spacecowb0y

For 65 years, this Second World War fighter had lain hidden under the surface of a beach where it crash-landed.

Just a short distance above it, holidaying families have built sandcastles, strolled and swum, all unaware of its existence.

But now the P-38 Lightning has re-emerged after freak weather conditions caused the sands to shift and expose its rusting frame.

The U.S. aircraft - with its distinctive "twinboom" design - was discovered on the North Wales coast, but the location is being kept secret in case it is targeted by looters.

Its remains were spotted by a family in July, but it was thought to be an unmanned drone used for aerial target practice from the 1950s.

However, a local aviation enthusiast recognised it from a newspaper photo and contacted a group of U.S. aircraft historians.

The Lightning has been identified using its serial number and other records. It was built in 1941 and reached Britain in 1942 before flying combat missions along the Dutch-Belgian coast.

It was flown by Second Lieutenant Robert F. "Fred" Elliott, 24, from North Carolina.

During a gunnery practice mission on September 27, 1942, a fuel supply problem forced him to make an emergency landing on the nearest suitable place - the Welsh beach.

His belly landing in shallow water sheared off a wingtip, but he escaped unhurt.

Unfortunately, less than three months later, the veteran of more than ten combat missions was shot down over Tunisia. His plane and body were never found.

The recovery group plans to collaborate with British museum experts in recovering the nearly intact but fragile aircraft next spring.

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."

Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.

Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.

The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.

He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.

The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.

Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."

What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.

Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"

What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.

Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. "How cool is that?" he says.

A young New Zealand inventor has found a solution to the unpalatable problem of a can of warm beer - a device that turns a tepid beverage into a cold drink within seconds.

And the portable gadget, which has a cooling capacity almost four times that of regular ice with the advantage that it doesn't water down your drink, could spell the end of lugging a heavy chilly bin to the beach.

The penny dropped for Kent Hodgson, a 22-year-old student from Albany, while having a few quiet ones around a barbecue with his mates early this year.

"We brought along a box of beers which was warm so we put them in the freezer to cool them down.

"I thought how cool would it be if we could replicate that. I mean, no one likes warm beer or a diluted drink and I was inspired."

Mr Hodgson calls his invention Huski, which is among the 30 exhibits from top graduates of Massey University's Auckland School of Design at the three-day Design Exposure 2007 beginning today at Britomart Pavilion.

He explained the rapid cooling beverage process he mastered as being "extremely simple".

"You have plastic cooling cells which are pressed down into the dock which houses the liquid carbon dioxide. The liquid CO2 expands and is pressurised into dry ice in the base of the cooling cells ... in a moment.

"You then pop it into your drink and then proceed from there as you normally would."

With a surface temperature of minus 78.5C, dry ice has a cooling capacity almost four times that of the same amount of regular ice.

"The cooling power is almost instant and is utilised for several minutes and it doesn't dilute the drink like ice would," said Mr Hodgson.

One canister can fill thirty 330 ml bottles at a cost of 7c each, which makes it an ideal alternative for those who don't want to lug around a chilly bin during the summer.

Mr Hodgson said he was looking at patenting the Huski, which he expects to retail at around $50.

Granite Bay, California - A California man can pretty much write off his Ford 150 pick-up truck.

Monday night during a storm, a lightning bolt pierced Mike Knapp's pick-up, slicing through the windshield and hood, frying the headlight and melting the tires.

The truck was sitting in Knapp's driveway at the time. No one was hurt.

A clam dredged from Icelandic waters had lived for 400 years - is this the longest-lived animal known to science?

Can you imagine living for four centuries? A team of scientists from Bangor University's School of Ocean Sciences believe they have found an animal which did just that, a quahog clam, Arctica islandica, which was living and growing on the seabed in the cold waters off the north coast of Iceland for around 400 years.

When this animal was a juvenile, King James I replaced Queen Elizabeth I as English monarch, Shakespeare was writing his greatest plays Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for espousing the view that the Sun rather than the Earth was the centre of the universe.

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the existing record for the longest-lived animal belongs to a 220 year old Arctica clam collected in 1982 from American waters. Unofficially, the record belongs to a 374 year old Icelandic clam which was found in a museum. Both these records appear to have been eclipsed by the latest specimen, whose age, between 405 and 410 years, has been assessed by counting the annual growth lines in the shell.

The clam was dredged up by Team members Paul Butler and James Scourse during a data collection cruise in Icelandic coastal waters in 2006 which formed part of the EU MILLENNIUM project investigating climate changes over the last 1000 years. The exciting discovery was made by postdoctoral scientist Al Wanamaker, the newest member of the ‘Arctica’ team. “Al and Paul rushed up to my office to announce that they had found a record-breaker,” said team member Chris Richardson. A detailed assessment later confirmed that, at 400 years, the clam had beaten the previous record by a massive 30 years!!

This is the ultra-high resolution multi-projector VR system that will be used for training at the Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. Built by Lockheed Martin, it uses Mersive Sol Server technology to automatically and seamlessly combine multiple projectors in one gigantabolous immersive display, thanks to camera-based fully-automatic calibration, edge blending and color correction.

The whole system will be used in the base's Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) Virtual Trainer Dome simulator, which is "primary training facility for the USAF JTACs."

Although there are other multiple-projectors solutions in the market, the cool thing about Mersive's Sol Server technology is the automatic calibration to adjust the multiple projectors to the curved surface. Instead of using complicated procedures that can take weeks to complete, Sol uses a robotic camera to obtain reference points. After the screen is mapped in less than an hour, the Sol Server software corrects for "geometric distortion, intensity and color variation in overlap regions that result from using multiple overlapping projectors on the spherical surface of the dome."

The Sol links to the MetaVR Virtual Reality Scene Generator (VRSG)™, which is the VR generator used by the JTAC unit, with zero latency to the display system.

The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist.

100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed.

The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry from the London School of Economics, who says that the human race will have reached its physical peak by the year 3000.

These humans will be between 6ft and 7ft tall and they will live up to 120 years.

"Physical features will be driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility that men and women have evolved to look for in potential mates," says the report, which suggests that advances in cosmetic surgery and other body modifying techniques will effectively homogenise our appearance.

Men will have symmetrical facial features, deeper voices and bigger penises, according to Curry in a report commissioned for men's satellite TV channel Bravo.

Women will all have glossy hair, smooth hairless skin, large eyes and pert breasts, according to Curry.

Racial differences will be a thing of the past as interbreeding produces a single coffee-coloured skin tone.

The future for our descendants isn't all long life, perfect bodies and chiselled features, however.

While humans will reach their peak in 1000 years' time, 10,000 years later our reliance on technology will have begun to dramatically change our appearance.

Medicine will weaken our immune system and we will begin to appear more child-like.

Dr Curry said: "The report suggests that the future of man will be a story of the good, the bad and the ugly.

It's neither a plane nor a boat, but the latest invention of Nelson's very own Flying Dutchman has people fascinated.

Hira resident Rudy Heeman, a mechanic who has spent the last 11 years building hovercraft in his spare time, has come up with a model that does more than skim the surface.

Over the past year, Mr Heeman has built a "wing in ground effect vehicle" - a hovercraft able to fly because of a peculiar set of aerodynamic principles.

He said the "hoverwing", which is almost complete, has drawn Atawhai Drive residents out of their houses and motorists out of their cars to watch test flights over the Haven.

While Mr Heeman has built and sold hovercraft before, he said the hoverwing gave him the kind of butterflies in his stomach the Wright Brothers must have felt.

After more than 800 hours of building time, he took it for its first flight just before Christmas last year.

But he refused to let his two daughters watch, just in case something went wrong.

He picked the Haven so his friends could accompany him in a "rescue boat", and because it was near the hospital.

That test flight ended in a crash landing, but a single bruise to his leg meant Mr Heeman knew exactly what adjustments he needed to make.

Now, the craft is only a few weeks away from completion.

Although the hoverwing will be able to carry a passenger, Mr Heeman has yet to decide who will be first to don the second life-jacket.

His family and friends have supported him through the building and testing process, but then there are also strangers such as the lady with three dogs who turned up at the Haven one day and said it should be her.

Mr Heeman said the project had cost tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours of his time.

Foreign exchange specialist Travelex today unveiled a unit of currency that has been created for use in space. It is the first currency of its kind in the universe and has been developed in partnership with a team of scientists from the National Space Centre and the University of Leicester.

With Virgin Galactic making its maiden voyage in 2009 and with the signing in April this year of the Global Exploration Initiative, an agreement between the US and the UK to work together on future planetary explorations to the Moon and beyond, Space Tourism is soon to become commonplace. Recognising that tourists could soon be heading further than Spain and Greece Travelex has teamed up with the National Space Centre to create the Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination or QUID.

The QUID has been designed to withstand the stresses of space travel and the extreme environment found in orbit around the Earth. It has also been created so that it can be purchased on earth in any one of the 176 currencies used around the globe.

Professor George Fraser from the University of Leicester commented: “None of the existing payment systems we use on earth – like cash, credit or debit cards – could be used in space for a variety of different reasons. Anything with sharp edges, like coins, would be a risk to astronauts while the chips and magnetic strips used in our cards on Earth would be damaged beyond repair by cosmic radiation. What’s more, because of the distances involved, it is more than 230,000 miles from the Earth to the moon, chip and pin technology is also out of the question.”

Professor Fraser continued: “We have had to completely rethink the design of the currency from the materials used to the payment mechanisms and aesthetics. The currency cannot contain any chemicals that might contaminate the astronauts’ life support systems and must be able to survive the extreme environment of space. We also had in mind that the currency should be meaningful for any intelligent life we might encounter in other planetary systems.”

A space qualified polymer called PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) will be used to construct the QUID’s - a material widely used by space agencies because of its versatility and durability. Best known for the ‘Teflon’ non-stick pan coating, it can resist high temperatures and corrosive materials. Importantly, too, the currency will not emit any dangerous chemicals into the space tourists’ environment. As a plastic it can be moulded into any shape so can have round edges to avoid damaging people and equipment if accidentally allowed float free in zero gravity.

Different colours and sizes are used to denote different values. They are valued from one to ten and by looking at today’s rates one QUID would cost you £6.25, 12.5 dollars or 8.68 Euros.

The ozone hole over Antarctica has shrunk 30 percent as compared to last year's record size. According to measurements made by ESA’s Envisat satellite, this year’s ozone loss peaked at 27.7 million tonnes, compared to the 2006 record ozone loss of 40 million tonnes.

Ozone loss is derived by measuring the area and the depth of the ozone hole. The area of this year’s ozone hole – where the ozone measures less than 220 Dobson Units – is 24.7 million sq km, roughly the size of North America, and the minimum value of the ozone layer is around 120 Dobson Units.

A Dobson Unit is a unit of measurement that describes the thickness of the ozone layer in a column directly above the location being measured. For instance, if an ozone column of 300 Dobson Units is compressed to 0º C and 1 atmosphere (the pressure at the Earth’s surface) and spread out evenly over the area, it would form a slab of ozone approximately 3mm thick.

Scientists say this year’s smaller hole – a thinning in the ozone layer over the South Pole – is due to natural variations in temperature and atmospheric dynamics (illustrated in the time series to the right) and is not indicative of a long-term trend.

"Although the hole is somewhat smaller than usual, we cannot conclude from this that the ozone layer is recovering already,” Ronald van der A, a senior project scientist at Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute (KNMI), said.

"This year's ozone hole was less centred on the South Pole as in other years, which allowed it to mix with warmer air, reducing the growth of the hole because ozone is depleted at temperatures less than -78 degrees Celsius."

UK photographer Anna Henly sat patiently between rocks in Hudson Bay, Canada, to capture this picture of an Arctic fox. The image was "highly commended" in the "Nature in Black and White" section of this year's competition.

Aided by many volunteers and using tools borrowed from my dad and the Stockholm County Museum, I've spent the day getting the Djurhamn sword out of the ground.

I found the sword on 30 August while metal detecting around the Harbour of the Sheaf Kings. Today we marked out a 2.5 by 2.0 metre trench around the sword, got rid of a lot of vegetation, dug and sieved 2.5 square metres and got the sword out. Its point was wedged between the roots of a large hazel bush, so I only got it out in one piece thanks to its excellent preservation.

It's a straight double-edged sword, 92 cm long with a single-hand grip. Nils Drejholt of the Royal Armoury tells me that it's an early-16th century weapon, unusually designed but similar in details to the so-called rikssvärden, "swords of the realm", ceremonial weapons commissioned by King Gustaf I.

The date tallies well with the level above the sea considering shore displacement. The sword appears to have been dropped into the water from a nearby quayside whose remains I've located or from a ship moored at the quay. Indeed, judging from the topography, Djurhamn was a really good harbour only until about 1600 when the entrance channel to a natural lagoon had shrunk too much to allow the passage of ships any more. The former lagoon is now a large tract of marshy forest.

During cardiac arrest, the heart stops beating. It's a trauma alert and people are often declared dead within minutes.

But now doctors at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital are bringing people back from the dead.

Dr. Lance Becker and his team are challenging fate with breakthrough new treatments that could save hundreds of thousands of lives.

61-year-old Bill Bondar is living proof that people can be brought back from the dead.

"I didn't know I died, I didn't feel anything, I still don't believe it," Bill said.

"I looked at his face, and I was looking at a dead man," Bill's wife Monica said.

It happened just after the couple left a jam session. Bill collapsed outside their home, lifeless.

"That was the most frightening thing I ever saw in my life and I knew my husband was gone. He was gone," said Monica.

Paramedics were able to restart his heart, but that's just part of the battle. Cells continue to die, and there can be damage to vital organs like the brain, that could be fatal.

Bill ended up at Penn, where he got the new experimental treatment of chilled saline that's injected.

Cooling pads are then wrapped around a patient. The body temperature is normally 98 degrees, but cooling brings it down to 92 degrees. Doctors keep it there for about 24 hours. This process is called intentional hypothermia.

"It decreases cellular injury when the cells are deprived of oxygen, so with less injury we are able to do a better job of getting people back," said Dr. Becker.

But Dr. Becker said the cooling therapy needs to be faster, so they're developing a slushy type saline that contains ice particles. It would be injected into the blood stream to quickly reduce body temperature.

"We really believe that that is going to save lives in a way that we haven't even seen," said Dr. Becker.

While it's one of the most important and abundant chemical compounds on Earth, water is still a puzzle to scientists. Much research has been done to uncover the structure of water beyond the H2O scale, which is thought to be responsible for many of water’s unique properties. However, the nature of this structure, governed by hydrogen bonds, is currently unknown.
“Water undoubtedly is the most important chemical substance in the world,” explained Elmar Fuchs and colleagues from the Graz University of Technology in Austria in a recent study. “The interaction of water with electric fields has been intensely explored over the last years. We report another unusual effect of liquid water exposed to a dc electric field: the floating water bridge.”

When exposed to a high-voltage electric field, water in two beakers climbs out of the beakers and crosses empty space to meet, forming the water bridge. The liquid bridge, hovering in space, appears to the human eye to defy gravity.

Upon investigating the phenomenon, the scientists found that water was being transported from one beaker to another, usually from the anode beaker to the cathode beaker. The cylindrical water bridge, with a diameter of 1-3 mm, could remain intact when the beakers were pulled apart at a distance of up to 25 mm.

Why water would act this way was a surprise, Fuchs told PhysOrg.com. But the group’s analyses have shown that the explanation may lie within the nature of the water’s structure. Initially, the bridge forms due to electrostatic charges on the surface of the water. The electric field then concentrates inside the water, arranging the water molecules to form a highly ordered microstructure. This microstructure remains stable, keeping the bridge intact.

The scientists reached the microstructure hypothesis after observing that the density of the water changes between the beaker edges and the center of the bridge. A microstructure consisting of an arrangement of water molecules could have a similar density variation.

A Japanese dairy company on Thursday announced the launch of super-premium milk for stressed-out adults -- at the price of 43 dollars for a bottle of 900 millilitres, or one quart.

Tokyo-based Nakazawa Foods will launch the "Adult Milk" line of products in October targetting "adults who live in a stressful society," the company said in a statement.

The price of 5,000 yen a bottle is nearly 30 times as expensive as ordinary milk even in Tokyo, which is famous for its high prices.

The milk is taken from cows once a week at the break of dawn as they discharge a lot of a stress-relieving hormone called melatonin during the night, the company said.

The milk is bottled within six hours of milking at a farm north of Tokyo.

It is said to contain three to four times as much melatonin as usual milk.

Is this what will become of the Earth's surface? The surface of the Earth is broken up into several large plates that are slowly shifting. About 250 million years ago, the plates on which the present-day continents rest were positioned quite differently, so that all the landmasses were clustered together in one supercontinent now dubbed Pangea. About 250 million years from now, the plates are again projected to reposition themselves so that a single landmass dominates. The above simulation from the PALEAOMAP Project shows this giant landmass: Pangea Ultima. At that time, the Atlantic Ocean will be just a distant memory, and whatever beings inhabit Earth will be able to walk from North America to Africa.

McDonald's and SK Telecom Wednesday showed a new ordering system using mobile phones and infra-red sensors which let customers make orders from their table and sends them a phone message when the meal is ready.

The ``Touch Order'' menu is the first in the world to utilize the radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology in a self-ordering system at a restaurant, SK Telecom said.

``It is a convergence service that utilizes SK Telecom's RFID technology in the restaurant industry,'' said Lee Joo-sik, senior vice president of business development of the mobile service company. ``We hope this partnership with McDonald's, the world's largest restaurant chain, will lay the groundwork for our RFID business on foreign markets.''

The Touch Order was unveiled at McDonald's Shinchon branch in western Seoul near Yonsei University. SK Telecom said that it hopes to expand it to a few more stores by December, and hopefully to other restaurant chains next year. But McDonald's remained more guarded about the new technology.

``We are closely monitoring it, but it is too early to discuss expanding it to other stores, let alone other countries'' said John Kim, senior director of marketing at McDonald's Korea.

The Touch Order system is likely to come in handy during the bustling lunch and dinner hours, though it may not be very attractive when the counter is not busy.

First, customers have to download a special program onto their handsets using SK Telecom's Nate mobile Internet service. Most phones manufactured after June 2005 can handle the operation, the firm said.

At each table, there are an RFID reader and a menu that has built-in RFID chips. Customers plug the reader into their mobile phones, and point them at the item on the menu that they wish to eat or drink.

The bill is charged through the mobile phone. When the meal is ready, the system sends a short message to the phone so the customer can pick up the ready tray at a designated counter.

The hidden content in ancient works could be illuminated by a light source 10 billion times brighter than the Sun.

The technique employs Britain's new facility, the Diamond synchrotron, and could be used on works such as the Dead Sea Scrolls or musical scores by Bach.

Intense light beams will enable scientists to uncover the text in scrolls and books without having to open - and potentially damage - them.

The research was presented at the British Association science festival.

Iron gall ink, which is made from oak apples, has been in use from the 12th Century, but causes parchment to deteriorate rendering precious documents unreadable.

Both paper and parchment - thinly stretched skins from cows, sheep or goats - contain collagen, which reacts with iron ink to become gelatine.

When dry, gelatine is very brittle; but as soon as it gets wet, it turns into jelly, destroying some documents if they are disturbed.

Now, scientists from the University of Cardiff have developed a technique that uses a powerful X-ray source to create a three-dimensional image of an iron-inked document.

The team then applies a computer algorithm to separate the image into the different layers of parchment, in effect using the program to unroll the scroll.

Professor Tim Wess, who led the research, said: "We've folded up a real piece of parchment and then done a process of X-ray tomography on it. We've been able to recover the structure where we can see the words that are written inside the document."

The team now plans to use the Diamond synchrotron's powerful X-ray source to penetrate many layers of parchment.

The synchrotron, which covers the area of five football pitches, generates light beams that can probe matter down to the molecular and atomic scale.

The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight -- if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies.

"The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart," he said. "We don't really have a good hypothesis for it."

The kilogram's uncertainty could affect even countries that don't use the metric system -- it is the ultimate weight standard for the U.S. customary system, where it equals 2.2 pounds. For scientists, the inconstant metric constant is a nuisance, threatening calculation of things like electricity generation.

"They depend on a mass measurement and it's inconvenient for them to have a definition of the kilogram which is based on some artifact," said Davis, who is American.

But don't expect the slimmed-down kilo to have any effect, other than possibly envy, on wary waistline-watchers: 50 micrograms is roughly equivalent to the weight of a fingerprint.

"For the lay person, it won't mean anything," said Davis. "The kilogram will stay the kilogram, and the weights you have in a weight set will all still be correct."

Of all the world's kilograms, only the one in Sevres really counts. It is kept in a triple-locked safe at a chateau and rarely sees the light of day -- mostly for comparison with other cylinders shipped in periodically from around the world.

"It's not clear whether the original has become lighter, or the national prototypes have become heavier," said Michael Borys, a senior researcher with Germany's national measures institute in Braunschweig. "But by definition, only the original represents exactly a kilogram."

The kilogram's fluctuation shows how technological progress is leaving science's most basic measurements in its dust. The cylinder was high-tech for its day in 1889 when cast from a platinum and iridium alloy, measuring 1.54 inches in diameter and height.

Search giant Google is offering a $30m prize pot to private firms that land a robot rover on the Moon.

The competition to send a robot craft to the Moon is being run with the X-Prize Foundation.

To claim the cash, any craft reaching the lunar surface must perform a series of tasks such as shoot video and roam for specific distances.

Firms interested in trying for the prize have until the end of 2012 to mount their Moonshot.

In a statement announcing the competition, Google and the X-Prize Foundation said it had been created in a bid to stimulate research into low-cost robotic exploration of space.

The top prize of $20m will be given to the private firm that soft lands a rover on the Moon which then completes a series of objectives.

These include roaming the lunar surface for at least 500m and gathering a specific set of images, video and data.

A prize of $5m will be given to the second firm that manages to reach the Moon with a rover that roams the surface and shoots some pictures.

Google said it would give bonuses of $5m if the rovers complete other objectives such as travelling further on the Moon, taking pictures of Apollo hardware, finding water-ice and surviving the freezing lunar night.

Rovers taking part must be fitted with high-definition video and still cameras.

"We are confident that teams from around the world will help develop new robotic and virtual presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration," said Dr Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X-Prize Foundation in a statement.

The prize will be on offer until 2012. After that a smaller sum of $15m will be offered and, if the cash goes unclaimed, the competition will end in 2014.