IPod hallucinations face acid test

vnunet.com: "A Welsh psychiatrist has claimed that some iPod users are experiencing what he calls 'musical hallucinations'. Dr Victor Aziz said that the effect can occur when people spend many hours listening to the same songs. The hallucinations are characterised by a song ' playing' constantly in the head, according to the psychiatrist, and the effect has caused sleeping problems for some of his patients. 'People find they can't sleep and can't think properly,' he told the Evening Standard. 'Having a song in your head every now and then is quite normal, but musical hallucinations can be quite distressing.' Dr Aziz first came across the phenomenon seven years ago when a heart bypass patient named Reginald King%uFFFDwas referred to him. King said that he began hearing pop songs and classical music and has done so every day since. Often one song runs into another rather like listening to tracks on a sound system. Dr Aziz called the experience 'musical hallucinations '. Dr Aziz belongs to a small circle of psychiatrists and neurologists who are investigating this condition. They suspect that the hallucinations experienced by King and others are a result of malfunctioning brain networks that normally allow us to perceive music. He believes that this condition has existed for centuries but that the use of personal music systems has exacerbated the situation because they provide a stream of music repeated many times."

NASA - Galaxy Evolution Explorer

NASA Telescope Catches Surprise Ultraviolet Light Show 05.31.05 It was a day like any other for a nearby star named GJ 3685A ? until it suddenly exploded with light. At 2 p.m. Pacific time on April 24, 2004, the detectors on NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer ultraviolet space telescope nearly overloaded when the star abruptly brightened by a factor of at least 10,000. After the excitement was over, astronomers realized that they had just recorded a giant star eruption, or flare, about one million times more energetic than those from our Sun. Findings on this intriguing event were presented today at the 206th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Minneapolis, Minn. Movies based on images of the flare are available online at http://www.nasa.gov/centers/jpl/missions/galex.html and http://www.galex.caltech.edu/.

Richard Branson and Burt Rutan Form Spacecraft Building Company

British entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson, has teamed up with aerospace designer, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites to form a new aerospace production company. The new firm will build a fleet of commercial suborbital spaceships and launch aircraft. Called The Spaceship Company, the new entity will manufacture launch aircraft, various spacecraft and support equipment and market those products to spaceliner operators. Clients include launch customer, Virgin Galactic%u2014formed by Branson to handle space tourist flights. Scaled Composites website is here

Japanese develop 'female' android

BBC NEWS: "Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised - a 'female' android called Repliee Q1. She has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, and a number of sensors and motors to allow her to turn and react in a human-like manner. She can flutter her eyelids and move her hands like a human. She even appears to breathe. Professor Hiroshi Ishiguru of Osaka University says one day robots could fool us into believing they are human."

An asteroid, headed our way

"Humans live in a vast solar system where 2,000 feet seems a razor-thin distance. Yet it's just wide enough to trigger concerns that an asteroid due to buzz Earth on April 13, 2029 may shift its orbit enough to return and strike the planet seven years later. The concern: Within the object's range of possible fly-by distances lie a handful of gravitational "sweet spots," areas some 2,000 feet across that are also known as keyholes. The physics may sound complex, but the potential ramifications are plain enough. If the asteroid passes through the most probable keyhole, its new orbit would send it slamming into Earth in 2036. It's unclear to some experts whether ground-based observatories alone will be able to provide enough accurate information in time to mount a mission to divert the asteroid, if that becomes necessary. So NASA researchers have begun considering whether the US needs to tag the asteroid, known as 99942 Apophis, with a radio beacon before 2013. Timing is everything, astronomers say. If officials attempt to divert the asteroid before 2029, they need to nudge the space rock's position by roughly half a mile - something well within the range of existing technology. After 2029, they would need to shove the asteroid by a distance as least as large as Earth's diameter. That feat would tax humanity's current capabilities."

A New Face: A Bold Surgeon, an Untried Surgery - New York Times

A New Face: A Bold Surgeon, an Untried Surgery - New York Times: "(With scientists at the Utrecht University, Dr. Barker and colleagues at the University of Louisville also are seeking approval for an experimental face transplant to be performed in the Netherlands. Proposals by surgeons in Britain and France have been denied.) Far Beyond Skin Grafts The medical challenges to face transplantation are formidable. As Dr. Siemionow envisions it, the series of operations will require rotating teams of specialists who may be deployed in more than one operating theater. The face to be transplanted will be removed, or 'degloved,' from a cadaver; it will most likely include the epidermis, along with the underlying fat, nerves and blood vessels, but no musculature. Surgeons also will remove the patient's own damaged facial tissue, then reattach the clamped blood vessels and nerves to the transplanted face. The procedures will take 15 hours, perhaps longer.The months following may be even more harrowing. Patients receiving transplanted organs must take a lifelong regimen of drugs to suppress their own immune systems and prevent rejection. The drugs are expensive, often $1,000 per month, and the regimen does not always work. But even when it does, long-term immunosuppression increases the risk of developing life-threatening infections and cancer. For every transplant patient, then, doctors must weigh the necessity for a new organ against the possibility of rejection and a shortened life"

First Planet Under Three Suns Is Discovered

050715222557 Originally uploaded by ReidAnderes. PASADENA, Calif. -- An extrasolar planet under three suns has been discovered in the constellation Cygnus by a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology using the 10-meter Keck I telescope in Hawaii. The planet is slightly larger than Jupiter and, given that it has to contend with the gravitational pull of three bodies, promises to seriously challenge our current understanding of how planets are formed. In the July 14 issue of Nature, Maciej Konacki, a senior postdoctoral scholar in planetary science at Caltech, reports on the discovery of the Jupiter-class planet orbiting the main star of the close-triple-star system known as HD 188753. The three stars are about 149 light-years from Earth and are about as close to one another as the distance between the sun and Saturn

Take Your Time: Extra Second Will be Added to 2005

LiveScience: "An extra second will be added to 2005 to make up for the slowing down of the Earth's rotation, officials said this week. The once-common 'leap second' is the first in seven years and reflects the unpredictable nature of the planet's behavior. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in Paris keeps track of time by measuring the Earth's rotation, which varies, and by an atomic clock, which is unwavering. When a difference in the two clocks shows up, the IERS adds or subtracts a second to the year. For the first time since 1998, the IERS will sneak in an extra second this year to get time back in synch, officials said in a statement Monday. On Dec. 31, the clock will read like this as it leads into Jan. 1, 2006: 23h 59m 59s ... 23h 59m 60s ... 00h 00m 00s. Normally, the seconds would roll from 59 directly to 00"

Deep Impact Success

NASA: This movie shows Deep Impact's impactor probe approaching comet Tempel 1. It is made up of images taken by the probe's impactor targeting sensor. The probe collided with the comet at at10:52 p.m. Pacific time, July 3 (1:52 a.m. Eastern time, July 4).

British Scientists Say Carbon Dioxide Is Turning the Oceans Acidic

New York Times: "Whether or not it contributes to global warming, carbon dioxide is turning the oceans acidic, Britain's leading scientific organization warned yesterday. In a report by a panel of scientists, the organization, the Royal Society, said the growing acidity would be very likely to harm coral reefs and other marine life by the end of the century. 'I think there are very serious issues to be addressed,' the panel's chairman, Dr. John Raven of the University of Dundee in Scotland, said in an interview. 'It will affect all organisms that have skeletons, shells, hard bits that are made of calcium carbonate.'The 60-page report was timed to influence next week's Group of 8 economic summit meeting. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, president of the group this year, has been calling for strong action to limit climate change.Unlike forecasts of global warming, which are based on complex and incomplete computer models, the chemistry of carbon dioxide and seawater is simple and straightforward.The burning of fossil fuels by cars and power plants releases more than 25 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year. Roughly a third of that is absorbed by the oceans, where the gas undergoes chemical reactions that produce carbonic acid, which is corrosive to shells."