Mercury on Jan. 14 sent back pictures of a geological formation never seen before in the solar system

Messenger's Pictures From Mercury Surprise Scientists
The Messenger spacecraft that sped past Mercury on Jan. 14 sent back pictures of a geological formation never seen before in the solar system: a central depression with more than 100 narrow troughs radiating out from it.

Called "The Spider" by scientists analyzing the trove of images and data coming back from Messenger, the puzzling feature is the kind of surprise that researchers live for.

"Messenger has sent back data near perfectly, and some of it confirms earlier understandings, and some of it tells us something brand-new," said principal investigator Sean C. Solomon. "The Spider is definitely in the category of something we never imagined we'd find."

Scientists were also surprised by evidence of ancient volcanoes on many parts of the planet's surface and how different it looks compared with the moon, which is about the same size. Unlike the moon, Mercury has huge cliffs, as well as formations snaking hundreds of miles that indicate patterns of fault activity from Mercury's earliest days, more than 4 billion years ago.

"It was not the planet we expected," said Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "It's a very dynamic planet with an awful lot going on."

Messenger passed by Mercury after a journey of more than 2 billion miles. It will swing by the planet twice more before settling into orbit around it in 2011.

Mercury is among the least understood planets because its proximity to the sun makes it hard to visit and to explore. Among the mysteries researchers hope to unravel is where and how Mercury was formed and the nature of the magnetic fields around it. Earth is the only other planet with such an active magnetosphere.

Solomon said clues into whether Mercury once orbited much farther from the sun, as theorized by many scientists, may emerge as the craft begins to orbit and conducts a chemical analysis of the surface.

Among the early findings is that a crater called Caloris is larger than researchers thought after the Mariner 10 spacecraft sent back the first images of the planet 33 years ago. Scientists now believe it is more than 950 miles wide. The Caloris basin, created by a long-ago asteroid strike, is home to "The Spider."

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Surprise Slosh! Mercury's Core is Liquid
Kitchen physics dictates that a raw egg will spin slower than a hard-boiled one. Scientists using this same logic have discovered the planet Mercury has a fluid core of molten iron.

The finding, detailed in the May 4 issue of the journal Science, solves a 30-year-old mystery but raises another.

To figure out whether Mercury's core was liquid or solid, a team of scientists led by Jean-Luc Margot at Cornell University measured small twists in the planet's rotation. They used a new technique that involved bouncing a radio signal sent from a ground telescope in California off the planet and then catching it again in West Virginia.

After 5 years and 21 such observations, the team realized their values were twice as large as what would be expected if Mercury's core was solid.

"The variations in Mercury's spin rate that we measured are best explained by a core that is at least partially molten," Margot said. "We have a 95 percent confidence level in this conclusion."

A polluted core

Mercury, named after the Roman gods' fleet-footed messenger, is the closest planet to our Sun. One year there is equal to 88 Earth-days. Mercury is thought to consist of a thin silicate mantle encasing an iron core. Because it is so small-its mass is only 5 percent of Earth's-scientists thought it cooled rapidly early in its formation, essentially freezing any liquid core it had into a solid.

But 30 years ago, a flyby of the planet by the Mariner 10 spacecraft detected a weak magnetic field, about 1 percent as strong as Earth's, within the planet. Magnetic fields are generally associated with a dynamic molten core.

Margot and his team speculate that sulfur or some other light element got mixed with Mercury's iron core when the planet was forming and lowered its melting temperature.

"If you had such a lighter element polluting the iron, it could explain why the core has remained fluid up to the present time," Margot told SPACE.com.

"The surprise," Margot added, "is that you don't expect sulfur to condense out at the distance of Mercury from the Sun."

Radial mixing

That unexpected result fails to jibe with standard planet formation theory. That theory asserts that planets form out of the swirling disks of gas and dust that swaddle newborn stars. Within this "protoplanetary" disk, elements condense and solidify out at different distances from the star depending on their densities.

Heavy elements with high melting points, such as iron, nickel and silicon, condensed into solids closer to the star. Out of these solids, planet embryos form. These "planetesimals" sometimes become full-fledged planets. This is why the inner planets in our solar system-Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars-are formed mostly of these heavy elements. Lighter elements such as sulfur can only solidify farther out from the star, where it is cooler.

The new findings suggests there was some "radial mixing" happening early in the solar system's history, with lighter elements at the fringes of the solar system being transported inward, possibly by planetesimals interacting gravitationally with each other.

"Since you don't expect sulfur to condense in solid form there when [Mercury] formed, it must have been brought in from farther out in the solar system," Margot said.

The mysteries still surrounding Mercury's core might be solved when NASA's Messenger spacecraft makes its first flyby of the planet in 2008.

"It is our hope that Messenger will address the remaining questions that we cannot address from the ground," Margot said.

The researchers made their measurements using the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 70-meter antenna at Goldstone, California, and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. They also sent signals from Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and received them back at Goldstone.

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NASA Spots Mysterious 'Spider' on Mercury

whole new side of Mercury has been revealed in pictures taken by NASA's MESSENGER probe, which flew by the tiny planet two weeks ago in the first mission to Mercury in more than three decades.

MESSENGER skimmed only 124 miles (200 kilometers) over Mercury's surface on Jan. 14, in the first of three passes it will make before settling into orbit March 18, 2011.

The photos, released today, include one of a feature the scientists informally call "the spider," which appears to be an impact crater surrounded by more than 50 cracks in the surface radiating from its center.

Scientists are perplexed by this structure, which is unlike anything observed elsewhere in the solar system.

Messenger's Pictures From Mercury Surprise Scientists
The Messenger spacecraft that sped past Mercury on Jan. 14 sent back pictures of a geological formation never seen before in the solar system: a central depression with more than 100 narrow troughs radiating out from it.

Called "The Spider" by scientists analyzing the trove of images and data coming back from Messenger, the puzzling feature is the kind of surprise that researchers live for.

"Messenger has sent back data near perfectly, and some of it confirms earlier understandings, and some of it tells us something brand-new," said principal investigator Sean C. Solomon. "The Spider is definitely in the category of something we never imagined we'd find."

Scientists were also surprised by evidence of ancient volcanoes on many parts of the planet's surface and how different it looks compared with the moon, which is about the same size. Unlike the moon, Mercury has huge cliffs, as well as formations snaking hundreds of miles that indicate patterns of fault activity from Mercury's earliest days, more than 4 billion years ago.

"It was not the planet we expected," said Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "It's a very dynamic planet with an awful lot going on."

Messenger passed by Mercury after a journey of more than 2 billion miles. It will swing by the planet twice more before settling into orbit around it in 2011.

Mercury is among the least understood planets because its proximity to the sun makes it hard to visit and to explore. Among the mysteries researchers hope to unravel is where and how Mercury was formed and the nature of the magnetic fields around it. Earth is the only other planet with such an active magnetosphere.

Solomon said clues into whether Mercury once orbited much farther from the sun, as theorized by many scientists, may emerge as the craft begins to orbit and conducts a chemical analysis of the surface.

Among the early findings is that a crater called Caloris is larger than researchers thought after the Mariner 10 spacecraft sent back the first images of the planet 33 years ago. Scientists now believe it is more than 950 miles wide. The Caloris basin, created by a long-ago asteroid strike, is home to "The Spider."

more..
Surprise Slosh! Mercury's Core is Liquid
Kitchen physics dictates that a raw egg will spin slower than a hard-boiled one. Scientists using this same logic have discovered the planet Mercury has a fluid core of molten iron.

The finding, detailed in the May 4 issue of the journal Science, solves a 30-year-old mystery but raises another.

To figure out whether Mercury's core was liquid or solid, a team of scientists led by Jean-Luc Margot at Cornell University measured small twists in the planet's rotation. They used a new technique that involved bouncing a radio signal sent from a ground telescope in California off the planet and then catching it again in West Virginia.

After 5 years and 21 such observations, the team realized their values were twice as large as what would be expected if Mercury's core was solid.

"The variations in Mercury's spin rate that we measured are best explained by a core that is at least partially molten," Margot said. "We have a 95 percent confidence level in this conclusion."

A polluted core

Mercury, named after the Roman gods' fleet-footed messenger, is the closest planet to our Sun. One year there is equal to 88 Earth-days. Mercury is thought to consist of a thin silicate mantle encasing an iron core. Because it is so small-its mass is only 5 percent of Earth's-scientists thought it cooled rapidly early in its formation, essentially freezing any liquid core it had into a solid.

But 30 years ago, a flyby of the planet by the Mariner 10 spacecraft detected a weak magnetic field, about 1 percent as strong as Earth's, within the planet. Magnetic fields are generally associated with a dynamic molten core.

Margot and his team speculate that sulfur or some other light element got mixed with Mercury's iron core when the planet was forming and lowered its melting temperature.

"If you had such a lighter element polluting the iron, it could explain why the core has remained fluid up to the present time," Margot told SPACE.com.

"The surprise," Margot added, "is that you don't expect sulfur to condense out at the distance of Mercury from the Sun."

Radial mixing

That unexpected result fails to jibe with standard planet formation theory. That theory asserts that planets form out of the swirling disks of gas and dust that swaddle newborn stars. Within this "protoplanetary" disk, elements condense and solidify out at different distances from the star depending on their densities.

Heavy elements with high melting points, such as iron, nickel and silicon, condensed into solids closer to the star. Out of these solids, planet embryos form. These "planetesimals" sometimes become full-fledged planets. This is why the inner planets in our solar system-Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars-are formed mostly of these heavy elements. Lighter elements such as sulfur can only solidify farther out from the star, where it is cooler.

The new findings suggests there was some "radial mixing" happening early in the solar system's history, with lighter elements at the fringes of the solar system being transported inward, possibly by planetesimals interacting gravitationally with each other.

"Since you don't expect sulfur to condense in solid form there when [Mercury] formed, it must have been brought in from farther out in the solar system," Margot said.

The mysteries still surrounding Mercury's core might be solved when NASA's Messenger spacecraft makes its first flyby of the planet in 2008.

"It is our hope that Messenger will address the remaining questions that we cannot address from the ground," Margot said.

The researchers made their measurements using the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 70-meter antenna at Goldstone, California, and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. They also sent signals from Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and received them back at Goldstone.

Apple's iPhone Elixir: Cut Prices

Apple (AAPL - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) CEO Steve Jobs will need to work some magic to hit his sales target of 10 million iPhones this year.

Since the iPhone's launch in June, Apple has sold about 4 million devices, including 2.3 million during the important holiday season.

To reach the 10 million mark, it needs to average 2.5 million phones in sales a quarter over the next four quarters -- or 200,000 more than what it sold during the big holiday season.

"The number is a challenge, but unless the global economy slows down profoundly, Apple will make it happen," says Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research
Some analysts say Apple will have to cut deals with more phone carriers outside the U.S., upgrade the iPhone and most importantly, drop the price in order to reach its ambitious sales target.

Apple's sales efforts have been stymied by a sour economy that could put these pricey $400 phones beyond the reach of some consumers. There's also the problem of some 1.7 million "missing" phones -- the difference between phones that were sold by Apple and those that were activated by AT&T (T - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), the telecom carrier with exclusive rights to the iPhone.

Activiation of the phones is crucial to Apple's bottom line because it gets a 10 percent of the cut in monthly fees charged by AT&T.

Apple investors are understandably worried about the situation, though iPhone sales represent a fraction of the company's revenue. Total revenue recognized during the quarter from sales of iPhones, iPhone accessories and payments from carriers was $241 million compared to $1.75 billion in overall revenue.

Apple's stock has fallen nearly 35% since it closed at a 52-week high of $199.83 less than a month ago. Apple shares closed up $1.53, or 1.2%, to $131.54 Tuesday.

Jobs unveiled the iPhone at the Macworld conference last January to much fanfare. Apple stock soared nearly 132% last year, mostly on strong interest in the iPhone before pulling back to its current levels.

Many analysts then deemed as low the target of 10 million phones in 2008. They saw the phone as a "game-changer" with the potential to take away market share from rivals such as BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIMM - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) and Nokia (NOK - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr).

But now, some company watchers fear a softening economy and limited carrier agreements for the iPhone could take its toll on consumer interest in the device.

That's where dropping the price of the iPhone could help. Gottheil believes Apple could shave $50 off the 8-GB iPhone's current price of $399 by the middle of the year. Apple saw a 20% to 25% improvement in sales when it cut the iPhone price by $200 in September.

"There is room in the iPhone margin to cut price now," he says.

A price cut is a possibility, agrees Mike Abramsky, an analyst with RBC Capital. But what's more likely to happen, he says, is that Apple will upgrade the software in the existing iPhone and offer new models, including the much-awaited 3G version of the phone.

"I think everything, including a price cut, is on the table but Apple is pleased with the performance of the product and maybe more inclined to add capabilities such as GPS or location-based services, and Bluetooth for the same value in the iPhone, as well as offer 3G," says Abramsky. RBC Capital makes a market in Apple shares.

Despite investor fears, Apple's iPhone sales have been solid, says Abramsky. iPhone sales in the quarter ended Dec. 30 were up 107% from the previous quarter, while the smart-phone industry is estimated to have grown at 13% to 15%.


"The 4 million phones sold in the first six months is also double the initial run rate of the Motorola (MOT - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) Razr," says Abramsky. "From our perspective, the early performance of the iPhone is nothing short of remarkable relative to other historic phone launches."

Analysts and investors also have been concerned about the difference between the number of iPhones sold by Apple and the devices activations registered by AT&T.

In its fourth-quarter earnings, AT&T indicated that about 2 million iPhones had been registered for the service on the company's network while Apple sold about 3.7 million iPhones during that quarter.

The difference of 1.7 million phones could indicate some excess inventory in the channel, which could come back to bite Apple's target of 10 million for the year and stoke fears of lower-than-anticipated demand for the phones.

Apple has not commented about the unlocked phones yet, and the company did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Apple could have sold about 400,000 phones in Europe during the quarter, and about 20% have been sold unlocked, estimates Keith Bachman, an analyst with BMO Capital. In the U.S., about 25% of the phones sold could be unlocked.

The rest are likely to still be in inventory, while some will be returned and a small percentage are being used for nonphone features, such as iPod touches, until the owners can switch their wireless contracts to AT&T, says Gottheil.

The high percentage of unlocked iPhones should not deter investors, says Abramsky. "It's a leading indicator of the demand," he says.

As Apple signs up contracts with carriers in countries such as Canada, Italy, Spain, and Australia, Apple could bring more users into the fold, he says.

Meanwhile, U.K. mobile company O2 is doing its part to make the iPhone more attractive to its customers, in what some see as an attempt to revive flagging sales. The company said that while the cost of the iPhone remains unchanged, it will give three times as many free calls and text messages on its £35 ($69)-a-month service plan for iPhone customers.

Where Are Those Million iPhones? Everywhere.

Our readers think they have found the million unaccounted-for iPhones discussed in an earlier post — phones that were bought but then never activated on the networks of the wireless carriers that are Apple’s partners. They are all around the world, in many countries where Apple has not yet worked out deals with local carriers, indicating that these phones have been “unlocked.” A sample of some of the comments (with a little editing for punctuation):
Australia: “I personally know of one person who brought eight of these phones back from the U.S. to be activated here in Australia for family members.”
India: “I was in India a few weeks ago and I saw the iPhone being sold in almost every store.”
Brazil: “I live in Brazil and just about all my friends here, the who’s who of Brazil, have iPhones, all unlocked and adapted to our local carriers. ”
Bolivia: “Truth in my small third world country city in Bolivia, South America you can find iPhones available signs all over the cellular dealers.”
Colombia: “The iPhone is for sale in Colombia quite cheaply. That is in spite of it not being officially sold there by Apple.”
Elsewhere in South America (and Spain): “I live in South America, have couple friends in Mexico and some friends in Spain, most of them got iPhones for christmas. They are everywhere, gray market is huge over here, so no surprise.”
Uganda: “I am yet to get mine but I know two friends who already own iPhones here in Uganda, East Africa.”
Russia: “I live in St. Petersburg, Russia, and you can get an unlocked phone for $1,000. A simple phone call to any one of about 20 different dealers and there you go.”
China: “I live and work in China. iPhones modified to work on the Chinese cell networks are very easy to find at all the electronics markets.”
Kuwait: “Back home in Kuwait cellphones are all the rage. Having the newest model is a status symbol.”
Canada: “Here in Canada, iPhones are everywhere. A carrier plan has not been reached with Apple yet so all of them are unlocked.”
Thailand: “I am currently in Bangkok on vacation and in one mall alone I must have seen hundreds of unlocked iPhones for sale. On a quick calculation the local vendors are making about $50-100 per unit.”
New Zealand: “I work at a university in New Zealand and have noticed several Asian students using unlocked iPhones (no, they’re not iPod Touches), perhaps the gray market is the explanation.”
The Philippines: “Here in the Philippines, unlocked iPhones are easily available in most cellphone shops in the malls. No big deal. And it must be this way in a lot of other countries as well.”
It sure looks like it.

Judge extends Microsoft monitoring for antitrust oversight

Microsoft Corp., facing new antitrust investigations in Europe, will remain subject to oversight by a federal judge in the U.S. to ensure it is competing fairly.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington yesterday extended an antitrust decree governing the conduct of the world's largest software maker until November 2009. The judge agreed with a group of states that said Microsoft withheld important information on communications links from its competitors.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly extended portions of the landmark antitrust consent decree between Microsoft Corp. and state and federal antitrust regulators for another two years, until Nov. 12, 2009.

Eleven states, lead by New York and California, had asked that the monitoring of Microsoft's business practices continue for five years, until late 2012. Microsoft, on the other hand, had repeatedly argued that no further oversight was necessary.

Kollar-Kotelly explained the reasoning behind the extension in a six-page summary of her 78-page opinion, which she issued late Tuesday from her District of Columbia court. "The provisions of the final
judgments have not yet had the chance to operate together as the comprehensive remedy the court and the parties envisioned when the final judgments were entered," she said.

She put much of the blame on the failure of the 2002 settlement to live up to its billing on Microsoft's shoulders, saying its foot-dragging was largely responsible. "Although the technical documentation project is complex and novel, it is clear, at least to the court, that Microsoft is culpable for this inexcusable delay. To be sure, the delay has developed in stages, and at each step Microsoft commendably has been willing to work with the plaintiffs and the TC to address issues and identify a means of resolving them.

"Nevertheless, practically speaking, Microsoft has never complied with § III.E," Kollar-Kotelly continued. "While Microsoft eventually proposed a plan that now appears to be producing the type of quality technical documentation required by § III.E, it did so in the face of mounting pressure from all plaintiffs and the court. In addition, there is no reason why the type of documentation finally being created could not have been created from the outset if the necessary resources had been devoted to the project.

The technical documentation that Kollar-Kotelly referred to was one of the major requirements of the consent decree, and forced Microsoft to document numerous Windows protocols so that rivals could create software that would work smoothly with Microsoft-powered servers. Those provisions -- in the section dubbed § III.E -- had already been extended for an additional two years, with Microsoft's consent, but the states claimed that the settlement was interconnected, and urged the judge to extend all the decree's rules if some had been.

"The court concludes that the § III.E delay, with its ramifications for the final judgments' overall implementation, is entirely incongruous with the original expectations of the parties and the court, and thus constitutes a 'significant change in circumstances' that warrants modification," reasoned Kollar-Kotelly.

Microsoft countered with a statement after the judge issued her ruling. "We will continue to comply fully with the consent decree," said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, in an e-mailed statement. "We are gratified that the court recognized our extensive efforts to work cooperatively with the large number of government agencies involved. We built Windows Vista in compliance with these rules, and we will continue to adhere to the decree's requirements."

The tussle over extending oversight had been relatively brief, but involved. In late August, the so-called California group of California, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, said Microsoft should be watched until 2012 because "Microsoft's market power remains undiminished and that key provisions of the final judgment have had little or no competitively significant impact."

In a series of briefs filed during November, the U.S. Department of Justice urged Kollar-Kotelly to reject the states' arguments, but other states -- the "New York group" -- joined in calling for more monitoring after earlier seeming to agree with the DoJ.

At one point, the states said that oversight should be continued because without it, Microsoft might use the dominance of its Internet Explorer browser to stymie competition from Web-based applications and services. A similar line of reasoning was recently used by Opera Software ASA, the Norwegian browser developer, in its formal complaint to the European Union. The EU's antitrust agency announced earlier this month that it had launched a formal investigation of Opera's charges.

But while Kollar-Kotelly noted that the extension should not be "viewed as a sanction against Microsoft," she also said that Tuesday's ruling may not be the final word. "Ultimately, the court's decision not to extend the final judgments beyond Nov.12, 2009, now does not foreclose the possibility of doing so in the future," she wrote in the executive summary.

"The door likewise remains open for the court to reassess the need for continued oversight as the expiration of the final judgments in November 2009 approaches."

String Theory Gets a Boost-Based On Neutral Hydrogen Absorption

This models a small region of the observable universe right after strings have formed, at around 10^{-36} sec, when the distances between them were still only a few times their thickness. Credit: Mark Hindmarsh
Ancient light absorbed by neutral hydrogen atoms could be used to test certain predictions of string theory, say cosmologists at the University of Illinois. Making the measurements, however, would require a gigantic array of radio telescopes to be built on Earth, in space or on the moon.
String theory -- a theory whose fundamental building blocks are tiny one-dimensional filaments called strings -- is the leading contender for a "theory of everything." Such a theory would unify all four fundamental forces of nature (the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity). But finding ways to test string theory has been difficult.

Now, cosmologists at the U. of I. say absorption features in the 21-centimeter spectrum of neutral hydrogen atoms could be used for such a test.

"High-redshift, 21-centimeter observations provide a rare observational window in which to test string theory, constrain its parameters and show whether or not it makes sense to embed a type of inflation -- called brane inflation -- into string theory," said Benjamin Wandelt, a professor of physics and of astronomy at the U. of I.

Among the scientific theories that excite a great deal of controversy are those theories that deal with strings. And the idea of cosmic strings gets as much play as any in scientific circles.
Cosmic strings are present in many high-energy physics theories. They are thought to be spaghetti-like structures, each mile weighing perhaps as much as our entire planet. Despite the weight, widths are thought to be significantly smaller than an atom. However, their existence has yet to be detected. Now, though, a team of cosmologists has discovered some hints that cosmic strings exist.
“At the moment,” Martin Kunz, a scientist at the University of Geneva when the paper was written, tells PhysOrg.com, “what we have found slightly prefers, or at least does not disfavor, cosmic strings.” Kunz is part of a team led by Mark Hindmarsh of the University of Sussex in Brighton, U.K., using measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation to search for evidence of cosmic strings. This team, which includes Neil Bevis at Imperial College in London and Jon Urrestilla at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, USA, have reported their findings in Physical Review Letters: “Fitting Cosmic Microwave Background Data with Cosmic Strings and Inflation.”
As these strings move around,” Kunz explains, “they will cause perturbations, attracting matter behind them. These perturbations become visible in the comic microwave background radiation. If there are cosmic strings, they induce extra perturbations that could be indirectly detected.”

In order to determine whether cosmic strings might be possible, Kunz and his peers factored a variety of parameters into a supercomputer and created different models. “We made new simulations of traces of cosmic strings,” Kunz says. “We calculated perturbations from standard inflation and calculated them from cosmic strings. We did model comparisons.”

The result was that, after predictions were compared to cosmic microwave data from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, it appeared that theories including cosmic strings offer the best explanation for the pattern of microwave radiation present in the universe.

Kunz cautions that cosmic strings are far from an absolute. “We need more data,” he insists. “While this result slightly favors cosmic strings, it isn’t conclusive.” Kunz says that better data may come from the Planck Satellite mission, which is due for launch this year by the European Space Agency.

“If we could detect strings,” Kunz points out, “it would tell us a lot about particle physics, and help us understand more about the fundamental structure of physics at very high energies, much higher than what can be probed in particle accelerators. Finding strings would be very helpful in areas of fundamental theory.”

Until more data is gathered, and more work done in the field, cosmic strings are likely to remain a subject of scientific debate. But this latest work on cosmic strings is encouraging for those who subscribe to string theory – a theory that could possibly tie quantum physics and gravity together, as well as provide a fundamental understanding of high-energy and condensed matter physics.

“What this does is show that cosmic strings could account for what we can detect in the universe,” Kunz says. “It doesn’t prove anything, and we do need more data. But it does show us that cosmic strings are worth looking at again. We haven’t detected them yet, but it’s something to watch for.”


More Detail

Space weather science rues cuts

The field of science dedicated to understanding "space weather" - which can pose hazards to satellites and aircraft - may be wiped out in the UK.

That is the verdict of experts responding to UK physics and astronomy cuts made as administrators seek to plug an £80m hole in their finances.

The UK is recognised as a world leader in solar-terrestrial physics (STP).

The science is crucial for protecting our communications networks against powerful outbursts from the Sun.

The organisation MIST (Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Solar-Terrestrial) which represents the STP community in the UK, has issued a damning statement in which it says the cuts will prove catastrophic to this area of research.

Andrew Kavanagh, a space scientist at Lancaster University and member of the MIST council, said the STFC was "essentially scrapping an entire field of research in the UK".

Flares and coronal mass ejections - large clouds of ionised gas thrown off the Sun - along with their associated shock waves are among the solar phenomena which exert an important influence on the space environment.

They compress the Earth's protective magnetic "bubble" and trigger geomagnetic storms. The energetic particles from these solar outbursts can damage the electronics on satellites and cause communications black-outs in the polar regions.

Space weather also has implications for planes crossing the Arctic on trans-polar flights. The Earth's magnetic field funnels energetic particles into the polar regions, exposing passengers and air crews to higher radiation levels there.

Tracking the Sun's changing activity is vital for managing radiation doses and for protecting aircraft electronics. It is also of economic importance, since it costs airlines to deviate from flight paths.

Spending crisis

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which looks after UK astronomy, has removed ground-based solar-terrestrial facilities from its future programmes.

The STFC argues it will continue to fund solar-terrestrial physics satellites through its subscriptions to the European Space Agency (Esa). But researchers point out that they require observations from both ground-based and space-based instruments to get the full picture.

Sources said they were not aware of any firm plans for forthcoming missions which fell into this category. An existing constellation of Esa satellites designed to study space weather, called Cluster, has been in space for eight years and its future funding is uncertain.

The STFC's delivery plan implies cuts to the funding of STP facilities and research at the universities of Lancaster, Leicester, Southampton, Aberystwyth, at University College London and at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot. The UK remains committed by an international agreement to the Eiscat project which operates radar facilities in Norway. However, resources to exploit these facilities will be withdrawn.

The STFC's problems have emerged out of the government's latest spending round which has left the council short of £80m in the three-year budget plan to 2011. Scientists say the problem has been compounded by the council's decision to claw back a further £40m for unspecified developments.

To manage its way out of this crisis, the STFC has announced its intention to close certain programmes and cut research grants. Science societies and union officials have warned the damage to UK physics and astronomy will be incalculable and will lead to hundreds of job losses.

'World-class research'

Stan Cowley, professor of solar planetary physics at the University of Leicester, commented: "This decision appears perverse in view of the existing and future potential [of this] high-impact world class research."

Solar-terrestrial physics is also vital for understanding climate change on Earth, particularly in placing firm limits on the effect of solar variations compared to the contribution made by greenhouse gases produced by human activities. Space weather also affects many other aspects of modern life, from oil drilling operations to power grids.

But prominent researchers from the STP community question why, when the government has invested considerable amounts of money into research and innovation, an applications-based science such as solar-terrestrial physics has been one of the first to be cut.

In its statement, MIST also expressed concern over what it described as "a lack of transparency in recent decision-making" within STFC.

STP researchers have attacked the lack of availability of records for minuted meetings concerning the decisions leading up to the funding cuts. With many projects competing for financial support, scientists point out that the process must be seen to be open and fair.

In evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Innovation, Universities and Skills, Professor Keith Mason, chief executive of the STFC, defended his organisation's record on consultation.

He added: "The period of time we are talking about is essentially a period where all the research councils are making bids to DIUS [Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills] for funding and one of the reasons for so-called secrecy - or at least keeping this under wraps - is that it was a negotiating situation."

The STFC was formed as a new research council on 1 April 2007 through a merger of the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC) and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PParc).

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The IHY-Africa Space Weather Science and Education Workshop will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia during Nov 12-16, 2007. The meeting will follow the 2nd Africa SCINDA Workshop on Sunday 11th November. Both meetings will be held at the Ghion Hotel. The Workshop is under the auspices of IHY, in cooperation and collaboration with several other international and African national programs, including CAWSES, eGY, AMMA, and AFREF. The workshop is sponsored by several US and International Agencies.

Workshop Objectives: The purpose of the workshop is to facilitate scientific interaction and promote space science in Africa, with a strong educational focus. The space science community is currently exploring ways to increase the observational infrastructure in the African sector, and to encourage scientists in Sub-Saharan Africa to become involved in the science objectives, and to host instrumentation at their institutions. The new observational infrastructure will facilitate the study of space weather, spark interest in space science education and research, and encourage the next generation to become interested in the space sciences.

The workshop will provide an ideal opportunity to develop strong interactions with scientists in Africa. A strong educational focus is planned with a break-out group

Sessions will include:

I. Ionospheric Irregularities and Scintillations


II. Total Electron Content


III. Electrodynamics and the Plasmasphere


IV.Satellite and Ground-based Data


V. Panel Discussion

Helio founder and CEO Sky Dayton has announced he's stepping down at the cell phone provider

Sky Dayton Pulls an Earthlink, Steps Down as Helio CEO

Helio founder and CEO Sky Dayton (pictured right) has announced he's stepping down at the cell phone provider. The serial entrepreneur and Earthlink founder isn't going far though -- Dayton is moving into the role of company chairman. Meanwhile, Wonhee Sull, Helio's former president and chief operating officer, is slated to take the reins as CEO.

Although it might set off alarms for those following the MVNO provider, Dayton is no stranger to switching hats. He made the exact same move at Earthlink two years into his role as CEO, turning over the day-to-day operations to Charles Betty right as the ISP hit its stride.

So, does this mean that Helio and its MVNO business model are finally quickening pace?

"Helio has reached a point in its development where I feel the timing is right for this change," Dayton said of the move. "As we have for the past three years, [Sull and I] will continue to define Helio's direction and future."

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Helio: Earthlink-who? We Boost SK Telecom Now

Trying to predict how Earthlink's downturn will effect its investment in mobile virtual network operator Helio is almost like reading tea leaves. Many were convinced that Helio's layoffs were a byproduct of Earthlink's lackluster Q2 performance were related, but then that turned out to be false.

But we knew that someday Earthlink was going to drop the axe. Our suspicions were confirmed last week when Earthlink's dismal Q3 report included the following: "EarthLink will not be required to participate in future funding rounds [in Helio], and will retain a meaningful ownership stake. The definitive amended joint venture agreements are expected to be finalized in the near future."

SK Telecom, Earthlink's partner in the Helio venture, has since stepped up to the plate and committed up to $270 million, but we were still skeptical of the state of the union. We finally got the chance to chat with our Helio contact today, and here's the scoop from their end:

We directly benefit from SK Telecom's pipeline of innovation, all in addition to their financial backing. SK Telecom's earlier announcement of additional funding for Helio is a ringing endorsement of our business showing they see our continued growth as a positive sign and our tremendous potential as we continue to scale. While EarthLink remains an enthusiastic investor, Helio is in a position to remain well funded through this growth phase with the full backing of SK Telecom.

Or put simply -- SK Telecom is Helio's new sugar daddy. The expensive nature of the MVNO business model has already thinned a lot of Helio's competition, so this doesn't come as much of a surprise. However, we're curious to see how long SK Telecom can bring home the bacon on this pricey venture without Earthlink's financial support.

AT&T, Verizon not affected by slow economy

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- For AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., business is pretty good and a slowing U.S. economy has not given executives any ulcers, at least not yet.
How would an anxious investor know? Well, the chief executives of both companies felt free to play hooky during conference calls for fourth-quarter results with Wall Street analysts. They left that task to the finance chiefs.
You can be sure that Randall Stephenson, in charge of AT&T (T:AT&T Inc



VZ, , ) boss Ivan Seidenberg would have been on the calls if the outlook for 2008 had begun to darken.
Instead, Seidenberg devoted a portion of Monday morning to a presentation to the company's employees. Stephenson, for his part, hung out with the global jet set last week in Davos, Switzerland, while his underlings handled investors and analysts.
Ironically, the talk in Davos involved worries about a U.S. economic slowdown, the effects of which would be felt worldwide. That's not the focus of AT&T or Verizon: They expect to do just fine, barring a sudden and dramatic economic dip.
There's been a lot of speculation about the potential impact of an economic slowdown," Verizon Chief Financial Officer Doreen Toben told analysts Monday after the company posted fourth-quarter earnings. "I would say that we have not seen a change in sales expectations through January." Read more on Verizon's results.
AT&T's finance chief, Richard Lindner, made the same point last Thursday during the company's call with analysts. See full story.
A necessary service
Concerns about the slowing economy took center stage in early January after Stephenson said at an investor conference that AT&T had disconnected more nonpaying customers. Although he also described the number of disconnections as immaterial, his words caused the biggest one-day drop in AT&T shares in five years.
So far in 2008, AT&T stock is down 13%, while Verizon is more than 14% lower.
Phone-industry executives have been in damage control ever since. While they downplay the threat from a slowdown, they are careful to hedge their bets. They know a recession would be more than just a mere speed bump.
"The economy is always a risk," Lindner pointed out.
Yet Lindner also noted that phone service is a vital utility for households and businesses, and that telecommunications companies are less susceptible than others in an economic downturn. While some subscribers on the margins might cancel service or fail to pay, most would continue to be customers in good standing.
The bigger question is whether customers will scale back on the addition of new services. Would they spend less on mobile services such as Internet access, a growing source of revenue for mobile operators? Or would customers scrimp on broadband? Wireless and data services have been the engines of growth in recent years.
Early in 2008, AT&T and Verizon say they have only seen small, isolated pockets of problems. Verizon's Toben said that she's been monitoring the housing market, mortgage delinquencies and unemployment rate.
"Obviously, we are monitoring numerous metrics very closely, and at this point we don't see any material changes," she commented.
Were material threats to sales growth arise, executives say, they still have tools available to maintain profits, particularly after years of hard to work to contain costs and develop more flexible business models. Verizon President and Chief Operating Officer Dennis Strigl said that the company could cut back on overtime, limitcontractor or travel-related expenses and even trim more jobs.
The point is Verizon is "very confident about 2008 despite all of the noise we're hearing about the economy," he added.
That's not to say all is hunky-dory at AT&T and Verizon. Both companies saw sharper declines than expected in local-phone lines during the fourth quarter. In the consumer market, the number of local lines served by Verizon was down a sharp 10.6% to 24.84 million from a year earlier, while AT&T reported a 5.6% drop to 35.05 million.
Most customers who've canceled wireline service chose to go entirely with wireless, or switched to phone plans sold by cable-television operators. Few customers disconnected service because of economic pressure, according to AT&T and Verizon execs.
One concern: More customers could choose to give up either mobile service or landline service to save money if they fell economically threatened.
At this point, executives say, there's no evident trend.

Cisco rolls out new data-center switch

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Cisco Systems Inc. introduced on Monday a new data-center switch that the company says can copy all the searchable data on the Internet in less than eight minutes, or run 5 million concurrent high-quality videoconferences between New York and San Francisco.
Analysts say Cisco's (CSCO:Cisco Systems, Inc
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CSCO 24.10, -0.10, -0.4%) Nexus 7000 underscores the growing demand for more powerful computer-networking gear, especially with the rapid increase in video traffic in what has been described as Web 3.0.
"It's infrastructure for the next generation of data-center requirements," said analyst Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. "In Web 3.0, a high proportion of the content is video, high-definition video even. And many software elements are delivered as a utility."
Cisco shares were up more than 1% midday Monday.
In a bid to keep costs down, many companies are pushing for more power-efficient networks. An emerging trend, called software on demand, lets companies buy computing power the way one purchases a utility such as water or electricity.
Cisco says that the new data-center switch would be able to copy all the searchable data on the Internet in 7.5 seconds, download Wikipedia's database in 10 milliseconds or download 90,000 Netflix movies in less than 40 seconds. It also can run 5 million concurrent transcontinental videoconferences using the company's Telepresence Collaboration systems, a company spokeswoman said.
The product will be available in the second half of 2008, according to Cisco.
Analyst John Anthony of Cowen and Co. said the new data-center switch "will undoubtedly drive sales for Cisco, although the timing of the revenue contribution is uncertain."
He also pointed out that a major Cisco competitor, Juniper Networks Inc. (JNPR:JNPR
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JNPR, , ) , is expected to introduce its own high-capacity switch as well.
"Given that both Cisco and Juniper will have significant new products in the marketplace, customer evaluations will likely take longer than normal," Anthony wrote in a research note.
Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates said that Cisco also faces competition in this market from Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (BRCD:BRCD
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Gary Beach, publisher of CIO magazine, which is geared toward chief information officers, said that Cisco appears to be "making a big bet" on the new data-center switch at a time when big corporations are looking to improve the way they manage their networks.
"Large corporations are drowning in data that needs to be quickly dispersed in globally integrated enterprises," he commented. "Moreover, as budgets remain relatively flat, CIOs must continue to search for more efficient ways to manage their infrastructures."

Cisco's New Data Center Plan Looks Promising. What Will IBM Think?
Cisco Systems revealed a major offensive today in its ongoing assault on the data center market. And more than ever, it proposes a vision in which data centers are defined not by a computer architecture, be it mainframe or PC server farm, but around the network itself. That makes sense. After all, almost every kind of software is evolving from something that was written for a particular computing platform, into something that is written to be delivered as a service via the Internet. And not static services, either, but ones that can be adapted at a moment’s notice on a users’ whim—say, by adding a new widget to Facebook, or a new customer order on Salesforce.com. These days, the communication of information—not just the processing of information—is where the action is.

Specifically, the company announced the Nexus 7000, its biggest upgrade of the basic corporate network switch since Cisco started selling its now-ubiquitous Catalyst line in the mid-1990s. The box is so fast it can download all of NetFlix’ 90,000 movies in 38 seconds, or copy the entire searchable Web in 7.5 minutes, the company claims.

But the speeds and feeds of the new box are not the big change.

The real news is a new layer of software, called a fabric, that is designed to orchestrate the efforts of the various kinds of technology found within any data center. Rather than just oversee the Cisco gear that moves bits in and out of the building, this fabric can also be used to control the servers that process those bits, the storage gear that holds them, and the applications that do something useful with them.

If it works, Cisco would mark off a hugely strategic niche for itself, as a kind of king of virtualization. That's the name of a technology that's risen to prominence in recent years within pockets of the data center. VMWare, for example, has become corporate tech’s new darling thanks to software that lets companies spread work among all of their available servers, rather than have them sit idle waiting for their particular job to be called. In storage, gear from companies like Brocade plays a similar role. But until now, no company has figured out a way to easily coordinate these various pools of virtualized gear. With a Nexus, companies will be able to automatically create “domains” to describe a given combination of bandwidth, processing, storage and software, says Cisco senior vice president Jayshree Ullal.

It’s been a huge undertaking, she says. She first assigned 50 top techies to the job almost three years ago. Now there are more than 500 on the job. The company has spent nearly $250 million on the project—mostly on perfecting the ten million lines of code in the new software.

Given Cisco's proven ability to move into new markets and its vast cash reserves and market influence, I don't think Cisco will fail. But here’s my question: How will today’s kings of the Data Center feel about Cisco taking on this expanded role? Cisco assures me it's worked this out to everyone's satisfaction, and referred me to a number of its partners. Top executives at VMWare and Intel, for example, both said they welcome Cisco’s approach. “We don’t think it threatens us, because we work at a fundamentally different layer,” says Bryan Byun, VMWare's vice president of Global Partners and Solutions. Since virtualizing the entire data center depends on being able to virtualize the computers, “we think the two approaches complement each other.”

But what about IBM, the world’s leading data center supplier and Cisco’s most important partner in recent years. I didn’t interview anyone from IBM, and I’m sure its executives will profess support, publicly. But the basic philosophy of Cisco’s new mantra can’t help but be threatening at some level. Ullal refers to servers, storage gear and other kinds of products as “peripherals” to the real platform of the future: the network. I’m sure IBM, a company that’s spent decades designing and building corporate data centers, doesn’t see itself as a peripheral maker. And Ullal says that as Cisco settles into this new role, it will begin rolling out many new services to help companies take advantage of its technology. Makes sense, but it will be interesting to see if Cisco can pull it off without encroaching on the turf of IBM’s Global Services division. “Cisco is trying to subsume control of the IT space,” says Frank Dzubeck, president of consultancy Communictions Network Architects. “They’ve got to be stepping on [some of its partners’] toes. It’s a question of how much it hurts before they start turning to other [partners].”

No doubt, Cisco won't enjoy any clear sailing. By the time the Nexus 7000 finally ships--it's not due out for another six months--it will face increased competition. Microsoft is pushing ahead with new virtualization plans. Brocade recently introduced a box called the DCF, for Data Center Fabric. And industry insiders expect Juniper Networks to announce a new switch for corporations at a Jan. 29 press event. Indeed, Juniper CEO Scott Kriens implies that Cisco made its announcement today in part to steal Juniper’s thunder. "I'm sure they knew we were having our little party in New York [tomorrow]."

Nikon Announces D60 D-SLR

(24hoursnews)Nikon is countering Canon's announcement of the Rebel XSi with the new D60 consumer D-SLR.

NEW NIKON D60 DIGITAL SLR CAMERA MAKES CAPTURING BEAUTIFUL PICTURES FUN AND EASY
Nikon, Inc., today introduced the new D60 digital SLR camera, which provides consumers with stunning picture quality and versatility in an easy-to-use, compact camera design. The D60 joins Nikon’s award-winning line of D-series digital SLR cameras and shares a form factor similar to the D40 – Nikon’s smallest D-SLR camera ever. With 10.2 effective megapixels and a wealth of innovative and user-friendly features, the D60 enables both photo enthusiasts and those new to digital SLR photography to capture incredible images like never beforethe highly successful D40 and D40x, the D60, which offers some new features along with old favorites. Also announced today were three new lenses: the wide-angle PC-E Nikkor 24mm F/3.5D ED, the AF-S DS Nikkor 16-85mm, and the AF-S Touting it as the new entry-level D-SLR, Nikon has enhanced the resolution from the D40 with a 10.2 megapixel sensor (up from 6.1), and included Nikon's EXSPEED processor (previously seen in the D3 and D330 models) and enhanced active dynamic lighting. A couple of new features also included are a dual dust-removal system and what it calls its Airflow Control System. Essentially it's an air vent that is at the bottom of the camera and has air move away from the sensor when the shutter is depressed—it's an interesting design that should theoretically keep dust out completely.
The D60 also includes many of the D40x's enhancements over the D40, like a 2.5-inch LCD and in-camera image editing such as red eye correction. A new power-conserving feature shuts the LCD off when the optical viewer is being used. So when reviewing pictures and the need arises to take a picture, just snap the shot and the LCD will turn off automatically. Last but not least, a fun feature added to the D60 is a stop animation movie feature that will allow the user to string together up to 100 JPEG clips to produce a movie.
All in all, I was expecting a little more from Nikon to counter Canon's new XSi announcement. There really isn't that big a difference from the D40x, and I'd be willing to bet the price will be similar as well. Packaged with a 3X zoom Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G lens, the D60 will be available in February and pricing will be announced 30 days before the release.
The most interesting lens released today is the new 24mm tilt/shift lens. It basically allows the photographer to mechanically shift the lenas to increase perspective. I had a chance to preview it at CES and I can't wait to get it into our Labs and try it out. Essentially, it can correct linear distortion and correct the view to what an actual human eye sees. For example, the angle of a building may not come out looking correct as an eye would see it. This lens will correct for that and make it seem much more accurate. The 24mm Nikkor lens debuts in the spring for about $1,930.

Where is another 1.75 million iphone?Now on search.

iphone is the most hot product for year 2007.Apple said that it has sold 3.75 million iPhones through the end of last year, but AT&T has activated a bit less than 2 million phones. There was a moment of panic as investors imagined more than a million unsold iPhones piled up in the stock rooms of AT&T stores.
Upon reflection, several analysts have come to the conclusion that the vast bulk of these have been bought and unlocked to use on carriers other than AT&T in the United States and on European carriers who are Apple’s partners.
I was skeptical of this, as unlocking an iPhone is rather complex and risky proposition. But as I talked to Gene Munster, of Piper Jaffray, and A.M. Sacconaghi, Jr. of Sanford C. Bernstein, who were both convinced that there is widespread buying of unlocked phones, my skepticism abated a bit.
What about people who got the phones as Christmas presents and did not get around to activating them before the end of the year, I asked.
Mr. Sacconaghi said he believes that most people who got phones as gifts activated them right away.
“Typically people activate a phone within three days, and the holiday season is when you have the most time and if you are excited about a gift,” he said.
There are not, however, 1 million people who are going to steep themselves in the art of iPhone hacking. Rather, both analysts suggested that there are organized groups of gray market dealers who are buying up iPhones, unlocking them, and reselling them, largely overseas.
Mr. Munster, in fact, dispatched spies to monitor Apple stores in New York, San Francisco, and Minneapolis, who found that some 40 percent of the phones were sold to people who purchased more than one phone at a time.
“The majority of the people who were buying more than one phone were Asian, and they were bringing small buses of people who all buy more than one phone,” he said. Mr. Munster conjectured that many of the phones are being resold into Asia. It is hard to get an iPhone there and, he said, “With the value of the dollar, the cost of the phone is much less here.”
Mr. Munster estimates that of the 1.7 million phones not activated by AT&T 350,000 were sold through Apple’s partners in Europe, 512,000 were in inventory at AT&T and the European carriers, and 838,000 were sold and unlocked. Mr. Sacconaghi figures slightly fewer phones were sold in Europe and are in inventory, leaving 1 million unlocked phones.
I called Apple’s public relations department, which, as usual, declined to comment. On its conference call with analysts earlier this month, Apple said that a significant number of phones were sold and unlocked.
On the face of it, this isn’t good news for Apple. The company receives a payment estimated to be about $15 a month, from AT&T and other carriers, for iPhone accounts that are activated. So every unlocked phone is $360 of revenue forgone over the two year life of a contract.
But there are a few reasons why we shouldn’t shed a tear for Apple on this one.
For one, it shows great demand for the iPhone, especially because Apple has not made it easy for people deal in unlocked phones. With each software update it tries to close the software loopholes that allowed previous versions to be connected to unauthorized carriers (although hackers seem to always find new unlocking methods within weeks). And it restricts the number of iPhones people can buy at any one time.
Mr. Sacconaghi said it is possible that the gray market dealers, however, have overestimated demand and have a big inventory backlog themselves.
What is more, both Mr. Munster and Mr. Sacconaghi are convinced that Apple actually makes money on the iPhone without taking into account the payments from the carriers. Mr. Munster estimates that gross profit on each iPhone is about $50. That doesn’t take into account costs like development and marketing, but it’s still amazing given the product is so new in its life cycle. (The cost of making a product tends to go down faster than its selling price.) If true, Apple’s effective profits from the iPhone, taking into account the payments from carriers, are huge even if diluted because a quarter of the phones are being unlocked.
Moreover, Apple has several ways to reduce the percentage of phones that are being unlocked. The most significant plan is simply to expand the number of countries in which it sells the phones, giving buyers in Asia and Latin America a legitimate alternative to gray market dealers. If Apple still found all this to be a significant problem, it could certainly require customers to sign up for a service plan before they left the store. And it wouldn’t be a surprise if the next generation of iPhone, which Mr. Munster expects over the summer, has even tougher ways of keeping the phones locked.
Comments
Apple has several ways to reduce the percentage of phones that are being unlocked. I dont think that its necessary to restict.Its time to open market....open product...no monopoly act.no lock

Bid : Wireless auction bids $3.7 bln

The bidding topped $3.7 billion on the second day of the Federal Communications Commission's auction of government-owned airwaves, but there were no new suitors Friday for a closely watched block of spectrum to be shared with public safety agencies.

The $3.7 billion, up from $2.78 billion on Thursday, represented the highest bids received for five separate blocks of spectrum in the auction, which is eventually expected to net the federal government at least $10 billion.

However, there were no new bids on a nationwide piece of the spectrum, known as the "D" block, which must be shared with public safety agencies under auction rules set by the agency. Thursday's bid of $472 million still stood.

Analysts at Stifel Nicolaus said new bidders could still emerge for the D block airwaves, but they said the prospects for the FCC getting the minimum $1.3 billion price it has set for the block were "declining."

Companies qualified to bid include major carriers AT&T Inc and Verizon Wireless, as well as possible new competitors like Internet company Google Inc, EchoStar Communications Corp and Cablevision Systems Corp.

Identities of bidders will be kept secret, under FCC rules, until the entire auction ends.

Analysts say the major carriers could use the new spectrum to offer consumers more advanced services such as broadband access via mobile phones and wireless broadband to laptop computers.

Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone Group Plc.
Bidding is scheduled to resume on Monday morning. The auction is expected to take weeks, or even months.

The top bid for another nationwide piece of the airwaves known as the "C" block topped $1.79 billion on Friday, up from $1.24 billion on Thursday. That block carries a condition requiring it be open to all devices and software applications as long as the $4.7 billion minimum price on it is met.

Other spectrum includes more local chunks set aside in blocks designated "A" and "B." The final, "E" block, is considered less useful because it is limited to one-way data transmission.

The 700-megahertz signals are valuable because they can go long distances and penetrate thick walls. The airwaves are being returned by television broadcasters as they move to digital from analog signals in early 2009.

The electronic auction will end when no more bids are submitted.

If bidders do not meet the minimum price for the D block or any other pieces of the spectrum, the FCC can rebid them and possibly ease some of the conditions on them.

A lack of bidders for the D block could be a reflection of the credit crunch that has hurt the ability of companies to raise capital and could hinder smaller bidders, according to industry analysts.

A key potential bidder for the D block airwaves, Frontline Wireless, dropped out earlier this month. Frontline declined to say why, but analysts blame it on a shortage of financing.
Market Fall May Hurt the Wireless Auction
The bidding for a valuable new chunk of wireless airwaves the federal government is selling was expected to raise $15 billion—or more money than any wireless auction in U.S. history. But with stock markets crumbling, expectations for the auction that begins Jan. 24—called Auction 73—are sliding fast, along with the shares of likely bidders.

In the first round, bidding got off to a slow start. So far, only one entity is vying for so-called Block C, a chunk considered the most coveted slice of airwaves, and offered $1 billion—far short of the $4.6 billion minimum set by the FCC. The FCC is disclosing bid amounts but won't reveal the names of prospective buyers. Stock market declines may be at least partly responsible for the lackluster opening round.

Since the beginning of the year, AT&T's (T) market value has tumbled by $29.5 billion, while Verizon's (VZ) shares are collectively worth $16.5 billion less. The market's plunge on Jan. 18 may have marked the biggest single-day loss in telecom market value ever, says Blair Levin, an industry analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus. Even Internet search giant Google (GOOG), which has been looking to purchase the spectrum licenses to build a new wireless network that would compete with the established players, has lost 20% of its value since New Year's.

A Lack of Bidders?
Combined with the credit crunch, these rapidly shrinking stock values are severely crimping the sector's financing options for big spectrum purchases in the Federal Communications Commission's auction. Many potential bidders may now be unwilling, or unable, to bid as much as they'd intended previously. "We've had, since the beginning of the year, equity values in the U.S. diminished by a trillion dollars," says Harold Furchtgott-Roth, a former FCC commissioner who is the founder of consultancy Furchtgott-Roth Economic Enterprises . "Some bidders will simply decide they can't afford to participate at this point."

Thanks to the market carnage, the auction may now raise only $10 billion to $12.5 billion, figures Carlyn Taylor, who heads the communications and media practice of the consultancy FTI (FCN). Many bidders might have been hoping to raise money for the auction by issuing stock or by securing loans in a more welcoming credit market. "The majority of bidders would be in this category," says Taylor. Cable companies, regional telcos, Alltel, Leap (LEAP), and MetroPCS (PCS) may be unable to raise as much as they'd hoped, she says. The FCC's rules forbid the prospective bidders from talking to the media about the auction.

Taylor's estimate assumes that all chunks of the spectrum being auctioned will be sold—and that might be a big if. In fact, the so-called D block of spectrum, earmarked to provide services to consumers and public safety agencies, may not find any takers. Startup Frontline , which had expressed the most interest in the D block, announced on Jan. 8 that it had been unable to line up financing for its bid and shut down the venture. If no other bidders step forward, the D block may have to be auctioned another time.

Less competition likely
If there aren't enough bidders willing or able to offer the minimum bids the FCC has requested, other spectrum blocks may have to be sold later as well. The FCC may need to "lower the reserve price, eliminate or soften the conditions [for using the spectrum], and re-auction the spectrum," says Levin.

Such an outcome may be bad news for consumers: One of the biggest conditions the FCC has attached to several wireless blocks is "open access," a requirement that winners allow any device, service, and application to run over new networks built using the spectrum. Open access's biggest proponent, Google, is still expected to bid at least $4.6 billion in the auction. But if some of the open access blocks don't get sold, the auction's impact on wireless business models may be more limited.

The industry's established powers, meanwhile, are also seeing their finances threatened on the business side. Already, AT&T has acknowledged softness in its bread-and-butter home phone business. And if consumer spending slows sharply, the company may see a dent in the rapid growth of its cell-phone business. If the economic punch starts squeezing consumers especially hard, some mobile subscribers may start cutting back on their wireless Internet usage and premium services such as mobile TV. Though Verizon recently maintained that its consumer businesses haven't been hurt by the economic downdraft, the trends being felt at AT&T would appear likely to affect the strategies of other telcos expected to participate in the FCC auction. Industry players would likely turn more conservative with their cash, says Paul DeBeasi, an analyst with consultancy Burton Group.

That said, the big telcos may prove to be beneficiaries of the stock market fallout if they encounter less competition in the bidding—and fewer new competitors enter their market through the FCC auction.

New Invention : Synthetic Genome Created

Its no more exclamatory where science reach ,Scientists yesterday announced that they have successfully created an entire synthetic genome in the lab by stitching together the DNA of the smallest known free-living bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium.

Experts are hailing the research as an important breakthrough in genetic manipulation that will one day lead to the "routine" creation of synthetic genomes—possibly including those of mammals.

This is "a striking technical accomplishment," biochemist Leroy Hood, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email.

"It represents the initial stages of an important new step in studying how genes function together in systems to create complex phenotypes [traits]," added Hood, co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington.

Step Toward Artificial Life

The new work is an important second step in a three-step process to the creation of synthetic life, said research leader Hamilton Smith, a biologist and Nobel laureate at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland.

The first step, reported last year by the same team at Venter's institute, was the successful transplantation of a genome from one species of bacteria into another, effectively switching the bug's identity.

"The third step, which we're working on now, is to take the chemically synthesized DNA, which is in the test tube, and get it into a bacterium where it can take over and produce a synthetic cell," Smith said.

Researchers liken that step to rebooting a computer, because a genome is akin an operating system that makes a cell function.

Successfully completing the final step would create the first synthetic life-form.

The research is also part of a project to create a cell with "the smallest number of genes that can still confer life," Smith added.

The team chose M. genitalium because it contains about 485 genes, the smallest known of any organism capable of surviving on its own. The researchers suspect that about 400 genes are necessary for life.

Once they have created a synthetic copy of the bacteria, scientists can begin to eliminate genes to determine which are essential.

Such an accomplishment would then allow scientists to create synthetic life-forms that may one day produce biofuels, clean up toxic waste, and fight global warming.

Genome Assembly
But completing that second step was no easy feat.

While scientists can pretty easily assemble short sequences of DNA—or order them out of a catalog—synthesizing entire genomes is difficult.

That's because as more base pairs of the four building blocks of DNA—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—are stitched together, the strands tend to weaken and eventually break.

Prior to this research, for instance, the longest synthesized string contained 32,000 base pairs of DNA. The M. genitalium genome is 582,970 base pairs.

So the researchers broke up the genome into 101 segments, called cassettes, each containing between 5,000 and 7,000 base pairs of genetic code.

The researchers also took steps at this stage to address concerns that the technology could be misused to engineer a deadly virus or that an unforeseen innocent error could lead to bacteria run amok.

The researchers added watermarks to the code to differentiate the synthetic DNA from genomes of wild M. genitalium. They also inserted a gene to block the ability of the synthetic genome to infect human or animal hosts.

Much of the cassette assembly work was outsourced to genetics companies.

Back at the lab, meanwhile, Smith and his colleagues devised a process to stitch the 101 cassettes into a full synthetic genome.

They combined increasingly larger sections of the genome together in a test tube with linking and repair enzymes found in the bacterium Escherichia coli until they had four overlapping quarter genome sections.

After unsuccessfully trying to combine the quarters into halves in E. coli, the team switched to brewers' yeast, and the genome came together through a process the yeast uses to repair damaged DNA.

"That was pretty remarkable," Smith said, explaining that scientists had not known that a single yeast cell would pick up all the overlapping pieces and correctly assemble them.

"Yeast will play a big part in the future in assembling large DNA molecules," he added.

Smith and his colleagues report the assembly process in a paper published on the Web site of the journal Science.

"Important Changes" to Genetics

Drew Endy is an assistant professor in the department of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and an expert in the field of synthetic biology. He was not involved in this study.

In an email, he said "reconstructing a natural bacterial genome from scratch is a great technical feat."

While genomes up to eight million base pairs have previously been assembled from existing DNA fragments, he noted the new accomplishment heralds "important changes in the science of genetics."

By 2012, he added, the technology should exist to routinely design and construct genomes of any bacteria or single-celled organism with a membrane-bound nucleus.

"Which also means," he said, "that it will be possible to construct some mammalian chromosomes."

More :Gene-Altered Plant, Tree Can Suck Up Toxins

Two types of genetically modified plants can remove toxic compounds from the environment, according to research by a pair of independent groups.

One group developed Arabidopsis plants—small plants related to cabbage and mustard—that can clean up soil contaminated with cyclonite, or RDX. The widely used explosive is highly toxic and carcinogenic.

The other team modified a poplar tree to soak up a host of cancer-causing compounds from soil, groundwater, and air.

The contaminants are then broken down into harmless compounds in a process called phytoremediation.

"It is our hope that by developing trees that can remove carcinogens from the water and air in a fast and economical way, people will be more likely to use [the land] than abandon the property as too expensive to clean up," Sharon Doty, of the University of Washington, said in an email.

Doty is the lead author of a paper on the modified poplar tree that appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"There is more research left to be done before we reach that stage, but that is the ultimate goal."

But outside experts cautioned that the risks of using genetically engineered plants are unknown and require rigorous testing.

"I think we're playing to some extent a game of roulette here," said Doug Gurian-Sherman with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.

He noted that both Arabidopsis and poplars spread naturally in the wild, which heightens the risk of an engineered gene spreading unchecked.

"If they do [escape and] cause problems," he said, "we're pretty much going to be stuck with them."

A cutting from a genetically modified poplar tree sits inside a closed chamber filled with benzene gas, a pollutant associated with petroleum.

Researchers added genes from rabbit livers to increase the rate at which poplars can remove harmful compounds from the environment.

Warning !!!!!satellite will fall to Earth soon !!!!

Senior government officials said Saturday that they were closely watching a failing U.S. spy satellite that had begun the process of "de-orbiting" and cautioned that the large device was no longer controllable and could hit the Earth as early as late February.
U.S. officials announced on Sunday that a no longer functional American spy satellite is likely to hit Earth by the end of February, possibly early March. The trajectory of the satellite is being carefully monitored by government officials, as the location where the satellite might land is still unknown. The satellite is no longer controllable and the debris could pose a potential danger, depending on where it might fall.

"Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council. "Numerous satellites over the years have come out of orbit and fallen harmlessly. We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause."

U.S. officials are unable to maneuver the satellite, and Johndroe declined to say whether it would be possible to shoot down the spy apparatus before it plummets to Earth. He would not divulge further specifics.

A disabled American spy satellite is rapidly descending and is likely to plunge to Earth by late February or early March, posing a potential danger from its debris, officials said Saturday.

Officials said that they had no control over the nonfunctioning satellite and that it was unknown where the debris might land.

“Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation,” Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement. “Numerous satellites over the years have come out of orbit and fallen harmlessly. We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause.”

Specialists who follow spy satellite operations suspect it is an experimental imagery satellite built by Lockheed Martin and launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in December 2006 aboard a Delta II rocket. Shortly after the satellite reached orbit, ground controllers lost the ability to control it and were never able to regain communication.

“It’s not necessarily dead, but deaf,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and an analyst of various government space programs.

It is fairly common for satellites to drop out of orbit and enter Earth’s atmosphere, but most break up before they reach the surface, Mr. McDowell said. Such incidents occur every few months, and it is often difficult to control the satellite’s trajectory or its re-entry into the atmosphere. The debris, if any survives the fiery descent, typically lands in remote areas and causes little or no harm.

“For the most part,” Mr. McDowell said, “re-entering space hardware isn’t a threat because so much of the Earth is empty. But one could say we’ve been lucky so far.”

Of particular concern in this case, however, is that the debris from the satellite may include hydrazine fuel, which is typically used for rocket maneuvers in space.

Much of the fuel on the experimental satellite may not have been used and, should the tank survive re-entry into the atmosphere, the remaining fuel would be hazardous to anyone on the ground. It is likely, however, that the tank may rupture on re-entry, and that the fuel would burn off in a fiery plume that would be visible to the naked eye.

John E. Pike, the director of Globalsecurity.org in Alexandria, Va., said that if the satellite in question was a spy satellite, it was unlikely to have any kind of nuclear fuel, but that it could contain toxins, including beryllium, which is often used as a rigid frame for optical components.

Since it was launched, the experimental satellite has been in a slowly decaying orbit. As of Jan. 22, it was moving in a circular orbit at about 275 kilometers above the Earth, Mr. McDowell said. In the last month, its orbit has declined by 15 to 20 kilometers.

“If you plot the curve, it’s now just a matter of weeks before it falls out of orbit,” he said.

The largest uncontrolled re-entry by a NASA spacecraft was that of Skylab, the 78-ton abandoned space station that fell from orbit in 1979.

Amazon.com announced that in 2008 the company will begin an international rollout of Amazon MP3, Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 digital music store

Amazon to Begin International Rollout of Amazon MP3 in 2008
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that in 2008 the company will begin an international rollout of Amazon MP3, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 digital music store where every song is playable on virtually any digital music-capable device, including the PC, Mac®, iPod®, Zune®, Zen®, iPhone™, RAZR™, and BlackBerry®. Amazon MP3 is the only retailer to offer customers DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels as well as over 33,000 independent labels. "We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can't wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future," said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music. "We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year." Launched on Amazon.com in September 2007, Amazon MP3 offers Earth's Biggest Selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000 artists. Every song and album in the Amazon MP3 music download store is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software and is encoded at 256 kbps to deliver high audio quality. Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device; organize their music using any music management application, such as iTunes® or Windows Media Player™; and burn songs to CDs for personal use. Most songs available on Amazon MP3 are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, with more than 1 million of the over 3.3 million songs priced at 89 cents. The top 100 bestselling songs are 89 cents, unless marked otherwise. Most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99. The top 100 bestselling albums are $8.99 or less, unless marked otherwise. Buying and downloading MP3s from Amazon MP3 is easy. Customers can purchase downloads using Amazon 1-Click shopping, and with the Amazon MP3 Downloader, seamlessly add their MP3s to their iTunes® or Windows Media Player™ libraries. The company is not disclosing a specific launch timeline for individual Amazon international websites. About Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as books, movies, music & games, digital downloads, electronics & computers, home & garden, toys, kids & baby, grocery, apparel, shoes & jewelry, health & beauty, sports & outdoors, tools, auto & industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), and Amazon Mechanical Turk. Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and the Joyo Amazon websites at www.joyo.cn and www.amazon.cn. As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise. Forward-Looking Statements This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, significant amount of indebtedness, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2006, and all subsequent filings.

more....

Sony Joins Other Labels on Amazon MP3 Store
Sony BMG, the music company, announced Thursday that it would become the fourth and final major label to begin selling digital music on Amazon.com, offering its entire catalog in the MP3 format by the end of the month.
The move by Sony BMG, which represents artists like Bruce Springsteen, the Foo Fighters, Santana and Justin Timberlake, further positions Amazon's digital music store as a significant rival to the market leader, the iTunes store from Apple.

"This is such an exciting day for us and our customers," said Bill Carr, vice president for digital music at Amazon. "All four major labels will be part of our service. It means our customers will really have access to all the biggest artists in the world."

Sony's embrace of the MP3 format is also the latest blow to the technology known as digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which is intended to prevent consumers from making unauthorized copies of digital material.

In an open letter to the music industry last February, Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, said his company would welcome the end of software antipiracy measures and a world where music from any online music store could be played on Apple devices.

Since then, one by one, major music industry figures like Edgar M. Bronfman Jr., Warner Music's chairman, have supported the notion that D.R.M. was doing more harm than good in the evolving digital music market.

But Sony's partnership with Amazon.com also underscores the music industry's gathering effort to nurture an online rival to Apple, which has sold more than three billion songs through its iTunes store. Most music purchased on iTunes can be played only on Apple devices, and Apple insists on selling all single tracks for 99 cents. Amazon, which sells tracks for anywhere from 89 cents to over a dollar, offers the pricing variability the labels want.

"The major music companies feel that Apple's foot is on their necks, and they would like to get it off," said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm. "They are looking to destabilize Apple's dominant share, and they see Amazon as their best shot."

The Universal Music Group and EMI Group joined the Amazon MP3 music store when it was introduced in September. In December, the Warner Music Group announced that it would make its entire catalog available.

Nevertheless, the development is not necessarily a bad one for Apple, said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Capital. "My guess is that Apple doesn't care," he said. "The reality is, everyone will now start downloading their songs more cheaply someplace else and using them on their iPods."

Apple also sells digital music without copy protection, but so far only EMI has made its music available to iTunes in that format.

Technorati : 2008, Amazon MP3, Amazon.com, Amazon’s DRM-free, MP3 digital music, international, news, store music, tech