AP - Israel ignored mounting international calls for a cease-fire and said it won't stop its crippling 10-day assault until "peace and tranquility" are achieved in southern Israeli towns in the line of Palestinian rocket fire.

AP - The Democratic-dominated Congress convenes Tuesday to confront perhaps the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and to grapple with a hugely ambitious agenda set by President-elect Barack Obama.

AP - President-elect Barack Obama's proposed stimulus package would provide businesses with billions of dollars in refunds on taxes they paid several years ago.

AP - President-elect Barack Obama's selection of an old White House hand to head the CIA shows a preference for a strong manager over an intelligence expert.

AP - Two more months of mortgage payments and retiree Allan Goldstein says he'll be broke, just another victim in what may be the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.

AP - Toyota is suspending production at all 12 of its Japan plants for 11 days over February and March, a stoppage of unprecedented scale for the nation's top automaker as it grapples with shrinking global demand.

AP - The Texas Longhorns will be No. 1 on at least one ballot. It belongs to coach Mack Brown. Brown said he made up his mind after Colt McCoy hit Quan Cosby for a 26-yard touchdown with 16 seconds to play, lifting the third-ranked Longhorns to a 24-21 Fiesta Bowl victory over No. 10 Ohio State on Monday night. The stunning strike capped an 11-play, 78-yard drive that took only 1:42.

1898: Two British researchers discover the element krypton. It's real, but it would inspire fantastic fiction.

William Ramsay, a Scot, and his student Morris Travers, an Englishman, were searching for gases in the helium family. They boiled a sample of liquefied air until they got rid of the water, oxygen, nitrogen, helium and argon. Then they placed the residue in a Plücker tube connected to an induction coil. It produced a spectrum with bright yellow and green lines.

Because they had suspected its presence, but had to look for it by removing all that other stuff, Ramsay and Travers gave the element with atomic number 36 the name krypton, from the Greek kryptos for hidden (think cryptography or encryption).

Within weeks, the scientifically dynamic duo had detected a duet of other noble gases: neon and xenon. Ramsay was already responsible for discovering helium (with Lord Rayleigh) in 1894 and argon in 1895, giving him ownership of nearly an entire column of the periodic table. (The noble gases used to be called the inert gases, but they have been found to be slightly reactive, forming compounds such as krypton difluoride and xenon tetroxide.)

King Edward VII made Ramsay a Knight Commander of the Order of Bath in 1902. Ramsay received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Krypton has a variety of uses today: in flashes for high-speed photography, in fluorescent lights in combination with argon, and to make so-called neon signs that have a greenish-yellow light. (Neon itself glows red.) Between 1960 and 1983, the meter was defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in a vacuum of the orange-red radiation of the krypton 86 isotope.

When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in Action Comics No. 1 (published June 1938), they named their superhero's home planet after the chemical element discovered 40 years earlier. Retellings of Superman's origins place his arrival on Earth around the time of World War I, a mere 20 years after Ramsay and Traver's discovery of krypton.

Siegel and Shuster may have been inspired by the element's cryptic name, its ghastly glow or perhaps just its sound, like George Eastman favoring the strength of the letter K.

Regardless, Superman and his legion of fans have made the fictional planet Krypton far better known than the real element. The fictional mineral kryptonite, which threatens Superman's strength and vitality, even has a real-life counterpart, almost.

Mining researchers in Jadar, Serbia, in 2007 unearthed some sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide and learned that's what's written on a case of rock containing kryptonite in the film Superman Returns. "The new mineral does not contain fluorine," a mineralogist told the BBC, "and is white rather than green but, in all other respects, the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite."

But the miners named it jadarite, because the mineral does not contain the element krypton, and internationally accepted rules of nomenclature thus prevented it from being named kryptonite.

Spoilsports.

Then again, doesn't Jadar sound like the name of one of Superman's cousins or something on the planet Krypton?

Source: Various

As technology makes the world smaller, it's also helping more countries escape to the heavens. (Ground control to Major Olawale!) But don't start daydreaming of UN meetings on Mars and space walks for peace: These space programs are all about blasting surveillance tech, comet chasers, super telescopes, and celestial probes into the (increasingly crowded) cosmos.

Nigeria
Program Founded: 1998
Budget: $93 million (initial funding)
Yes, Nigeria actually has its own space agency. The organization sent up its first satellite, a weather unit, back in 2003. In May 2007, China assisted in the launch of NigComSat-1, which helps provide Internet access to rural areas of the country.

Algeria
Program Founded: 2002
Budget: Unknown
France helped establish a constellation of desert launch sites more than 60 years ago. In 2002, the newly formed Agence Spatiale Algerienne blasted up Alsat-1, a 200-pound cube that has beamed back more than 1,000 photos as well as intel for disaster relief.

Israel
Program Founded: 1983
Budget: $50 million (est.)
Israel's Shavit launch vehicle is used primarily for communications, imaging, and research satellites — always over the Mediterranean to avoid flying above hostile neighbors. The first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, died aboard the NASA shuttle Columbia.

India
Program Founded: 1972
Budget: $1 billion
India's space agency is racing to be the sixth program to reach the moon (after Russia, the US, Europe, Japan, and China) with Chandrayaan-1 — an $83 million lunar orbiter carrying NASA and ESA instruments. India aims to send up its own manned lunar mission by 2020.

Iran
Program Founded: 2003
Budget: $100 million
In October 2005, Iran launched its first satellite, Sina-1, aboard a Russian rocket. Earlier this year, the country fired its own rocket, Kavoshgar-1, designed to scout future orbital paths. By 2010, Tehran expects to deploy four additional satellites.

Brazil
Program Founded: 1994
Budget: $125 million
In 2003, an explosion on the launch pad took 21 lives. But Brazil rebounded the next year, when a VSB-30 rocket reached an altitude of 160 miles. In 2006, Marcos Pontes became the first Brazilian in space, floating aboard the International Space Station for eight days.

Japan
Program Founded: 2003
Budget: $2.5 billion
Japan has yet to build a spacecraft fit for humans. But it did send the first journalist into space: 18 years ago, Toyohiro Akiyama spent a week on the Russian space station Mir. The Japanese are eyeing a lunar landing in 2020 and hoping to build a base on the moon by 2030.

China
Program Founded: 1993
Budget: $2 billion (est.)
From the Gobi Desert, China sent its first human into orbit in 2003 — becoming the fourth agency to do so. Today, manned missions are taking off on a regular basis. Officials are planning China's first space walk this fall and expect to launch a moon rover by 2012.

European Space Agency
Program Founded: 1975
Budget: $5 billion
On the ESA's plate: launching the James Webb Space Telescope (with NASA and Canada) in 2013. The following year, its Rosetta spacecraft will meet up with 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for the first long-term analysis of a comet.

Russia
Program Founded: 1920s
Budget: $1.5 billion
Russia helps fund its space program by licensing its rocket tech and assisting other countries' initiatives. (South Korea paid $25 million to send up its first citizen.) A joint effort with China aims to launch a soil-collecting satellite to the Martian moon Phobos in 2009.

* Wired apologizes to those countries funding space exploration that we did not mention, such as Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, the UAE, the UK, and, likely, North Korea and Iraq.

Bernie Krause listens to nature for a living. The 69-year-old is a field recording scientist: He heads into the wilderness to document the noises made by native fauna — crickets chirping in the Amazon rain forest, frogs croaking in the Australian outback.

But Krause has noticed something alarming. The natural sound of the world is vanishing. He'll be deep inside the Amazon, recording that cricket, but when he listens carefully he also hears machinery: The distant howl of a 747 or the dull roar of a Hummer miles way.

Krause has a word for the pristine acoustics of nature: biophony. It's what the world sounds like in the absence of humans. But in 40 percent of the locations where Krause has recorded over the past 40 years, human-generated noise has infiltrated the wilderness. "It's getting harder and harder to find places that aren't contaminated," he says.

This isn't just a matter of aesthetics. The contamination of biophony may soon become a serious environmental issue — Krause says that man-made sounds are already wreaking havoc with animal communication. We worry about the carbon emissions from SUVs and airplanes; maybe we should be equally concerned about the racket they cause.

Krause's argument is simple. In a biophony, animals divide up the acoustic spectrum so they don't interfere with one another's voices. He shows me a spectrogram of a wilderness recording, in which all the component noises are mapped according to pitch. It looks like the musical score for an orchestra, with each instrument in its place. No two species are using the same frequency. "That's part of how they coexist so well," Krause says. When they issue mating calls or all-important warning cries, they aren't masked by the noises of other animals.

But what happens when man-made noise — anthrophony, as Krause dubs it — intrudes on the natural symphony? Maybe it's the low rumble of nearby construction or the high whine of a turboprop. Either way, it interferes with a segment of the spectrum already in use, and suddenly some animal can't make itself heard. The information flow in the jungle is compromised.

Krause has heard this happen all over the world. For example, the population of spadefoot toads in the Yosemite region of the Sierras is declining rapidly, and Krause thinks it's because of low-flying military training missions in the area. The toad calls lose their synchronicity, and coyotes and owls home in on individual frogs trying to rejoin the chorus.

And as Krause has discovered, it doesn't take much to disrupt a soundscape. California's Lincoln Meadow, for example, has undergone only a tiny bit of logging, but the acoustic imprint of the region has completely changed in tandem with the landscape, and some species seem to have been displaced. The area looks the same as ever, "but if you listen to it, the density and diversity of sound is diminished," Krause says. "It has a weird feeling."

Biologists were initially skeptical of Krause's theory, but he's slowly gaining converts. Now even bigwigs like Harvard's E. O. Wilson have gone on record in support.

So how do you quiet an increasingly cacophonous world? Perhaps we should be developing not just clean tech but "quiet" tech, industrial machinery designed to run as silently as possible. More regulations could help, too. Cities have long had noise ordinances; wilderness areas could benefit from tighter protections as well.

Some of this is just about educating ourselves. We all recognize ecological tragedies by sight — when we see pictures of clear-cut areas, say, or melting Arctic ice shelves. Now we need to learn to listen to the earth, too.

Last year, Krause brought biophony to the masses by creating an extraordinarily cool add-on for Google Earth. Download it from his WildSanctuary.com site and you can click on dozens of locations worldwide to hear snippets of their soundscape.

I select the Amazon rain forest and my office is suddenly filled with a mesmerizing mix of hoots, cries, and rustling. It's spooky — like nothing I've ever heard before.

And like nothing I'll ever hear again, if we don't watch out. "Earth has a voice," Krause says. "We can't let it go silent."

Email clive@clivethompson.net.