Scientific American - Technology

NASA Readies a Satellite to Probe the Sun, Inside and Out

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:00:00 EST

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is what might be called a satellite for the information age. It is designed to provide scientists who study the sun with a torrent of data--the space agency says the observatory will return 150 million bits of data about Earth's host star per second, or about 1.5 terabytes per day. [More]

NASA - Solar Dynamics Observatory - Sun - Space - Earth

CERN Gears Up Its Computers for More Atom Smashing

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST

A deluge of high-energy physics data is headed toward servers in Geneva, Switzerland, later this month. That's because the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) now says it plans to restart its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) soon for a run that could last as long as two years at a collision energy of seven TeV (tera–electron volts, 3.5 TeV per beam). As CERN ramps up the world's most powerful particle accelerator to operate well beyond its previous best performance , the lab's computer systems must likewise be tuned so they can properly capture and analyze all of this new output. [More]

Large Hadron Collider - CERN - Particle accelerator - Geneva - Physics

Street Smarts: The BioBus Brings a Rolling Science Lab to Resource-Strapped Schools

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST

It's halfway through first period, and 10th-grade students at Frances Perkins Academy in Brooklyn are in science class--not in school, but on a specially outfitted bus parked outside. [More]

School - Tenth grade - Brooklyn - Science education - Education

Moving forward with electronic health records

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:00:00 EST

NEW YORK--Almost a year since President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which earmarked some $19 billion to get electronic health records off the ground, most of the country's medical and research institutions are still primarily pushing paper. [More]

United States - American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - Electronic health record - Barack Obama - Research

Utility to Build First Power Plant with Greenhouse Gas Emissions Limits in California

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:15:00 EST

Calpine Corp. is poised to build the first U.S. power plant with federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions in California after clearing a final regulatory hurdle today.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District granted the Houston-based utility its final air quality permit today, allowing the company to proceed with the planned construction of a 600-megawatt natural gas-fired Russell City Energy Center. The 15-acre project site is in Hayward, just east of the San Francisco Bay.

[More]

United States - Power station - Greenhouse gas - Calpine - California

NSF Teams with Microsoft to Move Scientific Research into the Cloud

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:15:00 EST

Microsoft and the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Thursday announced plans to offer researchers and research groups selected through the agency's merit review process free access to computer servers . Microsoft will host the computing infrastructure at its data centers, giving the researchers access to storage, computational and networking resources via the Internet for a period of three years. [More]

Microsoft - National Science Foundation - Computing - Research - Business

De-Worming Software More Effective at Detecting Infected Network Computers Before Contagion Can Spread

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:35:00 EST

More than a year after being launched by hackers on a campaign to infect computers running Microsoft Windows, the Conficker worm 's effects are still being felt. England's Greater Manchester Police department, for example, has had to cut its computers off from a national criminal database since detecting Conficker on its network last week. [More]

Conficker - Microsoft Windows - Greater Manchester Police - Police - Law

Better Broadband: New Regulatory Rules Could Change the Way Americans Get Online

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST

At the turn of the millennium, the U.S. had some of the best broadband access in the world. It reached more homes, and at a lower price, than most every other industrial country. Ten years later the U.S. is a solid C-minus student, ranking slightly below average on nearly every metric.

Just how the U.S. lost its edge and how it plans to get it back are the issues before the Federal Communications Commission as it prepares to launch the most significant overhaul of network policy since the birth of the Web. As part of last year’s stimulus package, Congress provided $7.2 billion to expand broadband access to every American. It also required the FCC to outline a plan for how to make that happen. The outcome of the FCC’s deliberations, due February 17, could determine not just control over the broadband infrastructure but also the nature of the Internet itself.*

[More]

Federal Communications Commission - United States - United States Congress - Broadband Internet access - FCC

Obama Budget Increases Funding for Energy Research and Nuclear Power

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:00:00 EST

Nuclear energy and energy research are among the big winners in the proposed $28.4 billion Energy Department fiscal 2011 budget the White House unveiled today.

The almost 5 percent increase in funding from fiscal 2010 covers a $36 billion boost in loan guarantee authority for nuclear power facilities for a total of $54 billion, $300 million for an innovative energy research program, and a $226 million increase in funding for the Office of Science for research and development of "breakthrough" technologies for a total of $5.1 billion.

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Nuclear power - White House - United States Department of Energy - Energy - Nuclear

Microsoft's Hands-Free Answer to the Nintendo Wii

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST

Editor's note: The online version of this story was posted on January 7.

When Nintendo’s Wii game console debuted in November 2006, its motion-sensing handheld “Wiimotes” got players off the couch and onto their feet. Now Microsoft hopes to outdo its competitor by eliminating the controller altogether: this past January it revealed details of Project Natal, which will give Xbox 360 users the ability to manipulate on-screen characters via natural body movement. The machine-learning technology will enable players to kick a digital soccer ball or swat a handball simply by mimicking the motion in their living room.

[More]

Microsoft - Project Natal - Nintendo - Wii - Nintendo Wii

Thinking Outside the Boxes: Robotic Pallet-Stacking Challenge Aims to Create an Automation Benchmark for Industry

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:55:00 EST

Anyone who has ever loaded a moving van knows how difficult it is to safely stack boxes of different sizes, weights and levels of fragility, all while minimizing the amount of space those cartons take up. Imagine an endless stream of such boxes and a business that lives and dies by the efficiency of their stacking, and you have an idea of the challenge facing warehouses that process large volumes of cargo onto pallets for shipping. [More]

Pallet - Business - Moving company - Industrial Goods and Services - Materials Handling

Genetically Modified Forest Planned for U.S. Southeast

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:45:00 EST

Genetic engineering is coming to the forests.

While the practice of splicing foreign DNA into food crops has become common in corn and soy, few companies or researchers have dared to apply genetic engineering to plants that provide an essential strut of the U.S. economy, trees.

[More]

United States - Genetic engineering - Maize - Genetics - Science and Technology

The space shuttle's 2009 mission to Hubble: Coming soon to a theater near you

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST

NEW YORK--Back in May 2009 two of the most iconic entities in space science and exploration came together--literally--in the final scheduled servicing mission of the space shuttle to the Hubble Space Telescope. The astronauts of space shuttle Atlantis plucked Hubble from orbit and in the course of five spacewalks dramatically revitalized the 19-year-old observatory, which had been limping along for some time. [More]

Hubble Space Telescope - Space Shuttle - Space Shuttle Atlantis - Space - Astronaut

What Might Cause a Gas Pedal to Become Stuck?

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:00:00 EST

During the past few days, Toyota Motor Corp. , has taken the unprecedented step of halting sales in the U.S., Europe and China of some of its most popular car and truck models. The reason: potential defects that cause the vehicles to speed up without warning and run out of control. The move follows a huge (and growing) recall of older Toyota vehicles last week. Safety Research and Strategies , based in Rehoboth, Mass., has reportedly implicated the sudden unintended acceleration problem to 2,274 incidents in Toyota vehicles, causing 275 crashes and at least 18 fatalities since 1999.