Kepler Spacecraft to Hunt Earth-Like Worlds

NASA's Kepler space telescope, a sharp-eyed spacecraft designed to hunt for Earth-like planets, is ready to ship out for an early March launch.
Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. - the Boulder, Colo.-based NASA contractor responsible for developing the Kepler flight system and supporting mission operations - recently completed the spacecraft's final pre-ship checkout and delivered the spacecraft to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., for a March 5 liftoff on a Delta 2 booster.

Full story on Space.com

Invisibility Cloak Closer Than Ever to Reality

An invisibility cloak for visible light could be made within six months, say scientists from Duke University, who, in a new paper published today in Science, explain how to hide objects from a dramatically extended range of wave lengths.

Full story on Discovery News

Viewing Earth as an Extra-Solar Planet

What if another civilization had telescopes and spacecraft better than ours? Would Earth be detectable from another planet a few light-years away? Likewise, what will it take for us to detect life on an Earth-like planet within a similar distance? It's interesting to consider those questions, and now, there is data to help answer them.

Full story on Universe Today

There is life on Mars... but not as we know it, say Nasa scientists

Mars is alive, according to Nasa scientists, who revealed the first 'definitive proof' of plumes of methane gas seeping from the surface.
When methane was first found in the Martian atmosphere in 2003, some scientists claimed it could have been dumped on the planet by comets. But the latest discovery is proof that it is actually produced on the Red Planet.
Professor Michael Mumma said last night the discovery of the gas meant there was a 'substantial probability that life was there or still survives' on our celestial neighbour.

Full story on The Daily Mail

Secret to a beating heart revealed

Scientists reveal what lies behind beat generation and it seems the life-giving process is simpler than we thought.

Read full article on New Scientist

Astronomers retrace Galileo's discoveries with replica of his 400-year-old telescope

Italian scientists have re-created one of Galileo's scopes in the hope of seeing the universe just as he saw it. Staffers at Florence's Institute and Museum of the History of Science built the replica with assistance from the Arcetri Astrophysics Observatory and the National Institute of Applied Optics in Florence. The telescope is based on a 20-power model gifted by Galileo to Cosimo II, the grand duke of Tuscany.

Full story on Scientific American

Making Supersolids With Ultracold Gas Atoms

Physicists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland have proposed a recipe for turning ultracold “boson” atoms—the ingredients of Bose-Einstein condensates—into a “supersolid,” an exotic state of matter that behaves simultaneously as a solid and a friction-free superfluid.

Full story on ScienceDaily

The Walking Frog Fish

Yasufuku 2.0: Prize bull cloned 13 years after death

Japanese scientists have successfully cloned a prize beef cow more than 13 years after it died, it was announced on January 6. The legendary steer — named “Yasufuku” in his first life (1980-1993) — is regarded as the father of Hida beef, a high-quality meat from Gifu prefecture famous for its marbled texture and rich flavor.

Full story on Pink Tentacle

Unexpected Marine Treasures In Amber

For the first time, scientists have unearthed ancient chunks of amber that contain the fossils of marine microorganisms called diatoms. Found in a thick layer of 98-million-year–old rocks in southwestern France, the amber also contains bits of fallen leaves and soil-dwelling organisms, says Vincent Girard, a paleontologist at the University of Rennes 1 in France. He and his colleagues speculate that all of these organisms may have become trapped in tree resin that had dripped to the tide-washed ground in a mangrove-like forest and then hardened.

Full story on ScienceNews

Hubble Mystery Light Puzzles Astronomers

Almost three years ago, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope were perusing a cluster of galaxies about eight billion light-years from Earth when they came upon a flash of light unlike anything they had seen before.
Over the next 100 days, the object gradually brightened. Then it spent another 100 days growing dimmer, until it finally vanished from view.
Astronomers speaking last week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, California, still have no idea what it was -- or is.

Full story on Discovery News

He Fell For It

Here's what someone who loses $150,000 to a Nigerian scam artist looks like:

His troubles began in July 2007. He said he got an e-mail from someone claiming to be a lawyer with a client named David Rempel who died in a 2005 bomb attack in London, England, and left behind $12.8 million...
The lawyer said his client had no family but wanted to leave the money to a Rempel. It was his lucky day. "It sounded all good so I called him," said Rempel. "He sounded very happy and said God bless you."
The man then told him he had to pay $2,500 to transfer the money into his name. Then there were several more documents. Some cost $5,000.
And on and on and on. Finally, the big day came:
They met Rempel the next day with a suitcase. They said it had $10.6 million in shrink-wrapped U.S. bills. Rempel wanted more proof. His new friends pulled out one bill and "cleansed" it with a liquid "formula," which washed off some kind of stamp. Rempel was told that process made the money "legal tender."
"I was like holy crap, is that mine?" he said. "They said ‘yes sir, it's yours.' It all sounded legit."

The he dropped the secret formula and the bottle broke. He was told he could get some more secret formula for $120,000. And he paid it.

via J-Walk blog

Pretty Loaded

Once upon a time, in a land of sputtering dial-up connections, websites took ages to load. Folks yearned for the 100% mark. But as soon as that figure arrived, the beloved preloader disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.

Pretty Loaded is an archive of preloaders that preload other preloaders... which in turn reveal yet more preloaders. It's a tribute to a vanishing art form amid a constantly changing digital landscape.

via The Presurfer

World Smallest Computer

The Mactini is the world's smallest computer:

Man takes 26 years to solve Rubiks Cube

Delighted Graham, 45, from Portchester, Hants, has been tirelessly trying to solve the riddle of the Cube since he bought the toy in 1983.
Married dad-of-one Graham has endured endless sleepless nights and after more than 27,400 hours he finally managed to conquer his personal Everest.

Full story on The Telegraph

Strange Rock Formations on Mars Explained

Rocks on Mars are in some areas scattered in a strangely uniform fashion, puzzling scientists for years. Now they've figured it out.
Researchers had thought the rocks were picked up and carried downwind by extreme high-speed winds thought to occur on Mars in the past.
Although Mars is a windy planet, its atmosphere is very thin, so it would be difficult for the wind to carry the small rocks, which range in size from a quarter to a softball, said Jon Pelletier, a geoscientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Pelletier and his colleagues now think the rocks are constantly on the move, rolling into the wind, not away from it, and creating a natural feedback system that results in their tidy arrangement.

Full story on Space.com

Roman chemical warfare comes to light

Roman soldiers defending a Middle Eastern garrison from attack nearly 2,000 years ago met the horrors of war in a most unusual place. Inside a cramped tunnel beneath the site’s massive front wall, enemy fighters stacked up nearly two dozen dead or dying Romans and set them on fire, using substances that gave off toxic fumes and drove away Roman warriors just outside the tunnel.

Full article on Science News

Siphonophore: Deep-sea superorganism

Here is some terrific video of a bioluminescent deep-sea siphonophore — an eerily fantastic creature that appears to be a single, large organism, but which is actually a colony of numerous individual jellyfish-like animals that behave and function together as a single entity. The individual units, called zooids, all share the same genetic material and each perform a specialized role within the colony. The best-known siphonophore is the poisonous Portuguese Man o’ War (Physalia physalis), which lives at the surface of the ocean, unlike the one shown in this video (filmed at a depth of 770 meters). Some siphonophore species can grow up to 40 meters (130 ft) in length.

via Pink Tentacle

Lego For Adults

Lego for adults

Mount Everest climbers show survival on record-low oxygen

It's no secret that scaling Mount Everest tests the limits of human survival; more than 200 people have died trying to reach its summit. Today we have new information about just how seriously climbers push their bodies on the world's highest peak: Those who manage to stay alive do so on an amount of oxygen so minute that, at sea level, would only be seen in people who were in cardiac arrest or dead.

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