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Photo may be first of extrasolar planet

The red object appears to be a planet orbiting the brighter brown dwarf star, seen here as blue-white. (SPACE.com) -- A group of European-led astronomers has made a photograph of what appears to be a planet orbiting another star. If so, it would be the first confirmed picture of a world beyond our solar system. "Although it is surely much bigger than a terrestrial-size object [like Earth], it is a strange feeling that it may indeed be the first planetary system beyond our own ever imaged," said Christophe Dumas, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory. SPACE.com revealed a similar imaging effort of another planet candidate in May by a U.S.-led team that used the Hubble Space Telescope. That possible planet has not been confirmed and could be a dim star in the background of the picture. Otherwise, all of the more than 120 known extrasolar planets have been detected indirectly, by noting the shadow of a planet crossing in front of a star or a planet's gravitational effect on a star. Because planets are so dim compared to stars, technology has not been able to spot them amid stellar glare. That is, perhaps, until now. The new picture shows a dim, red point of light that Dumas and his colleagues think is a young, giant planet similar to Jupiter. It orbits a failed star known as a brown dwarf, a very dim type of star -- its core does not support nuclear fusion -- that astronomers have for years hoped would make for good planet hunting. The brown dwarf, catalogued as 2M1207, is 42 times less massive than the sun, or some 25 times heftier than Jupiter. The objects are 230 light-years away. The possible planet is about five times as massive as Jupiter, the observations show. An analysis of its emissions found it contains water, which suggests its mass is in the range of planets rather than stars, the researchers announced today. The object is still contracting into its final form and so is very warm, some 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 Celsius), according to the research team, which was led by ESO's Gael Chauvin. The photograph was made at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile with an infrared camera, which records heat rather than visible light. A system of adaptive optics on the Very Large Telescope (it's 27 feet wide, or 8.2 meters) corrects for blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere, making detailed observations possible. The discovery will be detailed in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. If it is a planet, the object orbits 55 times farther from the brown dwarf than Earth is from the sun, or roughly twice the Earth-to-Neptune distance. The remaining question, however, is whether the thing might instead be a star that's in the foreground or background and not gravitationally bound to the brown dwarf, a scenario the researchers say is "statistically very improbable." Additional observations to monitor the movement of the two objects will reveal the answer within two years, the astronomers say.

GLASS SEMICONDUCTOR SOFTENS WITH LOW-POWER LASER, THEN RE-HARDENS

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Scientists at Ohio State University have found that a special type of glass that is finding use in the electronics industry softens when exposed to very low-level laser light, and hardens back into its original condition when the light is switched off.

Ratnasingham Sooryakumar
The discovery -- made by accident as physicists were trying to study properties of the material -- may one day enable new uses for the glass.

Ratnasingham Sooryakumar said that he and former doctoral student Jared Gump thought they were working with a bad batch of germanium-selenium glass when Gump was testing the material’s hardness in the laboratory and couldn’t reproduce his results.

“Every day he got a different result,” recalled Sooryakumar, a professor of physics at Ohio State. “It took us a while to realize that the material was fine, it was just very sensitive to light.”

They finally traced their strange results to the very low-power laser light that they were shining on the glass. Whether the laser was set to exactly the same power every time shouldn’t have affected the experiment, but it did. The higher the laser power, the softer the glass. In fact, with the laser set to a mere 6 milliwatts –- six thousandths of a Watt -- the material became 50 percent softer than usual.

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The discovery -- made by accident as physicists were trying to study properties of the material -- may one day enable new uses for the glass.
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“Normally, you’d have to almost melt the glass to get it that soft, but here we were doing it with a light source that was essentially a laser pointer, and with no heat at all,” said Sooryakumar. “And what’s really important is that the whole effect is reversible.”

In the journal Physical Review Letters, the physicists reported that the glass always hardened back into its original condition. Even the latticework of atoms that made up its structure appeared unchanged afterward.

Sooryakumar and Gump co-authored the paper with Ilya Finkler, a former undergraduate student majoring in physics and mathematics, and Hua Xia, a former postdoctoral associate, both of Ohio State; Wayne Bresser, an assistant professor of physics at Northern Kentucky University; and Punit Boolchand, professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science at the University of Cincinnati. Gump is now a scientist at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, MD, Finkler is a graduate student studying physics at Harvard University, and Xia is an engineer at General Electric Corp.

The glass is part of a family of glass semiconductors that are often used in electronics for DVDs and information storage technologies.

Germanium is hard and selenium soft. A combination of 80 percent selenium and 20 percent germanium is the “magic formula” where the material is neither too hard nor too soft, and well suited for forming a glass. Scientists call this point the rigidity transition.

Scientists are very interested in studying why the 80-20 ratio works, and what happens to the mechanical strength of the glass during the rigidity transition. To answer those questions, Sooryakumar and his colleagues tried to examine the hardness of the material in a range of selenium-germanium combinations around the transition point.

One way to determine the hardness of a material is to measure the speed of sound waves traveling through it; sound waves travel faster through harder materials. The physicists bounced a low-powered red laser beam off the sound waves to measure the speed –- a technique similar to how radar detects the speed of a moving car. The laser beam was only about as wide as a human hair, and used about as much power as a laser pointer.

That’s when they noticed the softening effect.

“It was as if the radar beam was influencing the speed of the car,” Sooryakumar said.

For compositions closest to the transition point, the effect was greatest: the material softened by 50 percent, from a hardness of 26 to 13 gigapascals as the laser power increased from 2 to 6 milliwatts. Hardness is a measure of how much pressure a material can withstand, and diamond rates at 100 gigapascals.(A gigapascal is roughly 10,000 times the pressure of earth’s atmosphere at sea level.)

Though the physicists don’t yet have a complete picture of why the material softened, Sooryakumar suspects that the answer has to do with the nature of the rigidity transition itself. Stiff materials normally carry a certain amount of stress in them, because the stacked molecules support each other like steel girders in a building. The transition point is special, Sooryakumar noted, because the molecules are arranged in just the right way to lower stress on the structure to a minimum.

Here’s why the physicists think the glass softened: When particles of light, called photons, hit the glass, they knocked some of the electrons that connect molecules in the latticework out of place. Such a change in bonding occurs most easily under conditions of minimum stress. With fewer supports holding up the structure, the glass became less stiff. Then, when the light was switched off, the electrons swung back into position, and the glass became stiff again.

Sooryakumar speculated that these types of glasses could have potential applications in re-writable computer memory. But right now, he and his colleagues are probing further to understand the rigidity transition and the remarkable response to light at this composition. They want to study what happens if the material is exposed to laser light of different color and higher power, and test different glasses besides selenium-germanium.

In search of Earth, new class of planets found

By Michael Coren Tuesday, August 31, 2004 Posted: 7:27 PM EDT (2327 GMT)

This illustration shows the second
planet, which orbits around the star 55 Cancri, which lies some 41 light-years
from Earth.

(CNN) -- Our planet is not alone. It may not even
be lonely.

Astronomers on Tuesday announced the discovery of a new -- and possibly abundant -- class of planets that has more in common with Earth than the uninhabitable gas giants previously discovered.

"We are closer to answering the question, 'Are we alone in the universe?'" said Anne Kinney, director of NASA's Universe Division, Science Mission Directorate. "We aim to answer that question by looking for planets, eventually imaging them and ultimately diagnosing the presence of life on those planets."

Astronomers found the two planets, among the smallest ever detected, orbit different stars less then 50 light years from Earth. One planet circles a red dwarf star, the most abundant in our Milky Way galaxy, igniting hope that the discoveries may just be the beginning.

"We would like to make these discoveries routine and eventually push into the 'super Earth' regime," said Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley, who discovered a planet orbiting working with R. Paul Butler at the
Carnegie Institution of Washington.

With evidence of smaller, rocky planets growing, finding another Earth seems more likely.

"It appears that most if not the majority of the remaining 100 billion stars [in the Milky Way galaxy] have some sort of planets orbiting around them," said Butler. "We are edging closer and closer to planet systems that are like our own
solar system."

Using a technique that measures the "wobble" of a star caused by a planet's gravitational pull, astronomers inferred the existence of the two extraterrestrial worlds, or exoplanets, as well as traits such as their mass, orbit and speed. The star's movement, or wobble, is found by measuring the Doppler effect on light. The wavelength of the star's light lengthens, or stretches, as it moves with the gravitational pull of the planet reveals much about the planet itself..

The announcement follows on the heels of another by Swiss planet hunters who claimed to discover another planet even smaller than the one announced on Monday. That would add another instance to the new class of planets, although astronomers at Tuesday's conference said recognition of the claim would first require acceptance by a peer-reviewed journal.

There has been an explosion in the number of astronomers scanning the skies for the telltale wobble of distant worlds. Already, about 135 large exoplanets have been discovered. By refining their methods, astronomers can now detect objects even smaller than Saturn. Eventually, they have their sights set on discovering a world the size of our own.

Both of the recently discovered planets are slightly larger than Earth, about the size of Neptune, or about 17 times the size of our planet. Because they are so close to their star, they race through an extraterrestrial "year" in a matter of days.

Beyond that, astronomers can't speculate much about their appearance. They may consist of spheres of gas like Jupiter or look like Neptune itself with a core of rock and ice surrounded by a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.

Given their proximity to the sun, they could also be like a scorched rock resembling Mercury.

The first planet orbits a cool, reddish dwarf star called Gilese 436 in the Leo constellation. Meticulous observation of the star began in July 2003 and detected the planet believed to be at least 21 times the size of Earth. It completes its orbit at the blazing rate of just 2.64 days instead of Earth's 365 days.

The second planet orbits a yellow star like our own, called 55 Cancri in the constellation Cancer, and is part of the first four-planet solar system ever discovered. It is estimated to be about the size of 18 Earths in mass, orbits in 2.81 days and lies about 41 light-years from Earth.

"It's the closest analog we have for our own solar system," said Barbara McArthur, investigator of the study from the University of Texas at Austin.

The planets were discovered using ground-based observations from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Lick Observatory in California and the McDonald Observatory in Texas. Archived data from the Hubble space telescope was also used.

Both studies will appear in the Astrophysical Journal in December.

NASA will launch a series of missions to find more planets in the future including the Kepler Mission, the Space Interferometry Mission and the Terrestrial Planet Finder to seek out Earth-like worlds.

"These are the three missions that NASA designed to find that pale blue dot orbiting a yellow star that might harbor life," Butler said.

The Internet at 35: Still evolving

NEW YORK (AP) -- Thirty-five years after computer scientists at UCLA linked two bulky computers using a 15-foot gray cable, testing a new way to exchange data over networks, what would ultimately become the Internet remains a work in progress.

University researchers are experimenting with ways to increase its capacity and speed. Programmers are trying to imbue Web pages with intelligence. And work is underway to re-engineer the network to reduce spam and security troubles.

All the while threats loom: Critics warn that commercial, legal and political pressures could hinder the types of innovations that made the Internet what it is today.

Stephen Crocker and Vinton Cerf were among the graduate students who joined UCLA professor Len Kleinrock in an engineering lab on September 2, 1969, as bits of meaningless test data flowed silently between the two computers. By January, three other "nodes" joined the fledgling network.

Then came e-mail a few years later, a core communications protocol called TCP/IP in the late 1970s, the domain name system in the 1980s and the World Wide Web -- now the second most popular application behind e-mail -- in 1990. The Internet expanded beyond its initial military and educational domain into businesses and homes around the world.

Today, Crocker continues work on the Internet, designing better tools for collaboration. And as security chairman for the Internet's key oversight body, he is trying to defend the core addressing system from outside threats, including an attempt last year by a private search engine to grab Web surfers who mistype addresses.

He acknowledges the Internet he helped build is far from finished, and changes are in store to meet growing demands for multimedia. Network providers now make only "best efforts" at delivering data packets, and Crocker said better guarantees are needed to prevent the skips and stutters now common with video.

Cerf, now at MCI Inc., said he wished he could have designed the Internet with security built-in. Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc., among others, are currently trying to retrofit the network so e-mail senders can be authenticated -- a way to cut down on junk messages sent using spoofed addresses.

Among Cerf's other projects: a next-generation numbering system called IPv6 to accommodate the ever-growing armies of Internet-ready wireless devices, game consoles, even dog collars. Working with NASA, Cerf is also trying to extend the network into outer space to better communicate with spacecraft.

But many features being developed today wouldn't have been possible at birth given the slower computing speeds and narrower Internet pipes, or bandwidth, Cerf said.

"With the tools we had then, we did as much as we could reasonably have
done," he said.

While engineers tinker with the Internet's core framework, some university researchers looking for more speed are developing separate systems that parallel the Internet. That way, data-intensive applications like video conferencing, brain imaging and global climate research won't have to compete with e-mail and e-commerce.

Think information highway with an express lane.

Some applications are so data-intensive, they are "simply impractical to do on the current Internet," said Tracy Futhey, chairwoman of the National LambdaRail. The project offers for its members dedicated high-speed lines so data can "get from point A to point B and not have to contend with the other traffic."

LambdaRail recently completed its first optical connection from San Diego, California, to Seattle, Washington, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Jacksonville, Florida. Work on additional links is planned for next year.

Undersea explorer Robert Ballard has used another network, Internet2, to host live, interactive presentations with students and aquarium visitors from the wreck of the Titanic, which he found in 1985.

The Internet's bandwidth can carry only "lousy" video and "can't compete with looking out the window," Ballard said. But with Internet2, "high-definition zoom cameras can show them the eyelids."

Internet2, with speeds 100 times the typical broadband service at home, is now limited to selected universities, companies and institutions, but researchers expect any breakthroughs to ultimately migrate to the main Internet.

While Internet2 and LambdaRail seek to move data faster and faster, researchers with the World Wide Web Consortium are trying to make information smarter and smarter. Semantic Web is a next-generation Web designed to make more kinds of data easier for computers to locate and process.

Consider the separate teams of scientists who study genes, proteins and chemical pathways. With the Semantic Web, tags are added to information in databases describing gene and protein sequences. One group may use one scheme and another team something else; the Semantic Web could help link the two. Ultimately, software could be written to process the data and make inferences that previously required human intervention.

With the same principles, searching to buy an automobile in Massachusetts will also incorporate listings for cars in Boston.

Change doesn't come easily, however. For instance, the IPv6 numbering system was deemed an Internet standard about five years ago, but the vast majority of software and hardware today still runs on the older IPv4, which is rapidly running out of room.

And the Internet faces general resistance from old-world forces that want to preserve their current ways of doing things: Companies that value profit over greater good. Copyright holders who want to protect their music and movies. Governments that seek to censor information or spy on its citizens.

In early August, the Federal Communications Commission declared that Internet-based phone calls should be subject to the same type of law enforcement surveillance as cell and landline phones. That means Internet service providers would have to design their systems to permit police wiretaps.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, fears a slippery slope. As these outside pressures meddle with the Net's open architecture, he said, there's less opportunity for experimentation and for innovations like the World Wide Web, born out of an unauthorized project at a Swiss nuclear research lab.

Doctors grow new jaw in man's back

LONDON, England (AP) -- A German who had his lower
jaw cut out because of cancer has enjoyed his first meal in nine years -- a bratwurst
sandwich -- after surgeons grew a new jaw bone in his back muscle and transplanted
it to his mouth in what experts call an "ambitious'' experiment.

According to this week's issue of The Lancet medical journal, the German doctors used a mesh
cage, a growth chemical and the patient's own bone marrow, containing stem cells, to create a new jaw bone that fit exactly into the gap left by the cancer surgery. Tests have not been done yet to verify whether the bone was created by the blank-slate stem cells and it is too early to tell whether the jaw will function normally in the long term.

But the operation is the first published report of a whole bone being engineered and incubated inside a patient's body and transplanted.

Stem cells are the master cells of the body that go on to become every tissue in the body. They are a hot area of research with scientists trying to find ways to prompt them to make desired tissues, and perhaps organs.

But while researchers debate whether the technique resulted in a scientific advance involving stem cells, the operation has achieved its purpose and changed a life, said Stan Gronthos, a stem cell expert at the Institute of medical and Veterinary Science in Adelaide, Australia.

"A patient who had previously lost his mandible (lower jaw) through the result of a destructive tumor can now sit down and chew his first solid meals in nine years ...resulting in an improved quality of life,'' said Gronthos, who was not connected with the experiment.

The operation was done by Dr. Patrick Warnke, a reconstructive facial surgeon at the University of Kiel in Germany. The patient, a 56-year-old man, had his lower jaw and half his tongue cut out almost a decade ago after getting mouth cancer. Since then, he had only been able to slurp soft food or soup from a spoon.

In similar cases, doctors can sometimes replace a lost jawbone by cutting out a piece of bone from the lower leg or from the hip and chiseling it to fit into the mouth.

This patient could not have that procedure because he was taking a potent blood thinner for another condition and doctors considered it too dangerous to harvest bone from elsewhere in his body since extraction leaves a hole where the bone is taken, creating an extra risk of bleeding.

Artificial jaws made from plastic or other materials are not used because they pose too much of a risk of infection.

"He demanded reconstruction,'' Warnke said. "This patient was really sick of living.''

Warnke and his group began by creating a virtual jaw on a computer, after making a three-dimensional scan of the patient's mouth.

The information was used to create a thin titanium micro-mesh cage. Several cow-derived
pure bone mineral blocks the size of sugar lumps where then put inside the structure, along with a human growth factor that builds bone and a large squirt of blood extracted from the man's bone marrow, which contains stem cells.

The surgeons then implanted the mesh cage and its contents into the muscle below the patient's right shoulder blade. He was given no drugs, other than routine antibiotics to prevent infection from the surgery.

The implant was left in for seven weeks, when scans showed new bone formation. It was removed about eight weeks ago, along with some surrounding muscle and blood vessels, put in the man's mouth and connected to the blood vessels in his neck.

Scans showed new bone continued to form after the transplant.

Four weeks after the operation, the man ate a German sausage sandwich, his first real meal in nine years. He eats steak now, but complains to his doctor that because he has no teeth he has to cut it into such small pieces that by the time he gets to the end of the steak, it's cold.

He has reported no pain or any other difficulties associated with the transplant, Warnke said, adding that he hopes to be able to remove the mesh and implant teeth in the new jaw about a year from now.

Paul Brown, head of the Center for Tissue Regeneration Science at University College in London, said it's not clear any major scientific ground has been broken, and tests may not be able to show whether the new bone came from stem cells, rather than from the growth factor alone.

The operation put established techniques together, resembling a well-known experiment in which University of Massachusetts scientists grew a human ear using a mold on the back of a mouse in 1995, he said.

"If you put loads of blocks of bone mineral into a hole and you induce cellular activity by putting in growth factors, it's a standard approach that people have used to induce the body's own response,'' said Brown, who was not connected with the study. "Clearly some of them are going to work and it sounds like for this patient, this has worked.''

Biopsies of the jaw bone could later provide some answers in the quality of the bone, experts said.

"Just making the gross tissue shape right isn't really the problem,'' Brown said. "It's what the shape of the tissue is at the microscopic and ultramicroscopic level. That's the architecture which is so tricky and which is what gives function.''

Student Charged With Clogging Toilet

Student Charged With Clogging Toilet

PORT OF SWEET GRASS, Mont. - Jesse Huffman insists he didn't do it on purpose, but the toilet he left plugged after "nature called" at this border crossing in north-central Montana has him facing criminal charges.

Toole County authorities charged the 19-year-old college student from Great Falls with criminal mischief after a border agent accused him of intentionally clogging the toilet.

Huffman said the clogged piping was completely unintentional, the result of an urgent, but natural bodily function.

"I've never been arrested before or anything like that, and I get arrested for taking a dump," said Huffman, a student at Montana State University in Bozeman.

Huffman was returning to Montana from a trip to Lethbridge, Alberta with four friends Saturday. Port authorities stopped their car for what was apparently a random search. The car's 19-year-old driver was cited for illegally possessing alcohol.

Huffman said he asked to use the bathroom while waiting for the driver.

A short time later, a port inspector discovered the toilet was clogged and threatened charges, Huffman said.

Cory Grayson, one of Huffman's friends, said he couldn't believe it when border agents first threatened charges.

"I didn't think they were serious at first, I was just laughing so hard," he said.

Port Director Larry Overcast said he could not comment on the case.

Huffman said he has hired an attorney and intends to fight the charge.

[Yahoo news]

US tops league of e-mail spammers..[Big F'n Suprise]

TOP SPAM NATIONS 1 - United States 42.53% 2 - South Korea 15.42% 3 - China (& Hong Kong)11.62% 4 - Brazil 6.17% 5 - Canada 2.91% 6 - Japan 2.87% 7 - Germany 1.28% 8 - France 1.24% 9 - Spain 1.16% 10 - United Kingdom 1.15% 11 - Mexico 0.98% 12 - Taiwan 0.91% Others 11.76% Source: Sophos August 2004

The US is the biggest spammer, despite efforts to combat unwanted e-mail, according to net security experts.

Almost 43% of all unwanted e-mails originated from the US in the last month, said anti-virus firm Sophos.

The report suggests that anti-spam laws passed in the US nine months ago have had little impact.

South Korea, the most broadband-connected country in the world, was next in line, firing out 15% of all junk e-mails.

"Almost nine months on from the Can-Spam legislation and the US's attempt to clean up its act appears to have had little impact," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos said.

"Canada has made some progress, however, cutting the percentage of the
world's junk e-mail sent from the country by over half, from 6.8% six months ago to 2.9% today."

The figures also showed that South Korea had tripled the amount of spam mails sent out from its networks since February.

Legal action

The Can-Spam Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) was passed by US law-makers in late 2003 and came into force in January this year.

It means spammers can be imprisoned and it also outlaws many of the tactics they use to hide their tracks.

It also requires that unsolicited e-mails should include a way for recipients
to "opt-out" of receiving future e-mails.

Only net service providers and governments can use the Can-Spam Act to tackle spammers.

In March, AOL, Microsoft, Earthlink and Yahoo filed lawsuits against
individuals in the US who they claimed used open proxies to send spam through innocent third-parties and used false "from" e-mail addresses.

"Spammers are motivated by watching their bank accounts get fatter and fatter, and many have turned to hacking into innocent third-party computers to send their junk emails," Mr Cluley commented.

"Many of the computers sending out spam are likely to have had their broadband internet connections exploited by remote hackers."

About 40% of global spam is sent out via "zombie computers", machines which have been harnessed without the knowledge of the PC user, he added.

[BBC]