Satellite images reveal 17 lost Egyptian Pyramids!!!

An archaeologist at the University of Alabama in Birmingham says she's discovered 17 lost pyramids in Egypt - without even leaving her desk.

Egyptologist Sarah Parcak used infra-red satellite imaging to find the pyramids, along with more than 1,000 tombs and 3,100 ancient settlements.

Her team used images from a combination of NASA and commercial satellites orbiting 400 miles above the Earth. The infrared images differentiated between different materials beneath the surface, showing the outline of ancient walls.

Once possible sites were discovered via satellite, a team of French excavators confirmed what Parcak saw in the images from space.

"I couldn't believe we could locate so many sites all over Egypt,” she told the BBC, in a documentary which airs this week in the UK and on the US' Discovery channel later this summer.

"To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist."

At Tanis, for example, Parcak discovered an ancient network of streets and houses, which are completely invisible from the ground.

"This hints at the possibilities of discoveries to come," she said. "I am excited for my generation and the generations to come. There is enough to be excavated for 50 generations."

Parcak isn't the first archeologist to search for sites from the sky. Earlier this year, Australian professor David Kennedy claimed to have discovered nearly two thousand archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia, simply by using Google Earth.

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Moon has much more water than it was previously thought

According to TG Daily,The moon appears to be far richer in water than previously believed, following the discovery of 'melt inclusions' in rocks brought back from the Apollo mission in 1972.

Analysis of the tiny globules of molten rock, which have turned to a glass-like material trapped within crystals, indicates that the water content of lunar magma is 100 times higher than thought.

Unlike most volcanic deposits, the inclusions are encased in crystals that prevent the escape of water during eruption.

Water in Moon

They were found in lunar sample 74220, the famous high-titanium 'orange glass soil'. It's now been analyzed by a state-of-the-art ion microprobe instrument to measure the water content of the inclusions, which were formed during explosive eruptions on the moon around 3.7 billion years ago.

"These samples provide the best window we have on the amount of water in the interior of the moon where the orange glass came from," said science team member James Van Orman of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

The results raise questions about aspects of the 'giant impact theory' of how the moon was created - which predicts that catastrophic degassing during an early collision of Earth with a Mars-sized body would have led to a very low water content in lunar rock.

The team says the study also strengthens the case for returning similar samples from other planetary bodies in the solar system.

Image of moon

"Water plays a critical role in determining the tectonic behavior of planetary surfaces, the melting point of planetary interiors and the location and eruptive style of planetary volcanoes," said Erik Hauri, a geochemist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington and lead author of the study.

"I can conceive of no sample type that would be more important to return to Earth than these volcanic glass samples ejected by explosive volcanism, which have been mapped not only on the moon but throughout the inner solar system."

The study may also provide a new explanation of the water ice found in polar craters by several recent NASA missions. It's previously been attributed to comet and meteor impacts, but the researchers now believe that some of the ice may have come from water released by the eruption of lunar magmas eons ago.

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Indian people can surf face book with out internet connection in their mobile phone

Singapore-based software applications developer U2opia Mobile has developed a new application for mobile phones that will allow them to access Facebook on all kind of handsets without paying for a data connection.

"We are using USSD technology, which will enable users to access Facebook without having a GPRS connection on their phones," said Sumesh Menon, the co-founder and CEO of U2Opia Mobile.

Unstructured Supplementary Data (USSD) is the technology used by telecom players to send alerts to their users that inform them about their balance at the end of call or for sending miss call alerts.

Menon mentioned that though the technology will not provide access to graphics, it will help users send and view updates on their friends' Facebook walls.

"It is like sms and hence, the load on the network is negligible.

U2opia launched this application today with Indian telecom major Bharti Airtel.

While Airtel customers can update their Facebook status through this USSD service free of cost, Rs 1 per day will be applicable for accessing the full-feature application, which enables viewing news feeds, commenting on or liking news feed stories, posting on friends' walls, confirming friend requests, viewing notifications and finding as well as adding friends.

"In the Indian market scenario, where the penetration of smart phones is relatively low and the use of internet on mobiles is primarily limited to key cities, many users are excluded from accessing their Facebook accounts via mobile phones," said Shireesh Joshi, Bharti Airtel Director - Marketing, Mobile Services , in a statement.

Airtel users can dial *325# and *fbk# for non-qwerty mobile handsets to access Facebook without subscribing to data plans, the statement said.

"We look forward to bringing millions of Facebook users in India closer to their love for social networking by allowing them to access it anytime, anywhere on their Airtel-powered mobile phones," Joshi added. Hope this service will be soon be starting in Nepal too. As Nepali mobile users can only update their status by sending email and hope they can also view news feed in Nepal too.

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MIT persuades algae to make hydrogen fuel!!!

Scientists at MIT, Tel Aviv University and the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory say they've found a way to use algae to make four times as much fuel as before.

Many types of algae and cyanobacteria can use sunlight to plit water and create hydrogen; but they're reluctant to do so, preferring instead to produce sugar for their own needs. However, the MIT team says it's found a way to use bioengineered proteins to flip this preference, allowing more hydrogen to be produced.

A multitasking enzyme, introduced into the liquid where the algae are at work, both suppresses the sugar production and redirects the organisms’ energies into hydrogen production. It increases the rate of algal hydrogen production by about 400 percent. The team can't take it any further, they say, as the algae needs to produce some sugar in order to survive.

"It’s one step closer to an industrial process," says Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering.

Ultimately, says the team, such a system could be used to produce hydrogen on a large scale using water and sunlight. The hydrogen could be used directly to generate electricity in a fuel cell or to power a vehicle, or could be combined with carbon dioxide to make methane or other fuels in a renewable, carbon-neutral way.

The approach, they say, is simple enough that it has promise in developing countries, as well as the industrialized world.

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NASA to collect samples from near-Earth Asteroid!!!

According to sources,NASA's announced that it's to launch an unmanned ship to an asteroid in 2016, gathering samples that could help to explain how life began.

The mission, called Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer - or, rather more manageably, Osiris-Rex - waspicked from a shortlist that also included a trip to the far side of the moon and a mission to Venus.

The capsule's design will be similar to that used by NASA's Stardust spacecraft, which returned the world's first comet particles from comet Wild 2 in 2006.

"This is a critical step in meeting the objectives outlined by President Obama to extend our reach beyond low-Earth orbit and explore into deep space," said NASA administrator Charlie Bolden. "It's robotic missions like these that will pave the way for future human space missions to an asteroid and other deep space destinations."

After a four-year trip, Osiris-Rex will approach the near-Earth asteroid 1999 RQ36 in 2020. Once there, it will map the surface for six months from a height of three miles.

It will then move closer, allowing a robotic arm to collect more than two ounces of material for return to Earth in 2023 and analysis at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

RQ36, which is around 1,900 feet across, is believed to be rich in carbon. Organic molecules have been found in meteorite and comet samples, and the team hopes they may be present on RQ36.

The mission will also accurately measure the 'Yarkovsky effect' for the first time - a small push caused by the sun on an asteroid as it absorbs sunlight and re-emits that energy as heat. This could help planners avoid possible Earth impacts from celestial obje in futures.

"This asteroid is a time capsule from the birth of our solar system and ushers in a new era of planetary exploration," said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division. "The knowledge from the mission also will help us to develop methods to better track the orbits of asteroids."

The mission, excluding the launch vehicle, is expected to cost approximately $800 million.

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Black holes spinning faster and faster!!! Can be Dangerous??

Many giant black holes in the centre of galaxies are spinning faster than at any time in the history of the universe, and may have been set in motion comparatively recently, new research shows.

Dr Alejo Martinez-Sansigre of the University of Portsmouth and Professor Steve Rawlings of the University of Oxford used radio, optical and X-ray data to test their theoretical models of spinning black holes, and found the models stood up well for supermassive black holes with twin jets.

Using the radio observations, the two astronomers were able to sample the population of black holes, deducing the spread of the power of the twin jets. By estimating how the black holes acquire material, they could then work out how quickly they might be spinning.

The observations also give information on how the spins of supermassive black holes have evolved. In the distant past, say the researchers, practically all spun very slowly, whereas nowadays some have very high spins. So on average, they're spinning faster than ever before.

It's the first time that the evolution of the spin of the supermassive black holes has been closely described, and suggests that those that grow by swallowing matter will barely spin, while those that merge with other black holes will be left spinning rapidly.

"The spin of black holes can tell you a lot about how they formed. Our results suggest that in recent times a large fraction of the most massive black holes have somehow spun up," says Dr Martinez-Sansigre.

"A likely explanation is that they have merged with other black holes of similar mass, which is a truly spectacular event, and the end product of this merger is a faster -spinning black hole."

Later this decade, the team hopes to test the theory that these supermassive black holes have been set spinning relatively recently.

"With so many collisions, we expect there to be a cosmic background of gravitational waves, something that will change the timing of the pulses of radio waves that we detect from the remnants of massive stars known as pulsars," says Professor Rawlings.

"If we are right, this timing change should be picked up by the Square Kilometre Array, the giant radio observatory due to start operating in 2019."

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Scientists set record in data transmission Speed !!!

According to TG Daily ,Scientists have successfully transmitted data at a rate of 26 terabits per second on a single laser beam - the equivalent of 700 DVDs in one second.

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) team sent the data over a distance of 50 km, and decoded it successfully using a new opto-electric decoding method. As no electronic processing methods are available for a data rate of 26 terabits per second, the team uses purely optical calculation in order to break down the high data rate to smaller bit rates that can then be processed electrically.

Professor Jürg Leuthold and his team applied orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for record data encoding, a process which has been used for many years in mobile communications.

"The challenge was to increase the process speed not only by a factor of 1000, but by a factor of nearly a million for data processing at 26 terabits per second," says Leuthold. "The decisive innovative idea was optical implementation of the mathematical routine."

Calculation in the optical range turned out to be not only extremely fast, but also highly energy-efficient, because energy is required for the laser and a few process steps only. 

"Our result shows that physical limits are not yet exceeded even at extremely high data rates," says Leuthold. 

“A few years ago, data rates of 26 terabits per second were deemed utopian even for systems with many lasers, and there would not have been any applications. With 26 terabits per second, it would have been possible to transmit up to 400 million telephone calls at the same time. Nobody needed this at that time. Today, the situation is different."

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Spongy carbon an energy storage breakthrough!!!

According to TG Daily Scientific efforts to create new high performance, efficient energy storage technologiesmay be taking a pretty big leap forward according to researchers at The University of Texas.



The research team, led by Professor Rodney S. Ruoff, has created a new porous, three-dimensional carbon they say can be used like a "greatly enhanced supercapacitor."

In a statement, the team likens a supercapacitor to a sprinter. It can discharge a bunch of energy very quickly, but also runs out of energy quickly because of its limited storage potential.

Comparatively, a battery is more like a marathon runner which can store a lot more energy but, because of the way batteries store energy, they are slower to discharge it. 



The team believes that the continuous, three-dimensional porous network that is created within their new sponge-like carbon is an optimum electrode material for supercapacitors because, apparently, it is an excellent conductor of electricity and the massive amount of surface area it offers within a very small space will allow supercapacitors to store much more energy. 



To put this new carbon’s attributes into perspective, Professor Ruoff explains that just one gram of the material contains 3,100 square meters of surface area. Two grams of the material have roughly as much surface area as a football field.

Eric Stach, a material’s scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and co-author of a paper about the material that will be published in Science magazines online publication, believes the enhanced storage capacity combined with a supercapacitor’s existing attributes of rapid discharge and lengthy life-cycle make this new form of carbon "particularly attractive for meeting electrical energy storage needs that also require a quick release of energy - for instance, in electric vehicles or to smooth out power availability from intermittent energy sources, such as wind and solar power."


Professor Ruoff says the process used to make the material is readily scalable to industrial levels, which would suggest the new carbon can be quickly implemented into new energy storage devices which are used in everything from energy grids to electric cars and even consumer electronics.

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World famous Physicist Stephen Hawking rejects idea of afterlife!!!

Physicist Stephen Hawking has described the idea of heaven as a 'fairy story'.

Stephen Hawkings

In an interviewwith the UK'sGuardian newspaper, he says he regards the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail.

"There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," he says.

Hawking set out his thoughts on the subject in 2010  in his book The Grand Design, in which he argued that there was no need to postulate a creator in order to explain the existence of the universe.

However, because he didn't specifically say that there was no God - and because he'd metaphorically referred to the 'mind of God' in A Brief History of Time, some hopefuls argued that he still might be a believer.

But in the Guardian interview, he makes his opinions clear, adding that he personally is not afraid of death.

Tomorrow, Hawking will address the Google Zeitgeist conference in London about how he believes the universe began.

"Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing," he says, explaining that matter originated through tiny quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.

He will discuss M-theory, which encompasses string theory and postulates a universe with 11 dimensions.

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'Dislike Button' scam sweeps Facebook!!

It's probably something we've all wished for at one time or another. It's all very well being allowed to express our approval of a Facebook post, but sometimes you just want to be, well, a bit more negative.

So it's easy to see why a new 'Enable Dislike Button' feature might be appealing. Unfortunately, though, it's just another scam, which has been sweeping the internet over the last two days.

Users are presented with a message offering to turn on the new feature - and jolly realistic it looks too. The scam's creators have managed to replace the 'Share' button with one reading 'Enable Dislike Button', making it appear entirely legitimate.

"Clicking on the link, however, will not only forward the fake message about the so-called 'Fakebook Dislike button' to all of your online friends by posting it to your profile, but also run obfuscated Javascript on your computer," says Graham Clueley of security firm Sophos. "The potential for malice should be obvious."

The user's page is also updated with a message reading: "I just got the dislike button, so now I can dislike all of your dumb posts lol!!!"

The main way the message appears to be being used is as a way of enticing users to fill in an online survey, like so many other scams. However, it could also enable much more dangerous activities by running malicious code on victims' machines.

Users have been calling for a 'Dislike' button for years. Over three million people 'like' a Facebook page calling for its introduction. Many of the page's friends have fallen for the scam.

Facebook is unlikely to oblige. The potential for online bullying and the like is just too obvious - and it might not do too much for the company's relationship with its advertisers, either...

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Team finds simple way to split hydrogen from water

According to TG Daily it seems possible to generate energy from water by splliting hydrogen from water.Splitting water to create renewable energy could be simpler than previously thought, says an international team led by Australia's Monash University.

Using sunlight to create a cheap, efficient way to split water would open up production of hydrogen as a clean fuel. And professor Leone Spiccia says the key to the hydrogen economy could come from a very simple mineral, commonly seen as a black stain on rocks.

"The hardest part about turning water into fuel is splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, but the team at Monash seems to have uncovered the process, developing a water-splitting cell based on a manganese-based catalyst," says Spiccia.

"Birnessite, it turns out, is what does the work. Like other elements in the middle of the Periodic Table, manganese can exist in a number of what chemists call oxidation states. These correspond to the number of oxygen atoms with which a metal atom could be combined."

When an electrical voltage is applied to the water-splitting cell, it splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. And, after the catalyst was examined at work using advanced spectroscopic methods, the team found that it had decomposed into a much simpler material called birnessite - well-known to geologists as a black stain on many rocks.

The catalyst appears to mimic nature's biogeochemicalical cycling of manganese in the oceans.

"This may provide important insights into the evolution of Nature’s water splitting catalyst found in all plants which uses manganese centres," says coauthor Dr Rosalie Hocking of the Australian Centre for Electromaterials Science.

"Scientists have put huge efforts into making very complicated manganese molecules to copy plants, but it turns out that they convert to a very common material found in the Earth, a material sufficiently robust to survive tough use."

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Photographs in White House when Laden was killed!!!

Sometime after midnight last night I Tweeted this: "Can't wait to see White House photographer Pete Souza's behind-the-scenes photos of the past few days' events." Souza has delivered. For the past several years, the White House chief photographer has been chronicling every moment of the Obama Administration. He has unprecedented access to the President and his staff and gets himself into meetings and rooms you'd think he wouldn't ever be allowed. Case in point: Souza was in the Situation Room with President Obama, Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other senior officials while the mission in Pakistan to take out Osama bin Laden was taking place yesterday. The photo above is truly remarkable — check out the no-BS look on the President's face and Secretary Clinton's expression of near shock at what she's watching. Absolutely awesome. We can only guess that they're watching the mission unfold via a camera mounted on one of the Navy SEAL's helmets. Check out more cool photos from yesterday's events in the White House after the jump.

By the way, one more thing about Souza's photos. He posts a selection of them every day on theWhite House Flickr feed, and perhaps even cooler, every single photo that he and his staff takes are protected pieces of the National Archives. Which means that he's not allowed to delete any photos and the entire collection will be made available to the public following the completion of Obama's presidency. That's pretty amazing.

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Facebook owner and youngest Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg bought home in Palo Alto

Mark Zuckerberg is, at age 26, on the young side for a first-time home buyer these days. But the Facebook cofounder and chief executive isn’t exactly stretching financially to make his first purchase. Valued at $13.5 billion, and with a persona made famous by the Oscar-winning film The Social Network, Zuckerberg recently plunked down a relatively paltry $7 million for his first home.

The restored historic Palo Alto, Calif. Abode encompasses 5,617 square feet on a 17,100 square-foot plot. It includes five bedrooms, five and a half baths, a banquet-size dining room, a music alcove and glassed-in porch. The backyard has a saltwater pool, a spa, an outdoor gazebo with a wood-burning fireplace and a carport. The lot, located on Edgewood Drive in the Crescent Park neighborhood, is shielded from nosy neighbors and gawkers by a wall and citrus trees. Crescent Park itself is a high-end neighborhood where median single-family homes went for an average of $1.9 million in February, according to the Zillow Home Value Index.

The young billionaire’s new pad hails from an earlier structure erected by William A. Newell, a physician and politician who helped establish and govern the area in the late 19th century. It was razed and rebuilt by another physician in 1903. Since then, it changed hands roughly seven times, going through several remodelings, before being acquired by the social media entrepreneur.

The property was listed through Sherry Bucolo of Alain Pinel Realtors. Both Bucolo and Facebook declined to comment on the sale, but public records indicate the deal closed in mid-March. As with most real estate transactions involving rich and famous homebuyers, the sale was conducted through a third party LLC.

The young billionaire has long been a fan of renting and of relatively modest digs. His last two places were rentals in the College Terrace neighborhood of Palo Alto, both of which were close to Facebook’s offices and significantly smaller than the new home.

Zuckerberg, who ranks 52nd on Forbes’ list of the World’s Billionaires, paid $1 million more than the previously listed asking price of $5.85 million. The $7 million paid is about what the home is valued in the expensive 94301 zip code, according to Zillow.com.

That might seem like a hefty price tag to many middle Americans, but it’s pee wee league among billionaires. Yuri Milner, a venture capital billionaire and Facebook investor, shelled out $100 million for an 11 acre, 25,000 square foot estate in the area earlier this year. In April, news broke that Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s wealthiest billionaire, had snatched up a London penthouse for $221 million, the most ever paid for an apartment anywhere.

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