Air Pollution: It's Not Just Your Lungs That Suffer - US News & World Report

A growing body of research is shedding light on the ways that air pollutants impinge on the health of the American public. Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency highlighted this concern in December when, after reviewing the evidence, it ruled that greenhouse gases are detrimental to human health, particularly because they can aggravate asthma and other respiratory illnesses and can produce longer, more intense heat waves that endanger the poor, sick, and elderly. But it's not just lungs that suffer.

To be sure, clean-air advocates have worked to improve the nation's air quality, and the health risks that a particular individual might face directly from breathing polluted air are low. But research consistently is finding that, when spread out over a given population -- be it residents of a certain city or those with a particular disease -- the quality of the air has a very significant impact on public health. When vehicles, factories, power plants, and other machines burn fuel, the chemicals they release into the atmosphere react with one another (and other compounds in the air) in ways that can amplify health hazards. "Greenhouse gases actually increase air pollution and therefore [raise the] potential for more adverse events for people with pre-existing respiratory conditions or heart conditions," says Kent Pinkerton, chair of the environmental health policy committee at the American Thoracic Society.

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Chile Earthquake Moved Entire City 10 Feet to the West -- Wired

The magnitude 8.8 quake that struck near Maule, Chile, Feb. 27 moved the entire city of Concepcion 10 feet to the west.

Precise GPS measurements from before and after the earthquake, the fifth largest ever recorded by seismographs, show that the country’s capital, Santiago, moved 11 inches west. Even Buenos Aires, nearly 800 miles from the epicenter, shifted an inch. The image above uses red arrows to represent the relative direction and magnitude of the ground movement in the vicinity of the quake.

The analysis comes from a project led by Ohio State earth scientist Mike Bevis that has been using GPS to record movements of the crust on Chile since 1993. The area is of particular interest to geoscientists because it is an active subduction zone, where an oceanic plate is colliding with a continental plate and being pushed into the Earth’s molten mantle below.

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Adding oxygen to booze speeds sobriety -- New Scientist

Booze that has been treated so that you sober up faster afterwards may sound like a drinker's dream, but could end up being their downfall if it encourages heavy drinkers to consume even more alcohol.

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A week off the grid and in touch with energy -- CNET

There's nothing like living off-grid for a while to make you aware of your environmental and energy footprint. During a family vacation to Belize last week, I got a flavor for what's needed to function, albeit at a leisurely pace, when you're far beyond the reach of power lines.

... The most vivid environmental lesson came to me when we visited one of the islands, or cays, that pop out along the 240-mile barrier reef off the coast. Bringing power lines to a place that takes 35 minutes to get to by boat obviously doesn't make sense, so most of these types of resorts rely on diesel generators. Our location, by contrast, relied largely on solar power.

When Americans buy rooftop solar photovoltaic panels, the total output when the sun is shining is typically anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 watts or more. But the individual cabins at this resort ran on just one or two solar panels, making maybe 200 to 300 watts. You could barely run a home computer and television with that much juice.

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Chilean Quake Likely Shifted Earth's Axis, NASA Scientist Says -- Business Week

The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.

Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth's rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.

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Roger Ebert using software to find his lost voice -- CNET

Although he lost his voice to cancer surgery, Roger Ebert is sounding like his old self thanks to some innovative software.

... But traditional TTS software is far from perfect. The voice that comes out of the computer can sound robotic and mechanical. One of the best-known examples is probably the audio system used by famed physicist Stephen Hawking. Voices that use an accent for added flair--Ebert initially tried a British voice--often mispronounce words and are still hard to understand.

Then one day, as Ebert writes on his Web site, he was surfing the Web and discovered a site for a company called CereProc with a new kind of TTS software, one that builds voices based on a person's actual recordings.

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Can hand sanitizers like Purell really stop people from getting the flu? -- Slate Magazine

Our homes and workplaces, we're told, are trying to kill us. Recently, a University of Arizona microbiologist named Charles Gerba, author of hundreds of scientific papers about household microbes, gave a terrifying lecture at the offices of the Food and Drug Administration. Gerba -- who, incidentally, has a child with the middle name Escherichia -- that's what the "E" in E. coli stands for -- explained that a kitchen sponge and sink are home to thousands of times more bacteria than a toilet seat. Plus, 10 percent of household dishrags contain salmonella. After playing with other children, toddlers have more fecal bacteria on their hands than does a person exiting a public toilet stall. Those toilets, by the way, aerosolize so many droplets with each flush that Gerba compares their dispersion to "the Fourth of July." And every public swimming pool he's ever tested has contained disease-causing viruses.

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Cell phones show human movement predictable 93% of the time -- Ars Technica

We'd like to think of ourselves as dynamic, unpredictable individuals, but according to new research, that's not the case at all. In a study published in last week's Science, researchers looked at customer location data culled from cellular service providers. By looking at how customers moved around, the authors of the study found that it may be possible to predict human movement patterns and location up to 93 percent of the time. These findings may be useful in multiple fields, including city planning, mobile communication resource management, and anticipating the spread of viruses.

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Leftover Valentine’s Chocolate? Use It to Measure the Speed of Light -- Wired

If you’re a long-time reader, you may remember the great leftover Easter Peeps microwave experiment. Well, today we’re going to be nuking leftover Valentine’s Day chocolate to demonstrate one of the constants of physics, the speed of light. Chocolate makes a very appropriate medium, because the heating property of microwaves was first discovered by a scientist whose candy bar melted in his pocket when he got too close to a microwave device being tested for use in radar.

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Any use of this article without the NFL's express written consent is prohibited -- ArsTechnica

With the Super Bowl just concluded and baseball's spring training only weeks away, a question occurred to us: whatever happened to the push for copyright holders to tone down their copyright notices?

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State lawmakers attack climate change, evolution -- Ars Technica

The teaching of evolution has been under attack for decades, but few are aware of the extent of the campaign. Each year, at least a half-dozen states seem to introduce legislation intended to undermine science education standards by allowing or requiring nonscientific ideas to be taught alongside a standard biology curriculum. In recent years, these have taken the form of the so-called "academic freedom" bills, which allow teachers to bring in outside materials that undercut standard science textbooks. Many of these bills are now placing climate change beside evolution as a target for special criticism, and there are signs that climatology may become an independent target for state legislators.

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Are Green Power Programs a Scam? - Mother Jones

When a hawker at an Oregon farmers market urged Laura McCandlish—with a coupon for free veggies and a postcard with pictures of bucolic windmills—to sign up for her utility's green power program, she thought it sounded like a good deal: For a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, her home's energy would come from local turbines instead of dirty coal plants. Right?

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The Potential for a 40-MPH Man - Wired

New research suggests the human body is capable of handling running speeds up to 40 miles per hour, if only our muscles could contract faster.

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Could Cars Have Contributed to Mortgage Meltdown? - Wired

Study of foreclosures in three cities finds those who don't have access to mass transit and are more dependent on the cars they own are more likely to default on their mortgage.

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Richard Branson unveils Virgin Galactic spaceplane - BBC

Sir Richard Branson has unveiled the rocket plane he will use to take fare-paying passengers into space. SpaceShipTwo was presented to the world in Mojave, California. The vehicle will undergo testing over the next 18 months before being allowed to take ticketed individuals on short-hop trips just above the atmosphere.

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Nov. 5, 1955: A Flux of Genius 

Google releases Dashboard privacy tool - CNN

Ever wonder what information Google knows about you? With a click or two, now you can find out.
Google released a feature Thursday that lets users see and control data that the Web giant has collected about them. Called Google Dashboard, the service provides an online summary of a user's Google files -- Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa photos and so on -- by collecting pre-existing privacy controls in one place.

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Obesity responsible for 100,000 cancer cases annually - CNN

More than 100,000 cases of cancer each year are caused by excess body fat, according to a report released Thursday in Washington. Researchers with the American Institute for Cancer Research looked at seven cancers with known links to obesity and calculated actual case counts that were likely to have been caused by obesity.

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Hubble's New Camera Delivers Another Stunner - Wired

The Hubble Space Telescope's new camera is returning incredibly detailed, stunning images of space. This close-up view of an area near the core of the iconic Southern Pinwheel galaxy, or M83, shows very rapid star birth.

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Record labels keep blaming P2P, but it's a hard sell - Ars Technica

In response to a new survey suggesting that P2P file-swapping might not be harming music sales, music's international trade group IFPI today put out a statement. "The net effect of illegal file-sharing in the UK and elsewhere has been to reduce legitimate sales," IFPI asserts. "This is why spending on recorded music has fallen every year since illegal file-sharing began to become widespread."

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Inside the Army's Far-Out Acid Tests - Wired

Dropping acid to boost the Pentagon's psychic powers was just the start. The Men Who Stare At Goats, the upcoming movie based on Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book of the same name, has George Clooney and Jeff Bridges in a bizarre military research project involving astral projection, remote viewing, and LSD. But for the real dope on the Army's narcotics and psychedelics tests, you have to turn to Dr. James S. Ketchum, who wrote a firsthand account of the military’s trials with these "incapacitating chemical agents."

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Sandra Day O'Connor Sworn In -- Bill of Rights Proposed 

The Four Horsemen send their regrets - Salon

A list of failed predictions of the end of the world, including a few current theories that probably won't pan out

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Build a Better Bulb for a $10 Million Prize - NYT

The ubiquitous but highly inefficient 60-watt light bulb badly needs a makeover. And it could be worth millions in government prize money -- and more in government contracts -- to the first company that figures out how to do it.

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Autumn Equinox & Hobbit Day 

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Energy Xtremism -- TomDispatch.com

Talk about roller-coaster rides: the price of a barrel of crude oil, which was still under $20 the week after September 11, 2001, made it to $147 in July 2008, just before the global economic meltdown, only to hit a low of $32.40 early this year. And yet, in recent months, hardly noticed, it's crept back above $70 -- and this with "recovery" barely on the horizon and global industrial demand still muted at best. And that's the good news.

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Bicycles, books and beer -- High Country News

How a man with no plan built a community around literature and social activism.

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America, the beautiful (America, the ugly) -- Salon

You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published "A New Literary History of America" -- the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily. You could do a lot worse, but I'm not sure you could do much better; this magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture.

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What a fat tax really means for America -- Slate Magazine

Not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, in the winter of 1942, physiologist A.J. Carlson made a radical suggestion: If the nation's largest citizens were charged a fee -- say, $20 for each pound of overweight -- we might feed the war effort overseas while working to subdue an "injurious luxury" at home.

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Smoking bans cut heart attacks by a third: study -- Reuters

Smoking bans in public places can reduce the number of heart attacks by as much as 36 percent, offering fresh proof that the restrictions work, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

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Tiny technologies could produce big energy solutions -- CNN

Forgot to charge your cell phone last night? Imagine that you could power it by walking. Weirder still, you might be able to just spray a new battery on.

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Moonshine returns! - Salon
The fabled liquor of outlaws and gangsters is making a comeback with craft distillers. Too bad it's still illegal.

Standing in the middle of the room at the Sweetwater Distillery in Petaluma, Calif., Bill Owens held a feedbag full of stale donuts high in the air. With a crowd gathered around him, he dumped its contents -- chocolate glazed, jelly-filled, iced with sprinkles -- into a tank filled with hot water and plunged an industrial mixer into the liquid, splattering warm, sticky bits onto anyone who stood too close. A dog wandered up and began licking the floor.

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Too Fat? No More Excuses - US News & World Report
Research is revealing how very damaging extra baggage is.
(Article is originally from 2007, but relevant to this day)

You may think your jiggling spare tire is just along for the ride, an inert mass that slows you down and forces a slackened belt. But far from just sitting there quietly, your body fat is talking. And what it's saying - in a constant stream of messages to your brain, liver, muscles, and points in between - amounts to an urgent reason to finally follow through on that New Year's resolution.

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Laser refrigeration could provide supercooled vodka, computers - SmartPlanet

The concept of laser cooling is three decades old, but German researchers have finally leaped beyond previous failures to show that bombarding high-pressure gas with a laser can produce dramatic cooling.

Reporting their findings last week in Nature, the researchers were able to drop the temperature as much as 66 degrees Celsius - or about 119 degrees Fahrenheit - in mere seconds.

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40 years ago today, man first steps onto another celestial body, the moon. To this day, only 12 people have done this.

Apollo 40th Anniversary - NASA

Restored Video from Apollo 11 Moonwalk - NASA

Many small steps led to Apollo 11's giant leap for mankind - ArsTechnica
Forty years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the surface of the moon, Ars looks at what led up to this monumental occasion, and congratulates all those involved.

IKEA is as bad as Wal-Mart - Salon
Everyone loves a bargain, but a new book illuminates the dangers of cheap stuff

My mother still owns, and uses, the same vacuum cleaner she bought early in her marriage, just after World War II. She still lives in the house my father -- not a carpenter by trade, but an electrician -- built in the early 1950s with the help of his brothers, a small but sturdy Cape Cod-style dwelling with hardwood floors and solid wood doors that close with a hearty, satisfying clunk (as opposed to the echoey click of hollow-core doors). Today the idea of anything -- a household appliance, a piece of furniture, a house -- being built to last is almost laughable. When your vacuum cleaner stops sucking, you most likely haul it out to the curb and trek to Target or a big-box home-goods store to replace it. Even if you could readily find someone to repair it, the trouble and the cost would be prohibitive. If you need a bookcase, there's always IKEA: Sure, you'd prefer to buy a sturdily built hardwood version that doesn't buckle under the weight of actual books, but who has extra dough to spend on stuff like that? The IKEA bookcase is good enough, for now if not forever.

That cycle of consumption seems harmless enough, particularly since we live in a country where there are plenty of cheap goods to go around. But in her lively and terrifying book "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," Ellen Ruppel Shell pulls back the shimmery, seductive curtain of low-priced goods to reveal their insidious hidden costs. Those all-you-can-eat Red Lobster shrimps may very well have come from massive shrimp-farming spreads in Thailand, where they've been plumped up with antibiotics and possibly tended by maltreated migrant workers from Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam. The made-in-China toy train you bought your kid a few Christmases ago may have been sprayed with lead paint -- and the spraying itself may have been done by a child laborer, without the benefit of a protective mask.

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The public trusts scientists - but not their conclusions - arstechnica

The public loves scientists, but it's not so pleased with conclusions that most scientists agree on, such as evolution and climate change. A new set of surveys explains this gap and hints at a widening partisan divide. A recent set of surveys performed by the Pew Research Center shows that the public generally supports scientific research and feels that scientists are valuable members of society, but finds that some of science's conclusions are widely mistrusted, and hints at a widening partisan divide.

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White House: cybersecurity facing a Sputnik moment - Ars Technica

The Obama administration has sent a number of signals that it takes the information infrastructure of the nation seriously, having approved stimulus money for broadband and established a post for a national CTO. In parallel with these actions, the administration authorized a review of the national cybersecurity policy, and that review is now complete. Depending on how you read the resulting report, it concluded either that we don't have a cybersecurity policy, or that we have too many of them; in either case, its authors have made a number of very specific suggestions as to how to improve the situation.

The report is fairly blunt, stating early on that "the architecture of the Nation’s digital infrastructure, based largely upon the Internet, is not secure or resilient." As our network infrastructure has developed, the focus has been on things like performance, ease-of-use, and compatibility, and security consciousness was pretty low for much of its history. So, it's not a surprise that both government and private computer systems have been victimized, and evidence suggests that both private parties and foreign governments have been behind these attacks.

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The evolutionary argument for Dr. Seuss -- Slate
Why do we often care more about imaginary characters than real people? A new book suggests that fiction is crucial to our survival as a species.

Why do human beings spend so much time telling each other invented stories, untruths that everybody involved knows to be untrue? People in all societies do this, and do it a lot, from grandmothers spinning fairy tales at the hearthside to TV show runners marshaling roomfuls of overpaid Harvard grads to concoct the weekly adventures of crime fighters and castaways. The obvious answer to this question -- because it's fun -- is enough for many of us. But given the persuasive power of a good story, its ability to seduce us away from the facts of a situation or to make us care more about a fictional world like Middle-earth than we do about a real place like, oh, say, Turkmenistan, means that some ambitious thinkers will always be trying to figure out how and why stories work.

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NASA Cheers Rejuvenated Hubble -- Washington Post
Shuttle Astronauts Prepare to Return From a Wildly Successful Servicing Trip

Just a few days ago the Hubble had a single major scientific instrument, a 16-year-old camera. It also had an aiming device that freelanced a little bit of science in its spare time. Everything else was kaput. The most advanced camera had been dead for two years, and the spectrograph dead for nearly five.

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Wire Power -- Newsweek
How to send electricity across the continent, virtually for free

Remember the Woodstock of Physics? Probably not. Back in the spring of 1987, though, headlines were trumpeting it as the most exciting scientific meeting in history. Three thousand physicists crammed into a ballroom at the New York Hilton to talk about superconductivity-the transmission of electricity with literally zero resistance. The technology was suddenly within reach of being economical. So it appeared, anyway, and that could mean anything from superfast computers to tiny, powerful electric motors to power lines that could carry current with no loss of energy.

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Successful Hubble Repair Mission Widens Policy Rift at NASA - Washington Post

NASA's triumphant mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope this week has cracked open a policy rift within the space agency, with a top NASA scientist saying that the United States is on the way to losing the capability of doing what it has just done so dramatically.

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2012: Tsunami of Stupidity -- Slate
Why the latest apocalyptic cult is a silly scam.

The growing harmonic convergence of apocalyptic stupidity that goes under the rubric 2012 or "the Mayan Calendar Prophecy" has not yet reached Y2K proportions. And while it's broken out of the New Agey cult status where it's been fermenting for some years, there are still many in the chattering classes who haven't heard about it. "The end of the world in 2012?" my friend Stanley said. "You mean I have to wait that long?"

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It's not the first photo of the Earth from the Moon, but it is probably the most famous photo of Earth. This photo was taken during the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968 and is "credited to crewman William Anders, although commander Frank Borman has always claimed that he took it". The orientation shown is how the astronauts actually viewed the Earthrise.

Points of Interest:

• first manned voyage to:
  • achieve a velocity sufficient to allow escape from the gravitational field of planet Earth
  • enter the gravitational field of another celestial body
  • escape from the gravitational field of another celestial body
  • return to planet Earth from another celestial body
• The first image of the whole Earth by humans was taken.
• One of the only 9 times, and we are very close to 300 manned space missions total for all countries, where man went beyond low earth orbit. The others - Apollo 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 & 17.
• Apollo 8 is regarded by some as as the most historically significant of all the Apollo missions.
• It is estimated that a quarter of the people alive at the time saw - either live or delayed - the Christmas Eve transmission during the ninth orbit of the Moon. During this broadcast they read the first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis, of which Pope Paul VI once said "I have spent my entire life trying to say to the world what you did on Christmas Eve."
• The crew themselves had rated as only having a fifty-fifty chance of fully succeeding the mission.
• TIME magazine chose the crew of Apollo 8 as their Men of the Year for 1968

So with a photo from 40 years ago this week I am

Wishing You And Yours
Merry Christmas,
A Happy New Year,
Peace, Love, Laughter
And A Great Good Cheer!

Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. Households Have No Phone -- PC Magazine

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention performed a study to try and determine whether phone surveys were being influenced by households with, well, no phone. The agency turned up some surprising results about homes that use cell phones as their primary point of contact.

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Give Thanks? Science Supersized Your Turkey Dinner -- Wired

Your corn is sweeter, your potatoes are starchier and your turkey is much, much bigger than the foods that sat on your grandparents' Thanksgiving dinner table.

... "Americans eat a pound of sugar every two-and-a-half days. The average amount of sugar consumed by an Englishman in the 1700s was about a pound a year," said food historian Kathleen Curtin of Plimoth Plantation, a historical site that recreates the 17th-century colony. "If you haven't had a candy bar, your taste buds aren't jaded, and your apple tastes sweet."

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Clue to break-up of ice shelves -- BBC

US researchers have come up with a way to predict the rate at which ice shelves break apart into icebergs. These sometimes spectacular occurrences, called calving events, are a key step in the process by which climate change drives sea level rise.

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Brains More Distracted, Not Slower with Age - Scientific America

Brains slow down as they become more easily distracted. Older brains do not think as quickly as younger brains do. But does this cognitive impairment arise because processing speeds slacken or because the ability to block out irrelevant information falters? A recent study reconciles these two leading hypotheses: older brains have a harder time ignoring distractions in the initial stages of performing a task, which slows down processing.

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Amazon deforestation accelerates -- BBC

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has accelerated for the first time in four years, Brazilian officials say. Satellite images show 11,968 sq km of land was cleared in the year to July, nearly 4% higher than the year before.

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Movie Studios Gang Up on Aussie ISP -- PCWorld

iiNet gets into hot water for attempting to protect customers. In case you didn't know, iiNet is being sued for not doing anything to stop its users from downloading stuff off the Internet. It's a case that could change the landscape of the Internet industry in this country if iiNet loses, as Roadshow, Universal, Paramount, Disney, Fox, Warner Bros. and Columbia, as well as Channel Seven, seek unspecified damages.

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Putting the Kibosh on Spam-Spewing McColo -- PCWorld

When McColo was taken down, worldwide spam volume dropped by 75 percent. Roger A. Grimes looks at how the spam-loving ISP was taken down, and lessons we can learn from this rare anti-spam success.

... It appears that a single security company and a technology columnist for The Washington Post has succeeded in bringing down worldwide spam rates 75% or more. No single event has ever accomplished what Brian Krebs and security firm Security Fix did nearly two weeks ago.

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Shuttle astronaut invents zero-gravity cup -- Reuters

Future space travelers may be drinking their own urine, thanks to the International Space Station's new water recycler, but they can now do so with a touch of class.

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Meteor streaking across Canadian sky caught on video -- Scientific America

Hundreds of people witnessed a meteor lighting up the evening sky over Edmonton, Alberta, last week, and the spectacular fireball was even caught on tape by unsuspecting videographers. Around 5:30 P.M. MST Thursday, a brilliant streak of light shot across the western Canadian sky, setting meteorite hunters on a chase to find any surviving fragments of the object.

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Who needs fossil fuels? 3 green power ideas escape the lab -- Ars Technica

Last week, Greentech Media hosted a conference focused on generating and delivering power in efficient and environmentally-friendly ways. Most of those presenting were involved in private companies that had received enough venture capital to develop a functioning product, but they weren't ready to start widespread sales or deployments of that product. Their presentations should be viewed with a degree of caution -- there was no shortage of self-promotion involved -- but the fact that these companies generally had working demonstrations of their technology suggests that the self-promotion wasn't pure hype.

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Photos: A vast zeppelin over the Valley -- CNET

CNET News' Daniel Terdiman takes a ride in Airship Ventures' 246-foot Zeppelin NT as it gets officially dedicated. Will passengers scream "Eureka" to the loo with a view?

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Schools, Fools and the Tools of Ignorance -- PC World

If not for help from a handful of geeks, Connecticut school teacher Julie Amero would be in prison right now for crimes she didn't commit. What's wrong with this picture?

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Ars Technica -- The Future of Driving:

Part I: Robots and Grand Challenges

Part II: Life after Driving

Part III: Hack My Ride

How the Telescope Changed Our Minds -- Wired

The telescope changed everything about how we see our place in the universe. But it took a leap of faith to accept the views of telescopes as real, just as it takes a leap to trust images produced by modern technology such as the microscope, the MRI and supercolliders.

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Green Energy: Cost-Efficient Process Expected To Turn Algae Into Fuel -- AP

Set amid cornfields and cow pastures in eastern Holland is a shallow pool that is rapidly turning green with algae, harvested for animal feed, skin treatments, biodegradable plastics -- and with increasing interest, biofuel.

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SpaceX Did It -- Falcon 1 Made it to Space -- Wired

SpaceX has made history. Its privately developed rocket has made it into space.
After three failed launches, the company founded by Elon Musk worked all of the bugs out of their Falcon 1 launch vehicles.
The entire spectacle was broadcast live from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific. Cameras mounted on the spacecraft showed our planet shrinking in the distance and the empty first stage engine falling back to Earth.

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Carbon Trading Won't Save Aviation and Shipping -- Wired

Carbon trading schemes won't solve the aviation and shipping industries' problem of soaring carbon emissions, a British climate scientist says, and the cuts needed to address global climate change are so deep that both sectors must limit their growth.

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On Bailout, Candidates Were Surely Themselves -- NY Times

It was classic John McCain and classic Barack Obama who grappled with the $700 billion bailout plan over the last week: Mr. McCain was by turns action-oriented and impulsive as he dive-bombed targets, while Mr. Obama was measured and cerebral and inclined to work the phones behind the scenes.

... Aides and political allies to both men agreed Sunday that perhaps no episode thus far in the campaign better demonstrated how they would approach managing problems as president. Their instincts, temperaments, and leadership traits were in the spotlight in Washington, as well as their limitations and foibles -- characteristics that also showed through stylistically in Friday night's debate.

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Artist Builds Temple of Science -- Wired

At a time when the gulf between religion and science is growing ever greater, an artist has erected a temple for scientific worship. Jonathon Keats, designer of the petri dish God, built The Atheon to get people thinking about what a scientific religion (or religious science?) would look and feel like.

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Where Is Human Evolution Heading? - U.S. News & World Report

If you judge the progress of humanity by Homer Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Girls Gone Wild videos, you might conclude that our evolution has stalled—or even shifted into reverse. Not so, scientists say. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new genetic traits and talents that may help us survive a turbulent future.

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How Did Life on Earth Get Started? - U.S. News & World Report

On an arid outcropping of basalt in northwestern Australia, some of the oldest rocks on Earth lie exposed to the fierce sun. Formed at the bottom of an ancient ocean, this volcanic material shelters what one scientist calls the "oldest robust evidence" of life. At a scientific meeting at Rockefeller University in May, Roger Buick of the University of Washington said that the 3.5 billion-year-old rocks hold traces of carbon that once made up living organisms.

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Will Respirators Help Our Olympic Athletes? - Slate

Four members of the U.S. Olympic cycling team sparked outrage Tuesday when they disembarked in Beijing wearing masks covering their mouths and noses. The U.S. Olympic Committee has issued several hundred respirators to its athletes to use as they prepare to compete at the Games. Will those masks actually help?

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U.S. Cyclists Are Masked, and Criticism Is Not - NY Times

After months of speculation about how Olympic athletes would react to the air quality problems here, some answers arrived at the airport Tuesday, when four track cyclists on the United States team stepped off their flight wearing masks over their mouths and noses.

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