Re: official science and technology thread
Posted: Fri Jul 03, 2015 9:08 pm
[youtube]www.youtube.com/embed/sNhhvQGsMEc[/youtube]
A co-op community for Arizona Fans
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I WAS DRIVING 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold.
Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched to the local hip hop station and began blaring Skee-lo at full volume. I spun the control knob left and hit the power button, to no avail. Then the windshield wipers turned on, and wiper fluid blurred the glass.
As I tried to cope with all this, a picture of the two hackers performing these stunts appeared on the car’s digital display: Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, wearing their trademark track suits. A nice touch, I thought.
The Jeep’s strange behavior wasn’t entirely unexpected. I’d come to St. Louis to be Miller and Valasek’s digital crash-test dummy, a willing subject on whom they could test the car-hacking research they’d been doing over the past year. The result of their work was a hacking technique—what the security industry calls a zero-day exploit—that can target Jeep Cherokees and give the attacker wireless control, via the Internet, to any of thousands of vehicles. Their code is an automaker’s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.
I say we snort it and find out once and for all.ghostwhitehorse wrote: Looks more like talc to me. . .
I volunteer Kieth Richards for the job.Chicat wrote:I say we snort it and find out once and for all.ghostwhitehorse wrote: Looks more like talc to me. . .
Catintheheat wrote:[youtube]www.youtube.com/embed/wHJTZ7k0BXU[/youtube]
Ever since The Jetsons people have been wondering when we were going to finally get flying cars...Catintheheat wrote:[youtube]www.youtube.com/embed/wHJTZ7k0BXU[/youtube]
This ^^Chicat wrote:
And This ^^Merkin wrote:Bionic arms with thought:
To be fair, that Earth was the "special effect" from the credits for Superman IV: The Quest For Peace.Chicat wrote:Hmmmm, seems to be passing a lot closer than 16 million miles in that rendering...
Pic must be from Chaffetz' office.Chicat wrote:Hmmmm, seems to be passing a lot closer than 16 million miles in that rendering...
azgreg wrote:
And now NASA is trolling themMerkin wrote:Maybe those Christians who predicted the end of the world which was suppose to happen yesterday were just a couple days off.
It should fly safely past earth on Saturday, but astronomers are keeping a close eye on 86666 (2000 FL10) which, according to NASA, will be one of the biggest to pass close to our planet in recent times.
gunz. moar. gunz.Jefe wrote:Makes you wonder what countermeasures we have to make sure it doesn't get too close
Sure, it might not work for some applications, like taking mercury out of contaminated solids. However, the suggested application is getting it out of liquids where there is not an easy to deploy solution. Building it into filters, contamination detectors, lining effluent pipes, or cleaning up after a spill.Puerco wrote:Lots of stuff absorbs mercury from water. The question is whether it will absorb a lot of mercury relative to its own mass, and those chemists didn't mention that. The quote from the environmental research organization was pretty bad: you're not going to suck mercury out of some contaminated biosolid with another polymeric solid without doing some heavy duty chemical reactions first. You'd start with contaminated biosolid, and you'd end with a lot of waste from the chemical process, a mercury contaminated polymer (which would have to be land filled), and then the biosolid which you could burn I suppose. They'd be better off just land filling the biosolid in the first place.
The color changing property could be interesting though, and if the polymer's binding properties were reversible, you could imagine using it in a process to concentrate the mercury to make it easier to dispose of or even to reuse.
And yes, I assume the used product has to be disposed of, probably in a land fill. But the stuff that went into making it is industrial waste with no other known uses at present, so it gets land filled already. Now, the fact that this stuff is now contaminated with mercury means you have to be careful how you land fill it, but the alternative is sequestering the mercury contaminated liquids (worse management issues than landfill) or just let it enter the food chain. I don't really see a down side here.The substance could be used to literally suck up mercury at sites where it is contaminating water.
"We also are thinking about using it as a coating to line pipes and other devices that are used to transport water or it could be used as part of a water filtration device," Dr Chalker said.
The substance changes colour when it comes into contact with and absorbs mercury, which means it could also be used to detect whether waterways are polluted.
and another life ending asteroid will barely pass by Earth on Halloween morning. They just found it a week agoAstronomers may have found giant alien 'megastructures' orbiting star near the Milky Way
A star identified by the Kepler Space Telescope may harbour structures which could point to an advanced technological civilisation
A large cluster of objects in space look like something you would "expect an alien civilization to build", astronomers have said.
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system - suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”.
He told The Independent: "I can’t figure this thing out and that’s why it’s so interesting, so cool – it just doesn’t seem to make sense."
Speaking to The Atlantic, Mr Wright said: "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build. I was fascinated by how crazy it looked."
The snappily named KIC 8462852 star lies just above the Milky Way, between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It first attracted the attention of astronomers in 2009, when the Kepler Space Telescope identified it as a candidate for having orbiting Earth-like planets.
But KIC 8462852 was emitting a stranger light pattern than any of the other stars in Kepler’s search for habitable planets.
Kepler works by analysing light from distant places in the universe — looking for changes that take place when planets move in front of their stars. But the dip in starlight from KIC 8462852 does not seem to be the normal pattern for a planet.
Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale, told The Atlantic: “We’d never seen anything like this star. It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
In 2011 the star was flagged up again by several members of Kepler’s “Planet Hunters” team – a group of ‘citizen scientists’ tasked with analysing the data from the 150,000 stars Kepler was watching.
The analysts tagged the star as “interesting “ and “bizarre” because it was surrounded by a mass of matter in tight formation.
This was consistent with the mass of debris that surrounds a young star just as it did with our sun before the planets formed. However this star was not young and the debris must have been deposited around it fairly recently or it would have been clumped together by gravity – or swallowed by the star itself.
Boyajian, who oversees the Planet Hunters project, recently published a paper looking at all the possible natural explanations for the objects and found all of them wanting except one – that another star had pulled a string of comets close to KIC 8462852. But he said even this would involve an incredibly improbable coincidence.
A this stage Mr Wright, the astronomer from Penn State University, and his colleague Andrew Siemion, the Director of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), got involved. Now the possibility the objects were created by intelligent creatures is being taken very seriously by the team.
As civilisations become more technologically advanced, they create new and better ways of collecting energy — with the end result being the harnessing of energy directly from their star. If the speculation about a megastructure being placed around the star system is correct, scientists say it could be a huge set of solar panels placed around the star.
The three astronomers want to point a radio dish at the star to look for wavelengths associated with technological civilisations. And the first observations could be ready to take place as early as January, with follow-up observations potentially coming even quicker.
“If things go really well, the follow-up could happen sooner,” Wright told The Atlantic. “If we saw something exciting… we’d be asking to go on right away.”
NASA says 2015 TB145 is the biggest known asteroid to sweep near Earth until 2027. It’ll pass at 1.3 times the moon’s distance and be visible through telescopes!
A newly found asteroid of notable size will safely pass by Earth on October 31, 2015 and should be visible moving in front of the stars, with the help of a telescope, the night before. According to NASA, asteroid 2015 TB145 will be the biggest known asteroid to come near Earth until 2027. It was discovered just over a week ago, on October 10, from the Pan-STARRS I telescope in Hawaii. The Halloween asteroid’s closest approach will occur at 1:05 p.m. ET (17:05 UTC) on October 31, 2015.
However, observers trying to glimpse the space rock using telescopes will have to look late on the night of October 30, and before dawn on October 31. The huge asteroid will pass Earth at 310,000 miles (498,896 km) or 1.3 times the Earth-moon distance, which is a totally safe pass. It’ll come closer to the moon than to Earth, only 180,000 miles (280,000 km) from the moon.
The space rock’s brightness will be at an approximate magnitude of 10, which is fainter than the eye alone can see. But the asteroid should be easy to spot “slowly” moving across the field of stars if you know when and where to look. And, by the way, although the asteroid’s distance will make this moving object appear to move slowly, this speeding space rock is traveling at 78,000 miles (126,000 km) per hour!
On the night of October 30-31, the asteroid will be traveling across the well-known constellation of Orion.
Preliminary estimates indicate asteroid 2015 TB145 is about 1,542 feet (470 meters) in diameter (estimates range between 689 to 2,133 feet, or 210 to 650 meters). Because of its size, advanced amateur astronomers may be able to see the moving asteroid in telescopes of 8″ in diameter or larger.
If the size is correct, the new found asteroid is 28 times bigger than the Chelyabinsk meteor that penetrated the atmosphere over Russia in February, 2013.
Various space agencies are already working towards earlier asteroid detections, but more funding is always required.
NASA is also planning to catch an asteroid, move it closer to our moon’s orbit, and then send astronauts to study how we can change the space rock’s orbit.
You are misunderstanding the Fermi Paradox, which the cartoon explains pretty clearly. The paradox is why, when life should be so abundant in the universe, do we not see anything at all (yet). If we could (theoretically) colonize the entire galaxy in two million years, and the odds are that other civilizations have a few billion years jump on us, why aren't they here communicating with us. Those other civilizations would perforce be type II. As the cartoon says, type I (almost us) would be too primitive, type III would be too advanced (sufficiently advanced science is equivalent to magic, doncha know). Hundreds maybe thousands of type II civilizations should be right next door crowding in on us. Why aren't they? (or maybe they are already walking amongst us?)ASUHATER! wrote:Fermi paradox is bs in my opinion. It's like searching 1 square mile or the ocean and saying you didn't see a shark..And then saying well the sharks didn't present themselves...must not be sharks!
Wonderful, smart, lady.Catintheheat wrote:Hedy Lamarr, one of the most beautiful women of her time and one of the most intelligent.
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WT1190F is a small temporary satellite of the Earth, thought to be space junk,[3] that will impact the Earth on November 13, 2015. It was first discovered on February 18, 2013 by the Catalina Sky Survey.[2][4] It was then lost, and reacquired on November 29, 2013. It was again discovered on October 3, 2015, and the object was soon identified to be the same as the two objects previously sighted by the team, who have been sharing their data through the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC).[5] An early orbit calculation showed that it was orbiting the Earth in an extremely elliptical orbit, taking it from within the geosynchronous satellite ring to nearly twice the distance of the Moon.[1] It is also probably the same object as 9U01FF6, another object on a similar orbit discovered on October 26, 2009.
WT1190F has been orbiting the Earth as a temporary satellite since mid 2009 (named as UWAIS), if not longer. While it has not been positively identified with any known artificial satellites, its estimated density of 0.1 g/cm³ is much lower than would be expected of a natural object. Hence, European Space Agency astronomers have concluded that the object is likely a fuel tank of some sort.[2][4]
After more observations, ESA astronomers have determined that the object will impact the Earth on November 13, 2015 at approximately 06:20 UTC (11:50 local time), south of Sri Lanka.[2][4] Due to its small size, it is expected that most or all of the object will burn up in the atmosphere before impacting, but will be visible as a bright daytime fireball.[2][4]
The International Astronomical Center (IAC) and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency will host an airborne observation campaign to study the entry of WT1190F. The IAC has chartered a Gulfstream 450 jet to bring researchers such as Peter Jenniskens to a location over the Indian Ocean south of Sri Lanka that should offer a view of the entry above the clouds and haze, but the event will be in broad daylight, so it will be a challenge to film for later study.[12] The Next TC3 Consortium Asteroid Detection and Early Warning team has narrowed the atmospheric entry time to ±8 seconds.[15]
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/12/world ... index.htmlLying on the edge of our solar system, a new, rocky planet close to the size of Earth and named GJ 1132b, is the discovery that holds the most potential for finding new life to date, according to astronomers.
The scientists who discovered it it said its small size and proximity -- it's three times closer than any other similar object found orbiting a star -- "bodes well for studies of the planet's atmosphere," according to their report in the journal, Nature.
"GJ 1132b (is) arguably the most important planet ever found outside the solar system," Drake Deming, an astronomer at the University of Maryland said in an accompanying letter in the journal. He added that it's proximity will "allow astronomers to study the planet with unprecedented fidelity."
Found moving across a "red dwarf" star that is only a fifth of the size of the world's sun, the planet has a radius only 16% larger than Earth's, and has surface temperatures that reach 260 degrees Celsius. Although that's too hot to retain liquid water or sustain life as we know it, Tucker said it was cool enough to support some of the basic building blocks of life, and possibly support life forms like bacteria.
"We haven't even found anything close to this so far," he said. "It's more habitable, it's less harsh and this gives us a good strong chance of actually finding life or something as opposed to the other Earth-like planets found to date."