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ISS

+ - Russian ISS Cargo Spacecraft Lost After Launch->

Submitted by
Comtraya
Comtraya writes "From the NASA statement:
Mission Control Moscow reported that communication with the Progress 44 cargo craft was lost 5 minutes, 20 seconds after its launch at 9 a.m. EDT today. Preliminary data from the Russian Federal Space Agency indicate there was a problem with the propulsion system, and that the vehicle did not reach its desired orbit.
Progress 44 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome into a cloudless sky at 7 p.m. Kazakhstan time bound for the International Space Station and a docking on Friday. At the time of launch, the space station was flying 230 miles over Equatorial Guinea on the west coast of Africa. The spacecraft is carrying 2.9 tons of food, fuel and supplies for the space station."
Link to Original Source
NASA

Shuttle Reentry Over the Continental US 139

Posted by kdawson
from the boom-boom dept.
TheOtherChimeraTwin notes that the shuttle Discovery will land at Kennedy Space Center on Monday morning at 8:48 EDT. The craft will make a rare "descending node" overflight of the continental US en route to landing in Florida. Here are maps of the shuttle's path if is lands on orbit 222 as planned, or on the next orbit. Spaceweather.com says: "...it takes the shuttle about 35 minutes to traverse the path shown... Observers in the northwestern USA will see the shuttle shortly after 5 am PDT blazing like a meteoric fireball through the dawn sky. As Discovery makes its way east, it will enter daylight and fade into the bright blue background. If you can't see the shuttle, however, you might be able to hear it. The shuttle produces a sonic double-boom that reaches the ground about a minute and a half after passing overhead."
Government

Former Astronauts Call Obama NASA Plans "Catastrophic" 555

Posted by timothy
from the how-to-spot-a-special-interest dept.
krou writes "Talking to the BBC at a private function held at the Royal Society in London, former astronauts Jim Lovell and Eugene Cernan both spoke out about Obama's decision to postpone further moon missions. Lovell claimed that 'it will have catastrophic consequences in our ability to explore space and the spin-offs we get from space technology,' while Cernan noted he was 'disappointed' to have been the last person to land on the moon. Said Cernan: 'I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership ... to seek knowledge. Curiosity's the essence of human existence.' Neil Armstrong, who was also at the event, avoided commenting on the subject."
Windows

Windows 7 Pre-Orders Top Vista's In Just 8 Hours 279

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the well-in-the-uk-anyway dept.
Barence writes "In order to ensure Windows 7 got off to a better start than Vista in the UK, Microsoft slashed the cost of Home and Home Professional by a third on promotional copies which were sold on a 'first come, first served basis while stocks last.' The promotion ensured Windows 7 shot to the top of Amazon's charts when it was released yesterday, with the online retailer claiming that 'sales in the first eight hours outstripped those of Windows Vista's entire 17-week pre-order period.' The price of pre-ordering Windows 7 has now shot up to £80, after the £50 copies sold out within a day."
Security

+ - Are Your "Secret Questions" Too Easily Ans->

Submitted by wjousts
wjousts writes "We've all seen the "secret" questions that are used to reset your password on various sites and several high-profile break-ins have resulted from hackers guessing the answers to secret question. This week, research from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University, presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy will show how woefully insecure these functions are.

As reported in Technology Review:



In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study's participants could guess the correct answers to the participant's secret questions. Even people not trusted by the participant still had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer to a secret question.

The least-secure questions are simple ones whose answers can be guessed with no existing knowledge of the subject, the researchers say. For example, the answers to the questions "What is your favorite town?" and "What is your favorite sports team?" were relatively easy for participants to guess. All told, 30 percent and 57 percent of the correct answers, respectively, appeared in the top-five list of guesses.

"
Link to Original Source
Mozilla

+ - Mozilla preparing to scrap tabbed browsing?->

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes "Mozilla Labs has launched a design competition that aims to find an alternative to tabbed browsing. "Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin internet, where ten browser sessions were 'many browser sessions'," Mozilla claims on its Design Challenge website. "Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless." Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has already blogged on the possibility of moving tabs down the side of the browser, with tabs grouped by the type of activity involved (i.e. applications, work spaces)."
Link to Original Source
Earth

+ - New theory about Earth's life cycle->

Submitted by
stonertom
stonertom writes "Two years ago, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley found the marine fossil record shows that biodiversity-the number of different species alive on the planet-increases and decreases on a 62-million-year cycle. At least two of the Earth's great mass extinctions-the Permian extinction 250 million years ago and the Ordovician extinction about 450 million years ago-correspond with peaks of this cycle, which can't be explained by evolutionary theory. Our Sun moves toward and away from the Milky Way's center, and also up and down through the galactic plane. One complete up-and-down cycle takes 64 million years- suspiciously similar to Earth's biodiversity cycle."
Link to Original Source

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. -- Dawkins

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