Reckless Reality |

Astronauts aboard the international space station and the newly arrived shuttle Endeavour planned Monday to start unpacking a new toilet and a contraption that purifies urine and sweat into drinkable water at the orbiting outpost.

The main business of the day is unloading a cargo container nicknamed “Leonardo” from space shuttle Endeavour’s belly and attaching it to the international space station. Inside the 21-foot-long container is almost 15,000 pounds of equipment that will allow the space station to expand from three to six crew members next year.

“Things are going exceedingly well,” said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team. Read the rest of this entry »

GENEVA – Fixing the world’s largest atom smasher will cost at least $25 million Cdn and may take until early summer.

An electrical failure shut down the Large Hadron Collider on Sept. 19, nine days after the $12 billion machine started up with great fanfare.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research recently said Monday that the repairs would be completed by May or early June. Read the rest of this entry »

Unhappy people glue themselves to the television 30 percent more than happy people.

The finding, announced on Thursday, comes from a survey of nearly 30,000 American adults conducted between 1975 and 2006 as part of the General Social Survey.

While happy people reported watching an average of 19 hours of television per week, unhappy people reported 25 hours a week. The results held even after taking into account education, income, age and marital status.

In addition, happy individuals were more socially active, attended more religious services, voted more and read a newspaper more often than their less-chipper counterparts. Read the rest of this entry »

A British pilot, Jim O’Neill, went blind 40 minutes into a solo flight from Scotland to southeastern England last week. He was 5,000 feet in the air. The cause of his sudden blindness was a stroke, for which he felt no other effects except the loss of his sight.

Jim O’Neill thought he was dazzled by sunlight and made an emergency call for help, but later after not being able to regain his sight he realizxed something of a more serious nature was happening.

“It was terrifying,” O’Neill said. “Suddenly, I couldn’t see the dials in front of me.”

Royal Air Force Wing Commander Paul Gerrard located the plane and began flying close to the plane and gave directions to O’Neill. Read the rest of this entry »

For tourists who struggle to make sense of the ruins around the Roman Forum, a new high-tech show provides a 3D sense of what life was like for plebeians and gladiators in ancient Rome.

Blending Hollywood animation and video-game technology with Cinecitta studio technicians’ versions of ancient frescoes and brickwork, plus academic research, “3D Rewind Rome” sucks the visitor back in time to 310 AD, the reign of Emperor Maxentius.

In a refurbished theater just off the Colosseum, the visitor center opening to the public on November 20 tries to breathe life into the tourists’ experience of Rome’s ancient artifacts, which for all their majesty are sorely lacking in orientation.

“Now all of Rome is at your feet,” says Sapientus, the tubby, balding, toga-clad 3D guide to a detailed virtual model of the city, developed by University of Virginia archaeologists. Read the rest of this entry »

A company backed by European aerospace giant EADS and one of France’s leading cardiac surgeons aims to create an implantable artificial heart it says could help hundreds of thousands of patients.

Carmat SA, financed by venture capital firm Truffle Capital, France’s state innovation agency OSEO, and EADS, said on Monday that preliminary animal trials and laboratory tests of the device had produced promising results.

“At present, Carmat’s prototype artificial heart has been patented and is undergoing preclinical testing,” the company said in a statement.

It said the device was functionally similar to the human heart, automatically regulating the heart rate and blood flow according to the patient’s needs. Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers have found a new “see-through” use for clear sticky tape — it produces X-rays when it is peeled off the roll.

The report in the journal Nature confirms a theory dating back to 1930 — that the process of peeling the tape releases energy not only in the form of a flash of visible light, but also an X-ray.

Many children hiding in closets have demonstrated that unwinding sticky tape produces sparks of light. The phenomenon is called triboluminescence and is caused by the movement of one surface against another.

Carlos Camara of University of California, Los Angeles and colleagues used a motorized peeling machine to unwind a roll of tape in a vacuum. Read the rest of this entry »

GENEVA  – The huge particle collider built to simulate the conditions of the “Big Bang” will not restart until spring 2009 after a weekend technical glitch, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said Tuesday.

A helium leak into the tunnel housing the biggest and most complex machine ever made forced CERN to shut down its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Saturday, just 10 days after starting it up.

CERN Director-General Robert Aymar said this was a psychological blow after a successful start of the LHC following years of painstaking preparation by skilled teams of scientists.

“I have no doubt that we will overcome this setback with the same degree of rigor and application,” he said in a statement. Read the rest of this entry »

Pipes that extract methane gas by waste decomposition

The city of San Antonio unveiled a deal that will make it the first U.S. city to harvest methane gas from human waste on a commercial scale and turn it into clean-burning fuel.

San Antonio residents produce about 140,000 tons a year of a substance gently referred to as “biosolids,” which can be reprocessed into natural gas, said Steve Clouse, chief operating officer of the city’s water system.

“You may call it something else,” Clouse said, but for area utilities, the main byproduct of human waste – methane gas – will soon be converted into natural gas to burn in their power plants. Read the rest of this entry »

If principles of life are universal, could life emerge on the internet?

The question was posed to evolutionary dynamicist Martin Nowak of Harvard University, developer of a mathematical model of evolution’s origins, the period during which unique chemical structures experienced mutation and selection that guided them towards replication — and thus to life.

Though Nowak’s focus is biological life, the principles seem broadly applicable, perhaps even to configurations of electrons coursing through the Internet’s silicon and fiber-optic substrate.

“Computer viruses are some form of evolution,” said Nowak. Read the rest of this entry »

CERN Control Center

Scientists involved in a historic “Big Bang” experiment to begin this week hope it will turn up many surprises about the universe and its origins — but reject suggestions it will bring the end of the world.

And Robert Aymar, the French physicist who heads the CERN research centre, predicted that discoveries to emerge from his organization’s 6.4 billion euro ($9.2 billion) project would spark major advances for human society.

“If some of what we expect to find does not turn up, and things we did not foresee do, that will be even more stimulating because it means that we understand less than we thought about nature,” said British physicist Brian Cox.

“What I would like to see is the unexpected,” said Gerardus t’Hooft of the University of Michigan. Perhaps, he suggested, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine at the heart of the experiment “will show us things we didn’t know existed.” Read the rest of this entry »

University of California, Berkeley researchers ran the first public test of their magnetically-steered bus system last week on a public street in San Leandro, Calif. While a human driver controlled braking and acceleration, a series of magnets embedded in the road guided the bus along its route. With the driving out of human hands, the scientists say, the bus runs its route more efficiently than ever—effortlessly pulling up to within a finger’s width of the curb to allow passengers easy access.

The magnets have to be placed a yard or so apart, running down the middle of the traffic land. And while giving away control of the bus to a mechanical system might be too much for some people, it’s not much different than the tracks that guide a light rail system, Berkeley scientist Han-Shue Tan says. Tan and colleagues hope that making the bus more efficient will lure more people to give up driving and take public transit.

On Sept. 10, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, will switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — a $6 billion particle accelerator that will send beams of protons careening around a 17-mile underground ring, crash them into each other to re-create the immediate aftereffects of the Big Bang, and then monitor the debris in the hope of learning more about the origins and workings of the universe.

Next week marks a low-power run of the circuit, and scientists hope to start smashing atoms at full power by the end of the month.

Critics of the LHC say the high-energy experiment might create a mini black hole that could expand to dangerous, Earth-eating proportions. Read the rest of this entry »

Particle accelerators, it seems, are serving us in other ways than just to inquire into the dynamics and structure of matter, space, and time.

French scientists have devised a way to test the authenticity of vintage wines and to determine their date using particle accelerators. This test was developed in coopearation with London-based wine dealer The Antique Wine Company.

This method of testing wines uses ion beams produced in a particle accelerator, and then passes the bottles through these beams. The bottles then emit X-rays which are analysed to determine their age, according to the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Read the rest of this entry »

A company in West Chester Pennsylvania has been inspired by nature to make turbines less prone to stalling ( When particularly strong or slow winds flow over angled blades, the blades can lose lift and stop rotating).

Inspired by the flippers of Humpback Whales,  WhalePower has developed something truly remarkable – Tubercle Technology – which takes its name from the bumps on the leading edge of the whale’s flippers. Read the rest of this entry »

China intends to produce the world’s fastest train  routing the capital Beijing and the financial hub, Shanghai.

The train will have top speed of 380km/h (236mph) causing the current journey to be split in half the ministry of railways says.
The completion of the project should take about four years.

China already has trains running at 350km/h recently opened linking between Beijing and the port city of Tianjin.

These lines are currently cutting the journey to 30 minutes from the previous 2 hour trek.

Read the rest of this entry »

A new ‘walking game’ has been created for people who find it hard to walk due to different causes like strokes, osteoarthritis, or falls. Researcher Wendy Powell at Portsmouth University has been able to create a special treadmill that enables people to walk better and faster.

“We have got a specially adapted treadmill that is linked in to a virtual reality system so a little bit like a computer game.

“The particularly interesting aspect, in terms of the research we are doing here, is that we have found that it we manipulate the virtual reality so that people think they are moving slower than they are what happens is that they move faster and better. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft’s latest Internet browser includes a piece of software that allows Internet users to hide the audit trail of websites they have visited.

The new InPrivate feature on Internet Explorer 8 — now in Beta release, and dubbed by many in the Web development community as “porn mode,” a nod to its most obvious use — when enabled automatically conceals sites visited by wiping clean browsing and search history, cookies, form data and passwords. It also clears the browser cache at the end of each session.

Once the setting is chosen, others using the same computer will not be able to see which sites have been accessed, the company said. Other browsers have similar functions, but this one is far more prominent. Although casual users cannot see the previous user’s search history, authorities such as the police will be able to access it if necessary.

Read the rest of this entry »

HAIFA, Israel-Paralyzed for the past 20 years, former Israeli paratrooper Radi Kaiof now walks down the street with a dim mechanical hum.

That is the sound of an electronic exoskeleton moving the 41-year-old’s legs and propelling him forward — with a proud expression on his face — as passersby stare in surprise.

“I never dreamed I would walk again. After I was wounded, I forgot what it’s like,” said Kaiof, who was injured while serving in the Israeli military in 1988.

“Only when standing up can I feel how tall I really am and speak to people eye to eye, not from below.”

The device, called ReWalk, is the brainchild of engineer Amit Goffer, founder of Argo Medical Technologies, a small Israeli high-tech company. Read the rest of this entry »

QUERETARO, Mexico  – Affluent Mexicans, terrified of soaring kidnapping rates, are spending thousands of dollars to implant tiny transmitters under their skin so satellites can help find them tied up in a safe house or stuffed in the trunk of a car.

Kidnapping jumped almost 40 percent between 2004 and 2007 in Mexico, according to official statistics. Mexico ranks with conflict zones like Iraq and Colombia as among the worst countries for abductions.

More people, including a growing number of middle-class Mexicans, are seeking out the tiny chip designed by Xega, a Mexican security firm whose sales jumped 13 percent this year. The company said it had more than 2,000 clients. Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Tan, an electronic lover in Jeling, China, recently made a massive 3-foot tall replica of his favorite cell phone.

The cell phone is 621 times bigger than his own, which he used as a reference. The phone is likely the largest self made phone in the world, measuring 36 x 17 x 6.5 inches and weighing around 48.5 pounds.
It has same functions as a regular cell like sending text messages, video recording, taking pictures, and browsing the Internet. The only difference is Mr. Han’s larger version has much better reception than the original model.

Cool gadget but hauling a 10 pound cell phone on the street could be challenging.

WASHINGTON – A hacker broke into a Homeland Security Department telephone system over the weekend and racked up about $12,000 in calls to the Middle East and Asia.

The hacker made more than 400 calls on a Federal Emergency Management Agency voicemail system in Emmitsburg, Md., on Saturday and Sunday, according to FEMA spokesman Tom Olshanski.

FEMA is part of Homeland Security, which in 2003 put out a warning about this very vulnerability.

Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft Corp., weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.’s advertising, is turning for help to Jerry Seinfeld.

The software giant’s new $300 million advertising campaign, devised by a newly hired ad agency, has been closely guarded. But Mr. Seinfeld will be one of the key celebrity pitchmen, say people close to the situation. He will appear with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in ads and receive about $10 million for the work, they say. Read the rest of this entry »

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — A Polish mobile operator said Friday it had hired actors to stand in line to buy Apple Inc.’s iPhone as the ubiquitous device went on sale for the first time in the Eastern European country.

The company, Orange, said it hired the fake iPhone customers as a way to stimulate interest in the mobile device, which has generated huge and genuine demand in the United States, Japan, Germany and elsewhere.

“It was a part of our marketing strategy, the concept was thought up at Orange Poland,” the company told The Associated Press in an e-mail. “The aim was to ‘warm up’ the atmosphere around the launch of the iPhone.”

The phone was also being launched Friday by a second mobile operator, Era.

Many gold farmers focus on World of Warcraft

Nearly 500,000 people in developing nations earn a wage making virtual goods in online games to sell to players, a study has found.

Research by Manchester University shows that the practice, known as gold-farming, is growing rapidly.

The industry, about 80% based in China, employs about 400,000 people who earn £77 per month on average.

The practice is flourishing despite efforts by games companies to crack down on the trade in virtual goods.

Big industry

Professor Richard Heeks, head of the development informatics group at Manchester who wrote the report, said gold farming had become a significant economic sector in many developing nations.
Read the rest of this entry »