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...

Dazzling Dunes

As NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity creeps farther into "Endurance Crater," the dune field on the crater floor appears even more dramatic. This false-color image taken by the rover's panoramic camera shows that the dune crests have accumulated more dust than the flanks of the dunes and the flat surfaces between them. Also evident is a "blue" tint on the flat surfaces as compared to the dune flanks. This results from the presence of the hematite-containing spherules, or "blueberries", that accumulate on the flat surfaces.

Sinuous tendrils of sand less than 1 meter (3.3 feet) high extend from the main dune field toward the rover. Scientists hope to send the rover down to one of these tendrils in an effort to learn more about the characteristics of the dunes. Dunes are a common feature across the surface of Mars, and knowledge gleaned from investigating the Endurance dunes may apply to similar dunes elsewhere.

Before the rover heads down to the dunes, rover drivers must first establish whether the slippery slope that leads to them is firm enough to ensure a successful drive back out of the crater. Otherwise, such hazards might make the dune field a true sand trap.

source: nasa.gov

Hubble maps cosmic web of 'clumpy' dark matter in 3-D

SEATTLE - An international team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has created the first three-dimensional map of the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe.

Dark matter is an invisible form of matter whose total mass in the universe is more than five times that of "normal" matter (i.e., atoms). The nature of dark matter is still unknown. Its presence in the universe is inferred from its current influence within galaxies and clusters of galaxies, and the gravitational effect it has had on the evolution of structure in the universe. The first direct detection of dark matter was made this past year through observations of the Bullet Cluster of galaxies.

This new map provides the best evidence to date that normal matter, largely in the form of galaxies, accumulates along the densest concentrations of dark matter. The map reveals a loose network of filaments that grew over time and intersect in massive structures at the locations of clusters of galaxies.

The map stretches halfway back to the beginning of the universe and shows how dark matter has grown increasingly "clumpy" as it collapses under gravity.

The dark matter map was constructed by measuring the shapes of half a million faraway galaxies. To reach Hubble, the light of the galaxies traveled through intervening dark matter. The dark matter deflected the light slightly as it traveled through space. Researchers used the observed, subtle distortion of the galaxies' shapes to reconstruct the distribution of intervening mass along Hubble's line of sight, a method called "weak gravitational lensing."

For astronomers, the challenge of mapping dark matter in the universe has been similar to mapping a city from nighttime aerial snapshots showing only streetlights. Dark matter is invisible, so only the luminous galaxies can be seen directly. These new map images are equivalent to seeing a city, its suburbs and country roads in daylight for the first time. Major arteries and intersections become evident, and a variety of neighborhoods are visible.

Mapping dark matter's distribution in space and time is fundamental to understanding how galaxies grew and clustered over billions of years. Tracing the growth of clustering in dark matter may eventually also shed light on dark energy, a repulsive form of gravity that would have influenced how dark matter clumps.

The research results appeared online today in the journal Nature and were presented at the 209th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Wash., by Richard Massey and Nick Scoville. Both researchers are from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.

"It's reassuring how well our map confirms the standard theories for structure formation," said Massey. He calls dark matter the "scaffolding" inside of which stars and galaxies have been assembled over billions of years.

Researchers created the map using the Hubble's largest survey to date of the universe, the Cosmic Evolution Survey, otherwise known as COSMOS. The survey covers an area of sky nine times the area of the Earth's moon. This allows for the large-scale filamentary structure of dark matter to be evident. To add 3-D distance information, the Hubble observations were combined with multicolor data from powerful ground-based telescopes, Europe's Very Large Telescope in Chile, Japan's Subaru telescope in Hawaii, the U.S.'s Very Large Array radio telescope, New Mexico, as well as the European Space Agency's orbiting XMM-Newton X-ray telescope.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. The Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, conducts Hubble science operations. The Institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., Washington.

source: spaceflightnow.com

Pluto's revenge: 'Word of the Year' award

(CNN) -- Pluto may no longer be a planet, but it has a new claim to fame: "Plutoed" has been chosen 2006 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.

The society defined "to pluto" as "to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet."

The former planet had some tough competition in the voting, which took place Friday at the ADS' annual meeting, held in Anaheim, California.

"Plutoed" won in a runoff against "climate canary," defined as "an organism or species whose poor health or declining numbers hint at a larger environmental catastrophe on the horizon."

The runner-up was "macaca" or "macaca moment," defined as "treating an American citizen as an alien" -- a reference to a campaign remark by former Virginia Sen. George Allen that some say marked the beginning of the end for his re-election hopes.

Also in the running for Word of the Year were YouTube; surge (referring to a large, but brief, increase in troop strength); and flog ("a fake blog created by a corporation to promote a product or a television show").

Like any good awards show, the ADS meeting had multiple categories.

In the "Most Unnecessary" category, "SuriKat" (the supposed nickname of the baby girl of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes) beat out "the decider," President Bush's description in April of his position in relation to whether Donald Rumsfeld kept his job as secretary of defense.

The "Most Outrageous" award went to "Cambodian accessory," defined as "Angelina Jolie's adopted child who is Cambodian."

In the "Most Euphemistic" category, the winner was "waterboarding," defined as "an interrogation technique in which the subject is immobilized and doused with water to simulate drowning."

The ADS has been choosing Words of the Year since 1990. The Word of the Year for 2005 was "truthiness," invented by Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," and defined by the ADS as "what one wishes to be the truth regardless of the facts." (Read the full list of winners for 2006 and past years)

Winning words or phrases don't have to be brand new; what's important is that they gained new prominence in the past year.

The society is dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, and includes academics, writers, and others.

source: cnn.com

Google joins LSST project

NEW YORK: Google has become part of a group of universities, national laboratories and private foundations, which is building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to probe into the mysteries of the universe.

The telescope, to become operational in 2013, has a three billion pixel digital camera, which is capable of surveying the whole of visible sky in multiple colors every week. It is particularly scheduled to look into the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and will provide a colorful glimpse on celestial objects that change or move rapidly like the exploding supernovae, near-earth asteroids and the Kuiper Belt objects.

The decade-long survey is expected to generate more than 30,000 gigabytes of image data every night and Google's participation in the project is to ensure that this massive data is properly and organized and preserved for proper and easy use.

Donald Sweeney, project manager for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope said Google will help organize "the seemingly overwhelming volumes of collected data" into a database, which will make discoveries available in real time for scientists and non-scientists alike.

William Coughran, Google's vice president of engineering said the company's mission is to take the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. He said the data from the project will be an important part of the world's information, and by being involved in the project Google hopes to make it easier for that data to become accessible and useful.

full story: earthtimes.org

Biologist at Field discovers rare bat

More than a century after biologists discovered the only known sucker-footed bat species, a Field Museum biologist working in Madagascar has found a second variety that relies on the same strange means of locomotion, using flat suction pads to climb up smooth leaves.

The new bat, which museum biologist Steven Goodman found by the thousands, was hiding in plain view amid the farms and grazing lands of the vast island.

The 19th and 20th Century biologists who described the first species of sucker-footed bats called them "exceedingly rare and remarkable." While the new bat species is not especially rare, its strategy for clinging to leaves is virtually unknown among mammals.

Among bats, the only other varieties that use suckers are the "disk-winged" bats of Central and South America, which have pads in a different place.

"If we already had described 100 other species like this and found one more, it would be less interesting," said Link Olson, curator of mammals at the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks.

Goodman's paper on the new bat appears in the current issue of the journal Mammalian Biology.

Before the new discovery, the other sucker-footed bat in Madagascar was the sole member of its biological "family"--a technical distinction, but one that experts say is extremely unusual among mammals.

"Most families have dozens or thousands of species," said Larry Heaney, curator of mammals at the Field Museum. "To be placed as the only species in a family means there are no known species that shared an ancestor with that animal in a long time."

Goodman and a team of researchers from Madagascar found the new bat through painstaking biological surveys. Goodman was in Madagascar and could not be reached for comment Friday, but his colleagues said such surveys typically consist of first-hand observations as well as catching bats with nets hung along their flying routes.

source: chicagotribune.com

Scientists' Report Documents ExxonMobil’s Tobacco-like Disinformation Campaign on Global Warming Science

Oil Company Spent Nearly $16 Million to Fund Skeptic Groups, Create Confusion

WASHINGTON, DC, Jan. 3–A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists offers the most comprehensive documentation to date of how ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry's disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.

"ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer," said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists' Director of Strategy & Policy. "A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 years."

source: ucsusa.org

Search on for Russian rocket parts in Wyoming

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colorado (AP) -- A spent Russian booster rocket re-entered the atmosphere Thursday over Colorado and Wyoming, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said.

NORAD spokesman Sean Kelly said the agency was trying to confirm a report that a piece of the rocket may have hit the ground near Riverton, Wyoming, at about 6 a.m.

Kelly said military personnel had not yet reached the scene.

No damage was reported and the debris was not believed to be hazardous, NORAD said.

Eyewitnesses reported seeing flaming objects in the sky at the time the rocket was re-entering, Kelly said.

"It was pretty spectacular," said Riverton Police Capt. Mark Stone, who said he saw the burning object while he was retrieving his newspaper. "My first concern is that we had some sort of aircraft that was coming down. It was definitely leaving a burning debris trail behind it."

He said he could tell it was a fairly large object, but it was too high to determine what it was.

A trooper found a 3-by-5 foot area burned in the snow about 35 feet from the edge of the highway, but found no object, Sgt. Stephen Townsend of the Wyoming Highway Patrol said. The highway was closed at the time because of wintry weather, he said.

NORAD identified the rocket as an SL-4 that had been used to launch a French space telescope in December, and Kelly said U.S. spacewatchers knew the rocket was coming down.

"Objects falling from space are almost an everyday occurrence," he said.

source: cnn.com

North Korea's Biochemical Threat

Fifty miles south of the Chinese border lies the rural town of Chongju. Like many North Korean towns, it is a small, impoverished place where people scratch a bare existence from government-controlled farms. What photographs exist of Chongju reveal a brown landscape of depleted-looking fields and shanty-style houses. It is hard to believe anything of value grows here.

But, according to intelligence reports, something precious to the North Korean regime may be under cultivation in Chongju. Beyond the shacks stands an installation suspected of being a component in North Korea's bioweapons (BW) research and development program. The effort is steeped in a level of secrecy possible only in a totalitarian state, but it is thought to encompass at least 20 facilities throughout the country. Another 12 plants churn out chemical weapons.

In late November, delegates of the signatory countries to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) met at the United Nations office in Geneva for the sixth review of the treaty since its inception in 1972. The meeting took place just weeks after North Korea publicly added the third prong to its capacity for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by testing a nuclear device.

continue reading: popularmechanics.com

Five Hackers Who Left a Mark on 2006

In the security year that was 2006, zero-day attacks and exploits dominated the headlines.

However, the year will be best remembered for the work of members of the hacking—er, security research—community who discovered and disclosed serious vulnerabilities in the technologies we take for granted, forced software vendors to react faster to flaw warnings and pushed the vulnerability research boat into new, uncharted waters.

In no particular order, here's my list of five hackers who left a significant mark on 2006 and set the stage for more important discoveries in 2007:

H.D. Moore

H.D. Moore has always been a household name—and a bit of a rock star—in hacker circles. As a vulnerability researcher and exploit writer, he built the Metasploit Framework into a must-use penetration testing tool. In 2006, Moore reloaded the open-source attack tool with new tricks to automate exploitation through scripting, simplify the process of writing an exploit, and increase the re-use of code between exploits.

Moore's public research also included the MoBB (Month of Browser Bugs) project that exposed security flaws in the world's most widely used Web browsers; a malware search engine that used Google search queries to find live malware samples; the MoKB (Month of Kernel Bugs) initiative that uncovered serious kernel-level flaws; and the discovery of Wi-Fi driver bugs that could cause code execution attacks.

Love him or hate him—hackers marvel at his skills while software vendors decry his stance on vulnerability disclosure—Moore's work nudged the security discussion to the mainstream media and confirmed that vulnerability research will remain alive in 2007.

Jon "Johnny Cache" Ellch and David Maynor

At the Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas, Jon "Johnny Cache" Ellch teamed up with former SecureWorks researcher David Maynor to warn of exploitable flaws in wireless device drivers. The presentation triggered an outburst from the Mac faithful and an ugly disclosure spat that still hasn't been fully resolved.

For Ellch and Maynor, the controversy offered a double-edged sword. In many ways, they were hung out to dry by Apple and SecureWorks, two companies that could not manage the disclosure process in a professional manner. In some corners of the blogosphere, they were unfairly maligned for mentioning that the Mac was vulnerable.

However, among security researchers who understood the technical nature—and severity—of their findings, Ellch and Maynor were widely celebrated for their work, which was the trigger for the MoKB (Month of Kernel Bugs) project that launched with exploits for Wi-Fi driver vulnerabilities.

Since the Black Hat talk, a slew of vendors—including Broadcom, D-Link, Toshiba and Apple—have shipped fixes for the same class of bugs identified by Ellch and Maynor, confirming the validity of their findings.

Maynor has since moved on, leaving SecureWorks to launch Errata Security, a product testing and security consulting startup.

Mark Russinovich

Before Mark Russinovich's mind-blowing expose of Sony BMG's use of stealth technology in a DRM (digital rights management) scheme, "rootkit" was a techie word. Now, the word is being used in marketing material for every anti-virus vendor, cementing Russinovich's status as a Windows internals guru with few equals.

The Sony rootkit discovery highlighted the fact that anti-virus vendors were largely clueless about the threat from stealth malware and forced security vendors to build anti-rootkit scanners into existing products.

Russinovich, who now works at Microsoft after Redmond acquired Sysinternals, spent most of 2006 expanding on his earlier rootkit warnings and building new malware hunting tools and utilities.

Joanna Rutkowska

Polish researcher Joanna Rutkowska also used the spotlight of the 2006 Black Hat Briefings to showcase new research into rootkits and stealthy malware. In a standing-room-only presentation, she dismantled the new driver-signing mechanism in Windows Vista to plant a rootkit on the operating system and also introduced the world to "Blue Pill," a virtual machine rootkit that remains "100 percent undetectable," even on Windows Vista x64 systems.

In 2006, Rutkowska also pinpointed inherent weaknesses in anti-virus software; warned that the major operating system vendors are not yet ready for hardware virtualization technology and confirmed fears that stealth malware is the operating system's biggest security threat.

source: eweek.com

The stuff of dreams

1. Dilatants - fluids that get more solid when stressed. The classic example is a mixture of cornflour and water - it's runny until you hit it when it becomes solid.

This video shows how that it possible to run across an apparently liquid pool of the stuff because your footfalls solidify it. If you stop, you sink.

I like this video better though - it shows how sound waves from a subwoofer produce interesting shapes in a dilatant. If you want to have a go yourself, try this recipe.

2. Auxetic materials - materials that get thicker when stretched. Pull them in one direction and they expand in another.

This video (.mov format) from Bolton University, UK, shows an auxetic foam in action. I like these because they are totally counter-intuitive - you just expect things to get thinner when stretched. Read more about them in a feature here or on this research page.

3. Superfluids - liquids that flow without friction. They can effortlessly flow through the tiniest of cracks and will even flow up the walls of a beaker and out the top. It's possible because all the atoms in a superfluid are in the same quantum state, so they all have the same momentum and move together. To make a superfluid you must cool helium down to a couple of a degrees above absolute zero - not one to try at home. They can be used to make super-sensitive gyroscopes to test theories about gravity.

Sadly I couldn't find any spectacular videos of supefluids in action. Here's a not-too-exciting one of superfluid helium drops (mpg format). Read more here.

4. Ferrofluids - magnetic fluids that can look spectacular. They're made from nanoscale magnetic particles suspended in a liquid. The spectacular sculpture in the video below is made using a ferrofluid and electromagnets.

Ferrofluids can be used to drive speakers or make shock absorbers that vary their stiffness in milliseconds. This guide shows you how to make your own ferrofluid at home.

5. Dry ice. Carbon dioxide freezes at -78.5 °C and it's fun and versatile stuff. These videos show how it can produce massive amounts of bubbles when mixed with soap and water, drive a simple cannon , transform your swimming pool, produce pretty patterns when dropped onto water in small chunks and spice up the all-too-familiar Diet Coke and Mentoes reaction. You can even freeze soap bubbles hard and pick them up, if you follow this guide. A block of dry ice will also distract mosquitos - they fly towards carbon dioxide because it's usually in the breath of their prey. Last of all, perhaps the best thing is that it's not that hard to get hold of - search online and you'll see.

source: newscientist.com

Liquid Lakes on Titan

The existence of oceans or lakes of liquid methane on Saturn's moon Titan was predicted more than 20 years ago. But with a dense haze preventing a closer look it has not been possible to confirm their presence. Until the Cassini flyby of July 22, 2006, that is.

Radar imaging data from the flyby, published this week in the journal Nature, provide convincing evidence for large bodies of liquid. This image, used on the journal's cover, gives a taste of what Cassini saw. Intensity in this colorized image is proportional to how much radar brightness is returned, or more specifically, the logarithm of the radar backscatter cross-section. The colors are not a representation of what the human eye would see.

source: saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

The Mathematics Of Cloaking

The theorists who first created the mathematics that describe the behavior of the recently announced "invisibility cloak" have revealed a new analysis that may extend the current cloak's powers, enabling it to hide even actively radiating objects like a flashlight or cell phone.

Allan Greenleaf, professor of mathematics at the University of Rochester, working with colleagues around the globe, has announced a mathematical theory that predicts some strange goings on inside the cloak-and that what happens inside is crucial to the cloak's effectiveness.

In October, David R. Smith, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, led a team that used a circular cloaking device to successfully bend microwaves around a copper disk as if the disk were invisible. In 2003, however, Greenleaf and his colleagues had already developed the mathematics of invisibility.

full story: spacemart.com