Fortnightly Science News Digest - 15/08/12

NASA's Curiosity rover landed safely on Mars grounds:  on the 5th of August, 10:31pm PDT, after 7 minutes of terror, the newest NASA's jewel safely landed on the Mars surface. The landing itself was already a big mission and a show of the finest engineering, as the delicate equipment inside the capsule approaching Mars needed to decelerate from 21,000 kph to 0 kph without crashing on the ground. This required different systems to make the landing safe, but everything went well and the rover already sent the first high-resolution pictures from the red planet. The mission is one of NASA's biggest on Mars, due to its size and the funds spent on it. Its aim is to determine whether Mars hosted life once (or still!). The mission will last 2 years, but the plutonium on board Curiosity can provide energy up to 14 years. Hopefully, it will serve as well as Spirit.

Virtual sensation comes closer:  scientists at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign experimented a new device which could recreate virtual sensory touch using an electronic "fingertip". The device would consist of a silicon hollow tube to be placed around the fingers with a circuit inside which could provide electrical stimuli to the fingertips simulating sensation. These circuits were built only on flat surfaces, making impossible to give a full sensory experience. The new study is experimenting and opening the way to provide sensations such as temperature, pressure and texture. The potential applications are variate, the first being giving sensation back to people who have lost it due to burnt skin.

Triumph expression is universally recognized:  having seen many, recently thanks to London 2012, a study suggest that the expression of olympic triumph is an expression which is universally recognized, next to anger and happiness. Psychologists noted that it is present in cultures which have nothing in common and are different on many grounds.

The Ultimate guide to install a broadband wireless dongle on Linux

Yet another mobile broadband dongle is not working out of the box on your beloved Linux distribution.

If you are new to Linux, this might be one of the most annoying problems you will face, as there is a sea of different kinds of these internet dongles and they usually all require different drivers to be detected.

Fortunately, as almost every single wireless broadband dongle user seeks for help on Linux forums for his particular hardware, there is lot of help around from which you can guess and work out what is your problem.
But this makes the search messy, as often beginners get easily lost and reading discontinue posts on what to do is sometimes more difficult than trying to work out a solution on your own.


Check out the post on my other forum about Linux:

http://www.greplinux.net/2012/07/everything-you-need-to-know-about.html

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 30/07/12

Most powerful laser blast achieved:  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a fusion research laboratory, blasted their fuel pellet with the most powerful laser beam attained in history. The laboratory, holding already the record for the biggest and most powerful laser, generated 300 trillion watts of power. The technique used by the laboratory is firing 192 lasers within a few trillionths of a second onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target in order to reach pressures, inside the pellet, high enough to generate fusion. This would release an enormous amount of energy, which is cleaner than fission. Although we can already make fusion happen, the real problem in the fusion energy research is to take useful energy from it. Nobody managed yet to do it, but scientists at LLNL hope to reach a break-even point (in which energy expenditure to fire the lasers equals energy income from fusion) by the end of the year.


Bacteria consumes waste and produces energy:  A new microbial is capable of consuming organic waste and produce energy at the same time. The microbial consumes waste and an energetic potential is the end product. This technique constitutes about 2% of annual electrical American power consumption, but most of the energy produced is used to power the facilities. This is not a problem as the microbial still work on consuming waste. Unfortunately there are limits for these bacteria, as only organic waste can be consumed.


Furthest spiral galaxy discovered:  Hubble spots a new furthest spiral galaxy. About two-thirds of bright galaxies discovered is spiral. When astronomers at the university of Toronto discovered it, they immediately thought of an error, being 10.7 billion light-years distant from Earth. The distance was calculated from the light-shift and that puts the galaxy to an astounding age of 3 billion years after the Big Bang. The age of the universe now is around 14 billion years and that would make this galaxy the earliest spiral galaxy every found.