63277183
submission
coondoggie writes:
MIT researchers this week found out that a system they have developed to produce oxygen on Mars will be making the next NASA trip to the Red Planet. MIT’s Mars OXygen In situ resource utilization Experiment or MOXIE will be just one of the seven instruments that will travel on the Mars 2020, mission which will feature a large rover similar to the Mars Curiosity rover currently looking around on Mars.
63246373
submission
coondoggie writes:
The US Federal Court System is warning people of yet another scam targeting potential jurors.
This time around the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts says citizens are getting e-mails claiming they have been selected for jury service and demanding that they return a form with such information as Social Security and driver’s license numbers, date of birth, cell phone number, and mother’s maiden name. According to the court office, the e-mail scam has been reported in in at least 14 federal court districts.
63190917
submission
coondoggie writes:
The U.S. Department of Energy ‘s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research this week said it is looking for “basic research that significantly improves the resiliency of scientific applications in the context of emerging architectures for extreme scale computing platforms. Extreme scale is defined as approximately 1,000 times the capability available today. The next-generation of scientific discovery will be enabled by research developments that can effectively harness significant or disruptive advances in computing technology.”
63132759
submission
coondoggie writes:
When it comes to blasting satellites into Low Earth Orbit, cost can be a major detriment. An Australian company called Rocket Labs is looking to fix that problem – at least for smaller satellite launches—with a carbon composite, 11-ton , 18 meter (about 60ft) tall rocket known as Electron that it says can blast payloads of about 100kg (about 220lbs) into LEO for about $5 million. The company says comparable flights would cost around $100 million.
63071593
submission
coondoggie writes:
Looking to throttle the multi-million dollar industry known as mobile cramming, the Federal Trade Commission today issued a report outlining five key steps carriers and legitimate third party providers should do to stop the fraud.
62904493
submission
coondoggie writes:
NASA is exploring its communications options with Mars.The space agency this week issued a Request For Information that looks to explore options where it would buy commercial communications services to support users at Mars, including landers and rovers and, potentially, aerobots and orbiters.
62810193
submission
coondoggie writes:
If what we know as advanced life exists anywhere other than Earth, then perhaps they are dirtying their atmosphere as much as we have and that we could use such pollution components to perhaps more easily spot such planets in the universe. That’s the basics of new research put for this week by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that stated if we could spot the fingerprints of certain pollutants under ideal conditions, it would offer a new approach in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
62689081
submission
coondoggie writes:
There’s never any shortage of cool, strange or weird news in the high-tech world. The trick is whittling the sheer volume of those stories into a manageable presentation. This year we have everything from crop circles and advanced toilet tech to flying saucers and wild software development.
62558509
submission
coondoggie writes:
The Federal Trade Commission today announced the rules for its second robocall exterminating challenge, known this time as Zapping Rachel Robocall Contest. “Rachel From Cardholder Services,” was a large robocall scam the agency took out in 2012.
62374627
submission
coondoggie writes:
Looking to build a hypersonic transport would be the heart of less expensive satellite launch system, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said it awarded three contracts to being work on the spacecraft. DARPA said Boeing (working with Blue Origin) Masten Space Systems (working with XCOR Aerospace) and Northrop Grumman Corporation (working with Virgin Galactic) would begin phase 1 work on the agency’s Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) program that aims to design, build, and demonstrate a reusable Mach 10 aircraft capable of carrying and deploying an upper stage that can place 3,000- 5,000 lb. satellite into low earth orbit (LEO) at a target cost of less than $5M per launch.
62181619
submission
coondoggie writes:
The University of Delaware this week killed off a plan to develop a 900,000 sq. ft. data center project that included a 279-megawatt cogeneration power plant.
62139249
submission
coondoggie writes:
DARPA’s two-year old program to better understand and perhaps ultimately influence social media has begun to bear fruit but some of that harvest is raising a stink. DARPA said when rolling out its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program was to develop a social networks science that will develop automated and semiautomated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion. But in building that science the agency says it has funded myriad social media/Twitter research (including a study that looked at Lady Gaga’s Twitter following—a model of social media popularity, DARPA stated) as well as a look into Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and Kickstarter.
62033341
submission
coondoggie writes:
es I suppose it is what it is, but sadly you can’t travel on business or vacation and let your electronic guard down. The Federal Trade Commission recently published a few scams it was warning travelers to be on the lookout for including: The late night front desk call...
61983943
submission
coondoggie writes:
Taking a page from NASA’s rocket powered landing craft from it most recent Mars landing mission, the European Space Agency is showing off a quadcopter that the organization says can steer itself to smoothly lower a rover onto a safe patch of the rocky Martian surface. The ESA said its dropship, known as the StarTiger’s Dropter is indeed a customized quadcopter drone that uses a GPS, camera and inertial systems to fly into position, where it then switches to vision-based navigation supplemented by a laser range-finder and barometer to lower and land a rover autonomously.
61746803
submission
coondoggie writes:
Looking to bring lighter, more powerful and less expensive systems for various applications such as communications, radar or guidance systems, DARPA said this week it had recently demonstrated an all-silicon, microchip-sized system on a chip that runs at 94 GHz. DARPA claims that this chip is the first time a silicon-only package has achieved such a high frequency, which falls in the millimeter-wave range.
