In the latest advance for private space flight, a Texas company has been granted rare government permission to launch its reusable rocket
From Morning Edition: Eight Badminton Players Disqualified From Olympics
The female badminton players have been booted from the London Olympics for purposely trying to lose. The players from Indonesia, South Korea and China had been charged with “throwing” group stage contests to secure an easier draw through the Olympic tournament.
from Morning Edition
From Gizmodo: A Rocket Launcher and Flamethrower Fall in Love, and a Deadly Weapon Is Born
The M2 flamethrower utilized by Allied forces during WWII proved to be a devastatingly effective weapon against bunkers—and Axis psyches. However, walking around a firefight with a napalm-filled backpack and an effective range of 20m is a great way to become a crispy critter. So the US military developed the M202 FLASH rocket-propelled flamethrower. More »
from Gizmodo
From Engadget: Kinect Toolbox update turns hand gestures into mouse input, physical contact into distant memory
Using Microsoft’s Kinect to replace a mouse is often considered the Holy Grail of developers; there have been hacks and other tricks to get it working well before Kinect for Windows was even an option. A lead Technical Evangelist for Microsoft in France, David Catuhe, has just provided a less makeshift approach. The 1.2 update to his Kinect Toolbox side project introduces hooks to control the mouse outright, including ‘magnetic’ control to draw the mouse from its original position. To help keep the newly fashioned input (among other gestures) under control, Catuhe has also taken advantage of the SDK 1.5 release to check that the would-be hand-waver is sitting and staring at the Kinect before accepting any input. The open-source Windows software is available to grab for experimentation today, so if you think hands-free belongs as much on the PC desktop as in a car, you now have a ready-made way to make the dream a reality… at least, until you have to type.
from Engadget
From Engadget: China’s new liquid oxygen and kerosene-fueled rocket engine lights up for testing
Liquid oxygen and kerosene, that’s what fuels China’s new — and freshly tested — rocket engine. When fired up on Sunday, it withstood temperatures as high as 5,432 degrees Fahrenheit (3,000 degrees Celsius) for 200 seconds and powered through almost 20,000 revolutions per minute in a rotational test. “The successful tests confirm the reliability of China’s LOX / kerosene engine,” test commander Lai Daichu told China Daily. According to China Central Television, the engine is non-toxic, pollution-free and the first of its kind for which China holds proprietary intellectual property rights — though similar engines have been used by other space agencies. The engine is on track to lend the upcoming Long March 5 rocket a total of 118 tons of thrust, giving it enough oomph to launch a 25-ton payload into low-earth orbit or 14-ton cargo into geostationary orbit. Its expected to haul additional portions of the country’s space station and aid lunar exploration, but the first voyage isn’t slated until 2014.
[Image Credit: China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation]
from Engadget
From Droid Life: Amazon Cloud Player and MP3 App Receive Updates, Audiophiles in For a Treat
Today, Amazon has pushed an update to both their online Cloud Player and MP3 mobile applications. To say the updates are major is almost an understatement. For starters, you can now use Amazon’s scan and match feature that will make uploading your library to the cloud much faster, as well as the ability to add past MP3 purchases to the Cloud for free. The new feature that most music lovers will be happy about is that Amazon now offers to turn your library of music (as long as they have it) into high quality 256 Kbps audio files. Yes please.
New features include:
- Import your music to Cloud Player faster with scan and match technology
- Upgrade your music to high-quality 256 Kbps audio
- Add your past Amazon MP3 purchases to Cloud Player automatically…for free
- Edit song and album information
- Import more types of music files
The updates are live now, so for anyone that has their music stored on the Cloud Player, go get your free high quality files!
Via: Amazon
from Droid Life
From AnandTech: The 16GB Nexus 7: Storage Performance
For the first time, in our Nexus 7 review, I started seriously looking at integrated storage performance of tablets and smartphones. I’ve casually done this in the past, but users complaining of poor system responsiveness with background writes on ASUS’ Transformer Prime/Pad series demanded something a little more thorough.
As I mentioned in our Nexus 7 review, most tablet and smartphone makers integrate a single chip controller + NAND combo to save on cost and space. In the case of the 8GB Nexus 7, you get an 8GB eMMC package from Kingston. In this tiny package is an eMMC controller and NAND die. The component list should sound familiar to anyone who remembers the earliest affordable MLC SSDs for PCs, particularly in the absense of any on-board DRAM for caching duties. The lack of DRAM is only part of the issue, the fact of the matter is these cheap eMMC controllers just aren’t very fast – at least compared to high-end SSD controllers. Things will get better over time, but for now cost is still a major concern.
The Kingston controller in the 8GB Nexus 7 is much faster than what ASUS uses in the Transformer Prime/Pad series, but I had heard the controller in the 16GB models was even quicker. I just got my hands on a 16GB N7 and ran through the Android version of our standard four-corners SSD tests using Androbench. Just like last time I increased read/write sizes to 100MB in order to get consistent results out of the device.
Sequential read speed is around 14% slower on the 16GB part, but it’s still higher than what you’ll get out of a Transformer Pad Infinity. The drop here is unfortunate as sequential read performance does matter – that’s really the only downside to the 16GB model’s IO performance though. The drop is also not significant enough to cause any additional stuttering or otherwise undesirable behavior.
Sequential write speed is up by 24%, putting the Nexus 7 further ahead of the other devices I tested here.
Random read performance shoots up by over 60%, putting the 16GB Nexus 7 ahead of the Galaxy Nexus.
Random write performance sees a 43% increase, putting good distance between the 16GB and 8GB N7s. None of these numbers are particularly good (we’re still talking about mechanical hard drive levels of performance here) but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
It’s always possible that we’ll see multiple controllers used in the 8 and 16GB Nexus 7s, but for now all of the 16GB models use the same controller. The difference in IO performance isn’t significant enough to push you towards the $250 Nexus 7 if you don’t need the extra space, but consider it an added benefit if you do order the 16GB model.
from AnandTech