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Scientists are sifting through their first new views of the planet Mercury in more than three decades thanks to images beamed home by NASA's MESSENGER probe. The car-sized spacecraft zipped past Mercury in a Monday flyby and is relaying more than 1,200 new images and other data back to eager scientists on Earth. "Now it's time for the scientific payoff," MESSENGER principal investigator Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington told SPACE.com after the flyby. "It's just a complete mix of results that we're going to get." In one new image, released today, the planet's stark surface is shown...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A NASA probe next week will become the first spacecraft in 33 years to fly by Mercury, a sojourn scientists hope will unlock the secrets of the small sun-baked planet. NASA's car-sized MESSENGER spacecraft is scheduled to zip about 124 miles above the cratered, rocky surface of the closest planet to the sun on Monday, part of a mission designed to place it into orbit around Mercury in 2011. "I think we're in for some big surprises," Faith Vilas, one of the scientists involved in the mission, told reporters during a conference call on Thursday. "You know...

I have been attempting to check my email at Yahoo for the last few hours and have been unable to get into the mail, I can however login on the main page. This is really frustrating as this has been happening too much lately. No wonder Yahoo stocks are tanking.

GREENSBORO, N.C. (BP)--Messengers to the 2006 Southern Baptist Convention adopted resolutions on such currently controversial topics as immigration and the environment June 14, but the debate time was dominated by an issue addressed repeatedly in the convention’s 161-year history -- alcohol. A lengthy debate on a recommendation concerning the use of alcoholic beverages consumed the Resolution Committee’s report in the morning session. In a departure from recent years, the committee needed the evening session to complete its report. When the back-and-forth on alcohol finally ended, the messengers passed with about a four-fifths majority a resolution not only opposing the manufacture...

What do Islamist terrorists want? The answer should be obvious, but it is not.A generation ago, terrorists did make clear their wishes. Upon hijacking three airliners in September 1970, for example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine demanded, with success, the release of Arab terrorists imprisoned in Britain, Switzerland, and West Germany. Upon attacking the B'nai B'rith headquarters and two other Washington, D.C. buildings in 1977, a Hanafi Muslim group demanded the canceling of a feature movie, Mohammad, Messenger of God," $750 (as reimbursement for a fine), the turning over of the five men who had massacred the...

Today I downloaded all seven critical updates for my computer ssytem. One of those was for Windows Messenger. What is the difference between that and AOL Instant Messenger? And which one do you prefer? After this "critical" download installed, a pop-up appeared asking me to sign in. I've never launched Windows Messenger and I never did attempt to sign in.

New worms spreading through MSN Messenger -- and its bundled-with-Windows Windows Messenger version -- via links to a malicious site are infecting users and leaving their PCs open to hacker hijack, security vendors reported Monday. The new worms, tagged as Kelvir.a and Kelvir.b, appeared over the weekend and on Monday, respectively, anti-virus vendors said. Both use the same mechanism to attract users and infect Windows-based PCs: they include a link in the instant message. That link, in turn, downloads a malicious file -- the actual worm, a variant of the long-running Spybot -- which opens a backdoor to the compromised...

Core Security Technologies, has published a vulnerability in Microsoft's MSN Messenger, an instant messaging program currently used by over 130 million people worldwide. A patch for this had been issued on Tuesday. Core Security is a Boston, U.S.-based information security solutions company. Core researchers discovered that by selecting a specially-crafted graphic as the user's display picture in MSN Messenger, an attacker could trigger a buffer overflow vulnerability on the chat partner's computer and covertly take over machines running instant messaging software. The attack would travel through the established chat session and would pass unnoticed by firewalls, network intrusion detection systems...

Bropia worm spreads on the back of MSN Messenger 5:04PM A new virus is using the MSN Messenger system to spread. Known as Bropia.A, the worm waits on an infected system until the Messenger window is opened and then sends a copy of itself to contacts, using filenames adaware.exe, VB6.EXE, lexplore.exe and Win32.exe. If a contact accepts the file and runs it, it checks to see if any of the previously mentioned files are present, and if not, places a file called oms.exe on the computer and runs it. This is a variant of Rbot, which installs a backdoor on...

Democrats look for message, messenger to win back power and influence policy BY STEVEN THOMMA Knight Ridder Newspapers Posted on Wed, Dec. 08, 2004 WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Which should come first for Democrats as they retool for the future, message or messenger? In their first meeting since their dark Election Day, Democrats will gather in Florida this weekend desperate to find a way back to power. Their focus will be on a search for a new messenger in the form of a national party chairman to voice the party's ideals on such issues as national defense, Social Security and...

Boeing Delta 2 Aug. 2, 2004 2:16:11 to 2:16:23 a.m. EDT (0216:11 to 0216:23 GMT)A Boeing Delta 2 rocket is set to launch the Mercury probe MESSENGER from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA (news - web sites) is about to embark on its hottest mission ever, to Mercury. The Messenger spacecraft, to be launched next week, will be blasted by up to 700-degree heat as it orbits the tiny planet closest to the sun — so close that it would be as though 11 suns were beating down on Earth. Remarkably, the only thing between the probe's room-temperature science instruments and the blistering sun and pizza-oven heat will be a handmade ceramic-cloth quilt just one-quarter of an inch thick. "If it doesn't stay toward the sun, it will...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - NASA is about to embark on its hottest mission ever, to Mercury. The Messenger spacecraft, to be launched next week, will be blasted by up to 700-degree heat as it orbits the tiny planet closest to the sun - so close that it would be as though 11 suns were beating down on Earth. Remarkably, the only thing between the probe's room-temperature science instruments and the blistering sun and pizza-oven heat will be a handmade ceramic-cloth quilt just one-quarter of an inch thick. "If it doesn't stay toward the sun, it will fry everything," said...

December 29 Short Trip for Mercury Probe A NASA spacecraft destined for Mercury has made its first trip, a 20-mile (32-kilometer) trek that pales before the eventual five-year voyage it is expected to make on the way to its target planet. After almost four years of design, assembly and testing, researchers with the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland shipped its Messenger spacecraft to the environmental testing facilities at NASA's nearby Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. There, spacecraft is undergoing about 10 weeks of shakedown tests that will check its balance and alignment, simulate...

<p>LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Too much text messaging? You may need professional help.</p> <p>More and more people are succumbing to so called "technology addictions," spending hours tapping on mobile phones or surfing the Internet, one of Britain's best known psychiatric clinics said on Saturday.</p>