Recycling and trash bins are now bantering and singing at your curbside in these new comedy animated videos designed for local television and websites to promote recycling for communities and waste management companies.

San Diego, CA (PRWEB) -- Trash day will never be the same again. It used to be that your trash cans only made irritating clanking noises. Not so any longer.

Waste and recycling bins have learned how to sing. And carry on insightful conversations about their purpose in the eco-system.

All since some clever creators brought two comical curbside bins to life. Meet Mikey and Herb.

Mikey, a recycling bin, is the less senior and confident of the two. His mentor, Herb, is a seasoned trash bin who has

Boulder, Colo.-The Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says the spin of the Earth is slowing down, adding a “leap second” to 2008 (also a “leap year”), thanks to the highly accurate atomic clocks developed by NIST and others around the

<img width="200" height="150" align="left" src="http://www.unitedstates-america.net/images/articles/20080707071705720_1.jpg"; alt="">(inan.info)<img width="200" height="135" align="right" src="http://www.unitedstates-america.net/images/articles/20080707071705720_2.jpg"; alt="">Today, NOAA christened a new, state-of-the-art research vessel that will enhance the study and protection of Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico. The 83-foot R/V Manta will operate out of Galveston, Texas, where the sanctuary is headquartered.

“This technologically advanced research vessel is a vital addition to our fleet,” said Daniel J. Basta, director of NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. “The Manta will open new windows onto the marine life and habitats of the Flower Garden Banks sanctuary while helping us protect this special place for future generations.”

Built in Bellingham, Wash., by All American Marine, the twin-hulled Manta features a laboratory equipped with the latest scientific instruments, air compressors to allow divers to refill scuba tanks at sea, and a recompression chamber to enhance diver safety. The vessel can hold up to 25 people, deploy robot subs and other ocean exploration tools, and cruise at

(inan.info)-Taking advantage of a unique cosmic configuration, astronomers have measured an effect predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity in the extremely strong gravity of a pair of superdense neutron stars. Essentially, the famed physicist's 93-year-old theory passed yet another test.

Scientists at McGill University used the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to do a four-year study of a double-star system unlike any other known in the Universe. The system is a pair of neutron stars, both of which are seen as pulsars that emit lighthouse-like beams of radio waves.

"Of about 1700 known pulsars, this is the only case in which two pulsars orbit around each other," said Rene Breton, a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. In addition, the stars' orbital plane is aligned nearly perfectly with their line of sight to the Earth. This causes the signal of one to be blocked, or eclipsed, as it circles the other.

"Those eclipses are the key to making a measurement that could never be done before," Breton said.

Einstein's 1915 theory predicted that in a close system of two very massive objects, such as neutron stars, one object's gravitational tug, along with an effect of its spinning around its axis, should cause the spin axis of the other to wobble, or precess.

Studies of other pulsars in binary systems had indicated that such wobbling occurred, but could not produce precise measurements of the amount of wobbling.

"Measuring the amount of wobbling is what tests the details of Einstein's theory and gives a benchmark that any alternative gravitational theories must meet," said Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

The eclipses allowed the astronomers to pin down the geometry of the double-pulsar system and track changes in the orientation of the spin axis of one of them. As one pulsar's spin axis slowly moved, the pattern of signal blockages as the other passed behind it also changed. The signal from the pulsar in back is absorbed by the ionized gas in the other's magnetosphere.

Pulsars, first discovered in 1967, are the "corpses" of massive stars that have exploded as supernovae. What is left after the explosion is a superdense neutron star that packs more than the mass of our Sun into the size of an average city. Beams of radio waves stream outward from the poles of the star's intense magnetic field and sweep around as the star rotates, as often as

(inan.info)-In findings embargoed for release on April 17, National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers investigate the role of surface melwater on the flow of the Greenland Ice Sheet and outlet glaciers.

The research was conducted by glaciologists Sarah Das, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Ian Joughin, University of Washington and published in a pair of companion papers in the online journal Science Express this

(inan.info)-The University of Colorado at Boulder took an unusual step today by returning nearly $3 million in cost savings to NASA for an award-winning satellite mission designed, built and controlled by the university to study how the sun's variation influences Earth's climate and atmosphere.

Known as the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment, or SORCE, the $100 million mission centered at CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics was launched by NASA in 2003 and is controlled from the LASP Space Technology Building at the CU Research Park. A $2,997,000 check for the cost savings from SORCE development and operations was presented by LASP officials to Ed Chang, NASA SORCE manager from the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., at a LASP event June 17.

The SORCE mission budget total of $100 million from 1999 to 2008 included the design and development of the satellite's five instruments, as well as five-and-one-half years of operations, and did not include launch costs, said LASP Senior Research Associate Tom Woods, principal investigator of SORCE. The free-flying, 640-pound satellite was launched from Florida's Kennedy Space Center in January 2003 aboard a Pegasus expendable launch vehicle built by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., which also constructed the SORCE satellite bus, or spacecraft vehicle.

According to Woods, SORCE's development cost savings are the result of a small, efficient management team, thorough pre-launch testing of prototype instruments and tight schedule adherence during the development phase. The cost savings during flight operations were

(inan.info)-A visible layer of desert dust coats the snow of Mount Sopris in Colorado's San Juan Mountains on May 16, 2007. (Photo by Penn Newhard)

A new study spearheaded by the University of Colorado at Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center indicates wind-blown dust from drought-stricken and disturbed lands in the Southwest can shorten the duration of mountain snow cover hundreds of miles away in the Colorado mountains by roughly a month.

Led by Tom Painter, the study found seasonal snow coverage in the subalpine and alpine areas of the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado disappeared by about 30 days earlier in 2006 because of heavy dust deposition from the Colorado Plateau roughly 200 miles away. The dust, which probably came from northeast Arizona and northwest New Mexico deserts, reduced the snow's reflectivity, allowing more of the sun's energy to warm the snowpack and cause it to melt earlier.

"The connection between dust and lower snow reflectance is already established, but the amount of impact measured and modeled in this system stunned us," said Painter. "The fact that dust can reduce snow cover duration so much -- a month earlier -- transforms our understanding of

(inan.info)-VOA News.com-

The gravitational microlensing technique is based on a concept first discussed by Albert Einstein in the early 20th century. When astronomers observe a star, the light waves generally travel straight from the star to the telescope. However, if another star passes directly in between, even if great distances separate the two, the gravity of the nearer object acts like a lens and magnifies the incoming light.

Telescopes cannot resolve the details of the magnified image, but they do notice a peak in light intensity, and when a planet is

(inan.info)There are roughly 42 million square kilometers of forest on Earth, a swath that covers almost a third of the land surface, and those wooded environments play a key role in both mitigating and enhancing global warming.

In a review paper appearing in this week's Forest Ecology special issue of Science, atmospheric scientist Gordon Bonan of the Natinoal Science Foundation's National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., presents the current state of understanding for how forests impact global climate.

"As politicians and the general public become more aware of climate change, there will be greater interest in legislative policies to mitigate global warming," said Bonan. "Forests have been proposed as a possible solution, so it is imperative that we understand fully how forests influence climate."

The teeming life of forests, and the physical structures containing them, are in continuous flux with incoming solar energy, the atmosphere, the water cycle and the carbon cycle--in addition to the influences of human activities. The complex relationships both add and subtract from the equations that dictate the warming of

(inan.info)Science Foundation-Ecosystems are constantly exchanging materials through the movement of air in the atmosphere and water in lakes and rivers. The effects of humans, however, are another major source of connections among ecosystems.

In a special issue of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment on "Continental-scale ecology in an increasingly connected world" (June 2008), ecologists discuss how human influences interact with natural processes to influence global connectivity.
The authors conclude that networks of large-scale experiments are needed to predict long-term ecological change.

"We know that the world has always been connected via a common atmosphere and the movement of