Slashdot Mirror
BLAST Telescope About To Launch From Antarctica
mtruch writes "BLAST, the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope, is about to be launched from McMurdo Station, Antarctica. BLAST is a 2700 kg telescope with a 2 meter primary mirror that hangs from a 1.1 million cubic meter balloon floating at an altitude of 38 km that will study the star formation history of the universe. It will float west at nearly constant latitude for about 14 days until it is (hopefully) located over McMurdo again and will be terminated and recovered. Real time position and flight track is available from the CSBF. Watch the launch live via a crappy webcam link. Three of the graduate students working on the project have photo blogs of much of the prep period, and specifically Don's blog should have launch photos soon (bandwidth to/from McMurdo is at a premium). BLAST made it on Slashdot in the past, when it launched from Sweden in June 2005, and indirectly with an interview with Prof. Barth Netterfield and George Staikos. Yes, the flight computers still run Slack, and yes, we still use kst for data viewing and analysis. There is a Discovery Science show about BLAST and high-altitude balloons, and a future documentary film being made as well."
It's too damn early (where I am, it's 6:43am) for a Slashdot headline to have big capital letters in it.
for a millisecond I thought that some evil genius was blowing up some sort of outer space telescope from his secret lair in Antarctica
TDz.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
If I was a low-rent evil genius, I'd have somebody harpoon this sucker. Not because I object to balloons or telescopes, or balloons with telescopes. I think I'd just really enjoy watching it zoom through the skies above the South Pole making that ridiculous 'air coming out of a balloon' sound.
That's my morning moment of Zen.
This is simply a barrier for the generic manufacturers. The R&D costs that the big companies pay are recovered through their sales of their pills. When a generic company starts flooding the market with cheap alternatives that patent holder is essentially screwed. So the original patent holder renews the patent with a meaningful "upgrade" to the drug. Things like slow release, or reduced side effects, or liquid forms, or combining it with a [pain reliever | antacid | antiinflammatory | etc.]
This new form gets a new patent and it spins for a few more years.
What I'm not certain of is this: Does the original, non-upgraded, patented form of the drug enter the public domain for the generics to copy and sell? I suspect that it does.
www.jmagar.com
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Wait until you've had your coffee before you post.... You posted to the wrong thread.