In the 1970s and 80s, several probes landed on Venus and returned data from the surface but they all expired less than 2 hours after landing because of Venus' tremendous heat. It's hard to keep a rover functioning when temperatures of 450 C are hot enough to melt lead but NASA researchers have designed a refrigeration system that might be able to keep a robotic rover going for as long as 50 Earth days using a reverse Stirling engine. The rover's electronics would be packed in a ceramic-based insulator and placed it inside a metal sphere about the size of a grapefruit. Heat would then be pumped out of the sphere by compressing and then expanding a gas with a piston. When the gas expands, it absorbs heat from the electronics chamber then, as the gas is compressed and its temperature rises, the heat is allowed to dissipate in the atmosphere via a radiator. NASA has not committed to a Venus rover mission, but a 2003 National Academies of Science study recommended that high priority be given to a robot mission to investigate the Venusian surface helping to answer such questions as why Venus ended up so different from Earth and if the changes have taken place relatively recently.

The NY Times is running a story on how stock options that have given an estimated 1,000 employees at Google a net worth of $5 million each affects the culture at Google. Google gives each of its new employees stock options, as well as a smaller number of shares of Google stock, as a recruiting incentive. The average options grant for a "Noogler" (new Google employee) who started a year ago was 685 shares at a price of roughly $475 a share which at last Friday's close would be worth $128,000. But employees say Google is different from other large high-tech companies where the day's stock price is a fixture on many people's computer screens. "It isn't considered 'Googley' to check the stock price," said one engineer adding that it is also considered unseemly to discuss the price with other employees. And the masseuse? In 1999 Bonnie Brown answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google "on a lark" and after five years of kneading engineers' backs, she retired, cashing in most of her stock options to travel the world, oversee a charitable foundation she founded, and write a book, still unpublished, titled "Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google."

Northeastern University has co-filed a suit claiming that database technology they patented in 1997 was misappropriated by Google. Northeastern's patent describes a "method for object examination in a distributed computer database system having a plurality of examination nodes and a plurality of index nodes connected by a network" that would allow for faster searching of huge databases, like Google's. The alleged patent violation wasn't discovered until 2 1/2 years ago when a representative of a Boston-area law firm described seeing a presentation by Google showing a technique that resembled Northeastern's patented technology. "We are aware of the complaint and believe it to be without merit based upon our initial investigation," said Google spokesman Jon Murchinson. It will be one to two years before the case goes to trial. "We expect them to be generous enough to pay a normal royalty," if we win said Michael Belanger, president of Jarg Corp, who co-filed the suit with Northeastern.

Physiatrist Todd A. Kuiken, M.D., Ph.D. has pioneered a technique known as targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR), that allows a prosthetic arm to respond directly to the brain's signals, allowing wearers to open and close their artificial hands and bend and straighten their artificial elbows nearly as naturally as their own arms. Doctors first perform nerve transfer surgery to redirect nerves that go to the amputated arm to the patient's chest muscles, then when the chest muscle contracts an electromyogram (EMG), picks up the electrical signal to move the prosthetic arm. The result? When the patient thinks "close hand," the hand closes. Now the team wants to see if they can extract more information from the electrical signals produced by the nerves to provide a greater number of hand and arm movements and have been able to identify unique EMG patterns with 95% accuracy for 16 different elbow, wrist, hand, thumb and finger movements. "We've been able to demonstrate remarkable control of artificial limbs and it's an exciting neural machine interface that provides a lot of hope," says Dr. Kuiken.

Complaints of the non-existence of flying cars as expressions of disappointment in the failure of the present to measure up to the glory of past predictions have long been a staple of popular culture but all that is about to change when Terrafugia introduces their $148,000 "Transition," a 19-foot, two-seater that the company describes as a roadable light-sport aircraft. The problem is that the U.S. doesn't have the infrastructure in place to make landing in front of your house a viable alternative yet and a sky filled with people who don't have pilot's licenses could also be a problem. The idea is to take advantage of the 6,000 public airports in the U.S. so a pilot can fly into a small airport (video) and instead of getting a rental car, just fold up the wings on the aircraft and drive away. Terrafugia expects the first production model to be ready in 2009 and says they've already received advanced orders for 30 to 50 Transitions.

The robot invasion may soon be coming to a warehouse near you. In a conventional warehouse, workers walk from shelf to shelf to fill orders, while in conveyor-based systems, boxes move past workers who pack them. A new warehouse design arranges rows and columns of freestanding shelves in a memory-chip-like grid serviced by robots. When a consumer submits an order, robots deliver the relevant shelving units to workers who pack the requested items in a box and ship them off allowing workers to fill orders two to three times faster than they could with conventional methods because the robots can work in parallel, allowing dozens of workers to fill dozens of orders simultaneously. The robotic system is also faster because the entire warehouse can adapt, in real time, to changes in demand by having the robots move shelves with popular items closer to the workers (pdf), where the shelves can be quickly retrieved while items that aren't selling are gradually moved farther away. Two giant warehouses have already been built for Staples and a third is being built for Walgreens where the software will also keep track of expiration dates to ensure that items that can go bad are sent out in the order that they're stocked.

Paid circulation at major newspapers in the United States declined sharply this year with readership at 609 papers that filed on Sunday falling 3.5% to 46,771,486. With the business model under extreme pressure, publishers have been whittling back on circulation considered to be less useful by advertisers and increasing their internet presence. While newspapers now generate only a fraction of their income from their web sites -- online profits margins have been skyrocketing worldwide and now account for an average of 5.5% of total ad revenue and is projected to hit 10% by 2008-2009. Last week the NY Times provided an especially good example of how newspapers are tailoring their stories for the internet when they published a story by writer Tom Bissell on his climb up Mount Kilimanjaro and supplemented the story with an Interactive Kilimanjaro Climb documenting Bissell's climb with 3D maps and video.

Gigi Sohn, President of Public Knowledge, presented a six-step program for reforming outdated US copyright laws in a speech at the New Media conference at Boston University expressing no patience with the "disconnect between the law and the technology" of media production and distribution. Sohn puts Fair Use at the top of the list for changes that will help return balance to copyright laws that have limited innovation, scholarship, creativity and free speech. In addition to the four-part legal test for fair use currently on the books, Sohn recommends that Congress add incidental, transformative and non-commercial personal uses to the list of fair uses enumerated in copyright law and expressly provide that making a digital copy for the purpose of indexing searches is not an infringement. In additional to Fair Use reform, Sohn advocates protecting a manufacturer of a technology from liability for the infringing activity of others if the technology has substantial non-infringing uses, punishing a copyright holder who "knowingly or recklessly" sends out false takedown notices, promoting fair and accessible licensing of copyrighted works, limiting damages for the use of orphan works, and requiring copyright holders to provide notice of any limitations on users' ability to make fair or lawful uses of their products.

People deal with cognitive dissonance -- the clashing of conflicting thoughts -- by eliminating one of the thoughts. Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our "moral integrity" and protect our "self-concept" and feeling of "global self-worth." Now experimenters at Yale have demonstrated that other primates employ the same psychological mechanism. In one experiment, a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&M's and was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest -- he was now much more likely to reject the blue. Rationalization is thought to have an evolutionary utility; once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. "We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that's an outsider's perspective. This experiment shows that there isn't always much conscious thought going on," said one researcher.

Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish. Scientists assert that open access will speed innovation by making it easier for them to share and build on each other's findings. The measure is contained in a spending bill that boosts the biomedical agency's effective budget by 3.1%, to $29.8 billion in 2008. The open-access requirement in the bill would apply only during fiscal year 2008; it would need to be renewed in yearly spending bills in the future.

Whose laws apply if astronauts from different countries get into a fight, make a patentable discovery, or damage equipment belonging to another country while on the International Space Station? According to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, ratified by 98 nations, states have legal jurisdiction within spacecraft registered to them. When the space station was assembled from modules supplied by the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency (ESA), partners rejected an initial proposal that US law should prevail throughout the space station. "It was agreed that each state registers its own separate elements, which means that you now have a piece of the US annexed to a piece of Europe annexed to a piece of Japan in outer space, legally speaking," said Dr Frans von der Dunk of the International Institute of Air and Space Law at the University of Leiden. So what happens if a crime is committed in space? "If somebody performs an activity which may be considered criminal, it is in the first instance his own country which is able to exercise jurisdiction," Dr. von der Dunk added.

Last week the NY Times provided an especially good example of how newspapers are melding disparate media on the internet to tell stories more effectively than on the printed page alone when they published an essay by writer Tom Bissell on his climb up Mount Kilimanjaro and the contradictions inherent in having "paid a great sum to come to Tanzania to do something virtually no Tanzanian of sound mind would contemplate doing for free." To supplement the story, the Times created an Interactive Kilimanjaro Climb documenting Bissell's climb with 3D maps and video so readers can get a feel for what it's like to climb 15,100 ft up an inactive stratovolcano that includes the highest peak in Africa.

Researchers at the University Of Alabama In Huntsville have discovered that some x-rays thought to come from intergalactic clouds of "warm" gas are instead probably caused by lightweight electrons leaving the mass of the universe as much as ten to 20 percent lighter than previously calculated. In 2002 the same team reported finding large amounts of extra "soft" (relatively low-energy) x-rays coming from the vast space in the middle of galaxy clusters. Their cumulative mass was thought to account for as much as ten percent of the mass and gravity needed to hold together galaxies, galaxy clusters and perhaps the universe itself. When the team looked at data from a galaxy cluster in the southern sky, however, they found that energy from those additional soft x-rays doesn't look like it should. "The best, most logical explanation seems to be that a large fraction of the energy comes from electrons smashing into photons instead of from warm atoms and ions, which would have recognizable spectral emission lines," said Dr. Max Bonamente.

Nick Frey, the reigning national time-trial bicycle champion, is a mechanical and aerospace engineering major at Princeton who puts his knowledge to work in modifications to his racing bike. Once a bicycle is moving fast enough, nearly all the cyclist's strength goes into pushing aside air. Reducing that resistance by a relatively small amount can result in major increases in speed with minimal increased effort so one of Frey's innovations is enclosing his brake cables in a special housing shaped like an airplane wing that shields them from the wind, reducing the resistance on his bike. "It's like free speed," says Frey. "And in cycling, every second counts." Other improvements include the helmet he purchased to match his riding posture and the silicon gel between his wheel rims and tires that subtly changes the shape of his tires, making them more aerodynamic. Frey subjects his own performance to rigorous analysis and posts his training and performance results, along with details about various races, on his blog.

USA Today has an advance story on Google's plans to announce a new operating system, geared specifically for cellphones with partners that include Sprint, Motorola, Samsung and Japanese wireless giant NTT DoCoMo. Although details won't be released until later today the new G-system will be based on Linux overlaid with Java and Google hopes to have a branded device ready for worldwide shipment by spring. Mobile Web browsing is notoriously slow and Google plans to change that by providing easy access to the Internet at PC-type speeds. Google plans to basically give away the software developer tools, used by programmers to write new applications. "If you're a developer, you'll be able to develop (applications) for the new Google Phone very quickly," said Morgan Gillis of the LiMo Foundation. AT&T and Verizon Wireless are noticeably absent from the coalition not wanting to support a device that favors Google over other providers. Sprint, the No. 3 carrier, supports the coalition, but it hasn't formally agreed to make the Google Phone available to its 54 million subscribers.