The Technophilez

General Motors Corp showed off its progress in developing the highly anticipated Chevrolet Volt and detailed its road map for bringing the rechargeable car to the market by 2010, an ambitious timeline challenged by some rivals.

"We are moving with incredible speed," Frank Weber, GM's vehicle line executive in charge of the Volt, told reporters. "This project is not concept work. This program is not theory. It is reality."

Weber said GM's senior executives remain committed to launching the Volt by November 2010, calling the plug-in hybrid the "No. 1 priority project that we have now within GM."

GM, which is counting on the high-mileage Volt to leapfrog Toyota's market-leading hybrid Prius, on Thursday opened its battery research labs and design studio to dozens of journalists and analysts.

The automaker's unusual open-door policy is part of an effort to show a commitment to the electric car technology many environmental advocates see as the best hope to cut oil use and greenhouse gas emissions. GM also wants to win back consumers it lost because of its reputation as the home of the Hummer.

The Volt is being designed to run 40 miles powered by a 400-pound, T-shaped lithium-ion battery pack that will be cooled by a liquid system to keep it from overheating.

Much lighter battery pack
That battery pack is shorter and only weighs a third as much as the nickel metal-hydride battery featured in GM's now-scrapped EV1 electric car, subject of the 2006 documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

The Volt marks the first attempt to adapt lithium-ion batteries, widely used in electronics, for a car, although Toyota is racing ahead with its own work on the same technology.

In its labs, GM is testing dueling battery packs, one supplied by a subsidiary of Korea's LG Chem  and the other built by a division of German auto parts supplier Continental AG using technology developed by Massachusetts-based A123 Systems.

The goal, GM said, is to ensure that it has a battery that can run at least 150,000 miles, last 10 years and allow drivers to accelerate to 60-miles-per-hour in less than 9 seconds.

Roland Matthe, a manager in GM's battery group, said the competing packs were neck-and-neck in tests meant to simulate driving in conditions ranging from Alaska cold to Arizona heat. "If you look at the data they look very similar," Matthe said.

GM has been quietly testing Volt-like technology in a maroon 2005 Chevrolet Malibu sedan at its Milford, Michigan proving track since last year and will began bolting the new batteries into vehicles for track testing this month.

"We've already learned a lot about how this battery behaves," said Michael Bly, GM's director of hybrid vehicle integration.

Gas-tank issue
Among the challenges GM is still grappling with is how to treat an unusual problem: the risk that gas in the Volt's specially pressurized, low-emission tank goes unused.

A gas engine will kick in to recharge the Volt battery as necessary, but with short trips and frequent recharging at a standard outlet some drivers may seldom need fuel.

GM, which has tweaked its global small-car platform for the Volt, could tune its proprietary drive-train software to kick in and burn off gas if needed to prevent engine damage.

Another problem: the first design GM showed off for the Volt at the 2007 Detroit auto show was too boxy and aggressively styled up front to cut through the wind and boost the vehicle's battery-only range.

After extensive wind-tunnel testing, GM designers rounded the front corners on the Volt and gave it a higher and bigger spoiler. Relatively small aerodynamic improvements have boosted the electric range by more than half a mile, Volt design director Bob Boniface said.

Meanwhile, GM engineers are counting on braking to capture energy that will deliver some 20 percent of the power needed for the Volt's 40-mile battery range. Without any braking — in perfectly traffic-free highway driving — the range would be closer to 32 miles, GM engineers said.

The Red Planet was too salty to sustain life for much of its history, according to the latest evidence gathered by one of the US rovers on Mars' surface.

High concentration of minerals in water on early Mars would have made it inhospitable to even the toughest microbes, a leading Nasa expert says.

Clues preserved in rocks that were once awash with water suggest the environment was both acidic and briny.

The observations were made by the US space agency's Opportunity rover.

It has spent months examining rocks on an ancient Martian plain.

'Ghost of a chance'

Dr Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team, and a biologist at Harvard University, Cambridge, US, said the finding "tightens the noose on the possibility of life".

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, he said conditions on Mars in the past four billion years would have been very challenging for life.

The quest for life on Mars will go on with the next generation rover
"It was really salty - in fact, it was salty enough that only a handful of known terrestrial organisms would have a ghost of a chance of surviving there when conditions were at their best," he explained.

The US Mars rovers - Opportunity and its twin, Spirit - have now spent more than 1,400 days on the Martian surface.

As their work comes to an end, Nasa has its hopes set on the Phoenix lander, which is due to reach Mars on 25 May.

The Phoenix mission will land near the planet's north pole, and aim to dig under the frozen surface in search of signs of microbial life, past or present.

The next-generation rover, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), is set to leave Earth in 2009, and land in 2010.

Twice as long and three times as heavy as Spirit and Opportunity, it will collect Martian soil and rock samples, and analyse them for organic compounds.

Microsoft Corp. said hackers have found a way to use some older versions of its Excel spreadsheet program to take over control of people's computers.

Microsoft said late Tuesday that it is investigating reports of such attacks, but has not yet determined whether it will patch the hole, or when.

People who open a specially crafted Excel file from an e-mail attachment or visit a compromised Web site could be inviting hackers to take over their PCs for malicious purposes such as stealing passwords and other personal information, or sending out spam. Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 2, Excel Viewer 2003, Excel 2002, Excel 2000 and Excel 2004 for Mac all contain the security hole.

The software maker said in a statement that users of these programs can protect their computers by using a tool that scans the files for bad code before opening, called Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment.

The most recent versions of the spreadsheet program, Excel 2007, Excel 2007 SP 1 and Excel 2008 for Mac, are not thought to be affected, Microsoft said.

Right around noon today, if all goes as planned, a spacecraft called Messenger will swoop past the planet Mercury and begin two days of unprecedented picture-taking and data-collecting.

The flyby, the first visit to Mercury in more than 33 years by an emissary from Earth, will mark a key moment in a NASA mission that will ultimately place the first satellite into orbit around the tiny planet that sits closest to the sun.

The planetary science community is eagerly awaiting images and information that should shed light on some of the enduring mysteries about the planet -- such as where in the solar system it was formed and why its hard metal core is so large and its outer rock crust so scant, compared with those of Earth and the other rocky planets.

"Mercury is a difficult place to get to, and it's taken a long time to get back," said principal investigator Sean Solomon, who has worked on the mission for more than 11 years. "But now we're in place to learn things about one of our few sister rocky planets, and we're ready for some real surprises."

Read More

Mars rover Opportunity will make what could be a trip of no return into a deep impact crater in an attempt to peer further back than ever before into the geologic history of the Red Planet.

The descent into Victoria Crater received the go-ahead because the potential scientific returns are worth the risk that the solar-powered, six-wheel rover might not be able to climb back out and would be forced to end its days there, NASA officials and scientists said Thursday.

The rover has been roaming the surface for nearly 3 1/2 Earth years, or some 1,200 Martian days, so scientists and engineers want to send it in while it still appears healthy and before the inevitable breakdown of vital parts that would certainly trap it there.

"This crater, Victoria, is a window back into the ancient environment of Mars," said Alan Stern, the NASA associate administrator who authorized the move.