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DailyTech – British Breakthrough Makes Manned Mars Mission Safer

New method for protecting astronauts would make trip to Mars much safer

A team of British researchers believes that they have defeated one of the major obstacles to the journey: solar storms. The Earth is protected from deadly solar storms by its magnetosphere, which deflects the radioactive particles produced in the storm.

When a spacecraft travels beyond the protective magnetosphere, it is subject to the destructive power of these storms that scientists claim can pop-up quickly and pose severe risk to instruments on the spacecraft and the lives of the astronauts in the spacecraft.

The system Bingham and other researchers developed creates a mini magnetosphere around the spacecraft. The team says that the theory has been tested in the lab on a scale model and provides almost total protection to the ship and occupants inside the vessel.

Designing a mini magnetosphere had previously been dismissed as impossible due to the large amount of equipment and power deemed necessary to create the protective bubble. The researchers were able to develop a prototype system that in its final form would be about the size of a merry-go-round on a playground and require as much energy to operate as a kettle.

Scientists see the system being comprised of two mini magnetosphere-generating satellites housed in outriders in front of the spacecraft. The artificial magnetosphere would not run at all times and would only be fired up when a solar storm was detected.

DailyTech – New “Near Perfect” Solar Design Could Change Entire Industry

New coated cell 43 percent more efficient, can be easily produced with current production lines

The new RPI solar cell is a normal cell covered in a special anti-reflective coating which traps sunlight from nearly every angle and part of the spectrum.  The new cell is near perfect; it absorbs 96.21 percent of the sunlight shined on it, while a normal cell could only absorb 67.4 percent.  That 43 percent efficiency boost, coupled with mass production, if properly implemented could place solar on the verge of competing unsubsidized with coal power, at last.

Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan — Meiji Jingu at night

Nice pictures from Kirainet

DailyTech – World’s First Fully Functional Artificial Heart Costs $192,000

French invention could help to extend the natural human lifespan

French scientists have invented a working prototype of a fully artificial heart.  The heart is based on bleeding edge technology found in satellites and aircraft.  The heart beats nearly like its organic counterpart and operates using similar feedback as well.  It uses electric sensors to monitor and control heart rate and blood flow.

Carmat, the company who developed the device, with funding from the European space and defense group EADS, unveiled the heart at a Paris press conference this week.  The device could save millions — and its all thanks to modern aerospace technology, according to Carmat’s top executives.  Carmat’s chief operating officer Patrick Coulombier states, “It’s the same principle in the airplane as in the body.”

In the past there have been artificial hearts, like the much hyped Jarvik heart, however they were only a temporary fix while awaiting transplant.  The key problem was that they could not adjust their pumping like a biological heart, and could only be adjusted externally.  This limited their usefulness.

The new heart tries its best to model the real thing, and come awfully close.  Tiny pressure and altitude sensors, developed for use in airplanes, feed information about blood flow to the heart.  The device responds almost immediately, with lightening fast decisions to increase or decrease blood flow.

Past hearts have also only had one pump, but the new heart features two, just like the real heart. It pumps blood to the lungs and then pumps the returning blood to the rest of the body, just like in the real heart.  The new heart is made largely of a combination of polymer and pig tissue, a similar design to modern heart valves, implanted in many people.

The device has been successfully tested on large mammals, and is awaiting permission to begin clinical human trials.  Its makers are very confident that the device will be safe, long-lived, and will open undreamt of possibilities for people with heart disease.  Initially it will be offered to those suffering from a massive heart attack or who had heart failure.  However eventually it could be implanted in people with milder heart problems.

AnandTech: The Dark Knight: Intel’s Core i7.

Awesome review and benchmarks by Anandtech. Click above for the article.

DailyTech – WiQuest Goes Down in Flames

Wireless USB company WiQuest closes its doors

Another problem plaguing UWB chips is the current high cost. EETimes reports that OEMs want UWB chips to be in the under $5 range. That price range is in line with current Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips. Current UWB chips can’t meet than price demand, but UWB chips coming to market in 2009 may be able to hit the price OEMs want.

Current UWB chips also draw more power than most OEMs want for devices. Current chips draw about 1 Watt of power and for handheld devices they need to draw under 300 milliWatts. Performance of first generation wireless USB chips was also subpar with speeds of under 50 Mbits/s.

The low performance was blamed on non-native WUB implementations and the high overhead of the USB protocol. Regulations also prevent the use of USB in many geographies and some areas use different frequency bands for UWB than others. This makes it difficult for OEMs to add WUSB to devices because they can’t guarantee the devices will function in all locations.

NASA – Magnetic Portals Connect Sun and Earth

Oct. 30, 2008: During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn’t believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page.

“It’s called a flux transfer event or ‘FTE,'” says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible.”

Indeed, today Sibeck is telling an international assembly of space physicists at the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Alabama, that FTEs are not just common, but possibly twice as common as anyone had ever imagined.

The Omega Project.

The Vision

o A single-nation global human population of ten million by 2012

o Restoration of the biosphere to its state of five hundred years ago, within a century

Read on by clicking on the source link above

BBC NEWS | Technology | Trojan virus steals banking info

The details of about 500,000 online bank accounts and credit and debit cards have been stolen by a virus described as “one of the most advanced pieces of crimeware ever created”.

In April 2007, researchers at Google discovered hundreds of thousands of web pages that initiated drive-by downloads. It estimated that one in ten of the 4.5 million pages it analysed were suspect.

Sophos researchers reported in 2008 it was finding more than 6,000 newly infected web pages every day, or about one every 14 seconds

The lab said no Russian accounts were hit by Sinowal.

“One of the key points of interest about this particular trojan is that it has existed for two and a half years quietly collecting information,” he said. “Any IT professional will tell you it costs a lot to maintain and to store the information it is gathering.

“The group behind it have made sure to invest in the infrastructure no doubt because the return and the potential return is so great.”

If the world could vote?

DailyTech – Quantenna Wi-Fi Chipset Offers 1 Gbps Speed

Highly integrated chip promises fast speed and mesh networking

Integration of the chipsets allows them to provide concurrent dual mode and a power amplifier to deliver content like real-time video on the 5 GHz band and legacy data on the more crowded 2.4 GHz band.

The QHS chipsets claim to be able to deliver link speeds of up to 1 Gbps and data throughput of up to 600 Mbps. The mesh networking capability uses spectrum management to cover a home or office entirely. The 4×4 MIMO technology and Tx beamforming claim to deliver 50% more performance than other 802.11n technologies.

DailyTech – New Paper Is 500 Times Stronger Than Steel, 10 Times Lighter

New nanotube paper is expected to set the mark as the world’s strongest material by the year’s end, to be used in aircraft

The new paper is composed of intertwined carbon nanotubes.  Thanks to nanotubes’ excellent flexibility, it can bend like normal paper.  Multiple sheets can be stacked for rigidity.  However, unlike normal paper, it can be up to 500 times stronger than steel, its creators predict, while being a mere tenth of the weight.

DailyTech – World’s Most Advanced Microscope Unveiled

The electron microscope is a very precise instrument that uses a beam of electrons to examine objects on a fine scale. Some electron microscopes can magnify specimens as much as 2 million times. McMaster University has unveiled the world’s most advanced microscope that is capable of even finer resolution.

The new electron microscope was built in the Netherlands by the FEI Company and cost in the area of $15 million. The microscope was installed at the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy at McMaster University.

218 HD Resolution Desktop Wallpapers for Nerds | Nerd Business Blog

Cool wallpapers

Enceladus up close – The Big Picture – Boston.com