The Washington Post: The first application in 30 years to build a new U.S. nuclear power plant has been filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the Washington Post. The new 1,600-megawatt reactor would be built at the Calvert Cliffs site in Lusby, MD, which is home to two existing reactors owned by Baltimore-based Constellation Energy Group. The licensing process will take up to 2.5 years and may cost as much as $100 million before Constellation starts construction.
Up to 28 new reactors are currently in the process of evaluated by electricity producers, each costing billions of dollars to build. The New York TImes reports that the money for construction may be available to the nuclear industry through easy-to-obtain government loans. The money is available because of a one sentence addition that was quietly added to an energy bill passing through the Senate. The Bush Adminstration had originally capped government loans to the industry at $4 billion, the cost of one new plant. The new legisation potentially makes $100 billion available.
The New York Times: NASA is about to launch a scientific laboratory to Mars that will be the first spacecraft to land in the northern polar region of the planet and dig for evidence of water or other conditions that could support some form of life.
ABC News: Scientists say a new era of research is being launched with the opening of Australia's first synchrotron in Melbourne.
Nature: Space agency hit by claims of theft, sabotage and drunkenness.
The Washington Post: U.N. inspectors visited a nuclear reactor Monday being built in central Iran, a facility that has been off-limits since April, state media reported.
The Register: American boffins reckon they may have found a way to build landmine-detecting equipment more cheaply, possibly offering hope to dispossessed people in warzones around the world.
BBC: A new analysis of Atlantic hurricanes says their numbers have doubled over the last century.
The Christian Science Monitor: In sessions at the American Institute of Math, geniuses munch food and crunch numbers, contemplating labyrinthine ideas.
The New York Times: Three years after President Bush urged global rules to stop additional nations from making nuclear fuel, the White House will announce on Friday that it is carving out an exception for India, in a last-ditch effort to seal a civilian nuclear deal between the countries.
Science: An earthquake that roughed up a nuclear power plant last week has Japan once again debating nuclear safety.
Environmental News Network: The Bush administration's environment chief drew fire Thursday from Democratic senators for delaying a decision on whether to let California regulate global warming emissions from cars and light trucks.
The Economist: A grandiose plan to link Europe's electricity grids may recast wind power from its current role as a walk-on extra to being the star of the show.
The New York Times: NASA has lost $94 million in office equipment over the past decade, looking the other way as employees give computers to spouses or claim missing laptops are lost in space, according to a Congressional report.
BBC: Ozone could be a much more important driver of climate change than scientists had previously predicted, according to a study in Nature journal.
Nature: Crystals flicker under extreme conditions.
ScienceNow: Researchers have developed a remarkably simple way to convert ordinary graphite particles into very thin but superstrong sheets that are tougher than steel and as flexible as carbon fiber but can be made much more cheaply. The discovery could spawn entirely new types of materials for applications as diverse as protective coatings, electronic components, batteries, and fuel cells.
BBC: Russia is sending a mini-submarine to explore the ocean floor below the North Pole and find evidence to support its claims to Arctic territory.
Wired: New research indicates that hacking the atmosphere -- pumping microscopic particles into the stratosphere or clouds to block sunlight and offset global warming caused by greenhouse gases -- is imminently possible. The problem is we could never, ever stop doing it.
PC World: Intel is close to creating chips that transmit data at high speeds using light instead of electrons.
CNN: NASA's aging but durable Mars rover Opportunity will make what could be a trip of no return into a deep impact crater as it tries to peer further back than ever into the Red Planet's geologic history.
NPR: Physician Paul Epstein has been trying to get people interested in climate change since the early 1990s. And now, finally, people are listening to his claims that climate change could lead to all sorts of health problems, everything from more allergies to more infectious diseases to more starvation. Some climate experts accuse him of overstating his case.
Geoffrey Lean: Get used to floods - the worst is yet to come
The Independent
The New York Times: For physicists, this is a summer of rumors, hope and hype as rival collaborations race to capture the legendary particle known as the Higgs boson.
MIT News: Army vet demos MIT prosthesis; device is first of its kind
Iraq War amputee's bionic hand moves all five fingers
USA Today
Indianapolis Star: By explaining science behind motions, camp aims to draw more girls to technology field
San Francisco Chronicle: Device made for contractors helps archaeologists create first-ever digital blueprints
BBC: A key US space agency (Nasa) satellite important for detecting hurricanes and providing other climate data will go silent in the next few years, and missions to replace it have been cancelled or delayed.
CIO: Think your storage headaches are big? Try being the guy in charge of storing the 1GB of data per second every day for a month coming off CERN's large hadron collider (LHC).
Science: An 8-year-old NASA weather satellite sits improbably at the center of the latest scientific storm raging in Washington, D.C.
Chicago Tribune: With its uniform pieces and simple moves, checkers may seem like a simple kid's game. But it took hundreds of computers running continuously for nearly 20 years before researchers announced today that the game has officially been solved, a major benchmark in the development of artificial intelligence.
Science: Department of Energy officials recently celebrated the belated completion of the plutonium trigger of a nuclear bomb operationally identical to ones last built 18 years ago. Critics of U.S. nuclear policy, however, say that building new pits contradicts the country's stated intention to reduce its nuclear arsenal.
Santa Fe New Mexican: Airborne releases of plutonium at Los Alamos National Laboratory could be about 59 times higher than what was officially reported during the Cold War, a health scientist told the public Wednesday evening.
The Christian Science Monitor: Astronomers are recruiting ordinary people around the world to help classify 1 million galaxies.
Wired: Once you catch an atom, you can do quite a lot with it. You can make a powerful computer, track infinitesimally small changes in gravity, even model the big bang.
That's what scientists in a field called ultracold physics are doing. Their tools are atoms cooled to near-absolute-zero temperatures, slowed just enough to let physicists harness their quantum properties.
MSNBC: Galaxy clusters collide at speeds that scientists thought were impossible
Nature: Parliament approves nanotechnology initiative.
USA Today: Bad news continued on Wednesday to leak out of a Japanese nuclear plant shaken by a powerful earthquake.
Two days after a magnitude-6.8 quake rattled the west coast of Japan Monday, killing nine people and causing a fire and a radioactive leak at the nearby Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear complex:
New leak identified at damaged Japanese nuclear plant
Guardian Unlimited
Reuters: The United States and India on Tuesday began a high-level effort to conclude a controversial nuclear cooperation agreement that the State Department said was still within reach.
National Geographic News: Scientists have discovered the force that creates "killer electrons," particles that pose a significant hazard to spacecraft and astronauts.
MSNBC: Large bodies like to stay near their stars, astronomers say
The Boston Globe: Two professors at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and the institute's former president have been chosen to receive the nation's highest honors for science and technology, the White House announced today, an extraordinary concentration of achievement for one university.
The New York Times: Eric Mazur, a professor at Harvard, wants his students to understand concepts, not regurgitate facts.
ScienceNow: Cut a thin strip from a piece of paper, twist it, and connect the two loose ends. You'll end up with a Möbius strip, a graceful bracelet that oddly has only one side, as you can easily demonstrate by running your finger around it. Now try the same thing with the much wider strip of paper. Why is it harder to connect the ends? Mathematicians now have a precise answer.
The Baltimore Sun: Adam Riess, the Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist who discovered that the universe is flying apart at an accelerating rate in response to a still-mysterious force dubbed "dark energy," has won yet another top prize for his discovery.
BBC: The UK government needs to develop a more coherent strategy on space, or risk falling behind other countries, a House of Commons committee has warned.
International Herald Tribune: United Nations inspectors have confirmed that North Korea has shut down its weapons-making nuclear reactor, the UN nuclear monitoring agency said Monday. Pyongyang, meanwhile, warned Washington that the real bargaining over its nuclear disarmament had only begun.
NPR: One of the world's largest reflecting telescopes takes its first look at the sky. The Great Canary Telescope sits on a peak on the Atlantic island of La Palma. It's expected to be fully online by 2008.
The New York Times: The trade association for the nuclear power industry recently asked 1,000 Americans what energy source they thought would be used most for generating electricity in 15 years. The top choice? Not nuclear plants, or coal or natural gas. The winner was the sun, cited by 27 percent of those polled.
Chicago Tribune: Well-known scientist returns to lead push for exotic-beam facility
Environmental News Network: As the summer swelters on, skyscrapers and apartments around the city will be cranking up the air conditioning and pushing the city's power grid to the limit.
Guardian Unlimited: The UN nuclear watchdog said today that Iran had agreed to lift its ban on inspectors visiting a controversial nuclear facility, and was ready to answer questions about its past plutonium experiments.
Science: Physicists at an ultrasensitive cosmic-ray observatory in Argentina say puzzled theorists can stop trying to explain ultrahigh-energy particles that other instruments had spotted streaming from outer space: the particles weren’t there.
University at Buffalo Reporter: Mention "outsourcing" and people tend to think of fields like manufacturing or telemarketing; theoretical physics isn't even on the list.
The Christian Science Monitor: American high-schoolers will test their physics prowess in Iran against teams from 70-plus nations.
The Register: For the first time ever, water has been conclusively identified in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system.
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