In the future, US military wants to have airplanes that can take off from a runway and reach hypersonic speed (six times the speed of sound). One important technology that is being developed for this purpose is pulse detonation engine or PDE (which is a kind of CVC - Constant Volume Combustion).
The unique thing about PDE is it works not by burning fuel but by exploding it. NASA is now working on PDE-powered aircraft.
Microsoft has agreed to buy semantic search engine Powerset for an estimated price of $100 million.
This move is interesting because Web 3.0 is thought to consist of semantic web. Here is a glimpse of how Web 3.0 will be like:
Some Internet experts believe the next generation of the Web — Web 3.0 — will make tasks like your search for movies and food faster and easier. Instead of multiple searches, you might type a complex sentence or two in your Web 3.0 browser, and the Web will do the rest. In our example, you could type "I want to see a funny movie and then eat at a good Mexican restaurant. What are my options?" The Web 3.0 browser will analyze your response, search the Internet for all possible answers, and then organize the results for you.
Semantic search engines like Powerset may prove to be vital in this kind of future.
Perhaps we are getting closer to actually finding proof of life on Mars. Recent study from Phoenix Mars Landers mission showed that Martian soil could possibly support life:
Martian soil around NASA’s Phoenix Lander is slightly alkaline and has enough different minerals that it could support Earthly plants and—more to the point—microbes beneath the Martian surface, according to the first results from the probe’s wet chemistry experiment released today.
A separate study also showed that it once rained on Mars:
Drawing on soil data from the five missions to Mars before the current Phoenix Lander and comparing it to information collected in Earth’s driest places, the scientists concluded that water must have fallen from above, not welled up from below, as has been thought.
Very interesting.
It’s good to learn that Stanford University has launched a video channel on Youtube. There are about 200 videos available there with the featured video being Oprah Winfrey’s 2008 commencement address.
I have been a fan of channels like Google Tech Talks where so many quality videos can be found. While Stanford already has a channel on iTunes U for some time, this new Youtube channel will definitely enable them to reach wider audience.
It’s amazing. How can we live as a community without having language for number? But that’s what an MIT team found recently:
An Amazonian language with only 300 speakers has no word to express the concept of “one” or any other specific number, according to a new study from an MIT-led team.
The team, led by MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Piraha tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as “some” and “more,” but not precise numbers.
Apparently, this kind of tribes has no currency, let alone trading. Perhaps they don’t even have economic transaction of any sort.
NASA has created a high-resolution picture of our galaxy. The picture is built from more than 80,000 snapshots taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The image’s resolution is not less than 5 gigapixel! Awesome!
As a Wired wrote, it’s a “180-foot-long mosaic of 800,000 high-resolution snapshots, all on glorious 400,000-pixel by 13,000-pixel display”. If even the picture is 180-foot long, I have no idea how long it will take to download it.
There is information circulating in the blogosphere about Nokia’s N79 and N85’s leak pictures. Pictures are available at http://flickr.com/photos/giusdama77/.
From Engadget:
What’s the N85, you ask? We don’t know a heck of a lot about this one, but we’re told that it features a 5 megapixel camera, GPS, and geotagging — sort of an N96 lite, perhaps.
From Talk About NSeries regarding N79:
A very odd looking device!!! The design doesn’t seem to fit with others in the range!!!
The speech at MIT’s commencement this June was delivered by Muhammad Yunus, an economist who won Nobel Prize in 2006. From the original article:
Citing his own in experiences in going against all conventional wisdom in the pioneering creation of Grameen Bank in his native Bangladesh–the forerunner of what is now a multibillion-dollar worldwide trend in microlending–Yunus said such businesses have a fundamentally different philosophy than conventional companies that see their prime obligation as the maximization of profit.
What’s needed, Yunus said, is to “reformulate the concept of a businessman”–not to replace the present model, but to offer another alternative that people can choose to follow. Such new-style businesspeople, he said, would have as their goal not maximum profit but “achieving some predefined social objective.”
Interesting points. If only more people go against conventional wisdom, the progress we see will be much faster.
Video of the speech is available here.
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