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Submission + - NASA's New Horizons to arrive at Pluto with Clyde Tombaugh's ashes (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: NASA’s New Horizons is bringing with it the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh – its discoverer – as it cruises towards the now dwarf-planet or ‘plutoid’. The probe will be close enough on January 15 to start observing Pluto. Clyde Tombaugh discovered the ice and rock-laden Pluto in 1930 and one of his final requests was that his ashes be sent into space. Tombaugh died on January 17, 1997. Fulfilling that wish NASA has fitted the upper deck of New Horizons probe with a small container containing Tombaugh’s ashes alongside a total of 7 scientific instruments. “Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system’s ‘third zone'”, reads the inscription on the container.

Submission + - The EU has a plan to break up Google (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google has been the target of repeated anti-trust scrutiny in Europe over the last decade. Today Financial Times is reporting that the European parliament is on the verge of taking even more drastic steps, preparing a plan that would call for the break up of the search giant, specifically the "unbundling [of] search engines from other commercial services."

Submission + - Denmark Plans to be Coal-Free in 10 Years

Submitted by merbs
merbs writes: Earlier this year, Denmark's leadership announced that the nation would run entirely on renewable power by 2050. Wind, solar, and biomass would be ramped up while coal and gas are phased out. Now Denmark has gone even further, and plans to end coal by 2025.

Submission + - First birth from human womb transplant (nationalpost.com)

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: The headline sounds like something from the tabloids — "Woman becomes first to give birth from transplanted womb — using one donated from her own mother". But it's from The National Post quoting The Lancet:

The breakthrough was reported by The Lancet medical journal on its website last night. It is thought the birth occurred within the last month after doctors transplanted wombs into several women who had a rare genetic condition that meant they were born without their own womb.

In January, one of the patients underwent in-vitro fertilization treatment that resulted in an embryo being transferred to her new womb. The donated womb came from the woman’s own mother, so the baby is also the first born to a woman using the same womb from which she emerged herself.

In wake of the Lancet article, the Swedish team refused to confirm a baby had been born saying: "As soon as there is a scientific peer-reviewed paper, we will comment on this. I will provide you with information as soon as we have some."

Eight of Dr. Brannstrom’s patients received their wombs from close relatives, reducing the risk of their bodies rejecting them.

There's nothing at The Lancet online yet.

Submission + - Snowflake-shaped networks are easiest to mend (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Z00L00K
Z00L00K writes: Networks shaped like delicate snowflakes are the ones that are easiest to fix when disaster strikes.

Power grids, the internet and other networks often mitigate the effects of damage using redundancy: they build in multiple routes between nodes so that if one path is knocked out by falling trees, flooding or some other disaster, another route can take over. But that approach can make them expensive to set up and maintain. The alternative is to repair networks with new links as needed, which brings the price down – although it can also mean the network is down while it happens.

As a result, engineers tend to favour redundancy for critical infrastructure like power networks, says Robert Farr of the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

So Farr and colleagues decided to investigate which network structures are the easiest to repair. Some repairs just restore broken links in their original position, but that may not always be possible. So the team looked at networks that require links in new locations to get up and running again. They simulated a variety of networks, linking nodes in a regular square or triangular pattern and looked at the average cost of repairing different breaks, assuming that expense increases with the length of a rebuilt link.

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