[via io9]
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Here are some vampires we don’t mind sparkling. This globular cluster, Messier 30, contains two types of ancient stars that have managed to keep themselves brilliant and young. One type relies on interstellar collisions; the other drinks from its neighbors.
Messier 30 is an unusual cluster. It’s an ancient cluster, and yet it is filled with blue stars, stars that tend to age and die more quickly than other types of stars. Astronomers have termed these unusually old blue stars “blue stragglers,” and they believe that there are two reasons these stars still exist.
Image by Nico Camargo and courtesy www.citizensky.org. Used under Creative Commons license.
Some kind of obstruction is blocking our view of Epsilon Aurigae, a star in the constellation Auriga. Its exact nature is unknown — but astronomers say that if you’ve got a telescope, you could help them figure it out.
Epsilon Aurigae is a binary system, or a star locked in a pattern of mutual orbit with a second body. It lies in the constellation Auriga, about two thousand light-years away from Earth. We like this star, because it gives us the chance to shout out to some old-school Green Day.
[via APOD]
What would it look like to travel across the known universe? To help humanity visualize this, the American Museum of Natural History has produced a modern movie featuring many visual highlights of such a trip.
The video starts in Earth’s Himalayan Mountains and then dramatically zooms out, showing the orbits of Earth’s satellites, the Sun, the Solar System, the extent of humanities first radio signals, the Milky Way Galaxy, galaxies nearby, distant galaxies, and quasars. As the distant surface of the microwave background is finally reached, radiation is depicted that was emitted billions of light years away and less than one million years after the Big Bang.
To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, until at least Jan 18.
We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.
Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.
The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression.
[via gizmodo.com]
So far he’s shown a good grasp of Twitter etiquette in his five tweets, replying to ‘slebs Ashton Kutcher and Ryan Seacrest; retweeting successfully twice, and even has a spiffy background wallpaper and profile pic.
[via nytimes.com]
Representative Anthony D. Weiner denounced what he called the predatory practices of Cash4Gold in New York’s diamond district on Tuesday.
The flashy ads have become a staple on late-night television, sometimes featuring figures like the late Ed McMahon or M.C. Hammer, trumpeting promises of quick dollars in exchange for bits of old gold jewelry.
The company behind the ads is called — plainly enough — Cash4Gold, but on Tuesday afternoon, Representative Anthony D. Weiner said that the company’s business practices were not always straightforward.
[via hackedgadgets.com]
I was shocked when I saw this Volt Meter Style Clock, it is close to a design that is sitting on my bench right now! My design should be done in 2 or 3 weeks. I love the minimal parts count of this project, since it is battery powered there is no power regulation section and that helps keep the circuit nice and simple. If you want to make your own code and schematics are available.
[via gizmodo.com]
The People’s Republic has unveiled more details on its quest to phase U.S.-made processors from its microchip diet. China’s next supercomputer will run purely on Chinese processors, possibly before the end of this year.
China has been developing its own CPUs at the state-run Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) for several years, but iterations of its chip – known as Loongson or “Dragon Core” – have been incapable of breaking into the elite ranks of supercomputing. China’s last supercomputer, the Dawning 5000a, was intended to run on Loongson processors, but was eventually constructed around AMD processors when the ICT couldn’t deliver a powerful enough chip quickly enough.