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Submission + - A Star Cluster Thrown Out Of Galaxy At Hypervelocity Discovered

Submitted by William Robinson
William Robinson writes: According to these reports, A globular cluster of several thousand stars, compressed into a space just a few dozen light years apart, is thrown out of galaxy M87. The cluster, named as HVGC-1, is traveling at a rate of 2 million miles per hour. The discovery was made by Nelson Caldwell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his team while studying the space around the supergiant elliptical galaxy M87. Caldwell and colleagues think M87 might have two supermassive black holes at its center. The star cluster wandered too close to the pair, which picked off many of the cluster’s outer stars while the inner core remained intact. The black holes then acted like a slingshot, flinging the cluster away at a tremendous speed.

Comment Re:you mean vertically? (Score 2) 110

by dpilot (#46886009) Attached to: SpaceX Looking For Help With "Landing" Video

Absolutely not. There is still significant gravity in space - it falls by inverse-square law, after all. In LEO the force of gravity is practically undiminished. For a "long" structure you'll soon find out that vertical does exist, because that's the way the long axis of that structure will be oriented. Look up "gravity gradient stabilization".

Of course that discribes the axis toward/away from the Earth. I don't know if there is any preferred direction beyond that, but it would surprise me if extended objects don't feel some force related to the direction of their orbits. Basically I'm sure of up/down, and have a feeling that fore/aft can be differentiated from port/starboard. I'd have to agree that North/South/East/West are meaningless - at least for electrically neutral structures.

Submission + - SpaceX Posts Damaged Video Of Falcon 9 First Stage Splashdown (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by rasmusbr
rasmusbr writes: SpaceX has posted video from a camera mounted on the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage as the rocket stage attempted a soft splashdown on the ocean surface on April 18, after launching a resupply mission to the International Space Station. The powered splashdown was a test of the Falcon 9 first stage's ability to decelerate and land after launch, a crucial step toward a reusable first stage.

The video bitstream is damaged and SpaceX has spent a week trying to repair it. They now turn to the public for help.

Submission + - Wonder-Material Graphene Could Be Dangerous to Humans and the Environment (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: It’s easy to get carried away when you start talking about graphene. Its properties hold the promise of outright technological revolution in so many fields that it has been called a wonder material. Two recent studies, however, give us a less than rosy angle. In the first, a team of biologists, engineers and material scientists at Brown University examined graphene’s potential toxicity in human cells. Another study by a team from University of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering examined how graphene oxide nanoparticles might interact with the environment if they found their way into surface or ground water sources.

Comment Re:Am I reading this right (Score 0) 172

by dpilot (#46825785) Attached to: Asteroid Impacts Bigger Risk Than Thought

You could look at them as shills, or you could look at them as putting their money where their mouths are. The saw a threat and are doing what they can within our system to handle it.

So when government does it, it's either inefficient or a boondoggle, but when a company does it, attempting to inform about the threat they're trying to solve makes them a shill. As long as they're above-board about their position, and clear and honest with their science, I see no problem.

Comment Re:By what definition of "rich"? (Score 1) 311

by dpilot (#46822471) Attached to: In the US, Rich Now Work Longer Hours Than the Poor

By "right school" I didn't mean Ivy or anything, I meant internet-connected. Though the likes of MIT or CMU aren't cheap, either. Since I don't remember the year, I don't remember how widespread internet acces was at that point.

Or to put it another way, did Slashdot come before or after AOL let the unwashed masses onto the internet?

Submission + - The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World's Richest (nytimes.com)

Submitted by gollum123
gollum123 writes: The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction. While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades. After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans. The struggles of the poor in the United States are even starker than those of the middle class. A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.

Submission + - What is 4chan? A Look at the Dark Side of the Internet (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: Memes, internet trolling and hacker collective Anonymous all have something in common – they were born out of 4chan, a simple imageboard website which has over 20 million viewers a month.

While it is well known among geeks, the rest of the world has little idea what 4chan actually is unless the website makes the news.

A fan of anime, 15-year-old Christopher Poole designed the site in 2003 as a simple anonymous imageboard in the style of Japanese imageboards. Users could discuss and post pictures of their favourite anime cartoons and manga comics in various sub-threads in a similar way to how Reddit works.

But while the concept of 4chan is simple – an online community for fans of Japanese culture — in reality the boards have often been used for cyberbullying and explicit content.

Geeks have been affected by internet trolling, i.e. cyber bullying for much longer than reported by mainstream media, but at least the website makes no money at all.

Submission + - Heartbleed Disclosure Timeline Revealed 1

Submitted by bennyboy64
bennyboy64 writes: Ever since the Heartbleed flaw in OpenSSL was made public there have been various questions about who knew what and when. The Sydney Morning Herald has done some analysis of public mailing lists and talked to those involved with disclosing the bug to get the bottom of it. The newspaper finds that Google discovered Heartbleed on or before March 21 and notified OpenSSL on April 1. Other key dates include Finnish security testing firm Codenomicon discovering the flaw independently of Google at 23:30 PDT, April 2. SuSE, Debian, FreeBSD and AltLinux all got a heads up from Red Hat about the flaw in the early hours of April 7 — a few hours before it was made public. Ubuntu, Gentoo and Chromium attempted to get a heads up by responding to an email with few details about it but didn't get a heads up, as the guy at Red Hat sending the disclosure messages out in India went to bed. By the time he woke up, Codenomicon had reported the bug to OpenSSL and they freaked out and decided to tell the world about it.

Submission + - Comcast PAC gave money to every senator examining Time Warner Cable merger (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It's no surprise that Comcast donates money to members of Congress. Political connections come in handy for a company seeking government approval of mergers, like Comcast's 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal and its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC).

But just how many politicians have accepted money from Comcast's political arm? In the case of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held the first congressional hearing on the Comcast/TWC merger yesterday, the answer is all of them.

Submission + - Kate Mulgrew, aka Captain Janeway, Thinks Sun Revolves Around Earth. (rawstory.com) 3

Submitted by synaptik
synaptik writes: A new documentary film, narrated by a former Star Trek actress, promotes the long-ago disproven idea that the sun revolves around the Earth. 'Everything we think we know about our universe is wrong,” says actress Kate Mulgrew as she narrates the trailer for “The Principle.' The film, which is set to be released sometime this spring, was bankrolled in part by the ultra-conservative and anti-Semitic Robert Sungenis, who maintains the blog 'Galileo Was Wrong.'

Submission + - Snowden's purloined documents are now available online (aclu.org)

Submitted by Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: The ACLU and others have long suspected that the National Security Agency has gone far beyond its mandate of gathering information for counter-terrorism and foreign intelligence purposes. Many Those suspicions were confirmed when, on June 5, 2013, The Guardian released the first in a series of documents provided by Edward Snowden detailing the NSA's unlawful spying activities. All of the documents released since that day, both by the media and the government, are housed in a database maintained by the ACLU and accessible by the public on-line.

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