That’s exactly what Tammabattula has created. The only catch is that the picture needs to come from a 3D camera. “All 3D printers require the item to be made from an intricate and complicated digital wireframe file. Naturally, you need a great deal of technical knowledge in order to produce these. My invention does away with this, instead printing directly from a photograph, by means of a 3D camera,” he said in a press release.

His creation has not yet been deployed in a commercial product, but he is already working on making it accessible to operations within the Indian government. He admits the idea seems crazy, and goes beyond what almost anyone else in this industry has tried to achieve, but he says, “It just goes to show what can be done when you take an existing technology and add a contribution that takes it to the next level.”

These old school mainframe computers roughly the size of a refrigerator have been replaced by smaller and cheaper Linux and UNIX systems that are also faster and easier to manage. These mainframe computers certainly served an important role in NASA’s early space exploration programs. NASA is calling the retirement of its last Z9 the end of an era.

NASA doesn’t mention what it will do with all the retired computer hardware. I would imagine the last Z9 would end up being sold off in some government auction. Apparently, the mainframe had been kept operating at NASA to support applications that NASA knew would eventually be retired. Once those applications were retired, there was no need to continue to maintain the Z9 mainframe.

This Hover Board, for those of you unaware, first appeared in the science fiction comedy action movie Back to the Future: Part II with Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd. In that movie it was a push-scooter-like toy which, once the character Marty McFly popped the bar off, became the greatest hovering skateboard in this history of future visions. This release will “glide” over most surfaces, and will be “movie accurate” but will not float over the ground like the film quite yet — Mattel has noted that it’s not quite 2015 yet, of course. Mattel’s press release reads like this:

Back to the Future Hover Board: Finally! This totally awesome 1:1 replica of the hover board from the BTTF 2 and BTTF 3 films includes multiple whooshing sounds and will glide over most surfaces (does not actually “hover” – check back in 2015 for that feature). We’ll be taking orders for it March 1 – March 20, 2012, and the final product will be shipped around November/December 2012. Because this is such a high-cost item, there will be a minimum number of orders required to go into production. If we don’t receive the minimum orders, won’t go into production and customers will not be charged. The price will be announced later this month. (Note: Hover board does not work on water.)

There are a couple of images released for this beast already, both showing off the spot where the front handle was ripped out by Marty in the movie – so we’re looking at quat might be the closest thing to the real deal thus far. You can see a poster from Toy Fair 2012 photographed by ToyArk in the gallery below with a small image of the bottom of the board as well as several slightly larger images of the board from MattyCollector who seem to be the only group on earth with a close-up view of the board thus far. Here’s hoping for more action soon!

The exact point in space that NASA is investigating is known as EML-2, which is near the lunar far side and being investigated as the leading option. NASA hopes that EML-2 could serve as a sort of gateway for exploring other destinations such as the moon, asteroids, and Mars. Some of the foundation elements according to NASA would be the planned heavy lift rocket called the Space Lunch System and the Orion crew capsule.

NASA plans for the station to be a international participation solution along the lines of the ISS. There’s no indication at this point of if NASA has the budget or the inclination to actually take on this project. NASA must have some sort of idea that the project would work at some point in the future to even be considering it. Interestingly, should the EML-2 station come to be it would be the longest distance from Earth humans have traveled.

[via Space.com]

That satellite is designed for high-accuracy laser measurements to test aspects of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The spacecraft is set to launch at 10:00 GMT from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. The Vega rocket is also packed with sensors to monitor all aspects of its first flight, though sensors are important if the first flight happens to fail. The data will be used to determine what caused the failure so it can be addressed.

The rocket will be used to launch satellites that way less than 2.5 tons each. The rocket has four stages with the first three burning solid fuel and the fourth stage using a liquid fuel allowing the rocket to be stopped and started repeatedly to achieve precise orbital insertions. BBC reports that the failure rate for maiden launches of new rocket systems is 58%. In exchange for taking this big risk with the satellite payloads, all the organizations that have satellites on the rocket for the maiden flight are getting the ride for free.

[via BBC]

We may not be able to beam up Scotty or use the force on planet Earth just yet, but this instance of science fiction turning into real science is just as exciting. So with the visor over your head, what you see is exactly what the robot sees. Sensors in the robot, named Telesar V, can also relay sound. And as for the gloves, well they’re lined with semiconductors and tiny motors to relay sensations of heat or texture.

So, yes, in addition to seeing and hearing exactly what Telesar V sees and hears, you can also feel what he feels. So far, though, there are no plans to send the little robotic buddy to a distant planet filled with Telesar cousins so humans can try to blend in and understand the alien population. What professor Susumu Tachi, who designed the bot, wants to use it for is to examine disaster areas that may be unsafe or impossible for humans to navigate. Obviously it was partially inspired by the Japanese earthquake and nuclear disaster last year.

[via Time]

The video was allegedly shot by some sort of government-employed engineer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia. The man who posted the video is Michael Cohen. The video is very brief and very blurry. I say that no further than where the person shooting video is standing from the creature crossing the river, the video shooter would’ve clearly been able to see what sort of an animal it was.

It looks to me like some sort of brown bear trotting across the water with a large fish flopping around, hanging from its mouth. It appears in the video the section that is supposed to be the “trunk” is actually a much lighter color than the rest of the animal. Watch the video for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments.

[via MSNBC]

The operation took place in Europe, with a team of medical professionals from Belgium and the Netherlands involved in the groundbreaking procedure. They used a 3D model of her lower mandible and printed it out using titanium. Upon the successful printing process, the “bone” was sprayed with a compound that made it look and feel more like a real part of a human body. While 3D printing has been used in limited capacity in medical procedures before, never had there been an attempt to use the technology to replace an entire jaw.

This is without a doubt one of the most remarkable uses of 3D printing to date. The still-niche industry is poised to bring monumental changes not only to medicine but to production, manufacturing, and personal consumption. It is even possible to print more than half of the components required for a 3D printer, from a 3D printer (it’s the rest of the printer that’s a bit more difficult). As for the 83-year-old patient, she was able to speak and swallow normally just one day after the surgery, and now has a perfectly functioning mouth.

[via Forbes]

The stunt was announced on February 6 and the window to execute opens in July. The stunt will take place somewhere in New Mexico. To say the stunt is extreme would be a massive understatement. The air temperature 23 miles above the Earth’s surface is a frosty -70°F. The stunt team has been testing and developing techniques needed for safety.

Baumgartner will wear a special custom-made spacesuit that was designed to survive a supersonic flight without an aircraft. Baumgartner hopes to become the first parachutist to break the sound barrier by plummeting to earth at 760 mph.

“Red Bull Stratos is testing new equipment and developing the procedures for inhabiting such high altitudes as well as enduring such extreme acceleration,” Dr. Jonathan Clark, team medical director, said. “The aim is to improve the safety for space professionals as well as potential space tourists.”

[via Fox News]

According to a team member the new process allows the recording of terabytes of information each second, which is hundreds of times faster than the storage technology in use today. In a conventional hard drive an external magnetic field is applied to magnetic medium such as a spinning disc inside a traditional HDD. With the new method, the researchers use a short pulse of heat.

That heat pulse is sufficient to invert the magnetic poles on magnetic medium. That reversal of magnetic poles is all that is needed to make the positive or negative required for binary code. There is no indication of when this sort of hardware may make it to market or how much storage devices based on this technology would cost.

York University physicist Thomas Ostler said, “Instead of using a magnetic field to record information on a magnetic medium, we harnessed much stronger internal forces and recorded information using only heat.”

“This revolutionary method allows the recording of terabytes — thousands of gigabytes — of information per second, hundreds of times faster than present hard-drive technology. As there is no need for a magnetic field, there is also less energy consumption.”

[via The Engineer]

This first entry also happens to look like a Death Star and will be capable of 2 miles of live video streaming as well as seeing a tree so it does not bonk directly in to it. Have a peek at the demonstration video for the GremLion here, and try not to freak out too much over how incomplete it still is at the moment:

Next there’s the X-MAUS, a quad-copter that is able to unfold itself after it’s taken off so that it can fly as an airplane for more efficient movement. This model appears very much to be an erector-set constructed piece made with styrofoam and some gears that allow it to transform into a superhero on the fly.

Then there’s the QuadShot fro TU Delft, this one again appearing to come straight out of Star Wars, this time in the form of a B-Wing. These machines show up in Return of the Jedi, if you’d like to know, but they’re certainly not the inspiration for the QuadShot, right? These models and a whole lot more will continue the competition through the coming weeks and the whole thing will come to an end sometime this Summer!

[via ieee spectrum]

There’s been a leak of the omnipotent colorway everyone always seems to want, white, for the phone that’s coming down to crush us all: Nokia Lumia 900. The entire Canon PowerShot range has been overhauled to include Wifi, waterproofing, GPS, and a whole lot more. The titan known as Skyrim has been brought to a whole new level with the Skyrim Creation Kit for your PC. And if that weren’t enough, you’ll be able to play Skyrim on no less than a brand new Xbox 360 Kinect Star Wars kit starting on the 3rd of April!

There will be no Samsung Galaxy S III release in March. Verizon will be rebooting their double data promotion soon. It’s time to get giddy with Windows 8 gaming as its own line-up is revealed. The Apple iTV rumors continue, and HTC HERO FORCE is not the name for the studio HTC has created for its hero devices in 2012 – but I wish it was!

The robot, named da Vinci, was employed at the San Anotonio Methodist Hospital. Dr. Nathan Hales performed the surgery, which involves inserting the tiny robot into the patient’s mouth and then remotely controlling it with a sophisticated computer terminal. He said instead of being admitted to the hospital for 7-10 days, the patient will likely be ready to leave in as little as three days.

In addition, she was able to eat and drink almost as normal within the next day. Patients of traditional throat cancer surgeries have to wait for up to a week before that’s possible. “As a head and neck surgeon, having one more tool or one more method that we can address these cancers, it’s advantageous for all of us. It gives us one more way to provide hope and help for patients,” Hales said.

[via KENS]

This program started in the 1970′s where it currently still resides at Voxtok Station, it being a simple drilling mission until 1996 when these Russian specialists along with their British counterparts discovered the lake. With sonar and satellite imaging, it was discovered that this lake was directly under the drill site and that it could be one of the world’s largest freshwater reservoirs. This lake is right around the size of Lake Ontario and is under 3623 meters of ice. RIA Novosti (the Russian news network) reported the following:

“Yesterday our scientists at the Vostok polar station in the Antarctic completed drilling at depths of 3,768 meters and reached the surface of the subglacial lake.” – RIA Novosti

Drilling started in the 1970′s and continued until 1998, just two years after it was discovered that the lake lie below. In 1998 it was feared that the lake would be contaminated by the process being used to drill. In 2003 a bit of technology that allowed the drilling continue was developed in St. Petersburg, and after testing the tech out, the drilling began again in 2005. It is the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute that predicts that the water will be:

“the only giant super-clean water system on the planet. …twice cleaner than double-distilled water.” – RAARI

Now the testing can commence and tiny samples of the water in the lake can be shown to contain all manner of wonderful things. There’s also the possibility that the lake contains absolutely nothing of interest: but we’re betting on the former option. What do you think they’ll find over 3500 meters under the ice and snow and who knows what else?

[via RT, Images via The Earth Institute Columbia University]

The Washington Post reports that the Soyuz spacecraft expected the ferry astronauts to the ISS in March and has ruptured at the welded seams during pressure testing. After the failure of the Soyuz capsule, the mission has been rescheduled to May 15th. The delay will prolong the mission of American astronaut Daniel Burbank and two Russian cosmonauts by 45 days.

The capsule split at the welded seams of the descent module. This is the second delay in six months in swapping out ISS crewmembers. I can’t be the only one that fears the next loss of life in space exploration will be due to faulty Russian equipment. At least, this problem was discovered before the mission started.

[via Washington Post]

If you’ve seen the movie “The Thing,” we know what you’re thinking right now. The parallels are pretty stark. But Lake Vostok probably won’t reveal any sentient alien spacecraft unfortunately. Nevertheless, it is an enormous scientific breakthrough. And the discoveries will not end with Lake Vostok. In fact, this is only the beginning of what could be centuries of work in uncovering newly realized structures in the mysterious continent.

Scientists in the region have confirmed there are more than 200 lakes below the surface of the ice of Antarctica. Lake Vostok, the one that has taken two decades of drilling to reach, is the first one to be explored. Mind blown yet? Scientists say the lakes were originally formed when the land was connected to Australia and have managed to stay liquid because of their proximity to the core of the Earth.

[via Washington Post]

At issue is a Colorado clinic which performs a non-surgical treatment called Regenexx-SD. It’s used for patients who have joint or bone pain, and the process involves using adult stem cells. Other than that, no drugs are used so the clinic has been operating without the stringent restrictions in place by the FDA. But now the FDA is arguing that stem cells, which exist in every living human, are drugs and thus subject to government regulation.

What is particularly cumbersome for the clinic is if the FDA has authority over the procedure, it has to be classified as interstate commerce, which ends up causing a lot of bureaucratic hullabaloo. The next step here is in court, where it will actually be up to the judicial process to decide whether or not something that resides in every human being can be subject to government intervention. How does that make you feel?

[via ANH-USA]

The first images that the crew captured using their sonar equipment showed a long cylinder shaped object spanning about 400m about 60m in diameter. A second sonar pass found a very large disk-like object about 200m away from the original object spied on sonar. The crew of the ship are veterans in finding shipwrecks and seeing things on the ocean floor, and they say that these formations are too big to be part of a shipwreck or to be things that could’ve fallen off of a ship passing by on the surface.

The crew says that this is something worth exploring, but at this point they can’t say what the nature of the objects are, they could well be natural formations on the ocean floor. As intriguing as the find is, there will be no official investigation until more details can be found. The cost of underwater exploration is very high indeed get to the bottom of the sea only to find the formations are mountains or other natural phenomenona is something the recovery team isn’t willing to risk. What do you think these might be? Perhaps, George Lucas is trying to plug the new 3-D Star Wars flicks.

[via JDJournal]

IBEX has observed four separate types of interstellar atoms—hydrogen, oxygen, neon, and helium—which fill the space between stars. They blow across the galaxy as interstellar wind of flowing charged and neutral particles. Researchers discovered that this interstellar wind has much less oxygen atoms relative to neon atoms. The ratio is 74 oxygen atoms to every 20 neon atoms, whereas that ratio is 111 oxygen atoms to 20 neon atoms inside our solar system.

This could mean that our solar system developed in a part of the galaxy that was much more oxygen-rich than where it currently resides or that a lot of oxygen is trapped in interstellar dust grains and unable to move freely through space. Understanding this composition will help scientists understand how our solar system evolved. It’s believed that the big bang initially created hydrogen and helium, while supernova explosions spread heavier elements such as oxygen and neon.

The IBEX orbits at about 200,000 miles above Earth to study the edge of the solar system and to understand the boundary region called the heliosphere. The heliosphere protects our solar system and prevents dangerous cosmic radiation from entering.

[via MMD]

When laser light struck that capsule of gas, x-ray emissions were created. The experiment was led by physicist Nina Rohringer, who works for the Max Planck Society in Germany. Using the short x-ray pulses, the team could capture the fast changes in matter. The laser is important because the faster the pulses and the purer the light created by the laser, the more details the scientist can see in the matter being studied.

According to the researchers, the superfast pulses in the laser allow the first pulse to trigger a change in the sample being studied, and the second pulse can record on the atomic scale any changes that occurred in the matter. The team of researchers plans to tweak the laser even further by studying other gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur in an attempt to create even higher energy and shorter pulses for the x-ray laser.

“X-rays give us a penetrating view into the world of atoms and molecules,” said physicist Nina Rohringer of Germany’s Max Planck Society in a news release last week.

“We envision researchers using this new type of laser for all sorts of interesting things, such as teasing out the details of chemical reactions or watching biological molecules at work,” she said.

[via Mercurynews]

Early Sunday morning specialists at the Russian mission control center that handles the ISS decided to raise the orbit of the space station. The orbit was changed to avoid chunk of debris left over from a Chinese anti-satellite missile test conducted in 2007. The mission controllers felt the chunk of space debris was going to pass too close to the space station for comfort.

The orbit of the ISS was raised by 1.7 km, putting the station at an orbit 391.6 km above the surface of the earth. The orbit change was made using the Zvezda service module’s engines. It took the ISS 64 seconds to change the orbit. The chunk of debris was from the Chinese Fengyun-1C weather satellite the Chinese military targeted with an anti-satellite weapon leaving a massive amount of space debris that spacefaring nations will have to deal with for many, many years to come.

[via SpaceDaily]

The treated seeds themselves aren’t what causes the problem, it’s suggested: instead, it’s how the seeds are planted. Farm machinery used to sew the fields release high concentrations of the insecticides in the waste talc that is exhausted; the clouds are “quite light” and “quite mobile” Christian Krupke, associate professor of entomology and co-author of the Purdue report says, and contain around 700,000 times the dose required to kill a bee.

“This material is so concentrated that even small amounts landing on flowering plants around a field can kill foragers or be transported to the hive in contaminated pollen” Krupke continues. “The fact that these compounds can persist for months or years means that plants growing in these soils can take up these compounds in leaf tissue or pollen.”

Although crops are obviously important, the honeybees do vital work in cross-pollination. In fact, the US Department of Agriculture says they’re worth up to $20bn annually to commercial farming processes. Even reduced amounts of neonicotinoid insecticide dust could still present a problem, with the researchers suggesting the bees exposed, although not killed outright, could be more susceptible to disease and lose their hive honing abilities.

[via ReaderSupportedNews]

The specific date in 2014 has not been confirmed, but we do know a few tidbits about the maiden flight of the Orion capsule. The maiden flight will be an unmanned mission with the rocket carrying the Orion taking off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Orion will make two orbits of the Earth on its first flight. After those two orbits, the Orion capsule will reenter the atmosphere and splash down in the Pacific Ocean where it will be retrieved.

The other tidbit we do know about the mission as of now, is that the Orion will orbit at a distance much higher than the orbit of the ISS. At its zenith, the Orion capsule will be nearly 3700 miles from the Earth’s surface, which is the farthest from Earth that a NASA spacecraft has gone since the early 1970s. Presumably, that high orbit is to keep the Orion capsule out of the way any space debris or important satellites. The test will be conducted to see how heat shields on the spacecraft perform, and whether the craft can survive reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere ahead of any manned missions. NASA is still aiming at 2021 for the first human flight aboard the Orion capsule.

“The beauty about flying in 2014 is that we can learn early if there are problems, so if we find something we really got to fix, we’ve got time before we fly people,” said Mark Geyer, head of the Orion program at NASA.

[via Philly.com]

At times massive solar storms can cause problems on Earth with TV reception, mobile phone signals, and GPS satellites among other things. The upside is that you can get quite the light show. According to a team of experts at the University of Michigan, these massive solar flares from the sun and the corresponding aurora borealis on Earth may continue for the next year or two on a monthly basis. Scientists expect the peak of the sun’s solar flare activity to occur next year, which is part of a normal 11-year cycle for our sun.

The last solar storm peaked on January 24 and was responsible for some disrupted high-frequency radio signals over a two-day period according to scientist Philip Chamberlain, who works on the Solar Observatory Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. We are so far from the sun that each time one of these massive eruptions occurs, we will have at least a day’s notice before the radiation hits the Earth’s atmosphere.

“The solar cycle is increasing, and so we are going to get more storms,” says University of Michigan space weather expert Tamas Gombosi. “Once an eruption happens on the sun, even the biggest ones, we’ll have at least a day’s warning.”

[via USA Today]

The Progress 46 ship lifted off atop a Soyuz rocket from the Central Asian Spaceport called Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan early Tuesday morning local time. It was the first space mission of the year for Russia and the supply ship will arrive late today with a huge amount of cargo onboard. Progress 46 has a total of 2.9 tons of cargo for the 6-man crew of the ISS.

The ship holds 2,050 pounds of fuel, 110 pounds of oxygen and air, 926 pounds of water, and 2,778 pounds of spare parts and other gear. The Progress ships are disposable and burn up in the atmosphere on reentry.

[via MSNBC]

The most interesting of the planetary systems in the newly discovered group is called Kepler-33. This star is bigger and older than our sun. It has five planets and the cool part is that all five of the planets orbit the parent star at a distance closer to that of Mars to the Sun. The planets are all larger than Earth as well ranging from 1.5 times the Earth’s diameter to five times Earth diameter.

At this point, the scientists studying the planets don’t know if they are rocky planets like Earth and Mars or if they are gas giants like Saturn or Jupiter. There are 2,300 other planet candidates that the scientists still need to confirm. Nine of the other newly discovered planetary systems have two planets and one has three with all of those planets orbiting closer to the host planet than Venus to the sun.

[via Telegraph]

If the team is able to hit more than the 215mph mark, they will own the land speed record for the diesel truck classification, including trucks that burn traditional diesel fuel. The first attempt by the Greenspeed team to take the record will be attempted at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The team is using a modified 1998 Chevrolet S-10 truck.

The truck already broke the 98mph record for vegetable oil-fueled vehicles this past November by putting down a top speed of 139mph on a dry lakebed in El Mirage in the Mojave Desert at a Southern California Timing Association Race. The goal of the Greenspeed team is to prove you don’t have to give up performance to go green.

That means you can still see the object that is cloaked. The researchers could cloak the object in the microwave spectrum using a shell made of a plasmonic material. The shell creates a “photo negative” of the object that is being cloaked and cancels it out. We have heard of cloaking objects in the past, but those cloaks were made of a metamaterials that were laid over an object.

The researchers that created the microwave cloak were able to cloak their object in free space. The team is from the University of Texas at Austin and the object they cloaked was 18cm long. The cloak in this case has to be tailored specifically to the device being hidden. The team says if you substitute a different device using the same cloak, it would not be as effectively hidden.

[via BBC]

Scientists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have used a laser to create insanely high temperatures. The laser used is an X-ray laser, and it was fired at a piece of foil that is thinner than a strand of spider silk. Despite how thin the foil was, the team was able to reach temperatures in the same area as the corona of the sun.

The x-ray laser created a temperature of 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit. The high temperatures were created with rapid pulses from the laser beam and created a material called hot dense matter. Hot dense matter is said to be the same sort of material found deep inside stars and gas giant planets.

[via Wired]

The big point here is that should we find that we’re able to create life without using already living cells (this is were we currently are with cloning), the possibilities will be endless in the fields of chemistry and greater science, not to mention in religious beliefs worldwide. As Devaraj says on the process:

“In our system, we use a sort of primitive catalyst, a very simple metal ion. The reaction itself is completely artificial. There’s no biological equivalent of this chemical reaction. This is how you could have a de novo formation of membranes.” – Devaraj

He also commented on the need for this type of study and what they hope to attain:

“We don’t understand this really fundamental step in our existence, which is how non-living matter went to living matter. So this is a really ripe area to try to understand what knowledge we lack about how that transition might have occurred. That could teach us a lot – even the basic chemical, biological principles that are necessary for life.” – Devaraj

Right now there’s already been scientists who have announced they’ve created a synthetic cell, but they’ve only got an artificial genome with a “hijacked” bacteria cell to work with it. To create a fully artificial life form, there will need to be a union taking place between an info-carrying genome and a 3D structure to hold it. This newest discovery is for the structure, the cell membrane, and can be constructed with essentially just one step.

“It’s trivial and can be done in a day. New people who join the lab can make membranes from day one.” – Devaraj

We’ll see about that, science, we’ll see how awesome your artificial cell pockets are when they’re filled with artificial genomes that aim to destroy the world. It’s inevitable of course, as any science fiction story will tell you.

[via Psysorg]

The time for Discovery to head to the museum collection is coming very soon. Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough has announced that the Discovery will be flown on the back of a Boeing 747 in April to Dulles International Airport. According to Clough, the 747 with the piggybacking space shuttle will make a flyover of Washington on its way to the Smithsonian hanger in north Virginia.

The flyover is set for April 17 according to Clough, but another spokesperson for the museum said that detail has not been fully worked out at this time. The formal welcoming ceremony for the Discovery at the hanger is set for April 19. In the second half of 2012, the Endeavour will make its final voyage to the California Science Center in LA.

[via Washington Post]

The first video you’re going to see is a lovely black and cyan/teal view of the Sun as viewed by the Solar Dynamics Observatory on the 22nd of this month. SDO’s view of what’s called the M8.7 Solar Flare is shown in the 131 Angstrom wavelength, a wavelength commonly used to view nothing less than solar flares on the regular. The flare itself, they note, began on the 22nd of January at 10:38 PM ET, peaked at 10:59 PM that same day, and ended at 11:34 PM.

The next video you may have seen still images of before as they’ve often accompanied stories surrounding the storm this week, it showing the recognizable orange Sun in all its glory. This video was also captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, this time in 304 angstrom. It was with this discovery that the world found that an Earth-directed CME, or Coronal Mass Ejection, was accompanying the flare.

Then from photographers appearing to mostly be in Norway we’ve got the Northern Lights flaring up like wacky waves of colorful fabulousness. Auroras galore from magnussveinsson, Runólfur Hauksson, Harpa Hrund, Sigurjón J. Sigurðsson, and Per Ivar Somby.

NASA also confirmed that there was and is no danger for the astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station as we speak. The CME arrived on Earth at 1500 UT (10 am EST) according to Space Weather, and they’re letting us all know that this could be “a happy day” for aurora watchers everywhere. The chart you’re looking at below is registered at Lofoton, Norway, and shows the CME’s arrival in ground currents outside the laboratory of scientist Rob Stammes.

With this and other Sun-related events, we’d like to assure you that though we’re in no clear and present danger of any kind of destruction of the Earth, it will come someday. For the Sun is not a Mass of Incandescent Gas, it is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma, and we invite you to take part in a learning exercise on the subject. To help us out, here’s They Might Be Giants with their smash hit: Why Does the Sun Really Shine? [This is an update to the original Why Does The Sun Shine? you might be familiar with if you were a fourth grader when their first Science album was released.]

The image at the head of this post comes from our same source, Space Weather, but was submitted by photographer Andy Keen and was taken at the very start of this storm on January 22nd, 2012, up in Northern Lapland, Finland.

[via Space Weather]

According to the scientist, the object is a giant scorpion-like organism that appears to change locations from one photo to the next. Ksanfomaliti describes the alleged bug as a scorpion shaped body, a disc, and a back flap that moves. However, others are disagreeing with Ksanfomaliti. It would seem that the stifling 464C heat on the surface of Venus and the gravity nine times that of the Earth would prohibit life.

Jonathon Hill is a mission planner and research tech working at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University. Hill is responsible for processing the images that are taken on Mars missions. He says that the object the Russian scientist thinks is a scorpion like creature is a mechanical component. Hill bases his assessment off higher-resolution images from Venera 13. He also notes that the same object is shown in photos taken by a different but identical probe that landed nearby called Venera 14.

[via Telegraph]

Some in Russia claim that a strong electromagnetic emission from the Alaskan radar installation could have caused parts of the probe to fail. While Russia has stopped short of officially accusing the US of sabotaging the probe, it has announced that it is investigating the possibility. The US has now came out and denied any link to the failed mission.

The US Department of State went so far as to point out that when asked the US helped Russia try to establish contact with the probe in hopes of salvaging the mission. Russian officials have pointed out that they are considering other causes for the failure, including issues in the engineering of the probe.

“We have seen speculation in the Russian media that foreign interference might have contributed to the failures of several recent Russian space missions,” Department of State spokesperson Jamie Mannina said. “We do not believe there is truth to these reports.”

[via Marsdaily]

What will be hitting the earth is a collection of charged particles that’ll be smashing in at right about 9AM EST, this according to the Space Weather Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA notes that this event will have polar flights here on Earth re-routed in plenty of time to avoid any mishaps. The worst that could happen and has happened in the past is satellite disruption (in orbit) and widespread communications interference. As officials at SpaceWeather.com noted in an alert:

There is little doubt that the cloud is heading in the general direction of Earth. A preliminary inspection of SOHO/STEREO imagery suggests that the CME will deliver a strong glancing blow to Earth’s magnetic field on Jan. 24-25 as it sails mostly north of our planet.” – Space Weather

NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries also spoke directly to Space.com on the astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station:

“The flight surgeons have reviewed the space weather forecasts for the flare and determined that there are no expected adverse effects or actions required to protect the on-orbit crew.” – Humphries

Folks anywhere near a place they’ll be able to see the Northern Lights are asked to take some awesome photos and let the whole world see how cool the sun can be when it has the intergalactic equivalent of a bad bellyache.

[via Space.com]

NASA had originally blocked the short 8-minute film, which Garriott planned to air in independent theaters, on the vague grounds that it was beyond the scope of the agreement Garriott had with the space agency. Garriott was aboard the ISS as a paid civilian back in 2008. The short film had a screenplay written by Tracy Hickman, apparently Hickman co-created the Dragonlance shared universe.

Garriott had wanted to release Apogee of Fear along with a documentary he made about following in his father’s footsteps called Man on a Mission. His father was astronaut Owen Garriott. NASA is now working with Garriott on the film’s release. I wonder if all this blocking of films and auctions by NASA is just it looking to make money off the films and items sold? Could NASAs budget woes mean it needs all the loot it can get? What do you think?

NASA is working with Richard Garriott to facilitate the video’s release. While the project was not part of his original Space Act agreement with NASA, everyone involved had the best of intentions. We hope to resolve the remaining issues expeditiously, and we appreciate Richard’s cooperation and his ongoing efforts to get people excited about the future of space exploration.

[via Wired]

The footage in question appears to have a triangular-shaped craft moving towards us. Also in the footage are Venus and Earth with the triangular shape on the opposite side of the video. The conspiracy theories started to float around wildly when the website for the images and video from the spacecraft was updated with new shots leading to cries of a cover-up.

Generally, NASA scientists leave the conspiracy theorists alone, but this time they decided to debunk the rumors. According to the scientists, the triangular-shaped object is a phenomenon seen frequently. The triangle shape has to do with light reflecting back and forth off the lenses, and mirrors inside the telescope the probes use. Generally, the reflections manifest as triangles or circles of different shapes and sizes. In short, it’s not a UFO. The official explanation is below.

“The answer lies on the exact opposite side of the image,” the scientists wrote. “At the same time as this strange-looking feature starts being visible, the very bright planet Venus enters the [telescopic camera's] field-of-view from the lower left.

“[Venus and the triangle stay in step as they move] This is not a coincidence. The strange-looking geometrical ‘object’ is actually an internal reflection of the planet Venus within the telescope optics. This effect has been seen many times before.”

[via Cristian Science Monitor]

Now we’re taking multiple pieces of a file, telling the computer to see each similar piece as one piece of information, essentially, and sending. As publisher Devin Coldewey so elegantly puts it: instead of sending a music file over to your friend instrument by instrument, you just stack the sounds on top of one another, this resulting in a single file much more complicated than any of the individuals. This can all be simplified, says MIT researchers working to improve this “discrete” Fourier transform.

What they’ve found, or what they’re showing in the paper about to be published on the matter, is that the level of simplification that can be applied to this process can be rather drastic. For example they have an 8×8 block of values (64) in which 57 can be discarded – this happening without visibly affecting the file at hand, the file in this case being an image. What this could mean for our future is some gigantic things, ironically, especially in the fields of mobile computing and home computing – entertainment to the max. Have a peek at the paper as it’s titled now: Nearly Optimal Sparse Fourier Transform written up by Haitham Hassanieh, Piotr Indyk, Dina Katabi, and Eric Price.

[via MIT]

The Senator was more than 3,500 years old when he passed. The bald cypress’ death and collapse happened after its hollowed-out center was affected by a “curious confluence of natural events.” These events may very well, they said, have been started several weeks ago when a lightening strike hit, it then smoldering until combustion occurred only this week. Another idea is that friction caused by buffeting winds made a tiny spark which then erupted into the flames that swallowed our old friend.

This tree was older than Egypt’s Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV,) pre-dated the Trojan War, and popped up right at about the time the Bible says Moses was speaking to the burning bush. Now Longwood’s number 1 attraction is no more. All things must pass, and this market that pre-American residents used as a compass, Calvin Coolidge dedicated a bronze plaque to, and Senator Moses Oscar Overstreet donated 11 surrounding acres to the state as parkland for in 1927, is now collapsed. We hope everyone who got the chance to see this 18-foot wide beast remembers him well!

[via The Daily, image from Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/MCT]