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This will mark the first time that a spacecraft from earth will actually visit a star.
The decision to chart a mission to the Sun also realizes a dream that astronomers almost realized a half century ago, when the National Academy of Science's "Simpson Committee" in 1958 recommended a probe to investigate. Several studies were subsequently carried out testing the feasibility of the project. But nothing came of them.

Since NASA has never sent any vehicle this close to Earth's Sun, the craft will have to be outfitted with a special shield designed to withstand radiation and temperatures exceeding 2550 degrees Fahrenheit. A spokesman for NASA said scientists will depend on simulations to guarantee that the probe can cope with that sort of intense heat.

Dick Fisher, who directs NASA's Heliophysics Division in Washington, said that the planned experiments would help resolve two key questions of solar physics. One is to explain why the sun's outer atmosphere is so much hotter than the sun's visible surface. (In the 1940s researchers discovered the corona's million-degree temperature.) The other is to find out more about how the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system gets accelerated.

"We've been struggling with these questions for decades and this mission should finally provide those answers," according to Fisher.

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A high-tech expedition that hopes to produce startling new images of the wreck of the Titanic is arriving on the scene Wednesday morning.

A team sponsored by RMS Titanic Inc. left St. John's on Monday evening on the research ship Jean Charcot.

Over the next three weeks, the team, which includes oceanographers, technicians and researchers, will use cutting-edge acoustic technology and robotic underwater machinery to scan the entire debris field of where the Titanic sunk in 1912.

The researchers hope to produce 3D maps of a wide area under almost four kilometres of sea.

RMS Titanic is not planning to collect materials from the wreck site, as it has done in previous expeditions. The company plans to use images, maps and other products from this expedition for public sale and through its touring exhibitions.

The team includes specialists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

The Titanic sank after striking an iceberg more than 590 kilometres south of Newfoundland. More than 1,500 people were killed after the luxury liner sank to the ocean floor.

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Why let your waste go to waste when it could be powering your mobile phone—or even your car?

It is a bright spring morning here at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, where I have come to meet my interviewee for this article, Shanwen Tao. Normally when I interview someone, I give them a business card and maybe the latest issue of New Scientist. Today, I give Tao a bottle of my own pee.

Chemist Tao doesn't find this odd. Urine, he believes, could help solve the world's energy problems, powering farms and even office buildings. And he has agreed to use my offering to show me how.

Urine might not pack the punch of rocket fuel, but what it lacks in energy density it makes up for in sheer quantity. It is one of the most abundant waste materials on Earth, with nearly 7 billion people producing roughly 10 billion litres of it every day. Add animals into the mix and this quantity is multiplied several times over.

As things stand, this flood of waste poses a problem. Let it run into the water system and it would wipe out entire ecosystems; yet scrubbing it out of waste water costs money and energy. In the US, for instance, waste water treatment plants consume 1.5 per cent of all the electricity the country generates. So wouldn't it be nice if, instead of being a vast energy consumer, urine could be put to use.

That thought occurred to Gerardine Botte, a chemical engineer at Ohio University in Athens, during a discussion in 2002 with colleagues about possible sources of hydrogen for use in fuel cells.

Hydrogen can be produced from fossil fuels in large quantities, but it is difficult to store and distribute. Another option is to split water on the spot, releasing hydrogen directly into a fuel cell - but here as much energy is needed to split the water as is released by the hydrogen.

Botte's brainwave was to use urine instead of water. By weight, urine contains roughly 2 per cent urea, and each urea molecule contains four hydrogen atoms, which, crucially, are less tightly bound to the molecule than the hydrogen in water. Splitting these bonds would require less energy, making hydrogen production more efficient.

Last year, Botte's team reported that they had been able to generate hydrogen from urine using an electrolytic cell with cheap nickel-based electrodes running at only 0.37 volts- much less than the 1.23 volts it takes to split water (Chemical Communications, 2009, p 4859). Pure hydrogen bubbled off at the cathode, while nitrogen and carbon dioxide formed at the anode.

Botte calculates that with more efficient electrodes, hydrogen could be produced from urine at a cost of less than $1 per kilogram. She thinks the technology could be useful wherever large numbers of people congregate and enough urine can be collected to make the process worthwhile. "An office building where 200 or 300 people work could produce about 2 kilowatts of power," she says.

Another approach is to forget about hydrogen and use urine directly as a fuel. This is the approach being taken by Tao and his colleague Rong Lan, along with John Irvine from the University of St Andrews, also in the UK. Since 2007, the team have been developing a fuel cell that can produce electricity directly from urine (see diagram). No voltage needs to be applied to break down the urea; instead, a low-cost electrode makes the reaction happen spontaneously. The details of the electrode are still secret.

Inside the fuel cell, water and air close to the 1 centimetre square cathode generate hydroxide ions, which are attracted to the anode. There they react with urea to form water, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. This reaction also generates electrons, which flow back to the cathode through an external circuit, forming a current that the team hope will one day be large enough to power electrical devices (Energy and Environmental Science, vol 3, p 438).

To show me the process in action, Tao and Lan add my urine to the fuel cell. As it flows into the cell, a screen shows the output voltage rising to about 0.6 volts. While this prototype is too small to power a light bulb - its output is about half that of an AA battery - scaling up the cell and connecting several cells together should produce practical amounts of power.

Tao hopes that even small urine fuel cells will one day become useful, if the right electrode materials can be found to boost their power output. They could be used to power radios or phones in remote locations, for example. "You could carry a small fuel cell for low-power mobile communications without having to carry the fuel," he says.

A larger-scale application could be found in farms. As the urine from all mammals contains urea, that from cattle, say, could be used to generate electricity to run farm buildings - assuming the cows' urine could be kept separate from other waste.

This, like all the applications mentioned so far, will only work with relatively concentrated urine. That rules out the most urine produced in people's homes, which goes into the sewerage system along much larger quantities of waste water - but even this resource need not go to waste.

By the time the urine reaches a sewage treatment plant it is not only dilute, but also contaminated with a cocktail of chemicals. What's more, most of the precious urea it contains has broken down into ammonia. Nevertheless, Botte says that her technology should be able to deal with this. She plans to adapt it to split ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen, and she hopes to secure funding within a year to test the technology at a treatment plant.

Another promising option would be to use microbial fuel cells to generate electricity from all kinds of compounds in mucky waste water, not just urea and ammonia. These devices can break down all the organic matter the water contains, cleaning it at the same time, says Bruce Logan, who develops microbial fuel cells at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

They take advantage of the fact that waste water naturally contains bacteria and organic matter. When bacteria "consume" this food, they produce electrons that would normally combine with oxygen. But if kept in an oxygen-free chamber they can feed those electrons to an electrode and from there into an external circuit. Protons, meanwhile, pass through a membrane that divides the cell, to reach another electrode - the cathode - where they combine with the incoming electrons from the external circuit, and oxygen, to form pure water.

Experimental microbial fuel cells have generated power densities of up to 6.9 watts per square metre of electrode surface (Environmental Science and Technology, vol 42, p 8101). "Maybe 6.9 watts doesn't sound like a lot, but we have very large reactors in waste water treatment plants, and if you have tens of thousands of square metres, that's going to be a lot of power," says Logan. The technology is being tested at pilot plant scale.

Alternatively, these cells can be modified to produce hydrogen fuel instead of electricity by keeping the cathode as well as the anode oxygen-free. Logan's team recently completed field trials of a 1000-litre version of a hydrogen-producing microbial cell at a winery, where the waste water contained leftovers from grape crushing and fermentation, such as sugars and ethanol. Logan says the cells coped well with the real-world conditions, such as varying composition of waste water, but won't discuss the details until the work is published.

Logan is focusing on scaling up the microbial cells and finding the materials for electrodes that make them work most efficiently. "We expend a lot of energy on waste water treatment right now, and these technologies hold the promise to convert this process from an energy consumer to a net energy producer," he says.

No one claims that urine will ever be the complete answer to our energy needs, but Botte argues that the more sources we have for our energy, the better. "We have gigantic energy needs. We are talking billions of megawatt-hours each year in the US alone," she says. "Trying to find one solution is not the answer. There is room for many technologies with different market shares."

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The cause of most cases of ALS--a devastating degenerative disease named after the baseball great who was its most famous victim--is largely a mystery. Only 5% to 10% of those who are diagnosed with ALS carry the distinctive gene mutation known to give rise to the disease: Of the 30,000 Americans who have the disease at any given time, at least 27,000 have no clue as to its origins. The study suggests that the symptoms that felled baseball's beloved "Iron Horse"--spastic movements, muscle weakness and progressive loss of muscle control--may, in part, have been the result of his legendary penchant for playing while injured, including after concussion.

The suggestion that traumatic brain injuries--also called concussions--may contribute to neurodegenerative disease is not new. But a growing body of research has strengthened evidence that concussion may be the catalyst for a wide range of brain diseases, from depression and dementia to Parkinson's disease symptoms and now, movement disorders such as ALS. Dr. Martina Wiedau-Pazos, an expert in movement disorders at UCLA who was not involved with the latest study, called the study's findings "very intriguing," but cautioned that the study was too small to allow clinicians to draw broad conclusions about the prevention or diagnosis of diseases like ALS. Neurobiologist Donald Stein of Emory University, who studies concussion, said the study's authors have raised the possibility that some patients with past brain trauma who appear to have ALS may have another disorder altogether, which may progress differently, and respond to different therapies, than ALS.

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Offering a cash prize to encourage innovation is all the rage. Sometimes it works rather well...

A CURIOUS cabal gathered recently in a converted warehouse in San Francisco for a private conference. Among them were some of the world’s leading experts in fields ranging from astrophysics and nanotechnology to health and energy. Also attending were entrepreneurs and captains of industry, including Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, and Ratan Tata, the head of India’s Tata Group. They were brought together to dream up more challenges for the X Prize Foundation, a charitable group which rewards innovation with cash. On July 29th a new challenge was announced: a $1.4m prize for anyone who can come up with a faster way to clean oil spills from the ocean.

The foundation began with the Ansari X Prize: $10m to the first private-sector group able to fly a reusable spacecraft 100km (62 miles) into space twice within two weeks. It was won in 2004 by a team led by Burt Rutan, a pioneering aerospace engineer, and Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft. Other prizes have followed, including the $10m Progressive Automotive X Prize, for green cars that are capable of achieving at least 100mpg, or its equivalent. Peter Diamandis, the entrepreneur who runs the foundation, says he has become convinced that “focused and talented teams in pursuit of a prize and acclaim can change the world.”


This might sound like hyperbole, but other charities, including the Gates Foundation, have been sufficiently impressed to start offering their own prizes. An industry is now growing up around them, with some firms using InnoCentive, an online middleman, to offer prizes to eager problem-solvers. Now governments are becoming keen too. As a result, there is a surge in incentive prizes (see chart).

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Lost at sea

Such prizes are not new. The Longitude Prize was set up by the British government in 1714 as a reward for reliable ways for mariners to determine longitude. And in 1795 Napoleon offered a prize to preserve food for his army, which led to the canned food of today. In more recent times incentive prizes have fallen out of favour. Instead, prizes tend to be awarded for past accomplishments—often a long time after the event. As T.S. Eliot remarked after receiving his Nobel prize, it was like getting “a ticket to one’s own funeral”.

Incentive prizes do spur innovation. A study led by Liam Brunt of the Norwegian School of Economics scrutinised agricultural inventions in 19th-century Britain and found a link between prizes and subsequent patents. The Royal Agricultural Society awarded nearly 2,000 prizes from 1839 to 1939, some worth £1m ($1.6m) in today’s money. The study found that not only were prize-winners more likely to receive and renew patents, but that even losing contestants sought patents for more than 13,000 inventions.

Today’s prizes appear to have a similar effect. The Ansari X Prize, for example, has attracted over $100m in investment into the (previously non-existent) private-sector space industry. The technology used by the winning spaceship is now employed by Virgin Galactic to develop a commercial space-travel service, and many of the losing contestants have formed companies in the burgeoning sector.

The important thing about a well-designed prize, argues Dr Diamandis, is its power to “change what people believe to be possible”. Indeed, they open up innovation. A study co-authored by Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School reviewed scores of problems solved on InnoCentive and found that people from outside the scientific or industry discipline in question were more likely to solve a challenge.

Prizes also help form new alliances. Netflix, an American company that rents films, offered a $1m prize to anyone that could do a better job than its own experts in improving the algorithms it uses in online recommendations. It was stunned to receive entries from over 55,000 people in 186 countries. The seven members of the winning team, who collaborated online, met physically for the first time when they picked up the prize in 2009.

Inspired by such successes, governments are now offering prizes. Britain, Canada, Italy, Russia and Norway, in co-operation with the Gates Foundation, are funding the Advanced Market Commitment (AMC) to develop vaccines for neglected diseases in the developing world. The AMC is offering $1.5 billion to drugs firms that can deliver low-priced vaccines for pneumococcal disease, a big killer of children. GlaxoSmithKline plans to deliver such vaccines to Africa next year.

Alpheus Bingham, a co-founder of InnoCentive, says government agencies, ranging from America’s space agency, NASA, to the city of Chicago, now use his company’s platform to offer prizes. There is even a bill in the American Congress that would grant every federal agency the authority to issue prizes.

Is this a good thing? Prizes used to promote a policy are vulnerable to political jiggery pokery, argues Lee Davis of the Copenhagen Business School. Thomas Kalil, a science adviser to Barack Obama, acknowledges the pitfalls but insists that incentive prizes offered by governments can work if well crafted. Indeed, he argues that the very process of thinking critically about a prize’s objectives sharpens up the bureaucracy’s approach to big problems.

One success was NASA’s Lunar Lander prize, which was more cost-effective than the traditional procurement process, says Robert Braun, NASA’s chief technologist. Another example is the agency’s recent prize for the design of a new astronaut’s glove: the winner was not an aerospace firm but an unemployed engineer who has gone on to form a new company.

When the objective is a technological breakthrough, clearly-defined prizes should work well. But there may be limits. Tachi Yamada of the Gates Foundation is a big believer in giving incentive prizes, but gives warning that it can take 15 years or more to bring a new drug to market, and that even AMC’s carrot of $1.5 billion for new vaccines may not be a big enough incentive. No prize could match the $20 billion or so a new blockbuster drug can earn in its lifetime. So, in some cases, says Dr Yamada, “market success is the real prize.”

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iPhone Users Have Twice as Much Sex as Android Users (Plus! Sexiest Cameras)

According to 11 million plus images indexed by users of dating site OK Cupid, iPhone users get laid twice as often as Android users.

If you're anything like me, you usually think of your pics in terms of content: Here's me smiling. Here's me looking tough. Here's me in Hawaii with that wacky turtle. And so on. Today, however, we'll analyze photography from a numerical angle-we'll discuss flash, focus, and aperture instead. We feel like people don't really think about these things when they choose a profile photo, and yet, as we shall see, their misuse can seriously mess you up.

As always, our data comes from dating site OkCupid, one of the largest, and most interesting, datasets on the web. This article aggregates 11.4 million opinions on what makes a great photo.

(snipped long but amusing article full of interesting graphs such as below)


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In conclusion, the data strongly suggest that if you're single, you (or someone you know) should learn a little bit about photography. Technique can make or break your photograph, and the right decisions can get you more dates.

It's actually not that hard. Use a decent camera. Go easy on the flash. Own the foreground. Take your picture in the afternoon. Then visit the nearest Apple store. Done.

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