Scientists Mull Future After Carbon Satellite Crash
Nine years of work disappeared in five minutes yesterday when a NASA satellite crashed into the icy waters near Antarctica. Now climate scientists who worked on the ambitious effort to map the world’s carbon dioxide are trying to figure out what comes next.
The $278 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory was designed to monitor how CO2 enters and exits the Earth’s atmosphere — hoping to yield a picture of a rhythm that is much like taking a breath. Forests and oceans absorb the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, while burning fossil fuels and decaying plant and animal life send more back.
There is a delicate balance between the two processes that shifts with seasons and weather patterns — plants, for example, pull in more CO2 in spring than in winter, when many lose their leaves.
Google Sinks Atlantis Discovery Buzz
Last week, a British man announced he’d found the lost city of Atlantis using Google Ocean — the latest add-on to Google Earth that features 3D bathymetry, which lets you explore the ocean floor. The supposed ‘Atlantis’ image is about 620 miles off the northwestern coast of Africa and south of Portugal. It shows a rectangular grid with what looks like roadways leading away from it at the coordinates 31 15’15.53N 24 15’30.53W. According to The Telegraph, the newspaper that first reported the “discovery,” the pattern is roughly the size of Wales (around 8,000 sq. mi.).
Friday’s find sparked intense interest online despite the farfetched claim. Many scratched their heads wondering, what if? After all, this underwater discovery seemed to match the location Plato had described in his writings. Plato said Atlantis was a massive island that was “larger than Libya and Asia together,” and located at a “distant point in the Atlantic Ocean…in front of the mouth of the pillars of Hercules” (the Straits of Gibraltar).
Kate Winslet hit in Facebook phoneys war
THE final straw was Kate Winslet calling Angelina Jolie, her fellow Oscar nominee, a “fat-lipped crazy cow”. That was when the monitors employed by Facebook, the social networking website, abruptly closed her account.
The real Winslet would have known nothing of the insult. Instead, the British actress had become the latest victim of the trend known as “Fakebooking”. In the past few days, as bookmakers reduced the odds against her taking home the best actress statuette at tonight’s Academy Awards in Los Angeles, Winslet has received the unwelcome accolade of having the most sites devoted to her by internet pranksters.
Sourcetool says Google violated U.S. antitrust laws
TradeComet.com, which owns the search engine SourceTool.com, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google Inc on Tuesday, accusing it of engaging in illegal predatory conduct to drive them out of business.
“TradeComet was forced to file the lawsuit when Google refused to stop engaging in predatory conduct to block search traffic by imposing massive, unjustified price increases,” the company said in a statement.
Mobiles to have same charging socket by 2012
Key mobile phone industry players have agreed to fit phones with the same power socket by 2012, industry group GSMA said on Tuesday.
It said handsets would have a micro USB interface, already used to transfer pictures from digital cameras to a computer.
The initial group of companies that have signed for the change include Nokia, LG, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.
With Four More Months to Make the Switch, Over 400 TV Stations Are All Digital
More than 400 television stations have stopped broadcasting in old-fashioned analog form, according to the Federal Communications Commission, months before the rescheduled transition to digital TV.
Turning off the analog signal allows stations that are short of cash to save money, but it also means a loss of service for viewers who have not yet upgraded their older television sets.
The long-awaited move to digital TV, which promises clearer pictures and more channel choices for over-the-air television viewers, had been scheduled to happen Tuesday, more than three years after the federal government set the day as the deadline for stations to cease analog broadcasting.
Pirate Bay Trial Gets Massive Online Coverage
The eyes of the file-sharing community remained on Sweden on Tuesday as the trial of four men from The Pirate Bay continued in Stockholm.
The men are charged with copyright-related violations in connection with The Pirate Bay, a Web site that lets users search for torrents, or small information files that coordinate the download of content via the BitTorrent P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing protocol.
Hackers Target Patched Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Vulnerability
According to security firm Trend Micro, cyber-criminals are targeting a patched flaw in IE 7 to steal data. A fix for the flaw was included in the recent round of Patch Tuesday security bulletins.
Hackers have begun actively targeting a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 7 that was patched earlier this month by Microsoft.
The bug cyber-criminals are looking to exploit is a remote code execution vulnerability that lies in the way Internet Explorer 7 handles errors when attempting to access deleted objects. According to Trend Micro, attackers are spamming a malicious .DOC file detected as X M L_DLOADR.A in a bid to infect unprotected users.
The Android Market Now Accepts Paid Applications
As Mentioned from Android Developers Blog: Android Market is now accepting priced applications from US and UK developers. Developers from these countries can go to the publisher website at http://market.android.com/publish to upload their application(s) along with end user pricing for the apps. Initially, priced applications will be available to end users in the US starting mid next week. We will add end user support for additional countries in the coming months.
Nvidia’s Tegra ready to power $99 mobile Internet devices
Nvidia said it’s ready to show how its Tegra computer on a chip will power a new family of HD mobile Internet devices that could sell for $99 to $200, or nothing at all with a subsidy from a mobile carrier.
The graphics chip maker said this new class of devices will provide users with a full high-definition experience that boasts a cheap price and a battery life 10 times that of current Intel Atom-based netbooks. Nvidia will be speaking more on its latest moves in mobile at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.