NASA's plans to ship people to the moon and some day Mars are very much up in the air these days, with debate over Barack Obama's plans for the space agency a hot water cooler topic in the aerospace industry. Budget battles aside, one new study asks, how should these future astronauts steer their way around our solar system?
Brain waves, suggests the current Acta Astronautica journal report. Fans of Neuromancer may recall the story's hero using brain implants to navigate around cyberspace, but the researchers led by Carlo Menon of the European Space Agency, see astronaut brain-machine interfaces as a the way to get around outer space.
Science & Technology
© NASA/JPL
Elysium Planitia
Elysium Planitia
Using cameras on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Matt Balme of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and his colleagues mapped the Elysium Planitia, a region near the equator. They saw rings up to 23 metres across made up of stones sorted by size into concentric bands.
On Earth, similar structures form via repeated freezing and thawing of ice, but with the stones sorted into layers. Water in soil under stones freezes faster than in surrounding soil, and the expanding ice pushes the stones upwards. Larger stones rise faster, and so layers sorted by size form.
© ALAMY
Pluto: 'More like Earth than Earth is like Jupiter'
Pluto: 'More like Earth than Earth is like Jupiter'
The number nine has a special significance for Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. Nine is the number of planets in the Solar System, and Sykes is one of several leading astronomers who want to keep it that way.
Unfortunately, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which adjudicates on these matters, has ruled there are no longer nine planets in the Solar System, after a decision two years ago to downgrade Pluto to the lowly status of a "dwarf planet".
But in 2009, Dr Sykes and his like-minded colleagues hope to get the ruling overturned at the next general assembly of the IAU, to be held in Rio de Janeiro in August.
© D. Modha, IBM
But University of Wisconsin-Madison research psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, who was recently selected to take part in the creation of a "cognitive computer," says the goal of building a computer as quick and flexible as a small mammalian brain is more daunting than it sounds.
Tononi, professor of psychiatry at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and an internationally known expert on consciousness, is part of a team of collaborators from top institutions who have been awarded a $4.9 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the first phase of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project.
© Unknown
Microsoft was not able to slow the market share loss of its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser in December. IE surrendered more than 1.5 points in December, according to Net Applications, while Firefox, Chrome and Safari posted substantial gains. Over the past 12 months, IE has lost almost 8 points, leaving the browser with the least amount of market share since 1999.
Net Applications released updated global browser market share numbers today, indicating that IE is losing users at an accelerated pace. The browser's share dropped from 69.77% in November to 68.15% in December. Most rivals were able to pick up a portion of what IE surrendered. Firefox gained more than half a point and ended up at 21.34%, Safari approaches the next big hurdle with 7.93% and Chrome came in at 1.04%, the first time Google was able to cross the 1% mark. Opera remained stable 0.71%, but it is clear that the Norwegian browser cannot attract any users IE loses.
Net Applications released updated global browser market share numbers today, indicating that IE is losing users at an accelerated pace. The browser's share dropped from 69.77% in November to 68.15% in December. Most rivals were able to pick up a portion of what IE surrendered. Firefox gained more than half a point and ended up at 21.34%, Safari approaches the next big hurdle with 7.93% and Chrome came in at 1.04%, the first time Google was able to cross the 1% mark. Opera remained stable 0.71%, but it is clear that the Norwegian browser cannot attract any users IE loses.
© Milde Science Communication, STScI, CFHT, J.-C. Cuillandre, Coelum
The spectrum -- a radio "fingerprint" that revealed radio emission from water masers in the distant quasar MG J0414+0534.
The spectrum -- a radio "fingerprint" that revealed radio emission from water masers in the distant quasar MG J0414+0534.
Using the giant, 100-meter-diameter radio telescope in Effelsberg, Germany, and the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, the scientists detected a telltale radio "fingerprint" of water molecules in the distant galaxy.
The soggy galaxy, dubbed MG J0414+0534, harbors a quasar -- a supermassive black hole powering bright emission -- at its core. In the region near the core, the water molecules are acting as masers, the radio equivalent of lasers, to amplify radio waves at a specific frequency.
Independent security researchers in California and researchers at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands, EPFL in Switzerland, and Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands have found a weakness in the Internet digital certificate infrastructure that allows attackers to forge certificates that are fully trusted by all commonly used web browsers.
As a result of this weakness it is possible to impersonate secure websites and email servers and to perform virtually undetectable phishing attacks, implying that visiting secure websites is not as safe as it should be and is believed to be. By presenting their results at the 25C3 security congress in Berlin on the 30th of December, the experts hope to increase the adoption of more secure cryptographic standards on the Internet and therewith increase the safety of the internet.
When you visit a website whose URL starts with "https", a small padlock symbol appears in the browser window. This indicates that the website is secured using a digital certificate issued by one of a few trusted Certification Authorities (CAs). To ensure that the digital certificate is legitimate, the browser verifies its signature using standard cryptographic algorithms. The team of researchers has discovered that one of these algorithms, known as MD5, can be misused.
As a result of this weakness it is possible to impersonate secure websites and email servers and to perform virtually undetectable phishing attacks, implying that visiting secure websites is not as safe as it should be and is believed to be. By presenting their results at the 25C3 security congress in Berlin on the 30th of December, the experts hope to increase the adoption of more secure cryptographic standards on the Internet and therewith increase the safety of the internet.
When you visit a website whose URL starts with "https", a small padlock symbol appears in the browser window. This indicates that the website is secured using a digital certificate issued by one of a few trusted Certification Authorities (CAs). To ensure that the digital certificate is legitimate, the browser verifies its signature using standard cryptographic algorithms. The team of researchers has discovered that one of these algorithms, known as MD5, can be misused.
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
This mosaic of frames from the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity gives a view to the northeast from the rover's position on its 1,687th Martian day.
This mosaic of frames from the navigation camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity gives a view to the northeast from the rover's position on its 1,687th Martian day.
Of the hundreds of engineers and scientists who cheered at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 3, 2004, when Spirit landed safely, and 21 days later when Opportunity followed suit, none predicted the team would still be operating both rovers in 2009.
"The American taxpayer was told three months for each rover was the prime mission plan," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The twins have worked almost 20 times that long. That's an extraordinary return of investment in these challenging budgetary times."
© National Oceanography Centre/ University of Southampton
New evidence uncovered by oceanographers challenges one of the most long-standing theories about how species evolve in the oceans.
New evidence uncovered by oceanographers challenges one of the most long-standing theories about how species evolve in the oceans.
Most scientists believe that allopatric speciation, where different species arise from an ancestral species only after breeding populations have become physically isolated from each other, is the dominant mode of speciation both on land and in the sea. The key to this theory is the existence of some kind of physical barrier that operates to restrict interbreeding (gene flow) between populations so that, given enough time, such populations diverge until they're considered separate species.
For example, finches that were blown by storms from South America to the Galapagos Islands (and were studied by Charles Darwin) were consequently isolated from their host populations and these isolated breeding colonies evolved separately from each other until they became separate species.
Comment: Click here for a PDF article about the Clovis comet.