628920
submission
PhreakOfTime writes:
The asteroid Apophis still has only a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2036, NASA says, despite recent news reports suggesting a 13-year-old German boy had discovered a mistake in the space agency's analysis. There are geosynchronous satellites orbiting Earth at a distance of 42,000 kilometres, but these orbit in a ring around Earth's equator, he says. Apophis's closest approach to Earth will occur at higher latitudes, however, far from the equator.
358861
submission
PhreakOfTime writes:
A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars on Thursday formally asked the Federal Communications Commission to stop Comcast Corp. from interfering with its subscribers' file sharing.
Two of the groups are also asking the FCC to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber.
The petitions will be the first real test of the FCC's stance on "Net Neutrality," the long-standing principle that Internet traffic be treated equally by carriers. The agency has a policy supporting the concept but its position hasn't been tested in a real-world case.
343585
submission
PhreakOfTime writes:
An FBI agent named Templeton threatened to have Abdallah Higazy's family tortured by the Egyptians unless he pled guilty to being part of the 9/11 hijackings. While Steve Bergstein was reading the opinion posted online by the court, he noticed another bizarre twist in this case:
Then something strange happened: a few minutes after I posted the blog, the opinion vanished from the Court of Appeals website! I had never seen this before, and what made all the more strange was that it involved a coerced confession.
The full story is available here
96326
submission
PhreakOfTime writes:
http://www.spaceweather.com/
ROCKET EXPLOSION:
What was it? It was a mystery for almost 24 hours until satellite expert Daniel Deak matched the trajectory of the plume in Palmer's photo with the orbit of a derelict rocket booster — "a Briz-M, catalog number 28944."
One year ago, the Briz-M sat atop a Russian Proton rocket that left Earth on Feb. 28, 2006, carrying an Arabsat-4A communications satellite. Shortly after launch, the rocket malfunctioned, leaving the satellite in the wrong orbit and the Briz-M looping around Earth partially-filled with fuel. On Feb. 19, 2007, for reasons unknown, the fuel tanks ruptured over Australia.
63084
submission
PhreakOfTime writes:
Rising seas, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true. The full story can be read at the Independent Online
