Slashdot Mirror

ke4roh writes "Since Slashdot last discussed terahertz imaging, the European Space Agency's Star Tiger project has taken terahertz images of a human hand. Some of the pictures show just how useful the imagery might be for peering through walls and such - one of the images is through a 15mm pad of paper." The EE Times has another story.

ke4roh writes "Space.com offers a list of questions and answers about the events and hardware surrounding Columbia's destruction Saturday. They address suspected causes, foam, tile, and some of the alternatives had NASA known the ship would not be able to re-enter the atmosphere." viewstyle writes "PC Magazine has a pack of stuff put together on the space shuttle accident, as they recognized the fact that the space program inspired a lot of tech people in general. What's pretty cool is the section written by a guy there who worked on the computer components in the shuttle." And naturally, the idea of a space elevator is back in vogue again.

ke4roh writes "Sailors, Africans, and Aussies will observe a total solar eclipse on Wednesday, Dec. 4. The International Space Station will only fly through a partial eclipse area, but they'll have a fantastic view of the dark spot on the Earth below. Mir cosmonauts photographed a similar view on August 11, 1999. It looks pretty weird if you ask me. See pictures and read more in NASA's report."

ke4roh writes "Space, medicine, and invention often cross paths. In this case, the invention is a new artificial hip. Scientists are researching ways to manufacture strong and porous ceramics with the benefit of microgravity - subtracting the effects of convection and settling from their experiment. In the end, they hope to offer a permanent artificial hip - much more user-friendly than today's models that come unglued and require replacement after only 5-10 years of use. It's just one more way space research helps to make life better on Earth."

ke4roh writes "NASA reports that they're readying Atlantis for a launch "no earlier than October 2". STS-112, space station assembly flight 9A (the 15th) will add to the truss on the station. To get the station from the vehicle assembly building to the launch pad, they transport it in launch position - on one of the 37-year-old crawlers that travels at just 1 mile per hour. Each 6 million pound vehicle transports a big rectangle - the Mobile Launch Platform - to the launch pad. The crawler is 40 by 37 meters, has two steering wheels and two mufflers the size of a car. The crawlers have received minimal service to date, and an inspector noticed a cracked bearing shortly before a crawler took Atlantis out for the launch. A few folks are enjoying the opportunity to work on the crawlers before they make their journey. Will N-Sync's 23-year-old singer Lance Bass be space tourist number three - and the youngest person to ever fly in space? Corporate sponsors get to decide. Telescopes show Contour, short for "Comet Nucleus Tour", in three pieces. Unfortunately, it's only supposed to be one. The craft was to visit three comets to investigate their contents. They're murmuring about a replacement which would cost about $15M less (than the $154M price tag) thanks to much of the engineering being done already. The AP has more."

ke4roh writes "An asteroid will fly near the planet and be visible with binoculars from the northern hemisphere August 18, so says this article. Astronomers say it will cross the sky at 8 degrees per hour and fade out of view as it approaches the sun and hence goes through its various phases - full, gibbous, half... down to nothing. Such a show only comes about twice a century, so take a look before it disappears!" Another reader sends in a few useful links: "Here's the complete article from the folks at NASA Space Science with extra links including details on the astreroid's trajectory."

ke4roh writes: "As a child, I would watch a lightning flash and count the seconds until I heard the first clap of thunder. Get three kids counting in different places, and you could figure out where that cloud-to-ground strike was by coordinating their counts. That's the premise behind NASA's latest lightning detector, according to a press release. It uses a radio to detect the strike and four microphones spaced about 20 feet (7 m) apart. The neat part is its accuracy - about 15 feet (5 m) within a 1 mile (1.6 km) radius. The information should help them determine if lightning may have damaged sensitive launchpad equipment."

astrobio writes: "How long will the Earth's technology be detectable to other worlds? From an article today by the Chairman of the SETI Institute: 'Not long, with shared transmission spectra. To transmit ever-increasing amounts of information, portions of the spectrum must be shared. This is only possible if signal strengths are reduced so that transmissions on the same frequency do not interfere with one another. The textbook example of this paradigm is the cellular phone system. This signal reduction means we are well on our way to becoming invisible.'"

ke4roh writes: "Reuters reports that China is 'boosting supervision and control' of online publishing, as reported by state newspapers. The Chinese Communist Party's control faces an unprecedented threat from present-day internet activity, the article says. Some key subjects to avoid: Tibet, Falun Gong, democracy in China, and porn."

Anonymous Coward writes "NASA Kepler mission should discover 50 terrestrial planets if most of those found are about Earth's size, 185 planets if most are 30 percent larger than Earth and 640 if most are 2.2 times Earth's size. To highlight the difficulty of detecting an Earth-sized planet orbiting a distant star, Borucki, Kepler's principal investigator, points out it would take 10,000 Earths to cover the Sun's disk. But in a 1000x1000 pixel jpeg, that is 100 pixels (large) and there are about 120 million 'astronomical' photocells or rods in the human eye (good pixel density)."

shpoffo writes "In relation to the recent /. article i thought i'd give people a heads-up on some more console info. For those of you with the time, interest and know-how there are a few really good resources around for reverse engineering most of the major video game consoles such as Jeff Frohwein's site for the Gameboy. There's others for the N64 here and here, Dreamcast, Playstation, TurboGraphix, Genesis, and the Nintendo."

al-bob writes: "For the person who has everything: handmade knives crafted from meteorites! These are beautiful knives with handles and/or blades made from extraterrestrial source materials. The guy bills them as the 'oldest knives in the solar system.' As someone said, 'not for the light of wallet'. " So, anyone wants to think of me for my next birthday ...

Crispen writes, "My dad, the Rev. Bob 'Bob' Crispen, recently reviewed the presidential candidates' Web sites. He didn't review their style, mind you -- he reviewed their HTML. If you are looking for one of the most revealing (and humorous) commentaries about the current U.S. presidential race, take a look."

mecca writes "CodeWeavers has announced they are in the process of merging the Willows TWIN code and Wine code in order to help port Windows software." Interestingly this project is being spear-headed by Rob Farnum, the key architect of Twin. The resulting code will be under the LGPL (Twin is LGPL'd, Wine is BSD'd. So the LGPL wins).It would appear that the Wine guys are cool with this. Some Twine code is available now, and more should come soon. Codeweavers is offering employment including to people who don't want to move to cold Minnesota.

5 hours ago, Rise revealed details of its new mP6 x86 core: it is 3 way superscalar, is pipelined and has a 3 way superscalar MMX unit. According to this EETimes article sent to us byChris Howard the processor is specifically targeted at multimedia applications, while boasting low power consumption Ed: It would be interesting to know how much of a performance boost the 3rd way gives them: for normal C code the V pipe of the pentium is used around 30% of the time. A third pipe would be used even less. 3-way superscalar MMX makes more sense however as only a few critical routines need to be changed. If a large OEM like Compaq were to ship a DVD-player on each of its boxes, it could expect the DVD software to be tailored for the chips it uses. update: The mP6's measured speed is around 1.15 times the speed of a Pentium II on Windows Apps. However their use of a 6-stage pipeline may reduce their ability to reach high MHz.

Chris Howard wrote to tell us about a new chamber to trap antimatter. Eventually antimatter may prove a cheap energy source for interplanetary exploration (as in Star Trek). moonboy contributed this link to a new plasma engine NASA is developing. Finally in related news, Tom Rothamel informed us of a setback for the Delta III rocket (i.e. a successful test, since those are the ones that find bugs): "Well, the new Delta III rocket's first test flight just exploded. I saw it on RealVideo from Boeing."

Chris Howard writes "This site says they have a POSIX layer on top of the MacOS. I'll download it tonight and give it a try. Sounds interesting. "

Frank sent us this link to a story about the ACLU's defense of spam. Truthfully, spammers have a right to exist, but there needs to be guidelines set in stone- put the word 'spam' in the subject or something. Maybe that should be Slashdot's next political issue.