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The day is not far when slow-moving ocean and river currents may become new, reliable and affordable alternative energy source, all thanks to VIVACE - a machine designed by an engineer at University of Michigan that works like a fish to turn potentially destructive vibrations in fluid flows into clean, renewable power.

VIVACE is the first known device that could harness energy from most of the water currents around the globe because it works in flows moving slower than 2 knots (about 2 miles per hour.) Most of the Earth’s currents are slower than 3 knots. Turbines and water mills need an average of 5 or 6 knots to operate efficiently.

Expanded as Vortex Induced Vibrations for Aquatic Clean Energy, VIVACE doesn’t depend on waves, tides, turbines or dams. It’s a unique hydrokinetic energy system that relies on “vortex induced vibrations.”

Vortex induced vibrations are undulations that a rounded or cylinder-shaped object makes in a flow of fluid, which can be air or water. The presence of the object puts kinks in the current’s speed as it skims by.

This causes eddies, or vortices, to form in a pattern on opposite sides of the object. The vortices push and pull the object up and down or left and right, perpendicular to the current.

“For the past 25 years, engineers-myself included-have been trying to suppress vortex induced vibrations. But now at Michigan we’re doing the opposite. We enhance the vibrations and harness this powerful and destructive force in nature,” said VIVACE developer Michael Bernitsas, a professor in the U-M Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering.

Fish excel in how to put the vortices that cause these vibrations to good use.

“VIVACE copies aspects of fish technology. Fish curve their bodies to glide between the vortices shed by the bodies of the fish in front of them. Their muscle power alone could not propel them through the water at the speed they go, so they ride in each other’s wake,” said Bernitsas.

The working prototype in his lab is just one sleek cylinder attached to springs. The cylinder hangs horizontally across the flow of water in a tractor-trailer-sized tank in his marine renewable energy laboratory. The water in the tank flows at 1.5 knots.

Now, the VIVACE cylinder in the current causes alternating vortices to form above and below the cylinder. The vortices push and pull the passive cylinder up and down on its springs, creating mechanical energy. Then, the machine converts the mechanical energy into electricity.

Bernitsas said that only a few cylinders might be enough to power an anchored ship, or a lighthouse. These cylinders could be stacked in a short ladder.

He estimated that array of VIVACE converters the size of a running track and about two stories high could power about 100,000 houses. Such an array could rest on a river bed or it could dangle, suspended in the water. But it would all be under the surface.

It is believed that the system would not harm marine life like dams and water turbines can, because the oscillations of VIVACE would be slow.

Bernitsas said VIVACE energy would cost about 5.5 cents per kilowatt hour.

“There won’t be one solution for the world’s energy needs. But if we could harness 0.1 percent of the energy in the ocean, we could support the energy needs of 15 billion people,” said Bernitsas.

The study is published in the current issue of the quarterly Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and the newly-arrived shuttle Endeavour planned on Monday to start unpacking a new toilet and a contraption that purifies urine and sweat into drinkable water at the orbiting outpost.

The main business of the day is unloading a cargo container nicknamed ‘Leonardo’ from space shuttle Endeavour’s belly and attaching it to the ISS. Inside the 21-foot-long container is almost 15,000 pounds of equipment that will allow the space station to expand from three to six crew members next year.

“Things are going exceedingly well,” said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team.

Besides the extra bathroom and urine processor, Endeavour delivered an exercise machine, kitchenette and two sleeping compartments. Endeavour docked with the space station on Sunday afternoon, almost two days after it launched from Florida.

The shuttle’s crew will spend almost two weeks orbiting 220 miles above Earth at the outpost, setting up the new equipment and going on four spacewalks to clean and lubricate a solar wing-rotating joint that broke down more than a year ago.

Once the hatch opened between the space station and shuttle, it looked like a family reunion. The shuttle’s seven astronauts exchanged a cacophony of greetings with the station’s three crew members, wrapping one another in bear hugs and shaking hands. In a long-standing tradition, a bell was rung at the station’s entrance.

“Sandy, welcome to your new home,” ISS commander Mike Fincke told astronaut Sandra Magnus, who traded places with astronaut Gregory Chamitoff as a space station crew member. After living for six months at the station, Chamitoff will return to Earth with Endeavour.

Analysts on the ground continued looking at images taken during launch and right before Endeavour docked. When Endeavour pulled within several hundred feet of the space station Sunday, shuttle commander Christopher Ferguson guided it through a 360-degree backflip so Fincke and Chamitoff could take close-up photos of its thermal shielding. About 200 digital images will help NASA determine whether Endeavour sustained damage during liftoff Friday night.

Shuttle officials initially thought a narrow strip of thermal blanket was yanked off during launch, but images showed the blanket remained intact. They now think the piece of debris seen coming off Endeavour or its external fuel tank during launch likely was a piece of ice, which didn’t strike the shuttle.

Shuttle officials can order an extra inspection if they’re concerned but won’t make that decision until Tuesday. The extra precautions were implemented after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry in 2003 over Texas, killing all seven crew members.

Australia’s kangaroos are genetically similar to humans and may have first evolved in China, Australian researchers said Tuesday.

Scientists said they had for the first time mapped the genetic code of the Australian marsupials and found much of it was similar to the genome for humans, the government-backed Center of Excellence for Kangaroo Genomics said.

“There are a few differences, we have a few more of this, a few less of that, but they are the same genes and a lot of them are in the same order,” center Director Jenny Graves told reporters in Melbourne.

“We thought they’d be completely scrambled, but they’re not. There is great chunks of the human genome which is sitting right there in the kangaroo genome,” Graves said, according to AAP.

Humans and kangaroos last shared an ancestor at least 150 million years ago, the researchers found, while mice and humans diverged from one another only 70 million years ago.

Kangaroos first evolved in China, but migrated across the Americas to Australia and Antarctica, they said.

“Kangaroos are hugely informative about what we were like 150 million years ago,” Graves said.

NASA is keeping an eye on the weather as it prepares the shuttle Endeavour for a Friday night launch toward the International Space Station.

Endeavour has a 60 percent chance of favorable launch weather for its planned 7:55 p.m. EST (0055 Nov. 15 GMT) liftoff to ferry a new crewmember and vital new equipment to the space station. Thick clouds and the chance of nearby rain showers at the shuttle’s Kennedy Space Center launch site in Florida are the only concerns, NASA officials said.

“Our systems are in great shape,” said NASA Test Director Jeff Spaulding in a televised briefing at the seaside spaceport in Cape Canaveral, Fla. “We’re tracking no issues at this time.”

A weather front is expected to arrive at Endeavour’s launch site late this week and poses a 40 percent chance of thwarting the launch late Friday, said Kathy Winters, shuttle weather officer for the launch.

The forecast is even worse for Saturday, with rain and thick clouds posing a 60 percent chance of preventing the shuttle launch, she added.

“The timing of the front will be critical,” Winters said.

While NASA watches the weather, Endeavour shuttle commander Chris Ferguson and his STS-126 crew are due to arrive at the Kennedy Space Center today at about 4:00 p.m. EST (2100 GMT).

Endeavour’s seven astronauts are gearing up for a planned 15-day mission to the space station, where they plan to swap out one member of the outpost’s Expedition 18 crew and deliver a second kitchen, bathroom, new exercise equipment, two sleeping compartments and a recycling system that will allow astronauts to process urine into drinking water.

The new gear is designed to boost the station’s ability to accommodate larger, six-person crews. Four spacewalks are also planned for the mission, which could be extended an extra day if supplies allow, to clean and grease up a balky solar array joint that has been damaged by metal shavings.

The countdown for Endeavour’s launch is slated to begin tonight at about 10:00 p.m. EST (0300 Nov. 12 GMT).

NASA must launch the shuttle by Nov. 25 before having to stand down due to unfavorable power and sun angle conditions at the space station. Mission managers prefer to launch Endeavour by Nov. 21 to avoid docking conflicts with an unmanned Russian Progress cargo ship at the space station late this month.

Endeavour’s STS-126 liftoff will mark NASA’s fourth shuttle flight, and second night launch, of the year. But it comes after a months-long flight hiatus made even longer by last month’s launch delay for the shuttle Discovery’s mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

So maybe there was no dinosaur dancing after all.

Paleontologists say there are no signs of dinosaur tracks at a remote spot along the Utah-Arizona border that was previously described by University of Utah geologists as a “dinosaur dance floor” for its density of tracks.

“We didn’t observe a single footprint,” said Andrew Milner, paleontologist at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm in southwestern Utah.

He was one of four paleontologists who hiked into the area last week after a heavily publicized study claiming there were more than 1,000 previously unknown dinosaur tracks crammed onto less than an acre in the Arizona portion of Vermillion Cliffs National Monument.

“We went up there optimistic, really hoping we were going to find footprints,” Milner said Friday.

They quickly determined there were none. Instead, it was a dense collection of potholes caused by erosion in the sandstone, they said.

And the supposed tail-drag marks in the rock? Probably another result of erosion, the paleontologists said.

Marjorie Chan, a University of Utah researcher who co-authored the “dinosaur dance floor” study, said she’s open to the paleontologists’ views and says she’ll team up with other researchers for another examination of the site.

“I’m interested in the truth, no matter what the outcome is,” Chan said.

The much-delayed launch of a European satellite designed to monitor Earth’s gravitational field is unlikely to take place before February, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Friday.

The Gravity field and state-steady Ocean Circulation Explorer, or GOCE, should have been launched on September 10 from the Plesetsk cosmodrome 800 kilometres (500 miles) north of Moscow.

The operation has been postponed several times, after a problem was identified in the guidance and navigation subsystem in the launcher’s upper stage, called the Breeze KM.

“The necessary hardware changes will require a minimum of two months of additional work by the manufacturer,” ESA said in a press release here.

“As a consequence, the launch of GOCE cannot take place earlier than February 2009; however, the exact launch date will only be decided at a later stage once the corrective measures have been fully implemented and validated.”

GOCE is part of ESA’s “Earth Explorer” programme, initiated in 1999, to deepen understanding about some of the fundamentals of the planet — its atmosphere, oceans, biosphere and interior.

The satellite’s launcher is a Rockot, a derivative of a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile operated by a joint venture between EADS Astrium and the Khrunichev Space Centre.

Six farm employees were charged with animal abuse and neglect Wednesday in connection with a video obtained by an animal-rights group that showed workers abusing pigs.

Authorities in rural Greene County northwest of Des Moines began investigating about a month ago after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals released a video of workers at a farm in Bayard hitting sows with metal rods, slamming piglets on a concrete floor and bragging about jamming rods into the anuses of sows. The farm is owned by MowMar Farms LLP of Fairmont, Minn., and supplies Hormel Foods Corp. of Austin, Minn.

Sheriff Tom Heater said warrants have been issued for the workers, who are facing misdemeanor charges that include livestock abuse, aiding and abetting livestock abuse and livestock neglect. The most serious counts carry a maximum two-year sentence.

According to a news release from Heater’s office, four of the workers no longer work at the plant, while two others are still employed there. Once they are arrested, they will have hearings before a Greene County magistrate.

PETA had sought the prosecution of 18 people on animal cruelty violations.

Heater said some workers shown in the video using electric prods won’t be charged because there is debate on whether the devices are reasonable for use in livestock farming.

Daphna Nachminovitch, vice president of PETA’s Cruelty Investigations Department, said the group respects the sheriff’s judgment and trusts that a solid case has been built based on its undercover video.

“Charges against any number of pig factory farmers in the nation’s top pork producing state should deter the industry’s workers from continuing to abuse and neglect these intelligent, playful and sensitive animals,” she said in a statement.

The sheriff said MowMar Farms has been cooperative in the investigation. The company has said it had owned the farm for less than a month before the video came out.

“I think once the charges are out they will proceed with anything they need to do — firings, restructuring, training,” Heater said.

Earlier this week, PETA released additional video allegedly showing the manager of the farm kicking and shocking an injured sow. PETA said it confirmed that the manager still works at the farm through a telephone call to the facility.

MowMar didn’t indicate what might happen to the manager, but has said it has fired other workers that have been documented abusing pigs. It said its investigation is continuing.

“It is important that the investigation is allowed to complete its work to ensure that any termination and/or discipline is justified and the rights of employees are respected,” the company said in a statement this week.

Heater said his department knew nothing about the abuse at the farm until the PETA footage was released last month. Asked what he thought of the video images, Heater said some of the workers’ actions were “uncalled for.”

“I was a farm boy. The deputy investigating is a farm boy. You don’t have to beat animals … you just have to deal with them and wait,” he said.

India was Tuesday set to launch its historic unmanned flight to the moon, the sixth to do so after the US, former Soviet Union, European Space Agency, China and Japan. The skies cleared Tuesday evening after a heavy downpur, cheering scientists counting down to the early Wednesday morning launch.

Full Coverage: Moon Mission »

As the fully-loaded 44-metre-tall 316-tonne rocket, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV C11) stood at the second launch pad of the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Sriharikota, off the Andhra Pradesh coast, 80 km north of Chennai, a meteorogical officer at the spot told agencies: “Though rain is likely at the launch, there is no cyclone threat forecast”.

As the PSLV holds aloft the 1,380-kg lunar orbiter Chandrayaan, waiting for the ignition command at 6.20 a.m. Wednesday, the top brass of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) decided that “two or three hours before liftoff, met experts will analyse the weather data once again to ascertain possibility of lightning striking the rocket or the spacecraft”, the official added.

Still very much within the earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft was sitting protected by the rocket’s 3.2-metre bulbous heat shield Tuesday evening as the weather office in Chennai also told us that the chances of a cyclone affecting the launch were slim.

“The low pressure trough is in southern Tamil Nadu, south of Pudukotai,” the Chennai weather bureau said. “It is unlikely to move north in time to affect the Chandrayaan launch.”

A confident S. Satish, director, Publications & Press Relations of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told agencies: “Eighteen minutes into the flight the rocket will sling the spacecraft into the 255-km perigee (nearest point to earth) and 23,000 km apogee (farthest point from earth) path to script a new history in the annals of India’s space odyssey,”

From there the spacecraft will be taken into more elliptical orbits, firing its onboard motor - technically called Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) - towards the moon, 387,000 km from the earth.

Once the spacecraft nears the moon, the LAM will be fired in reverse to slow it down to enable the moon’s gravity to capture Chandrayaan into an elliptical orbit around the lunar poles.

Thereafter the spacecraft’s orbit will be gradually lowered till it is 100 km above the moon’s surface. That is expected to happen around Nov 8.

On Nov 14 the spacecraft will eject an important piece of luggage on to the moon’s surface - the Moon Impact Probe (MIP).

The spacecraft cameras and other instruments that would do the intended tests for the next two years will be activated after that.

The 11 experimental instruments carried by the spacecraft are from different sources - five Indian, two from the US, three from the European Space Agency and one from Bulgaria - and each has a different purpose.

“Designing the spacecraft that would fit these pre-built instruments was a challenge which was overcome with Indian ingenuity,” Mylswamy Annadurai, project director, Chandrayaan, told IANS.

Indian space scientists may not face such problems in Chandrayaan-2 as they can stipulate the payload specifications.

The Indian government has sanctioned Rs.4.25 billion for the second moon mission that is expected to happen sometime in 2011.

That mission will have the Russian Federal Space Agency as a partner which will provide the moon rover.

Looking forward India may plan missions to Mars, Venus, Mercury and also an asteroid or comet flyby mission.

Moles are famously short-sighted thanks to disruption of genes that help to grow the lenses of their eyes, scientists said on Tuesday.

The “defects” result from genetic triggers that occur in the embryo and are not, as some have thought, a degenerative condition that starts in adulthood, they said.

Fibres that develop into the moles’ lens start to grow normally but are not completed as a result of interference of two genes called PAX6 and FOXE3.

Other genes that are central to eye development also behave abnormally, the researchers found.

Under Darwinian theory, moles and other subterranean animals forego good vision in order to accentuate sensitivity to vibrations and smell that help them survive.

The study was carried out on embryos of the Iberian mole, Talpa occidentalis, which unlike other mole species has permanently closed eyes.

The paper, led by Martin Collinson of the University of Aberdeen, northeastern Scotland, appears in the British-based open-access journal BMC Biology.

Scientists are working on using cellulose to power microbial fuel cells, in which bacteria digest plant waste matter to create electricity directly.

These fuel cells could be used to charge batteries or power electrical devices.

Others are considering drawing power from microbes digesting human waste at wastewater treatment plants or manure from feedlot lagoons.

“Basically, we’re converting cellulose into a different energy source than ethanol,” said John Regan of Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

“It’s not more efficient right now, but if you look at what’s been done over the last decade, there has been about a five to six order-of-magnitude (100,000-1,000,000-fold) increase in power density,” he added.

Microorganisms generate electrons as they break down food sources for energy, but in most species the electrons are transferred to molecules inside the cell.

Microbial fuel cells rely on the ability of certain bacteria to transport electrons to the outside of the cell. If provided with electrodes in the right arrangement, the bacteria can dump their exterior electrons through a circuit, providing power.

But these “exoelectrogenic” microbes, as Regan calls them, cannot digest cellulose. So, the system relies on another type of bacteria to break the cellulose down into simple molecules that the electron dumpers can then use.

Regan found that wastewater, which contains a diverse community of microorganisms, could generate electricity from cellulose, too, though not as much. Adding extra cellulose-degraders to the wastewater sped up the process.

Regan envisions near-term applications that would not depend on cellulose, but rather would degrade the soup of compounds in wastewater.

“In waste treatment, the incoming product is free. It’s waste material, so you could use that electricity to run pumps or aerators,” he said.

Even if the wastewater couldn’t produce enough electricity to completely power the plant, it could at least reduce the plant’s utility bill.