NEW YORK —  A broad survey about the technology people have, how they use it, and what they think about it shatters assumptions and reveals where companies might be able to expand their audiences.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that adult Americans are broadly divided into three groups: 31 percent are elite technology users, 20 percent are moderate users and the remainder have little or no usage of the Internet or cell phones.

But Americans are divided within each group, according to a Pew analysis of 2006 data released Sunday.

The high-tech elites, for instance, are almost evenly split into:

— "Omnivores," who fully embrace technology and express themselves creatively through blogs and personal Web pages.

— "Connectors," who see the Internet and cell phones as communications tools.

— "Productivity enhancers," who consider technology as largely ways to better keep up with their jobs and daily lives.

— "Lackluster veterans," those who use technology frequently but aren't thrilled by it.

John Horrigan, Pew's associate director, said he started the survey believing that the more gadgets people have, the more they are likely to embrace technology and use so-called Web 2.0 applications for generating and sharing content with the world.

[...]

The Pew study found 15 percent of all Americans have neither a cell phone nor an Internet connection. Another 15 percent use some technology and are satisfied with what it currently does for them, while 11 percent use it intermittently and find connectivity annoying...

LONDON (AP) -- Liverpool's pigeon population has it easy. Feasting on fast food and leaving droppings wherever they please, the fat birds are an embarrassment to a city chosen to be next year's European Capital of Culture.

Fear not. Enter the Robop.

Short for robotic bird of prey, the Robop is the name for a mechanical falcon that squawks and flaps its wings, something the city's council hopes will scare the pesky pigeons away.

"The key is that we move (the Robops) around, so the pigeons don't get used to them," council spokeswoman Sarah Langworthy said. "It keeps (the pigeons) on their toes."

The 10 Robops - only two of which have so far been installed - cost about 2,000 pounds ($4,000) each, and are part of a campaign to expel the pigeons from the city center.

Cleaning teams spend 88 staff hours a day scraping droppings from streets and buildings at a cost of about 160,000 pounds ($320,000) a year, the council said.

The city had weighed several options, including introducing live falcons, but ultimately settled on buying robotic replacements...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Treating cancer with surgery, chemotherapy or radiation may sometimes cause tumors to spread and U.S. researchers said on Thursday they may have nailed down one of the causes -- a compound called TGF-beta.

Tests in mice show that using the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin or radiation both raised levels of TGF-beta, which in turn helped breast cancer tumors spread to the lung.

But using an antibody to block TGF-beta stopped the process, Dr. Carlos Arteaga and colleagues at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee reported.

Developing drugs that block TGF-beta might help prevent cancer from recurring, Arteaga's team reports in the May issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

"The repopulation and progression of tumors after anti-cancer therapy is a well-recognized phenomenon," the researchers wrote. "It has been shown to occur following radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and surgery."

Cancer experts have wondered if the so-called primary tumor -- the first and biggest tumor -- might somehow suppress the growth of other tumors, and that removing or destroying the first tumor might allow other, undetectable, tumors to then grow.

TGF-beta, which is involved in both the growth and suppression of tumors, may hold part of the answer, Arteaga's team said...

LOS ANGELES — An Air Force veteran has filed a federal claim after an operation at a Veterans Administration hospital in which a healthy testicle was removed instead of a potentially cancerous one.

Benjamin Houghton, 47, was to have had his left testicle removed June 14 at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center because there was a chance it could harbor cancer cells. It also was atrophied and painful.

But doctors mistakenly removed the right testicle, according to medical records and the claim, which seeks $200,000 for future care and unspecified damages. He still hasn't had the other testicle removed.

"At first I thought it was a joke," Houghton told the Los Angeles Times. "Then I was shocked. I told them, 'What do I do now?"'

Houghton, his wife, Monica, and their attorney, Dr. Susan Friery, said they hoped to get the VA's attention by going public with the situation.

Dr. Dean Norman, chief of staff for the Greater Los Angeles VA system, has formally apologized to Houghton and his wife...

A colossal half-ton squid, believed to be the largest ever caught, may be destined for the microwave oven.

But researchers say they don't want to cook the massive creature - just defrost it so they can study it better.

Scientists at New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, have taken possession of the beast that took fishermen two hours to land after it was netted by chance in Antarctic waters last month and was frozen soon afterward to preserve it.

Expert Steve O'Shea said the squid had weighed in at 495 kilograms (1,089 pounds) and measured 10 meters (33 feet) long - heavier but shorter than initial estimates of 450 kilograms (990 lbs) and 12 meters (39 feet).

ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Their eyes glow in the dark, and they've been genetically altered to resist malaria. Could these mosquitoes one day reduce the spread of this disease that kills up to 3 million people every year? Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore say the answer could be "yes," although Jason Rasgon, Ph.D., co-author of a new study, told Ivanhoe he believes moving this from a laboratory experiment to real life application will take another 10 to 20 years.

Rasgon and his colleagues already knew mosquitoes could be genetically altered to resist malaria. But for the first time, the genetically altered kind is proving to win in the survival of the fittest mosquito battle -- and actually outbreed and overtake natural mosquitoes not resistant to malaria.

Malaria is an infectious disease caused by a parasite that needs two hosts to complete its lifecycle: female Anopheles mosquitoes and the bloodstream of a vertebrate where it invades and damages red blood cells (and can kill people -- mostly small children in sub-Saharan Africa).

In this new study, Rasgon and his colleagues studied what happened when natural mosquitoes and the altered kind (with eyes that glow in the dark to distinguish them) fed on mice infected with malaria. They discovered the genetically altered kind actually had a twofold survival advantage. They were more fertile and lived longer.

But Rasgon cautions we shouldn't jump to conclusions about wiping out malaria just yet. He says even if they were able to develop a mosquito resistant to human malaria as well as malaria in mice, that alone "is not enough to push the gene into the population." Scientists would therefore have to come up with a different way to get the gene into the mosquito population.

Rasgon adds, "Transgeneic mosquitoes are not going to be the magic bullet that cures malaria." He says they would instead need to be used in conjunction with things like drugs, insecticides, and a vaccine, if one is ever created. He concludes, "It's really just one component of an integrated control strategy. That's how I see it."

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A New Zealand fishing crew has caught an adult colossal squid, a sea creature with eyes as big as dinner plates and razor-sharp hooks on its tentacles, an official said Thursday.

New Zealand Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said the squid, weighing an estimated 990 pounds, took two hours to land in Antarctic waters.

The fishermen were catching Patagonian toothfish south of New Zealand "and the squid was eating a hooked toothfish when it was hauled from the deep," he said.

Colossal squid, known by the scientific name Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, are estimated to grow up to 46 feet long and have long been one of the most mysterious creatures of the deep ocean.

Experts have not yet examined the squid, but if original estimates are correct it is about 330 pounds heavier than the next biggest specimen ever found.

The first specimen of a colossal squid, a 330-pound immature female, was caught on the surface in the Ross Sea near the Antarctic coast in April 2004.

Steve O'Shea, a squid expert at the Auckland University of Technology, said the latest specimen eclipsed that find and scientists would be very excited...

Berkeley -- For 11 years, Jill Banfield at the University of California, Berkeley, has collected and studied the microbes that slime the floors of mines and convert iron to acid, a common source of stream pollution around the world.

Imagine her surprise, then, when research scientist Brett Baker discovered three new microbes living amidst the bacteria she thought she knew well. All three were so small - the size of large viruses - as to be virtually invisible under a microscope, and belonged to a totally new phylum of Archaea, microorganisms that have been around for billions of years.

[...]

Banfield, Baker and their UC Berkeley and University of Queensland, Australia, colleagues report their findings in the Dec. 22 issue of Science.

Banfield noted that the bacteria and newfound Archaea living in the highly acidic mine drainage are archetypes of the kind of life that could exist on other planets, such as in the iron- and sulfur-rich soil of Mars.

"This community of microbes is relevant to probing potential strategies for life on other planets, especially the life likely to exist on Mars," she said.

The organisms in the mine drainage, which live in a pink slick on pools of acidic green water, obtain energy by oxidizing iron - that is, generating rust -- and in the process create sulfuric acid and dissolve pyrite (iron sulfide or fool's gold) to release more iron and sulfur. This self-sustaining process creates the acidic drainage that pollutes creeks and rivers, including those around the researchers' study site, the Richmond Mine at Iron Mountain, Calif. The mine is one of the largest Superfund sites in the country.

Banfield has been trying to understand how the extremophiles - microbes that live in extreme environments - live together and generate the acid drainage that makes such mines toxic hazards. The green runoff from the mine, captured and treated by the Environmental Protection Agency, is a hot 108 degrees Fahrenheit, as acidic as battery acid, and loaded with toxic metals - zinc, iron, copper and arsenic...

A device the size of a sugar cube will be able to record and store high resolution video footage of every second of a human life within two decades, experts said yesterday.

Researchers said governments and societies must urgently debate the implications of the huge increases in computing power and the growing mass of information being collected on individuals.

Some fear that the advent of "human black boxes" combined with the extension of medical, financial and other digital records will lead to loss of privacy and a dramatic expansion of the nanny state.

Others highlight positive advances in medicine, education, crime prevention and the way history will be recorded.

Leading computer scientists, psychologists and neuroscientists gathered to debate these issues at Memories for Life, a conference held at the British Library yesterday...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Circumcising men cuts their risk of being infected with the AIDS virus in half, and could prevent hundreds of thousands or even millions of new infections, researchers said on Wednesday.

Circumcising men worked so well that the researchers stopped two large clinical trials in Kenya and Uganda to announce the results, although they cautioned that the procedure does not make men immune to the virus.

Public health leaders hailed the results as pointing to a potentially powerful way to reduce HIV infections in Africa, the continent hardest hit by AIDS.

"It does have the potential to prevent many tens of thousands, many hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of infections over coming years," Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the World Health Organization's Department of HIV/AIDS, told reporters.

A U.S. National Institutes of Health study in Kisumu, Kenya, involving 2,784 men aged 18 to 24 showed a 53 percent reduction of HIV infections in circumcised men compared to uncircumcised men. A parallel study involving 4,996 men aged 15 to 49 in Rakai, Uganda, showed circumcised men were 48 percent less likely than uncircumcised men to become infected...

HOUSTON, Oct. 23 — What does it say about this country that it’s hard to find people willing to be paid to lie around all day and take an occasional spin?

NASA’s Johnson Space Center is conducting experiments on counteracting the effects of weightlessness. To simulate a zero-gravity environment, volunteers lie down for three weeks on beds with their feet about five inches higher than their heads. They do not get up: they eat propped on an elbow, use bedpans and shower lying down on a waterproof gurney.

Like real weightlessness, this simulated version can weaken muscles and bone. To determine whether the effects can be countered, the study puts some subjects in a daily one-hour ride on a centrifuge bed that spins about 30 times a minute to simulate gravity.

The problem is that the researchers are not finding many recruits, said Liz Warren, the deputy project scientist, who is working with NASA researchers and scientists from outside institutions, including the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They had hoped for about 30 participants and have enrolled about 10.

Some people may be put off by the centrifuge bed, which — let’s face it — does look like a high-tech torture device. But Dr. Warren said just one potential test subject “has had any significant motion sickness.” Volunteers receive $6,100 for their time in the 41-day study, which includes 11 days of medical tests and 9 days of recovery.

“I don’t know why it’s so hard” to find volunteers, Dr. Warren said. “You look at how many people in this country do nothing but be couch potatoes anyway. Why can’t they come work for us?”

But later in the conversation, she shared an inkling. “Could you lie down for that period?” she asked. “Could you take that much time off of work?”...

A decade after the final retirement of Lockheed Martin's Mach-3 SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, the Air Force is preparing to test a plane that flies more than three times as fast. Two Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicles, built by Lockheed Martin with input from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), will take to the air in 2008. The $100-million program aims to field a Mach-10 unmanned aircraft that can spy on foreign powers, drop bombs or even lob satellites into orbit.

The Blackbird, which was first retired in 1990 then briefly resurrected between 1995 and 1997, reached its Mach-3 top speed by way of its hybrid Pratt & Whitney J-58 engines, which featured a conventional turbojet engine installed inside a ramjet optimized for supersonic flight. At low speeds, the turbojet did most of the work; at high speed the turbojet throttled back and the ramjet took over.

Engineers are improving on this so-called "combined cycle" to propel the Falcon, using a more powerful "scramjet" in place of the ramjet. "We need propulsion that transitions seamlessly from Mach 0 to Mach 9 or 10," says Lockheed Martin's Bob Baumgartner.

"For low speed, we're looking at turbine engines that can perform at speeds from Mach 0 to Mach 4, then a scramjet ... that takes over anywhere between Mach 2 and Mach 4 and goes up to higher Mach numbers -- depending on the fuel, up to Mach 10," says Steven Walker, a Darpa researcher. "For sure, we know how turbines work, but we don't have turbines that work at Mach 4."...

Scientists found a gold mine of bacteria almost two miles beneath the Earth’s surface.

The subterranean microorganisms, a division of Firmicutes bacteria, use radioactive uranium to convert water molecules into useable energy.  Uranium is an element contained within the Earth’s crust and is an abundant source of energy.

The presence of such terrestrial organism raises the potential that bacteria could live beneath the surface of other planets such as Mars. The researchers found the bacteria when they learned of a water-filled fracture [image] in a South African gold mine close to Johannesburg. Upon sampling the water they noticed something odd.

The water contained hydrogen and hydrocarbons that form when water exposed to radiation from rocks containing uranium breaks down. The age of the water and analysis of the microbes revealed that these bacteria parted from their surface relatives some three to 25 million years ago.

"We know how isolated the bacteria have been because our analyses show that the water they live in is very old and hasn't been diluted by surface water,” said lead author Li-Hung Lin, from National Taiwan University.  “In addition, we found that the hydrocarbons in the local environment did not come from living organisms, as is usual, and that the source of the hydrogen needed for their respiration comes from the decomposition of water by radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and potassium."...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Scientists are boldly going where only fiction has gone before - to develop a Cloak of Invisibility. It isn't quite ready to hide a Romulan space ship from Capt. James T. Kirk or to disguise Harry Potter, but it is a significant start and could show the way to more sophisticated designs.

In this first successful experiment, researchers from the United States and England were able to cloak a copper cylinder.

It's like a mirage, where heat causes the bending of light rays and cloaks the road ahead behind an image of the sky.

"We have built an artificial mirage that can hide something from would-be observers in any direction," said cloak designer David Schurig, a research associate in Duke University's electrical and computer engineering department.

For their first attempt, the researchers designed a cloak that prevents microwaves from detecting objects. Like light and radar waves, microwaves usually bounce off objects, making them visible to instruments and creating a shadow that can be detected.

Cloaking used special materials to deflect radar or light or other waves around an object, like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream. It differs from stealth technology, which does not make an aircraft invisible but reduces the cross-section available to radar, making it hard to track.

The new work points the way for an improved version that could hide people and objects from visible light...