“Ulysses has taught us far more than we ever expected about the Sun and the way it interacts with the space surrounding it,” said Richard Marsden, ESA’s Ulysses Project Scientist and Mission Manager. The shut-down of the satellite is a joint decision of the two agencies and comes a year after the mission was expected to end.

For more on the discoveries that Ulysses has been given credit for take a look here.

But as Ulysses has moved further from Earth, the communications bit-rate has gone down, and the mission managers decided they could no longer justify the cost of keeping Ulysses in operation. Probably have cellular phones with better pic resolution than that does these days…lol

“We expected the spacecraft to cease functioning much earlier,” said Paolo Ferri, Head of the Spacecraft Operations Solar and Planetary Missions Division. “Its longevity is a tribute to Ulysses’s builders and the people involved in operations over the years. Although it is always hard to take the decision to terminate a mission, we have to accept that the satellite is running out of resources and a controlled switch-off is the best ending.”

After shut-off, Ulysses will continue to orbit the Sun, becoming in effect a man-made ‘comet’.

“Whenever any of us look up in the years to come, Ulysses will be there, silently orbiting our star, which it studied so successfully during its long and active life,” said Marsden.

The International Space Station (ISS) is easy to spot with the naked eye if you know when and where to look. A new notification service on Twitter will tell you exactly when to go out and look up.

Twitter ISS Alerts (@twisst) gives personal up to date info on when and where to spot the space station. Following it can give you a heads up on how to look up and see it between your Cyber Monday celebrations.

Dutch science reporter Govert Schilling and journalist/web developer Jaap Meijers created @twisst, a Twitter service that will tell you when the space station will fly over your location.

There are other sites that also perform the duty of guiding you in the right direction when it comes to satellites.

The orbiting outpost constantly passes over different parts of the planet as it circles Earth every 90 minutes or so. It flies at an average altitude of 216 miles (348 km) and speeds along at 17,200 mph (27,700 kph). It is about as big as a football field and has highly reflective solar panels. It’s the reflection of sunlight that makes it visible from Earth.

Europe will enjoy several passes this week, Schilling said. Good passes will occur for the United States on July 7 and East Asia on July 10.

People who eat lots of soy products have better lung function and are less likely to develop the smoking-associated lung disease COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). A new study has shown that consumption of a wide variety of soy products can be associated with a reduction in the risk of COPD and other respiratory symptoms.

Well then…if you smoke every time you get in your car, pull out your laptop at a picnic table, or huff away while sitting at home, you should probably start eating a hell of a lot of soy :).

Dr. Fumi Hirayama and Professor Andy Lee from Curtin University of Technology, Australia, worked with a team of respiratory physicians to poll 300 patients with COPD from six Japanese hospitals and 340 age-matched control subjects from the same areas as the patients about their soy intake.

Dr. Hirayama said, “Soy consumption was found to be positively correlated with lung function and inversely associated with the risk of COPD. It has been suggested that flavonoids from soy foods act as an anti-inflammatory agent in the lung, and can protect against tobacco carcinogens for smokers. However, further research is needed to understand the underlying biological mechanism”.

OF course it is. People are still inhaling SMOKE aren’t they?

Well…more great news for those that want human life to end. The Greenland ice sheet, according to a new study led by a University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher and published in the journal Hydrological Processes, suggests that it is melting faster than expected.

It also states that the melting may have caused almost 25 percent of the total sea level increase over the last 13 years. The study also shows that seas now are rising by more than 3 millimeters a year–more than 50 percent faster than the average for the 20th century.

End of the world. Sell your certified diamonds and live it up. We’re all going to die (most likely not from this, but we are all going to die)

“Increasing sea level rise will be a problem in the future for people living in coastal regions around the globe,” said UAF researcher Sebastian H. Mernild. “Even a small sea level rise can be a problem for these communities. It is our hope that this research can provide people with accurate information needed to plan for protecting people and communities.”

It starts at 4.6 Billion B.C. at the formation of the solar system and goes pretty in depth up until present day. Ending in 2008 with the first sequenced Neandertal mitochondrial genome, which they say shows no evidence of interbreeding with humans.

Just thought it was a pretty fun way to look through the history of evolution. Clicking on this link will show you diet pills reviews. Clicking on the images in the slide show will show you a bit more about certain periods with little tidbits about the life that existed, or has been discovered during them. You may have to scroll down a bit to see the timeline at first if your monitor isn’t big enough.

Interestingly enough, the recordings were never even meant to be played back. It was considered one of the best acne treatments of the time….lol just kidding.

No seriously though…

Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville never intended for the soot-lined imprint of the sound waves to be played back, the historians reported. But the inventor hoped the visual patterns of the sound waves he had recorded using a hornlike device with the stylus attached resembling an artificial ear — called a phonautograph — might one day be read like sheet music to recreate a singer’s voice or the timbre of a musical instrument.

Although the article linked above does not include the recordings I was able to find them online so you could judge for yourself. The article says they sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher. You can make your own call by listening here.

BTW…they aren’t in English so if you are that dense I guess I should warn you ;).

For the very first time in New York coastal waters, the voices of singing blue whales have been positively identified. Acoustic experts at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bioacoustics Research Program (BRP) and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) confirmed that the voice of a singing blue whale was tracked about 70 miles off of Long Island and New York City on Jan. 10-11, 2009, as the whale swam slowly from east to west. At the same time, a second blue whale was heard singing offshore in the far distance.

Blue whales have always been very fascinating to me. When you think of all the behemoths that lived with the dinosaurs that no treadmill was going to help you get in shape to outrun, we still have the largest animal that has ever lived on Earth traversing our waters.

At up to 32.9 metres (108 feet) in length and 172 metric tonnes (190 short tons) or more in weight, the blue whale is the largest animal ever to have existed.

“These endangered blue whales are the largest animals ever to have lived on this planet, and their voices can travel across an ocean. It’s just amazing to hear one singing out there on New York’s ocean stage only tens of miles from Carnegie Hall and Broadway!” said Christopher Clark, director of Cornell’s BRP. “This opens a whole new universe of opportunities for all of us to learn more about and appreciate these species and the vitality of New York’s marine environment.”

New York State’s DEC Commissioner Pete Grannis added, “This is a very important moment in the environmental history of New York State. Blue whales were almost hunted to extinction by the middle of the 20th Century, and the fact that now we’re finding them migrating not far off our shores is truly remarkable. Although whaling no longer occurs in U.S. waters, whales still face numerous threats including vessel strikes and marine debris, and this latest finding will enable DEC and its partners to develop science-based management plans to protect these magnificent creatures.”

A demonstration at CeBIT in Hannover this past March, provides an innovative way of controlling the interconnected electronic devices that will populate the smart homes of the future, granting increased autonomy to people with physical disabilities as well as pleasing TV channel-surfing couch potatoes.

Check this out:

“The BCI lets people turn on lights, change channels on the TV or open doors just by thinking about it,” explains Christoph Guger, the CEO of Austrian medical engineering company g.tec that developed the application.

g.tec teamed up with a group of international universities and research institutes as part of the EU-funded Presenccia project to incorporate its BCI technology into virtual environments. As part of the project a fully functioning smart home was created in virtual reality (VR).

“It has a kitchen, bathroom, living room… everything a normal home would have. People are able to move through it just by thinking about where they wanted to go,” Guger says.

So…you can basically sit in your chair and perform basic lazy functions with your newfound Bioshock plasmid, Telekinesis. (Just got done playing Biohock)

Here is how it works:

Electroencephalogram (EEG) equipment is used to monitor electrical activity in a user’s brain via electrodes attached to their scalp. After a period of training, the system learns to identify the distinctive patterns of neuronal activity produced when they imagine walking forwards, flicking on a light switch or turning up the radio.Eventually it learns how to do it for you.

This was developed to help people with disabilities of course, but surely the lazy are looking to benefit as well. These aren’t people that are going to make plans to go rv camping anytime soon obviously. Who cares if you look like a swimmer with a bunch of boils on your head. You are a fat slob anyways. It isn’t going to make much difference is it? :p

Controll everything with your mind

The U.S. Air Force has offerd a pair of grants to Shay Curran, associate professor of physics at the University of Houston, where his research team have demonstrated ultra-high electrical conductive properties in plastics, called polycarbonates, by mixing them with just the right amount and type of carbon nanotubes.

“While its mechanical and optical properties are very good, polycarbonate is a non-conductive plastic. That means its ability to carry an electrical charge is as good as a tree, which is pretty awful,” Curran said. “Imagine that this remarkable plastic can now not only have good optical and mechanical properties, but also good electrical characteristics. By being able to tailor the amount of nanotubes we can add to the composite, we also can change it from the conductivity of silicon to a few orders below that achieved by metals.”

For us this just means less cost for manufacturing what we want, and possibly lasting longer, which will also save us electronics money that we can use at Las Vegas hotels.

A new study may have helped progress that problem and we may be even closer to compatibility than ever before. Turn on your home alarm system because this is some in depth study ;).

A team of Australian and Korean researchers led by Geoffrey M. Spinks and Seon Jeong Kim has now developed a novel, highly porous, sponge-like material whose mechanical properties closely resemble those of biological soft tissues. It consists of a robust network of DNA strands and carbon nanotubes.

Soft tissues, such as tendons, muscles, arteries, and skin or other organs, obtain their mechanical support from the extracellular matrix, a network of protein-based nanofibers. Different protein morphologies in the extracellular matrix produce tissue with a wide range of stiffness. Implants and scaffolding for tissue growth require porous, soft materials — which are usually very fragile. Because many biological tissues are regularly subjected to intense mechanical loads, it is also important that the implant material have comparable elasticity in order to avoid inflammation. At the same time, the material must be very strong and resilient, or it may give out.