Hey, folks: Due to sporadic network/server issues throughout the week, our access to the Internet was limited. We apologize for the delay in publishing any comments you may have left to this week's articles, as well as the delay in your receiving this week's newsletter. Hopefully, after completion of the server switch, we will not experience such issues. **fingers crossed**

Hate for the Great Pumpkin Caper
Eight pumpkins were stolen from the front of Kyle Konecny's family's New York home. When the family's pumpkins were stolen two years ago, Konecny thought about putting a sign in front of his house to let people know he was mad. When it happened again Sunday, the sign went up.

The sign — which reads: "To whoever stole my kid's pumpkins! Thanks for ruining his Halloween you jerk! He grew them himself!" — was placed in front of the Konecny house Monday, reports The Binghamton Press.

Every year, 10-year-old Dylan and his father grow their own at the boy's grandmother's house. Because the family had more pumpkins than usual this year, little Dylan had been moving them around in front, trying to find a good place for them all. When he got home from hockey on Sunday, his mother told him the pumpkins had been stolen again.

So up the father's sign went. "I wanted the people who did it to know that I was ticked," he said.

Don't worry — considering the press attention, we think it is safe to assume that gift pumpkins will be flooding in any time now, if they haven't already.

Scrabble Champ's Win a Fluke?
On Oct. 12, a carpenter named Michael Cresta scored 830 points in a game of Scrabble. His opponent, Wayne Yorra, who works at a supermarket deli counter, totaled 490 points. Says Slate, "The two men set three records for sanctioned Scrabble in North America: the most points in a game by one player (830), the most total points in a game (1,320), and the most points on a single turn (365, for Cresta's play of QUIXOTRY)."

Cresta's 830 shattered a 13-year-old record, 770 points, which had been threatened only infrequently.

Most impressive: Cresta and Yorra aren't expert-level players. They know the basics — like the 101 two-letter and most of the 1,015 three-letter words — but they're both rated in the bottom third of tournament players. The win is being called a fluke.

Spacecraft to Film Sun in 3D
A pair of Sun-watching satellites launched into the night sky above Florida late Wednesday, kicking off a NASA mission to take three-dimensional (3-D) images of our nearest star, BBC News reports.

The Stereo mission will study violent eruptions from our parent star known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). The eruptions create huge clouds of energetic particles that can trigger magnetic storms, disrupting power grids and air and satellite communications.

The mission is expected to help researchers forecast magnetic storms — the worst aspects of "space weather."

I'm Trapped!!! But I Kinda Like It… Pt. II
Another kid's curiosity got the best of him when he got stuck in a toy vending machine.

Like Devin Haskin (Item 8), three-year-old Robert Moore got a bit frustrated in a local store's game room when he was unable to manipulate a toy crane and win a stuffed Sponge Bob on Saturday evening, according to The Antigo Daily Journal.

Moore was quickly inside the Plexiglas cube that held the crane and stuffed animals. No key to the cubicle could be found in the store, so the local fire department was called in. After breaking one lock, firefighters noticed there were two latches on the inside of the Plexiglas and asked Robert to help. They handed the boy a screwdriver and told him to get to work, at which point he stacked up all the stuffed animals and used the screwdriver to open the latches to free himself.

He never did get his Sponge Bob.

A Really Tall Building Next?
It's like the Babel fish in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Or the TARDIS in the new "Dr. Who." Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are developing a so-called "Tower of Babel" device that should enable all users to silently mouth a word in their own language for it to be translated and read out in another, reports BBC News.

The translation systems currently in use work by using voice recognition software; but this requires people to speak out loud and then wait for the translation to be read out, making conversations difficult.

The new device, however, is different. Electrodes are attached to the neck and face to detect the movements that occur as the person silently mouths words and phrases. Using this data, a computer can work out the sounds being formed and then build these sounds up into words. The system is then able to translate the words into another language which is read out by a synthetic voice.

The researchers said the effect was like watching a television program that had been dubbed. While the system is not yet fully accurate, experts said it showed the technology was "within reach."

Cloaking Device Closer to Reality
After all the bad press at Duke University of late, it's kinda hopeful to hear some good news coming from the school. Researchers at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering last week demonstrated a cloaking device that can render items nearly invisible to electromagnetic waves at microwave frequencies.

The demonstration showcases the potential for an emerging class of electronic materials — called "metamaterials" — that may have broader uses in optics and electronics.

Reports Design News:

Duke's real-world cloaking device consists of 10 concentric rings, the largest less than five inches across. These rings hold individual cells of metamaterials whose permeability and permittivity can be tightly controlled at any given point in the material's structure.

"There's no way to do that with natural materials," according to David Schurig, one of the cloaking device's creators and a physicist with Duke's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Tumbling like a "Drunken Sailor" Toward Discovery
A unique rover robot designed to explore planets and moons underwent final assembly last week in a lab at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The robot may also be useful in hazardous environments on Earth, its creators say.

Instead of driving, walking or rolling around like other vehicles designed to traverse distant, rugged landscapes, the new rover changes its shape and topples along, veering a bit from side to side as it moves ahead.

"We call it the drunken-sailor walk," Pamela Clark, one of the designers of the project at Goddard and a professor at Catholic University of America, told Technology Review.

The device consists of an adjustable frame joined together at key points called nodes. The thin struts connect to the round nodes to form a tetrahedral shape, with another "payload node" at the center to hold the computer systems and sensors. The robot moves by extending or contracting its struts to change its configuration and shift its center of gravity until it tumbles over, then begins the process again.

Tumbling by changing the center of gravity — seemingly an awkward and ungainly way of getting around — is efficient and useful for dealing with obstacles, slippery surfaces and steep slopes, says Clark.

Marooned Mars Rover Returns Most Detailed Panorama
The most detailed panoramic view ever obtained on Mars has been returned by NASA's Spirit rover in time to mark its 1,000th Martian day, or sol, on the Red Planet, reports New Scientist.

Spirit took the images over a span of more than five months, while parked on a slope called Low Ridge Haven during winter in the planet's southern hemisphere. The relatively small amount of winter sunshine meant the rover did not have enough power to drive anywhere.

Too weak to move for the past six months, NASA's Spirit rover produced the most detailed panoramic view of the Red Planet ever made. A total of 1,449 individual images representing 500 megabytes of raw data were acquired for the view, called the McMurdo panorama.

The panorama shows Spirit's view of part of the Columbia Hills region, where it has made many of its most interesting discoveries. Many dark, volcanic rocks litter the area.

Cheers.