New Software Could Smooth Supercomputing Speed Bumps

ONE SIZE DOESN'T FIT ALL: Researchers are increasingly turning to computers powered by a combination of graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units (CPUs), but they're looking for a better way to write software for these systems. © FOTOIE, VIA ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

From Scientific American:

Researchers turn to the Open Computing Language as a way to get graphics and general-purpose computer processors on the same page for more powerful number crunching

Supercomputers have long been an indispensable, albeit expensive, tool for researchers who need to make sense of vast amounts of data. One way that researchers have begun to make high-speed computing more powerful and also more affordable is to build systems that split up workloads among fast, highly parallel graphics processing units (GPUs) and general-purpose central processing units (CPUs).

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The Dissection: A Home Electric Meter

Electric Meter An unsuspecting electric meter, waiting to be dissected. Vin Marshall

From Popular Science:

A peek inside the simple gears and complicated math that make up one of the coolest devices in your house.

You remember calculus, right? In a time before mechanized computing was performed by computers, complex (or sometimes just clever) machines were used to automate calculations. One example that has always impressed and fascinated me is the wheel-and-disk integrator, a simple machine capable of solving the calculus equations you labored over in high school without breaking a sweat. While this concept was used most impressively in Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, an analog computer built in 1931, the chances are good that you've seen one in a more mundane application around your house: the power meter. Click on the photo gallery to see inside one and how it works, and follow the jump for more in-depth electro-geekery.

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Digital Rosetta Stone For Digital Storage For 1000 years

From The Next Big Future:

Tadahiro Kuroda, an electrical engineering professor at Keio University in Japan, has invented what he calls a "Digital Rosetta Stone," a wireless memory chip sealed in silicon that he says can store data for 1,000 years.

Currently long term data storage requires: Data typically has to be put on new storage systems every 20 years or less for it to be accessible. The digital migration costs time and money. Storing and maintaining a digital master of a very high-resolution movie, for example, costs $12,500 a year; archiving a standard film costs $1,000 a year.

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Exact Date Pinned To Great Pyramid's Construction?

The setting sun casts a golden hue over the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt in an undated picture. Construction of the Great Pyramid (right), the tomb of the pharaoh Khufu, started on August 23, 2470 B.C., according to controversial new research announced in August 2009. Photograph by Kenneth Garrett/NGS

From National Geographic:

The Egyptians started building the Great Pyramid of Giza on August 23, 2470 B.C., according to controversial new research that attempts to place an exact date on the start of the ancient construction project.

A team of Egyptian researchers arrived at the date based on calculations of historical appearances of the star Sothis—today called Sirius.

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More Than 4735 Deaths So Far From H1N1 Flu

Shortage Of Shots As More Kids Die Of Swine Flu -- MSNBC

CDC: H1N1 virus causing unprecedented number of infections for early fall

WASHINGTON - Even as swine flu infections are causing an unprecedented amount of illness for this time of year — and a growing number of deaths, particularly among children — supplies of vaccine to protect against it will be delayed, government health officials said Friday.

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200,000-Year-Old Cut Of Meat: Archaeologists Shed Light On Life, Diet And Society Before The Delicatessen

A bone from the Qesem Cave showing irregular cutmarks. (Credit: Photo by Dr. Mary Stiner)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 15, 2009) — Contestants on TV shows like Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen know that their meat-cutting skills will be scrutinized by a panel of unforgiving judges. Now, new archaeological evidence is getting the same scrutiny by scientists at Tel Aviv University and the University of Arizona.

Their research is providing new clues about how, where and when our communal habits of butchering meat developed, and they're changing the way anthropologists, zoologists and archaeologists think about our evolutionary development, economics and social behaviors through the millennia.

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Small Asteroid to Fly Past Earth Tonight

From Live Science:

A small asteroid will buzz the Earth late Friday EDT (early Saturday GMT), flying just inside the orbit of the moon. It should pass safely by our home planet, according to a crack team of NASA space rock trackers.

The space rock, named 2009 TM8, was just discovered Thursday by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona. It will get within 216,000 miles (348,000 km) of Earth when it zooms by at a speed of about 18,163 mph (29,232 kph).

"That's slightly closer than the orbit of our moon," NASA's Asteroid Watch team said Friday via Twitter.

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Remembering The Man Who Made Jet Fighters Possible

Richard T. Whitcomb solved a problem that had bedeviled aviation engineers, leading to supersonic flight. He died Tuesday at age 88. NASA

He Sparked Supersonic Flight With A Coke Bottle And File -- Wall Street Journal

Richard T. Whitcomb dreamed up techniques that made supersonic flight possible and innovations that endure on passenger jets today.

Mr. Whitcomb, who died Oct. 13 at age 88, solved a problem that had bedeviled aviation engineers, whose designs couldn't achieve supersonic flight even though they seemed to have enough power. Increased wind resistance at speeds approaching the speed of sound was the problem. Engineers took to calling it the "sound barrier."

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My Comment: We have gone a long way since his techniques made supersonic flight possible .... but he was the first to dream of the impossible becoming possible.

The Moon Belongs To No One – Yet

Making the moon mine (Image: View China Photo/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

LAST week, NASA bombed the moon. Or rather, it crashed its Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite into the moon's south pole in a bid to discover reserves of water and other resources.

This was the latest in a veritable flurry of moon missions: between 2007 and 2011 there will have been eight: one from Japan, two from China, one from India, one from Russia and three from the US.

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LHC Gets Colder Than Deep Space

The giant Atlas detector will search for hints of the elusive Higgs boson particle

From The BBC:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has once again become one of the coldest places in the Universe.

All eight sectors of the LHC have now been cooled to their operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.

The large magnets that bend particle beams around the LHC are kept at this frigid temperature using liquid helium.

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How Net Activity Boosted 'Paranormal Activity'

From San Francisco Chronicle:

Fueled by a grassroots Internet campaign that included a "Tweet Your Scream" promotion using Twitter, a low-budget horror film titled "Paranormal Activity" has become a surprise box office hit.

Meanwhile, a more anticipated movie, "Where the Wild Things Are," gained 871,000 fans on its Facebook page last week and now has more than 1.5 million eager devotees even before the film hits screens today.

And the official Twitter account promoting next month's sequel to the romantic vampire movie "Twilight" went live Monday and bit into more than 79,000 followers by Thursday. Its Facebook page already had 3.8 million fans.

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Cheetah, Gecko And Spiders Inspire Robotic Designs

From Gadget Lab:

A cheetah can run faster than any other animal. A gecko’s feet can stick to almost any surface without using liquids or surface tension. And some roaches scurry at nearly 50 times their body length in one second, which, scaled up to human levels, can be around 200 miles an hour.

The wonders of the animal kingdom are not just for fans of National Geographic. Robotic designer Sangbae Kim, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to understand how he can take some of the mechanisms animals use and replicate them in robots.

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Stormy Times For Cloud Computing?

From Times Online:

Concern over data loss and legal uncertainty may delay the development of cloud computing, experts warned on Monday.

Cloud computing involves the storage of data online, rather than on locally networked servers or machines. The best known services are provided by Google and Microsoft.

Last weekend, Microsoft in the United States was forced to admit that it had irretrievably lost all online data belonging to owners of the T-Mobile Sidekick, a smartphone that backs up its data online, in the cloud.

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British Men Have More Stamina In Bed Than Foreigners, Study Finds

British men last longer in bed than their foreign counterparts, a study has found
Photo: GETTY IMAGES

From The Telegraph:

British men have more stamina between the sheets than their foreign counterparts – lasting just 10 minutes, a study has found.

Researchers in Holland measured the sexual performance of nearly 500 men from five countries against the clock.

They found that British men had sex for 10 minutes on average before reaching an orgasm.

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Andromeda Galaxy Captured In Crystal Clear Detail By Nasa's Swift Satellite

The Swift image has revealed new features not seen in previous composites of M31 (pictured)

From The Daily Mail:

Nasa's Swift satellite has captured the highest-resolution view of our neighbouring galaxy Andromeda.

Also known as M31, it contains an incredible one trillion stars and is the largest galaxy in our small section of the Universe.

Swift, which usually searches for distant cosmic explosions, turned its incredibly powerful ultraviolet telescope onto our celestial neighbour to achieve the shot.

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Giant Impact Near India -- Not Mexico -- May Have Doomed Dinosaurs

Three-dimensional reconstruction of the submerged Shiva crater (~500 km diameter) at the Mumbai Offshore Basin, western shelf of India from different cross-sectional and geophysical data. The overlying 4.3-mile-tick Cenozoic strata and water column were removed to show the morphology of the crater. (Credit: Image courtesy of Geological Society Of America)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 15, 2009) — A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.

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Monkey Drumming Suggests The Origin Of Music

An illustration of a rhesus macaque drumming with cage doors.
Credit: K. Lamberty, PNAS.

From Live Science:

When monkeys drum, they activate brain networks linked with communication, new findings that suggest a common origin of primate vocal and nonvocal communication systems and shed light on the origins of language and music.

In the wild, monkeys known as macaques drum by shaking branches or thumping on dead logs. Similar behavior has been seen in non-human primates — for instance, gorillas beat their chests and clap their hands, while chimpanzees drum on tree buttresses.

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Atlantic Salmon Shortage's Ripple Effect

Watch CBS News Videos Online

From CBS News:

(CBS) In Chile's northern Patagonia, in channels sheltered by the Andes Mountains, the salmon are dying, CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports.

At fish farms, divers check for signs of a waterborne virus called ISA: Infectious Salmon Anemia.

Harmless to humans and deadly to Atlantic salmon, it's the mostly popular fresh fish to eat for American consumers.

ISA has killed millions of salmon in Chile.

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Rocking On With Hot Rocks Geothermal Energy

From NOVA:

The world is getting hotter. This is because of the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due mainly to our excessive burning of fossil fuels. We burn them for the energy that is needed increasingly in our daily life – to drive to school, cool ourselves on hot summer days, blow-dry our hair and listen to our music. The resulting greenhouse gases trap radiation from the sun, preventing it from escaping back into space, causing the planet’s temperature to rise. But not all of the planet’s heat comes from the Sun; some of it is within the Earth; and rather than causing global warming it could help to wean us off fossil fuels.

This heat, geothermal energy, lies in abundance beneath our feet. If the energy stored in hot rocks inside the Earth could be tapped and used instead of fossil fuels, it could help to reduce the threat of climate change.

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20 Years After The Bay Area Quake: Are We Better Prepared?

Photo: Repair crews in Oakland, Calif., examine damage to the Cypress Structure during the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. Dave Bartruff / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

The San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics were just about to start Game 3 of the 1989 World Series on Oct. 17 when the shaking began. ABC play-by-play announcer Al Michaels managed to tell viewers, "We're having an earth—" before the signal went dead. The temblor was brief — just 15 seconds — but the damage caused by the 6.9-magnitude quake was impressive. It killed 63 people, injured thousands and caused $7 billion worth of damage throughout California's Bay Area, including major destruction to the Oakland Bay Bridge. "It was a good sized shock," says Peter Yanev, chairman of Risk Solutions International and the author of Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country.

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