Science & TechnologyS


Saturn

Titan's squashed shape hints at soggy interior

David Shiga
New Scientist
Fri, 03 Apr 2009 03:00 UTC
Titan
© NASA/JPL/Space Science InstituteTitan may look like a sphere, but radar studies by the Cassini probe show it is slightly squashed.
Saturn's moon Titan is surprisingly non-spherical, suggesting it may hide vast reserves of liquid methane beneath its surface, according to a new study.

Titan is 5150 kilometres across, making it larger than Mercury and only slightly smaller than the largest moon in the solar system, Jupiter's Ganymede.

By bouncing radar signals off the moon's smog-enshrouded surface, the Cassini spacecraft has now measured Titan's shape precisely for the first time.

"What we have are the first actual measurements showing that Titan's not an exact sphere - this distorted egg-shaped thing best fits the observed shape," study leader Howard Zebker of Stanford University told New Scientist.
Read More...
Question

Jupiter's Stormy Great Red Spot is Shrinking

A. Pawlowski
CNN
Fri, 03 Apr 2009 01:39 UTC
Image
© NASANASA's Cassini spacecraft photographed Jupiter and its Great Red Spot, seen center near the equator, in 2000.
Everything about Jupiter is super-sized, including its colorful, turbulent atmosphere. But there's fresh evidence that one of the planet's most recognizable features, the Great Red Spot, is shrinking.

The spot, which is actually an ancient monster storm that measures about three Earths across, lost 15 percent of its diameter between 1996 and 2006, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found.

It shrank by about 1 kilometer (about 0.6 miles) a day during that time period, said Xylar Asay-Davis, a postdoctoral researcher who was part of the study.
Read More...
Bell

"Type A" Personalities Have the Edge in Procreating

John Cloud
Time
Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:36 UTC
Image
© Rick Gomez / CorbisType A family
Throughout most of human history, you didn't get some unless you had some. More precisely: it was wealthy, powerful men who scored the most sexual mates and, therefore, fathered the most offspring. Men with less wealth and low standing, meanwhile, died disproportionately childless. (As for women, they had little choice about sex regardless of status, since men treated them as property.)

Many evolutionary scientists believe that those thousands of years of human behavior are no artifact: modern men still strive for status partly because it is an evolutionary advantage for improving reproductive success. But other researchers have disputed that theory by citing data showing that wealthier, higher-status men do not in fact have more children than their less moneyed, lower-status peers. (See pictures of Barack Obama's family tree.)

Now a new study in the Journal of Personality offers another theory: it is not necessarily wealth that facilitates procreation but a more basic and deeply ingrained evolutionary trait - having a Type A personality. The study finds that adolescents who say they always take charge, tell others what to do, anger quickly, get into fights easily, and walk, talk and eat fast end up having more kids than others when they grow up. That's true regardless of the kids' performance in school.
Read More...
Telescope

Hidden Planet Discovered in Old Hubble Data


Live Science
Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:34 UTC
Image
© NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)This is an artistic illustration of the giant planet HR 8799b. The planet was first discovered in 2007 at the Gemini North observatory. The planet is young and hot, at a temperature of 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. It is slightly larger than Jupiter and may be 10 times more massive.
A new technique has uncovered an extrasolar planet hidden in Hubble Space Telescope images taken 11 years ago. The new strategy may allow researchers to uncover other distant alien worlds potentially lurking in over a decade's worth of Hubble archival data.

The method was used to find an exoplanet that went undetected in Hubble images taken in 1998 with its Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). Astronomers knew of the planet's existence from images taken with the Keck and Gemini North telescopes in 2007 and 2008, long after Hubble snapped its first picture of the system.

The planet is estimated to be at least seven times the mass of Jupiter. It is the outermost of three massive planets known to orbit the dusty young star HR 8799, which is 130 light-years away from Earth. NICMOS could not see the other two planets because its coronagraphic spot - a device that blots out the glare of the star - blocked its viewof the two inner planets.
Read More...
Light Saber

World's largest laser built in California


United Press International
Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:32 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The U.S. Department of Energy says the National Nuclear Security Administration has certified the completion of the world's largest laser. Located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility in California, the laser is expected to allow scientists to achieve fusion ignition in the laboratory, obtaining more energy from the target than is provided by the laser.

"Completion of the National Ignition Facility is a true milestone that will make America safer and more energy independent by opening new avenues of scientific advancement and discovery," said NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino. "NIF will be a cornerstone of a critical national security mission, ensuring the continuing reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile without underground nuclear testing, while also providing a path to explore the frontiers of basic science and potential technologies for energy independence."
Read More...
Satellite

ESA space debris conference begins


United Press International
Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:28 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The European Space Agency is the host for the Fifth European Conference on Space Debris through Thursday at its Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany. The ESA said the conference, which began Monday, is the largest dedicated event on space debris issues. It is co-sponsored by the British, French, German and Italian space agencies, the Committee on Space Research and the International Academy of Astronautics.

"Space debris has recently been attracting increasing attention not only due to the growing recognition of the long-term need to protect the commercially valuable low-Earth and geosynchronous orbital zones but also due to the direct threat that existing debris poses to current and future missions," the ESA said. "While commercial and scientific uses of space have expanded across a wide range of activities, including telecommunications, weather, navigation, Earth observation and science, space debris has continued to accumulate, significantly threatening current and future missions."
Read More...
Blackbox

What would it look like to fall into a black hole?

Stephen Battersby
New Scientist
Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:48 UTC

Falling into a black hole might not be good for your health, but at least the view would be fine. A new simulation shows what you might see on your way towards the black hole's crushing central singularity. The research could help physicists understand the apparently paradoxical fate of matter and energy in a black hole.

Andrew Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, built a computer code based on the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as a distortion of space and time.
Read More...
Binoculars

Conficker virus could be deadly threat - or April Fool's joke

Bobbie Johnson
Guardian
Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:14 UTC
Computer virus
© Unknown
It could be the biggest April Fool's joke ever played on the internet, or it could be one of the worst days ever for computers connected to the network. Security experts can't work out whether the Conficker virus - which has infected more than 10m Windows PCs worldwide - will wreak havoc on Wednesday , or just let the day pass quietly.

Experts have worked out that from midnight on 1 April, the Conficker program will start scanning thousands of websites for a new set of instructions telling it what to do next. The infected machines thus comprise one of the biggest "botnets" - a network of "robot" computers - in internet history. And if they were all given a target, such as simultaneously sending search queries to Google or trying to connect to a gambling site, they could knock it offline through the sheer volume of connections - a "denial of service". Victims usually discover that they have been locked out of their computers or have very slow-running internet connections.
Read More...
Evil Rays

Economic collapse encouraging dangerous shift to wireless technology

Marguerite Reardon
cnet news
Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:53 UTC
HAARP
© Unknown
Las Vegas - Wireless industry executives at the CTIA Wireless 2009 trade show here say that despite the economic meltdown, the cell phone industry remains strong. And they're confident that it will be a driving force in pulling the nation out of the current financial crisis.

Verizon Communications CEO Ivan Seidenberg and Robert Dotson, CEO of T-Mobile USA, which is owned by Deutsche Telekom, took the stage on Wednesday, the opening day of the trade show, with a similar message.

These executives said that despite the economic troubles facing the nation and the world, the wireless market is thriving and innovation is flourishing. They also agreed that as the nation moves through the current crisis that the wireless industry could play a significant role in the economic recovery of the country. But they also warned that reluctant investors and overzealous regulators could stunt its potential and harm the recovery.

Comment: It's unsurprising that the market for wireless technology is still viable when we remember that the US Govt is considering introducing "free wireless technology for all".

This cash cow certainly has dangers for us all: New Instruments of Surveillance and Social Control: Wireless Technologies which Target the Neuronal Functioning of the Brain

Read More...
Info

Google admits data center podification

Cade Metz
The Register
Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:40 UTC
Google has admitted that its data centers are pieced together using intermodal shipping containers pre-packed with servers and cooling equipment.

As reported by our friends at Data Center Knowledge, the search giant dropped its long-standing data-center wall of secrecy this morning during a company event in Mountain View. Confirming an October report from The Register, Google said it has used containers in its live data centers since 2005.

Famously, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive publicly pitched the container idea in the fall of 2003, and that December, Google filed for a patent describing a modular data center of its own. According to Kahle and a well-known 2005 expose from Robert X. Cringely, Google co-founder Larry Page was in the audience for one Internet Archive pitch a little more than a month before the patent filing.
Read More...