752 and 890 nanometers.

Cassini acquired the view on Dec. 13, 2006 at a distance of approximately 822,000 kilometers (511,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 46 kilometers (28 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The Magnificent Tail of Comet McNaught

Comet McNaught, the Great Comet of 2007, has grown a long and filamentary tail. The spectacular tail spreads across the sky and is visible to Southern Hemisphere observers just after sunset. The head of the comet remains quite bright and easily visible to even city observers without any optical aide. The amazing tail is visible on long exposures and even to the unaided eye from a dark location. Reports even have the tail visible just above the horizon after sunset for many northern observers as well. Comet McNaught, estimated at magnitude -2 (minus two), was caught by the comet's discoverer in the above image just after sunset last Friday from Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. Comet McNaught, the brightest comet in decades, is now fading as it moves further into southern skies and away from the Sun and Earth.

Auroras from Space

If Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, had a sister she would be the goddess of Aurora. Glowing green ripples form arcs that constantly transform their shape into new glowing diaphanous forms. There is nothing static about auroras. They are always moving, always changing, and like snowflakes, each display is different from the last. Sometimes, there is a faint touch of red layered above the green. There are bright spots within the arcs that come and go, and transform into upward directed rays topped by feathery red structures. Sometimes there will be six or more rays, sometimes none at all.

source: earthobservatory.nasa.gov

Saturn's Hyperion

What lies at the bottom of Hyperion's strange craters? Nobody knows. To help find out, the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured moon again last week and took an image of unprecedented detail. That image, shown above in false color, shows a remarkable world strewn with strange craters and a generally odd surface. The slight differences in color likely show differences in surface composition. At the bottom of most craters lies some type of unknown dark material. Inspection of the image shows bright features indicating that the dark material might be only tens of meters thick in some places. Hyperion is about 250 kilometers across, rotates chaotically, and has a density so low that it might house a vast system of caverns inside.

Monster Bunnies For North Korea

An east German pensioner who breeds rabbits the size of dogs has been asked by North Korea to help set up a big bunny farm to alleviate food shortages in the communist country. Now journalists and rabbit gourmets from around the world are thumping at his door.

It all started when Karl Szmolinsky won a prize for breeding Germany's largest rabbit, a friendly-looking 10.5 kilogram (23 lbs) "German Gray Giant" called Robert, in February 2006.

Images of the chubby monster went around the world and reached the reclusive communist state of North Korea, a country of 23 million which according to the United Nations Food Programme suffers widespread food shortages and where many people "struggle to feed themselves on a diet critically deficient in protein, fats and micronutrients."

source: spiegel.de

How Can We Convert the US to the Metric System?

Despite past efforts of the 1970s and 1980s, the United States remains one of only three countries (others are Liberia and Myanmar) that does not use the metric system. Staying with imperial measurements has only served to handicap American industry and economy. Attempts to get Americans using the Celsius scale, or putting up speed limits in kilometers per hour have been squashed dead. Not only that, but some Americans actually see metrication efforts as an assault on 'our way' of measuring.

Winter Weather Across the United States

A powerful winter storm swept across the United States on January 15 and January 16, 2007, leaving much of the country under snow and ice. The storm moved from northern Texas, across the Midwest, and into the Northeast. By January 16, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image, the clouds cleared enough to reveal a path of snow across the Midwest. The Intermountain West was also buried in a blanket of white snow, but the Southeast and the East were still covered by a broad band of clouds. More winter weather swamped the Midwest in the days that followed. By January 19, icy roads and other weather-related incidents had claimed 70 lives, reported CNN.

This image of the United States was stitched together from three satellite overpasses. Faint diagonal lines across the image reveal the boundary between each image. The large image provided above has a resolution of one kilometer per pixel.

NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.

An Unlikely Alliance

Environmental Woes: A lignite-fired power plant spews smoke over the German village of Gusdorf

By Samantha Henig

Newsweek

Updated: 11:13 a.m. CT Jan 17, 2007

Jan. 17, 2007 - A group of 28 scientists and evangelical Christians today announced their commitment to working together to address global and environmental climate change--an issue that they say is pressing enough to trump any theological differences between the groups. Eric Chivian, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, is one of the scientists leading the collaboration. In an interview with NEWSWEEK’s Samantha Henig, Chivian discussed the origins of this peculiar union, what the two groups have in common, how the evangelical Christian community can help scientists and the spiritual significance of his fruit garden. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Scientists and evangelicals have announced that they are coming together to address global warming and environmental change. What exactly does this collaboration entail?
Eric Chivian: We believe that it was very important for these two groups--scientists and evangelical Christians--to get together and speak with one voice, because the public sees us as disagreeing on a whole variety of issues. And yet it was clear after we began to meet that we really shared a very deep reverence for life and we shared an enormous concern about what was being done to it by human activity. And that was a surprise to us.

What do you have planned?
We are planning to meet with a bipartisan group of members of the Congress this afternoon. I know we’re meeting with Sen. Barbara Boxer and with the staff of Sen. Dick Lugar, and others in both the House and Senate. We are planning a large meeting some time in the near future of our two communities, a large public meeting. This is just the beginning of this dialogue.

Who are the scientists working on this? Are any of them members of the National Association of Evangelicals?
Some in the evangelical group are also scientists. For example, Cal Dewitt is a professor of environmental science at the University of Wisconsin, but he’s also a prominent evangelical. Randy Isaac is a scientist who runs something called the American Scientific Affiliation, which is a group of some 2,000 scientists, most of whom are evangelicals, but are also scientists. So this distinction between scientist and evangelical is not a firm one.

It seems like an unlikely pairing, evangelicals and scientists.
Yes, it does.

continue @ newsweek

Cold War era military artwork from the Military Art Collection of the United States Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)

See Full Gallery @ militaryphotos.net

On Approach: Jupiter and Io

This image was taken on Jan. 8, 2007, with the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), while the spacecraft was about 81 million kilometers (about 50 million miles) from Jupiter. Jupiter's volcanic moon Io is to the right; the planet's Great Red Spot is also visible. The image was one of 11 taken during the Jan. 8 approach sequence, which signaled the opening of the New Horizons Jupiter encounter.

Even in these early approach images, Jupiter shows different face than what previous visiting spacecraft - such as Voyager 1, Galileo and Cassini - have seen. Regions around the equator and in the southern tropical latitudes seem remarkably calm, even in the typically turbulent "wake" behind the Great Red Spot.

The New Horizons science team will scrutinize these major meteorological features - including the unexpectedly calm regions - to understand the diverse variety of dynamical processes on the solar system's largest planet. These include the newly formed Little Red Spot, the Great Red Spot and a variety of zonal features.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

Expert Wants to Decertify Global Warming Skeptics

Apparently in the Senate, at least one scientist wants to put a permanent stop to any arguments over Global Warming. The Weather Channel's most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming.

The First HD DVD Movie Hits BitTorrent

Ars Technica reports that the first HD DVD movie has made its way onto BitTorrent, showing that current DRM efforts to prevent illegal sharing of copyrighted content are still futile and fighting an uphill battle. From the article: "The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB."

Global Warming Exposes New Islands in the Arctic

LIVERPOOL LAND, Greenland — Flying over snow-capped peaks and into a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren strip of rocks between two glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can of cooking gas were tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining, the helicopter lifted off, snow and fog swirling in the rotor wash.

When it had disappeared over the horizon, no sound remained but the howling of the Arctic wind.

“It feels a little like the days of the old explorers, doesn’t it?” Dennis Schmitt said.

Mr. Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer from Berkeley, Calif., had just landed on a newly revealed island 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: he had discovered the island on an ocean voyage in September 2005. Now, a year later, he and a small expedition team had returned to spend a week climbing peaks, crossing treacherous glaciers and documenting animal and plant life.

Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, charted these coastlines. Would have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice.

Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers. The island’s distinct shape — like a hand with three bony fingers pointing north — looks like the end of the peninsula.

Now, where the maps showed only ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran between a newly exposed shoreline and the aquamarine-blue walls of a retreating ice shelf. The water was littered with dozens of icebergs, some as large as half an acre; every hour or so, several more tons of ice fractured off the shelf with a thunderous crack and an earth-shaking rumble.

All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks — “lonely mountains” in Inuit — that were encased in the margins of Greenland’s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.

“We are already in a new era of geography,” said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. “This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now.”

full story: nytimes.com

The hidden engineering gender gap

By Joyce Park 01.2.07

(Editor’s note: This essay comes in two parts. Here is the first part.)

Anyone who has met John Doerr knows that he is genuinely passionate about encouraging the participation of women in the venture-creation system: as VCs, as entrepreneurs, and especially as engineers. He was the first person I ever heard clearly articulate something that I think many of us suspect in our hearts but are hesitant to say.

With all love and respect to our sisters in product management, marketing, sales, finance, HR, and G&A, 50 years of Silicon Valley history strongly suggest that technology companies will ever continue to be founded by entrepreneurs from engineering backgrounds; and if women never become engineers in sufficient numbers, they will disproportionately fail to experience the upper end of the range of Silicon Valley outcomes.

Furthermore, it’s impossible to calculate the opportunity cost to Silicon Valley ventures due to insufficient diversity of backgrounds, ideas, and modes of thought; but as the end consumer of our work becomes increasingly female, these costs must be rising.

However, no one can have failed to notice that despite all the efforts of a great many fearsomely brilliant, motivated, and determined individuals and groups to support women — Mr. Doerr and a few other funders, the Anita Borg Institute, Google and Yahoo and HP, Mills College and Stanford and Berkeley — there are still not nearly as many working female engineers as male.

And when it comes to female tech entrepreneurs from an engineering background I believe the ratio is even more skewed, although no one seems to even know a definitive number. Finally, when you count the women who head venture-backed businesses — which is an utterly arbitrary distinction except insofar as it highlights the availability of capital and other resources which can ease the crushing burden of starting a business — it is a lonely little group indeed.

But I’m not here to wring my hands and whine about the status quo. Nor do I plan to propose computer science education as the long-term solution to the gender imbalance problem, because far better-qualified people than I are already working along those lines. Instead I want to focus on a well-known but little-studied phenomenon in the technology industry — particularly in the newer, more experimental, startup-driven subdomains — and in the Open Source movement. This enigma is the lack of self-taught female software engineers. (Throughout this essay, by “self-taught” I mean someone who lacks a degree in computer science and has taken personal responsibility for training him or her self as a software engineer. Some of them may have enjoyed on-the-job training or other instruction, even including non-degree-granting university-level instruction, but in my mind they still count as self-directed.)

Everyone in professional or Open Source software development has worked with countless male colleagues who are essentially self-taught, lacking all or most formal training in computer science, and in not a few cases bereft of any post-secondary degree whatsoever. In the perhaps less glamorous areas of the software development lifecycle — QA, build and release, documentation, i18n, metrics, DBA, etc. — almost everyone I’ve ever worked with has lacked formal qualifications (which in many cases don’t exist anyway). These self-motivated male engineers run the gamut of quality, from the best of the best to the truly sub-par; but it is incontestable that there are a relatively large number of them, and that they form an important part of the technology ecosystem. But everyone seems to agree — and certainly it has been my experience — that there is no correspondingly large pool of female professional and Open Source engineers without formal training.

Why does this gender gap in non-CS-degreed software engineers exist? Could it be bridged through some sort of organized effort? Would such an effort be ethically troubling or bad for the profession in some other way? What opportunities might be lost if we continue to do nothing about the gender disparity in software engineering, or simply wait for long-term educational efforts to take root at some unspecified future date? For those who care about women in the technology industry, I would argue that these questions should be very pressing and our ignorance of their answers should be equally troubling.

(Joyce proposes an answer to these last questions in Part Two: A modest proposal.)

Real Life Car Pinball

Comet McNaught via SOHO Satellite

This is an animation of the most recent images from the SOHO spacecraft's LASCO C3 camera.

Expect it to load slowly

Comet C/2006 P1 (McNaught) will be visible from Friday, Jan. 12 to Monday, Jan. 15. The first SOHO images of the comet can be seen in our Comet McNaught Viewer's Guide.

This real-time movie, which shows the most recent 48 hours of solar activity, is updated every hour if satellite communications permit. The image is generated by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft.

Other animation sizes and formats are avaible at the SOHO site.

Instruments on SOHO makes images like this one by blocking the light coming directly from the Sun with an occulter disk, creating an artificial eclipse within the instrument itself. The lack of detail (notice that the tail is all white) occurs because the comet is so bright it saturates the image detector. The small moving dot is Mercury.

SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

More SPACE.com Cams

Comet McNaught Over Catalonia, Spain

This past weekend Comet McNaught peaked at a brightness that surpassed even Venus. Fascinated sky enthusiasts in the Earth's northern hemisphere were treated to an instantly visible comet head and a faint elongated tail near sunrise and sunset. Recent brightness estimates had Comet McNaught brighter than magnitude -5 (minus five) over this past weekend, making it the brightest comet since Comet Ikeya-Seki in 1965, which was recorded at -7 (minus seven). The Great Comet of 2007 reached its brightest as it rounded the Sun well inside the orbit of Mercury. Over the next week Comet McNaught will begin to fade as it moves south and away from the Sun. The unexpectedly bright comet should remain visible to observers in the southern hemisphere with unaided eyes for the rest of January. The above image, vertically compressed, was taken at sunset last Friday from mountains above Catalonia, Spain.

How Not to Parallel Park

Pillars of Creation

This majestic view, taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, tells an untold story of life and death in the Eagle Nebula, an industrious star-making factory located 7,000 light-years away in the Serpens Sonstellation. The image shows the region's entire network of turbulent clouds and newborn stars in infrared light.

The color green denotes cooler towers and fields of dust, including the three famous space pillars, dubbed the "Pillars of Creation," which were photographed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 (right of center; see http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/ssc2007-01b.html for exact location).

But it is the color red that speaks of the drama taking place in this region. Red represents hotter dust thought to have been warmed by the explosion of a massive star about 8,000 to 9,000 years ago. Since light from the Eagle Nebula takes 7,000 years to reach us, this supernova explosion would have appeared as an oddly bright star in our skies about 1,000 to 2,000 years ago.

According to astronomers' estimations, the explosion's blast wave would have spread outward and toppled the three pillars about 6,000 years ago (which means we wouldn't witness the destruction for another 1,000 years or so). The blast wave would have crumbled the mighty towers, exposing newborn stars that were buried inside, and triggering the birth of new ones.

source: nasa.gov

10th Annual Wacky Warning Label Contest

It's official: M-Law's 10th Annual Wacky Warning Label Contest is over. First prize has gone to a washing machine label urging not to put people in washers. Started to promote awareness of excessive litigation, the contest highlights common sense warning labels, such as the one that warns not to dry cellphones in microwave ovens. Companies find it necessary to stick crazy warnings on their products because of previous insane lawsuits.

NASA Finally Goes Metric

"Space.com is reporting that NASA has decided to use the metric system for its new lunar missions. NASA hopes that metrication will allow easier international participation and safer missions. The loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter was blamed on an error converting between English units and metric units. 'When we made the announcement at the meeting, the reps for the other space agencies all gave a little cheer,' said a NASA official."

source: space.com

Home Project - Closet

installed my hang-track and standards today. did you know Home Depot refuses to cut hang-track? they only cut shelving... so i bought a $4 hack-saw and cut it myself. somehow i managed to find two studs in the wall... it's a miracle! long-story short, the developer of my condo didn't put studs every 16" inches. in addition to the two studs, i also used two 50 pound dry-wall anchors. after drilling holes in the hang-track and some pilot holes in the studs, mounting was a breeze. standards just snap in... here's what it looks like.




now the fun part... figuring out what shelves, drawers, etc to put in...