Geothermal power is emerging as a significant player in the alternative energy space, with operations cropping up around the world and high hopes for powering significant numbers of homes and businesses as an alternative to traditional electricity. But as with all prospects in alternative energy, geothermal power is not without its downside. Currently, a great deal of effort is being poured into determining just how damaging geothermal drilling is - or if it even exists. The question of whether geothermal drilling can trigger, either directly or indirectly, the harrowing natural disaster of earthquakes has been generating quite a bit of buzz lately. So how is the verdict on this controversial topic coming along?

One school of thought proposes that our activities in international geothermal drilling simply aren't intense or widespread enough to have much of an impact on seismic activity. The argument here primarily rests within the idea that the Earth is pretty big, pretty powerful, and is able to get by pretty well without caring much about our relatively tame activities in drilling. A geologist with a specialty in volcanoes, Erik Klemetti posits that in terms of depth and breadth, geothermal drilling simply doesn't have enough power to set off volcanic eruptions, phenomena which also relies on the movements of the planet's fault lines as well as tectonic plates. Klemetti's opinion is culled from the investigation of recent eruptions on an island in the Philippines, where twenty earthquakes took place in succession shortly following geothermal drilling on the Canlaon Volcano. Proponents of this idea of the inability of human efforts to greatly affect the Earth's eruptions point out that while it can be tempting to link seismic activity with nearby or recent drilling projects, these seemingly coincidental events are not enough to imply causation.

People living near a geothermal drilling project in fault-riddled northern California are worried about more earthquakes after a similar project triggered a major jolt in Switzerland. A seismologist explains the forces at work.

Despite the promise of cheap, clean power, geothermal energy development may be on shaky ground. There have been rumblings from residents and scientists alike that drilling deep to tap naturally occurring heat could cause bigger earthquakes.

Already on edge about temblors, northern California locals are eying an expansive new geothermal project proposed by a company called AltaRock that's going to be boring down more than two miles (3.2 kilometers). The area near the town of Anderson Springs - about 90 miles (150 kilometers) north of San Francisco - is home to natural geothermal vents (nicknamed The Geysers by early visitors who saw the steam vents there) and has been exploited for its natural energy-generating capacity for the better part of the last century. Starting in the 1970s, as technology improved, engineers started to crank up the production levels. Small earthquakes began shortly thereafter.

Houston - - From March 31 to July 14, a six-man international crew called an isolation chamber in Moscow their home. The crew, composed of four Russians and two Europeans, simulated a 105-day Mars mission full of experiments and realistic mission scenarios, including emergency situations and 20-minute communications delays.

U.S. participation in the mission consisted of three research teams with experiments evaluating solutions to conditions that impact work performance. The projects evaluated lighting interventions to counter sleep disruption due to shift work or long hours, tested two objective methods of measuring the impact of stress and fatigue on performance, and assessed interactions between crew members and mission control. The three projects were funded by the Houston-based National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI).

Shape memory alloys can "remember" a condition. If they are deformed, a temperature change can be enough to bring them back to their original shape. A simulation calculates the characteristics of these materials.

It seems like a magic trick. A man takes a paper clip and bends it in such a way that it merely resembles a crooked piece of wire. Then, he throws the clip into a bowl of hot water. Within a fraction of a second, the metal wire returns to the shape of a paper clip. This phenomenon is called the shape memory effect. It can be observed in certain metallic alloys, known as shape memory alloys. These kinds of materials are ideal for many applications. For instance, in aerospace technologies: solar sails can unfold in outer space thanks to shape memory alloys. The medical sciences, too, rely on their characteristics. One example is cardiology: stents are small tube-shaped, metal grid frameworks. They are folded together and inserted into blood vessels where they expand and prevent the vessels from becoming blocked.

As more and more news appears on the Internet as well as in print, it becomes possible to map the global flow of news by observing it online. Using this strategy, Cornell computer scientists have managed to track and analyze the "news cycle" -- the way stories rise and fall in popularity.

Dr. David Kelly -- the biological warfare weapons specialist at the heart of the continuing political crisis for the British government - had links to three other top microbiologists whose deaths have left unanswered questions.

The 59-year-old British scientist was involved with ultra secret work at Israel's Institute for Biological Re search. Israeli sources claim Kelly met institute scientists several times in London in the past two years.

Israel has not signed the Biological Weapons and Toxins Convention, an international treaty ratified by more than 140 countries. It forbids the development, possession and use of offensive biological and chemical weapons.

Inquisition Neptune conspiracy vs Copernican Heresy

An Australian boffin says that the planet Neptune may have actually been discovered 234 years earlier than had been thought, by the famed Renaissance Italian astronomer and scientist Galileo Galilei - who was persecuted by the Inquisition for his "heretical" astronomy research. Professor David Jamieson of Melbourne Uni says that proof for this theory may lie within a hidden coded message yet to be discovered.

Two planets are prominent in the predawn sky these July mornings. They are brilliant Venus and the much dimmer Mars.

Actually, these two planets have spent the past couple of months rather close to each other in our sky, but since late June they have gradually been pulling apart, with Venus slowly moving away to the east.

Nonetheless, both planets appear in the same general region, low in the eastern sky a couple of hours before sunrise [Map]. Over these past couple of months, both planets have also been shifting east against the zodiacal constellations, and now they both can be seen against the rich backdrop of stars that make up Taurus, the Bull.

High-energy laser weapons have been hailed as the future of anti-missile defence, but they may be further from being battle-ready than military chiefs hoped.

In recent tests, several prototypes have suffered serious damage to their optics at intensities well below the expected levels of tolerance. "Optical damage has been quietly alarming upper management in most major programmes," Sean Ross of the US Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico told a meeting of the Directed Energy Professional Society in Newton, Massachusetts, last week. There are also big problems managing the waste heat generated by high-intensity beams.

Laser weapons require mirrors and lenses to focus powerful beams onto distant moving targets, and to compensate for atmospheric perturbations that can reduce the power they deliver. The higher the intensity of the beam, the more likely it is to damage the surface of its optical components.

Scientists at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), working together with researchers from three French laboratories, have developed a new ultra-fast camera that can take 1 500 finely exposed images per second. Called OCam, this camera uses the CCD220 detector developed by e2v Technologies in the UK. The team said OCam will be a major component of the next generation of adaptive optics instruments of the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), in particular for the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument.