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Submission + - A Trio of Oil Companies Now Fracking the Nile

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes: Some 97% of Egyptians get their drinking water from the Nile, a little north-flowing river in Africa that is also probably the most famous body of water in the world. Without the Nile, civilization in water-scarce, rainfall-allergic Egypt isn’t possible. No wonder, then, that some of the nation’s 90 million citizens are incensed by the growing number of oil and gas fracking operations popping up a little too close to its lifeblood.

At least three major companies — the Dutch oil giant Shell, the American oil and gas corporation Apache, and the United Arab Emirates-based Dana Gas — have launched major hydraulic fracturing operations in Egypt. Apache and Dana have been fracking directly in the Nile valley.

Dana just announced a brand new natural gas discovery yesterday: between 4 and 6 billion cubic feet lie below the Nile Delta, where it plans to frack. According to the Egypt Independent, Apache has a fracking operation “in the Western Desert near important aquifers.”

Shell is the latest to the game; it’s using a new waterless technique, foam fracking, to tap into gas reserves previously thought unreachable. In August, it began drilling 65 exploratory wells, and hopes to ramp natural gas production up from 0.5 million cubic feet a day to 5 million cf/d.
Google

Submission + - 17th century microscope book is now freely readable (downloadtheuniverse.com) 2

Submitted by menno_h
menno_h writes: In January 1665, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he stayed up till two in the morning reading a best-selling page-turner, a work that he called "the most ingenious book I read in my life." It was not a rousing history of English battles or a proto-bodice ripper. It was filled with images: of fleas, of bark, of the edges of razors.

The book was called Micrographia. It provided the reading public with its first look at the world beyond the naked eye. Its author, Robert Hooke, belonged to a brilliant circle of natural philosophers who--among many other things--were the first in England to make serious use of microscopes as scientific instruments. They were great believers in looking at the natural world for themselves rather than relying on what ancient Greek scholars had claimed. Looking under a microscope at the thousands of facets on an insect's compound eye, they saw things at the nanoscale that Aristotle could not have dreamed of. A razor's edge became a mountain range. In the chambers of a piece of bark, Hooke saw the first evidence of cells.
Micrographia is is available on Google Books now.
Crime

Submission + - The Pirate Bay Founder's Jailing Sounds a Little Extreme (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Things aren’t looking awesome for Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm, who’s currently under lock and key in a newly built jail about 15 minutes north of Stockholm. Svartholm’s mother Kristina says that her 28-year-old boy is being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day without any human contact other than his interactions with the guards. It’s been nearly two months since Svartholm was arrested in Cambodia, where he’d been living for years, and extradited back to Sweden, where he’s due to spend a year behind bars and pay a $1.1 million fine for copyright offenses related to his role at the Pirate Bay. But that’s not why Sweden’s being so tough on him in prison. Authorities believe he may have played a role in the hacking of Logica, a Swedish technology company with ties to the country’s tax authorities. They haven’t charged him with any crimes yet in that case, however."
Cloud

Submission + - NASA achieves data goals for Mars rover with open source software (opensource.com)

Submitted by
caseyb89
caseyb89 writes: "Open source projects Nginx, Railo CMS, and GlusterFS are powering Mars Curiosity's big data crunching. "Taken together, the combination of cloud and open source enabled the Curiosity mission to provide beautiful images in real time, not months delayed; at high quality, not "good enough" quality. A traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and flexibility.""
Moon

Submission + - A Supercomputer on the Moon to Direct Deep Space Traffic 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "NASA currently controls its deep space missions through a network of 13 giant antennas in California, Spain and Australia known as the Deep Space Network (DSN) but the network is obsolete and just not up to the job of transmitting the growing workload of extra-terrestrial data from deep space missions. That's why Ouliang Chang has proposed building a massive supercomputer in a deep dark crater on the side of the moon facing away from Earth and all of its electromagnetic chatter. Nuclear-powered, it would accept signals from space, store them, process them if needed and then relay the data back to Earth as time and bandwidth allows. The supercomputer would run in frigid regions near one of the moon’s poles where cold temperatures would make cooling the supercomputer easier, and would communicate with spaceships and earth using a system of inflatable, steerable antennas that would hang suspended over moon craters, giving the Deep Space Network a second focal point away from earth. As well as boosting humanity's space-borne communication abilities, Chang's presentation at a space conference (PDF) in Pasadena, California also suggests that the moon-based dishes could work in unison with those on Earth to perform very-long-baseline interferometry, which allows multiple telescopes to be combined to emulate one huge telescope. Best of all the project has the potential to excite the imagination of future spacegoers and get men back on the moon."
NASA

Submission + - The First Laptop in Space (spaceindustrynews.com)

Submitted by littlesparkvt
littlesparkvt writes: The first laptop in space was designed by a man named Bill Moggridge who passed away September 8th, 2012 at the age of 69 years old. Bill won the Prince Philip Designers Prize in 2010 which recognizes outstanding computer design.
DRM

Submission + - Amazon Blocks Arch Linux Handbook from Kindle Store (thepowerbase.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We've all heard the horror stories of Amazon swindling the user out of their content on the Kindle, but this time they've managed to do it preemptively: by blocking the GFDL licensed Arch Linux Handbook from the Kindle Store.

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