Slashdot Mirror

sam1am points out a New York Times report on a recent paper published in Nature about the formation of planetary systems. A binary star system surrounded by a protoplanetary disc was observed over a period of six years by scientists at Wesleyan University. The orbit of the stars around each other caused changes in illumination from within the disc and allowed the researchers to learn a great deal about its composition. Some of the basic data is posted on the university's site. An animation of the system is also available. From the NYTimes: "'This is the first step in going from smoke particles to macroscopic things like planets and asteroids,' Dr. Herbst said in an interview, noting that these grains were about the same size as those found in many meteorites. Observing starlight reflected from these grains, he said, represented a rare opportunity to study the structure and chemical properties of material in the inner parts of another planetary system."

sam1am points out a New York Times report on a recent paper published in Nature about the formation of planetary systems. A binary star system surrounded by a protoplanetary disc was observed over a period of six years by scientists at Wesleyan University. The orbit of the stars around each other caused changes in illumination from within the disc and allowed the researchers to learn a great deal about its composition. Some of the basic data is posted on the university's site. An animation of the system is also available. From the NYTimes: "'This is the first step in going from smoke particles to macroscopic things like planets and asteroids,' Dr. Herbst said in an interview, noting that these grains were about the same size as those found in many meteorites. Observing starlight reflected from these grains, he said, represented a rare opportunity to study the structure and chemical properties of material in the inner parts of another planetary system."

DotEdu writes "Today's NY Times has an interesting article on two new micropayment companies, BitPass and Peppercoin, and the venerable PayPal. More interesting than the companies are the critique: Micropayments are not the silver bullet. You still need to actually have a viable product that you can sell."

Betelgeuse writes "CNN has a story about a group of astronomers, led by William Herbst and Catrina Hamilton at the astronomy department of Wesleyan University that have detected an eclipsing disk around a young star. As someone who helped take the observations as an undergraduate at Wesleyan, it's pretty exciting to see that small telescopes can still have a place in modern astronomy. More information can be found here."

Betelgeuse writes "CNN has a story about a group of astronomers, led by William Herbst and Catrina Hamilton at the astronomy department of Wesleyan University that have detected an eclipsing disk around a young star. As someone who helped take the observations as an undergraduate at Wesleyan, it's pretty exciting to see that small telescopes can still have a place in modern astronomy. More information can be found here."

Calmacil writes "Lunar Prospector hit the moon, and made no dust plume. Thus, no water was found :( "Darnit, there goes my moon base.

ikky writes "This problably falls into the "We've-had-enough-of-Java-in-the-past-few-days", but here we go anyways. Seems like SUN has decided that the new JDK (officially launched today) will be named Java 2. Also the link provides some insight into SUN's OSS plans for Java. Great news for OSS! And it comes just after the Jikes release... " As an aside, thanks to Jason Y. Sproul for our spiffy new Java Icon. We've been running with that crappy blob thing ever since that whole Invaders/Java thing quite some time ago. Update! S: Here's Tim O'reilly's (and others) reaction(s) to the opening (but not open-sourcing) of Java.

Yet another Cool Convention has been brought to our attention by Aaron H. Weiss. Robotica is the replacement for Robot Wars, and will occur on Aug 14-16 in SanFrancisco... You can learn more about it at their website. Aaron also says "If you've never seen video of radio-controlled robots beating the crap out of each other, it's an amazing sight. This year will also include demos of at least two autonomous robots, taking on challengers willing to strap on a transceiver.".

Jesse wrote in to tell us that RH5.1 (Manhattan) has made an appearance on kernel.org's mirror. Interested folks should definately check the mirrors list and be warned- I checked a few other mirrors and am not seeing the 5.1 dir on most of them, but kernel.org is on the official mirrors list, so I'm assuming this is legit.