Hasta La Gadget!

The cassette tape was a popular medium back in the 80s and early 90s, and served as one of the main platforms for distributing music. Today, the cassette is all but living as other types of media have taken over since then. However, researchers have developed a prototype that is able to store 35TB of data onto a single cassette tape.

Researchers from both Fuji Film and IBM were able to take a cassette tape that measures about 4 inches x 4 inches x 1 inch and stuff 35TB of data into it onto the magnetic tape that has been coated in particles of barium ferrite. News Scientist refers to this as “a new wave of ultra-dense tape drives.”

However, don’t expect these high-density casette tapes to reach your local store, though. They’ll be made with servers in mind, and would only be available to large companies who have huge server farms, like Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. Plus, these tapes are currently only being developed for the $43 million IBM computer that will run the upcoming Square Kilometre Array telescope (SKA).

The SKA, which will be the world’s largest radio telescope once it’s complete in 2024, will be able to push out a petabyte of data per day (approximately 1 million gigabytes). Obviously, this would be a huge task for today’s paltry hard drives, and the researchers are working to shrink the new cassette tape system even further, by attempting to squeeze in 100 terabytes per cassette.

[via New Scientist]

Image via Flickr

Cassette tape prototype able to store 35 terabytes of data is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

While the future of storage on your laptop is undoubtedly solid state, it’s more difficult to predict how the huge tranches of data in server farms will be housed in the future. Recent suggestions, though, predict the rebirth of an old technology: the humble casette tape. More »

Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days.

Most mornings, we wake up with little to no idea what happened the day before, let alone last week. Fortunately, they don’t let us run important scientific research projects. Or maybe they do, and we just forgot? This week (and most others as it goes) we definitely leave it to the pros, as we get some insightful glimpses at some important origins. Ball Lightning, the moon and even us humans are the benefactors of those tireless scientists, who work hard to explain where it all comes from. There’s also a planet with four stars that sees the first few paragraphs of its origin story excitedly written out. One thing we never forget, however, is that this is alt-week.

Continue reading Alt-week 20.10.12: our oldest ancestor, the birth of the moon and a planet with four stars

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Alt-week 20.10.12: our oldest ancestor, the birth of the moon and a planet with four stars originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Oct 2012 17:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NASA‘s Curiosity rover has snatched a scoop of Martian soil for analysis, the culmination of years of planning as the robotic explorer begins the hunt for evidence that life might once have been supported on the red planet. The new milestone followed two test scoops Curiosity slowly gathered and discarded as part of its preparation for soil testing, with the final sample being roughly as much as a crushed baby asprin and even now running through the rover’s onboard Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument.

“This instrument gives us a more definitive mineral-identifying method than ever before used on Mars: X-ray diffraction” project scientist John Gortzinger said of the CheMin tool. “Confidently identifying minerals is important because minerals record the environmental conditions under which they form.”

The NASA team responsible for Curiosity’s sample gathering equipment had feared that contamination of Earth dirt acquired during testing prior to the rover’s launch might confuse results when on Mars. Because of that, cleaning routines have been factored into the process: Curiosity picked up two prior scoopfuls, and shook them in the sample-processing chambers to remove any stowaway detritus.

Despite all those precautions, there were fears that the process had been contaminated anyway when a glistening spec was spotted in one of the holes Curiosity dug on Mars. The sample itself was dumped, but subsequent examination of the photography – shown above – led scientists to conclude that the small, bright particle did indeed originate on the red planet.

The glimmering anomalies will now become the subject of inquires of their own, NASA says. “We plan to learn more both about the spacecraft material and about the smaller, bright particles,” Curiosity Project Manager Richard Cook said this week, describing them as “fodder for the mission’s scientific studies.”

NASA Curiosity rover swallows first mouthful of Mars dirt is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The ability to see maps in buildings and landscapes in 3D makes following along considerably easier than with just 2D. So researchers at the University of Washington have made generating 3D models of a given location dead simple using custom software and nothing more than a webcam timelapse video of the spot captured on a sunny day. More »