LaruRidi - Slashdot User

Solar Impulse Airplane To Launch First Sun-Powered Flight Across America 89

Posted by samzenpus on Friday March 29, 2013 @08:08AM from the guided-by-the-light dept.

First time accepted submitter markboyer writes "The Solar Impulse just landed at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California to announce a journey that will take it from San Francisco to New York without using a single drop of fuel. The 'Across America' tour will kick off this May when founders Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg take off from San Francisco. From there the plane will visit four cities across the states before landing in New York."

Laser Fusion's Brightest Hope 115

Posted by samzenpus on Friday March 29, 2013 @05:36AM from the coming-together dept.

First time accepted submitter szotz writes "The National Ignition Facility has one foot in national defense and another in the future of commercial energy generation. That makes understanding the basic justification for the facility, which boasts the world's most powerful laser system, more than a little tricky. This article in IEEE Spectrum looks at NIF's recent missed deadline, what scientists think it will take for the facility to live up to its middle name, and all of the controversy and uncertainty that comes from a project that aspires to jumpstart commercial fusion energy but that also does a lot of classified work. NIF's national defense work is often glossed over in the press. This article pulls in some more detail and, in some cases, some very serious criticism. Physicist Richard Garwin, one of the designers of the hydrogen bomb, doesn't mince words. When it comes to nuclear weapons, he says in the article, '[NIF] has no relevance at all to primaries. It doesn't do a good job of mimicking secondaries...it validates the codes in regions that are not relevant to nuclear weapons.'"

Google Releases Street View Images From Fukushima Ghost Town 63

Posted by samzenpus on Friday March 29, 2013 @03:02AM from the new-fallout-map dept.

mdsolar writes in with news that Goolge has released Street View pictures from inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima disaster. "Google Inc. (GOOG) today released images taken by its Street View service from the town of Namie, Japan, inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011. Google, operator of the world's biggest Web search engine, entered Namie this month at the invitation of the town's mayor, Tamotsu Baba, and produced the 360-degree imagery for the Google Maps and Google Earth services, it said in an e-mailed statement. All of Namie's 21,000 residents were forced to flee after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the town, causing the world's worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl. Baba asked Mountain View, California-based Google to map the town to create a permanent record of its state two years after the evacuation, he said in a Google blog post."

Submission + - Ability to Drink May Be an Evolutionary Advantage That Evolved 10000 Years Ago (counselheal.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @03:37PM

An anonymous reader writes: Apparently, the urge to pour a stiff drink is an ancient one, stretching back thousands of years. According to a recent study, the ability to process alcohol first appeared about 10,000 years ago.
Steven Benner, a chemist from the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainseville, Florida, believes that he is cracked the answer as to why humans and some other primates, like chimpanzees and gorillas, can process ethanol, while others. He believes that the answer lies in fermented fruit.

Submission + - Flightgear 2.10 released (flightgear.org)

Submitted by arnodf on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @03:03PM

arnodf writes: "The FlightGear development team is happy to announce the v2.10 release of FlightGear, the free, open-source flight simulator. This new version contains many exciting new features, enhancements and bugfixes. Highlights in this release include improved usability, better terrain rendering and a fully scriptable 2D rendering system."

"Highlights to FlightGear 2.10 include improved usability, a fully-scriptable 2D rendering system, and better terrain rendering. There's also improved modularization, atmospheric light scattering, improved performance, better internationalization support, Rembrandt renderer improvements, AI improvements, and much more. An extensive list of FLightGear 2.10 changes can be found from their Wiki-based change-log. "

Submission + - Does the Higgs Boson Reveal Our Universe's Doomsday? (discovery.com)

Submitted by

astroengine

on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @02:16PM

astroengine writes: "If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of light, replaced by a strange, alternative dimension, one theoretical physicist calls boring. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself,” Joseph Lykken, with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., told Discovery News. "This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there’ll be a catastrophe.""

Submission + - University of Oxford Develops Low-Cost Self-Driving Car System (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @12:15PM

Zothecula writes: Oxford University’s Mobile Robotics Group (MRG) has developed an autonomous navigation system for cars at a build cost of only £5,000 (US$7,700). Installed in a production Nissan LEAF, the robot car uses off the shelf components and is designed to take over driving while traveling on frequently used routes.

Submission + - STRaND-1 – World's First Smartphone-Based Satellite Set to Launch (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @10:38AM

Zothecula writes: The University of Surrey’s Surrey Space Centre (SSC) and Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) are set to launch the world’s first smartphone-based satellite. Built around a Google Nexus One smartphone running on the Android operating system, the STRaND-1 (Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator) satellite will also be the U.K.’s first CubeSat to go into space.

Submission + - Britain Could Switch Off Airport Radar And Release Spectrum (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by

judgecorp

on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @09:00AM

judgecorp writes: "Britain is considering switching off air traffic control radar systems and using "passive radar" instead. A two year feasibility study will consider using a network of ground stations which monitor broadcast TV signals and measure echoes from aircraft to determine their location and velocity. The system is not a new idea — early radar experiments used BBC shortwave transmitters as a signal source before antenna technology produced a transceiver suitable for radar — but could now be better than conventional radar thanks to new antenna designs and signal processing techniques. It will also save money and energy by eliminating transmitters — and release spectrum for 5G services."

Submission + - Retail copies of Office 2013 are tied to a single computer forever (geek.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @08:35AM

An anonymous reader writes: With the launch of Office 2013 Microsoft has seen fit to upgrade the terms of the license agreement, and it’s not in favor of the end user. It seems installing a copy of the latest version of Microsoft’s Office suite of apps ties it to a single machine. For life.

On previous versions of Office it was a different story. The suite was associated with a “Licensed Device” and could only be used on a single device. But there was nothing to stop you uninstalling Office and installing it on another machine perfectly legally. With that option removed, Office 2013 effectively becomes a much more expensive proposition for many.

Submission + - Ancient Languages Reconstructed by Computers (halls-of-valhalla.org)

Submitted by

halls-of-valhalla

on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @08:18AM

halls-of-valhalla writes: "Researchers have developed a new software which can be used to reconstruct dead, ancient languages using probabilistic models of sound change.

This new software was tested by taking 637 Austronesian languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific, and attempting to reconstruct the ancient languages they're based on. The system was found to have provided a relatively accurate, large-scale automatic reconstruction of the protolanguages. A language believed to be roughtly seven thousand years old was reconstructed using a database of 142,000 words.

When compared to the results of linguists specializing in Austronesian languages, more 85% of the system's reconstructions were found to be within one character of the manual reconstruction. These are very promising results, however a linguist is still able to produce a higher accuracy, so this will be likely to become a tool used by linguists rather than a replacement for them."

Submission + - Living cells turned into computers (nature.com) 2

Submitted by ananyo on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @07:48AM

ananyo writes: Synthetic biologists have developed DNA modules that perform logic operations in bacteria. These ‘genetic circuits’ could, for example, be used by scientists to track key moments in a cell’s life or, in biotechnology, to turn on production of a drug at the flick of a chemical switch. The researchers have encoded 16 logic gates in modules of DNA and stored the results of logical operations. The different logic gates can be assembled into a wide variety of circuits.

Submission + - Earth-buzzing asteroid could be worth big bucks: $195B if we could catch it (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @07:21PM

coondoggie writes: "The asteroid NASA say is about the half the size of a football field that will blow past Earth on Feb 15 could be worth up to $195 billion in metals and propellant. That's what the scientists at Deep Space Industries, a company that wants to mine these flashing hunks of space materials, thinks the asteroid known as 2012 DA14 is worth — if they could catch it."

Comment Re:Satisfied with CFLs (Score 1) 743

by LaruRidi on Tuesday April 17, 2012 @02:54PM (#39714007) Attached to: $60 Light Bulb Debuts On Earth Day

My oldest CFLs are from late 90s. I have been mostly CFL since 2007 and in autumn last year I put CFLs even in the "unsuitable" areas like bathroom/toilet (frequent on/offs). I have yet to meet my first failed CFL. It kinda sucks because those old Phillipses from the 90s lost a lot of intensity but they refuse to die and I'm reluctant to throw away a working light bulb. I only buyed Phillips then switched to Osrams circa three years ago when some of the newer Phillips bulbs seemed cheaply made (they made bad plastic smell when heated). Even within the brand you will probably find cheap (==low quality) models. I never buyed any other brands. I also noticed that the ones I buy tend to be among the most expensive on the market.

Comment Re:Where the oxygen came from... (Score 1) 109

by LaruRidi on Thursday January 12, 2012 @04:50AM (#38671668) Attached to: Tracking Down the First Oxygen Users

You can understand carbon storage as a shorthand for "freeing up the oxygen" (I've probably never seen this term used before). From this point of view fossil fuels don't really differ from limestone -- both are geological structures which contain a lot of carbon a store it "indefinitely". Of course the limestone will one day be recycled in the mantle and we burn the fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow.

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