So, what was it all about? Simply this, for the second year in a row, millions of people all around the globe flipped the switch, and sat in the dark for one whole hour. The reason? To play a role in making a difference and raising awareness about global warming.

Even internet search engine Google jumped on the bandwagon, changing its usual white background to black for the day, with the message, “We’ve turned the lights out. Now it’s your turn.”

“This is the perfect opportunity for individuals, governments, businesses and communities around the world to unite for a common purpose, in response to a global issue that affect us all,” said the World Wildlife Fund’s Carter S. Roberts.

Crowds turned out in cities that chose to be a part of it all to watch their local “lights out” ceremonies. Atlanta, Phoenix, San Francisco, Chicago, Toronto, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Manila, Dublin, Copenhagen and Bangkok were some of the larger participating cities.

The Earth Hour website urges everyone to make it more than a one hour observance by always turning off appliances not in use, switching to energy efficient light bulbs, or turning out lights when you’re not in a room.

The alert went out Saturday about cantaloupes shipped by the Honduran grower and packer Agropecuaria Montelibano because, based on current information, fruit from this company appears to be associated with a Salmonella Litchfield outbreak in the United States and Canada.

The FDA also contacted importers and advised U.S. grocers, food service operators, and produce processors to remove from their stock any cantaloupes from this company. The FDA also advised consumers who have recently bought cantaloupes to check with the place of purchase to determine if the fruit came from this specific grower and packer. If so, consumers should throw them away.

To date, the FDA has received reports of 50 illnesses in 16 states and nine illnesses in Canada linked to the consumption of cantaloupes. No deaths have been reported, but 14 people have been hospitalized. The states are Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin.

The FDA recommends that consumers take the following steps to reduce the risk of contracting Salmonella or other foodborne illnesses from cantaloupes:

• Purchase cantaloupes that are not bruised or damaged. If buying fresh-cut cantaloupe, be sure it is refrigerated or surrounded by ice.
• After purchase, refrigerate cantaloupes promptly.
• Wash hands with hot, soapy water before and after handling fresh cantaloupes.
• Scrub whole cantaloupes by using a clean produce brush and cool tap water immediately before eating. Don’t use soap or detergents.
• Use clean cutting surfaces and utensils when cutting cantaloupes. Wash cutting boards, countertops, dishes, and utensils with hot water and soap between the preparation of raw meat, poultry, or seafood and the preparation of cantaloupe.
• If there happens to be a bruised or damaged area on a cantaloupe, cut away those parts before eating it.
• Leftover cut cantaloupe should be discarded if left at room temperature for more than two hours.
• Use a cooler with ice or use ice gel packs when transporting or storing cantaloupes outdoors.

Photo Credit: aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu

In fact, the web is so big it spreads across several acres at the Lake Tawakoni State Park. The park is located at Wills Point in Hunt County, about 50 miles outside of Dallas.

The massive web is not easy to miss, and has captured the attention of park workers, visitors and more than a few scientists eager to solve its mystery. One good thing about the web is that it’s captured a lot of flies and mosquitoes.

Photo by Donna Garde on 0 8/23/07
© Tx. Parks & Wildlife Dept.

Spider experts are busy comparing notes about the web. Some suggest its the work of many spider species working together, while others suspect it involves some sort of seasonal migration, or a common practice among spiders called ballooning.

The plans revealed in Moscow also call for cosmonauts to establish a permanent base on the Moon between 2027 and 2032. A manned flight to Mars is also on the to-do list by 2035, as well as a new Russian space center.

Russia has never sent a manned mission to the moon, but sent a number of experimental spacecraft there from the 1950′s to the 1970′s.
  

The fuel cell power plant provides clean, efficient power for the campus data center and other operations, drastically reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the company says.

According to the EPA, data centers across the U.S. consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006, roughly 1.5 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption, and based on current trends, consumption is expected to double by 2011. The fossil fuel-burning power plants used to generate this electricity release more than 40 percent of the total U.S. CO2 emissions, a prime contributor to global warming.

“Our real-world use of the hydrogen fuel cell is a clear demonstration of the ability of corporations to make a significant and financially responsible investment in reducing harmful impacts on the environment, with the ultimate goal of reversing global warming,” said Tetsuo Urano, head of American operations, Fujitsu America.

“With a payback of about three and a half years and a lifespan of about 15 years, hydrogen power is an excellent investment for the company. All of us at Fujitsu have a deep commitment to environmental responsibility, and we are proud of the leadership we’ve shown over the years, from reducing our carbon footprint, to eliminating lead and other harmful wastes from our supply chain and products, to broad recycling and reuse programs. We will continue to invest in innovation and programs that are both good for the environment and good for our business.” Urano explains.

The hydrogen fuel cell installed on the Fujitsu Sunnyvale campus is the UTC Power PureCell Model 200 system, featuring ultra-low emissions.

The hydrogen fuel cell system meets the most stringent air emissions standards as set by the California Air Resources Board (CARB 07), Fujitsu says.

Although it utilizes natural gas, it produces 35 percent less CO2 per megawatt-hour than the average fossil fuel-based power plant, and approximately 4,000 lbs per year less NOx, the equivalent of taking more than 100 average passenger cars off the road.

The system has a low sound profile at 60 decibels at 30 feet, and emits no ozone-depleting fluorocarbons, according to Fujitsu.

The company will also be contributing to water conservation. When compared to conventional power plants, a UTC Power PureCell(TM) Model 200 system will save at least 800,000 gallons of water per year. Over the 15-year life of the fuel cell system, Fujitsu will leave 12 million gallons of water untouched.

“Fujitsu is a model for how large organizations can work through the process of understanding their energy requirements, researching the best solution to meet their fiscal requirements and their environmental impact goals, and then making a solid, long-term investment in a clean, efficient, cost-effective energy system,” said Jan van Dokkum, UTC Power President.

“Our environmentally advanced UTC Power PureCell(TM) products offer proven reliability, energy productivity and a reduced carbon footprint to benefit our customers and their communities.” Dokkum concluded.

With its impressive and speedy new addition for Windows, Apple unveiled on Monday its latest internet browser, Safari 3 for Windows PCs and Macs. Safari is the fastest browser running on Windows, according to the industry standard iBench tests, rendering web pages up to twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Safari joins iTunes in delivering Apple’s legendary user experience to both Windows and Mac users as well as full support of open Internet standards. Safari 3 features easy-to-manage bookmarks, effortless browsing with easy-to-organize tabs and a built-in RSS reader to quickly scan the latest news and information.

“We think Windows users are going to be really impressed when they see how fast and intuitive web browsing can be with Safari,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes, and we look forward to turning them on to Safari’s superior browsing experience too.”

Safari has always been the fastest browser on the Mac and now it’s the fastest browser on Windows, loading and drawing web pages up to twice as fast as Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Mozilla Firefox 2, Apple said.

The speed of Safari combined with its intuitive user interface lets users spend more time surfing the web and less time waiting for pages to load. Other Safari features now available to Windows users include SnapBack, one-click access to an initial search query; resizable text fields; and private browsing to ensure that information about an individual’s browsing history isn’t stored.

Safari 3 supports all modern Internet standards so users can view websites as they were meant to be seen, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and Java. Safari software updates are delivered seamlessly through Apple’s Software Update application, which automatically checks for updates.

The free public beta of Safari 3 is available immediately as a download at www.apple.com/safari, and is preview software licensed for use on a trial basis for a limited time.

The final version of Safari 3 will be available as a feature in the upcoming Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard, and will be available as a free download to Mac OS X Tiger and Windows users in October.

With its current Alpha 5 support for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems, novel changes has been added which include an enabled bookmarks portion of places, new crash reporting system, Breakpad, and a new Javascript-based Password Manager.

Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0 Alpha 5 also included support for Growl notification under Mac OS X, and support for native controls on Mac OS X.

With Alpha 6 slated for release on June 29th, the current release supports Microsoft Windows 2000 or later, MacOS X 10.3.9 or later, and Linux.

Firefox 3.0 Alpha 5 download can be found here.

Plasma astrophysicists at the University of Warwick have found that key information about the Sun’s “storm season” is being broadcast across the solar system in a fractal snapshot imprinted in the solar wind. This research opens up new ways of looking at both space weather and the unstable behaviour that affects the operation of fusion powered power plants.

Fractals, mathematical shapes that retain a complex but similar patterns at different magnifications, are frequently found in nature from snowflakes to trees and coastlines. Now Plasma Astrophysicists in the University of Warwick’s Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics have devised a new method to detect the same patterns in the solar wind.

The researchers, led by Professor Sandra Chapman, have also been able to directly tie these fractal patterns to the Sun’s “storm season”. The Sun goes through a solar cycle roughly 11 years long. The researchers found the fractal patterns in the solar wind occur when the Sun was at the peak of this cycle when the solar corona was at its most active, stormy and complex sunspot activity, solar flares etc. When the corona was quieter no fractal patterns were found in the solar wind only general turbulence.

This means that fractal signature is coming from the complex magnetic field of the sun.

This new information will help astrophysicists understand how the solar corona heats the solar wind and the nature of the turbulence of the Solar Wind with its implications for cosmic ray flux and space weather.

These techniques used to find and understand the fractal patterns in the Solar Wind are also being used to assist the quest for fusion power. Researchers in the University of Warwick’s Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics (CFSA) are collaborating with scientists from the EURATOM/UKAEA fusion research programme to measure and understand fluctuations in the world leading fusion experiment MAST (the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) at Culham. Controlling plasma fluctuations in tokamaks is important for getting the best performance out of future fusion power plants.

This widely consumed beverage is regularly investigated and debated for its impact on health conditions from breast cancer to heart disease. Among its complex effects on the body, coffee or its components have been linked to lower insulin and uric acid levels, the latest one being gout, the most prevalent inflammatory arthritis in adult males.

To examine how coffee consumption might aggravate or protect against this common and excruciatingly painful condition, researchers at the Arthritis Research Centre of Canada, University of British Columbia in Canada, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard School of Public Health in Boston conducted a prospective study on 45,869 men over age 40 with no history of gout at baseline.

Over 12 years of follow-up, Hyon K. Choi, MD, DrPH, and his associates evaluated the relationship between the intake of coffee and the incidence of gout in this high risk population. Their findings, featured in the June 2007 issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/arthritis), provide compelling evidence that drinking 4 or more cups of coffee a day dramatically reduces the risk of gout for men.

Most significantly, the data revealed that the risk for developing gout decreased with increasing coffee consumption. The risk of gout was 40 percent lower for men who drank 4 to 5 cups a day and 59 percent lower for men who drank 6 or more cups a day than for men who never drank coffee.

Rather than starting with a title or keyword, the Universal Swivel Search allows subscribers to search by starting with a program currently being viewed. From there, using the show description text elements, users can dig for more information about it, and its linked shows, or even actors by simply clicking a button.

The Universal Swivel Search also allows viewers to seamlessly link from descriptions of one program to all others that have common elements, including program name, actors, or suggestions based on other viewers’ feedback.

Moreover, users can also find programs related to a specific subject with ‘tags,’ which are topic-related terms that might not be included in the program’s title or episode description, but fall under an over-arching subject of interest.

For example, a user would start with a television show or movie that they enjoy, for instance Seinfeld. Seinfeld features Julia Louis-Dreyfus. From the cast list and with the click of a button, the viewer can ‘swivel’ and see other programs that the actor appears in, for instance, The New Adventures of Old Christine, including both broadcast lineup and available for download. Furthermore, from that cast list a user can select Clark Greg and discover that he was also in The West Wing.

While the Universal Swivel Search ability is not limited to actors, topic tags, or even lists of similar programs, it also enables users to jump from a show to an actor, to a second actor, then to another show, and so on.