Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done. Wired.com. The Problem With Landing Humans on Mars (and How to Fix It) When NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory — scheduled to lift-off from Cape Canaveral later this week — touches down on the Red Planet in August of 2012, the one-ton probe will be the largest and most complex piece of unmanned machinery ever to land on another world.But here’s a little secret: With current technology, nothing larger or heavier than MSL can be put on the surface of Mars.
Anything more massive, including a human mission, which NASA estimates would require landing at least 40 to 80 tons of machinery, is completely out of the question. “We’ve maxed out our ability to take mass to the surface of Mars,” said engineer Bobby Braun, former NASA chief technologist and co-author of a 2005 research paper highlighting this problem.The basic obstacle for large-scale missions is Mars’ tenuous atmosphere, which is more than 100 times thinner than that of Earth. Images: 1) NASA 2) Pat Rawlings/NASA. Ars Technica. Anonymous exposes cybercrime investigator's Gmail, voicemail. On Friday, a group of hackers operating under the banner of Anonymous' Operation AntiSec published the private e-mails of a California Department of Justice investigator.
The hackers posted the entirety of the 38,000 e-mails in a Gmail account that appears to belong to Alfredo "Fred" Baclagan, a California Department of Justice special agent supervisor in charge of computer crime investigations, to a hidden site on Tor, as well as to a torrent listed on The Pirate Bay. They also posted what they claim is Baclagan's personal address and phone number. The effort is part of an ongoing attack on law enforcement as part of a response to law enforcement's activities surrounding the Occupy Wall Street protests. Operation AntiSec began as a "joint" effort between Anonymous and LulzSec in June as a protest against government monitoring and censorship of the Internet.
The insanely weird quantum wave function might be "real" after all. Quantum mechanics has a concept called a "wave function.
" It's incredibly important because it holds all the measurable information about a particle (or group of particles) within it. In practice, the wave function describes a set of probabilities that change in time. When we make a measurement, we are really poking at the wave function, causing these probabilities to collapse and take on a definite value. The value that the wave function predicts is determined by the relative probabilities of all the possible measurement results. But physically, the wave function is problematic. Until now, we have taken comfort from the idea that, real or not, the results from the wave function would be the same. Weird science There's a long, long history of puzzled physicists showing that the wave function must be a bizarre object. Bohm's bummed: wave theory needs 10,000x light speed to work. One of the most controversial parts of modern physics is what it tells us about philosophy.
Both quantum mechanics and special relativity have much to say on the limits of what can be casually related, the degree to which reality is deterministic, how local (or non-local) the universe is, and even whether some forms of realism are scientifically valid. Many people find the conclusions of quantum mechanics unpalatable and have proposed alternatives, such as Bohm's pilot wave quantum mechanics, to match their personal preference for reality.
However, most of these proposals require that there is some privileged view of the universe that keeps both special relativity and their particular ideas in agreement. Researchers have now tested the mechanism that would have to be behind this agreement, and found it to be extremely unlikely. If you are experiencing déjà vu about now, you are not alone—we have been here before. Outer Space Flight Videos & Pictures. Transferring your iTunes Library. For most users, iTunes does a great job of handling all of the details of managing your media library for you, allowing you to manage your content through iTunes itself and not having to worry too much about the underlying files and folders that make up your iTunes library.
Unfortunately, this user-friendly approach has one serious limitation: When it comes time to move your iTunes library, it can often be a bit of a challenge to figure out exactly what pieces you need to move and how to go about doing this. Many iTunes users start out with a basic iTunes library and use the default settings to store all of their media content on their primary internal hard drive. However, as you add new content over time, particularly with the additional video content now supported by iTunes, you may soon find that your library threatens to take over your computer. Another common scenario many users find themselves in is what to do when they upgrade to a new computer. How iTunes Manages Media Content.