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Posts Tagged ‘Technology’

Russian Research Project Offers ‘Immortality’ to Billionaires – by Transplanting Their Brains Into Robot Bodies

July 19, 2012 2 comments

Thursday, 19 July 2012

So what would be the difference? I don’t understand

‘A Russian entrepreneur who heads a hi-tech research project called ‘Avatar’ has contacted billionaires to offer them immortality. Itskov claims he will personally oversee their immortality process, in exchange for an undisclosed fee.’

Read more: Russian Research Project Offers ‘Immortality’ to Billionaires – by Transplanting Their Brains Into Robot Bodies

Hubble sees the needle galaxy, edge-on and up close


July 16, 2012

Hubble sees the needle galaxy, edge-on and up close

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit: ESA/NASA

This image snapped by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals an exquisitely detailed view of part of the disc of the spiral galaxy NGC 4565. This bright galaxy is one of the most famous examples of an edge-on spiral galaxy, oriented perpendicularly to our line of sight so that we see right into its luminous disc. NGC 4565 has been nicknamed the Needle Galaxy because, when seen in full, it appears as a very narrow streak of light on the sky.

The edgewise view into the Needle Galaxy shown here looks very similar to the view we have from our into the core of the Milky Way. In both cases ribbons of dust block some of the light coming from the galactic disc. To the lower right, the dust stands in even starker contrast against the copious yellow light from the star-filled central regions. NGC 4565’s core is off camera to the lower right.

Read more : http://phys.org/news/2012-07-hubble-needle-galaxy-edge-on.html

Par:AnoIA: Anonymous Launches WikiLeaks-esque Site for Data Dumps


By Quinn Norton July 13, 2012 

Par:AnoIA

Frustrated by the lack of impact from Anonymous’ otherwise famous hacks and data dumps, and the slow pace of material coming out of WikiLeaks, participants in the Anonymous collective have launched a WikiLeaks-like site called Par:AnoIA (Potentially Alarming Research: Anonymous Intelligence Agency).

Paranoia, which debuted in March, is a new publishing platform built by Anonymous to host Anonymous data leaks that’s trying to find a solution to a problem that plagues news sites, government transparency advocates, and large-website owners everywhere: how to organize more data than any human could possibly read.

The site marks a departure from the groups’ previous modus operandi, where it would publicly drop the documents, make them available in a torrent — usually as a zip file, and then move on. By contrast, the goal of Paranoia is to curate and present content to a hopefully interested public.

Read more: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/paranoia-anonymous/

New Instrument Sifts Through Starlight to Reveal New Worlds


ScienceDaily (July 5, 2012) — An advanced telescope imaging system that started taking data last month is the first of its kind capable of spotting planets orbiting suns outside of our solar system. The collaborative set of high-tech instrumentation and software, called Project 1640, is now operating on the Hale telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California after more than six years of development by researchers and engineers at the American Museum of Natural History, the California Institute of Technology, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Two images of HD 157728, a nearby star 1.5 times larger than the Sun. The star is centered in both images, and its light has been mostly removed by the adaptive optics system and coronagraph. The remaining starlight leaves a speckled background against which fainter objects cannot be seen. On the left, the image was made without the ultra-precise starlight control that Project 1640 is capable of. On the right, the wavefront sensor was active, and a darker square hole formed in the residual starlight, allowing objects up to 10 million times fainter than the star to be seen. Images were taken on June 14, 2012 with Project 1640 on the Palomar Observatory’s 200-inch 

The project’s first images demonstrating a new technique that creates extremely precise “dark holes” around stars of interest were presented July 5 at the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation meeting in Amsterdam by Ben R. Oppenheimer, a curator in the Museum’s Department of Astrophysics and principal investigator for Project 1640.

Although hundreds of planets are known from indirect detection methods to orbit other stars, it’s extremely difficult to see them directly in an image. This is largely because the light that stars emit is tens of millions to billions of times brighter than the light given off by planets.

Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120705161252.htm

Your own solar observatory


July 2, 2012

You can watch or control the scopes for yourselves  live here:

http://observatory.godlikeproductions.com/  (you can watch as a guest, but you are required to login for queueing in the control line)

Learn how to use it here:

http://video.godlikeproductions.com/video/HOW_TO_VIDEO_FOR_OBSERVATORY?id=1162905b337b781e514

==> Please note that believenothing.net is not affiliated in any way with the above mentioned website and this is not some kind of advertising.

I just think that it is something worth mentioning and a good alternative to the official channels.

Army Demonstrates a Weapon That Shoots Laser-Guided Lightning Bolts


By Clay Dillow Posted 06.28.2012

Over at Picatinny Arsenal, the research and development facility and proving ground for the U.S. Army’s weaponry, engineers are developing a device that shoots lighting bolts along a laser beam to annihilate its target. That’s right: lighting bolts shot down laser beams. This story could easily end right here and still be the coolest thing we’ve written today, but for the scientifically curious we’ll continue.

Texas Students Hijack a U.S. Government Drone in Midair

June 29, 2012 1 comment

By Colin Lecher Posted 06.28.2012

The U.S. government, understandably, doesn’t want its drone technology to fall out of the sky and into other peoples’ laps. But being able to hijack a drone and control it? That’s even worse. And a team of researchers has done it for 1,000 bucks.

The University of Texas at Austin team successfully nabbed the drone on a dare from the Department of Homeland Security. They managed to do it through spoofing, a technique where a signal from hackers pretends to be the same as one sent to the drone’s GPS.

Quantum Researchers Able to Stop and Restart Light


Wednesday, 27 June 2012

‘In two independent experiments that defy the notions of Einstein, researchers have been able to stop, then restart a beam of light.

Ordinarily, light travels at the speed of 186,282 miles per second, but the research team of Lene Hau, a professor of physics at Harvard, who in 1999 was able to slow light down to 38 miles per hour, has been able to trap light in a cloud of sodium atoms super-cooled to near ‘absolute zero.’’

Read more: Quantum Researchers Able to Stop and Restart Light

The unidentified object at the Bottom of the Baltic Sea Cuts off Electrical Equipment when Divers Get Within 200 Metres


Wednesday, 27 June 2012

Related post reporting the discovery  of the object (July 4, 2011): https://believenothing.net/2011/07/04/mysterious-disc-found-on-baltic-seabed/

‘The divers exploring a ‘UFO-shaped’ object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea say their equipment stops working when they approach within 200m.

Professional diver Stefan Hogerborn, part of the Ocean X team which is exploring the anomaly, said some of the team’s cameras and the team’s satellite phone would refuse to work when directly above the object, and would only work once they had sailed away.

He is quoted as saying: ‘Anything electric out there – and the satellite phone as well – stopped working when we were above the object.’

Read more: UFO at the Bottom of the Baltic Sea Cuts off Electrical Equipment when Divers Get Within 200 Metres

http://www.davidicke.com/headlines

Now Facebook Tries to ‘Hijack’ Users’ Email Addresses by Forcing Them to Submit to Own Service


Wednesday, 27 June 2012

‘Facebook is trying to force its 900million users to switch to its own email service.

It is removing the personal email address displayed on an individual user’s profile pages and replacing it with a @facebook.com address – even if the member never uses it.

The social networking site’s email service was launched two years ago but has failed to take off, possibly because most people do not like having multiple mail accounts.’

Read more: Now Facebook Tries to ‘Hijack’ Users’ Email Addresses by Forcing Them to Submit to Own Service