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Mars

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101

Posted by samzenpus
from the take-a-look dept.
SternisheFan points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."
Technology

Festo's Drone Dragonfly Takes To the Air 45

Posted by samzenpus
from the little-flyer dept.
yyzmcleod writes "Building on the work of last year's bionic creation, the Smart Bird, Festo announced that it will literally launch its latest creation, the BionicOpter, at Hannover Messe in April. With a wingspan of 63 cm and weighing in at 175 grams, the robotic dragonfly mimics all forms of flight as its natural counterpart, including hover, glide and maneuvering in all directions. This is made possible, the company says, by the BionicOpter's ability to move each of its four wings independently, as well as control their amplitude, frequency and angle of attack. Including its actuated head and body, the robot exhibits 13 degrees of freedom, which allows it to rapidly accelerate, decelerate, turn and fly backwards."
The Media

What Does It Actually Cost To Publish a Scientific Paper? 166

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the one-trillion-dollars dept.
ananyo writes "Nature has published an investigation into the real costs of publishing research after delving into the secretive, murky world of science publishing. Few publishers (open access or otherwise-including Nature Publishing Group) would reveal their profit margins, but they've pieced together a picture of how much it really costs to publish a paper by talking to analysts and insiders. Quoting from the piece: '"The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think," agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS. But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality.' There's also a comment piece by three open access advocates setting out what they think needs to happen next to push forward the movement as well as a piece arguing that 'Objections to the Creative Commons attribution license are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible.'"
Cloud

One In Six Amazon S3 Storage Buckets Are Ripe For Data-Plundering 79

Posted by samzenpus
from the ripe-for-the-picking dept.
tsamsoniw writes "Using a combination of relatively low-tech techniques and tools, security researchers have discovered that they can access the contents of one in six Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets whose owners had them set to Public instead of Private. All told, researchers discovered and explored nearly 2,000 public buckets, according to Rapid 7 Senior Security Consultant Will Vandevanter, from which they gathered a list of more than 126 billion files, many of which contained sensitive information such as source code and personal employee information. Researchers noted that S3 URLs are all predictable and public facing, which make it that much easier to find the buckets in the first place with a scripting tool."
Power

+ - New process that takes the energy from coal without burning it->

Submitted by
rtoz
rtoz writes "Ohio State students had come up with a scaled-down version of a power plant combustion system with a unique experimental design--one that chemically converts coal to heat while capturing 99 percent of the carbon dioxide produced in the reaction.

Typical coal-fired power plants burn coal to heat water to make steam, which turns the turbines that produce electricity. In chemical looping, the coal isn't burned with fire, but instead chemically combusted in a sealed chamber so that it doesn't pollute the air.

This new technology, called coal-direct chemical looping, was pioneered by Liang-Shih Fan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of Ohio State's Clean Coal Research Laboratory"
Link to Original Source

+ - Energy from coal without burning and minimal CO2->

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes "The clean coal technique was developed by scientists at Ohio State University, with just $5 million in funding from the federal government, and took 15 years to achieve. The process removes 99 percent of the pollution from coal.

Retrofitting existing power plants with the new process would be costly, but it would cut billions of tons of pollution. The process, called “coal-direct chemical looping,” has been proven in a small scale lab at OSU. The next step is to take it to a larger test facility in Alabama. The technology generated 25 kilowatts of thermal energy in current tests; the Alabama site will generate 250 kilowatts."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Megan wouldn't know design even if it bit her ass (Score 1) 370

by r_batty_00 (#40655765) Attached to: Why Is Wikipedia So Ugly?

Megan Garber is being destroyed in the comment section of The Atlantic. There are nearly 50 comments... all of them pointing out how clueless she is about design, how Wikipedia is actually well laid out, that she doesn't know what an empirical truth is , etc...

Oddly enough, Wikipedia has some interesting info on The Atlantic-

        "In 2010, The Atlantic posted its first profit in the last decade... was the result of a cultural
          transfusion, a dose of counterintuition and a lot of digital advertising revenue."

It has already been suggested in the comments that she may be nothing more than a comment troll.

If you found Megan's article to be insightful, be sure to read her similarly penetrating articles:

          Taco Bell vs. Old Spice: The Twitter War That Wasn't
          Here Are 10 GIFs That Will Restore Your Faith in GIFs
          'New York Times' + Buzzfeed = OMG

Comment: Re:Common Objections to this work (Score 1) 199

Slashdot of 10 years ago would have had a lively debate about the ethics of your experiments and the pro/ con of animal experiments used in education. Sadly, you can see many of the comments have devolved into first posts, Nazi comparisons and knee-jerk animal rights propaganda. Some of us old timers would have been thrilled to be able to probe neural activity in advanced biology (in addition to fetal pig dissection ). Don’t take the negative comments too personally, were not the Slashdot we one were.

Comment: Re:American fluid dynamicists did it first! (Score 1) 55

by r_batty_00 (#40162649) Attached to: Mathematicians Show Why Bubbles Sink in Nitrogen-Infused Stouts

Twelve years ago an almost identical paper was on the office wall of a chemical engineering professor I had in college. I'm mostly kidding with my subject line - I expect there's novelty in the new paper and just want to point out that this has been used as a model system (probably many times) before now.

I believe you are referring to Md Nurul Hasan Khan. In 1999 he published a paper proving Guinness bubbles fall. As far as I know he was the first.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/19/1079199418340.html

Hardware

+ - Raspberry Pi Orders Now Being Accepted->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "These tiny computers are about the size of a USB stick and come with a 700MHz ARM11, 256 MB RAM, SD card slot, Ethernet port, 2 USB ports, and an an HDMI connector. Distribution developers and hobbyists are porting their favorite versions of Linux, like Fedora, to the little machine."
Link to Original Source
Medicine

+ - World's first biodegradable joint implant grows new joints-> 1

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes "Joint implants should always be made of materials like titanium, so they can last the lifetime of the patient ... right? Well, not according to researchers at Finland's Tampere University of Technology. They've developed a product known as RegJoint, which is reportedly the world's first biodegradable joint implant. Unlike permanent implants, it allows the patient's bone ends to remain intact, and it creates a new joint out of their own tissue."
Link to Original Source
Wikipedia

+ - Wikipedia Finally Enables Https->

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes "The Wikimedia Foundation has enabled HTTPS (ssl) for all of its projects including Wikipedia, Wikimedia, and others. The protocol behind secure.wikimedia.org does not offer the same protections as https and ssl has finally been adapted.

The project is still not considered done. Many templates, CSS, and Javascript on projects are improperly referencing resources, and causing them to be loaded incorrectly. The MediaWiki core and extension developers will have much work to do to repair many issues caused by the https upgrade."
Link to Original Source

+ - Should Science be King?-> 2

Submitted by Layzej
Layzej writes "According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on science and accountability, rather than a populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking. He also proposes an intriguing free market solution to our energy and climate challenges."
Link to Original Source

In the long run, every program becomes rococco, and then rubble. -- Alan Perlis

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