Buzzing science news

AP - NASA will try to launch Discovery to the international space station next week, less than a month after the last shuttle mission.

(AP) -- Unlimited domestic phone calls are nearly standard feature for landline plans these days. Now, Vonage Holdings Corp., which helped pioneer that feature with its Internet phone service, ...
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A new movie intriguingly turns the tables on the notion of alien overlords – but science quickly takes a back seat to explosions in this sci-fi film


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A decision has been reached in the case of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi and will be announced Thursday, the Scottish government said. British news networks reported that he would be released on compassionate grounds.
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As the nationwide recession continues, California and 14 other states have unemployment rates hovering around 10 percent. Job loss can devastate workers, says David Dooley, UC Irvine professor of psychology & social behavior, and it can take a toll on their families and communities as well.
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Young adults see living together as the best way to protect against divorce, not as an alternative to marriage, a University of Michigan researcher says.
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AP - NASA will try to launch Discovery to the international space station next week, less than a month after the last shuttle mission.

Simulations that showed the British Mars probe tumbling to disaster in the Martian atmosphere were wrong, says the Beagle team


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A 63-year-old woman spends five days alone trapped on a small raft in Iowa's Wapsipinicon River after it gets tangled in brush. Her rescue came when a fisherman spotted her. Jeanne Schnepp, who only had two cans of Mountain Dew and a bottle of water with her, is doing "remarkably great" after her ordeal.
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A team of scientists led by CSIRO's Dr Kishore Prayaga has been awarded a prestigious Australian Museum Eureka Prize for its work to develop a simple genetic test which has the potential to end the need to dehorn cattle in Australia.
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Back in the day, planes, trains and automobiles all sported one brand name. If you bought a Boeing, you got, nose to tail, a Boeing. These days, however, complex industrial equipment is starting to look like NASCAR vehicles festooned with logos. Why does it matter? "When component brands become powerful it changes the industry," says George John, Marketing Department Chair at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "What becomes more important, the product brand or the component? The Dodge truck or its Cummins engine?"

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AFP - The European Space Agency (ESA) on Wednesday signed a deal with its Russian counterpart Roscosmos to cooperate on two Mars exploration projects, Russia's Interfax news agency reported.

Under a microscope, Heterosigma akashiwo looks like a potato or a cornflake. To the naked eye, sea lettuce is a big, green sheet of seaweed. In most cases, these different algae are food for the ocean's vegetarians.
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(AP) -- This week's indictment of a hacker believed responsible for the biggest retail-store data breaches in U.S. history doesn't necessarily make shoppers safer from having their credit card ...
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Some children with a history of severe milk allergy can safely drink milk and consume other dairy products every day, according to research led by the Johns Hopkins Children's Center and published in the Aug. 10 online edition of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
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From 1995 to 2006, hospital 30-day death rates decreased significantly for Medicare patients hospitalized for a heart attack, as did the variation in the rate between hospitals, according to a study in the August 19 issue of JAMA.
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SPACE.com - An international spaceflight company plans to launch paying passengers on week-long orbital trips by 2013 using vehicles based on Soviet-era spacecraft built for classifed military space stations.
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A group of researchers in Australia and Taiwan has developed a new way to analyze the health of human teeth using lasers. As described in the latest issue of Optics Express,, by measuring how the surface of a tooth responds to laser-generated ultrasound, they can evaluate the mineral content of tooth enamel -- the semi-translucent outer layer of a tooth that protects the underlying dentin.
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When Planet Earth was just cooling down from its fiery creation, the sun was faint and young. So faint that it should not have been able to keep the oceans of earth from freezing. But fortunately for the creation of life, water was kept liquid on our young planet.
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AFP - An absent-minded musician left his 18th century violin in the back of a New York taxi but was soon reunited with the instrument thanks to satellite technology, newspapers reported Tuesday.

Crosstalk between cells lining the lung (epithelial cells) and airway smooth muscle cells is important in lung development. However, it has also been shown to contribute to several lung diseases, including asthma and pulmonary hypertension.
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A hacking incident report released Monday warns there has been a steep rise in attacks at social-networking hotspots including wildly popular microblogging service Twitter.
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(PhysOrg.com) -- A chemist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) has developed a kind of invisible fence for trapping and controlling particles as small as a single virus or large protein.
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An international research team has used lotto to show that the condition 'spatial neglect', which affects how we see the world, isn't connected to how is it is imagined.
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Super-streamlining, pothole power and heat recycling: a spate of innovation is about to transform diesel-guzzling trucks into green giants


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A cargo ship that disappeared weeks ago in European waters has been found near Cape Verde, according to Russian news agencies. The Arctic Sea and its 15-man Russian crew, discovered about 300 miles from the island nation off West Africa, mysteriously vanished on July 28 after passing through the English Channel.
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Romania, which has been lauded for tackling its AIDS epidemic, is facing shortages of antiretroviral drugs because of the global recession.


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University of California, San Diego computer scientists have created software that they hope will lead to data centers that logically function as single, plug-and-play networks that will scale to the massive scale of modern data center networks. The software system -- PortLand -- is a fault-tolerant, layer 2 data center network fabric capable of scaling to 100,000 nodes and beyond.
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Heavier rainstorms lie in our future. That's the clear conclusion of a new MIT and Caltech study on the impact that global climate change will have on precipitation patterns.
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