Hoping to end a string of delays, NASA will try to launch the space shuttle Endeavour on Sunday on a mission to deliver the last piece of Japan’s Kibo laboratory to the International Space Station.

Liftoff is scheduled for 7:13 p.m. EDT from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Forecasters predicted a 70 percent chance the weather would be suitable for launch.

NASA canceled Saturday’s launch attempt after a spate of lightning strikes near the shuttle’s launch pad. Engineers spent the day checking the spaceship’s electrical systems and other equipment to make sure there was no damage.

“We’ve seen nothing so far that indicates anything was actually affected by the lightning strikes,” Mike Moses, the shuttle program manager at the Kennedy Space Center, told reporters after Saturday’s postponement.

NASA managers met early Sunday to review the engineers’ findings and cleared the shuttle for flight.

Shortly before 10 a.m. EDT, technicians began pumping a half-million gallons (1.9 million liters) of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen into the ship’s external fuel tank for the 8 1/2-minute ride into orbit.

Endeavour’s primary cargo is a porch for Japan’s $2.4 billion Kibo lab complex. The platform can be used to expose experiments to the open environment of space.

The porch is scheduled to be installed during the first of five spacewalks planned during Endeavour’s 12-day stay at the outpost, a $100 billion project of 16 nations.

The space station has been under construction 225 miles above Earth for more than a decade. It consists of nearly 26,000 cubic feet (735 cubic meters) of pressurized space, about as much room as a typical four-bedroom house.

The shuttle also will be ferrying a new crew member to the station. NASA astronaut Timothy Kopra will take over for Japan’s Koichi Wakata, who has been aboard the station since March.

NASA had hoped to fly Endeavour last month, but the mission was rescheduled after hydrogen leaked from a vent line while the ship was being fueled for flight.

(Editing by Jim Loney and Doina Chiacu) – Reuters

NASA prepared to launch space shuttle Endeavour to the International Space Station on Saturday to deliver a Japanese porch and spare parts needed to keep the outpost going after the shuttle fleet’s retirement next year.

The space agency planned to begin fueling the ship just after 10 a.m. (3 p.m. British time) for liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:39 p.m. (12:39 a.m. British time).

NASA tried twice last month to launch Endeavour, but was stymied by potentially dangerous hydrogen fuel leaks.

Engineers discovered a misalignment in a line that vents hydrogen from the fuel tank as it is being filled. Technicians made repairs and tested the work last week.

“I have extremely high confidence” in the repair, said Mike Moses, who oversees the shuttle program at the Kennedy Space Center.

The only issue may be the weather. Meteorologists on Friday predicted a 60 percent chance that thunderstorms and rain would be too close to the launch site for Endeavour to fly.

“I don’t worry about things I can’t control and I certainly can’t control the weather,” Moses said.

NASA is running out of time to finish the station and retire the shuttle fleet by September 30, 2010, as directed by Congress. Managers say they will not compromise safety for schedule and will ask for an extension and more funding if necessary to complete the outpost, a $100 billion project of 16 nations.

Including Endeavour’s mission, the agency plans eight more flights to the station. After the shuttles are retired, U.S. astronauts will fly on Russian Soyuz capsules and cargo will be delivered by Russian, European and Japanese vehicles.

The station has been under construction 225 miles above Earth for more than a decade. It consists of nearly 26,000 cubic feet (735 cubic meters) of pressurized space, about as much room as a typical four-bedroom house.

Endeavour carries the last parts for Japan’s elaborate three-part Kibo laboratory, including an open porch to expose science experiments to the space environment.

“It’s really an exceptionally valuable piece of real estate,” Endeavour astronaut David Wolf said in a prelaunch interview. “It has its own robotic arms, the ability to do observations of the Earth and of the sky, astrophysics experiments, a very wide range of abilities.”

The platform will be attached to the front of Japan’s $2.4 billion Kibo complex during the first of five spacewalks planned during Endeavour’s 12-day stay at the station.

One of the Endeavour astronauts, Timothy Kopra, will remain aboard the station, taking over the flight engineer’s post from Japan’s Koichi Wakata, who has been in orbit since March.

Wakata is scheduled to return with the Endeavour crew — commander Mark Polansky, pilot Douglas Hurley, spacewalkers Wolf, Christopher Cassidy, Thomas Marshburn and Canadian flight engineer Julie Payette — on July 27.

(Editing by Jim Loney and Peter Cooney) – Reuters

British scientists claim they have created human sperm from stem cells. But other experts have questioned their data.

Researchers at Newcastle University and the NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute say they used a new technique to derive what they described as sperm cells from embryonic stem cells.

Newcastle research leader Karim Nayernia says in a statement Wednesday that the technique would allow researchers to study how sperm develops and possibly help develop treatments for infertile men.

But many other British experts say they are unconvinced by the research. They also say the sperm cells created in the laboratory were clearly abnormal. – AP

Google Inc is planning a direct attack on Microsoft Corp’s core business by taking on the software giant’s globally dominant Windows operating system for personal computers.

Google, which already offers a suite of e-mail, Web and other software products that compete with Microsoft, said on Tuesday it would launch a new operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.

Called the Google Chrome Operating System, the new software will be in netbooks for consumers in the second half of 2010, Google said in a blog post, adding that it was working with multiple manufacturers.

Netbooks are low-cost notebook PCs optimized for Internet surfing and other Web-based applications.

“It’s been part of their culture to go after and remove Microsoft as a major holder of technology, and this is part of their strategy to do it,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group. “This could be very disruptive. If they can execute, Microsoft is vulnerable to an attack like this, and they know it,” he said.

Google and Microsoft have often locked horns over the years in a variety of markets, from Internet search to mobile software. It remains to be seen if Google can take market share away from Microsoft on its home turf, with Windows currently installed in more than 90 percent of the world’s PCs.

The news comes as executives from the world’s biggest technology and media companies, including Google and Microsoft, gather in Sun Valley, Idaho for an annual conference organized by boutique investment bank Allen & Co.

A spokesman for Microsoft had no immediate comment.

Key to success will be whether Google can lock in partnerships with PC makers, such as Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc, which currently offer Windows on most of their product lines.

HP, the world’s largest PC brand, declined to confirm if it would sell PCs running on the new operating system.

“We are looking into it,” said HP spokeswoman Marlene Somsak, referring to the operating system. “We want to understand all the different operating systems available to customers, and will assess the impact of Chrome on the computer and communications industry.”

Google’s Chrome Internet browser, launched in late 2008, remains a distant fourth in the Web browser market, with a 1.2 percent share in February, according to market research firm Net Applications. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer continues to dominate with nearly 70 percent.

FAST AND LIGHTWEIGHT

The new Chrome OS is expected to work well with many of the company’s popular software applications, such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Maps.

It will be fast and lightweight, enabling users to access the Web in a few seconds, Google said. The new OS is based on open-source Linux code, which allows third-party developers to design compatible applications.

“The operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web,” Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, said in the blog post. The Chrome OS is “our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.”

Google said Chrome OS was a new project, separate from its Android mobile operating software found in some smartphones. Acer Inc, the world’s No.3 PC brand, has already agreed to sell netbooks that run on Android to be released this quarter.

The new OS is designed to work with ARM and x86 chips, the main chip architectures in use in the market. Microsoft has previously said it would not support PCs running on ARM chips, allowing Google an opportunity to infiltrate that segment.

Charlene Li, partner at consulting company Altimeter Group, said Google’s new OS could initially appeal to consumers looking for a netbook-like device for Web surfing, rather than people who use desktop PCs for gaming or high-powered applications.

But eventually, the Google OS has the potential to scale up to larger, more powerful PCs, especially if it proves to run faster than Windows, she said.

Google did not say how much it would charge for the operating system (OS), but Enderle expects Google to charge at most a nominal fee or make it free, saying the company’s business model has been to earn revenue from connecting applications or advertising.

Microsoft declines to say how much it charges PC brands for Windows, but most analysts estimate about $20 for the older XP system and at least $150 for the current Vista system.

Li added: “A benefit to the consumer is that the cost saving is passed on, not having to pay for an OS.”

“It’s clearly positioned as a shot across the bow of Microsoft,” she said.

(Additional reporting by Kelvin Soh in Taipei; Writing by Tiffany Wu, editing by Will Waterman) – Reuters

The super-secretive National Security Agency is about to build a huge, $1.9 billion data center at Camp Williams, Utah, to help spy on communications worldwide.

The planned work there is so sensitive and classified that Utah’s congressional delegation is declining to talk about it, saying it doesn’t want to accidentally step over any lines about what can and cannot be disclosed. They referred inquiries to the NSA, which provided only a brief statement confirming the center is coming to Utah.

Utah’s National Guard (owner of Camp Williams) was equally mum, with spokesman Lt. Col. Hank McIntire simply divulging that the guard’s extent of involvement is to provide the land for the center and be the NSA’s “benevolent landlord.” He said the project has been in the works for years.

But some interesting details are revealed in unclassified budget-request documents that the NSA sent to Congress.

For example, they say the facility will sit on 120 acres at Camp Williams. They add that the center’s mission will be to deliver “responsive, reliable, effective and expert signals-intelligence and information-assurance products and services” to enable “network-warfare operations to gain a decisive information advantage for the nation and our allies under all circumstances.”

In other words, it will help with spying on communications.

Many spy novels — especially those by Tom Clancy — have described how the NSA and its satellites and supercomputers can listen for key words or voices in cell-phone, radio, computer and other communications worldwide that may reveal terrorist plans and movements.

President Barack Obama signed into law last week a supplemental war-spending bill that includes the first $169.5 million for construction at the center (after another $207.4 million had been spent on planning it).

Documents say that first batch of money will go to provide utilities to the site and relocate some existing National Guard facilities away from the area. The money will also be used to install initial security items, including perimeter fencing and alarms, an interim visitor control center and a vehicle-inspection center for use during construction.

The money will also fund surveying the site for unexploded ordnance from previous National Guard training and exercises there and take care of remediation as needed.

The NSA has requested another $800 million for the center in 2010 appropriations bills that are now before Congress. That money would fund a first-phase, 30-megawatt data center to include “state-of-the-art high-performance computing devices and associated hardware architecture.” Documents project completion of the design work for that first phase by February.

The NSA said in budget documents that after that first phase, it plans to seek another $800 million in the future to eventually expand operations into a 65-megawatt operation. The agency projects the total construction and outfitting cost of the center over time at $1.93 billion.

In response to Deseret News inquiries, the NSA provided a written statement saying that after “evaluation of several potential data-center locations throughout the United States, Camp Williams in Utah emerged as the best choice of location.”

The agency added, “Over the coming months the project-management team will begin the design phase and this will be followed by the issuance of a request for proposal in order to competitively select a developer for the project.”

The only description the NSA itself offered of the data center in its statement is that it will be “a specialized facility that houses computer systems and supporting equipment.”

Such computer-assisted NSA spy operations for years have been based at Fort George G. Meade, Md., just outside Washington, D.C.

However, the Baltimore Sun reported in 2006 that the operations at Fort Meade had maxed out the electric capacity of the Baltimore area’s power grid — and the NSA was then unable to install some new supercomputers for fear of blowing out the electrical infrastructure of the area.

So the agency began looking for ways to decentralize operations. In 2007, it announced plans to build a second data center in San Antonio. The Utah center will now be the NSA’s third.

The Camp Williams site is near major electrical power-transmission lines that serve the Wasatch Front and sits on 28,000 acres straddling the border of Utah and Salt Lake counties.

The regional center is the training base to the only military unit of its kind in the world, a linguistics unit 1,200-strong called the 300th Military Intelligence Brigade. About 600 members are from Utah, which McIntire says bolsters its ranks because of the unique population of returned LDS missionaries who can speak another language.

Camp Williams already enjoys a steadfast relationship with other branches of the military, local police and the community in general. Many church groups make use of the barracks and obstacle course for events, and police agencies hold emergency-vehicle training there. – Deseret News

Garmin just today announced that together with BMW Motorrad they have developed the new BMW Motorrad Navigator IV. This is a new GPS navigation system for motorcycles that is based on Garmin’s zūmo 660. The new BMW Motorrad Navigator IV takes Garmin’s navigation technology and adds BMW specific features such as customized mount, preloaded BMW dealer database, unique audio and Bluetooth handling capabilities.

Take for example the custom hardware which is a four-button motorcycle mount with quick-key functions for extra control and usability. The mount and GPS device are vibration-tested, waterproof (IPX-7), and designed to withstand fuel sprays and UV rays.

The rest of the specs should be pretty similar to zumo 660, such as the 4.3″ glove friendly touch screen, millions of POIs, and turn-by-turn, voice-prompted directions to the final destination. In addition BMW Motorrad Navigator IV’s A2DP Bluetooth wireless technology makes it possible for riders to pair their phone to a Bluetooth enabled helmet or handset so that they can safely talk on the phone or listen to MP3’s without having to remove their gloves or helmet.

BMW Motorrad Navigator IV is expected to be available third quarter of this year from authorized BMW Motorrad retailers in North America and Europe. No word on pricing just yet. – GPSNews

Australian palaeontologists say they have discovered three new dinosaur species after examining fossils dug up in Queensland.

Writing in the journal PLOS One, they describe one of the creatures as a fearsome predator with three large slashing claws on each hand.

The other two were herbivores: one a tall giraffe-like creature, the other of stocky build like a hippopotamus.

The fossils date back nearly 100m years to the middle of the Cretaceous period.

They were found in rocks known as the Winton Formation.

Beyond velociraptor

Queensland Museum palaeontologist, Scott Hucknell, said the carnivore, Australovenator wintonensis, was even bigger and more terrifying than velociraptor made famous in the Jurassic Park movies.

“The cheetah of his time, Banjo was light and agile. He could run down most prey with ease over open ground,” he told reporters.

The dinosaurs have been named after characters in Australia’s famous song, Waltzing Matilda.

The carnivore has been named named after Banjo Patterson, who composed Waltzing Matilda in Winton in 1885, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper explained.

Clancy, Witonotitan wattsi, was a tall slender animal, while Matilda, Diamantinasaurus matildae, was more stocky and hippo-like.

These two plant-eating, four-legged sauropod species are new types of titanosaurs – the largest animals ever to walk the earth.

Banjo and Matilda – possibly predator and his prey – were found buried together in a 98m year old billabong, or stagnant pond.

Breakthrough

The find was published in the public access journal Public Library of Science One, and was announced by Queensland Premier Anna Bligh at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History in Winton.

She said the discoveries were a major breakthrough in the scientific understanding of prehistoric life in Australia.

Museum Victoria palaeontologist, John Long, said the finds were “amazing”.

The newspaper quoted him saying that the finds put Australia back on the international map of big dinosaur discoveries for the first time since 1981, when the discovery of Muttaburrasaurus, a large four-legged herbivore that could rear up on two legs, was announced.

The new species will be part of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History under construction in Winton. This aims to house the world’s largest collection of Australian dinosaur fossils when it is completed in 2015. – BBC

Two University of Hawai’i at Mānoa astronomers have found a binary star-disk system in which each star is surrounded by the kind of dust disk that is frequently the precursor of a planetary system. Doctoral student Rita Mann and Dr. Jonathan Williams used the Submillimeter Array on Mauna Kea, Hawaii to make the observations.

A binary star system consists of two stars bound together by gravity that orbit a common center of gravity. Most stars form as binaries, and if both stars are hospitable to planet formation, it increases the likelihood that scientists will discover Earth-like planets.

This binary system, 253-1536, stands out as the first known example of two optically visible stars, each surrounded by a disk with enough mass to form a planetary system like our own. It lies 1,300 light-years from Earth, in the famous Orion Nebula, the kind of rich cluster of stars that is a common birth environment for most stars in our Milky Way galaxy, including our sun.

One of the disks was discovered in an image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, but the other disk was hidden in the glare of the star. Hubble saw only the disk shadow, so the amount of material and its capability for planet formation was unknown until the UH team made the SMA observations. “The SMA was able to image the binary system at almost the same level of detail as the Hubble Space Telescope, but in the extreme infrared, where we can see the glow from the dust, rather than its shadow,” explained Mann.

The two stars are 400 times farther from each other than Earth is from the sun. They would take 4,500 years, or about the length of human recorded history, to complete one orbit around their common center. Both stars are only about a third the mass of our sun and are much cooler and redder in color. Viewed from a potential future planet, the stellar neighbor would appear as an intense point in the night sky, about one thousand times brighter than the brightest star in our night sky, Sirius. Planets around the other star would be visible only through telescopes, but they would be within reach of spacecraft from a civilization with the same level of technology as ours.

The larger disk in 253-1536 is also the most massive found in the Orion Nebula so far. The discovery of this massive disk and the binary disk system improve our understanding of how common planet formation is in our Galaxy and place our Solar System in context. – Science Daily