'Other UK gov parties' wanted details suppressed

Farnborough British boffins have devloped a cunning new method of transmitting high bandwidth data - plus power - through tough solid barriers such as submarine hulls or tank armour. The tech is being touted as a way of adding modifications to subs or armoured vehicles cheaply, but it seems that there are also other, highly secret, government applications.

Lawmakers are paying new attention to how best to shield Earth from a bad day - getting whacked by an asteroid or comet that has our planet in its cross-hairs.

A new bill introduced to Congress proposes establishing a government-sponsored commission to study the threat of a major space rock collision with Earth and how prepared we are - as a country and a planet - to face such a danger.

There is a growing choir of concern regarding Near Earth Objects, or NEOs - spotting them and dealing with any Earth-threatening gatecrashers.

While the annual probability of the Earth being struck by a huge asteroid or comet is small, the consequences of such a collision are so calamitous that it is prudent to appraise the nature of the threat and prepare to deal with it, experts say. [Gallery: Holes in the Earth]

Last month, Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R - CA) introduced the new bill before Congress, H.R. 5587, titled: "To establish a United States Commission on Planetary Defense and for other purposes."

The bill has been referred to the Committee on Science and Technology, on which Rohrabacher serves as a member. Both sides of the aisle are now looking at the commission idea.

Sometimes a problem is so big, one country cannot handle it alone. That's the message scientists are delivering at the International Living with a Star (ILWS) meeting in Bremen, Germany, and representatives from more than 25 of the world's most technologically-advanced nations have gathered to hear what they have to say.

"The problem is solar storms-figuring out how to predict them and stay safe from their effects," says ILWS Chairperson Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters. "We need to make progress on this before the next solar maximum arrives around 2013."

The sun and Earth are separated by 93 million miles of space-a seemingly safe distance. But since the Space Age began, and especially in recent years, there has been a growing realization that 93 million miles really isn't so far apart.

Spacecraft and ground-based observatories have shown that Earth is located in the sun's outer atmosphere, buffeted by solar winds and pelted by hail storms of energetic particles. Moreover, the two bodies are actually connected by invisible threads of magnetism. During "reconnection events," which typically happen several times a day, you can trace invisible lines of force all the way from Earth's poles to the surface of the sun.

A solar eclipse photo (gray and white) from the Williams College Expedition to Easter Island in the South Pacific (July 11, 2010) was embedded with an image of the Sun's outer corona taken by the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) on the SOHO spacecraft and shown in red false color.

LASCO uses a disk to blot out the bright sun and the inner corona so that the faint outer corona can be monitored and studied.

Further, the dark silhouette of the moon was covered with an image of the Sun taken in extreme ultraviolet light at about the same time by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

Part A

Though a nickel will not buy much today the element nickel is invaluable to our contemporary way of life. Without access to this nonferrous metal, much of what we take for granted would not be practical or in many cases possible. Automobiles would be fragile - hitting a pothole would, as in very early cars, often break an axle. Internal combustion engines could not be depended upon and would also weigh a great deal more per unit of horse-power than the motors we are accustomed to. Airplanes, if they could be made to fly (the Wright brothers used a motor that took advantage of nickel steel's superior strength to weight ratio), would be terribly unsafe. Jet powered flight would be impossible - the strength that nickel gives to steel at high temperatures made this type engine feasible. No buildings could scrape the sky without nickel's contribution; steel bridges would be massive, ugly and corrode rapidly as well. In essence, our world would appear and function much as it did one hundred years ago, for it was in the late 1880′s when nickel-steel became a product.

The discovery of this nickel-steel key to our century is quite fascinating. John Gamgee, an eccentric inventor, had succeeded in convincing U.S. government officials that victims of a yellow fever epidemic, then sweeping the south, could be brought back to health by living in a cold environment. Gamgee's plan was to develop a refrigerated hospital ship which could travel from port to port, pick up victims, and freeze the fever out of them. Aiding Gamgee in this enterprise was Samuel J. Ritchie, a carriage manufacturer, who had recently met the inventor by chance (their Washington, D.C. hotel rooms were next door to one another). With Ritchie's help, Gamgee received a promise from the Senate Committee on Epidemic Diseases for an appropriation of a quarter million dollars if the inventor could prove that a workable refrigeration system was possible. A machine shop at a local Navy shipyard was made available to Gamgee so that he could construct and demonstrate his cooling apparatus to the committee.

On Earth, lake levels rise and fall with the seasons and with longer-term climate changes, as precipitation, evaporation, and runoff add and remove liquid. Now, for the first time, scientists have found compelling evidence for similar lake-level changes on Saturn's largest moon, Titan-the only other place in the solar system seen to have a hydrological cycle with standing liquid on the surface.

Using data gathered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft over a span of four years, the researchers-led by graduate student Alexander G. Hayes of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Oded Aharonson, associate professor of planetary science at Caltech-have obtained two separate lines of evidence showing roughly a 1 meter per year drop in the levels of lakes in Titan's southern hemisphere.

The decrease is the result of the seasonal evaporation of liquid methane from the lakes-which, because of Titan's frigid temperatures (roughly minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit at the poles), are composed largely of liquid methane, ethane, and propane.

"It's really exciting because, on this distant object, we're able to see this meter-scale drop in lake depth," says Hayes. "We didn't know Cassini would even be able to see these things."

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.