Cowards Anonymous passes along a PCWorld article that begins, "The robotic arm on the Mars Lander found itself in a tough position over the weekend. After receiving instructions for a movement that would have damaged its wrist, the robotic arm recognized the problem, tried to rectify it and then shut down before it could damage itself, according to Ray Arvidson, a co-investigator for the Mars Lander's robotic arm team and a professor at Washington University in St. Louis."

schliz writes "Pioneer has developed a 16-layer read-only optical disc which it claims can store 400GB of data. The per-layer capacity is 25GB, the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc, and the multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable discs."

Sportsqs writes "The Sierra Nevada Corporation claimed this week that it is ready to begin production on the MEDUSA, a damned scary ray gun that uses the 'microwave audio effect' to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people's heads."

Vigile writes "Much has been said about ray tracing for gaming in recent weeks: luminaries like John Carmack, Cevat Yerli and NVIDIA's David Kirk have already placed their flags in the ground but what about developers that have actually worked on fully ray traced games? PC Perspective discusses the benefits and problems in art creation, programming and design on a ray traced game engine with a group of students working on two separate projects. These are not AAA-class titles but they do offer some great insights for anyone considering the ray tracing and rasterization debate."

A two-count lawsuit filed by Chicago company LimitNone alleges that Google misappropriated trade secrets and violated Illinois' consumer fraud laws when it developed "Google Email Uploader" which competes with LimitNone's "gMove" application. "Google claims its core philosophy is 'Don't be evil' but, simply put, they invited us to work with them, to trust them — and then stole our technology,'" said Ray Glassman, CEO of LimitNone, in a prepared statement. The lawsuit was filed by Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, the same commercial litigation group which challenged Google over the company's online advertising system.

An anonymous reader writes "My kid is now 1 year old and I already have 100G of digital video (stored on DVDs, DVD quality) and photos. How should I store it so that it's still readable 10 to 20 years from now? Will DVDs stil be around, and readable, 10 years from now? Should I plan for technology changes every 5 to 10 years (DVD->Blue-ray->whatever)? Is optical storage better, or should I try to use hard drives (making technology changes automatic)? And, if the answer is optical, how do you store optical disks so that they last?"

KentuckyFC writes "X-ray crystallography has been a workhorse for chemists since the 1940s and 50s, revealing the 3D structure of complex biological molecules such as haemoglobin, DNA and insulin. But the technique has a severe limitation: it only works with molecules that form into crystals and that turns out to be a tiny fraction of the proteins that make up living things. But today, a team of US researchers say they have created the first image of a single uncrystallized virus using x-ray diffraction. The trick is to take a diffraction pattern of the virus and then subtract the diffraction pattern of its surroundings (abstract). The breakthrough paves the way for scientists to start teasing apart the 3D structures of the many proteins that have eluded biologists to date."

An anonymous reader writes "At the Research@Intel Day 2008, Intel showed a ray-traced version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Compared to the original game, a water with reflections and refractions and a physically correct glass shader were added. Also, a camera portal with up to 200 recursions to itself has been demonstrated. To show off this ongoing research in the topic of real-time ray tracing, a four-socket system with quad cores has been used that allowed rendering the enhanced visual effects in 1280x720 at 14-29 fps. Just two years before, early versions of Quake 4: Ray Traced ran only at 256x256 with 17 fps. Even though Intel's upcoming Larrabee will be primarily a rasterizer, the capabilities for also doing ray tracing on it should deliver interesting opportunities."

iamlucky13 writes "Over 17 years ago, the Ulysses spacecraft was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery for a unique NASA/ESA mission. While nearly all other probes travel along our solar system's ecliptic plane, Ulysses used a Jupiter gravity assist to swing 80 degrees out of plane, carrying it over the sun's poles for an unprecedented view. During a mission that lasted four times longer than planned, it has flown through the tails of several comets, helped pinpoint distant gamma-ray bursts, and provided data on the sun and its heliosphere from the better part of two solar cycles. Unfortunately, the natural reduction of power from its radioisotope thermal generator means it is now unable to even keep its attitude control fuel from freezing, and NASA has decided to formally conclude the mission on July 1."

Btarlinian writes "GLAST (the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope) was launched Wednesday at 1605 GMT. GLAST was built in a rather interesting manner, in that much of the work was funded by the Department of Energy. In fact, the main instrument on GLAST, the Large Area Telescope was assembled at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. It can detect gamma rays at energies between 20 MeV and 300 GeV. Researchers will use GLAST to study some of the most massive and energetic objects known to science."

Love old or unusual movies but never know when they're on? Here are several I recommend you watch this week: The Kingdom : After a brutal bombing inside an American compound in Saudi Arabia, an FBI team is sent ...

That long list of books is making the rounds again , yet I can't bring myself to join in the fun.

This was a 1985 flick directed by Mardi Rustam and, candidly, I really don't know if the filmmakers actually knew what they were making, or actually cared for that matter.

The 46th annual 22 Holden Reunion was held on Sunday, June 8, 2008 at Chief Logan State Park, Shelter 6. Former residents and friends of 22 Holden visited from several states.

Although his drumming was at the heart of jazz, Bobby Durham will perhaps best be remembered as one of the very few musicians that Duke Ellington actually fired .

Let s go back a few years and see what was happening: 50 Years Ago In high school basketball coach GEORGE BISACCA S Fairfield Prep team beat Bullard-Havens 68-47 as HENRY ROJAS scored 22 points while Ken Lisi, ...

When you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer, according to an old ad campaign.

The R. I. Reds Heritage Society's eighth annual reunion at Goddard State Park in Warwick on Sunday, August 3, now expects a record-breaking roster of 38 former Reds and other ex-pro hockey players.

At a meeting of local emergency doctors at Aldo's Ristorante Italiano last week, Dr.

When you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer, according to an old ad campaign.