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Space

Submission + - Hubble Spots Widespread Changes on Jupiter

Submitted by
SeaDour
SeaDour writes: "Recent images of Jupiter from the Hubble Space Telescope taken a little over two months apart are showing dramatic changes in the gas giant's overall appearance. 'Between March 25 and June 5, Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 captured entire bands of clouds changing color. Zones have darkened into belts and belts have lightened and transformed into zones. Cloud features have rapidly altered in shape and size.' These large-scale shifts in Jupiter's atmosphere have been noticed before in the 1980s and 90s, but never with such fine resolution. Astronomers do not yet have a solid explanation for the phenomenon."
Space

Submission + - Suborbital Cremated Remains Go Misssing

Submitted by
SeaDour
SeaDour writes: "Earlier it was reported that the cremated remains of Jimmy Doohan (aka "Scotty") and Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper were successfully launched along with the remains of 198 other individuals on a suborbital rocket from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The rocket was tracked by the nearby White Sands Missile Range, but it seems that they have been unable to find it since it landed in the nearby mountains. "...the general location of the rocket hardware is known within some 1,300 feet (400 meters) or so. But given the dense vegetation on the side of the mountain being searched, along with equipment available to the search team, pinpointing the exact locale has proven a tough assignment.""
OS X

Submission + - Apple delays Mac OS X Leopard until October

Submitted by bobbybobber
bobbybobber writes: Apple Inc. on Thursday conceded that it will be unable to release its next generation Leopard operating system in June as previously planned and now says it anticipates launching the software in October. In a statement, the Cupertino-based company said: "iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned."
Movies

Submission + - Is this the greatest movie summer of all time?

Submitted by
PrvtBurrito
PrvtBurrito writes: "This could well be the greatest geek move summer of all time. In addition to movies already out, we have Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek the third, a Brad Bird driven pixar movie, Transformers, the next Harry Potter, a Die Hard movie, Evan Almighty, the Simpson's Movie, the next Jason Bourne movie, Ocean's 13, Fantastic four (blah) and, of course, Spiderman 3. Most of these movies come out within a span of eight weeks, from late May to late July. I honestly can't remember a better summer for movies, at least in a great long time. AOL has a list of these and other summer movies."
Microsoft

Submission + - Bill Gates on 640k (1989)

Submitted by
billgatesforpresiden
billgatesforpresiden writes: "There's an article at NewsForge about a recently recovered talk that Bill Gates gave back in 1989. He covers many other topics, including OS/2, software piracy, the history of the software industry, and his role at Microsoft. In particular, Gates talks about how in 1981, he thought that 640k would be good enough for at least 10 years. Do we finally have proof of Gates' "640k ought to be enough for anybody" quote?"
Space

Submission + - Pioneer anomaly

Submitted by
KellyYoung
KellyYoung writes: "The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft gave us some of the earliest close-up pictures of the outer planets. They also gave us a curious puzzle now known as the Pioneer anomaly. http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn11304-comp uter-sleuths-try-to-crack-pioneer-anomaly.html Even though both spacecraft were heading in different directions, both experienced a tiny deceleration. It was as if the Sun's gravity was pulling a little harder than Newton's laws predicted. Scientists are hoping to know within a year whether the Pioneer anomaly is due to an issue with the two spacecraft themselves, namely the heat generated by their onboard nuclear generators. An international team of scientists are re-analyzing the tracking and telemetry data to look for clues."
Mars

Submission + - Scientist: Sun is Warming Both Earth and Mars

Submitted by
MCraigW
MCraigW writes: "Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural — and not a human-induced — cause. Earth is currently experiencing warming, which climate scientists say is due to humans pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun."
Microsoft

Submission + - Bill Gates Talks About 640k in 1989

Submitted by
dalektcalum3
dalektcalum3 writes: "I recently came across an 18 year-old talk by Bill Gates. One of the most surprising things that Bill Gates says is that in 1981, he thought that 640k would be good for 10 years. Bill has denied saying this but now we finally have proof! In addition, Bill talks about his role in starting Microsoft, Microsoft's future in OS/2, and where the software and hardware industries are heading in general."
Music

Submission + - Gracenote Database Helps Find Musical Plagurist

Submitted by SeaDour
SeaDour writes: A music critic for Gramophone, a classical music magazine, has discovered that the recent works of Joyce Hatto, a famed British pianist who passed away last year, are nothing more than blatant copies of other performances. What makes this story interesting is that he found this out when iTunes, and therefore the Gracenote music database, "misidentified" the CD. "He put the disc into his computer to listen, and something awfully strange happened. His computer's player identified the disc as ... not a Hatto recording. Instead, his display suggested that the disc was one on BIS Records, by the pianist Lászlo Simon. Mystified, our critic checked his Hatto disc against the actual Simon recording, and to his amazement they sounded exactly the same." Sound wave analysis is now being done to determine just how many of Hatto's recordings are indeed rip-offs.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Infants Form Memories, but Forget Them

Submitted by Dollaz
Dollaz writes: Adults thinking back rarely can remember anything before preshool,but those bright infant eyes staring back at mommy and daddy really are forming memories. It's just that babies also forget. In fact, babies' rate of forgetting is even faster than that of adults, Patricia J. Bauer of Duke University said Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The Internet

Submission + - Wikipedia Deletion of Webcomics

Submitted by
clockinreverse
clockinreverse writes: "The creator of the webcomic Starslip Crisis recently tried to prove that the editors of Wikipedia were biased agianst webcomics by attempting to delete his own strip. In doing so he discovered that the editors were striking votes of people who were cheating by using multiple accounts and voting "keep", but were not striking the votes of his own multiple accounts that were voting to delete."

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