Hasta La Gadget!

NEPTUNE Canada, the world’s largest undersea cabled network, has powered up and will begin streaming data from hundreds of undersea instruments and sensors on the Pacific Ocean floor to the Internet, Scientific American reports.

The network will run around the clock and is expected to produce 50 terabytes of data each year. The data will include information about earthquake dynamics, deep-sea ecosystems, salmon migration, and the effects of climate change on the water column, the report said.

“It’s revolutionary in that it brings two new components into the ocean environment, which are power and high-bandwidth Internet,” says Project Director Chris Barnes, from the project’s offices at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, in the article. “We’re really on the verge of wiring the oceans.”

Shown in the photo is a rat-tail fish checking out the installation of a seismometer at “node ODP 1027” of the new network–buried at a depth of 2,660 meters underneath the surface. (Image credit: NEPTUNE Canada/CSSF)

Virgin Galactic has taken the wraps off the first of five long-awaited SpaceShipTwo spacecrafts.

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson were on hand to christen the spacecraft with the customary bashing of champagne bottles, National Geographic reports. Meanwhile, Sir Richard Branson’s daughter Holly announced the first ship’s name: V.S.S. Enterprise.

The 60-foot-long ship is based on the original SpaceShipOne, a reusable manned spacecraft that won the $10-million Ansari X Prize back in 2004. EVE, a twin-fuselage mother ship, carries the V.S.S. Enterprise to launch altitude at about 50,000 feet before it separates, the report said.

The ship is designed to carry two pilots and six passengers, who “will pay handsomely for two and a half hour flights into suborbital space,” to experience weightlessness and see the Earth’s curvature.

The horrifying space butterflies have stopped flying, and now they are just walking around their cage, having a few space beers, and smoking a few astroturf joints. And man, they were really pissed off.

This is what happened, according to the experiment project manager Stefanie Countryman:

They basically learned really quickly not to fly. When they try to fly, because there’s no gravity to stabilize them, they basically tumble.

This is what happened, according to the butterfly:

So I was like, you know, taking this nap, and then I woke up and I was like, Huh? What? What? Fuck. I’m not a worm anymore. Oh, and I had these things on my back, you know? Wings. So I said: hey, let’s try to fly for a little b*WHOAWHOAWHOAWHOAWHOA!!! What the fuck was that? The hell… I was like, going like crazy, man. So I got back down, or up, or whatever the fuck, I don’t know, this is space, you know. And I was like OK, let’s try ag*WHOAOHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCK!!! What fuckassery is this? I don’t know man. Fuck that flying thing. I’m staying on the ground.

True story. [Bloombert]

NC State may be well on its way to yet another underwhelming season on the hardwood, but it seems as if a few of its most spirited boffins aren’t even taking any time off to celebrate the season-ending victory over the hated Heels on the team’s final football game. Dr. Michael Dickey and team have just published their latest invention, and if this thing ever reaches commercial status, you can expect ordinary objects to become a lot more intelligent. The crew’s shape-shifting, twistable antenna overcomes the common limitation of copper-based alternatives by relying on an alloy that can be “bent, stretched, cut and twisted” while still transmitting or receiving a signal. Aside from enabling concept phones like the Ondo to become real, the development could also allow for stretchable antennas to be integrated into actual structures, giving buildings and bridges a way to communicate stresses to architects. Too bad it can’t communicate the crumbling of an athletics program to an oblivious AD, but hey, there’s always room for improvement in version 2.0.

NC State intellects design twistable, shape-shifting antennas originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In an increasingly unsurprising turn of events, the Large Hadron Collider suffered a major power failure this morning, knocking the machine and its website out of service. The failure occurred in an 18,000-volt power line in Meyrin, Geneva where the LHC is housed beneath the ground, causing pretty much everything to shut down. The LHC’s magnets maintained a temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (having to re-cool them would have been a pretty sizeable setback), however, and no long-term damage seems to have occurred. The trouble-prone Large Hadron Collider is expected to resume full operations sometime later today, and is currently operating on limited power from a backup supply. Regardless, the unfortunate event is sure to resurrect that zany Higgs boson time-travelling theory.

Large Hadron Collider grinds to a halt… again originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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