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Space

Submission + - Hole in Asteroid Belt Reveals Extinction Asteroid (physorg.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Further evidence for the asteroid mass extinction theory has been discovered as a break in the main asteroid belt of our solar system. From the article, "A joint U.S.-Czech team from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Charles University in Prague suggests that the parent object of asteroid (298) Baptistina disrupted when it was hit by another large asteroid, creating numerous large fragments that would later create the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the prominent Tycho crater found on the Moon.""
Graphics

Submission + - Content-aware image resizing (youtube.com) 2

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, have demonstrated a new method to shrink images. The method called 'Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing' figures out which parts of an image are less significant. This makes it possible to change the aspect-ratio of an image without making the content look skewed or stretched out. Watch the demonstration. A pdf paper can be found here.
Space

Submission + - Comet Probes Given New Duties

Submitted by iamlucky13
iamlucky13 writes: In January of 2004, the NASA's Stardust mission made a flyby of comet Wild-2, taking images and collecting samples from its tail that have since been returned to earth in a detachable capsule. On July 4, 2005, Deep Impact smashed a 350 kg projectile traveling 37,000 km/h into comet Tempel 1 as part of its studies of that object. With both craft in good shape at the end of their missions, NASA has been considering additional tasks for the probes. These plans have now been confirmed with a variety of tasks costing an estimated 15% what a new mission would. Among the new duties will be a revisit of Tempel 1, a flyby of comet Boethin, and transit studies of known extra-solar planets.
Privacy

Submission + - Newly Declassified Window Film Keeps Out Hackers, (sciam.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A newly declassified window film from CPFilms Inc. (Solutia Inc.) will give war drivers a run for their money. As printed in a recent issue of Scientific American: Once manufactured under an exclusive contract with the U.S. government, this recently declassified window film is now available to the public. But don't expect to see it on store shelves anytime soon. Currently, it's only available directly from the manufacturer, and at prices that will likely make it prohibitive for all but the wealthiest home owners. The two-millimeter-thick coating can block Wi-Fi signals, cell phone transmissions, even the near-infrared, yet is almost transparent, making it no more intrusive than conventional window treatments. It can keep signals in (preventing attempts to spy on electronic communications) or out, minimizing radio interference and even the fabled electronics-destroying electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generated by a nuclear blast.
Space

Submission + - Lyrid meteors no moon this weekend

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "If you want to take a chance on the Lyrid Meteor Shower you should be looking this weekend. This shower is usually a quiet one but can result is spactacular displays from time to time. Sky and Telescope http://skytonight.com/observing/objects/meteors/33 05866.html has this to say:

In 1982 the rate unexpectedly reached 90 for a single hour, and 180 to 300 for a few minutes. A brief outburst of 100 per hour was also seen in 1922. And on April 20, 1803, residents of Richmond, Virginia, upon being rousted out of bed by a fire bell, were startled to see great numbers of meteors in all parts of the sky.
http://www.earthsky.org/article/49561/who-should-w atch-the-lyrid-meteor-shower gives viewing times as the very early hours of Sunday and Monday morning. The Moon will have set by then."
Power

Submission + - Bussard Recieves Navy Funding for Fusion Research

Submitted by
UnreasonableMan
UnreasonableMan writes: "From Kent Brewster at Speculations.com:

...got some really interesting news about five minutes ago, straight from the man himself. Dr. Robert Bussard, of whom you may have heard, says that because of the publicity around his November 9th talk at Google and his International Academy of Science Outstanding Technology of the Year Award, the Navy has sent him a contract extension to continue his fusion research. It's two orders of magnitude below the $200 million Dr. Bussard says he needs to produce a full-scale 100mw system, but it's a start.
If you're interested in helping out, see emc2fusion.org for more.

More details may be found in The Advent of Clean Nuclear Fusion: Superperformance Space Power and Propulsion, Dr. Bussard's contribution to the 57th International Astronautical Congress.
(via M. Simon)"
Space

Submission + - NASA mission probe proves Einstein was right

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Gravity Probe B uses four ultra-precise gyroscopes to measure two effects of Einstein's general relativity theory, one called the geodetic effect, the other called frame dragging. A common analogy, the geodetic effect is similar to the shape of the dip created when the ball is placed on to a rubber sheet. If the bowling ball is then rotated, it will start to drag the rubber sheet around with it. In a similar way, the Earth drags local space and time around with it — ever so slightly — as it rotates. Over the course of a year, these effects would cause the angle of spin of the gyroscopes to shift by minute amounts. According to the mission's principal investigator, Professor Francis Everitt, from Stanford University, the data from Gravity Probe B's gyroscopes clearly confirm Einstein's geodetic effect to a precision of better than 1%.
Power

Submission + - Harnessing High Altitude Wind Power

Submitted by jakosc
jakosc writes: The Economist this week has an interesting article about increasing the efficiency of wind-powered generators by turning them into Flying Wind Farms. These tethered generators would harness high speed jet stream winds above 15,000 ft and in theory could give outputs of 40MW per generator (pdf) The developer's website has more details of some of the safety, technological and economic issues.
Space

Submission + - Sunspots reach 1000 year peak

Submitted by rlp
rlp writes: Researchers at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich are reporting that solar sunspot activity is at a 1000 year peak. Records of sunspots have been kept since 1610. The period between 1645 and 1715 (known as the Maunder Minimum) was a period of very few sunspots. Researchers extended the record by measuring isotopes of beryllium (created by cosmic rays) in Greenland ice cores. Based on observations and ice core records, we are now at a sunspot peak exceeding solar activity for any time in the past thousand years.
Enlightenment

Submission + - Physicists figure math needed for invisibility

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A group of engineers at Purdue University in Indiana have now used mathematical equations figured out last year, to bend light around objects, to design a relatively simple device that ought to be able to — one day soon — make objects as big as an airplane simply disappear. From the article: "It looks pretty much like fiction, I do realize, but it's completely in agreement with the laws of physics," said lead researcher Vladimir Shalaev, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue. The design calls for tiny metal needles to be fitted into a hairbrush-shaped cone at angles and lengths that would force light to pass around the cloak. This would make everything inside the cone appear to vanish because the light would no longer reflect off it. The major limitation is that the current design can only bend the light of a single wave-length at a time, and does not work with the entire frequency range of the visible spectrum. "How to create a design that works for all colors of visible light at the same time will be a big technical challenge, but we believe it's possible," Shalaev said. "In principal it's doable."
Space

Submission + - Massive star burps, then explodes

Submitted by
gollum123
gollum123 writes: "Tens of millions of years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a massive star suffered a nasty double whammy ( http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/0 4/04_supernova.shtml ). Signs of the first shock reached Earth on Oct. 20, 2004, when the star was observed letting loose an outburst so enormous and bright that Japanese amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki initially mistook it for a supernova. The star survived for nearly two years, however, until on Oct. 11, 2006, professional and amateur astronomers witnessed it blowing itself to smithereens as Supernova (SN) 2006jc. All the observations suggest that the supernova's blast wave took only a few weeks to reach the shell of material ejected two years earlier, which did not have time to drift very far from the star. As the wave smashed into the ejecta, it heated the gas to millions of degrees, hot enough to emit copious X-rays. The Swift satellite saw the supernova continue to brighten in X-rays for 100 days, something that has never been seen before in a supernova. All supernovae previously observed in X-rays have started off bright and then quickly faded to invisibility."
Space

Submission + - NASA Confirms Solar Storm near 2012

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: `This week researchers announced that a storm is coming — the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one," she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.`

`Dikpati's forecast puts Solar Max at 2012. Hathaway believes it will arrive sooner, in 2010 or 2011.`

Anyone familiar with the Mayan Calendar? December 21, 2012 (13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan Calendar) Coincidence?
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - The Incredible Shrinking Engine

Submitted by Somnus
Somnus writes: In the latest issue of MIT's Technology Review , researchers describe how they can dramatically boost engine output and efficiency by preventing pre-ignition, or 'knock:'

... Both turbocharging and direct injection are preexisting technologies, and neither looks particularly impressive ... by combining them, and augmenting them with a novel way to use a small amount of ethanol, Cohn and his colleagues have created a design that they believe could triple the power of a test engine ...
Why didn't I think of this?
It's funny. Laugh.

Journal Journal: Al "Green" Gores Shocking Electric Bill 1

Journal by music2myear
Some interested person called the Nashville (TN) Electrical Service and under the Freedom of Information Act asked for the Academy Award Winning Ex-VP's energy bill. Apparently the publicly dull persona has quite the party life going at home. His usage last year? 221,000 kWh, that's a $30,000 bill, more than 20 times the national average. Last August alone he used 22,619 kWh, more than you or me (even with those massive 1000W PS' ru

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