Nov 14th, 2008 · yaksha writes to tell us that the Indian Space probe, Chandrayaan has become only the fourth nation to land a probe on the Moon. The 35-kg Moon Impact Probe touched down in what officials are describing as a "perfect operation". "Developed by ISRO's Vikram …
Nov 8th, 2008 · After an 18-day journey, Chandrayaan-1, the moon mission of India, has entered Lunar orbit. The maneuver was described as crucial and critical by scientists, who pointed out that at least 30 per cent of similar moon missions had failed at this juncture, …
Nov 6th, 2008 · All invisibility cloaks to date work by hiding an object embedded inside them. Now a group of physicists have worked out how to remotely cloak objects that sit outside a cloaking material. The trick is to make the cloaking material with optical properties …
Oct 30th, 2008 · Some clever computer scientists at UC San Diego (UCSD) have developed a software that can perform key duplication with just a picture of the key — taken from up to 200 feet. One of the researchers said 'we built our key duplication software system …
Oct 25th, 2008 · Distributed.net's 8-year-old OGR-25 distributed computing project has just proven conclusively that the predicted shortest 25-mark Golomb ruler is optimal. 'The total length of the ruler is 480, with marks at positions: 0 12 29 39 72 91 146 157 160 161 …
Oct 23rd, 2008 · Luminary Crush writes with this excerpt from PhysOrg about the permanance of leaving Earth for Mars, at least for early travelers: "The first astronauts sent to Mars should be prepared to spend the rest of their lives there, in the same way that European …
Oct 20th, 2008 · A team from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory (LASEC) in Lausanne, Switzerland, found 4 different ways to fully or partially recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters, even through walls. They tested 11 different wired …
Oct 18th, 2008 · Nine rocket-powered vehicles will compete for NASA's $2 million, 2008 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, Oct. 24-25. The goal is to accelerate development of commercial Lunar Landers capable of bringing payloads or humans back and forth between …
Sep 23rd, 2008 · New Scientist reports that the Department of Homeland Security recently tested something called Future Attribute Screening Technologies (FAST) — a battery of sensors that determine whether someone is a security threat from a distance. Sensors look …
Sep 23rd, 2008 · The BBC reports that NASA is to send its Mars rover Opportunity on a two-year trek to try to reach a crater called Endeavour. The robot will have to move about 11km to get to its new target — a distance that would double what it has already achieved …
Sep 16th, 2008 · Several readers including houbou and DigitumDei sent links to what may be the first-ever image of a planet orbiting a sun-like star (research paper). The giant planet, the mass of 8 Jupiters, orbits its star at 330 AU, or 11 times the distance to Neptune's …
Sep 12th, 2008 · Some of my friends are using iChat to stay in touch and gap the distance of the Atlantic. I'm feeling left out on my Fedora Gnome based desktop. Is there a good program for Gnome that provides cross-platform instant messaging and video chat? This rules …
Sep 11th, 2008 · Some of my friends are using iChat to stay in touch and gap the distance of the Atlantic. I'm feeling left out on my Fedora Gnome based desktop. Is there a good program for Gnome that provides cross-platform instant messaging and video chat? This rules …
Sep 6th, 2008 · BetaNews has a short description of what we might expect from Governor Palin regarding technology issues. She demonstrated her familiarity with the internet by initiating an online education program for state workers, using the web for government transparency, …
Aug 29th, 2008 · We've long thought that nuclear decay rates are constant regardless of ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain two puzzling experiments from the …
Aug 28th, 2008 · In an unusual move that could alienate a large segment of potential customers, iRacing.com, an online racing simulation company that opened its site to the public on August 26, is calling its system a 'driver development tool' that isn't designed for …
Aug 27th, 2008 · New Scientist reports on a neat DARPA idea that uses the shimmer of heat haze to allow binoculars to see further. It works by exploiting the fact that some distortions from heat haze actually magnify objects behind them. The binoculars collect a series …
Aug 26th, 2008 · Dr Sabine Begall and colleagues from the University of Duisburg-Essen have discovered that cows tend to point north. The researchers studied deer in the Czech Republic and looked at thousands of images of cattle on Google Earth. The animals tended to …
Aug 17th, 2008 · The way bumblebees search for food could help detectives hunt down serial killers — because just as bees forage some distance away from their hives, so murderers avoid killing near their homes, says a University of London research team. The researchers' …
Aug 4th, 2008 · There have been a lot of tests in using quantum mechanics to communicate across large distances. But a student & a professor at USC have proven that the Viterbi algorithm can be applied to quantum communication. In the traditional Alice sends Bob …
