Obama orders review of NASA plan to return to moon

NASA's human spaceflight program gets top-level review

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., May 7 (Reuters) - The Obama administration has ordered a top-level review of the U.S. human spaceflight program that has been focused on returning astronauts to the moon by 2020, officials said on Thursday.

Former Lockheed Martin (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) Chairman and Chief Executive Norm Augustine will head a blue-ribbon panel charged with assessing NASA's progress on a space transportation system to replace the retiring space shuttle fleet.

"Clearly if we're on the wrong path, we should change, but if you're asking me do I think we're on the wrong path, the answer is no," Chris Scolese, NASA's acting administrator, said at a news conference to unveil the agency's $18.7 billion spending plan for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

The review, which is due by August, will focus on the U.S. space agency's Ares rocket program and the Orion capsule that is being designed to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station as well as to the lunar surface.

Prime contractors for the shuttle replacement program include Boeing Co (BA.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Alliant Techsystems Inc (ATK.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies Corp (UTX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) unit, which are building the new Ares rocket; and Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research), which is developing the Orion capsule spacecraft.

The space shuttles are due to be retired by Sept. 30, 2010, after eight more flights to assemble and outfit the space station and a final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope that is scheduled for launch on Monday.

The $3.2 billion budget request for space shuttle operations includes funds for an added flight to carry the $1.5 billion Alpha Magnet Spectrometer particle physics experiment to the station for installation and operation.

Scolese said the review panel also will address extending NASA support of the space station beyond 2016 and possibly the lunar initiative.

BUSH'S MOON PLANS

In January 2004, President George W. Bush announced plans for the United States to return to the moon by 2020 and build a way station there for flights to Mars. NASA's last human flight to the moon was in 1972.

The agency also is requesting $150 million to help foster a commercially developed capsule to fly crew members to the space station.

Space Exploration Technologies, a California firm known as SpaceX, has been working under a NASA contract to develop its Dragon capsule to haul cargo to the outpost. The contract includes an option for a passenger system, which NASA said it intends to exercise.

NASA's spending plan is $2 billion richer than the budget it received two years ago, largely the result of federal economic stimulus dollars.

In part, the extra funding will go toward an expanded global climate change research program, a new initiative to develop environmentally more benign aviation technologies, and new science programs including a joint U.S.-European mission to Jupiter's ocean-bearing moon Europa.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Will Dunham)

Google's Latest Domination

By chris.thompson - The Big Money

<. But you haven't been looking at mobile Internet devices, which everyone agrees will be the most dynamic and explosive piece of the online world for years to come. According to a new report from the Internet marketing firm Net Applications, Google accounp>You may think Google (GOOG) dominates the search market, with 63.7 percent of all searches conducted in the United States compared with Yahoo's (YHOO) 20 percentts for 97.5 percent of all mobile phone searches. 97.5 percent. Now that's what we call dominance.

And the company's fortunes keep rising elsewhere as well. BusinessWeek spreads around a rumor that Dell (DELL) is exploring the option of using the Android operating system for a new line of cheap laptops. This makes Dell the second major computer manufacturer to flirt with abandoning Windows for Android; Hewlett-Packard announced it was looking into Android a few months back. Google has an outright monopoly on mobile search, and it's threatening to eat into Microsoft's (MSFT) core business. What does it do for an encore?

Ah, yes: Twitter. For months, gossipmongers like us have been spreading word that Google might snatch up the microblogging company for a few hundred million. After all, Twitter's main potential value lies in searching all those tweets in real time and the advertising that could accompany the search results. What business model does that sound like to you?

And Google's not alone in reportedly salivating over all that searchable data. Apple has reportedly offered $700 million to make Twitter a part of the Steve Jobs family. In fact, Twitter Vice President of Operations Santosh Jayaram (who just happens to be Google's former head of search quality) just announced a new breakthrough in searching tweets. Now, Twitter's search engine will also crawl over each tweet, find any links people embedded in them, scan the linked page, and index the content to produce even more accurate results. In addition, Twitter's search engine will also rank results according to whatever Internet or cultural trend is hot at the moment, as well as the popularity of each twitterer. Now everyone searching on Twitter gets to know what Ashton Kutcher thinks, whether they want to or not.

Sounds perfect for Google, right? They've got the search know-how, and Twitter's got the next big thing. Nonetheless, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone maintains that he won't sell the company—to Google or anyone else. In case anyone didn't get the message, he even went on The View to tell Barbara Walters. Got that, Eric Schmidt? Twitter's not for sale. Until it is, of course.

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

New Documentary Gives Inside Look at Alzheimer's

Maria Shriver Talks About How the Disease Touched Her Life

By IMAEYEN IBANGA

When her father was diagnosed six years ago with Alzheimer's disease, California first lady Maria Shriver learned firsthand just how devastating it can be.

"At the age of 93, my dad still goes to Mass every day. And believe it or not, he still remembers the Hail Mary. But he doesn't remember me, Maria. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that still makes me cry. "

Shriver has become so passionate about the issue that she even testified before congress. Afterward, she said her office was inundated with letters from people who could relate to what's happening to her family and her father, Sargent Shriver.

Now, the author and journalist is giving others the opportunity to get the same look at the disease with her documentary "The Alzheimer's Project."

Shriver, who executive produced the program that will air on HBO beginning May 10, hopes to reach a broad audience.

Watch Maria Shriver live on "Good Morning America" Thursday as she talks about "The Alzheimer's Project."

The four-part series will tackle topics like memory loss, living with Alzheimer's disease and the science of finding a cure.

The Future of Alzheimer's

Someone gets Alzheimer's disease every 70 seconds and, currently, 5.3 million people in the United States live with the condition, according to the Alzheimer's Association.

The fight to learn more about the disease and pinpoint a cure has become more fevered as a bevy of baby boomers quickly march toward their senior years. It all adds up to a heavy burden on the health care system.

The direct and indirect costs of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias to Medicaid and Medicare amounts to more than $148 billion annually, according to the Alzheimer's Association.

The financial burden also falls to those caring for an Alzheimer's patient.

Alzheimer's Resources

Click here for more information and resources from ABC News on Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's Association CareSource offers resources to help manage caregiving responsibilities, such as financial decisions and skills for caring for loved ones every day.

On the organization's Web site, you can find message boards, create a calendar to keep track of tasks with your family, and locate assisted living facilities in your area.

The Alzheimer's Association offers a Doctor's Appointment Checklist to help family members prepare for effective doctor visits and keep track of questions.

Phone home and call likely answered on the cell

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a high-tech shift accelerated by the recession, the number of U.S. households opting for only cell phones has for the first time surpassed those that just have traditional landlines.

It is the freshest evidence of the growing appeal of wireless phones.

Twenty percent of households had only cells during the last half of 2008, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey released Wednesday. That was an increase of nearly 3 percentage points over the first half of the year, the largest six-month increase since the government started gathering such data in 2003.

The 20 percent of homes with only cell phones compared with 17 percent with landlines but no cells.

That ratio has changed starkly in recent years: In the first six months of 2003, just 3 percent of households were wireless only, while 43 percent stuck with only landlines.

Stephen Blumberg, senior scientist at the CDC and an author of the report, attributed the growing number of cell-only households in part to a recession that has forced many families to scour their budgets for savings. People who live in homes that have only wireless service tend to be disproportionately low-income, young, renters and Hispanics.

"We do expect that with the recession, we'd see an increase in the prevalence of wireless only households, above what we might have expected had there been no recession," Blumberg said.

Six in 10 households have both landlines and cell phones. Even so, industry analysts emphasized the public's growing love affair with the versatility of cell phones, which can perform functions like receiving text messages and are also mobile.

"The end game is consumers are paying two bills for the same service," said John Fletcher, an analyst for the market research firm SNL Kagan, referring to cell and landline phones. "Which are they going to choose? They'll choose the one they can take with them in their car."

In one illustration of the impact these changes are having, Verizon Communications Inc. had 39 million landline telephone customers in March 2008 but 35 million a year later. Over the same period, its wireless customers grew from 67 million to 87 million, though 13 million of the added lines came from the firm's acquisition of Alltell Corp., according to figures provided by Verizon spokesman Bill Kula.

Another Verizon spokesman, Eric Rabe, said he wasn't sure the overall drop in landlines was directly related to the stalled economy, although he said the company has lost some landline business customers because companies are closing some of their locations.

"For somebody who's mobile and not planning to be in the same apartment for more than a year, it's very appealing to go with a cell," Rabe said.

Further underscoring the public's diminishing reliance on landline phones, the federal survey found that 15 percent of households have both landlines and cells but take few or no calls on their landlines, often because they are wired into computers. Combined with wireless only homes, that means that 35 percent of households — more than one in three — are basically reachable only on cells.

The changes are important for pollsters, who for years relied on reaching people on their landline telephones. Growing numbers of surveys now include calls to people on their cells, which is more expensive partly because federal laws prohibit pollsters from using computers to place calls to wireless phones.

About a third of people age 18 to 24 live in households with only cell phones, the federal figures showed, making them far likelier than older people to rely exclusively on cells. The same is true of four in 10 people age 25 to 29.

About three in 10 living in poverty are from wireless-only households, nearly double the proportion of those who are not poor. Also living in homes with only cell phones are one in four Hispanics, four in 10 renters and six in 10 people living with unrelated adults such as roommates or unmarried couples.

One in 50 households has no phones at all.

The data is compiled by the National Health Interview Survey, conducted by the CDC. The latest survey involved in-person interviews with members of 12,597 households conducted from last July through December.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Windows 7's "XP Mode" Won't Run on Some CPUs

Ian Paul

Hoping to use Windows 7's XP Mode on your new laptop? Better check your specs, because many big-name, Intel-powered notebooks including Asus, Dell Studio, HP Pavilion, Sony Vaio, and Toshiba Satellite models may not have what it takes to run Windows 7's XP mode. Featured in the recent Windows 7 release candidate, XP mode allows XP-specific applications to run inside Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise versions of Windows 7. Microsoft included XP mode to entice business customers to upgrade to Windows 7 even if they're using custom-made programs that run only on XP.

To run XP Mode, your Intel-powered computer must support Intel Virtualization Technology. Problem is, many Intel laptops found on retail shelves aren't packing Intel VT. Affected chips include Intel Celeron, Pentium Dual-Core, Pentium M, and Atom 270 and 280 processors. If you've got a Pentium D, Core, or Core 2 Duo chip you'll need to check your model number because P7350/7450, T1350, T2050/2250, T2300E/2350/2450, T5200/5250/5270/5300/5450/5470/5550/5670/5750/5800/5850/5870/5900 and T6400/6570 do not support VT, according to ZDNet. AMD-powered computers may also find difficulties running XP mode since Sempron processors and some Athlon 64 chips don't support virtualization.

That's a pretty big list of processors that can't support virtualization, so it's no surprise that many laptops will be frozen out of Windows 7's XP mode. However, for the everyday user this may not be as big an issue since XP Mode is targeted at a small segment of the market anyway -- gamers take note that XP mode was not built to support video games.

If you are a part of the XP-specific minority running a custom application or another XP-specific program, you'd better make sure your processor supports virtualization before making the switch to Windows 7.

Can't find your processor's model number? Run GRC's Securable a free app that can tell you if your processor supports virtualization.

Connect with Ian Paul on Twitter (@ianpaul).