Science & Technology

Two Number Ones – China in Gold, U.S. in Total

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The Beijing Olympics have come to a close after 16 days of thrilling competition - with the home nation sat on top of the gold medal table.

China has spent seven years planning for this event. It must be relieved that these Olympics are being hailed as both a sporting and an operational success. Worries about air pollution, protesters and media freedom were eventually overshadowed by what went on in the sporting arenas.

At the closing ceremony the International Olympic Committee President, Jacques Rogge, said they had been "truly exceptional games".

Best of the best

Worldwide, 200 countries provided a staggering 5,000 hours of coverage through rights-holding broadcast partners. In China, 842 million people - more than twice the population of the United States - tuned in to watch some part of opening ceremony.

On the field of play, nearly 11,000 athletes from 204 nations created indelible memories with their performances, many of them smashing records.

The ceremony to mark the end of the games, held in the Bird's Nest stadium, borrowed some of the grand style of the opening ceremony. Hundreds of performers were deployed in dazzling sequences that took months of planning to execute to perfection. And this being China, there were more fireworks.

The Olympics is being seen as a success from the government all the way down to ordinary people on the streets. "The best of the best - ever," said one compere, referring to this particular Games a few minutes before the closing ceremony started.

Positive legacy

There was certainly an attempt at this last event to shape the way the world should think about the contro- versial decision to award China this year's summer Games.

Liu Qi, president of the Beijing organizing committee, said the Chinese people had honored the commit- ments it made when bidding for the games. Speaking at the closing ceremony, he said: "The Beijing Olympic Games is a testimony of the fact that the world has rested its trust upon China."

The Chinese spared no expense ($40 billion for infra- structure) and overlooked no detail, however minute, in the planning, preparation and execution of what Liu Qi called "this grand gala of humankind."

Beijing, the historic seat of power in China, set a standard for host cities in almost every way, from its efficient routing of traffic - no small feat in a city of 17.4 million - to its stunning and innovative competition venues such as the Bird's Nest and Water Cube. Some 100,000 well-trained volunteers kept the Olympic machine humming.

"We cannot be more pleased with the Chinese people's presentation of these Games," said Peter Ueberroth, chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee. "Whether it's the (Athletes') Village or the venues, they've done an incredible job."

The IOC President, Jacques Rogge, suggested this Olympics would have a positive legacy. "Through these games, the world learned more about China, and China learned more about the world," he said.

All-star cast

The closing ceremony is partly about handing over to the next host of the summer Games, which in 2012 will be London. That gave the British capital the chance to stage its own mini-show within the closing ceremony.

It began when the Olympic flag was handed to recently- elected London Mayor Boris Johnson, who seemed to fumble to unfurl the banner before holding it aloft. A red London bus than entered the stadium, out of which popped singer Leona Lewis and guitarist Jimmy Page, who together performed the rock classic "Whole Lotta Love". Britain's most recognizable footballer, David Beckham, then appeared from inside the double-decker - surely no other London bus can have carried such an all-star cast.

To huge cheers, Beckham kicked a football into the crowd of athletes who had also paraded into the stadium. As the bus left, pretend passengers clung to the sides holding up umbrellas. It was an attempt to poke fun at Britain's rainy weather and its people's preoccupation with it.

Gold medals

But the Chinese still stole the show, with some sequences that were vast in scale and ambition. China won 100 medals and led with 51 gold in an eye-opening performance. A successful Olympics, with 51 gold medals for the home country, is probably exactly what China's leaders had hoped would happen.

After the event, one closing ceremony performer, Ying Ying, said her team of cheerleaders had been practicing since last autumn. "I feel very lucky just to be here. I've been moved to see so many athletes - and China has done really well," said the 20-year-old Beijing university student.

The U.S. finished with 110 medals total, leading the overall medal standings for the fourth consecutive Olympics and setting a U.S. record for medal production in a full-participation Games.

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Photos courtesy of Jeff Gross/Getty Images, Shaun Botterill/Getty Images, Stu Forster/Getty Images, Phil Walter/Getty Images, Clive Rose/Getty Images

Original Source: BBC News and Kansas City Star

Image Gallery: Pictures of 2008 Olympics Closing Ceremony

Related Articles: Beijing Wrap-Up: The 25 Most Marketable Olympians and Top 50 moments of Beijing 2008

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Ice sculptures constructed from the spare core samples by the scientists working on the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project.

The ice samples, which the researchers analyze for clues to the temperature and concentration of greenhouse gases of the ancient atmosphere, are collected using this drill.

The visiting group of scientists, journalists and Danish environmental officials land at NEEM, the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project. NEEM had arranged for the visitors to examine their research, which focuses on the climatic conditions which shaped the warm geologic period before the earth's last Ice Age, an important clue in understanding global warming. The camp is located approximately 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The scientists are drilling deep into the ice, which is 1.5 miles thick, the accumulation of 130,000 years of snow. These researchers are taking ice near the surface, which can help them analyze the last few hundred years of climatic history.

The main drill, which will excavate the deepest ice cores, is being built in this underground site.

The tour also included a visit to the coastal town of Ilulissat, home to one of the most productive glaciers in the world. A tour of Disko Bay, outside the town, revealed massive icebergs floating in the water, the product of accelerated melting.

The main graveyard in Ilulissat, just outside the town, overlooks the icebergs of Disko Bay.

Pools of melted water slice through the Ilulissat icefjord, which is fed by the melting Sermeq Kujalleq glacier.

Greenland has lost an average of 150 billion tons of ice a year over the past four summers.

In 2004, UNESCO declared the Ilulissat icefjord a World Heritage site.

Every year, the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier surrenders around 20 billion tons of icebergs into the ocean. Most of them end up in the northern Atlantic.

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Original Source and Photos courtesy of: Time

Wikipedia definition of Open Source.

She has brought her precious pooch back from death, more than one but five – via cloning at the price of $50,000. Not the one unique dog Booger, but a bunch - FIVE!
Woken up at midnight by dear memory of the dead dog? Or thrilled by five identical dogs resembling the dead one? It is not a bad idea to hear from the very first commercial cloning client, or to imagine, the true sentiment before jumping to clone yours.

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(SEOUL, South Korea) — Booger is back. An American woman received five puppies Tuesday that were cloned from her beloved late pitbull, becoming the inaugural customer of a South Korean company that says it is the world's first successful commercial canine cloning service. Seoul-based RNL Bio said the clones of Bernann McKinney's dog Booger were born last week after being cloned in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who created the world's first cloned dog in 2005.

The team of scientists working for RNL Bio is headed by Lee Byeong-chun, a former colleague of disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who scandalized the international scientific community when his purported breakthroughs in cloned stem cells were revealed as fake in 2005. Independent tests confirmed the 2005 dog cloning was genuine, and Lee's team has since cloned more than 20 canines. But RNL Bio said that its cloning was the first successful commercial cloning of a canine. "RNL Bio is commencing its worldwide services with Booger as its first successful clone," the company said in a statement.

RNL Bio charges up to $150,000 for dog cloning but will receive just a third of that sum from McKinney because she is the first customer and helped with publicity, said company head Ra Jeong-chan. Ra said his firm eventually aims to clone about 300 dogs per year and is also interested in duplicating camels for customers in the Middle East.

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Photos courtesy of Ahn Young-joon/AP

Original Source: Time

Related Article: The Rise and Fall of the Cloning King

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The one Lun-class ekranoplan originally developed by the Soviet Union military transports, and based mostly on the shores of the Caspian Sea and Black, at a naval base near Kaspiysk. During the Cold War, ekranoplans were sighted for years on the Caspian Sea as huge, fast-moving objects. The name Caspian Sea Monster was given by US intelligence operatives who had spotted the huge vehicle, which looked like an airplane with the outer halves of the wings removed. After the end of the Cold War, the "monster" was revealed to be one of several Soviet military designs meant to fly only a few meters above water, saving energy and staying below enemy radar.

The 8-engined sea skimmer could have been a deadly weapon of war with it’s 6 ‘Sunburn’ anti-ship missiles and ability to travel at high speed under the radar of patrol aircraft. The Lun-class (Russian: "Hen Harrier") (NATO reporting name: "Utka"; Russian: "Duck") ekranoplan Wing-In-Ground effect vehicle was an extremely unusual aircraft designed by Rostislav Evgenievich Alexeev and used by the Soviet & Russian navies from 1987 to sometime in the late '90s. Wing-in-ground-effect aircraft use the extra lift of their large wings when in proximity to the surface (about one to four meters). It is also interesting to note that this is the largest military aircraft ever built, with a length of 73m, rivaling that of the Hughes H-4 Hercules "Spruce Goose" and many modern jumbo jets.

Currently the world's largest aircraft, the first Antonov An-225 Mriya (meaning "Dream") proto- type flew on 21 Dec. 1988. It was designed and built by Antonov Design Bureau (headquarters in Kiev, Ukraine), known for their outstanding achievements in producing heavy transport aircraft. It is the largest aircraft to ever takeoff more than once. Capable of transporting oversized objects externally, the An-225 was designed mainly to transport the Russian space shuttle "Buran" and its components from a service area to a launch site, although the Antonov bureau is looking for possible commercial applications for the enormous aircraft.

Construction of the An-124 provided the basis for the new aircraft with Antonov using many of the same components to keep cost and development efforts down. Although the basic configuration is the same as the An-124, the An-225 is longer, has no rear ramp/door assembly, and incorporates a 32-wheel landing gear system (two nose and fourteen main wheel bogies, seven per side, each with two wheels). The Mriya is not a military aircraft, however, it packs a great potential for military use as a super-heavy transport, it is capable of airlifting cargos that no other aircraft in the world is capable of.

The Hughes H-4 Hercules (registration NX37602) is a "one-off" heavy transport aircraft designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft company. The aircraft made its first and only flight on 2 November 1947. Built from wood due to wartime raw material restrictions on the use of aluminum, the Hercules is the largest flying boat ever built, and has the largest wingspan and height of any aircraft in history. It survives in good condition at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

The 555 seat, double deck Airbus A380 is the most ambitious civil aircraft program yet. Airbus first began studies on a very large 500 seat airliner in the early 1990s. The European manufacturer saw developing a competitor and successor to the Boeing 747 as a strategic play to end Boeing's dominance of the very large airliner market and round out Airbus' product line-up.

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Photos courtesy of flightsimx.co.uk, BusinessWeek, Wikipedia, AFP

Original Source: Wikipedia, FlightSimX, The Aviation Zone, and Airliners.net

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When Royal Caribbean launches its $1.2 billion 'Oasis of the Sea' in 2009, it will carry up to 5,400 passengers and will be as tall as a 12-story building, as long as four football fields, and wider than the Panama Canal.

Formidably awesome – a floating city.

The question is - at sea, the bigger, the better?

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Photos courtesy of Robert Polidori

Original Source: CNN

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The rising cost of food is a growing concern for many people across the world. There have been protests, and even riots, in countries including Mexico, India and Egypt, clear evidence of the struggle that many people are now facing. However, if Italians feel that their local food retailer is charging unreasonable prices, they can now call on a new service to help them haggle or walk away. Thanks to a short message service (SMS) text system set up jointly by the Italian agriculture ministry and consumer associations, shoppers can check the average price of different foods in northern, central and southern Italy.

Italy’s Department of Agriculture, Food & Forestry, along with consumer organisations, have come up with the SMS Consumatori service www.smsconsumatori.it, which tracks prices for over 80 types of fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy products and so on. To use the service, shoppers send a text message to 47947 for free, typing the name of the product they want a price for. They get a reply straightaway listing both a wholesale price and average retail prices in the north, centre and south. If a product comes in varieties, the service sends separate messages for each of the most popular ones.

SMS Consumatori sources information from 2,200 different stores, such as butchers, market stalls and discount stores, and covers the whole country. Prices are updated from Tuesday to Saturday. A very good feature is that people can fill a virtual shopping cart and see what its average cost would be. According to Jote Bassi, vice-president global sales and marketing at messaging services provider Anam, which is headquartered in Dublin, SMS Consumatori is a great use of SMS technology and yet more evidence of the importance to both consumers and operators of SMS services in general.

With prices spiraling out of control in some parts of the world, some people feel that it is high time consumers could check just how much traders are profiting. BBC reporter Emma Wallis from BBC World Service's Culture Shock programme decided to find out how much 2kg of tomatoes cost in a market in Rome. She found that the wholesale price of a kilo of cherry tomatoes is 69 euro cents (54p). Whereas the retail price in the north is 2.9 euros, in central Italy it is 2.8 euros, while in the south its 1.85 euros. By contrast, for bigger tomatoes the wholesale price is 62 cents compared with 2.15 euros in the north, 1.85 euros in central and 1.50 euros in the south. However, the tomatoes are bought by the wholesalers for only 22 cents a kilo from the farmers.

According to Tom Standage, business editor at The Economist magazine, markets are more efficient when you have more information. "If you are in a supermarket and there's a price for tomatoes and that's the only piece of information you have, you've got no idea whether you should be protesting by not buying it," he says. He explains that for supply and demand to work at its best, consumers need to be able to compare different prices from suppliers on the spot, something the texting service and others like it should help make easier. "There are even services where you can scan a barcode in with your mobile phone and it tells you how much the internet retailers are selling a particular product for," he says.

With many analysts warning that high food costs are here to stay, Italian consumer are unlikely to be the only ones hoping to find the High Street's best prices.

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Photos courtesy of AFP, SiliconRepublic.com, and CTV.ca

Original Source: BBC News and SiliconRepublic.com

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The new Moon drew its shadow across Earth's Eastern Hemisphere earlier today, totally eclipsing the Sun along a track that crossed the Arctic, Siberia, and interior China. Thousands of eclipse chasers had stationed themselves along the path in anticipation. The Moon's shadow arced over the Earth as the lunar body passed directly between our planet and its star. In all, the path of darkness covered about 10,200km (6,300 miles). Russia saw the longest full eclipse, for two minutes, 27 seconds, at 1021 GMT - but the UK and most of Europe experienced just a partial eclipse.

"Totality" began at sunrise at 0921 GMT in Queen Maud Gulf off Victoria Island in the territory of Nunavut, Canada. The instant of greatest eclipse occurred at 1021 GMT close to the Russian city of Nadym, before totality came to an end at 1121 GMT near the Chinese city of Xi'an, in Shaanxi province.

Tourists and amateur and professional astronomers flocked to towns in the best viewing locations along the path of totality. In Novosibirsk, Siberia's cultural and scientific capital, more than 5,000 foreign tourists were expected to show up in the city. China experienced the eclipse just a week before the opening ceremony of Beijing's Olympic Games. Chinese TV was due to broadcast the eclipse live, with crowds of people gathered along the Silk Road, a fabled trading route through the country's western deserts. Eclipses were once viewed as unlucky events in China, but the country's media had rebranded the event as "the Olympic eclipse", reports said, hoping for good fortune ahead of the sporting jamboree.

The eclipse allowed astronomers a glimpse of the Sun's corona - its outer atmosphere of super-heated gases. The area is usually impossible to see because of the bright light of the Sun, but is visible during a total eclipse as the Sun's light is obscured. Total solar eclipses usually take place about once every 18 months, and always at new Moon - when the lunar body sits directly between the Sun and the Earth. However, they do not happen every new Moon. The lunar orbit is slightly tilted to that of our planet and therefore the Moon's shadow often misses the Earth.

The world's next total eclipse of the Sun comes less than a year from now, on July 22, 2009. It will begin at sunrise in India, cross parts of Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, and thickly inhabited areas of China, and will end at sunset over the South Pacific. The next total solar eclipse for North America comes on August 21, 2017. The path of totality will sweep from Oregon to South Carolina.

The Moon's shadow has two parts: an umbra and a penumbra. The umbra is the "inner" part of the Moon's shadow, and people inside this zone will witness the full glory of the eclipse. The penumbra is the Moon's faint "outer" shadow. It will only give surface viewers a partial eclipse.

In London, where the Moon's disc took its biggest bite out of the Sun at 1016 BST (0916 GMT), a maximum of 12% of the star was blotted out. Conditions were better further north. In Lerwick in the Shetland Isles, the Moon obscured as much as 36% of the Sun.

Astronomical groups reminded the public that viewing the Sun without protective equipment - even in partial eclipse phases - could result in a retinal burn and permanent eye damage. Viewing the Sun's harsh light should only be done through proper solar telescopes or glasses, or through a pinhole projection system.

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Photos courtesy of Joe Rao, EPA/Toms Kalnins and John Sun

Original Source: BBC News (with videos) and Sky & Telescope

Related Article: Solar Eclipse Wows Airborne Skywatchers Over Arctic Circle

Image Gallery: In photos: 'Solar Eclipse Around the World'

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Boasting big plans, startup search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool") launched on Monday. The Cuil in the name is pronounced "Cool," and derives from an old Irish word for knowledge. Tom Costello, a co-founder and the CEO of the company, is from Dorgheda, Ireland. The company sold itself on having indexed more pages than Google, ranking based on context rather than on popularity, and displaying results organized by concept within a beautiful user interface. There was just one problem: when the search engine launched, it didn't work very well. Cuil's site was down intermittently throughout the day on Monday, and even when the site was up, it sometimes returned no results for common queries, or failed to produce the most relevant or up-to-date results. For example, as of Wednesday morning, searching Cuil for its own name returns nothing on the first results page that is related to the engine itself, in spite of the buckets of press it got this week.

"I've seen these sorts of things for all sorts of startups that get launched," says search-engine expert Danny Sullivan, who runs Search Engine Land. "You have issues with how it's displaying results; you have spam showing; you have a lot of duplicate results." But Cuil wasn't supposed to suffer from the common problems that all sorts of startups encounter. Its founders have impressive credentials: Anna Patterson and Russell Power both had major roles in building Google's large search index, and Tom Costello researched search architecture and relevance methods for Stanford University and IBM. On top of the company's talent, Cuil raised a reported $33 million in venture capital. "In many ways, Cuil was the exception," Sullivan says. "They were one of the few people or companies out there where you would say, 'Well, all right, I'd be dubious about anyone else, but if anyone's going to have a chance, you should have a chance.' But they didn't deliver, and I think that makes it even harder now for startups to come along."

One of Cuil's main selling points is the size of its index. Claiming to have indexed 120 billion Web pages, which it states is three times more than any other search engine, the company says, "Size matters because many people use the Internet to find information that is of interest to them, even if it's not popular." But Sullivan notes that relevance may be the most important quality of search. "When you come into the idea of size, that starts getting into the question of obscure search," he says. "The needle-in-the-haystack search sounds so very compelling--the idea that if you don't have a lot of pages, you can't search through the entire haystack. But, as Cuil has demonstrated very well, it doesn't help you to look through the entire haystack if it gets dumped on your head, and all you can see is a bunch of hay out there."

Investor Azeem Azhar, who incubated the startup search engine True Knowledge, notes that while it's useful to have a large base of knowledge, sometimes the sample that's selected matters more. "There are certain things that people expect to have, and there are certain facts that are more useful than others," he says. True Knowledge, which aims at the subset of searchers who are looking for answers to direct questions, is currently working on building up a database of relevant facts that can be used to answer questions such as, "Who was president when Barack Obama was a teenager?" The company hopes that by focusing on facts of broad interest, such as those relating to famous people and places, it will be useful to people even as it solicits responses for them by way of rounding out its database. When a user asks a question that the system can't answer, it returns, "If there are any answers, I couldn't find any"; invites the user to add to the database; and points to traditional search results.

Azhar also notes that it's hard to approach many common search problems directly. For example, while many companies are trying to improve search by parsing documents using natural-language processing or, like Cuil, analyzing them for context, True Knowledge is building a database containing facts and their relations to each other. "It's a testament to how difficult it is to improve automatic understanding of documents that we said we can build a database of 700 million facts more easily," he says.

According to numbers from comScore Inc., Google has 62 percent of the U.S. search-engine market, followed by Yahoo with 21 percent. True Knowledge, which is still in a private experimental release, has no plans to go head to head against the majors. Azhar says that the company may eventually try to sell its services to existing portals as a feature that could enrich traditional search results.

That may be the safer approach. Positioning yourself as an alternative to Google, or, for that matter, to Microsoft's and Yahoo's search engines, is highly unlikely to be a viable strategy at this point, Sullivan says. "[Startups can] really underestimate the amount of work that's involved with the incredible task of trying to compete with Google." Instead, he adds, startup search engines might do better to present themselves as supplementing what the existing major search engines offer, or as providing good results for particular types of content.

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Photos courtesy of Technology Review, ChattahBox, DailyTech

Original Source: Technology Review and Winston-Salem Journal

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China now has the world's largest net-using population, say official figures. The news comes from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), which stated that 253 million Chinese went online by the end of June of this year. The total represents a 56.2% year-on-year growth - up by 91 million from June of last year, and up 43 million from December. The figure is higher than the 223 million that the US mustered in June, according to Nielsen Online.

Net penetration in the US stands at 71% compared to 19% in China suggesting it will eventually vastly outstrip the US. The development is significant because the US has had the largest net-using population since records of how many people were online started to be kept.

"This is the first time the number has drastically surpassed the United States, becoming the world's number one," said a statement from the CNNIC, the nation's official net monitoring body.

The 2008 figure is up 56% in a year, said CNNIC. Analysts expect the total to grow by about 18% per annum and hit 490 million by 2012.

About 95% of those going online connect via high-speed links. Take up of broadband has been boosted by deals offered by China's fixed line phone firms as they fight to win customers away from mobile operators. China's mobile phone-using population stands at about 500 million people.

Despite having a greater number of people online, China's net economy still has a long way to go to match or exceed that of the US or even that of South Korea.

Breaking it down further, 214 million of those on the Internet in China accessed via a broadband Internet connection.

The percentage of the population in China on the Internet now stands at 19%, still way below that of the United States, at 71%.

Comparing this to previous numbers, just in 2006 alone, there were 137 million Internet users in China. This shows that the number of people in the Internet in the country continues to grow at a rapid pace.

People under the age of 30 in China make up 69% of the total Internet users.

Figures from Analysys International said China's net firms reported total revenues of $5.9bn in 2007. By contrast net advertising revenue alone for US firms in 2007 stood at $21.2bn.

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Photos courtesy of dBTechno, AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, and DanWei.org

Original Source: dBTechno and BBC News