NASA Confirms Water on Mars

Its official, NASA has confirmed through testing on the Phoenix Mars Lander. The idea of water outside of earth is nothing spectacular with comets as well as various moons and planets with water. This is the first time that a sample of water was actually tested on Mars. There are no sensors on board the Phoenix Mars Lander that can directly test for life, so the answer to that question has to wait for a future mission.


NASA
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080731.html

"Laboratory tests aboard NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander's robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.

"We have water," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. "We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.""


For more info on the Phoenix Mars Lander, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix

Hidden Van Gough Portrait Discovered

Vincent Van Gogh is thought to have regularly painted over his paintings. Using a new technique using "synchrotron radiation induced X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy", which is an improvement on X-ray radiography, a new portrait has been revealed. X-ray radiography has been used in the past to show painted over layers in famous paintings. The new technique was used to reveal the portrait of a yet unidentified female in Van Gogh's "Patch of Grass".


Pictures along with more detail are available at Fox News.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,395042,00.html

"A previously unknown portrait of a woman by Vincent van Gogh has been revealed in a high-tech look beneath another of his paintings, it was announced today.
...
Behind the painting, done mostly in greens and blues, is a portrait of a woman rendered in browns and reds."

RNC Launches BarackBook.com

The Republican National Committee ("RNC") just launched the interesting new website, Barack Book. Barack Book is a fairly blatant ripoff of Face Book. It is the twentieth century version of guilt by association. You have to give some credit to the Republicans for coming up with an interesting web attack, an area that they seem to be lacking in.


GOP
http://www.gop.com/news/NewsRead.aspx?GUID=62fd995e-b0c6-4d83-8414-011f408bdc26

"The Republican National Committee (RNC) today launched a new Web site, www.BarackBook.com.

The social networking site highlights some of Barack Obama’s notable associations throughout stages of his career ... BarackBook allows voters to explore Obama’s connections with these individuals as well as their connections to one another using video and news articles.

BarackBook will be updated routinely between now and Election Day with additional, new Obama “friends.”"

Frustrated With Late Payment Notices . . . Set Yourself on Fire!?!

A man from Newark set himself on fire today in the middle of a rental store reportedly over being frustrated with some late payment notices he had received. It is not really clear what the man was hoping to accomplish, but something tells me that their were better, less painful ways, to archive his goals.


NJ.com
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/07/newark_man_sets_himself_on_fir.html

""He basically pulled out a bottle of lighter fluid, poured it all over his body, pulled out a cigarette lighter and lit himself on fire," Bloomfield Police Capt. Chris Goul said.
...
Saladriagas arrived at the store and asked to speak with a manager about a series of form letters he'd received about late payments on his furniture rentals, Goul said. When he was told a manager wasn't available he became upset and pulled out the lighter fluid."

Google Lets Users Make Gmail More Secure

Last week, Google announced a new option in the Gmail settings which makes security easier. If you use Gmail you should change this setting the next time you log on. The slight slowdown, if any, is worth the massive increase in security.


Gmail Blog
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/making-security-easier.html

"We care about your security today just as much as we did when we launched, which is why we're constantly working on improvements like the recently launched last account activity and remote sign out. Today, we're making it even easier for you to use https to protect your mail every time you access it. We've added an option to Settings to always use https. If you don't regularly log in via unencrypted wireless connections at coffee shops or airports or college dorms, then you might not need this additional layer of security. But if you want to always use https, then this setting makes it super easy. Whenever you forget to type https://mail.google.com, we'll add the https for you. If you already have the https URL bookmarked, using this setting will ensure you access your account via https even when you don't use your bookmark. Any http link to Gmail (for example, the one at the top of Google.com) will be automatically redirected to https."

Google indexes One Trillion URLs

Last Friday, Google announced that they had hit an indexing milestone; 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion). That is some impressive number, but given the growth rate of the internet it will not take long for that milestone be surpassed by an even more mind boggling milestone.


Official Google Blog
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

"We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!"

New Mass Diet Coke and Mentos Fountain Record

Turiba, a Latvian Business University decided to break a world record on its 15th anniversary. on June 19 (2008) a full 1,911 bottles were set off at the same time. It is an official Guinness World Record.

Read the story and see some pictures on SuperPasTime.com at http://superpastime.com/index.php/Funny/New-Coke-Mentos-Record.html