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Space

+ - Video reveals sprites are brighter than Venus->

Submitted by
CarrieSmith
CarrieSmith writes "High-quality video recordings reveal how these brief but very bright flashes tear through the upper atmosphere at 30,000 km/h. The flashes are massive — up to 50km high — and occur around the world above big thunderstorms. A researcher at the University of Alaska has captured amazing video of sprites in New Mexico using a 10,000 frames per second camera, which shows that they are made of really bright sparks that drop down through the atmsophere, followed by other brighter sparks that actually rise up dozens of kilometres and get brighter and brighter as they do — a sort of massive explosive firework. Check out the cool video embeded in: http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn1204 4-video-reveals-sprites-are-brighter-than-venus.ht ml"
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Software

+ - Safari 3 beta for Windows performance tested

Submitted by
Hanners1979
Hanners1979 writes "Apple surprised everyone at this year's WWDC event when they launched the latest version of their Safari web browser for both MacOS and Windows, thus throwing their name into the ring as the latest entrant in the PC browser wars. Much of their focus at the event when it came to promoting Safari surrounded its rendering performance against the competition under Windows — Elite Bastards have evaluated some of its performance characteristics, as well as taking a look at the browser itself, with some impressive results."
PlayStation (Games)

+ - Euro Playstation 3 to have inferior ps2 emulation

Submitted by Tetsuochris
Tetsuochris writes "Euro Playstation 3 to have software emulation of ps2 games. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070223/tc_nm/sony_pla ystation_europe_dc;_ylt=AjDbmlPU326p52vsCHQ.Qye9Ix IF "The backwards compatibility is not going to be as good as the U.S. and Japan models," a Sony spokesman said. Amazing, so not only will European customers pay more for the ps3 exchange wise, they will also get an inferior model."
Music

+ - Study shows file sharing has no effect on CD sales

Submitted by
jibjibjib
jibjibjib writes "Ars Technica reports that a study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, recently published in the Journal of Political Economy, shows that file sharing is not responsible for declining CD sales figures.

The study, entitled "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis," claims that "a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero.""
Space

+ - Fermi Paradox Could Predict Humankind's Future

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The Fermi paradox says that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, at least one of them should have colonized the entire galaxy by now. But since there is no evidence of this, humankind must be the only intelligent life in the galaxy. The Space Review has an article on how the Fermi paradox can be applied to human civilization. It says that, like the extraterrestrials, humans have three choices: colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct."
Television

+ - Robert Adler, co-inventor of TV remote, dead at 93

Submitted by
yroJJory
yroJJory writes "Hit the mute button for a moment of silence: The co-inventor of the TV remote, Robert Adler, has died. Adler, who won an Emmy Award along with fellow engineer Eugene Polley for the device that made the couch potato possible, died Thursday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at 93, Zenith Electronics Corp. said Friday.

In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 U.S. patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make TV a truly sedentary pastime.

In a May 2004 interview with The Associated Press, Adler recalled being among two dozen engineers at Zenith given the mission to find a new way for television viewers to change channels without getting out of their chairs or tripping over a cable.

Adler also was considered a pioneer in SAW technology, or surface acoustic waves, in color television sets and touch screens. The technology has also been used in cellular telephones.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published his most recent patent application, for advances in touch screen technology, on Feb. 1."
NASA

+ - Take out asteroid soon, UN urged

Submitted by stevedmc
stevedmc writes "http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21247126-2,00 .html

THE United Nations has been urged to launch a space mission designed to take out an asteroid threatening to smash into the Earth in 2036.

In scenes straight out of Hollywood action movie Armageddon, a group of astronauts, engineers and scientists say they are monitoring an asteroid named Apophis, which has a one in 45,000 chance of striking Earth on April 13, 2036.

A recent congressional mandate for NASA to upgrade its tracking of near-Earth asteroids is expected to uncover a host of threatening space rocks in the near future, former astronaut Rusty Schweickart said.

"It's not just Apophis we're looking at. Every country is at risk. We need a set of general principles to deal with this issue," Mr Schweickart, a member of the Apollo 9 crew that orbited the moon in March 1969, told an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference.

Mr Schweickart plans to present an update this week to the UN Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space on plans to develop a blueprint for a global response to an asteroid threat.

The Association of Space Explorers, a group of former astronauts and cosmonauts, intends to host a series of high-level workshops this year to flesh out the plan and will make a formal proposal to the UN in 2009, he said."

"Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch." -- Robert Orben

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