A White House commission tasked with making voting improvements after lengthy wait times were reported in the 2012 election is hitting the road.

The president's Commission on Election Administration, which met for the first time on Friday, announced it will hold upcoming hearings in four states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Ohio.

Co-chair Bob Bauer, President Barack Obama's former counsel, said they will hold "a public meetings process around the country that enables us to hear from election officials, from experts and from citizens in affected communities about the voting experience and their perspective on the issues they should be covering." Bauer and co-chair Ben Ginsberg, former counsel for Mitt Romney, invited election experts and members of the public to participate.

"Please help us to ferret out the information we need," Bauer said.

Hearing specifics are still slim. Known so far: They are scheduled for June 28 at the University of Miami, Aug. 8 in Denver, Sept. 4 in Philadelphia and Sept. 20 somewhere in Ohio.

The commissionwas first publicly announced by Obama in his State of the Union address, during which he expressed concern about long wait times at the polls in 2012. The commission is tasked with presenting recommendations in six months to the president to improve voting, specifically focusing on members of the military, overseas voters, voters with disabilities and voters with limited English proficiency. It will also look at the training of polling workers, the operation of polling places and voting machines, and ballot design per the president's executive order, which included a long list of other potential areas of study.

Columbia Law School professor Nathan Persily, who is on the committee and presented research on Friday, emphasized during his presentation the necessity of the public hearings.

"It will be one of the main ways we interact with the public," Persily said, adding that voters will "plug holes where we don't have research."

After the hearing, Bauer told Yahoo News that he believes the commission will serve to change the historically typical ebb and flow of election interest.

"There's always this problem we have in this country that elections take place and then they kind of fade away," he said. "What I think the president's hoping to accomplish here is to have a very focused discussion that's well-informed and enabled to be national in scope, and to have recommendations presented to him that will really be helpful to election administrators around the country."

Costs for the commission will be handled by the the U.S. General Services Administration. No money was requested in the presidents proposal or in GSAs budget request. Steve Croley, deputy White House counsel, told Yahoo News in late April .

Ginsbergwhose inclusion along with Bauer's is designed to send a clear bipartisan messagesaid on Friday he was "flattered" to be asked to be part of the commission and expressed hope they could make a difference in voting in America.

"I hope we can make a difference in correcting these things that Republicans and Democrats agree really are issues," Bauer said.

The co-chairs on Friday readily conceded they have a large challenge before them related both to the scope of their task as well as logistically given the short time frame and a commission staffed by volunteers. But they expressed hope the CEA wouldn't join the list of past commissions criticized for their ineffectiveness.

"It's a challenge, but everyone's interested in the issue so we're all willing to work hard for the discrete time period we have," Ginsberg said.

Still, the Benjamin Britten opera, commissioned to help mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, was hardly a rousing success back in 1953.

Instead of the joyous celebration many expected, Britten and librettist William Plomer produced a somber work about the first Queen Elizabeth and her relationship with the Earl of Essex. Though the opera has festive elements, it ends on a downbeat note, with the monarch portrayed as an aging, disillusioned woman contemplating death.

The first night audience at Covent Garden which included many members of the royal family greeted it with bewilderment, some wags dubbed it "Boriana," and the piece soon disappeared from the Royal Opera's repertory.

Until now.

This month, "Gloriana" is back in a new production by Richard Jones that the company's director, Kasper Holten, notes commemorates a "triple anniversary": 60 years since the coronation and the opera's premiere and 100 years since the composer's birth.

"There was feeling that it deserved another chance, to be looked at again," said Holten, who holds the same job Lord Harewood did in 1953. "To see whether the piece isn't really better than its reputation."

That it is. "Gloriana" contains some of Britten's finest music, though it possibly falls short of being a masterpiece to rank with his "Peter Grimes" or "Billy Budd."

"There are fantastic moments," Holten said in an interview. "The courtly dances, the lute song. I think the problem is that there are other parts that dramatically fail to pick up the same pace. That makes for an uneven evening."

What may have seemed an inappropriately dark portrayal of monarchy 60 years ago also feels different with the passage of time a perspective heightened by Jones's production. He frames the work as a pageant being staged for the young queen by a local community group of amateurs. This mixture of Tudor pomp with nostalgia for a Britain that was still recovering from World War II makes for a poignant combination.

"On opening night I had a strong feeling that from the first moment, people got it," Holten said. "This piece is a part of their history and it says something about them."

Critical reaction has been mixed. Many applauded Jones's staging while finding fault with the piece itself. Writing in the Financial Times, Richard Fairman said it was "brave of the Royal Opera to bring the work back to the theatre where it had its troubled birth," but he added that "drama and music are stretched painfully thin. Perhaps that first-night audience was not so wrong-headed after all."

More positive was Michael Church in The Independent, who noted that in 1953 "people just weren't ready for a work which chimes so neatly with our post-modern consciousness. . Covent Garden," he said, "has now shown that 'Gloriana' is, if not a great work, certainly one of the most intriguing in the canon."

Part of what's intriguing is the way Britten and Plomer depict the title character. Basing his libretto on Lytton Strachey's psychological history, "Elizabeth and Essex," Plomer presents a queen who, as Holten says, "is quite a flawed character, struggling with the dilemma between personal and public roles."

The idea of the queen as outsider in her own court, beloved by her people but lonely nonetheless, struck a chord with Britten, who was drawn to portrayals of outcasts in many of his other works as well.

In the opera's final scene, after Elizabeth has condemned Essex to death for treason, she is left alone on stage. Britten daringly subverts expectations here: Instead of giving her a final aria with a soaring vocal line, he has her abandon singing altogether for stretches of spoken declamation.

"It's almost as if the musical language falls apart at the end, as if she loses her language," Holten said. "There's no more singing in her, she's been worn out. I think that's a beautiful effect."

"Gloriana," starring soprano Susan Bullock in the title role and tenor Toby Spence as Essex, runs through July 6.

Nationwide, the rallies were among the most gigantic Egypt has seen in nearly 2 years of continuous upheaval, including during the square-packing, 18-day uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak in early 2011.

Waving Egyptian flags and carrying posters of Morsi crossed out in red, crowds packed central Cairo's Tahrir square, the birthplace of anti-Mubarak, thunderous chants of "erhal!", or "leave!" rang out.

At the same time, a tidal wave of crowds marched on the Ittihadiya presidential palace, filling a broad boulevard for blocks and spilling over into nearby avenues. "You lied to us in the name of religion," some chanted, and others raised a banner proclaiming, "Morsi=Mubarak. Early presidential elections." The crowds hoisted long banners in the colors of the Egyptian flag and raised red cards a sign of expulsion in soccer.

Near Ittihadiya palace, thousands of Islamists gathered in a show of support for Morsi outside the Rabia al-Adawiya Mosque. Some Morsi backers wore homemade body armor and construction helmets and carried shields and clubs precautions, they said, against possible violence. Their crowd also swelled as sun went down and summer temperatures became more tolerable.

Up until nightfall, violence was limited to a few pockets in the provinces as the two sides largely stayed apart. The anti-Morsi protests had a festive, celebratory atmosphere, with many families with young children among the crowds of men, women and elderly.

In a potentially volatile confrontation after nightfall, however, several dozen youths attacked the headquarters of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood on a plateau overlooking the capital. They threw stones and firebombs at the building, and people inside the walled villa fired at the attackers with birdshot, according to an Associated Press Television News cameraman at the scene. Earlier in the day, two offices belonging to the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice party, were attacked and ransacked in the city of Bani Suef, south of Cairo.

The opposition's goal is to show through sheer numbers in the street that so much of the country has turned against Morsi, the country's first freely elected president, that he can no longer rule. Similarly sized crowds turned out in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta cities of Mansoura, Tanta and Damanhour, with sizeable rallies in cities nationwide.

"Mubarak took only 18 days although he had behind him the security, intelligence and a large sector of Egyptians. Morsi got all of us against him, even the army and police," said Amr Tawfeeq, an oil company employee marching toward Ittihadiya with a Christian friend. "He won't take long. We want him out and we are ready to pay the price."

Morsi, who has three years left in his term, has said he will not step down, saying street protests cannot be used to overturn the results of a free election.

"There is no room for any talk against this constitutional legitimacy," he told Britain's The Guardian newspaper in an interview published Sunday, rejecting early elections.

If an elected president is forced out, "well, there will (be) people or opponents opposing the new president too, and a week or a month later, they will ask him to step down," he said.

As the crowds massed, Morsi's spokesman repeated the president's longstanding offer of dialogue with the opposition to resolve the nation's political crisis, calling it "the only framework through which we can reach understandings."

"I cannot imagine any substitute for dialogue," said the spokesman Ihab Fahmi. The opposition has repeatedly turned down his offers for dialogue, arguing that they were for show.

There is a sense among opponents and supporters of Morsi that Sunday is a make-or-break day, hiking worries that the two camps will come to blows, even as each side insists it won't start violence. Already at least seven people, including an American, have been killed in clashes the past week, mainly in Nile Delta cities and the coastal city of Alexandria.

The confrontation is the culmination of polarization and instability that have been building since Morsi's June 30, 2012 inauguration as Egypt's first freely elected leader. The past year has seen multiple political crises, bouts of bloody clashes and a steadily worsening economy, with power outages, fuel shortages, rising prices and persistent lawlessness and crime.

In one camp are the president and his Islamist allies, including the Muslim Brotherhood and more hard-line groups. Morsi supporters accuse Mubarak loyalists of being behind the protests, aiming to overturn last year's election results, just as they argue that remnants of the old regime have sabotaged Morsi's attempts to deal with the nation's woes and bring reforms.

Hard-liners among them have also given the confrontation a sharply religious tone, denouncing Morsi's opponents as "enemies of God" and infidels.

On the other side is an array of secular and liberal Egyptians, moderate Muslims, Christians and what the opposition says is a broad sector of the general public that has turned against the Islamists. They say the Islamists have negated their election mandate by trying to monopolize power, infusing government with their supporters, forcing through a constitution they largely wrote and giving religious extremists a free hand, all while failing to manage the country.

With protesters from a range of social and economic levels in a festive atmosphere, the crowds resembled those from the 18 days of protests against Mubarak a resemblance the protesters sought to reinforce, chanting the slogan from that time: "The people want to topple the regime."

In Cairo, some marchers carried tents, planning to camp in Tahrir or outside the palace. Residents of nearby buildings sprinkled water down on the marchers to cool them in the punishing summer heat and waved flags and blew whistles in support.

"The country is only going backward (under Morsi). He's embarrassing us and making people hate Islam," said Donia Rashad, a 24-year-old unemployed woman who wears the conservative Islamic headscarf. "We need someone who can feel the people and is agreeable to the majority," added Rashad, who wore a tiny tiara in the letters of "erhal."

"Today is the Brotherhood's last day in power," said Suliman Mohammed, a manager of a seafood company who was protesting at Tahrir, where crowds appeared to approach 300,000 after nightfall.

"I came here today because Morsi did not accomplish any of the (2011) revolution's goals. I don't need anything for myself, but the needs of the poor were not met."

At the pro-Morsi rally at the Rabia al-Adawiya Mosque, the crowd chanted, "God is great," and some held up copies of Islam's holy book, the Quran.

"The people hold the legitimacy and we support Dr. Mohamed Morsi," Ahmed Ramadan, one of those at the rally said. "We would like to tell him not to be affected by the opponents' protests and not to give up his rights we are here to support and protect him."

Underlining the potential for deadly violence, a flurry of police reports on Sunday spoke of the seizure of firearms, explosives and even artillery shells in various locations of the country, including Alexandria and the outskirts of Cairo. Banks closed early and most government offices shut down on Sunday, a work day in Egypt.

The opposition protests emerge from a petition campaign by a youth activist group known as Tamarod, Arabic for "Rebel." For several months, the group has been collecting signatures on a call for Morsi to step down.

On Saturday the group announced it had more than 22 million signatures proof, it claims, that a broad sector of the public no longer wants Morsi in office.

It was not possible to verify the claim. If true, it would be nearly twice the around 13 million people who voted for Morsi in last year's presidential run-off election, which he won with around 52 percent of the vote. Tamarod organizers said they discarded about 100,000 signed forms because they were duplicates.

Morsi's supporters have questioned the authenticity and validity of the signatures, but have produced no evidence of fraud.

Adding to his troubles, eight lawmakers from the country's interim legislature announced their resignation Saturday to protest Morsi's policies. The 270-seat chamber was elected early last year by less than 10 percent of Egypt's eligible voters, and is dominated by Islamists.

A legal adviser to Morsi also announced his resignation late Saturday in protest of what he said was Morsi's insult of judges in his latest speech on Wednesday.

A week ago, with the public sense of worry growing over the upcoming confrontation, Defense Minister Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi last week gave the president and his opponents a week to reach a compromise. He warned that the military would intervene to prevent the nation from entering a "dark tunnel."

Army troops backed by armored vehicles were deployed Sunday in some of Cairo's suburbs, with soldiers, some in combat gear, stood at traffic lights and major intersections. Army helicopters flew over Cairo on several occasions on Sunday, adding to the day's sense of foreboding. The aircraft were loudly cheered every time they flew over Tahrir.

Morsi had called for national reconciliation talks in a Wednesday speech but offered no specifics. Opposition leaders dismissed the call as cosmetics.

Asked by The Guardian whether he was confident that the army would not intervene if the country becomes ungovernable, Morsi replied, "Very."

The Egyptian leader, however, said he did not know in advance of el-Sissi's comments last week.

____

AP reporters Tony G. Gabriel and Mariam Rizk contributed to this report.

(Logo: )

"GALEX is a remarkable accomplishment," said Jeff Hayes, NASA's GALEX program executive in Washington. "This small Explorer mission has mapped and studied galaxies in the ultraviolet, light we cannot see with our own eyes, across most of the sky."

Operators at Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Va., sent the signal to decommission GALEX at 3:09 p.m. EDT Friday, June 28. The spacecraft will remain in orbit for at least 65 years, then fall to Earth and burn up re-entering the atmosphere. GALEX met its prime objectives and its mission was extended three times before NASA decided to end it.

Highlights from the mission's decade of sky scans include:

The mission also captured a dazzling collection of snapshots, showing everything from ghostly nebulas to a spiral galaxy with huge, spidery arms.

In a first-of-a-kind move for NASA, the agency in May 2012 loaned GALEX to Caltech, which used private funds to continue operating the satellite while NASA retained ownership. Since then, investigators from around the world have used GALEX to study everything from stars in our own Milky Way galaxy to hundreds of thousands of galaxies 5 billion light-years away.

In the space telescope's last year, it scanned across large patches of sky, including the bustling, bright center of our Milky Way. The telescope spent time staring at some areas of the sky exploded stars, called supernovae, and monitoring how objects, such as the centers of active galaxies, change over time. GALEX also scanned the sky for massive, feeding black holes and shock waves from early supernova explosions.

Data from the last year of the mission will be made public in the coming year.

"GALEX, the mission, may be over, but its science discoveries will keep on going," said Kerry Erickson, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

A slideshow showing some of the popular GALEX images can be seen here:

JPL managed the GALEX mission and built the science instrument. The mission's principal investigator, Chris Martin, is at Caltech. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., developed the mission under the Explorers Program it manages. Researchers sponsored by Yonsei University in South Korea and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France collaborated on the mission.

Graphics and additional information about the Galaxy Evolution Explorer are online at:

SOURCE NASA

According to various reports, Instagram will add video to its popular photo-sharing service. The announcement is expected at the. Facebook, which bought Instagram for $1 billion in April 2012, sent mysterious invites to an event late last week via snail mail. "A small team has been working on a big idea. Join us for coffee and learn about a new product," the press invitation read.

Technology websitesandhave both independently reported that the Instagram team is planning to add video capabilities to the app. "The new video product is something that the service said it was planning to do for two years now, and there have been numerous rumors about it in recent weeks," Mike Isaac of All Things D reports.

When reached by ABC News, Facebook said it doesn't comment on rumors or speculation.

TechCrunch first reported that Facebook would release a new news reader app at the Thursday event, but now maintains that the event will be dedicated to just the new Instagram feature.

Details on how the service will work are slim. Though, Matthew Keys, the former social media editor at Reuters, that the feature would allow users to upload between five to 10 seconds of video.

The service as described in the reports would be a direct competitor to , which allows user to upload and share six-second videos. The iPhone and Android app has quickly become very popular, with reports thatphotos.

Still, Instagram has a much larger built-in user base. The photo-sharing service has over 100 million active users, who upload around 40 million photos per day.

Since being acquired by Facebook, Instagram has still maintained an ad-free service. Back in December, when theand to the wording about advertising, there was user uproar and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom assured users that the company was listening to the strong feedback.

"We want to create meaningful ways to help you discover new and interesting accounts and content while building a self-sustaining business at the same time," Systrom said. Yesterday Facebook announced that it had 1 million active advertisers on the social network.

The Facebook event begins at 10 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET on Thursday, June 20. ABC News will have the latest then.

Volcanoes are typically found near the borders of tectonic plates, born as these plates either violently push or pull at each other. Strangely, volcanoes sometimes erupt far away from these boundaries in the middle of these plates. The sources of these outbursts might be , streamsof molten rock rising up from deep in the Earth to penetrate overlying material like a blowtorch. As theover such plumes, geologists think chains of volcanic isles, such as the , emerge.

However, more than 40 years after mantle plumes were first proposed, scientists are debating whether they actually exist. For example, it remains hotly debated whether and how mantle plumes can remain active and stationary for more than 100 million years.

To help resolve the controversy, a French-German project now aims to image a plume that may have played a role in the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The scientists haveover a vast area of seafloor of more than 1.1 million square miles (3 million square kilometers) around Runion Island, one of the most active volcanoes in the world. The seabed the devices rest on can vary from 7,500 feet (2,300 meters) to 18,000 feet (5,500 m) below the ocean's surface.

The seafloor devices join about 60 other seismometers on islands in the Indian Ocean, such as Runion, Mauritius, Madagascar and the Seychelles. These land-based stations reduce the need for expensive sensors on the ocean bottom, researchers explained. []

"We are starting from a stage where almost nothing is known of the deep mantle structure beneath La Runion and beneath the whole Indian Ocean region," researcher Guilhem Barruol, a seismologist at the University of La Runion, told OurAmazingPlanet. "It's indeed exciting to take part of this deep Earth exploration."

Lurking beneath the surface

The plume that may lurk under Runion is suspected to have seared a track of volcanic activity that stretches about 3,400 miles (5,500 km) northward from Runion to the Deccan Plateau region of what is now India. At theabout 65 million years ago, massive volcanism in the Deccan area spewed lava across 580,000 square miles (1.5 million square km), radically altering Earth's climate and perhaps hastening the giant reptiles'demise.

The Runion Hotspot and Upper Mantle-Runions Unterer Mantel (RHUM-RUM) project aims to image theunder Runion at all depths for the biggest plume hunt so far. The network of ocean floor sensors will illuminate structures under the island down to about 600 miles (1,000 km) below the Earth's surface, while the land-based seismometers will image the area below that all the way to the boundary of the core and mantle. Coincidentally, two other seismological experiments are deploying 50 more seismic stations in Madagascar, data that, along with recent seismic-scanning initiatives such as AfricaArray, should help boost imaging of the mantle layer under Runion.

The stems of mantle plumes are challenging to image because they may be 60 to 300 miles (100 to 500 km) or so wide, similar to the wavelengths of the seismic waves used to scan them. Using state-of-the-art techniques, such as methods that account for how seismic waves scatter around narrow conduits of magma, the researchers hope to pin down the existence and location of any plume that might exist, as well as how it might erode or spread under overlying rock.

Plume to ridge

Scientists think heat rising from oceanic mantle plumes may channel heat to nearby midocean ridges. Such flow channels might explain a series of anomalies near Runion, such as volcanism on Rodrigues Island. RHUM-RUM will analyze Rodrigues Ridge to help confirm or refute this idea the most recent volcanism on Rodrigues Island dates back 1.5 million years, so any flow channel should still be operating and will hopefully become the first to be clearly imaged, researchers said.

The researchers hope to provide insights "on the presence, or absence, of a deep mantle plume beneath a long-lived hotspot such as La Runion and therefore bringing answers to important questions," Barruol said. "Is a rising plume present beneath the volcano? Is it continuous? Does it originate from the upper mantle? From the transition zone? From the lower mantle? From theas proposed [in] the plume models?"

The seafloor seismometers will analyze the Earth for about 13 months before the buoyant part of each machine detaches and rises, with all its data, back to the surface. Early results from RHUM-RUM are expected in 2015. Barruol and his colleague Karin Sigloch at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich detailed their work to date in the June 4 issue of Eos, a trade publication of the American Geophysical Union.

Follow OurAmazingPlanet, and . Original article at LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.