4G mobile phone network comes to Scandinavia

At launch the network is only available on laptops

Swedish and Norwegian mobile users could be among the first to use a fourth-generation (4G) mobile network.

Mobile phone firm TeliaSonera has completed work on two 4G networks in Oslo and Stockholm. The company said that the first customers will be able to start using the networks in early 2010. Despite the launch of the network, no handsets can yet use 4G. Initially customers will connect via a dongle and a laptop.

Fourth-generation, 4G, networks are based around the Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology and downlink data speeds can hit 100 megabits per second - about ten times quicker than the fastest 3G networks. The technology has been designed to overlay existing 3G networks and most operators have committed to upgrading to the faster system. TeliaSonera said it was recruiting customers to pilot the network during the first quarter of 2010. It has released no information about the cost of connecting to the high-speed network. The dongles for connecting to the LTE network are made by Samsung.

Phone equipment maker Ericsson has put together the network in Stockholm, Sweden and Chinese firm Huawei is behind the one in Oslo, Norway. Both networks cover the central regions of both cities. TeliaSonera said it expected the boost in speed to drive many novel applications including gaming on the move and much greater viewing of video on laptops. Handsets that can use LTE are expected in mid-late 2010.

Nasa sky survey probe blasts off

A Nasa satellite designed to uncover hidden cosmic objects has blasted off from California.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (Wise) blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a Delta II rocket just after 1409 GMT. It will pick up the glow of hundreds of millions of astronomical bodies. The probe is expected to uncover objects that have never seen before, including some of the coolest stars and the most luminous galaxies.

The $320m mission will do this by scanning the entire sky in infrared light with a sensitivity hundreds of times greater than ever before. Viewing the sky with "infrared glasses" can lift a veil on many objects that are not visible to the naked eye.

"All systems are looking good, and we are on our way to seeing the entire infrared sky better than ever before," said William Irace, the mission's project manager at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.

The satellite will also have a role in planetary protection: Wise will be able to detect some of the darkest near-Earth asteroids and comets.

This would help efforts to determine whether any of these objects could strike Earth in the near future.

Engineers acquired a signal from the spacecraft just 10 seconds after the spacecraft separated from the rocket.

Approximately three minutes later, Wise re-oriented itself with its solar panels facing the Sun to generate its own power.

Super cool

Wise is cooled by a chamber of super-cold hydrogen. Because the instrument sees the infrared, or heat, signatures of objects, it must be kept at chilly temperatures. Its coldest detectors operate below -266C.

"Wise needs to be colder than the objects it's observing," said Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the mission's principal investigator. "Now we're ready to see the infrared glow from hundreds of thousands of asteroids, and hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies."

Wise will cast a wide net for astronomical objects of interest

With the spacecraft stable, cold and communicating with mission controllers, a month-long process of check-out and calibration is underway. Wise joins two other infrared missions in space: Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory. This mission is different from those others in that it will survey the entire sky. It is designed to cast a wide net to catch a variety of objects of interest. Wise will target dim objects called brown dwarfs. These are effectively failed stars, which have not gathered up enough mass to ignite.

Brown dwarfs are cool and faint, and nearly impossible to see in visible light. Mission scientists expect the spacecraft to uncover many hundreds. This could double or triple the number of star-like objects known within 25 light-years of Earth.

NASA's strike on moon worked, mission official says

NASA said Friday's rocket and satellite strike on the moon was a success, kicking up enough dust for scientists to determine whether or not there is water on the moon. An artist's rendering shows the LCROSS spacecraft, left, separating from its Centaur rocket. "We have the data we need to actually address the questions we set out to address," said Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, mission. It will be awhile before all the data from the satellite can be analyzed to determine if there is water on the moon, according to LCROSS project manager Dan Andrews. Andrews said that "the spacecraft performed beautifully."NASA crashed the rocket and a satellite into the moon's surface on Friday morning in a $79 million mission. NASA televised live images of the LCROSS as it crashed into a crater near the moon's south pole. Watch as NASA reacts to "successful" crash »

Minutes before its impact, the satellite guided a rocket into the Cabeus crater in an effort to kick up enough dust to help the LCROSS find whether there is any water in the moon's soil. Don't Miss The Centaur upper-stage rocket impacted the moon shortly after 7:30 a.m. ET, and the satellite followed it four minutes later. The LCROSS carried spectrometers, near-infrared cameras, a visible camera and a visible radiometer to help NASA scientists analyze the resulting plumes of dust -- more than 250 metric tons' worth -- for water vapor. But immediate NASA images of the crash produced no sign of the plumes, which were expected to rise six kilometers from the moon's surface, said John Marmie, LCROSS deputy project manager. "Everyone was like, 'What's happening here?' " Marmie said. "But that doesn't mean we don't have good data there." Observatories on Earth did confirm they saw plumes after the crashes, Marmie said. Watch as a mission official explains the importance of finding water »

The orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the impacts. Meanwhile, hundreds of telescopes on Earth focused on the moon, hoping to catch a glimpse of two plumes. The Cabeus crater lies in permanent shadow, making observations inside the crater difficult. NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, who watched at a public event at the Newseum in Washington, noted the great interest in the NASA mission. "We had families ... literally coming in off the street" to watch, Garver said on NASA TV. NASA had encouraged amateur astronomers to join the watch parties.

"We expect the debris plumes to be visible through midsized backyard telescopes -- 10 inches and larger," said Brian Day at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, before the strike. Day is an amateur astronomer who is leading education and public outreach for the LCROSS mission. Ames -- which led the mission -- hosted an all-night event featuring music and food before the broadcast of NASA's live transmission of the lunar impact. Other science observatories and amateur astronomy clubs across the country hosted similar events. Watch CNN's Jeanne Moos ask if lunacy is behind the moon "bombing" »

"The initial explosions will probably be hidden behind crater walls, but the plumes will rise high enough above the crater's rim to be seen from Earth," Day said. Data from previous space missions have revealed trace amounts of water in lunar soil. The LCROSS mission seeks a definitive answer to the question of how much water is present. NASA has said it believes water on the moon could be a valuable resource in the agency's quest to explore the solar system. LCROSS launched with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 18.

Phishing attack targets Hotmail

Reports suggest Windows Live Hotmail accounts have been hacked

Thousands of accounts on web-based e-mail system Hotmail have been compromised in a phishing attack, software giant Microsoft has confirmed.

BBC News has seen a list of more than 10,000 e-mail accounts, predominantly originating from Europe, and passwords which were posted online. Microsoft said it had launched an investigation. Phishing involves using fake websites to lure people into revealing details such as bank accounts or login names. "We are aware that some Windows Live Hotmail customers' credentials were acquired illegally and exposed on a website," said a Microsoft spokesperson.

"Upon learning of the issue, we immediately requested that the credentials be removed and launched an investigation to determine the impact to customers."

Quick change

Graham Cluley, consultant at security firm Sophos, told BBC News the published list may just be a subset of a longer list of compromised accounts. "We still don't know the scale of the problem," he told BBC News. Technology blog neowin.net was the first to publish details of the attack. It said the accounts were posted on 1 October to pastebin.com, a website commonly used by developers to share code. Although the details have since been removed, BBC News and Neowin has seen a list of 10,028 names beginning with the letters A and B. BBC News has confirmed that the accounts are genuine and predominantly originate in Europe. The list included details of Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail accounts with email addresses ending hotmail.com, msn.com and live.com. Mr Cluley advised Hotmail users to change their password as soon as possible.

"I'd also recommend that people change the password on any other site where they use it," he said. Around 40% of people use the same password for every website they use, he added. Hotmail is currently the largest web-based e-mail service.

Robot fish could prevent crashes

The robots use lasers to measure the distance between each oth

Robots that mimic the behaviour of fish have been developed by Japanese car firm Nissan, who believe the technique can be used in crash avoidance systems.

The tiny robots, called Eporo, can move in a fleet without bumping into their travelling companions. It is the second time the firm has looked to the animal kingdom for inspiration for its designs. Last year, the manufacturer unveiled its BR23C robot, which was modelled on the behaviour of bumblebees.The bee also displays anti-collision behaviour but tends to fly solo.

The new three-wheeled robot, which will be shown off at Japanese design fair Ceatec on 6 October, is designed to travel in a group of up to seven vehicles. Each uses a laser range-finder to measure the distance between obstacle. The data is constantly shared between peers via radio, allowing the group to travel as a "shoal" without bumping into each other. The technique allows the cars to travel side-by-side or quickly switch direction as a group. "We, in a motorised world, have a lot to learn from the behaviour of a school of fish in terms of each fish's degree of freedom and safety," said Toshiyuki Andou, principal engineer of the project.

DNA sequencing in a holey new way

DNA molecules will be held in place by tiny voltages within the nanohole

IBM will announce on Tuesday how it intends to hold DNA molecules in tiny holes in silicon in an effort to decode their genetic secrets letter by letter.

Their microelectronic approach solves one of two long-standing problems in "nanopore" DNA sequencing: how to stop it flying through too quickly. The aim is to speed up DNA sequencing in a push toward personalised medicine. IBM's chief executive Sam Palmisano will announce the plans to the Medical Innovation Summit in the US on Tuesday. While sequencing the genomes of humans and animals has become relatively routine in a laboratory setting, the ability to quickly and cheaply sequence genomes of individuals remains out of reach. That widely available genetic information will help bring about the era of "personalised medicine" - in which preventative or therapeutic approaches can be tailored to individuals based on their specific genetic makeup.

All-electronic

"There have been a number of attempts to sequence DNA much faster than it was sequenced when the first human genome was announced," said Gustavo Stolovitzky, a computational biologist from IBM.

Individual genetic information will lead to more directed therapi

"All of them use some complicated sample preparation - chopping the DNA, amplifying, reverse transcribing - and some sophisticated and labour-intensive optics," Dr Stolovitzky told BBC News. "All this makes sequencing faster, but still slower and more expensive than it needs to be before it could be used for personalised medicine." Instead, Dr. Stolovitzky and colleagues are pursuing a method involving silicon peppered with holes just three billionths of a metre across - 20,000 times thinner than a human hair and just wide enough for one strand of DNA to pass through. Researchers have been looking into using such nanopores for a number of years - mimicking the proteins in cell membranes that perform the same trick - because using a semiconductor offers significant advantages over biochemical and optical techniques.

"DNA nanopore sequencing continues to be one of the great candidates to do fast and cheap DNA sequencing without sample preparation or sophisticated optics, using only electronics to fetch the signal out," Dr Stolovitzky said. Moreover, the approach could be done in a "massively parallel" way - that is, with hundreds or thousands of DNA strands passing through an array of holes on a single chip.

Trap stack

The idea is conceptually simple but devilishly difficult to carry out. Because DNA naturally carries a net electric charge, simply applying a voltage across the two sides of the chip drives the DNA strands through the holes. However, the DNA tends to pass through too quickly to decode the identities of the individual nucleotides - letters of the genetic code - as they pass. More than that, until they can study DNA strands moving at a more carefully controlled pace, researchers cannot develop the techniques to query the precise nucleotide they have trapped in place.

The Blue Gene supercomputer simulated the nanopores' every atom

The IBM team have now hit on the idea of a chip composed of a stack of layers, each of which can hold a precisely-controlled voltage in a thin layer inside the nanopore. These smaller voltages trap the negatively charged chemical groups called phosphates that separate individual nucleotides. By cycling this internal voltage, the DNA strand can be made to advance one nucleotide at a time. The team has used IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer to simulate the process in order to ensure it would work, and the team has built prototypes of the trapping nanopore. Tuesday's announcement marks the beginning of the testing and refinement stages of the process.

What remains is to investigate the means to identify the individual nucleotides trapped inside the nanopores, which is likely to rest on measuring some electrical or electronic property of each as it passes. Stas Polonsky, another IBM researcher working on the project, remains convinced that with the benefit of a trapping mechanism, this last problem is tractable.

"As a company we have a lot of expertise with electrical measurements," he said. "We have nanopores plus the whole arsenal of microelectronics - we can integrate all these ultrasensitive circuits right on a chip, which will boost the sensitivity for measurements tremendously."

Trial HIV vaccine cuts infection

An experimental HIV vaccine has for the first time cut the risk of infection, researchers say.

The vaccine - a combination of two earlier experimental vaccines - was given to 16,000 people in Thailand, in the largest ever such vaccine trial. Researchers found that it reduced by nearly a third the risk of contracting HIV, the virus that leads to Aids. It has been hailed as a significant, scientific breakthrough, but a global vaccine is still some way off. The study was carried out by the US army and the Thai government over seven years on volunteers - all HIV-negative men and women aged between 18 and 30 - in some of Thailand's most badly-affected regions. The vaccine was a combination of two older vaccines that on their own had not cut infection rates. Half of the volunteers were given the vaccine, while the other half were given a placebo - and all were given counselling on HIV/Aids prevention. Participants were tested for HIV infection every six months for three years. The results found that the chances of catching HIV were 31.2% less for those who had taken the vaccine - with 74 people who did not get the vaccine infected and 51 of the vaccinated group infected.

'Encouraging'

"This result is tantalisingly encouraging. The numbers are small and the difference may have been due to chance, but this finding is the first positive news in the Aids vaccine field for a decade," said Dr Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet medical journal. "We should be cautious, but hopeful. The discovery needs urgent replication and investigation." Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said: "For the first time, an investigational HIV vaccine has demonstrated some ability to prevent HIV infection among vaccinated individuals. "Additional research is needed to better understand how this vaccine regimen reduced the risk of HIV infection, but this is certainly an encouraging advance for the HIV vaccine field." The findings were hailed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UN/Aids). They said while the results were "characterised as modestly protective... [they] have instilled new hope in the HIV vaccine research field".

Rocket launch prompts calls of strange lights in sky

A series of spooky lights above parts of the northeastern United States Saturday sparked a flurry of phone calls to authorities and television news stations. CNN affiliate stations from New Jersey to Massachusetts heard from dozens of callers who reported that the lights appeared as a cone shape shining down from the sky. However, the lights were the result of an experimental rocket launch by NASA from the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, a spokesman told CNN. Keith Koehler said the Black Brant XII Suborbital Sounding Rocket was launched to study the Earth's highest clouds. The light came from an artificial noctilucent cloud formed by the exhaust particles of the rocket's fourth stage about 173 miles high. Natural noctilucent clouds, also called "polar mesospheric clouds," are "found in the upper atmosphere as spectacular displays that are most easily seen just after sunset," according to a NASA statement published earlier in September. "The clouds are the highest clouds in Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere around 50 miles altitude."Normally, noctilucent clouds are not visible to the naked eye and can only be seen when illuminated by sunlight below the horizon.

The launch took place at 7:46 p.m. Saturday, just as the sun was setting for the day. Observation stations on the ground and in satellites will track the artificial noctilucent clouds created by the rocket for months, NASA said. "Data collected during the experiment will provide insight into the formation, evolution, and properties of noctilucent clouds, which are typically observed naturally at high latitudes. "In addition to the understanding of noctilucent clouds, scientists will use the experiment to validate and develop simulation models that predict the distribution of dust particles from rocket motors in the upper atmosphere," the NASA statement said.

Students launch camera to edge of space, snap pics of Earth

Oliver Yeh is the kind of guy who cooks up ideas so kooky, so out-of-this-world, that even his fellow MIT students tend to roll their eyes when they hear them.

But that never stops him.

His latest concept -- to launch a camera into near-space using a weather balloon, a cell phone, hand warmers and a drink cooler -- fell flat when he sent out an e-mail message to dozens of his classmates, asking for help. Unfazed, Yeh managed to find one friend willing to chip in. And on September 2, the go-it-alone pair floated a balloon-camera high enough into the atmosphere to photograph the curvature of the Earth and the deep black of space, all on a lunch-money budget of $148. "For me, it was just about not being afraid to do what I love to do," said Yeh, a 20-year-old MIT senior studying computer science and electrical engineering. "Before, people were just kind of like, 'That's a crazy idea; there he goes all over again.' (Yeh once convinced a friend to float the Charles River with him on a raft made of plastic bottles.) "I didn't have a lot of people who wanted to do it with me, so I'm really glad I stuck it out and succeeded in what I wanted to do."After Yeh's fellow student and sidekick, Justin Lee, uploaded the story to CNN's iReport.com, their camera-to-space effort, which they named Project Icarus, went viral online. See photos of their feat »

Since then, the duo has received a number of requests from other would-be space photographers, asking for their project notes. Yeh said he will post those soon on the project's Web site at 1337arts.com. They've gotten so many inquiries they had to post this warning: "CAUTION/DISCLAIMER: Launching things into the stratosphere can be DANGEROUS! Please contact the FAA before trying ..." These enterprising students seem to have hit a nerve with the public, probably because their effort costs so little, suggesting that anyone with some know-how and a few common tools can photograph the edge of space. That's something normally reserved for big-budget agencies like NASA. They're also tapping into the exploding do-it-yourself movement online. Web sites like Makezine.com and Instructables offer blueprints for people who want to make everything from wiener-dog wheelchairs to self-playing harmonicas.

Most of the inventors who use these sites care more about the ideas and the sense of community and accomplishment than traditional rewards like copyrights and cash, said Eric Wilhelm, a former MIT student who is now CEO of Instructables. Yeh and Lee are far from the first people, or even the first students, to send balloons into near-space to take pictures. But their on-the-cheap methods and stunning images have earned them a glowing reputation among those who paved their way. Yeh and Lee also learned from those who came before them. They did tons of Internet research during the spring semester and over summer break, so that when they arrived back on MIT's campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they set right to work. All of the parts they used are commonly available. Yeh and Lee bought a Canon camera on eBay and then fastened it inside a Styrofoam cooler. A hole poked in the side of the container let the camera lens gaze out into space, and they attached a Motorola Boost cell phone to the camera so it would send GPS coordinates back to Earth.

A wireless router was hooked up to the mobile phone to give it the extra antenna power needed to send the coordinates down. And the students taped a hand warmer -- the kind skiers put in their gloves -- to the mobile phone's battery so it wouldn't freeze. "We weren't sure if they were both necessary, but we couldn't test it, because we couldn't find anything that's negative 40 degrees," Yeh said. "Our freezer stopped at negative 10, so that was the best we could do." Watch an interview with Yeh and Lee »

The plan seemed simple enough -- at least to the MIT students. They would fill a spherical weather balloon, available online, with helium and float the entire cooler-camera-cell-phone apparatus high into the atmosphere. When the balloon had traveled about 17 miles up, air pressure would cause it to pop, and a parachute dangling from the side of the cooler would lower the contraption back to Earth. Then the GPS in the phone would tell them where to find their camera, which they set, using open-source software, to take photos every 5 seconds. Yeh and Lee knew that wind would change their contraption's course after launch, so they went on a free Web site to try to calculate roughly where the balloon would go. After some consideration, they decided to launch the balloon from a field near a warehouse in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. That was far enough from the coast, they hoped, to avoid sending the balloon and the camera into metro Boston or the Atlantic Ocean. But, not quite sure of the calculations, they pasted this note on the side of the cooler just in case: "If found, please call [their phone number]. ... Material contents are 100% safe/non-toxic/non-flammable and are part of a student science project. $40 reward."

They rented a Zipcar, loaded up the cooler and left their apartments that night. After adding one person to the team -- a new student Lee had met at MIT orientation -- they drove 60 miles inland and slept on the ground at a parking lot, the car and their big idea waiting beside them. In the morning, they launched. The balloon stayed afloat for five fretful hours. During that time, all of the question marks about their cobbled-together process dominated Yeh's thinking: What if the phone battery died? What if it froze? What if the device crashed down to Earth too hard and the camera broke? What if it landed in the ocean? Or hit a person? Or a plane? The chance for a mishap seemed tremendous. Four hours after the launch, Lee said, the team thought all was lost. "We were like placing bets on whether we thought it would work or not," the 23-year-old mechanical engineering grad student said. "Early on, we were optimistic that it would work. About 4 hours after, [when] we hadn't heard any news about the device, we had sort of given up hope. We'd thought we'd lost it." Dejected, the group drove back to Boston to Lee's apartment. They checked his computer and found an unlikely signal: The camera had landed in a construction zone outside Worcester, Massachusetts, about 25 miles from the launch site. "We were so excited, we jumped right back into the car, and we drove out to Worcester, and we found it. That was a great moment," Lee said.

They were amazed with the results. The camera was unharmed. The hand warmers were still hot. And the photos were amazing. "There's something that's fascinating about seeing the Earth from high -- I can't quite put my finger on it," Lee said. "But there's something just beautiful about seeing that." He said Yeh is the kind of person who has tons of zany ideas, so many that he's not always taken seriously. "Oliver also has a tendency to dream big without necessarily thinking about the required steps," he said. "He was like, 'Oh, let's go into space tomorrow!' And I was like, 'No, Oliver, we can't just release a balloon into space tomorrow ... We want it to succeed. We don't want it to fail.' " Lee said he admires Yeh's out-there imagination -- and his ability to follow up on his dreams. "A lot of people have ideas but don't do anything with them, but he actually does them," Lee said. Yeh's favorite photo is one captured at 93,000 feet, just as the balloon rises to its highest point and pops, revealing the black or space behind it. It's as if he had to let his vision reach its most insanely illogical peak before it produced something truly remarkable.

'Open internet' rules criticised

US proposals to ensure that all traffic on the internet is treated equally have drawn strong criticism from providers.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants rules to prevent providers blocking or slowing down bandwidth-heavy usage such as streaming video.Providers claim a two-tiered system is essential for the future vitality of the net. But many consumer groups argue that so-called net neutrality is at the very heart of what the web is about. FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said doing nothing was not an option. In his first major speech since his appointment earlier in the summer, he told an audience in Washington that the rules were "not about government regulation of the internet". "History's lesson is clear. Ensuring a robust and open internet is the best thing we can do to promote investment and innovation," he told the audience at Washington think tank the Brookings Institution."And while there are some who see every policy decision as either pro-business or pro-consumer, I reject that approach; it's not the right way to see technology's role in America." The FCC's proposals are meant to ensure that internet service providers cannot block or slow down traffic, such as bandwidth-hogging video downloads. Operators must also be transparent about network management, it said.

'Phenomenal success'

Almost as soon as Mr Genachowski stepped off the podium, industry critics condemned the inclusion of wireless traffic in the new policy proposals. "We are concerned the FCC appears ready to extend the entire array of net neutrality requirements to what is perhaps the most competitive consumer market in America - wireless services," said AT&T's Jim Cicconi. "The internet in America has been a phenomenal success that has spawned technological and business innovation unmatched anywhere else in the world," said David Cohen, executive vice-president at Comcast."So it's still fair to ask whether increased regulation of the internet is a solution in search of a problem."Verizon, the nation's biggest cellphone operator, said it believed the FCC had no reason to impose "a new set of regulations that will limit customer choices and affect content providers, application developers, device manufacturers and network builders". Politicians also weighed in on the proposals. Six Republican senators introduced a measure that would cut the FCC's funding to "develop and implement new regulatory mandates". Meanwhile, the two Republicans on the FCC's board said they were not convinced that there were widespread problems of internet providers blocking or slowing traffic that needed to be addressed with new rules.

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Hurricanes

A typical hurricane releases some 600 trillion watts of heat energy, equivalent to 200 times the world’s total electrical generating capacity.

1 Our word for these storms comes from Hurakán, a one-legged Mayan deity who summoned the Great Flood from his perch in the windy mists.

2 The Mayans built their major cities inland away from flooding, showing a better understanding of Hurakán’s rages than the engineers who designed the New Orleans waterfront.

3 In 1609 a group of English settlers en route to Virginia were struck by a hurricane and washed ashore at Bermuda—an event that reportedly helped inspire Shakespeare’s Tempest.

4 Hurricanes laid waste to so many powerful armadas that, during the Spanish-American War, President McKinley declared that he feared the storms more than the Spanish navy. In response he established a network of storm-warning stations, the forerunner of today’s National Hurricane Center.

5 During World War II, a British flying instructor, Colonel Joe Duckworth, bet his pilots he could fly straight into a hurricane. Amazingly, he succeeded.

6 Hurricane forecasts today rely on Air Force pilots who zig­zag through the eye, releasing dropsondes—parachute-equipped tubes containing instruments that measure pressure, temperature, humidity, and wind speed.

7 In North America we call them hurricanes, but in the western Pacific the same storms are known as typhoons. To avoid a tedious argument, meteorologists call them all tropical cyclones.

8 Due to the earth’s rotation, hurricanes spin counterclockwise north of the equator and clockwise south of it.

9 And once and for all: No, your flushing toilet does not do the same thing.

10 Most Atlantic hurricanes are born off the western coast of Africa, where warm water and a cool, windy upper atmosphere conspire to create a spiraling storm.

11 Activity peaks this month, when ocean-surface waters are warmest. Nearly half of all tropical cyclones occur in September.

12 We’re going to need a bigger windmill: A typical hurricane releases some 600 trillion watts of heat energy, equivalent to 200 times the world’s total electrical generating capacity.

13 Hurricanes unleash torrential rains, violent thunderstorms, and even tornadoes. But their deadliest component by far is the storm surge, the chunk of ocean pushed ashore by winds that can gust up to 200 miles per hour.

14 In 1970 a 30-foot storm surge claimed at least 300,000 lives in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

15 The horrific event inspired the Concert for Bangladesh, the first major rock benefit concert. But most of the proceeds were impounded by the IRS until years later.

16 The largest known tropical cyclone was 1979’s typhoon Tip, which stretched 1,400 miles across the northwestern Pacific—the distance from Dallas to Washington, D.C.

17 That’s still nothing compared with Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a seemingly eternal 400-mile-per-hour hurricane nearly twice the size of our entire planet.

18 The World Meteorological Organization started naming hurricanes in 1953. Now the organization moves through an alphabetical list of names on a six-year rotation, retiring hall-of-famer storm names like “Katrina” each season.

19 Want a storm to call your own? Bad news: The National Hurricane Center already has “a rather large file folder of nominated names.”

20 And be careful what you wish for. After “Cleo” was retired in 1964, a researcher at the center filled the slot with “Camille,” in honor of the daughter of famed hurricane forecaster John Hope. Five years later, hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi coast, killing 250.

Seeing the past

It may not be possible to travel back in time, but seeing stars and galaxies as they looked millions or even billions of years ago is no problem thanks to telescopes, the closest thing we have to time machines. Now, astronomers are holding their breath to see what they'll observe and discover with a new generation of huge telescopes set to be built around the world. Peering ever deeper into space and further back in time, the powerful devices will be able to show what the universe was like when it was just a few hundred million years old and emerging from a period of total darkness after the Big Bang. "[We'll be] looking at the first generation of stars forming in the universe, which is kind of a cool idea: The time when the lights went on in the universe. There was no light before that time," said Daniel Fabricant, associate director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. His institution is one of several research organizations and universities developing the Giant Magellan Telescope, to be built in Las Campanas, Chile, by 2018.

'Eye on the sky'

Bigger is better in the world of reflecting telescopes, which rely on primary mirrors to collect light. The bigger the primary mirror, the more light it can gather and the fainter the objects astronomers can see. The world's largest optical and infrared telescopes have primary mirrors that measure about 10 meters (32 feet) across. But the Giant Magellan Telescope will more than double that diameter, with a monster primary mirror spanning almost 25 meters (80 feet). If the Magellan is the first new-generation star gazer to be built, it may not remain the record holder for long. Another consortium of organizations and universities is preparing to construct the aptly named Thirty Meter Telescope on the Mauna Kea summit in Hawaii, also scheduled for completion in 2018.

Trumping them all may be the European Extremely Large Telescope, dubbed "the world's biggest eye on the sky," which is to have a primary mirror 42 meters (137 feet) in diameter and is also scheduled to start operation in 2018. No site has been chosen, though Argentina, Chile, Morocco and Spain are being considered. Astronomers hope these giants will fill in gaps in knowledge about key moments in the early days of the universe. See some of the amazing photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope "Right now, we can see to almost 13 billion years [back], but our best models tell us the age of the universe is almost 14 billion years, so it's this whole epoch when galaxies are actually first starting to form that we can't really see very well," said Elizabeth Barton, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, and a member of the Science Advisory Committee for the Thirty Meter Telescope. "So the Thirty Meter Telescope will let us do things like find some of the first galaxies to form and characterize them to figure out what the conditions were actually like and how big these things were when they were forming." Blog: Will the Big Crunch follow the Big Bang?

Seeing the past

Looking so far back in time may sound like science fiction, but it's possible because light travels at a finite speed and takes a certain amount of time to get from one place to another, said Marla Geha, an assistant professor of astronomy at Yale University. In our own cosmic neighborhood, it takes the light from the sun eight minutes to reach Earth, so when you look at a beautiful sunrise, you see the star as it appeared eight minutes ago. If the sun were to suddenly go dark, you wouldn't know it for those several minutes. The same concept of seeing objects as they appeared in the past holds true on a much bigger scale.

"The light from the nearest star [outside the solar system] takes a couple of years to get to us. The light from the farthest star in the Milky Way takes 100,000 years to get to us," Geha said.

"Since the universe is about 14 billion years old, and as we're looking at things that are farther away, we're looking at light that's taken half or more than half of the age of the universe to get to us."

Some of that light is from the first stars to ever form -- fascinating to astronomers because they were probably much larger and brighter than those we find in the present-day universe, Fabricant said.

Closer to home, astronomers hope to see planets orbiting other stars -- perhaps young "Earths" in the process of formation -- and observe other solar systems, he added.

Sharper than Hubble

The pictures will likely be spectacular. Despite being ground-based, all of the next-generation telescopes promise images several times sharper than those produced by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope thanks to adaptive optics, technology that corrects for the "wiggling" of the Earth's atmosphere. Twinkling stars may be romantic to look at, but they're a big headache for astronomers trying to get a sharp picture. One way to combat the distortion is to shoot laser beams into the sky to create fake stars and then measure how their appearance is changed by the atmosphere and take the appropriate counter-measures -- all at hundreds of times a second. "You know what a perfect image looks like, you know what you observe, and then you know what you need to do to correct the image," Fabricant said. "The idea is ... to have the mirror wiggle exactly opposite to take out the twinkling," Geha added.

Until the ground-based giants are built, Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be helping to answer key questions about the universe. Webb is scheduled to be launched in 2014, about the time Hubble's mission will end. Operating much farther from Earth and equipped with a primary mirror more than twice the diameter of Hubble's, Webb is designed to look deeper into space to see the earliest stars and galaxies, according to NASA. Researchers on the competing projects say there's a certain rivalry about making the big discoveries but emphasize that the most important thing is that somebody makes them. "It's a competition where you want the other guy to succeed as well," Fabricant said.

Space shots revisited

Broader views of the universe are among the richest payoffs to result from space exploration, as demonstrated by the latest installment of "Month in Space Pictures." But those views becomes even richer when you see them from a completely different perspective. Some of the latest gems from space do just that, energizing scientific sleuths and confounding conspiracy theorists in the process.

Here's a quick sampling of completely different perspectives to peruse during the long Labor Day weekend:

Revisiting past space shots

* Apollo 12 and Surveyor 3 spotted: One of the interesting things about the Apollo 12 mission, which will be the focus of 40th-anniversary remembrances in November, is that the Intrepid lunar module touched down within walking distance of the unmanned Surveyor 3 probe. The touchdown demonstrated that NASA could make something close to a precision landing on another celestial body. Now yet another unmanned NASA probe, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, has taken a picture of the whole scene from above - including Surveyor 3 in its crater as well as the Apollo 12 leftovers and the astronauts' tracks going back and forth. The amazing picture, released on Thursday, follows up on LRO imagery of other Apollo landing sites.

* Apollo 15, too: You'd think that all that orbital imagery of Apollo landing sites would have finished off any claims that the moon missions were faked - but some conspiracy theorists reasoned that if NASA could fake the original missions, they could fake the LRO pictures as well. To take this view, you'd have to assume that the LRO imaging team at Arizona State University and all the other scientists working on the mission were in on the conspiracy. But now researchers from India have announced that their own moon orbiter, Chandrayaan 1, took pictures of the Apollo 15 site before contact was lost. They say the pictures reveal the tracks of the lunar rover. "Happy now, you conspiracy retards?" Gizmodo asks in its item on the imagery (with labeled and unlabeled photos).

* Spirit rover ... and Mars Polar Lander? NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is still working on its plan to free the Spirit rover from its Martian sand trap. In the meantime, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken pictures of the probe and its surroundings near the Home Plate plateau from high above. The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla drills deep into the imagery to point out the rover and its tracks. Emily and others are also working mightily to look for traces of the long-lost Mars Polar Lander in MRO imagery.

* Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: NASA's eye in the Martian sky is currently in precautionary safe mode due to some technical glitches, but this week the team behind MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, released more than 1,500 pictures recorded between April and August. There's a special section for the September data dump, or you can graze through the full HiRISE catalog.

* Neptunian moon spotted by Voyager: Philosophy professor (and amateur imaging whiz) Ted Stryk found a golden oldie in 20-year-old imagery from the Voyager 2 mission: a sequence of pictures showing the tiny moon Despina and its shadow passing over Neptune's disk. Another amateur astronomer, Tony Farkas, turned up the coolness dial by converting that sequence into an animated image.

Moving sights from the cosmos

* Asteroid with two moons: While we're on the subject of animated images, check out this view of the asteroid 1994 CC, which has not just one but two tiny moons. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports that 1994 CC is only the second triple-asteroid system to be discovered in the near-Earth population.

* Eclipses on other worlds: I love to watch eclipses on other worlds, such as this view of a partial solar eclipse as seen by NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars (involving Deimos). Here's a short video clip showing several solar eclipses, starring Phobos as well as Deimos, and here's a "lunar eclipse" in which Mars' shadow blots out Phobos. All this is a buildup to last month's unusual eclipse clip, showing the shadow of one Jovian moon (Io) passing over the surface of a sister moon (Ganymede). Astroengine's Ian O'Neill also links to a subtler video that shows Ganymede blotting out Io.

* Saturn's moons on the move: Emily Lakdawalla's roundup of imagery featuring Saturnian moons includes some must-see animations, including shadows of Saturn's rings passing over Janus and Epimetheus, plus some interplay between Saturn's F-ring and the shepherd moons Prometheus and Pandora. Here's the larger version of Mike Malaska's animation, created from images sent back last month by the Cassini orbiter.

* Virtual telescopes: This week I got a look at the latest release of WorldWide Telescope, the free astronomy program produced by Microsoft Research. (Msnbc.com is a Microsoft-NBC Universal joint venture.) This "Aphelion" release draws upon data from the Galaxy Zoo project to add realism to its 3-D renderings of galaxies and provides a wide-scale look at the universe that meshes quite well with the "cosmic web" we've come to know and love. "You now have this crispness to the way the unverse shapes itself," WWT co-creator Jonathan Fay told me. Other features make the software more valuable for professional astronomers. "It's not just a curiosity," Fay said. "You could actually use it to follow up on scientific research." Stay tuned for more about WWT and other astronomy programs such as Sky in Google Earth, Celestia and Stellarium in the months ahead.

Big pictures from space
When we publish our "Month in Space Pictures" roundup, folks usually ask where they can get bigger versions of the images for printing out or using as computer-monitor wallpaper. Click on the links to learn more about the latest, greatest images in our Space Gallery:

* Midnight ride: NASA's Human Spaceflight Web site has a great gallery of pictures showing Discovery's liftoff and other highlights from the shuttle mission.

* Rover's stomping grounds: Check out the HiRISE Web site or for the big picture of Victoria Crater on Mars.

* Eye of a galactic storm: The Spitzer Space Telescope's Web site has great views of the spiral galaxy NGC 1097.

* Psychedelic Saturn: The Gemini Observatory tells you all about this ringed planet of a different color.

* Where there's smoke... NASA has a Web page that features satellite imagery of the fires in the Los Angeles area. More recent imagery shows how pollution from the fires has spread around the globe.

* Star foundry: Click over to the European Southern Observatory's Web site for bigger views of the RCW 38 star-forming region.

* Disappearing act: NASA's Saturn Web portal shows you in greater detail how the planet's rings faded away during last month's equinox.

* Open for business: Go back to the Human Spaceflight Web site for pictures of Discovery's rendezvous with the international space station.

* Moon over Earth: This view of the moon hovering above Earth's atmosphere is another gem from NASA.

* Pingos on Mars: Cover your computer monitor with what could be Martian pingos, courtesy of the HiRISE imaging team. What's a pingo? Glad you asked.

* Three-ring circus: The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory's Web site explains how three separate perspectives were put together to create a picture of the sun you couldn't possibly see in real life.

* Storms get in line: Check out NASA's Earth Observatory for more about the GOES-14 satellite image that shows tropical storms lined up across the Atlantic.

* Full of stars: The European Southern Observatory has more about this view of the HD 87643 reflection nebula.

* Great White North: The satellite view of Russia's Novaya Zemlya frontier comes from NASA's Earth Observatory.

* Seeking shooting stars: Here's a bigger version of the Perseid meteor picture we published, and you'll find many more in SpaceWeather.com's gallery.

* Meteorite on Mars: The Mars rovers' home on the Web has this view of the "Block Island" meteorite on Martian sand as well as this closeup of the rock.

* Farewell to a rocket: This big-picture view of last month's Delta 2 GPS launch is so detailed you can see the crescent moon in the sky.

* The sun in 3-D: Get out your 3-D glasses for a full appreciation of this STEREO view of the sun, taken from the SOHO Web site.

* Clouds of creation: You can learn much more about the "trigger-happy" Cepheus B star-forming region from the Spitzer Web site.

* High above Mount Hood: Go to NASA's Earth Observatory for the full-resolution view of Mount Hood as seen from the international space station.

* Hell in paradise: The European Space Agency has the full story behind the satellite view of the Canary Island fires.

* South Korean liftoff: The satellite launch may have failed, but the blastoff made for a fantastic picture.

Stay tuned for still more fantastic space shots on Wednesday, when the first big batch of pictures from the upgraded Hubble Space Telescope is due to be released. (We were given a preview in July when the Hubble team shared this picture of Jupiter's Great Black Spot.) In the meantime, check out our Space Gallery for more of the universe's greatest hits.