What If Biggest Known Solar Storm Hit Today?

This week's largest solar flare is seen in a still from a NASA satellite video. Image courtesy SDO/NASA

Solar Flare: What If Biggest Known Sun Storm Hit Today? -- National Geographic

Repeat of 1859 space-weather event could paralyze modern life, experts say.

A powerful sun storm—associated with the second biggest solar flare of the current 11-year sun cycle—is now hitting Earth, so far with few consequences. But the potentially "severe geomagnetic storm," in NASA's words, could disrupt power grids, radio communications, and GPS as well as spark dazzling auroras.

The storm expected Thursday, though, won't hold a candle to an 1859 space-weather event, scientists say—and it's a good thing too.

If a similar sun storm were to occur in the current day—as it well could—modern life could come to a standstill, they add.

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My Comment: In short .... it's going to be a mess.

Collusion! Apple, Publisher Partners Accused Of Raising E-Book Prices

Justice Department May Sue Apple, Publishers On E-Books -- Reuters

(Reuters) - The Justice Department has warned Apple (AAPL.O) and five major publishers that it plans to sue them, accusing them of colluding to raise the prices of electronic books, a person familiar with the probe said on Thursday.

Several parties have held talks to settle the potential antitrust case, said the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

The five publishers facing possible Justice Department action are Simon & Schuster Inc, a unit of CBS Corp (CBS.N); Lagardere SCA's (LAGA.PA) Hachette Book Group; Pearson Plc's (PSON.L) Penguin Group (USA); Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; and HarperCollins Publishers Inc, a unit of News Corp (NWSA.O).

U.S. and European officials have been investigating whether e-book publishers and Apple fixed prices in the growing electronic book industry, blocking rivals and hurting consumers.

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More News On The Justice Department Investigating Apple Over E-Book Pricing

U.S. Warns Apple, Publishers -- Wall Street Journal
Apple, publishers threatened with Justice lawsuits, report says -- Washington Post
Apple, book publishers facing potential US suit: WSJ -- AFP
DOJ targets Apple and publishers for e-book price fixing -- CNN
Publishers could face legal action over ebook prices -- The Guardian
Government Pressuring Publishers to Adjust Pricing Policy on E-Books -- New York Times
Apple, publishers in DOJ crosshairs over e-book prices -- MSNBC
U.S. reportedly warns Apple, e-book publishers about price-fixing -- L.A. Times
Report: U.S. threatens Apple, book publishers with price collusion suit -- Seattle PI
DOJ Threatens Apple, Book Publishers with Lawsuit Regarding E-Book Sales -- Daily Tech

Dust Devils Caught On Camera On The Martian Surface

Pluming hell: The towering dust devil snakes across the Martian surface

Let's Twist Again: Martian Dust Devil 2,600-Feet Tall caught On Camera -- Daily Mail

* Picture was taken from over 160 miles up by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
A towering dust devil reaching half a mile in height has been pictured swirling across the surface of Mars by Nasa.

The Agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the image with its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on February 16 this year as it passed over the Amazonis Planitia region of the planet.

Despite the atmosphere on Mars being desperately thin – one per cent of Earth’s pressure – the planet's winds are strong enough to produce dramatic events and in the area observed, paths of many previous whirlwinds, or dust devils, are visible as streaks on the dusty surface.

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Air Force X-37B Hits The One Year Mark In Space

Revealed: How America's Secret Space Plane Has Been In Orbit For Over A Year - And No One Knows What It's Doing -- Daily Mail

* The X-37B has been circling the Earth at 17,000mph and was due to land in California in December

The U.S Air Force’s highly secret unmanned space plane was supposed to stay in space for nine months, but it’s now been there for a year and three days – and no one knows what it’s doing.

The experimental craft has been circling Earth at 17,000 miles per hour and was due to land in California in December.

However the mission of the X-37B orbital test vehicle was extended – for unknown reasons.

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Previous Post: U.S. Air Force's Second X-37B Space Plane Marks One Year In Orbit

More News On The X-37B

Air Force space drone's secret mission hits one-year mark -- L.A. Times
Air Force's mysterious space plane survives one year in orbit -- MSNBC/Space.com
A year later, mysterious space plane is still in orbit -- Wired
The Air Force's Mysterious X-37B Spaceplane Celebrates Its First Full Year in Orbit -- Popular Science
Secret Military Mini-Shuttle Marks One Year in Orbit -- Discovery News
US Air Force’s Mysterious Space Plane Has Been In Orbit For A Whole Year -- Gizmodo
What Next for X-37B -- Space Travel

Preparing To Dive To The Deepest Part Of The Ocean

The sub is designed for one person and is fitted with 3D cameras

James Cameron Close To Diving To Deepest Ocean -- BBC

Director James Cameron has said that he is close to diving 11km (seven miles) down to the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific.

He has just successfully completed a test-dive 8km (five miles) down off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

He now hopes to reach the world's deepest point in his one-man submersible in the coming weeks.

Only two people have been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, back in 1960.

Mr Cameron said: "The deep trenches are the last unexplored frontier on our planet, with scientific riches enough to fill 100 years of exploration."

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My Comment: I wish Cameron the best.

Infinite Storage In The Cloud

Infinite Storage In The Cloud -- Kurzweil

Bitcasa has created a new cloud service that promises “infinite storage” in the cloud for Windows and Mac.

Once you install Bitcasa it prompts you to choose which of your folders to “cloudify.” Cloudified folders are uploaded to Bitcasa’s cloud right away and get a Bitcasa logo added to the system tray or Finder.

Any time you save, copy, or paste new files into a cloudified folder they also uploaded. You’ll also be able to access your files from any device, wherever you are, the company says.

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How Western Tech Firms Are Helping Arab Dictators

A computer systems coordinator at Tunisia Television in Tunis / Reuters

Surveillance Inc: How Western Tech Firms Are Helping Arab Dictators -- The Atlantic

As democratic movements spread in the Middle East, governments are cracking down, and that means big business for the companies who help them do it.

Reliance means vulnerability, and the activists and citizen journalists of the Arab uprisings rely heavily on the Internet and mobile technology. They use text messaging to coordinate protests, for example, or social media sites to upload the photos and videos that then make it into mainstream global media. In the first protests in Tunisia, because traditional journalists could not get access, citizen journalists filled in, using YouTube and the live-streaming platform UStream to give the world -- including, for example, the Egyptians and Syrians who later began revolts of their own -- a window into the events there.

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My Comment: Helping governments to bring misery to their people for a few dollars .... there has to be an accounting for this in addition to exposing the companies and the people who are involved in this trade.

Control Dangerous AI Before It Controls Us

A killer robot from the 2009 film "Terminator Salvation" — exactly the type of future we don't want to see. Warner Bros.

Control Dangerous AI Before It Controls Us, One Expert Says -- MSNBC/Innovation

He believes super-intelligent computers could one day threaten humanity's existence

Super-intelligent computers or robots have threatened humanity's existence more than once in science fiction. Such doomsday scenarios could be prevented if humans can create a virtual prison to contain artificial intelligence before it grows dangerously self-aware.

Keeping the artificial intelligence genie trapped in the proverbial bottle could turn an apocalyptic threat into a powerful oracle that solves humanity's problems, said Roman Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. But successful containment requires careful planning so that a clever breed of artificial intelligence cannot simply threaten, bribe, seduce or hack its way to freedom.

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Update: Humanity Must 'Jail' Dangerous AI to Avoid Doom, Expert Says -- Live Science

Communication Technologies Can Operate 1,000 Times More Faster

Credit: © lassedesignen / Fotolia)

Communication Technologies Including Smartphones and Laptops Could Now Be 1,000 Times Faster, New Study Suggests -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Mar. 7, 2012) — Many of the communication tools of today rely on the function of light or, more specifically, on applying information to a light wave. Up until now, studies on electronic and optical devices with materials that are the foundations of modern electronics -- such as radio, TV, and computers -- have generally relied on nonlinear optical effects, producing devices whose bandwidth has been limited to the gigahertz (GHz) frequency region. (Hertz stands for cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon, in this case 1billion cycles).

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My Comment: Faster please.

Search For The 'God Particle' Coming To An End?

Chicago's Tevatron particle accelerator: Analyzing data from some 500 trillion sub-atomic particle collisions designed to emulate conditions right after the Big Bang, scientists at Fermilab outside Chicago produced some 1,000 Higgs sightings over a decade of work.

'End Game' For The Higgs: U.S. Particle Collider Helps Prove Einstein Right With New Sightings Of Elusive 'God Particle' -- Daily Mail

A second particle collider - Chicago's Tevatron - has captured glimpses of the elusive Higgs boson, the ‘God particle’ that would complete Albert Einstein's theory of the universe.

The probability that the particles are not the Higgs, but instead a statistical fluke is now just 1 in 250.

Tevatron's sighting tally with measurements from CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which is to 'turn up' its beams this year to find the particle by Christmas.

'The end game is approaching in the hunt for the Higgs boson,' said Jim Siegrist, Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics.

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More News On The Search For The 'God Particle'

In search for ‘God particle,’ US research confirms Europe’s: No place for Higgs boson to hide -- Washington Post/AP
Data Hint at Hypothetical Particle, Key to Mass in the Universe -- New York Times
Scientists at U.S. lab detect hints of elusive particle -- Reuters
Higgs boson hints multiply in US Tevatron facility data -- BBC
Scientists see 'endgame' for subatomic quest -- MSNBC/Reuters
Strong hints of the Higgs boson from Tevatron particle collider in US -- The Guardian
Hunt for 'God Particle' even closer to conclusion -- The Telegraph
US physicists confirm Higgs finding is near -- AFP
Higgs Boson Finding is Near -- Discovery News
Eureka? Evidence of the Higgs Boson Mounts -- Wired Science
Higgs boson hunt approaching 'end game' say scientists -- Christian Science Monitor
Higgs boson coming into focus, say scientists -- Christian Science Monitor
Are scientists close to uncovering the Higgs boson? -- Christian Science Monitor

Here Comes The Solar Storm

Earth Braces For Biggest Space Storm In Five Years -- Space Daily

A pair of scorching explosions on the Sun's surface is sparking the biggest radiation and geomagnetic storm the Earth has experienced in five years, space weather experts said Wednesday.

The storm, expected to hit Earth early Thursday US time and last through Friday, may disrupt power grids, GPS systems and satellites, and has already forced some airlines to change their routes around the polar regions.

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More News On the Approaching Solar Storm

Biggest Solar Storm In Years Races Toward Earth -- NPR/AP
Biggest solar storm in years races toward Earth, could disrupt power grid, GPS and more -- Washington Post/AP
Solar storms ramp up, take aim at Earth -- Washington Post
Massive solar storm headed toward Earth -- CNET
Fears of disruption as big solar storm set to hit Earth -- BBC
Massive solar storm heading for Earth -- The Guardian
Solar flares erupt from the Sun -- The Telegraph
Massive solar flare ripples sun's surface; storms speed to Earth -- L.A. Times
Major Sun Storm May Supercharge Northern Lights This Week -- Space.com
Will the solar storm disrupt power grids? -- Christian Science Monitor

Apple TV Makes It's Debut

The new Apple TV has a refreshed user interface. Image: Courtesy Apple

Hands-On With the New 1080p Apple TV -- Gadget Lab

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple introduced its new 1080p Apple TV to the world on Wednesday, and we got a brief chance to check out the improved user interface and features for ourselves.

Thanks to its brand-new A5 processor and new software design, the updated Apple TV experience is snappy and intuitive, largely improving on the 2010 version. The new device is capable of delivering 1080p content, and the fresh UI takes full advantage of the fact that you’re probably watching content on a widescreen TV set with large icons and luscious HD images.

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CSN Editor: For more news and article on Apple TV, you can go here or here.

Apple Unveils iPad3

Apple Unveils New iPad With 'Retina' Display -- The Telegraph

Apple has announced its new iPad, which adds an improved display, a faster processor and an upgraded camera to the leading tablet computer.

The new device, named "new iPad", has what Apple calls a "Retina" display, which offers 3.1 million pixels, which is a higher screen resolution than a HDTV.

It also has a 5-megapixel rear camera, which features the same lens technology as Apple's iPhone 4S, and is capable of recording full 1080p HD video.

Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, announced the new iPad at an Apple event in San Francisco. He described the device as the flagship among the company's "post-PC" products.

The new iPad will be released in the UK on Friday, March 16. Apple has not confirmed prices but they are expected to start at £499 - the same prices as the iPad 2.

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CSN Editor: There are thousands of stories and reviews on Apple's new iPad. You can check some of them here, or here.

Supernova Countdown

About 165 years ago, Eta Carinae mysteriously became the second brightest star in the sky. In 20 years, after ejecting more mass than our sun, it unexpectedly faded. N. Smith / J.A. Morse (U. Colorado) et al. / NASA

Supernova Countdown: Giant Star Could Explode Any Day Now -- Time

When the sun finally dies some 5 billion years from now, the end will come quietly, the conclusion of a long, uneventful life. Our star will, in a sense, go flabby, swelling first, releasing its outer layers into space and finally shrinking into the stellar corpse known as a white dwarf.

Things will play out quite differently for a supermassive star like Eta Carinae, which lies 7,500 light-years from Earth. Weighing at least a hundred times as much as our sun, it will go out more like an adolescent suicide bomber, blazing through its nuclear fuel in a mere couple of million years and exploding as a supernova, a blast so violent that its flash will briefly outshine the entire Milky Way. The corpse this kind of cosmic detonation leaves behind is a black hole.

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Soldiers From The Past

Forensic Reconstructions Reveal The Faces Of Civil War Sailors -- Popular Mechanics

Forensic anthropologists have reconstructed the faces of two Union sailors found onboard the USS Monitor, 150 years after the world’s first battle between ironclad warships off the coast of North Carolina.

One-hundred-fifty-year-old ghosts rarely look so detailed.

In 1862, two ironclad warships from opposing sides of the American Civil War blasted each other silly in the Battle of Hampton Roads. Although neither vessel could inflict much damage on the other, the Union’s USS Monitor and the Confederacy’s CSS Virginia opened a new era in naval technology as wooden sailing frigates gave way to armored warships with steam engines. The Monitor, however, didn’t have long to live; it sank in rough seas on December 1862 and sat for more than a century.

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My Comment: It is truly amazing what science can reveal, and looking at the pictures I cannot help but feel that these two fallen sailors are related by family.

A History Of The Parachute

A Brief History Of The Parachute -- Popular Mechanics

One hundred years ago, an Army daredevil completed the first parachute jump from a plane. But the history of the chute goes all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci, and all the way up to today's advanced military air drops.

Base jumpers like Jeb Corliss have nothing on U.S. Army Captain Albert Berry (right, above). The son of a balloonist, Berry grew up jumping out of balloons and dangling from a trapeze bar suspended from a parachute, a common stunt for early 20th century daredevils. But 100 years ago, on March 1, 1912, Berry entered a class of his own when he hopped off the axle of an early Benoist pusher biplane high above a St. Louis army base, and became the first person to jump from an airplane and land by parachute.

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An Interview With Radical Linguist Noam Chomsky

Photo: John Soars/Wikimedia Commons

Discover Interview The Radical Linguist Noam Chomsky -- Discover

For centuries experts held that every language is unique. Then one day in 1956, a young linguistics professor gave a legendary presentation at the Symposium on Information Theory at MIT. He argued that every intelligible sentence conforms not only to the rules of its particular language but to a universal grammar that encompasses all languages. And rather than absorbing language from the environment and learning to communicate by imitation, children are born with the innate capacity to master language, a power imbued in our species by evolution itself. Almost overnight, linguists’ thinking began to shift.

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Can America's Bunker-Busting Bombs Penetrate Iran's Defenses?

Exploding Concrete Wikimedia Commons

Could Iran's Ultra-Tough Concrete Withstand Bunker-Busting Bombs? -- Popular Science

Iran may not impress us with its flying saucer drones, but the country does at least one thing better than anyone else: Make concrete. Iran is in an earthquake zone, and its engineers make some of the world’s toughest building materials, which could conceivably withstand small earthquakes.

Or, as it happens, artificially-induced earth shaking. Like from bombs.

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My Comment: Oh oh .... another uncertainty for the Pentagon (and Israeli) planners to work out a successful plan of action against Iran's protected nuclear facilities.

A Earth - Comet Collision 13,000 Years Ago?

Comet May Have Collided With Earth 13,000 Years Ago -- Live Science

New evidence supports the idea that a huge space rock collided with our planet about 13,000 years ago and broke up in Earth's atmosphere, a new study suggests.

This impact would have been powerful enough to melt the ground, and could have killed off many large mammals and humans. It may even have set off a period of unusual cold called the Younger Dryas that began at that time, researchers say.

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U.S. Air Force's Second X-37B Space Plane Marks One Year In Orbit

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center image shows on-orbit functions for the reusable X-37 space plane, now under the wing of the U.S. Air Force. CREDIT: NASA/MSFC

U.S. Air Force Space Plane Marks One Year In Orbit -- Space Flight

The U.S. Air Force's second X-37B space plane marked one year in orbit Monday, continuing its clandestine mission more than 200 miles above Earth.

The robotic spacecraft's purpose is secret, but Air Force officials acknowledge the vehicle is performing well one year after it blasted off on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket on March 5, 2011.

"We are very pleased with the results of the on-going X-37B experiments," said Lt. Col. Tom McIntyre, X-37B program director in the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office. "The X-37B program is setting the standard for a reusable space plane and, on this one-year orbital milestone, has returned great value on the experimental investment."

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Update: Air Force's Mysterious X-37B Space Plane Survives 1 Year in Orbit -- Space.com

My Comment: The Air Force is saying that they are VERY pleased with the performance of the X-37B .... are planning for a third one .... and .... oh yeah .... everything else is secret so don't bug us.