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Mars

New Mars Rover Rolls For the First Time 100

wooferhound writes "Like proud parents savoring their baby's very first steps, mission team members gathered in a gallery above a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch the Mars Curiosity rover roll for the first time. Engineers and technicians wore bunny suits while guiding Curiosity through its first steps, or more precisely, its first roll on the clean room floor. The rover moved forward and backward about 1 meter (3.3 feet). Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is scheduled to launch in fall 2011 and land on the Red Planet in August 2012. Curiosity is the largest rover ever sent to Mars. It will carry 10 instruments that will help search an intriguing region of the Red Planet for two things: environments where life might have existed, and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life."
NASA

Gamma Ray Mystery Reestablished By Fermi Telescope 95

eldavojohn writes "New observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveal that our assumptions about the 'fog' of gamma rays in our universe are not entirely explained by black hole-powered jets emanating from active galaxies — as we previously hypothesized. For now, the researchers are representing the source of unaccounted gamma rays with a dragon (as in 'here be') symbol. A researcher explained that they are certain about this, given Fermi's observations: 'Active galaxies can explain less than 30 percent of the extragalactic gamma-ray background Fermi sees. That leaves a lot of room for scientific discovery as we puzzle out what else may be responsible.' And so we reopen the chapter on background gamma-rays in the science textbooks and hope this eventually sheds even more light on other mysteries of space — like star formation and dark matter."
Image

Facebook Master Password Was "Chuck Norris" 319

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."
Image

Man Sues Neighbor For Not Turning Off His Wi-Fi 428

Scyth3 writes "A man is suing his neighbor for not turning off his cell phone or wireless router. He claims it affects his 'electromagnetic allergies,' and has resorted to being homeless. So, why doesn't he check into a hotel? Because hotels typically have wireless internet for free. I wonder if a tinfoil hat would help his cause?"

Comment Re:My feeling about this... (Score 1) 71

Under the broadest theoretical models, this is possible. The universe could have an overall curvature, so that light emitted at one end of the universe would travel in a very large circle. To understand this, you can think about the two-dimensional analogue: a 2-d world existing on the surface of a sphere; the geometry of the universe would be non-Euclidean. (ie, if you draw a triangle on the surface of the sphere, the 3 angles would add up to more than 180 degrees). There are two problems with this, however. (One is more trivial than the other.) First, if the circumference of this sphere is larger than (speed of light)*(age of universe), then we would not be seeing echos of our own galaxy, since the light wouldn't have had time yet to make an entire loop around the universe. Secondly, and most importantly, all of our current experimental evidence seems to rule out the possibility of a curved universe. By studying the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), (as well as using other methods) astronomers can determine all sorts of things about the large scale structure and nature of the universe. Most recent observations point toward a universe that is "flat", rather than curved. One of these recent results came from the Boomerang team, which I believe was reported by /. a few months ago. So basically, the normal, euclidean geometry that we love so much really is correct. Two beams of light that are emitted parallel to each other will stay parallel. So, to sum up, while it is theoretically possible that the universe is curved and not infinite, fewer and fewer scientists acually believe it anymore.

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