Science and Technology News

Russia released plans to invest about $800 million (£527m) into a new spaceport in the far eastern part of Siberia, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has announced.

The move is meant to lighten the weight on the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan, constructed during the soviet-era.

The new cosmodrome will be built near the town of Uglegorsk in the Far Eastern Amur region, which is close to China.

The intentions is for mostly civilian launches, and it should be operational by 2015.

"The government has made a decision to earmark 24.7 billion rubles ($809m) over the next three years for the start of the full-blown construction of the Vostochny cosmodrome," Mr Putin said.

Vostochny means "eastern" in Russian.

Roscosmos Anatoly Perminov, the head of Russia's federal space program, said that up to 30,000 specialists would help to build the new space facility.

He added that it will be smaller than the Baikonur, which Russia currently rents from Kazakhstan.

"It will be a least costly and a more compact site," Mr Perminov noted, comparing the new site with Baikonur, which is the largest and oldest space launch facility in the world.

The new port will be about 700 sq km, which will house new launch pads, high-tech residential compounds and research laboratories.

Mr Perminov had mentioned earlier that Russia hoped to launch is first flight from the new port as soon as it was finished in 2015, and planned manned flights in 2018.

Mr Putin pointed out that the new site will be aimed at civilian launches.

"I very much expect that Vostochny will become the first national cosmodrome for civilian purposes and will guarantee Russia full independence of space activities," he said.

"It is important that the cosmodrome effectively ensures the operation of all future space projects," the Russian premier added.

Russia is hoping to build new generations of spacecraft that could also be used for interplanetary flight, like a voyage to Mars.

Engineers are starting to design the Vostochny's launch pads, assembly and testing sites next year. The main construction is scheduled to take place in 2012.

Russia's space agency's first deputy chief Viktor Remishevsky said that the cosmodrom was supposed to ensure stability of the Russian space industry by giving independent access to space.

Putin also encouraged more international co-operation, adding that the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) should be finished by 2015.

"In early 2011, the Russian Soyuz launch vehicle will start operating at the ESA's French Guiana Space Centre in Kourou. Later, the Phobos-Grunt Russian interplanetary spacecraft will put a Chinese space probe in orbit around Mars as part of our programmes to explore deep space," he stated.

With the US shuttle program being phased out by February of next year, the only way to get to the ISS will be by the Soyuz spacecraft.

The UK-manufactured Zephyr solar-powered plane has destroyed previous endurance records for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).

The plane took flight from the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona at (0640 MST) last Friday and is still flying.

The plane has been in non-stop operation, day and night, meaning it has now septupled the next longest flight that was officially recognized by the world air sports federation.

The plane has been developted by the defense and research company Qinetiq.

Jon Saltmarsh, project manager, said Zephyr would be brought down once it had flown non-stop for a full fortnight.

"Zephyr is basically the first 'eternal aircraft'," he said.

The UAV has been in development for several years at Qinetiq.

Solar-powered high-altitude long-endurance (Hale) UAVs are projected to have many functions and applications in the future.

Military uses include reconnaissance and communications platforms. Civilian and scientific programs will give them small payloads for Earth observation duties.

The unique selling point is their persistence over a specific location. Low-Earth orbiting satellites come and go in swift patterns overheard, and the bigger drones used by the military need to return to landing zones regularly for fuel.

But as Zephyr has shown, solar UAVs can be left up in the sky.

The solar cells push the propellers during the day and top up their batteries to maintain the aircraft through the dark nights. An autopilot keeps them circling over one spot.

The newest model of Zephyr is 50% larger than previous builds.

The new plane has about a 74 foot wingspan, and features new wingtip and tail designs that greatly improve aero performance.

It also has more configuration near the main body to accommodate more equipment. Additionally, the team upgraded the avionics and onboard power management systemes.

"The launch was absolutely beautiful; it was just so smooth," said Mr Saltmarsh. "We had five people lift it above their heads, start running and it just lifted away into the sky."

The current official endurance recordi n the world for a UAV is 30 hours, 24 minutes. This was set by the American robot Global Hawk. Zephyr has already clocked in an 83-hour continuous flight, but representatives from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI) were not present to witness proceedings.

They are at Yuma this time and the latest flight will go down as an official world record provided the FAI is satisfied its rules have been followed.

"This is a huge milestone that puts us at the leading edge," Mr Saltmarsh told BBC News. "It's a practical system that can actually be used rather than simply a demonstration of small technical achievements."

The flight of Zephyr is the second landmark event in solar-powered aviation. Last month, Andre Borshberg became the first person to pilot a manned solar plane through the night.

Physicists have begun to quell rumors that the elusive Higgs boson, AKA the God particle, has been detected by a US “atom smasher”.

A spokesman for the lab where the Tevatron accelerator is housed, denied that scientists made a discovery there.

The Tevatron, which is at Femilab in Illinois, is the American rival to Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The rumors of discovery were made public on a blog post by an Italian particle phsyicist.

A spokesman for the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) said, "There is no merit to the rumours of a Higgs discovery."

Their Twitter feed said, "Let's settle this: the rumors spread by one fame-seeking blogger are just rumors. That's it."

Stefan Soldner-rembold, a spokesman for the Dxero experiment at Tevatron, said, "There is no evidence yet of a Standard Model Higgs signal; more data will be needed for that.

"The rumours started by the blog are not correct and blogs are not a reliable source of information."

The Higgs boson is of tantamount importance to the widely accepted theory of physics, known as the Standard Model.

The sub-atomic particle helps explain why all other particles have mass.

Though with decades of various attempts, no-one has been able to find it.

Tommaso Dorgio, who is a physicist at the University of Padua in Italy, wrote in his blog, "It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal.

"Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result."

"Three-sigma" refers to the statistical certainty of the result - a 99.7% likelihood of an accurate measurement.

Errors and fluctuations in data mean that high energy physicists need an effect of five-sigma to produce a convincing body of evidence to a discovery.

Physicist and blogger Lubos Mtol published some details in the tevatron rumors. He noted that the anonymous source for his information was skeptical of the observations.

The discovery of the Higgs boson is the main aim of the $10 billion LHC experiment near Geneva. The gigantic particle smasher is not expected to be able to find a sign from a Higgs boson until 2011 at the earliest.

The possibility remains that the Tevatron could make a discovery before the European machine.

Particle physicists are going to present new data from their experiments at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Paris from July 22-28.

Significant progress has been made on putting a new cap on the hemorrhaging oil well in Gulf of Mexico, according to US Coast Guard Commander Thad Allen.

Adm Allen is in charge of overseeing the response to the spill. He said, "This could lead to the shutting of the well."

He added that later today, BP hopes to close the cap and run a pressure test.

The cap is the newest of several devices that BP has deployed as it grinds away on a permanent solution, which should come by mid-August.

The progress comes just before a planned visit to the Gulf by First Lady Michelle Obama, who is expected to be briefed by officials and local government leaders and speak to the local community.

Monday saw the presidential commission to research the oil spill's beginning.

President Barack Obama, after visiting the area several times, has donned the spill the nation's worst-ever environmental disaster.

The coastal towns and areas from Florida to Alabama rely heavily, almost exclusively, on fishing and tourism, and many people think that the oil spill will completely eliminate that livelihood.

Work on the new cap, which BP hopes will eventually help capture all of the leaking oil, was begun Saturday.

"The hope is that we can slowly turn off the valves, close the capping completely and then test pressure to see how the well is performing," Adm Allen told CBS News on Monday.

The White House says that containment is at a “critical point”.

"The new containment procedure will more than triple our containment capacity when it's all said and done," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told NBC television.

BP claims to have spent $3.5 billion on the response so far.

The firm has also set up an additional $20bn fund to finance the clean-up operations and other costs.

BP shares have almost halved since the disaster, but early trading shoed its price riding a rally, climing 5.5% to 384.7p.

BP said in a statement that the sealing cap was "proceeding as planned".

The oil giant's vice president, Kent Wells, said he was pleased with operation's progress.

"We have carefully planned and practiced this whole procedure. We've tried to work out as many of the bugs as we can," he said.

He then warned that "something unexpected" was bound to show up to challenge to undersea robots while installing the cap.

The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in April killed 11 people right off the bat. Since the explosion, thousands of barrels of oil have been spilling into the sea every day.

BP's current permanent solution to fixing the leak is to drill two relief wells, which they hope and expect to be completed by mid-August.

The first of the relief wells got as deep as 17,810ft on Sunday, and the tenth randing tun, a test to help hone in the casing of the leaking well, was done.