jodirren - Slashdot User

Aftermath of Distant Planetary Collision? 97

Posted by Zonk on Saturday January 19, 2008 @02:33PM from the two-plus-two-equals-weird dept.

gazurtoid writes "Astrobiology Magazine is reporting that astronomers have announced a mystery object orbiting the 8-million-year-old brown dwarf 2M1207 170 light-years from Earth might have formed from the collision and merger of two protoplanets. The object, known as 2M1207B, has puzzled astronomers since its discovery because it seems to fall outside the spectrum of physical possibility. Its combination of temperature, luminosity, and age do not match up with any theory. 'Hot, post-collision planets might be a whole new class of objects we will see with the Giant Magellan Telescope', said Eric Mamajek of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics."

Submission + - NASA moon rocket may shake too much (yahoo.com)

Submitted by

caffiend666

on Saturday January 19, 2008 @01:52PM

caffiend666 writes: "According to an AP New Article: "Engineers are concerned that the new rocket meant to replace the space shuttle and send astronauts on their way to the moon could shake violently during the first few minutes of flight, possibly destroying the entire vehicle.... NASA officials hope to have a plan for fixing the design as early as March, and they do not expect it to delay the goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020.... The shaking problem, which is common to solid rocket boosters, involves pulses of added acceleration caused by gas vortices in the rocket similar to the wake that develops behind a fast-moving boat...." Astronauts always desribed the shuttle ride as rocky until the SRBs fall off, I was wondering what would happen when they no longer had the counter-weight of the main tank and the orbiter."

Submission + - Personal weather station helping weather forecast

Submitted by Weather Storm on Saturday January 19, 2008 @11:53AM

Weather Storm writes: Weather information from thousands of personal weather stations are being used for weather forecasting by several private and government agencies including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Department of Homeland Security (DOH). Citizens Weather Observation Program (CWOP) created by a few amateur radio operators experimenting with transmitting weather data with packet radios, has expanded their network to include internet only weather stations. "As of September 2007, nearly 5,000 station world-wide reported weather data regularly to CWOP a href="http://www.findu.com/">FindU database." The weather data is forwarded every 15 minutes to NOAA's Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS), checked for temporary and spatial consistency, than utilized by computer forecast models and internal forecast verification programs. In a Febuary 2007 report, DOH listed CWOP as a national assets to the "BioWatch" Network stating that data from personal weather station could be useful in weather forecasts for hazardous releases. In 2007, the FindU server received 422,262,687 weather reports which is a 29.5% increase over 2006.

World of Warcraft Gold Limit Reached, It's 2^31 479

Posted by CmdrTaco on Saturday January 19, 2008 @10:27AM from the and-i-thought-my-life-was-void dept.

Mitch writes "Blizzard apparently used signed integers for their World of Warcraft gold values as some people have recently hit the limit of 2^31. "Apparently that amount is 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper. After you reach that lofty sum, you'll no longer be able to receive money from any source in the game. While some responses to the original posts claim that this exact limit had previously been theorized to exist, there have been no reports of anyone in the game actually achieving this amount via legal means." I guess Blizzard didn't expect anyone to ever get close to that much gold in game."

Teleportation — Fact and Fiction 348

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday January 18, 2008 @09:22PM from the there-and-back-again dept.

jcatcw writes "Earlier this week actor Hayden Christensen, of Star Wars fame, and director Doug Liman discussed teleportation with MIT professors to compare the reality to the special effects version in the upcoming movie, Jumper. Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, said, 'It's a little less exotic than what you see in the movie. Teleportation has been done, moving a single proton over two miles. [But] teleporting a person? That is pretty far down the line. The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable. That is just not in the foreseeable future.'"

Pentagon Working on "Human Fear" Weapons 310

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday January 18, 2008 @04:11PM from the smells-like-... dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Animals use pheromones to attract each other for sex, and warn each other of danger. Now, Wired reports, military researchers are working to harness the 'human fear' pheromone to create a scent of terror. The pheromone could lead to smell-based terrorist sensors, and new weapons that rely on 'contagious' stress."

Bizarre Self-Destructing Palm Tree Found 190

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday January 18, 2008 @02:01PM from the this-message-will-self-destruct-in-100-years dept.

Smivs writes "A giant self-destructing palm tree has been discovered in Madagascar. The palm is 20m (60ft) high with leaves 5m (16ft) long, the tallest tree of its type in the country, but for most of its life — around 100 years — it appears fairly unremarkable apart from its size. However, when it flowers, it puts so much energy into an impressive flower-spike, that it eventually collapses and dies. Dr John Dransfield, who announced the tree in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, is baffled as to how it came to be in the country. It bears a resemblance to a species of palm found in regions of Asia; 6,000km away. It is thought that the palm has gone through a remarkable evolution since Madagascar split with India some 80m years ago."

Comment Re:Not quite there yet! (Score 1) 194

by jodirren on Wednesday July 11, 2007 @06:13PM (#19831441) Attached to: John Knoll on CGI, Tron And 25 Years of Change

I mean, are they even using earth's gravity acceleration of 9.8 m/s2????

Of course they are. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting the dynamics of the body correct. Modeling gravity is easy, but modeling all the tendons, ligaments, and muscles of humans (or almost any species for that matter) is extremely complicated. Biomechanics is a huge area of research exactly because it's so complicated and we're only just reaching a point where we can think about simulating the human body on computers, be it for entertainment or scientific/medical research.

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