'Twitter' Olympics may strain Internet
LONDON, March 21 (UPI) -- Experts say Internet speeds may take a hit at the 2012 Olympics in London with slow service or even disruptions by what are being dubbed the "Twitter Games."
England's Internet Service Providers' Association is warning of a "massive hit on the infrastructure" from a predicted deluge of data as the athletic events get under way in July, the BBC reported Wednesday.
Businesses allowing employees to watch the Summer Games at work could face problems, it said.
"The average connection speed for small and medium business is unlikely to allow every employee to stream the Olympics to their desk," association member James Blessing said.
Olympic officials have told London businesses to prepare for sluggish service during the Games, the report said.
Mobile carrier Vodafone said it expected difficulties in meeting the demand for mobile data as users seek updates using their smartphones.
"This summer it's going to be the equivalent of England playing in the World Cup final on Christmas Day, every day for the 17 days of the Games," a Vodafone representative said.
New images give clues to asteroid's past
PASADENA, Calif., March 21 (UPI) -- NASA says its Dawn spacecraft has revealed unexpected details on the surface of the giant asteroid Vesta, including some never seen before on an asteroid.
Vesta is one of the brightest objects in the solar system and is visible to the naked eye from Earth, and the orbiting Dawn spacecraft has found that some areas on Vesta can be nearly twice as bright as others, giving clues to the asteroid's history, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., reported Wednesday.
Bright areas appear everywhere on Vesta but are most predominant in and around craters, where cosmic impacts on the surface seem to have exposed and spread this bright material, researchers say.
"Our analysis finds this bright material originates from Vesta and has undergone little change since the formation of Vesta over 4 billion years ago," Jian-Yang Li, a Dawn participating scientist at the University of Maryland, said. "We're eager to learn more about what minerals make up this material and how the present Vesta surface came to be."
Darker areas of Vesta are thought to be from collisions that melted the outer crust of the asteroid, researchers said.
"Some of these past collisions were so intense they melted the surface," Brett Denevi, another Dawn participating scientist at Johns Hopkins University, said. "Dawn's ability to image the melt marks a unique find. Melting events like these were suspected, but never before seen on an asteroid."
Three-cylinder cars coming to U.S.
LOS ANGELES, March 21 (UPI) -- U.S. automakers say new cars with three-cylinder engines can give better gas mileage with the same power as the four-cylinder compact sedans Americans buy now.
The cars can get 40 miles per gallon in traffic and 50 on the highway, and they're not expensive hybrids nor do they need any special fuels, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.
Ford Motor Co. said it will have a three-cylinder Focus or Fiesta for sale in the United States by the middle of next year.
"This engine is a game-changer," Steve Cropley of the British publication Autocar said of the three-cylinder Focus that just went on sale in Europe. "You barely hear the thing start, and it idles so smoothly you'd swear it had stalled."
Japanese makers Mitsubishi and Nissan and Germany's BMW and Volkswagen are all said to be working on three-cylinder designs.
Any vehicles with such small engines must be sure "not to compromise performance or fuel economy," to attract U.S. buyers, Rebecca Lindland, an analyst with IHS Automotive, said.
Manufacturers have been encouraged by how quickly Americans have been willing to move from large power plants down to four-cylinder models.
Forty-seven percent of the cars sold last year had four cylinders, auto survey company Edmunds.com said.
"Three cylinders shouldn't be much of a stretch," Dave Sullivan of automotive consulting firm AutoPacific Inc., said.
Madagascar's 'founding mothers' found
PALMERSTON NORTH, New Zealand, March 21 (UPI) -- Though Madagascar is just 250 miles off Africa's coast, researchers say DNA analysis suggests its first settlers may have been from Indonesia, 5,000 miles away.
Murray Cox of Massey University in New Zealand and colleagues analyzed mitochondrial DNA -- inherited from mothers -- from 266 Malagasy and 2,745 Indonesians. Their findings suggest Madagascar's initial population contained about 30 women of reproductive age, with roughly 93 percent of their genes indicating ties to Indonesia, NewScientist.com reported Wednesday.
Madagascar appears to have been colonized only within the last 1,500 years but long accidental crossings of the Indian Ocean between Indonesia and Madagascar have happened before, Cox said.
"In the Second World War there was bombing around Java and a lot of that wreckage -- including in one case a survivor in a life raft -- actually washed up on Madagascar," he said. "So you could imagine a boat being blown off course in Indonesia and making it to the island."
Cox said he wants repeat his DNA studies of Madagascar's "founding mothers" with Y chromosome data to work out how many men were in the first population.
"This isn't just a story of the women," he said.
