NASA: Space Shuttle Atlantis ready for launch

With little more than an hour to go until the launch of NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis, the six-man crew will already be onboard and prepped for launch. The shuttle will take off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida; there is a 90 percent chance of clear skies, so the launch should go ahead without delay. Read more

Xbox 720 vs PS3’s Blu-ray

An interesting article has surfaced on the possibilities that Microsoft have in terms of storage capacity relating to their Xbox 720 console. A recent study has found that it might be possible to fit 12TB of data on a single DVD disc.

Sounds hard to believe I know, but the scientists are still exploring this possibility and might of found a breakthrough. Click here to read more on this. But anyway, an article over at GamePlayer has suggested that Microsoft could be (and maybe should be) willing to try out this new method for the Xbox 720.

The article points out the fact that 12TB of storage would be 240 times the capacity of Blu-ray, so imagine the possibilities if this turns out to be true.

How would Sony and their Blu-Ray format compete with that kind of storage capabilities? It will be interesting to see what the storage options for the Xbox 720 will be.

Take a look at the full article and also the ‘new DVD technology’ we mentioned above. We would like to know your thoughts on this.

NASA gains support for working MMO title

NASA have secured the services of various developers for partnership work on their MMO project, Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond. This is quite an adventurous move for NASA with former NASA astronauts, scientists and engineers taking part in the project. Read more

Last Minute Christmas Gifts at the Right Price

While Christmas is great and everything, it’s definitely crept up on us! Here we are now, 4 weeks to go and no tree, no turkey and worst of all, No Presents! Oh No! But worry not my disorganised friends; Prezzybox has a range of last minute gifts in one place so you don’t need to spend ages looking around for the perfect present Read more

Digital Globe: Is DigitalGlobe Unique?

Digital Globe or DigitalGlobe is pretty cool really and we like it very much, basically DigitalGlobe is one of the leading providers of high resolution commercial imagery. They are the only company that operates a constellation of sub-meter commercial imaging satellites. Read more

Einstein Refrigerator: Can it prevent global cooling?

It looks like the Albert Einstein Refrigerator or simply known as the Einstein Refrigerator is making a comeback. The early invention by Einstein has been rebuilt at Oxford University by scientists, they are basically trying to develop and environmentally refrigerator that runs without electricity, this is why I ask “Can it prevent global cooling?

Just a little recap of the invention: The Einstein refrigerator is simply an absorption refrigerator and the good thing about this refrigerator is that it has no moving parts; the only thing it requires is a heat source to operate it. This invention was a joint project way back in 1926 by Albert Einstein himself and his former student Leó Szilárd, it was patented on November 11, 1930 (U.S. Patent 1,781,541 ).

This invention is just pure brilliance and would be something we should all look forward too, and if it does prevent global cooling then I am well up for this idea. For more information on the Einstein Refrigerator please visit here.

CERN scientists perform rap to explain the LHC on YouTube

As the scientists start work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project at CERN, they have recorded a rap song to celebrate. The video that goes with the rap has been posted on YouTube and has had more that 2.5 million hits in less than a week.

In the video you can see the scientists in white coats dancing in the collision chamber, the rap was written by Kate MacAlpine whose rap name is Alpinekat and she is a trainee at CERN.

Kate said she wrote the rap on her journey’s to and from work, and then the staff all got together to do the video, Kate said the scientists hope that it explains what goes on at CERN, with lyrics such as “Twenty seven kilometres, a tunnel underground, Designed with a mind to send protons around.
We have to wait 30 days for the first atom smashing will take place at the LHC, which is reported as the world’s biggest scientific experiment.

You can watch the YouTube video by CERN here

Read the full article at vnunet

Natural History Museum unveiled it’s Cocoon of 34 million plants and insects

Natural History Museum unveiled new wing as part of its Darwin Centre phase two, which is design around an iconic eight-storey glass atrium encased like a Cocoon. As the Cocoon will be the home for the museums 34 million plant and insect specimens, as well as laboratories for up to 200 researchers, the cocoon will be temperature controlled.

This will be something quite spectacular for visitors when the centre opens in September 2009, visitors will be able to watch scientists in action cataloguing rare specimens.

The director if the Natural History Museum, Dr Michael Dixon said: “The Darwin Centre Phase Two will be a landmark new building that will allow visitors to explore the natural world in an exciting and innovative way - truly putting our science on view for the first time.

We can’t wait for the centre to be open, we have been following the progress and think it is something quite amazing, roll on September 2009.

Read the full story at the BBC

Proposed acquisition by IBM of ILOG

IBM and ILOG today announced they have signed an agreement regarding a proposed acquisition by IBM of ILOG to be implemented by way of concurrent cash public tender offers in both France and the United States. Through this proposed transaction, IBM will combine its business process management (BPM), business optimization, and service oriented architecture (SOA) technologies with ILOG’s Business Rules Management Systems software. This will enable IBM to help clients deliver critical business information in real-time, allowing them to make better business decisions faster Read more

Samsung Anycall Haptic beats the LG Viewty

We all love the Apple iPhone, but if you are a Samsung lover then back in March they launched the Anycall Haptic which has a large touch-screen, much like the iPhone. There is one thing that this phone has that the Apple iPhone does not a Haptic Pad, so you are able to feel the clicks.

I have an iPhone and I hate not being able to feel what I am doing on the phone, this is something that the LG Viewty has had for a while now, so it was about time Samsung come up with their own phone with a Haptic Pad.

The Samsung Anycall Haptic goes one better than the LG Viewty as there are 22 kinds of touch sensations, so you can control how much sensation you want to feel in your fingers.

Haptic is from the Greek “haptesthai,” which means touch. The plural form haptics means science and physiology of the sense of touch.

Scientists have studied the haptic technology for years, so by the time Samsung wanted to apply it to their Samsung Anycall Haptic, they knew a lot about the biology of touch.

Source

HP Labs today announced new research initiatives

HP today announced new research initiatives from HP Labs, the company’s central research arm, aimed at developing new technologies and business models that leave a lighter carbon footprint.

Initially, HP Labs will focus its research in sustainability on three major projects, including: an industry-first initiative to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers by 75 percent; groundbreaking research to replace copper wiring in servers with laser light beams; and tools for measuring and managing the amount of energy used to develop products.

Sustainability is one of five major research themes of the newly redesigned HP Labs, which recently refocused its efforts to address the most complex challenges facing technology customers in the next decade.

“HP’s long-standing commitment to the environment is second to none in the technology industry. Today, HP Labs extends our dedication with these important research initiatives that will advance the state of the art in sustainable IT,” said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president, research, and director, HP Labs. “HP Labs will lead the industry in developing the technology that could dramatically reduce energy consumption and the carbon footprint of entire industries.”

The ultimate sustainable data center

HP Labs unveiled its Sustainable Data Center project, which is focused on reducing the carbon footprint of data centers by 75 percent while simultaneously reducing the total cost of ownership. For example, an average data center that consumes five megawatts of electricity annually could power more than 4,300 homes in the United States for a year. This research project will enable companies to drastically reduce the amount of electricity consumed in the data center.

Under the leadership of Chandrakant Patel, HP Fellow and director of the Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab, researchers will study how energy is used and managed for the entire lifetime of a data center, from its design, synthesis, operation and end-of-life for its components. The research team, which includes computer scientists, materials scientists, physicists, and mechanical and electrical engineers, will use this information to develop data center technologies that achieve a massive reduction in resource consumption while maintaining performance, reliability and uptime requirements.

HP expects this research to open up new markets for its business by extending the technology to other areas such as smart buildings, grids and print factories.

Replacing copper with light to improve energy efficiency

A second sustainability research initiative is focused on replacing the copper-based electrical connections used in today’s IT systems with optical laser communication links.

The Photonic Interconnect project, led by HP Senior Fellow and Director of Information and Quantum Systems Lab, R. Stanley Williams, builds on years of research dedicated to building photonic optical connections and components.

Photonic interconnections make it possible to fit dozens, and eventually hundreds, of processors on server system chips. In addition, the optical connections are 20 times more efficient than what is on the market today and will save companies multiple gigawatts of power annually, thus driving down IT costs. The photonic interconnects, which range in distance from 100 meters to 100 nanometers, also enable more flexible system configurations that can be quickly redeployed based on business needs.

New approach for modeling and measuring energy and material use

HP Labs also introduced a new project, to be led by Patel, focused on developing a set of tools that can model, predict, measure and manage the environmental impact of product manufacturing, supply chains and business processes.

HP will develop software and services tools to measure and manage key environmental impact metrics, such as carbon emissions, total energy usage and non-recoverable energy consumption. HP will use the tools to help customers re-engineer their businesses to be more sustainable and cost-effective through the innovative use of IT. This project will initially focus on three primary areas:

• HP Labs researchers are developing analyses of commercial printing and publishing industries that compare the sustainability impact of their current business models against a reduced impact that would result from the deployment of new research technologies. The aim is to identify and quantify how such research technologies can be best deployed to increase efficiency and reduce resource and energy use as well as carbon emissions. HP plans to extend this research to its customers in other vertical industries.
• HP Labs researchers have developed a unique approach to quantify the costs and environmental impact of a product by looking at the amount of available energy, known as exergy, that was used in that product’s life cycle from extraction, manufacturing, shipping, usage and recycling. HP Labs and the University of California at Berkeley have jointly developed the Lifetime Exergy Advisor, a software tool designed to assess a product’s total environmental impact through joules, units of available energy. The Lifetime Exergy Advisor can help organizations determine the environmental benefits gained from using alternative materials and processes across every phase of the product life cycle. HP believes that as the world’s energy resources are increasingly tapped, companies will measure the amount of joules associated with the creation of a product much they way they measure dollars, so joules will be valued as much as currency.
• To harness the knowledge of the world’s leading experts in sustainability, HP Labs researchers plan to create an open online resource, called a “sustainability hub,” to gather and share data and information about the sustainable design of products. Sustainability experts, researchers, scientists, engineers and academia from around the world are invited to contribute to the hub, which will have a repository of research information dedicated to the development of tools and methodologies for sustainability. The sustainability hub is expected to be available to the public in 2009. HP Labs intends to apply the data in future research to quantify the amount of available energy used when new products and supply chains are created across the entire global ecosystem.

More information on these projects is available at the HP Labs website at www.hpl.hp.com.

Bendy silicon chip paves way for flexible electronic devices

In just a few short years we will be seeing a range of flexible electronic devices thanks to a new bendy silicon chip. US scientists have designed these new chips and are made from ultra-thin silicon that has been bonded to sheets of rubber and have been folded like a concertina.

According to the Science Journel these flexible stretchy chips will be ideal in a number of products like smart clothing. US scientists are now working on a design for a smart latex glove, which will then be use by surgeons. The glove will be able to measure vital signs as well as blood oxygen levels; this could prove invaluable during an operation.

For a full report visit BBC News

Nintendo Wii Controller System to operate real military robots: Is this good for warfare?

Strange but true and quite scary really but the Nintendo Wii controller system will be used in real life warfare to operate military robots. All I hope is that the men and women in the military do not play the Nintendo Wii in real life or they might think it’s a game.

Scientist has reported that two scientists in the United States have just adapted the Nintendo Wii control system technology into robots that clear mine fields.

The Nintendo Wiimote detects movement in three dimensions using wireless technology in the games as we know it, but it is just for that “games” so do we really want this technology in modern warfare?

Sky News – Full Story

Potential New Cancer Drug Identified by Scientists

We all know that Cancer claims a lot of lives and many of us have lost relatives to the disease, I know I have.

Scientists from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Centre have been able to accomplish what a lot of scientists have been trying to do for years; they have found a cancer drug which doesn’t kill normal cells in the way that it does tumour cells.

To read the full and in depth article about this discovery click here.

Robo-dog Ideal Pet For The Elderly

It’s lovely to come home and be greeted by your pet, but for some people it is not practical to have pet in their home, due to long working hours, some elderly people don’t have pets as they can’t out and about to walk them.

Here is the answer it’s the Read more

Scientists love gaming consoles instead of super computer, Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii in particular

16 Sony PS3 consoles used instead of one super computer to simulate two black holes merging is one reason why scientists love gaming consoles. We know that gaming consoles are getting more and more powerful everyday and they are easily programmable as research computers, scientists are in fact finding real world applications for Read more

Create Your Own Energy: But how?

A team of American and Canadian scientists have got together and produced a device which will create its own energy. It look pretty similar to a knee brace and after one minute of walking can generate enough energy to power a mobile phone for Read more

E-Coli Can Produce Hydrogen Fuel

Scientists have found that by modifying a few genes in a stomach, it has made the bacteria capable of producing hydrogen. Which could possibly be enough to power a vehicle and homes in the future. The research team was led by Read more

Bionic Eye - What do you think?

A new contact lens called the “Bionic Eye” has been developed that contains circuts, LEDs and electrical components that can enable us mere human to have super-human vision. This news comes from researchers at the University of Washington and some of the Read more

Good News for Nintendo: they own 50% of 26-year-olds memories

Well Nintendo could not get more viral marketing then owning over 50 percent of 26-year-olds long-term memories, what great news for Nintendo but what for our future generation Read more

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