Iraq-born teen cracks maths puzzle

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – A 16-year-old Iraqi immigrant living in Sweden has cracked a maths puzzle that has stumped experts for more than 300 years, Swedish media reported on Thursday.
In just four months, Mohamed Altoumaimi has found a formula to explain and simplify the so-called Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of calculations named after the 17th century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, the Dagens Nyheter daily said.
Altoumaimi, who came to Sweden six years ago, said teachers at his high school in Falun, central Sweden were not convinced about his work at first.
"When I first showed it to my teachers, none of them thought the formula I had written down really worked," Altoumaimi told the Falu Kuriren newspaper.
He then got in touch with professors at Uppsala University, one of Sweden's top institutions, to ask them to check his work.
After going through his notebooks, the professors found his work was indeed correct and offered him a place in Uppsala.
But for now, Altoumaimi is focusing on his school studies and plans to take summer classes in advanced mathematics and physics this year.
"I wanted to be a researcher in physics or mathematics; I really like those subjects. But I have to improve in English and social sciences," he told the Falu Kuriren.

Astronauts drink water from recycled urine

HOUSTON – (AP) At the international space station, it was one small sip for man and a giant gulp of recycled urine for mankind.
Astronauts aboard the space station celebrated a space first on Wednesday by drinking water that had been recycled from their urine, sweat and water that condenses from exhaled air. They said "cheers," clicked drinking bags and toasted NASA workers on the ground who were sipping their own version of recycled drinking water.
"The taste is great," American astronaut Michael Barratt said. Then as Russian Gennady Padalka tried to catch little bubbles of the clear water floating in front of him, Barratt called the taste "worth chasing."
He said the water came with labels that said: "drink this when real water is over 200 miles away."
The urine recycling system is needed for astronaut outposts on the moon and Mars. It also will save NASA money because it won't have to ship up as much water to the station by space shuttle or cargo rockets.
It's also crucial as the space station is about to expand from three people living on board to six.
The recycling system had been brought up to the space station last November by space shuttle Endeavour, but it couldn't be used until samples were tested back on Earth and a stuck valve was fixed on Monday.
So when it came time to actually drink up, NASA made a big deal of it.