The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos

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When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them, they jumped into action. They drove to Los Angeles, where the refrigerator-sized drives were being stored in a backyard shed surrounded by chickens. At the same time, they retrieved the tapes from a storage unit in nearby Moorpark, and things gradually began to take shape. Funding the project out of pocket at first, they were consumed with figuring out how to release the images trapped in the tapes.

via The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos | Raw File | WIRED.

The resulting framelets had to be individually reassembled in Photoshop. After kluging through countless engineering problems (try finding a chemical substitute for whale oil to lubricate tape heads), the LOIRP team was able to single out and reproduce the famous earthrise image. This proof of concept brought the first NASA funding in 2008, and the team recently completed processing the entire tape collection.

This Time, Get Global Trade Right

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But the administration’s rationale for secrecy seems to apply only to the public. Big corporations are playing an active role in shaping the American position because they are on industry advisory committees to the United States trade representative, Michael Froman. By contrast, public interest groups have seats on only a handful of committees that negotiators do not consult closely.

via This Time, Get Global Trade Right – NYTimes.com.

Drones On Demand

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Supposing you can make the whole thing safe, then it might stand a chance. The app could summon a drone using its GPS for location and the internet to communicate with the drone. This means the drone has to have a good internet connection and a satellite link seems like the best option, but the technology for this isn’t easy to get right.

via Drones On Demand.

Aereo analysis: Cloud computing at a crossroads

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“Consider any file-hosting service that allows people to store their own material, such as Dropbox. What if it can be shown they are storing copyrighted work. Do they need a license?” he asked in a telephone interview.

Mitch Stoltz, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney, said in a telephone interview that, “If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the broadcasters, their opinion might create liability for various types of cloud computing, especially cloud storage.”

via Aereo analysis: Cloud computing at a crossroads | Ars Technica.

‘Easter Dragon’ makes delivery to International Space Station

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Reuters – A cargo ship owned by Space Exploration Technologies arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, with a delivery of supplies and science experiments for the crew and a pair of legs for the experimental humanoid robot aboard that one day may be used in a spacewalk.

via ‘Easter Dragon’ makes delivery to International Space Station | Reuters.

Dragon will be reloaded with science samples and equipment no longer needed on the station and returned to Earth in about a month.

Preventing Heat From Going to Waste

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 Thermoelectrics are slabs of semiconductor with a strange and useful property: heating them on one side generates an electric voltage that can be used to drive a current and power devices. To obtain that voltage, thermoelectrics must be good electrical conductors but poor conductors of heat, which saps the effect. Unfortunately, because a material’s electrical and heat conductivity tend to go hand in hand, it has proven difficult to create materials that have high thermoelectric efficiency—a property scientists represent with the symbol ZT.

via Preventing Heat From Going to Waste | Science/AAAS | News.

The key to the ultralow thermal conductivity, Kanatzidis says, appears to be the pleated arrangement of tin and selenium atoms in the material, which looks like an accordion. The pattern seems to help the atoms flex when hit by heat-transmitting vibrations called phonons, thus dampening SbSe’s ability to conduct heat. The researchers report the results today in Nature.

The IRS uses computers?! The horror!

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It’s impossible to imagine the Internal Revenue Service or most other number-crunching agencies or companies working without computers. But when the IRS went to computers — the Automatic Data Processing system –there was an uproar. The agency went so far as to produce a short film on the topic called Right On The Button, to convince the public computers were a good thing.

via The IRS uses computers?! The horror!.

$99 ARM-based Utilite gives the Raspberry Pi some competition

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The Utilite can have the processor configured up to 1.2GHz, up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, up to a 512GB mSATA SSD, up to a 128GB Micro-SD SDXC, and two display ports — HDMI 1.4 and DVI-D — up to 1920×1200 resolution at 60Hz. The specs of the GPU aren’t listed, but rather what is listed is what it supports: OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, OpenVG 1.1 and OpenCL EP, multi-stream 1080p H.264, VC1, RV10, and DivX HW decoding. What seems static on the Utilite, at least, is Bluetooth 3.0, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, stereo line-out and in, four USB 2.0 ports, a micro-USB OTG connector, and two RS232 serial ports.

via $99 ARM-based Utilite gives the Raspberry Pi some competition | ExtremeTech.

44 Percent of Twitter Accounts Have Never Tweeted

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According to the site, approximately 44 percent of Twitter’s 947 million accounts or so have never sent a single tweet. Of the number that have — approximately 550 million — just under half of these accounts are reported to have sent their last tweet more than one year ago (43 percent). Only 126 million have sent any kind of tweet at any point in the past 30 days.

via 44 Percent of Twitter Accounts Have Never Tweeted | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

What Twitter has said, however, is that the service had a count of 241 million average monthly active users as of December 31 last year – a 30 percent increase over the same time period one year prior.