… Read More → "What if every Christmas tree light had an Internet address?"

With eight months to go before the Mars Science Laboratory reaches its destination, the spacecraft is already getting to work. All systems have checked out beautifully — so much so that NASA didn’t have to perform course-correction maneuvers as planned — and the spacecraft is already making measurements.

MSL is carrying an instrument called the Radiation Assessment Detector, or RAD, designed to monitor high-energy solar and cosmic … Read More → "Already 32 million miles from Earth, Mars Curiosity science lab gets to work"

Earlier this year it was announced that the FAA would begin approving the iPad for airline use in cockpits by pilots wishing to use the Apple tablet to navigate with maps – this week American Airlines is the first to be approved to make this situation a reality. This past June the Allied Pilots Association announced that American Airlines was the first to conduct tests of the iPad for all phases of flight as used by the pilots of their … Read More → "American Airlines gets first iPad for cockpit approval by FAA"

This is amazing. I really want more and better video of it though!

… Read More → "Incredible daytime fireworks show"

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and famed aerospace engineer Burt Rutan are teaming up for space once again. This time they are heading to orbit and they are going to bring in Elon Muskof SpaceX to help them get there. The new project, called Stratolaunch Systems, will use an air-launched booster rocket to deliver payloads of cargo and/or people into low earth orbit.

Allen announced the new company today saying, “By the end of this decade, Stratolaunch will be putting spacecraft into orbit.”

The company will use … Read More → "Rutan, Allen & Musk team up for orbit"

Finally, physicists may have gotten a long-awaited prize with the latest data release from the Large Hadron Collider on Dec. 13, which show a possible signal for the elusive Higgs boson at around 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).

Two separate experiments confirm a small rise in the number of certain particle decay events occurring in a particular energy range. This could be a sign of the Higgs particle, which is a manifestation of the Higgs field required to give … Read More → "LHC may have revealed first hints of Higgs"

YouTuber crysknife007 has isolated the ambient engine hum of the Starship Enterprise as heard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The sound is looped repeatedly into a 24 hour long YouTube movie. via Laughing Squid

… Read More → "A 24-hour loop of Star Trek Starship Enterprise ambient engine sound"

MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a camera that can capture images at one trillion frames per second.

The system relies on a recent technology called a streak camera, deployed in a totally unexpected way. The aperture of the streak camera is a narrow slit. Particles of light — photons — enter the camera through the slit and pass through an electric field that deflects them in a direction perpendicular to the slit. Because the electric field is changing very rapidly, it deflects late-arriving photons more than it does early-arriving ones.

The image produced … Read More → "Experimental camera records light in slow motion"

Starting next year, computers will be available with three-dimensional transistors – these will incorporate vertical components, unlike the flat chips that we’re used to seeing. This structure will allow them to have shorter gates, which are the components that allow the transistors to switch the electrical current on and off, and to direct its flow. The shorter the gate, the faster the computer can operate. While the new 3D transistors will have a gate length of 22 nanometers, … Read More → "New 3D transistors could mean faster, lighter, cooler computers"

Here is an interesting electronics gadget. It’s a semiconductor component tester that displays the type, pinout, and some relevant specifications of the device connected to its probes.

Read more here at Dangerous Prototypes, and see a video of this little gadget in action.