Author: John

A Meteoroid Hits the Moon

Moon impact 

Very neat. I hope that the next probe that is sent to map the surface will get some crist high detail images of this new crater.

There’s a new crater on the Moon. It’s about 14 meters wide, 3 meters deep and precisely one month, eleven days old. NASA astronomers watched it form: "On May 2, 2006, a meteoroid hit the Moon’s Sea of Clouds (Mare Nubium) with 17 billion joules of kinetic energy—that’s about the same as 4 tons of TNT," says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. "The impact created a bright fireball which we video-recorded using a 10-inch telescope."

NASA – A Meteoroid Hits the Moon

60th Anniversary of The King of Thailand

60th Anniversary of The King of Thailand

Long live the king! I know this is a bit late but it’s still news worthy.
I happened to see live streaming of his address to his people from the government building in Bangkok. Seeing the hundreds of thousands of people gathered to hear their king was amazing. It was a sea of yellow (yellow is the color of royalty) as everyone was sporting their official ‘I love the king’ shirts.

2Bangkok.com – 60th Anniversary

Impressive Apollo Space Program Fan Site

A while back I ran across a page that has quite a bit of information on the Apollo space program. As fan sites go it’s amazing. You can even get a cool LEM screensaver from here. 

July 1969. Boosted aloft into the Florida skies by the immense Saturn V rocket, the Apollo 11 spacecraft carried men to the surface of a celestial body for the very first time. There have been many spacecraft built since the conclusion of the Apollo program, the Space Shuttle included. However, they merely creep above the atmosphere, flying only a scant few hundred kilometers above the Earth’s surface. To this day, Apollo remains the world’s first and only true spaceship. It journeyed farther, traveled faster and was more expensive than anything before or since

APOLLO MANIACS : Apollo spacecraft and Saturn Rocket / Apollo project

Epson A6 QXGA Electronic Paper

Epson epaper 

The technology of thin film displays marches on. I’ll take my place in line for a roll up computer monitor as soon as they hit the streets.

Epson announced that they successfully developed a A6 (7.1") QXGA (1536×2048) Electronic paper using the SUFTLA Technology (Surface-free technology by laser annealing) son poly-Si TFT-LCD.?
In order to realize electronic devices on plastic film, new technology has been developed that enables the transfer of thin-film devices from an original substrate to another substrate by using laser irradiation. This technology was termed SUFTLA, which stands for surface-free technology by laser annealing. A polycrystalline-silicon thin film transistor (poly-Si TFT) back-plane for liquid crystal displays (LCDs) with integrated drivers was fabricated using a low-temperature process (below 425/spl deg/C) and could be successfully transferred from a glass or quartz substrate to plastic film using this technology. This technology enabled us to fabricate an all-plastic substrate TFT-LCD having a display area of 0.7 in measured diagonally and a pixel count of 428/spl times/238. In addition, the operation of the integrated drivers and the displayed image could be confirmed for the first time in the world.

Epson A6 QXGA Electronic Paper

A Robot For Baseball

BaseBallBot 

Could be handy if your looking to play catch and you are anti social.

In a collaboration of a mechanical engineering and psychology, two professors from Arizona State Universtiy have designed a robot that chases balls on a baseball field. Engineer Thomas G. Sugar and psychologist Michael K. McBeath have built a rolling robot that simulates the perception and prediction of a baseball player and can move at 30 feet per second to intercept fly balls and scoop up grounders.

[via Robot Gossip]

Nuts-and-Bolts Ballplayer for a Space-Age Infield