Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
NASA has unveiled a plan to return to the moon not too long ago. It’s going to look more like the old Apollo missions of the ’60s. Sounds like a good idea to me, the basic ideas have been tested already and are known to work. The advances in technology over the last 30 years will make for larger vehicles and better performance. Lets hope for solid funding and for politics to keep its nose out of the mix so we can look up at the moon and marvel at the bases there.
Could this be the basis of quantum computers? Maybe…
Physicists in Australia have slowed a speeding laser pulse and captured it in a crystal, a feat that could be instrumental in creating quantum computers.
The scientists slowed the laser light pulse from 300,000 kilometers per second to just several hundred meters per second, allowing them to capture the pulse for about a second.
Wired News: This Laser Trick’s a Quantum Leap
(Thank you Special Agent Steve for this info)
Greg sent this to me:
The Dunn has two high-order adaptive optics benches, the only telescope in the world with two systems, which enhances instrument setup and operations.
This image was built from a series of 80 images, each 1/100th of a second long (10 ms), taken over a period of 3 seconds by a high-resolution Dalsa 4M30 CCD camera in its first observing run after being added to the Dunn. Speckle imaging reconstruction then compiles the 80 images and greatly reduces residual seeing aberrations.
I wonder if any digital camera makers will ever offer adaptive optics on their products. It may not be practical to do the layering of images if your subject is moving, but it might be useful to chart out the lens flaws and build a digital filter to correct them in camera.
This is by far one one the more impressive DIY projects that I have seen of late. Normaly a sextant is an expencive and very precice instrument but with a CD case, some LEGO bricks and a few mirrors you can build one. I don’t think you wan’t to use it to sail around the world but you could ( by the way you had better be an ace at celestrial navigation before you start Mister!)
Anyway, the project is simple enough that you could build it in a weekend. It would be fun to take out on trips and ‘shoot the sun’ and try to figure out where you are on this big ‘ol sphere we call home.
[via hack a day]
CD sextant
No, this isn’t some banana slug snuff project, the slug this uses is the Linksys NSLU2 wireless USB storage device. After a little firmware hacking you can convert your ‘Slug’ into a web server, streaming MP3 server, or eve a VoIP PBX!
Not to be outdone by others, these guys are planning on sending theirs up in a tiny R/C airplane attached to a weather balloon. The plan is to release it at 100,000 feet and have it fly home. On it’s way down the craft will take photos and make temperature and barometric readings. All this will be run by the 266MHz XScale computer in the NSLU2. Pretty darn impressive for a simple wireless USB port!
By using a flying beam of x-rays this company can quite literally see through walls! The technique is very much like how the picture on your TV is produced. A narrow beam of x-rays are projected to the target (like an electron gun in your TV) and the energy that is reflected back is recorded from exactly where the beam intersected the target (like how the phosphor glows in the picture tube when the electrons hit it). This builds up a picture of what is in side of the object being scanned. Items with low atomic numbers (such as explosives, drugs, cigarettes, and people) are shown in stark contrast to their surroundings.