A team of scientists has found the source of the stream of particles that build the solar wind. At the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast, Professor Louise Harra explained how astronomers have used a UK-led instrument on Hinode space observatory to track down the starting point for the wind.

Solar wind consists of electrically charged particles that flow out from the Sun in all directions. The particles have a minimum speed of 200 km per second, taking 10 days to travel from the Sun to the Earth. These winds create the northern and southern lights auroras and can interfering with electronic systems on satellites and sometimes can overload electrical power grids on the ground.

Hinode was launched in the autumn of 2006 and since then it has been used to study the Sun. One of the instruments on the probe, the UK-built Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) measures the speed at which material flows out from the Sun.

The Sun is shaped by magnetic fields, which create regions of high activity. Scientists found that at the edges of these regions hot gas spurts out at high speeds and that magnetic fields connect the regions together even if they are widely separated.

It is a video from a bikini contest that got more that 4616 diggs. And in just 12 minutes the video was made popular by 400 diggs.

NSFW - Not Safe For Work

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TagCow is a new service that automatically tags photos. They said that users can upload thousands of photos that can be tagged and in a few minutes.

And it turns out that the service is powered by humans. At Amazon’s Mechanical Turk you can apply for a job that pays 4 cents for five tagged photos. Amazon Mechanical Turk is a service where people are paid to do things that are to complex for computers to do.

Amazon launched Amazon TextBuyIt, a service that allows Amazon users to buy stuff through mobile phone text message.

User’s text the name of a product, the description, or the UPC or ISBN number to Amazon 262966 and if Amazon has the item, the users will get the two results sent to them.

If the user wants to make a purchase, he replies with 1 or 2 and is asked for his email address and zip code. Then he is called back by the system to complete the checkout process via an automated voice system.

This is a free service, but if you use TextBuyIt you can’t take advantage of “Deal of the Day” items or “Gold Box Discount”.

Google didn’t stop after the Virgle hoax and delivered more hoaxes.

Google China launches “A tiger, n-Wu” a social search engine

Use meat search ways of interpreting human search “A tiger, n-Wu”, which is on the distant quiz on the “human search,” explained one Googler. Today would like to come back to this project, the most interesting is the different “types” Googler to warm to what they see as “human search,” Yansigefeng the engineers, the pursuit of perfect love UI designers and the write poems Googler.”

Google Korea launches SATURI a translation service.

“Instead of utilizing technology to provide a service that Google Korea’s R & D center is a combination of metrics for dialect translation systems developed by its current service through the Google translation. For example, if you want to translate the dialect Jeolla Province was put into sentences, sentences that the document search and translated into various dialects, dialect retrieved documents are converted back Jeolla Province will be provided to the user, Google lets you translate the dialect of the local dialect to another did not even know you can retrieve all the documents without any inconvenience.”

Google Japan launched a special Universal Search result for Dajare.

Google is “to organize the world’s information to people around the world that can be used to access” in order to fulfill its mission and started PigeonRank night working on the development of the technology. In particular, the R & D Center in Tokyo, the early “laughter” especially “DAJARE” highly communicative function with a focus on the research and development done’m here.

Google Australia launched gDay, a new service that lets you search today the web pages published tomorrow.

“Using MATE’s™ machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future. Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.”

Did you notice the gDay logo?

Also from Google Australia the Gmail Custom Time service.

“Just click Set custom time from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox.”

Google Book Search launched a new feature they capture the smell of books.

“Today I’m pleased to let you know that we’ve made some headway with one type of volume we’ve struggled with in the past: books employing scratch-and-sniff technology. Using special equipment and tricky JavaScript, we’re now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process and then embed them in your web browser when you preview these titles in Google Book Search.”

This are just a few hoaxes and there are many more.

Google and Virgin have created a joint venture Virgle Inc., with the purpose of colonizing Mars. The spacecrafts should be ready to send people and materials to Mars in 2014, the crafts will be manufactured by Virgin and Google will finance project.

Also Virgin created a 100 years plan for the development of the Mars Settlement and Google already started to sell ads on Mars.

Don’t take this too seriously like my, this is Google’s April Fool’s day of 2008.

For more information read the Google blog.

After the launch of MySpace Mobile, MySpace has expanded the text message alert program with five new carriers Alltel Wireless, Verizon Wireless, Virgin Mobile USA, T-Mobile USA and US Cellular through a partnership with mBlox.

Users can receive notifications of friend requests, profile comments and new messages through SMS message. Until now three carriers supported the service AT&T, Helio and Sprint.

Entrecard social network has closed their Series A round of funding. They didn’t said how much money they received, but the investment is evaluated at $1.1 million. The founder of Powweb, Andrew Te led the investment.

In five months it has reached a rank of 1433 on Alexa and serves up to 2 million widgets a day.

Warner Music joins RIAA on the $5 a month tax. They say that this is not really a tax is only a “protection” services against them, if you pay you won’t be sued.

The tax isn’t mandatory but if the ISPs will be force to join the scheme it will be. It may seem that this is good news but it isn’t because this is an extortion scheme and if it get approved it will be government endorsed extortion, making RIAA and the other music labels criminal organizations, from witch users can’t escape.

Even if you will pay the tax it will still be illegal to download music from the Internet through BitTorrent or from other P2P networks. And because like any other criminal organization RIAA will get greedy and the $5 tax will soon become the $10 tax. From the $5 tax RIAA will generate $20 billion a year in revenues making it a very powerful organization.