"If you drop a pack of Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke, you get this huge fountain of spray and Diet Coke foam coming out," says Tonya Coffey, a physicist at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. "This was a good project for my students to study because there was still some mystery to it."

When mint or fruit Mentos are dropped into a fresh bottle of Diet Coke, a jet of Coke whooshes out of the bottle's mouth and can reach a height of 10 metres. Theories abound as to why this happens, with some bloggers speculating that it is an acid-base reaction because Coke is acidic.

Experiments in a 2006 edition of the Discovery Channel programme Mythbusters suggested the chemicals responsible for the reaction are gum arabic and gelatine in the sweets, and caffeine, potassium benzoate and aspartame in the Coke. But there have been no rigorous scientific studies of the reaction until now."

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The attack was a stark reminder of the risks the crews of naval ships face when they are forced to put in at potentially unfriendly ports.

Now some members of Congress believe they have a way to keep ships out of harm's way and prevent similar incidents happening in the future. A bill recently passed by the House of Representatives aims to make many more of the ships in the US naval fleet nuclear powered, including amphibious assault ships that carry troops into combat. The benefit will be two-fold, argue proponents of the bill."

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US firm Oceaneering International won the contract worth up to $745 million, which involves design, testing, evaluation and production of a suit that can we worn in two different styles.

The "default" version (see image, right) is designed for use during launch and landing aboard Orion, trips to the International Space Station, and spacewalks for contingency operations.

It will also be used to protect astronauts against unforeseen circumstances like cabin leaks.
Walking boots

For expeditions on the lunar surface, though, astronauts will be able to replace certain parts of that suit with other components to create a version more suited for strolling (see image, lower right).

The suit will need to cope with a large number of moonwalks with minimal maintenance during the planned six-month lunar outpost expeditions.

The current spacesuits used by spacewalking astronauts were designed for weightless floating in space, not walking on the Moon, says, project manager for the spacesuit system at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, US.

"They were built to solve a completely different set of problems," he says. Astronauts on the Moon will need lighter-weight suits that can bend and be easily manoeuvred, he added.

Suits and the life-support systems that go with them will be needed for up to four astronauts on Moon voyages and as many as six space station travellers."

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Mission controllers had tried half a dozen times since the soil was scooped up and dumped onto the instrument deck last Friday to dislodge the sample by vibrating the metal screen above oven number four. On Monday they even tested a backup procedure--canting the shovel at the end of the probe's robotic arm and shaking it to dribble soil a bit at a time [see video below].

But when a seventh and final round of screen-shaking Tuesday night stopped abruptly, researchers found that the dirt had finally passed through the screen into the narrow confines of the oven, no wider than a pencil lead. "The dirt finally did start to flow and we finally got a full oven," William Boynton of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, lead scientist for Phoenix's Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA), said during a press conference yesterday.

NASA doesn't have a lot of room for error: The probe has only three months to do its job of analyzing Martian soil and ice before a long, sunless arctic winter blankets it in carbon dioxide ice, most likely putting it out of commission permanently."

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The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), a small body set up in 2004, was due to be closed down next year. But rising cyber-crime and attacks such as one suffered by EU member Estonia last year has triggered a rethink.

The bloc's 27 telecoms industry ministers, meeting in Luxembourg, agreed a three-year reprieve until 2012 to give time to decide how to take Greek-based ENISA forward.

The European Parliament is set to formally endorse the move next week.

ENISA's executive director, Andrea Pirotti, said network security was crucial for the European economy, which increasingly depends on a trouble-free Internet.

"The need for secure networks, systems and services will certainly not suddenly disappear in 2012," Pirotti said in a statement.

"Network and information security touches business and the daily lives of citizens in Europe. It consequently needs constant reinforcement to keep up with the evolving threats landscape," Pirotti said.

With an annual budget of 8 million euros and fewer than 50 staff, ENISA had no remit or resources to deal with cyber attacks like that experienced by Estonia last year, when the Baltic state accused Russia of causing government websites to crash."

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The bill, introduced by Industry Minister Jim Prentice, would continue to exempt Internet service providers from liability for copyright violations by their subscribers, requiring them only to pass on notices of violations rather than to take down offending material as required in the United States.

It would also allow consumers to record television and radio programs for playing back at a later time, a practice known as time-shifting, but would prohibit people from keeping them indefinitely in a personal library of recordings.

In drafting the new legislation, the government said it faced the delicate task of balancing the rights of content creators with the realities and needs of everyday life in a digital world, and also realizing the difficulty of policing possible personal infringements.

Prentice said of the issue: "It touches each and every one of us, and it is no surprise to find so many different points of view with respect to copyright."

One online group, Fair Copyright for Canada, was set up on Facebook in advance of the new bill to protest against the government's copyright plans and has 40,000 members.

Its creator, University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, focused on provisions under which it would be illegal to break digital locks."

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After releasing two release candidates (plus a third Mac-specific version), the browser developer said it hopes to be able to target next Tuesday as the official release date.

"Whenever we're asked 'when is Firefox going to be released' we endeavor to answer to the best of our abilities, but the truth of the matter is that we'll only ever ship 'when it's ready,'" the company said in a blog post. "We have a lot of indicators that help us understand when the product is ready for release: feedback from our pre-release milestones, excitement in the community and the press, availability of compatible Add-Ons, and a large active beta community helping us ensure that the release is compatible with all the various sites on the Internet."

The beta releases of Firefox 3.0 have been well-reviewed for its stability and quickness, and for its ability to have apparently finally solved a persistent memory leak that has increased the browser's memory footprint over time.

Firefox 3 required more than 34 months of development, Mozilla said. "Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 -- the best web browser, period," the company claimed. "

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"On the enterprise side, Apple has taken a huge step forward for kind of ticking off all of the boxes that enterprises want, from Cisco VPN to wiping the device remotely," said Carolina Milanesi, Gartner research director. "They are basically executing what they had promised to do."

Enhancing Productivity

Achieving growth in the enterprise space is an essential component of Apple's plan for meeting its 10 million iPhone sales target for 2008. Though the company still has much work to do to make the iPhone an enterprise hit, Jobs says Apple has already laid the groundwork.

"The business world has bought a lot of iPhones in the last year," with the "CEOs and senior executives in most of the Fortune 500 companies already having iPhones of their own," Jobs told ABC News. "And there are a lot of employees that have them at home, and they really want to use them at work."

For enterprises, productivity is key. Apple noted that the speed of its new iPhone is twice as fast over 3G than over the EDGE wireless technology featured in its original iPhone. "My impression is that it's going to be able to handle enterprise applications more quickly," said Rena Bhattacharyya, IDC research manager. "

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"A form of usage-based pricing for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns is inevitable," spokesman Michael Coe said this week.

The top 5 percent of AT&T's DSL customers use 46 percent of the total bandwidth, Coe said. Overall bandwidth use on the network is surging, doubling every year and a half.

AT&T doesn't have any specific plans or fees to announce yet, Coe said.

Most cable companies have official or secret caps on the amount of data they allow subscribers to download every month. Time Warner Cable started a trial earlier this month in Beaumont, Texas, under which it will charge subscribers who go over their monthly bandwidth cap $1 per gigabyte.

Cable companies are at the forefront of usage-based pricing because neighbors share capacity on the local cable lines, and bandwidth hogs can slow down traffic for others. Phone companies have been less concerned about congestion because the phone lines they use to provide Internet service using DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line technology, aren't shared between neighbors, but AT&T is evidently concerned about congestion higher up in the network.

Those who mainly do Web surfing or e-mail use little data and have scant reason to pay attention to traffic caps. But those who download movies or TV, particularly in high definition, can hit the caps imposed by cable companies.

Download caps could put a crimp in the plans of services like Apple Inc.'s iTunes that use the Internet to deliver video. DVD-by-mail pioneer Netflix Inc. just launched a TV set-top box that receives an unlimited stream of Internet video to a TV set for as little as $8.99 per month."

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But after eluding Microsoft's grasp, Yahoo is now turning to Google to help squelch a rebellion among its shareholders who believe it should have accepted Microsoft's $47.5 billion buyout offer while it was still available last month.

Yahoo announced its decision to let Google handle some of its advertising sales late Thursday, just a few hours after revealing it unsuccessfully tried to persuade Microsoft to renew its previous offer of $33 per share. The snub caused Yahoo to conclude that there is no hope for any kind of deal with Microsoft.

Although Yahoo believes Google could help boost its annual revenue by $800 million, the advertising partnership wasn't enough to ease the disappointment of investors who had been holding out hope for a Microsoft deal.

Yahoo shares fell 85 cents, or 3.6 percent, to $22.67 in morning trading Friday after plunging 10.1 percent a day earlier. Google shares rose $12.96, or 2.3 percent, to $565.91 and Microsoft shares gained 53 cents to $28.77.

Part of the problem for Yahoo is that antitrust concerns might prevent an alliance with Google."

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In what it said would be the largest scale relaunch of a website of its size, MySpace will change its home page, navigation, profile editing, search, and MySpaceTV player facilities. Other changes will come during the summer.

"This is more than a face-lift; we're changing the way people interact with the site and with brands," MySpace said, adding that a major advertiser was signed for the U.S. MySpace home page on the first day of the relaunch.

The main phase of the relaunch is set for June 18.

MySpace said it had drastically overhauled the look and feel of its searches, which it said currently ranked third in total number of searches by any site.

It said it was working with Lucene Open-Source engine and community, marking the first time MySpace has contributed to the open-source community.

MySpace, with about 110 million users worldwide, claims to be the most trafficked website in the United States, adding that about 300,000 people sign up each day."

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Starting Monday, Sprint will begin offering a new "share" plan that offers 3,000 voice minutes and a bounty of add-ons for $169.99 a month for two lines. Additional lines cost $19.99 each.

In addition to the 50 hours of calling time, subscribers will receive: unlimited messaging and e-mail, unlimited access to the mobile Web, 50 streaming music channels, 25-plus live TV channels, on-demand TV - clips as well as full-length TV shows - and unlimited GPS navigation. For sports fans, there's also unlimited access to NFL Mobile and NASCAR Sprint Cup Mobile. BlackBerry users also qualify for this plan.

Cheaper plans with fewer services start at $69.99 a month. Depending on the plan, lines can be added for as little as $9.99 a month.

For a family of three, the $169.99 plan represents a $45 savings off Sprint's prior plans, says Walter Piecyk, a telecom analyst at Pali Research. The savings is $60 compared with Verizon and $45 compared with AT&T wireless. The latter don't offer GPS navigation or BlackBerry options, he notes."

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Amid the buzz surrounding Apple Inc.'s new iPhone model, coming out July 11, it's been easy to miss the news that Sprint Nextel Corp. is bringing out a phone on June 20 that is the closest thing so far to an iPhone made by someone else.

The Samsung Instinct is, like the real iPhone, a slab with a large touch screen and few buttons. There are other touch-screen alternatives, but the Instinct's the only one that does what the iPhone does: wrap a wealth of features into a package that's easy to use.

This is a remarkable achievement, mostly on Sprint's part. The hardware, made by Samsung Electronics Co., is available overseas. Sprint commissioned its own software to run on it, working very closely with an outside design house on its development.

The result is a lucid, logical interface. It's not as pretty as the iPhone's, but it allows the user to quickly use e-mail, Web browsing, GPS navigation and text messaging; watch videos, live TV and photos; and listen to music and online radio.

Of course, Apple should get much of the credit for inspiring competitors to come up with phones like this. But the Instinct is more than a copy: Sprint pulled out all the stops when it came to adding features, resulting in an almost absurdly capable phone that outdoes the first-generation iPhone in many ways."

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Eight of the laptop models unveiled by HP this week are based on Puma, including the Pavilion dv4, Pavilion dv5, Pavilion dv7 and Compaq Presario CQ50. Pricing and detailed specifications of these laptops were not immediately available.

Puma, unveiled last week at the Computex exhibition in Taipei, includes a dual-core Turion X2 Ultra processor, an M780 chipset, and a Wi-Fi chip. The notebooks also come with ATI's Radeon HD 3000 graphics chips, AMD said.

One of the main advantages of the Puma platform is the chipset, which includes a hardware decoder for high-definition video formats, such as Blu-ray. With this feature, the processor utilization rate remains low while watching a high-definition video.

Previous AMD products, as well as Intel's current notebook chips, relied on the processor for this task.

Intel plans to follow AMD's lead in the mobile space, releasing a high-definition video decoder in the Cantiga chipset that is part of the company's Montevina notebook platform. Montevina, which will be called Centrino 2 when it's released in August, was delayed by several weeks because of issues with the integrated-graphics chipset."

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The tables offer Harrah's a new way to track its customers' habits and behaviors, adding to its sophisticated costumer rewards program that tracks users' gambling habits.

"Of all the goodies up our sleeves lately, this is one of the most dramatic," Tim Stanley, chief information officer of Harrah's, told The Associated Press. "The range of opportunities are fairly limitless."

The six rectangular tables with built-in 30-inch flat screens using Microsoft Surface technology were installed in a lounge at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, with custom applications built for Harrah's.

A spokeswoman for Microsoft said the units sold for a base price of $10,000."

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