Hawking says space colonies needed

By SYLVIA HUI, Associated Press Writer Tue Jun 13, 1:42 PM ET

HONG KONG - The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who arrived in Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture planned for Wednesday were sold out.

He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

The 64-year-old scientist — author of the global best seller "A Brief History of Time" — is wheelchair-bound and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

Hawking said he's teaming up with his daughter to write a children's book about the universe, aimed at the same age group as the Harry Potter books.

"It is a story for children, which explains the wonders of the universe," said his daughter, Lucy, a journalist and novelist. They didn't provide other details.

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Is being a good dad ruining your career?

Fifteen years after women first tried to have it all, men now want the same. But is it possible both to impress the boss and be an attentive father? New dad Rafael Behr on the struggle to juggle career with fatherhood

Sunday June 11, 2006
The Observer

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Vista Beta 2, up close and personal

Up in Redmond, Microsoft developers proudly talk of dogfooding the software they write. Running beta software is the only way to learn what works and what doesn’t. A copy of Windows Vista running on a test machine in the corner isn’t likely to get a serious workout. To find the pain points – another popular Microsoft expression – you have to run that beta code on the machine you use every day.

In that same spirit, I’ve spent the last three months running beta versions of Windows Vista on the PCs I use for everyday work. February and March were exasperating. April’s release was noticeably better, and the Beta 2 preview – Build 5381, released to testers in early May – has been running flawlessly on my notebook for nearly three weeks.

Read more and see a screenshot slideshow of the new OS...

Plan for cloaking device unveiled

So far, cloaking has been confined to science fiction; in Star Trek it is used to render spacecraft invisible.

Professor Sir John Pendry says a simple demonstration model that could work for radar might be possible within 18 months' time.

Two separate teams, including Professor Pendry's, have outlined ways to cloak objects in the journal Science.

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Encyclopedia > Moller Skycar

The Moller Skycar is a prototype personal VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft — a "flying car" — called a "volantor" by its inventor Paul Moller, who has been attempting to develop such vehicles for many years.1 The Skycar demonstrated limited tethered flight capability in 2003. More tethered flight tests are now scheduled for an undisclosed date sometime after mid 2006. Moller is currently upgrading the Skycar's engines, and the improved prototype is now called the "M400X". Download high resolution version (400x616, 66 KB)Poster for Skycar Illustration by me --Terrible Tim 15:35, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC) File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Download high resolution version (400x616, 66 KB)Poster for Skycar Illustration by me --Terrible Tim 15:35, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC) File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Moller_M400_hover_test. ... Image File history File links Moller_M400_hover_test. ... Prototypes or prototypical instances combine the most representative attributes of a category. ... Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) describes airplanes that can lift off vertically. ... Airbus A380 An aircraft is any machine capable of atmospheric flight. ... The Waterman Aerobile at the Smithsonian. ... Paul S. Moller (b. ...


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Last chromosome in human genome sequenced

Scientists have reached a landmark point in one of the world's most important scientific projects by sequencing the last chromosome in the Human Genome, the so-called "book of life".

Chromosome 1 contains nearly twice as many genes as the average chromosome and makes up eight percent of the human genetic code.

It is packed with 3,141 genes and linked to 350 illnesses including cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

"This achievement effectively closes the book on an important volume of the Human Genome Project," said Dr Simon Gregory who headed the sequencing project at the Sanger Institute in England.

The project was started in 1990 to identify the genes and DNA sequences that provide a blueprint for human beings.

Chromosome 1 is the biggest and contains, per chromosome, the greatest number of genes.

"Therefore it is the region of the genome to which the greatest number of diseases have been localized," added Gregory, from Duke University in the United States.

The sequence of chromosome 1, which is published online by the journal Nature, took a team of 150 British and American scientists 10 years to complete. Continued...

Trio of Neptune-size planets discovered

European astronomers reported the smallest planet yet spotted in the "habitable zone" of a nearby sun-like star on Wednesday.

About the size of Neptune, the planet circles the star HD 69830, some 41 light-years away in the southern sky (one light-year equals about 5.9 trillion miles.)

Two other slightly smaller planets orbit closer to the star, reports the discovery team led by Christophe Lovis of Switzerland's Geneva Observatory.

Detections of the planets "suggest that the search for habitable planets might be easier than assumed," says Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau, in a commentary accompanying the report in Thursday's Nature magazine. The habitable zone planet is not Earth-like, says Lovis, likely cloaked in a high-pressure hydrogen atmosphere.

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Natural light 'to reinvent bulbs'

A light source that could put the traditional light bulb in the shade has been invented by US scientists.

The organic light-emitting diode (OLED) emits a brilliant white light when attached to an electricity supply.

The material, described in the journal Nature, can be printed in wafer thin sheets that could transform walls, ceilings or even furniture into lights.

The OLEDs do not heat up like today's light bulbs and so are far more energy efficient and should last longer.

They also produce a light that is more akin to natural daylight than traditional bulbs.

"We're hoping that this will lead to significantly longer device lifetimes in addition to higher efficiency," said Professor Mark Thompson of the University of Southern California, one of the authors of the paper.

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Proving How the Universe Was Born

Physicists announced Thursday that they now have the smoking gun that shows the universe went through extremely rapid expansion in the moments after the big bang, growing from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.

The discovery -- which involves an analysis of variations in the brightness of microwave radiation -- is the first direct evidence to support the two-decade-old theory that the universe went through what is called inflation.

It also helps explain how matter eventually clumped together into planets, stars and galaxies in a universe that began as a remarkably smooth, super-hot soup.

"It's giving us our first clues about how inflation took place," said Michael Turner, assistant director for mathematics and physical sciences at the National Science Foundation. "This is absolutely amazing."

Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicist, said: "The observations are spectacular and the conclusions are stunning."

Researchers found the evidence for inflation by looking at a faint glow that permeates the universe. That glow, known as the cosmic microwave background, was produced when the universe was about 300,000 years old -- long after inflation had done its work.

Honda Accord ADAS auto-pilot system takes the reins

Posted Jan 30th 2006 4:35PM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Transportation
We've heard of radar assisted cruise control, that has certain luxury cars running at set speeds on the highway, but slows them down or speeds them up when they get too close to a car in front or behind. Well now Honda UK is taking it to another level with their Advanced Driver Assist System (ADAS) that not only regulates your speed, but manages the turning, allowing you a full auto-pilot system for your Accord when you're out on the freeway. The Adaptive Cruise Control is your regular radar variety, but the Lane Keep Assist System keeps you headed in the right direction by using a camera on the rear-view mirror to watch the white lines and turn accordingly. Honda was quick to point out that their system isn't exactly set up for you to take a nap, since the ADAS system will beep every 10 seconds to make sure you're paying attention, requiring you to touch the steering wheel to inform the car you're still in charge, but we're sure someone is going manage an accident and an ensuing lawsuit or three out of this "convenience".

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China to build world`s first "artificial sun" experimental device

HEFEI, 01/21 - A full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, which aims to generate infinite, clean nuclear-fusion-based energy, will be built in March or April in Hefei, capital city of east China`s Anhui Province.

Experiments with the advanced new device will start in July or August. If the experiments prove successful, China will become the first country in the world to build a full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, nicknamed "artificial sun", experts here said.

The project, dubbed EAST (experimental advanced superconducting Tokamak), is being undertaken by the Hefei-based Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It will require a total investment of nearly 300 million yuan (37 million U.S. dollars), only one fifteenth to one twentieth the cost of similar devices being developed in the other parts of the world.

The new device will be an upgrade of China`s first superconducting Tokamak device, dubbed HT-7, which was also built by the plasma physics institute, in partnership with Russia, in the early 1990s. HT-7 made China the fourth country in the world, after Russia, France and Japan, to have such a device.

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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.

cont. http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/06/business/google.php

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.

Cont.

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.

Full article here

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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