Hasta La Gadget!

NASA’s Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists claim is the largest gamma-ray burst ever detected, AFP reports. The blast produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said.

“Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts,” NASA astrophysicist Frank Reddy said in the article. “If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don’t stop for anything—they just bore through and that’s why we can see them from enormous distances.”

The visible blast occurred back in September somewhere in the Carina constellation, which is about 12.2 billion light years away. That means that while we may have first heard of it back in September, it actually happened before our own solar system formed.

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is doing better this month after a Martian wind blew away some of the dust that has accumulated on its solar panels, increasing their electrical output, according to NASA. Spirit’s daily energy supply has risen by about 30 watt-hours—defined as the amount of energy used to power a 30 watt light bulb for one hour—from 210 watt-hours to 240. The rover uses about 180 watt-hours per day for basic survival and communications, the report said, so the increase doubles the power available for driving and using instruments to perform science.

“We will be able to use this energy to do significantly more driving,” said Colette Lohr, a rover mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., in a statement. “Our drives have been averaging about 50 minutes, and energy has usually been the limiting factor. We may be able to increase that to drives of an hour and a half.” Both rovers are still operating on the planet after five years. Spirit was the same rover that experienced a temporary glitch a few weeks ago. (Via Slashdot)

Who knew that the solar system was actually full of space dust, instead of being mostly empty? Scientists have determined that our solar system is currently experiencing a cosmic dust storm, with at least three times as much dust passing through compared to just a few years ago, according to Space.com.

“We not only do not know what the stuff is, but we do not know where it is made or how it gets into space,” said Donald York, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago and part of the team working on the problem, in the article.

Where is it all coming from? The scientists cited the double star system HD 44179, which lies in the Red Rectangle 2,300 light-years away, as the culprit. The report said that the increase in dust in our system is due to a periodic weakening of the sun’s magnetic field, and that sometime in the next 10,000 years, we’ll plow through the G-cloud, a region of dust more dense than the one we’re currently sailing through. Good times.

A new brand of finger vein authentication technology called “mofiria” was developed by Sony for incorporation in electronic devices. Not only is the mofiria capable of being used as a security measure for personal computers, it could also be put into smaller portable devices due to its compact size. Unlike fingerprint authentication, this technology relies on the veins inside the finger to recognize an identity and hence, forgery would take a lot more to accomplish.

The CMOS sensor of the mofiria device captures the scattered light in the finger brought about by near-infrared LED shone on the body part. The light is then formed into an image or a pattern that serves as a person’s recognition. The authentication device doesn’t even require the finger to be placed upon it on a certain position because the captured data (that takes around 0.015 second using a computer and 0.25 second on a mobile device) is automatically corrected. That makes mofiria highly-accurate in its given task. Sony is looking at a 2009 commercialization date for the mofiria finger vein authentication technology.

New Mexico-based design firm Ideum today announced the release of a Microsoft Surface-like multi-touch table, the MT Table.

The device features a 50-inch diagonal touchscreen with a high resolution that Microsoft’s table (1280 x 720). The table uses multi-touch Snowflake Software technology for Swedish company ral User Interface (NUI). It also lets developers create their own apps for the hardware using Flash, C/C++/C#, Java, and Python.

It comes loaded with Google Earth, a media viewer, a drawing app, and a 3D model viewer. The table stands 31-inches tall on locking casters and is handicap accessible.

Ideum is developing custom versions of the table for a number of museums, including The Don Harrington Discovery Center in Amarillo, Texas and Vulcan Park and Museum in Birmingham, Alabama.