Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that drillers looking for geothermal energy in Hawaii have inadvertently put a well right into a magma chamber. Molten rock pushed back up the borehole several meters before solidifying, making it perfectly safe to study. Magma specialist Bruce Marsh says it will allow scientists to observe directly how granites are made. 'This is unprecedented; this is the first time a magma has been found in its natural habitat,' the Johns Hopkins University professor told BBC News. 'Before, all we had to deal with were lava flows; but they are the end of a magma's life. They're lying there on the surface, they've de-gassed. It's not the natural habitat.' It is hoped the site can now become a laboratory, with a series of cores drilled around the chamber to better characterise the crystallisation changes occurring in the rock as it loses temperature."

Garabito writes "A spider that had been sent to the International Space Station for a school science program was lost. Two arachnids were sent in order to know if spiders can survive and make webs in space, but now only one spider can be seen in the container. NASA isn't sure where the other spider could have gone. I, for one, welcome our new arachnid overlords."

piemcfly writes "Chinese-born physicist Shu Quan-Sheng Monday pleaded guilty before a US court to violating the Arms Export Control Act by illegally exporting American military space know-how to China. The 68-year-old naturalized US citizen, pictured here on his company profile, admitted handing over the design of fueling systems between 2003 and 2007. Also, in 2003 he illegally exported a document with the impossibly long name of 'Commercial Information, Technical Proposal and Budgetary Officer — Design, Supply, Engineering, Fabrication, Testing & Commissioning of 100m3 Liquid Hydrogen Tank and Various Special Cryogenic Pumps, Valves, Filters and Instruments.' This contained the design of liquid hydrogen tanks for space launch vehicles. He also admitted to a third charge of bribing Chinese officials to the tune of some 189,300 dollars for a French space technology firm." Here's the FBI press release regarding Shu's plea.

The Register is reporting that according to some reports, Interpol will soon be pushing for a world-wide facial recognition database at the borders of all member nations. "The UK already has airport gates equipped with such technology, intended to remove the need for a human border guard to check that a passenger's face matches the one recorded in his or her passport. According to the Guardian, Interpol database chief Mark Branchflower believes that his organization should set up a database of facial-recognition records to operate alongside its existing photo, fingerprint and DNA files."

David Gerard points out a Times Online story that says: "Everyone [in the UK] who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance. Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society. A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say." We've recently discussed other methods the UK government is using to keep track of people within its borders, such as ID cards for foreigners and comprehensive email surveillance.

vitamine73 writes "At 9 a.m. next Sunday, six computer programs — 'artificial conversational entities' — will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognized 'thinking' machine. If any program succeeds, it is likely to be hailed as the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be 'conscious' — and if humans should have the 'right' to switch it off."

Being in a relationship is not easy, more than half of all first marriages fail in this country. That statistic doesn't improve if you spend most of your time reading your favorite website and not tending to the needs of your family. Instead of asking me to help fix your relationship maybe you should try playing with your kids, talking to your wife, and not staring at a computer screen all day. You should realize that the help link doesn't provide help with your life. It's mostly for getting passwords and stuff. Below you'll find a collection of people that should have reached out to Dr. Phil and not Dr. Sam.

On my drive in to the office today, I heard an interview with a comic creator. Since I started the car mid-interview, it took me just a few moments to figure out who it was: Chris Onstad from Achewood (NSFW some days. Possibly including today, depending on your W). He's plugging his book The Great Outdoor Fight. Since his comic is one of the favorites here, I thought you all might enjoy hearing the interview. Today's comic is especially amusing given that it will likely be read by a great number of those NPR types unfamiliar with the strip.

An anonymous reader writes "Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn't stopping there. It has plans to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system."

paulkoan writes "I have been using ReiserFS for my file system across a few servers for some time now (follow the link below for details of my experience). I can't foresee the future of ReiserFS, but if I'm going to have to migrate as support diminishes, I'd like to begin that process now. My criteria are: in-kernel support, shrinkable, and has good recovery when the file system is not closed properly. That shrinkable requirement precludes a lot of options. What's a good replacement for ReiserFS?"

J.Tatar and a number of other readers alert us to the shooting death of an anti-government webmaster while in police custody in Ingushetiya, a volatile province in southern Russia. Police took Ingushetiya.ru owner Magomed Yevloyev off a plane that had just landed in Ingushetiya. "Yevloyev ... was a prominent opponent of the pro-Kremlin president of Ingushetia, Murat Zyazikov [a close ally of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin]. Prosecutors have opened a preliminary manslaughter investigation after Yevloyev was shot in a police car in Narzan, the capital of volatile Ingushetia, a mostly Muslim region that borders Chechnya, Russian media reported. A spokesman for the prosecutor's office, Vladimir Markin, said 'an incident' took place after Yevloyev was taken into a police car 'resulting in a shooting injury to the head and he later died in hospital,' Interfax reported."

dtjohnson writes "Data from the United Kingdom Meteorological Office suggests that 2008 will be an unusually cold year due to the La Nina effect in the western Pacific ocean. Not to worry, though, as the La Nina effect has faded recently so its effect on next year's temperatures will be reduced. However, another natural cycle, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, is predicted to hold global temperatures steady for the next decade before global warming takes our planet into new warmth. If these predictions are correct, there must be a lot of planetary heat being stored away somewhere ... unless the heat output from the sun is decreasing rather than increasing or the heat being absorbed by the earth is decreasing due to changes in the earth's albedo."

longacre writes "Following in the footsteps of DARPA's Urban Challenge, in which robotic vehicles had to navigate a complex obstacle course without human intervention, the UK upped the ante with its own Ministry of Defence Grand Challenge: within a mock enemy village, robots were instructed to find potential targets and make distinctions between armed troops, roadside bombs and snipers. The winning entry, Team Stellar's SATURN system, actually consists of three vehicles: a low level drone and a tracked ground vehicle transmit reconnaissance data to a high-altitude robotic relay aircraft, which proceeds to phone that data home to a central processing center. Upon announcing the winner yesterday, MoD said they are 'carefully considering if technologies demonstrated in the final can be incorporated into future frontline kit for the Armed Forces. It is possible that the winning team will have invented a product that can be developed rapidly for the front line.'"