Science: Six months into their rule on Capitol Hill, the Democrats have begun to make their mark on science policy. Many of their moves have underscored differences with the White House, including efforts to overturn the ban on federal funding for work on new embryonic stem lines, prominent accusations that the Bush Administration has politicized science advice, and proposals to increase and reshape funding for climate change research (see sidebar). But as far as the Administration's most prominent science initiative is concerned, the new Congress has so far been more than supportive, at least in loosening the purse strings: It is poised to top the president's generous requests for the multiagency American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI), which is aimed at sharply increasing funds for the physical sciences.
NPR: NASA's Mars rover Opportunity is scheduled to begin a descent down a rock-paved slope into the Red Planet's massive Victoria Crater.
Nanowerk LLC: Researchers from the London Centre for Nanotechnology and the US have published an article in Physical Review Letters (" Efficient Dynamic Nuclear Polarization at High Magnetic Fields") that describes a technique for making molecules a thousand times more useful for quantum computing.
Wired: When IBM chief maintenance engineer Jóhann Gunnarsson started tinkering with the IBM 1401 Data Processing System, believed to have been the first computer to arrive in his native Iceland in 1964, he noticed an electromagnetic leak from the machine's memory caused a deep, cellolike hum to come from nearby AM radios.
Nature: Congress gets cold feet over next generation nuke.
The New York Times: Many of Alaska’s roads, runways, railroads and water and sewer systems will wear out more quickly and cost more to repair or replace because of climate change, according to a study released yesterday.
MSNBC: Scientists spotted jet 20,000 light-years from Earth in Circinus X-1
San Diego Union-Tribune: New research centers in Tennessee, Wisconsin and California will try to develop new ways of turning switchgrass, poplar trees and other plants into fuel under a $375 million plan announced Tuesday by the Energy Department.
BBC: Scientists have identified a possible crater left by the biggest space impact in modern times - the Tunguska event.
Oak Ridger: The number of college students enrolled in undergraduate health physics programs continues to increase, according to a survey of the 30 U.S. universities with health physics programs conducted by Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.
AZoNano.com: Operating on a molecular level is no longer just a dream for the future. A newly approved Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel is working on "molecular machines". The project team will design and synthesize molecules and nanometer sized aggregates of molecules that will operate as pumps, rotors, actuators and "intelligent" materials. The German Research Foundation has approved a grant of more than EUR 5.5 million to the SFB 677 "Function by Switching” for its first four years. Spokesman of the project is Professor Rainer Herges (Chair of Organic Chemistry).
Wired: 1954: The world's first nuclear power plant becomes operational in Obninsk, outside of Moscow.
Space.com: NASA is pressing ahead with plans to use part of the International Space Station (ISS) as a national laboratory, a move that would reserve about half of the outpost's U.S. science facilities for outside use by 2011.
The Christian Science Monitor: A Maine school bus driver won $200,000 in a NASA-sponsored contest to design a new glove for astronauts.
Wired: Sun Microsystems announced today that its hardware will power the largest supercomputer ever built, weighing in with 62,976 CPU cores, 125 terabytes of memory, 1.7 terabytes of disk space, and 504 teraflops of performance.
The Guardian: We will never explain the cosmos by taking on faith either divinity or physical laws. True meaning is to be found within nature
BBC: Archaeologists have revived the debate over whether a spectacular Bronze Age disc from Germany is one of the earliest known calendars.
The Nebra disc is emblazoned with symbols of the Sun, Moon and stars and said by some to be 3,600 years old.
Writing in the journal Antiquity, a team casts doubt on the idea the disc was used by ancient astronomers as a precision tool for observing the sky.
They instead argue that the disc was used for shamanistic rituals.
space.com: The skies of stars might experience weather like that on planets, says astrophysicist Oleg Kochukhov and colleagues at Uppsala University in Sweden. The drifting clouds are wispy, "just like cirrus clouds on Earth"-except these are made of mercury, he adds. The research in publish online in Nature Physics.
Various: As though their knowledge of the quantum secrets came with the power of prophecy, some three dozen of Europe’s best physicists ended their 1932 meeting in Copenhagen with a parody of Goethe’s “Faust.” Physicist Gino Segrè's new book, Faust in Copenhagen forms the basis of a New York Times review by George Johnson. Joscelyn Jurich in her review for the San Francisco Chronicle, looks in more detail at the links between Fraust and physics in the 1930s.
Congressional Quarterly: A squeeze on funding for satellites to look down on the Earth’s environment at a time of growing need for research into the effects of climate change is creating alarm among scientists and on Capitol Hill. NASA's Earth science budget has been cut by 30 percent to help pay for the President's Moon-Mars vision and for repairs to the space shuttle. A significant number of Earth observation satellites are failing or at the limit of their design lifetime, and few are expected to be replaced. Now the Senate's commerce committee which monitors NASA, is applying more pressure to Mike Griffen, NASA administrator to maintain US expertise in monitoring the planet says CQ's William Scally.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has announced that it will delay starting up the giant Large Hadron Collider from this November until May 2008. The decision was taken at a council meeting earlier this week.
The move has a number of implications for the particle physics community, including the likihood that the lifetime of Fermilab's collider the Tevatron might extended in order to try and beat the LHC to discovery of the Higgs Boson particle.
Science: More than 20 years after the discovery of cuprate superconductors, physicists do not agree on what mechanism causes the loss of electrical resistance at temperatures as high as 160 K (known as Tc, the transition temperature). They do agree that electron pairs are crucial because they can form a condensate that flows without resistance, but the interaction that causes the pairs to form is disputed. Philip W. Andersen suggests in this week's Science that the bosonic glue most physicists believe is needed to explain the superconducting behavior is folklore rather than the result of scientific logic.
BBC: Satellite images show that Pakistan is building a nuclear reactor that could be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium, says the Institute of Science for International Security (Isis).
New York Times: The Senate passed a broad energy bill late Thursday that would, among other things, require the first big increase in fuel mileage requirements for passenger cars in more than two decades.
The vote, 65 to 27, was a major defeat for car manufacturers, which had fought for a much smaller increase in fuel economy standards and is expected to keep fighting as the House takes up the issue
Nature: Researchers detained on suspicion of 'espionage'
The New York Times: DuPont and Environmental Defense, one of the nation’s largest environmental groups, plan to release jointly developed guidelines today for evaluating the safety and environmental risks of nanotechnology products.
ScienceNow: The sun-shaded crater at the moon's south pole might be frigid, but the argument over whether to build an observatory there someday remains on the torrid side. A newly developed liquid might shift the debate's balance by allowing construction of giant telescope mirrors that dwarf the resolving power of the best space telescopes in the works.
Wired: The tiny brick library in Leonardo Da Vinci's hometown is putting 3,000 pages of the genius' work online in a high-resolution, searchable archive.
Earth Times: China's 2006 carbon dioxide emissions were 8 percent higher than those of the United States, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency announced Tuesday.
ScienceNow: Marco Polo heard them in the Gobi Desert, Charles Darwin in Chile, and physicists have been trying to explain them for 100 years. But booming sand dunes have remained mysterious. Now, a combined acoustic and seismological study of California dunes points to a natural internal structure that amplifies the sound of sliding sand at select frequencies.
Miami Herald: A computer simulation of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks supports a federal agency's findings that the initial impact from the hijacked airplanes stripped away crucial fireproofing material and that the weakened towers collapsed under their own weight.
New London Day: Lawsuits allege that 'hot fuel' is costing motorists
Computerworld: Several officials at the company that manages security at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) used unprotected e-mail networks earlier this year to share highly classified information related to the characteristics of materials used in nuclear weapons.
Congressional Quarterly: The House passed a bill Monday that would help create an international nuclear fuel bank to discourage countries from enriching uranium that could be used for nuclear weapons.
BBC: The European Space Agency (Esa) has ordered the first bespoke spacecraft in its new global monitoring programme.
Nature: Plants and animals show big spring-time shift over a decade.
Wired: For weeks, the physics world has been buzzing with rumors juicier -- at least in context -- than any Washington scandal: Researchers at Fermilab's Tevatron particle collider may have made one of the biggest scientific discoveries in decades, just months before a new European facility supplanted their position at the top of the field.
ScienceNow: A geoscientist has pinpointed the motion of the center of the Earth to within 1 millimeter--or about the thickness of a dime--per year, cutting the uncertainty about Earth's center by more than half. The new measurement and the method that made it possible should help scientists more accurately track increases in sea level caused by global climate change.
The Register: Australia's Woomera Test Facility last Friday hosted the successful launch and firing of a scramjet engine which reached speeds of "up to Mach 10", the country's Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) has announced.
BBC: The same computer systems that crashed aboard the International Space Station (ISS) last week are also incorporated into two new European contributions to the orbiting outpost due to be launched around the year's end.
Science: The United States is considering the development and deployment of new nuclear weapon designs, the objective being to sustain the nation's ultimate deterrent for the foreseeable future.* These initiatives are presented as supporting the highest U.S. security priorities, which include countering the threats of terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons--priorities that are widely shared internationally
BBC: Pluto has suffered yet another blow to its status.
Nature: When two objects separated by a vacuum are barely a whisker apart, a strange attraction comes into play. Philip Ball meets the physicists who are trying to make something out of nothing.
MSNBC: New light source lighter, brighter, and more efficient than incandescents
The Independent: Scientists now say that an ocean several miles deep once covered a third of the surface of the planet, enough water to support the origin and evolution of life. The red planet, they said, had once been a deep blue, just like Earth.
Nature: 'Stuff' not made of particles could be seen soon, in theory.
MSNBC: Two explosions observed in 2004 and 2006 in a galaxy 78 million light years from Earth were part of the fiery death of one of the most massive stars known to exist, astronomers said on Wednesday.
The New York Times: The Russian computers that help keep the International Space Station in orbit were out of commission for the second day, a glitch that could imperil the $100 billion orbiting laboratory if it is not corrected.
ScienceNow: A House spending panel has exceeded President George W. Bush's 2008 budget request for four key science agencies. That's very good news, say science lobbyists, who nevertheless warned that the bill must still survive a threatened White House veto if its higher spending levels aren't first whittled down in the Senate. Science and math education is treated especially well, in line with the bipartisan push to improve teacher quality and raise student test scores.
MSNBC: Saturn's moon, covered in dunes, may shed light on changes on our planet
San Francisco Examiner: An aging weather satellite crucial to accurate predictions on the intensity and path of hurricanes could fail at any moment and plans to launch a replacement have been pushed back seven years to 2016.
BBC: The European Space Agency (Esa) is pushing forward with its design for a rover mission to send to Mars in 2013.
The New York Times: Increasingly, physicists are constructing materials that bend light the “wrong” way, an optical trick that could lead to sharper-than-ever lenses or maybe even make objects disappear.
The New York Times: A new study suggests that the so-called Goldilocks planet is too hot to be like Earth, but astronomers have uncovered another, cooler option.
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