Three different spacecraft have confirmed there is water on the Moon. It hasn’t been found in deep dark craters or hidden underground. Data indicate that water exists diffusely across the moon as hydroxyl or water molecules — or both — adhering to the surface in low concentrations. Additionally, there may be a water cycle in which the molecules are broken down and reformulated over a two week cycle, which is the length of a lunar day. This does not constitute ice sheets or frozen lakes: the amounts of water in a given location on the Moon aren’t much more than what is found in a desert here on Earth. But there’s more water on the Moon than originally thought.

“Scientists thought they knew fairly accurately what the surface of the moon was like and these results show that they didn’t – or at least not completely,” said Dr. Chris Welch, astronautics and space systems expert at Kingston University in London. “Finding so much more water could make living on the moon much easier in the future…If there is water on the moon – in whatever form – then we have a potential reservoir that could be used for drinking or to make into hydrogen and oxygen which could be used as rocket propellant. Also, of course, we could use the oxygen to breathe.”

There are potentially two types of water on the moon: exogenic, meaning water from outside sources, such as comets striking the moon’s surface, and endogenic, meaning water that originates on the moon. The M3 research team, which includes Larry Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, suspect that the water they’re seeing in the moon’s surface is endogenic.

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/09/23/yes-theres-water-on-the-moon/

“Phoenix is showing off a few interesting things at IDF, but the real standout is their new Instant Boot BIOS, a highly optimized UEFI implementation that can start loading an OS in just under a second. Combined with Windows 7’s optimized startup procedure, that means you’re looking at incredibly short boot times — we saw a retrofitted Dell Adamo hit the Windows desktop in 20 seconds, while a Lenovo T400s with a fast SSD got there in under 10.”

http://hardware.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=story&sid=09/09/25/0247220

Would you like to own the computer Neil Armstrong used to land on the moon in 1969?

Well, that’s possible now, because a geek named John Pultorak created a working reproduction of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), wrote a complete manual that will allow you to build your own Apollo flight computer clone and released it in the puclic domain. Well, I think that’s just incredible!

John Pultorak, who is a 54 year old Lockheed Martin software engineer, built his own Apollo AGC in his basement. He completed it in 2005 – it took him 4 years to build it (working about 10 hours a week on the project) and he spent about $3, 000 for the required hardware. When finished, he created a fantastic 1,000 page documentation which includes detailed descriptions and all schematics of the computer.

Using his manuals you are now able to build your own Apollo Guidance Computer, and you’ll probably even need less time than John did, as all the research has already been done. Of course the manuals also include the required software code for the Apollo computer.
The Apollo AGC itself is a piece of computing history, it was developed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and it was a quite amazing piece of hardware in the 1960s. It was the first computer to use integrated circuits (ICs), running at 1 Mhz it offered four 16-bit registers, 4K words of RAM and 32K words of ROM. The AGC mutlitasking operating system was called the EXEC, it was capable of executing up to 8 jobs at a time. The user interface unit was called the DSKY (display/keyboard, pronounced “disky”); an array of numerals and a calculator-style keyboard used by the astronauts to communicate with the computer.

Each Apollo mission featured two AGC computers – one in the Apollo Command Module (“CM”, that’s the spacecraft orbiting the moon) and one in the Apollo Lunar Module (“LM”, that’s the spacecraft that landed on the moon). The command module (CM) had two DSKYs; one located on the main instrument panel and another located in the equipment bay. The lunar module (LM) had a single DSKY for its AGC.

By the way, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon they did have some trouble with the AGC which reported several unusual “program alarms” and guided them towards a large crater with rocks scattered around it. Armstrong took manual control of the lunar module (with Aldrin calling out data from the radar and computer) and guided it to a landing with about 30 seconds of fuel left.

So if you’d like to build your own Apollo computer, go to the source of this post and take a look =D

Would you like to own the computer Neil Armstrong used to land on the moon in 1969?

Well, that’s possible now, because a geek named John Pultorak created a working reproduction of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), wrote a complete manual that will allow you to build your own Apollo flight computer clone and released it in the puclic domain. Well, I think that’s just incredible!

John Pultorak, who is a 54 year old Lockheed Martin software engineer, built his own Apollo AGC in his basement. He completed it in 2005 – it took him 4 years to build it (working about 10 hours a week on the project) and he spent about $3, 000 for the required hardware. When finished, he created a fantastic 1,000 page documentation which includes detailed descriptions and all schematics of the computer.

Using his manuals you are now able to build your own Apollo Guidance Computer, and you’ll probably even need less time than John did, as all the research has already been done. Of course the manuals also include the required software code for the Apollo computer.

The Apollo AGC itself is a piece of computing history, it was developed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and it was a quite amazing piece of hardware in the 1960s. It was the first computer to use integrated circuits (ICs), running at 1 Mhz it offered four 16-bit registers, 4K words of RAM and 32K words of ROM. The AGC mutlitasking operating system was called the EXEC, it was capable of executing up to 8 jobs at a time. The user interface unit was called the DSKY (display/keyboard, pronounced “disky”); an array of numerals and a calculator-style keyboard used by the astronauts to communicate with the computer.

Each Apollo mission featured two AGC computers – one in the Apollo Command Module (“CM”, that’s the spacecraft orbiting the moon) and one in the Apollo Lunar Module (“LM”, that’s the spacecraft that landed on the moon). The command module (CM) had two DSKYs; one located on the main instrument panel and another located in the equipment bay. The lunar module (LM) had a single DSKY for its AGC.

By the way, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon they did have some trouble with the AGC which reported several unusual “program alarms” and guided them towards a large crater with rocks scattered around it. Armstrong took manual control of the lunar module (with Aldrin calling out data from the radar and computer) and guided it to a landing with about 30 seconds of fuel left.

So if you’d like to build your own Apollo computer, go to the source of this post and take a look

Source :>> http://www.galaxiki.org/web/main/_blog/all/build-your-own-nasa-apollo-landing-computer-no-kidding.shtml

A team of atmospheric chemists has moved closer to what’s considered the “holy grail” of climate change science: the first-ever direct detections of biological particles within ice clouds. Ice in Clouds Experiment – Layer Clouds (ICE-L) team mounted a mass spectrometer onto a C-130 aircraft and made a series of high-speed flights through a type of cloud known as a wave cloud. Analysis of the ice crystals revealed that the particles that started their growth were made up almost entirely of either dust or biological material such as bacteria, fungal spores and plant material. While it has long been known that microorganisms become airborne and travel great distances, this study is the first to yield direct data on how they work to influence cloud formation.

Source :::>> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-05/nsf-smf051509.php

Her cell phone is ringing, but the display is turned off. She lightly pushes a small dot on the skin on her left forearm to suddenly reveal a two by four inch tattoo with the image of the cell phone’s digital display, directly in the skin of her arm. She answers the call by pushing a tattooed button on her arm. While she’s talking, the tattoo comes to life as a digital video of the caller. When she finishes, the tattoo disappears.

Source http://www.core77.com/competitions/GreenerGadgets/projects/4673/

“The Vatican is going solar in a big way. The tiny state recently announced that it intends to spend 660 million dollars to create what will effectively be Europe’s largest solar power plant. This massive 100 megawatt photovoltaic installation will provide enough energy to make the Vatican the first solar powered nation state in the world! ‘The 100 megawatts unleashed by the station will supply about 40,000 households. That will far outstrip demand by Pope Benedict XVI and the 900 inhabitants of the 0.2 square-mile country nestled across Rome’s Tiber River. The plant will cover nine times the needs of Vatican Radio, whose transmission tower is strong enough to reach 35 countries including Asia.’”

Source ::>> http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/20/2113232

Posted by timothy on Monday April 20, @05:13AM

“Globally, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (KWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion United States gallons of gasoline”.

Source:

http://img.en25.com/Web/McAfee/CarbonFootprint_12pg_web_REV_NA.pdf

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you’re a hacker.

The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term ‘hacker’.

Source ::>> http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Alexander Graham Bell (3 March 1847 – 2 August 1922) was an eminent scientist, inventor and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone.

Bell’s father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech, and both his mother and wife were deaf, profoundly influencing Bell’s life’s work. His research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices which eventually culminated in Bell being awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone in 1876. In retrospect, Bell considered his most famous invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study. Upon Bell’s death, all telephones throughout the United States “stilled their ringing for a silent minute in tribute to the man whose yearning to communicate made them possible”.

Source ::>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell

Here some family papers:

Alexander Graham Bell’s design sketch of the telephone, ca. 1876.

Alexander Graham Bell’s aeronautical sketch, May 10, 1903.

Alexander Graham Bell’s sketch of a kite, November 18, 1902.

More papers at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/bellhtml/agbcap.html

The Times of London reports that the United Kingdom’s Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain to routinely hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant. The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state that drives ‘a coach and horses’ through privacy laws.

Autralian Police:

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/05/002219

Source >> http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/04/2042242&tid=158