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• Who is Pania Rose, and where can I get some more? (Popoholic)
• No wardrobe malfunctions for Cameron Diaz. (Hollywood Tuna)
• All the details on the Jennifer Aniston / Vince Vaughn break up and cheating. (Pink is the New Blog)
• Don’t get into a fight with Pete Doherty, because you just might end up falling off a balcony and dying. (DListed)
• Fergie is a pretty boring performer. (IDLYITW)
• Is Beyonce lying about her age? (Popsugar)
• They look like they’re in love, but I doubt Chad Michael Murray and his 18-year-old fiancée Kenzie Dalton will make it very far. (Just Jared)
• Lance Bass dumped boyfriend Reichen Lehmkuhl and already has a new guy. (A Socialite’s Life)
• Sean "Diddy" Combs may not want to be called Puffy anymore, but that doesn’t mean he’s stopped puffing. (CityRag)
• Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy ain’t gettin’ married just yet. (Hollywood Rag)
• Thank God Bette Midler is not copying Lindsay and Britney. (Defamer)

via egotastic.

Playgrounds in America might never be the same: Paris Hilton says she wants to have children — soon.

The partying heiress says that hanging around with her new best friend, Britney Spears, and Spears’ two tykes has made her want to reproduce.

“It’s been my dream to have four babies by 30,” the 25-year-old heiress announced, reports Life & Style Weekly. And Hilton thinks she’s highly qualified for motherhood, explaining: “I look after animals, so I’d have a lot to give my kids.”

In fact, looking after kiddies has become so appealing to Hilton that she recently cut short a night out with Spears, announcing to friends, “We’re going home to the babies. We miss them.”

Source.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are planning another wedding party to take place December 9 at his producing partner Paula Wagner’s Beverly Hills mansion, Cruise’s rep confirms to Us exclusively. The bash is for friends and family who couldn’t attend the couple’s nuptials last month in Italy.

The party is fresh on the heels of the couple’s 13-day honeymoon. The new Mr. and Mrs. Tom Cruise spent November 19 to December 1 in the Maldives on the Arctic P, a yacht with an onboard doctor (for Suri) and spa therapist.

"It was a family occasion," says a source. "They played with Suri all the time, filming her on a camcorder." On Thanksgiving, the group visited a Fesdu Island resort where, says a source, "they sunbathed by the pool, read philosophy books and went snorkeling in the lagoon. Later, they took Suri for a swim."

Source.

Boeing-Spectrolab has developed a solar cell that can convert almost 41 percent of the sunlight that strikes it into electricity, the latest step in trying to drop the cost of solar power.

Potentially, the solar cell could bring the cost of solar power down to around $3 a watt, after installation costs and other expenses are factored in, over the life of the panel. The new cost information comes from Boeing, whose Spectrolab unit supplies searchlights and solar simulators, and the Department of Energy, which sponsored the project. Current silicon solar cells provide electricity at about $8 a watt, before government rebates. The goal is to bring it to $1 a watt without rebates or incentives.

The cell achieves 40.7 percent efficiency. The Department of Energy has been sponsoring research to find ways to get solar cells past the so-called 40 percent barrier.

Earlier this year, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories reported that cells made of a new type of semiconductor, zinc-manganese-tellurium, combined with a few atoms of oxygen, could convert around 45 percent of sunlight into electricity. That technology, also partly sponsored by the Department of Energy, has been licensed to RoseStreet Labs in Arizona. It remains to be seen whether this material can be made into solar cells economically.

Sharp Solar, one of the biggest solar companies in the industry, showed a solar cell offering 36 percent efficiency earlier this year. The Sharp cell includes a concentrator–a thin lens that focuses sunlight on the cell–but is not made of silicon. It instead is made out of III-V compounds, molecules made from elements in the III and V columns of the periodic table of elements. (The metallic element gallium–used in semiconductors and optoelectronic devices–is from this neighborhood.)

Currently, the best commercial silicon solar cells can convert 22 percent of the sunlight that hits them into electricity, and physics dictates that maximum efficiency for these cells will come at around 26 percent.

Boeing got around that barrier by integrating two technologies. One, the solar cell, contains a layer of concentrators. From a practical point of view, using a concentrator is like adding extra surface area to the cell.

The solar cell also contains more than one material. Silicon cells interact with only a limited part of the light spectrum. Additional layers of gallium arsenide or other materials can convert light in other portions of the spectrum into electricity. Making so-called multi-junction solar cells is more expensive than making single-junction silicon cells. Still, many companies believe the higher manufacturing expense can be offset by cost savings from the cells’ greater electrical output.

Boeing, however, did not state what materials it used in its cell.

via c|net.

Photographs from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor may indicate some level of occasional liquid water flow on the surface of Mars.

Though the Mars Global Surveyor may be lost in space, recent comparisons of images captured throughout the satellite’s decade of observing the Red Planet have shown changes in surface geography that, scientists theorize, could be signs of water flow in several locations between 1999 and 2005.

These discrepancies in the presence of light-colored deposits in gullies on Martian craters are "what you would expect to see if the material were carried by flowing water," Michael Malin, of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, asserted in a statement from NASA. The findings were announced Wednesday.

Changes in the makeup of gullies on slopes, a topographical feature first noticed by Malin’s research team in 2000, were first noticed after a gully appeared to form after mid-2002. It was, however, attributed to the flow of sand on a dune. But now, comparisons of earlier and more recent images have revealed new light-colored deposits that could possibly be related to ice or salt formations that would come from liquid water flow. Deposits caused by dry dust or sand are more likely to be dark in color.

It’s by no means positive. But Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, said that this is "the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars."

Ice water and water vapor are known to exist on Mars, but up until this point, there has not been compelling evidence for the presence of liquid water. Due to Mars’ thin atmosphere and subzero temperatures, liquid water–crucial for the sustenance of even the smallest microbial life–could not stay in that form for long. But researchers have suggested that it could be possible for liquid water to escape from underground and stay liquid for long enough to alter surface deposits in the way that the evidence from the Mars Global Surveyor shows.

via c|net.