CubeSat is a program at Stanford and California Polytechnic State University to assist college and high school students and companies in building their own tiny satellites and launching them into low Earth orbit. The satellites are tiny — they weigh a kilogram and generally measure about 10cm on each side — but they cost far less than conventional commercial satellites. A CubeSat unit costs roughly $40,000 to build and only $40,000 to launch. As part of the program, Cal Poly takes care of the bureaucratic and logistical hurdles. By contrast, a conventional satellite can run between $150 million and $250 million to build and $100 million to launch
Mailinator, the free, temporary e-mail service gets a lot of spam; over a million e-mails a day. And with another cool application of Google maps, the site now shows a Spam Map indicating what sites are spamming mailinator in almost real time. It’s oddly addictive to poke around and see where the spam is actually coming from
The beasties at my friends’ place in Gilgai.
Amber is a small, fluffy, fast-moving missile of excitable Akita puppy goodness
NASA has announced that the US will send four astronauts to the moon in 2018 in a major return to its pioneering manned missions into space. Welcome to 1969
Toshiba has developed two small fuel cell prototypes that can dramatically increase the playing time for mobile music players. A fuel cell unit the size of a pack of chewing gum can power a flash-memory-based player for about 35 hours on a single charge, using highly concentrated methanol as its fuel. For a hard disc drive system, a fuel cell unit the size of a person’s palm could let the player run for 60 hours on a single charge. Toshiba hopes to introduce the products commercially in 2007
The Concerned Women
for America, a backward group of hate-mongering homophobes, have attacked the Girl Scouts for apparently trying to make feminist lesbians out of girls. At least, that’s how they portray it
A full clone of Super Mario Brothers has been implemented in Javascript.
If that doesn’t light your fire, try Lemmings in DHTML
Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia came up with an ingenious way to fight back against anti-choice fundamentalists who block clinic doors and harass workers and patients. The idea: hold a fund drive in which donors give cash for each protestor that shows up. The more there are, the more money Planned Parenthood receives. And, let the harassers know how much their presence is helping the clinic raise funds — via Warren Ellis
A malfunctioning light bulb in a school gym, at the Baker Elementary School in Columbia, exposed more than 100 people to short-wave radiation for an hour, sending 18 to the hospital with severe sunburns and swollen eyes. Dr Michael Richardson, an emergency room doctor from the Maury Regional Hospital, said the symptoms, similar to overexposure from a tanning bed, were produced by a radiation leak from a halide bulb. The bulbs, commonly used in gyms, are designed with a special membrane that blocks the UV rays, but occasionally the membranes break — via Warren Ellis
Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500m long. It was the meander of an ancient river
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez told a UN summit that fighting the war in Iraq without UN authorisation showed Washington did not respect the world body. He recommended moving UN headquarters to a country that has more regard for the organisation. He won rousing applause for his critique
A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe. Agents for the firm have told would-be customers it is developing collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments from skin taken from prisoners after they have been shot. The agents say some of the company’s products have been exported to the UK, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts is traditional
and nothing to make such a big fuss about
— via BoingBoing
Microsoft has unveiled Microsoft Expression, a suite of Web site design and graphics software that enables .Net developers to handle tasks similar to those that users of corresponding software from from Adobe Systems and Macromedia have performed for years. I expect it to be the nightmarish, bastard child of Publisher and Frontpage
The FBI and New Jersey officials have started a hushed but intensive search for three missing lab mice reportedly infected with deadly strains of plague. The incident has been cited as not that big a deal
, but it’s a little disturbing Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist, comments about certain federal bio-terrorism labs: You have more security at a McDonald’s than at some of these facilities
In the first case of its kind, US Magistrate Judge James Orenstein chastised the US Department of Justice for trying to constantly track a mobile user’s location without providing any proof of criminal behaviour. Their Patriot Act surveillance request was denied — via Politech
IP Address Typo Leads to a False Arrest
Brian and Sarah Doom were shocked when police showed up at their Wichita home accusing them of child pornography. But the police had the wrong house, based on mistaken information from the
Dooms’ ISP, Cox Communications, who typed in an IP address different from the one provided
by police — via Politech
Yahoo has hired veteran war correspondent Kevin Sites to single-handedly report on every armed conflict on the planet. Video, audio and daily blog entries will be combined to bring some of the world’s most important, yet under-reported
stories to a web site called Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone. Yahoo says Sites will cover every armed conflict in the world within one year, reporting from every place which the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London deems to be armed conflict areas. His first reports from a war zone will be published on 26 September
This is the golden age of the internet, a time of glorious anarchy where information is free and anyone, rich or poor, can blog their views to the world. But government and big business are moving in — the clampdown has started
Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans. Some of the mercenaries say they have been deputised
by the Louisiana governor; indeed some are wearing gold Louisiana state law enforcement badges on their chests and Blackwater photo identification cards on their arms. They say they are on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and have been given the authority to use lethal force. Several mercenaries we spoke with said they had served in Iraq on the personal security details of the former head of the US occupation, Paul Bremer and the former US ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte
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