Pentagon to Test a Huge Conventional Bomb

A huge mushroom cloud of dust is expected to rise over Nevada's desert in June when the Pentagon plans to detonate a gigantic 700-ton explosive -- the biggest open-air chemical blast ever at the Nevada Test Site -- as part of the research into developing weapons that can destroy deeply buried military targets, officials said yesterday.The test, code-named 'Divine Strake,' will occur on June 2 about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas in a high desert valley bounded by mountains, according to Pentagon and Energy Department officials.'This is the largest single explosive we could imagine doing,' said James A. Tegnelia, director of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is conducting the test.The test is aimed at determining how well a massive conventional bomb would perform against fortified underground targets -- such as military headquarters, biological or chemical weapons stockpiles, and long-range missiles -- that the Pentagon says are proliferating among potential adversaries around the world.Tegnelia said there is a range of technical hurdles to overcome. He suggested that big conventional bombs are unlikely to solve the overall problem of buried threats. 'It's a lot easier to dig your tunnel 50 feet deeper' than to develop weapons that can destroy it, he told a meeting of defense reporters.Such a bomb would be a conventional alternative to a nuclear weapon proposed by the Bush administration, which has run into opposition on Capitol Hill. The Pentagon for several years has sought funding for research into the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) -- also known as the 'bunker buster' -- after the administration's 2001 Nuclear Posture Review stated that no weapon in the U.S. arsenal could threaten a growing number of buried targets. Congress, however, has repeatedly refused to grant funding for a study on a nuclear bunker buster, instead directing money toward conventional alternatives.The June test will detonate 700 tons of heavy ammonium nitrate-fuel oil emulsion -- creating a blast equivalent to 593 tons of TNT -- in a 36-foot-deep hole near a tunnel in the center of the Nevada Test Site, according to official reports. It aims to allow scientists to model the type of ground shock that will be created, and to weigh the effectiveness of such a weapon against its collateral impact."

Sandia's Z machine exceeds two billion degrees Kelvin

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. Sandia's Z machine has produced plasmas that exceed temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin hotter than the interiors of stars. The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amountof energy as larger plants. The phenomena also may explain how astrophysical entities like solar flares maintain their extreme temperatures."

Enceladus!

Captain's Log: March 9, 2006 Enceladus! Last November, special imaging sequences trained on Enceladus as it sat backlit by the sun revealed in striking detail the plume of material that we had flown through back in July as we buzzed the Enceladus surface. Many distinct narrow fountains of vapor and fine water ice particles, were clearly seen jetting from the south polar surface and reaching tens of miles into space. These jets supply material to an even larger diffuse plume that extends hundreds of miles above the south pole. A spectacular sight if there ever was one!"

New Animal Resembling Furry Lobster Found - Yahoo! News

New Animal Resembling Furry Lobster Found - Yahoo! News

Microsoft unveils much-hyped 'Origami' device - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com

HANOVER, Germany - After months of cryptic Web marketing and word-of-mouth hype over Microsoft Corp.'s Project Origami, the company finally showed off the product: an ultracompact computer running Windows XP with a touchscreen and wireless connectivity.It's everything a full computer or laptop is, minus the keyboard. It has a 7-inch touch-sensitive screen that responds to a stylus or the tap of a finger.Two models from different manufacturers are expected to hit stores shelves by spring, and Microsoft says they'll be about an inch thick and weigh less than 2 1/2 pounds %u2014 about the size of a large paperback book. It will run on a full version of Windows XP, the same operating system used on larger tablet PCs, and newly developed software called Windows Touch Pack will handle touch-screen functions. Future editions will support Windows Vista, a version of Microsoft's flagship operating system that's due out in the second half of this year. (MSNBC.com is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)'It really opens up new possibilities for PC use,' Bill Mitchell, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Mobile Platforms Division, said Wednesday. The device will be officially unveiled Thursday at CeBIT, the annual technology trade show in Hanover."

Map of future extinction

Imperial College London scientists created a list of places where mammals are at risk of future extinction, even when they may be just fine now. All of the regions they highlight are mostly human-free these days but could suffer from human encroachment in times to come. From News@Nature: The list, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, namechecks places that do not typically feature on lists of the world's most threatened habitats. Greenland, the Siberian tundra, the highlands of eastern India and the Patagonian coast are all places where mammals, from polar bears to musk oxen, face an uncertain future."

New Info On Indonesian Quake of 04'

Study of 2004 Tsunami Disaster Forces Rethinking of Theory of Giant Earthquakes PASADENA, Calif.--The Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of December 26, 2004, was one of the worst natural disasters in recent memory, mostly on account of the devastating tsunami that followed it. A group of geologists and geophysicists, including scientists at the California Institute of Technology, has delineated the full dimensions of the fault rupture that caused the earthquake. Their findings, reported in the March 2 issue of the journal Nature, suggest that previous ideas about where giant earthquakes are likely to occur need to be revised. Regions of the earth previously thought to be immune to such events may actually be at high risk of experiencing them. Like all giant earthquakes, the 2004 event occurred on a subduction megathrust-in this case, the Sunda megathrust, a giant earthquake fault, along which the Indian and Australian tectonic plates are diving beneath the margin of southeast Asia. The fault surface that ruptured cannot be seen directly because it lies several kilometers deep in the Earth's crust, largely beneath the sea. Nevertheless, the rupture of the fault caused movements at the surface as long-accumulating elastic strain was suddenly released. The researchers measured these surface motions by three different techniques. In one, they measured the shift in position of GPS stations whose locations had been accurately determined prior to the earthquake. In the second method, they studied giant coral heads on island reefs: the top surfaces of these corals normally lie right at the water surface, so the presence of corals with tops above or below the water level indicated that the Earth's crust rose or fell by that amount during the earthquake. Finally, the researchers compared satellite images of island lagoons and reefs taken before and after the earthquake: changes in the color of the seawater or reefs indicated a change in the water's depth and hence a rise or fall of the crust at that location. On the basis of these measurements the researchers found that the 2004 earthquake was caused by rupture of a 1,600-kilometer-long stretch of the megathrust-by far the longest of any recorded earthquake. The breadth of the contact surface that ruptured ranged up to 150 kilometers. Over this huge contact area, the surfaces of the two plates slid against each other by up to 18 meters.