July 31, 2001 - West Nile Virus - West Nile Virus is a form of encephalitis (an inflammation of the brain) cause by a virus transmitted by mosquitoes. It is closely related to St. Louis encephalitis virus found in the United States. On July 6, 2001 the presence of West Nile Virus was confirmed by the Department of Health in one crow from Jefferson County, marking the first time West Nile Virus has been detected in the State...

  July 23, 2001 - Building a Droid for the International Space Station - NASA Science News - Inspired by science fiction classics, NASA scientists are building a talking, thinking and flying robot to help astronauts with their chores in space...

 July 25, 2001 - Space Seeds Return to Earth - NASA Science News - Seed pods from a commercial gardening experiment aboard the International Space Station are back on our planet. The far-out pods will liven up Earth-bound biology classrooms and may hold the key to long-term habitation of space...

 July 23, 2001 - NASA scramjet probe heats up - By Lester Haines, On June 2 NASA's experimental scramjet - the X-43A - was completely destroyed during a test flight, as we previously reported. To recap, the X-43A is a prototype hypersonic aircraft, powered by a 'scramjet'. This ducts air directly from the atmosphere, mixing it with hydrogen before combustion. The forward speed of the vehicle provides compression, thereby eliminating the need for conventional jet engine turbines. The speed of the airflow through the engine remains supersonic throughout...

July 20, 2001 - Debate on Mars life rages long after Viking - By Richard Stenger CNN Sci-Tech (CNN) - The mightiest probe ever to land on another planet settled down on Mars on this day 25 years ago, igniting a scientific firestorm that still rages today. Does the red planet possess life? Officially, NASA concluded that the Viking 1 and its sister ship the Viking 2, which landed on the other side of the planet weeks later, did not uncover signs of life after scooping, baking and dissecting the iron-rich soil...

July 24, 2001 - Stem cells help paralyzed mice walk - By Charlene Laino MSNBC, BAR HARBOR, Maine - In a novel experiment, human stem cell transplants have allowed paralyzed lab animals to walk again - the first time such transplants have given rise to any type of recovery, scientists said Tuesday. The work used "smart" cells derived from human fetuses, which along with embryonic sources, are at the center of a controversy raging throughout the world...

July 20, 2001 - All the World's a Stage... For Dust - Tune in to a NASA website and watch giant dust clouds as they ride global rivers of air, cross-pollinating continents with topsoil and microbes. This story includes movies of an African dust cloud blowing westward to North America in June. It also addresses questions like: Where does topsoil for Caribbean islands come from? And, are sneezes in Florida triggered by allergens from other continents? The answers may surprise you...

July 20, 2001 - Happy Anniversary, Viking Lander - NASA NEWS, On July 20, 1976, NASA's Viking 1 lander parachuted safely to the surface of Mars, revealing an alien world that continues to puzzle scientists and tempt explorers. Twenty-five years ago NASA's Viking 1 lander made history by parachuting from orbit to the surface of Mars. It was the first probe from Earth to land intact on the Red Planet, and the first American spacecraft to land on any world since the Apollo program... 

July 19, 2001 - Federal funds cut off for Hopkins research on human subjects - MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS, Faulting one of the world's top medical research centers in the case of a healthy volunteer who died in an asthma experiment, the government has halted all federally funded studies on human subjects at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore...

 July 19, 2001 - Tricky new virus spreads quickly - By Bob Sullivan MSNBC - Anti-virus companies have raised their risk rating on a new computer virus making the rounds called "Sircam." The virus is particularly troublesome because it arrives with random subject lines and attachment names, meaning there's no easy way to warn computer users. The bug also has a nasty payload - it can expose private corporate information. The number of infections around the world has risen sharply during the day Thursday, leading anti-virus firms to raise the warning flag..."

 July 19, 2001 - The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer - Scientists have found a cheaper way to solve tremendously difficult computational problems: connect ordinary PCs so that they can work together - This article is the second in a two-part series.  The first part, "How to Build a Hypercomputer," by Thomas Sterling, appeared in the July 2001 Scientific American issue. - By William W. Hargrove, Forrest M. Hoffman and Thomas Sterling. IN THE WELL-KNOWN STONE SOUP FABLE, a wandering soldier stops at a poor village and says he will make soup by boiling a cauldron of water containing only a shiny stone. The townspeople are skeptical at first but soon bring small offerings: a head of cabbage, a bunch of carrots, a bit of beef. In the end, the cauldron is filled with enough hearty soup to feed everyone. The moral: cooperation can produce significant achievements, even from meager, seemingly insignificant contributions...

 July 11, 2001 - Solar Sail Test Flight Launches from Russian Arctic July 20 - Mission Is a Joint Project of The Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios, Pasadena, CA -- The deployment test flight for the Cosmos 1 Solar Sail project has been re-scheduled to launch on July 20, 2001 at 4:33 AM (Moscow time), which is July 19, 2001 at 5:33 PM (California time). In the unlikely event that weather conditions warrant a change, the flight could launch at an earlier back-up time that same day...

 July 18, 2001 - Touchy-Feely Computing - A new mouse picks up good vibrations, by Steve Ditlea. Imagine living with just two of your five senses: vision and hearing. That's the sensory-deprived state of personal computing today. PCs communicate with their users almost exclusively via images and sounds, ignoring all the other cues that humans rely on to perceive the world. Admittedly, interacting with your computer through the senses of smell and taste may not be absolutely essential. But now PC users can try the iFeel mouse, a device from peripherals manufacturer Logitech that adds the all-important sense of touch to desktop computing...

  July 16, 2001 - Intel: Pentium 4 to clock up to 1.8GHz - Intel will celebrate the Fourth of July with the launch of faster Pentium 4 chips, but don't expect fireworks or a major bump in lagging Pentium 4 sales. The chipmaker will release 1.8GHz and 1.6GHz Pentium 4 processors in early July, sources said...

  July 16, 2001 - New chip to revolutionize our future - In 1896, Henri Antoine Becquerel discovered that small flecks of uranium could fog photographic plates. Around ten years later, Einstein wrote his Special Theory of Relativity and demonstrated that mass and energy were equivalent: E=MCsquared. Forty years on, Oppenheimer showed what happens when you mix the two ideas...

  July 16, 2001 - International Space Station 'made astronaut lives misery' - Leaked documents show astronauts on board the International Space Station had to put up with dozens of irritating problems which sometimes made their lives a misery.  Medical labels in Russian, noisy machinery and even a lack of shampoo sometimes left them at their wits' end.  Bill Shepherd, who commanded the outpost for five months, reportedly told ground controllers a procedure to sample fluid from the heating system "basically sucks"...

July 12, 2001 - A.I.: Real Life Robots - Steven Spielberg's new movie, A.I., portrays a world in which lifelike robots feel and think; they experience jealousy, rage, romance and love. Is such a future even a possibility? Can machines of metal and plastic so closely imitate flesh and blood? Forget artificial intelligence--this is a dream about artificial humans...

July 11, 2001 - Hybrid Electric Vehicles - "The dormancy went on until 1993, when the Clinton administration announced the formation of the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) consortium, which includes the "Big Three" automakers and about 350 smaller technical firms. Its members are spending about $500 million a year--including $250 million in federal funds--to develop a car that can travel 34 kilometers per liter (80 miles per gallon) of gasoline. Such a vehicle would be about three times as efficient as today's comparable, gas-fueled, midsize cars. Moreover, the efficiency is to be achieved without any sacrifices in performance or safety and in a vehicle that does not cost significantly more and emits perhaps one eighth of the pollutants..."