Dylan to Host XM Satellite Radio Show

"Bob Dylan will host a weekly music show on XM Satellite Radio, the first time the rock star has had his own radio show.



Dylan will select music for the hour-long show, which will debut in March on XM's deep album rock channel, the station announced Tuesday.
He'll also offer comments on music and other subjects, interview guests and answer e-mail from XM subscribers.

'Songs and music have always inspired me,' the 64-year-old Dylan said in a statement. 'A lot of my own songs have been played on the radio, but this is the first time I've ever been on the other side of the mic.'"

Email to the Future

Although time travel technology doesn't exist yet that would enable a person to visit their future self, you can send an email to the person you will become via FutureMe.org, which lets you specify a date, up to 2035. Forbes.com recently ran a similar experiment, collecting email 'time capsules' to be sent out over the next 20 years.

As if we didn't have enough to do getting this year's Christmas cards done!

More Research Urged on Nanoparticle Risk

"Those stain-resistant khakis you just picked up at the mall, the tennis ball that holds its bounce longer and sunscreen that's clear instead of white have something in common - nanotechnology.

Scientists manipulating matter at the molecular level have improved on hundreds of everyday products in recent years and are promising dramatic breakthroughs in medicine and other industries as billions of dollars a year are pumped into the nascent sector.

But relatively little is known about the potential health and environmental effects of the tiny particles - just atoms wide and small enough to easily penetrate cells in lungs, brains and other organs.

While governments and businesses have begun pumping millions of dollars into researching such effects, scientists and others say nowhere near enough is being spent to determine whether nanomaterials pose a danger to human health."

Click the title to read the entire article

Earth's Magnetic Pole Drifting Quickly

"Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said Thursday.

Despite accelerated movement over the past century, the possibility that Earth's modestly fading magnetic field will collapse is remote. But the shift could mean Alaska may no longer see the sky lights known as auroras, which might then be more visible in more southerly areas of Siberia and Europe.

The magnetic poles are part of the magnetic field generated by liquid iron in Earth's core and are different from the geographic poles, the surface points marking the axis of the planet's rotation.

Scientists have long known that magnetic poles migrate and in rare cases, swap places. Exactly why this happens is a mystery."

Worming out of a problem in Australia

"On A patch of dairy country near Korumburra, a delicate and unprecedented operation has been taking place.

A group of threatened giant Gippsland earthworms, living in the path of a planned road, is being moved.

It is the first time scientists have tried to move an entire colony of the creatures, which can grow up to 1.5 metres long.



On the last day of the operation yesterday, the team declared their mission a success, having moved more than 600. However, there was a 20 per cent mortality rate."

Pushing the envelope on love letters

"Love may be in the air but it is no longer in the mail, according to a new competition to revive the lost art of love letter writing.

Run for the first time last year in the United States when it attracted 5,000 entries, philanthropist Henri Zimand's competition to find the best written love letters has now opened to entrants from Britain as well.

'In this age of one-line e-mails and abbreviated text messages, the simple art of letter writing has all but been forgotten,' he said. 'Writing a love letter is a dying art and to me that is a real shame.'

The competition is dedicated to the memory of Zimand's wife Anda who died from breast cancer in 2003 aged 49.

'No one should underestimate the power of a letter that truly comes from the heart and with every letter I receive, I am moved, and remember my Anda,' Zimand said.

For each of the first 10,000 letters submitted to the website www.AndaSpirit.com in Britain or www.AndaSpiritUSA.com in the United States, Zimand will make a contribution to a cancer facility in the area where the letter originated.

If inspiration is needed, an example of one of last year's entries is as follows: 'Heartfelt and true, your beauty shines through, with love, emotion and everlasting devotion, I yearn to marry you.'

The winners -- to be selected by a panel including Zimand and judges from the Romance Writers of America -- will be flown to New York and, on the morning of St Valentine's Day, taken on a romantic horse-drawn carriage ride in the city."

After decades out of the limelight, `60s star seems to be everywhere

"Spying Donovan in the corridors at Sirius Satellite Radio in Manhattan is a bit like seeing one of those Japanese soldiers emerge from the jungles of the Philippines decades after the war has ended. He looks like a man disconnected from the flow of time.



Forty years after the release of his first hit, "Catch the Wind," a song that vaulted folk music into the vanguard of pop, Donovan still cuts a pixieish figure, shoulder-length hair framing his creased yet boyish pug face. As he walks the hallway with a corkscrew gait, the remnant of a polio vaccine that withered his right leg as a boy in Glasgow, Scotland, he spritzes himself with a vial of floral essence.

Flower power is back. And this refugee from the '60s arrives with precious artifacts from that era: "Try for the Sun: The Journey of Donovan," a gaudily decorated four-disc career retrospective; "The Hurdy Gurdy Man," an effervescent autobiography; and a tour."

They can't believe it's Buddha

"Nepal's 'Buddha boy' is under investigation by the authorities, who question his claim not to have eaten anything for six months and are examining his followers' finances.

The government believes that Ram Bomjon, 15, may be breaking his fast to eat at night when his shrine is closed to visitors.



Buddhism experts, the interior ministry and Nepal's leading scientific agency have all been called in to investigate the phenomenon, which has attracted thousands of pilgrims and excitement worldwide.

"We told the shrine management committee, 'Either we need to see everything that is going on or, if this is a fraud, you need to close it down,' " said Hari Har Dahal, a local official. "This has got into the media all over the world. If it is not true, it will be bad for the country."

The way donations to the organising committee have been spent has also been questioned.

Hundreds of pilgrims were still entering the jungle near the village of Ratanpuri to see Ram this week, despite the authorities' attempts to discourage the faithful from visiting the site."

All the right moves for chess in America

"Chess in America is having a crisis. There were no American contenders in the recent world chess championship tournament in San Luis, Argentina, which was limited to the world's top eight players. The closest American candidate for the tournament was Hikaru Nakamura -- a 17-year-old who is ranked 42nd in the world. But Nakamura -- who at 15 became the youngest American grandmaster, breaking Bobby Fischer's record -- says that he might give up pro chess because there is so little money in it. Losing Nakamura would be devastating for American chess.

How can American chess save itself? No doubt it would make purists protest, but chess should steal a few moves from poker. After all, in the past few years, poker has lured away many chess masters who realized that the analytical skills they've learned from chess would pay off in online card rooms.

And that's a shame. There are plenty of smart people playing poker (and I love playing it myself), but there's no denying that when it comes to developing mental acuity, chess wins hands down, so to speak. Dan Harrington, a former world poker champion who quit chess because there wasn't enough money in it, laments that poker is thin and ephemeral in comparison."

Click on the title to read more, with suggestions for improving the marketability of chess

SPACE.com -- Best Hubble Space Telescope Images Results

The 'Top 20' images from the Hubble telescope. Incredible!