NASA Day of Remembrance at Kennedy Space Center Jan. 29, NASA
"NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla., will pay tribute to the crews of Apollo 1 and space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, as well as other NASA colleagues, during the agency's Day of Remembrance observance on Friday, Jan. 29."
This candy apple Sophie Madeleine limited edition LP is just oozing with style that no one can digitize. [Sophie Madeleine via boingboing]
Hi all. I need to know what spec power supply to buy for the following application. To drive a 24V DC motor with gearbox. WATT :240. AMP: 14. RPM: 3800. GEAR RATIO on the gearbox is 32:1. Load: Don't know but the application strain is well under what the motor is designed for. I know input must be
If you’ve been expecting to hear from a far-off alien civilization, don’t hold your breath, suggests Frank Drake, the founder of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)–the odds of ET phoning Earth may be diminishing. And your digital TV might well be to blame.
Speaking at a meeting of the Royal Society in London, Drake said that digital transmissions are effectively “gagging” the planet. In the fast-fading analog age, TV and radio signals transmitted around the world escaped into space. At present, the Earth is surrounded by a 50 light year-wide ‘’shell” of radiation from analogue TV, radio and radar transmissions, he said [The Telegraph]. Those signals reach distant stars, which means that if someone is home at any of those stars, they could heard us.
But Drake says that phasing out analog transmissions from TV, radio and radar is making our planet electronically invisible from outer space. While an old-style TV transmitter might generate one million watts, Drake says the power of a digital satellite signal is around 20 watts. He added that present-day satellites tend to point towards the earth rather than old-school transmitters which beam their signals all over the place [The Guardian], and notes that digital cable is even more impossible to detect from space. He also said that if Earth is making itself “invisible,” albeit unintentionally, then other civilizations are probably doing the same. And he further hypothesizes that in some cases it might even be deliberate; a proverbial drawing of the kitchen blinds, so to speak [Wired].
Drake says he’s still convinced that intelligent life does exist somewhere in the universe, but added that because the transmissions that signal the presence of life may be weaker, we might need to look for them harder. “We’re going to have to search many more stars and many more frequencies” [The Telegraph].
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Image: iStockphoto
This view from the front hazard-avoidance camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows the position of Spirit's front wheels following a backward drive during the 2,154th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (Jan. 23, 2010). The view is toward the north. Click for a larger verison. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“Spirit is not dead; it has just entered another phase of its long life,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA HQ in Washington, on the news that the rover Spirit is now a stationary platform.
Yes, it appears Spirit is not going to get out of the sand that has trapped it for about 10 months and it will live out its life right were it is. There is still plenty of science Spirit can do over the next few months to years, but can it survive the winter?
Spirit has been on Mars for the past six years and has returned over 133,000 images and traveled somewhere around 12 miles. Not bad for a mission that was to last 90 days.
Spirit’s twin Opportunity is still mobile and is making its way to a location called ‘Concepcion’ Crater.
Check your watch. Fist pump. Clap. Raise the roof. Release mosquitoes. Fist bop. Wave your lighter. Repeat as necessary. That's the Bill Gates Boogie. [Guest of a Guest and CrunchGear]
My group and I are currently trying to develop a mock business plan for a fictional company. This is our senior project, our topic is Brownfield development and construction. Our objective for the semester is to state why Brownfield development would be a good market niche to enter into.
Any and
Well, this had to happen eventually: someone from an Apple tablet partner—McGraw-Hill's Harold McGraw III—has confirmed the tablet's coming tomorrow, that it'll run an iPhone-style OS, that it's "terrific", and that he'll probably never work with Apple again.
MacRumors caught the slip during a CNBC segment, in which the anchor lobs a softball closer question about the—excuse me, a—tablet, from Apple, maybe. Instead of deflecting, Mr. McGraw just started talking about it as if it'd already been announced:
Yeah, Very exciting. Yes, they'll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable. So what you are going to be able to do now is we have a consortium of e-books. And we have 95% of all our materials that are in e-book format. So now with the tablet you're going to open up the higher education market, the professional market. The tablet is going to be just really terrific.
Holy hell, guy. So, now we know a few things about the tablet! It's real, it's going to have a wide media strategy that at the very least includes textbooks, and it may be exactly what we predicted it will be, and apparently it doesn't suck, according to this man in a suit who is heavily invested in its success, or at least was, until he barfed up his NDA all over CNBC's anchor table. We reached out to the company regarding the slip, they're not calling back.
Don't worry, McGraw-Hill guy, you'll still get a Christmas card from Steve this year. Just make sure to have it checked for anthrax. [MacRumors]
Most of Gizmodo is comprised of whippersnappers who can only just remember the Bigtrak from the '80s, so we asked an actual, genuine, grey-haired old man* to tell us his thoughts upon hearing it's to make a comeback this year.
Back in 1980, Bigtrak's chunky all-terrain monster truck looked like the most exciting toy on six wheels, especially with its futuristic programmable navigation system, but it was a fad that passed faster than a Sinclair C5.
Forget remote control, you had to laboriously punch in the direction and distance you wanted it to go before it would do anything. Few kids really got their heads around how to program it and fewer still could actually afford one on 1980s-level pocket money.
Our school bought a Bigtrak and Trailer—its only accessory—as a teaching aid and the novelty soon wore off. As my dad was headmaster of the school, it's now sitting in my parent's attic, gathering dust and eBay value. 30 years on, it seems I've got the last laugh against my schoolyard enemies.
With the seriously scaled-down reissue about to go on sale, interest in the hulking originals will be sky high, but I'd love to get one of the new smaller models when they go on sale.
*genuine grey-haired old man being my fiance. Sorry, Jim! [Pocket Lint via Wired]
USING A DRAGER TUBE TO TEST HIGH PRESSURE SAMPLES..HOW AND WHICH DRAGER TUBE WOULD I USE TO TEST A HP TANK
After ten months of trying to extricate the Mars rover Spirit from a sandy patch on the Red Planet, NASA has finally given up. The space agency said Tuesday that Spirit will no longer be a fully mobile robot, roving over an alien planet. It will instead be a stationary science platform–which means a sedentary life for the robot geologist [that] has taken thousands of images and found evidence in Mars’ rocks of a wetter, warmer past [BBC].
Ten months ago, as Spirit was driving south beside the western edge of a low plateau called Home Plate, its wheels broke through a crusty surface and churned into soft sand hidden underneath [NASA]. The rover has been stuck there ever since, and now only four of its six wheels are functioning. Since all the maneuvers that the NASA instructed the rover to try have failed to free it, the sandpit known as “Troy” will be Spirit’s final resting place.
Spirit may stop roving, but hopefully it won’t stop working. In the coming weeks, NASA will focus on tilting the rover to the north so that more sunlight will fall on its solar panels during the long, cold Martian winter. Even if the rover does settle into a better position, it is likely Spirit will maintain so little energy in its batteries that it will go into hibernation, perhaps as soon as April. It will not emerge from that state until August or September, when the Sun gets high enough in the Martian sky to power up the rover’s systems [BBC News].
If Spirit does make it through the winter (when temperatures are expected to reach -55 degrees Fahrenheit), it can resume studying the tiny wobbles in the rotation of Mars to gain insight about the planet’s core. This requires months of radio-tracking the motion of a point on the surface of Mars to calculate long-term motion with an accuracy of a few inches [NASA]. This would help determine if the core of Mars is liquid or solid. Tools on Spirit’s robotic arm are also expected to study variations in the composition of nearby soil and see how they’re affected by water. Stationary science also includes watching how wind moves soil particles and monitoring the Martian atmosphere [NASA].
Since landing on Mars in 2004, Spirit has trekked nearly five miles and climbed a mountain as tall as the Statue of Liberty. Its twin, Opportunity, continues to drive and explore [Associated Press]. So far, NASA has spent more than $900 million on its Mars exploration rover program and the data acquired by the vehicles has generated about 100 scholarly papers, including special editions of the leading international journals Science and Nature.
Related Content:
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80beats: Future Looks Grim for Stuck Mars Rover
80beats: Mars Rover Will Try Daring Escape From Sand Trap of Doom
80beats: Will This Mars Rover Ever Rove Again? Spirit Get Stuck in the Sand
80beats: Mars Rover Spirit Shows Signs of Age, Including Senior Moments
DISCOVER: Mars Rover Delves Into Crater
DISCOVER: Those Mars Rovers Keep Going and Going…
Image: NASA/ JPL-Caltech
I an interested in the characteristics of plastic film as found on some food products. I am particularly interested in the electro static qualities of the packaging found on such food items as individually rapped crackers. The film used to package many different items of food and other items is ne
Scholars debate why opera doesn’t seem to hold much appeal for modern audiences, but they’ve overlooked a glaringly obvious answer: The Zeiss Universarium astronomical projector isn’t involved. Or at least, it wasn’t, until now.
The Gotham Chamber Opera has set out to give the genre some geek awesomeness with its presentation of Haydn’s Il Mondo Della Luna (The World on the Moon) at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium.
The opera follows the exploits of the love-stricken Ecclitico, who poses as an astronomer to impress Buonafede, the strict father of his beloved. Ecclitico and his two romance-minded accomplices, smitten with Buonafede’s other daughter and maidservant, use a sleeping potion to convince the gullible old man that he has been transported to the moon. There, Buonafede can no longer impede the young lovers’ relationships, and the lunar emperor (a servant in disguise, resplendent in imperial glowsticks) commands the three happy pairs to marry.
The acoustics of the planetarium don’t lend themselves to live performance, but the singers and orchestra give an impressive performance in spite of the dead space. The costumes and occasional choreography revel in a burlesque take on Haydn, complete with a bawdy French-maid character, the fake astronomer incarnated as a cross between an 18th century dandy and Dr. Horrible, and plenty of booty-shaking all around. Well-integrated projections on the planetarium’s domed screen contribute swirling nebulae and lunar landscapes that take the audience along for Buonafede’s boozy trip.
Performances continue nightly through this Thursday, January 28. Tickets here.
Bats and dolphins are two of the most celebrated users of echolocation, employing high-frequency sounds to locate prey, find their way, or to communicate. Now a new set of findings in Current Biology show that not only do the two different kinds of mammals use the same method, they also evolved nearly the exact same molecular means for hearing at high frequencies.
That second part was a surprise, study author Stephen Rossiter says: “It’s common on a morphological scale but it’s assumed not to occur at a DNA level because there are so many different ways to arrive at the same solution” [BBC News]. That is, while it’s quite common for different species to separately evolve similar features—like the tusks of elephants and walruses—it’s quite unlikely that natural selection working in separate species would settle an essentially identical gene and protein for growing tusks, hearing high-frequency sounds, or anything else. Or so the thinking went.
The gene in question, and the protein it encodes, are both called prestin. It’s present in the short hairs of the inner ear, the researchers say. Prestin changes shape when exposed to high-frequency sound, and this in turn deforms the fine hair cells, setting off an electrical impulse to the brain. So the protein has the important jobs of detecting and selecting high-frequency sounds for amplification [New Scientist]. Prestin is common across mammals, although many different variants exist; mutations of the human version cause people to lose high-frequency hearing. But the prestin proteins that echolocating dolphins and bats evolved are almost identical, the study says. By contrast, bats that don’t use sonar don’t have that version of the protein, despite the fact that they’re much more closely related to their fellow bats than dolphins are.
For biologist David Pollock, who wasn’t involved in the study, this new could open a new window to understanding protein evolution. These findings, combined with a previously identified example of molecular convergence in snake and lizard mitochondrial genomes, suggest that molecular convergence may be more common than scientists realize — “it’s [just] not always easy to detect,” Pollock said [The Scientist].
Related Content:
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The Loom: How to Be a Bat [with high-speed video]
DISCOVER: Killing Whales with Sound
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Image: flickr / Ken Lund
"After six years of unprecedented exploration of the Red Planet, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit no longer will be a fully mobile robot."
Marc's note: After all these years Spirit keeps on giving. Good news in an otherwise difficult time for NASA.
Some people say the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was a joke made up to satirize creationism and the incursion of fundamentalist religion into politics. Other people seem to see their religious icons everywhere they look. Still others promote their beliefs through the military.
I think these folks ought to get together. Or maybe they already did:
People say there are no atheists in foxholes… but maybe there is a higher authority.
Tip o’ the noodly appendage to Jay Sinclair.
Credit: US Air Force and Tech. Sergeant Russell E. Cooley IV
I've had a lot of fun on CR4, and therein lies the problem. It takes up too much of my time. Those of you who would like to stay in touch with me privately please PM me for my email address.
Live long and perspire,
europium
Hi All,
I posted to this forum back a couple months and got excellent advice for my '01 cavalier, and now I am back with another vehicle problem. I have a 2001 Toyota 4runner 4X4. The other day, after having driven it all day I went to pull out of a parking spot and suddenly my transm
Now we know what students do for fun over at Stanford University. If this video is to be believed, they wave their iPhones around while wearing speakers strapped to their hands. (Actually, the whole production seems kind of like using a weirding module, so maybe they’re onto something.) The speakers amplify the different sounds produced by various iPhone apps to create a glorious symphony, courtesy of the MoPho (Mobile Phone) Orchestra.
Some of the music apps are quite fun–like the one called the “Ocarina” that transforms your iPhone into a 12,000-year-old wind instrument (but with more apps). Check out the video below for a demonstration of both ancient music and modern compositions played on the iPhone, from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
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WHAT ARE THE CHARCTERISTICS OF PIPES ASTM A 510?
