From the bbc.co.uk article:
A Nasa spacecraft has sent back the first historic pictures of an unexplored region of Mars.
The Mars Phoenix lander touched down in the far north of the Red Planet, after a 680 million-km (423 million-mile) journey from Earth.
The probe is equipped with a robotic arm to dig for water-ice thought to be buried beneath the surface.
It will begin examining the site for evidence of the building blocks of life in the next few days.
Read the article here.
From the philosophersnet.com website:
When Thomas Hobbes died in 1679 at the age of 91 his reputation as an atheist in religion and an absolutist in politics not only rendered him highly disreputable but also served to shunt his political ideas into relative obscurity for the next three hundred years. He was undoubtedly ahead of his time and his contribution to political philosophy has only been fully recognised more recently in the huge range of scholarship devoted to his most enduring work, Leviathan (1651).
Read the rest of the article here.
Additional info on Hobbes at Wikipedia here.
From the breitbart.com article:
Rex Jameson bikes and swims regularly, and plays tennis and skis when time allows. But the 5-foot-11, 180-pound software engineer is lucky if he presses 200 pounds—that is, until he steps into an “exoskeleton” of aluminum and electronics that multiplies his strength and endurance as many as 20 times.
With the outfit’s claw-like metal hand extensions, he gripped a weight set’s bar at a recent demonstration and knocked off hundreds of repetitions. Once, he did 500.
“Everyone gets bored much more quickly than I get tired,” Jameson said.
Jameson—who works for robotics firm Sarcos Inc. in Salt Lake City, which is under contract with the U.S. Army—is helping assess the 150-pound suit’s viability for the soldiers of tomorrow. The suit works by sensing every movement the wearer makes and almost instantly amplifying it.
The Army believes soldiers may someday wear the suits in combat, but it’s focusing for now on applications such as loading cargo or repairing heavy equipment. Sarcos is developing the technology under a two-year contract worth up to $10 million, and the Army plans initial field tests next year.
Read the article here.
From the cosmosmagazine.com article:
Simulating spectacular supernovae could help unlock some of the darkest secrets of the cosmos, say scientists. They are using the world’s fastest supercomputer – the Argonne Blue Gene/P – to model exploding stars.
During these video simulations a seemingly innocuous yellow dot appears in the centre of the star. The dot stretches and mushrooms into a gigantic ball of nuclear energy, pushing through to the surface of the star, blistering out and eventually enveloping the star in an immense nuclear deflagration. Watch a video of one of the simulations here.
In reality the process would take less than five seconds and yield an unimaginable quantity of energy. The energy released during the detonation alone is equivalent to 1,027 hydrogen bombs.
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The whole process of simulating a supernova takes three days using the Argonne Blue Gene/P (BGP) supercomputer, but would take around 1,000 years using an ordinary desktop computer.
Read the rest of the article and see the video here.
From the smithsonianmag.com article:
Today’s Washington, D.C. owes much of its unique design to Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who came to America from France to fight in the Revolutionary War and rose from obscurity to become a trusted city planner for George Washington. L’Enfant designed the city from scratch, envisioning a grand capital of wide avenues, public squares and inspiring buildings in what was then a district of hills, forests, marshes and plantations.
Read the full article here. There is also a video to watch at the smae link.
Also don’t miss this informative interactive map, it allows you to fly around a pixel Washington D.C. and learn about the various sites. Click on any of the buildings for a breif summary.
From the sciencemode.com article:
Hewlett-Packard announced today that its researchers from HP Labs, the company’s central research facility, have proven the existence of what had previously been only theorized as the fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering.
This scientific advancement could make it possible to develop computer systems that have memories that do not forget, do not need to be booted up, consume far less power and associate information in a manner similar to that of the human brain.
In a paper published in today’s edition of Nature, four researchers at HP Labs’ Information and Quantum Systems Lab, led by R. Stanley Williams, presented the mathematical model and a physical example of a “memristor” – a blend of “memory resistor” – which has the unique property of retaining a history of the information it has acquired.
Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department of the University of California at Berkeley, initially theorized about and named the element in an academic paper published 37 years ago. Chua argued that the memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor, and that it had properties that could not be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements.
Building on their groundbreaking research in nanoelectronics, Williams and team are the first to prove the existence of the memristor.
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One application for this research could be the development of a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (DRAM). Computers using conventional DRAM lack the ability to retain information once they lose power. When power is restored to a DRAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming “boot-up” process is necessary to retrieve data from a magnetic disk required to run the system.
In contrast, a memristor-based computer would retain its information after losing power and would not require the boot-up process, resulting in the consumption of less power and wasted time.
This functionality could play a significant role as “cloud computing” becomes more prevalent. Cloud computing requires an IT infrastructure of hundreds of thousands of servers and storage systems. The memory and storage systems used by today’s cloud infrastructure require significant power to store, retrieve and protect the information of millions of web users worldwide.
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Another potential application of memristor technology could be the development of computer systems that remember and associate series of events in a manner similar to the way a human brain recognizes patterns. This could substantially improve today’s facial recognition technology, enable security and privacy features that recognize a complex set of biometric features of an authorized person to access personal information, or enable an appliance to learn from experience.
Read the full article here.
From the skyandtelescope.com article:
Most people have never knowingly seen Mercury. That’s a pity, because viewing the innermost planet is very rewarding, whether you use a telescope, binoculars, or just your unaided eyes.
The problem with Mercury is that it never strays far in the sky from the Sun, so it’s usually visible only very close to the horizon in bright twilight. But people at mid-northern latitudes (the US and most of Canada, Europe, and Asia) have an extraordinarily good opportunity to view the elusive planet on evenings in May 2008. Throughout most of the month, Mercury is high above the western horizon a half hour after sunset, and it’s still reasonably high even an hour after sunset, when the Sun’s glow is quite subdued.
As always when it’s visible in the evening, Mercury is brightest at the beginning of the apparition, fading from magnitude -0.8 on May 1st to 0.3 on May 12th. That’s nearly a threefold decrease, but magnitude 0.3 is still dazzlingly bright.
Read the reast of the article here.
