NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, left to right, Firouz Naderi, Director for the Solar System Exploration, and John Brophy, Electric Propulsion Engineer, are shown during Bolden’s visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., on Thursday, May 23, 2013. NASA engineers are developing an ion engine for an asteroid capture mission later this decade. — AP Photo

PASADENA, California – Surrounded by engineers, NASA chief Charles Bolden inspected a prototype spacecraft engine that could power an audacious mission to lasso an asteroid and tow it closer to Earth for astronauts to explore.

Bolden checked on the progress Thursday a month after the Obama administration unveiled its 2014 budget that proposes $105 million to jumpstart the mission, which may eventually cost more than $2.6 billion.

Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and Glenn Research Center in Ohio are developing a thruster that relies on ion propulsion instead of conventional chemical fuel.

Once relegated to science fiction, ion propulsion – which fires beams of electrically charged atoms to propel a spacecraft – is preferred for deep space cruising because it’s more fuel-efficient. Engine testing is expected to ramp up next year.

During his visit to the JPL campus, nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of Los Angeles, Bolden viewed an engineering model of the engine and peered through a porthole of a vacuum chamber housing the prototype.

NASA is under White House orders to fly humans to an asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars. Instead of sending astronauts to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, as originally planned, the space agency came up with a quicker, cheaper idea: Haul the asteroid close to the moon and visit it there.

Bolden said the original concept was impractical given the flat budget and praised the alternative as “ingenious.”

“If you can’t get to the asteroid, bring the asteroid to you,” Bolden said.

The space agency would launch an ion-powered unmanned spacecraft to snare a yet-to-be-selected small asteroid in 2019 and park it in the moon’s neighborhood. Then a spacewalking team would hop on an Orion space capsule that’s currently under development and explore the rock in 2021.

Besides preparing astronauts for an eventual trip to Mars, NASA said the asteroid-capture mission is designed to test technologies to deflect threatening space boulders on a collision course with Earth.

“Anytime that you can get up close to an asteroid and understand its composition and its characteristics … that’s getting to know the enemy,” said Don Yeomans, who heads NASA’s Near Earth Object Program at JPL.

Scientists have a dozen potential small asteroids in mind for the mission, but Yeomans said more observations are needed before settling on a target. Whatever asteroid NASA chooses to redirect, it won’t pose a threat to Earth because it would burn up if it inadvertently plunged through the atmosphere, scientists said.

Bolden’s JPL stop is part of his annual spring tour of NASA centers around the country. His California journey began Wednesday at the Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave Desert where Sierra Nevada Corp. is preparing its Dream Chaser spaceship for test flights later this year before it can make supply runs to the International Space Station.

On Friday, Bolden was set to visit the Ames Research Center in the Silicon Valley where engineers are working on various space technologies.

Yahoo! Chief Executive Marissa Mayer listens in a Startup Battlefield session during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse in San Francisco, California September 12, 2012. — Reuters Photo

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK, Fri May 24, 2013 - Yahoo Inc has submitted a formal proposal to buy Hulu, joining a growing list of bidders for the video service owned by News Corp and Walt Disney Co, two sources with knowledge of the bid told Reuters on Friday.

Yahoo just this week announced a $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging service Tumblr. It now joins rival bidders for Hulu, including Time Warner Cable Inc, DirecTV, former News Corp president Peter Chernin and Guggenheim Digital Media, sources have said.

It is unclear how much the Internet company bid.

Sources have said Chernin is bidding $500 million, excluding an additional sum to cover Hulu’s debt and programming commitments. But a source close to the bidding told Reuters his offer was too low, that Hulu could be worth as much as $1 billion to $2 billion.

Time Warner Cable’s bid was fashioned as an equity investment, another person said, as the cable operator hopes to set up a joint venture with other cable companies to operate Hulu.

Yahoo did not respond to requests for comment. Its shares closed up 1.2 percent at $26.33.

At least five bidders have emerged for the five-year-old video service with 4 million users, potentially setting up a bidding competition. A second source close to the bidding said the offers submitted so far were non-binding and dependent on Hulu amending content licensing agreements the bidders found too restrictive.

Silver Lake, a minority owner of influential Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor, has also submitted an indicative letter of interest, the source familiar with the Hulu bidding said, confirming an earlier Bloomberg report. The private equity firm teamed up with William Morris Endeavor, which it invested in a year ago, for the bid, according to the source.

Hulu, which generated revenues of around $700 million last year, streams TV shows online in similar fashion to Netflix Inc. It is being advised in the sale by Guggenheim Partners, a separately funded group from the digital media unit that placed the bid.

Yahoo has gone on an acquisition spree to bring in talent as well as beef up its mobile and online products and content, as CEO Marissa Mayer tries to revive a once-dominant Internet icon that has for years bled users.

Yahoo remains one of the Web’s most popular destinations, but has seen its revenue shrink, as consumers and advertisers favor rivals such as Google Inc and Facebook Inc.

In this May 2013 photo, Christophe Bailhache navigates an SVII camera through a large group of sea lions during a survey dive at Champion Island in Galapagos. Google Maps sent crews armed with backpack-mounted Street View cameras and underwater gear to the Galapagos, and will be bringing the islands’ natural wonders to the Internet. — AP File Photo

SAN FRANCISCO – Few have explored the remote volcanic islands of the Galapagos archipelago, an otherworldly landscape inhabited by the world’s largest tortoises and other fantastical creatures that inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Soon it will take only the click of a mouse or finger swipe on a tablet to explore some of the Galapagos Islands’ most remote areas, surrounding waters and unique creatures.

Mountain View, Calif.,-based Google sent hikers to the Galapagos with Street View gear called “trekkers,” 42-pound computer backpacks with large, soccer ball-like cameras mounted on a tower.

Each orb has 15 cameras inside it that have captured panoramic views of some of the most inaccessible places on the Galapagos. Crews from The Catlin Seaview Survey worked with Google to capture 360-degree views of selected underwater areas too.

“We spent 10 days there hiking over trails … and even down the crater of an active volcano,” Raleigh Seamster, the project’s leader for Google Maps said. “And these are islands, so half of the life there is under the water surface. So (we brought) Street View underwater to swim with sea lions, sharks and other marine animals.”

Google is processing the footage and is trying to stitch it together. It hopes to post it to Street View later this year.

The cameras captured the nesting sites of blue-footed boobies, the red-throated “magnificent frigatebirds,” swimming hammerhead sharks and, of course, the island’s giant tortoises.

Scientists working with Google are exploring the footage for other species and hope to update the pictures regularly throughout the years as they study the effects of invasive species, tourism and climate change on the island’s ecosystems.

“We hope that children in classrooms around the world will be trying to discover what they can see in the images, even tiny creatures like insects,” said Daniel Orellana, a scientist with the Charles Darwin Foundation.

“We can use this as an education experience for children, and there is a huge opportunity for rare discoveries.”

Orellana and others supervised the Google trekkers and helped guide them to remote areas either off-limits to tourists or rarely visited because they are hard to reach.

They also captured images of the areas frequented by tourists so they can keep track of how this access is affecting the environment.

Since launching Street View in 2007, Google has expanded from urban neighborhoods accessed easily by its mapping cars to more hard-to-access sites like the ocean floor, the Amazon rain forest and the Arctic.

“This whole project was part of Google’s ongoing effort to build the most comprehensive and accurate map of the world,” Seamster said.

This product image released by Microsoft shows the new Xbox One entertainment console that will go on sale later this year. — AP Photo

SAN FRANCISCO, May 23, 2013 - The US International Trade Commission sided with Microsoft on Thursday in a patent dispute with Google-owned Motorola Mobility that could have gotten Xbox 360 videogame consoles banned from import.

“The investigation is terminated,” the ITC said in a notice announcing it was rejecting a Motorola Mobility patent complaint dating back to late 2010.

Motorola Mobility had argued that Xbox 360 consoles infringed on patent technology for wirelessly transmitting data.

If the ITC had sided with Motorola Mobility, which was acquired by Google in a $12.5 billion deal in 2012, it could have resulted in a ban on importing Xbox 360 consoles, which are manufactured in China.

“This is a win for Xbox customers and confirms our view that Google had no grounds to block our products,” Microsoft said in a statement.

Motorola Mobility countered that it was “disappointed” with the ITC decision and would explore its options. Xbox consoles are at the heart of Microsoft’s push to lay claim to Internet Age living rooms.

On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled a new-generation Xbox One console touted as a home entertainment hub that goes far beyond games.

The beefed-up hardware is powered by software that allows for instant switching between games, television, and Internet browsing. Microsoft-owned Skype was also integrated for online group video calls.

Kinect motion and sound-sensing accessories accompanying the consoles recognize users, respond instantly to commands spoken in natural language and even detect a person’s pulse.

Xbox One consoles are set to hit the market later this year.

“This is the beginning of a new generation of games and entertainment and a new generation of smart TV,” Microsoft entertainment unit executive Yusuf Mehdi said during an event at the technology giant’s headquarters in the northwestern state of Washington.

Coffee cups with Google logos are seen at the new Google office in Toronto, November 13, 2012. — Reuters Photo

WASHINGTON, Thu May 23, 2013 – US regulators are in the early stages of an antitrust probe into whether Google Inc, the top player in Web display advertising, breaks antitrust law in how it handles some advertising sales, a source told Reuters on Thursday.

The source said that it was unlikely that the Federal Trade Commission had sent out civil investigative demands in relation to the probe, which would be the sign of a formal and more serious investigation.

The new line of inquiry focuses on tools acquired when Google bought display ad company DoubleClick in 2007; other firms which specialize in helping Web publishers sell ads to put on their websites are complaining to the FTC, the source said.

The firms have accused Google of leveraging some of its most popular DoubleClick products, such as the ad managing system which has an estimated 80 percent of the market, to push websites to use other products, including Ad Exchange where websites swap ads, the source said.

According to a second source familiar with the situation, Google has not been notified of any antitrust investigation so far. Google and the Federal Trade Commission declined comment on the matter.

The sources did not want to be named in order to protect their business relationships.

The FTC wrapped up an earlier investigation into Google just four months ago, concluding that the search giant had not manipulated its Web search results to hurt rivals.

Google was the number one player in the $15 billion US display ad market in 2012, with a 15.1 percent market share, compared with Facebook Inc’s 14.6 percent share, according to industry research firm eMarketer. Google is expected to widen its lead to 20.7 percent of the market in 2014.

Google is currently trying to convince European antitrust investigators to wrap up a separate antitrust probe, and has offered to change some search pages to give more space to rivals in order to satisfy their concerns.

In that case, Google is accused of hiding links to rival shopping, travel and other websites to protect its ad revenues. On April 11, it said it would offer consumers links to three rival sites in some searches and would label its products.

The official US figures of number of strikes and estimated deaths remain classified. —File Photo.

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama said Thursday that he will engage Congress in exploring a number of options for increased oversight of lethal drone strikes outside of war zones like Afghanistan.        

The official US figures of number of strikes and estimated deaths remain classified.

But, according to the New America Foundation, which maintains a database of the strikes, the CIA and the military have carried out an estimated 416 drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, resulting in 3,364 estimated deaths, including militants and civilians.

The Associated Press also has reported a drone strike in Somalia in 2012 that killed one.

The think tank compiles its numbers by combining reports in major news media that rely on local officials and eyewitness accounts.

Strikes in Pakistan spiked in 2010 under Obama to 122. But the number has dropped to 12 so far this year. Strikes were originally carried out with permission of the Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf, though subsequent Pakistani governments have demanded strikes cease.

Most of those killed by the strikes in Pakistan are militants, according to the New America Foundation database.

The CIA and the military have carried out some 69 strikes in Yemen, with the Yemeni government’s permission.

2002 – Up to 10 killed in 1 strike in Yemen

2003 – None.

2004 – Up to 7 killed 1 strike in Pakistan

2005 – Up to 15 killed 3 strikes in Pakistan

2006 – Up to 94 killed 2 strikes in Pakistan

2007 – Up to 63 killed 4 strikes in Pakistan

2008 – Up to 301 killed 37 strikes in Pakistan

2009 – Up to 634 killed in 56 strikes in Pakistan and Yemen

2010 – Up to 855 killed in 123 strikes in Pakistan and Yemen

2011 – Up to 647 killed 87 strikes in Pakistan and Yemen

2012 – Up to 621 killed in 81 strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia

2013 – Up to 118 killed in 22 strikes in Pakistan and Yemen

Total estimated strikes: 417

Total estimated deaths, including militants and civilians: 3,365

Solar Impulse, piloted by André Borschberg, takes flight during the second leg of the 2013 Across America mission, at dawn, Wednesday, May 22, 2013, from Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. — AP Photo

DALLAS – A solar-powered plane has landed in Texas, completing the second leg of a trip across the United States.

The Solar Impulse is making the first attempt by a solar airplane of flying day and night without fuel across the US.

The plane landed early Thursday at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport after taking off Wednesday from Phoenix.

The plane flew its first leg from California in early May. From Dallas, it will fly to Lambert-St. Louis airport, Dulles airport near Washington and New York’s John F. Kennedy airport.

Each flight leg takes 20 or so hours, with multiday stops in each city.

Pilot Andre Borschberg is one of the plane’s creators along with Bertrand Piccard.

South Korean rap star Psy.—File Photo by Reuters

CANNES, France: A man from rural France impersonated South Korean “Gangnam Style” entertainer Psy at the Cannes Film Festival, eating, drinking and partying with the stars in Cannes for two days, press reports said on Thursday.

Psy “was spotted all over town, attending festival parties and events and posing for photos with festgoers and other celebrities,” The Hollywood Reporter said.

“But it turns out that the man was not Psy at all, but rather an imposter using his name and fame to get access to the festival.” The double was dressed exactly like Psy, with his trademark jackets and round sunglasses. He spent a day at the top-ranked Martinez beach restaurant and partied at night at the A-listers’ Carlton hotel.

Those who fell victim to the con included “Skyfall” actress Naomie Harris, who tweeted an image of herself posing with him at a party thrown by luxury jewellers Chopard.

Who was the trickster?

According to La Montagne, a daily newspaper in France’s remote Auvergne region, it was a 34-year-old Psy lookalike from Clermont-Ferrand called Denis Carre.

Carre, born in the small town of Blanzat, said he got hooked on Psy-chology last September when he was in a club in Dublin with his girlfriend, La Montagne reported.

“A crowd of people gathered around me, and the situation got totally out of control. We were only able to get out with the help of the bouncers. Then it happened again and again, to the point that the resemblance (with Psy) was causing problems in my private life,” he said.

The original Psy appears to have been unfazed by the identity theft. He tweeted: “Seems like there’s another ME at cannes… say Hi to him.”

LOS ANGELES – Google Inc.’s new music service offers a lot of eye candy to go with the tunes. The song selection of around 18 million tracks is comparable to popular services such as Spotify and Rhapsody, and a myriad of playlists curated along different genres provides a big playground for music lovers.

The All Access service represents Google’s attempt to grab a bigger piece of the digital music market as more people stream songs over mobile phones. Such services are also meant to further wed smartphone users to Google’s Android operating system, where the search leader makes money from advertising and transactions on its digital content store, Google Play.

For a monthly fee, All Access lets you listen to as much music as you want over an Internet connection. You can also download songs onto mobile devices for smooth playback later when you don’t have cellphone or Wi-Fi access.

It’s worth a try for the discounted monthly rate of $8 if you sign up by the end of June. Those who sign up later will pay $10 a month, the same amount charged by the main competitors, Spotify and Rhapsody. Either way, you get the first month free and can cancel at any time. All Access works on the free Google Play Music app for Android devices and over Web browsers on computers – but not on the iPhone. (Spotify and Rhapsody work on both Android and the iPhone).

Visually, the app that I tested on Google’s Nexus 4 smartphone is engaging. Iterating on the list-heavy layouts of its competitors, Google Play Music jazzes up the interface by adding plenty of big artist photos along with little animations, including bouncing equalizer bars and screen-size cover art that moves slowly back and forth when a song is playing.

Some of the touch features require a pixie-like dexterity, though. It’s one downside to this solid entrant to the world of unlimited music streaming.

You can re-order songs that are in your queue on the fly – something not offered by either Spotify or Rhapsody. But this takes gripping a very thin digital handle to the left of a song title and sliding it up or down. Because it’s much thinner than the thumb I’m using to grip it, I ended up playing songs that I only wanted to move, or deleting them from the queue by accident (which takes a swipe right or left).

The options icon on each song title (three dots stacked on top of each other) is also tiny and caused frequent mis-taps. This means a lot of accidentally playing songs and mistakenly erasing queues that I had spent time creating.

I wasn’t that impressed by the service’s recommendations, although perhaps it’s because I haven’t used it that much. It recommended artists “like Madonna” even though I don’t really listen to the Material Girl. The top recommendations were the same ones I saw onstage during Google’s official unveiling of All Access last week. Digging a little deeper revealed recommendations for other works by artists whose songs I already own, like Sara Bareilles or Maroon 5. But I could have looked that up on my own.

Where the service starts to get interesting is in its radio function. Like other Internet radio plans, it takes some traits of a particular song and finds others like it somehow. Doing this with Reggie Watts’ comedic beat-box tune “(bleep) (bleep) Stack,” I discovered the song fits within a kind of sub-genre of humorous rappers, after it played Flight of the Conchords’ “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros,” and MC Chris’ “I Want Candy.” I gave these songs a digital thumbs up, which marks them in a playlist so I can find them later.

Google Play Music attempts to do something that Samsung Electronics Co.’s Music Hub did before it. Music Hub, which launched last July on Samsung’s Galaxy S III phone, blended four things: a music store, an online storage service, unlimited song streaming and an Internet radio player.

Google’s app does all those things. In addition, because it comes as an update to the existing Google Play Music app, it preserved the music I took the trouble of uploading to my Google Music storage space prior to the revamp.

When Google first launched its music store in November 2011, it merely sold songs or albums a la carte. But it offered users free online storage for up to 20,000 songs, including ones they had bought at other stores such as Apple Inc.’s iTunes.

Starting last December, Google’s uploader software added the ability to scan your hard drive for songs and match them with songs Google already has on its servers. That way, you have to upload only the songs Google didn’t recognize. With that, your personal library of owned songs still exists, but the sense of ownership has blurred.

With All Access, you still see your library of owned songs in a place called My Library on the Google Play Music app. A lot of that music is stored online, or in the cloud, and requires an Internet connection to listen to. But you can “pin” a song to download a copy for offline listening, something that Google Play Music and other cloud lockers had offered already.

You can toggle the view in My Library to see everything you can access in the cloud, or just the stuff you can access on the device without a cellular or Wi-Fi connection. If you start running out of space, you basically “unpin” the song to free up the memory, even though your ownership still exists in the cloud.

All Access also allows you to “pin” songs you don’t own. Copies will get downloaded for offline play. Or you can mark songs as favorites by adding them to My Library in the cloud. But because those favorites are stored in the same place as songs you actually own, your sense of ownership will suffer a hit. You might not know which is which until the All Access songs disappear should you ever stop paying the monthly fee.

You can share songs from the app to the Google Plus social network, but there’s no Facebook integration as is the case with Spotify and Rhapsody. It also doesn’t integrate with Twitter’s new (hash)music service, the way Rdio and Spotify do quite well.

Google’s new music service covers the fundamentals of unlimited on-demand music with Google-like solid execution. And with the radio function running on Google’s vaunted ability to tweak algorithms, it adds a healthy dose of serendipity to the mix, turning up songs and artists I wouldn’t have discovered on my own.

That puts it at least on an equal footing with streaming services that have come before it and will persuade some subscribers of those services to switch. Although you need an Android phone to use All Access fully, I don’t believe that in itself will get Apple fans to drop their iPhones. But it’s one more nice thing Android has going for it.