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+ - NASA goes all-in on asteroid mitigation program->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "NASA again stepped up its plan to mitigate the asteroid threat to Earth by announcing two significant new programs that call on a multitude of scientists and organizations to help spot, track and possibly alter the direction of killer space rocks.

First off, the agency announced the latest in its series of Grand Challenges where it dares public and private partnerships to come up with a unique solution to a very tough problem, usually with prize money attached for the winner"
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+ - FBI "Most Wanted" list names its 500th fugitive->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "t's a list one would never aspire to be on. The FBI today said it named the 500th criminal to its iconic "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives," program — a list that has been kept since 1950. The idea behind the Ten Most Wanted was to get the names and faces of criminals out to the public and ultimately lead to their capture. And the FBI says the list has done just that in a major way: Of the 500 fugitives who have been named to the list, 469 have been apprehended or located. Of those, 155 fugitives have been captured or located as a direct result of citizen cooperation, the agency says."
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+ - What if William Shakespeare had been a power Facebook user?->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "Carnegie Mellon researchers call the project Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB). But what it is is an great big data mining project that tries to trace the influence and ideas of Bacon, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton and more than 6,000 others from the 16th-17th centuries to let scholars and students reassemble and discuss or debate the era's networked culture."
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+ - Carnegie Mellon video net brings Harry Potter Marauder's Map to life->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "A network of video cameras melded a unique algorithm let scientists with the Carnegie Mellon University track the locations of multiple individuals in complex, indoor setting — just like Harry Potter's Marauder's Map. The Carnegie Mellon system was able to automatically follow the movements of 13 people within a nursing home, even though individuals sometimes slipped out of view of the cameras and researchers said they made use of multiple cues from the video feed: apparel color, person detection, trajectory and, perhaps most significantly, facial recognition, according to university researchers."
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+ - FAA wants all aircraft flying on unleaded fuel by 2018->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) this week put out a call to fuel producers to offer options that would safely let general aviation aircraft stop using leaded fuel by 2018. The FAA says there are approximately 167,000 aircraft in the United States and a total of 230,000 worldwide that rely on the current 100 octane, low lead fuel for safe operation. It is the only remaining transportation fuel in the United States that contains the addition of tetraethyl lead (TEL), a toxic substance, to create the very high octane levels needed for high-performance aircraft engines. Operations with inadequate octane can result in engine failures, the FAA noted."
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+ - The most magnificent high-tech flying machines->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "Few things can ignite passion as much as an amazingly designed aircraft or rocket flashing through the sky. Here we take a look at some of the latest in high-tech flying machines. Some are only prototype s that are pure research vehicles, others you may someday see of fly in in the next few years or more in other cases."
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+ - Futuristic UC Berkeley OS controls discrete 'manycore' resources->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "At the Design Automation Conference (DAC) here this week, John Kubiatowicz, professor in the UC Berkeley computer science division, offered a preview of Tessellation, describing it as an operating system for the future where surfaces with sensors, such as walls and tables in rooms, for example, could be utilized via touch or audio command to summon up multimedia and other applications. The UC Berkeley Tessellation website says Tessellation is targeted at existing and future so-called "manycore" based systems that have large numbers of processors, or cores on a single chip. Currently, the operating system runs on Intel multicore hardware as well as the Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors (RAMP) multicore emulation platform."
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+ - NASA teams with Lego to offer coolest, most realistic model competition->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "Seems like a natural fit: NASA today said it would team up with Lego to offer a competition to see who can build the coolest models of future airplanes and spacecraft. The "NASA's Missions: Imagine and Build" competition is open now with an entry deadline of July 31. Winners in each category will be selected by a panel of NASA and LEGO officials and announced Sept. 1."
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+ - After firestorm, TSA nixes notion to allow pocket knives in passenger carry-ons->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "After a major conflagration of criticism from Congress and flight attendants over the Transportation Security Administration's proposed decision in March to let a bunch of previously prohibited items such as small pocket knives on aircraft as carry-ons, the TSA has had a change of heart."
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+ - IBM touts nickel-sized chip that backs Gb/sec wireless, sharper radar images->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "IBM says it has packed an integrated circuit about the size of a nickel with technology that can enable gigabit/sec mobile data-rate and clutter-cutting radar image applications. The integrated circuit takes advantage of millimeter-wave spectrum which spans the 30 GHz to 300 GHz range, 10 to 100 times higher than the frequencies used for mobile phones and Wi-Fi. Frequencies in the range of 90-94GHz are well suited for short and long range, high-resolution radar imaging, IBM said."
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+ - Malicious power-charger can infect Apple iOS devices ->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "IoS devices are vulnerable to malware coming from a malicious charger according to researchers from Georgia Tech. The researchers, who will be presenting their proof-of-concept charger known as Mactans at the upcoming Black Hat security conference, say: “despite the plethora of defense mechanisms in iOS, we successfully injected arbitrary software into current-generation Apple devices running the latest operating system (OS) software. All users are affected, as our approach requires neither a jail-broken device nor user interaction.”"
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+ - Get ready for a flood of new Hadoop apps ->

Submitted by Brandon Butler
Brandon Butler writes "It's a big week for Hadoop. The latest release of Apache Hadoop code includes a new workload management tool that backers of the project say will make it easier for developers to build applications for the big data platform.

Hadoop systems have thus far relied on MapReduce to process data, but Yarn is a new platform to run applications within Hadoop that is expected to be released in the beta 2.0 version of the open source code this week. Yarn monitors the resources applications need and provisions capacity within the distributed computing system.

Yarn now allows Hadoop systems to run multiple applications at once, instead of bolting on functionality to MapReduce. Developers can also now write apps to Yarn specifications and be assured that they'll work in a Hadoop system. Backers expect that Yarn could open the floodgates for new applications being built to run on Hadoop.

Already some projects, like Apache Tez, have been created to do more advanced data processing compared to what MapReduce specializes in. Tez uses real-time analytics and in-memory processing for higher-speed queries, for example. There are many more applications expected for streaming analytics, such as Twitter Storm while other ETL and real-time processing apps are expected to be developed as well."
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Given its constituency, the only thing I expect to be "open" about [the Open Software Foundation] is its mouth. -- John Gilmore

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