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Moon

How NASA Will Bomb the Moon To Find Water 280

Posted by kdawson from the black-eye-on-green-cheese dept.
mattnyc99 writes "A few weeks ago we got first word of NASA's plan to crash a spacecraft into the moon next February. The new issue of Popular Mechanics has an in-depth look at the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and its low-cost, lightning-fast mission prep — even if delays have pushed it to late February or early March. Quoting: 'Andrews had no budget for an expensive lander to seek water, and conditions in the eternally dark polar craters would kill rovers, with temperatures close to minus 300 F. Instead, Blue Ice and its partners at Northrop Grumman came up with a concept to bring the lunar floor out in the open.... Since engineering precision hardware would break the budget, the LCROSS team had to make existing components work together.'"
Space

Submission + - Why the Milky Way's black hole is so quiescent (physorg.com)

Submitted by esocid
esocid writes: Using NASA, Japanese, and European X-ray satellites, a team of Japanese astronomers has discovered that our galaxy's central black hole let loose a powerful flare three centuries ago. The finding helps resolve a long-standing mystery: why is the Milky Way's black hole so quiescent? The black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, is a certified monster, containing about 4 million times the mass of our Sun. Yet the energy radiated from its surroundings is billions of times weaker than the radiation emitted from central black holes in other galaxies. X-ray pulses emanating from just outside the black hole take 300 years to traverse the distance between the central black hole and a large cloud known as Sagittarius B2, so the cloud responds to events that occurred 300 years earlier. "By observing how this cloud lit up and faded over 10 years, we could trace back the black hole's activity 300 years ago," says team member Katsuji Koyama of Kyoto University. "The black hole was a million times brighter three centuries ago. It must have unleashed an incredibly powerful flare."

Who knew black holes were supposed to be so bright?
Displays

Submission + - New Yankee Stadium Video and Scoring System (fastsilicon.com)

Submitted by
mrneutron2003
mrneutron2003 writes: "Daktronics is in-charge of putting together a 19+ million dollar integrated video and scoring system inside the new Yankee Stadium. The project's time table is set for spring 08 through the end of the year. They will be visible beginning the 09 baseball season.

Daktronics will also hold the world's largest led screen record when they complete the Kansas City Royal's 100 feet high by 85 feet wide screen behind center field. Keep in mind that these screens have a 16mm led spacing and have to be assembled from many small led "cubes". Would love to play crysis on one of these screens since they can play HD signals.

Check out the dimensions on these huge displays in Yankee Stadium. The main two displays will have (64 feet diag)438.9 m2 of LEDs each! Outdoor screens have come a long way.
http://www.fastsilicon.com/off-the-wall/new-yankee-stadium-video-and-scoring-system.html"
Graphics

Submission + - Nvidia rolls out 'tri-SLI (reghardware.co.uk)

Submitted by DeeQ
DeeQ writes: Nvidia has launched its anticipated 'Tri-SLI' technology as "3-way SLI", allowing gamers to connect not one, not two but three graphics cards in co-operative rendering harmony.

They have to be Nvidia GeForce cards, natch, but when connected deliver up to 2.8 times the performance of a single GPU. That, the company claimed, is enough to allow games 60fps frame-rates at a resolution of 2560 x 1600 with 8x anti-aliasing enabled.

As expected, 3-way SLI works on systems build upon Nvidia's nForce 680 SLI chipset, and requires three GeForce 8800 GTX or 8800 Ultra cards. A special three-card connector links the three add-in boards.

Oh, and you'll need an 1100W power supply with six six-pin PCIe power connectors... phew
The Internet

Submission + - Digg still affected by year-old controversy

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: A researcher at UCSD suggests that Digg is still feeling the consequences of annoying its top users back in September 2006. At the time, Kevin Rose responded to accusations that relatively small numbers of users had control of Digg's frontpage by tweaking his algorithm to penalise people that often digg the same stories. Top ranked users got angry and even quit Digg. In a paper in the pre-print Arxiv, the researcher used data scraped from digg to show "a general decline in individual user participation on Digg" that persists today. After the recent Facebook u-turns, proof that annoying your users can have long-lasting effects.
Linux Business

Submission + - Stock exchange embraces Linux

Submitted by
E5Rebel
E5Rebel writes: "The New York Stock Exchange is investing heavily in x86-based Linux systems and blade servers as it builds out the NYSE Hybrid Market trading system that it launched last year. Flexibility and lower cost are among the goals. But one of the things that NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow says he most wants from the new computing architecture is technology independence. Interestingly, while Linux is embraced, virtualisation is rejected because it slows processing speeds.... http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/infrastructure/applications/news/index.cfm?newsid=6673"
Businesses

Submission + - Computer knowledge 'undervalued' (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
pthompson
pthompson writes: "Computer skills are still undervalued in the UK board room, according to Microsoft. In a survey of 500 UK business leaders, knowledge of IT was seen as only the seventh most important workplace skill."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Xbox messing with WLANs? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by netbuzz
netbuzz writes: That's the suspicion of the IT staff at Morrisville State College in New York, who report that the Xbox 360 emits a strong signal that's doing strange things to other equipment. What's not clear is whether the signal disrupts the college's WLAN access points or students' wireless notebooks. There is some anecdotal evidence, however, that it at least affects other radios in the same 2.4GHz band. Tests are being conducted. Microsoft mum, so far.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/121307-microsoft-xbox-jams-wireless-lans.html
Sony

Submission + - Sony Makes Battery-Free Camera (fastsilicon.com)

Submitted by
mrneutron2003
mrneutron2003 writes: "Sony , purveyor of rootkits and exploding batteries, has just released a battery-less digital camera apparently for those times when your in the middle of the Australian Outback or the frozen wastelands of the Antarctic, and can't find a battery store or a charger outlet. The device, shaped somewhat like a pizza-cutter, has an external wheel that you "roll" for approximately 15 seconds to generate the amount of electricity needed to operate the camera. For one photo. It is no suprise too, that this is currently a Japanese market item only. Good proof-of-concept perhaps, but a fundamentally stupid idea.
http://www.fastsilicon.com/off-the-wall/sony-makes-battery-free-camera.html"

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