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Science

Submission + - New Interactive Black Hole Simulation Published (newscientist.com)

Submitted by
quaith
quaith writes: "The New Scientist reports on a simulation just published in the American Journal of Physics that shows how the sky would appear in the vicinity of a black hole — if an observer could actually get near one. Using real positions of around 118,000 stars, the simulation shows how the bending of light, the frequency shift, and the magnification caused by gravitational lensing and aberration in the vicinity of the black hole affect the sky's appearance. The simulation is interactive and allows the user to explore the stellar sky around the black hole. The simulation offers a couple of modes: "quasi static" or "freely falling" and the sample videos are quite spectacular. The New Scientist has a writeup, with an embedded video. The original article citation is here. The simulation, which runs on Linux or Windows, as well as sample videos can be downloaded from the University of Stuttgart website."
Science

Submission + - Statistical Analysis of U of Chicago Graffiti (inklingmagazine.com) 1

Submitted by
quaith
quaith writes: "Quinn Dombrowski, a member of the University of Chicago's central IT staff, has been recording the graffiti left in the Joseph Regenstein Library Since September 2007. To date, she's photographed and transcribed over 620 pieces of graffiti. Over 410 of them are datable to within a week of their creation. She has now published in Inkling Magazine a statistical analysis of the entire collection covering such subjects as love, hate, despair, sex, anatomy and temporal fluctuations of each of these — after November, both love and despair graffiti drop off significantly until spring, while sex graffiti reaches its one and only peak in December before declining for the rest of the school year. The story includes links to all of the original graffiti photos which she's made freely available to use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license."
Science

Submission + - International Space Station Cupola Video Released (esa.int)

Submitted by
quaith
quaith writes: "With the Space Shuttle Endeavour scheduled to be launched at 4:39 AM EST on Sunday for a trip to the International Space Station, the European Space Agency (ESA) has released a video that shows how the modules it's carrying, Node-3 ('Tranquility') and Cupola, are going to get attached. Node-3 is a connecting module. Cupola has six trapezoidal windows and circular roof that are designed to provide a unique vantage point for observing Earth. The video animations show how the station's robotic arm will be used to first put both in place as a single module, then detach Cupola from the end of Node-3 and reattach it on the Earth-facing side. With this addition, the ISS should start to look something Jules Verne would have been interested in visiting."
Science

Submission + - Europe's LHC to Run at Half-Energy through 2011 (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by
quaith
quaith writes: "ScienceInsider reports that Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will run at half its maximum energy through 2011 and likely not at all in 2012. The previous plan was to ramp it up to 70% of maximum energy this year. Under the new plan, the LHC will run at 7 trillion electron-volts (TeV) through 2011. The LHC would then shut down for a year so workers could replace all of its 10,000 interconnects with redesigned ones allowing the LHC to run at its full 14 TeV capacity in 2013. The change raises hopes at the LHC’s lower-energy rival, the Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, of being extended through 2012 instead of being shut down next year. Fermilab researchers are hoping that their machine might collect enough data to beat the LHC to the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle key to how physicists explain the origin of mass."
Science

Submission + - Evolving robots learn to prey on each other (plosbiology.org)

Submitted by quaith
quaith writes: Dario Floreano and Laurent Keller report in PLoS ONE how their robots were able to rapidly evolve complex behaviors such as collision-free movement, homing, predator versus prey strategies, cooperation, and even altruism. A hundred generations of selection controlled by a simple neural network were sufficient to allow robots to evolve these behaviors. Their robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behavior, but as they evolved, the robots were able to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate. The authors point out that this confirms a proposal by Alan Turing who suggested in the 1950s that building machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult for a human designer and could instead
be done using an evolutionary process. The robots aren't yet ready to compete in Robot Wars, but they're still pretty impressive.

Submission + - Buy Thor for $10,000 and the Ark of Truth for $5K (stargateartifacts.com)

Submitted by will_die
will_die writes: Propworx after all the recent auctions for their Battlestar Galactica props are now selling off 15 years of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis props. Over the next couple of months minor items will be sold off on ebay and the major items will be sold off in two live auctions.
Ebay auctions will consist of smaller props, most costumes, drawing and even parts of stargates. The live auctions will contain items such as the Thor puppet, The Ark of Truth and the only fully working Stargate*.

*Multiple Stargates needed for travel.
Science

Submission + - Making it hard for extraterrestrials to hear us (guardian.co.uk) 2

Submitted by quaith
quaith writes: US astronomer Frank Drake has told scientists at a special SETI meeting in London that earthlings are making it less likely that we will be heard in space. In the past, we used huge ground stations to broadcast radio and television signals which could be picked up relatively easily, according to astronomers calculations anyway. Now we use satellites that transmit at 75 watts and point toward Earth instead of into space. In addition, we've switched to digital which makes the transmissions even fainter. Drake has concluded that very soon, in space no one will hear us at all. I guess we'd better keep listening.
Idle

Submission + - Republicans and Democrats do look different. (plosone.org)

Submitted by quaith
quaith writes: It's not the way they dress, but the appearance of their face. A study published in PLoS One by Nicholas O. Rule and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University used closely cropped greyscale photos of people's faces, standardized for size. Undergrads were asked to categorize each person as either a Democrat or Republican. In the first study, students were able to different Republican from Democrat senate candidates. In the second, students were able to differentiate the political affiliation of other college students. Accuracy in both studies was about 60% — not perfect, but way better than chance.
Space

Submission + - NASA concedes defeat in effort to free rover

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The US space agency NASA has conceded defeat in its battle to free the Spirit rover from its Martian sand trap. The vehicle became stuck in soft soil back in May last year and all the efforts to extricate it have failed. NASA says Spirit, which landed on the Red Planet ver six years ago, "no longer be a fully mobile robot," and has instead designated the once-roving scientific explorer a stationary science platform.

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