Hasta La Gadget!

NASA is determined to bring the final frontier closer than ever — or at least a small, photographic slice of it. Using NASA’s Swift satellite, astrophysicists at Goddard Space Flight Center and Pennsylvania State University were able to create a stunningly detailed survey of the two galaxies closest to us: the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. The 160-megapixel image was painstakingly stitched together using thousands of smaller photographs captured with Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope. Rendering the galaxies in UV wavelengths allows researchers to study details unseen in visible light images, like individual stars surrounding the Tarantula Nebula in the LMC (the large pink cluster in the photo above). This high-res mosaic provides ample opportunity to study the life cycles of stars, from birth to death, in detail astrophysicists could previously only dream about. Fancy a tour? Check out the video after the break — or journey on past the source link to download the 457MB TIFF.

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Source: NASA

Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days.

We’ve not had a week quite as exciting as this in… well, weeks! Not only has a team of paleontologists discovered mammoth remains with liquid blood, there’s good news for future generations who’d rather put their feet up (while hiding from mammoths, we assume). This is alt-week.

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Currently up for $50,000 in funding on Kickstarter, the Wheelharp delivers the sounds of a chamber string orchestra via a keyboard and a full chromatic set of real strings. Oh, and it’s pretty much the most striking instrument we’ve ever seen. Developed by Los Angeles-based Antiquity Music, the device reacts to a user’s press of the keys by moving a corresponding string to a rotating wheel with an edge that bows the string. The instrument gives the player plenty of controls; the right pedal controls wheel speed, while the left mans the strings’ damper system.

Though an early version was demoed at NAMM this year, the Wheelharp is currently in R&D mode, and Antiquity plans to put much of the Kickstarter money toward researching the optimal string selection. Hit up the source link to hear the instrument in action. Just don’t get too excited; the instrument will retail for a cool $12,500 — or a slightly more palatable $10,000 through the crowdfunding site.

Filed under: Misc, Peripherals, Alt

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Via: Laughing Squid

Source: The Wheelharp (Kickstarter)

While we’ve learned that radiation levels on Mars are safe for humans, actually getting there in the first place remains a problem. Recent results from Curiosity‘s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) reveal that exposure even while safely ensconced inside a protected spacecraft is dangerously high. Explorers would be bombarded with 466 milliSieverts of high-energy galactic cosmic rays and solar particles during the 253-day transit and the same coming back, with total levels that could exceed NASA’s career radiation limit for astronauts. “In terms of accumulated dose, it’s like getting a whole-body CT scan once every five or six days,” said Cary Zeitlin, a principal scientist from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) who’s the lead author of the findings. A manned Mars voyage isn’t completely out of the question, but it does mean better shielding is necessary before such a trip — much less a future colony — becomes a reality.

Filed under: Robots, Science, Alt

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Source: NASA

Calling a clock the most accurate ever may sound like hyperbole, but physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado have built a pair of devices that can claim that title. The team used an optical lattice to address an issue that plagues atomic clockmakers: constantly shifting frequencies that negatively impact the accuracy of their measurements. For example, a single second can be defined by the frequency of light emitted by an atom when electrons jump from one state to the next, but those frequencies change as the atom moves. The optical lattice essentially suspends atoms to minimize the Doppler effect produced by that movement. By combining the lattice with the element ytterbium, the group was able to create a device that measures time with a precision of one part in 10¹⁸. To put that into perspective, Andrew Ludlow, one of the paper’s authors, said, “A measurement at the 10¹⁸ fractional level is equivalent to specifying the age of the known universe to a precision of less than one second.” To read more about the team’s work, you can find the full PDF at the source.

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Via: MIT Technology Review, Gizmodo

Source: Cornell University Library (PDF)