On March 6th theВ Bay Area Chapter of the American Red Cross partnered up with advertising company Publicis & Hal Riney for their latest campaign. The Prepare Bay Area project attempts to raise awareness on the importance of disaster preparedness.
According to the Red Cross, only 6-percent of people are prepared for a natural disaster in the Bay Area, which led to an aggressive push by the non-profit to literally show people what to expect when the big one hits.
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.
1945 – During WW II Allied bombers begin 4 day raid over Germany
1685 – Born today – Johann Sebastian Bach, Eisenach, Germany, Composer
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.”
1931 – Nevada legalized gambling
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.
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.
Click on image for full story.
Scheduled for release on 22 May 2008, script is ready and filming is expected to begin in June 2007
Techniques developed by atomic physicists are being used to develop the first of what promises to be a new generation of cancer treatments in place of conventional radiotherapy. One day doctors could even be using anti-matter.
Announcements from the CERN laboratory in Geneva have aroused considerable interest in some medical circles.
Cancer cells were successfully targeted with anti-matter subatomic particles, causing intense biological damage leading to cell death.
Here.
Sales of movies in the Blu-ray high-definition format have accounted for more than 60% of the market since the first week of January, far outpacing sales in the competing HD DVD format, figures from market researcher Nielsen VideoScan showed.
VideoScan declined to draw any conclusions from the numbers, but starting about two weeks after the release of Sony’s PlayStation 3 videogame console, which includes a Blu-ray DVD player, the high definition format steadily grabbed market share from HD-DVD. Sony, which created the Blu-ray format, released PlayStation in the United States on Nov. 17.
From slashdot.org
The Project Epoc system can move objects based on a gamer’s thoughts, reflect facial expressions, and respond to the excitement or calm the gamer mentally exerts, the company said.
Sensors in the helmet pick up on electric signals in the brain. The system software analyzes the signals emitted by the brain and then wirelessly relays what it detects to a receiver. The receiver is plugged into the USB port of a game console or PC, according to Randy Breen, Emotiv’s chief product officer.
As with handwriting or voice recognition, the machine itself has a learning curve, improving as it better understands what the player is thinking, but there is also a skill level involving visualization on the part of the gamer.
In conjunction with Project Epoc’s debut, the company launched a kit for game developers Wednesday. Emotiv also announced that it is developing its technology for use in other industries, including medicine, security, market research, and interactive television.
In general, Hollywood filmmakers follow the laws of physics because they have no other choice. It’s just when they cheat with special effects that we seem to forget how the world really works.