Dec 05
Those Mexican thieves that stole a truckload of cobalt-60
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Aug 21
Japan’s nuclear agency wants to raise the severity level of the new radioactive water leak
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Apr 11
Think of a random number between one and ten. Most likely, you chose seven—so exactly how random was your choice? Turns out that generating a truly random number is more difficult than you might think—but this video should help you get to grips with the problem. More »
Nov 05
Radioactive Orchestra 2.0 takes the music live, makes sweet photonic melodies (video)
Posted in: Today's Chili 
Sweden’s Kollektivet Livet took a step towards demystifying the invisible energy around us last year through its Radioactive Orchestra, which turned isotopes into beats and beeps. To our relief, the Orchestra isn’t content to record in the studio. Version 2.0 of the music project is all about going on tour, so to speak, through live instruments: in a first prototype, a photon detector translates every radiation hit from nearby materials into its own audio pulse. The invention results in an imprecise art based on distance, but aspiring cesium rock stars can tweak the sensitivity or transpose the notes to generate their own distinct tunes. Orchestra manager Georg Herlitz tells us that the initial setup you see here, played at TEDx Gotëborg, is just a “sneak peek” of both a finished instrument and more work to come. We might just line up for the eventual concerts if the performance video after the break (at the 10:30 mark) is any indication.
Radioactive Orchestra 2.0 takes the music live, makes sweet photonic melodies (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Jul 15
France’s ANDRA developing a million-year hard drive, we hope our badly-written blogs live in perpetuity
Posted in: Today's Chili 
Us humans have been quick to embrace digital technology for preserving our memories, but we’ve forgotten that most of our storage won’t last for more than a few decades; when a hard drive loses its magnetism or an optical disc rots, it’s useless. French nuclear waste manager ANDRA wants to make sure that at least some information can survive even if humanity itself is gone — a million or more years, to be exact. By using two fused disk platters made from sapphire with data written in a microscope-readable platinum, the agency hopes to have drives that will keep humming along short of a catastrophe. The current technology wouldn’t hold reams of data — about 80,000 minuscule pages’ worth on two platters — but it could be vital for ANDRA, which wants to warn successive generations (and species) of radioactivity that might last for eons. Even if the institution mostly has that pragmatic purpose in mind, though, it’s acutely aware of the archeological role these €25,000 ($30,598) drives could serve once leaders settle on the final languages and below-ground locations at an unspecified point in the considerably nearer future. We’re just crossing our fingers that our archived internet rants can survive when the inevitable bloody war wipes out humanity and the apes take over.
[Image credit: SKB]
France’s ANDRA developing a million-year hard drive, we hope our badly-written blogs live in perpetuity originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 15 Jul 2012 13:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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