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Supermassive Black Hole Is Thrown Out of Galaxy 167

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 12 2010, @07:50PM
from the moving-to-better-quarters dept.

DarkKnightRadick writes "An undergrad student at the University of Utrecht, Marianne Heida, has found evidence of a supermassive black hole being tossed out of its galaxy. According to the article, the black hole — which has a mass equivalent to one billion suns — is possibly the culmination of two galaxies merging (or colliding, depending on how you like to look at it) and their black holes merging, creating one supermassive beast. The black hole was found using the Chandra Source Catalog (from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The direction of the expulsion is also possibly indicative of the direction of rotation of the two black holes as they circled each other before merging."

Cooling the Planet With a Bubble Bath 219

Posted by Soulskill on Friday March 26 2010, @04:58PM
from the rubber-ducky-optional dept.

cremeglace writes "A Harvard University physicist has come up with a new way to cool parts of the planet: pump vast swarms of tiny bubbles into the sea to increase its reflectivity and lower water temperatures. 'Since water covers most of the earth, don't dim the sun,' says the scientist, Russell Seitz, speaking from an international meeting on geoengineering research. 'Brighten the water.' From ScienceNOW: 'Computer simulations show that tiny bubbles could have a profound cooling effect. Using a model that simulates how light, water, and air interact, Seitz found that microbubbles could double the reflectivity of water at a concentration of only one part per million by volume. When Seitz plugged that data into a climate model, he found that the microbubble strategy could cool the planet by up to 3C. He has submitted a paper on the concept he calls “Bright Water" to the journal Climatic Change.'"

Home-Built Turing Machine 123

Posted by Soulskill on Friday March 26 2010, @01:31PM
from the i'll-order-a-dozen dept.

stronghawk writes "The creator of the Nickel-O-Matic is back at it and has now built a Turing Machine from a Parallax Propeller chip-based controller, motors, a dry-erase marker and a non-infinite supply of shiny 35mm leader film. From his FAQ: 'While thinking about Turing machines I found that no one had ever actually built one, at least not one that looked like Turing's original concept (if someone does know of one, please let me know). There have been a few other physical Turing machines like the Logo of Doom, but none were immediately recognizable as Turing machines. As I am always looking for a new challenge, I set out to build what you see here.'"

Apple Removes Wi-Fi Finders From App Store 461

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 04 2010, @09:30PM
from the you've-been-very-very-naughty dept.

jasonbrown writes "Apple on Thursday began removing another category of apps from its iPhone App Store. This time, it's not porn, it's Wi-Fi. Apple removed several Wi-Fi apps commonly referred to as stumblers, or apps that seek out available Wi-Fi networks near your location. According to a story on Cult of Mac, apps removed by Apple include WiFi-Where, WiFiFoFum, and yFy Network Finder."

Herschel Spectroscopy of Future Supernova 21

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday November 28 2009, @01:50PM
from the that's-a-big-star dept.

davecl writes "ESA's Herschel Space Telescope has released its first spectroscopic results. These include observations of VYCMa, a star 50 times as massive as the sun and soon to become a supernova, as well as a nearby galaxy, more distant colliding starburst galaxies and a comet in our own solar system. The spectra show more lines than have ever been seen in these objects in the far-infrared and will allow astronomers to work out the detailed chemistry and physics behind star and planet formation as well as the last stages of stellar evolution before VYCMa's eventual collapse into a supernova. More coverage is available at the Herschel Mission Blog, which I run."

Comment: FUD from boing, that's all. (Score 0) 911

by Jump on Tuesday June 09 2009, @06:31AM (#28263367) Attached to: Computers Key To Air France Crash

You don't know if your pilot today is battle proven, don't you? Having the option to take control from the computer, however, should be possible. I can't believe airbus isn't doing this. The news claims, the autopilot was turned off - so this means human control, no? I'm rather more concerned about having no backup radar on board. It seems strange, that only one radar is there, while a second radar could be in a less exposed position (being less useful for that reason, but for backup purposes).

It seems somebody is spreading FUD against airbus, and that's something which doesn't surprise me at all.

Comment: Re:Doesn't seem that scary (Score 1) 242

by Jump on Thursday March 19 2009, @03:11PM (#27259979) Attached to: Intel CPU Privilege Escalation Exploit

What if it writes itself in the firmware when you shutdown the computer just before rebooting, and loads itself back into the SMM during boot?
Maybe even restoring the original firmware? To work around space limitations, the SMM code could hide another rootkit hiding on the disk and download a new copy if the system has been wiped.

The Birth of vi 459

Posted by Zonk on Saturday January 06 2007, @07:13AM
from the please-keep-emacs-trolling-to-a-minimum dept.

lanc writes "Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, tells the story of how he wrote the vi editor. The article at The Register delves into his motives, who instigated the project, and some of the quirks of leaving a 'gift to mankind'. From the piece: '9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore. The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens. So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.'"

Fingerprinting the World's Mail Servers

Submitted by

ttul

on Saturday January 06 2007, @04:17AM

ttul writes "This O'Reilly SysAdmin Article describes some work done by mod_perl author Stas Bekman and his colleagues at anti-spam software company MailChannels to fingerprint the world's publicly visible email servers. Interesting results from the survey? Open source options like Sendmail and Postfix are still firmly in the lead after all these years, but commercial services like Postini are catching up fast. The article goes into some detail on how email servers can be fingerprinted despite attempts by sysadmins to cloak their identity."

Offshore Wind Farms are set to battle bad storms

Submitted by

abramsv

on Saturday January 06 2007, @01:44AM

abramsv writes "New floating wind farms are located off Denmark's West coast in the North Sea, which is considered to be one of the roughest stretches of water in the world — 8 to 10 meter waves are expected at the site... Based on data determining that average wind speeds at sea are higher than on land, the modern offshore wind farms promise to be exceptionally energy efficient — but it still remains to be seen whether or not these long-bladed Goliaths will survive the harshest of North Sea storms."