The home of Mac info for New Zealanders, mac-nz serves daily Mac, iPhone and related news from the world of Apple Inc.
Futurology 146: formats, oil, sails & shoes
Monday, 14 June 2010
Vault holds key to decrypting formats: A box recently sealed in a vault in the Swiss Alps contains tools for future users to reconstruct defunct file formats and retrieve otherwise lost information.
A Reuters article from May 19 talks about what it calls a 'digital genome', a box supposedly containing all the necessary information to read data formats that might be so obsolete fifty, even twenty-five years from now that future computers could not otherwise access them. Stored at a secret bunker called the Swiss Fort Knox (its actual name) that can protect it from any outside disturbance up to a nuclear blast, the box is the culmination of the four-year Planets project, which brought together experts from sixteen European libraries, archives, and research institutions to figure out the best way to preserve data long-term.
Comment — if only future people can decipher the entry lock.
Costner to clean up oil spill: Kevin Costner once boasted that he could have cleaned up the Exxon Valdez spill in a week. Now he'll get a chance to show what he can do — BP is buying 32 of his 'expensive' his oil/water separation machines. There's an embedded video of the machine in action (pic) at IO9.
Comment — about time he was allowed in on the act. As if BP can't afford t!
Getting the fitted boot – 5000 years ago: A shoe so old that when the Great Pyramid was built, it had already been sitting in a cave for 1000 years is so well preserved – thanks to sheep droppings – that a toe-print inside is still discernible.
Found in Armenia, the leather footwear is the oldest such shoe in the entire world. It's made from a single piece of cow-hide, and custom made to fit its wearer's foot. Archaeologists aren't sure whether the shoe belonged to a man or a woman; it's the equivalent of a modern size 7 women's, but the smaller average stature of ancient people means such a shoe could easily have fit a man.
Comment — where's the other one?
Japanese solar sailor: The Japanese space agency JAXA has successfully unfurled a solar sail in space for the first time. Solar sails offer the best hope for deep space exploration because they eliminate the need to carry fuel. The Japanese spacecraft IKAROS created centripetal force by spinning, allowing it to launch the 0.0003-inch-thick sail. While deployment is a challenge in a zero-gravity environment, spacecraft — unlike airplanes — don't have to contend with drag, so with each photon that hits the sail helps the spacecraft gather speed. NASA is also considering the concept.
Comment — 'sailors wanted: must be very patient ...'
Old Soviet Moon probe spectacularly back in action: A recently rediscovered forty-year-old Soviet probe has led to the most accurate lunar measurements ever made and add to a way to prove Einstein right or wrong.
The Lunokhod 1 probe was one of the greatest successes of the Soviet space program. Carried to the Moon by the Luna 17 rocket in 1970, Lunokhod 1 ('Moonwalker') was the first remote-controlled robot put on the surface of another celestial body. The rover traveled seven miles across the lunar surface during its eleven months of operation, sending back tons of TV images and high-resolution pictures during its tour.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted it in one of its images of the lunar surface, enabling contact with the old rover to be reestablished using the laser retroreflector placed on Lunokhod 1. Astronomer Tom Murphy of the University of California San Diego used the telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to send laser light pulses to the rover's lunar coordinates.
Comment — the signal that came back was incredibly strong; they can even send and receive signals during lunar daylight, previously thought impossible.
Smarty pants monitor diabetes: A team of scientists at the University of California San Diego, led by nano-engineering professor Joseph Wang, has designed some high-tech underwear that may save lives.
Sensors in the waistband monitor a person's blood pressure, heart rate, and other vital signs. The designers also hope that one day the underwear can release drugs to relieve pain and treat wounds.
"But the technology's range of application goes beyond the military. 'We envision all the trend of personalized medicine for remote monitoring of the elderly at home, monitoring a wide range of biomedical markers, like cardiac markers, alerting for any potential stroke, diabetic changes, and other changes related to other biomedical scenario,' said Wang. Wearable biosensors can also provide valuable information to athletes or even measure blood alcohol levels."
Comments — your pants telling you to stop drinking?!
Sixty-five million years ago, up to 95% of life on Earth died. Why? Some Paleontologists call it the Great Dying – 90-95 percent of all life on Earth died out. It took 30 million years for the planet to recover.
The Great Dying left almost nothing alive — it's likely that 9 out of 10 marine species and 7 out of 10 land species went extinct. Moreover, this was the only extinction event on Earth that destroyed many species of insects as well as animals.
Comment — it was an epoch of great volcanoes – IO9's article fingers them.
