New Horizons will study Pluto and Kuiper Belt

CAPE CANAVERAL — A piano-sized space probe neared the end of its countdown Tuesday for a mission to Pluto, the solar system's last unexplored planet, and to study a mysterious zone of icy objects at the outer edges of the planetary system.

Even though the scheduled afternoon liftoff was intended to make New Horizons the fastest spacecraft ever launched, the distance involved means scientists won't be able to receive data on Pluto until at least July 2015, the earliest date the mission is expected to arrive.

"To make a decision to work in the field of space science is almost the ultimate in delayed gratification," NASA administrator Michael Griffin said at a news conference Tuesday.

A successful journey to Pluto would complete an exploration of the planets started by NASA in the early 1960s with unmanned missions to observe Mars, Mercury and Venus.

"What we know about Pluto today could fit on the back of a postage stamp," Colleen Hartman, a deputy associate administrator at NASA, said earlier. "The textbooks will be rewritten after this mission is completed."

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Google and Yahoo tune into television

Two ascending Internet giants, Google and Yahoo, were planning to make plain Friday that they intend to move aggressively beyond the Internet browser and onto the television screen.

The two companies, already the most popular services for searching and organizing the vast information on the Web, want to perform the same function for television, which will increasingly be delivered over the Internet.

Indeed, much of the innovation at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where top executives of both companies were to speak late Friday, revolves around video gadgets of all sizes that connect online to new programming services.

Both Yahoo and Google have emerged as potent threats to television networks because they are drawing ad dollars to their existing sites.

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Vote for seven wonders

The Acropolis in Athens made it, as did Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia, China's Great Wall, the Colosseum in Rome, the Inca temple of Machu Picchu in Peru, Stonehenge and the Moai - the Easter Island statues.

Less immediately obvious choices in a final shortlist of 21 contenders for the New Seven Wonders of the World, announced in Switzerland yesterday, included the Kremlin in Moscow, the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty.

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New Space Race: Make Extraterrestrial Travel Cheap And Safe For Ordinary People…

A plan to build the world’s first airport for launching commercial spacecraft in New Mexico is the latest development in the new space race, a race among private companies and billionaire entrepreneurs to carry paying passengers into space and to kick-start a new industry, astro tourism.

The man who is leading the race may not be familiar to you, but to astronauts, pilots, and aeronautical engineers – basically to anyone who knows anything about aircraft design – Burt Rutan is a legend, an aeronautical engineer whose latest aircraft is the world’s first private spaceship. As he told 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley when he first met him a little over a year ago, if his idea flies, someday space travel may be cheap enough and safe enough for ordinary people to go where only astronauts have gone before.

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More Rings Are Found Around Planet Uranus

LOS ANGELES - Astronomers aided by the Hubble Space Telescope have spied two more rings encircling Uranus, the first additions to the planet's ring system in nearly two decades.

The faint, dusty rings orbit outside of Uranus' previously known rings, but within the orbits of its large moons, said Mark Showalter, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who made the discovery.

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Yahoo! plans to shoot Skype with Messenger

Internet media giant Yahoo! has fired the first salvo in a pricing war with Skype with plans to introduce a new internet voice service within days.

Yahoo! is releasing an upgrade to its popular Messenger text, voice and video communications software with the addition of a feature that's familiar to Skype's 68million worldwide users.

"Phone out" will let people make calls from computers to regular telephones while "Phone in" will let computer users receive telephone calls. The service mirror's Skype's equivalent service, named "Skype in" and "Skype out."

Yahoo! said it would undercut Skype's pricing plans for the telephone services, charging just 1¢per minute to people calling the US from countries such as Russia. It will charge 2¢ a minute to call 30 other countries, including Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Korea.

A Yahoo! spokeswoman said it would make the Yahoo! Messenger service available in 180countries, with downloads available from http://voice.yahoo.com/, although as of late on Friday the site was yet to go live.


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Google: Ten Golden Rules

Issues 2006 - At google, we think business guru Peter Drucker well understood how to manage the new breed of "knowledge workers." After all, Drucker invented the term in 1959. He says knowledge workers believe they are paid to be effective, not to work 9 to 5, and that smart businesses will "strip away everything that gets in their knowledge workers' way." Those that succeed will attract the best performers, securing "the single biggest factor for competitive advantage in the next 25 years."

At Google, we seek that advantage. The ongoing debate about whether big corporations are mismanaging knowledge workers is one we take very seriously, because those who don't get it right will be gone. We've drawn on good ideas we've seen elsewhere and come up with a few of our own. What follows are seven key principles we use to make knowledge workers most effective. As in most technology companies, many of our employees are engineers, so we will focus on that particular group, but many of the policies apply to all sorts of knowledge workers.

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Firefox is rekindled with faster, slicker revamp

The non-profit Mozilla Foundation hopes to up the heat on Microsoft after launching a faster, revamped version of its popular Firefox internet browser.

Firefox 1.5, which is available as a free download from www.Mozilla.com, will aim to build on the success of last year’s Firefox 1.0, which won a cult following among users who say the software is slicker and more secure than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), the market leader.

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New entry in orbital launch business ready for first flight

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. - A newly developed rocket designed to break into the orbital launch business with low-cost service waited on a Pacific atoll Friday to make its maiden flight.

The Falcon 1 had been scheduled for launch Friday from a pad on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands but the launch was bumped back to 1 p.m. PST Saturday because of preparations for a missile defense test launch, said El Segundo-based rocket builder SpaceX.

The rocket's payload is a satellite for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Academy. FalconSat-2 will measure space plasma phenomena, which can impair space-based communications.

The Falcon 1 rocket is the first in what is intended to be a family of launch vehicles from SpaceX, the latest enterprise of Elon Musk, whose previous endeavors include PayPal, the online payment service now owned by eBay.

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Star scientist hatches cloning controversy

The last thing the controversial field of human cloning needed was another controversy.

But an ethical scandal has erupted around the world's leading cloning scientist that could mean a major setback for stem-cell research, medicine's most promising, yet polarizing subject.

South Korea's star scientist, Hwang Woo-suk, who successfully cloned the world's first human embryo in 2004, admitted yesterday that he had violated ethical standards while conducting his work.


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Top 10 Space Movies of All Time

Space.com has the list.

Ariane rocket launch breaks payload record

Europe's most powerful rocket blasted-off from Kourou in French Guiana on Wednesday night, carrying more than eight tonnes into orbit.

The Ariane 5 ECA launcher lifted off at 2346 GMT carrying two large telecommunications satellites. The launch was initially scheduled for 24 June 2005 but was postponed several times for technical reasons. Most recently, on 12 November, the launch was delayed following of an undisclosed technical problem with the launch platform.

The heavy-lift booster has only flown twice before. During its maiden flight in 2002 it veered off course and had to be destroyed remotely. So mission officials were eager to ensure the third flight was a success. The two telecommunications satellites it carried into space were its heaviest payload yet.


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European Space Agency Launches Venus Probe

DARMSTADT, Germany Nov 9, 2005 — A European spacecraft left Earth orbit Wednesday on a five-month, 220 million-mile journey to Venus, an exploratory mission that could help spur a new space race.

The European Space Agency said the unmanned Venus Express lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and mission control in Darmstadt activated the probe's instruments and immediately picked up a signal to hearty applause in the observation room.

The Europeans then received another signal a congratulatory note from the Pasadena, Calif.,-based Planetary Society, which had monitored the launch from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.

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Leap second proposal means new time

I personally think GMT should be abolished and for good reason.

Greenwich Mean Time would become an irrelevance if proposals to redefine how time is measured are accepted...

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The brightest stars may owe their origin to black holes

Astronomers at the Chandra X-ray Observatory are agog with findings that may very well trash traditional theories and view the bleak and enigmatic black holes of the Milky Way as originators of new stars. While older theories have held that black holes are the galaxy's destructive forces, these scientists believe that the evidence lies in disks of gas inhabit the vicinity of the black holes to support the new ”star-spawning” theory.

The enigma that surrounds the black holes has spurred numerous science fiction space adventures with the shrunken star remnant's invisible but violent pull even dragging light out of shape into its mysterious vortex. The study that was conducted by the University of Leicester's Sergei Nayakshin and Max Planck Institute's Rashid Sunyaev dwelled into the possibility of black holes playing constructive roles in the galaxies. The spiral Milky Way that supports the earth's solar system on one of its several arms radiating from its core also contains a black hole at its center surrounded by a cluster of stars.

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The birth of TV gadgets

DO you find the MRT rides boring despite the hundreds of songs on your iPod? How would you like to watch Desperate Housewives on it to while away the time?

The updated version of the original iPod has a 6.35cm screen on which you can watch music videos and even TV programmes. --AP
Now you can, thanks to the new iPod video player launched by Apple Computer yesterday.

The tech giant has forged a deal with Walt Disney that will allow users to watch their favourite TV shows while on the move.

''It's a stunner and yes, it does video,'' said Apple chief executive Steve Jobs while unveiling the portable video player with a 6.35cm colour screen on which users can watch music videos, TV programmes and display photos as well.


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Cosmic cooperation

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia I wonder what the Russian spaceflight pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, one of the greatest futurist visionaries of the 20th century, would have made of the latest Chinese space mission. In 1903, at the dawn of wood-and-canvas aviation, Tsiolkovsky had already come up with the idea of a multistage rocket and calculated what speed would be needed to reach escape velocity and achieve Earth orbit. It was Tsiolkovsky who authored the famous utopian formulation "The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but humanity can't remain in its cradle forever" - probably the single most quoted sentence among advocates of human space exploration everywhere.

With two Chinese astronauts having blasted off early Wednesday and now in orbit of the Earth and with an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut currently crewing the International Space Station, it's worth reflecting on the fact that Tsiolkovsky didn't say that it was the Russians who would outgrow the terrestrial cradle, or the Americans, or any other nation for that matter. Rather he was concerned with the fate of the entire species. In any case, the maturation he was referring to presumably precluded such adolescent rivalries as superpower competition.

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China astronauts blast into space

China has successfully launched its second manned spacecraft, carrying two Chinese astronauts into orbit.

The lift-off, from Jiuquan in the Gobi desert, was shown live on state television and included views from a camera on the outside of the craft.

The mission is expected to see the Shenzhou VI orbit the Earth for five days, during which the astronauts will carry out experiments.

It comes almost exactly two years after China's first manned space flight.

In a sign of growing official confidence about the programme, the launch was announced in advance and broadcast in full on state television.

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That famous equation and you

During the summer of 1905, while fulfilling his duties in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein was fiddling with a tantalizing outcome of the special theory of relativity he'd published in June. His new insight, at once simple and startling, led him to wonder whether "the Lord might be laughing and leading me around by the nose."

But by September, confident in the result, Einstein wrote a three-page supplement to the June paper, publishing perhaps the most profound afterthought in the history of science. A hundred years ago this month, the final equation of his short article gave the world E=mc².

In the century since, E=mc² has become the most recognized icon of the modern scientific era. There is nothing you can do, not a move you can make, not a thought you can have, that doesn't tap directly into E=mc². It's an equation that tells of matter, energy and a remarkable bridge between them.

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Chris Foss

His science fiction book covers pioneered a much-imitated style featuring vast, colourful spaceships, machines and cities, often marked with mysterious symbols. Human figures are (almost) totally absent. These images are suggestive of science fiction in general rather than depictions of specific scenes from books, and therefore can be - and have been - used interchangeably on book covers.

See a gallery of his work