It’s not necessarily laziness that makes people hit the “snooze” button in the morning. Most likely, your body clock is mismatched with the demands of your life.
Your clock is controlled by the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a part of the brain that controls the body’s biological rhythms. But, says Jean Matheson, a sleep-disorders specialist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, these preset natural rhythms often don’t align with daily realities—work or school start times cannot be adjusted to fit a person’s sleep schedule. People who have trouble crawling out of bed probably have an inner clock set to late wake-up and sleep times, a condition known as phase delay.
It is possible to adjust your phase-delayed body clock, Matheson says, but at a price: No sleeping in on the weekends. “When people sleep late on weekends, they revert to their natural phase-delayed rhythm,” she explains. This makes it harder to wake up early on weekdays. You can train yourself to wake up earlier, Matheson says, by setting your alarm 15 minutes earlier each day (and heeding its call).
Exposure to artificial light in the evening can also cause phase delay. The brain is very sensitive to light, and too much of it just before bed—from computer screens, televisions or bright reading lights—can trick the brain into thinking it’s daytime.
If you find it difficult to adjust your sleep habits, there’s some good news. Scientists at the University of California at Irvine recently discovered that a single amino acid regulates your internal clock. One day, says pharmacology professor Paolo Sassone-Corsi, this research could translate into a drug that controls the brain’s sleep cycle.

IBM's latest supercomputer crunches numbers at enormous speeds--and will soon be put to use for nuclear warfare.

IBM has broken its own record of computer processing speed by pushing its newest supercomputer past the petaflop barrier. The Roadrunner, a massive machine occupying 6,000 square feet of space, this week achieved a peak of 1.026 petaflops, or just over one million billion calculations per second. Just ten years ago, the fastest supercomputer in the world would have taken 20 years to finish a problem the Roadrunner is capable of finishing in a week.

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Everyone knows you shouldn’t reveal your passwords. But what if you're out sick and your coworker needs to borrow your computer?

Carnegie Mellon University’s Grey project lets you give people temporary access to your PC without the risk that they could later use your password to break in. It replaces ordinary login methods with smartphone access, in which your phone uses Bluetooth to send a computer an unfakeable digital access ID. To allow a pal onto your PC, simply send a one-time pass to his phone.

The same system could also control office doors or file cabinets, so you could instantly revoke or grant entry whenever needed. A start-up company, GreenBack Systems, recently began developing Grey for possible use in workplaces in two to four years.

ece.cmu.edu/~grey

The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, has been called a missile-defense tool and a mind-control device. The truth is a bit less ominous

Northern Exposure: With HAARP, an antenna array located 200 miles north of Anchorage, Alaska, scientists study the outer atmosphere by zapping it with radio waves generated by 3,600 kilowatts of electricity. Appropriately, it has a great view of the aurora borealis. Photo by U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

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http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2008-06/militarys-mystery-machine

You probably don’t live anywhere near a gold mine, but chances are you own some gold jewelry or electronics that have bits of gold inside. Gold mining, which often takes place in developing nations often uses huge pools of cyanide to leach gold from the earth. Occasionally these pools burst, destroying rivers.

Illegal miners collect mercury-laced gold, separate the two, and leave the concentrated mercury to pollute rivers. What can you do? It’s difficult to know where your gold is coming from, but buying vintage jewelry—the ultimate in recycling—won’t increase demand for more mining

In 2010, Russia is expected to set afloat its first barge-mounted nuclear power plant, a $200-million plant the size of a football field that can be towed to energy-starved Arctic communities on the White Sea. Built by the energy company Rosenergoatom, the barge will carry its load of nuclear waste on board, offloading the stuff every 10 to 20 years, plenty of time to run into a perfect storm—or two.

Found this on:

http://www.popsci.com/environment/gallery/2008-06/looming-eco-disasters

Wind energy, tidal energy, solar—the world is embracing large-scale green power. Oh wait, maybe we spoke too soon. Tata Mundra, the largest coal-fired energy plant built in decades, is going up in India with the help of a $450-million loan from the World Bank. The 4,000-megawatt coal plant will use relatively modern, efficient technologies to produce enough juice to help out 16 million people, but in the end, coal is coal—at full capacity, the plant will emit only 13 percent less carbon than a conventional coal-fired facility.

On top of that, experts predict that up to 20 percent of the power generated will be lost to India’s poorly maintained electricity grid, negating any benefits of the plant’s technology and making it just another mammoth fossil-fuel incinerator.

I found This On:

http://www.popsci.com/environment/gallery/2008-06/looming-eco-disasters