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.

Foto: David Olsen

From Popular Science:

Richard Chapin from Arizona has spent the past four years and $2 million of his personal fortune building the world’s first and only therapeutic moonbeam catcher, a 30-ton array of mirrors named the Interstellar Light Collector.
Although he has no medical training, Chapin is convinced that his invention will help people overcome depression, arthritis and even some types of cancer.

Full story here.

Interactive explanation of Periodic Table Of Elements by Popular Science.

Photo credit: Nasa

The Fermi paradox says that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, at least one of them should have colonized the entire galaxy by now. But since there is no evidence of this, humankind must be the only intelligent life in the galaxy.
The Space Review has an article on how the Fermi paradox can be applied to human civilization. It says that, like the extraterrestrials, humans have three choices: colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct.

From strangepaths.com:

There are three strategies to travel 10.5 light-years from Earth to Epsilon Eridani and bring humanity into a new stellar system:
1) Wait for future discovery of Star Trek physics and go there almost instantaneously.
2) Build a relativistic rocket powered by antimatter and go there in 22 years by accelerating constantly at 1g, provided that you master stellar amounts of energy (so, nothing realistic until now).
3): go there by classical means, by building a gigantic Ark of several miles in radius, propulsed by nuclear fusion and featuring artificial gravity, oceans and cities, for a travel of seven centuries — where many generations of men and women would live ?
This new speculation uses some actual physics and math to figure out how far are our fantasies of space travel from their actual implementation.

More technical explanation can be found here.