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Science and Education
NASA testing next-gen lunar rover in Arizona
By Kyle Sherer
17:06 October 27, 2008 PDT
NASA’s 12-wheeled Small Pressurized Rover raced (by lunar rover standards) across the moon-like Arizona outback at 6mph this week as part of the 11th annual Desert Research and Technology Studies (RATS). While the buggies on the Apollo missions only provided a 6 mile range, the presence of two or more SPRs on a lunar landing will provide a range of over 150 miles. Read More
The world's most advanced electron microscope
By Darren Quick
23:52 October 21, 2008 PDT
Microscopes have been an integral tool for scientists for hundreds of years, opening up the world that surrounds us and providing countless scientific breakthroughs. Now the most advanced and powerful electron microscope on the planet—capable of unprecedented resolution—has been installed in the new Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy at McMaster University in Ontario. Read More
Turning old houses into green homes
By Darren Quick
22:37 October 20, 2008 PDT
Building environmentally friendly houses from the ground up is all well and good, but what about the existing energy inefficient houses most of us still live in? In 1930’s England three million semi-detached houses, or duplexes, were built and are still a major part the current housing stock. Now a three-year research project is about to start at The University of Nottingham that will help people living in these properties meet the Government’s ambitions to reduce CO2 emissions from homes. The joint project with the energy firm E.ON aims to learn energy efficiency lessons for the future from the failings of houses in the past. Read More
Mining the moon: the Scarab lunar prospecting robot
02:16 October 16, 2008 PDT
Plans are afoot to have humans back on the moon by 2020, but if we want to make it more than just a brief visit and truly begin to colonize the solar system, the challenge will be to find ways to extract and exploit local resources that can help sustain a lunar outpost. That's where the Scarab comes in. The four-wheel, 880-pound lunar prospecting robot designed by Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, and soon to be field tested by NASA on the slopes of a dormant volcano in Hawaii, is equipped to drill and collect three-foot samples of soil and rock while operating in one of the harshest environments imaginable - the moon's southern pole. The rover will act as a terrestrial testbed for the development of technologies that it's hoped can be used to find hydrogen, oxygen and possibly even water, that could be mined from beneath the moon's surface. Read More
The Internet updateable SmartGlobe
By Emily Clark
02:01 October 14, 2008 PDT
This update to the original interactive SmartGlobe from Oregon Scientific makes sure your geographic knowledge is up to date via downloadable weekly information updates. Read More
HiPER nuclear fusion project underway
By Darren Quick
00:32 October 9, 2008 PDT
Nuclear fusion has long been the holy grail of energy production. It is the process going on inside the sun, it is clean, and it has the potential to provide practically limitless power. Up until now nuclear fusion reactions have only been replicated inside hydrogen bombs due to the huge amount of power needed to start the reaction and keep it running, but scientists in Britain are hoping to change all that. Britain’s Telegraph newspaper is reporting that British scientists believe they are on the verge of achieving controlled fusion in a laboratory for the first time and will begin work this week to create a nuclear fusion reactor. Read More
MAVEN: NASA's post-Phoenix Mars probe
By Kyle Sherer
00:27 September 22, 2008 PDT
After the Phoenix lander has finished scraping away at Martian soil, the MAVEN spacecraft will examine the atmosphere of the red planet. The US$485 million Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN program is the second stage of NASA’s Mars Scout program, following the successful Phoenix mission. The MAVEN craft will study the planet’s atmospheric gases, upper atmosphere, solar wind, ionosphere, planetary corona, solar EUV and SEPS, and investigate past climate change. Read More
Scientists lay foundations for exascale computing
00:49 September 19, 2008 PDT
Having crashed through the petaflop barrier of a thousand trillion calculations per second back in June, scientists are continuing work into achieving the next benchmark in supercomputer performance - exascale computing. Georgia Institute of Technology's Professor Karsten Schwan is one of two scientists working in the field to receive a 2008 HP Labs Innovation Research Award to further research into solving the problems thrown-up by computing on this scale. Read More
Durham Uni Smartdesk envisages the classroom of the future
By Jack Martin
09:00 September 18, 2008 PDT
September 18, 2008 A century ago, most school children sat on the floor, with tables and chairs following and eventually giving way to rudimentary desks. A century from now, one wonders how far we’ll have progressed in creating an environment most conducive to nurturing the minds of our most precious resource. Researchers at the Technology-Enhanced Learning Research Group (TEL) at Durham University in the United Kingdom are designing new learning environments using interactive multi-touch desks that look and act like a large version of an Apple iPhone. Read More
First images from NASA's Gamma-ray telescope
By Kyle Sherer
09:14 August 31, 2008 PDT
After two months of calibration and testing, NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope has started to deliver the goods, providing scientists with an all-sky image of the Milky Way. The all-sky image combines 95 hours of “first light” observations from the Large Area Telescope, which is 30 times more sensitive than any previous space-based gamma-ray instrument. Read More
Robots reinvigorate computer science classrooms
13:36 August 8, 2008 PDT
Education has long been based around the three R's, but now for computer science students throughout the U.S., a fourth R is making ground - Robotics. A program that began in 2006 through the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE) using robots as the circuit breaker in introductory computer science courses is being expanded to 28 more high schools and universities. Gizmag spoke to Dr. Tucker Balch, director of IPRE, to learn more. Read More
The ORION PLUS helium ion microscope
By Kyle Sherer
04:03 August 5, 2008 PDT
Carl Zeiss SMT has introduced an improved version of its helium ion microscope at the Microscopy and Microanalysis 2008 exhibition: the ORION PLUS. By focusing helium ions into a beam, instead of electrons, the microscope can offer higher focus with lower sample damage. Read More
New insight into Martian environment
By Kyle Sherer
10:27 July 18, 2008 PDT
NASA’s $720 million Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has provided groundbreaking insight into the environmental makeup of the planet during its earliest geological age. Images from the MRO reveal that the Red Planet was originally a muddy brown, with vast lakes and flowing rivers covering a predominantly clay surface. Read More
European Synchrotron Radiation Facility succesfully analyzes zeolites
By Kyle Sherer
22:16 June 26, 2008 PDT
June 27, 2008 In a world first, scientists at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility have determined the distribution of aluminum in zeolites, an important step towards understanding the versatile volcanic material used in water purification, nuclear waste removal, and the spin cycle of your washing machine. Read More
SkyScout Personal Planetarium for $299.99 at Amazon
By Tim Hanlon
02:44 June 11, 2008 PDT
June 11, 2008 There are few things that reinforce the unfathomable wonder of our existence as much as pointing a telescope at the night sky and that goes double if you happen to be using a Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium. As we have written before, SkyScout technology uses GPS to provide information and history on what you are looking at through the viewfinder – an invaluable educational tool your child, available for $299.99 (51% off) for the next 22 hours at Amazon
Touchdown! Phoenix spacecraft lands on Mars
By Kyle Sherer
19:07 May 25, 2008 PDT
May 26, 2008 NASA has announced the successful touchdown of the Phoenix spacecraft on arctic plains in the north of the Red Planet. The completion of the 10 month journey was confirmed with the detection of a radio signal from Phoenix (a signal which takes more than 15 minutes to reach Earth) indicating that it had reached the Martian surface. The spacecraft reached speeds of approximately 12,000 mph before entering the top of the planet's atmosphere and beginning its decent towards a soft touchdown on its three-legs made possible by parachute deployment and finally, the use of controlled thrusters. Launched on August 4, 2007, Phoenix is the sixth lander to touch down on Mars with only five of the 11 previous international attempts having succeeded including the first successful landing of the Viking program in 1976. Read More
Space engineers to explore next gen lunar rovers
20:03 April 30, 2008 PDT
May 1, 2008 The development of a new generation of lunar rovers has been given a boost thanks to funding for an exchange program between the Surrey Space Centre and the University of Beijing. The exchange will pave the way for future moon projects such as the UK‘s proposed Moonraker lander mission and the second phase of China's Chang'e programme. Read More
FIRST crowns science and tech champions
By Emily Clark
19:27 April 21, 2008 PDT
April 22, 2008 FIRST, an organization inspiring kids to engage in science and technology, has crowned this year’s champions at its annual science showdown. The 2008 FIRST Championship at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta recognized winners across three categories: Robotics Competition, Tech Challenge, and LEGO League. Read More
The world's most powerful laser
00:44 April 17, 2008 PDT
April 17, 2008 A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin has demonstrated the highest powered laser in the world. With greater than one quadrillion watts of laser power, the level of output achieved on March 31 by the Texas Petawatt laser is equivalent to more than 2,000 times the output of all power plants in the United States and brighter than the Sun's surface, according team leader and physicist at The University of Texas at Austin, Dr.Todd Ditmire. Read More
Laser Triggers Electrical Activity in Thunderstorm
By Mike Hanlon
13:46 April 14, 2008 PDT
April 14, 2008 A team of European scientists has deliberately triggered electrical activity in thunderclouds for the first time, according to a new paper in the latest issue of Optics Express, the Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal. They did this by aiming high-power pulses of laser light into a thunderstorm. The laser beams were supplied by the Teramobile - a nine-ton portable terawatt and femtosecond laser which fits inside a standard six-meter freight container. Its pulses have an instantaneous power of 5 terawatts (5TW = 5 x 1012W or the power equivalent of a thousand nuclear reactors) and a duration of approximately 100 femtoseconds (1013 s.). Read More
The Fukang Pallasite for sale
By Mike Hanlon
17:13 April 8, 2008 PDT
April 9, 2008 Meteorite enthusiasts the world over know of the Fukang Meteorite. Discovered in the Gobi desert (near Fukang) in China eight years ago, the extremely rare and beautiful Pallasite meteorite is thought to have originated at the mantle-core boundary of very large differentiated asteroids that were destroyed during the early formation of the solar system over 4.5 billion years ago, give or take a hundred millennia or so. Fukang’s unique crystalline structures formed as the metal matrix cooled, with no gravitational influence, at a rate of only a few degrees per million-year period. Now the “main mass” of the meteorite, a distinction considered highly desirable by meteorite collectors, is to be sold at auction by international fine art auctioneers Bonhams on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at its salerooms in New York. Read More
Mathematica Player Pro - new Application Delivery System for Mathematica
By Mike Hanlon
23:52 April 1, 2008 PDT
April 2, 2008 Wolfram has a new runtime environment for Mathematica applications named Mathematica Player Pro. Player Pro gives access to any Mathematica-6-based files, allowing full interaction with Mathematica's capabilities such as performing adaptive visualization, controlling dynamic interface elements and connecting to real-time data. Developers can now build applications in Mathematica and deploy them cost-effectively via Player Pro. Until now, developing with Mathematica has almost always meant deploying with Mathematica but using the free Player and Player Pro, it’s now possible to deploy to almost anyone. Read More
Researchers develop health-screening nanodevice
By Kyle Sherer
18:15 March 27, 2008 PDT
March 28, 2008 Arizona State University researcher Wayne Frasch has designed a method of DNA detection that is faster and more portable than any other current model. The result is a biosensing nanodevice that could transform security screening and health testing. Read More
Hubble breakthrough boosts search for life outside our solar system
23:35 March 25, 2008 PDT
March 26, 2008 In another first for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST), an organic molecule has been detected in the In another first for atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a star 63 light-years (or somewhere in the vicinity of 370 trillion miles) away. Given that the molecule found was methane, a key chemical player in the "primeval soup" from which life was formed on this planet, the discovery represents a significant breakthrough in the search for life outside our solar system. Read More
The largest explosion ever seen
By Mike Hanlon
18:30 March 21, 2008 PDT
March 22, 2008 Gamma-Ray Bursts are the most powerful explosive events in the Universe. They thankfully occur in far-off galaxies and hence are usually faint, but on the morning of March 19, 2008 the Swift satellite found a burst which was so bright it could be seen without binoculars or a telescope even though it was seven thousand times further away than the Andromeda galaxy. Put simply, it could be seen with the naked eye from a distance of over twenty billion light years from Earth. It turned out to be a great day for GRB hunters. The Swift satellite typically finds only two GRBs a week, but for the first time found five bursts within 24 hours. The second burst of the day was the new record holder. The enormous energy released in the explosion – brighter than the light from all of the stars in five million Milky Way Galaxies – was caused by the death of a massive star which collapsed to form a black hole. Read More
John M
- November 25, 2009 @ 17:19 UTC
