From slashdot.org

The spacecraft “Gravity Probe B” was launched into orbit from California, US, on 20 April 2004. It uses four ultra-precise gyroscopes to measure two effects of Einstein’s general relativity theory — the geodetic effect and frame dragging. According to the mission’s principal investigator, the data from Gravity Probe B’s gyroscopes confirm the Einstein theory’s value for the geodetic effect to better than 1%. In a common analogy, the geodetic effect is similar to the shape of the dip created when the ball is placed on to a rubber sheet. If the ball is then rotated, it will start to drag the rubber sheet around with it. In a similar way, the Earth drags local space and time around with it — ever so slightly — as it rotates. Over time, these effects cause the angle of spin of the satellite’s gyroscopes to shift by tiny amounts.

From slashdot.org

Researchers at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich are reporting that solar sunspot activity is at a 1000-year peak. Records of sunspots have been kept since 1610. The period between 1645 and 1715 (known as the Maunder Minimum) was a period of very few sunspots. Researchers extended the record by measuring isotopes of beryllium (created by cosmic rays) in Greenland ice cores. Based on both observations and ice core records, we are now at a sunspot peak exceeding solar activity for any time in the past thousand years.

From wired.com

The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you’re thinking. Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm, has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 million effort to build prototype cockpits, missile control stations and infantry trainers that can sense what’s occupying their operators’ attention, and adjust how they present information, accordingly. Similar technologies are being employed to help intelligence analysts find targets easier by tapping their unconscious reactions.
The idea — to grossly over-simplify — is that people have more than one kind of working memory, and more than one kind of attention; there are separate slots in the mind for things written, things heard and things seen. By monitoring how taxed those areas of the brain are, it should be possible to change a computer’s display, to compensate. If a person’s getting too much visual information, send him a text alert. If that person is reading too much at once, present some of the data visually — in a chart or map.

Full story located here.

Very interesting map of science representing relationships between 1.6 million scientific articles can be found here.

From wired.com

High school student Thiago Olson has gone beyond basic physics class. Way beyond. Using parts and materials aquired from the local hardware story and eBay, he built a working fusion reactor.

In November 2006, a few tiny bubbles in his neutron dosimeter told him that he’d achieved success: Fusing hydrogen nuclei into helium.

While it takes far more energy to run than it produces, Olson’s nuclear reactor is pretty bad-ass, producing 200 million-degree plasma at its core — or, as Olson points out, “several times hotter than the core of the sun.”

With a radar technique, astronomers have penetrated for the first time about 2.5 miles (nearly four kilometers) beneath the south pole’s frozen surface. The data showed that nearly pure water ice lies beneath.
Discovered in the early 1970s, layered deposits of ice and dust cap the North and South Poles of Mars. Until now, the deposits have been difficult to study closely with existing telescopes and satellites. The current advance comes from a probe of the deposits using an instrument aboard the Mars Express orbiter.
The reflected beams revealed that 90 percent or more of the frozen polar material is pure water ice, sprinkled with dust particles. The scientists calculated that the water would form a 36-foot-deep ocean of sorts if spread over the Martian globe.

From slashdot.org

NASA created two virtual flyovers of the Mars rover landing sites using 3D imagery from the MR Orbiter. The images were made using the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet, MRO’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE).

The three-dimensional information is obtained by taking pairs of images from slightly different vantage points as the spacecraft orbits the Red Planet.

Movie 1. Movie 2.

From www.itwire.com.au

When New Horizons (officially called Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission) flies by Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest within the solar system, at 47,000 miles per hour (21 kilometers per second) it will send back images of the gigantic planet through its almost 7-foot (2.1-meter) dish antenna. The images sent back to Earth, which were first transmitted on September 4, 2006, will help astronomers to better calculate the orbits of the inner moons of Jupiter, measure physical characteristics of the active volcanoes on moon Io, and study the four Galilean moons (Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io) in greater detail than ever before.

The New Horizons mission will be the first exploration of a probe to the distant Pluto-Charon system. The spacecraft, built by the Southwest Research Institute (Texas) and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (Maryland), is expected to fly within 6,200 miles (10,000 kilometers) of Pluto and as close as 6,800 miles (27,000 kilometers) of Charon. The scientific instruments aboard New Horizons—including cameras, ultraviolet and infrared spectrometers, and radio science and space plasma experiments—will study (as its primary mission) the geology, geomorphology, and surface compositions and temperatures of both Pluto and Charon. In addition, the instruments will study the atmosphere of Pluto.

NASA-funded researchers are refining a tool that could not only check for the faintest traces of life’s molecular building blocks on Mars, but could also determine whether they have been produced by anything alive.
The instrument, called Urey: Mars Organic and Oxidant Detector, has already shown its capabilities in one of the most barren climes on Earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile. The European Space Agency has chosen this tool from the United States as part of the science payload for the ExoMars rover planned for launch in 2013. Last month, NASA selected Urey for an instrument-development investment of $750,000.

More info here.

From slashdot.org

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created ‘the world’s first material that reflects virtually no light.’ This anti-reflection technology is based on nanomaterial and could lead to the development of more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs, and ’smarter’ light sources. In theory, if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls, giving a sense of floating free in infinite space.

Full story here.

From slashdot.org

Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have broken the speed of light. For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that propagates about 300 times faster than light would travel in a vacuum. The pulse seemed to exit the chamber even before entering it.

This research was published in Nature, so presumably it was peer-reviewed. It’s impossible from the CBC story to determine what is being claimed. First of all they get the physics wrong by asserting that Einstein’s special relativity only decrees that matter cannot exceed the speed of light. Wrong. Matter cannot touch the speed of light in vacuum; energy (e.g. light) cannot exceed it; and information cannot be transferred faster than this limit. What exactly the researchers achieved, and what they claim, can only be determined at this point by subscribers to Nature.

From slashdot.org

“The Cassini spacecraft has recently entered a highly-inclined orbit around Saturn, revealing some never-before-seen images of the planet’s ring system as seen from above and below the planet. ‘Sailing high above Saturn and seeing the rings spread out beneath us like a giant, copper medallion is like exploring an alien world we’ve never seen before. It just doesn’t look like the same place. It’s so utterly breath-taking, it almost gives you vertigo.’ The spacecraft will eventually return to its standard orbit parallel to the ring plane in late June.”

The New Horizons spacecraft began sending a limited number of photographs of Jupiter and some of its moons as it slingshots by the planet on its way to Pluto. The craft will reach a record speed of 52,000 miles per hour to reach Pluto by 2015.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

From www.voanews.com

A U.S. spacecraft has taken the closest images of Jupiter since the Galileo probe perished in a programmed dive into the huge planet’s atmosphere four years ago. The spacecraft’s destination is icy, distant Pluto, but the U.S. space agency NASA wanted to fly close to Jupiter on the way out to get a scientific update and a speed boost.
NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft has been taking pictures of Jupiter since January and will continue to dispatch them through June, but the close pass more than two million kilometers away is giving astronomers another detailed look at the gas giant, its rings, and its four biggest moons.
The spacecraft will also become the first to take a trip down the long tail of Jupiter’s magnetosphere, a wide stream of charged particles extending tens of millions of kilometers.

From www.livescience.com

Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.
The finding, made by Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington State University in St. Louis, and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence, now at the University of California, San Diego, will be detailed in a forthcoming monograph to be published by the American Geophysical Union.
The pair analyzed more than 600,000 seismograms—records of waves generated by earthquakes traveling through the Earth—collected from instruments scattered around the planet.
They noticed a region beneath Asia where seismic waves appeared to dampen, or “attenuate,” and also slow down slightly. “Water slows the speed of waves a little,” Wysession explained. “Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well.”

From slashdot.org

The Mars rover Spirit used to get quite confused when it came upon a rock. Because it could only plan routes of a metre or two it couldn’t understand how to navigate around large objects, and frequently used to rock back and forth for hours trying to figure it out.
NASA have written new software called D* for the rover Opportunity, which should allow it to autonomously plan routes up to 50 metres long. The new software still won’t be able to avoid sand-traps, though.

From popularmechanics.com:

They will go back and stay this time.

With the iconic Space Shuttle nearing retirement, the pressure is on NASA to design a new manned vehicle — one that will deliver us safely to the lunar surface by 2020 before building a lasting lunar base. From ensuring a safe launch to getting the vehicle back on the ground, here’s an inside look at some of the toughest challenges Orion’s engineers are now confronting.

Full story here.

From slashdot.org

SETI@home is a distributed processing client from UC Berkeley that installs on the vounteers’ home computers and harnesses their processing power in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far nothing noteworthy has comeout of this massive project… that is until today!
One of the voluteers was able to track down his wife’s stolen laptop using the IP address that SETI@home client reports back to the server.

From slashdot.org

Scientists working in Cambridge have managed to make quantum encryption completely secure (registration required) by putting decoy pulses in the key transmission stream. According to the story this paves the way for safe, encrypted high-speed data links.
Could this allow completely private transmission of data away from snooping eyes and ears? Or will it mean film studios can stop movies from being copied when traveling on the internet?

From slashdot.org:

Scientific American has an article on Gordon Bell’s 9-year-long experiment of recording great swaths of his life on digital media. The idea harks back to an article by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, which arguably presaged hypertext and the Web as well. Bell, the father of the VAX computer and now with Microsoft Research, first published a paper on his experiment in CACM in 2001.
The goal is to record “all of Bell’s communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits.” Storage requirements are estimated at a modest 18 GB a year, 1.1 TB over a 60-year span. Not a lot if the article’s projection comes to pass — that we will all be walking around with 1 TB of storage in our portable devices by 2015.
The article is co-authored by Jim Gemmell, who wrote the software for the MyLifeBits project.

Full story here.