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.

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.