Do Clouds Come From Outer Space?

High-speed cosmic ray particles--protons and neutrons of still-mysterious origins that travel at nearly the speed of light--collide with water molecules in the atmosphere, stripping away electrons from those molecules and converting them into electrically charged ions. The ions then begin attracting other water molecules, which eventually form clouds.

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Killer Asteroids May Escape NASA's Notice

NASA estimates that there are about 20,000 asteroids and comets in our solar system that are potential threats to Earth. They are larger than 460 feet in diameter -- slightly smaller than the Superdome in New Orleans. So far, scientists know where about 6,000 of these objects are.

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The Incredible Shrinking Camera

Biomedical engineers have pulled off something like the shrinking submarine, except it’s real. This time, it’s a miniature camera in a capsule.

Doctors use this camera capsule to examine the inside of the small intestine, one part of the body that’s hard to reach with more conventional diagnostic tools.

It carries a camera on a computer chip, light source, radio transmitter and a battery.

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Lockheed Martin Demonstrates Tactical Smartphone Applications

Warfighters operating in theatre may soon have greater situational awareness with the added ability to download high-value tactical data anywhere in the field on smartphones loaded with new applications from Lockheed Martin.

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China warns against missile defence systems

China's foreign minister warned on Wednesday that there was a "looming danger" of an arms race in outer space, as he urged countries not to deploy missile defence systems that could undermine global security."The practice of seeking absolute strategic advantage should be abandoned," Yang Jiechi told the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.

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Organelle Simulated on Microchip for First Time

More and more synthetic versions of key parts of the human cell, including chromosomes, have been developed by scientists in the past decade or so. Now researchers are aiming even higher, developing the first working artificial prototype of an "organ" of a human cell—the Golgi apparatus, which helps modify biomolecules and package them for delivery around the cell.

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New Device Sequences Complete Human Genome Faster, Cheaper Than Ever

A new gene sequencing device designed by Stanford engineer Stephen Quake may finally usher in the long predicted practice of personalized genetic medicine. By using a new refrigerator-sized machine to decode the DNA, Quake has cut both the cost and time of the process by at least a fifth.

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NASA to Spend $50 Million to Spur Commercial Spacecraft

NASA plans to spend up to $50 million in federal stimulus money to help foster development of commercial spacecraft for launching astronauts and cargo into space.

Under the plan, NASA will competitively award Space Act agreements to promising private companies to boost their commercial spacecraft work. NASA said last week that it intended to issue a formal Commercial Crew and Cargo Program solicitation. Proposals will be due 45 days later with multiple awards expected in November.

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'Printed chips' could be boon for consumers

'Printed chips' could be boon for consumersAugust 12th, 2009 By Steve Johnson -->
Until now, creating the microchips that power all of our electronic gadgets has been a laborious, complex and time-consuming process costing billions of dollars. But if a Milpitas, Calif.-based startup succeeds, making them could be as easy as printing a piece of paper.

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More Issues with Air Speed Indicators on Airbus Aircraft Surface

Over the weekend, the AP reported that faulty airspeed indicators (pitot tubes) had been found on Northwest Airlines Airbus 330s that caused pilots not to know their airspeed on at least a dozen flights. Airspeed indicators are thought to be a contributing factor to the loss of Air France 447, although French accident investigators continue to insist they have no evidence that says the crash was caused by or related to problems with the pitot tubes.

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Russian Military Defence Technology to Counter US

The US Military will have the airborne strike capability to hit any part of Russia within two decades, according to the head of the Russian Air Force. On this basis, he said, the Russian military intends to construct and implement advanced 21st century air defence technology as a counter-mechanism.

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New Low Cost Fighter Aircraft for USAF

The United States Air Force is in the market for a new, lightweight combat aircraft, as opposed to a highly technologically advanced multi-role combat aircraft in the class of the soon-to-enter-service F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Its aim is to induct a new "fixed-wing platform" capable of carrying out "strike, armed reconnaissance and advanced aircraft training in support of irregular warfare." That is to say, a dedicated light fighter of the kind not used en-masse for some decades.

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Nanoelectronic transistor combined with biological machine could lead to better electronics

If manmade devices could be combined with biological machines, laptops and other electronic devices could get a boost in operating efficiency.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have devised a versatile hybrid platform that uses lipid-coated nanowires to build prototype bionanoelectronic devices.

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NSF awards UCLA Engineering $10M to create customized computing technology

The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has been awarded a $10 million grant by the National Science Foundation's Expeditions in Computing program to develop high-performance, customizable computing that could revolutionize the way computers are used in health care and other important applications.

In particular, UCLA Engineering researchers will demonstrate how the new technology, known as domain-specific computing, could transform the role of medical imaging and hemodynamic simulation, providing more energy-efficient, cost-effective and convenient solutions for preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic procedures and dramatically improving health care quality, efficiency and patient outcomes.

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Ytterbium gains ground in quest for next-generation atomic clocks

An experimental atomic clock based on ytterbium atoms is about four times more accurate than it was several years ago, giving it a precision comparable to that of the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, the nation's civilian time standard, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report in Physical Review Letters.*

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Intel and Micron Team Up To Squeeze More Data into Flash Drives

What's better than 2-bits per cell? 3 bits of course. IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, has announced that they have developed a 3-bit-per-cell NAND device that Micron will begin producing for commercial consumption this fall. The technology, dubbed 3bpc (tricky acronym for 3-bits-per-cell), stores more bits per cell than current technology and allows the development of higher density flash memory so it can store more data in less space.

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Russia building new 'star wars' missiles

Russia is developing new missiles to counter space-based missile systems that could soon be deployed by the United States, Russia's air force commander was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

"We are building new missiles that will be capable of defending not only against air-defence systems but space-based systems," General Alexander Zelin said, quoted by Russian news agencies.

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Raytheon Develops World's Largest Infrared Light-Wave Detector

Raytheon Company has developed the world's largest infrared light-wave detector, expanding current capabilities in missile warning, environmental monitoring and astronomical research.

Optimized for space applications, the new "4K-by-4K" focal plane array comprises some 16 million pixels, arranged in 4,096 rows and columns. It is four times larger than infrared detectors currently in production, giving it the ability to collect data from a much wider field of view with improved sensitivity.

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3-D Printers Make Manufacturing Accessible

3-D printers can take blobs of plastic and shape them into almost any object you desire. Now, thanks to open source hardware designs and enthusiastic do-it-yourselfers, these printers are increasingly popular and accessible. People are using them to fabricate iPod docks, plastic bracelets, hair clips and miniature teapots at home.

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Clock IC harnesses GPS signals for synchronization

Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI), a global leader in high-performance signal processing, introduced today the industry's first clock IC that enables system designers to use the standard, readily available and free 1-pps (pulse-per-second) signal of GPS (global positioning system) satellite transmitters to generate and synchronize clock signals for communications infrastructure equipment.

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Wire power

Zenergy Power has produced a complete set of superconducting coils for a 1.7MW hydro power generator that will be installed into E.ON Wasserkraft's hydro power station in Bavaria, south east Germany, in the early part of 2010.

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Can Cars Use Water for Fuel?

There are a number of online marketing offers of kits that will convert your car to “run on water,” but these should be viewed skeptically. These kits, which attach to the car’s engine, use electrolysis to split the water (H2O) into its component molecules—hydrogen and oxygen—and then inject the resulting hydrogen into the engine’s combustion process to power the car along with the gasoline. Doing this, they say, makes the gasoline burn cleaner and more completely, thus making the engine more efficient.

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The Truth About Airplane Turbulence

The Federal Aviation Administration says 58 airliner passengers are injured every year by turbulence. In fact, turbulence is the number one cause of injuries to passengers and flight attendants in nonfatal accidents. Two-thirds of those injuries happen above 30,000 feet—just when you're told you can get up and move about the cabin.

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New Reactor To Make Breathable Air Out of Moon Rocks

Adapting a chemical process they originally created to extract metal, the Cambridge team has designed a reactor that strips the oxygen from the metal oxides found in moon rocks. Essentially a giant electrode sitting in a vat of melted salt, the reactor creates an electric current that chemically breaks the oxygen off of the metal, and frees it into the atmosphere.

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Google Steals Spotlight With Caffeine Boost

Google announced this week a project it has been working on to develop a faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive search engine. The announcement of the project, code-named ‘Caffeine' (a clever play on words implying that the project will boost speed), seems a little out of character for Google which usually makes these sort of search engine tweaks under the radar. One thing that the announcement of Caffeine accomplished though is to divert attention away from Microsoft's Bing search engine and the Microsoft/Yahoo partnership news and put Google search back in the headlines.

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"Unforgeable" UK National ID Security Technology Apparently Cracked

The London Daily Mail published a long, interesting and disturbing story yesterday about the ease with which security experts were able to hack the supposedly "unforgeable" new UK ID card for foreign nationals and change the data within the embedded microchip within minutes.

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Classified Tests Show Growler Ready for Ops

The EA-18G Growler is now on the road to a full-rate production decision and it could benefit from an expected Quadrennial Defense Review determination that U.S. expeditionary forces need another 26-30 airborne electronic attack (AEA) aircraft.

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New Thales Missiles: Capability and Economy

Thales UK is qualifying two missiles that not only represent significant technology enhancements in target acquisition and destruction, but trends in tactical weapon design and deployment in an era of asymmetric warfare and budget-cutting.

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Stealth Bomber Upgrades Detailed

Grumman B-2 as part of efforts to keep the stealth bomber in the front line to 2050 and beyond.

The drive to sustain the 20-strong fleet enjoys “good support across the board” says Brig. Gen. Robert Wheeler, commander of the 509th Bomb Wing at the B-2’s home at Whiteman AFB, Mo. The case for injecting new life into the B-2 was unquestionably bolstered by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s April decision to ax the next-generation bomber project, ambitiously aimed at fielding a new aircraft in 2018. But Wheeler adds the stealth bomber was always part of the equation.

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Open Architecture for UAV Ground Control

“Unmanned aircraft are unmanned only in name” is becoming the mantra of operators as they wrestle with the increasing demands on today’s unmanned systems. That could change with new U.S. acquisition rules designed to encourage competition and innovation in the manpower-intensive ground segment.

The ground segment is a key element of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), particularly for the U.S. Air Force as it operates deployed air vehicles remotely from the U.S. via satellite links. But the combat use of unmanned aircraft has underlined the limitations of current ground control stations (GCS).

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