Researchers at Harvard University and Pennsylvania State University have invented a technology, inspired by nature, to reduce the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by human emissions. By electrochemically removing hydrochloric acid from the ocean and then neutralizing the acid by reaction with silicate (volcanic) rocks, the researchers say they can accelerate natural chemical weathering, permanently transferring CO2 from the atmosphere to the ocean.
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| ©Unknown
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| As weathering dissolves more continental rock, more carbon is permanently transferred from the atmosphere to the ocean and ultimately to the sediments.
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A stray bullet rips through the command center, blowing holes in vital equipment and damaging the data archives. Repair teams spring into action. The damage must be patched up quickly or the control systems could go haywire. It's literally a matter of life or death, and a decision must be made: try to fix the damage in place, or move the broken parts to the repair shop.
This is a drama that unfolds every day in the microscopic world inside the cells of astronauts. High-speed particles of space radiation zip through an astronaut's body. Occasionally, one of these particles will strike and break a strand of DNA. Because DNA carries a cell's genetic information and directs its behavior, broken DNA can make a cell grow out of control and even lead to cancer.
Tired of Windows? The next generation of laptops may let you jump from one operating system to another to play movies, surf the Web or read e-mail.
Phoenix Technologies Ltd., a leading maker of the software that controls Windows computers most basic workings, announced this week that it will offer a feature it calls HyperSpace to laptop manufacturers.
Woody Hobbs, the Milpitas, Calif.-based company's chief executive, said the first application of the technology probably will show up next summer in the shape of laptops that can play DVDs outside Windows.
User will be able to boot in a few seconds straight into the DVD player, skipping the longer Windows startup, or switch to the DVD player from Windows. If Windows is running at the same time, it can be put in sleep mode, prolonging battery life.
Physicists in the US have developed a tiny portable device that is sensitive enough to detect the magnetic fields from electrical signals in the brain. Consisting of a cell filled with a vapour of rubidium atoms, the sensor can detect magnetic field changes as small as 70 fT -- about one billionth of Earth's magnetic field.
Although 70 fT is not as good as superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometers, which can detect changes as small as 3 fT, the new sensor operates at room temperature. This is an advantage over SQUIDs, which must be cooled to near absolute zero to reach such sensitivity, making them power hungry and expensive.
A bizarre, 3,000-year-old burial site is providing rare insights into the lives of an ancient island culture.
The site in the South Pacific country of Vanuatu includes a skull in a jar and 60 headless skeletons-one of them with three skulls arrayed across its rib cage.
In 2003 construction workers at Teouma, an archaeological site on Éfaté Island, unearthed 60 skeletons. Their skulls had been taken away by mourners some time after burial.
But a new isotope analysis of teeth left behind has given researchers new clues to the lifestyle and origins of the mysterious Lapita people, ancestors of today's Polynesians and Melanesians-roughly the peoples of the central and southeastern Pacific north and east of Australia.
Comet 17P/Holmes has certainly given sky-watchers - backyard and professional astronomers alike - a thrilling chance to see a cometary outburst on a grand scale. After we posted
my story about on-going speculation about what could have caused this outburst (and the one 115 years ago), many readers posted comments related to two questions:
Could this have been triggered by a collision with an object in the main asteroid belt? And why can't we see more of a tail on this comet?
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| ©Pic du Midi Observatory/Francois Colas/Jean Lecacheux/Boris Baillard
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NASA's Orion spacecraft now in development is America's first new manned spacecraft since development of the space shuttle 30 years ago. It's the centerpiece of NASA's Constellation program, which aims to take the next generation of human explorers to the moon and beyond. Orion's launch abort system, a "rocket on top of the rocket," is designed to ensure the safety of its astronaut crew by pulling the crew module away from it's booster rocket in the event of a booster malfunction, either while on the launch pad or during ascent to orbit.
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| ©NASA photo by Tom Tschida.
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| NASA Dryden's mockup Orion crew module is located in Dryden's former Shuttle hangar.
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A US defence department advisory board has warned of the danger that American war robots scheduled for delivery within a decade might be riddled with malicious code. The kill machines will use software largely written overseas, and it is feared that sinister forces might meddle with it in production, thus gaining control of the future mechanoid military.
Leon Engelbrecht
ItWebTue, 16 Oct 2007 22:31 UTC
The National Defence Force is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercisSA National Defence Force spokesman brigadier general Kwena Mangope says the cause of the malfunction is not yet known and will be determined by a Board of Inquiry. The police are conducting a separate investigation into the incident.
Media reports say the shooting exercise, using live ammunition, took place at the SA Army's Combat Training Centre, at Lohatlha, in the Northern Cape, as part of an annual force preparation endeavour.
e on Friday.
Comment: Giving soldiers computer-controlled guns that go on random autonomous rampages with no explanation as to the cause somehow gives the term "cannon-fodder" a whole new meaning!
Astronomers have discovered a record-breaking fifth planet around the nearby star 55 Cancri, making it the only star aside from the sun known to have five planets.
The discovery comes after 19 years of observations of 55 Cancri and represents a milestone for the California and Carnegie Planet Search team, which this year celebrates the 20th anniversary of its first attempts to find extrasolar planets by analyzing the wobbles they cause in their host star.
Comment: Giving soldiers computer-controlled guns that go on random autonomous rampages with no explanation as to the cause somehow gives the term "cannon-fodder" a whole new meaning!