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http://www.spaceweather.com/ PROTO NEW-CYCLE SUNSPOT: A sunspot from the next solar cycle could soon appear in the sun's northern hemisphere. SOHO magnetograms show an emerging magnetic dipole with the telltale polarity of Solar Cycle 24: So far this is merely a proto-sunspot; the magnetic fields have not coalesced to form a truly dark sunspot core. Nevertheless, the little active region is significant. It is a herald of new Solar Cycle 24, and a sign that the solar cycle, while seemingly stuck in endless minimum, is actually progressing normally. The calm won't last forever! Readers with solar telescopes, keep an eye on...

Garching, Germany (SPX) Apr 30, 2008 By an enormous burst of gravitational waves that accompanies the merger of two black holes the newly formed black hole was ejected from its galaxy. This extreme ejection event, which had been predicted by theorists, has now been observed in nature for the first time. The team led by Stefanie Komossa from the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) thereby opened a new window into observational astrophysics. The discovery will have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution in the early Universe, and also provides observational confirmation of a key...

Bremerhaven, Germany (SPX) Apr 29, 2008 The Antarctic deep sea gets colder, which might stimulate the circulation of the oceanic water masses. This is the first result of the Polarstern expedition of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association that has just ended in Punta Arenas/Chile. At the same time satellite images from the Antarctic summer have shown the largest sea-ice extent on record. In the coming years autonomous measuring buoys will be used to find out whether the cold Antarctic summer induces a new trend or was only a "slip". The Polarstern expedition...

SEOUL, April 29 (AFP) Apr 29, 2008 South Korea's first astronaut Yi So-Yeon has been admitted to hospital with severe back pains caused by her rough return voyage to Earth, officials said Tuesday. The state-run Korea Aerospace Research Institute said Yi is undergoing MRI and other scans at an air force hospital to determine the exact cause of her discomfort. "She has complained of considerable back pains and will have to cancel all her appointments for the time being, including visits to the presidential office and TV interviews," a doctor at the military hospital was quoted by Yonhap news agency...

Moffett Field CA (SPX) Apr 28, 2008 The prevailing thinking is that Mars is a planet whose active climate has been confined to the distant past. About 3.5 billion years ago, the Red Planet had extensive flowing water and then fell quiet - deadly quiet. It didn't seem the climate had changed much since. Now, in a research article that graces the May cover of Geology, scientists at Brown University think Mars' climate has been much more dynamic than previously believed. The findings could have important implications in determining whether or not Mars was ever a suitable habitat for life...

HANOI, April 27 (AFP) Apr 27, 2008 Asia's rainforests are being rapidly destroyed, a trend accelerated by surging timber demand in booming China and India, and record food, energy and commodity prices, forest experts warn. The loss of these biodiversity hot spots, much of it driven by the illegal timber trade and the growth of oil palm, biofuel and rubber plantations, is worsening global warming, species loss and poverty, they said. Globally, tropical forest destruction "is a super crisis we are facing, it's an appalling crisis," said Oxford University's Professor Norman Myers, keynote speaker at the Asia-Pacific Forestry Week conference...

Shanghai (AFP) April 23, 2008 China's top economic planning agency has warned that a range of economic factors were likely to push up domestic property prices in the second quarter. The National Development and Reform Commission said in a quarterly report on China's real estate sector released on Tuesday that upward pressure on housing prices was mounting again after a slight slowdown in the first three months. "Excessive liquidity and the appreciating yuan are driving asset prices including houses higher, while soaring costs of steel and labor are also pushing prices forward, especially in small and medium-sized cities," the report...

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Apr 23, 2008 The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) successfully captured a movie of the "Full Earth-Rise"*1 using the onboard High Definition Television (HDTV) of the lunar explorer "KAGUYA " (SELENE) on April 6, 2008 (Japan Standard Time, JST, all the following dates and time are JST.) The KAGUYA is currently flying in a lunar orbit at an altitude of about 100 km. An "Earth-rise," or the rising Earth over the Moon, was first captured by the Apollo project. The Earth rising image taken by the KAGUYA on November 7, 2007, was...

MOSCOW, April 23 (AFP) Apr 23, 2008 Russian fire services were on Wednesday battling blazes across Siberia blamed on an exceptionally mild winter and illegal logging. The emergency situations ministry said on its website that 36,000 hectares (89,000 acres) were burning in the Amur, Buryatiya, Khabarovsk, Primorsky and Jewish Autonomous provinces. Another 11,000 hectares (27,000 acres) of forest had been consumed by fire in the previous 24 hours, the ministry said. "To extinguish the fire, 6,551 people and 1,779 firefighting vehicles, including eight aircraft, have been deployed," the ministry said. The Interfax news agency reported the air was thick with...

Manchester, UK (SPX) Apr 22, 2008 Researchers have used the world's thinnest material to create the world's smallest transistor, one atom thick and ten atoms wide. Reporting their peer-reviewed findings in the latest issue of the journal Science, Dr Kostya Novoselov and Professor Andre Geim from The School of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Manchester show that graphene can be carved into tiny electronic circuits with individual transistors having a size not much larger than that of a molecule. The smaller the size of their transistors the better they perform, say the Manchester researchers. In recent decades, manufacturers...

Durham NC (SPX) Apr 21, 2008 Some primates have evolved big brains because their extra brainpower helps them live and reproduce longer, an advantage that outweighs the demands of extra years of growth and development they spend reaching adulthood, anthropologists from Duke University and the University of Zurich have concluded in a new study. The four investigators compared key benchmarks in the development of 28 different primate species, ranging from humans living free of modern trappings in South American jungles to lemurs living in wild settings in Madagascar. "This research focused specifically on the balance between the costs and benefits...

Huntsville AL (SPX) Apr 18, 2008 Behold the full Moon. Ancient craters and frozen lava seas lie motionless under an airless sky of profound quiet. It's a slow-motion world where even a human footprint may last millions of years. Nothing ever seems to happen there. Right? Wrong. NASA-supported scientists have realized that something does happen every month when the Moon gets a lashing from Earth's magnetic tail. "Earth's magnetotail extends well beyond the orbit of the Moon and, once a month, the Moon orbits through it," says Tim Stubbs, a University of Maryland scientist working at the Goddard Space Flight...

Cape Canaveral FL (SPX) Apr 17, 2008 The cargo aboard the space shuttle Discovery on mission STS-124 already has traveled halfway around Earth, more than 10,000 miles over land and sea. It's now ready for the culmination of its 23-year journey to the International Space Station. Hope will take flight on Discovery. Or rather, the centerpiece of Kibo, a laboratory complex named for the Japanese word for hope, will take flight. STS-124 will launch the main segment of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's - or JAXA's - station laboratory. Kibo's Japanese Pressurized Module, or JPM, is 14.4 feet in diameter...

Russia will need an additional $5 billion to finish the construction of its segment of the International Space Station (ISS) by 2015, the head of Russia's rocket and space corporation Energia said Friday. The ISS is a joint project of space agencies from the United States, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan. The orbital station is likely to remain operational until 2020. "So far, we have allocated about $4.2 billion for the ISS project, but we will need an additional $5 billion to finish the construction [of the Russian segment] by 2015," Energia President Vitaly Lopota said at a conference dedicated...

Gravity Wave 'Smoking Gun' Fizzles: Gravitational Radiation Can Be Produced More Than One Way ScienceDaily (Apr. 15, 2008) — A team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University has found that gravitational radiation—widely expected to provide "smoking gun" proof for a theory of the early universe known as "inflation"—can be produced by another mechanism. According to physics scholars, inflation theory proposes that the universe underwent a period of exponential expansion right after the big bang. A key prediction of inflation theory is the presence of a particular spectrum of "gravitational radiation"—ripples in the fabric of space-time that are notoriously difficult...

Beijing (AFP) April 14, 2008 Chinese authorities uncovered 31,700 cases of illegal land grabs in four months in a crackdown on one of the major factors behind rising social unrest across the country, state media reported on Monday. The unlawful land grabs were discovered between September 15 last year and January 15, and led to 2,864 people being punished, Xinhua news agency quoted Zhang Pu of the Ministry of Land and Resources as saying. Land illegally seized amounted to 224,000 hectares (553,000 acres) in total, according to Xinhua, nearly 60 percent of which was used before getting government approval. The...

John Wheeler, giant on whose shoulders we stand, has died at 96.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA engineers have adjusted the flight path of the Phoenix Mars Lander, setting the spacecraft on course for its May 25 landing on the Red Planet. "This is our first trajectory maneuver targeting a specific location in the northern polar region of Mars," said Brian Portock, chief of the Phoenix navigation team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The mission's two prior trajectory maneuvers, made last August and October, adjusted the flight path of Phoenix to intersect with Mars. NASA has conditionally approved a landing site in a broad, flat valley informally called "Green Valley."...

MAC Indexing has announced the introduction of the MAC Global Solar Energy Index, the first index to independently track the rapidly growing solar energy sector. Dow Jones will publish the Index, which was developed and is maintained by MAC Indexes, an affiliate of Melvin and Company that specializes in clean energy equity research and index development. The MAC Global Solar Energy Index has been licensed to Claymore Advisors, LLC, which anticipates launching the first solar power exchange-traded fund (ETF) on the NYSE-Arca under the symbol "TAN" in April (www.claymore.com/tan). "The creation of the MAC Global Solar Energy Index recognizes the...

Cosmologists Probe Mystery Of Dark Energy With South Pole Telescope ScienceDaily (Apr. 3, 2008) — Something is pulling the universe apart. What is it, and where will it take us from here? Scientists at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, seek answers to those questions with the newly-commissioned South Pole Telescope. Frigid and bone-dry, with six straight months of night each year, the South Pole is a forbidding place to live or work. But for largely the same reasons, it’s one of the best spots on the planet for surveying the faint cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation...