Cryobots Could Drill Into Icy Moons With Remote Fiber-Optic Laser Power | Wired Science. Future extraterrestrial rovers may be powered remotely by high-energy laser beams shot through miles of thin fiber-optic cables. This new technology could allow robotic probes to penetrate thick layers of ice to explore Antarctic lakes or the subterranean oceans on icy moons like Europa or Enceladus, and even power a new kind of rocket into space.
“Our modest goal over the next three years is to use a 5,000-watt laser to send a cryobot through up to 250 meters of ice,” inventor and explorer Bill Stone, who presented the new concept today at NASA’s Astrobiology Science Conference in Atlanta, told Wired. “All the data show there are no show-stoppers for doing that. But from my standpoint, this is child’s play compared to what we could do.” The problem for scientists hoping to study the ocean of liquid water believed to lie beneath Europa’s icy crust has always been the amount of energy required to melt through miles of ice. The answer, he found, was a lot. The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level.
It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world's 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet.
By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world's billions of public web pages. Once it's operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA's cloud. 1 Geostationary satellites Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. 3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia. Are you ready for a 'quantified life'? Opinion April 14, 2012 07:00 AM ET Computerworld - That smartphone you carry around is a box full of sensors.
Those sensors are just sitting there doing nothing, or performing mundane tasks like giving you turn-by-turn directions or turning off your screen when you're yakking on the phone. But what if you could use phone sensors to their full potential? Tiny instruments inside your phone can tell where you are on the surface of the planet. Smart software with access to all the data gathered by these sensors, combined with an Internet full of information, could figure out all kinds of things about you.
Everybody knows that big companies like Google, Apple and Facebook want to harvest cellphone-generated data and use it to serve up virtual personal assistants with a side order of contextual advertising. This vision of the future puts your phone's sensor data in the hands of megacorporations. What is the quantified fife? A free new app lets you quantify your life. Physicists Create First Long-Distance Quantum Link | Wired Science. By Jim Heirbaut, ScienceNOW For more than a decade, physicists have been developing quantum mechanical methods to pass secret messages without fear that they could be intercepted.
But they still haven’t created a true quantum network — the fully quantum-mechanical analog to an ordinary telecommunications network in which an uncrackable connection can be forged between any two stations or “nodes” in a network. Now, a team of researchers in Germany has built the first true quantum link using two widely separate atoms. A complete network could be constructed by combining many such links, the researchers say. “These results are a remarkable achievement”, says Andrew Shields, applied physicist and assistant managing director at Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. in Cambridge, U.K., who was not involved in the work. “In the past we have built networks that can communicate quantum information, but convert it into classical form at the network switching points.
Optimizing User Experience | User Experience Design | Above the Fold & Socially Acceptable. User experience optimization is just as important as any other SEO practice Being the amazing search engine marketer that you are, every single page of your website has been perfectly optimized. Every title tag carefully constructed with the most relevant and highly searched keywords and elegantly crafted to be the perfect character length. Every meta description is unique, informative and has a call to action that is sure to pull the customer in. Every image has a keyword rich alt tag. You’ve thoroughly done everything you know to make your pages conquer the SERP.
Great! Not so fast! When people ask SEOs what they do, their explanation often ends with: “It’s pretty much a chess match with Google.” How long did it take to get seated and receive your food? If a user lands on your page due to a search query like “How to play chess”, make sure they are going to find this information immediately. Did you receive exactly what you ordered? How was the service? Do You Need a Website Audit? Nasa. For those of you waiting to see the results from our on-orbit checkout of the smartphone, this post summarizes our data.
The Tests SPHERES operates inside the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM). As shown in the diagram below, we’ve defined a JEM coordinate system with X forward, Y starboard, Z toward the deck, and the origin in the middle of the module. For our test, Expedition 29 Commander Mike Fossum velcroed the smartphone to the -X face of the sphere and placed the sphere at the origin of the coordinate system. From a laptop, he ran a program on the sphere to translate it one meter to +X and back to center, one meter to +Y and back, and one meter to +Z and back. Figure 1 - Coordinate Systems. After the on-orbit test, we ran a similar series of tests with a sphere and a smartphone on the ground. Figure 2 - SPHERES and HET Smartphone on an air carriage. The Logger App (available on the Android Market here) ran on the phone during all these tests. The Data Figure 5 - Gravity Sensor. Nokia Lumia 900 review. Long-awaited, heralded, longed for, lusted after, overdue, deal breaker, savior, second coming, dead-on arrival, revelation, last gasp, comeback, hail mary pass, flagship... finally!
If that string of descriptors hasn't already tipped you off, Nokia's Windows Phone messiah has arrived stateside to either silence critics or give' em fodder for further nay-saying. Ensconced in a polycarbonate frame that's similar to the N9, the Lumia 900 on AT&T's LTE network is widely understood to be Espoo's first true stab at building a presence for a mobile brand that's ubiquitous everywhere but here. To understand the gamble the company's making with the Lumia 900, one need only look to another critically acclaimed, yet interminably stalled overseas import: Kylie Minogue. That foreign pop siren, a music industry veteran, has repeatedly failed to empty mainstream American wallets with her scattered hits, despite enjoying chart domination across the globe. Nokia Lumia 900 review See all photos 100 Photos. Exclusive: a behind-the-scenes look at Facebook release engineering. Facebook is headquartered in Menlo Park, California at a site that used belong to Sun Microsystems.
A large sign with Facebook's distinctive "like" symbol—a hand making the thumbs-up gesture—marks the entrance. When I arrived at the campus recently, a small knot of teenagers had congregated, snapping cell phone photos of one another in front of the sign. Thanks to the film The Social Network, millions of people know the crazy story of Facebook's rise from dorm room project to second largest website in the world. But few know the equally intriguing story about the engine humming beneath the social network's hood: the sophisticated technical infrastructure that delivers an interactive Web experience to hundreds of millions of users every day.
I recently had a unique opportunity to visit Facebook headquarters and see that story in action. As I passed through the front entrance of the campus and onto the road that circles the buildings, I saw the name on a street sign: Hacker Way. Google Gets Transparent With Glass, Its Augmented Reality Project | Epicenter. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have long had the dream of a hands-free, mobile Google, where search was a seamless process as you moved around the world.
As the years progressed the vision did, too, expanding beyond search to persistent connections with the people in your lives. In other words, Google’s view of the world now has the social side fully baked into it. Today, Google is revealing that it is taking concrete steps towards that vision with ProjectGlass, an augmented reality system that will give users the full range of activities performed with a smart phone — without the smart phone. Instead, you wear some sort of geeky prosthetic (one of those pictured is reminiscent of the visor that Geordi La Forge wore on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” but Google has also been experimenting with a version that piggybacks on regular spectacles.) On top of your field of vision, you get icons, alerts, directional arrows, and other visual cues that inform, warn, or beg response. Nuff said. The Pretense of Knowledge - Friedrich A. Hayek. [Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1974] The particular occasion of this lecture, combined with the chief practical problem which economists have to face today, have made the choice of its topic almost inevitable.
On the one hand the still recent establishment of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science marks a significant step in the process by which, in the opinion of the general public, economics has been conceded some of the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences. On the other hand, the economists are at this moment called upon to say how to extricate the free world from the serious threat of accelerating inflation which, it must be admitted, has been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue.
We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things. This brings me to the crucial issue. As a profession, economists have made a mess of things. Human brain has been 'shrinking for the last 20,000 years' By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 18:05 GMT, 31 December 2010 It's not something we'd like to admit, but it seems the human race may actually be becoming increasingly dumb. Man's brain has been gradually shrinking over the last 20,000 years, according to a new report. This decrease in size follows two million years during which the human cranium steadily grew in size, and it's happened all over the world, to both sexes and every race. Old big head: A 3D image replica of a 28,000-year-old skull found in France shows it was 20 per cent larger than ours 'Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimetres to 1,350 cubic centimetres, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball,' Kathleen McAuliffe writes in Discover magazine. 'The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion.' Some paleontologists agree with this diagnosis, that our brains may have become smaller in size, but increasingly efficient.
Introduction to Microsoft Sync Framework. Microsoft CorporationOctober 2009 Introduction Microsoft Sync Framework is a comprehensive synchronization platform enabling collaboration and offline for applications, services and devices. Developers can build synchronization ecosystems that integrate any application, any data from any store using any protocol over any network. Sync Framework features technologies and tools that enable roaming, sharing, and taking data offline. A key aspect of Sync Framework is the ability to create custom providers. Providers enable any data sources to participate in the Sync Framework synchronization process, allowing peer-to-peer synchronization to occur. A number of providers are included by Sync Framework that support many common data sources. Database synchronization providers: Synchronization for ADO.NET-enabled data sourcesFile synchronization provider: Synchronization for files and foldersWeb synchronization components: Synchronization for FeedSync feeds such as RSS and ATOM feeds Participants.
'Mind-reading device' recreates what we see in our heads. Counter Intelligence: 800 Degrees in Westwood. Pininfarina designs Ferraris. Pininfarina designs Maseratis. But on a sleepy Wednesday afternoon in Westwood, the Pininfarina design that is attracting attention is a soda dispenser in the new pizzeria 800 Degrees. Teenagers approach the sleek, glistening slab like apes drawn to the monolith at the beginning of "2001: A Space Odyssey. " This machine, one of the first in the Los Angeles area, dispenses 300 different soft drinks from its maw, all variants on the basic Coca-Cola product line but with every permutation of those you could imagine.
You select your beverage from a glowing touch screen; if you tap Hi-C, for example, a sub-menu with dozens of choices pops up. It is the ultimate in the high-fructose corn syrup experience. On this afternoon, a junior-high-age boy stands in front of the machine, kneading the console with his fingertips like a ballpark organist. When you get to the place, you will stand in a line, usually curving down the block, that moves much faster than you think.