Flying into the sun's corona is suicidal to be sure, but scientists want to find out how the sun's atmosphere is heated.

ap, They're Dead! New Water Filter Electrocutes Bacteria

America has some of the cleanest drinking water on earth, but in many developiong countries, clean water is oftentimes hard to come by. Bacteria and other nasty organisms give rise to such waterborne illnesses as cholera, typhoid and hepatitis.

Many scientists are working on inexpensive and simple technologies that can clean water and make it safe to drink. Among them are Yi Cui and his colleagues at Stanford University, who have developed a new type of water filter that is 80,000 times faster than existing filters and less expensive than what's available today. It doesn't cost much because there are no moving parts and uses very little power.

Ngô Bảo Châu is being awarded the 2010 Fields Medal for for his proof of the Fundamental Lemma in the theory of automorphic forms through the introduction of new algebro-geometric methods.
Ngô Bảo Châu was born on June 28, 1972, in Hanoi, Vietnam. After secondary school in Vietnam, he moved to France and studied at the Université Paris 6, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris. He completed his PhD Degree in Orsay under the supervision of Gérard Laumon. He is currently Professor in the Faculté des Sciences at Orsay and Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In September 2010, he will start his new appointment at the University of Chicago.

The Vietnamese government is making efforts to invite Ngo Bao Chau, whose mathematics research has earned international acclaim and awards, to work in the country.

During a visit to Chau's family Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister, Nguyen Thien Nhan, said the government is willing to offer the best working and living conditions to Chau, whose groundbreaking mathematical proof was honored by TIME Magazine as one of the top ten scientific discoveries of 2009.

A huge star, 265 times the mass of our sun, was recently discovered. Is that as big as it gets?

To most people, stars are those twinkling little lights that shine way up in the night sky. If you have ever spent a night under a truly dark sky you may be stunned to see how many there really are.

It’s estimated that there are more stars in the Universe than there are grains of sand on the Earth. Stars are plentiful in the Cosmos, but what of their sizes?

Small studies raise big alarm about exposure to a hormone-mimicking chemical

Cash register and other receipts may expose consumers to substantial amounts of bisphenol A, a hormone-mimicking chemical that has been linked with a host of potential health risks, according to a trio of recent studies. Each study offers preliminary evidence that a large number of retail outlets print sales receipts on certain types of heat-sensitive, or thermal, paper that use BPA as a color developer.

Two of the new studies also showed that the BPA coating easily rubs off onto fingers. And one found evidence that BPA from receipts may penetrate skin.

The DEPTHX autonomous robot as it is being lowered into the Zacatón sinkhole in northeastern Mexico. The robot discovered an amazing wealth and diversity of life in the water-filled cavern. Image Credit: John Spear, Colorado School of Mines

Scientists have found amazingly diverse microbial life in the world's deepest water-filled sinkhole, even down where sunlight can't reach.

A UN panel has added Florida's Everglades National Park and Madagascar's tropical rainforest to a list of world heritage sites at risk.

Unesco's World Heritage Committee said development in the Everglades had caused water flow to fall 60% in the wetland, a major wildlife sanctuary.

The pollution level there was so high it was killing marine life, it added.

Mobile phone users are being encouraged to find out if operators are doing enough to keep their calls secret.

Security researchers have released tools that, they say, make it easy to see what security systems operators use to stop eavesdropping.

The researchers want to expose those operators that have not updated security systems to prevent others listening in.

The tools are based on an attack first demonstrated in late 2009.

To break the terabyte barrier for the Indy Minute Sort, the University of California, San Diego computer science researchers built a system made up of 52 commodity servers. Credit: UC San Diego / Daniel Kane
Computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego broke "the terabyte barrier" - and a world record - when they sorted more than one terabyte of data in just 60 seconds.

A shopper looks at a smartphone at a shop in Taipei on July 19. Software security experts warn that mobile phones are tempting targets for hackers in a world where people eagerly invite strange applications onto handsets packed with personal data.

MIT researchers from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a control system that lets a foam glider land on a perch like a pet parakeet. Photo: Jason Dorfman/CSAIL
Everyone knows what it's like for an airplane to land: the slow maneuvering into an approach pattern, the long descent, and the brakes slamming on as soon as the plane touches down, which seems to just barely bring it to a rest a mile later. Birds, however,..

The molecular `knots' have dimensions of around two nanometers

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have constructed molecular 'knots' with dimensions of around two nanometers -- around 30,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

In this Thursday, July 15, 2010 video cameras are seen on the front of an unmanned electric-powered vehicle as a technician works on another similar vehicle in Parma, Italy. Next week, four electric-powered orange vans depart on what has been conceived as the longest-ever test drive of unmanned vehicles: a 13,000-kilometer (8,000-mile), three-month road trip from Italy to China

Fungal disease drives the loss of 30 species in Panama.

A small black hole has been observed blowing a vast bubble of hot gas 1,000 light-years across.

The gas is expanding because it is being heated by powerful particle "jets" being released by the black hole.

The observations were made by the Very Large Telescope in Chile and Nasa's Chandra space observatory.

Astronomers have unveiled the findings in the latest edition of Nature journal.

Astronomers have glimpsed what could be the youngest known star at the very moment it is being born. Not yet fully developed into a true star, the object is in the earliest stages of star formation and has just begun pulling in matter from a surrounding envelope of gas and dust, according to a new study that appears in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Drinking several cups of tea or coffee a day appears to protect against heart disease, a 13-year-long study from the Netherlands has found.

It adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting health benefits from the most popular hot drinks.

Those who drank more than six cups of tea a day cut their risk of heart disease by a third, the study of 40,000 people found.

The stage has been set for what many predict will be an ugly fight over broadband plans for US citizens.

The Federal Communications Commission has taken the first formal steps towards tougher rules for broadband.

It asked for public comment on three different plans, igniting an expensive lobbying campaign by all sides.

The looming battle follows a court ruling questioning the FCC's right to regulate internet service providers after one throttled traffic to users.

That court ruling dealt a major blow to a central plank of the FCC's broadband plan called net neutrality which demands that all data traffic be treated equally.

Researchers say equal elevation of dry valleys and river deltas points to an ancient Martian ocean

Mars was once a water world, concludes a new study that dives into the controversy over whether an ocean covered much of the Red Planet’s northern hemisphere early in its history.

Ever since researchers found hints in the late 1980s that Mars’ northern lowlands are ringed by what appears to be a dried-up shoreline, planetary scientists have debated whether the region was covered by water about 3.5 billion years ago. Now, Gaetano Di Achille and Brian Hynek of the University of Colorado in Boulder have analyzed spacecraft data to find that 29 of 52 dry river deltas and thousands of river valleys within and surrounding the northern lowlands all lie at about the same elevation. That’s just what would be expected if a sea once blanketed the region, leaving behind a level coastline, the researchers report online June 13 in Nature Geoscience.

We may never be able to teleport ourselves "Star Trek"-style, but scientists managed to transmit information a record distance using entangled photons.

Scotty won't beam anybody anywhere anytime soon, but a new report by Chinese scientists shows that it is possible to transmit information over long distances using quantum entanglement. The research, published in the current issue of the journal Nature Photonics, could lead to faster and smaller quantum-based computers and unbreakable, encrypted communication across the world.

Two-dimensional entertainment is so 2009.

With Sony’s release of the 3-D upgrade for PlayStation 3, the upcoming 3-D Nintendo DS, at least two 3-D television channels on the horizon, and the box office success of a little flick called Avatar, the consensus is clear: The future of entertainment is 3-D.

But while moviegoers have flocked to recent 3-D offerings, film fans also have had mixed reviews about their experiences, with some reporting headaches, nausea, vision problems and motion sickness. And with 3-D leaping to the small screen, clinical researchers and tech experts want to know whether the special effect might damage eyes in the process.

 Experts are starting to put together a three-dimensional view of the oil spill -- and what they're finding is more bad news.
Scientists have confirmed the spread of oil from the massive Gulf of Mexico spill more than 40 nautical miles from the disaster site and at a depth of 3,300 feet, a top official said Tuesday.
Experts have completed a scientific analysis of the oil, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Jane Lubchenco, told a press conference.

Boston College researchers report developing a "nanocoax" technology that can support a highly efficient thin film solar cell. This image shows a cross section of an array of nanocoax structures, which prove to be thick enough to absorb a sufficient amount of light, yet thin enough to extract current with increased efficiency, the researchers report in the journal Physica Status Solidi. Credit: Boston College

There's a potential threat lurking in your internet café, say University of Calgary computer science researchers. It's called Typhoid adware and works in similar fashion to Typhoid Mary, the first identified healthy carrier of typhoid fever who spread the disease to dozens of people in the New York area in the early 1900s.

Climate change could wipe out one species in five, researchers say.         
As many as one in five species of the world’s lizards could go extinct by 2080 because they can’t take the heat of climate change, an international research team reports.

The cost associated with ISO 14001 certification has developing countries companies’ lag in environmental management.
The ISO 14000 series of international standards have been developed to integrate environmental aspects into processes and product standards. This includes, but is not limited to, environmental management systems (ISO 14001), auditing guidelines (ISO 14010), labeling (ISO 14020), performance evaluations (ISO 14031), life cycle assessment (ISO 14040...

Cozily positioned next to the piping hot kettle corn tent and across from the Panasonic HD 3D truck, NASA's new traveling exhibit "From Rockets to Race Cars" made its NASCAR debut last weekend at Richmond International Raceway.

How your genes could reveal what you look like.

Male, short and stout, with dark skin, brown eyes, ­shovel-shaped teeth, type A+ blood and coarse, dark brown hair giving way to pattern baldness. He would have a high tolerance for alcohol and a higher-than-average risk of nicotine dependence—fortunately, he lived thousands of years before humans discovered smoking. The description of a Stone Age Greenland resident published in February paints an extraordinary portrait of a man who vanished more than 4,000 years ago, drawn almost solely from his DNA remains.

About 2,000 scientists from 80 countries have gone on hundreds of voyages over the past decade in an effort to compile on Census of Marine Life, a comprehensive catalog the oceans"biological diversity. In the past, scientists estimated that there might be more than one million species in the oceans, some 230,000 of which had not yet been identified. Those estimates are still listed on the census web site, which apparently needs to be updated. According to a newly-issued press release, census research now indicates that there may be more than 20 times than number of bacteria species alone, and that the total number of species of marine microbes of all sorts may be close to one billion.

JUST suppose that Darwin"s ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth"s history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin"s explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.

A team led by Yale University researchers has used nanosensors to measure cancer biomarkers in whole blood for the first time. Their findings, which appear December 13 in the advanced online publication of Nature Nanotechnology, could dramatically simplify the way physicians test for biomarkers of cancer and other diseases.

Time Magazine on December 9 announced its top ten lists for 2009, and includes Vietnamese Professor Ngo Bao Chau"s solving of the “fundamental lemma”.

Top 10 Scientific Discoveries:

1. Our Oldest Ancestor, "Ardi"

2. The Human Epigenome, Decoded

3. Gene Therapy Cures Color Blindness

4. A Robot Performs Science

5. Breeding Tuna on Land

6. Water on the Moon

7. The Fundamental Lemma, Solved

8. Teleportation!

9. The Large Hadron Collider, Revived

10.A New Planet (or Brown Dwarf?) Discovered

The structure of the frosty flakes also fascinate ice chemists like Purdue University"s Travis Knepp, a doctoral candidate in analytical chemistry who studies the basics of snowflake structure to gain more insight into the dynamics of ground-level, or "tropospheric," ozone depletion in the Arctic.

NASA has successfully collected data after two spacecraft -- the Centaur rocket and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) -- impacted the moon"s south pole, the space agency said Friday.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama"s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Charles K. Kao, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, all from the United States, on Tuesday.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 awards studies of one of life's core processes: the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life. Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics.

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

STOCKHOLM —  Three scientists who created the technology behind digital photography and helped link the world through fiber-optic networks shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday.

Penicillin

If you have ben living under a rock for the past 80 years or so, here is how the popular story goes:

Alexander Fleming did not clean up his workstation before going on vacation one day in 1928. When he came back, Fleming noticed that there was a strange fungus on some of his cultures. Even stranger was that bacteria did not seem to thrive near those cultures.

Penicillin became the first and is still one of the most widely used antibiotics.

THE UBot whizzes around a carpeted conference room on its Segway-like wheels, holding aloft a yellow balloon. It hands the balloon to a three-fingered robotic arm named WAM, which gingerly accepts the gift.

Cameras click. "It blows my mind to see robots collaborating like this," says William Townsend, CEO of Barrett Technology, which developed WAM.

The robots were just two of the multitude on display last month at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Pasadena, California. But this happy meeting of robotic beings hides a serious problem: while the robots might be collaborating, those making them are not. Each robot is individually manufactured to meet a specific need and more than likely built in isolation.

The crucial technological development happened recently at the Flexible Display Centre at Arizona State University. Using a novel lithographic process invented by HP Labs, the research arm of Hewlett-Packard, and an electronic ink produced by E Ink, a company spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the centre’s researchers succeeded in printing flexible displays onto long rolls of a special plastic film made by DuPont. To make individual screens, the printed film is sliced up into sections rather as folios for magazines or newspapers would be cut from a printed web of paper.

Waste disposal is creating a serious problem in many cities in Asia.
Groundwater and soil quality are at risk, diseases are spreading unchecked and the ecological consequences are destroying the livelihood of the local population.
The need to organise waste management systematically and to communicate the message to the local people demands considerable awareness raising, good networking and a lot of patience. With the EU project ISSOWAMA (Integrated Sustainable Solid Waste Management in Asia), ttz Bremerhaven, together with 21 partners, is planning to develop a practicable model and implement it on site. The project was officially launched on 11 and 12 February in Bangkok.

A pair of U.S. astronauts on Monday conducted the fifth and final spacewalk of space shuttle Atlantis" Hubble-upgrade mission, installed fresh batteries, thermal shields and a sensor for Hubble Space Telescope.

A third of web users have admitted to using the same password for a number of different websites, says

According to the security firm, just 19 percent never use the same password twice. Sophos added that three years ago, 41 percent of web users said they used the same password, indicating that just 8 percent of web users have realised the importance of strong, unique passwords

Ten winners of the 2008 Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and economics received their prizes on Wednesday at a ceremony in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden.

A Russian carrier rocket blasted off from a central Asia launching pad on Sunday, sending the crew members for the International Space Station (ISS) and the sixth space tourist.

Soaring oil prices have led to such a boom for solar power that the industry could operate without subsidies in just a few years, according to industry leaders. At the solar industry trade fair in Munich over the weekend, there was growing confidence that the holy grail known as "grid parity" - whereby electricity from the sun can be produced as cheaply as it can be bought from the grid - is now just a few years away.

U.S. scientists have succeeded in making unique nanoscale droplets that are much smaller than a human cell and can potentially be used to deliver pharmaceuticals.

California' + char(39)+ N's largest utility company has signed deals to build the world' + char(39)+ N's two biggest solar plants that would supply electricity to 250,000 homes and reestablish the United States as the global leader in solar power, officials said Friday.

VietNamNet Bridge - ASEAN celebrated its 41st anniversary on August 8 and marked the occasion by a flag hoisting ceremony held at the ASEAN Secretariat in the capital city of Jakarta, Indonesia.

In his speech, ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan reviewed the development of the grouping over the past 41 years.

Global warming increases the rate of "ocean acidification" and is damaging some of the most important living organisms in the sea' + char(39)+ N's food web, U.S. scientists have warned.

Father of the mobile phone: Marty Cooper: Cooper filed a patent for the radio telephone system in 1973, while working at Motorola, and was the first person to make a call on a portable mobile phone. (He called a rival engineer at Bell Labs.) Cooper has stated that his inspiration came from watching Star Trek Captain Kirk talk on his communicator device. Today, Cooper is the CEO and founder of ArrayComm.

Research in the University of Alberta' + char(39)+ N's Faculty of Science may soon be able to answer that question. The departments of computing science and earth and atmospheric science have been working together to create a Wireless Sensor Network that allows for the clandestine data collection of environmental factors in remote locations and its monitoring from anywhere in the world where the Internet is available.

The number of transistors it is possible to squeeze in to a chip for a fixed cost doubles every two years

First outlined by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel

Published in Electronics Magazine on 19 April, 1965

Father of the mobile phone: Marty Cooper: Cooper filed a patent for the radio telephone system in 1973, while working at Motorola, and was the first person to make a call on a portable mobile phone. (He called a rival engineer at Bell Labs.) Cooper has stated that his inspiration came from watching Star Trek Captain Kirk talk on his communicator device. Today, Cooper is the CEO and founder of ArrayComm.

A proposed space telescope would focus light primarily with a patterned sheet of metal rather than a large mirror or lens. The telescope would have amazingly sharp vision and could spot Earth-size planets around other stars, its backers say.

Telescopes used for astronomy normally focus light using a curved mirror. But there are limits to how large a mirror can be sent into space. That' + char(39)+ N' + char(39)+ N' + char(39)+ N's because of the tremendous cost of lofting heavy objects into orbit, as well as the limited cargo capacity of launch rockets.

Silicon electronics are a staple of the computing industry, but researchers are now exploring other techniques to deliver powerful computers.

Researchers in California have developed a hybrid light that is cheaper, longer lasting, more energy efficient and is as bright as traditional light emitting diodes (LEDs).