Technology Science - Sperm whale 'dialects' linked to distinct cultures

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Sperm whales speak in distinct regional dialects that appear closely linked to different "cultural groups," a Canadian researcher says.

"The animals in the Caribbean sound different than the animals in the Pacific â€Â" even the Gulf of Mexico, which is right beside the Caribbean," said Shane Gero, a researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax. "In a lot of ways, that's very similar to us. We can identify someone from the U.K. versus Canada because they say 'lorry' and not 'truck.'"

Sperm whales from many different regions meet in some "multicultural" areas of the ocean but tend to associate with whales that speak their own dialect, Gero told CBC's Quirks & Quarks in an interview that airs Saturday.

Upcoming interview

Shane Gero talks to Quirks & Quarks on Saturday, May 21, at noon on CBC Radio One.

"Their society really is divided based on culture," he said. "Animals that have different dialects behave differently. They feed on different things. They raise their babies differently."

Gero has been studying sperm whales in the Caribbean for his PhD thesis. He and his collaborators in Canada and Scotland have been trying to decode sperm whale language by recording the voices of pairs of animals talking to one another and noting differences among the sounds they make.

Female sperm whales spend all year in family groups in subtropical regions of the ocean, while males roam all over the world. When two whales encounter each other, they make patterns of clicks called codas.

Unique individual voices

Some codas are spoken by all whales, but each in a different way, so that they can be told apart from one another.

"They actually have one particular coda that seems to function in telling individual identity," Gero said.

Other codas are unique to particular cultural groups. For example, in the Caribbean, whales make a coda that consists of two slow clicks and then a faster triplet.

Gero noted that humans tend to co-operate with others from the same cultural group, and he suspects that sperm whales have developed different cultures and dialects to bond groups together because co-operation is so important to their survival.

Sperm whales are the deepest diving whales, routinely diving to 1,200 metres and occasionally as deep as two kilometres as they hunt.

"Mom always has to dive down for food and baby can't dive with her," Gero said.

Because of that, babysitters are crucial.

"It takes a village to raise a sperm whale baby."

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Technology Science - 450 Toronto school roofs to go solar

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The Toronto District School Board and AMP Solar Group Inc. have teamed up to install solar panels on hundreds of school rooftops in a deal that could be worth $1.1 billion in green electricity generation over 20 years.

The TDSB said late Wednesday it signed a deal with AMP, which will build, install and maintain solar photovoltaic panels on as many as 450 school rooftops or 12 million square feet of roof space.

The board said there is no cost to the TDSB and that AMP will be responsible for all project costs. The panels will go only on roofs that can support them, and in return the schools will get $120 million worth of roof repairs.

This is seen as a boon for the school board which is in need of some $3 billion to repair its crumbling buildings â€Â" everything from new roofs to boilers.

TDSB schools are going to get new roofs in exchange for letting the green energy company put the panels up and for more than 60 schools that means the difference between a tarp covering their school and an actual roof.

"We have 61 schools today that have tarped roofs that need to be replaced," said trustee Sheila Penny.

Between 58 and 66 megawatts of electricity could be generated by this program each year, the board said. That is equivalent to the amount needed to meet the average electrical needs of almost 6,000 households, according to the TDSB.

The energy produced will be sold into the local distribution grid for use by local electricity customers, including TDSB schools, and it could be worth as much as $1.1 billion over the 20-year period, staffers told the CBC's Steven D'Souza. The board could get 14.5 per cent of that over the period, he reported.

The initiative is expected to get underway beginning next spring.

The board and AMP executives will hold a news conference 11 a.m. Thursday at Hillcrest Public School.

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Technology Science - LinkedIn shares more than double after IPO

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Investors keen to get in on the online networking craze more than doubled the price of LinkedIn Corp.'s shares on the morning of its IPO.

The initial public offering was priced at $45 US, but demand caused the price to double to more than $90 shortly after opening on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. Late in the afternoon, the stock was up even further, to $95.

The pre-market IPO price gave LinkedIn a market value of more than $4 billion, the highest for a U.S. internet company taking its first bow on Wall Street since Google Inc. went public nearly seven years ago. That value itself has now more than doubled.

Filings say the company made $3.4 million in profit last year.

Mutual funds, pension funds and other major money managers got the first chance to buy most of the IPO's 7.84 million shares because stock in these offerings is typically sold to investment bankers' top customers.

The IPO price already was well above LinkedIn's first target of $32 to $35 per share.

The lofty appraisal of LinkedIn reflects the investors' belief that internet services connecting people with common interests will be able to make more money as the web's audience steadily expands.

LinkedIn's valuation eventually may look modest compared with other internet companies being touted as potentially going public in the next 18 months.

Hot properties

The short list includes: online messaging service Twitter, web game maker Zynga, coupon site Groupon and Facebook, the social network that boasts more than 500 million users.

LinkedIn, based down the street from Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, runs a website that serves as part Rolodex, part hiring centre for people trying to meet people who might further their careers and businesses searching for talented employees. More than 102 million people have set up LinkedIn profiles so far. Another million join each week.

The company makes most of its money from fees charged for better access to the data on its website. LinkedIn earned $3.4 million on revenue of $243 million last year but expects to lose money this year as it invests in new products and more computers to run its services.

LinkedIn's CEO is Jeff Weiner, a former Yahoo Inc. executive who has been running the professional networking company for the past two years. The company's stock trades under the ticker LNKD on the New York Stock Exchange.

With files from The Associated Press

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Technology Science - E-books outselling print at Amazon.com

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Since April 1, Amazon.com has sold 105 e-books, not including free e-books, for every 100 print books. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)

Online bookstore Amazon.com now sells more e-books than all hardcover and paperback print books combined.

"We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com in a statement Thursday announcing the milestone.

Since April 1, Amazon.com, the company's U.S. site, has sold 105 e-books, not including free e-books, for every 100 print books. Amazon said it does not have any specific stats to share for Canada, where the national site is Amazon.ca.

Bezos noted that the Seattle, Wash.-based company has been selling print books for 15 years and e-books for less than four. Amazon introduced its Kindle e-book reader in 2007.

Kindle e-book sales overtook hardcover sales in July 2010 and paperback sales this past January.

Amazon's e-books can be read on Amazon's Kindle e-readers as well as on desktop and laptop computers and a variety of mobile devices, such as the Apple, Windows, Android and BlackBerry smartphones and tablets.

Amazon also announced Thursday that a new Kindle e-reader with ads is outselling other Kindle models in the U.S.

The Kindle with Special Offers, introduced in April, costs $114 â€Â" $25 less than the next lowest-priced Kindle.

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Technology Science - Lonely planets can wander far from stars

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The researchers calculated each object has about the mass of Jupiter. Above is an artist's impression of what such a gas giant would look like. (NASA)

Are these planets without orbits? Astronomers have found 10 potential planets as massive as Jupiter wandering through a slice of the Milky Way galaxy, following either very wide orbits or no orbit at all. And scientists think they are more common than stars.

These mysterious bodies, apparently gaseous balls like the largest planets in our solar system, may help scientists understand how planets form.

Other scientists have reported free-wandering objects in star-forming regions of the cosmos, but the newfound objects appear to be different, said one author of the new study, physicist David Bennett of the University of Notre Dame.

Bennett and colleagues from Japan, New Zealand and elsewhere report the finding in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. They didn't observe the objects directly. Instead, they used the fact that massive objects bend the light of distant stars with their gravity, just as a lens does. So they looked extensively for such "microlensing" events.

No sign of a star

They found 10, each caused by one of the newfound objects. They calculated each object has about the mass of Jupiter, and estimated how common such objects are. They also found no sign of a star near these bodies, at least not within 10 times the distance from Earth to the sun. (For comparison, within our solar system that would basically rule out an orbit closer than Saturn's.)

So the newfound objects either orbit a star more distant than that, or they don't orbit a star at all, the researchers concluded. They drew on other data to determine most of the objects don't orbit a star.

If that's the case, it would give a boost to some theories that say planets can be thrown out of orbit during formation, said Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, an outside expert.

Scientists believe planets are formed when disks of dust that orbit stars form clumps, so that these clumps â€Â" the planets â€Â" remain in orbit. Maybe the newfound objects started out that way, but then got tossed out of orbit or into distant orbits by the gravitational tugs of larger planets, the researchers suggest.

The work suggests that such a tossing-out process is quite common, Bennett said.

'Exciting' theoretical challenge

Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who wasn't involved in the research, said maybe the bodies formed around a pair of stars instead, one of which supplied the gravitational tug.

But even that would take some explaining to produce an object without an orbit, he said. Or maybe they somehow formed outside of any orbit. So the theoretical challenge in explaining the existence of such bodies is "exciting," he said.

Boss said he suspects most of these are in a distant orbit, and that maybe they even formed at that great distance rather than being tossed outward from a closer orbit.

If they orbit stars, their sheer number suggests every star in the galaxy has one or two of them, "which is astounding" because that's five or 10 times the number of stars scientists had thought harbored such gas-giant planets, he said.

And if instead they are wandering free, that "would be really stunning" because it's hard to explain how they formed, he said.

Kaltenegger also said the new results can't rule out the possibility that these possible planets are in orbit, and that they may only have the mass of Saturn, about a third of Jupiter's.

But if they aren't orbiting a star, she noted, they don't fit the official definition of a planet â€Â" at least not the definition applied to objects in our own solar system.

All in all, Boss said, the new work is "pretty exciting in telling what is out there in the night sky... Lots of theories will grow in this environment."

© The Associated Press, 2011

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Technology Science - Calgary shooting victim hopes for a taste of sight

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Jose Neto, shown here singing a Portuguese song in a CBC studio, has been chosen to test a new device that could help him "see" with his tongue. CBC

A young man blinded by a stray bullet in downtown Calgary will be taking part in a unique medical study he hopes could partially restore his sight.

Jose Neto has been chosen to test a prototype device called BrainPort, which sends information from a digital video camera to an electrical stimulation pad placed on the tongue.

Users report that they can "feel" black and white shapes, even letters, much like champagne bubbles on the tongue.

Neto will travel to the University of Pittsburg Medical Centre at the end of the month for a two-week study into the device, which he first learned about through news articles.

"I am really glad to be able to go down there…and be part of those studies," Neto said. "Few people get to go down there and try this device and I'm one of them."

Helps blind people with mobility

Besides the mouth device and sunglasses mounted with the camera, the blind person also has a handheld base unit, which can adjust contrast and zoom in and out.

The base unit pixilates the images from the digital camera and converts them to electrical pulses, which sends them to the "lollipop" in the mouth. The nerves on the tongue send the information to the brain, which reconstructs the image.

Within 15 minutes of using the device, the brain can begin interpreting the spatial information, although it takes hours of training to become adept.

"People use canes the vast majority of time, but the deficiency of a cane is that beyond the reach of a cane, you don't know what is going on," said Dr. Amy Nau, an assistant professor in the department of ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh.

She said this device helps people in day-to-day activities like finding an exit sign or an elevator button.

"We have subjects who are able to walk along a sideway unassisted because there is such a big contrast between the road and the sidewalk," Nau said. "So I think in terms of mobility this is going to enhance independence."

Neto was a Brazilian exchange student studying in Calgary when he was caught in gunfire on Sept. 16, 2008 while walking near Chinatown with his girlfriend. The couple,now married, have decided to stay in Calgary and apply for permanent residency.

A fundraising event will be held on May 27 at the Edgemont Community Centre. Neto's band will play at the event, which is meant to raise money to help pay for the expense of his trip to Pittsburgh and to purchase a BrainPort device if it becomes available for sale.

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Technology Science - Dark energy does speed up universe's expansion

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The new study supports Einstein's cosmological constant as the source of dark energy and the accelerating expansion of the universe. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Dark energy is real and it is causing spacetime and the universe to expand at an increasing speed, a new study says.

The paper to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, provides the first independent confirmation of both the existence of dark energy and its rate of expansion. It has been put together by a team of 26 scientists including Chris Blake from Melbourne's Swinburne University.

"It shows physicist Albert Einstein was right," said Blake. "Dark energy is a smooth cosmological constant throughout the universe, rather than a change in the laws of gravity."

A hundred years ago scientists believed the universe was steady and unchanging. Einstein invented the cosmological constant to expand the fabric of space-time after his own equations for general relativity wouldn't allow for the cosmos to remain static as expected in a steady state universe.

Soon afterwards, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was actually expanding, consistent with Einstein's original general relativity theory.

Einstein then removed his cosmological constant describing his failure to predict an expanding universe in theory before it was proven by observation, as his biggest blunder.

Dark energy acceleration

In 1998, astronomers studying distant exploding stars called a Type 1A supernovae discovered that not only was the universe expanding, but that the rate of expansion was accelerating due to some type of unknown force or dark energy. Einstein's cosmological constant was back.

Alternate theory

According to NASA, the new findings contradict an alternate theory that gravity, not dark energy, is the force pushing space apart. The alternate theory says Albert Einstein's concept of gravity is wrong, and gravity becomes repulsive instead of attractive when acting at great distances.

"The acceleration was a shocking discovery, because it showed we have a lot more to learn about physics, " Blake said.

To verify the supernovae findings, Blake and colleagues spent four years using a powerful spectrograph at the Australian Astronomical Observatory to collect data on more than 240,000 galaxies going back over seven billion years to when the cosmos was less than half its current age.

"It showed the growth of structure in the universe, the development of galaxy clusters and super clusters has slowed down," Blake says.

"This implies the most distant parts of the universe which are further back in space-time, have ordinary matter and hence gravity is dominating. But today this antigravity dark energy has taken hold."

Galaxies need personal space

The researchers then looked at the distances between pairs of galaxies.

"The average distance between galaxy pairs is about 500,000,000 light years," says Blake.

"Galaxies tend to grow on compression waves called baryon acoustic oscillations, which spread through the universe. They can be detected as ripples in cosmic microwave background radiation."

According to Blake, "The average distance between these galaxy pairs has also been found to have grown because of the expansion of space-time, and that's further confirmation of an antigravity agent.'

But, Blake admitted that's as much as they currently know.

"Although the exact physics required to explain dark energy still remains a mystery, confirming it exists is a significant step in understanding the origin, evolution and fate of the universe."

© Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2011

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Technology Science - Astronauts install $2B detector on space station

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This image provided by NASA-TV shows the cosmic ray detector just prior to being attached to the International Space Station early Thursday morning. The $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was delivered by space shuttle Endeavour. (NASA/Associated Press)

Endeavour's astronauts accomplished the No. 1 objective of their mission Thursday, installing a $2 billion cosmic ray detector on the International Space Station to scan the invisible universe for years to come.

The space fliers used a pair of Canadian-made robot arms to remove the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer from the shuttle, then hoist it onto the sprawling framework on the right side of the station.

The instrument â€Â" which has a one-metre magnet at its core â€Â" is the most expensive piece of equipment at the orbiting lab and certainly the most prominent scientific device. It will search for antimatter and dark matter for the rest of the life of the space station, and hopefully help explain how the cosmos originated.

Upcoming interview

Roberto Battiston, a professor of physics at the University of Perugia, and one of the designers of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment, talks to Quirks & Quarks on Saturday, May 21, at noon on CBC Radio One.

The device will be monitored by an international team of 600 scientists, led by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"I'm sure that Professor Ting and his group have been holding their breath. You guys can all start breathing again now," astronaut-scientist Gregory Chamitoff said once the seven-tonne device was installed. It took Chamitoff and his crewmates two extra hours to complete the operation.

Ting personally relayed his thanks from Mission Control. He's worked on the project for 17 years and fought to have it placed back on the shuttle, when its flight was suspended several years ago.

"This has been a very difficult experiment, and I think in the next 20 to 30 years, nobody will be able to do such a thing again," Ting told the astronauts. "I hope together with you, we will try to make a contribution to a better understanding of our universe."

Ting said the spectrometer will be checked over the next couple of days, before it begins collecting data in earnest. The magnetic field generated by the instrument will bend the path of incoming cosmic particles and eight state-of-the-art detectors will try to identify them in the nanoseconds it takes to travel through the magnet.

Endeavour tile damage analyzed

Back at Mission Control, meanwhile, engineers continued to analyze several areas of damage on Endeavour's belly. Thermal tiles were gouged and nicked during Monday's liftoff, the second-to-last for the shuttle program. Some of the slashes are as much as 6 15 centimetres long and 5 centimetres wide.

Giffords undergoes surgery

Mark Kelly's wife, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, underwent more surgery Wednesday, just two days after seeing her husband blast into orbit. Doctors in Houston put in a plastic implant to replace part of her skull that was removed following the Jan. 8 shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona, that left six dead and 13 injured.

In a TV interview following the spectrometer work, Kelly said his wife was doing really well and her neurosurgeons were pleased. He said it didn't make sense to hold up the surgery until he got back; doctors wanted to do it Wednesday.

Kelly is keeping abreast of her condition through family members, using the space station's internet phone.

NASA wants to make certain the shuttle is safe to come home in two weeks.

The damage was spotted in photos snapped by the space station crew just before Endeavour docked Wednesday. The shuttle performed a slow backflip for the cameras, a customary procedure put in place after shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere in 2003.

Mission Control may ask shuttle commander Mark Kelly and his five crewmates to take a closer look at the gouges this weekend, using a laser-tipped inspection boom.

Kelly and his crew will remain at the space station until May 29.

Two of the astronauts will venture out Friday on the first of four spacewalks to perform some station maintenance.

Endeavour will conclude its final voyage with a landing on June 1.

NASA is shutting down its shuttle program this summer after 30 years, to focus on interplanetary travel. One more mission remains, by space shuttle Atlantis in July.

The space station will continue to operate until at least 2020, with Americans hitching rides on Russian Soyuz capsules until private U.S. companies can take over the job.

© The Associated Press, 2011

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Technology Science - 'Zombie apocalypse' health advice goes viral

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"Zombie apocalypse." That blog posting headline is all it took for a behind-the-scenes public health doctor to set off an internet frenzy over tired old advice about keeping water and flashlights on hand in case of a hurricane.

"You may laugh now, but when it happens you'll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you'll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency," wrote Dr. Ali Khan on the emergency preparedness blog of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Above the post is a photo of what appears to be a dirty-fingered female zombie.

Khan's postings usually draw 1,000 to 3,000 hits in a week. This one â€Â" posted Monday â€Â" got 30,000 within a day. By Friday, it had gotten 963,000 page views and was the top item viewed on the agency's web site, thanks in part to media coverage that began mid-week.

As of Friday morning, the traffic showed no signs of abating.

"The response has been absolutely excellent. Most people have gotten the fact that this is tongue-and-cheek," Khan said.

More important, CDC officials said, it is drawing interest from teens and young adults who otherwise would not have read a federal agency's guidance on the importance of planning an evacuation route or how much water and what tools to store in case a major storm rolls in.

The idea evolved from a CDC Twitter session with the public earlier this year about planning for disasters. Activity spiked when dozens of tweets came in from people saying they were concerned about zombies.

Dave Daigle, a veteran communications specialist, proposed the idea of using a zombie hook to spice up the hurricane message. Khan, director of emergency preparedness, approved it immediately and wrote it himself.

"Most directors would have thrown me out of their office," Daigle laughed. "Ali has a good sense of humour."

In the blog, Khan discussed what fiction has said about flesh-eating zombies and the various infectious agents that different movies have fingered as the cause.

His favorite zombie flick is "Resident Evil," but his interest in unpredictable terrors is driven more by his decades of work tracking real-life infections like Ebola hemorrhagic fever, bird flu and SARS.

CDC officials said the feedback they've gotten is almost completely positive, including a nice note from the boss, Dr. Tom Frieden.

Almost as rewarding was a nice comment Daigle said he received from his 14-year-old daughter, who has shown little interest in her dad's work but saw the zombie post and said, "This is cool!"

There have been few comments asking whether this is the best way for the government to spend tax dollars. The agency is under a tight budget review at the moment and facing potentially serious budget cuts. But the zombie post involved no extra time or expenditure, CDC officials said.

"We have a critical message to get out and that is CDC saves lives while saving money. If it takes zombies to help us get that message out, then so be it," said agency spokesman Tom Skinner.

Whether the message sticks still has to be determined. The agency is planning a follow-up survey to see if people actually did prepare emergency kits or follow Khan's other advice.

CDC deserves credit for trying something like this, said Bill Gentry, director of the community preparedness and disaster management program at the University of North Carolina's school of public health.

But that doesn't mean the agency should start using vampires to promote vaccinations or space aliens to warn about the dangers of smoking.

"The CDC is the most credible source out there for public health information," he said. "You don't want to risk demeaning that."

© The Associated Press, 2011

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Technology Science - Lizards, ferrets and butterflies get more park

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The Grasslands National Park is where the black-footed ferret is being reintroduced to nature. File photo

Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan's southwest is expanding, a move which Parks Canada says will help a number of species in the area.

The land, some 111 square kilometres, comes from a transaction involving the Dixons, a prominent ranching family that has roots in the area going back to 1883.

In a news release issued Thursday, the government said the land "is significant for its spectacular scenery and native grassland which includes critical habitat for species at risk."

"This acquisition also represents important cultural heritage value as it was the historic Dixon's Diamond T Ranch," the release added.

The family worked with the government on the transaction.

"We think that parks are for people and it's comforting to know our ranch will be a place for visitors to enjoy and come back to," Bruce Dixon was quoted as saying in the government's release. "We are pleased they will have the chance to see how a large ranch operated in harmony with nature and has been a home for many rare species for many generations."

According to the government, the area is an important habitat for the greater short-horned lizard and the Mormon metalmark butterfly.

Parks Canada has also been reintroducing species to the area, including plains bison, black-tailed prairie dogs and the black-footed ferret.

The government said the formal acquisition of the Dixon ranch land will be completed at the end of 2013.

The park was established as a national park in 2001 and is comprised of two blocks covering a total of 921 square kilometres.

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Technology Science - Busy Atlantic hurricane season forecast

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The 2011 Atlantic hurricane season will bring an above-average 12 to 18 named storms, and six to 10 of them will likely become hurricanes, the Canadian Hurricane Centre said Thursday.

Chris Fogarty, program supervisor for the centre in Dartmouth, N.S., said Thursday that by comparison, there were 12 hurricanes last year.

Although fewer hurricanes are expected than last year, Fogarty said people who live along the Atlantic coast should not be complacent because there is no way to predict how many will hit the region.

But, he said, the good news is that as the storms move north they will encounter water temperatures off the Canadian coast that are at normal or below normal levels, which decreases a hurricane's strength.

Map: Major tropical storms in Canada

The U.S. National Weather Service has delivered virtually the same message about the hurricane season.

It said that three to six of the forecast hurricanes are expected to be major, meaning a minimum Category 3 hurricane with wind speeds of at least 178 kilometres an hour.

Weather officials in the U.S. say the Atlantic coast is unlikely to escape as lightly as it did last year during hurricane season. In fact, if the forecast is accurate, this season will be busier than usual.

How accurate?

“Regarding accuracy it’s easy to do a comparison,” Karen Matthews from CBC Weather Centre says. “For example, last year’s predictions were bang on.”

Last year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecast eight to 14 hurricanes and there were 12.

It forecast three to seven major hurricanes and there were five.

Need to be ready

"Winds steered most of the season’s tropical storms and all hurricanes away from our coastlines,” said Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said of the 2010 season.

“However, we can’t count on luck to get us through this season. We need to be prepared, especially with this above-normal outlook.”

Forecasters list several reasons for the more active hurricane outlook:

• The Atlantic Ocean surface water temperature is up to 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer than average.
• The impact of the weather phenomenon La Nina is expected to linger into hurricane season.
• Seasonal climate models suggest an above-normal hurricane season is likely.

The U.S. weather service said it can't predict exactly when or where hurricanes will track, saying the landfall details depend on weather patterns in place when the storms approach.

It's not uncommon for some Atlantic hurricanes to track the eastern seaboard as they head north, lashing Atlantic Canada with high winds and drenching rain.

Hurricane season is considered to be from June 1 until the end of November.

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Technology Science - Shell plans biggest floating object ever

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Royal Dutch Shell will construct the biggest floating man-made object ever, a natural gas processing plant longer than four football fields and more massive than any aircraft carrier.

The "Prelude FLNG" facility, to be anchored off the Australian coast, will be made of 260,000 tons of steel â€Â" five times more than Sydney's famed Harbour Bridge, Shell said Friday.

It is designed to take in the equivalent of 110,000 barrels per day in gas from undersea fields 200 kilometers off Australia's Northwest coast and cool it into liquefied natural gas, known as LNG.

Australia is awash in natural gas, and is eager to sell it to the booming economies of Asia.

In order for natural gas to be shipped overseas, it must be cooled to -260 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature the gas becomes a liquid that takes up just 0.2 per cent of the volume of the gas, allowing more gas to be packed onto a ship.

The Australian oil and gas company Woodside is set to begin production at a giant onshore liquid natural gas facility in Western Australia this year and is considering doubling its size.

Shell claimed the plant will be able to withstand Category Five cyclones, the worst type of storms, and is planned to remain moored above the Prelude gas field for 25 years after completion.

Cost not disclosed

Shell said the plant will be built in a South Korean shipyard but did not say how much it would cost.

A company spokeswoman declined to set a date for the plant's completion date, but noted the Prelude gas field is scheduled to start production around 2017.

"We don't give specific guidance on project level spend, but we are making a substantial investment in Australia LNG," said spokeswoman Kirsten Smart in an email.

Shell plans $30 billion in various investments in Australia over the coming five years, the company has said.

"This project is certainly competitive with more traditional Australian LNG developments on a cost and economics basis," Smart wrote.

Financial newswire Dow Jones cited Australia's Resources Minister Martin Ferguson as saying the project will benefit the country's economy by creating around 1,000 jobs and contributing $12.8 billion US in tax revenues over 25 years.

© The Associated Press, 2011

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Technology Science - Endeavour spacewalk clipped by glitch

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Mission specialist Drew Feustel is seen from the helmet camera of mission specialist Greg Chamitoff during the first spacewalk of Endeavour's final mission. (NASA TV)

NASA managers cut short a task during the last part of Friday's spacewalk by two Endeavour astronauts because one of their carbon dioxide sensors stopped working.

The astronauts were nearly five hours into a planned 6½ hour spacewalk at the International Space Station when mission controllers noticed that Gregory Chamitoff's spacesuit sensor wasn't working. NASA needs to know if levels of carbon dioxide â€Â" expelled when you breathe â€Â" get too high.

The levels were probably not too high, but the decision was made because of the lack of information. Chamitoff and spacewalking partner Drew Feustel were about to start a 45-minute task to finish installing an antenna on the space station, but controllers figured that would take too much time. The astronauts agreed.

Instead the duo started nearly an hour's worth of clean-up and other tasks, such as retrieving bags. The spacewalk lasted six hours and 19 minutes, just 11 minutes shy of the scheduled time.

Astronauts said the spacewalk was a success despite the small shortening.

"Really happy how it worked out today," Chamitoff said.

Feustel and Chamitoff had already installed a light fixture, swapped out some experiments parked outside the space station and were in the middle of a lengthy task of installing the antenna â€Â" getting to the point where they had to remove a shield â€Â" when the glitch on the spacesuit was noticed and work was halted.

NASA officials said this spacewalk was supposed to be as routine as they get for what is always a risky task of strolling outside in space. Unlike other spacewalks, when the tasks were so tough their laboured breathing could be heard on the radio, Chamitoff and Feustel didn't sound like they were out of breath.

'Dream come true'

This was the first spacewalk for Chamitoff. He called it "a dream come true for me."

Endeavour's astronauts will spacewalk a total of four times.

This is Endeavour's last flight. Endeavour's day started with a wake-up song written by two Kennedy Space Center employees, Dan Keenan and Kenny McLaughlin. The song is called "We All Do What We Can Do" and honours workers who prepare the shuttles for launch.

On Thursday, the shuttle's astronauts accomplished their main job: installing on the station a $2 billion physics experiment that looks for antimatter and dark matter.

On Saturday, the two crews will get an unprecedented VIP call â€Â" Pope Benedict XVI will make the first papal call to space. Two Italians are on board the space station.

After a planned 16-day mission, Endeavour is scheduled to land June 1. NASA is shutting down its shuttle program this summer after 30 years, to focus on interplanetary travel. One more mission remains, by shuttle Atlantis in July, to carry up one last load of supplies and equipment.

Later Friday, mission controllers will further study two damaged tiles on Endeavour's underbelly that slightly worry them. Unless ground engineers can prove that the two gouges â€Â" one of them the size of a deck of cards â€Â" are not a safety problem, Endeavour will make an unusual added inspection of the underbelly Saturday. That examination would involve a camera and laser at the end of a boom at the end of the shuttle's robot arm.

Damage on a tile was blamed for the disintegration of space shuttle Columbia in 2003. But similar damage to Endeavour in 2007 did not cause problems.

© The Associated Press, 2011

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Technology Science - Shaw phone service impacted across B.C.

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Shaw offers home and business telephone service along with its internet and cable television packages. (Shaw)

An unknown number of Shaw telephone customers in B.C. lost service most of Friday after major problems developed with the network.

"We are currently experiencing a phone outage impacting customers in Central B.C., Vancouver and Vancouver Island," said a message posted on Shaw's website around 1:30 p.m.

Service was restored at about 5 p.m. PT, the company said on its website.

The problem was affecting calls between Shaw customers and other networks, but 911 calls and calls between customers were getting through according to the statement.

"We have been successful in rerouting the majority of those calls late this afternoon. We expect the issue to be fully solved by this evening," said the message.

No problems were reported with Shaw's cable television and internet service. But people also might be having problems with their alarm systems if those systems are connected to a Shaw telephone.

Michael Jagger with Provident Security in Vancouver said customers started calling the company Friday morning complaining their home alarms weren't working.

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Technology Science - Final shuttle mission date set

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NASA has scheduled its last space shuttle mission for July 8.

The space agency is shutting down the program this summer after 30 years to focus on interplanetary travel.

One more mission remains, by shuttle Atlantis, to carry up a load of supplies and equipment.

Endeavour is currently on its last mission to the International Space Station, and is expected to return to Earth on June 1.

© The Associated Press, 2011

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Technology Science - Lizards, ferrets and butterflies get more park

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The Grasslands National Park is where the black-footed ferret is being reintroduced to nature. File photo

Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan's southwest is expanding, a move which Parks Canada says will help a number of species in the area.

The land, some 111 square kilometres, comes from a transaction involving the Dixons, a prominent ranching family that has roots in the area going back to 1883.

In a news release issued Thursday, the government said the land "is significant for its spectacular scenery and native grassland which includes critical habitat for species at risk."

"This acquisition also represents important cultural heritage value as it was the historic Dixon's Diamond T Ranch," the release added.

The family worked with the government on the transaction.

"We think that parks are for people and it's comforting to know our ranch will be a place for visitors to enjoy and come back to," Bruce Dixon was quoted as saying in the government's release. "We are pleased they will have the chance to see how a large ranch operated in harmony with nature and has been a home for many rare species for many generations."

According to the government, the area is an important habitat for the greater short-horned lizard and the Mormon metalmark butterfly.

Parks Canada has also been reintroducing species to the area, including plains bison, black-tailed prairie dogs and the black-footed ferret.

The government said the formal acquisition of the Dixon ranch land will be completed at the end of 2013.

The park was established as a national park in 2001 and is comprised of two blocks covering a total of 921 square kilometres.

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Technology Science - LinkedIn shares more than double after IPO

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Investors keen to get in on the online networking craze more than doubled the price of LinkedIn Corp.'s shares on the morning of its IPO.

The initial public offering was priced at $45 US, but demand caused the price to double to more than $90 shortly after opening on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. Late in the afternoon, the stock was up even further, to $95.

The pre-market IPO price gave LinkedIn a market value of more than $4 billion, the highest for a U.S. internet company taking its first bow on Wall Street since Google Inc. went public nearly seven years ago. That value itself has now more than doubled.

Filings say the company made $3.4 million in profit last year.

Mutual funds, pension funds and other major money managers got the first chance to buy most of the IPO's 7.84 million shares because stock in these offerings is typically sold to investment bankers' top customers.

The IPO price already was well above LinkedIn's first target of $32 to $35 per share.

The lofty appraisal of LinkedIn reflects the investors' belief that internet services connecting people with common interests will be able to make more money as the web's audience steadily expands.

LinkedIn's valuation eventually may look modest compared with other internet companies being touted as potentially going public in the next 18 months.

Hot properties

The short list includes: online messaging service Twitter, web game maker Zynga, coupon site Groupon and Facebook, the social network that boasts more than 500 million users.

LinkedIn, based down the street from Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, runs a website that serves as part Rolodex, part hiring centre for people trying to meet people who might further their careers and businesses searching for talented employees. More than 102 million people have set up LinkedIn profiles so far. Another million join each week.

The company makes most of its money from fees charged for better access to the data on its website. LinkedIn earned $3.4 million on revenue of $243 million last year but expects to lose money this year as it invests in new products and more computers to run its services.

LinkedIn's CEO is Jeff Weiner, a former Yahoo Inc. executive who has been running the professional networking company for the past two years. The company's stock trades under the ticker LNKD on the New York Stock Exchange.

With files from The Associated Press

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Technology Science - 450 Toronto school roofs to go solar

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The Toronto District School Board and AMP Solar Group Inc. have teamed up to install solar panels on hundreds of school rooftops in a deal that could be worth $1.1 billion in green electricity generation over 20 years.

The TDSB said late Wednesday it signed a deal with AMP, which will build, install and maintain solar photovoltaic panels on as many as 450 school rooftops or 12 million square feet of roof space.

The board said there is no cost to the TDSB and that AMP will be responsible for all project costs. The panels will go only on roofs that can support them, and in return the schools will get $120 million worth of roof repairs.

This is seen as a boon for the school board which is in need of some $3 billion to repair its crumbling buildings â€Â" everything from new roofs to boilers.

TDSB schools are going to get new roofs in exchange for letting the green energy company put the panels up and for more than 60 schools that means the difference between a tarp covering their school and an actual roof.

"We have 61 schools today that have tarped roofs that need to be replaced," said trustee Sheila Penny.

Between 58 and 66 megawatts of electricity could be generated by this program each year, the board said. That is equivalent to the amount needed to meet the average electrical needs of almost 6,000 households, according to the TDSB.

The energy produced will be sold into the local distribution grid for use by local electricity customers, including TDSB schools, and it could be worth as much as $1.1 billion over the 20-year period, staffers told the CBC's Steven D'Souza. The board could get 14.5 per cent of that over the period, he reported.

The initiative is expected to get underway beginning next spring.

The board and AMP executives will hold a news conference 11 a.m. Thursday at Hillcrest Public School.

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Technology Science - Astronauts install $2B detector on space station

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This image provided by NASA-TV shows the cosmic ray detector just prior to being attached to the International Space Station early Thursday morning. The $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was delivered by space shuttle Endeavour. (NASA/Associated Press)

Endeavour's astronauts accomplished the No. 1 objective of their mission Thursday, installing a $2 billion cosmic ray detector on the International Space Station to scan the invisible universe for years to come.

The space fliers used a pair of Canadian-made robot arms to remove the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer from the shuttle, then hoist it onto the sprawling framework on the right side of the station.

The instrument â€Â" which has a one-metre magnet at its core â€Â" is the most expensive piece of equipment at the orbiting lab and certainly the most prominent scientific device. It will search for antimatter and dark matter for the rest of the life of the space station, and hopefully help explain how the cosmos originated.

Upcoming interview

Roberto Battiston, a professor of physics at the University of Perugia, and one of the designers of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment, talks to Quirks & Quarks on Saturday, May 21, at noon on CBC Radio One.

The device will be monitored by an international team of 600 scientists, led by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"I'm sure that Professor Ting and his group have been holding their breath. You guys can all start breathing again now," astronaut-scientist Gregory Chamitoff said once the seven-tonne device was installed. It took Chamitoff and his crewmates two extra hours to complete the operation.

Ting personally relayed his thanks from Mission Control. He's worked on the project for 17 years and fought to have it placed back on the shuttle, when its flight was suspended several years ago.

"This has been a very difficult experiment, and I think in the next 20 to 30 years, nobody will be able to do such a thing again," Ting told the astronauts. "I hope together with you, we will try to make a contribution to a better understanding of our universe."

Ting said the spectrometer will be checked over the next couple of days, before it begins collecting data in earnest. The magnetic field generated by the instrument will bend the path of incoming cosmic particles and eight state-of-the-art detectors will try to identify them in the nanoseconds it takes to travel through the magnet.

Endeavour tile damage analyzed

Back at Mission Control, meanwhile, engineers continued to analyze several areas of damage on Endeavour's belly. Thermal tiles were gouged and nicked during Monday's liftoff, the second-to-last for the shuttle program. Some of the slashes are as much as 6 15 centimetres long and 5 centimetres wide.

Giffords undergoes surgery

Mark Kelly's wife, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, underwent more surgery Wednesday, just two days after seeing her husband blast into orbit. Doctors in Houston put in a plastic implant to replace part of her skull that was removed following the Jan. 8 shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona, that left six dead and 13 injured.

In a TV interview following the spectrometer work, Kelly said his wife was doing really well and her neurosurgeons were pleased. He said it didn't make sense to hold up the surgery until he got back; doctors wanted to do it Wednesday.

Kelly is keeping abreast of her condition through family members, using the space station's internet phone.

NASA wants to make certain the shuttle is safe to come home in two weeks.

The damage was spotted in photos snapped by the space station crew just before Endeavour docked Wednesday. The shuttle performed a slow backflip for the cameras, a customary procedure put in place after shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere in 2003.

Mission Control may ask shuttle commander Mark Kelly and his five crewmates to take a closer look at the gouges this weekend, using a laser-tipped inspection boom.

Kelly and his crew will remain at the space station until May 29.

Two of the astronauts will venture out Friday on the first of four spacewalks to perform some station maintenance.

Endeavour will conclude its final voyage with a landing on June 1.

NASA is shutting down its shuttle program this summer after 30 years, to focus on interplanetary travel. One more mission remains, by space shuttle Atlantis in July.

The space station will continue to operate until at least 2020, with Americans hitching rides on Russian Soyuz capsules until private U.S. companies can take over the job.

© The Associated Press, 2011

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Technology Science - Dark energy does speed up universe's expansion

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The new study supports Einstein's cosmological constant as the source of dark energy and the accelerating expansion of the universe. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Dark energy is real and it is causing spacetime and the universe to expand at an increasing speed, a new study says.

The paper to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, provides the first independent confirmation of both the existence of dark energy and its rate of expansion. It has been put together by a team of 26 scientists including Chris Blake from Melbourne's Swinburne University.

"It shows physicist Albert Einstein was right," said Blake. "Dark energy is a smooth cosmological constant throughout the universe, rather than a change in the laws of gravity."

A hundred years ago scientists believed the universe was steady and unchanging. Einstein invented the cosmological constant to expand the fabric of space-time after his own equations for general relativity wouldn't allow for the cosmos to remain static as expected in a steady state universe.

Soon afterwards, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was actually expanding, consistent with Einstein's original general relativity theory.

Einstein then removed his cosmological constant describing his failure to predict an expanding universe in theory before it was proven by observation, as his biggest blunder.

Dark energy acceleration

In 1998, astronomers studying distant exploding stars called a Type 1A supernovae discovered that not only was the universe expanding, but that the rate of expansion was accelerating due to some type of unknown force or dark energy. Einstein's cosmological constant was back.

Alternate theory

According to NASA, the new findings contradict an alternate theory that gravity, not dark energy, is the force pushing space apart. The alternate theory says Albert Einstein's concept of gravity is wrong, and gravity becomes repulsive instead of attractive when acting at great distances.

"The acceleration was a shocking discovery, because it showed we have a lot more to learn about physics, " Blake said.

To verify the supernovae findings, Blake and colleagues spent four years using a powerful spectrograph at the Australian Astronomical Observatory to collect data on more than 240,000 galaxies going back over seven billion years to when the cosmos was less than half its current age.

"It showed the growth of structure in the universe, the development of galaxy clusters and super clusters has slowed down," Blake says.

"This implies the most distant parts of the universe which are further back in space-time, have ordinary matter and hence gravity is dominating. But today this antigravity dark energy has taken hold."

Galaxies need personal space

The researchers then looked at the distances between pairs of galaxies.

"The average distance between galaxy pairs is about 500,000,000 light years," says Blake.

"Galaxies tend to grow on compression waves called baryon acoustic oscillations, which spread through the universe. They can be detected as ripples in cosmic microwave background radiation."

According to Blake, "The average distance between these galaxy pairs has also been found to have grown because of the expansion of space-time, and that's further confirmation of an antigravity agent.'

But, Blake admitted that's as much as they currently know.

"Although the exact physics required to explain dark energy still remains a mystery, confirming it exists is a significant step in understanding the origin, evolution and fate of the universe."

© Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2011

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Technology Science - 'Zombie apocalypse' health advice goes viral

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"Zombie apocalypse." That blog posting headline is all it took for a behind-the-scenes public health doctor to set off an internet frenzy over tired old advice about keeping water and flashlights on hand in case of a hurricane.

"You may laugh now, but when it happens you'll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you'll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency," wrote Dr. Ali Khan on the emergency preparedness blog of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Above the post is a photo of what appears to be a dirty-fingered female zombie.

Khan's postings usually draw 1,000 to 3,000 hits in a week. This one â€Â" posted Monday â€Â" got 30,000 within a day. By Friday, it had gotten 963,000 page views and was the top item viewed on the agency's web site, thanks in part to media coverage that began mid-week.

As of Friday morning, the traffic showed no signs of abating.

"The response has been absolutely excellent. Most people have gotten the fact that this is tongue-and-cheek," Khan said.

More important, CDC officials said, it is drawing interest from teens and young adults who otherwise would not have read a federal agency's guidance on the importance of planning an evacuation route or how much water and what tools to store in case a major storm rolls in.

The idea evolved from a CDC Twitter session with the public earlier this year about planning for disasters. Activity spiked when dozens of tweets came in from people saying they were concerned about zombies.

Dave Daigle, a veteran communications specialist, proposed the idea of using a zombie hook to spice up the hurricane message. Khan, director of emergency preparedness, approved it immediately and wrote it himself.

"Most directors would have thrown me out of their office," Daigle laughed. "Ali has a good sense of humour."

In the blog, Khan discussed what fiction has said about flesh-eating zombies and the various infectious agents that different movies have fingered as the cause.

His favorite zombie flick is "Resident Evil," but his interest in unpredictable terrors is driven more by his decades of work tracking real-life infections like Ebola hemorrhagic fever, bird flu and SARS.

CDC officials said the feedback they've gotten is almost completely positive, including a nice note from the boss, Dr. Tom Frieden.

Almost as rewarding was a nice comment Daigle said he received from his 14-year-old daughter, who has shown little interest in her dad's work but saw the zombie post and said, "This is cool!"

There have been few comments asking whether this is the best way for the government to spend tax dollars. The agency is under a tight budget review at the moment and facing potentially serious budget cuts. But the zombie post involved no extra time or expenditure, CDC officials said.

"We have a critical message to get out and that is CDC saves lives while saving money. If it takes zombies to help us get that message out, then so be it," said agency spokesman Tom Skinner.

Whether the message sticks still has to be determined. The agency is planning a follow-up survey to see if people actually did prepare emergency kits or follow Khan's other advice.

CDC deserves credit for trying something like this, said Bill Gentry, director of the community preparedness and disaster management program at the University of North Carolina's school of public health.

But that doesn't mean the agency should start using vampires to promote vaccinations or space aliens to warn about the dangers of smoking.

"The CDC is the most credible source out there for public health information," he said. "You don't want to risk demeaning that."

© The Associated Press, 2011

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Technology Science - Shell plans biggest floating object ever

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Royal Dutch Shell will construct the biggest floating man-made object ever, a natural gas processing plant longer than four football fields and more massive than any aircraft carrier.

The "Prelude FLNG" facility, to be anchored off the Australian coast, will be made of 260,000 tons of steel â€Â" five times more than Sydney's famed Harbour Bridge, Shell said Friday.

It is designed to take in the equivalent of 110,000 barrels per day in gas from undersea fields 200 kilometers off Australia's Northwest coast and cool it into liquefied natural gas, known as LNG.

Australia is awash in natural gas, and is eager to sell it to the booming economies of Asia.

In order for natural gas to be shipped overseas, it must be cooled to -260 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature the gas becomes a liquid that takes up just 0.2 per cent of the volume of the gas, allowing more gas to be packed onto a ship.

The Australian oil and gas company Woodside is set to begin production at a giant onshore liquid natural gas facility in Western Australia this year and is considering doubling its size.

Shell claimed the plant will be able to withstand Category Five cyclones, the worst type of storms, and is planned to remain moored above the Prelude gas field for 25 years after completion.

Cost not disclosed

Shell said the plant will be built in a South Korean shipyard but did not say how much it would cost.

A company spokeswoman declined to set a date for the plant's completion date, but noted the Prelude gas field is scheduled to start production around 2017.

"We don't give specific guidance on project level spend, but we are making a substantial investment in Australia LNG," said spokeswoman Kirsten Smart in an email.

Shell plans $30 billion in various investments in Australia over the coming five years, the company has said.

"This project is certainly competitive with more traditional Australian LNG developments on a cost and economics basis," Smart wrote.

Financial newswire Dow Jones cited Australia's Resources Minister Martin Ferguson as saying the project will benefit the country's economy by creating around 1,000 jobs and contributing $12.8 billion US in tax revenues over 25 years.

© The Associated Press, 2011

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Technology Science - Lonely planets can wander far from stars

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The researchers calculated each object has about the mass of Jupiter. Above is an artist's impression of what such a gas giant would look like. (NASA)

Are these planets without orbits? Astronomers have found 10 potential planets as massive as Jupiter wandering through a slice of the Milky Way galaxy, following either very wide orbits or no orbit at all. And scientists think they are more common than stars.

These mysterious bodies, apparently gaseous balls like the largest planets in our solar system, may help scientists understand how planets form.

Other scientists have reported free-wandering objects in star-forming regions of the cosmos, but the newfound objects appear to be different, said one author of the new study, physicist David Bennett of the University of Notre Dame.

Bennett and colleagues from Japan, New Zealand and elsewhere report the finding in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. They didn't observe the objects directly. Instead, they used the fact that massive objects bend the light of distant stars with their gravity, just as a lens does. So they looked extensively for such "microlensing" events.

No sign of a star

They found 10, each caused by one of the newfound objects. They calculated each object has about the mass of Jupiter, and estimated how common such objects are. They also found no sign of a star near these bodies, at least not within 10 times the distance from Earth to the sun. (For comparison, within our solar system that would basically rule out an orbit closer than Saturn's.)

So the newfound objects either orbit a star more distant than that, or they don't orbit a star at all, the researchers concluded. They drew on other data to determine most of the objects don't orbit a star.

If that's the case, it would give a boost to some theories that say planets can be thrown out of orbit during formation, said Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, an outside expert.

Scientists believe planets are formed when disks of dust that orbit stars form clumps, so that these clumps â€Â" the planets â€Â" remain in orbit. Maybe the newfound objects started out that way, but then got tossed out of orbit or into distant orbits by the gravitational tugs of larger planets, the researchers suggest.

The work suggests that such a tossing-out process is quite common, Bennett said.

'Exciting' theoretical challenge

Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who wasn't involved in the research, said maybe the bodies formed around a pair of stars instead, one of which supplied the gravitational tug.

But even that would take some explaining to produce an object without an orbit, he said. Or maybe they somehow formed outside of any orbit. So the theoretical challenge in explaining the existence of such bodies is "exciting," he said.

Boss said he suspects most of these are in a distant orbit, and that maybe they even formed at that great distance rather than being tossed outward from a closer orbit.

If they orbit stars, their sheer number suggests every star in the galaxy has one or two of them, "which is astounding" because that's five or 10 times the number of stars scientists had thought harbored such gas-giant planets, he said.

And if instead they are wandering free, that "would be really stunning" because it's hard to explain how they formed, he said.

Kaltenegger also said the new results can't rule out the possibility that these possible planets are in orbit, and that they may only have the mass of Saturn, about a third of Jupiter's.

But if they aren't orbiting a star, she noted, they don't fit the official definition of a planet â€Â" at least not the definition applied to objects in our own solar system.

All in all, Boss said, the new work is "pretty exciting in telling what is out there in the night sky... Lots of theories will grow in this environment."

© The Associated Press, 2011

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Technology Science - E-books outselling print at Amazon.com

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Since April 1, Amazon.com has sold 105 e-books, not including free e-books, for every 100 print books. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)

Online bookstore Amazon.com now sells more e-books than all hardcover and paperback print books combined.

"We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com in a statement Thursday announcing the milestone.

Since April 1, Amazon.com, the company's U.S. site, has sold 105 e-books, not including free e-books, for every 100 print books. Amazon said it does not have any specific stats to share for Canada, where the national site is Amazon.ca.

Bezos noted that the Seattle, Wash.-based company has been selling print books for 15 years and e-books for less than four. Amazon introduced its Kindle e-book reader in 2007.

Kindle e-book sales overtook hardcover sales in July 2010 and paperback sales this past January.

Amazon's e-books can be read on Amazon's Kindle e-readers as well as on desktop and laptop computers and a variety of mobile devices, such as the Apple, Windows, Android and BlackBerry smartphones and tablets.

Amazon also announced Thursday that a new Kindle e-reader with ads is outselling other Kindle models in the U.S.

The Kindle with Special Offers, introduced in April, costs $114 â€Â" $25 less than the next lowest-priced Kindle.

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Technology Science - Calgary shooting victim hopes for a taste of sight

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Jose Neto, shown here singing a Portuguese song in a CBC studio, has been chosen to test a new device that could help him "see" with his tongue. CBC

A young man blinded by a stray bullet in downtown Calgary will be taking part in a unique medical study he hopes could partially restore his sight.

Jose Neto has been chosen to test a prototype device called BrainPort, which sends information from a digital video camera to an electrical stimulation pad placed on the tongue.

Users report that they can "feel" black and white shapes, even letters, much like champagne bubbles on the tongue.

Neto will travel to the University of Pittsburg Medical Centre at the end of the month for a two-week study into the device, which he first learned about through news articles.

"I am really glad to be able to go down there…and be part of those studies," Neto said. "Few people get to go down there and try this device and I'm one of them."

Helps blind people with mobility

Besides the mouth device and sunglasses mounted with the camera, the blind person also has a handheld base unit, which can adjust contrast and zoom in and out.

The base unit pixilates the images from the digital camera and converts them to electrical pulses, which sends them to the "lollipop" in the mouth. The nerves on the tongue send the information to the brain, which reconstructs the image.

Within 15 minutes of using the device, the brain can begin interpreting the spatial information, although it takes hours of training to become adept.

"People use canes the vast majority of time, but the deficiency of a cane is that beyond the reach of a cane, you don't know what is going on," said Dr. Amy Nau, an assistant professor in the department of ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh.

She said this device helps people in day-to-day activities like finding an exit sign or an elevator button.

"We have subjects who are able to walk along a sideway unassisted because there is such a big contrast between the road and the sidewalk," Nau said. "So I think in terms of mobility this is going to enhance independence."

Neto was a Brazilian exchange student studying in Calgary when he was caught in gunfire on Sept. 16, 2008 while walking near Chinatown with his girlfriend. The couple,now married, have decided to stay in Calgary and apply for permanent residency.

A fundraising event will be held on May 27 at the Edgemont Community Centre. Neto's band will play at the event, which is meant to raise money to help pay for the expense of his trip to Pittsburgh and to purchase a BrainPort device if it becomes available for sale.

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Technology Science - Busy Atlantic hurricane season forecast

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The 2011 Atlantic hurricane season will bring an above-average 12 to 18 named storms, and six to 10 of them will likely become hurricanes, the Canadian Hurricane Centre said Thursday.

Chris Fogarty, program supervisor for the centre in Dartmouth, N.S., said Thursday that by comparison, there were 12 hurricanes last year.

Although fewer hurricanes are expected than last year, Fogarty said people who live along the Atlantic coast should not be complacent because there is no way to predict how many will hit the region.

But, he said, the good news is that as the storms move north they will encounter water temperatures off the Canadian coast that are at normal or below normal levels, which decreases a hurricane's strength.

Map: Major tropical storms in Canada

The U.S. National Weather Service has delivered virtually the same message about the hurricane season.

It said that three to six of the forecast hurricanes are expected to be major, meaning a minimum Category 3 hurricane with wind speeds of at least 178 kilometres an hour.

Weather officials in the U.S. say the Atlantic coast is unlikely to escape as lightly as it did last year during hurricane season. In fact, if the forecast is accurate, this season will be busier than usual.

How accurate?

“Regarding accuracy it’s easy to do a comparison,” Karen Matthews from CBC Weather Centre says. “For example, last year’s predictions were bang on.”

Last year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecast eight to 14 hurricanes and there were 12.

It forecast three to seven major hurricanes and there were five.

Need to be ready

"Winds steered most of the season’s tropical storms and all hurricanes away from our coastlines,” said Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said of the 2010 season.

“However, we can’t count on luck to get us through this season. We need to be prepared, especially with this above-normal outlook.”

Forecasters list several reasons for the more active hurricane outlook:

• The Atlantic Ocean surface water temperature is up to 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer than average.
• The impact of the weather phenomenon La Nina is expected to linger into hurricane season.
• Seasonal climate models suggest an above-normal hurricane season is likely.

The U.S. weather service said it can't predict exactly when or where hurricanes will track, saying the landfall details depend on weather patterns in place when the storms approach.

It's not uncommon for some Atlantic hurricanes to track the eastern seaboard as they head north, lashing Atlantic Canada with high winds and drenching rain.

Hurricane season is considered to be from June 1 until the end of November.

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Technology Science - Endeavour spacewalk clipped by glitch

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Mission specialist Drew Feustel is seen from the helmet camera of mission specialist Greg Chamitoff during the first spacewalk of Endeavour's final mission. (NASA TV)

NASA managers cut short a task during the last part of Friday's spacewalk by two Endeavour astronauts because one of their carbon dioxide sensors stopped working.

The astronauts were nearly five hours into a planned 6½ hour spacewalk at the International Space Station when mission controllers noticed that Gregory Chamitoff's spacesuit sensor wasn't working. NASA needs to know if levels of carbon dioxide â€Â" expelled when you breathe â€Â" get too high.

The levels were probably not too high, but the decision was made because of the lack of information. Chamitoff and spacewalking partner Drew Feustel were about to start a 45-minute task to finish installing an antenna on the space station, but controllers figured that would take too much time. The astronauts agreed.

Instead the duo started nearly an hour's worth of clean-up and other tasks, such as retrieving bags. The spacewalk lasted six hours and 19 minutes, just 11 minutes shy of the scheduled time.

Astronauts said the spacewalk was a success despite the small shortening.

"Really happy how it worked out today," Chamitoff said.

Feustel and Chamitoff had already installed a light fixture, swapped out some experiments parked outside the space station and were in the middle of a lengthy task of installing the antenna â€Â" getting to the point where they had to remove a shield â€Â" when the glitch on the spacesuit was noticed and work was halted.

NASA officials said this spacewalk was supposed to be as routine as they get for what is always a risky task of strolling outside in space. Unlike other spacewalks, when the tasks were so tough their laboured breathing could be heard on the radio, Chamitoff and Feustel didn't sound like they were out of breath.

'Dream come true'

This was the first spacewalk for Chamitoff. He called it "a dream come true for me."

Endeavour's astronauts will spacewalk a total of four times.

This is Endeavour's last flight. Endeavour's day started with a wake-up song written by two Kennedy Space Center employees, Dan Keenan and Kenny McLaughlin. The song is called "We All Do What We Can Do" and honours workers who prepare the shuttles for launch.

On Thursday, the shuttle's astronauts accomplished their main job: installing on the station a $2 billion physics experiment that looks for antimatter and dark matter.

On Saturday, the two crews will get an unprecedented VIP call â€Â" Pope Benedict XVI will make the first papal call to space. Two Italians are on board the space station.

After a planned 16-day mission, Endeavour is scheduled to land June 1. NASA is shutting down its shuttle program this summer after 30 years, to focus on interplanetary travel. One more mission remains, by shuttle Atlantis in July, to carry up one last load of supplies and equipment.

Later Friday, mission controllers will further study two damaged tiles on Endeavour's underbelly that slightly worry them. Unless ground engineers can prove that the two gouges â€Â" one of them the size of a deck of cards â€Â" are not a safety problem, Endeavour will make an unusual added inspection of the underbelly Saturday. That examination would involve a camera and laser at the end of a boom at the end of the shuttle's robot arm.

Damage on a tile was blamed for the disintegration of space shuttle Columbia in 2003. But similar damage to Endeavour in 2007 did not cause problems.

© The Associated Press, 2011

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Technology Science - Shaw phone service impacted across B.C.

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Shaw offers home and business telephone service along with its internet and cable television packages. (Shaw)

An unknown number of Shaw telephone customers in B.C. lost service most of Friday after major problems developed with the network.

"We are currently experiencing a phone outage impacting customers in Central B.C., Vancouver and Vancouver Island," said a message posted on Shaw's website around 1:30 p.m.

Service was restored at about 5 p.m. PT, the company said on its website.

The problem was affecting calls between Shaw customers and other networks, but 911 calls and calls between customers were getting through according to the statement.

"We have been successful in rerouting the majority of those calls late this afternoon. We expect the issue to be fully solved by this evening," said the message.

No problems were reported with Shaw's cable television and internet service. But people also might be having problems with their alarm systems if those systems are connected to a Shaw telephone.

Michael Jagger with Provident Security in Vancouver said customers started calling the company Friday morning complaining their home alarms weren't working.

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Technology Science - Sperm whale 'dialects' linked to distinct cultures

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Sperm whales speak in distinct regional dialects that appear closely linked to different "cultural groups," a Canadian researcher says.

"The animals in the Caribbean sound different than the animals in the Pacific â€Â" even the Gulf of Mexico, which is right beside the Caribbean," said Shane Gero, a researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax. "In a lot of ways, that's very similar to us. We can identify someone from the U.K. versus Canada because they say 'lorry' and not 'truck.'"

Sperm whales from many different regions meet in some "multicultural" areas of the ocean but tend to associate with whales that speak their own dialect, Gero told CBC's Quirks & Quarks in an interview that airs Saturday.

Upcoming interview

Shane Gero talks to Quirks & Quarks on Saturday, May 21, at noon on CBC Radio One.

"Their society really is divided based on culture," he said. "Animals that have different dialects behave differently. They feed on different things. They raise their babies differently."

Gero has been studying sperm whales in the Caribbean for his PhD thesis. He and his collaborators in Canada and Scotland have been trying to decode sperm whale language by recording the voices of pairs of animals talking to one another and noting differences among the sounds they make.

Female sperm whales spend all year in family groups in subtropical regions of the ocean, while males roam all over the world. When two whales encounter each other, they make patterns of clicks called codas.

Unique individual voices

Some codas are spoken by all whales, but each in a different way, so that they can be told apart from one another.

"They actually have one particular coda that seems to function in telling individual identity," Gero said.

Other codas are unique to particular cultural groups. For example, in the Caribbean, whales make a coda that consists of two slow clicks and then a faster triplet.

Gero noted that humans tend to co-operate with others from the same cultural group, and he suspects that sperm whales have developed different cultures and dialects to bond groups together because co-operation is so important to their survival.

Sperm whales are the deepest diving whales, routinely diving to 1,200 metres and occasionally as deep as two kilometres as they hunt.

"Mom always has to dive down for food and baby can't dive with her," Gero said.

Because of that, babysitters are crucial.

"It takes a village to raise a sperm whale baby."

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Technology Science - Final shuttle mission date set

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NASA has scheduled its last space shuttle mission for July 8.

The space agency is shutting down the program this summer after 30 years to focus on interplanetary travel.

One more mission remains, by shuttle Atlantis, to carry up a load of supplies and equipment.

Endeavour is currently on its last mission to the International Space Station, and is expected to return to Earth on June 1.

© The Associated Press, 2011

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Technology Science - Solar plane completes 1st international flight

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Solar Impulse reached Brussels airport after a 12-hour flight from Switzerland. (Yves Logghe/Associated Press)

A solar-powered plane landed in Brussels on Friday evening after a 12-hour flight from Switzerland, the futuristic aircraft's first international sortie.

The Solar Impulse single-seater prototype took off from Payerne airfield in Switzerland at 8:40 a.m. (2:40 a.m. ET) after a three-hour delay because of strong winds.

The four-engine plane with the wingspan of a Boeing 777 made its 2009 maiden flight in Switzerland and further tests have all taken place there. Last year, it completed a 26-hour non-stop flight that proved the plane can stay aloft at night from the solar energy its 12,000 solar cells soaked up during the day.

The Solar Impulse team, led by pilot Andre Borschberg and adventurer Bertrand Piccard, said Friday's 600-kilometre flight across France, Luxembourg and Belgium posed a new challenge because it required navigation across international air traffic networks.

It is scheduled to fly to France in June where it will be exhibited at the Paris air show. The plane had to go into a holding pattern when it reached Brussels National Airport, waiting for a break in traffic at the busy airport.

"I feel relieved," Piccard said. "For the last month, my biggest nightmare was ... that the plane would not arrive due to technical problems or due to weather problems."

"We always hoped it would become an ambassador for renewable energy," he said. "In the 20th century, every step of aviation was a historic one (and now) Solar Impulse is also making history."

Belgian Crown Prince Phillipe followed the solar plane in a helicopter, which filmed the approach and landing, and broadcast it live on the team's website.

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