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NASA's Mars Rover Spirit Faces Circuitous Route


Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:51 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
The track dug by the dragged right-front wheel as Spirit drove backward is visible in this image, receding toward the southeast.
Pasadena, Calif. -- Loose soil piled against the northern edge of a low plateau called "Home Plate" has blocked NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit from taking the shortest route toward its southward destinations for the upcoming Martian summer and following winter.

The rover has begun a trek skirting at least partway around the plateau instead of directly over it.

However, Spirit has also gotten a jump start on its summer science plans, examining a silica-rich outcrop that adds information about a long-gone environment that had hot water or steam. And even a circuitous route to the destinations chosen for Spirit would be much shorter than the overland expedition Spirit's twin, Opportunity, is making on the opposite side of Mars.
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Display

Zillion TV Startup to Provide TV over the Internet

Alexander Toldt
eFluxMedia
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:31 UTC
Image
© eFluxMedia
Start up company Zillion TV promised to soon release a service that offers customers who had enough of cable and satellite TV, TV over the Internet.

Zillion TV already signed more than 40 deals with major Hollywood movie studios and TV networks such as Disney, 20th Century Fox Television, NBC Universal and Warner Bros. Digital Distribution. This is one of the most important factors in the equation because the deals give content owners the chance to make some advertising bucks from their films or TV shows.
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Laptop

January YouTube Viewers Exceed 100M for First Time

Chloe Albanesius
PC Magazine
Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:28 UTC
Americans are apparently riding out the recession by holing up with their laptops. Internet users watched 14.8 billion online videos in January 2009, while YouTube surpassed 100 million viewers for the first time, according to data from comScore.

Web video viewership was up 4 percent from December, with Google leading the way.

People watched 6.4 billion videos on Google sites. About 99 percent of that occurred on YouTube, which now has 43 percent of the online video market share. The site logged just over 100 million unique viewers, with the average person watching about 62 videos over the course of the month for an average of 3.5 minutes.
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Info

Horses first ridden - and milked - 5,500 years ago

Ben Hirschler
Reuters
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:22 UTC
London - Horses were first domesticated on the plains of northern Kazakhstan some 5,500 years ago -- 1,000 years earlier than thought -- by people who rode them and drank their milk, researchers said on Thursday.

Taming horses changed human history, influencing everything from transport to agriculture to warfare. But experts have struggled to pinpoint when and where it first happened.

Now archaeologists think they have the answer, after finding the world's oldest horse farm among the Kazakh people of the ancient Botai culture.
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Bell

Revealed: The headset that will mimic all five senses and make the virtual world as convincing as real life

David Derbyshire
The Daily Mail
Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:13 UTC
Virtual reality
© The Daily Mail
A virtual reality helmet that recreates the sights, smells, sounds and even tastes of far-flung destinations has been devised by British scientists.

The device will allow users a life-like experience of places such as Kenya's Masai Mara while sitting on their sofa.

They can also enjoy the smell of flowers in an Alpine meadow or feel the heat of the Caribbean sun on their face.

Scientists say the device will also enable users to greet friends and family on the other side of the world as though they were in the same room.

And students will even be able to find out what it was like to live in ancient Egypt, Rome or Greece.
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Telescope

Two big black holes found together

Will Dunham
Reuters
Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:56 UTC
pair of colossal black holes
© P Marenfeld/NOAO
A pair of colossal black holes appear to orbit each other about every 100 years.

Two colossal black holes appear to be orbiting one another in sort of a cosmic minuet at the centre of a faraway galaxy formed when two separate galaxies collided, U.S. astronomers said on Wednesday.

These two so-called supermassive black holes, which are celestial objects with enormous gravitational pull, are locked in orbit about 5 billion light years away from Earth, the scientists said. A light year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km), or the distance light travels in a year.

Data from Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico provided the best evidence to date of two black holes orbiting each other, according to astronomer Todd Boroson of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.
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Info

What The Romans Learned From Greek Mathematics


Science Daily
Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:55 UTC
Greek mathematics is considered one of the great intellectual achievements of antiquity. It has been decisive to the academic and cultural development of Western civilisation. The three Roman authors Varro, Cicero and Vitruvius were all, in their own way, influenced by Greek knowledge and transferred it to Roman literature.

In his dissertation, Erik Bohlin, at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, studied the traces of Greek influence on these authors with regard to the mathematical branch of geometry.

Most people have heard of the great Greeks Euclid and Archimedes. And who is not familiar with Pythagoras' theorem? When Rome usurped political power around the Mediterranean, the Romans came into close contact with Greek culture, its literature and science.
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Blackbox

Mars Life? Computer Analysis Hints At Water - And Life - Under Olympus Mons


Science Daily
Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:49 UTC
Image
© Rice University/NASA
Using a computer modeling system to figure out how Olympus Mons came to be, McGovern and Morgan reached the surprising conclusion that pockets of ancient water may still be trapped under the mountain.

The Martian volcano Olympus Mons is about three times the height of Mount Everest, but it's the small details that Rice University professors Patrick McGovern and Julia Morgan are looking at in thinking about whether the Red Planet ever had - or still supports - life.

Using a computer modeling system to figure out how Olympus Mons came to be, McGovern and Morgan reached the surprising conclusion that pockets of ancient water may still be trapped under the mountain.

Their research is published in February's issue of the journal Geology.

The scientists explained that their finding is more implication than revelation. "What we were analyzing was the structure of Olympus Mons, why it's shaped the way it is," said McGovern, an adjunct assistant professor of Earth science and staff scientist at the NASA-affiliated Lunar and Planetary Institute. "What we found has implications for life - but implications are what go at the end of a paper."
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Sun

Spectacular spectrum reveals Sun's chemistry

Anil Ananthaswamy
New Scientist
Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:31 UTC
Image
© N A Sharp, NOAO/NSO/Kitt Peak FTS/AURA/NSF
This high-resolution masterpiece was created by a spectrometer affixed to the world's largest solar telescope.

This is what visible light from the sun looks like if you split it into its constituent colours. But playing with a prism at home will not give you this high-resolution masterpiece, which was created using a sophisticated spectrometer fixed to the world's largest solar telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. The spectrometer splits light from the sun into two beams and sends them towards two mirrors, which bounce the light back to a detector where the beams recombine. Via a complex mathematical technique, the resulting interference pattern appears as a spectacular solar spectrum, covering the entire range of visible light.

What are the dark blobs in the image? These are known as Fraunhofer lines after German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer, who first studied them in detail in 1814. They are caused by specific elements in the outer layers of the sun absorbing a characteristic wavelength of light - the missing wavelength showing up as a dark line. This barcode-like image tells us about the elements present in the sun. For instance, the broad dark patch in the red part of the spectrum (upper right) indicates the presence of hydrogen and the two prominent lines in the yellow part are sodium.
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Cloud Lightning

Scientist Looks to Weaponize Ball Lightning

David Hambling
Wired
Fri, 20 Feb 2009 03:40 UTC
Two hundred years ago this week, the warship HMS Warren Hastings was struck by a weird phenomenon: "Three distinct balls of fire" fell from the heavens, striking the ship and killing two crewmen, leaving behind "a nauseous, sulfurous smell," according to the Times of London.

Ball lightning has been the subject of much scientific scrutiny over the years. And, as with many powerful natural phenomena, the question arises: "Can we turn it into a weapon?" Peculiar as it may seem, that's exactly what some researchers are working on -- even though it hasn't even been properly replicated in the laboratory yet.

The exact cause and nature of ball lighting has yet to be determined; there may be several different types, confusing matters further. But generally it manifests as a grapefruit-sized sphere of light moving slowly through the air which may end by fizzling out or exploding.
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