Nice Pics

Barack Obama works on the speech that we would deliver after his strong showing on Super Tuesday in February.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates shakes hands with a reporter before a television interview in Baghdad, Iraq.

A list of names of high school students who survived the massive earthquake that struck Sichuan, China in May is scanned at a stadium housing people made homeless by the tragedy.



Investor Warren Buffett checks his watch while waiting for members of the media at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders' conference.

Pope Benedict XVI arrives for a general audience on St. Peter's Square in November.

During the BLACK ERA of Gen. Pervez Musharaf a Pakistani lawyer runs away from tear gas fired by police officers during a protest in front of the residence of the country's deposed chief justice, Iftikhar Mahmood Chaudhry.

A Georgian man cries as he holds the body of his relative after a bombardment in Gori, near South Ossetia, Georgia. Five people were killed in the attack.

His holiness the Dalai Lama prostrates himself before a statue of Buddha at his residence in Dharamsala, India.

Athletes competing in the men's road cycling event race past Tiananmen Square on the first day of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

Barack Obama is joined by his wife Michelle and aide Valerie Jarrett, among others, as he makes his way to a victory speech St. Paul, Minnesota. The speech would be his first after clinching his party's nomination in June.

John and Cindy McCain, joined by Florida Governor Charlie Crist (in the yellow shirt) get a tour of Everglades Safari Park in June.

A video of departing President George W. Bush plays at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Laid off from his job at Wachovia Bank in March, Gregory Gochtovtt, 40, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, decided to enlist in the National Guard. He shipped out to Iraq in December.

Congolese government forces stand guard along a road in the eastern Congo during renewed fighting in November.

A tire burns atop a truck used as a makeshift roadblock in Kisumu, Kenya, after the town had been cleared of ethnic Kikuyus by armed mobs in January.

A house is engulfed in flames as floodwaters and crashing waves inundate beach homes on Galveston Island as Hurricane Ike approaches the Texas Gulf Coast.

Boathouses borne by rising floodwaters collide with a railroad bridge in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in June.

Emergency workers carry a wounded man out of a collapsed building in Mianyang, China, after it was destroyed by an earthquake in May.

Siamoy, an Afghan woman from remote Badakhshan province in Afghanistan, feeds her one-month old baby. The remote, mountain region has the highest maternity mortality rate in the world.

iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dons 3-D glasses to watch a program about an Iranian rocket during a visit to Iran's space control center in Tehran.

Cardboard cutouts of John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin stand near the press section of the Straight Talk Air campaign plane.

Hillary Clinton departs a campaign event in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Not to be outdone by two aides who each did a pair of pull-ups, Obama does three before stepping out to address a crowd at the University of Montana.

A young supporter of the GOP ticket arrives at a campaign event on Halloween Day dressed as vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin

Cindy McCain waits while her husband works goes over a speech in a hotel room in Dallas.

Barack Obama works the phones during a campaign stop in Providence, Rhode Island.

Obama and his wife Michelle depart the stage in Grant Park after winning the Presidential election on November 4, 2008.

Mars Hoax Circulates: 'Big as the Moon!'

Once again it appears that a Mars hoax that has widely circulated through the Internet since its first appearance during the summer of 2004 has begun to circulate yet again. It comes in the form of an e-mail message titled "Mars Spectacular," which originated from an unknown source.
In turn, this message has gotten passed on to others who couldn't resist forwarding it to their entire address book.

The e-mail declares that on the night of Aug. 27, the planet Mars will come closer to Earth than it has in the past 60,000 years, thereby offering spectacular views of the Red Planet. The commentary even proclaims, with liberal use of exclamation marks, that Mars will appear as bright as (or as large as) the full moon.
The problem is that "Aug. 27" is actually Aug. 27, 2003. Mars made a historically close pass by Earth that night (34.6 million miles, or 55.7 million km). The Hubble Space Telescope used the opportunity to make a great photo of Mars. But even then, to the naked eye Mars appeared as nothing more than an extremely bright yellowish-orange star, not at all like the full moon.
This year, Mars is actually much dimmer and far-less conspicuous than in 2003.
You can find Mars in the early morning sky right now, however, located not far from the dazzling planet, Venus. This week, the moon serves as a guide to spotting the red planet -- and you can easily compare them to see just how different they appear in size.

"In the past, the rapid spread of this information was like some sort of brain info-virus, and led to at least one daily newspaper comic that showed Mars crashing into a home while the husband and wife were indoors, debating how close the planet will come," said Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York's Hayden Planetarium.
In terms of actual size, Mars (approximately 4,213 miles, or 6,780 km. in diameter) is almost twice the size of our moon (about 2,160 miles, or 3,475 km). But the great distance between Mars and Earth never allows it to appear anywhere near as large as the moon in our sky.
The average distance of the moon from Earth is 238,000 miles (382,900 km). So for Mars to appear to loom as large as the Moon does from Earth, it would have to be about twice the Moon's distance, or roughly 476,000 miles (766,000 km.).

In fact, right now the red planet remains is 189 million miles (304 million km) from Earth.
So, plain and simple, if you have already received this infamous Mars E-mail -- or eventually receive it this summer -- be advised that it is totally bogus.
Or Tyson suggests: "Now it's time for you to send this antidote to all the infected people in your address book!"
Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.

Most Habitable Zone' on Mars Revealed

Descending onto Mars on May 25, 2008, Phoenix was designed to study the history of water and habitability potential in the Martian arctic's ice-rich soil. It did not pack instruments designed to find life. To date, there is no firm evidence that Mars ever hosted biology.
But researchers say the landing site has or had the ingredients necessary to support life as we know it.
Recently, scientists revealed controversial evidence of liquid water at the landing site. Water is a key to life.
Now four papers are under review for scientific publication on four major discoveries from the mission, said Peter Smith, the Phoenix mission's principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Smith and other Phoenix scientists provided a review of what the spacecraft uncovered on the red planet at last week's 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held here.

Microbial metabolism

Carol Stoker of NASA's Ames Research Center — and a Phoenix science team co-investigator — noted that one goal of the Phoenix sampling at its Northern Plains landing site was to determine whether this environment may have been habitable for life at some time in its history.
Stoker said given our current understanding of life, the potential for habitability in a specific time and space takes in three factors: the presence of liquid water; the presence of a biologically available energy source; and the presence of the chemical building blocks of life in a biologically available form. In addition to these factors, temperature and water activity must be high enough to support growth.
A major Phoenix find in its digging into and gulping quantities of Martian soil was identifying perchlorate salt at its landing locale. Perchlorate and chlorate are compounds used for microbial metabolism — energy sources relied on by numerous species of microbes here on Earth, Stoker said.
Stoker rolled out at the meeting a "habitability index" — an approach akin to the Drake equation to evaluate the probability of life in the universe.
As a general conclusion, Stoker valued the Phoenix landing site as having a higher potential for life detection than any site previously visited on Mars. Moreover, the icy material that was sampled might periodically be capable of sustaining modern biological activity.
Delving into the Phoenix data, while admittedly still a work in progress, Stoker said it provides key information about the potential habitability of a red planet environment ...and the data suggest that habitable conditions have occurred in modern times. That belief, she said, cries out for rovers and the ability to drill down into Mars.
"What you see is that Phoenix comes down as a clear winner — a much, much higher habitability index than any of the other sites," Stoker told conference attendees. "The Phoenix landing site is the most habitable zone of any location we have ever visited on Mars."

Crucial factors


Phoenix results have shown that no chemicals detrimental to all microbe life were found at its landing spot, said Tufts University researcher Suzanne Young, one on a team scientist working with the output from Phoenix's wet chemistry laboratory — part of the suite of tools called the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA for short.
Several, but not all, of the crucial factors for bio-habitability were found by the Mars lander's wet chemistry laboratory. Some factors could not be measured by the Phoenix, Young explained. The data of the full Phoenix mission points to no true negative, she said, so further missions would be necessary to complete the picture of habitability, and possibly life, on Mars.
"We have lots of microbes out there that can do things...eat rock and release from it stuff that they need" — a process, Young added, that creates a viable energy system for other microbes.
The environment at the Phoenix site was pretty gentle, Young said. "We didn't find anything excessively toxic that's going to do bad things."
In terms of a habitability checklist, "we've got bunches of checkmarks in really good places," Young explained. "I think Phoenix really did expand the possibility for serious consideration of looking for past and maybe even present life on mars ...but it's still a work in progress," she said.



Need to go back

As the craft's available solar power declined with the approaching Martian winter, the mission was declared finished — maybe, anyway — Nov. 2 when Earth controllers were unable to re-contact the robot.
"We will try to get it back in October but the chances are poor," Smith said. "However, it is known as the Phoenix mission and we do have a chance. We may be back," he added.
Young agreed that a repeat landing by a spacecraft near the northern polar region is warranted.
"There are things we couldn't do. There are things we didn't do," she said. "There are things that serendipity could have delivered to us and didn't. But we have not found any impossibilities...we've not found anything that's a no. And we have added a lot to the possibility — and so more missions are needed. We need to go deeper...we need to go back."