Slashdot Mirror

HashCode writes "The Star Trek franchise is about to take a warp speed trip down memory lane ... Star Trek: Birth of the Federation. It looks like its going to become a reality. " Free Advice to paramount trek producers: Go to farm. Find horse. Kill it. Beat it until fists hurt. A related story from Adam Juda confirms that Voyager will land in 2001.

Keith Gabryelski writes, "space.com has an article on how, in late December 1999, engineers at JPL used a laser beam to move extremely lightweight material using only the pressure of light." For those of you who haven't been keeping up with your science fiction, the idea is that with a tremendously large and incredibly thin sail, you could launch a spacecraft that would be propelled away from the solar system by the miniscule impact force from the light of the sun/gigantic lasers/mirror-focused light striking the sail. The theory is simple enough, but the execution is, shall we say, non-trivial.

Keith Gabryelski writes, "space.com has an article on how, in late December 1999, engineers at JPL used a laser beam to move extremely lightweight material using only the pressure of light." For those of you who haven't been keeping up with your science fiction, the idea is that with a tremendously large and incredibly thin sail, you could launch a spacecraft that would be propelled away from the solar system by the miniscule impact force from the light of the sun/gigantic lasers/mirror-focused light striking the sail. The theory is simple enough, but the execution is, shall we say, non-trivial.

szyzyg writes "For the fisrt time ever astronomers have been able to observe waves and flows on the surface of a star other than the sun. Alex Lobel and Andrea Dupree managed to detect these flows on the surface of the supergiant Betelgeuse - the bright red star in the constellation of Orion. This star is so large that its radius is about the same as the distance at which the earth orbits.... i.e. about 150 million km. It's almost at the upper limit for stellar sizes predicted by Eddington "

Surazal writes "Here's a fine example of Dilbert-esque management decisions that have no basis in reality. The popular Space Science News website will be taken down Monday, simply because management decided the site was not the direction they wanted to go, despite the fact the site was the place for journalists, scientists, and the general population to check up on what's going on up above. This is not a horribly bright PR move in my opinion."

Anonymous Coward writes "Mark Johnson, director of motion graphics for Visual Forensics, has been using data from Earth-imaging satellites for a special purpose: sticking it to the bad guys and keep the good guys out of trouble. Now Johnson's looking forward to the launch of the Ikonos imaging satellite later this week, which is capable of taking pictures that show clearly the name of a football team in the end zone." Johnson's fees for testifying on your behalf in court are apparently $25,000 and up. Not a cheap alibi!

urk writes " NASA's got some prototypes of a new 'personal satellite assistant' that could be joining astronauts in 3 yrs time, from telling them about warnings of gas levels, checking on payloads to reading them bed time stories or teaching them russian. It's a little red sphere that floats around the shuttle / space station by itself. It should be able to talk, relay information and have conversations. Star wars comes to life! " The inspiration for this came from the Practice Ball in the Falcon in A New Hope.

An anonymous reader noted an amusing story where we learn that Jar Jar will make space fun for children with attention spans destoryed by MTV, and senses of humor rendered disfunctional by years of Sitcoms. It might be better if it was hosted by Darth Darth Binks (thanks SissyLaLa) Point_Blank Sent us a really interesting site that has a history of GUIs. Its just interesting to watch the evolution of those clicky interfaces that we've been using for so long. John Hebert noted that there are New Dune Novels coming out. Tim Macinta sent us a super hilarious Microsoft Advocacy HOWTO. Worth the read. $Bob was the first to tell us that the new obfuscated Perl challange is up (no I'm not entering Slash ;) Bowie J. Poag has concocted an epic poem known asTuxowolf: ..A retelling of the classic Beowulf legend in more familliar prose. Gorak sent us a great 3D image gallery at Mastering 3D Graphics that is laden with bit streams that fulfil Rob's Art Axiom (Art is better when it is a desktop image) And finally, the most disturbing bit was sent by an anonymous reader. Ever want to augment your cats the hi tech way. Check it out. Update: 07/29 12:05 by CT : Shaheen reminded me that I'm going to be on The Wednesday Night Wireside net radio thingee tonight at 9:30 EDT.