Lcross Mission Finds Water on Moon, NASA Scientists Say – NYTimes.com

Posted on March 15, 2012 by t3chmonkey

“Indeed yes, we found water,” Anthony Colaprete, the principal investigator for NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, said in a news conference. “And we didn’t find just a little bit. We found a significant amount.”

The confirmation of scientists’ suspicions is welcome news to explorers who might set up home on the lunar surface and to scientists who hope that the water, in the form of ice accumulated over billions of years, holds a record of the solar system’s history.

So here’s my scenario: They’ve captured thousands of liters of this water, and have distributed across the globe for various purposes, but everyone at NASA is too amped up; they don’t want to wait for the data. They want to know what it tastes like and they want you to drink it.

Would you?

via Lcross Mission Finds Water on Moon, NASA Scientists Say – NYTimes.com.

First black hole for light created on Earth – New Scientist

Posted on March 7, 2012 by t3chmonkey

Cui is confident that they can do it. “I expect that our demonstration of the optical black hole will be available by the end of 2009,” he says.

Such a device could be used to harvest solar energy in places where the light is too diffuse for mirrors to concentrate it onto a solar cell. An optical black hole would suck it all in and direct it at a solar cell sitting at the core. “If that works, you will no longer require these huge parabolic mirrors to collect light,” says Narimanov.

No comment due to mind being blown.

Via: New Scientist

Japan sending biped robots to conquer moon by 2020 — Engadget

Posted on March 7, 2012 by t3chmonkey

Japan sending biped robots to conquer moon by 2020 — Engadget.

Idea: Avatars, baby. When these get up to the moon, you could have human hands at the helm, controlling them and doing labor intensive tasks that are quite simple for us but would require a great deal of processing power for a machine. (Other tasks or outside of a certain quadrant would be overruled) And with a point system, people around the world would do this for free. Like a game. The extra benefit; bragging about your bot and taking your own photos from it, from freaking SPACE.

One way or another, slave labor disguised as a game is going to become a big concept. Look at Foldit as an example. The gamification of labor intensive tasks will yield surprising results in unexpected parts of the world. The best protein folder in the world (as it stands when I saw the TED Talk that gave this example) is an administrator in England. Imagine if the best “bot navigator” was a dude in Kenya who just had an uncanny knack for it.

I’d love it if a gaming feature of my current job was the ability to get slow motion instant replays of the many ways I accidentally kick the crap out of myself each day. I could have the screen flash red if I was doing something wrong, but that seems redundant as my boss already serves as my flashing red screen.

Microscopic Fuzz May Be Best Evidence of Martians | Space.com

Posted on March 7, 2012 by t3chmonkey

Microscopic Fuzz May Be Best Evidence of Martians | Space.com.

Cellulose in salt deposits, which have not yet been found, are yet another possible angle of approach for finding evidence of life beyond this pale, blue dot.

I appreciate the increasingly novel ways astro-scientists are finding to examine the universe. As our understanding in sub-sciences becomes more robust, we learn new methods to discern even more about the whole workings of the universe on a macro level.

I have a feeling it’s liking thinking of something in particular and then finding it everywhere you look. I think that once we find out HOW to find the conclusive evidence, we’ll start seeing it all over the galaxy.