30170771
submission
99luftballon writes:
The head of NASA Ames has said that he expects any colonisation of Mars, the Moon or asteroids to be done by private companies rather than by NASA. There's some interesting parallels with the East India Company, although that was hardly a triumph of capitalism. The article also mentions Google's head of space projects, who has 'Intergalactic Federation King Almighty and Commander of the Universe' on her business cards.
28293654
submission
99luftballon writes:
Astronomers are planning the Event Horizon Telescope project in Arizona on Wednesday — and say in three or four years they should be able to image the ring of matter around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The black hole is 26,000 miles away but should be large enough to check if Einstein got his equations right.
24672752
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99luftballon writes:
The OccupySF team have been running an ad-hoc computer network on the streets of San Francisco without a steady power source, no Wi-Fi and even the occasional police raid. It turns out the best way to keep the lights on is car batteries and pedal power.
5152253
submission
99luftballon writes:
Nearly 70 years after Station X (aka the Bletchley Park cryptanalysis unit) was set up the surviving members are to be honoured by the British government.
Bletchley was one of the most important computing centres of its time and housed giants of the technology industry (as it was) like Tommy Flowers, who built Colossus, and Dr. Alan Turing.
I was lucky enough to meet one of the staff at the site 11 years ago and she was very bitter that their work was never recognised, and that they were bound by the Official Secrets Act and couldn't talk about it. It's just a shame that so few of the staff are still alive to receive the award.
9907
submission
99luftballon writes:
Today is an important anniversary for Russian hero Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet missile commander who saved the world from nuclear destruction in 1983.
Sadly there are plenty of other examples of this kind of thing. How long will we keep getting lucky?
