A glittering introduction to the night sky

Marcus Chown, consultant

ONCE upon a time, when I was a professional astronomer, I enjoyed a stint at a big telescope in the southern hemisphere. During an observing break, I went outside with colleagues and, with the aid of a star map, we began searching the sky for the Large Magellanic Cloud. When we found it, we cringed with embarrassment: this satellite galaxy of our Milky Way was a huge smudge, about six times the apparent size of the moon.

I use this example to illustrate how professional astronomers, reliant on software to steer their telescopes, can be poor at finding their way around the night sky. Despite knowing how stars work, they may have little clue how to locate them. Well, they could do a lot worse than arm themselves with A Down to Earth Guide to the Cosmos.

Mark Thompson, astronomer on the BBC's The One Show and Stargazing Live, has written an admirably clear and concise guide to the wonders of the night sky, which will give anyone with a hankering to rise above the humdrum a toehold in the heavens. Thompson deals with the nuts and bolts of how to read a star map depending on your latitude and the time of year. He weaves in a clear history of astronomy and an overview of modern astrophysics - so when you have found the stars you are looking for, you know how they work. From black holes to brown dwarfs, Neptune to neutron stars, pulsars to the Pole Star, it's all here.

"The real beauty of astronomy," says Thompson, "is that it is free and open to anyone." This is a book to get people started, whether keen amateurs or clueless professionals.

Book information:
A Down to Earth Guide to the Cosmos by Mark Thompson
Bantam Press
£16.99

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Eurozone PMIs for private business hit 10-month high

BRUSSELS: Private business activity across the eurozone hit a 10-month high level in January, according to a leading growth indicator released on Thursday.

The Purchasing Managers' Index published by London-based Markit researchers, a survey of thousands of eurozone companies, logged 48.2 points in compared to 47.2 points the previous month.

January marked a third rise running for the index, even though it remains below the boom-and-bust 50-point line indicating economic growth or contraction -- the 16th shrinkage in 17 months.

Manufacturing production fell for the 11th month in a row, with both the manufacturing and services sectors each registering their smallest retreat in 10 months.

The key eurozone economy of Germany powered back to growth, but No. 2 economy France is still in contraction.

"While the surveys add to the mounting evidence that eurozone economic activity turned the corner in late-2012, they indicate that it is not out of the woods yet," said London-based IHS Global Insight analyst Howard Archer, who highlighted worries about France.

- AFP/xq

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'jOBS' biopic starring Ashton Kutcher to hit theaters April 19

Ashton Kutcher as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

(Credit:
Sundance )

The Steve Jobs biopic starring Ashton Kutcher will open in theaters on April 19, the movie's distributor announced today.

The indie film, which is set to debut Friday at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on Firday, covers Jobs' life during the years 1971 through 2000 -- a time frame that includes the founding of Apple, as well as his ouster, the forming of NeXT and Pixar, and then his return to the company when Apple acquired NeXT.

The movie should not to be confused with a separate production penned by "The Social Network" and "The West Wing" writer Aaron Sorkin. That movie is said to be based on Walter Isaacson's biography, while "jOBS" is based on widely available information.

Principal photography on "jOBS" began at Jobs' childhood home in Los Altos, Calif., in June. Photos from the production have since leaked out, showing Kutcher and others in costume.

Along with Kutcher, the movie also stars Matthew Modine as former Apple CEO John Sculley, Josh Gad as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and "The Help" star Ahna O'Reilly playing Chris-Ann Brennan, Jobs' girlfriend, and the mother of his daughter Lisa. Other additions include J.K. Simmons and Kevin Dunn, who will play venture capitalist Arthur Rock and former Apple CEO Gil Amelio respectively.

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Deformed Dolphin Accepted Into New Family

In 2011, behavioral ecologists Alexander Wilson and Jens Krause of the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Germany were surprised to discover that a group of sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus)—animals not usually known for forging bonds with other species—had taken in an adult bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus).

The researchers observed the group in the ocean surrounding the Azores (map)—about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) off the coast of Lisbon, Portugal—for eight days as the dolphin traveled, foraged, and played with both the adult whales and their calves. When the dolphin rubbed its body against the whales, they would sometimes return the gesture.

Among terrestrial animals, cross-species interactions are not uncommon. These mostly temporary alliances are forged for foraging benefits and protection against predators, said Wilson.

They could also be satisfying a desire for the company of other animals, added marine biologist John Francis, vice president for research, conservation, and exploration at the National Geographic Society (the Society owns National Geographic news).

Photographs of dogs nursing tiger cubs, stories of a signing gorilla adopting a pet cat, and videos of a leopard caring for a baby baboon have long circulated the web and caught national attention.

A Rare Alliance

And although dolphins are known for being sociable animals, Wilson called the alliance between sperm whale and bottlenose dolphin rare, as it has never, to his knowledge, been witnessed before.

This association may have started with something called bow riding, a common behavior among dolphins during which they ride the pressure waves generated by the bow of a ship or, in this case, whales, suggested Francis.

"Hanging around slower creatures to catch a ride might have been the first advantage [of such behavior]," he said, adding that this may have also started out as simply a playful encounter.

Wilson suggested that the dolphin's peculiar spinal shape made it more likely to initiate an interaction with the large and slow-moving whales. "Perhaps it could not keep up with or was picked on by other members of its dolphin group," he said in an email.

Default

But the "million-dollar question," as Wilson puts it, is why the whales accepted the lone dolphin. Among several theories presented in an upcoming paper in Aquatic Mammals describing the scientists' observations, they propose that the dolphin may have been regarded as nonthreatening and that it was accepted by default because of the way adult sperm whales "babysit" their calves.

Sperm whales alternate their dives between group members, always leaving one adult near the surface to watch the juveniles. "What is likely is that the presence of the calves—which cannot dive very deep or for very long—allowed the dolphin to maintain contact with the group," Wilson said.

Wilson doesn't believe the dolphin approached the sperm whales for help in protecting itself from predators, since there aren't many dolphin predators in the waters surrounding the Azores.

But Francis was not so quick to discount the idea. "I don't buy that there is no predator in the lifelong experience of the whales and dolphins frequenting the Azores," he said.

He suggested that it could be just as possible that the sperm whales accepted the dolphin for added protection against their own predators, like the killer whale (Orcinus orca), while traveling. "They see killer whales off the Azores, and while they may not be around regularly, it does not take a lot of encounters to make [other] whales defensive," he said.

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Pentagon to Allow Women in Combat

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will lift a longstanding ban on women serving in combat, according to senior defense officials.

The services have until this May to come up with a plan to implement the change, according to a Defense Department official.

That means the changes could come into effect as early as May, though the services will have until January 2016 to complete the implementation of the changes.

"We certainly want to see this executed responsibly but in a reasonable time frame, so I would hope that this doesn't get dragged out," said former Marine Capt. Zoe Bedell, who joined a recent lawsuit aimed at getting women on the battlefield.

The military services also will have until January 2016 to seek waivers for certain jobs -- but those waivers will require a personal approval from the secretary of defense and will have to be based on rationales other than the direct combat exclusion rule.

The move to allow women in combat, first reported by the Associated Press, was not expected this week, although there has been a concerted effort by the Obama administration to further open up the armed forces to women.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously recommended in January to Secretary Panetta that the direct combat exclusion rule should be lifted.

"I can confirm media reports that the secretary and the chairman are expected to announce the lifting of the direct combat exclusion rule for women in the military," said a senior Defense Department official. "This policy change will initiate a process whereby the services will develop plans to implement this decision, which was made by the secretary of defense upon the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey sent Panetta a memo earlier this month entitled, "Women in Service Implementation Plan."

Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Images

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"The time has come to rescind the direct combat exclusion rule for women and to eliminate all unnecessary gender-based barriers to service," the memo read.

"To implement these initiatives successfully and without sacrificing our warfighting capability or the trust of the American people, we will need time to get it right," he said in the memo, referring to the 2016 horizon.

Women have been officially prohibited from serving in combat since a 1994 rule that barred them from serving in ground combat units. That does not mean they have been immune from danger or from combat.

As Martha Raddatz reported in 2009, women have served in support positions on and off the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan, where war is waged on street corners and in markets, putting them at equal risk. Hundreds of thousands of women deployed with the military to those two war zones over the past decade. Hundreds have died.

READ MORE: Female Warriors Engage in Combat in Iraq, Afghanistan

"The reality of the battlefield has changed really since the Vietnam era to where it is today," said Rep. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a former military helicopter pilot who lost both her legs in combat. "Those distinctions on what is combat and what is not really are falling aside. So I think that after having seen women, men, folks who -- cooks, clerks, truck drivers -- serve in combat conditions, the reality is women are already in combat."

Woman have been able to fly combat sorties since 1993. In 2010, the Navy allowed them on submarines. But lifting restrictions on service in frontline ground combat units will break a key barrier in the military.

READ MORE: Smooth Sailing for First Women to Serve on Navy Submarines

READ MORE: Female Fighter Pilot Breaks Gender Barriers

Panetta's decision will set a January 2016 deadline for the military service branches to argue that there are military roles that should remain closed to women.

In February 2012 the Defense Department opened up 14,500 positions to women that had previously been limited to men and lifted a rule that prohibited women from living with combat units.

Panetta also directed the services to examine ways to open more combat roles to women.

However, the ban on direct combat positions has remained in place.

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Accidental physics: Why mass has a split personality

MacGregor Campbell, contributor

We interact with the concept of mass every day. Without it, gravity wouldn't keep us firmly planted on Earth. But mass is also a component of inertia, making it hard, for example, to push a stalled car.

On the surface, inertia and gravity don't seem to have much in common. But in experiments, these two versions of mass always give the same results. Although we've been aware of the coincidence since Galileo's day, the only explanation, proposed by Einstein, has been much disputed.

In this video, we delve into the split personality of mass, exposing the conundrum that lies at the core of one of the most basic concepts in physics. For more on the topic, read our full-length feature article, "Sacrificing Einstein: Relativity's keystone has to go".

For more mind-bending animations, check out our previous explainers to find out, for example, how to change the past, or if space is really infinite.

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Gillian Chung 'cohabits' with Korean beau

HONG KONG: Hong Kong singer-actress Gillian Chung's relationship with her Korean boyfriend is heating up.

Chung told reporters during a recent awards ceremony after-party that she had been 'cohabiting' with her boyfriend, reported Hong Kong media.

She coyly revealed that her boyfriend had specially flown in from Korea to celebrate her birthday, and had been staying at her home for the duration of his trip "because he has no place to stay in Hong Kong".

The star, who turned 32 on Monday, added that he had given her a limited edition handbag, of which only five pieces exist in the world, for her birthday.

However, Chung insists there won't be any romantic "surprises" during his stay as some tabloids have claimed.

"Perhaps everyone has been watching too much Korean dramas and think all Korean men are romantic," said Chung.

Although things appear to be going well between her and her beau, Chung said marriage is not on the cards.

"I don't want to get married, I am a little afraid, and I'm not emotionally prepared yet," explained Chung.

-CNA/ha

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Google's Native Client reaches ARM-based Chromebooks

Google has finished a version of its Native Client programming technology that extends beyond mainstream x86 PC processors into the world of ARM chips.

Native Client, or NaCl for short, is designed to let programmers easily adapt the C or C++ software they've written for native software so that it can run as a part of Web apps, too. It's designed for high performance, but it's also got security mechanisms built in to counter the risks of running malicious code directly on the processor. The first version of NaCl, though, only worked on personal computers using Intel or AMD's x86 chips.

Google's David Sehr announced NaCl for ARM today with version 25 of its NaCl software developer kit, which programmers use to build NaCl programs.

The technology is designed so that programmers can bring their existing code to the Web -- for example, game designers who have written a physics engine in C++. But NaCl has been at odds with the Web philosophy in one important way, namely, that NaCl software doesn't simply run on any device with a browser.

Extending to ARM is thus an important for NaCl, because ARM chips power almost every smartphone out there. But this version of NaCl doesn't do that -- it only works on the new ARM-based Samsung Chromebooks.

To reach mobile phones, Google is banking on a revamp called Portable Native Client, or PNaCl. It adopts a low-level translation technology called LLVM that adapts native code to a variety of processors.

"With Portable Native Client, we'll be able to support not just today's architectures, but also those of tomorrow - and developers won't have to recompile their app," Sehr said in the blog post.

With PNaCl, programmers will be able to produce a single package (with the .pexe extension rather than NaCl's .nexe extension) that will run on all supported devices. With today's approach, programmers must produce separate .nexe files for ARM and for x86.

Another major challenge for Native Client is attracting support. It's built into Chrome, but no other major browser maker supports it, and Mozilla is downright frosty about NaCl.

So far you can only get NaCl software through Google's Chrome Web Store. That's also a big departure from the ordinary Web, where you simply point a browser at a Web page to fetch the necessary HTML, CSS, and JavaScript software.

That'll change with PNaCl, too, Google said. The Chrome Web Store is required today to ensure software is compatible with different chip architectures, Google said in a statement. PNaCl sheds this chip-architecture constraint.

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The Promise and Perils of Mining Asteroids

Encouraged by new space technologies, a growing fleet of commercial rockets and the vast potential to generate riches, a group of entrepreneurs announced Tuesday that they planned to mine the thousands of near-Earth asteroids in the coming decades.

The new company, Deep Space Industries (DSI), is not the first in the field, nor is it the most well-financed. But with their ambition to become the first asteroid prospectors, and ultimately miners and manufacturers, they are aggressively going after what Mark Sonter, a member of DSI's board of directors, called "the main resource opportunity of the 21st century." (Related: "Asteroid Hunter to Be First Private Deep-Space Mission?")

Prospecting using miniaturized "cubesat" probes the size of a laptop will begin by 2015, company executives announced. They plan to return collections of asteroid samples to Earth not long after.

"Using low cost technologies, and combining the legacy of [the United States'] space program with the innovation of today's young high tech geniuses, we will do things that would have been impossible just a few years ago," said Rick Tumlinson, company chairman and a longtime visionary and organizer in the world of commercial space [not sure what commercial space means].

"We sit in a sea of resources so infinite they're impossible to describe," Tumlinson said.

Added Value

There are some 9,000 asteroids described as "near-Earth," and they contain several classes of resources that entrepreneurs are now eyeing as economically valuable.

Elements such as gold and platinum can be found on some asteroids. But water, silicon, nickel, and iron are the elements expected to become central to a space "economy" should it ever develop.

Water can be "mined" for its hydrogen (a fuel) and oxygen (needed for humans in space), while silicon can be used for solar power systems, and the ubiquitous nickel and iron for potential space manufacturing. (See an interactive on asteroid mining.)

Sonter, an Australian mining consultant and asteroid specialist, said that 700 to 800 near-Earth asteroids are easier to reach and land on than the moon.

DSI's prospecting spacecraft will be called "FireFlies," a reference to the popular science fiction television series of the same name. The FireFlies will hitchhike on rockets carrying up communication satellites or scientific instruments, but they will be designed so that they also have their own propulsion systems. The larger mining spacecraft to follow have been named "DragonFlies."

Efficiencies

It all sounds like science fiction, but CEO David Gump said that the technology is evolving so quickly that a space economy can soon become a reality. Providing resources from beyond Earth to power spacecraft and keep space travelers alive is the logical way to go.

That's because the most expensive and resource-intensive aspect of space travel is pushing through the Earth's atmosphere. Some 90 percent of the weight lifted by a rocket sending a capsule to Mars is fuel. Speaking during a press conference at the Santa Monica Museum of Flying in California, Gump said that Mars exploration would be much cheaper, and more efficient, if some of the fuel could be picked up en route. (Related: "7 Ways You Could Blast Off by 2023.")

Although there is little competition in the asteroid mining field so far, DSI has some large hurdles ahead of it. The first company to announce plans for asteroid mining was Planetary Resources, Inc. in spring 2012—the group is backed by big-name investors such as Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, filmmaker James Cameron, and early Google investor Ram Shriram. DSI is still looking for funding.

Owning Asteroids

While these potential space entrepreneurs are confident they can physically lay claim to resources beyond Earth, there remain untested legal issues.

The United Nations Space Treaty of 1967 expressly forbids ownership of other celestial bodies by governments on Earth. But American administrations have long argued that the same is not true of private companies and potential mining rights.

While an American court has ruled that an individual cannot own an asteroid—as in the case of Gregory Nemitz, who laid claim to 433 Eros as a NASA spacecraft was approaching it in 2001—the question of extraction rights has not been tested.

Moon rocks brought back to Earth during the Apollo program are considered to belong to the United States, and the Russian space agency has sold some moon samples it has returned to Earth-sales seen by some as setting a precedent.

Despite the potential for future legal issues, DSI's Gump said his group recently met with top NASA officials to discuss issues regarding technology and capital, and came away optimistic. "There's a great hunger for the idea of getting space missions done with smaller, cheaper 'cubesat' technology and for increased private sector involvement."

Everyone involved acknowledged the vast challenges and risks ahead, but they see an equally vast potential—both financial and societal.

"Over the decades, we believe these efforts will help expand the civilization of Earth into the cosmos, and change what it means to be a citizen of this planet," Tumlinson said.

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Al Qaeda Commander Killed for the 3rd Time

The second in command of al Qaeda's Yemen affiliate was reportedly killed in an airstrike in Yemen in December, according to a news report by Arabic television network Al Arabiya, the third time the former Guantanamo detainee has been reported dead since 2010.

According to the report, Said al-Shihri died last month after sustaining severe injuries from a joint U.S.-Yemeni airstrike that targeted a convoy in which he was riding. The al Arabiya account, based on information from "family sources," said that the airstrike left al-Shihri in a coma. He allegedly died soon after and was buried in Yemen.

On Tuesday afternoon, hours after the initial report, a Yemeni government official denied having any information regarding the death of al-Shihri, according to Arabic news site al-Bawaba.

No photos of a body have yet surfaced and no mention of his death has appeared on jihadi forums.
This is the third time al-Shihri, the second in command of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has been reported killed since 2009. In 2010, the Yemeni government claimed it had captured him. In September 2012, Yemeni news sites reported he was killed in an American drone strike.

PHOTOS: Terrorists Who Came Back from the Grave

READ: Gitmo Detainee turned terror commander killed: Reports

Al-Shihri, a "veteran jihadist," traveled to Afghanistan shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks to fight coalition troops, only to be captured weeks later, according to West Point's Combating Terrorism Center. He was sent to the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he stayed for six years before being released to Saudi Arabia. There, he entered a so-called "jihadi rehab" program that attempted to turn terrorists into art students by getting them to get "negative energy out on paper," as the program's director told ABC News in 2009.

READ: Trading Bombs for Crayons: Terrorists Get 'Art Therapy'

But just months after he supposedly entered the fingerpainting camp, al-Shihri reappeared in Yemen where he was suspected to have been behind a deadly bombing at the U.S. embassy there.

At the time, critics of the "jihadi rehab" program used al-Shihri as evidence that extremists would just go through the motions in order to be freed.

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