Eureka Alert!

Ultra-high-speed process makes 6-petabits discs practical.

Researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University in China have demonstrated a way to record on ferromagnetic films using laser-assisted ultrafast magnetization reversal dynamics. The development will allow for practical use of new technology for recording more than 6,000 terabits (6 petabits) of data on a single 5-inch disc, using ultra-high-density magneto-optical storage devices.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-09/aiop-ptt092010.php
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-09/aiop-ptt092010.php

And how long will burning one of those discs take? Dual Layer burning takes multiple hours already, so what? A week? ;-)

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Hi Jord Ya probably a week ;-)

$10 million for Project 10^100 winners

Google has announced the winners of Project Project 10^100 (ideas for changing the world by helping as many people as possible). Thousands of people from more than 170 countries submitted over 150,000 ideas, and Google is providing at total of $10 million funding to the five winners that received the most votes:

The Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos;

FIRST, a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition;
Public.Resource.Org, a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States;

Shweeb, a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using human-powered vehicles on a monorail;

The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), a center for math and science education and research in Cape Town, South Africa.

http://www.project10tothe100.com/
http://www.project10tothe100.com/

China's 'big hole' marks scale of supercomputing race

1,000 U.S. scientists are involved in exascale development, but China and Europe have stepped up their investment, IBM warns

WASHINGTON -- To make a point about China's interest in supercomputing, David Turek, IBM's vice president of deep computing, displayed a slide with a picture depicting a large construction site for a building that will house a massive computer.

Speaking at an IEEE-USA forum here on Thursday, Turek pointed to a photo (below) of a supercomputing center being built in Shenzhen, China, and said, "That's a truck -- that's a big truck, that's a big hole, and that's going to be a big building. And that's only the first building they are going to build there."

China, Europe, and Japan are rushing to build supercomputing centers in competition with the United States, said David Turek, IBM’s vice president of deep computing.

China has 24 systems on the most recent Top 500 list, and China has the world’s second-most-powerful supercomputer on the planet, the Nebulae, a 1.27-petaflop system, according to the … more…

computer world

Researchers at IBM Research – Almaden have published a breakthrough technique in the peer-reviewed journal Science that measures how long a single atom can hold information, giving scientists the ability to record, study and visualize extremely fast phenomena inside these atoms.

The scientists are using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope like a high-speed camera to … more…

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/32558.wss#release
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/32558.wss#release

Goddard Team Obtains the 'Unobtainium' for NASA's Next Space Observatory

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the much anticipated, long awaited “next generation” telescope, which we hope will look further back in time, and deeper within dusty star forming regions, using longer wavelengths and more sensitivity than any previous space telescope. In order to take us to this next level, you’d kinda figure that new technologies would have to be developed in order for this ground-breaking, super-huge telescope to be built. You’d be right.

In fact, engineers had to use a little unobtainium to build the one-of-a-kind chassis, the backbone that will hold the spacecraft together.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/jwst-unobtainium.html
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/jwst-unobtainium.html

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced the beginning of Cyber Storm III — a three-day-long, DHS-sponsored exercise that brings together a diverse cross-section of the nation’s cyber incident responders to assess U.S. cyber response capabilities.

Cyber Storm III is an exercise scenario that simulates a large-scale cyber attack on critical infrastructure across the nation. … more…

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1285629130041.shtm
http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1285629130041.shtm

More and more, computers will serve to “augment humanity” by filtering and directing relevant information to users, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said Tuesday.

Schmidt said that search traffic tripled throughout the first half of 2010, and highlighted Google Goggles and Google Translate as two services that can use the smartphone as a sensor, passing information up to … more…

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369839,00.asp
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369839,00.asp

A new study co-authored by MIT researchers documents the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups’ individual members, and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/collective-intel-1001.html
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/collective-intel-1001.html

APPROACHING COMET: Green comet 103P/Hartley 2 is approaching Earth for a close encounter on Oct. 20th. At that time, the comet will be only 11 million miles (0.12 AU) from our planet and should be dimly visible to the naked eye from dark sky sites. It already looks great through backyard telescopes, as shown by images featured on today's edition of http://spaceweather.com NASA's Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft is en route to this comet for close-up studies and a daring flyby on Nov. 4th.

UPSIDE-DOWN LIGHTNING OVER THE KENNEDY SPACE CENTER: An amateur photographer has photographed rare lightning-like discharges called "gigan tic jets" shooting up from storm clouds near NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Visit http://spaceweather.com/ for a movie and more information about the phenomenon.

http://spaceweather.com/
http://spaceweather.com/

China successfully launched their second robotic mission, Chang’E-2, to the Moon. A Long March 3C rocket blasted off from Xichang launch center just before 1100 GMT on October 1. The satellite is scheduled to reach the Moon in five days, and so far, all the telemetry shows everything to be working as planned. It will take some time for Chang’E-2 to settle into its 100-km (60-mile) orbit above the lunar surfaces, although the China space agency also said the spacecraft will come as close as 15km above the surface during its mission in order to take high-resolution imagery of potential landing sites for Chang’E-3, China’s next lunar mission that will send a rover to the Moon’s surface, scheduled for 2013.

http://www.universetoday.com/74740/china-launches-second-moon-mission/
http://www.universetoday.com/74740/china-launches-second-moon-mission/

A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo — has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. The computer was primed by the

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/science/05compute.html?_r=1
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/science/05compute.html?_r=1

This morning the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics to two University of Manchester researchers. Drs. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were Awarded the highest honor in physics research "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene".

Graphene is a form of carbon that arranges itself into a unique atomic lattice structure from which emerges remarkable properties not usually intrinsic to the element. For example, graphene is a strong conductor of electricity, performing as well as the metal copper. Graphene is also transparent and extremely dense. Additionally, despite being arranged into a structure only one atom thick, it has been classified as the strongest material known on Earth.

The discovery and characterization of graphene by Drs. Geim and Novoselov has the potential to greatly and positively impact numerous fields, including computing, consumer electronics, "green" energy technology, and engineering, among many others.

Both are natives of Russia and started their careers in physics there.

http://www.pnosker.com/science/46-physics/524-michael-convente
http://www.pnosker.com/science/46-physics/524-michael-convente

SETI Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak argues that SETI might be more successful if it shifts the search away from biology and focuses squarely on artificial intelligence. Shostak sees a clear distinction between life and intelligence: he says we should be searching for extraterrestrial machines.

The window between a society’s technological birth and its shift to AI is amazingly small. “Once any society invents the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are at most only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm of sentience to artificial intelligence,” he says. Because artificial sentience would almost inevitably outlast and outperform its fleshy, needy predecessors, Shostak concludes that any aliens we detect will be machines.

“Machines have … no obvious limits to the length of their existence, and consequently could easily dominate the intelligence of the cosmos. In particular, since they can evolve on timescales far, far shorter than biological evolution, it could very well be that the first machines on the scene thoroughly dominate the intelligence in the galaxy.”

The machines would require two primary resources: energy to operate with and materials to maintain or advance their structure. Because of these requirements, Shostak thinks SETI ought to consider expanding its search to the energy- and matter-rich neighborhoods of hot stars, black holes and neutron stars, and to Bok globules (dense regions of dust and gas that produce multiple-star systems at around negative 441 degrees Fahrenheit, and are more efficient, since cooling is not required).

http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3632/astronomer-seeks-et-machines
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3632/astronomer-seeks-et-machines

two russian companies plan to build first commercial space station.Will there soon be another human destination in low Earth orbit, or is this a redundant pipe dream? Two Russian-based companies hope to build the first-ever commercial space station, named, fittingly, Commercial Space Station (CSS). Orbital Technologies and Rocket and Space Corporation Energia (RSC Energria) said in a press release that they will work together to build, launch, and operate the station, which they foresee as will being utilized by private citizens, professional crews as well as corporate researchers interested in conducting scientific programs.

http://www.universetoday.com/74589/two-russian-companies-plan-to-build-first-commercial-space-station/
http://www.universetoday.com/74589/two-russian-companies-plan-to-build-first-commercial-space-station/

breaking news small neo could pass within 60000 km of earth on October 12 2010

A small asteroid will likely pass very close to Earth this week Tuesday. Astronomers are still tracking the object, now designated as 2010 TD54, and various estimates say it could possibly come within anywhere from 52,000 km (33,000 miles) to 64,000 km (40,000 miles) on October 12, with closest approach at approximately 11:25 UT. Information on the IAU Minor Planet Center website lists the object as coming with 0.0003 AU. The size of the object has not been determined, but estimates say it is likely smaller than 10 meters. We’ll provide an update as soon as more information is available.

UPDATE: Don Yeomans, Manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office replied to an inquiry about the object and said the newly discovered NEO 2010 TD54 is approximately 5-10 meters in size, and is now predicted to pass about 46,000 km from Earth’s surface at about 07:25 EDT (11:25 UT) on Tuesday, Oct 12, 2010. It was discovered by Catalina Sky Survey on Saturday morning.

“Only 1 in a million chance of an impact,” Yeomans said, “and even if it does impact, it is not large enough to make it through the Earth’s atmosphere to cause ground damage.”

Sources: IAU Minor Planet Center, Unmanned Spaceflight,Yahoo News Groups

http://www.universetoday.com/75457/breaking-news-small-neo-could-pass-within-60000-km-of-earth-on-tuesday/
http://www.universetoday.com/75457/breaking-news-small-neo-could-pass-within-60000-km-of-earth-on-tuesday/

Silicon Valley’s Solar Innovators Retool to Catch Up to China. Silicon Valley start-ups dreamed of transforming the economics of solar power by reinventing the technology used to make solar panels and deeply cutting the cost of production, attracting billions of dollars in venture capital investment. But as the companies finally begin mass production, they are finding that the economics of the industry have already been transformed, by China … read more here ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/business/energy-environment/13solar.html?_r=1
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/business/energy-environment/13solar.html?_r=1

Chinese photovoltaic giant Suntech looks to electronics to help squeeze more power out of solar arrays. the world's largest maker of crystalline-silicon solar modules, based in Wuxi, China, has announced partnerships with Santa Clara, California-based National Semiconductor and other solar electronics makers to develop "smart" panels that would give the most power possible even if other panels are underperforming due to damage or to sunlight being blocked by shade or debris. This kind of system is useful because in conventional photovoltaic systems, one panel's performance affects the output of the whole system. "We think smart module technology is a clear path for the future," says Andrew Beebe, Suntech's chief commercial officer ...

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/26525/?nlid=3635
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/26525/?nlid=3635

NASA Science News for Oct. 18, 2010

NASA's Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft is hurtling toward Comet Hartley 2 for a breathtaking flyby on Nov. 4th. Mission scientists say all systems are go for a close encounter with one of the most active comets they've seen.

FULL STORY at

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/15oct_epoxi/