Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
From the position of them in the illustration and in the article I’m going to call them ‘slats‘. Flaps are at the trailing edge of a wing surface.
Scientists have discovered that the flying dinos might have used a thumb like bone on their wings as a slat to provide more control over their flying. Some birds do this today and as more and more research shows that their ancestors share a commonality I’m sure that more of these parallels will be found.
After a little extra burn to correct their orbit, The two Chinese astronauts (‘taikonauts’) are adapting well to their five day mission. During a televised conference, one of the astronauts was shown clapping after his daughter had sang ‘happy birthday’ to him. This is quite a mission for China, so far Russia and the US have been the only countries to successfully launch a manned space mission. With China building on space hardware technology from Russia and ambition to make a name for itself as a modern country, they might make it to the moon before we get a chance to return ourselves.
A good day in space for China’s taikonauts
Chinese astronauts celebrate birthday, record
STANFORD HAS WON the 132-mile, $2 million 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous vehicle robot race — unofficially. The Stanford Racing Team’s “Stanley,” a modified Volkswagen Touareg R5, finished with a time of six hours and 53 minutes.
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.