CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., May 18, 2010 — Boeing [NYSE: BA] announced today that the first of 12 Global Positioning System (GPS) IIF navigation spacecraft that the company is building for the U.S. Air Force has successfully completed prelaunch testing. The satellite, GPS IIF-1, is scheduled for a May 20 launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta IV rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

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Gemma is believed to be a GSD x Shar Pei and she’s looking for a new home because her owner has gone into residential care. She’s a lovely old lady who enjoys pottering in the garden and she walks to heel beautifully. She needs somewhere where she’ll be the only dog and she’d be happiest in a quiet retirement home without young children.

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Thirty years ago, on May 18, Mount St. Helens lost its top–3.7 billion cubic yards of mountain, to be exact. The peak of the Pacific Northwest icon dropped by about 1,300 feet in a matter of seconds, taking down with it enough trees to build 300,000 two-bedroom houses. Gone, too, were 200 homes, 57 human lives and most of the visible wildlife across 230 square miles. [More]

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An obscure family of chemicals – important to the metalworking industry but virtually unknown to the public – is suddenly the subject of scrutiny from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. [More]

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16/5/2010 Sweet little Sammy the Yorkie has found a lovely home where she’ll have 4 Yorkie companions.

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Editor’s Note: William Gilly , a professor of cell and developmental biology and marine and organismal biology at Stanford University, is traveling with a group of students on board the Don José in the Sea of Cortez. They will monitor and track Humboldt squid and sperm whales in their watery habitats. This is the group’s eighth blog post. [More]

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Having dipped their feet in the waters of electric vehicle sales in Japan once before, Honda’s president of research and development, Tomohiko Kawanabe, said that they still “lack confidence” in demand for electric cars, according to a report from Bloomberg.

“It’s questionable whether consumers will accept the annoyances of limited driving range and having to spend time charging them,” Mr. Kawanabe is quoted as saying. “We are definitely conducting research on electric cars, but I can’t say I can wholeheartedly recommend them.”

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With the Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Volt and other plug-in cars entering the market, potential buyers wonder: How will recharging stations work? What will a “fill up” cost? To answer those questions, Popular Mechanics talked to dozens of experts and spent a day with a hypothetical EV driver from the future.

This is an excerpt of a post that originally appeared on the Popular Mechanics website, where you can read it in its entirety. Written by Erik Sofge. llustration by Dongyun Lee.

Santa Monica, California, 12 AM, August 4, 2020. At midnight, your car wakes up. The hefty, 15-pound charging cable tethering the front of the vehicle to a 220-volt outlet in your garage goes live, pulling 5 kilowatts of power from the grid. In just 5 hours, it will nearly double your home’s average daily electrical consumption. Across California, hundreds of thousands of plug-in hybrids and pure electric vehicles are doing the same, sipping electricity from a power network at rest. Some of those vehicles have different charging regimens, communicating more with the local utility, or even allowing that utility to actively control when and how to recharge their batteries. But yours follows a simple pricing scheme, automatically charging during what is typically the cheapest time of the day, between midnight and 5 am. That’s when the utilities have power to spare, when the office buildings in downtown Los Angeles have gone dark and sweltering. In the daily rhythm of the grid, this is off-peak.

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It’s clear that one of the most important selling points and design features of future cars will be the driver interface. In a world of increasingly connected social media outlets and smartphone apps, the car is becoming an extension of all that. Google has announced a collaboration with GM, Ford has its collaboration with Microsoft… I wonder who Apple will partner with? Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.

But all this nifty integration and connectedness may come with a dangerous price: opening your vehicle up to the whim of a hacker and his viruses.

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As a tendril of oil from BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster creeps south in the Gulf of Mexico–potentially already caught up in the swirl of a massive conveyor of ocean water known as the Loop Current–the larger question is, where will the at least 5 million gallons of oil already spilled end up? [More]

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It seems that no matter what governments and organizations do lately, tiger poaching continues to climb, driving the big cats closer and closer to extinction. But now two countries are resorting to extreme measures to help combat the dramatic decline in tiger populations, while a third is trying a new idea to boost its own tiger numbers.

Tigers vs. tourists? [More]

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Audrey, the JRT cross needs a calm and loving owner who can help her to overcome her anxieties about strange sights and sounds so if you’re a terrier fan, do take a look at her. She’s around 7 -10 years old, a cracking little girl who will be an active and fun companion. Her ideal home will be one where she is the only pet but can get out and about for regular canine socialisation .

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Shaggy dog Beryl is a lady of mature years, around 10 -13 but no one has told her. She’s quite an active girl, very sociable and easy going and would be ideal for a first time dog owner. However, if you already have a dog, she’d be fine to share as she does enjoy the company of her four legged friends.

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Such a cheeky little face! Meet Whiskey, a 12 year old Yorkie who is looking for a doting new owner to give him loads of tlc and help him to settle down and enjoy his retirement. Whiskey needs a quiet, child and animal free home and he would love a little garden where he can do lots of pottering around.

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Want to feed a hungry world? According to David Gracer, add bugs to the menu. Gracer is, he says, a normal guy who’s also an entomophagist, an advocate for insects as food. He gave a talk about ingesting insects at a May 16th TEDxCambridge conference called “How We Eat.” The event was a spin-off of the popular TED talks.

Here’s one of the reasons Gracer’s a fan: "They can’t give us pandemics. So the mass production of insects–farm insects–really easy. There’s no cricket flu on par with avian flu or swine flu or E. coli ."

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2009 flu pandemic – Avian influenza – Pandemic – Cricket – David Gracer

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The best science transforms our conception of the universe and our place in it and helps us to understand and cope with changes beyond our control. Relativity, natural selection, germ theory, heliocentrism and other explanations of natural phenomena have remade our intellectual and cultural landscapes. The same holds true for inventions as diverse as the Internet, formal logic, agriculture and the wheel.

What dramatic new events are in store for humanity? Here we contemplate 12 possibilities and rate their likelihood of happening by 2050. Some will no doubt bring to mind long-standing dystopian visions: extinction-causing asteroid collisions, war-waging intelligent machines, Frankenstein’s monster. Yet the best thinking today suggests that many events will not unfold as expected. In fact, a scenario could be seen as sobering and disappointing to one person and curious and uplifting to another. One thing is certain: they all have the power to forever reshape how we think about ourselves and how we live our lives.

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Phenomenon – Universe – Asteroid – Physics – Mathematical logic

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The board of editors at Scientific American is not simply made up of wordsmiths who assist contributors with grammar and spelling–as vital as those tasks are to a polished publication. Rather, one of our critical roles for readers is that we keep up with what’s happening in science, enabling Scientific American to be the authoritative source for the information that matters to our audience. We go to conferences and meetings, pore over other publications, and routinely confer with our researcher sources and authors. As editors, we think short-term–what’s the news that readers need to know right now, in a given issue?–and we also consider the longer view about what will come about in the months ahead.

In addition to reacting to news as it breaks, in other words, we work to anticipate what will happen. Case in point: the cover story for this issue, “ 12 Events That Will Change Everything .”

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Scientific American – Magazines and E-zines – Science in Society – Steve Mirsky – Podcast

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Calling all Rottie fans! Ben is looking for a home. He is a lovely gentleman who enjoys just lying in the garden or in front of the fire with the occasional game of ball. While he can a little bloody minded at times, he will do anything for a treat. He is looking for a Rottie experienced home where he can relax and be loved for the rest of his days.

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Boeing [NYSE: BA] announced today that it has, for the first time in aviation history, flown a manned airplane powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

The recent milestone is the work of an engineering team at Boeing Research & Technology Europe (BR&TE) in Madrid, with assistance from industry partners in Austria, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

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Police protection for a plant? It makes sense if it’s one of the last wild examples of its species and collectors are willing to pay rhino horn–level prices for its flowers.

That’s the situation for the lady’s slipper orchid ( Cypripedium calceolus ). Just a few of the wildflowers remain in Britain following decades of habitat loss to real-estate development and overharvesting by orchid collectors . One of the plants–in fact, the last flowering example of the plant in the wild in Britain–exists at Silverdale Golf Club in Carnforth, England, where it is visited by hundreds of plant enthusiasts every year. As the 100-year-old orchid prepares to bud some time in the next two months, British police are stepping up efforts to protect it from collectors, who have twice already tried to steal it.

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