Science & TechnologyS

Network

Jimmy the Porn King says: 'MySpace will fail..'

Popular social-networking site MySpace will fail in a few years time, says self-confessed geek Jimmy Wales.

, founder of the free web encyclopaedia Wikipedia, is currently in South Africa for a digital freedom tour.

MySpace, owned by News Corp and with reportedly more than 100 million registered users, "hurts my eyes", Wales says.

"There's way too much advertising and they're not really respecting their own community."

Wikipedia is another matter, he says. "We're not similar at all - you get involved in a community."

Wales, who confesses to spending lots of time on the web - "I pretty much roll out of bed and log on" - says when he started Wikipedia he knew it was a big idea, but he never imagined it would be in the Top 10 websites.

Star

Astronomers Make Detailed Image Of Giant Stellar Nursery

An international team of astronomers have collaborated to create the most detailed image ever produced of the Rosette Nebula (NGC 2237), a giant stellar nursery. The new image was assembled using data from INT Photometric H-Alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS) and covers four square degrees of sky, equivalent in size to about twenty times the size of the full moon.

The Rosette nebula is a vast cloud of dust and gas spanning 100 light years and lying about 4500 light-years away, in the direction of the constellation of Monoceros. Inside the nebula lies a cluster of bright, massive, young stars (NGC 2244), whose strong stellar winds and radiation have cleared a hole in the nebula's centre. Ultraviolet light from these hot stars excites the surrounding nebula, causing it to glow.

Star formation is still active around the nebula, as proven by the presence of a very young infrared star (AFGL 961) still in its final stages of formation. It is thought that the young massive stars in the nebula will one day blow all the gas and dust away. The centre of the Rosette Nebula is about 1.8 degrees below the Galactic Plane, the glow from which can be seen at the top left (northeastern) corner of this image.

Ambulance

The artificial bones created from an inkjet

Scientists are creating artificial bones using a modified version of an inkjet printer.

The technology creates perfect replicas of bones that have been damaged and these can then be inserted in the body to help it to heal.

Recycle

Packaging - unwrapped

I LOST 2 pounds the week I gave up packaging. Among aisles and aisles of neatly wrapped goods almost everything at my local grocery store was off-limits. Only a selection of fruit and vegetables made the grade. For milk I could buy from a local dairy that refills bottles, and I found bread without a bag at a local bakery. That was it: everything else was forbidden even lettuce, which only came wrapped up. My conscience was clear, but my stomach wouldn't stop rumbling.

Attention

Sudden Sea Level Surges Threaten 1 Billion

New mapping techniques show how much land would be lost and how many people affected by rapid sea level rises that are often triggered by storms and earthquakes.

Telescope

Uranus rings 'were seen in 1700s'

The rings around the planet Uranus may have been spotted nearly 190 years prior to the accepted date for their discovery, according to a theory.

Comment: As for Sir William Herschel - from this link. Also drop 'Planet X' or 'The 12th Planet' and add 'Dark Companion Brown Dwarf Star' on the linked website and you see a picture that has been hidden from us start to form.

New York Times
January 30, 1983

Something out there beyond the farthest reaches of the known solar system seems to be tugging at Uranus and Neptune. Some gravitational force keeps perturbing the two giant planets, causing irregularities in their orbits. The force suggests a presence far away and unseen, a large object that may be the long- sought Planet X. ... The last time a serious search of the skies was made it led to the discovery in 1930 of Pluto, the ninth planet. But the story begins more than a century before that, after the discovery of Uranus in 1781 by the English astronomer and musician William Herschel. Until then, the planetary system seemed to end with Saturn.

As astronomers observed Uranus, noting irregularities in its orbital path, many speculated that they were witnessing the gravitational pull of an unknown planet. So began the first planetary search based on astronomers predictions, which ended in the 1840's with the discovery of Neptune almost simultaneously by English, French, and German astronomers. But Neptune was not massive enough to account entirely for the orbital behavior of Uranus. Indeed, Neptune itself seemed to be affected by a still more remote planet. In the last 19th century, two American astronomers, Willian H. Pickering and Percival Lowell, predicted the size and approximate location of the trans-Neptunian body, which Lowell called Planet X. Years later, Pluto was detected by Clyde W. Tombaugh working at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Several astronomers, however, suspected it might not be the Planet X of prediction. Subsequent observation proved them right. Pluto was too small to change the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, the combined mass of Pluto and its recently discovered satellite, Charon, is only 1/5 that of Earth's moon.

Recent calculations by the United States Naval Observatory have confirmed the orbital perturbation exhibited by Uranus and Neptune, which Dr. Thomas C Van Flandern, an astronomer at the observatory, says could be explained by "a single undiscovered planet". He and a colleague, Dr. Richard Harrington, calculate that the 10th planet should be two to five times more massive than Earth and have a highly elliptical orbit that takes it some 5 billion miles beyond that of Pluto - hardly next-door but still within the gravitational influence of the Sun. ...



Bizarro Earth

Giant Tsunami May Have Destroyed Atlantis

The legend of Atlantis, the country that disappeared under the sea, may be more than just a myth. Research on the Greek island of Crete suggests Europe's earliest civilisation was destroyed by a giant tsunami.

©BBC

Comment: If you believe that Atlantis was in the Mediterranean, that is.


Magnify

Mites Resume Their Sex Life

A group of researchers has discovered that a family of tiny mites found in the Southern Hemisphere has taken the unusual step of resuming sexual reproduction after years of producing offspring through asexual means, raising intriguing questions about evolutionary biology.

Grey Alien

Meteorite has message for humans, say scientists

RUSSIA: ET may have already contacted humans through messages contained in what is believed to have been a meteorite that hit earth almost 100 years ago, Russian scientists claim.

Star

Huge Hot Stars Create Planetary "Danger Zones"

Massive stars create "planetary danger zones" - regions of space where extreme solar winds and radiation make planets less likely to form, according to a new study.

The zones extended 1.6 light-years - about 10 trillion miles (16 trillion kilometers) - around so-called O-type stars, which are roughly 20 times bigger than our sun and a million times brighter.

Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the study team mapped out the Rosette Nebula, a stellar nursery where many stars have formed close together.

The team searched the nebula for protoplanetary disks - the gas, dust, and rocks that swirl around some stars. With time, gravity can pull the clumps of matter together to form planets.

But if the younger stars are in a danger zone, solar wind and radiation from the nearby O-stars tend to blow away their orbiting disks, the study suggests.

The stars and their disks "look like comets ... with a bright head and a tail," said study leader Zoltan Balog of the University of Arizona.