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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 69 declined, 20 accepted (89 total, 22.47% accepted)

Submission + - Alternate Star Trek:TOS pilot found, and to be rel (thrfeed.com)

Raver32 writes: "Star Trek" fans know there were two pilots for the original series.

The first, "The Cage," was rejected by NBC for being "too cerebral" (ah, some things never change).

The second, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," replaced the actor who played the captain with William Shatner and was more action driven. That pilot had an alternate version which was largely lost and has never aired. Apparently, a film collector in Germany acquired the print and "recently brought it to the attention" of CBS/Paramount. CBS is now releasing this version on Blu-ray Dec. 15.

Space

Submission + - Astronomers Claim Discovery of Earth-like Planet (sciam.com)

Raver32 writes: A team of astronomers announced they have discovered the smallest and potentially most Earth-like extrasolar planet yet. Five times as massive as Earth, it orbits a relatively cool star at a distance that would provide earthly temperatures as well, signaling the possibility of liquid water. "The separation between the planet and its star is just right for having liquid water at its surface," says astronomer and team spokesperson Stephane Udry of the Observatory of Geneva in Versoix, Switzerland. "That's why we are a bit excited." But researchers do not yet know if the planet contains water, if it is truly rocky like Earth, which might make it hospitable to life as we know it, or whether it is blanketed by a thick atmosphere. "What we have," Udry says, "is the minimum mass of the planet and its separation" from its star.
Medicine

Submission + - Robot removes Calgary woman's brain tumour (canada.com)

Raver32 writes: Calgary doctors have made surgical history, using a robot to remove a brain tumour from a 21-year-old woman. Doctors used remote controls and an imaging screen, similar to a video game, to guide the two-armed robot through Paige Nickason's brain during the nine-hour surgery Monday. Surgical instruments acting as the hands of the robot -called NeuroArm — provided surgeons with the tools needed to successfully remove the egg-shaped tumour.
Space

Submission + - First Look at a New Space Terminal (space.com)

Raver32 writes: "Architectural and engineering teams have begun shaping the look and feel of New Mexico's Spaceport America, taking the wraps off new images today that showcase the curb appeal of the sprawling main terminal and hangar at the futuristic facility. Last month, a team of U.S. and British architects and designers had been recommended for award to design the primary terminal and hangar facility at Spaceport America — structures that symbolize the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport. Selected from an international field of eleven firms, the winning design is the work of URS Corporation — a large design and engineering enterprise — teamed with Foster + Partners of the United Kingdom, a group with extensive experience in crafting airport buildings. When the 100,000 square-foot (9,260 square-meter) facility is completed — the centerpiece of the world's first, purpose-built, commercial spaceport — the structures will serve as the primary operating base for Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic suborbital spaceliner, and also as the headquarters for the New Mexico Spaceport Authority."
Space

Submission + - Lunar Eclipse Next Tuesday Morning (space.com)

Raver32 writes: "Tuesday morning, Aug. 28 brings us the second total lunar eclipse of 2007. Those living in the Western Hemisphere and eastern Asia will be able to partake in at least some of this sky show. The very best viewing region for viewing this eclipse will fall across the Pacific Rim, including the West Coast of the United States and Canada, as well as Alaska, Hawaii, New Zealand and eastern Australia. All these places will be able to see the complete eclipse from start to finish. Europeans will miss out on the entire show, as the Moon will be below the horizon during their mid and late morning hours."
Privacy

Submission + - Chinese bloggers encouraged' to register real info (theglobeandmail.com)

Raver32 writes: "— Blog service providers in China are "encouraged" to register users with their real names and contact information, according to a new government document that tones down an earlier proposal banning anonymous online blogging. At least 10 major Chinese blog service providers have agreed to sign the "self-discipline pledge" issued by the Internet Society of China, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday. Online bulletin boards and blogs are the only forum for most Chinese to express opinions before a large audience in a society where all media are state-controlled. China has the world's second-biggest population of Internet users after the United States, with 137 million people online. It also has 30 million registered bloggers, and more than 100 million Chinese Internet users visit blogs regularly, according to the ISC. The group is under the Ministry of Information Industry. The guidelines, issued Tuesday and effective immediately, "encouraged" real-name registration of users, according to a copy posted on the Internet group's Web site. The information — to be filed with the companies, not posted online — should include the user's name, address, contact numbers and e-mail address, it said."
Space

Submission + - Strange Asteroids Baffle Scientists (space.com)

Raver32 writes: "Two space rocks in our solar system's outer asteroid belt might contain mineral evidence for a new class of asteroids or long eroded mini-worlds. The asteroids, (7472) Kumakiri and (10537) 1991 RY16, were found to contain basalt, a grey-black mineral that forms much of the crust on Earth and the other inner planets. Basalt has also been found in space rocks shed by Vesta, the third largest object in the asteroid belt, located between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. The presence of basalt is evidence that an object was once large enough to sustain internal heating. "We need now to observe both objects in the near-infrared range to confirm whether they have a basaltic surface," said study leader Rene Duffard of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Grenada, Spain. "If they do, we will need to try to work out where they came from and the fate of their parent objects. If they do not, we will have to come up with a new class of asteroid." The finding, made using photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), was presented at annual European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany"
Space

Submission + - Voyager Spacecraft Celebrate 30th Anniversary (space.com)

Raver32 writes: "NASA's two Voyager spacecraft are celebrating three decades of flight as they careen toward interstellar space billions of miles from the solar system's edge. Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, and Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977. Both spacecraft continue to return information from distances more than three times farther away than Pluto, where the sun's outer heliosphere meets the boundary of interstellar space. "The Voyager mission is a legend in the annals of space exploration. It opened our eyes to the scientific richness of the outer solar system, and it has pioneered the deepest exploration of the sun's domain ever conducted," said Alan Stern, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. "It's a testament to Voyager's designers, builders and operators that both spacecraft continue to deliver important findings more than 25 years after their primary mission to Jupiter and Saturn concluded." Voyager 1 currently is the farthest human-made object at a distance from the sun of about 9.7 billion miles (15.6 billion kilometers). Voyager 2 is about 7.8 billion miles (12.6 billion kilometers)."
Space

Submission + - Bigelow Aerospace Fast-Tracks Manned Spacecraft (space.com)

Raver32 writes: "Following the successful launch and deployment of two inflatable space modules, on Monday the owner and founder of Bigelow Aerospace announced plans to move ahead with the launch of its first human habitable spacecraft, the Sundancer. The decision to fast-track Sundancer was made in part to rising launch costs as well as the ability to test some systems on the ground, company CEO Robert Bigelow said in a press statement. "As anyone associated with the aerospace industry is aware, global launch costs have been rising rapidly over the course of the past few years," Bigelow is quoted as saying. "These price hikes have been most acute in Russia due to a number of factors including inflation, previous artificially low launch costs and the falling value of the U.S. dollar.""
Space

Submission + - Astronomers Witness Whopper Galaxy Collision (space.com)

Raver32 writes: "A major cosmic pileup involving four large galaxies could give rise to one of the largest galaxies the universe has ever known, scientists say. Each of the four galaxies is at least the size of the Milky Way, and each is home to billions of stars. The galaxies will eventually merge into a single, colossal galaxy up to 10 times as massive as our own Milky Way. "When this merger is complete, this will be one of the biggest galaxies in the universe," said study team member Kenneth Rines of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The finding, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, gives scientists their first real glimpse into a galaxy merger involving multiple big galaxies. "Most of the galaxy mergers we already knew about are like compact cars crashing together," Rines said. "What we have here is like four sand trucks smashing together, flinging sand everywhere.""
Space

Submission + - Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit (space.com)

Raver32 writes: "The new planet, spotted using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas, circles its bloated parent star every 360 days and is located about 300 light-years away, in the constellation Perseus. The red giant star is twice as massive and about 10 times larger than the sun. Its planet is about the size of Jupiter or larger and was discovered using the so-called wobble technique, in which astronomers look for slight wiggles in a star's motion created by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets. The discovery could help astronomers understand what will happen to our sun's brood of planets when it exhausts its store of hydrogen fuel and its outer envelope begins to swell. When that happens in an estimated 5 billion years, our sun will be so big that it will engulf the inner planets and most likely Earth. But long before that happens, life on our planet will have perished and its seas will have boiled away."
Space

Submission + - X Prize Cup Announces Lunar Lander Competitors (space.com)

Raver32 writes: "The X Prize Foundation announced Thursday the name of eight of the nine competitors in this year's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge to be held this October during the Wirefly X Prize Cup and Holloman Air and Space Expo. The number of teams competing for the $2 million purse increased from four teams to nine. Sponsored by NASA's Centennial Challenges Program, the event is designed to accelerate commercial development of technology that can ferry cargo and humans between the Moon's surface and lunar orbit. "We are excited by the number of teams competing this year and their overall level of sophistication," Peter H. Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation said in a statement. "We fully expect to award the $2 million purse this year in what will prove to be an exhilarating showdown between a number of very qualified teams." The 2007 Wirefly X PRIZE Cup and Holloman Air and Space Expo will be held October 27-28 at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, NM."
Mars

Submission + - Scientist Calls Mars a Terraforming Target (space.com)

Raver32 writes: "Mars will be transformed into a shirt-sleeve, habitable world for humanity before century's end, made livable by thawing out the coldish climes of the red planet and altering its now carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. How best to carry out a fast-paced, decade by decade planetary facelift of Mars — a technique called "terraforming" — has been outlined by Lowell Wood, a noted physicist and recent retiree of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a long-time Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution. Lowell presented his eye-opening Mars manifesto at Flight School, held here June 20-22 at the Aspen Institute, laying out a scientific plan to "experiment on a planet we're not living on.""
The Internet

Submission + - EU Examines Search Engines and Privacy Issues (pcworld.com)

Raver32 writes: "European data protection officials are expanding their examination of the impact search engines have on privacy, after initially targeting Google Inc. last month, European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx said in an interview late Wednesday. A panel of European data protection officials called the Article 29 Working Group decided Wednesday to request information from Google's rivals amid concerns that search engines are holding onto information about the people who use them for too long, Hustinx said. Hustinx, a senior member of the working group, declined to name the companies. However, they are believed to include Yahoo Inc., Lycos Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Live.com."
Microsoft

Submission + - MS to change desktop search after Google complaint (theglobeandmail.com)

Raver32 writes: "Microsoft Corp. will make changes to the program that helps Windows Vista users search their hard drives, in response to antitrust complaints from Google Inc., according to a U.S. Justice Department report issued late Tuesday. Google filed a 49-page document with the Justice Department in April claiming Vista's desktop search tool slowed down competing programs, including Google's own free offering, and that it's difficult for users to figure out how to turn off the Microsoft program. Microsoft initially dismissed the allegations, saying regulators had reviewed the program before Vista launched. However, Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said in an interview last week that the company was willing to make changes if necessary."

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