Hasta La Gadget!

It may seem that the age of the supercomputer a la Cray-1 has long passed. But that’s not entirely true–we just don’t hear about them as often. For example, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are visualizing supernova, protein structures, and other complex phenomena using supercomputers.

The scientists there are using a technique called software-based parallel volume rendering, which interprets the billions of data points collected from MRIs, X-rays, or research simulations. They’re also working on equations that could search for sudden density changes–for example, separating bone from muscle data–in order to generate complex visualizations.

Using parallel computing, such as with Argonne’s Blue Gene/P supercomputer, scientists can create images using the computer’s 160,000 cores. (Try that on a Core i7.) The above image is a rendering of a supernova–specifically, the mechanisms behind a star’s violent collapse, with different colors and transparencies depicting different values of entropy. (Image credit: ANL)

Man, tremendous particle accelerators just can’t catch a break these days. Right as engineers finished repairing the helium leak that benched the Large Hadron Collider from doing much last year (aside from a successful early test), the team discovered two more vacuum leaks in another part of the machine.

In order for the leaks to be repaired, first engineers have to warm up the area, which is normally maintained at “ultracold temperatures,” according to Wired. The new delay will likely push the LHC’s projected restart sometime into November, after already being delayed twice recently.

Currently, the LHC is running about two and a half years behind schedule, according to the report.

The Apollo missions marked a turning point in human history. They changed the political climate of the day, made many tech advances possible, and inspired future scientists and astronomers the world over. But it turns out they’re also having a far more practical effect: acting as a guiding light for future lunar missions.

NASA’s next-generation Orion spaceship–scheduled for first launch in 2015–may look a lot like the Apollo craft in use 40 years ago. But as Space.com reports, the similarities are often just skin deep–and also draw from the Shuttle program as well. “The computing power of modern electronics just dwarfs what [Apollo engineers] had available,” Jim Geffre, a NASA engineer working on Orion, said in the article. “That allows us to do a lot more and build more automation into the spacecraft. More performance that uses less power and less space allows us to build in redundancy that Apollo didn’t have.”

The Orion is also about four feet larger in diameter–16.5 feet, to the Apollo craft’s 12.8 feet–which will enable four astronauts to travel to the moon instead of three, let all four descend to the surface (instead of just two), and allow for missions that run several weeks long. (Image credit: NASA)

NASA released Thursday newly restored video of the Apollo 11 mission from July 20th, 1969, including video showing the moonwalk more clearly than what has been seen before. It’s part of the 40th anniversary commemoration of astronauts landing on the moon for the first time.

The initial release shows 15 key moments from the mission. The video material came from a variety of sources and was assembled by a team of Apollo-era NASA engineers.

“The restoration is ongoing and may produce even better video,” said Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center that oversaw TV processing during Apollo 11, in a statement. “The restoration project is scheduled to be completed in September and will provide the public, future historians, and the National Archives with the highest quality video of this historic event.”

The new videos are definitely clearer. Unfortunately, an opportunity to make them sharper still was lost, it turns out. NASA concluded after an exhaustive three year search that the original tapes–not the degraded broadcast versions–were most likely erased and reused accidentally sometime in the early 1980s for satellite missions, as NPR reports. But we’ll take whatever we can get, of course.

With that, we’d like to turn it over to you, our readers. What are your memories of the Apollo 11 mission? Let us know in the Comments section below.

CERN has completed repairs of the Large Hadron Collider, and has begun running massive stress tests ahead of its relaunch in October, according to Syfy’s DVICE.

Through the end of last month, the Collider sent out data to 11 computer centers across Europe, Asia, and North America, which in turn relayed the data to 140 locations in 33 countries for processing, according to the report. “A whopping 4 GB a second was cranked out from the LHC, though researchers predict that, while operating, the LHC will only send out around 1.3 GB of data.” Essentially, that means all systems are go.

In June, CERN announced that they were pushing the LHC’s startup back an extra month, from September to October. CERN shut the particle accelerator down last September due to a liquid helium leak caused by an electrical fault.