The federal government is again accepting applications to build new solar power plants on public land, reversing a previous moratorium on new projects, a key agency said Wednesday. The Bureau of Land Management said it will keep its doors open for new proposals while it studies how large solar plants might affect the environment of undeveloped areas of California and the Southwest.

This was about the same time that a much bigger object slammed into the Earth, throwing material into orbit around our infant planet. This material is thought to have coalesced to form the Moon. ... "It happened probably right at the end of the formation of the four terrestrial planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars," said Craig Agnor, a co-author on the Francis Nimmo study. ... "In terms of the process of the planets sweeping up the last bits of debris, this could have been one of the last big bits of debris."

The 52-year-old man had advanced melanoma which had spread to the lungs and lymph nodes. Scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle concentrated on a type of white blood cell called a CD4+ T cell. From a sample of the man's white blood cells, they were able to select CD4+ T cells which had been specifically primed to attack a chemical found on the surface of melanoma cells. These were then multiplied in the laboratory, and put back in their billions to see if they could mount an effective attack on the tumours. Two months later, scans showed the tumours had disappeared, and after two years, the man remained disease-free.

Mice carrying a gene which appears to make them invulnerable to cancer may hold the key to safer and more effective treatments for humans. The new breed, created with a more active "Par-4" gene, did not develop tumours, and even lived longer, said the journal Cancer Research.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts. Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate. But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.

A colossal collision in space 160 million years ago set the dinosaurs on the path to extinction, a study claims. An asteroid pile-up sent debris swirling around the Solar System, including a chunk that later smashed into Earth wiping out the great beasts. Other fragments crashed into the Moon, Venus and Mars, gouging out some of their most dominant impact craters, a US-Czech research team believes. Its study, based on computer modelling, is reported in the journal Nature. ... unless a rogue comet came from the outer edge of the Solar System ("a rather unlikely event"), the Baptistina asteroid family remains a likely source for the Chicxulub impactor. "It is a poignant thought that the Baptistina collision some 160 million years ago sealed the fate of the late-Cretaceous dinosaurs well before most of them had evolved,"

Stop Badware announced that there are 10,834 sites hosted by IPowerWeb in the Stop Badware index — this index is composed of sites that Google and other partners have identified as hosting code that could damage a visitor's machine. More than one in five of the sites Stop Badware analyzed was hosted by IPowerWeb. That statistic strongly suggests that IPowerWeb has been systematically compromised, allowing hackers to inject this hostile code, possibly through a bug in cpanel (which IPowerWeb runs on at least some of their servers.) ...

A major webhosting provider is vulnerable to attacks on hosted pages. Over 10,000 pages have been affected, and some now contain a Javascript designed to load a Windows trojan horse onto visitors' machines. That trojan horse may be sending data (including passwords entered into your browser!) to a cabal of Russian hackers.