Throttling Rockets and Throbbing Oil

Physics Org

Throttling Back to the Moon - Accelerating from 0 to 60 then slowing down for a stop light is no problem for an ordinary automobile. But if you were piloting a rocketship, it wouldn't be so easy. Most rocket engines are designed to burn full-on (liftoff!) or full-off (coasting through space) with no in-between. And that can be a problem--namely, how do you land this thing?

Coming Soon, Safer Cigarettes? - The federal agency charged with keeping food and drugs from harming people may soon be asked to take a consumer product that kills more than 400,000 people a year and make it safer.

Case closed: MIT gumshoes solve 'throbbing' oil mystery - Hey kids! Try this at home. Pour clean water onto a small plate. Wait for all the ripples to stop. Then mix a small amount of mineral oil with an even smaller amount of detergent. Squeeze a tiny drop of that mixture onto the water and watch in amazement as the oil appears to pump like a beating heart.

Flavonoids in orange juice make it a healthy drink, despite the sugar - Orange juice, despite its high caloric load of sugars, appears to be a healthy food for diabetics due to its mother lode of flavonoids, a study by endocrinologists at the University at Buffalo has shown. The study appeared in the June 2007 issue of Diabetes Care.

SPACE.com

Slimming Down Future Spacesuits - Skintight spacesuits may give future astronauts a more flexible - not to mention stylish - way to explore the moon and Mars. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are edging closer to a spaceworthy astronaut garment that replaces the bulky traits of current, gas-pressurized versions with flexibility and mobility. Dubbed BioSuit, the spacesuit design relies on mechanical counter pressure rather than the stiff pressurized vessels employed by astronauts in space today.

ABC News: Technology

Iran's New Game: `Rescue Nuke Scientist' - An Iranian hard-line student group unveiled a new video game Monday that simulates an attempt to rescue two Iranian nuclear experts kidnapped by the U.S. military and held in Iraq and Israel.

Reuters: Science

Weight training can help with heart trouble: AHA - While conventional wisdom once held that people with heart disease should not pump iron, a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association says some resistance training can be good for them.

BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition

Energy use 'drove human walking' - Humans evolved to walk upright because it uses less energy than travelling on all fours, according to researchers.

Milestone for unique bionic hand - A highly functional bionic hand which was invented by a Scottish NHS worker has gone on the market.

New Scientist Tech - Weapons Technology

Taser unveils long-range and 'scatter' weapons -Two new electric stun weapons unveiled this week suggest that their use may shift from law enforcement to the battlefield. Some critics, however, worry that this could lead to such weapons being used more indiscriminately. US company Taser International demonstrated a shotgun-fired projectile capable of stunning a target and a weapon capable of firing six individual shock darts at a time at an event held in Chicago, US, on Monday.