Gizmodo reports that NASA has released this pair of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope a couple of years ago. As you can see, a fairly substantial object instantaneously appeared in a portion of space that the telescope was pointed at while looking for supernovae. It increased in magnitude over the period of 100 days, then faded away back to nothingness in the same amount of time. According to the scientists who wrote this up for the Astrophysical Journal, the object did not match any known pattern for a supernova, is inconsistent with gravitational microlensing, and does not match any known object in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database.
Maybe the Vogons finally got all the necessary permits for that hyperspace bypass after all. Do you know where your towel is?
DSL Reports says that scientists at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy have successfully tested a wireless network technology capable of a throughput speed of 1.2 terabits per second. That utterly shatters the previous record, which was 160Gbps. By comparison, your typical home wireless network running 802.11g (which is soon to be superseded by 802.11n) crawls along at 19 megabits per second, literally about a billion times slower. The technology uses a combination of optical and radio transceivers, where present conventional wireless networking is entirely radio-based. The first practical use for such technology is hoped to be inter-satellite communication, but before you know it, you’ll be able to pick up one of these babies at Circuit City for 69 bucks.
Okay, if that link wasn’t geeky enough for you, this one is guaranteed to make your eyes roll back in your head: it’s an Ars Technica interview with Tim Sweeney, the guy who developed the Unreal 3D graphics engine and co-founded Epic Games. Having just spent the better part of an entire weekend frigging around with replacing the graphics card in my computer so that I would be able to play Spore, this article caught my eye. The subject of the interview is his view that gaming PCs are going to swing away from big fat GPUs (graphics processing units) on motherboards and graphics cards and back towards processing all graphics right in the CPU itself. The advent of the GPU was a big, big deal for high-speed three-dimensional rendering when it first emerged in the ’90s — it took lots of load off the CPU, which could then be given over to other tasks, and it created a particular paradigm of graphics processing that has taken the animation of computer games from the clunky styles of yesteryear to the near-flawless rendering you see today. But, Sweeney argues, the multi-core processor is ready to take back graphics and do an even better job with improved software-based rendering. The best part is that you won’t even need a tricked-out gamer PC to achieve all of this; even laptops will come with the processing power necessary to render 3D graphics flawlessly soon enough.
Back to outer space for a minute…remember that Gamma Ray Burst that was so powerful it was visible to the naked eye? You don’t? Well, I posted about it when it happened. You just weren’t paying attention. A few days ago, astronomer and blogger Phil Plait filled in some of the details about just how close we all came to being crispy-crittered by the aforementioned GRB. Let’s just say we wouldn’t have had to worry about the Large Hadron Collider, if this thing had been a few billion miles closer, mm-kay?
A sign of the times: The University of Kentucky has decided to yank all the land-line telephones wired into dorm rooms on their campus because students have abandoned using them in favor of cellphones, IM and other modern communications devices. I can still remember standing in line for what seemed like a bazillon years as a freshman at Northwestern to get signed up for an account with Illinois Bell. Every dorm room at NU had (has?) a landline, and rare was the pair of roommates who did not have their own telephone. By comparison, my friends who went to University of Maine didn’t have in-room phones, and it was always a crapshoot trying to call them on the one public-use phone in their dorm lounge. We’d have to coordinate a call-time via letters (yes, snail-mail! It took a week and a half to arrange a 10-minute phone call once a month!).
Another sign of the times: while UK students might have traded landlines for iPhones, their iPhones are spying on them. This Wired blog post discusses a little-publicized bit of information about the iPhone: the clever way it returns you to the exact place you left off when you turned off your phone is by caching screenshots every time the screen changes. That cache persists in the iPhone’s memory, and, according to one hacker, can be accessed by anyone savvy enough to find the cache, not the least of whom are the assorted phone-tapping intelligence people George Bush keeps on hand to “fight terrorism”. Your entire history of activity on the iPhone, not just your phone calls, can be completely traced. So whatever you do, the next time you plan to blow up the World Trade Center, don’t call Osama on your iPhone, got it?
