Meet One of Mars Rover Curiosity’s Earthbound Twins

Like its twin that's busy exploring Mars aboard the rover Curiosity, the device known as SAM II spends its days as if it were 200 million miles away, in a very different environment than our own.

Temperatures around the instrument plunge to minus 130ºF (-90°C), the air pressure is one percent of Earth's, and the atmosphere it sits in consists largely of carbon dioxide.

But this second SAM—short for Sample Analysis on Mars—resides in suburban Maryland, inside a tightly controlled chamber where it plays a little-known but essential role as a test instrument for the Curiosity mission to Mars. (Watch: How Curiosity took a self-portrait.)

And for a short time last month, this microwave-size "test bed" SAM was out of its deep freeze for repairs and upgrades, offering a rare peak into exactly what it takes to keep a rover and its scientific instruments alive and well on Mars.

Simply put, SAM is the most complex and sophisticated suite of scientific equipment to ever land on another celestial body.

The gold-covered box holds two tiny cylinder ovens that can vaporize Mars's rocks and soil at temperatures up to 1800°F (1,000 °C). Three instruments (spectrometers) then identify and analyze the gases produced by the ovens, as well as those collected from the Martian atmosphere. Some six miles (nine kilometers) of electrical wire connect these and many other parts together.

SAM's task constitutes a primary aim of Curiosity's mission: investigating whether Mars preserves the chemical ingredients needed for life, including organic carbon. (Related: Intriguing new evidence of a watery past on Mars.)

SAM has already analyzed some Martian soil and will very soon get its first taste of Martian rock, dug out with a drill last week and crushed into powder. A pre-programmed examination of that rock powder—a first-of-its-kind procedure—is scheduled to begin inside SAM shortly. (Related: Curiosity completes first full drill for Martian rock samples.

Maryland SAM in the Operating Room

But for the SAM on Mars to operate safely and properly, it needs the Maryland SAM (a 99 percent duplicate) as a test bed.

Every command sent to the instrument on Mars must first be run through the twin on Earth to make sure it doesn't confuse the operating system, doesn't open a wrong valve, doesn't set into motion a fatal cascade of events. So keeping the test-bed SAM in near-perfect shape is essential to Curiosity's success.

Yet some parts or connections have failed in recent months, requiring less-than-ideal workarounds. And when the SAM team recently devised additional ways to further improve their creation, they decided to bring it in for repairs.

Which is why test-bed SAM was out of its chamber last month, laid out on a gurney in a clean room at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Several days before, the liquid nitrogen piped into SAM II's chamber to keep it cold had been turned off. Myriad pipes and tubes going in were shut down. The near-vacuum pressure inside the chamber—which is the size of a washing machine and wrapped in aluminum foil—had been changed to Earth conditions.

The big chamber door (which would have exerted some 10,000 pounds, or about 4,500 kilograms, of force) was swung open.

SAM II's lustrous gold plating, needed to regulate temperatures and keep the instrument as clean as possible, had been removed, exposing the warren of intricately packed equipment and wiring inside.

In a Mylar-draped section of the room, two of the men who put both SAMs together were poking and prodding, vacuuming and tightening its insides. In their head-to-toe white cover-ups, they looked like surgeons in the OR.

One of them, Oren Sheinman, is a lead designer and builder of the two SAMs. His repair involved a heat pipe for the tunable laser spectrometer—an instrument Sheinman designed to sniff the Mars air for gases such as carbon-based methane, which could be a sign of past or present life.

Problems with SAM's heat pipe had made it difficult to ensure that the new computer instructions going up to Mars were accurate and effective, so Sheinman and colleague Bob Arvey had to find a work-around.

Speaking from behind the Mylar screen, Sheinman said that what they had created was actually similar to some spacecraft he had worked on. "Not in terms of guidance and propulsion," he said, "but in terms of system issues and sheer complexity."

"With SAM, the difficult part mechanically was packaging, because it isn't really an instrument, but an instrument suite," he said.

Discovery Requires Complexity

SAM was already the largest and heaviest instrument that Curiosity would carry, but it needed to be as small as possible to make room for Curiosity's other equipment.

Fortunately, the hardware Sheinman was working on sat near the outside of the SAM configuration; fixing a piece deeper inside would have required what he called an "excavation."

For Arvey, the primary repair job involved his specialty, the miles of wire. Because SAM has high-temperature wires to supply the ovens and low temperature wires for the instruments, all the wiring had to be crimped together rather than connected with welds.

One of those crimps, or "getters," had failed some time ago, and it too had to be replaced.

Arvey said he needed all of his 40-plus years of experience in wiring space-bound equipment (to Venus, Jupiter, Titan, and Mars) to lay out the electrical rigging of SAM.

"Everything we did in building SAM had to be made up new," he said.

It was SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy who decided to open up the chamber, and he says his rationale was more improvement than repair.

While the several malfunctioning parts were making life difficult, his primary goal was to better stabilize the test-bed SAM so the team could send up commands that would allow Mars SAM to make more sensitive measurements.

Curiosity is a "discovery-driven" mission, Mahaffy said, and that means demands placed on the faraway rover and its instruments are ever changing.  The result is a constant process of tweaking, upgrading and modifying as scientists and engineers learn about Mars and look to devise ways to follow new leads.

Everyone Needs a Test Bed

The Goddard test bed is hardly the only one used for Curiosity.

The home institutions of the principal investigator for all ten Curiosity instruments have their test beds, and their results have to be squared with the entire Curiosity system, headquartered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

JPL has its "Mars yard," where duplicate Curiosity rovers are put through their paces—everything from climbing a steep incline to approaching and drilling a rock.

Using the drill, for instance, involves more than a hundred discrete commands, and they have been put through their paces at the yard in advance of Curiosity's first ever Mars drilling.

"It's kind of unexpected and occasionally funny, but the test beds tend to come up with more problems than the actual equipment on Mars," said Curiosity mission manager Michael Watkins.

Since the equipment and instruments are virtual duplicates, Watkins said it's not an issue of quality. Rather, problems arise because the equipment is made to operate under Mars atmospheric and gravity conditions, which are difficult to entirely reproduce on Earth.

The test equipment is also used far more frequently and aggressively than what's on the actual Curiosity.

The constant testing slows a mission down at times, and after six months on Mars the rover has traveled only about a quarter mile, or less than half a kilometer.

But it has been a productive trip. Since landing on Mars in early August, Curiosity has identified a once fast-flowing stream bed on the planet, found tantalizing but unconfirmed signs of organic materials, and has drilled into low-lying bedrock and found grey (rather than the usual Martian red) rock inside.

The rover's travels on Mars are officially set to continue until the summer of 2014, but if Curiosity and its instruments remain healthy, all involved expect it will operate for several years beyond that.

With that kind of time frame in mind, the SAM team recently arranged to have its busy test bed moved to a building that has a supply of liquid nitrogen just outside a back door.

Before that, researchers and technicians had to roll large, heavy canisters of the gas long distances into a different test room. Hardly ideal for a test bed that's likely to be busy for a long time to come.

Marc Kaufman is working on a book about Curiosity and Mars for National Geographic Books.

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Jodi Arias' Friends Believe in Her Innocence

Accused murderer Jodi Arias believes she should be punished, but hopes she will not be sentenced to death, two of her closest friends told ABC News in an exclusive interview.

Ann Campbell and Donavan Bering have been a constant presence for Arias wth at least one of them sitting in the Phoenix, Ariz., courtroom along with Arias' family for almost every day of her murder trial. They befriended Arias after she first arrived in jail and believe in her innocence.

Arias admits killing her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander and lying for nearly two years about it, but insists she killed Alexander in self defense. She could face the death penalty if convicted of murder.

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Nevertheless, she is aware of the seriousness of her lies and deceitful behavior.

The women told ABC News that they understand that Arias needs to be punished and Arias understands that too.

"She does know that, you know, she does need to pay for the crime," Campbell said. "But I don't want her to die, and I know that she has so much to give back."

Catching Up on the Trial? Check Out ABC News' Jodi Arias Trial Coverage

The lies that Arias admits she told to police and her family have been devastating to her, Bering said.

""She said to me, 'I wish I didn't have to have lied. That destroyed me,'" Donovan said earlier this week. "Because now when it's so important for her to be believed, she has that doubt. But as she told me on the phone yesterday, she goes, 'I have nothing to lose.' So all she can do is go out there and tell the truth."

During Arias' nine days on the stand she has described in detail the oral, anal and phone sex that she and Alexander allegedly engaged in, despite being Mormons and trying to practice chastity. She also spelled out in excruciating detail what she claimed was Alexander's growing demands for sex, loyalty and subservience along with an increasingly violent temper.

Besides her two friends, Arias' mother and sometimes her father have been sitting in the front row of the courtroom during the testimony. It's been humiliating, Bering said.

"She's horrified. There's not one ounce of her life that's not out there, that's not open to the public. She's ashamed," she said.

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Flowers get an electrifying buzz out of visiting bees

Plants could turn out to be one of the more chatty organisms. Recent studies have shown they can communicate with a surprising range of cues. Now it turns out they could be sending out electrical signals, too.

As they fly through the air, bees – like all insects – acquire a positive electric charge. Flowers, on the other hand, are grounded and so have a negative charge. Daniel Robert at the University of Bristol, UK, and colleagues set out to investigate whether bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) were able to make use of these signals.

To test the idea, the team created artificial flowers, filling some with sucrose and others with quinine, a substance bees don't feed on. To start with, the bees visited these flowers at random. But when a 30 volt field – typical for a 30-centimetre-tall flower – was applied to the artificial blooms containing sucrose, the team found that the bees could detect the field from a few centimetres away and visited the charged flowers 81 per cent of the time. The bees reverted to random behaviour when the electricity was switched off.

"That was the first hint that had us jumping up and down in the lab," says Robert. The result suggests the bees may use the electric field as an indicator of the presence of food, much like colour and scent do. In the absence of a charge, they forage at random.

Next, his team looked at whether the bees were influenced by the shape of a flower's electric field, which is determined by the flower's shape. By varying the shape of the field around artificial flowers that had the same charge, they showed that bees preferentially visited flowers with fields in concentric rings like a bullseye: these were visited 70 per cent of the time compared to only 30 per cent for flowers with a solid circular field.

Ruthless evolution

The researchers don't know exactly what information is contained in the flowers' electrical signals, but they speculate that flowers could evolve different shaped fields in their competition to attract pollinators. "Flowers are a ruthless expression of evolution," says Robert. "They exploit the bees."

It's likely that a flower's electric charge reinforces the cues provided by its colour and scent, says Robert, in much the same way as TV commercials use a mix of visual and aural cues to convey their message. The team showed, for example, that bees took a shorter time to distinguish two very similar shades of green when an electric cue was applied. "Electricity is part of their sensory world," says Robert.

When a bee visits a flower it transfers some of its positive charge, incrementally changing the flower's field. With repeated visits, the charge may alter significantly, which could tell other bees that the nectar supply has been diminished. "The last thing a flower wants to do is lie to a bee," says Robert. "Electricity is a way to change cues very quickly: 'I look perfect, I smell nice, but my electrics aren't quite right – come back later!'"

Of course, there may be a few cheaters out there that won't budge a millivolt when visited, he says. But both flowers and bees have limited control over their charge. "All that comes for free," says Robert. "It's just atmospheric physics." He hopes to find out whether other pollinators – including bats – also use electrical cues.

Dishonest advertising

Robert Raguso at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, agrees that the changing electric field may signal that nectar is running low. "Flower colours and scents change slowly, but nectar or pollen can be removed quickly by a pollinator, creating a situation in which the just-visited flower still advertises, dishonestly," he says. The rapid change in electric charge would cut through those out-of-date cues. "Just as the chemical marks left by bee feet can be used by subsequent bees to avoid visiting a depleted flower," he says.

Lars Chittka at Queen Mary, University of London, also thinks it is an interesting finding. He notes that an electrostatic charge can cause pollen to jump short distances from flower to bee, making it easier for the bee to pollinate – another reason bees may favour flowers with a charge.

However, Chittka points out that we cannot yet say with certainty that the bees' ability to detect an electric charge is a true sixth sense. It may be that when a bee hovers over a flower it simply feels the static charge making its hairs bend, in the same way that hairs on our arm bend towards a charged balloon.

If, however, bees do have a true electrical sense, they will join the ranks of certain fish and amphibians. They would be the first animal found to detect electrical fields in the air. "It's previously only been seen in animals in soggy environments," says Chittka.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1230883

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Big Bird repays Obamas with healthy eating ad

WASHINGTON: Big Bird is back as a player in big time US politics.

Mitt Romney wanted to get rid of him, but after a reprieve following the Republican's election defeat, the towering Sesame Street puppet has signed up to endorse First Lady Michelle Obama's nutrition and fitness campaign.

The fluffy yellow character known to generations of US kids is seen jogging in the East Room of the White House and checking out a bowl of fruit and vegetables in the presidential kitchen in two new public service ads.

"Gee, I bet you could get just anything you want in this kitchen," Big Bird said in one of the ads, before remarking "those look good" when the First Lady points out some crunchy vegetables.

The ads will be distributed to 320 public broadcasting stations as part of the First Lady's "Let's Move!" campaign which is designed to fight obesity and improve the diets and health of American kids.

The First Lady will kick off a national tour next week to mark the three year anniversary of the program.

"Eating healthy is easy and it's fun and delicious too," Michelle Obama says in one of the ads.

The use of Big Bird may be seen as one last jab at Romney by the Obamas after the famous Muppet emerged as a punch line during last year's presidential election.

Romney said in a debate in Denver that he liked Big Bird but pledged to cut a government subsidy for public television where he appears, as part of efforts to trim the deficit.

President Barack Obama's team seized on the remark to ridicule Romney after the president badly wobbled in the debate.

"Mitt Romney knows it's not Wall Street you have to worry about, it's Sesame Street," one Obama ad said, jokingly describing Big Bird as an "evil genius" towering over financial felons like Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff.

"Mitt Romney. Taking on our enemies, no matter where they nest," the announcer of the television ad said.

- AFP/fa

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Facebook puts old photos on ice

Facebook's data center in Prineville, Oregon.

(Credit:
Facebook)

Facebook will preserve your aged photos using the tried-and-true freezer method, as billions of photos are headed for colder climates: a "cold storage" unit at Facebook's Prineville, Oregon data center.

Yesterday, the social network opened up the in-construction building to members of the media to demonstrate how it plans to make room in the fridge for the more than 350 million new photo uploads it sees each day, but still keep distant memories alive for revisiting.

Facebook currently houses 240 billion photos, a massive collection that consumes 7 billion petabytes per month. The cold storage process takes into account a photo's lifecycle to transfer a "cold" photo, or one that's transitioned from active moment to old memory, to a more efficient cold storage server.

The company plans to have the first of three 16,000-square-foot cold storage data hubs functioning by fall, according to The Oreganian. The paper paid a visit to the new data center yesterday and said the building is currently just a frame and a concrete pad.

Last month, Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, explained that the company's process for storing photos was too inefficient to support the active storage of billions of photos. The new cold storage rack, which will keep cold photos on ice, has eight times the storage capacity of a normal server, but consumes a quarter of the power.

In essence, the specialized units have been designed to let Facebook freeze photo memories and thaw them out when need be.

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Pictures: Artifacts Provide Clues to Life in Early Christchurch

Photograph courtesy Jaden Harris, Underground Overground Archaeology
 
 
 

A tiny container for Holloway's ointment, less than two inches (five centimeters) wide, came from what was probably a brick-lined basement on Madras Street under a multistory modern commercial building.

British patent medicine entrepreneur Thomas Holloway began to advertise his ointment in 1837, claiming it would cure an impressive list of ailments—"Bad Legs, Bad Breasts, Burns, Bunions, Bite of Mosquitoes and Sandflies, Coco-bay, Chiego-foot, Chilblains, Chapped Hands, Corns (Soft), Cancers, Contracted and Stiff Joints, Elephantiasis, Fistulas, Gout, Glandular Swellings, Lumbago, Piles, Rheumatism, Scalds, Sore Nipples, Sore Throats, Skin Diseases, Scurvy, Sore Heads, Tumours, Ulcers, Wound(s), Yaws."

("Coco-bay" is a Jamaican word for a form of leprosy. "Chiego-foot" is a Trinidadian term that describes a foot covered in chigger bites.)

Holloway moved his company several times in London. "The changing address and the subtle differences in the wording and images that appear on these pots are what enable them to be dated," said Watson. The address on this particular pot—533 Oxford Street, London—indicates that it was made between 1867 and 1881.

Published February 21, 2013

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Las Vegas Strip Shooting Leads to 3 Dead

A drive-by shooting on the Las Vegas strip early this morning by the occupants of a Range Rover SUV, who shot at the occupants of a Maserati, caused a multi-car accident and car explosion that left three dead.

Police said that they believe a group of men riding in a black Range Rover Sport SUV pulled up alongside a Maserati around 4:20 a.m. today and fired shots into the car, striking the driver and passenger, according to Officer Jose Hernandez of the Las Vegas Metropolitan police department.

The Maserati then swerved through an intersection, hitting at least four other cars. One car that was struck, a taxi with a driver and passenger in it, caught on fire and burst into flames, trapping both occupants, Hernandez said.

Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun/AP Photo

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The SUV then fled the scene, according to cops.

The driver of the Maserati died from his gunshot wounds at University Medical Center shortly after the shooting, according to Sgt. John Sheahan.

The driver and passenger of the taxi both died in the car fire.

At least three individuals, including the passenger of the Maserati, were injured during the shooting and car crashes and are being treated at UMC hospital.

Police are scouring surveillance video from the area, including from the strip's major casinos, to try and identify the Range Rover and its occupants, according to police.

They do not yet know why the Range Rovers' occupants fired shots at the Maserati or whether the cars had local plates or were from out of state.

No bystanders were hit by gunfire, Hernandez said.

"We're currently looking for a black Range Rover Sport, with large black rims and some sort of dealership advertising or advertisement plates," Hernandez said. "This is an armed and dangerous vehicle."

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority had no immediate comment about the safety of tourists in the wake of the shooting today.

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First snaps made of fetal brains wiring themselves up

The first images have been captured of the fetal brain at different stages of its development. The work gives a glimpse of how the brain's neural connections form in the womb, and could one day lead to prenatal diagnosis and treatment of conditions such as autism and schizophrenia.

We know little about how the fetal brain grows and functions – not only because it is so small, says Moriah Thomason of Wayne State University in Detroit, but also because "a fetus is doing backflips as we scan it", making it tricky to get a usable result.

Undeterred, Thomason's team made a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the brains of 25 fetuses between 24 and 38 weeks old. Each scan lasted just over 10 minutes, and the team kept only the images taken when the fetus was relatively still.

The researchers used the scans to look at two well-understood features of the developing brain: the spacing of neural connections and the time at which they developed. As expected, the two halves of the fetal brain formed denser and more numerous connections between themselves from one week to the next. The earliest connections tended appear in the middle of the brain and spread outward as the brain continued to develop.

Thomason says that the team is now scanning up to 100 fetuses at different stages of development. These scans might allow them to start to see variation between individuals. They are also applying algorithms to the scanning program that will help correct for the fetus's movements, so fewer scans will be needed in future.

Once they understand what a normal fetal brain looks like, the researchers hope to study brains that are forming abnormal connections. Disorders such as schizophrenia or autism, for instance, are believed to start during development and might be due to faulty brain connections. Understanding the patterns that characterise these diseases might one day allow physicians to spot early warning signs and intervene sooner. Just as importantly, such images might improve our understanding of how these conditions develop in the first place, Thomason says.

Emi Takahashi of Boston Children's Hospital says that one way to do this would be to follow a large group of children after they are born, and look back at the prenatal scans of those who later develop a brain disorder. Although she says the study is a very good first step, understanding the miswiring of the brain is so difficult that it may be some time before the results of such work become useful in clinical settings.

Journal reference: Science Translational Medicine, 10.1126/scitranslmed.3004978

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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Tennis: Kvitova eyes revenge match with Radwanska

DUBAI: Petra Kvitova, the former Wimbledon champion from the Czech Republic, continued her exciting return to form here on Wednesday with a performance which edged her nearer the tenth title of her career.

Kvitova's brilliantly masked hitting eased her into the quarter-finals of the $2,000,000 Dubai Open with a 7-5, 7-6 (7/1) win over Ana Ivanovic, the former French Open champion from Serbia.

It sets her up with a last eight match against Agnieszka Radwanska, the defending champion, and who she has painful memories of as the Pole beat her in the end of year Istanbul tournament last year.

Kvitova's match was full of fine ground strokes between two players who are gradually regaining some of their former excellence after fitness problems.

It lurched unpredictably, first one way and then the other.

Kvitova led 5-1 in the first set and 5-3 in the second and both times Ivanovic increased her ratio of early attacks and worked her way back to parity.

However Kvitova's outstanding facility for disguise tipped the balance.

"From the forehand I can think about going for every point a hundred percent and make winners from that side," she said.

Radwanska had to work hard to get past Yulia Putintseva, an 18-year-old wild card player from Kazakhstan, by 7-5 6-3.

Radwanska acknowledged the promise of her opponent.

"I really want to see her, you know, in a couple of months, how she's gonna play and what her ranking is going to be," the world number four from Poland said.

Kvitova was not displeased with this quarter-final draw.

"I played her last time Istanbul and I lost to her," she said with a blunt look, which recalled that in the process she also lost her WTA Championship season-end title.

"I'm looking for revenge, for sure."

Both players title hopes were boosted after the withdrawal of world number one Serena Williams earlier on Wednesday with a back injury. This followed Monday's withdrawal of top-seeded Victoria Azarenka with a heel injury.

Another reason for Kvitova's fine form, which saw her lead Williams 4-1 in the final set in Doha last week, is the improvement in her physical fitness compared with last year.

"I changed my fitness coach," she says.

"So it's different exercises, and working on different muscles. I have to get used to that and continue with it and to show it on the court then."

Another who might capitalise on the absence of the top two is Caroline Wozniacki, the former world number one from Denmark who won the title here two years ago.

She also looked in good form as she overwhelmed Zheng Jie, the former Wimbledon semi-finalist from China, by 6-0, 6-1.

Wozniacki looks fitter too and is trying to reproduce the movement and consistency which got her to the top in 2010 and 2011.

She was asked to explain the curiosity of her father-coach Piotr coming on to court to offer advice despite her rampant first set performance.

"It's just because we practise a lot of things," said Wozniacki. "He gives me some pointers, about what I need to remember, what we have practiced, and what can still be improved.

"It doesn't matter if you win 6-0 or 6-3, at the end of the day you want to win but you also want to try a few of the things that you have been practising."

Wozniacki next plays Marion Bartoli, the former Wimbledon finalist from France, who enjoyed her second piece of rare luck in this tournament by receiving a walk-over from Williams.

Bartoli was earlier given a wild card into the tournament after submitting her entry late.

-AFP/ac

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Microsoft to back Oracle in Java case against Google -- report

The legal war between Oracle and Google has been rather muted for the last several months, but there could be a major new twist in the case.

Reuters has reported that legal representatives for Microsoft told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a briefing yesterday that it would support Oracle.

We reached out to Oracle to confirm, but the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based corporation declined to comment.

Not many more details are available at this time, but it would seemingly line up with Microsoft's other patent-related lawsuits against Motorola Mobility, now a Google subsidiary.

To recall, Oracle originally sued Google in 2010 over copyright infringement related to the use of 37 Java APIs used on the
Android mobile operating system.

Google argued they were free to use because the Java programming language is free to use, and the APIs are required to use the language. Oracle tried to make the case that Google had knowingly used the APIs without a license from Sun Microsystems, which was bought by Oracle in 2010.

But last spring, a federal jury at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco sided with Google on nearly all of the copyright claims as well as on all of the patent disputes.

At this point in the case, Oracle is working on an appeal after a federal judge rejected the Java owner's motion for a new trial. The two parties also met several times last summer to discuss damages.

In one instance, at a case management hearing in June, Oracle's legal team explained that it filed a stipulation in which Google was asked to pay $0 in statutory damages (in reference to the nine lines of code in the rangeCheck method and the test files) in order to move proceedings along faster as it works toward an appeal.

This story originally appeared at ZDNet under the headline "Microsoft teaming up with Oracle against Google in Java case?"

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