According to an Associated Press count until Friday, the 19^th of September 2008, at least 4,168 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003 and the figure includes eight military civilians killed in action. According to the military’s numbers at least 3,377 military personnel died as a result of hostile action,.

The AP count is four more than the Defense Department’s tally, last updated Friday at 10 a.m. EDT.

The British military has reported 176 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 21; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, seven; El Salvador, five; Slovakia, four; Latvia and Georgia, three each; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand and Romania, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and South Korea, one death each.

The latest identifications reported by the military:

• Army Capt. Darrick D. Wright, 37, Nashville, Tenn.; died Wednesday in Baghdad of a non-combat related illness; was assigned to the 926th Engineer Brigade, Montgomery, Ala.

On the Net:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/

Friday, the 19^th of September 2008, at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, England, the professor Stephen Hawking unveiled The Corpus Clock. The author of A Brief History of Time, Professor Stephen Hawking, was the guest of honour at a ceremony that mark the creation of The Corpus Clock, which cost more than 1 million pounds (US $ 1.8 million) to build and erect in Cambridge. The “Corpus clock” is the brainchild of inventor John Taylor, who used his own money to build it, in part to pay homage to the genius of John Harrison, the Englishman who in 1725 invented the ‘grasshopper’ escapement — a mechanical device that help to regulate a clock’s movement. Making a visual pun on the grasshopper image, Taylor has designed a fantasy version of a grasshopper at the top of the clock face, and uses this beast — with its long needle teeth and barbed tail — as an integral part of the clockworks. Its jaws begin to open halfway through a minute, then snap shut at 59 seconds.    The creature’s eyes, usually a dull green, occasionally flash bright yellow. The oversize grasshopper is called a chronophage, or ‘time eater.’

NEW YORK - After a few years away from the limelight, the most famous white rapper Eminem may release a new album this year.

During a recent appearance on his Sirius XM satellite radio station named Shade 45, the MC admitted that he has been producing tracks for the Shady Records artists and himself. Eminem also interviewed MC Masta Ace, who he’s long noted as an influence.

“I’m concentrating on my own stuff right now — just banging out tracks,” Eminem said. “The more I keep producing, the better it seems I get. I start knowing stuff, learning the boards like the back of my hands.”

An representative of Interscope said that “There is no official release date nor a first single”, but the confirmed that an album may arrive just before the end of the year.

Eminem’s last album, “Encore” was set for release on November 16, 2004, but was moved up to November 12, after the album was leaked to the Internet. Encore sold 711,000 copies in its shortened three day opening week and still claimed the #1 spot on the Billboard Top 200 chart for that week. The following week, Encore sold an estimated 871,000 copies, claiming the #1 another week.

50 Cent, the hip-hop artist with whom Eminem has collaborated in the past, gave an interview to BBC Radio 1 this week and said fans will be “seeing (Eminem) shortly. He is working. I spent the weekend at his house. Even though he tries to relax and stay home, it’s impossible for him to stay in.”

A significant problem with existing solar technology is that it is not terribly efficient at harvesting solar energy and transforming it into electricity.

Solar technology gets improved all the time, but one 12-year-old boy may hold the key to making solar panels that can harness 500 times the light of a traditional solar cell that it is built today. William Yuan is a seventh grade student, part of a project titled “A Highly-Efficient 3-Dimensional Nanotube Solar Cell for Visible and UV Light,” that may change the course of energetic industry and transform solar energy far easier to harness and distribute.

Yuan’s project is based on a special solar cell that can harness visible light as well as the ultraviolet light. Most solar cells that are used today are either photovoltaic, equivalent to the fact that they harness only visible light, or thermal. While visible, the infrared, and ultraviolet light are all heavily scattered or absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere, ultraviolet light comes in at shorter wavelengths and with higher energy than both visible and infrared light. Ultraviolet light is able to provide more energy to a collector than the other, longer-wavelength members of the electromagnetic spectrum. The solar cells that Yuan has invented are innovative not only for their collection of UV light, but also because they are designed to stand in a free way in three dimensions (which let them collect more light) and make use of carbon nanotubes, which allow the cell to distribute the energy it collects a dissipating as much as traditional cells do.

The young inventor is looking for someone to invest in building his new solar cell, and likely won’t have a problem finding someone to join the business. Yuan’s new solar cells have already earned him a $25,000 scholarship at the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, to fund his education and research, and a host of other awards in science and engineering. Yuan it is not the only young inventor that makes a difference because more and more young innovators are changing the face of the new technology.