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NASA unveiled a modest telescope on Friday with a sweeping mission — to discover if there are any Earth-type planets orbiting distant stars.Though astronomers have found more than 330 planets circling stars in other solar systems, none has the size and location that is believed to be key to supporting life.

“A null result is as important as finding planets,” Michael Bicay, director of science at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, told reporters in Titusville, Florida, where the Kepler telescope is being prepared for launch.

Named after the 17th century astronomer who figured out the motions of planets, Kepler is scheduled for liftoff on March 5 aboard an unmanned Delta 2 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Once in position trailing Earth in orbit, Kepler will spend at least 3 1/2 years focused on a star-rich patch of sky between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.

Equipped with a 95 megapixel camera — the largest ever flown in space — Kepler will attempt to find Earth-sized planets flying across the face of their parent stars.

Scientists say it will be a bit like trying to spot a gnat in the glare of a floodlight.

To an outside observer, a planet as large as Jupiter temporarily blots out about 1 percent of visible light from the sun as it makes its transit. Passage of Earth-like worlds produce a change in brightness of about 84 parts in a million.

“This is a very small signal and it’s very difficult to predict,” said James Fanson, Kepler project manager at the U.S. space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The plan is to stare at this place for three years and wait for the stars to wink.”

Kepler will need to keep extraordinarily still for weeks at a time, breaking its gaze only once a month for 12-hour radio linkups with Earth.

Data from 170,000 target stars will be relayed for scientists on the ground to analyze.

The selected stars are just a fraction of the estimated 4 million objects that will fall within Kepler’s view, but scientists want to maximize the telescope’s observing time to make sure they catch as many blinking stars as possible.

To find a planet like Earth, scientists will need to catch at least four transits, a process that will take about 3 1/2 years. Ground-based telescopes will be used to verify results.

“There’s several astrophysical phenomena that masquerade as planets,” Bicay said. “We’re going to have to sort them out.”

No one knows how many stars have solid-body planets like Earth orbiting in what are called habitable zones, places where liquid water can exist.Water is believed to be crucial for life, although that evidence is based on a sample of one — Earth.

“We’re privileged to live in a time and in a country that has the technology to answer these questions scientifically,” said Fanson.

More than 600,000 homes and businesses were still without power on Friday morning after snow and ice storms earlier this week left more than 1.5 million customers in the dark from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania, local utilities reported. The storms on January 27-28 hit Kentucky the hardest, leaving more than half a million customers without power.

Officials at E.ON U.S., which owns Louisville Gas and Electric Co and Kentucky Utilities Co, said it could take up to two weeks to restore service to all 332,000 still without service.

E.ON U.S., a subsidiary or German energy company E.ON AG, owns and operates about 8,000 megawatts of generating capacity and transmits and distributes electricity to more than 900,000 customers and natural gas to more than 325,000 customers in Kentucky.

High temperatures in Louisville, the biggest city the Bluegrass State, will remain below normal in the 20s and 30s degrees Fahrenheit through Sunday, according to forecasts by AccuWeather.com.

In Arkansas, another hard hit state, the electric cooperatives, which serve about 490,000 customers, said outages peaked at about 300,000. The co-ops still had about 178,000 homes and businesses in the dark Friday morning.

After crashing across the Midwest, the storm dropped a lot of snow in the Northeast before moving off the East Coast into the Atlantic Ocean late Wednesday.

Snow, however, does not disrupt power service like ice. Ice accumulates on trees and branches, snapping them onto power lines.

Japan got its first commercial order to launch a satellite on a homegrown rocket on Monday, a deal that Japanese officials hope will grow into a business that could support the country’s cash-strapped space program.The agreement — which targets a liftoff date after April 2011 — comes less than two weeks before Japan plans to launch eight satellites into space to show that its H2A rocket can compete with rivals in Russia, the United States and Asia’s new space powerhouse, China.

Japan’s space program has long been focused entirely on lifting government-sponsored, unmanned payloads — mainly scientific, telecommunications and spy satellites, which it first launched 10 years ago — off the launch pad.

But officials are hoping that commercial use would help fund Japan’s long-term space development, which Tokyo believes is an essential part of national security.

The primary mission of the Jan. 21 launch from remote Tanegashima island, where Japan’s main space station is based, is to send into orbit a greenhouse-gas monitoring satellite called “Ibuki,” which means “breath.” But along with the main payload, the rocket will carry seven “baby satellites” — one developed by JAXA, the government space agency, and six created by university research centers and private industry.

JAXA decided to open the payload up to the private sector because it had extra launching power and wanted to display its capabilities for commercial use.

“If we can successfully launch the seven mini satellites, this could be an excellent precedent for commercial use in the future,” said Asaka Hagiwara, spokeswoman for JAXA, whose official name is Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

In a promising sign, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., which makes the H2A rocket, signed an agreement Monday with the Korea Aerospace Research Institute to launch its multipurpose Arirang 3 satellite. It was the first commercial order for use of a Japanese-made rocket. The price was not disclosed.

The H2A rocket was initially designed and built as a government project in which Mitsubishi Heavy took part. The rocket project has since been privatized as a business of Mitsubishi Heavy, now considered a vital part of Japan’s space program.

Japan has long been one of the world’s leading space-faring nations — having launched its first satellite in 1970 — but it has been struggling to get out from under China’s shadow in recent years and gain a niche in the global rocket-launching business, which is dominated by Russia, the U.S. and Europe’s Arianespace.

Becoming a commercial space power would help Japan keep apace of an intensifying space race in Asia.

Struggling under a relatively small budget — 188 billion yen ($2 billion) in 2008 — Japan has watched rival China march ahead with high-profile manned flights and is now seeing a growing rival in India, which has set its sights on reaching the moon.

China has already built up lucrative commercial satellite launching services. It launched a communications satellite for Nigeria in 2007 and another for Venezuela last year.

Japan is keenly aware that its space program has crucial implications for national security.

Lance Gatling, an independent space and defense expert, said that while commercial success would be a nice outcome, Japan believes it needs to keep its rocket program in good shape for defensive reasons.

“They want to be able to launch a satellite and not tell anybody where it’s going. There are many reasons to do that,” he said, referring to North Korea and other regional concerns. “If it was a commercial business, it would have been shut down years ago.”

Underscoring the military realities, Japan’s parliament last year voted to allow the nation’s space programs to be used for defense for the first time. The law, one of several recent moves to give greater freedom to the armed forces, allows the military to develop advanced spy satellites for intelligence and a missile defense shield being built jointly with the United States.

Japan’s current spy satellite program is run by a civilian agency.

JAXA official Takao Eto, who is in charge of coordinating the piggybacks, said the agency has already selected four other piggybacks for a launch in 2011. They will be launched for free, but JAXA is considering charging a launch fee in the future.

Takeshi Maemura, head of space systems for Mitsubishi Heavy, said Japan’s launch cost has come down to a competitive level. He said the standard for a competitive launch — largely set by Russia’s Proton rocket — used to be around 7 billion yen ($75 million), but has now risen to around 9 billion ($97 million).

JAXA says this month’s launch will cost about 8.5 billion yen ($91.7 million) — the lowest ever.

“The cost has reached a level where we can be quite competitive,” Maemura said. He said Mitsubishi Heavy has received dozens of offers for satellite launches. “Our launch cost is getting pretty close.”

According to the space agency’s Web site, Ibuki will monitor the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and is “expected to play an important role in monitoring global environmental changes.” The piggyback satellites have missions that vary from measuring gamma radiation to monitoring lightning. The total project cost is estimated at 34.6 billion yen ($372.8 million).

JAXA spokesman Tatsuo Oshima said it is counting on orders from the military.

“With the new law that allows space programs for defense purposes, we expect there will be more opportunities for development and launches of various kinds of satellites,” he said.

But Mitsubishi’s Maemura acknowledged Japan needs to launch rockets far more frequently than the one or two a year it launches now. The Tanegashima launch site, about 600 miles (970 kilometers) southwest of Tokyo, lacks the capability to handle so many launches because of weather, size and arrangements with local fishermen that prohibit launches during peak fishing seasons.

While workers in ant society are known to physically restrain their peers from cheating the queen by having their own offspring, scientists have for the first time found how the cheaters get caught red-handed.Jurgen Liebig and his colleagues at Arizona State University say that experimental evidence shows that chemical hydrocarbons produced by those sneaky sorts are a dead giveaway of their fertility status.

Published online in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, the findings represent the first direct evidence that cuticular hydrocarbons are the informational basis for the ants’ reproductive policing.

Liebig’s team had previously shown that workers used hydrocarbons to discriminate between eggs laid by workers and queens, and also for nestmate recognition and sexual attraction.

Since hydrocarbon profiles play important roles in communication, he and his colleagues had a strong suspicion that they would also help catch reproductive cheaters.

With an eye on testing the idea in one ant species called Aphaenogaster cockerelli, the research team mimicked reproductive cheaters by applying a synthetic compound typical of fertile individuals on non-reproductive workers, and that treatment attracted nestmate aggression in colonies where a queen was present.

The researchers said that the same treatment in colonies without a queen, and where workers had begun to reproduce, failed to attract nestmate aggression.

Liebig says that this system for catching cheaters plays an important role in maintaining harmony in the ant world, and it sets an example that we might learn from ourselves.

“The idea that social harmony is dependent on strict systems to prevent and punish cheating individuals seems to apply to most successful societies,” he said.

“Understanding what mechanisms are employed within ant societies, which are perhaps the most successful and widespread among all animals, provides a model for understanding the fundamental basis of successful cooperation,” he added.

Soil rich in diamond dust discovered across North America reinforces a theory that falling meteors caused the extinction of mammoths and other animals, said a study in the journal Science. “These discoveries provide strong evidence for a cosmic impact event at approximately 12,900 years ago that would have had enormous environmental consequences for plants, animals and humans across North America,” said Douglas Kennett of the University of Oregon, who led the research.

The findings appear to bolster the theory set out in 2007 that several comets hitting the Earth triggered a 1,300-year-long ice age, causing the extinction of several species of animals and fragmented the prehistoric human Clovis culture.

The Clovis people lived off of hunting and gathering in an area across what is now the United States, Mexico and Central America.

The peak of the Clovis era was from 13,200 to 12,900 years ago and scientists say the Clovis may have entered North America across a land bridge from Siberia.

One of the diamond-rich sediment layers found by the researchers is located directly above Clovis materials at a site in Murray Springs, Arizona, the researchers said.

The nanometer-sized diamonds are produced under high temperatures and high pressure from cosmic impacts that have been found in meteorites.

The sediments full of diamond dust were also found at digs at five other sites, in Bull Creek, Oklahoma; Gainey, Michigan; and Topper, South Carolina in the United States and Lake Hind, Manitoba; and Chobot, Alberta in Canada.

Nanodiamonds can be produced on Earth but only as a result of high-explosive detonations or chemical vaporization.

The study appears in the January 2 edition of the journal Science.

The face of war is all set to transform, with American armed robots predicted to patrol on the battle ground in a matter of few years, killing without any remorse.According to a report in the Washington Post, this advancement in American military prowess is a fact that comes under Moore’s law.

Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, noticed nearly half a century ago that computing power seemed to be doubling about every two years.

The rapid emergence of the armed unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) that roam over Pakistan is considered by experts to be a sequel to Moore’s Law.

Technological advancements include onboard computers becoming far more powerful, so automatic pilots became far more competent.

Also, signal processors became more sophisticated, facilitating collection and processing of more interesting intelligence.

Global Positioning System receivers shrank and could be economically employed on small robotic aircraft. Precision-guided munitions could deliver lethal firepower.

Now, the Army stands on the threshold of one of the greatest transformations in war-fighting history, on the short list with steel and gunpowder.

The Future Combat Systems program is aimed at developing an array of new vehicles and systems - including armed robots.

Though the robots of past science fiction were governed by Isaac Asimov’s three Laws, which precluded bringing harm to humans, the real robots of the future will be different.

Within a decade, the Army will field armed robots with intellects that possess, as H.G. Wells put it, “minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.”

In short, the robot soldiers of the future will be utterly without remorse or pity when confronting the enemy.

According to the report, armed robots will all be snipers.

They will aim with inhuman precision and fire without human hesitation. Commanders will order them onto battlefields that would mean certain death for humans.

No human army could withstand such an onslaught. Such an adversary would present the enemy with the simple choice of martyrdom or flight.

These stone cold robot killers will not need bonuses to enlist or housing for their families or expensive training ranges or retirement payments.

Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of an ancient city in Peru that they hope might finally answer questions about the fate of the Moche culture, which was best known for ceremonial sex acts and ritualistic human sacrifices depicted on its pottery.According to a report in The Times, the unearthed city is some 5km (three miles) long and has revealed what appears to be a gathering place for human sacrifices, a heap of human bones at the bottom of a cliff, ceramics, items of clothing and the well-preserved remains of a young woman.

Archaeologists hope that the ruins will provide the missing link between the Moche people, whose disappearance has long since puzzled historians, and the Wari, who later colonised parts of what is today Peru.

“The city provides the missing link because it explains how the Wari people allowed for the continuation of culture after the Moche,” said Cesar Soriano, chief archaeologist on the excavation project, 22km from the Pacific coast city of Chiclayo.

The Wari ruled the country now known as Peru from about AD600 until about AD1100.

But, it is the Moche who often inspire the greater fascination, largely because of their wildly exotic rituals and artefacts, such as their erotic ceramics, which depict ceremonial sexual encounters, performed in specially constructed temples in front of witnesses.

Moche ceramics also depict ceremonial human sacrifice and blood drinking, with victims being subjected to excoriation (skinning), decapitation and bloodletting.

It is thought that cannibalism probably also took place.

The reason for the Moche’s demise in the early 9th century - after flourishing for 700 years - remains a mystery.

Scholars believe that the various autonomous tribes which comprised the Moche (connected by a common elite culture) could have been ravaged by a super El Nino - perhaps 30 years of intense tropical downpours followed by another 30 years of drought - and then fallen victim to a protracted civil war.

So far, no evidence has emerged to show that the Wari invaded Moche settlements.

But, it is known that the Wari people, who first established themselves in the central Andes, far from the Moche on the Pacific coast, excelled at using military force to make territorial acquisitions and then to impose their culture on defeated populations.

When the attackers arrived on the shores of Mumbai last month, they had studied satellite images of the city, were carrying handheld GPS sets and were communicating with their handlers via the Internet and satellite phone.Many of the Indian police they encountered did not even have walkie-talkies.

The Mumbai gunmen not only overwhelmed security forces with their weaponry and willingness to die, but also with their sophisticated use of technology, security experts said.

“These (terrorists) are well aware of the technology available and also know that the police are several steps behind. And a lot of this technology is extremely easy to use and to learn,” said Pavan Duggal, a technology expert and New Delhi-based lawyer.

India’s underfunded and poorly trained police force is simply unable to compete, experts said.

“Crimes that involve technology usually make the police very nervous,” Duggal said.

To prepare for their Nov. 26 assault, militants examined the layout and landscape of the city using images from Google Earth, which provides satellite photos for much of the planet over the Internet, said Mumbai’s chief police investigator, Rakesh Maria.

The 10 gunmen also studied detailed photographs of their targets on laptop computers, Maria said.

When the assailants traveled by boat from Karachi, Pakistan, to Mumbai — stealing an Indian trawler along the way — they used four GPS systems to navigate, Maria said. The sets could also be used as walkie-talkies.

The attackers were equipped with a satellite phone and nine cell phones. Throughout the attack, they called their handlers in Pakistan, who had eschewed conventional phones for voice-over-Internet telephone services, Maria said.

Those services route phone calls over the Internet, making it far harder to trace them. For example, a person might have a New York City telephone number, but calls made to that number are routed over the Internet, allowing a client to answer from anywhere there is online access.

Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a Pakistani accused of plotting the attacks, spoke from two Internet phone numbers to six different Indian mobile numbers, India’s Hindu newspaper reported. The Internet numbers were paid by wire transfer by someone using fake ID, the newspaper said.

By contrast, many Indian police do not even have walkie-talkies or cell phones to communicate with each other. The commando unit flown in from New Delhi to take on the attackers had neither night-vision goggles or thermal sensors, which would have allowed them to pinpoint the locations of attackers and hostages during the siege, security experts said.

“The communication expertise that the gunmen employed was clearly a few steps if not a generation ahead of what the police had,” said C. Uday Bhaskar, a former naval commander and retired director of India’s Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses.

Bhaskar said the security forces in India, a country renowned for its huge supply of world class computer programmers, are especially weak in cybersecurity.

“When it comes to tracking satellite communication or e-mails and phone calls over the Internet, we know how to do this in an intellectual sense only,” he said.

It’s unclear whether India will soon have the training and the funding to bridge the technological gap. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he discussed offering counterterrorism aid to India in a meeting Sunday with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, but details were not released.

The Mumbai attacks also raised concerns about how easily accessible and cheap civilian technology can aid criminals.

India has expressed concerns in recent years that Google Earth could be used by terrorists to examine targets in preparation for an attack.

In March, the U.S. Defense Department banned Google teams from making detailed, street-level video maps of U.S. military bases after images of a Texas base ended up on the popular Internet site. Google said taking such pictures is against its policy and that the incident was a mistake.

Google said in a statement it condemns terrorism but believes that Google Earth’s benefits outweigh its risks for criminal use, noting that the computer tool had been used for flood relief in India’s western state of Gujarat, tsunami relief in southern India and earthquake relief in Kashmir.

Indian investigators have not named the Internet phone service the planners and attackers used.

Skype, one of the more popular voice-over-Internet providers, condemns misuse of its service and “cooperates with law enforcement agencies as much as is legally technically possible,” spokeswoman Eunice Lim said, speaking about the company’s general policy.

“Unfortunately, criminals will use any type of communications tool to talk to each other or share information,” Lim said.

University of Illinois researchers say that dietary fructose affects a wide range of genes in the liver that had not previously been identified, and thus ingesting too much of it may be harmful.Lead author Manabu Nakamura highlights the fact that most people consume quite a bit of fructose in the form of table sugar and corn syrup, which is used in products as diverse as soft drinks, protein bars, and fruit juice.

He further says that many scientists are of the view that high dietary fructose may lead to metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors that predict heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

“For this reason, it’s important for scientists to understand exactly how consuming high amounts of fructose affects human health,” said Nakamura, an associate professor of Food Science and Human Nutrition.

With an eye on making recommendations about its dietary use, he and his colleagues are continuing to study the metabolism of fructose.

Nakamura says that his study goes to indicate that the metabolism of fructose is more complex than the data had indicated.

“Our gene-expression analysis showed that both insulin-responsive and insulin-repressive genes are induced during this process. Our bodies can do this, but it’s complicated, and we may pay a price for it,” he said.

According to him, the body handles most carbohydrates fairly simply-converting them quickly to glucose, and using them for energy or storing as fat.

“When we are eating, blood sugar–and insulin production–goes up. When we sleep or fast, it goes down,” he said.

However, the researcher adds, the process is not so straightforward with fructose.

“In order for fructose to be metabolised, the body has to create both fasted and fed conditions. The liver is really busy when you eat a lot of fructose,” the researcher said.

Since fructose metabolism happens mainly in the liver, the researchers wanted to gain a complete picture of gene expression in the organ during the process.

For their study, Nakamura and his colleagues fed 24 rats either a 63 percent glucose or fructose diet four hours a day for two weeks.

Half the animals fasted for 24 hours at the end of this period, and before the researchers performed a gene expression analysis. The other half were examined at the end of a four-hour feeding.

The researchers observed that fructose feeding induced a broader range of genes than had previously been identified, and that there were simultaneous increases in glycogen (stored glucose) and triglycerides in the liver.

“To our surprise, a key regulatory enzyme involved in the breakdown of glucose was about two times higher in the fructose-fed group than in the glucose-fed group,” Nakamura said.

Based on their observations, the researchers said that their findigns suggested that a protein, called carbohydrate response element binding protein, was responsible for the fructose effect on certain genes that trigger the production of fat.

“We’re continuing to assess the risk of fructose insulin resistance and the consequent risk for development of diabetes,” he said.

People’s perception of their pain depends on how they see the affected part of the body, says researchers, who discovered that by manipulating the appearance of a chronically achy hand, they could increase or decrease the ache and swelling in patients moving their symptomatic limbs.In their opinion, the findings revealed a profound top-down effect of body image on body tissues.

“The brain is capable of many wonderful things based on its perception of how the body is doing and the risks to which the body seems to be exposed,” said G. Lorimer Moseley, who is now at the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute in Australia.

In the study, the researchers asked ten right-handed patients with chronic pain and dysfunction in one arm to watch their own arm while they performed a standardized set of ten hand movements.

The participants repeated the movements under four conditions: with no visual manipulation, while looking through binoculars with no magnification, while looking through binoculars that doubled the apparent size of their arm, and while looking through inverted binoculars that reduced the apparent size of their arm.

As the patients’ pain was always worse after movement than it was before, the extent to which the pain worsened depended on what people saw.

Specifically, the pain increased more when participants viewed a magnified image of their arm during the movements, and-perhaps more surprisingly-the pain became less when their arm was seen through inverted binoculars that minimized its size.

The degree of swelling too was less when people watched a “minified” image of their arm during movements than when they watched a magnified or normal image, the researchers reported.

However, the researchers are not yet sure how this phenomenon works at the level of neurons.

But, they said that a possible philosophical explanation comes from the notion that protective responses-including the experience of pain-are activated according to the brain’s implicit perception of danger level.

“If it looks bigger, it looks sorer and more swollen. Therefore, the brain acts to protect it,” said Moseley.

While he said the findings don’t mean that pain is any less real, they may lead to a new therapeutic approach for reducing pain. His team is now testing visual manipulations as an analgesic strategy for use in clinical settings.

The study is published in the latest issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.