Posts tagged science
Pan the heavens with Google Sky
Mar 14th
Google has just released its ‘Google Sky’, which allows you to ‘pan the heavens’ as you would a map of the Earth. It’s built on the same Google Maps technology and can be found at sky.google.com. Prior to the web version of Sky, Google created Google Mars, Google Moon and finally integrated Google Sky into the desktop app Google Earth. The web version provides the following feature-set:
- Search the ‘tens of thousands’ of indexed named objects
- Infrared, microwave, ultraviolet or x-ray views
- Best images gallery from Hubble and other telescopes
- Planetary positions and constellations
- ‘Earth & Sky’ podcast gallery
- No download needed
It’s a pretty cool site, though still needs some work, in my opinion. And, of course, you can’t just zoom in ‘infinitely’ like you can on Maps or Earth. Nonetheless, if you’re interested in this kind of stuff, you’ll find it pretty interesting.
Laser-driven hard drives
Jul 1st
“Ultra-rapid pulses of polarized light fired from lasers, new tests show, can outperform conventional magnetic data writers by as much as two orders of magnitude.
Researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands think they’ve found another candidate. In laboratory experiments, they used laser light to write data to a magnetic hard drive at very high speeds. The technique works because the photons transmitted by the laser actually carry angular momentum, allowing them to interact with the hard drive. Also, each laser pulse heats a tiny space on the disk just enough to make changing its polarity—thereby storing a bit of data—a little easier. The key is reversing the polarity of the laser pulses, which can produce the equivalent of either a 1 or a 0 of binary code on the disk storage medium.
The researchers managed to transfer data at intervals of about 40 femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second, about 100 times faster than conventional magnetic transfers, the researchers report in a paper accepted for publication by Physical Review Letters.”
Sewage-based Diesel
May 13th
Slashdot:
A New Zealand company has successfully turned sewage into modern-day gold. New Zealand Herald is reporting that a Marlborough-based Aquaflow Bionomic yesterday announced it had produced its first sample of bio-diesel fuel from algae in sewage ponds. It is believed to be the world’s first commercial production of bio-diesel from ‘wild’ algae outside the laboratory – and the company expects to be producing at the rate of at least one million litres of the fuel each year from Blenheim by April.