Moving people and supplies across the Great White South is treacherous, difficult, and expensive with logistical costs constituting as much as 90 percent of an expedition’s budget—about $125,000 a trip on average. And that’s assuming the convoy isn’t swallowed by an ice crevasse en route. But a new radar-equipped rover could help the National Science Foundation save lives and millions of dollars a year. More »
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days.
Sometimes we wonder, what would we have ended up doing if we didn’t spend our time trawling the web for the week’s best alternative tech stories? We could have been paleontologists, novelists, engineers, or if we were really lucky, worked for Google. Instead, here we are bringing you some of the more colorful tech-tales from the last seven days, which we’re really not complaining about. That said though, at least on this occasion, we got to taste a bit of all the above. This is alt-week.
Filed under: Misc, Science, Alt
Alt-week 9.15.12: The ultimate wind machine, Egyptian Lego and the office of our dreams originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Sep 2012 19:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A quintet of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation have envisioned a new internet architecture, one where features could be purchased à la carte. The proposed framework would allow users to fine tune their experience by choosing from a variety of connection services. Let’s say, for example, that a customer’s connection is fine for browsing the web, but it doesn’t pass muster for streaming content — a service dedicated to video delivery could be added to close the gap. “Ultimately, this should make the internet more flexible and efficient, and will drive innovation among service providers to cater to user needs,” report co-author Rudra Dutta told The Abstract. A piecemeal next-gen web is no easy feat, however, as it would require revamping the web’s infrastructure with new protocols for choosing particular features, completing payments and monitoring network performance. The group’s rough blueprint will be presented at a conference next week, but you can thumb through their short paper at the source.
Filed under: Internet
Researchers propose à la carte internet services, overhaul for web infrastructure originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Aug 2012 07:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Abstract, North Carolina State University | 
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You, sir or ma’am, should probably not get too excited. Chances are, this trans-Pacific 10 Gigabit link won’t do you any good, personally. On the other hand, researchers working together across the oceanic divide have tons to cheer about. The China Education and Research Network, the National Science Foundation and Indiana University worked together with BGI, one of the largest genomics organizations in the world, to christen the connection by transferring 24 Gigabytes of genomic data from Beijing to UC Davis in under 30 seconds. As a benchmark, the same file was sent between the same locations over the regular ol’ Internet and it took over 26 hours. The high-speed link should prove to be a major boon for genetic research and DNA sequencing.
10 Gigabit per-second connection between US and China demoed originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jun 2012 03:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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