Pretty amazing stuff.

WN: Some say that you have given the UFO motivation for your hacking as a distraction from more nefarious activities.

McKinnon: I was looking before and after 9/11. If I had wanted to distract anyone, I would not have chosen ufology, as this opens me up to ridicule.

That said — I wonder what the status is of his possible pending extradition. I fear that the pleads didn’t help ‘m a bit…

NASA, UFO, Hacker, Gary McKinnon

Finally, no more tinkering with Wine, which doesn’t really enhance stability and stuff….

You can download it here.

Google Earth, Linux

Really, I don’t see anything ‘new’ about this at all — the general concept anyways. Anybody that has ever theorised the possibilities of invisibility must’ve thought about this too (not specifically using some material, but rather using lots of energy for instance).

Nice that these guys have, once again, brought the thing up, together with new theories as to how this could be accomplished in practice, and even give the long-sought-after material a name. But I have yet to see (or not see, really), a proof-of-concept.

And even if total invisibility is possible — what kind of practical use would this have?

Civilian use? I don’t know, I can’t think of anything useful really, other than that one could hide large buildings. Which brings me to the question, who would want to live in something having artificial light shining on you all day? Ah, of course — prisons.

And millitairy use? I doubt it. Although a technique like this could hide mobile rocket-launchers and other types of installations — how can you communicate with these if radio-waves are retracted around it? A wired connection would also give the location away in some way or another.

And thinking of airplanes, how can one hide the trails of condensing water, how can they hide the heat-signature of the exhaust? Anything that moves through matter, affects the surrounding matter, so there will always be something to detect these ‘invisible’ objects.

So in the end, technologies like radar will become obsolete and the army invents something more refined.

I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be a pretty impressive accomplishment if someone did achieve to make something disappear, to the naked eye, but still — I really don’t see how hiding shit would make this world a better place.

Let those researches concentrate on time-travel, so I can go back to before man started messing things up.

Invisibility, Cloaking, Science

Just how efficient? If a car could use this kind of engine, it could theoretically go about a billion miles (1.6 billion km) on a gallon of gas, said Steve Allen of Stanford University in California.

Pretty impressive. Also,

These supermassive black holes are “green” in another way, said Kim Weaver of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center: they appear to limit star formation and galactic sprawl.

The heat coming from the black hole jets is believed to heat up the gas around the galactic center; without this source of heat, the gas would cool down and form new stars, Weaver said.

“This is one way to keep the stars from forming and letting the galaxies grow bigger,” she said.

Nature, Space, Energy

“Animals don’t seem to sense radiation and will occupy an area regardless of the radiation condition,” says radioecologist Sergey Gaschak.

“A lot of birds are nesting inside the sarcophagus,” he adds, referring to the steel and concrete shield erected over the reactor that exploded in 1986.

“Starlings, pigeons, swallows, redstart – I saw nests, and I found eggs.”

There may be plutonium in the zone, but there is no herbicide or pesticide, no industry, no traffic, and marshlands are no longer being drained.

It even appears that the rare species of Przewalski’s horses are even breeding there. (If you check the Wikipedia article, you’ll note its conservation status is criticial.) Incidentally I happened to see a documentary some time ago about Chinese biologists and their breeding-programme to keep this species alive so it’s a good thing they are ‘surviving’.

Amazing eh, nature? It’ll fall back on its feet as long as you keep the humans at bay.

BTW if you never caught this in the past, for a real spooky series of photos check out this tour through the Chernobyl-area by motorbike. It’s pretty impressive and it nicely shows the consequences of the dangers of nuclear energy when things go terribly wrong (which they will, in the end)…

I do think the radiation is bound to have some effect on the genes, negative or positive. For all we know, these species could somehow have now evolved into a more radiation-resistant type.

But I leave that to the real scientists to found out.

Chernobyl, Radiation, Nuclear Energy, Nature

I didn’t have to go through this hassle of re-installing everything. I just upgraded the WINE package and started up Google Earth, using:

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="ole32,usp10,msvcrt=n" wine Google/Google\ Earth/GoogleEarth.exe

As you see, there are some issues with the way fonts are displayed but that doesn’t bother me that much.

Google, Google Earth, Wine, Slackware

Felber’s antigravity discovery solves the two greatest engineering challenges to space travel near the speed of light: identifying an energy source capable of producing the acceleration; and limiting stresses on humans and equipment during rapid acceleration.

So — if true,

“Dr. Felber’s research will revolutionize space flight mechanics by offering an entirely new way to send spacecraft into flight,” said Dr. Eric Davis, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin and STAIF peer reviewer of Felber’s work. “His rigorously tested and truly unique thinking has taken us a huge step forward in making near-speed-of-light space travel safe, possible, and much less costly.”

But not as soon as some would like;

“Based on this research, I expect a mission to accelerate a massive payload to a ‘good fraction of light speed’ will be launched before the end of this century,” said Dr. Felber. “These antigravity solutions of Einstein’s theory can change our view of our ability to travel to the far reaches of our universe.”

So thankfully, most of us won’t be around when mankind will start messing up space — and beyond…

Space, Einstein, Gravitational Field Equation

It took an awful long while before the technology is now finally used!

IT week reports Nantero will soon be shipping DIMMs built with a new technology. It will contain so called carbon nanotubes, dubbed buckytubes:

If you’ve never come across them, carbon nanotubes are extremely small cylinders made up of carbon atoms – they’re about 50,000 times thinner than a human hair.

Although they don’t occur naturally, they have similar properties to setae, which are those tiny hairs on the feet of gecko lizards.

You got to read the whole article to read how it works, but the important part is (emphasis mine):

The coming chips can’t walk up walls, but they can retain information without requiring the near constant electrical refresh cycles associated with current DRAM technologies.

Pretty amazing…

Technology, Nano Technology, Memory, Gecko

According to Scientific American, this 10th planet, dubbed Xena, proves to be bigger than Pluto:

When astronomers announced the discovery of UB313, the so-called tenth planet, a little more than a year ago, they had a hunch it might be bigger than Pluto because of its brightness. But despite several attempts to observe more closely the mysterious object orbiting the sun at a distance of more than 14 billion kilometers, accurate estimates of its size remained elusive. Now German astronomers working in Spain have determined that UB313 has a diameter of roughly 3,000 kilometers–roughly 700 kilometers larger than Pluto’s.

Xena, Planets, Space

German and Dutch nuclear opponents plan to disrupt a consignment of depleted uranium hexafluoride they say is due to run Wednesday, 25 February, from Germany through The Netherlands to Russia. The UF6, a product of the uranium enrichment process, will leave Germany’s only uranium enrichment plant in Gronau, near the Dutch border. The train will run to Rotterdam from where the deadly material will be shipped on to Russia.

The actual route of the shipment from Germany to The Netherlands, from which it will be shipped to Russia.

The question they asked was `Who predicted the 9/11 attacks on New York & World War II?‘

Funny thing is: the thing about 9/11 is totally wrong:

Anyway, quibbling over words is futile, given that Nostradamus didn’t even write the passage. He died in 1566, nearly a hundred years before the date of attribution. The quatrain in question is nowhere to be found in his entire published oeuvre. In a word, it’s a hoax.

More precisely, its attribution to Nostradamus is a hoax. The passage was lifted intact from a Web page (since deleted from the hosting server due to overwhelming post-9/11 traffic) containing an essay written several years ago by college student Neil Marshall entitled “A Critical Analysis of Nostradamus.” Marshall invented the quatrain to demonstrate — quite ironically, in light of its subsequent misuse — how a Nostradamus-like passage can be so cryptically composed as to lend itself to myriad interpretations.

 
See how the media simply assumes something to be true and tries to serve it as fact? Do you realize how easily this could be done with other so-called facts?
 
Anyways, reading some of his quatrains got me thinking — I had learned of Nostradamus before, predicting an anti-christ with a blue turban that would attack on 1994… In the following quatrain:

Mabus then will soon die, there will come
Of people and beasts a horrible rout:
Then suddenly one will see vengeance,
Hundred, hand, thirst, hunger when the comet shall run.

..most people rather read Osama or Saddam in stead of the following explanation:

Contemplating Mabus it occurred to me that, if you turn the “M” upside down and substitute the “a” for an “h,” Mabus is an anagram for W Bush. During the 1980′s many noticed that Ronald Wilson Reagan is numerological 666 (six letters in each name). They point out that Reagan introduced Performer Q, the Hollywood Who’s Who, when President of the Actors Guild, which is constantly maintained at exactly 666 stars (“Parade Magazine,” March 11, 1979). When Governor of California, Reagan introduced the Universal Price Code (UPC) which all contain three sixes, at the beginning, middle and end of each mark, according to “The New Money System” by fundamentalist Christian, Mary Relfe, 1984. The April 30, 1987 “San Francisco Chronicle” ran the headline: “Is 666 St. Cloud a Presidential Address? A Visit to Mr. Reagan’s Neighborhood” (Section B, page 1). The Reagans moved to 666 St. Cloud Drive in 1989 and made headlines again when Nancy had the address changed to 668 to avoid the Antichrist stigma. John’s Revelation, Chapter 13, states that this Antichrist, whose name numbers 666, “will cause all, both rich and poor, to receive a mark with the number of his name in their right hand and between their eyes.” This is called “the image of the beast.”

History is replete with people accusing political foes of being the Antichrist. Yet how could Nostradamus possibly have foreseen “Mabus” being an anagram for the Third Antichrist some 500 years ago?! Was Nostradamus just lucky to have likewise predicted the names and atrocities of Napoleon (“Pau Nay Oloron”) and Hitler (“Hister”)?

The article I refer to has a good conclusion which I also support:

I don’t claim to know the answers. I’ve been working on this article for three months since September 11th and the only thing I can say for sure is that Nostradamus and Orson Welles are extremely fascinating characters. Did they really see the future? Or are tyrants merely force-fulfilling their terrifying visions in order to conquer the world? Only time will tell.

Propaganda, Misinformation, War On Terror, 911, Nostradamus

A team in Switzerland has discovered that most of the small satellite galaxies around the Milky Way’s near-twin, Andromeda, are lined up in a single plane that slices through Andromeda’s spiral disc. Using images from the Hubble space telescope, soon to be decommissioned, the researchers found that 9 of the 14 of Andromeda’s satellites lay on a relatively narrow plane bisecting Andromeda.

From the article: ‘The team believes the plane could have formed in several ways. In one scenario, the galaxies may have fallen towards Andromeda along an invisible filament of dark matter. Computer simulations show these filaments can form a cosmic web along which galaxies flow.

Pretty interesting stuff…
 
Space, Dark Matter, Andromeda, Milky Ways

Similarities seen nine years apart imply something very fundamental is producing a pair of observed frequencies, namely the warping of space and time predicted by Einstein but rarely seen in such detail.
(…)
“The fact that we found the exact same frequency of X-ray oscillations nine years later is likely no coincidence,” said Homan. “The black hole is still singing the same tune. The oscillations are created by a groove hammered into space-time by the black hole. This phenomenon has been suspected for a while, but now we have strong evidence to support it.”

Interesting to see all those (initially theoretical) space-time mysteries being proved and unraffled, slowly but surely.

Space, Time, Einstein, Black Holes

Astronomers have proven the existence of the event horizon, the ‘point of no return’ that surrounds black holes. An MIT and Harvard team said they showed its existence by looking for X-ray bursts from neutron stars and more compact objects thought to be black holes.”

Quite interesting stuff! The article that is referred to from the Slashdot article, can be found here.

Space, Event Horizon, Astrophysics

Quoting Wikipedia,

Redshift may be characterized by the difference between the observed and emitted wavelengths. In astronomy it is customary to refer to the relative change in wavelength, a dimensionless quantity called z and defined by the equation

OK that’s clear — it is about the difference in observed and actual emitted wavelength. Redshift occurs..

..for example, when a light source moves away from an observer in an analogous but not equivalent fashion to a Doppler shift of sound waves from a receding object. Redshift is used as a diagnostic in spectroscopic astrophysics to determine information about the dynamics and kinematics of distant objects. Most famously, redshifts are observed in the spectra from distant galaxies, quasars, and intergalactic gas clouds to increase proportionally with the distance to the object. Astronomers consider this to be one of the major forms of evidence that the universe is expanding, supporting the Big Bang model.

That’s clear as well. But then this image isn’t:

 

It seems obviously assumed that the distant galaxy actually emits the same frequencies as our Sun. There is no way for us to detect, or observe, the actual emitted frequencies. So, detecting a difference between these spectrums is downright impossible. In my humble opinion, the red shift phenomenon doesn’t seem to prove anything, or I’m missing something fundamental here.

Space, Redshift, Einstein

So, when you’re counting down to the New Year, take note of this extra second and start cheering one second later than everybody else.

Don’t forget to reset your watches, too.
 
New Year, Leap Second

Although these elements have also been detected in other places in space, this is the first near Earth-like planets, so this is pretty exciting news….

Space, Planets, Life, Universe

A large object has been found beyond Pluto travelling in an orbit tilted by 47 degrees to most other bodies in the solar system. Astronomers are at a loss to explain why the object’s orbit is so off-kilter while being almost circular.

Researchers led by Lynne Allen at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, first spotted the object in observations made with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in December 2004. Since October 2005, they have made follow-up observations that have revealed the object’s perplexing path.
 

 
Tentatively named 2004 XR190, the object appears to have a diameter of between 500 and 1000 kilometres, making it somewhere between a fifth and nearly half as wide as Pluto. It lies in a vast ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt, most of which orbit in nearly the same plane as Earth.

Space, Planets