Hurricane Ike tripled in size in the central Gulf of Mexico as it churned on a weekend collision course with the 5.6 million residents of the Houston area, where coastal communities prepared to evacuate.

The system’s strongest winds extend as far as 115 miles (185 kilometers) from the eye, up from 35 miles yesterday, the Miami- based National Hurricane Center said today. Ike’s wind field is now larger than that of Katrina, the storm that devastated New Orleans in 2005, said Jeff Masters, the director of meteorology at private forecaster Weather Underground Inc.

“The total amount of energy is more powerful than Katrina, so we could be seeing a storm surge that could rival Katrina,” Masters said. The storm is so large “the location doesn’t matter much; it is going to inundate a huge part of the Texas coast.”

Galveston, parts of southern Houston and areas south of the city and near the Texas coast were under a mandatory evacuation order starting at noon today, local officials said at a press conference. The coast may see a storm surge of as much as 20 feet (6 meters). Ike is following a track similar to the 1900 Galveston hurricane that killed 8,000 people.

Officials in Harris, Brazoria, Chambers, Matagorda and Galveston counties ordered about 564,063 people to leave homes that are now in Ike’s path.

Felt Before Landfall

Ike was a Category 2 hurricane with sustained winds of 100 mph, up from 80 mph yesterday, the center said in an advisory at 1 p.m. Houston time. Its central pressure is more like that associated with a Category 3 or 4 storm, Masters said.

The storm is moving west-northwest at 10 mph, with landfall south of Galveston on Sept. 13. Because of its size, Ike will be felt along the Texas coast long before its eye makes landfall.

The center’s forecasters said Ike may strengthen to at least a major hurricane with Category 3 intensity, meaning sustained winds of at least 111 mph, before landfall. Other forecasters predict Ike may become a Category 4 storm, the second-strongest on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, packing winds from 131 to 155 mph.

The storm is forecast to sweep through the center of the Gulf, missing the offshore Louisiana oil and natural gas fields. The Gulf is home to about a quarter of U.S. oil production.

Oil Production Shut

About 96 percent of all oil production in the Gulf has been shut in along with 73.1 percent of natural gas facilities, according to the Minerals Management Service, a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Some facilities have been closed since Hurricane Gustav struck Louisiana last week.

Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Baytown facility, 17 miles east of Houston, is the country’s biggest, with a capacity of 586,000 barrels a day. The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which is the largest U.S. oil-import terminal and handles 13 percent of imports, said it closed marine operations because of Ike.

Dow Chemical Co., the largest U.S. chemical maker, and competitors such as DuPont Co., LyondellBassell Industries and Texas Petrochemicals Inc. are closing plants in the Houston area. The Texas Gulf Coast produces two-thirds of the nation’s ethylene, used in products from plastic bags to auto parts.

President George W. Bush declared an emergency for Texas, his home state, and Governor Rick Perry readied 1,350 buses to evacuate residents in preparation for Ike’s landfall. As many as 7,500 Texas National Guard members are on standby.

Threat to Galveston

Houston’s population is 2.2 million, making it the fourth- biggest U.S. city, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and its metropolitan area, with a population of 5.6 million, is the sixth-largest in the U.S.

Jim Rouiller, a meteorologist with Planalytics Inc. in Wayne, Pennsylvania, said he’s particularly worried about storm surge damage around Galveston Bay, on the coast southeast of Houston, which may be in the top right quadrant of the storm field where rains and winds are most powerful. Some parts of the Texas-Louisiana coast may get as much as 15 inches of rain, the hurricane center said.

The U.S. Coast Guard closed waterways near Houston and Galveston to incoming ships and is requiring self-propelled ocean-going vessels over 500 gross tons to apply to remain in port, according to a statement e-mailed to the media.

The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, home of one of the most secure biological labs in the U.S., has begun evacuating its 260 patients to Austin and San Antonio, spokeswoman Kristen Hensley said by telephone.

Labs Closed

The school, with about 3,500 students and faculty, will close its 84-acre campus at noon. Its biological labs include a level-4 bio-safety facility, which is also in the process of shutting down, Hensley said.

“It’s in the strongest and most heavily reinforced building on campus; it can withstand severe wind and storm surges,” Hensley said. “We have secured all the pathogens and decontaminated all the lab work surfaces.”

The lab’s systems are backed up with emergency generators to provide electricity in case power goes out, she said.

NASA’s Johnson Space Center heeded the evacuation order, preparing to shut its 1,600-acre facility in Houston that houses Mission Control and the training ground for astronauts.

Some 15,000 people work at the space center. It sits across the street from an arm of Galveston Bay.

“Our buildings can withstand a hurricane, but there’s some concern about the expected tidal surge,” said John Ira Petty, a spokesman at Johnson.

Warnings Posted

Flight engineers left for Austin a few days ago. They will manage the International Space Station from temporary facilities there, Petty said.

The New Orleans area, including Lake Pontchartrain, was under a tropical-storm warning for Ike. That means such conditions, with sustained winds of 39 to 73 mph, are expected within 24 hours. The warning stretches along the coast from Cameron, Louisiana, east to the Mississippi-Alabama border.

New Orleans was spared the worst of Hurricane Gustav when it struck the state. The storm killed 25 people in Louisiana.

A hurricane watch was in place from Cameron, Louisiana, west to Port Mansfield, Texas. The watch means hurricane conditions, with sustained winds of at least 74 mph, are possible within 36 hours.

In July, Hurricane Dolly, with winds of 100 mph, struck the Texas coast at South Padre Island, about 35 miles northeast of Brownsville.

Crude oil for October delivery fell $1.63 cents, or 1.6 percent, to $100.95 a barrel at 1:48 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Futures touched $100.10, the lowest since April 2. Prices are up 31 percent from a year ago.

Source: Bloomberg

Good morning. The official forecast for Hurricane Ike maintains a landfall centered upon Brazoria County, near Freeport.

What’s been surprising overnight is that the storm’s maximum winds have not increased, remaining at 100 mph this morning. The central pressure, after falling Wednesday evening, has settled at 945 millibars. The official forecast now brings a strong category 3 hurricane to Texas.

There is considerable uncertainty in both the track and intensity forecast, even less than two days before landfall. (For what it’s worth, the very latest GFDL model has tracked moderately back down the coast, to near Bay City). But if these forecasts hold, what can the Houston area expect in terms of wind, storm surge and rainfall?

WINDS

Expect tropical storm-force winds to reach the upper Texas coast around midday on Friday, and for them to last about 24 hours. Hurricane force winds should then reach the coast before midnight, and last about 12 hours. Areas inland, such as downtown Houston, should see these winds a few hours later than the coast.

Peak winds of 110 to 115 mph are possible along the coast, especially near where Ike’s eye makes landfall.

As Ike is a large storm there should be a fairly wide swath of hurricane-force winds. Here’s the most recent hurricane-force winds probability map:

Source: Houston Chronicle

Well, in the words of Stephen Sondheim, I’m still here. And so are you, I hope. Despite all the newspaper headlines about black holes, practically no one expected any cataclysmic consequences to arise from the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

The apocalyptically-minded among you can continue to worry a bit, however; it will be several months before the particles begin to collide at a couple of Tevs under c (which is to say 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light). Perhaps we’ll all be engulfed then.

But the point of the experiments being conducted beneath Geneva are that nothing in the standard model of physics suggests any such danger, Instead, they may provide us with confirmation of the existence of subatomic particles (such as the celebrated boson named for Professor Peter Higgs) which have so far eluded detection, but which would fill the gaps in the arithmetic of theorectical physicists.

At the most simplistic level possible, one of the reasons for attempting to recreate the circumstances of the plasma, or primordial soup, which sprang into being fractions of seconds after the Big Bang, is that the universe ought not to exist.

Were any of several factors (energy, momentum, quantity of matter, proportions of heavy elements) even slightly different, there would be nothing here now. Every visitor to CERN – I was lucky enough to go down into the tunnels last year – is overwhelmed by the sheer scale of this enterprise: millions of man hours, 17 miles of tunnel, 10,000 researchers and £4.4 billion.

The machines are the size of tower blocks, but built to within tolerances smaller than a human hair. The people who work there are very keen to point out the practical applications, no doubt in response to those who suggest that this is a lot of money to spend, and that science spending might be better devoted to curing cancer, or devising an alternative to fossil fuels.

Actually, CERN has done pretty well on the practicality front: MRI scanners for medical use owe almost everything to the work undertaken there, and it gave the world (entirely free) the World Wide Web.

But the lack of an immediate quotidian purpose is, in fact, one of CERN’s chief triumphs. It is a vindication of the human desire to understand more about the world we live in, simply for the sake of pure knowledge.

All the same, for those of us who have trouble getting our minds round the finer points of this fearsomely difficult physics, I was comforted when Dr James Gillies, CERN’s head of communications, admitted to me that almost everyone who works there occasionally thinks of the particles they are studying in terms of billiard balls clacking into one another, and conceded that one of the things they might find out is that human beings are – in evolutionary terms – not all that well designed for understanding the finer points of the universe’s structure.

CERN is routinely compared, as a work of engineering, with the great cathedrals. It has also been cited as the principal wonder of the modern world. It is both. Look at the trouble humans will go to to understand just a little more about the world we live in, and be grateful that we do.

Source: Telegraph UK

Xandros, which bought Linspire in July, won’t release a new commercial version of the Linspire Linux distribution. Furthermore, Freespire, the free version of Linspire, will be based on the Debian code base rather than Ubuntu, as it has been in the past.

Custom Linux provider Xandros will release a free Linux OS called “Freespire 5″ during the fourth quarter of 2008. This next version of Freespire will be based on the Debian GNU/Linux “Lenny” release rather than the Ubuntu Linux platform Freespire 4 uses.

The move spearheads a new Xandros consolidated desktop strategy following its acquisition in July of Linspire , the developer of the CNR software distribution platform. Linspire also developed the commercial Linux OS called “Linspire” and the community-supported Freespire Linux desktop OS.

No Need

Prior to the acquisition, Xandros had distributed the Xandros Desktop Professional Linux and a free Open Circulation edition of Xandros Desktop Linux. Xandros is integrating the former Freespire Linux version developed by Linspire into the new Freespire 5 Linux OS. Xandros will not offer the previous Linspire Linux OS nor develop a new version of it.

Xandros will follow its release of the free Freespire 5 with the Xandros Desktop Professional 5. This OS version will be built on the same open source code base used in Freespire 5 but will include additional commercial elements, primarily for enterprise customers.

“The commercial version of the Linspire OS is folded. We have no need for it,” Larry Kettler, president and CEO of Linspire — now a division within Xandros, told LinuxInsider.

Old Roots

Company officials are calling the retooling of the upcoming Freespire 5 to Debian instead of continuing its Ubuntu roots the “Freespire Initiative.” The idea is to help Xandros consolidate its base of users.

“It will bring the final piece to providing an end-to-end Linux solution,” said Kettler.

However, the Freespire product is continuing and will grow. An active community is supporting it. The transition, however, is a little bit fluid right now, he added.

Dual Gain

Some of the details behind the Linspire acquisition are only now surfacing. Until now, officials have been very tight-lipped about their reasons for acquiring Linspire and burying only one of its three products.

“Acquiring Linspire was part of a twofold marketing plan to advance the popularity of Linux on the desktop,” Andy Typaldos, CEO of Xandros, told LinuxInsider.

One reason was to put the pieces together for a geek-free desktop Linux solution. The second reason was to provide customers with a one-stop software shop for open source packages for a variety of Linux distros.

“With Freespire, we have that product. CNR is a pure add-on for OS integration,” Typaldos said.

Growth Factors

The presence of Asus Eec PC on store shelves is one driving factor that will push the Linux desktop. This Linux-based laptop with no hard drive broke the barrier of having Linux on the desktop for everyday users, according to Typaldos.

“Now, not just geeks can buy Linux off the shelf. It’s exciting to see them using Linux and they don’t even know it,” Typaldos said.

Xandros is going to enhance the user experience by having available applications and content for Linux. As part of this overall usability plan, Xandros will soon announce a media download for music and audio through the CNR (Click-N-Run) platform it acquired from Linspire.

Linux Central

Kettler runs the CNR part of the operation. The CNR platform standardizes the process and eliminates the complexity of finding, installing and managing Linux software for the most popular desktop Linux distributions.

Linspire developed the CNR platform in 2002. The upgraded service that will be offered by Xandros will be a Web 2.0 structure, said Kettler. It will be available before the end of the year.

CNR will be the only marketplace where Linux users can search for program packages by category or other variables. The packages will be vendor-supported. Also, it will be a gathering place for collaborative Linux communities. Each offered product will have its own wiki, and both free and commercially sponsored packages will be available, he explained.

Xandros’ CNR product will eliminate the need for single platform repositories of Linux packages based on distributions. For example, the offering can be branded, so a Linux vendor or hardware maker can provide its customers with a link that will appear to go to that company’s Web site. However, the customer will arrive at the CNR page that has Linux programs for that particular product, explained Kettler.

Unified Linux

People do not want to buy an operating system if it does not have enough applications to meet personal and business needs, said Typaldos. Xandros’ new marketing strategy aims to solve that problem. On the commercial side, CNR breaks that vicious cycle by creating and delivering Linux content.

“A combined Xandros/Linspire development effort will return Freespire to its Debian GNU/Linux roots and put it in sync with Xandros Desktop Pro,” said Typaldos. “We will have a leading-edge code base while preserving our commitment to Debian, stability, Windows interoperability, and ease of use.”

This commitment allows Xandros to meet the needs of a wide range of users, from open source enthusiasts to demanding enterprise clients. In addition, Xandros is intensifying its commitment to the Freespire open source community, which will now help to drive both the Freespire and Xandros products, he added.

“This is really some of the most exciting news since the announcement of Freespire 1.0,” said Tom House, Freespire community organizer. “This is what we were hoping to see — both the continued development of Freespire and a return to a Debian base.”

Source: Tech News World

GENEVA (AP) — It has been called an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe — or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday.

Whatever the case, the most powerful atom-smasher ever built comes online Wednesday, eagerly anticipated by scientists worldwide who have awaited this moment for two decades.

The multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider will explore the tiniest particles and come ever closer to re-enacting the big bang, the theory that a colossal explosion created the universe.

The machine at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, promises scientists a closer look at the makeup of matter, filling in gaps in knowledge or possibly reshaping theories.

The first beams of protons will be fired around the 17-mile tunnel to test the controlling strength of the world’s largest superconducting magnets. It will still be about a month before beams traveling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some skeptics fear could create micro “black holes” and endanger the planet.

The project has attracted researchers of 80 nationalities, some 1,200 of them from the United States, which contributed $531 million of the project’s price tag of nearly $4 billion.

“This only happens once a generation,” said Katie Yurkewicz, spokeswoman for the U.S. contingent at the CERN project. “People are certainly very excited.”

The collider at Fermilab outside Chicago could beat CERN to some discoveries, but the Geneva equipment, generating seven times more energy than Fermilab, will give it big advantages.

The CERN collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel 150 to 500 feet under the bucolic countryside on the French-Swiss border.

Once the beam is successfully fired counterclockwise, a clockwise test will follow. Then the scientists will aim the beams at each other so that protons collide, shattering into fragments and releasing energy under the gaze of detectors filling cathedral-sized caverns at points along the tunnel.

CERN dismisses the risk of micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

But the skeptics have filed suit in U.S. District Court in Hawaii and in the European Court of Human Rights to stop the project. They unsuccessfully mounted a similar action in 1999 to block the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state.

CERN’s collider has been under construction since 2003, financed mostly by its 20 European member states. The United States and Japan are major contributors with observer status in CERN.

Scientists started colliding subatomic particles decades ago. As the machines grew more powerful, the experiments revealed that protons and neutrons — previously thought to be the smallest components of an atom — were made of still smaller quarks and gluons.

CERN hopes to recreate conditions in the laboratory a split-second after the big bang, teaching them more about “dark matter,” antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time.

Meanwhile, scientists have found innovative ways to explain the concept in layman’s terms.

The team working on one of the four major installations in the tunnel — the ALICE, or “A Large Ion Collider Experiment” — produced a comic book featuring Carlo the physicist and a girl called Alice to explain the machine’s investigation of matter a split second after the Big Bang.

“We create mini Big Bangs by bumping two nuclei into each other,” Carlo explains to Alice, who has just followed a rabbit down one of the hole-like shafts at CERN.

“This releases an enormous amount of energy that liberates thousands of quarks and gluons normally imprisoned inside the nucleus. Quarks and gluons then form a kind of thick soup that we call the quark-gluon plasma.”

The soup cools quickly and the quarks and gluons stick together to form protons and neutrons, the building blocks of matter.

That will enable scientists to look for still missing pieces to the puzzle — or lead to the formulation of a new theory on the makeup of matter.

Kate McAlpine, 23, a Michigan State University graduate at CERN, has produced the Large Hadron Rap, a video clip that has attracted more than a million views on YouTube.

“The things that it discovers will rock you in the head,” McAlpine raps as she dances in the tunnel and caverns.

CERN spokesman James Gillies said the lyrics are “absolutely scientifically spot on.”

“It’s quite brilliant,” Gillies said.

Source: Associate Press

Sony is recalling about 438,000 Vaio TZ-series notebooks worldwide that may overheat and cause burns, the company said Thursday.

The number of recalled laptops sold in the United States is 72,800, a Sony spokesman said.

According to a statement issued by Sony and the Consumer Products Safety Commission, the problem is related to irregularly positioned wires near the computer’s hinge and/or a dislodged screw inside the hinge, which can cause a short circuit and overheating.

The problem affects the Vaio VGN-TZ100 series, VGN-TZ200 series, VGN-TZ300 series, and VGN-TZ2000 series, which were sold through the SonyStyle stores and Web site, as well as electronics retailers, as well as authorized business-to-business dealers nationwide from July 2007 through August 2008 for between $1,700 and $4,000.

Sony has received 15 reports of overheating, including one consumer who suffered a minor burn. The company said it would inspect and repair affected computers, if needed.

Consumers are advised to contact Sony toll-free at 888-526-6219 or visit the company’s support Web page.

In 2006, Sony had to conduct a multimillion-dollar battery recall due to overheating issues.

Source: CNET

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