Tuesday Morning Tech News

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Discovery's return had been delayed by 24 hours after rain and lightning at Kennedy Space Center in Florida had led NASA's entry flight director Leroy Cain to opt for an extra day in space. The weather for Tuesday’s landing in Florida was still not suitable, so Cain chose to end the mission in California. Rain can damage the heat shield tiles, though it does not endanger the landing. During the 14-day mission, the crew travelled 9.3 million kilometres (5.8 million miles), transferred supplies the space station, tested heat shield repair kits and performed an unscheduled repair by plucking protruding gap fillers from the orbiter's belly

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It turned out that the coating, in combination with the makeshift apparatus, made the paper waterproof without making it waxy, brittle or changing its other characteristics. The original piece of paper has been submerged in water since June 6. It hasn't dissolved and Ramsey's original writing is still on it. She once even took it out of the water, wrote on it some more, and submerged it again.

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Basically, Sender ID checks whether an e-mail that claims to come from a certain Internet domain (such as "customerservice@anybank.com") really originates from the e-mail servers associated with that domain ("anybank.com"). The system uses the Domain Name System, or DNS, to make that determination. Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which merged with Microsoft's Caller ID for E-mail Technology to become Sender ID, also uses the same approach.

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The long, very thin wires are unprecedented in biological systems, says the microbiologist who discovered the bacteria and the wires' conductivity. They completely change science's understanding of how microbes handle electrons, he said. Derek Lovley and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass.) reported observing and measuring the conductivity of long wires, 3 to 5 nanometers in diameter, emanating from the Geobacter bacteria.

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The 2-ton orbiter is scheduled for launch on Wednesday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station between 7:54 a.m. and 9:39 a.m. EDT. Weather conditions were favorable, with only a 20 percent chance that isolated showers would cause a delay, Air Force weather officer Clay Flinn said. The 21-foot (6.5-meter) spacecraft will ride aloft on a Lockheed Martin Atlas V rocket and is scheduled to reach Mars in March 2006. Using the friction of the planet's upper atmosphere as a brake, it will slowly dip into a low orbit about 190 miles above the surface of Mars, NASA said.