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Apple takes delivery of 188 mysterious ocean containers


Fortune Magazine
Tue, 20 May 2008 18:46 UTC
Here's an intriguing report from ImportGenius, a search engine that gathers "competitive intelligence" by monitoring U.S. Customs records of ocean containers entering American ports.

Searching for shipments to Apple, Inc. (AAPL), employees at the Scottsdale, Ariz., company reported on Friday that they've spotted a "major spike" since mid March in ocean containers marked with a mysterious new label: "electric computers"
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Ark

Archaeologists find medieval feeding bottles in northwest Russia


RIA Novosti
Mon, 26 May 2008 11:52 UTC
VELIKY NOVGOROD - Archaeologists have made a rare find of a number of medieval baby bottles at excavations in Veliky Novgorod, an ancient city in northwest Russia, a scientist said on Monday.

"Similar bottles are rarely found in excavations, and here we have already discovered... three of them,"
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Telescope

Cosmic Supermagnet Spreads Mysterious 'Morse Code'


ScienceDaily
Thu, 22 May 2008 11:52 UTC
Astronomers from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research have discovered mysterious pulses that are being emitted by an extremely magnetic star. The magnetic star, a magnetar, emits the pulses as very high energy X-rays. The astronomers made their observations using the ESA space telescopes INTEGRAL and XMM-Newton and the NASA satellite RXTE.
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Bomb

The Food Chain - World's Poor Pay Price as Crop Research Is Cut

Keith Bradsher and Andrew Martin
New York Times
Sun, 18 May 2008 23:01 UTC
LOS BAÑOS, Philippines - The brown plant hopper, an insect no bigger than a gnat, is multiplying by the billions and chewing through rice paddies in East Asia, threatening the diets of many poor people.

The damage to rice crops, occurring at a time of scarcity and high prices, could have been prevented. Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute here say that they know how to create rice varieties resistant to the insects but that budget cuts have prevented them from doing so.

Luis Liwanag
©New York Times
Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, the world's main repository of information about rice, are trying to deal with problems like the rice hopper, which destroys plants, by developing stronger varieties of rice.
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Star

Tiny Star Unleashes Huge Explosion

Jeanna Bryner
Space.com
Mon, 19 May 2008 22:31 UTC
A tiny star recently unleashed what is considered the brightest burst of light ever seen in the universe from a normal star, astronomers announced today.

Shining with only 1 percent of the sun's light and boasting just a third of the sun's mass, this run-of-the-mill star previously was nothing to write home about. On April 25, the red dwarf star, known as EV Lacertae, unleashed a mega-flare, packing the power of thousands of solar flares. Since the star is located 16 light-years away, in reality, the flare actually occurred 16 years ago.
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Phoenix

NASA spacecraft successfully lands on Mars

Alicia Chang
Associated Press
Sun, 25 May 2008 20:56 UTC
Pasadena, Calif. - A NASA spacecraft plunged into the atmosphere of Mars and successfully landed in the Red Planet's northern polar region on Sunday, where it will begin 90 days of digging in the permafrost to look for evidence of the building blocks of life.

Cheers swept through mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the touchdown signal from the Phoenix Mars Lander was detected after a nailbiting descent. Engineers and scientists hugged and high-fived one another.
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Magic Wand

Europeans unite to tap early universe for secrets of fundamental physics


European Science Foundation
Fri, 23 May 2008 11:20 UTC
The future of fundamental physics research lies in observing the early universe and developing models that explain the new data obtained. The availability of much higher resolution data from closer to the start of the universe is creating the potential for further significant theoretical breakthroughs and progress resolving some of the most difficult and intractable questions in physics. But this requires much more interaction between astronomical theory and observation, and in particular the development of a new breed of astronomer who understands both.

This was the key conclusion from a recent workshop organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF), bringing together experts in cosmology, astrophysics and particle physics. "I think the realization of how important this is, and of how much needs to be done to get to that stage, will be the main long-term legacy of the workshop," noted Carlos Martins, convenor of the ESF workshop. "In particular, a lot of work needs to be done in order to provide a stronger 'theoretical underpinning' for future observational work. Ultimately this means that when training the next generation of researchers in this area, a lot more effort needs to be put into forming 'bilingual' researchers, that are fluent both in the language of observations and in that of theory."
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Sherlock

Archaeologists try to solve mystery of Nazca Lines in Peru


ANI
Fri, 23 May 2008 10:49 UTC
Two British archaeologists are trying to solve the mystery of the Nazca Lines in Peru by locating and measuring the lines with high-precision GPS, photographing the distribution of 1,500-year old pottery, and working out the chronological sequence of overlying lines and designs.

The archaeologists, who are doing the research, are Dr Nick Saunders from Bristol University and Professor Clive Ruggles from the University of Leicester.

Funded by the Anglo-Peruvian Cultural Association in Lima, their research hopes to unlock the purpose of the dazzling but confusing array of desert drawings.
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Magnify

The jet fuel; how hot did it heat the World Trade Center?


911 Research
Fri, 23 May 2008 13:09 UTC
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report into collapse of the WTC towers, estimates that about 3,500 gallons of jet fuel burnt within each of the towers. Imagine that this entire quantity of jet fuel was injected into just one floor of the World Trade Center, that the jet fuel burnt with perfect efficency, that no hot gases left this floor, that no heat escaped this floor by conduction and that the steel and concrete had an unlimited amount of time to absorb all the heat. With these ideal assumptions we calculate the maximum temperature that this one floor could have reached.
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Evil Rays

What Your Cell Phone Knows About You

Andy Greenberg
Forbes.com
Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00 UTC
Can your cell phone tell if you're happy or overworked?

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think it can do that and more--separate the rich from the poor, the sick from the healthy, even the outgoing from the introverted. Sandy Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Research program, has focused his work on that unlikely task: using gadgets as simple as a cell phone to better understand the quirks and patterns of human behavior.
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