HackingTheUniverse

You are browsing the archives of 2012 February.

Born in England in 1815, Ada Augusta Byron married William King, becoming Ada Augusta King, but has been known as Ada Lovelace because her husband was named Earl of Lovelace, making her the Countess of Lovelace. Ada Lovelace studied Babbage’s “difference engine”, and earned the distinction of being called the first programmer because she published [...]

Magnetic levitation is used to both lift railway trains off their guiding rail and to propel them forward along the rail. This reduces friction with the rail, leaving air resistance as the primary obstacle to forward speed. By operating a maglev transport inside a tube with evacuated atmosphere, the drag from air can also be [...]

Researchers at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University have been studying the dynamics of fish schooling behavior and how it can be influenced. Their published results suggest that robotic fish can “steer” a school of fish in a desired direction. Fish by themselves only display the most simple of ethical behavior (basic survival of [...]

While single atom transistors have been created previously, they were positioned with somewhat random locations, making it difficult to find one that was actually useful. A team from the University of New South Wales in Australia has been able to locate a single atom of phosphorus with near atomic precision. The silicon substrate the atom [...]

The Jester Dynamic: A Lesson in Asymmetric Unmanaged Cyber Warfare – [sans.org] 2. Background On December 30, 2010, a patriot hacker posted a message to an Internet Chat Relay (IRC) Server. Quoting Steve Jobs, the hacker typed: “A small team of A players can run circles round a giant team of B and C players” [...]

MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) offers free online MIT courses complete with lecture notes, exams and videos. There is no registration required and there are no fees involved, but they do offer suggestions for course textbooks, which are often fairly expensive (standard for college level courses). MIT says that “virtually all MIT course content” is included in [...]

William Rowan Hamilton was born in 1805 in Dublin, Ireland and was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer. In mathematics, he studied number theory and various forms of algebras, eventually producing an extension to complex numbers (combinations of real numbers and “imaginary” units that involve the square root of negative one) that is known as quaternions. [...]

The GRASP (robotics and automation) lab at Univ Penn is doing some fascinating work with swarms of small flying quadrotors. A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors – [youtube.com] VIDEO Experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics. Special thanks to Professor Daniel Lee for [...]

There is a large impact crater on the Moon named after the Greek astronomer Aristarchus. It is about twenty five miles across and two miles deep and is one of the brightest lunar formations. Aristarchus crater is known for it’s history of exhibiting color changes that astronomers call “Transient Lunar Phenomonon” or TLPs. Luminescent glows [...]