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Space

NASA Wants "People People" for Astronaut Core 86

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the hope-there-is-still-a-little-steel dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Astronauts are the ultimate Type A personalities but that can backfire during a long stay in space so NASA is taking applications for a new crop of astronauts whose main duties are to conduct experiments, keep the station running and stay in their crewmates' good graces. For that, NASA needs an affable, tolerant guy or gal who is more researcher than jet jockey. 'You need to be more of a people person' to serve on the station, says astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who has flown on the space shuttle and commanded the station. 'You can't just be steely-eyed, no matter how competent.' Coping skills are crucial on a station mission, which lasts three to six months, compared with 11 to 15 days for a shuttle mission. 'Anybody can get along with anybody for a couple of weeks,' says psychiatry professor Nick Kanas who studies astronaut behavior. After a month or two, 'being with somebody for that long starts to wear on you. The jokes get stale. You have to learn new ways of interacting.'"
Mozilla

Submission + - Weave... Mozilla is trying to be more social (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
Cassanova
Cassanova writes: "Weave ; It's the newest Mozilla Labs project. It allows the user to save his browser settings on Mozilla servers (Favorites, sessions ,passwords...etc..) and be able to load it wherever he is. With this project. Mozilla is trying to be an online services provider which is an important step. But can Mozilla labs get over the privacy issues ?"
Government

Submission + - Army Buys Macs to beef up security

Submitted by agent_blue
agent_blue writes: The Army is integrating macs into their IT network to thwart hack attempts. the Mac platform, they argue Mac are more secure because there are less attacks against macs than there is against windows based systems. Story Here
Space

Submission + - Mars Rover Technology Used to Make Better Maps

Submitted by
Cal
Cal writes: "Interesting article on O'Reilly Radar about a new street mapping technology by a company in Berkeley (earthmine). They are using technology developed by the Jet Propulsion Lab for the Mars Exploration Rover missions for reconstructing three-dimensional data of the street-scape. Will be interesting to see if the product ends up in the hands of consumers. From the press release: "The technology licensed by earthmine is currently utilized as a part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet. Wide angle stereo cameras are mounted on NASA's twin robot geologists, the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) launched toward Mars in 2003. The licensed software and algorithms are used to create a 3D representation of the local terrain, allowing autonomous routing of the MERs through the Martian environment. earthmine has combined this JPL technology with its unique, capture hardware and web delivery technology to deliver 3D data with unprecedented density and accuracy.""
Space

Submission + - Group plans to bring Martian sample to earth

Submitted by
sm62704 (mcgrew)
sm62704 (mcgrew) writes: "New Scientist has a story about IMARS (the International Mars Architecture for Return Samples) planning to bring samples of Martian siol to earth.

The robotic mission would be a needed precursor to manned trips to the red planet. Also, international cooperation is necessary since the US has already nixed bankrolling manned Mars missions."
Networking

Submission + - Cablevision CEO has Verizon FiOS at home? (my-pc-help.com)

Submitted by
Keri_Love
Keri_Love writes: "As you may already know, Cablevision and Verizon are in the middle of heated debate over Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) Broadband and Television. With Cablevision slinging lines like "We're not afraid of your fiber!" Mike Murray writes in his tech blog today "click the picture to the right showing a Verizon FiOS can and drop directly above Cablevision's CEO Chuck Dolan's Oyster Bay, Long Island mailbox."

He's not scared! He's a customer!"
Space

Submission + - A telescope as big as the Earth

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "A week ago, seven telescopes around the world were linked together to watch a distant galaxy called 3C273 in real time and create a single world telescope. The data from these telescopes, which are located in Australia, China and Europe, was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per second. One of the Australian researchers involved in the project said that it was the first time that astronomers have been able to instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart. He added that 'the diameter of the Earth is 12,750 km and the two most widely separated telescopes in our experiment were 12,304 km apart.' So he's almost right by cliaming they created 'a telescope almost as big as the Earth.' But read more for additional references and a picture showing the location of these telescopes."
Censorship

Submission + - Libraries Defend Open Access

Submitted by aisaac
aisaac writes:
Publisher plans to equate public access to federally funded research with government censorship and the destruction of peer review were exposed earlier this year (Nature, January 25, 2007). In an open letter last month, Rockefeller University Press castigated the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM) for using distortionary rhetoric in a coordinated PR attack on open access. Now the Association of Research Libraries has released an Issue Brief addressing this PR campaign in more detail. The Issue Brief exposes some of the distortions used to persuade key policy makers that recent gains open access scientific publishing pose a danger to peer reviewed scientific research, free markets, and possibly the future of western civilization. As an example of what the publishers backing PRISM hate, consider the the wonderfully successful grants policy of the National Institutes of Health, which requires papers based on grant-funded research to be published in PubMed Central.

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