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Posted by
timothy
on Saturday July 26, @02:40PM
from the agressive-product-placement dept.
from the agressive-product-placement dept.
Teancum writes "In an interesting show of the level of regulations private spacecraft designers have to go through, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has demanded that American participants of the Google Lunar X Prize obtain a license if their spacecraft are "capable of actively or passively sensing the Earth's surface, including
bodies of water, from space by making use of the properties of the electromagnetic waves emitted, reflected, or diffracted by the sensed objects". What prompted NOAA to ask for this license came from a visit by the XPrize staff to the NOAA offices in Maryland. What is going to happen when "space tourists" bring their private cameras along for the ride?"
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- 192 comments
Posted by
Soulskill
on Saturday July 26, @05:13AM
from the pretty-pictures dept.
from the pretty-pictures dept.
slatterz writes with an excerpt from a brief PC Authority article:
"Nasa is to make its huge collection of historic photographs, film and video available to the public for the first time. A partnership with the non-profit Internet Archive will see 21 major Nasa imagery collections merged into a single searchable online resource. The Nasa Images website is expected to go live this week. The content of the site covers all the diverse activities of America's space programme, including imagery from the Apollo missions, Hubble Space Telescope views of the universe and experimental aircraft past and present."
The site is working already, and it looks fantastic. Don't hesitate to share any interesting pictures or movies you find.
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- 94 comments
Posted by
kdawson
on Friday July 25, @01:05PM
from the anything-you-can-compute dept.
from the anything-you-can-compute dept.
sciencehabit writes "For anyone who still believes that boys are better at math than girls, a massive new study published today in Science shows there's no difference. 'Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests.' But the researchers do note a disturbing trend towards omitting harder kinds of math questions from standardized tests."
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- 662 comments
Posted by
kdawson
on Friday July 25, @11:28AM
from the imagineering-on-the-other-side dept.
from the imagineering-on-the-other-side dept.
Many readers are sending in word that Randy Pausch has died at 47. The charismatic young college professor celebrated life despite a death sentence from pancreatic cancer in a remarkable speech widely known as the "Last Lecture." The video went viral and has been downloaded by over 10 million people.
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- 202 comments
Posted by
timothy
on Friday July 25, @03:22AM
from the when-aliens-are-tickled dept.
from the when-aliens-are-tickled dept.
daftna writes "The New York Times (registration required) is reporting that NASA researchers 'have identified the trigger for the colorful electrical storms in the polar regions ... Scientists knew two events that occur in the tail of the magnetic field during substorms, but did not know which event acted as the trigger for the auroras.'"
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- 95 comments
Posted by
timothy
on Thursday July 24, @03:57PM
from the would-be-helpful-at-the-jupiter-hotel-too dept.
from the would-be-helpful-at-the-jupiter-hotel-too dept.
TechFiends32 writes "After years of working with NASA to bring Internet connectivity to deep space, scientists say Vint Cerf's efforts may be nearing completion. To combat the apparent challenges of extending the Internet into space (such as meteors and weighty, high-powered antennas), Cerf and others have made significant efforts, like adjusting satellite-based IP, and working on delay-tolerant networking (DTN) to address pure IP's limitations in space. According to principal engineer at The Mitre Corp., Keith Scott, 'The 2010 goal is designed to bring DTN to a sufficient level of maturity to incorporate it into designs for robotic and human lunar exploration.'"
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- 170 comments
Posted by
timothy
on Thursday July 24, @03:03PM
from the stick-it-in-your-ear dept.
from the stick-it-in-your-ear dept.
RevWaldo contributes a link to an AP story carried by Google, according to which "The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer. The warning from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is contrary to numerous studies that don't find a link between cancer and cell phone use, and a public lack of worry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration." RevWaldo continues: "One possible solution offered? 'Use a wireless headset.' No risk of EM exposure from one of them, no sirree!"
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- 538 comments
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thursday July 24, @12:48PM
from the truth-is-out-there dept.
from the truth-is-out-there dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Former NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell — a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission — has stunningly claimed aliens exist. And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions — but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades. Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as 'little people who look strange to us.'"
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- 1225 comments
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thursday July 24, @12:05PM
from the next-lets-blow-bubbles dept.
from the next-lets-blow-bubbles dept.
xaositects writes "Now I know all of you have your 3D glasses from 1985 still, so don them once again to check out these cool 3D images of Mars's Arctic landscape from the Phoenix Lander's stereoscopic imager. There are also a few close-ups of the parts of Phoenix that are in view and a link to more pictures on the Phoenix Image Gallery."
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- 61 comments
Posted by
kdawson
on Wednesday July 23, @01:48PM
from the can-you-say-awww-cute dept.
from the can-you-say-awww-cute dept.
KentuckyFC writes "Earlier this year, Paris-based Aldebaran-Robotics picked up $8 million in venture capital funding to help commercialize its NAO humanoid robot. The target market for this device is research labs working on the next generation of robotic hardware and software. Today, the company has posted a detailed spec of NAO on the arXiv saying that it expects the robot to cost about $15,000 each. That's cheap compared to other humanoids. Fuitsu's HOAP humanoids cost $50,000 each and various estimates price Honda's Asimo at $1 million per bot, although they are not for sale. Aldebaran-Robotics says that NAO's cost should come down to about $6,000 as production ramps up."
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- 190 comments
