Science & Technology

• 29 December 2006
  "After years of delay, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively concluded yesterday that milk and meat from some cloned farm animals are safe to eat. That finding could make the United States the first country to allow products from cloned livestock to be sold in grocery stores. Even if the agency’s assessment is formally approved next year, consumers will not see many steaks or pork chops from cloned animals because the technology is still too expensive to be used widely. But the F.D.A.’s draft policy touched off an immediate storm of criticism from consumer groups, as well as some concerns from meat and dairy companies worried about consumer reaction. 'At the end of the day, F.D.A. is looking out for a few cloning companies and not for consumers or the dairy industry,' said Joseph Mendelson, legal director for the Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 28 December 2006
  "It's technology that lets you speak your mind—literally. NASA scientists are developing a speech recognition system that can understand and relay words that haven't been said out loud. The system uses electrodes attached to the throat to detect biological signals that occur as a person reads or talks to him- or herself. The signals can then be converted into text or synthesized speech. 'Subvocal speech recognition is basically the understanding of words without the requirement for sound,' said Chuck Jorgensen, a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, whose team is developing the system. 'We're looking at the neuromuscular patterns being sent through the nervous system and inferring from those patterns what words would have been said out loud had a person actually permitted himself to produce the acoustics.' The technology could one day be used for communication in high-noise environments or in 'silent' cell phone calls." Learn more in The National Geographic News.

• 27 December 2006
  "The COROT space telescope, designed to search for planets not much bigger than Earth, launched into space at 1423 GMT on Wednesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The mission is expected to provide a better understanding of planets smaller than Saturn, of which only a small number of examples are known so far. The vast majority of the more than 200 extrasolar planets found to date have been detected from the ground by watching for the slight gravitational tug they exert on their parent stars, called the radial velocity technique. Most of these planets are similar in mass to Jupiter or even heavier, because these 'gas giants' are the easiest to detect. But the new telescope, called COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits (COROT), will be able to detect much. The satellite will use its 27-centimetre telescope to search for dips of light due to planets passing in front of their parent stars in events called transits. It will monitor different patches of the sky that each span the width of about six Full Moons, staring at each for 150 days at a time." Learn more at The New Scientist.com.

• 26 December 2006
  "Extracorporeal cardiac shock wave therapy sounds like something Capt. Picard might need after a run-in with the Borg. But it's actually a new, real-life way to treat end-stage heart disease. A team of Japanese researchers found that blasting the heart with shock waves helps patients grow new blood vessels and increase blood flow. Coronary artery disease -- a leading cause of death in men and women in the United States -- happens when plaque builds up in blood vessels, blocking the flow of oxygenated blood to the heart muscle. Medication, angioplasty or bypass surgery can sometimes treat the disease. But when these approaches aren't enough, the only hope is to grow new blood vessels. Gene and cell therapies can also engender new blood vessels, but those procedures require surgery, which is risky for elderly or severely sick patients. Scientists had shown the technique could stimulate growth factors in human blood vessel cells in the laboratory, and after getting positive results in animal studies the team performed the first clinical trial of cardiac shock wave therapy in humans." Learn more in the Wired News.

• 22 December 2006
  "At sundown on any given night, mountaintop turrets around the world rumble to life as astronomers train their telescopes on the sky. The quest: to write the history of the cosmos from clues they find in feeble starlight from the edge of the visible universe. Now groups in Europe and North America aim to build observatories that would leave Galileo breathless. They envision behemoths up to four times bigger than today's largest optical telescopes, which currently rely on 10-meter (33-foot) light-gathering mirrors. These ambitions are pushing this corner of astronomy into the era of 'big science,' where the cost of building and operating world-class observatories or laboratories outpaces a single country's willingness to foot the bill. Major projects are planned, built, and run by a host of international partners. The era has long since dawned on fields such as high-energy physics, fusion-energy research, and other areas of space science. Now, the highly visible and highly competitive field of ground-based astronomy stands on the threshold." Learn more in the Christian Science Monitor.

• 21 December 2006
  "Google Inc. and NASA Ames Research Center said Monday that they have finalized an agreement to deliver more of the space agency's imagery and information through the Internet's leading search engine. The collaboration marks another step in a partnership announced 15 months ago when Google unveiled plans to build a 1 million-square-foot campus at the NASA center, located a few miles south of the company's Mountain View headquarters. Under the arrangement, Ames will feed Google with its weather forecasting information, three-dimensional maps of the moon and Mars, and real-time tracking of the international space station and space shuttle flights so the pictures and data are available to anyone with an Internet connection." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 20 December 2006
  "Spurred on by the apparent discovery of evidence of very recent liquid water on Mars, researchers are boosting their efforts to determine whether water is flowing on the red planet's surface right now. At the same time, new findings from the satellites and rovers studying Mars are unraveling the central role water has played in shaping the planet. This week scientists announced a plan to use powerful imaging instruments on NASA's newest red planet spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to focus on gullies. Sediment deposits found in such areas would unmistakably confirm the presence of water. 'We've moved it up the priority list,' said Roger Phillips of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, a leader of the orbiter's radar team. 'We hope for results by the end of next month.' Phillips and other NASA researchers presented their new Mars findings Wednesday in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 19 December 2006
  "The brains behind a doomed antispam service are turning their technology into an online swarming tool for activists, hoping to subject politicians and government agencies to the kind of mass pressure Blue Frog once inflicted on spammers. With its Blue Frog software, Israel-based Blue Security made it easy for spam victims to automatically send opt-out requests to advertised websites, either in e-mail or through online order forms on the sites being promoted. In practice, that meant that some sites were deluged with thousands of such messages simultaneously, prompting critics to charge that the service was little more than a vigilante denial-of-service tool...Now founders Aran Reshef and Amir Hirsh are reincarnating their software to turn armies of internet users into political activists." Learn more in Wired News.

• 18 December 2006
  "Human increases in carbon dioxide emissions are thinning the Earth's outer atmosphere, making it easier to keep the space station aloft but prolonging the life of dangerous space debris, scientists said Monday. 'It's a bit of a two-edge sword,' said Stanley Solomon, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. 'In the future, it will be a little bit easier to keep the space station, for instance, in orbit. It will need a little bit less fuel. On the other hand, it will give space junk a much longer lifetime,' he told the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Solomon is the co-author of a study presented Monday that found man's burning of fossil fuels and increase of carbon dioxide emissions will make the Earth's outer atmosphere above 62 miles 3 percent less dense by 2017. The study found a decrease of about 5 percent between 1970 and 2000." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 15 December 2006
  "A 65-year-old Quebec man who received a new long-term mechanical heart last month is being described as the only living Canadian without a pulse. Dr. Renzo Cecere implanted the 'Heartmate II' mechanical heart into Gerard Langevin in an three-hour operation Nov. 23. Officials at the McGill University Health Centre say the device, which is about the size of a flashlight battery, could last up to 10 years. That is longer than other models which are thought to be good for only two or three years. The new mechanical heart, which is powered by batteries located in pouches on Mr. Langevin's body, provides a continuous flow of blood so the patient has no pulse. 'Mr. Langevin happens to be the only individual currently living in Canada without a pulse and without a measurable blood pressure,' Dr. Cecere said Wednesday. Mr. Langevin admitted to reporters that, before the operation, he felt his time was up after he suffered his second heart attack in July." Learn more in the Globe and Mail.

• 14 December 2006
  "A handheld device sensitive to changes in colour not detectable by the human eye could be used to spot objects hidden by camouflage or foliage. The Image Replication Imaging Spectrometer (IRIS) system was developed by Andrew Harvey and colleagues at Heriot-Watt University in the UK. The cells in the human retina that detect coloured light are sensitive to only certain parts of the spectrum – red, green or blue. All perceived colours are a mixture of this basic palette of colours. Digital cameras work in a similar way, also using separate red, green and blue filters or sensors. By contrast, the IRIS system has a greater basic palette, of 32 or more 'colours'– bands of the light spectrum. It works by dividing an image into 32 separate snapshots, each containing only the light from one of its 32 spectral bands. This allows it to pick out features that blend into one for a human observer." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 13 December 2006
  "Electromagnetic field sensitivity is an empirical chimera. Riding in on peer-reviewed research, but flunking every major test, the idea that wireless technology amounts to a modern health threat presents a conundrum to proponents and skeptics alike. With Wi-Fi networks blanketing homes, schools and even whole cities, they've become the latest flash point in a struggle that's arced from power lines to microwaves, cell phones and even computers, spanning decades of debate. To sufferers of EMF sensitivity, however, such academic battles are exasperating. To them, it's as if their symptoms, and even their sanity, are under attack. British author Kate Figes recently described a sensation akin to being "prodded all over your body by 1,000 fingers" when in the presence of a Wi-Fi signal. When Michael Bevington fell ill, he blamed a network recently installed at the prestigious school where he'd worked for 28 years: 'Over the weekend, away from the classroom, I felt completely normal.'" Learn more in Wired News.

• 12 December 2006
  "The iconic culprit in global warming is the coal-fired power plant. It burns the dirtiest, most carbon-laden of fuels, and its smokestacks belch millions of tons of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas. So it is something of a surprise that James E. Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy, a coal-burning utility in the Midwest and the Southeast, has emerged as an unexpected advocate of federal regulation that would for the first time impose a cost for emitting carbon dioxide. But he has his reasons. 'Climate change is real, and we clearly believe we are on a route to mandatory controls on carbon dioxide,' Mr. Rogers said. 'And we need to start now because the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive this is going to be.' Global warming is not only an environmental hazard, but also a great challenge for economic policy. Without economic incentives, analysts say, the needed investments in industrial cleanup, innovative low-carbon technologies, fuel-efficient cars and other ways of reducing energy waste will not occur." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 11 December 2006
  "A single, gigantic asteroid slammed into Earth 65 million years ago, dooming the dinosaurs and many other species, scientists said on Thursday in a new study rebutting theories that multiple impacts did the deed. An examination of rock sediments drilled from five sites at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean strongly supports the notion that one massive hunk of space rock caused the mass extinction, a research team led by University of Missouri-Columbia geology professor Ken MacLeod found. 'It's a completely straightforward, single-impact scenario,' MacLeod, whose findings appear in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, said in an interview. 'It was a haymaker that nobody saw coming. One shot, and that's all you need to explain it.' Scientists believe that an asteroid about 6 miles wide hurtled to Earth 65.5 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period, plunging into what is now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula to carve out the Chicxulub crater measuring about 110 miles across. To put it mildly, it was a bad day to live on Earth." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 8 December 2006
  "The Ebola virus is marching steadily across western and central Africa, wiping out more than 90 percent of the gorillas in its path and threatening the species with extinction, a new study says. About 5,000 gorillas were killed by the virus in one study area alone, according to results to be published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science. Ebola causes a hemorrhagic fever, resulting in massive internal and external bleeding that kills within two weeks of symptoms appearing. There is no known cure, and in humans the mortality rate is around 80 percent. The virus is named after the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, near where the first known outbreak occurred in 1976. Ebola is moving at a rate of around 31 miles (50 kilometers) per year in western and central Africa, experts say. Most of the area's remaining gorillas live within about 124 miles (200 kilometers) of the current outbreak." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 7 December 2006
  "Liquid water has flowed on the surface of Mars within the past five years, suggest images by the now lost Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). The results appear to boost the chances that Mars could harbour life. In 1999, MGS spotted gullies carved on the sides of Martian slopes. Thousands of gullies have been imaged since then, most recently by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Many scientists believe the gullies were carved by liquid water, although others have argued they are due to avalanches of carbon dioxide gas or rivers of dust. The gullies appear to have formed sometime in the past several hundred thousand years, since impact craters have not accumulated on top of them. But exactly how long ago material flowed through them has not been clear. Now, new flows have appeared in two of the gullies monitored by MGS, showing that they have been active within the past several years." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 6 December 2006
  "The hunt for Earth-like planets is to be stepped-up as a new mission prepares for launch. Corot will be the first spacecraft capable of detecting rocky planets just a few times bigger than Earth that are orbiting neighbouring stars. It will also uncover information on the stars themselves, determining their mass, age and chemical composition. The mission, led by the French space agency Cnes, is due to launch on the 26 or 27 December. Thien Lam Trong, Corot Project Manager from Cnes, said: 'Man has been thinking about other worlds since the beginning of astronomy. Corot will help us to understand whether Earth-like exoplanets are a reality or dream.' The 650kg (1,400lb) satellite will be launched on the Soyuz-2-1b vehicle from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, into a polar orbit 827km (514 miles) above the Earth. Corot carries a 27cm (11in) telescope and a four-charge-coupled-device (CCD) camera, sensitive to tiny changes in the brightness of stars." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 5 December 2006
  "NASA's plans for returning people to the moon -- an objective called for by President Bush in 2004 -- includes establishing a permanent outpost that would be used to prepare for a manned trip to Mars. The moon base would be at either the north or south pole of the moon, NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale said during a news conference Monday at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Increased sunlight at the poles would allow better use of solar energy to power the outpost, she said. NASA's lunar architecture team decided it would be better to establish a base than to conduct individual missions to the moon, as in the Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s, she said. Team scientists believe astronauts could use the moon's natural resources to maintain the outpost, and could use the base to prepare for the trip to Mars, an objective also set forth by Bush. Sorties to other locations on the moon could also be carried out from the outpost, Dale said." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 4 December 2006
  "Perform a Google search on 'lost luggage complaint' and it returns a list of horror stories to chill even the heartiest frequent flier. At a time when fuller flights and heightened security means more luggage is being checked -- and lost -- than ever before, some airlines and airports are hoping that radio frequency identification, or RFID, will dig them out from under a mountain of misrouted bags. Baggage checked at large airports today is shunted into a system of conveyer belts, switches and ramps designed to move luggage quickly to the proper plane. The system's key -- and its Achilles' heel -- is the luggage tag attached to each checked bag, printed with passenger data and flight information, as well as a bar code and 10-digit identifier. Laser scanners read each bar code as it passes, guiding luggage through the system and sending data on each bag's location to a central database so missing luggage can be traced." Learn more in Wired News.

• 1 December 2006
  "Mobile phones may be one of our smaller electronic possessions, but the environmental issues surrounding them are proving to be a sizeable challenge. The sheer number of the devices sold around the globe is startling. David McQueen, principal analyst for handsets at Informa Telecoms and Media, says that an estimated 940-980 million phones will be sold this year. 'Next year, if growth in the market continues at about the current rate, there will be more than a billion brand new handsets sold around the world - it is a massive market,' he observes. 'If you take these figures over the years since the late 80s, when phones first came on the market, there has got to be at least five billion handsets in existence.'" Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 30 November 2006
  "Dick Loveless is comfortable with uncertainty. In one sense, that's just a job description. After all, he's a particle physicist, and something called the uncertainty principle is one of the basic underpinnings of his field. But driving across the countryside here on the way to CERN's new Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, particle accelerator, Loveless means something else. 'I'm looking for new physics,' he says. 'This is a new land. We're like Columbus here. I don't know what we'll find.' He's not alone. This new particle-smasher is designed to be nothing less than a gateway to the big bang's explosive early moments. But only with the help of the four major experiments being built astride it, designed to capture the radioactive debris thrown off by collisions, will scientists begin to understand exactly what they are seeing." Learn more in Wired News.

• 29 November 2006
  "Brightness changes of clock-like regularity have been found in a source of gamma rays for the first time. Studying these variations should help astronomers solve the mystery of how these very high energy gamma rays are produced. They also provide the first clear sign outside the laboratory of light being converted into particles of matter and antimatter. Gamma rays coming from a system called LS 5039 were first detected in 2005 by the High Energy Stereoscopic System. HESS is an observatory in Namibia that detects gamma rays by observing their effects on particles in Earth's atmosphere. The LS 5039 system consists of a compact object – either a black hole or neutron star – orbiting a star with 20 times the mass of the Sun. The gamma rays are thought to be emitted by electrons accelerating to very high speeds, beyond anything achievable in the most powerful particle physics experiments on Earth. But exactly where and how the electrons get accelerated to such high speeds in this system is a mystery." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 28 November 2006
  "The stellar baby boom period of the Milky Way sparked a flowering and crashing of life here on Earth, a new study suggests.    Some 2.4 billion years ago when the Milky Way started upping its star production, —high-speed atocosmic raysmic particles—started pouring onto our planet, causing instability within the living. Populations of bacteria and algae repeatedly soared and crashed in the oceans. The researchers counted the amount of carbon-13 within sedimentary rocks, the most common rocks exposed on the Earth's surface. When algae and bacteria were growing in the oceans, they took in carbon-12, so the ocean had an abundance of carbon-13.Many sea creatures use carbon-13 to make their shells. If there is a lot of carbon-13 stored in rocks, it means life, the origin of which is still unknown, was booming.  Therefore, variations in carbon-13 are a good indicator of the productivity of life on Earth." Learn more in Space.com.

• 27 November 2006
  "People who receive stem cell transplants for diseases such as leukaemia appear to face a higher risk of developing secondary cancers, especially if the cells come from a female donor, according to a preliminary study. The scientists behind the new report caution that future stem cell treatments for ailments such as spinal cord injury and heart failure might also carry a cancer risk. However, experts point out that the study is far from conclusive and more work needs to be done to confirm a link between stem cell transplants and tumours. Donna Forrest of the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Canada, and colleagues, reviewed the medical records of more than 900 adult patients who had received haematopoietic stem cell transplants, also known as bone marrow transplants, in the past two decades. The vast majority of these transplant recipients were suffering from leukaemia." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 22 November 2006
  "So much to do, so little time. Between a hectic work schedule and a thriving social life, Yves (not his real name), a 31- year-old software developer from Seattle, often doesn't have time for a full night's sleep. So he swallows something to make sure he doesn't need one. 'If I take a dose just before I go to bed, I can wake up after 4 or 5 hours and feel refreshed,' he says. 'The alarm goes off and I'm like, let's go!' Yves is talking about modafinil, a stimulant that since its launch seven years ago has acquired a near-mythical reputation for wiring you awake without the jitters, euphoria and eventual crash that come after caffeine or amphetamines. Modafinil is just the first of a wave of new lifestyle drugs that promise to do for sleep what the contraceptive pill did for sex - unshackle it from nature. Since time immemorial, humans have structured their lives around sleep. In the near future, we will, for the first time, be able to significantly structure the way we sleep to suit our lifestyles." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 21 November 2006
  "Peeling back both space and time, scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have found that the strange force known as dark energy appears to have existed for at least the past two-thirds of the universe's history. Dark energy is a mysterious repulsive force that opposes gravity, causing the universe to expand. Albert Einstein posited that a form of the force existed nearly a century ago by, but it was not discovered until 1998. Scientists believe dark energy makes up about 70 percent of the substance of the universe. Scientists can measure the strength of dark energy by looking at distant galaxies for a type of exploding star known as a Type 1A supernova. Because these supernovae release known amounts of energy, measuring the amount of light arriving on Earth serves as a convenient distance marker to any galaxy in which one is observed." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 17 November 2006
  "An Indian blood bank plans to take advantage of the country's booming birth rate by opening a repository for blood taken from umbilical cords. But critics worry that without proper oversight, the massive bank could put a price tag on umbilical cords, putting the country's millions of impoverished women and children at risk of exploitation. Cord blood is used in the treatment of many ailments, especially blood diseases like leukemia, thalassemia and sickle cell anemia. With 43 million births a year, India is poised to be the largest supplier of umbilical cord blood in the world. LifeCell, based here, hopes to open a cord-blood bank in December. The bank would serve anyone in the world with access to FedEx. Most experts agree that public cord-blood banking is a good idea. Stem cells from both cord blood and bone marrow treat many blood diseases, but cord blood is easier to obtain." Learn more in Wired News.

• 16 November 2006
  "The archaic human species that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago is about to emerge from the shadows. With the help of a new DNA sequencing machine that operates with firefly light, the bones of the Neanderthals have begun to tell their story to geneticists. One million units of Neanderthal DNA have already been analyzed, and a draft version of the entire genome, 3.2 billion units in length, should be ready in two years, said Dr. Svante Paabo, the leader of the research project at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Biologists expect knowledge of the Neanderthal genome to reveal, by its differences with the human genome, many distinctive qualities of what it means to be human. Researchers also hope to resolve such questions as whether the Neanderthals spoke, their hair and skin color, and whether they interbred at all with the modern humans who first arrived on their doorstep 45,000 years ago, or were driven to extinction without leaving any genetic legacy." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 15 November 2006
  "The tangle of cables and plugs needed to recharge today's electronic gadgets could soon be a thing of the past. US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires. The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said. Although the team has not built and tested a system, computer models and mathematics suggest it will work. 'There are so many autonomous devices such as cell phones and laptops that have emerged in the last few years,' said Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the researchers behind the work. 'We started thinking, 'it would be really convenient if you didn't have to recharge these things.' 'And because we're physicists we asked, 'what kind of physical phenomenon can we use to do this wireless energy transfer?'" Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 14 November 2006
  "At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high. On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface. The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 13 November 2006
  "Using internet search engine Google can help doctors diagnose tricky cases, researchers have said. A team of Australian doctors Googled the symptoms of 26 cases for a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. In 15 cases, the web search came up with the right diagnosis, the paper published on the British Medical Journal website reports. The authors say Google can be a 'useful aid', but UK experts said the internet was 'no replacement' for doctors. Google is the most popular search engine on the web, with access to more than three billion medical articles - and searching for health information is one of the most common uses of the web. And while doctors carry a huge amount of medical information in their heads, they may need to seek further help if they come up against an unusual case." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 10 November 2006
  "When Stephen Devine drove with his family from their home in Massachusetts to New York City, he spent two frustrating hours trying to find a place to park his 9-foot-high camper van, which won't fit in most garages. In the end, his 17-year-old daughter found a place to park online -- and she didn't even have to leave the van to do it. Devine's van is equipped with TracNet, a system that allows passengers to access the Internet on a vehicle's video screens. Launched in September by Middletown, Rhode Island-based KVH Industries Inc., TracNet brings the Internet to the installed screens in a car, truck, RV or boat. It also turns the entire vehicle into a wireless hot spot, so passengers can use their laptops to go online. Devine -- who also purchased KVH's satellite TV system, called TracVision, when he bought his camper a month ago -- said the value of in-vehicle Internet became obvious at that moment in New York." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 9 November 2006
  "A colossal reservoir of energy stored up under the Tibetan plateau has been discovered – and it can only be fully released by mega-earthquakes striking about every 1000 years, researchers have found. The study suggests that earthquakes in the past 200 years in the central Himalaya, while catastrophic, are small in comparison to what the region has seen in the past - and will see again. The energy builds up as the result of the collision between the Indian subcontinent and Asia, and the movement of the two continental plates was tracked using GPS technology. The reservoir of energy is so large because of the nature of the two plates. They are both continental, and therefore made of relatively low density rocks. This means that, rather than one heavier, denser plate plunging deep under a lighter plate, as happens when dense oceanic crust plunges under a continental plate, they both strive to float near the surface of the planet. This generate a lot of friction, causing a huge amount of energy to be stored underneath Tibet." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 8 November 2006
  "The Australian senate has voted to permit the use of cloned human embryos for stem cell research, sparking an emotional debate on the ethics of the scientific procedure. New legislation overturning a four-year ban on therapeutic cloning was passed by 34 votes to 32 in a late-night session on Tuesday, marked by warnings of a nightmarish future in which scientists create monsters. The legislation will now go before the House of Representatives, where it is expected to be approved and become law. Australia's Prime Minister John Howard allowed a rare conscience vote on the issue, giving senators and members of parliament the freedom to vote outside party lines. The bill would let researchers clone human embryos so that their stem cells could be used for research that could one day finding cures for debilitating diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and spinal cord injuries." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 7 November 2006
  "Governments must make a dramatic shift towards climate-friendly energy policies to avoid global economic disruption, industrialised countries warn. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which involves 26 governments, says that business as usual could lead to price shocks and sudden interruptions in energy supply, as well as a huge growth in climate-wrecking carbon dioxide emissions. 'The energy future we are facing today, based on projections of current trends, is dirty, insecure and expensive,' says IEA's Executive Director Claude Mandil. 'New government policies can create an alternative energy future which is clean, clever and competitive.' The IEA, based in Paris, was asked by world leaders at the last two G8 summits, at Gleneagles in Scotland and St Petersburg in Russia, to advise on future energy scenarios. In response, it is today publishing World Energy Outlook 2006, which examines how countries can reduce their dependence on imported fossil fuels." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 6 November 2006
  "Tracking traffic can be an expensive business. In some places, costly cameras and radar systems are mounted high above highways to watch traffic at strategic points. Transportation agencies also dig up roads to install sensors that monitor the flow. And helicopters roam the skies of the busiest cities, relaying information on the choked roadways to media outlets. Atlanta's horrendous traffic has inspired two companies that are looking to monitor many more roads and highways than is done today and at a much lower cost. Their approach: Track the signals of cell phones that happen to be inside cars. By using anonymous data from wireless providers to mark how fast cell-phone handsets are moving -- and overlaying that information with location data and maps -- IntelliOne and AirSage hope to offer more detailed information and pragmatic advice than other firms that monitor traffic through radar, helicopters or cameras. But some critics aren't so sure the benefits outweigh the potential privacy risks." Learn more in Wired News.

• 3 November 2006
  "Unless humans act now, seafood may disappear by 2048, concludes the lead author of a new study that paints a grim picture for ocean and human health. According to the study, the loss of ocean biodiversity is accelerating, and 29 percent of the seafood species humans consume have already crashed. If the long-term trend continues, in 30 years there will be little or no seafood available for sustainable harvest. The increasing pace of diversity loss thus imperils the 'ecosystems services' that many human populations depend on for survival, the study says. The research also found that biodiversity loss is tightly linked to declining water quality, harmful algal blooms, ocean dead zones, fish kills, and coastal flooding. 'Biodiversity is a finite resource, and we are going to end up with nothing left...if nothing changes,' said Boris Worm, an assistant professor of marine conservation biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada." Learn more in National Geographic News.

• 2 November 2006
  "A newly discovered bird flu strain has emerged in China and has spread rapidly through poultry in Southeast Asia. Human infections by the new strain have also turned up in several locations, including both farms and urban centers, intensifying fears of a worldwide flu pandemic that could kill millions. Magnifying those concerns is the vaccine-selective nature of the new strain, which means that existing animal vaccines are less effective on it than they are on previously known bird flu types. 'This virus seemed to spread very fast over a big geographic region,' said Yi Guan, director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong in China. A team led by Guan discovered the new strain—dubbed 'Fujian-like'—while monitoring chickens, ducks, and geese in Chinese markets, including several in Fujian Province. 'However, we don't have any evidence to show whether this virus is more dangerous or less dangerous than any other H5N1 [bird flu] viruses,' Guan said." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 1 November 2006
  "If pigeons wrote their own blogs, they might talk about where to score breadcrumbs or find prime roosting spots. Now, with the help of tiny high-tech backpacks, pigeons really have become bloggers—but they're posting messages about California smog. In a project known as PigeonBlog, sensors in the backpacks collect data on toxic gases, such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, as the birds wing through city skies. The information is then sent back to a central computer, which automatically posts a map of the pollutants' concentration on the Internet. Beatriz da Costa, a professor of arts, computation, and engineering at the University of California, Irvine, dreamed up the idea. One of the inspirations for the project was moving to California and 'seeing the smog in L.A.,' she said. 'It's pretty bad out here.' Around the same time she ran across a century-old photo of a pigeon with a camera around its neck. 'Pigeons were clearly one of our first...delivery systems,' da Costa said. She decided to update this idea for the 21st century and 'use pigeons as journalists to report on a current situation.'" Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 26 October 2006
  "Play 'I Spy' in the world of industrial design, and you can see nature mimicked: a Mercedes-Benz modeled after a tropical boxfish, a PC fan that looks like a seashell or a building that copies the ventilation of a termite mound. But it's no game. Scientists call it biomimicry when human-made designs are inspired by nature. Though it's not mainstream quite yet, biomimicry is a fast-growing field of research and development in corporate and academic environments because some believe it could help solve global energy problems, reduce waste and promote sustainability. To Janine Benyus, who wrote a book on the subject and spoke here this week, the field of study is a tonic to the bad news about global warming. Benyus, a natural history writer, runs the nonprofit Biomimicry Institute, which consults with companies on possibilities for new products and research. 'It's definitely springtime in the world of biomimicry--innovation inspired by life's design,' said Benyus, speaking at the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. 'One of the reasons...is that we're ready to listen to ideas that are not our own.'" Learn more at News.com.

• 25 October 2006
  "The half-human, half-robot cyborg has long been a vision nurtured by science fiction writers and futurologists. But how close are we to humans version 2.0, computer-enhanced people? Ray Kurzweil, a renowned American inventor and futurist, supplements his daily diet with a cocktail of 250 pills. Now in his mid-fifties, Kurzweil is attempting to extend his life until 2029. This is when he believes science will have made two huge breakthroughs; understanding how the human mind works and the creation of computers that are equal to its power. If Mr Kurzweil is right the implications could be profound. 'In 25 years from now...we will have both the hardware and the software to recreate human intelligence in a machine,' he says. Once computers have the processing power of the human brain it will be possible to enhance our intelligence with silicon implants and even download the contents of our minds to machines, preserving them forever. Mr Kurzweil is saying that in just a few decades humans could, in effect, become immortal." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 24 October 2006
  "In 2004, Kenneth R. Feinberg, special master of the federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, awarded $2.6 million to the family of a downtown office worker who died from a rare lung disease five months after fleeing from the dust cloud released when the twin towers fell. That decision made the worker, Felicia Dunn-Jones, a 42-year-old lawyer, the first official fatality of the dust, and one of only two deaths to be formally linked to the toxic air at ground zero. The New York City medical examiner’s office, however, has refused to put her on its official list of 9/11 victims, saying that by its standards there was insufficient medical evidence to link her death to the dust. Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s case shows how difficult it can be to prove a causal connection with any scientific certainty — and how even government agencies can disagree. With thousands of people now seeking compensation and treatment for dust exposure, the debate about the relationship between the toxic particles and disease will be a central issue in the flood of Sept. 11-related lawsuits." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 23 October 2006
  "Pope Benedict told scientists on Saturday that by believing only in "artificial intelligence" and technology they risked the fate of the mythical Icarus, whose home-made wings melted when he flew too close to the sun. 'Contemporary life gives pride of place to an artificial intelligence ever more enslaved to experimental tecnhiques, thereby forgetting that all science should safeguard mankind and promote his tendency to authentic goodness,' the Pope said. The German-born Pope, a theology professor and an enforcer of Vatican dogma before his election as pontiff last year, has voiced his concerns about some areas of scientific research that clash with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Like his predecessor Pope John Paul II, Benedict is against stem cell technology, which researchers say could help cure serious illnesses but the Church opposes it because it often relies on cells from embryo tissue." Learn more at ABC News.com.

• 20 October 2006
  "The first known organisms that live totally independently of the sun have been discovered deep in a South African gold mine. The bacteria exist without the benefit of photosynthesis by harvesting the energy of natural radioactivity to create food for themselves. Similar life forms may exist on other planets, experts speculate. The bacteria live in ancient water trapped in a crack in basalt rock, 3 to 4 kilometres down. Scientists from Princeton University in New Jersey, US, and colleagues analysed water from the fissure after it was penetrated by a narrow exploratory shaft in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. The shaft was then closed. There were many species of bacteria present, but RNA sequencing showed most were a previously-unknown type of bacteria dubbed Desulfotomaculum. 'Similar microbes have been detected in many subsurface environments,' study leader Li-Hung Lin, now at National Taiwan University, told New Scientist. 'What is unique in our study is that this microbial community doesn’t depend on photosynthetic products.'" Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 19 October 2006
  "'Trap' streets, phantom churches, and typos are just some of the dangers travelers might face when navigating the streets of Great Britain. That's because, unlike in the United States, the British government holds copyright on the data it produces—including maps—and it licenses that data mostly to corporate buyers. In rare cases, corporate map producers have added a ghost or two to the government's data: nuggets of false information known as Easter eggs that serve as clues for protecting copyrights. Earlier this year London's Guardian newspaper cracked one such Easter egg—a trap street identified as the nonexistent cul-de-sac of Lye Close—in the A-Z Map Company's street map for the English city of Bristol. After the report was released, an A-Z representative promised to delete the fake feature in all future maps." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 18 October 2006
  "Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said. Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge. The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology. People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added. The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the 'underclass' humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 17 October 2006
  "Scientists located a rare meteorite in a wheat field thanks to new ground penetrating radar technology that someday might be used on Mars. The dig in Kansas Monday was likely the most documented excavation yet of a meteorite find, with researchers painstakingly using brushes and hand tools in order to preserve evidence of the impact trail and to date the event of the meteorite strike. Soil samples were also bagged and tagged, and organic material preserved for dating purposes. Even before they had the meteorite out of the ground, the scientific experts at the site were able to debunk prevailing wisdom that the spectacular meteorite fall of Brenham, Kansas, occurred 20,000 years ago. Its location in the Pleistocene epoch soil layer puts that date closer to 10,000 years ago. 'We know it is recent,' said Carolyn Sumners, director of Astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, as she surveyed progress on the dig. 'Native Americans could have seen it.'" Learn more at CNN.com.

• 16 October 2006
  "A newly developed genetic 'roadmap' promises to streamline the drug discovery process. Called the Connectivity Map, this public database matches drug compounds with diseased cells and the processes occurring within them. 'The reason it's so difficult to find those disease and drug connections is that the languages in which they are conventionally described are very different,' says Justin Lamb, senior scientist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA. 'A physician would describe a disease in terms of its physical symptoms, whereas a chemist would describe drug actions in terms of binding that chemical to a particular protein.' The researchers want to bridge that gap using a common language: gene-expression signatures." Learn more in the Technology Review.

• 13 October 2006
  "One day, a U.S. soldier entering tense situations without the assistance of an Arabic interpreter might rely on two-way translation software in mobile computers. This year the military's Joint Forces Command has been testing laptops with such software in Iraq. When someone speaks into a microphone attached to the computer, the machine translates it into Arabic and reads that translation aloud over the PC's speakers. The software then translates the Arabic speaker's response and utters it in English. If the software is uncertain about what one party said, it presents choices on the computer screen for the speaker to choose. The military has had variations on this. Troops in Afghanistan had a gadget called the Phraselator that could speak a list of commonly useful phrases such as 'get out of the car.'" Learn more at CNN.com.

• 12 October 2006
  "Small changes in Earth's orbit and tilt may have regulated the cyclical rise and fall of many prehistoric mammal species, new research suggests. Earth's orbital patterns are believed to drive long-term climate change. Over millions of years these climatic shifts may have regularly spawned events that give rise to new mammal species. They may have also caused the periodic extinctions that doomed other mammal lineages to oblivion, says a team of researchers led by paleontologist Jan van Dam of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. 'The question of climate's role in causing both evolution and extinction has been a big area of contention,' said Tony Barnosky, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 11 October 2006
  "The internet could one day be broken up into separate networks around the world, a leading light in the development of the net has warned. Nitin Desai, chair of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), set up by the UN, warned that concerns over the net's future could lead to separation. 'People are concerned about whether the system we have now will also work five years from now,' he said. Mr Desai was speaking at a conference in London to discuss the net. The conference was organised by Nominet, the UK body in charge of domain names ending .uk, ahead of the first-ever Internet Governance Forum, a global gathering of stakeholders in Athens later this month. Mr Desai said there were tensions about the future regulation of the net and over specific issues such as international domain names." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 10 October 2006
  "The first generation of nanotechnology-based food industry products has entered the market, raising new issues for the Food and Drug Administration. What if the candy maker Mars could come up with an additive to the coating of its M&Ms and Skittles that would keep them fresher longer and inhibit melting? Or if scientists at Unilever could shrink the fat particles (and thereby the calories) in premium ice cream without sacrificing its taste and feel? These ideas are still laboratory dreams. The common thread in these research projects and in product development at many other food companies is nanotechnology, the name for a growing number of techniques for manipulating matter in dimensions as small as single molecules. Food companies remain wary of pushing the technology--which is named for the nanometer, or a billionth of a meter--too far and too fast for safety-conscious consumers. But they are tantalized by nanotechnology's capacity to create valuable and sometimes novel forms of everyday substances." Learn more in News.com.

• 6 October 2006
  "A company that developed technology capable of creating water out of thin air nearly anywhere in the world is now under contract to nourish U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq. The water-harvesting technology was originally the brainchild of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which sought ways to ensure sustainable water supplies for U.S. combat troops deployed in arid regions like Iraq. 'The program focused on creating water from the atmosphere using low-energy systems that could reduce the overall logistics burden for deployed forces and provide potable water within the reach of the war fighter any place, any time,' said Darpa spokeswoman Jan Walker. To achieve this end, Darpa gave millions to research companies like LexCarb and Sciperio to create a contraption that could capture water in the Mesopotamian desert. But it was another company, Aqua Sciences, that developed a product on its own and was first to put a product on the market that can operate in harsh climates." Learn more in Wired News.

• 5 October 2006
  "Beaming people in 'Star Trek' fashion is still in the realms of science fiction, but physicists in Denmark have teleported information from light to matter bringing quantum communication and computing closer to reality. Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second. But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter. 'It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium,' Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 4 October 2006
  "Scientists say they are developing an entirely new way of providing instant protection against flu. In preliminary tests, it was found to protect animals against various strains of the virus - and may also protect against future pandemic strains. University of Warwick researchers used a flu virus naturally stripped of some genetic material to compete with other invading flu viruses. This slowed the rate of infection so much the body could fight it off. In effect, the invading virus became its own vaccine by triggering an immune response sufficiently powerful to neutralise it before it could gain a strong enough foothold. The Warwick team plan to develop the treatment as a nasal spray. Experts warned much more testing was required." Learn more in the BBC.com.

• 3 October 2006
  "The winners of last year's Pentagon-sponsored robot race are back to take on another challenge -- this time to develop a vehicle that can drive through congested city traffic all by itself. Stanford University, whose unmanned Volkswagen dubbed Stanley won last year's desert race, was among 11 teams selected Monday to receive government money to participate in a contest requiring robots to carry out a simulated military supply mission. Stanford, which teamed up with the German automaker again, will enter a Passat sedan outfitted with the latest sensors, lasers and other high-tech gear. Engineers have tested the car on a closed course and will begin actual tests after scientists finish writing the program that will serve as the car's brain. 'It's definitely a more challenging problem scientifically,' said team member David Stavens." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 2 October 2006
  "It was his infant son’s cries, gasping and insistent, that first woke Salif Oudrawogol one night last month. The smell hit him moments later, wafting into the family’s hut, a noxious mélange reminiscent of rotten eggs, garlic and petroleum. Mr. Oudrawogol went outside to investigate. Beside the family’s compound, near his manioc and corn fields, he saw a stinking slick of black sludge. 'The smell was so bad we were afraid,' Mr. Oudrawogol said. 'It burned our noses and eyes.' Over the next few days, the skin of his 6-month-old son, Salam, bloomed with blisters, which burst into weeping sores all over his body. The whole family suffered headaches, nosebleeds and stomach aches. How that slick, a highly toxic cocktail of petrochemical waste and caustic soda, ended up in Mr. Oudrawogol’s backyard in a suburb north of Abidjan is a dark tale of globalization." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 29 September 2006
  "A continental crash that raised one of the biggest mountain chains in the Earth's history may be responsible for the explosive diversification of animals more than 500 million years ago. Sediments washed from the mountains – dubbed the Transgondwanan Supermountain – added vital nutrients to the ocean, opening new evolutionary opportunities, says Rick Squire, now at Monash University in Clayton, Victoria, Australia. The rapid proliferation of animals that occurred at that time is one of evolution's biggest enigmas. Life had remained simple and largely single-celled for nearly three billion years, until the multi-celled Ediacara fauna evolved, 575 million years ago." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 28 September 2006
  "An experiment to reconstruct the deadly 1918 flu virus has given a new insight into how the infection took hold. Scientists discovered a severe immune system reaction was triggered when mice were infected with the recreated virus. The US team believe the extreme immune response could have provoked the body to begin killing its own cells, making the flu even deadlier. The study, published in Nature, may aid the hunt for new treatments. The 1918 pandemic took about 50 million lives. The devastating infection, which is thought to have originated in birds, left young adults worst hit. Scientists in the US have reconstructed the H1N1 virus in a bid to better understand how it became such an effective killer - and to also bolster knowledge in the face of current H5N1 bird flu threat." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 27 September 2006
  "French doctors carried out the world's first ever operation on a human in zero gravity on Wednesday, using a specially adapted aircraft to simulate conditions in space. During a 3-hour flight from Bordeaux in southwest France, the team of surgeons and anaesthetists successfully removed a benign tumour from the forearm of a 46-year-old volunteer. The experiment was part of a programme backed by the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop techniques for performing robotic surgery aboard the International Space Station or at a future Moon base. 'We weren't trying to perform technical feats but to carry out a feasibility test . . . Now we know that a human being can be operated on in space without too many difficulties,' team leader Dominique Martin said after the flight." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 26 September 2006
  "The Earth's rapid warming has pushed temperatures to their hottest level in nearly 12,000 years – and a hair’s breadth away from a million-year peak – according to a NASA study. Global warming, which has increased temperatures by 0.2°C per decade over the past 30 years, has caused temperatures to reach and now pass through the warmest levels in the current interglacial period, which lasted almost 12,000 years. The study, led by James Hansen and colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, reports that Earth is now within about 1°C of the maximum estimated temperature of the past million years. 'That means that further global warming of 1.0°C defines a critical level. If warming is kept less than that, effects of global warming may be relatively manageable,' he says." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 25 September 2006
  "Hanging chads made it difficult to read voter intentions in 2000. Hotel minibar keys may do the same for the elections in November. The mechanics of voting have undergone a major change since the imbroglio that engulfed presidential balloting in 2000. Embarrassed by an election that had to be settled by the Supreme Court, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which provided funds to improve voting equipment. From 2003 to 2005, some $3 billion flew out of the federal purse for equipment purchases. Nothing said 'state of the art' like a paperless voting machine that electronically records and tallies votes with the tap of a touch screen. Election Data Services, a political consulting firm that specializes in redistricting, estimates that about 40 percent of registered voters will use an electronic machine in the coming elections." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 22 September 2006
  "Scientists have long said the only way to restore Louisiana’s vanishing wetlands is to undo the elaborate levee system that controls the Mississippi River, not with the small projects that have been tried here and there, but with a massive diversion that would send the muddy river flooding wholesale into the state’s sediment-starved marshes. And most of them have long dismissed the idea as impractical, unaffordable and lethal to the region’s economy. Now, they are reconsidering. In fact, when a group of researchers convened last April to consider the fate of the Louisiana coast, their recommendation was unanimous: divert the river. Far from rejecting the idea, state officials have embraced it, motivated not just by the lessons of Hurricane Katrina but also by growing fears that global climate change will bring rising seas, accelerating land loss and worse weather." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 21 September 2006
  "The U.S. Commerce Department said Wednesday it will extend its oversight of the California organization that handles domain name policies, while finding ways to improve the group's accountability and transparency. John Kneuer, the department's acting assistant secretary for communications and information, said the government's current agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers works and should continue. Commerce plans to renew a memorandum of understanding with ICANN, but it will likely add provisions designed to address complaints that the group is sometimes too secret and makes decisions that don't reflect the internet community at large." Learn more in Wired News.

• 20 September 2006
  "Nasa's lunar exploration plans have been strongly endorsed by an influential panel of US scientists. The Moon provided great opportunities for robotic and human space exploration, said a report by the National Academy of Sciences. The 15-member panel was asked to evaluate and give advice on Nasa's lunar research programme. President Bush vowed two years ago to return astronauts to the Moon, with the eventual goal of landing on Mars. He told the US space agency (Nasa) to devote $12.5bn (£9.5bn) over five years for the early stages of the programme, with a goal of landing astronauts on the Moon between 2015 and 2020. Some scientists have criticised the plans, saying they divert funds from research programmes that have no direct bearing on long-distance human spaceflight." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 19 September 2006
  "This summer, as 100 of the world's finest, fastest and most fuel-hungry cars in the world congregated in Times Square for the Bullrun Rally, another unique vehicle made its debut. Under the overcast skies, surrounded by slack-jawed tourists and visibly stunned Yankees, rumbled Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Rolls Royces and Porsches. One vehicle attracted stares and puzzled looks of non-recognition, even among some of the world's rarest cars such as limited-run hand-built exotics like Panoz, Mosler and Spyker. There, in the luxury rally's menagerie of supercars, squatted a boxy, cumbersome Hummer H2. It wasn't horsepower, top speed or an intemperate thirst for petrol that set this Hummer apart. No, it was a length-long banner reading "Hydrogen" stretched across its side. The first of its kind to attempt a cross-country endurance rally -- almost 3,700 miles in eight short days -- the Hydrogen Hummer was prepped to make history. Cyclone Energy's hybrid vehicle, built to operate on a mixture of normal petroleum augmented by a stream of hydrogen, would be the first hydrogen-abetted vehicle to attempt a super-rally." Learn more in Wired News.

• 18 September 2006
  "A radically different way to reach outer space -- the space elevator -- may finally be getting off the ground floor thanks to recent huge advances in technology. Traveling thousands of miles into the cosmos up a length of super-strong material, it is believed that the space elevator could revolutionize space exploration by providing an affordable means of transporting satellites, space station supplies, and one day even tourists into space. The concept of the space elevator was first mooted by Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov in the 1960s, and until recently has remained more familiar to fans of science fiction, such as Arthur C. Clarke's1979 novel, 'The Fountains of Paradise.' Previous ideas, such as lassoing one end of the elevator cable to an asteroid in geo-stationary orbit, haven't helped the concept to be accepted as a serious project. However there is a growing recognition that what once seemed a starry idea is not merely feasible but probable." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 15 September 2006
  "The first tree to have its full DNA code unravelled is a poplar. The genome of the black cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa) was sequenced in a four-year international project led by US institutions. The work, reported in Science journal, shows the poplar tree has far less DNA in its cells than humans or other mammals, but twice the number of genes. Researchers say the new information will be a boon to the understanding of plant biology and evolution. The forestry industry also expects the genomic data to help it improve the yield and quality of its products, such as bioethanol. 'Under optimal conditions, poplars can add a dozen feet of growth each year and reach maturity in as few as four years, permitting selective breeding for large-scale sustainable plantation forestry,' said Dr Sam Foster of the US Forest Service." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 14 September 2006
  "Scientists said on Wednesday that they have found the most distant galaxy yet, nearly 13 billion light-years away, in a discovery that could help explain how stars were formed at the dawn of time. The galaxy, named IOK-1, is so far away that the light waves that reached Earth depict it as the system of stars existed shortly after the Big Bang created the universe 13.66 billion years ago. That period, known to astronomers as the Dark Ages, saw the formation of the first stars and galaxies from elementary particles. Scientists had been unable to directly observe that time period until now. Japanese astronomers working at the Subaru Telescope Facility in Hilo, Hawaii, developed a filter to pick up light that has been stretched over billions of years to the red end of the spectrum by an expanding universe. The scientists, whose findings will be published on Thursday in the journal Nature, said they had expected to find at least six galaxies similar to IOK-1, 12.88 billion light-years away." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 13 September 2006
  "Outbreaks of polio in India and Nigeria are rapidly spreading, and experts warn that new infections could turn into an epidemic of international scale. India's outbreak started in mid-2006 in Moradabad, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh near the border with Nepal. 'The [outbreak] … has now spread throughout Uttar Pradesh state and into other nearby states,' said Jay Wenger, project manager at the National Polio Surveillance Project, a joint effort between the UN and the Indian government. The latest estimates by the UN's World Health Organization (WHO) place the number of polio cases in India this year at 249, compared to just 35 in 2005. The entire area of western Uttar Pradesh is acting as a reservoir for the wild poliovirus, Wenger says, and the disease has already spread outside the country. Meanwhile, a separate polio outbreak is ravaging Nigeria, where the outlook is similarly grim." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 12 September 2006
  "When it comes to life expectancy, the US is far from one nation. According to a new analysis of health disparities, there are in fact eight Americas – some of them more reminiscent of developing countries than a global superpower. Life expectancy in the US varies widely by race and socioeconomic status. Now researchers led by Majid Ezzati of the Harvard School of Public Health have thrown geography into the mix. They examined death records for people in more than 3000 counties and divided the population into eight groups ac-cording to race, income and geographic location. Some groups were confined to a relatively small area – Native Americans in the western states, for example. Another group, labelled 'Middle America', was mostly white, fairly wealthy, and accounted for the majority of the popula-tion." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 11 September 2006
  "Drugs that work by blocking communication between bacteria – rather than killing them – may provide us with a much-needed new arsenal of antibiotics, researchers report. Such compounds are less likely to cause antibiotic resistance because they do not directly influence bacterial growth, say the researchers, who are using a new microwave-based technology to identify the compounds. Microbes communicate with each other using chemical signals in a process known as “quorum sensing”: when the bacteria sense that sufficient numbers of them exist within a host they launch a coordinated attack to release toxins. The new compounds work by disrupting the chemical signalling between bacteria so that they are unable to spread. Recent studies have shown the promise of this approach. For example, an engineered compound made of amino acids stopped S. aureus from producing at least two toxins that contribute to its virulence. However, finding the right compounds to create this interference can be a timely task. Now, researchers say that a microwave-based technology can accelerate this process by as much as 100 times." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 8 September 2006
  "The discovery in the mid-1990s of the first planets outside our solar system gave new life to the simmering debate over whether humans are the only intelligent beings in the universe. By now dozens of these so-called exoplanets have been washed by our radio and television broadcasts. But is there anyone on the exoplanets to tune in to those shows? Probably not on the exoplanets we can detect with current instruments. These gas giants have crushingly high gravities and deadly atmospheres. Still, theories abound that life-supporting 'other Earths'—as yet undetectable by astronomers—might exist near such gas giants. So if there are aliens on other Earths, what are they listening to, and why haven't they replied in kind?" Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 7 September 2006
  "New cures, supercrops, and secrets of evolution may emerge from the fast-growing branches of the 'Tree of Life,' scientists say. The increasing availability of genetic information—and the computer technology to analyze it—is allowing researchers to begin drawing a detailed picture of how life on Earth originated, adapted, and diversified. "A huge amount of progress has been made over the last decade," said Michael Donoghue, a biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Donoghue attributes the progress to revolutions in molecular biology and computer technology that allow scientists to see at the genetic level how species are related to each other. When plotted on a page the information looks like a giant, bushy tree, hence the project's nickname. Donoghue is part of an army of scientists working in teams around the U.S. to assemble the tree." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 6 September 2006
  "In rice-growing states, traces of an unapproved genetically modified (GM) rice have been found mixed in with conventional rice meant for human consumption. In Oregon, genetically engineered creeping bentgrass, being tested for possible use on golf courses, has been found miles outside its test beds, making it the first GM plant known to have escaped into the wild. In Hawaii, a federal judge has admonished the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) for displaying "utter disregard" for the state's endangered native plant species. The judge says the USDA failed to conduct research on the environmental effects of fields of experimental corn and sugarcane that had been genetically modified to produce pharmaceuticals. Environmental and food-safety groups have asked for a moratorium on all field tests of experimental drug-producing plants until their safety precautions can be reviewed. Learn more in the Christian Science Monitor.

• 5 September 2006
  "As Chad Kingsbury watches his daughter playing in the sandbox behind their suburban Chicago house, the thought that has flashed through his mind a million times in her two years of life comes again: Chloe will never be sick. Not, at least, with the inherited form of colon cancer that has devastated his family, killing his mother, her father and her two brothers, and that he too may face because of a genetic mutation that makes him unusually susceptible. By subjecting Chloe to a genetic test when she was an eight-cell embryo in a petri dish, Mr. Kingsbury and his wife, Colby, were able to determine that she did not harbor the defective gene. That was the reason they selected her, from among the other embryos they had conceived through elective in vitro fertilization, to implant in her mother’s uterus. Prospective parents have been using the procedure, known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or P.G.D., for more than a decade to screen for genes certain to cause childhood diseases that are severe and largely untreatable. Now a growing number of couples like the Kingsburys are crossing a new threshold for parental intervention in the genetic makeup of their offspring Learn more in the New York Times.

• 1 September 2006
  "In the ongoing debate over global warming, climatologists usually peg carbon dioxide as the most dangerous of the atmosphere's heat- trapping gases. But methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, might be even more problematic. According to Tessa Hill, a geologist at the University of California, Davis, more methane is released into the atmosphere from ocean deposits during periods of warming than previously thought. This expelled methane increases temperatures and releases more methane, creating a positive feedback loop. The research appeared yesterday in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. To assemble her portrait of methane's historical effects on Earth's climate, Hill analyzed samples of preserved tar from ancient undersea rock layers off the California coast." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 31 August 2006
  "Latin America and the Caribbean face a greater risk of more natural disasters because of environmental degradation and climate change, campaigners warn. A report by a coalition of environment and aid groups said the region's weather was becoming less predictable and often more extreme. Evidence showed many areas were more vulnerable because depleted ecosystems were struggling to adapt, they argued. The groups said efforts to end poverty were being undermined as a result. The report, Up in Smoke? Latin America and the Caribbean, presented evidence it said showed that the livelihoods of millions of people in the region were at risk. The report's author, Andrew Simms, from the New Economics Foundation (Nef), said the findings highlighted how climate change was having an impact on global efforts to eradicate poverty." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 30 August 2006
  "Producing iron by electrolysis rather than conventional smelting could prevent the emission of a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. So concludes Donald Sadoway, a materials scientist at MIT in the US who has developed a way producing iron by electrolysing a molten iron oxide in the lab. If the process can be scaled up, it could eliminate the need for conventional smelting, which releases almost a tonne of CO₂ for every tonne of steel produced. In conventional smelting, iron ore is combined with a coal-derived carbon called coke. The coke reacts with the iron, producing CO₂ and carbon monoxide, leaving pure iron behind. Electrolysis produces iron a different way. The iron ore is dissolved in a solvent of silicon dioxide and calcium oxide at 1600°C and an electric current passed through it." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 29 August 2006
  "The thousands of oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico may soon become a source for blockbuster drugs, researchers say. 'They are all very, very rich in organisms' that could provide ingredients for powerful pharmaceuticals, said Lawrence Rouse, the director of the Coastal Marine Institute at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. At least 3,500 oil platforms mine the seafloor beneath the northern Gulf of Mexico and are responsible for about a quarter of U.S. energy production, according to the federal Minerals Management Service. The platforms are essentially artificial reefs, allowing researchers to collect unique organisms without harming natural reefs. Several years ago Rouse and his colleagues looked for undiscovered species by collected algae, bacteria, barnacles, and other creatures from a cross-section of deep and shallow water platforms. New species may produce chemical compounds for their survival that could also benefit humans, such as painkillers or toxins that kill cancer cells." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 28 August 2006
  "The Italian town of Prato has been built on cloth. There is even a museum there dedicated to its history, so there is no better place to weave together traditional Italian know-how with digital technology and come up with the next generation of cloth, what they are calling 'smart fabric'. A company called Luminex has hit on the idea of weaving fibre-optics into fabric, so the wearer can really light up a room when they enter it. Luminex's Cristiano Peruzzi says: 'It is a fabric containing, amongst other things, fibre-optics, but there is also a technical side to it. The system consists of cabling, and the fibre-optics are lit by high-efficiency LEDs. The system powering it varies according to the function.' Luminex's glimmering garments include shining shawls, as well as shirts and trousers that twinkle. But it is not just night-clubbers whose stars are coming out at night." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 25 August 2006
  "Western civilization--or at least a lot of the pipelines, overpasses and other steel structures that keep it humming--is falling apart. Approximately 2.2 million miles of oil and gas pipelines crisscross North America, and the average age of the pipes is 29 years old, according to Gary Jolly, the CEO of Fiber Optic Systems Technology, which sells systems for monitoring the rate of corrosion in beams and pipes. Recently reported corrosion problems in a BP pipeline in Alaska are really more of a symbol of the problem than an isolated incident, he said. And what about all those historically interesting steel bridges built by the Works Projects Administration in the 1930s? 'Half the bridges in North America you wouldn't want to drive on,' he said." Learn more in News.com.

• 24 August 2006
  "The distant icy ball is no longer a true planet, according to a new definition of the term voted on by scientists today. "Whoa! Pluto's dead," said astronomer Mike Brown, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as he watched a Web cast of the vote. 'There are finally, officially, eight planets in the solar system.' In a move sure to generate controversy even as it forces textbooks to be rewritten, Pluto will now be dubbed a 'dwarf planet.' But it's no longer part of an exclusive club, since there would be more than 40 of these dwarfs, including the large asteroid Ceres and 2003 UB313, nicknamed Xena—a distant object slightly larger than Pluto discovered by Brown last year. Researchers voted on the definition at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Prague, in the Czech Republic. This group decides on the official names of all celestial bodies." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 23 August 2006
  "If you thought the sight of New Orleans flooded to the eaves -- its people trapped in attics or cowering on rooftops -- was the nightmare hurricane scenario, think again. Max Mayfield, director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center, says there's plenty of potential for a storm worse than Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,339 people along the U.S. Gulf coast and caused some $80 billion in damage last August. 'People think we have seen the worst. We haven't,' Mayfield told Reuters in an interview at the fortress-like hurricane center in Florida. 'I think the day is coming. I think eventually we're going to have a very powerful hurricane in a major metropolitan area worse than what we saw in Katrina and it's going to be a mega-disaster. With lots of lost lives,' Mayfield said." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 22 August 2006
  "A vaccination that stimulates immune cell production could be key to enabling people with serious spinal injuries to walk again, researchers say. However, the study has been criticised by some experts in the neurological field who remain sceptical about the findings. The controversial research claims come from a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who say that key immune cells can work with stem cells to mend broken spines in mice. Their latest study involved a vaccine that increased the numbers of immune cells, known as T-helper cells, that specifically protect myelin – a protein that coats nerve cells. The vaccine encouraged and protected stem-cells in the spine as they grew and become nerve cells, to such an extent that previously crippled animals were able to resume walking, they say. However, the new claims have reignited a major controversy in neuroscience." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 21 August 2006
  "US astronomers say they have found the first direct evidence for the mysterious stuff called dark matter. Dark matter - which does not emit or reflect enough light to be 'seen' - is thought to make up 25% of the Universe. By contrast, the ordinary matter we can see is believed to make up no more than about 4% of our Universe. Until now, astronomers have only been able to infer the existence of dark matter through the gravitational effects it has on ordinary matter.The researchers have discovered what is effectively the gravitational signature of dark matter. This signature was created by dark matter and normal matter being wrenched apart by the immense collision of two large galaxy clusters." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 18 August 2006
  "Invisibility has long been a fantastical ability exclusively enjoyed by teenage wizards, super heroes and the ultra-advanced civilisations of science fiction. But more pragmatic-minded scientists and engineers now believe that invisibility-enabling technology may be within reach of lesser mortals as well. The key to that possibility is the development of increasingly complex metamaterials -- manmade composites engineered on a nano scale with properties entirely different to anything found in nature. Doctor Ulf Leonhardt, a physicist at Scotland's St. Andrews University who has recently published two papers on the theory behind invisibility technology, said the key was developing a transparent material capable of bending light around an object concealed behind it. 'What you want to do is to surround yourself with a transparent material that is not only transparent but bends the light around you,' Leonhardt told CNN."

• 17 August 2006
  "Rich countries face increasing water shortages, a report by conservation organisation WWF warns. A combination of climate change and poor resource management is leading to water shortages in even the most developed countries, it says. It urges water conservation on a global scale and asks rich states to set an example by repairing ageing water infrastructure and tackling pollution. The report was released in Geneva just ahead of World Water Week. The WWF says economic wealth does not automatically mean plenty of water. Its report reveals that some of the world's wealthiest cities - such as Houston or Sydney - are using more water than can be replenished. In London leaks from ageing water mains are wasting 300 Olympic swimming pools' worth of water every single day, the WWF says. Meanwhile southern Europe is becoming drier as a result of climate change and further north Alpine glaciers - a significant source of water - are shrinking." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 16 August 2006
  "Researchers are launching a project to discover how certain people, dubbed “elite controllers”, are successfully able to fend off the HIV virus without using drugs. More and more cases of such people – also known as 'elite suppressors'– are coming to light. Unlike the sex workers in Kenya identified a decade ago as being HIV-negative despite their constant exposure to the virus, elite controllers are infected, and do develop antibodies to the virus, but at a very, very low level. Their immune system is naturally able to suppress the virus and they remain as healthy and symptom-free as people on antiretroviral drugs, despite not receiving this treatment. 'We have recruited over 100 elite controllers ourselves and an additional 100 through our collaborators,' says Bruce Walker at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, US. 'We are now identifying about 10 a week through word of mouth,' he told New Scientist.

• 15 August 2006
  "Rising temperatures will increase the risk of forest fires, droughts and flooding over the next two centuries, UK climate scientists have warned. Even if harmful emissions were cut now, many parts of the world would face a greater risk of natural disasters, a team from Bristol University said. The projections are based on data from more than 50 climate models looking at the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers gathered results from 52 computer simulations to calculate the risks from climate-induced changes to the world's key ecosystems. They then grouped the results according to the amount of global warming: less than 2C (3.6F); 2-3C (3.6F-5.4F); and more than 3C (5.4F). For each of the temperature ranges, the team assessed the probability of changes in forest cover, the frequency of wildfires and changes to freshwater supplies over the next 200 years." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 14 August 2006
  "A cream, gel or pill that women can use to protect themselves from the AIDS virus is key to stopping the AIDS pandemic, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has given hundreds of millions of dollars to HIV programs, said on Sunday. Gates said he would step up funding for prevention research but said governments and other donors needed to do so also. 'We want to call on everyone here and around the world to help speed up what we hope will be the next big breakthrough in the fight against AIDS--the discovery of a microbicide or an oral prevention drug that can block the transmission of HIV,' Gates said in a speech to open the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto. 'This could mark a turning point in the epidemic, and we have to make it an urgent priority.' A microbicide is a gel or a cream that a woman could use to protect herself against sexual transmission of the AIDS virus. And some studies suggest that certain HIV pills might help protect people from infection." Learn more at News.com.

• 10 August 2006
  "In a 21st century twist on Microsoft's original 'PC in every home' vision, a young company has created a home energy-storage appliance that connects to the power grid--and the Internet. Called GridPoint, the 3-year-old company has developed 'intelligent energy management' systems, which it claims can help people lower their electricity bills. It makes two products: a storage appliance that works in conjunction with a renewable power source, such as solar electric panels, and a back-up power supply unit. Both refrigerator-size boxes are equipped with Net-connected PCs that collect and analyze data on power usage. Using the company's software, people can lower their energy consumption by having the system shut off appliances at certain times. Or people can power their homes from their batteries on a schedule that makes best use of changing electricity tariffs, according to GridPoint." Learn more at News.com.

• 9 August 2006
  "Google has started warning users if they are about to visit a webpage that could harm their computer. The warning will pop up if users click on a link to a page known to host spyware or other malicious programs. The initiative comes out of a larger project cataloguing programs that plague people with unwanted ads, spy on web habits or steal personal data. Google is one of several companies trying to act as an "in-flight adviser" to ensure people stay safe online. The warnings will be seen by anyone using the search engine who clicks on a link to a site identified as harmful by the Stop Badware coalition. Google, PC maker Lenovo and Sun set up this initiative in January 2006 to identify dangerous software and the websites that try to trick people into installing these malicious programs." Learn more in the BBC.com.

• 8 August 2006
  "The bacteria that cause a common food-borne illness show low drug resistance in Australia, unlike similar strains from the United States and Europe, a study has found. Scientists behind the finding say Australia's de facto ban on certain antibiotics in poultry and other livestock helps explain why. In the study, researchers analyzed samples of Campylobacter jejuni bacteria from 585 patients in five Australian states. Scientists found that only 2 percent of the samples were resistant to ciprofloxacin, one of the group of antibiotics known as fluoroquinolonones. By contrast, 18 percent of Campylobacter samples in U.S. patients are immune to fluoroquinolonones, which have been used in the U.S. to prevent or treat respiratory disease in poultry for a decade. The study, led by Leanne Unicomb, a graduate student at Australian National University in Canberra, was published in the May issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 7 August 2006
  "A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has proposed a controversial method for protecting Earth from global warming: seeding the atmosphere with sulfur to reflect the sun's rays. In the current issue of the journal Climate Change, Paul Crutzen of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry suggests injecting particles of sulfur into the stratosphere—the upper layer of the atmosphere—to cool the planet and buy time for humans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The sulfur particles would be dropped from high-altitude balloons or fired into the atmosphere with heavy artillery shells, he says. Once airborne the particles would act like tiny mirrors, bouncing the sun's light and heat back into space. Crutzen's plan would imitate the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions, which send large sulfur-rich clouds into the atmosphere. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, he points out, the huge plume of sulfur cooled the Earth by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degree Celsius) the following year. A relatively small amount of sulfate could produce a level of cooling similar to that caused by the Pinatubo eruption, according to Crutzen's calculations." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 4 August 2006
  "Forecasters at Colorado State University (CSU) have reduced the number of tropical storms they think will form in the Atlantic this season. But they still predict that three major hurricanes will form before November 30. CSU forecasters Phil Klotzbach and William Gray said this morning that 15 named storms will form in the Atlantic Basin, which includes the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Of those storms, seven will develop into hurricanes with winds of at least 74 miles (119 kilometers) an hour. Three will evolve into major storms with winds of at least 111 miles (178 kilometers) an hour, they say. In May, the forecasters had said this hurricane season would be 'very active,' producing five major storms between June 1 and November 30. The 2006 season seems quiet in comparison to the raucous summer of 2005, when an unprecedented 28 named storms formed. So far in 2006 there have been only three named storms, including one minor hurricane. By this time last year two major hurricanes had already formed in the Atlantic." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 3 August 2006
  "African thunderstorms may hold the key to figuring out why hurricanes form, scientists say. Seven to ten times a month, a cluster of storms rolls off Africa's west coast and wends its way over the Atlantic Ocean toward the United States. Scientists are watching these clusters very closely. 'Some are organized and eventually turn into a tropical depression or a tropical storm or a hurricane,' said Robbie Hood, a hurricane scientist at the NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. 'And maybe a hurricane that affects the U.S.' Hood is part of a team of U.S. and European scientists strategically positioned between continental Africa and the Caribbean to study why some of these thunderstorm clusters—called tropical waves—develop into hurricanes, while others fizzle out. 'We know that these waves are the seeds of storms, but we don't understand why most of them do not turn in to anything,' said Bjorn Lambrigtsen, an atmospheric scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 2 August 2006
  "Global warming has loaded the dice in favor of heat waves and may be to blame for the scorching weather across much of the United States and Europe this summer, according to several of the world's leading climate scientists. The U.S has already seen two severe heat waves this summer, and a third is currently frying the Midwest. The U.K. just experienced what may be its hottest July on record. And August, often the warmest month of the year, is just beginning. Scientists at the University of Oxford in England and the Hadley Centre for Climate Research and Prediction in Exeter, England, recently concluded that human-induced global warming has increased the odds by a factor of around six that Europe will see summer heat waves as extreme as that of 2003. That heat wave killed an estimated 20,000 people. And the odds are getting worse. By the middle of this century, every second European summer will be warmer than that of 2003, the scientists say. The study was published in the journal Nature in 2004. Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 1 August 2006
  "When Rene Descartes said, 'I think, therefore I am,' the philosopher probably didn't imagine a stamp-sized clump of rat neurons grown in a dish, hooked to a computer. For years, scientists have learned about brain development by watching the firing patterns of lab-raised brain cells. Until recently, though, the brains-in-a-dish couldn't receive information. Unlike actual gray matter, they could only send signals. Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology figured they could learn more from neuron clumps that acted more like real brains, so they've developed 'neurally controlled animats' -- a few thousand rat neurons grown atop a grid of electrodes and connected to a robot body or computer-simulated virtual environment. In theory, animats seem to cross the line from mass of goo to autonomous brain. But Steve Potter, a neuroscientist and head of the Georgia Tech lab where the animats were created, said his brain clumps won't be reciting French philosophy anytime soon." Learn more in Wired News.

• 31 July 2006
  "More than 95% of e-mail is junk, be it spam, error messages or viruses, report mail monitoring firms. Analysis of the contents of millions of e-mails has revealed that less than 4% is legitimate traffic. Further work has shown that most of this junk mail is originating on hijacked home computers. E-mail security firm Return Path said 99% of the computers it monitors that send mail have been taken over by spammers or virus writers. Return Path reached its estimate by calculating a 'reputation score' for the 20 million net addresses of those machines. The score was derived by analyzing the e-mail traffic sent through those addresses, the number of complaints filed about that address, and if the owner of that address responds to complaints. The vast majority of these net addresses were not good net citizens, said George Bilbrey, spokesman for Return Path. Only 1% of net addresses could be regarded as legitimate sources of mail. The rest, said Mr Bilbrey, were hijacked computers, or bots, used by spammers and other net criminals to send e-mail." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 28 July 2006
  "British engineers are converting street vibrations into electricity and predict a working prototype by Christmas capable of powering facility lights in the busiest areas of a city. 'We can harvest between 5 to 7 watts of energy per footstep that is currently being wasted into the ground,' says Claire Price, director of The Facility Architects, the British firm heading up the Pacesetters Project. 'And a passing train can generate very useful energy to run signaling or to power lights.' Like solar and wind proponents, vibration harvesters argue that abundant, clean energy is all around us and goes to waste. The challenge is how to store the power efficiently so it provides a continual output even if the vibrations from footsteps or passing trains temporarily taper off." Learn more in Wired News.

• 27 July 2006
  "Scientists have long known that sun-baked cities form "heat islands" that make hot days even hotter. But new studies show that as cities grow, these heat islands increasingly affect the summer weather—not just by making cities hotter but by adding ever more power to summer thunderstorms. In Houston, Texas, for example, another two decades of urbanization might be enough to double a small thunderstorm's intensity, increasing the risk of flooding. J. Marshall Shepherd, a meteorologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, found that in 20 years Houston could see regularly see summer storms so large that they cover the entire city—and produce twice the amount of rain. Shepherd reported his findings at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) this spring in Baltimore, Maryland." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 26 July 2006
  "UK drugs firm GlaxoSmithKline believes it has developed a vaccine for the H5N1 deadly strain of bird flu that may be capable of being mass produced by 2007. The vaccine has proved effective at two doses of 3.8 micrograms during clinical trials in Belgium, BBC business editor Robert Peston has learned. It is the size of the dose that is highly significant, Glaxo explained. Firms want the smallest effective dose so that they can get the maximum number of shots out of a quantity of vaccine. Glaxo has yet to publish the results of its tests. The news of the work on a potential vaccine came as Glaxo reported its profits had risen 14% in the three months to June to £1.32bn (US$2.4bn). Glaxo said that governments could order the vaccine for delivery and stockpiling in early 2007. One of Glaxo's main rivals, the French drug company Sanofi Aventis, has also been working on a vaccine." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 25 July 2006
  "On an animal-breeding farm in Siberia are cages housing two colonies of rats. In one colony, the rats have been bred for tameness in the hope of mimicking the mysterious process by which Neolithic farmers first domesticated an animal still kept today. When a visitor enters the room where the tame rats are kept, they poke their snouts through the bars to be petted. The other colony of rats has been bred from exactly the same stock, but for aggressiveness instead. These animals are ferocious. When a visitor appears, the rats hurl themselves screaming toward their bars. “Imagine the most evil supervillain and the nicest, sweetest cartoon animal, and that’s what these two strains of rat are like,” said Tecumseh Fitch, an animal behavior expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who several years ago visited the rats at the farm..The two strains of rat are part of a remarkable experiment started in the former Soviet Union in 1959 by Dmitri K. Belyaev." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 24 July 2006
  "A device that mimics a sea scallop - propelling itself by alternately sucking and blowing - could one day carry drugs to hard-to-reach parts of the human body. 'Our motor has no moving parts and can be powered remotely with no connecting wires,' says Claus-Dieter Ohl, a physicist at the University of Twente in the Netherlands who led the team that built the device. The so-called 'roboscallop' consists of a tube a few millimetres long and about 750 microns in diameter that is closed at one end and contains a bubble of air. Submerging the tube in fluid and bombarding it with sound waves causes the bubble to expand and contract, alternately sucking and blowing liquid from one end of the tube. The process generates thrust because fluid enters the tube from a wide angle but is expelled as a narrow jet. 'It's how a scallop moves,' explains team member Rory Dijkink. 'When you watch our device, it looks as if it is making two steps forward and one step back.'" Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 21 July 2006
  "Researchers in Germany said Thursday that they planned to collaborate with an American company in an effort to reconstruct the genome of Neanderthals, the archaic human species that occupied Europe from 300,000 years ago to 30,000 years ago until being displaced by modern humans. Long a forlorn hope, the sequencing, or decoding, of Neanderthal DNA suddenly seems possible because of a combination of analytic work on ancient DNA by Svante Paabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a new method of DNA sequencing developed by a Connecticut company, 454 Life Sciences. The initial genome to be decoded comes from 45,000-year-old Neanderthal bones found in Croatia, though bones from other sites may be analyzed later. Because the genome must be kept in constant repair and starts to break up immediately after the death of the cell, the material surviving in Neanderthal bones exists in tiny fragments 100 or so DNA units in length." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 20 July 2006
  "In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun's necklaces. The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation. Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origins to unexplained chunks of glass found scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert. But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it? An Austrian astrochemist Christian Koeberl had established that the glass had been formed at a temperature so hot that there could be only one known cause: a meteorite impacting with Earth. And yet there were no signs of an impact crater, even in satellite images." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 19 July 2006
  "As part of an intensive effort to develop a new generation of machines that will sequence DNA at a vastly reduced cost, scientists are decoding a new human genome — that of James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and the first director of the National Institutes of Health’s human genome project. Decoding a person’s genome is at present far too costly to be a feasible medical procedure. But the goal now being pursued by the N.I.H. and by several manufacturers, including the company decoding Dr. Watson’s DNA, is to drive the costs of decoding a human genome down to as little as $1,000. At that price, it could be worth decoding people’s genomes in certain medical situations and, one day, even routinely at birth. Low-cost decoding may bring the genomic age to the doctor’s office, but it will also raise quandaries about how to safeguard and interpret such a wealth of delicate and far-reaching personal information." Learn more at the New York Times.

• 18 July 2006
  "The virtual worlds depicted in the movies 'The Matrix' and 'Minority Report' can often seem far too real in today's world of computers, e-mail, instant messaging, MP3 players, cell phones, laptops, Wi-Fi and RFID. Many of us can't get through a day without scanning, dialing or logging into a digital world so deeply embedded that living without 1s and 0s seems almost unthinkable -- and maybe impossible. 'We now live in an era where the technology is becoming mandatory instead of a choice. ...We have found ourselves tethered to our technology in a way that has really changed our lifestyle,' said Larry Rosen, co-author of the book 'TechnoStress: Coping with Technology @Work @Home @Play.'" Learn more at CNN.com.

• 17 July 2006
  "In a sneak peek of what could be fashion's future, leggy models draped in dresses by designers like Oscar de la Renta and Versace strut their stuff on the runway. But this is no Paris or New York fashion show. Rather, the scene is a Toronto biotechnology conference and the dresses are made from a new fiber called Ingeo, made largely from genetically engineered corn. The Biotechnology Industry Organization used the fashion statement last week to burnish its battered image as an environmental scourge. Biotechnology is quietly playing a growing role in an apparel industry waking up to its customers' concerns about the environment and the country's reliance on the foreign oil used to make synthetic fabrics like polyester and nylon. But the trend is raising concerns among some environmental purists who oppose genetically engineered crops of any kind." Learn more in USA Today.

• 14 July 2006
  "Mike Duggan, a veterinary surgeon, holds his gloved hands over an 8-inch incision in the belly of pig 78-6, a 120-pound, pink Yorkshire. He’s waiting for a green light from Hasan Alam, a trauma surgeon at Massachu­setts General Hospital. 'Make the injury,' Alam says. Duggan nods and slips his hands into the gash, fingers probing through inches of fat and the rosy membranes holding the organs in place. He pushes aside the intestines, ovaries, and bladder, and with a quick scalpel stroke slices open the iliac artery. It’s 10:30 am. Pig 78-6 loses a quarter of her blood within moments. Heart rate and blood pressure plummet. Don’t worry – Alam and Duggan are going to save her. Alam goes to work on the chest, removing part of a rib to reveal the heart, a throbbing, shiny pink ball the size of a fist. He cuts open the aorta – an even more lethal injury – and blood sprays all over our scrubs. The EKG flatlines." Learn more in Wired News.

• 13 July 2006
  "A brain implant makes it possible for paralyzed patients to move a robotic arm and a computer cursor with some ease, says a study released Thursday. The report published in the journal Nature comes amid intense efforts by neuroprosthetics researchers to give paralyzed patients more normal lives. A second journal study involving two monkeys suggests such implants may allow paralyzed people to type the equivalent of 15 words a minute. Brain implants 'are really a launching pad for a whole new kind of neurotechnology,' says John Donoghue of Brown University in Providence, co-author of the first study. He and colleagues report that an implant enabled a 25-year-old paralyzed man to squeeze a robotic hand and use a robotic arm to move objects and a computer cursor. Unlike efforts that employ non-invasive scalp readings of brain activity, researchers surgically attached a rigid 100-electrode sensor, about the size of a pencil eraser tip, atop the motor-control region of the paralyzed patient's brain." Learn more in USA Today.

• 12 July 2006
  "A new brain-computer-interface technology could turn our brains into automatic image-identifying machines that operate faster than human consciousness. Researchers at Columbia University are combining the processing power of the human brain with computer vision to develop a novel device that will allow people to search through images ten times faster than they can on their own. Darpa, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is funding research into the system with hopes of making federal agents' jobs easier. The technology would allow hours of footage to be very quickly processed, so security officers could identify terrorists or other criminals caught on surveillance video much more efficiently. The system harnesses the brain's well-known ability to recognize an image much faster than the person can identify it." Learn more in Wired News.

• 11 July 2006
  "The storm was nothing special. Its waves rocked the Norwegian Dawn just enough so that bartenders on the cruise ship turned to the usual palliative — free drinks. Then, off the coast of Georgia, early on Saturday, April 16, 2005, a giant, seven-story wave appeared out of nowhere. It crashed into the bow, sent deck chairs flying, smashed windows, raced as high as the 10th deck, flooded 62 cabins, injured 4 passengers and sowed widespread fear and panic. 'The ship was like a cork in a bathtub,' recalled Celestine Mcelhatton, a passenger who, along with 2,000 others, eventually made it back to Pier 88 on the Hudson River in Manhattan. Some vowed never to sail again. Enormous waves that sweep the ocean are traditionally called rogue waves, implying that they have a kind of freakish rarity...But scientists are now finding that these giants of the sea are far more common and destructive than once imagined, prompting a rush of new studies and research projects." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 10 July 2006
  "Led by fast-growing China and India, Asia is going nuclear in a big way to feed its ravenous appetite for energy. The strains of economic growth are already showing. Energy shortages have forced Chinese factories to scale back production, and farmers in India often have power for only half the day. Both countries say their future growth is at risk unless they diversify their energy mix. So does South Korea, where Yoon Ho-taek scans a construction site the size of 10 football fields in the southeastern city of Ulsan, points to what looks like a partly built amphitheater, and declares: 'The future of nuclear power is bright.' South Korea, the world's second biggest coal importer and third biggest oil importer, already depends on nuclear reactors for 40% of its power and is talking of increasing that to 60% by 2035. Yoon's company, Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power, is building four reactors and plans four more by 2017. Two of them are 1,000-megawatt reactors going up in Ulsan, lighting as many as 2.4 million homes in South Korea's industrial heartland." Learn more in USA Today.

• 7 July 2006
  "A huge sunshade a million miles from Earth could help astronomers search for signs of life on planets orbiting distant stars, a study says. The daisy-shaped 'occulter', as it is known, would use a powerful telescope trailing thousands of miles behind. The shade, described in the journal Nature, would stop light from the planet's star swamping the telescope. The concept by Professor Webster Cash of the University of Colorado has already received funding from Nasa. He believes an occulter could be in space within seven years 'stalking' Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013. 'We have proposed to build a star shade to launch a couple of months later and follow it out to its orbit,' he said. 'We believe this the fastest way to get operational.'" Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 6 July 2006
  "UK scientists have developed technology that enables artificial limbs to be directly attached to a human skeleton. The breakthrough, developed by researchers at University College London, allows the prosthesis to breach the skin without risk of infection. The team says early clinical trials have been 'very promising'. It hopes the work - which is to be published in the Journal of Anatomy - may help survivors of the 7 July bombings, as well as other amputees. The work paves the way for bionic limbs which are controlled by the central nervous system. The technique, called Intraosseous Transcutaneous Amputation Prosthesis (ITAP), involves securing a titanium rod directly into the bone. The metal implant passes through the skin and the artificial limb can be directly attached to it. Currently, artificial limbs are fixed or strapped to an amputee's stump. Risk of infection, which could be caused by bacteria passing from the external limb through the rod to the bone, is avoided because the skin tissue meshes around the rod to form a seal." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 5 July 2006
  "In March 1990, when few people had even heard of the internet, U.S. Secret Service agents raided the Texas offices of a small board-game maker, seizing computer equipment and reading customers' e-mail stored on one machine. A group of online pioneers already worried about how the nation's laws were being applied to new technologies became even more fearful and decided to intervene. And thus the Electronic Frontier Foundation was born -- 16 years ago this Monday -- taking on the Secret Service as its first case, one the EFF ultimately won when a judge agreed that the government had no right to read the e-mails or keep the equipment. Today, after expanding into such areas as intellectual property and moving its headquarters twice along with its focus, the EFF is re-emphasizing its roots of trying to limit government surveillance of electronic communications, while keeping a lookout for emerging threats even as the internet and digital technologies become mainstream." Learn more in Wired News.

• 3 July 2006
  "Investors hoping to strike it rich while saving the planet risk losing everything in the rush to invest in so-called green companies, analysts say. High oil prices, climate change and insecure supplies have sparked an explosion of companies seeking money to develop ways to ease the looming energy crisis. However, some fear that backers of growth firms on London's junior exchange, the Alternative Investment Market, could lose their shirts. 'It has all the makings for a bubble,' said Keith Woolcock, director at Westhall Capital, a London-based stockbroker. 'It could take awhile to pop because we are in the very early stage.' Like Google and Microsoft, a handful of tiny companies could grow into profitable global players, he added. 'There's going to be a lot of investors who get burned; there's going to be a lot of investors who are going to make an extremely large amount of money,' Woolcock said." Learn more at News.com.

• 30 June 2006
  "Genetically modified tomatoes containing edible vaccine are to be used to challenge two of the world's most lethal viruses. The aim is to create affordable vaccines for HIV and the hepatitis B virus (HBV) that could be easily grown and processed in the countries where they are most needed. So far, none of the 90 or so potential vaccines against HIV have proved successful and, though a vaccine already exists for HBV, it is too expensive to be used by poorer countries. Rurik Salyaev at the Siberian Institute of Plant Physiology and Biochemistry in Irkutsk, Russia, and his colleagues used the soil bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens to shuttle a synthetic combination of HIV and HBV DNA fragments into tomato plants. These include fragments of genes for various HIV proteins and the gene for an HBV protein called HBV surface antigen. The tomato plants then manufacture the proteins and, like the oral polio vaccine, when the tomatoes are eaten, these proteins prompt the body to create antibodies against the viruses." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 29 June 2006
  "Imagine being able to record a smell and play it back later, just as you can with sounds or images. Engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan are building an odour recorder capable of doing just that. Simply point the gadget at a freshly baked cookie, for example, and it will analyse its odour and reproduce it for you using a host of non-toxic chemicals. The device could be used to improve online shopping by allowing you to sniff foods or fragrances before you buy, to add an extra dimension to virtual reality environments and even to assist military doctors treating soldiers remotely by recreating bile, blood or urine odours that might help a diagnosis. While a number of companies have produced aroma generators designed to enhance computer games or TV shows, they have failed commercially because they have been very limited in the range of smells they can produce, says Pambuk Somboon of the Tokyo team." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 28 June 2006
  "A whole new world opened up for Tommy Craig as he tested a new handheld device for the blind that converts print to audio. Craig was able to "read" everything from menus to cooking directions by positioning the reader over print and taking a picture. In seconds, the device's synthetic voice read the printed message to him. 'The reader provides access to materials that a lot of times you just didn't read,' said Craig, 51, of Austin, Texas, who was one of about 500 blind people who tested the device over the past few months. 'It certainly makes you more independent.' The National Federation of the Blind plans to put the device on sale Saturday, when its annual meeting gets under way in Dallas. 'It's not quite like having a pair of eyes that work, but it's headed in that direction,' said James Gashel, executive director for strategic initiatives at the Maryland-based National Federation of the Blind." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 27 June 2006
  "Obesity is just as likely to be caused by lack of sleep and too much air-conditioning as it is by a sedentary lifestyle and aggressive marketing by the food industry, according to a research article that challenges the conventional wisdom. David Allison, an obesity researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, US, and colleagues have published a paper questioning the importance of what they call the 'Big Two' obesity factors: overeating as a result of junk food marketing and lack of exercise. In the US the proportion of the population defined as obese increased by 60% between 1991 and 2000, so that now almost a quarter of all Americans are obese. Most researchers tend to attribute the increase to a more sedentary lifestyle and overeating driven partly by aggressive corporate food marketing. But Allison says that the evidence for the Big Two is far from conclusive. 'What seems intuitively to be right is not always right. This might be an example where the rush to judgment may have negative effects,' Allison says." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 23 June 2006
  "It has been 2,000 years and possibly much longer since Earth has run such a fever. The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the 'recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.' A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that Earth is heating up and that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century. This is shown in boreholes, retreating glaciers and other evidence found in nature, said Gerald North, a geosciences professor at Texas A&M University who chaired the academy's panel." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 22 June 2006
  "A man died of H5N1 flu in Beijing in November 2003 - two full years before China admitted any human cases of H5N1. The death of the 24-year-old from bird flu came months before China even admitted H5N1 was circulating in its poultry. The man was tested for respiratory illness because of concern in the wake of the SARS epidemic. It is not clear when the Chinese scientists who reported the finding discovered this, but they tried to withdraw their paper from the New England Journal of Medicine at the last minute on Wednesday. It was too late to prevent publication. The case suggests that, as has long been suspected, many more people have caught H5N1 flu in China than have been reported, and for a longer time. The more human cases there are, the more chances the virus has to evolve into a human pandemic strain of flu." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 21 June 2006
  "What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor? Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner. Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years. Currently involved in identifying the type of stem cells that will multiply the most to create larger quantities of meat within a bioreactor, the team hopes to have concrete results by 2009." Learn more in Wired News.

• 20 June 2006
  "The spike in oil prices has prompted plenty of drivers to consider biodiesel-powered or hybrid cars for their daily commute, but what about that gas guzzler we use to fly across country? Government and corporate researchers are looking into ways to power commercial jet engines with alternative fuels, although many caution that widespread use could be years or even decades away. Scientists face myriad obstacles, including the difficulty of producing, transporting and using massive amounts of these fuels under harsh conditions such as extreme cold. And for now at least, experts say many alternative jet fuels are more expensive than traditional ones. 'It's just so much easier to develop a fuel for automobile applications than for airplane applications,' said Billy Glover, director of environmental performance for Boeing Co." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 19 June 2006
  "Gritty rats and mice living in sewers and farms seem to have healthier immune systems than their squeaky clean cousins that frolic in cushy antiseptic labs, two studies indicate. The lesson for humans: Clean living may make us sick. The studies give more weight to a 17-year-old theory that the sanitized Western world may be partly to blame for soaring rates of human allergy and asthma cases and some autoimmune diseases, such as Type I diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. The theory, called the hygiene hypothesis, figures that people's immune systems aren't being challenged by disease and dirt early in life, so the body's natural defenses overreact to small irritants such as pollen. The new studies, one of which was published Friday in the peer reviewed Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, found significant differences in the immune systems between euthanized wild and lab rodents." Learn more in Wired News.

• 16 June 2006
  "We take the properties of water for granted. Yet scientists assure us that we have a lot to learn about our biologically essential old friend. Research supporting the counterintuitive claim that hot water freezes faster than cold illustrates this point. The claim made news in 1969 when Erasto Mpemba, a Tanzanian schoolboy, said that his ice cream mixture froze faster when it started out hot than when it started out cold. Never mind that others have reported this strange behavior of water for centuries. Skeptics scoffed. The boy's teacher spoke derisively of 'Mpemba's physics.' It's time to rethink the derision. Jonathan Katz at Washington University has studied the 'Mpemba effect' and finds the claim valid. Reviewing the physics of water in Science two years ago, Yan Zubavicus and Michael Grurze at the University of Heidelberg in Germany explained why 'liquid water is one of the most mysterious substances in our world.'" Learn more in the Christian Science Monitor.

• 15 June 2006
  "The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said. Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference. 'We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system,' added Hawking, who came to Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture Thursday were sold out. Hawking said that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth. 'It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,' Hawking said. 'Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.'" Learn more at CNN.com.

• 14 June 2006
  "On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky. The complex, sprawling like an information-age factory, heralds a substantial expansion of a worldwide computing network handling billions of search queries a day and a growing repertory of other Internet services. And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border — at the intersection of cheap electricity and readily accessible data networking — is the backdrop for a multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 13 June 2006
  "Medical researchers have come up with a novel way to stiffen the spider silk – using glass. The discovery could make it easier to grow replacement parts for human bodies by improving the silk scaffolds on which human cells are grown. Medical technicians already spin spider silk, the strongest natural fibre known, to make mats and sponges as scaffolds on which to grow human cells. But these structures would be even more useful if their stiffness could be adjusted to more closely suit the tissue being grown on them. For example, surgeons often need to replace bone lost during surgery or in an accident. Cells grown on a scaffold as stiff as bone should more readily fuse with bone cells when implanted into the body. Now a team of biomedical engineers from Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, US, Nottingham Trent University in the UK and the US Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, have figured out how to stiffen spider silk." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 12 June 2006
  "German birds are changing migration patterns. Canadian red squirrels are reproducing earlier in the year. Mosquitoes in Newfoundland remain active longer into August. Traditionally, scientists have viewed such changes simply as behavior modifications in the face of a changing environment—in this case, global warming. But scientists say these shifts provide mounting evidence that for some animals, global warming is sparking genetic changes that are altering the ecosystems we live in. The effect is most striking in the northern latitudes, where climates are becoming more and more like those in the south, researchers say. 'Over the past 40 years, animal species have been extending their range toward the poles, and populations have been migrating, developing, or reproducing earlier,' said William Bradshaw, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Oregon in Eugene." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 9 June 2006
  "An error-checking method that could prove crucial to the development of a practical quantum computer has been developed by US researchers. Quantum computers process information in the form of quantum bits, or qubits. These act like the bits in conventional computers but, instead of existing in one of two states, a qubit can exist in both states simultaneously. This means a quantum computer can perform multiple calculations simultaneously. So far, only a handful of qubits have been used at a time to perform calculations in the laboratory. But if quantum computers can be scaled up, they should be able to perform incredibly tricky calculations in an instant. Physicists at the University of California in Santa Barbra, US, have discovered a new way to check how much the information stored inside a quantum computer has decayed. This is an impressive feat since measuring the state of a qubit normally destroys its quantum properties." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 8 June 2006
  "Namibia is suffering its first polio outbreak in more than a decade, setting back hopes that the disease might be eradicated from the world by the end of 2006. Three human cases of wild polio virus have been confirmed in Namibia so far, while a further 33 cases - including six deaths - are currently being investigated, say officials from the World Health Organization. The last recorded case of the disease in the country was in 1996. The Namibian outbreak is the latest setback in the global eradication campaign. WHO figures released in May suggested that there had been 453 confirmed cases of polio between January and May - up by 67 cases on the same period in 2005. The vast majority of these cases were in Nigeria, followed by India, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The disease remains endemic in all of these countries." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 7 June 2006
  "Beijing will be shooting for the stars in a bid to stave off downpours when it hosts the Olympics Games in 2008. Using an arsenal of rockets, artillery and aircraft, China will try to blast the clouds out of the sky, a meteorologist told a Beijing magazine, through a technique which falls under the umbrella of 'cloud seeding.' 'We can turn a cloudy day into a dry and sunny one by shooting the clouds less intensively than when we make rain,' head meteorologist Mian Donglian for the Beijing municipal weather bureau told Time Out. By shooting shells containing chemicals like silver iodide, or dry ice into the sky, scientists say they can create rain. China has gone so far as to set up a weather modification office that is in charge of such an endeavor. When the guns go off, they scatter crystals that attract water droplets in the cloud, making them grow faster, said climate and weather expert Johnny Chan from the City University of Hong Kong. The crystals become heavy and fall as raindrops, he said." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 6 June 2006
  "Chinese engineers have demolished the temporary barrier behind the Three Gorges dam, in a spectacular explosion. The barrier, called a cofferdam, was used to hold back the waters of the Yangtze River while the permanent structure of the dam was built. Enough explosives to topple 400 10-storey buildings were used in the blast, China's Xinhua news agency said. The controversial dam - the world's largest hydro-electric project - will not be fully operational until 2009. When its 26 turbines become operational, the dam will have a capacity of more than 18,000 megawatts. On 20 May, builders poured the last concrete to complete the construction of the dam's 185m-high (610ft), 2,310m-long (1.4 miles) main wall. Engineers used 191 tonnes of underwater explosives for a demolition operation which took about 12 seconds." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 5 June 2006
  "Researcher David Baker believes the key to an AIDS vaccine or a cure for cancer may be that old PC sitting under a layer of dust in your closet or the one on your desk doing little else but running a screen saver. Those outdated or idle computers may be just what Baker needs to turn his ideas into scientific breakthroughs. Baker, 43, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington, realized about two years ago that he didn't have access to the computing horsepower needed for his research -- nor the money to buy time on supercomputers elsewhere. So he turned to the kindness -- and the computers -- of strangers. Using software made popular in a massive yet so far fruitless search for intelligent life beyond Earth, he and his research team are tapping the computing power of tens of thousands of PCs whose owners are donating spare computer time to chop away at scientific problems over the Internet." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 2 June 2006
  "An orbiting 'gas station' is an important requirement for the long-term future of human interplanetary exploration, a study by NASA engineers suggests. For missions to Mars, spacecraft would make pit stops at fuelling stations orbiting the Earth or Moon to fill their tanks with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen generated in space. Researchers believe it may one day be possible to mine oxygen from lunar soil. And if there is frozen water in some of the Moon's craters, that could be split into hydrogen and oxygen. This would mean the fuel loads needed for long missions would not have to be lifted out of the Earth's gravity, making the missions more efficient and sustainable, say Joe Howell, project manager for NASA's in-space cryogenic propellant depot at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, US, and his colleagues." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 1 June 2006
  "The origin of HIV has been found in wild chimpanzees living in southern Cameroon, researchers report. A virus called SIVcpz (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus from chimps) was thought to be the source, but had only been found in a few captive animals. Now, an international team of scientists has identified a natural reservoir of SIVcpz in animals living in the wild. The findings are to be published in Science magazine. It is thought that people hunting chimpanzees first contracted the virus - and that cases were first seen in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo - the nearest urban area - in 1930. Scientists believe the rareness of cases - and the fact that symptoms of Aids differ significantly between individuals - explains why it was another 50 years before the virus was named. This team of researchers, including experts from the universities of Nottingham, Montpellier and Alabama, have been working for a decade to identify the source of HIV." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 31 May 2006
  "Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is working on a new set of safety guidelines for next-generation robots. This set of regulations would constitute a first attempt at a formal version of the first of Asimov's science-fictional Laws of Robotics, or at least the portion that states that humans shall not be harmed by robots. The first law of robotics, as set forth in 1940 by writer Isaac Asimov, states: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Japan's ministry guidelines will require manufacturers to install a sufficient number of sensors to keep robots from running into people. Lighter or softer materials will be preferred, to further prevent injury." Learn more in Pravda Online.

• 30 May 2006
  "An exotic theory, which attempts to unify the laws of physics by proposing the existence of an extra fourth spatial dimension, could be tested using a satellite to be launched in 2007. Such theories are notoriously difficult to test. But a new study suggests that such hidden dimensions could give rise to thousands of mini-black holes within our own solar system – and the theory could be tested within Pluto’s orbit in just a few years...The theory they use, called the Randall-Sundrum braneworld model, proposes that the 3D universe we live in is floating within a larger universe with an extra spatial dimension." Learn more at Britain's New Scientist.

• 26 May 2006
  "Rarely, if ever, does physics news pique the interest of Pentagon brass, Harry Potter fans, and aspiring Romulans—those cloaking-device- wielding Star Trek baddies. But a paper in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science might. In it researchers lay out design specs for materials that they say will be able to bend electromagnetic radiation around space of any size and shape. The translation for Star Trek fans: Invisibility shields may not be science fiction for much longer. The theoretical breakthrough is made possible by novel substances called metamaterials." Learn more at the National Geographic.

• 25 May 2006
  "A partially-sighted Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) poet has developed a small, relatively inexpensive 'seeing machine' that can allow people who are blind or visually impaired to access the Internet, view the face of a friend, 'previsit' unfamiliar buildings and more. The work is led by Elizabeth Goldring, a senior fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies. She developed the machine over 10 years, in collaboration with MIT students and professional ophthalmologists...Goldring's idea came after an eye examination when technicians looked into her eyes with a diagnostic device known as a scanning laser ophthalmoscope, or SLO. They used it to project a simple image directly onto the retina of one eye..She was able to see the image, and asked if they could write the word 'sun' and transmit that through the SLO. 'And I could see it,' she said. 'That was the first time in several months that I'd seen a word, and for a poet that's an incredible feeling.'" Learn more at Engineering Online.

• 24 May 2006
  "The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said. Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not 'part of the internet model,' he said in Edinburgh. He warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet, the network would enter 'a dark period'. Sir Tim was speaking at the start of a conference on the future of the web. 'What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web,' he said. 'Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring.'" Learn more at BBC News.

• 23 May 2006
  "Greenhouse gases are known to spur global warming, but scientists said on Monday that global warming in turn spurs greenhouse gas emissions — which means Earth could get hotter faster than climate models predict. Two scientific teams, one in Europe and another in California, reached the same basic conclusion: when Earth has warmed up in the past, due to the sun’s natural cycles, more greenhouse gases have been spewed into the atmosphere. As greenhouse gas levels rose, so did Earth’s temperature, the scientists reported. Earth has not endlessly warmed up, though, because these natural solar cycles ended, letting the planet cool down and prompting a corresponding drop in greenhouse gas emissions, the scientists reported. But these previous periods of heating and cooling were not influenced by the burning of fossil fuels, and the current resulting trend toward higher global average temperatures, according to Margaret Torn of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory." Learn more at Reuters AlertNet.

• 22 May 2006
  "Philip R. Zimmermann wants to protect online privacy. Who could object to that? He has found out once already. Trained as a computer scientist, he developed a program in 1991 called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, for scrambling and unscrambling e-mail messages. It won a following among privacy rights advocates and human rights groups working overseas--and a three-year federal criminal investigation into whether he had violated export restrictions on cryptographic software. The case was dropped in 1996, and Zimmermann, who lives in Menlo Park, Calif., started PGP Inc. to sell his software commercially. Now he is again inviting government scrutiny. On Sunday, he released a free Windows software program, Zfone, that encrypts a computer-to-computer voice conversation so both parties can be confident that no one is listening in." Learn more at News.com.

• 18 May 2006
  "As far as anyone knows, the plight of civilization is nowhere near as dire as in the opening pages of Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,' where alien spaceships are poised to destroy Earth to make way for an interstellar highway. Still, with resource consumption and environmental destruction rising at unsustainable rates, plenty of people view the future with alarm. That spotlights technologies like nuclear power, genetic engineering and nanotechnology, which are often cited as crucial to heading off economic and environmental disaster. The catch is that any technology powerful enough to improve life radically is also capable of abuse and prone to serious, unanticipated side effects. It's a great time to be a Hollywood screenwriter, but rough on policy makers and business strategists. Mix new technologies with the wide variations in how organizations and individuals behave, and you often have 'a recipe for explosion.'" Learn more in the New York Times.

• 17 May 2006
  "A way to cloak carbon nanotubes, making them both non-toxic and highly customisable, has been revealed. It marks a step towards using nanotubes in biological research and medicine. Nanotubes are rolled up sheets of linked carbon atoms and are as little as 10 atoms wide. In the future they could act as tiny molecular sensors, detecting individual enzymes inside living cells, or could enable new medical treatments for diseases such as cancer. But for reasons that remain unclear, bare nanotubes are toxic, triggering the death of cells that they touch. To deal with this problem, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, US, created rod-shaped synthetic polymers that mimic molecules found naturally on the outer surface of the body's cells. They then attached these molecules to the nanotubes like pine needles on a twig." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 16 May 2006
  "Tsunamis triggered by asteroid impacts cause a disaster similar to the 2004 Asian tsunami once every 6000 years on average, according to the first detailed analysis of their effects. Researchers have assumed that tsunamis would make ocean impacts more deadly than those on land. But Steve Chesley at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and Steve Ward at the University of California at Santa Cruz, both in the US, are the first to quantify the risks. The pair first calculated the chance of various size asteroids reaching the Earth's surface, and then modelled the tsunamis that would result for asteroids that hit the oceans. For example, the model shows that waves radiating from the impact of a 300-metre-wide asteroid would carry 300 times more energy than the 2004 Asian tsunami. To accurately assess the overall impact-tsunami risks, the analysis included the full range of asteroid sizes, including the smallest asteroids capable of penetrating the Earth's atmosphere. These are between 60 and 100 metres, depending on their composition." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 15 May 2006
  "When an F-16 lights up its afterburners, it consumes nearly 28 gallons of fuel per minute. No wonder, then, that of all the fuel the United States government uses each year, the Air Force accounts for more than half. The Air Force may not be in any danger of suffering inconveniences from scarce or expensive fuel, but it has begun looking for a way to power its jets on something besides conventional fuel. In a series of tests — first on engines mounted on blocks and then with B-52's in flight — the Air Force will try to prove that the American military can fly its aircraft by blending traditional crude-oil-based jet fuel with a synthetic liquid made first from natural gas and, eventually, from coal, which is plentiful and cheaper. While the military has been a leader in adopting some technologies — light but strong metals, radar-evading stealth designs and fire-retardant flight suits, for example — any effort to hit a miles-per-gallon fuel efficiency rating has taken a back seat when the mission is to haul bombs farther and faster or push 70-ton tanks across a desert to topple an adversary." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 12 May 2006
  "When the mobile company he co-founded, Palm Computing, was getting off the ground in 1992, the industry was called 'the mother of all markets' by one technology executive, Apple Computer's John Sculley, and 'a pipe dream driven by greed' by another, Intel's Andy Grove. Now, cognitive computing--essentially, when computers process information the same way a brain does--is either "'not in our lifetime' or 'any moment now,'" Hawkins said wryly to an audience at a conference of the same name this week at IBM's Almaden Research Center. 'We've been trying to do this for 50 to 60 years. Artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, neural networks, the Fifth Generation project--they've all had big moments in the sun.' He added: 'The reality is we've not had much success.' Despite the false starts, many high-profile neuroscientists and bioengineers gathered this week at IBM to talk about how and why cognitive computing research is finally bearing fruit." Learn more at News.com.

• 11 May 2006
  "The flocks of migratory birds that winged their way south to Africa last autumn and then back over Europe in recent weeks did not carry the H5N1 bird flu virus or spread it during their annual journey, scientists have concluded, defying health officials' dire predictions. International health officials had feared that the disease was likely to spread to Africa during the winter migration and return to Europe with a vengeance during the reverse migration this spring. That has not happened - a significant finding for Europe, because it is far easier to monitor a virus that exists domestically on farms but not in nature...In thousands of samples collected in Africa this winter, H5N1 was not detected in a single wild bird, officials and scientists said." Learn more in the International Herald Tribune.

• 10 May 2006
  "Unlike the events depicted in [last night's] made-for-TV movie about a bird-flu pandemic, so far avian influenza can't easily be transmitted from person to person. But humans may still be responsible for much of the disease's spread. 'The most common way that avian influenza is spread is by the movement of poultry and poultry products—both legal and illegal,' said William Karesh, director of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) field veterinary program. In the battle against bird flu, international health authorities must handle a thriving legal trade in live birds and chicks. Illicit dealers also move poultry products, from meats to more unusual items, such as a large cargo of Chinese duck feathers recently seized at a North Carolina port." Learn more in the National Geographic.

• 9 May 2006
  "Testing for the AIDS virus could become part of routine physical exams for adults and teens if doctors follow new U.S. guidelines expected to be issued by this summer. Federal health officials say they would like HIV testing to be as common as a cholesterol check. The guidelines for routine testing would apply to every American ages 13 to 64, according to the proposed plan by the U.S. Centers for Disease control and Prevention. One-quarter of the 1 million Americans with the AIDS virus don't know they are infected, and that group is most responsible for HIV's spread, CDC officials said." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 8 May 2006
  "A confidential Ministry of Defence report on Unidentified Flying Objects has concluded that there is no proof of alien life forms. In spite of the secrecy surrounding the UFO study, it seems citizens of planet Earth have little to worry about. The report, which was completed in 2000 and stamped 'Secret: UK Eyes Only', has been made public for the first time. Only a small number of copies were produced and the identity of the man who wrote it has been protected. His findings were only made public thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, after a request by Sheffield Hallam University academic Dr David Clarke. The four-year study - entitled Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK - tackles the long-running question by UFO-spotters: 'Is anyone out there?'" Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 5 May 2006
  "A human influenza pandemic may cost billions, and perhaps trillions of dollars, a top health economist has warned at a meeting of bird flu experts in Singapore on Thursday. However, Martin Meltzer, at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Georgia, US, argues that economic models can help governments and healthcare systems to reduce the impact vastly – keeping key healthcare workers in place and hospitals running. Analysing the costs of a pandemic, combined with epidemiological information, can help make crucial decisions regarding who should receive the limited supplies of vaccines and antiviral treatments in the event of the outbreak. 'Assuming you can’t stop it at its source, you can do a lot to ameliorate it,' said Meltzer." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 4 May 2006
  "Intel Corp. said on Tuesday it plans to spend $1 billion over five years to promote Internet use and computer training in developing countries, the latest move in the No. 1 chip maker's effort to break into new markets. The program, which Intel has dubbed 'World Ahead,' aims to bring high-speed wireless Internet access to 1 billion people who can't now get online, while training 10 million teachers to use technology in education. 'Decades of providing technology in growing volume and at decreasing costs have driven great gains for developing nations, communities and people worldwide, but there is still much to do,' Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said in a statement. Otellini is expected to give details of the initiative at a technology conference in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 3 May 2006
  "A newly discovered asteroid is now the biggest thing known with a possibility of hitting the Earth in this century – and it is also the one that could hit the soonest. But the odds of impact currently stand at just one in six million, reducing the fear factor somewhat, and these odds should further diminish with additional observations. This latest addition to NASA-JPL's list of potentially hazardous asteroids was discovered on 27 April 2006. The asteroid, called 2006 HZ51, has an estimated diameter of about 800 metres and is the one of the largest objects ever to make the list. An object of that size would cause widespread devastation if it did strike the Earth. HZ51 also has one of the shortest lead-times to a potential impact of any such object yet found, and the shortest of any potential Earth-impactor currently on the list." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 2 May 2006
  "The polar bear and hippopotamus are for the first time listed as species threatened with extinction by the world's biodiversity agency. They are included in the Red List of Threatened Species published by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) which names more than 16,000 at-risk species. Many sharks, and freshwater fish in Europe and Africa, are newly included. The IUCN says loss of biodiversity is increasing despite a global convention committing governments to stem it. 'The 2006 Red List shows a clear trend; biodiversity loss is increasing, not slowing down,' said IUCN director-general Achim Steiner. ' The implications of this trend for the productivity and resilience of ecosystems and the lives and livelihoods of billions of people who depend on them are far-reaching.'" Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 1 May 2006
  "It was a stunt that launched a thousand conspiracy theories. Market researcher James Vicary claimed in 1957 that he could get movie-goers to 'drink Coca-Cola' and "eat popcorn" by flashing those messages on the screen for such a short time that viewers were unaware of it. People were outraged, and the practice was banned in the UK, Australia and the US. Vicary later admitted that his study was fabricated, and scientists through the years who have tried to replicate it have largely failed. But now researchers have shown that if the conditions are right, subliminal advertising to promote a brand can be made to work. Johan Karremans at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands and his colleagues wanted to see if they could subliminally induce volunteers to favour a particular brand of drink, Lipton Ice." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 28 April 2006
  "More than 200,000 people perished when a monstrous wave swept the Indian Ocean in 2004. In hopes of avoiding a similar disaster here, a tsunami warning system has now been expanded to both coasts of the United States. 'We take building this warning system very seriously,' Conrad C. Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in an interview. DART Deep-ocean sensors in the Pacific, Atlantic and Caribbean now listen for earthquakes on the seafloor, sense the pressure of waves passing over them, and radio their findings to scientists at warning centers in Alaska and Hawaii. Unlike wind-driven surface waves, tsunamis are caused by seismic activity such as undersea earthquakes, landslides or volcanoes. That means tsunamis are deep, reaching all the way to the seafloor, so that when they reach land they are forced upward into often towering walls of water that can inundate coastal communities." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 27 April 2006
  "The digital divide is narrowing as citizens in emerging markets get online via computers and mobile phones, with some regions now on a par with developed nations, a ranking of Web-savvy nations showed on Wednesday. 'Encouraging is the apparent narrowing of the digital divide,' said the annual study published by U.S. computer company International Business Machines Corp. and the intelligence unit of British magazine The Economist. 'This is particularly evident in basic connectivity: emerging markets are providing the vast majority of the world's new phone and Internet connections,' the study found. Within China and India, regions such as Shanghai and Bangalore have almost the same level of Internet and mobile phone connections as developed nations." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 26 April 2006
  "'It's the wild west of evolution and ecology,' says Joel Brown, an ecologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Evolution is operating with a vengeance in the urban environment as animals struggle to adapt to novel conditions and cope with 'evolutionary illusions'. An animal is said to be in an evolutionary illusion or trap when it does something it has evolved to do, but at the wrong time or in the wrong place. The concept may help explain why so many squirrels get squashed on city streets, says Brown. Though ecologists used to dismiss urban areas as unworthy of study, they have recently begun to realise that cities provide an ideal theatre in which to see behaviour evolving at a pace rarely seen in the wild." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 25 April 2006
  "At the 2005 World Exposition in Japan's Aichi prefecture, robots from laboratories throughout the country were on display. The humanoids came in all shapes and sizes: they moved on wheels, walked on two legs, looked like lovable little dolls or fantastic mechanical warriors. All, however, were instantly recognizable as artificial creations. Except one: it had moist lips, glossy hair and vivid eyes that blinked slowly. Seated on a stool with hands folded primly on its lap, it wore a bright pink blazer and gray slacks. For a mesmerizing few seconds from several meters away, Repliee Q1expo was virtually indistinguishable from an ordinary woman in her 30s. In fact, it was a copy of one. To many people, Repliee is more than a humanoid robot--it is an honest-to-goodness android, so lifelike that it seems like a real person. Japan boasts the most advanced humanoid robots in the world, represented by Honda's Asimo and other bipedal machines. They are expected to eventually pitch in as the workforce shrinks amid the dwindling and aging population. But why build a robot with pigmented silicone skin, smooth gestures and even makeup? Learn more in the Scientific American.

• 24 April 2006
  "For nearly 16 years, puzzle enthusiasts have labored to decipher an 865-character coded message stenciled into a sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. This week, the sculptor gave them an unsettling but hopeful surprise: part of the message they thought they had deciphered years ago actually says something else. The sculpture, titled ‘Kryptos,’ the Greek word for "hidden," includes an undulating sheet of copper with a message devised by the sculptor, Jim Sanborn, and Edward M. Scheidt, a retired chairman of the C.I.A.'s cryptographic center. The message is broken into four sections, and in 1999, a computer programmer named Jim Gillogly announced he had figured out the first three, which include poetic ramblings by the sculptor and an account of the opening of King Tut's tomb. The C.I.A. then announced that one of its physicists, David Stein, had also deciphered the first three sections a year earlier." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 21 April 2006
  "The spread of bird flu poses serious risks to biodiversity, say scientists who have detailed an outbreak of the virus in Owston's civets. The mammal is a small, endangered carnivore that lives in the forests of Vietnam, Laos and southern China. Three animals died at a conservation centre in northern Vietnam last summer. It is not known how they contracted the virus, as they do not eat poultry. The scientists report the cases in a journal of the UK's Royal Society. The team - from the UK, Vietnam and China - call for better monitoring of the H5N1 virus in wild animals...H5N1 has killed birds in at least 11 of the 27 avian orders, including gulls, storks, pigeons, eagles, cranes, pelicans, parrots and owls. It has also infected tigers, leopards and domestic cats fed contaminated meat, and ferrets and mice in laboratory studies." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 20 April 2006
  "Roger Harvey wants to wean pigs off of antibiotics. The drugs have been widely used to fend off E. coli bacterial infections, which may sicken or kill young pigs. Dr. Harvey, a veterinarian at a US Department of Agriculture research lab in College Station, Texas, has developed a drug-free alternative - a friendly bacteria that he says would essentially 'vaccinate' piglets against E. coli. Field trials on thousands of pigs at five farms with E. coli problems have shown the treatment to be effective and cost-saving for farmers...Finding alternatives to antibiotics has become more urgent as concerns grow that their use in farm animals builds up resistance in bacteria, ultimately creating new 'super bugs' that can defy the antibiotics used to treat humans." Learn more in the Christian Science Monitor.

• 19 April 2006
  "Home network hardware supplier D-Link has been accused of harming the net's ability to tell the time accurately. Detective work has found that many D-Link routers, switches and wireless access points are bombarding some net time servers with huge amounts of data. Time servers help many net functions run smoothly. For instance they have a role in deciding who made the last bid in eBay auctions. D-Link is now taking action after protests from time server overseers. The problems caused by D-Link hardware came to light thanks to Danish contractor Poul-Henning Kamp who runs Denmark's time server. Typically the time servers have links with atomic clocks to ensure they are as accurate as possible." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 18 April 2006
  "Fast-forward 10 years, a decade out from the final deconstruction of the old order marked by headlines about France’s Alcatel sweeping up its last remnant, Lucent Technologies, AT&T’s old equipment division. The year is 2016. You’ve just come out of surgery and are being pushed down the hospital corridor on a gurney toward the recovery room. The nurses know you are on the way because a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag on your plastic patient identification bracelet automatically generated an alert to the nursing station. The doctor doing rounds checks the Internet to monitor your vital signs. As always, the implants in your body are beaming real-time information about your brain waves and blood pressure to a protected web site 24/7." Learn more about the possible future of the internet in the Red Herring.

• 17 April 2006
  "Anna O'Connell couldn't find Ted. She stood bent at the waist on a frigid afternoon last December, her head and all its fuzzy red hair crammed into an old stand-up freezer that looked like something you get milk from at the corner store: tall, white with a bit of rust and a pull handle. That freezer is the first thing you see when you walk into the Fox Chase Cancer Center laboratory in Philadelphia, where O'Connell has spent decades as a staff scientist. She pushed aside vial after vial. 'I know we still have him somewhere,' she yelled, her head still inside the freezer. 'We've got serum from, like, 450,000 people.' Today most Americans have their tissue on file somewhere. In 1999 the RAND Corporation published a report (the first and, so far, the last of its kind) with what it called a "conservative estimate" that more than 307 million tissue samples from more than 178 million people were stored in the United States." Learn more in the New York Times Magazine.

• 14 April 2006
  "If ET has left a light on in the window, Paul Horowitz hopes to be the first to spot it. This week, the Harvard University physics professor unveiled a sensitive new telescope, the first to be used exclusively to hunt for light signals from any intelligent extraterrestrials who may lurk in the galaxy. Scientists have been hunting for ET for at least 45 years using large radio-telescopes. Within the last decade they have expanded the search to include light. But these efforts have been akin to 'looking through soda straws,' he says. Telescopes check out individual stars one by one, typically piggybacking with other projects looking at the same patch of sky. The result: Scientists have been able to scan only about one ten-thousandth of the sky. The telescope, with the largest light-gathering surface east of the Mississippi, is designed to take in the whole sky from its shed at the university's Oak Ridge Observatory in Harvard, Mass.quot; Learn more in the Christian Science Monitor.

• 13 April 2006
  "When her hairdresser asked her last fall whether she would continue wearing her hair long, Elizabeth Sloan broke down crying. Unbeknown to the hairstylist, Ms. Sloan had recently had a breast tumor removed and was expecting to begin chemotherapy, which would probably mean losing her hair. But later that day, Ms. Sloan received the results of a new $3,500 genetic test, which indicated that her cancer probably would not come back even if she skipped chemotherapy. 'It was a huge relief,' said Ms. Sloan, 40, a mother of two young boys who lives in Manhattan. 'I did not want to napalm-bomb my body with chemicals.' The test taken by Ms. Sloan, known as Oncotype DX and offered by a company called Genomic Health, is part of a new wave of sophisticated genetic or protein tests that are starting to remake the diagnostics business, both for the technology they use and the way they are developed and sold." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 11 April 2006
  "Stem cell therapy has long captured the limelight as a way to the goal of regenerative medicine, that of repairing the body with its own natural systems. But a few scientists, working in a relatively obscure field, believe another path to regenerative medicine may be as likely to succeed. The less illustrious approach is promising, in their view, because it is the solution that nature itself has developed for repairing damaged limbs or organs in a wide variety of animals. Many species, notably amphibians and certain fish, can regenerate a wide variety of their body parts. The salamander can regenerate its limbs, its tail, its upper and lower jaws, the lens and the retina of its eye, and its intestine. The zebra fish will regrow fins, scales, spinal cord and part of its heart." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 10 April 2006
  "Reduced air pollution and increased water evaporation appear to be adding to man-made global warming. Research presented at a major European science meeting adds to other evidence that cleaner air is letting more solar energy through to the Earth's surface. Other studies show that increased water vapour in the atmosphere is reinforcing the impact of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists suggest both trends may push temperatures higher than believed. But they say there is an urgent need for further research, particularly at sea. Between the 1950s and 1980s, the amount of solar energy penetrating through the atmosphere to the Earth's surface appeared to be declining, by about 2% per decade. This trend received some publicity under the term 'global dimming.'" Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 7 April 2006
  "By reconstructing ancient genes from long-extinct animals, scientists have for the first time demonstrated the step-by-step progression of how evolution created a new piece of molecular machinery by reusing and modifying existing parts. The researchers say the findings, published today in the journal Science, offer a counterargument to doubters of evolution who question how a progression of small changes could produce the intricate mechanisms found in living cells. 'The evolution of complexity is a longstanding issue in evolutionary biology,' said Joseph W. Thornton, professor of biology at the University of Oregon and lead author of the paper. 'We wanted to understand how this system evolved at the molecular level. There's no scientific controversy over whether this system evolved. The question for scientists is how it evolved, and that's what our study showed.'" Learn more in the New York Times.

• 6 April 2006
  "Apple Computer, the maker of the iPod, yesterday announced a new program which allows its computers to run Microsoft's Windows operating system. The surprise move - which some analysts imagined could never happen - is seen as an attempt by Apple to capitalise on the phenomenal success of its iPod digital music player, which has sold more than 40m units around the world. The new software, called Boot Camp, lets customers run the Windows system alongside existing Apple programs....Microsoft's Windows system runs on 95% of the world's computers. But Apple has long been designed to reject any attempt to run Windows. Although Apple's computers have versions of popular Microsoft programs - such as Word and Excel - they have been unable to run all of Microsoft's applications." Read more about this sudden shift at Britain's Guardian.

• 3 April 2006
  "Population pressures combined with limited access to fertilisers threaten the future of farming in Africa, a new study warns. The report highlights the continent’s “soil health crisis”, revealing that three-quarters of its farmlands are severely degraded. The politicians and researchers behind the report stress that urgent changes are necessary to improve food security in the continent, particularly in sub-Saharan countries. Agriculture is the main source of income for two-thirds of Africa’s population, according to the document from the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development (IFDC), a nonprofit organisation based in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, US. Farmers in sub-Saharan countries traditionally grew crops on cleared land for only a brief period before moving on to new areas, allowing the land to regain fertility. But population pressure now forces the farmers to grow crop after crop in the same area." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 31 March 2006
  "California researchers say a blood-cleaning machine could save lives if bird flu becomes a pandemic. Fighting viruses by cleansing the blood might sound too good to be true, and many infectious disease experts say it is. The device, called the Hemopurifier, performs a type of dialysis. According to James Joyce, founder and CEO of Aethlon Medical in San Diego, it can also remove smallpox and the Ebola and Marburg viruses. The Hemopurifier works against so many different viruses, according to Joyce, that the device could one day serve as a 'portable immune system.' Joyce's lofty claims make some infectious-disease specialists bristle. For one thing, dialysis carries a serious risk of infection, something Joyce himself admits." Learn more in Wired News.

• 30 March 2006
  "New software that hides on cell phones and captures call logs and text messages is being sold as a way to monitor kids and spouses. But one security company calls it a Trojan horse. The FlexiSpy application captures call logs, text messages and mobile Internet activity, among other things. The software, released at the beginning of March, sells for $49.95 and is advertised by Bangkok, Thailand-based Vervata as a tool to monitor kids and unfaithful spouses. The data captured is sent to Vervata's servers and is accessible to customers via a special Web site. Similar surveillance software for PCs already exists and has raised the ire of groups fighting domestic violence, who fear it may be used by abusive spouses. FlexiSpy has attracted a different kind of criticism from security company F-Secure, which has labeled the software a Trojan, or a malicious program that disguises itself as something innocuous." Learn more at News.com.

• 29 March 2006
  "What if everything in life were free? You'd think we'd be happier. But game designers know better: We'd be bored. Economics is loosely defined as choice under scarcity. After all, in the real world, there's only so much to go around. You can't always get what you want, and unfulfilled desires give rise to markets. But in a game world, there's no inherent reason for scarcity. Game designers have given us plenty of utopias where we can have all the mithril we want, to buy whatever we want whenever we want it. Problem is, those worlds turn out to be dull. For example, the developers of Active Worlds made everything in the game free. Players built enormous houses - in which there was nothing to do. The game never quite caught on. That's why today's newer massive synthetic worlds make life hard." Learn more in Wired.

• 28 March 2006
  "Wesley Clark built a campaign for President as an expert in national security. But he recently discovered a hole in his personal security--his cell phone. A resourceful blogger, hoping to call attention to the black market in phone records, turned the general into his privacy-rights guinea pig in January. For $89.95, he purchased, no questions asked, the records of 100 cell-phone calls that Clark had made. (He revealed the ruse to Clark soon after.) 'It's like someone taking your wallet or knowing who paid you money,' Clark says. 'It's no great discovery, but it just doesn't feel right.' Since then, Clark has become a vocal supporter of the movement to outlaw the sale of cell-phone records to third parties. The U.S.'s embrace of mobile phones--about 65% of the population are subscribers--has far outpaced efforts to keep what we do with them private." Learn more in Time Magazine.

• 27 March 2006
  "Talk of decline was old news in academia even in 1898, when traditionalists blasted Harvard for ending its Greek entrance requirement. But today there's a new twist in the story: Are search engines making today's students dumber? In December, the National Center for Education Statistics published a report on adult literacy revealing that the number of college graduates able to interpret complex texts proficiently had dropped since 1992 from 40 percent to 31 percent. As Mark S. Schneider, the center's commissioner of education statistics, put it, 'What's disturbing is that the assessment is not designed to test your understanding of Proust, but to test your ability to read labels.'...While some blame reality television, MP3 players, cellphones or the multitasking that juggles them all, the big change has been the Web." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 24 March 2006
  "Hollywood studios, seeking a way to foil piracy and looking toward life beyond the DVD, are turning Europe into a proving ground for new methods of digital movie distribution. Within several weeks, new services from Universal Pictures and Warner Brothers will offer Internet movie downloads at the same time that major blockbusters enter retail stores in DVD form, the first time studios will make 'virtual' movies available so quickly. Universal Pictures International detailed plans Thursday for a 'download to own' service in Britain in partnership with LoveFilm, an online video rental company. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland..." Learn more about these new methods at Paris' International Herald Tribune.

• 23 March 2006
  "The deadly bird flu virus may pose a fresh threat to endangered mammal species including big cats such as tigers and leopards, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said on Wednesday. UNEP said it was especially concerned about countries like Vietnam, which is home to both a rich variety of wild species and a large poultry industry that has been hit by avian flu outbreaks. 'A far wider range of species, including rare and endangered ones, may be affected by highly virulent avian flu than has previously been supposed,' UNEP said in a statement. It said experts at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) conference in Brazil said 'there is growing evidence that the H5N1 virus can infect and harm big cats like leopards and tigers, small cats such as civets and other mammals like martens, weasels, badgers and otters.'" Learn more at Reuters News.

• 22 March 2006
  "Humans are responsible for the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs and must make unprecedented extra efforts to reach a goal of slowing losses by 2010, a U.N. report said on Monday. Habitats ranging from coral reefs to tropical rainforests face mounting threats, the Secretariat of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity said in the report, issued at the start of a March 20-31 U.N. meeting in Curitiba, Brazil. 'In effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of earth, and the greatest since the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago,' said the 92-page Global Biodiversity Outlook 2 report. Apart from the disappearance of the dinosaurs, the other "Big Five" extinctions were about 205, 250, 375 and 440 million years ago. Scientists suspect that asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions or sudden climate shifts may explain the five." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 21 March 2006
  "In a sky blue bedroom they share but rarely leave, a young sister and brother lie in twin beds that swallow up their small motionless bodies, victims of a genetic disease so rare it does not even have a name. Moshira, 9, and Salame, 8, who began life as apparently healthy babies, fell into vegetative states after their first birthdays. The sick children are Bedouin. Until recently their ancestors were nomads who roamed the deserts of the Middle East and, as tradition dictated, often married cousins. Marrying within the family helped strengthen bonds among extended families struggling to survive the desert. But after centuries this custom of intermarriage has had devastating genetic effects...The plight of the community is being addressed by an unusual scientific team: Dr. Ohad Birk, a Jewish Israeli geneticist, and two physicians, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip, and Dr. Khalil Elbedour, himself a Bedouin from Israel." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 20 March 2006
  "When Daniel Hickey's doctor suggested he have a microchip implanted under his skin to provide instant access to his computerized medical record, the 77-year-old retired naval officer immediately agreed. 'If you're unconscious and end up in the emergency room, they won't know anything about you,' Hickey said. 'With this, they can find out everything they need to know right away and treat you better.' Roxanne Fischer felt the same way, and she had one of the devices injected into the arm of her 83-year-old mother, who has Alzheimer's disease. 'I may not be available if she ends up in the emergency room. This gives me tremendous peace of mind,' Fischer said... Some doctors are welcoming the technology as an exciting innovation that will speed care and prevent errors. But the concept alarms privacy advocates." Learn more in the Washington Post.

• 17 March 2006
  "Inflation means one thing to economists and another to cosmologists. When applied to the universe, it means the expansion from its tiny origins nearly 14 billion years ago. Now, scientists have a better idea of how fast this happened, thanks to a U.S. satellite orbiting four times farther than the moon. It is called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP for short, launched in 2001...Scientists report evidence that the universe was born in less than the blink of an eye, expanding instantly from sub-microscopic size to astronomical proportions. The conclusion comes from data gathered by a U.S. satellite that has been peering for clues to the origin of the cosmos in a faint glow of background radiation that is almost as old as the universe." Learn more in the Voice of America Online.

• 16 March 2006
  "British researchers are set to begin the largest ever study into the genetic and environmental causes of disease. The UK Biobank aims to obtain DNA samples from 500,000 people aged 40-69 and track their health. This database will be made available to researchers wanting to discover the causes of diseases. Lead investigator Professor Rory Collins said the project could have a profound impact on scientific understanding of disease. He said: 'In 10, 20, or 30 years time we'll be able to confirm or refute various theories about how some diseases are caused. We'll be able to identify new ways of identifying diseases and preventing them. 'Professor Collins believes that the biobank could be used to find cures for some of the biggest killers including heart disease, diabetes and various cancers." Learn more in the BBC.com.

• 15 March 2006
  "The world is about to reach a grim milestone, with the confirmation of the 100th death from H5N1 bird flu expected this week. Nor do the numbers seem likely to stop rising, with almost daily news of the virus reaching new areas, most of them impoverished with little defence against human infection. The World Health Organization confirmed on Tuesday that three people who died in the Salyan region of southeast Azerbaijan had H5 bird flu. Final confirmation from a UK lab that it is H5N1, expected by the end of the week, will bring the worldwide number of confirmed human deaths from the virus to 101. Wild birds on the Caspian coast of Azerbaijan died of H5N1 in February, and village poultry in Salyan are also reported to have died, although they were not tested. Nearly all known human cases of H5N1 caught it from poultry. Meanwhile the virus continues its explosive worldwide spread. Just in the past few days H5N1 was confirmed for the first time in Serbia, where it affected wild birds, and in Albania, in chickens. Myanmar, the only major country in southeast Asia that had not reported the virus, has confirmed it in poultry, as has Cameroon – the fourth African country hit after Niger, Egypt and Nigeria." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 14 March 2006
  "Scientists have discovered a new planet they call a 'super-Earth' in a solar system 9,000 light-years away. The icy, rocky planet, which weighs 13 times as much as Earth, orbits the outer region of its solar system, around a so-called red dwarf star that is about half as big as our sun. The planet dominates a region similar to the one in our solar system that is populated by the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. Scientists believe the planet likely didn't accumulate enough gas to grow to giant proportions. 'We've never been able to see these failed Jupiter cores before,' said Andrew Gould, an astronomer at Ohio State University in Columbus who is leading the research. He suggests, however, that icy super-Earths are common and that about 35 percent of all stars have them." Learn more about this new "Super-Earth in the National Geographic.

• 13 March 2006
  "Last month, the Motion Picture Association of America announced one of its boldest sorties yet against online piracy: a barrage of seven federal lawsuits against some of the highest-profile BitTorrent sites, Usenet hosts and peer-to-peer services. Among the targets: isoHunt, TorrentSpy and eDonkey. But, as always, one prominent site is missing from the movie industry's announcement, and it happens to be the simplest and best-known source of traded movies -- along with pirated video games, music, software, audio books, television broadcasts and nearly any other form of media imaginable. The site is called The Pirate Bay, and it's operated by a crew of intrepid Swedes who revel in tormenting the content industries. To international observers, The Pirate Bay's defiant immunity from copyright lawyers is somewhat baffling. But in Sweden, the site is more than just an electronic speak-easy: It's the flagship of a national file-sharing movement that's generating an intense national debate." Learn more in Wired News.

• 10 March 2006
  "Nuclear fusion will never be a practical source of electrical power, argues a prominent scientist in the journal Science. Even nuclear fusion’s staunchest advocates admit a power-producing fusion plant is still decades away at best, despite forty years of hard work and well over $20 billion spent on the research. But the new paper, personally backed by the journal’s editor, issues a strong challenge to the entire fusion programme, arguing that the whole massive endeavour is never likely to lead to anything practical or useful. 'The history of this dream is as discouraging as it is expensive,' wrote William Parkins, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during the second world war, who later became the chief scientist at US engineering firm Rockwell International. Sadly, Parkins passed away while his lengthy paper, which makes its case on engineering grounds, was being edited. But Donald Kennedy, Science's editor considered the paper important enough to run the piece posthumously." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 9 March 2006
  "A scientific study pinpoints 20 areas in the world where animals are not at immediate risk of extinction, but where the risk is likely to arise soon. The regions include Greenland and the Siberian tundra, Caribbean islands and parts of South East Asia. The London-based research team believes its work will help conservationists prevent extinctions through early intervention - prevention, not cure. It is reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The study concentrates on a concept called 'latent extinction risk.' This means animals are not under threat right now, and may not be classified as in danger according to the Red List, the internationally accepted database of threatened species. But the pattern of human development means they could be sent on a fast track to extinction in the near future, perhaps overtaking other species currently in higher-risk classifications." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 8 March 2006
  "By some estimates, there are more than 30,000 people patrolling the Web in China, helping to form one of the world's far-reaching Internet filtering systems. But while China's huge Internet police force is busy deleting annoying phrases like 'free speech' and 'human rights' from online bulletin boards, specialists say that Wild West capitalism has moved from the real economy in China to the virtual one. Indeed, the unchecked freedoms that exist on the Web, analysts say, are perhaps unwittingly ushering in an age of startling social change. The Web in China is a thriving marketplace for everyone, including scam artists, snake oil salesmen and hard-core criminals who are only too eager to turn consumers into victims. Chinese entrepreneurs who started out brazenly selling downloadable pirated music and movies from online storefronts have extended their product lines — peddling drugs and sex, stolen cars, firearms and even organs for transplanting." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 7 March 2006
  "Human genes involved in metabolism, skin pigmentation, brain function and reproduction have evolved in response to recent environmental changes, according to a new study of natural selection in the human genome. Researchers at the University of Chicago, US, developed a statistical test to find genomic regions that evolution has favoured over the last 15,000 years or so – when modern humans dealt with the end of the last ice age, the beginning of agriculture, and increased population densities. Many of the 700 genes the researchers identified – especially those involved in smelling, fertility, and reproduction – are also suspected of having undergone natural selection during the divergence of humans and chimpanzees millions of years ago. But some of the newly identified genes fall into categories not previously known to be targets of selection in the human lineage." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 6 March 2006
  "Are consumers going to start having to spend a lot more to surf the Web? Phone and cable companies have stoked those fears recently by floating plans that would have Amazon, Yahoo and other Web sites paying new fees to ensure that their content will be delivered to customers faster. This possibility has raised the prospect that consumers may end up having to pay twice for access to the Internet — once to the phone or cable company that sells them a dial-up or broadband line, and again to Internet companies that pass along new charges for fast access to content from their sites. Those worries were highlighted yesterday when AT&T announced plans to buy BellSouth for $67 billion, a merger that would create a telecommunications giant with $130 billion in sales and 70 million local phone customers in 22 states." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 3 March 2006
  "Imagine being in a car crash, lying unconscious and bleeding in an ambulance. With no blood on board, paramedics give you an experimental substitute, but even at the hospital, you get fake blood for several hours before doctors try the real thing. Medical ethicists say a study that is doing just that on hundreds of trauma patients without their consent should be halted. It's a renewed attack on research that began in 2004 after Northfield Laboratories got federal approval for its study of the blood substitute Polyheme. Debate was reignited by a Wall Street Journal story last week that suggested the company tried to hide some crucial details about another blood substitute study back in 2000. The Journal reported that 10 heart surgery patients in that Polyheme experiment had heart attacks, while other patients given real blood did not." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 2 March 2006
  "The global scientific body on climate change will report soon that only greenhouse gas emissions can explain freak weather patterns. Simultaneous changes in sea ice, glaciers, droughts, floods, ecosystems, ocean acidification and wildlife migration are taking place. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had previously said gases such as CO2 were 'probably' to blame. Its latest draft report will be sent to world governments next month. A source told the BBC: 'The measurements from the natural world on all parts of the globe have been anomalous over the past decade. If a few were out of kilter we wouldn't be too worried, because the Earth changes naturally. But the fact that they are virtually all out of kilter makes us very concerned.'" Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 1 March 2006
  "Observations by astronomers tracking near-Earth asteroids have raised a new object to the top of the Earth-threat list. The asteroid could strike the Earth in 2102. However, Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US, told New Scientist: 'The most likely situation, by far, is that additional observations will bring it back down to a zero.' He adds: 'We're more likely to be hit between now and then by an object that we don't know about.' On 23 February, new observations allowed researchers to more accurately calculate the orbit of the asteroid, named 2004 VD17, which was originally detected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's LINEAR project. Since the improvement did not rule out a potential collision with the Earth on 4 May 2102, they increased the asteroid's rating to level 2 on the Torino Scale, a relatively rare event." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 28 February 2006
  "The town of Sevagram in central India has long been known for three things: its heat, which is oppressive even by Indian standards; its snakes, which are abundant; and its ashram, a derelict and increasingly malarial retreat preserved as a tribute to Mohandas Gandhi, who lived here and was known for tenderly relocating the poisonous vipers that slithered into his shack. Despite this intemperate setting, Sevagram's hospital has a good reputation. Though the power fails often, forcing medics to use the backlit screens of their cell phones for illumination, the standard of care is higher than at many of the country's public hospitals. Last year, Sevagram began garnering even more cachet. A German pharmaceutical company called Boehringer Ingelheim, approved the town's hospital as a trial site - one of 28 in India recruiting stroke victims to round out the company's 18,500-person study. " Learn more in Wired News.

• 27 February 2006
  "On the internet, the traffic cops are blind -- they don't look at the data they're directing, and they don't give preferential treatment. That's something operators of the internet highway, the major U.S. phone companies, want to change by effectively adding a toll lane: They want to be able to give priority treatment to those who pay to get through faster. Naturally, consumer advocates and the web companies that would be paying the toll are calling it highway robbery. 'Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the internet such a success,' Vinton Cerf told a Senate committee recently. Cerf, who played a key role in building the internet, is now the chief internet evangelist at Google." Learn more in Wired News.

• 24 February 2006
  "Our universe may one day be obliterated or assimilated by a larger universe, according to a controversial new analysis. The work suggests the parallel universes proposed by some quantum theorists may not actually be parallel but could interact – and with disastrous consequences. Random quantum fluctuations mean the behaviour of particles and photons of light cannot be predicted exactly. The quantum equations that describe them contain a variety of different - and opposing - outcomes in their solution, such as a particular particle causing a bell to both ring and not ring in an experimental setup. Physicists then have to use an equation called the Born rule to calculate the probability of the bell ringing, and countless experiments have shown the rule works." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 23 February 2006
  "Advances in nanotechnology bring blessings as well as warnings of possible hazards. Two breakthroughs reported this month show how significant the blessings can be. One promises to become the first major alternative to chemical batteries in 200 years. The other opens a way to boost solar-cell efficiency. A third development deals with the dark side. It offers a way to look into plant or animal cells to see if the molecule-size nanotech units that bring the blessings may also be doing mischief inside the basic units of biological life. The promised devices are assembled from particles, tubes, or filaments that measure just 100 billionths of a meter (100 nanometers) in at least one of their dimensions. At that size, the material of which these units are made - carbon or a metal, for example - has most of its atoms on its surface. It is much more active chemically or electrically than is the same material in bulk form, where most of the atoms are buried inside." Learn more in the Christian Science Monitor.

• 22 February 2006
  "Researchers said Monday the next major human epidemic may not be a pandemic flu, but will likely be a type of virus known as a retrovirus and it will jump from animals to humans. Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St. Louis, scientists said new infectious diseases are evolving at an unusually high rate. 'A good analogy to this is that we’re living through a mass extinction,' said Mark Woolhouse, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. 'As lots of species are dying off through human action, human pathogens seem to be going through a bit of a reverse.' Although new diseases mean new markets for the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, the anti-infectives market is not thought of as a high-profit area." Learn more in the Red Herring.

• 21 February 2006
  "Here is one question that probably won't cross the minds of Sasha Cohen, Irina Slutskaya and the other Olympic women figure skaters today, even if they fall: Why is ice slippery? But maybe it should. After all, ice is a solid, and trying to glide on thin metal blades across the surfaces of most solids — concrete, wood, glass, to name a few — results in ear-piercing sounds and ungraceful stumbles. Though the question may seem to be a simple one, physicists are still searching for a simple answer. The explanation once commonly dispensed in textbooks turns out to be wrong. And slipperiness is just one of the unanswered puzzles about ice. Besides the everyday ice that you slip on, there are about a dozen other forms, some of which experts suspect exist in the hot interior of Earth or on the surface of Pluto. Scientists expect to discover still more variations in the coming years." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 20 February 2006
  "Technology firms are investing more in an area of biotech research they hope will blunt a growing public health worry: the threat of an avian flu pandemic. The H5N1 bird flu strain has devastated poultry flocks in 19 nations in Asia and Eastern Europe. At least 165 humans have been infected, and 88 have died. Scientists are concerned the strain could start spreading from person to person, sparking a deadly pandemic. IBM and the Scripps Research Institute said they are combining forces to research infectious diseases such as bird flu that could spread worldwide. The venture marries IBM's growing life-sciences division, including its Blue Gene supercomputer, with Scripps' new biotech research park in Boca Raton, Fla." Learn more in USA Today.

• 17 February 2006
  "Sustainable farming methods can help the poorest farmers in developing nations out of poverty, new research suggests. Scientists found that techniques such as crop rotation and organic farming increased crop yields by an average of 79%, without risking future harvests. The study, possibly the largest of its kind, looked at more than 280 projects in 57 of the world's poorest countries. The findings appear in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The team of international scientists who carried out the four-year project found that the farmers enjoyed improved crop productivity, while reducing their use of pesticides and water. One of the report's co-authors, Professor Jules Pretty from the University of Essex, UK, said the findings challenged the dominate view that the West knew best when it came to agriculture." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 16 February 2006
  "While everyone knows doping in sports is a big no-no, the next best way to improve performance might be to concentrate on chemicals coming out of athletes, rather than going in. By measuring hormone and other chemical levels before, during and after tough workouts, trainers can precisely tailor an athlete's regimen. For example, creatin kinase levels are high following muscle wear and tear. If levels are high following, say, a rugby match, an athlete might want to train lightly the following week to avoid injury. If levels are low, the coach can push slackers harder. Until recently, a blood sample obtained by a pinprick was necessary to test most chemicals related to athletic performance. But scientists at HortResearch in New Zealand are developing a non-invasive and painless method. Some trainers are already using Hort's technology by measuring testosterone, cortisol and creatin kinase." Learn more in Wired News.

• 15 February 2006
  "A slim cable for a space elevator has been built stretching a mile into the sky, enabling robots to scrabble some way up and down the line. LiftPort Group, a private US company on a quest to build a space elevator by April 2018, stretched the strong carbon ribbon 1 mile (1.6 km) into the sky from the Arizona desert outside Phoenix in January tests, it announced on Monday. The company's lofty objective will sound familiar to followers of NASA's Centennial Challenges programme. The desired outcome is a 62,000-mile (99,779 km) tether that robotic lifters – powered by laser beams from Earth – can climb, ferrying cargo, satellites and eventually people into space. The recent test followed a September 2005 demonstration in which LiftPort's robots climbed 300 metres of ribbon tethered to the Earth and pulled taut by a large balloon. This time around, the company tested an improved cable pulled aloft by three balloons." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 14 February 2006
  "I've always been proud of my irrelevance. When I raised my hand to speak at our weekly meetings here in the science department, my colleagues could be sure they would hear something weird about time travel or adventures in the fifth dimension. Something to take them far from the daily grind. Enough to taunt the mind, but not enough to attract the attention of bloggers, editors, politicians and others who keep track of important world affairs. So imagine my surprise to find the origin of the universe suddenly at the white hot center of national politics. Last week my colleague Andrew Revkin reported that a 24-year-old NASA political appointee with no scientific background, George C. Deutsch, had told a designer working on a NASA Web project that the Big Bang was "not proven fact; it is opinion," and thus the word 'theory' should be used with every mention of Big Bang." Learn more about the politics of science in the New York Times.

• 13 February 2006
  "An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees - the first known case in which US workers have been “tagged” electronically as a way of identifying them. CityWatcher.com, a private video surveillance company, said it was testing the technology as a way of controlling access to a room where it holds security video footage for government agencies and the police. Embedding slivers of silicon in workers is likely to add to the controversy over RFID technology, widely seen as one of the next big growth industries. RFID chips – inexpensive radio transmitters that give off a unique identifying signal – have been implanted in pets or attached to goods so they can be tracked in transit. 'There are very serious privacy and civil liberty issues of having people permanently numbered,' said Liz McIntyre, who campaigns against the use of identification technology." Learn more in the Financial Times.

• 10 February 2006
  "The first case of H5N1 bird flu in Africa is likely to be followed quickly by others, creating a "very severe situation", the UN's top expert says. Dr David Nabarro of the World Health Organization (WHO) told the BBC the virus 'might be quite widespread'. It comes after the strain deadly to humans was detected on a farm in Kaduna in northern Nigeria. Officials are investigating whether poultry in other states have also died from the virus. Dr Nabarro said the WHO was anticipating further outbreaks in other parts of Africa. 'If it's in Nigeria it might also be in other countries that are less well-equipped.' He said governments and ordinary people would have to take 'very, very strong precautions' to protect themselves and stop the disease spreading. " Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 8 February 2006
  "When it comes to downloading music and instant messaging, today's students are plenty tech-savvy. But that doesn't mean they know how to make good use of the endless stream of information that computers put at their fingertips. Educators and employers call those skills 'technology literacy,' and while everyone agrees it's important to have, it also is difficult to measure. Now a test that some high school students will begin taking this year could help. The ICT Literacy Assessment touches on traditional skills, such as analytical reading and math, but with a technological twist. Test-takers, for instance, may be asked to query a database, compose an e-mail based on their research, or seek information on the Internet and decide how reliable it is." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 7 February 2006
  "In the chaos that followed the worst natural disaster in American history, a forensic investigation has been taking place to find out what went wrong and why. The BBC's Horizon programme has spoken to the scientists who are now confronting the real possibility that New Orleans may be the first of many cities worldwide to face extinction. The Mississippi River had been controlled over the years to stop the annual floods with hundreds of miles of levees and dams. As a result sediments that were naturally brought down to replenish the land, were cut off. Gradually Louisiana started to lose its coast and today it has the highest rate of coastal land loss in North America. An area the size of Wembley stadium is lost to the sea every 20 minutes." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 6 February 2006
  "Scientists have used genetic modification in an early step towards creating a pandemic flu vaccine. The US Centers for Disease Control created the vaccine by putting a gene from a strain of the deadly H5N1 type of bird flu into a cold virus. This was then developed in cell cultures, rather than hens' eggs used in conventional vaccine development. Experts said the Lancet paper was technically interesting, but not immediately useful. The growing incidence of cases of H5N1 in humans is hastening scientists' search for a vaccine which would be effective in a flu pandemic. The problem is that it would not be the existing strain of the virus being seen in birds which would cause that pandemic. The fear is that H5N1 will mutate or combine with a human flu, and spread quickly and easily. The traditional way to make a vaccine is to inject a slightly altered virus - which will not cause disease - into fertilised hens' eggs. But it takes around six months for the whole process to be completed, and scientists are looking at ways to speed this up." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 3 February 2006
  "A flock of pigeons wearing mobile phone-style backpacks are to be used as air-pollution monitors. The 20 pigeons will each carry a GPS satellite tracking receiver, air pollution sensors and a basic mobile phone transmitter. Text messages on air quality will be beamed back in real time to a special pigeon "blog", or online journal, while miniature cameras slung around the birds' necks will post aerial pictures. The pigeons are to be released in August into the smog-filled skies over San Jose in California. Beatriz da Costa, a researcher from the University of California at Irvine, and two of her students came up with the idea. They built a prototype of the pigeons' equipment, containing a mobile phone circuit board with SIM card and communication chips, a GPS receiver and sensors capable of detecting carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide." Learn more at the Scotsman.com.

• 2 February 2006
  "Robots are on the march. Already, 1.5 million Roomba vacuum-cleaning bots are crawling the globe, and autonomous planetary rovers are working overtime on Mars. But this is only the start of what engineers are hoping to achieve. The goal is to build robots that can be let loose in our world, where they will learn to interact with humans in a messy and unpredictable environment, not just in the lab. These robots need to be able to get around in the same places we do, manipulate objects in their surroundings and communicate with others around them. In short, they need to be more like us. Lifelike humanoid robots have eluded designers because the mechanisms required to perform such tasks as emulating a hand, or walking and talking in anything approaching a natural manner, are hugely complex and need fine control." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 1 February 2006
  "The CHIKYU is studded with superlatives. Completed last year, the ship houses the world's biggest deep-sea drill, sports a high-tech floating laboratory and boasts a $500 million price tag. The Japanese boat has an ambitious agenda to match: uncover the secrets of climate change, find microbes that help explain the origin of life, and clarify the causes of earthquakes. The 210-yard ship underwent its first major test run in November, drilling deep into the ocean floor off northern Japan for specimens that scientists say can yield historical information on everything from volcano cycles to global warming. 'The contributions from this are actually immense,' said Daniel Curewitz, a structural geologist who supervises the ship's lab, as he pointed to long tubes of deep-sea sediment. 'Each one of these cores is a tape recorder.'" Learn more at CNN.com.

• 31 January 2006
  "Work has started on a £90m biomass power station, hailed as the largest project of its kind in the UK. A ground breaking ceremony marked the beginning of the E.ON UK project at Steven's Croft near Lockerbie. The green scheme - which converts waste timber products into energy - should supply enough power to meet the needs of around 70,000 homes. The firm predicts the project will create 40 direct jobs and 300 indirect posts in forestry and farming. The Big Lottery Fund is providing £18m from its Bio-Energy Capital Grants Scheme for the E.ON UK project. The company said 220,000 tonnes of fuel would be required each year and this would be sourced from the local environment...The plant was also backed by Friends of the Earth Scotland's Head of Research, Stuart Hay. He said: 'In the future using biomass to generate electricity and heat is going to play an ever increasing part in helping to reduce climate pollution." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 30 January 2006
  "New study results bolster the controversial hypothesis that certain cases of obesity are contagious. Over the last 20 years, some research has suggested that certain strains of human and avian adenoviruses--responsible for ailments ranging from the chest colds to pink eye--actually make individuals build up more fat cells. Having antibodies to one strain in particular, so-called Ad-36, proved to correlate with the heaviest obese people, and in one study, pairs of twins differed in heft depending on exposure to that virus. Now researchers have identified another strain of adenovirus that makes chickens plump...Though the infected chickens and noninfected controls consumed the same amount of food and were exposed to the same conditions, chickens carrying Ad-37 were found to have nearly three times as much fat in their guts and more than two times as much fat over their entire body at the end of the three-and-a-half week period." Learn more in the Scientific American.

• 27 January 2006
  "Scientists have created a map showing the 3D structure of the virus which causes Aids. The variable size and shape of HIV has made it hard to map, the team said in the journal Structure. So the UK-German team took hundreds of images of viruses, that are 60 times smaller than red blood cells, and used a computer program to combine them. Oxford University's Professor Stephen Fuller said the 3D map would assist in understanding how the virus grows. He told the BBC: 'You say can you show me the structure of the HIV virus and the question is which one. HIV is very variable. It varied in diameter by a factor of three.' The way the research team, from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University, dealt with this was by taking multiple images at different tilts. Working with colleagues in Heidelberg and Munich, they took about 100 images of 70 individual HIV viruses and then looked at similarities." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 26 January 2006
  "Tracking the movements of hundreds of thousands of banknotes across the US could provide scientists with a vital new tool to help combat the spread of deadly infectious diseases like bird flu. Modern transport has transformed the speed at which epidemics can spread, enabling disease to rip through populations and leap across continents at frightening speed. However, scientists possess few mathematical models to help them understand these movements and how this might govern the global spread of disease. To a large degree, this is because tracking the movements of so many people over such a large area is next to impossible. But now physicists from the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany, and the University of Santa Barbara, California, US, have developed a model to explain these movements, based on the tracked movements of US banknotes." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 25 January 2006
  "Amid the cacophony of the sprawling Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, the main action had little to do with electronics. Sure, booth after booth claimed to have the biggest TV screen, the smallest music player and the niftiest wireless gizmo. But that was to be expected. The real news was neither shiny nor tiny. The question in the air was what people will watch, listen to and do with these machines now that they are becoming interchangeable and interconnected. This should not be a pop quiz. For decades, nearly every gathering of media or technology executives has defined the future in a single word: convergence...Yet for all the time that media executives - from the towers of Sixth Avenue to the back lots of Burbank - had to prepare for convergence, they are now scrambling to figure out what to do about it." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 24 January 2006
  "Among the many temptations of the digital age, photo-manipulation has proved particularly troublesome for science, and scientific journals are beginning to respond. Some journal editors are considering adopting a test, in use at The Journal of Cell Biology, that could have caught the concocted images of the human embryonic stem cells made by Dr. Hwang Woo Suk. At The Journal of Cell Biology, the test has revealed extensive manipulation of photos. Since 2002, when the test was put in place, 25 percent of all accepted manuscripts have had one or more illustrations that were manipulated in ways that violate the journal's guidelines, said Michael Rossner of Rockefeller University, the executive editor. The editor of the journal, Ira Mellman of Yale, said that most cases were resolved when the authors provided originals. 'In 1 percent of the cases we find authors have engaged in fraud,' he said." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 23 January 2006
  "Researchers are testing potentially life-saving techniques for keeping humans in a state of suspended animation while surgeons repair their wounds. US doctors have developed a method of inducing hypothermia to shut down the body's functions for up to three hours. In tests, they reduced the body temperature of injured pigs from 37C to 10C before operating on them and then reviving them. Now they are applying for permission to test the procedure on casualty patients without a pulse who have lost large amounts of blood, New Scientist magazine reported. It is thought this method and others could one day be used on car crash and gunshot victims, as well as in the battlefield to treat wounded soldiers. A surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Hasan Alam, has tested the technique about 200 times on pigs, with a 90 per cent success rate." Learn more in the Sydney Morning Herald.

• 20 January 2006
  "The Bush administration, seeking to revive an online law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google for details on what its users have been looking for through its popular search engine. Google has refused to comply with the subpoena, issued last year, for a broad range of material from its databases, including a request for 1 million random web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period, lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department said in papers filed Wednesday in federal court in San Jose, California. Privacy advocates have been increasingly scrutinizing Google's practices as the company expands its offerings to include e-mail, driving directions, photo-sharing, instant messaging and blogs. Although Google pledges to protect personal information, the company's privacy policy says it complies with legal and government requests. Google also has no stated guidelines on how long it keeps data, leading critics to warn that retention is potentially forever given cheap storage costs." Learn more in Wired News.

• 19 January 2006
  "The woolly mammoth and the dodo have gone; the dinosaur kingdom lies withered in its fossil graveyard. The gorilla and the bonobo dwindle, along with countless fish and rainforest beetles as yet un-numbered. Golden eagles and rhinos, meanwhile, gambol in their newly-found multitudes. What is it, then, that decides who lives and who dies - which species teeter and fall after the dodo, and which, like the eagle, regain their numbers and soar again? It is a key question for conservationists, desperate to deploy scarce resources to best effect as the human race's expansion funnels so many plants and animals towards the vortex of extinction. So you would think there would be a definitive answer, and you might think it would involve the size of a population; the fewer there are, the worse the prospects. Think so? Then read on..." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 18 January 2006
  "A new design for an ion engine promises up to 10 times the fuel-efficiency of existing electric propulsion engines, according to tests by the European Space Agency. The new thruster could be used to propel craft into interstellar space, or to power a crewed mission to Mars, ESA says. Ion engines work by using an electric field to accelerate a beam of positively charged particles – ions – away from the spacecraft, thereby providing propulsion. Existing models, such as the engine used in ESA’s Moon mission, SMART-1, extract the ions from a reservoir and expel them in a single process. Tests on a prototype called the Dual-Stage 4-Grid (DS4G) thruster, at ESA’s Electric Propulsion Laboratory in the Netherlands showed that DS4G’s two-step process produces an ion exhaust plume that traveled at 210 kilometres per second." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 17 January 2006
  "There are bacteria that blink on and off like Christmas tree lights and bacteria that form multicolored patterns of concentric circles resembling an archery target. Yet others can reproduce photographic images. These are not strange-but-true specimens from nature, but rather the early tinkering of synthetic biologists, scientists who seek to create living machines and biological devices that can perform novel tasks. 'We want to do for biology what Intel does for electronics,' said George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard and a leader in the field. 'We want to design and manufacture complicated biological circuitry.' While much of the early work has consisted of eye-catching, if useless, stunts like the blinking bacteria, the emerging field could one day have a major impact on medicine and industry." Learn more in the New York Times.

• 16 January 2006
  "Although Turkish officials are now taking appropriate steps to contain the outbreaks of avian influenza that have spread across this country, their slow initial response in detecting the arrival of bird flu three weeks ago has created a health crisis that may be very hard to correct, international experts said Wednesday. The Turkish government has reported more than 20 outbreaks of avian influenza in birds, spread all across the country. Fifteen human cases of the virus, A(H5N1), have been confirmed, at least two children have died and more than 100 people are in hospitals under observation. 'Turkey has provided us with a double problem,' said Dr. Joseph Domenech, chief of veterinary services at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. 'First, their detection was not early enough, so the virus was able to spread for weeks. And even with that, we do not understand why so many people have become infected.'" Learn more in the New York Times.

• 13 January 2006
  "Pigs may not be able to fly just yet, but at least three of them glow. Taiwanese researchers said Friday that they have bred the pigs with a fluorescent material in a move that they hope will benefit the island's stem-cell research effort. The fluorescent pigs are green from inside out, including their hearts and internal organs, said Wu Shinn-Chih, assistant professor of animal science at the prestigious National Taiwan University. From the outside, the pigs appear to be bathed in a light green tint, particularly their eyes, mouths and knuckles. Mr. Wu said the pigs are bred by injecting their embryos with fluorescent green protein taken from jelly fish. Pigs are commonly used to study human diseases, and Mr. Wu believes his technique will be useful in helping researchers monitor tissue changes over time." Learn more in the Globe and Mail.

• 12 January 2006
  "From toothpaste to trousers, dozens of everyday products contain materials made through the blossoming science of nanotechnology -- but laws safeguarding the public's health and safety aren't developing nearly as quickly, according to a new report. Few will say whether the nano materials, often hundreds of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, are unquestionably safe or dangerous given the lack of definitive research into the matter. However, Terry Davies, author of the report released Wednesday, said it's time to start discussing changing laws -- and perhaps drafting new ones -- to identify and protect the public from any risks that may crop up in the future. 'The technology is new but it's not so new that it's not being commercialized,' said Davies, a senior adviser to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former Environmental Protection Agency official." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 11 January 2006
  "Scientific research is being added to at an alarming rate: the Human Genome Project alone is generating enough documentation to "sink battleships". So it's not surprising that academics seeking data to support a new hypothesis are getting swamped with information overload. As data banks build up worldwide, and access gets easier through technology, it has become easier to overlook vital facts and figures that could bring about groundbreaking discoveries. The government's response has been to set up the National Centre for Text Mining, the world's first centre devoted to developing tools that can systematically analyse multiple research papers, abstracts and other documents, and then swiftly determine what they contain. Text mining uses artificial intelligence techniques to look in texts for entities (a quality or characteristic, such as a date or job title) and concepts (the relationship between two genes, for example)." Learn more in the Guardian.

• 10 January 2006
  "The US has officially notified the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency that NASA is preparing to launch New Horizons, its Pluto-bound mission carrying 10.9 kilograms of radioactive material. The New Horizons probe is scheduled to begin its nine-year journey on 17 January. It is carrying plutonium dioxide to power its instruments during its frozen odyssey through the solar system. The spacecraft's trajectory is expected to take it near southern Africa and Australia. The UN is notifying these nations of the upcoming launch, says William Armbruster, senior public diplomacy officer with the US State Department. NASA has estimated the probability of a launch accident involving the release of plutonium dioxide at about 4 in 1000." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 9 January 2006
  "Space tourists must be screened to ensure they are not terrorists, according to proposed regulations from the US Federal Aviation Administration. The draft report's suggestions aim to prevent a terrorist from destroying a spacecraft or using it as a weapon. However, the report has no strict proposals on the health of any would-be space tourists. The suggestions will affect Sir Richard Branson's enterprise which aims to launch people into space this decade. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is attempting to regulate the commercial space industry in a bid to ensure minimum safety standards. It has recommended security checks similar to those for airline passengers." Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 6 January 2006
  "An extraordinary 'hyperspace' engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government. The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today's New Scientist magazine. The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft. Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached." Learn more in The Scotsman.

• 5 January 2006
  "Two Turkish teenagers have died of bird flu, probably H5N1, according to the World Health Organization and the Turkish government. They are the first fatalities from avian influenza outside East Asia. There are also about a dozen more cases in the region, some serious. But there is so far no indication that the virus has begun spreading readily between humans, which it must do to become pandemic. Like most of the other 142 reported human cases so far, the Turkish victims appear to have been infected directly by sick chickens. In October, Turkey became the first country with European territory to report H5N1 in poultry, with outbreaks in the west of the country. And in late December, Turkey reported a massive outbreak in poultry in Igdir province in the far east of the country, which is on a major flyway for birds migrating from central Asia. At that time, the Kocygit family in Doğubayazit in Agri province, 60 kilometres south of the outbreak, cooked and ate its remaining chickens after several of the birds died." Learn more in the New Scientist.

• 4 January 2006
  "When I left the Monitor as a full-time staffer to work from home as a freelance writer last fall, I knew that, among the various items I'd need to pursue this endeavor (laptop, wireless Internet, fax machine) would be a second phone line. We already had one phone, a landline, that handled most of the family needs. But I was going to need a line for work-related calls. I wasn't all that enthused about getting another 'regular phone' - appointments waiting for service people to come, holes drilled into my house, yet another way for telemarketers to contact me. So I went to the local mall and bought a cellphone instead. Now I had a phone number that was all mine; I could carry the phone wherever I went; people could reach me when they needed me, and I had access to e-mail, text messaging, and the Web. And all for a price that was less than what I paid every month for my landline. Hmmm, I wondered, Why do I need that landline again?" Learn more in the Christian Science Monitor.

• 3 January 2006
  "Across the country, the National Association of Realtors and the 6 percent commission that most of its members charge to sell a house are under assault by government officials, consumer advocates, lawyers and ambitious entrepreneurs. But the most effective challenge so far emanates from a spare bedroom in the modest home here of Christie Miller. Ms. Miller, 38, a former social worker who favors fuzzy slippers, and her cousin, Mary Clare Murphy, 51, operate what real estate professionals believe to be the largest for-sale-by-owner Web site in the country. They have turned Madison, a city of 208,000 known for its liberal politics, into one of the most active for-sale-by-owner markets in the country. And their success suggests that, in challenging the Realtor association's dominance of home sales, they may have hit on a winning formula that has eluded many other upstarts." Learn more in the New York Times.

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