In 2006 a second red spot was observed which now rivals the first in storm furiousness and also almost in size. The third red spot, recently discovered is the same size as the Earth and is growing rapidly.

Cheap, renewable energy for everyone? In Japan, Yoshiaka Arata has produced cold fusion in front of many witnesses AND claims the experiment is easily reproducible, which was a problem with the first time anyone saw it.

Instead of it taking 1000 years to degrade a plastic bag, he can do it in around 3 months with his microbes and their helper microbes.

Yup, by forcing people to not smoke where people who don’t smoke don’t generally go anyway, the incidence of drunk driving fatalities has increased. Another new way to kill more people invented!

Apparently, if you want to communicate over the galaxy, you need to use neutrinos instead of photons as neutrinos are much more noise free. We will hopefully have detectors for neutrino traffic next year some time.

Slashdot | Hubble Survey Finds Half of the Missing Matter

In the first time since 1992, ESA is looking for future astronauts. The requirements are stringent, but this is the job of a lifetime!

To the long list of objects vulnerable to attack by computer hackers, add the human heart.

The threat seems largely theoretical. But a team of computer security researchers plans to report Wednesday that it had been able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker.

They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal — if the device had been in a person. In this case, the researcher were hacking into a device in a laboratory.

The researchers said they had also been able to glean personal patient data by eavesdropping on signals from the tiny wireless radio that Medtronic, the device’s maker, had embedded in the implant as a way to let doctors monitor and adjust it without surgery.

Official URL Link

Don’t call it a flying car. It’s a “roadable aircraft.”

It’s named the Transition, and the first full-scale model is taking shape inside a former machine shop on an industrial back alley in Woburn, MA. Between now and late July, the 10 employees of angel-funded startup Terrafugia will be spending “a lot of long days, nights, and weekends” in that shop, says CEO and founder Carl Dietrich. That’s because they want to show off their concept vehicle at AirVenture—the world’s largest aviation festival, held annually in Oshkosh, WI—and there’s a lot of work to finish first.

When I visited Terrafugia yesterday, technicians were shaping the grooves in the fuselage’s carbon-fiber skin that will hold the straps for the vehicle’s rocket-fired emergency parachute. They hadn’t yet attached the folding wings to the fuselage or the fuselage to the empanage (which will hold up the dual tails), and they had yet to figure out where to put the engine’s exhaust system. “It’s crunch time,” says Dietrich.
…………

Official URL Link

In a study just published by Britain’s Which? Computing magazine, alarming levels of dangerous bacteria and other gross-out biological matter was found on many computer keyboards. A microbiologist examined and measured bacteria levels on 33 keyboards in an office, and one was found to be five times dirtier than the office toilet seat, carrying 150 times the acceptable limit of bacteria. Two others had ‘warning’ levels of bacteria, and a further two had elevated levels of coliform, which is usually associated with fecal matter.

Eating at your desk along with poor personal hygiene are primarily responsible for these problems, so it might make sense to invest in some kind of cleaning device. Some have also said that you can actually wash a standard keyboard in your dishwasher as long as you remove it before it melts in the dry cycle, but don’t take my word for it.

Official Link URL

This is a one horsepower vehicle. Literally. Get it?! It has a horse inside powering it, meaning it is literally powered by one horse! One horsepower! Do you get it? Hold on, let me explain more clearly for you.

It’s called the Naturmobil, and it was built by Abdolhadi Mirhejazi of Dubai. Yes, it has a horse on a treadmill inside which powers the car. But it also has a battery, which the horse powers while it walks and that can take over the power when that poor horse gets tired, with enough energy left over to power a couple of LCD screens on the side of the vehicle. Because what good is a crazy contraption like this if you can’t slap a couple of ads on the side?

Official URL

Dutch ecologist Roxina Soler and her colleagues have discovered that subterranean and aboveground herbivorous insects can communicate with each other by using plants as telephones. Subterranean insects issue chemical warning signals via the leaves of the plant. This way, aboveground insects are alerted that the plant is already %u2018occupied%u2019.

Insects use plant like a telephone

Wedging yourself into an economy-class airplane seat is one of the atrocities of our age, but there’s help on the way. The Cozy Suite is a revolution in airline seating, giving you more room to yourself while giving the airlines the opportunity to pack even more sardines into their pressurized tin cans. Sure, it’s not as tricked-out as some of the latest business class seating, but it’s a whole lot better then the disgraceful seats in steerage now.

Designed by Thompson Solutions, Delta Air Lines plans to place the “fixed cocoons” in its Boeing 777 and 767 economy classes by 2010. With the seats’ staggered arrangement, the design not only keeps that person next to you out of your face, you also end up with a comfy place to rest your weary head. You can also recline without smacking into that unfortunate soul behind you, and there’s a footrest along with an extra 2 inches of legroom. Another major advantage: the passenger in the window seat can get to the aisle without the other two getting up.

Of course, Delta’s new merger mate Northwest Airlines (we call it “Northworst”) will probably help the new combined company find a way to make these great-looking seats uncomfortable, too, cramming even more people into those horrid, stuffy (albeit safe) airborne rattletraps. See the gallery for more shots of the Cozy Suite, and also see Thompson’s other version (with the orange seats) using a diagonal arrangement that’s a bit less fancy.

Official URL LInk

Robotic parts aren’t good enough and… “The general cited animals like salamanders that can regrow lost tails or limbs. ‘Why can’t a mammal do the same thing?’ he asked.” Good point. I’m all for having my stem cell cloned leg back after it got blown away instead of having a cheap piece of plastic or pegleg as a replacement!

This day’s launch is a test to check out design and handling inside the atmosphere as the craft maneuvered through a pre-planned course in the sky. Although the flight didn’t go into space, the builders of the vehicle hoped to learn a lot about how the on-board computers, software and avionics, work together.

Official URL Link

Official Darkwin Site

Concerns have been raised that performing collisions at previously unexplored energies might unleash new and disastrous phenomena. These include the production of micro black holes, and strangelets. Such issues were raised in connection with the RHIC accelerator, both in the media[14][15] and in the scientific community;[16] however, after detailed studies, scientists reached such conclusions as “beyond reasonable doubt, heavy-ion experiments at RHIC will not endanger our planet”[17] and that there is “powerful empirical evidence against the possibility of dangerous strangelet production.”[18]

One simple argument against such fears is that collisions at these energies (and higher) have been happening in nature for billions of years apparently without hazardous effects, as ultra-high-energy cosmic rays impact Earth’s atmosphere and other bodies in the universe.[19] A concern against this cosmic-ray argument is that, if dangerous strangelets or micro black holes were created at LHC, a proportion would have less than the Earth’s escape velocity (of 11.2km/s), and therefore would be captured by the Earth’s gravitational field, whereas those created by high-energy cosmic rays would leave the planet at high speed, due to the laws of conservation of momentum at relativistic speeds[citation needed].

CERN’s review concludes, after detailed analysis, that “there is no basis for any conceivable threat” from strangelets, black holes, or monopoles.[20][21] However, the concern about the verity of Hawking radiation was not addressed, and another study was commissioned by CERN in 2007 for publication on CERN’s web-site by the end of 2007.[citation needed]

The risk of a doomsday scenario was indicated by Sir Martin Rees, with respect to the RHIC, as being a one in fifty million chance,[22] and by Professor Frank Close, with regards to (dangerous) strangelets, that ‘the chance of this happening is like you winning the major prize on the lottery 3 weeks in succession; the problem is that people believe it is possible to win the lottery 3 weeks in succession’.[23] Accurate assessments of these risks are impossible due to the currently incomplete, or even hypothetically flawed, standard model of particle physics (see also a list of unsolved problems in physics).

Micro black holes

Although the Standard Model of particle physics predicts that LHC energies are far too low to create black holes, some extensions of the Standard Model posit the existence of extra spatial dimensions, in which it would be possible to create micro black holes at the LHC[24][25][26] at a rate on the order of one per second. According to the standard calculations these are harmless because they would quickly decay by Hawking radiation. The concern from opposing civil society movements[27] is that, among other disputed factors, Hawking radiation (which is still debated[28]) is not yet an experimentally-tested or naturally observed phenomenon. Thus, the above mentioned opponents to LHC consider that micro black holes produced in a terrestrial laboratory might not decay as rapidly as calculated, or might even not be prone to decay and, if unable to rapidly evaporate, they could start interacting, grow larger and potentially be disastrous to Earth itself.[29]

Strangelets

Strangelets are a hypothetical form of strange matter that contains roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks and are more stable than ordinary nuclei. If strangelets can actually exist, and if they were produced at LHC, they could conceivably initiate a runaway fusion process (reminiscent of the fictional ice-nine) in which all the nuclei in the planet were converted to strange matter, similar to a strange star.

Official Wikipedia Link

Consiprary NUT Link

ou may remember hearing about China’s plans to control the weather during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing by attacking shady clouds with artillery and aircraft. Along similar lines, scientists in New Mexico decided to mess with thunderclouds, but with fancy lasers.

The researchers harassed two passing storms from their evil fortress (or observatory) with a high powered laser, fired in pulses. The laser light managed to generate clusters of plasma filaments that, in turn, caused electrical discharges within the thunderheads. It wasn’t enough to get those coveted air-to-ground lighting strikes, though.

Why are they doing it? Being able to trigger a gen-u-wine lightning bolt would allow scientists to study their effects in a controlled manner, such as the effect of lightning on power lines and aircraft. It’d also allow them to ruin someone’s day. Over and over.

Official URL Link

Nice funny way of describing the new computing technologies scientists are concentrating on

1. Optical computing
2. Quantum computing
3. DNA computing
4. Reversible computing
5. Billiard Ball computing
6. Neuronal computing
…

Official URL Link

EARTHWORMS WERE pushed into the firing line last week after a resumption of the testing of depleted uranium shells at Dundrennan.

Significant levels of radioactive uranium isotopes were found in the flesh of worms at the Ministry of Defence’s Dumfries weapons range last year. Despite concerns from environmentalists and the international community, the MoD last week started a series of tests of depleted uranium (DU) shells, supposed “safety checks”.

A report published in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring found that worms in the Dumfries testing ground had significant traces of poisonous uranium isotopes in their bodies.

Official URL

We made a very significant announcement last week, of a collaboration with one of the most (if not the most) security sensitive institutions on earth, the United States government’s National Security Agency. They’ve joined the burgeoning OpenSolaris community, to collaborate with Sun and other community members on the future of ultra-secure operating systems.

Official Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog

In Cern, Zwitserland, zijn ze goed bezig. Ooit werd daar de basis gelegd voor het WWW, HTML, XML en meer protocollen voor ons huidige internet. Nieuw -en direct klaar voor verfilming- is: The Grid.

The Grid? Een initiatief van Cern(waar ook het W3C.org huist) met onder andere professor Tony Doyle die het project technisch leidt. The Grid? Heel simpel het initiatief om het huidige internet 10.000 maal sneller te maken dan de huidige verbindingen.

Hoe?

Er wordt beter gebruik gemaakt van fibre(glasvezel)-verbindingen. Op dit moment zijn er zo een 55.000 servers verbonden met dedicated fibre. Dit zou de komende jaren tot 200.000 moeten uitgroeien. Deze zomer moet het snelle netwerk -dat in principe evenwijdig ligt aan het huidige ‘trage’ internet- een boost krijgen.

Het parallele internetnetwerk loopt van Cern naar elf knooppunten VS, Canada, Azie, Europa en wat verspreiding over de wereld.

Een probleem kan zijn de enorme stijging in energieverbruik.

Official Link

Did it take you more than 20 minutes to finish Mario Galaxy? Was it difficult getting through Halo 3’s first level? Relax, the Japanese company Cyber Gadget has the pill for you, the “Game Suppli” vitamin suppliment! If you require endurance for long gaming periods try Blueberry, for extreme concentration drop a DHA.

I almost forgot… These are some of the same nutrients Grandma grew in her garden for years… But hey… Now you can buy them as pills!

Link

Spinal injuries that leave people paralyzed are currently incurable, one of the most feared and rehabilitating things that can happen to you. But researchers at Northwestern University are looking to change that for good, as they’re hard at work on a new nanotechnology that could enable us to completely heal cut and severed spinal cords, allowing the previously paralyzed to walk again.

The tech takes the form of a gel that, when injected into mice with spinal cord injuries, allowed them use of their hind legs again after a mere 6 weeks. The procedure hasn’t been tested on humans yet, but it’s certainly a promising step forward towards a time where spinal cord injuries won’t necessarily mean a life confined to a wheelchair.

Official URL

Basically it’s having a look at which areas of the brain activate when you make a purchase. Once you know that, you can rig people up to brain scanners, show them different ads and see if the areas light up. If they light up – hey presto: good ad! And then fine tune it.

Is this kind of advertising a bit too much manipulation, like subliminal advertising is considered to be, though?