The early days of planetary solar systems can be violent times indeed. Our own moon was most likely birthed from a stupendous collision, before our own solar system had settled down into the relatively placid routine we see today.
Astronomers have been observing a star system called HD 23514 in the Pleiades cluster that seems to be going through the same bumper-cars evolution as our own, with rocky planets potentially similar to Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in the process of formation.
Using an infrared camera with the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii, a UCLA-led team has found hot dust surrounding a star much like our own Sun, but about 45 times younger.
The warm dust appears to indicate what they call “catastrophic collisions” in a region roughly comparable to the space between the orbits of Mercury and Mars in our own solar system.
They believe that so-called planetary embryos – rocky bodies that are evolving into full-fledged planets – must have recently bumped, breaking up or even pulverizing one another. Says Inseok Song of the Spitzer Science Center:
“In the process of creating rocky, terrestrial planets, some objects collide and grow into planets, while others shatter into dust; we are seeing that dust,” Song said.
Researchers said this was the first evidence of planet formation in the Pleiades, and further supports the notion that terrestrial planets like those in our own solar system are relatively common.
Leave it to the European Commission to ruin a good party.
On Tuesday, the antitrust arm of the European Commission nixed approval on Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, citing competitive concerns.
The EU also ordered an in-depth review into the acquisition.
The scale of the deal certainly raises eyebrows — $3.1 billion isn’t chopped liver — but by most estimates, Google grossly overpaid for the company.
DoubleClick’s annual revenue — which reportedly falls short of $200 million — hardly puts a dent in the overall Web ad market, which is estimated to be worth anywhere from $17 billion to $20 billion.
Well, what if that is Google’s point? What if Google hopes to do to the iPhone what Microsoft did to Apple’s first user experience breakthrough, the Mac?
Here is the Google video again, just to remind you what Android looks like:
Let’s return to the to the Android, Windows analogy.
Think about it: Apple spent a lot of time building the Mac. They proved the concept of the GUI on the desktop, but Apple never captured the desktop.
Why? Because all Microsoft had to do was step in with a lower-cost alternative that ripped off Apple’s UI and did most, but certainly not all, of the things the Mac did.
Windows has never equaled the Mac in terms of aesthetics or usability, but it never had to. It just had to be good enough.
The other reason Windows beat the Mac in the 1980s was because it was, gasp, more open than the Mac.
While Windows is far from an open platform, it is more open than Mac and Microsoft has always courted developers. As a result, Windows is the global ecosystem of applications and developers.
One thing I noticed about the slick user interface is that it marches right past Nokia’s S60’s usability. What can S60 do to prevent Google from eroding its market share?
In short, probably nothing. Any new mobile platform will steal users from each and every other platform that already exists on the market. But that sure shouldn’t stop Symbian and Nokia from trying.
Even the latest iteration of S60 doesn’t do some of the things we saw in the Android demo.
While Symbian and Nokia are probably hard at work developing touch-capable software and phones, Google has already done it, to a certain extent.
The demos highlight how applications can be used and tied together seamlessly to create a natural workflow.
Don’t get me wrong. S60 is a great platform, one of the best, in fact. Its strengths have led it to become the dominant smartphone platform in the world (78% share). But it is still somewhat clunky to use. It requires users to think like they are interacting with a computer.
If there’s one thing the iPhone seems to have taught the world is that mobile user interfaces don’t have to be painful to deal with.
While everyone else is going to be playing catch up for a while, Google will represent a serious challenge when Android finally becomes available.
Will it have the hardware cache, the integrated platform that Apple has with the iPhone and its other products? Or the global manufacturing and distribution empire that Nokia has?
Likely not but the interface sure does some cool things and as is evidenced by U.S. sales of the Apple iPhone, people are tired of difficult user interfaces.
So Nokia needs to make some snappy changes to S60. Though the Finnish giant is not known for quick updates to its core platform, in this case it has a lot more to lose than anyone else if it can’t play the UI game up to Apple and Google’s standards.
November 13, 1946: Artificial snow is produced for the first time in the clouds over Mt. Greylock, Massachusetts.
While not exactly a blizzard — in fact, no snow ever hit the ground — it was the harbinger of a new industry and was an overnight sensation.
Using pellets of dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide), Vincent Schaefer, a scientist working for General Electric, seeded the clouds from an altitude of 14,000 feet. He was carrying out the first field experiment resulting from lab work in which he had successfully created precipitation by placing dry ice in a chilled chamber.
Flying over Mt. Greylock (the highest point in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts), Schaefer dropped his pellets and produced a similar effect in the clouds, which resulted in snow that fell an estimated 3,000 feet before evaporating in the dry air.
Artificial snow, like so many other scientific innovations, was born out of wartime necessity. In this case, it began during World War II and experiments with the creation of artificial fog, meant to conceal ships at sea.
Schaefer, a research associate under Nobel Prize-winner Irving Langmuir, began examining the physics of cloud formation. This work led him to his postwar experiments with cloud seeding, and the ultimate development of artificial snow.
Despite protests that artificial snow shouldn’t be used because it messed with Mother Nature’s design, it only took a few years for ski resorts to begin looking for ways to create the fake stuff for use during bad snow years.
Nowadays, artificial snow is made using a variety of machines and seeding methods. In addition to the ski industry, artificial snow is also popular on movie sets and in places where snow doesn’t normally fall.
According to Digitimes, which cites the Commercial Times (a Chinese paper), High Tech Computer has said it will design and engineer two or three handsets for Google’s Android mobile platform next year.
The information comes from statements at an analyst meeting made by HTC’s CEO, Peter Chou. His remarks have led people to believe that HTC will be the first to market with an Android phone.
If this is the case, it isn’t too much of a stretch to believe that T-Mobile would be the carrier offering up such a device, as HTC and T-Mobile are pretty tight these days.
Not only did Chou spill the beans about Android phones, he also said HTC is working on a new 3G solution that is not based on Qualcomm’s chipsets.
Whether it is changing suppliers to STMicro, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Ericsson, or developing a radio solution of its own is unknown.
HTC is also working on a next-generation touch-based user interface that it says will be better than its own TouchFlo UI, which appears on several of HTC’s smartphones.
Lastly, HTC is putting together a dual-mode handset, but not the kind you might think.
Rather than marry Wi-Fi and cellular radios, which is has done with more than a few handsets, it is pairing WiMax and TD-WCDMA, which is the home-grown Chinese flavor of WCDMA. This phone would strictly be for Chinese markets.
Posted in Geekery + Technology | 
Comments Off
According to 