Mar 9th, 2011 by RedPepper
The astrophotographer Alan Friedman captured this shot at a star party in the Florida Keys last week, using a relatively little amateur telescope. On his website has an entire photo album of space snapshots and more hot sun photos like this one.
Image: Alan Friedman
Mar 9th, 2011 by RedPepper
In 1976 a explore ship was moored off the shoreline of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. When the team winched up the anchors they discovered a 4.5 meters long shark twisted up in the cable. It looked like nothing they had ever seen.
It was seven years before the creature was officially described and named. Taking their lead from press coverage of the finding, the scientists recommended naming it the Megamouth Shark. The shark’s mouth can be over a meter across – a fifth of the animal’s length.
Since then the Megamouth has proved an mysterious beast, not least because it not often comes shallower than 12 meters, and spend most of its time above 100 meters down. Only 50 have yet been seen, and fewer than half of those have been studied by scientists. A specimen caught in 2009 wound up being cooked.
Source: New Scientist, Image: Bruce Rasner/Rotman/NaturePL
Jul 15th, 2009 by RedPepper
Within the past couple of years, memristors have morphed from obscure jargon into one of the hottest properties in physics. They’ve not only been made, but their unique capabilities might revolutionise consumer electronics. More than that, though, along with completing the jigsaw of electronics, they might solve the puzzle of how nature makes that most delicate and powerful of computers – the brain.
Read Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence from New Scientist and Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics by DARPA.
Jul 15th, 2009 by RedPepper
The photograph shows an experiment in which dense deuterium is irradiated by a laser. The white glow in the container in the centre of the photograph is from deuterium.
A material that is a hundred thousand times heavier than water and more dense than the core of the Sun is being produced at the University of Gothenburg. The scientists working with this material are aiming for an energy process that is both more sustainable and less damaging to the environment than the nuclear power used today.
Ultra-dense deuterium may be a very efficient fuel in laser driven nuclear fusion. Ultra-dense deuterium is a million times more dense than frozen deuterium, making it relatively easy to create a nuclear fusion reaction using high-power pulses of laser light.
"If we can produce large quantities of ultra-dense deuterium, the fusion process may become the energy source of the future. And it may become available much earlier than we have thought possible", says Leif Holmlid.
"Further, we believe that we can design the deuterium fusion such that it produces only helium and hydrogen as its products, both of which are completely non-hazardous. It will not be necessary to deal with the highly radioactive tritium that is planned for use in other types of future fusion reactors, and this means that laser-driven nuclear fusion as we envisage it will be both more sustainable and less damaging to the environment than other methods that are being developed."
Source: nextbigfuture.com
Jul 15th, 2009 by RedPepper
SpaceX successfully launched a Malaysian satellite into orbit late Monday night, the second successful launch for the private space exploration company, which aims to reduce the cost of orbital transport tenfold.
After a series of expensive failures, SpaceX had its first successful launch last September, but that mission carried a dummy payload. Before, on previous disastrous launch, the company lost a Malaysian satellite, the ashes of actor James Doohan and an inexpensive NASA satellite.
The Falcon 1 rocket carried RazakSAT, a small Malaysian satellite built by ATSB, an Asian satellite design firm. The satellite carries a high resolution camera that will be used to monitor natural resources.
RazakSAT was launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific, and reached orbit ten minutes later.
Falcon 1, a two-stage, liquid oxygen/rocket-grade kerosene vehicle designed from the ground up by SpaceX, will place the RazakSAT satellite, equipped with a high resolution Medium-Sized Aperture Camera (MAC), into a near equatorial orbit.
RazakSAT was designed and built by ATSB, a pioneer and leader in the design and manufacture of satellites in Malaysia. The satellite is expected to provide high resolution images of Malaysia that can be applied to land management, resource development and conservation, forestry and fish migration.
SpaceX’s Falcon 1 launch site is located approximately 2500 miles southwest of Hawaii on Omelek Island, part of the Reagan Test Site (RTS) at United States Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific. Due to the location of the launch site, the Kwajalein local date at the opening of the launch window will be Tuesday, July 14th. – SpaceX
Source: Wired