NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, will complete its first survey of the entire sky on July 17, 2010. The mission has generated more than one million images so far, of everything from asteroids to distant galaxies.

"Like a globe-trotting shutterbug, WISE has completed a world tour with 1.3 million slides covering the whole sky," said Edward Wright, the principal investigator of the mission at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Some of these images have been processed and stitched together into a new picture. It shows the Pleiades cluster of stars, also known as the Seven Sisters, resting in a tangled bed of wispy dust. The pictured region covers seven square degrees, or an area equivalent to 35 full moons, highlighting the telescope's ability to take wide shots of vast regions of space.

The new picture was taken in February. It shows infrared light from WISE's four detectors in a range of wavelengths. This infrared view highlights the region's expansive dust cloud, through which the Seven Sisters and other stars in the cluster are passing. Infrared light also reveals the smaller and cooler stars of the family.

A Senate committee on Thursday unanimously agreed to a blueprint for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that cancels the agency's return-to-the-moon program, starts investments in commercial companies that could build rockets to take astronauts to low Earth orbit and speeds development of a heavy-lift rocket for more distant missions.

The compromise authorization bill approved by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation bridges disparate proposals and outlines the tasks and budgets for NASA over the next three years. The bill has gained the support of both the White House, which was pushing for more aggressive changes under plans proposed by President Obama, and senators on the committee who had resisted those plans.

"The consensus we achieved today was a miracle, but I believe in miracles," Senator Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat who is chairman of the committee's space subcommittee, said after the vote. The bill now moves to the full Senate.

Lake turns to barbecue gas in Saturn's barbecue summer

NASA boffins have released a video travelogue entitled "See Beautiful Ontario Lacus", revealing the delights that travellers to the moons of Saturn might encounter during a visit to the freezing antarctic patio-gas lakes of Titan.

It'll get right up your nose

As if botnet clients and infected USB devices weren't bad enough, security pros of the future may be faced with the menace of "smart dust" information stealing threats, if a futurologist is to be believed.

Ian Pearson reckons that so-called "smart dust" will be the stuff of future IT security nightmares. Smart dust is nothing to do with the Smoke Monster in Lost, nor the concept outline in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, though it might as well be given the vagueness of the description Pearson offers.

Siemens is warning customers of a new and highly sophisticated virus that targets the computers used to manage large-scale industrial control systems used by manufacturing and utility companies.

Siemens learned about the issue on July 14, Siemens Industry spokesman Michael Krampe said in an e-mail message Friday. "The company immediately assembled a team of experts to evaluate the situation. Siemens is taking all precautions to alert its customers to the potential risks of this virus," he said.

Security experts believe the virus appears to be the kind of threat they have worried about for years -- malicious software designed to infiltrate the systems used to run factories and parts of the critical infrastructure.

In the first week of a joint Indonesia - U.S. exploration of the deep ocean north of Sulawesi, Indonesia, NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer's built-in multibeam sonar mapped a huge undersea volcano while cameras on the ship's remotely-operated vehicle took high-definition images of the feature called Kawio Barat, referring to the ocean area west of Kawio Islands.

Scientists chose Kawio Barat as the first target for the expedition based on satellite information and data collected by a joint Indonesian-Australian team in 2004. The immense underwater feature served as an ideal initial target to calibrate onboard tools and technologies being used on the ships maiden voyage. Expedition scientists hope the maps and video produced from the expedition will pave the way for other researchers to follow up on their preliminary findings.

Archeologists in Guatemala have discovered a Mayan king's tomb packed with a well-preserved hoard of carvings, ceramics and children's bones that cast fresh light on the vanished civilisation.

Researchers uncovered the burial chamber in Guatemala's the jungle-covered Peten region in May, but the discovery has only just been made public.

The tomb is thought to date from 300 - 600AD and is located beneath the El Diablo pyramid in the city of El Zotz.

The well-sealed tomb - measuring ten feet long by nearly four feet wide - helped preserve textiles, wood carvings and red and yellow ceramics decorated with fish and wild boar motifs.

"It's like their Fort Knox, their depositary of wealth with textiles and ... trade items - and that's what's overwhelming about it," said Stephen Houston, the dig's director at El Zotz, who is based at Brown University in the United States.

Shifting sands and surging tides on the Outer Banks have delivered more pieces from what may be the oldest shipwreck on the North Carolina coast.

More could be out there.

"Anywhere along that beach, anyone could find something," said Bob Hill of San Diego, who owns a house in Duck.

In May, about 15 miles south of where the main wreckage was discovered, Hill found a 15-foot-long piece of a keel that had wooden pegs and scarf and key types of joinery that matched the 12-ton remains of a wreck that could date from the Jamestown era.

"As soon as I saw the pegs, that was the clincher," he said.

Let's take the history lesson most of us learnt in our school days. Though we come to understand that we have inherited a lot of good stuff from our deep cultural heritage, there is however one myth about the 'Aryan' theory of invasion into India that has been shoved down our throats. According to this theory, the so-called Aryans, the original people behind the Vedas (the oldest scriptures of Hinduism), were reinterpreted not as sages and seers - the rishis and yogis of Hindu historical tradition - but as primitive plunderers. Naturally this cast a shadow on the Hindu religion and culture as a whole.

We need to know more about this myth as this comes in the way of who we really are and the source of our deep culture. Due to this myth perpetrated by colonial historians, it been thrust on us we are 'Dravidians' subjugated by the 'Aryans'. Correcting this myth thereby will alter the very fabric of how we interpret ourselves and our ancient civilization. In fact the word 'Dravid' refers to the geographical 'Panch Dravida area' extending from central India down south i.e. Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Konkan and also Gujarat. So the term Dravid is used in Indian literature to denote lands to the south of Vindhya ranges.

The Deccan Herald on June 25, 2010 reports that "The intelligentsia and even the politicians were in for shock at the World Classical Tamil Conference in Coimbatore, when a Finland-based Indologist Prof Asko Parpola turned the spotlight on a Dravidian-Aryan continuum while demolishing the Aryan-Dravidian divide as a myth".

Even the previous head pontiff of the Kanchi Kamakoti Math ~ Sri Chandrashekarendra Saraswati Swamigal confirms that "It is wrong to classify the people of this land into Aryan and Dravidian. In Sanskrit, Arya means, worthy of respect, and anaarya means, not worthy of honour or worship. Whoever is worthy of respect or honour is Arya, and therefore, Aryans are not people belonging to any particular part of the country". He often used to say that this Aryan-Dravidian divide was a canard created by the erstwhile British rulers of India in their continuing efforts to explore and exploit all the avenues of continued differences between the people of India, so as to sustain themselves in power. 'Aryans' does not refer to a particular race but rather refer to characteristics that are common to a broad set of people belonging to the Indian civilisation. 'Aryan', literally, is nothing but an anglicised form of addressing the Arya. The root word is only Arya which means 'noble'.

James Cameron's futuristic vision in the Terminator series of predator robots flying the skies took another step towards becoming reality this week, when the British military unveiled a top-secret long-range unmanned drone.

Called Taranis, after the Celtic god of thunder, the unmanned drone is capable of carrying out reconnaissance missions in other continents and has a long-range strike ability with a cache of bombs and missiles available.

And just like those "Hunter-Killer" robot jets in the Terminator series, the Taranis has been designed to use artificial intelligence that could potentially allow the drone to identify and attack enemy targets on its own.

The size of a small plane, and similar in shape to the American B2 stealth bomber, the Taranis is "the first of its kind" according to the U.K. military and defence contractor BAE systems.

The prototype, unveiled to journalists on Monday by the U.K. Ministry of Defence under tight security, cost about $225 million and took some three years to design and build.

"It could then carry out intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance activity ... It's a combat aircraft with weapons so it could strike with precision weapons," Squadron Leader Bruno Wood, the Ministry of Defence spokesman for the Taranis project, told The Globe and Mail earlier this week.