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Some cool hi-rez pics of bugs.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Baby Monitor Pics up NASA mission.PALATINE, Ill. - A mother of two in this suburb of Chicago doesn't have to turn on the news for an update on NASA's space mission. She just flips on her baby monitor. Since Sunday, Natalie Meilinger's baby monitor has been picking up black-and-white video from inside the space shuttle Atlantis.
"Whoever has a baby monitor knows what you'll usually see," said the elementary school science teacher. "No one would ever expect this."
Live video of the mission is available on NASA's Web site, so it's possible the monitor is picking up a signal from somewhere.
"It's not coming straight from the shuttle," NASA spokeswoman Brandi Dean said. "People here think this is very interesting and you don't hear of it often — if at all."
Meilinger silenced disbelieving co-workers by bringing in a video of the monitor to show her class on Tuesday, her students' last day of school. At home, 3-month-old Jack and 2-year-old Rachel don't quite understand what their parents are watching.
"I've been addicted to it and keep waiting to see what's next," Meilinger said.
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360 degree panoramic View of Mount Everest------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Physicists report an electrifying discovery!Canadian physicists have cracked a decades-old mystery surrounding metals that carry electricity without resistance, opening the door for everyday trains that levitate on magnetic fields, ultrapowerful quantum computers and big savings for utilities.
Details of the breakthrough in an arcane field called high-temperature superconducting are published today in the research journal, Nature.
Using uniquely pure crystals created at the University of British Columbia, researchers from the University of Sherbrooke detected an elusive signature of electrons within a high-temperature superconductor, a feat that has eluded scientists since the exotic materials were first discovered in 1986.
"This discovery has cleared the thick fog that physicists have been in for the past 20 years," said research team leader Louis Taillefer, a Sherbrooke professor previously at the University of Toronto.
Taillefer predicted the discovery would lead to room-temperature superconductors within 10 years, triggering a technological revolution similar to the invention of the transistor.
One of the most promising applications for such superconducting metals is in magnetic levitation trains, which can theoretically run at speeds of up to 500 km/h.
The force of powerful magnets suspends these trains in the air above a rail, eliminating friction from moving parts.
But the few experimental magnetic levitation (known as maglev) trains have been commercial failures because current electromagnets are too inefficient and bulky.
The use of superconducting metals for the magnets would slash both electricity costs and weight, making maglev trains practical, transportation experts say.
Other possible superconducting applications include shrinking MRI machines to the size of laptops, eliminating the 10 to 20 per cent electricity lost from resistance inside power stations and building quantum computers, machines so powerful they would make today's supercomputers resemble mere pocket calculators.
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Polar Depths yield hundreds of new species.Antarctic waters served as a cradle for marine life, researchers say
By Jeanna Bryner
Updated: 9:56 p.m. ET May 16, 2007
Carnivorous sponges, blind creepy-crawlies adorned with hairy antennae and ribbed worms are just some of the new characters found to inhabit the dark abysses of the Southern Ocean, an alien abode once thought devoid of such life.
Recent expeditions have uncloaked this polar region, finding nearly 600 species of organisms never described before and challenging some assumptions that deep-sea biodiversity is depressed. The findings also suggest that all of Earth's marine life originated in Antarctic waters.
Scientists had assumed that the deep sea of the South Pole would follow similar trends in biodiversity documented for the Arctic. "There are less species in the Arctic than around the equator," said one of the scientists behind the study, Brigitte Ebbe, a taxonomist at the German Center for Marine Biodiversity Research. "People assumed that it would be the same if you went from the equator south, but it didn't prove to be true at all."
The findings, reported this week in the journal Nature, provide a more accurate picture of creatures in the southern deep sea and shed light on the evolution of biodiversity in the deep ocean, including ancient colonization dating back 65 million years.
"The Antarctic deep sea is potentially the cradle of life of the global marine species," said lead author Angelika Brandt of the Zoological Institute and Zoological Museum at the University of Hamburg.
Deep dwellers
Between 2002 and 2005, an international team of scientists completed three research expeditions to the Weddell Sea aboard the German vessel Polarstern. Part of the Southern Ocean, the Weddell Sea is bounded by an Antarctic bulge called Coats Land and the Antarctic Peninsula.
Ernest Shackleton's Endurance was trapped and crushed by ice in this sea in 1915. (Shackleton and his entire crew survived. Shackleton died in 1922 of a heart attack on a different Antarctic expedition).
Part of the ANDEEP (Antarctic Benthic Deep-Sea Biodiversity) project, the team collected biological samples from regions between about 2,000 and 21,000 feet below the surface of the Weddell Sea and nearby areas.
In addition to cataloging biodiversity, the scientists aimed to determine how species intermingled within and between the deep and shallower waters and whether continental-shelf organisms colonized the deep ocean or vice versa.
The Weddell Sea is part of a vast ocean current and a critical source of deep water and possibly a mode of transport to the rest of the Southern Ocean. Some of the scientists' findings indicate species originating in a single water domain did migrate to the Southern Ocean, and some even trekked across the globe and now inhabit the Arctic waters. Many of the organisms have relatives in both the nearby shallower waters and even in other ocean basins.
Species finds included 674 species of isopods, a group of crustaceans, 80 percent of which were new to science. Some of the isopods and marine worms spotted on the continental shelf sported clues of their deep-water past. "On the shelf, the animals have eyes because they can see. There's light in the water. In the deep sea you don't really need them, so many animals get rid of their eyes," Ebbe told LiveScience.
"There were some [species] that are very closely related to eyeless isopods, and they are now living on the shelf. So that's an indication they have moved upward," Ebbe said.
Water travel
Many species living in the deep abyss of the Weddell Sea showed strong links with other oceans, particularly organisms like amoebae that can disperse their larvae over long distances. Poor dispersers — including some isopods, nematode worms and seed shrimps — stayed close to home in the Southern Ocean.
One particularly cosmopolitan group included the foraminifera, or tiny single-celled organisms covered with relatively decorative shells. Genetic analyses showed that three foraminifera species (Epistominella exigua, Cibicidoides wuellerstorfi and Oridorsalis umbonatus) found in both the Weddell Sea and the Arctic Ocean were nearly identical.
"They literally found some of [the foraminifera] from pole to pole, which is really amazing," Ebbe said.
Time to diversify
In terms of the soaring biodiversity, the scientists suggest organisms in the Antarctic have been around for a long time, giving them time to diversify.
"The Southern Ocean has been like it is pretty much for the last 40 million years, and it has been isolated," Ebbe said. "So the communities have had a long, long time to evolve. In the Arctic, it is much different."
In the geologic past Antarctica belonged to a giant land mass called Gondwana that straddled the equator. The land mass, which also included Africa, Australia, India and the tip of South America, started breaking apart more than 100 million years ago. About 60 million years ago, Antarctica had drifted close to the South Pole, and oceans rise to fill the gaps between Antarctica and Africa and India. By 40 million years ago, the continent had become completely encircled by oceans, now called the Southern Ocean.
"What was once thought to be a featureless abyss is in fact a dynamic, variable and biologically rich environment," said study team member Katrin Linse, a marine biologist with the British Antarctic Survey.
"Finding this extraordinary treasure trove of marine life is our first step to understanding the complex relationships between the deep ocean and distribution of marine life," she said.
© 2007 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.
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Quite a fast train...-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Highway shut for butterfly crossing.Taiwan is to close one lane of a major highway to protect more than a million butterflies, which cross the road on their seasonal migration.
The purple milkweed butterfly, which winters in the south of the island, passes over some 600m of motorway to reach its breeding ground in the north.
Many of the 11,500 butterflies that attempt the journey each hour do not reach safety, experts say.
Protective nets and ultra-violet lights will also be used to aid the insects.
Taiwanese officials conceded that the decision to close one lane of the road would cause some traffic congestion, but said it was a price worth paying.
"Human beings need to coexist with the other species, even if they are tiny butterflies," Lee Thay-ming, of the National Freeway Bureau, told the AFP news agency.
Under the bridge
Each year thousands of butterflies die when turbulence generated by fast-moving cars drags them into the traffic or under the wheels of oncoming vehicles.
Ecologists hope the triple-action effort of lane closure, protective nets and ultra-violet lighting will dramatically increase the milkweed's chances of reaching the breeding ground.
The protective nets are designed to force the butterflies to fly higher, reducing the chances of them getting caught in the traffic.
Ultra-violet lighting will be used below an elevated section of road to encourage the butterflies to head beneath.
The measures are estimated to have cost $30,000 (£15,200).
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