All Blog Posts Tagged 'system' (18)

Relationship Management System

A UK-based developer who finally scraped together enough money for a MacBook Air managed to hack Google's Chromium OS onto it a short time later, according to a blog post published on Tuesday. Chromium's startup time is slower than OS X and the need for BIOS emulation bogs the entire thing down, but the author managed to force the OS and the hardware to put aside most of their differences. For science.

The process involves…

Market research firm VisionMobile has published a report that evaluates the openness of eight major open source software projects. The study—which was partly funded by the European Union—focuses largely on open governance, inclusiveness, transparency, and ease of access to source code. To quantify relative openness, the researchers established criteria and a numerical rating system with points.

The projects that VisionMobile analyzed include Android, Eclipse, the Linux kernel, MeeGo,…

A new twist on an old solar cell design sends light ricocheting through layers of microscopic spheres, increasing its electricity-generating potential by 26 percent.

By engineering alternating layers of nanometer and micrometer particles, a team of engineers from the University of Minnesota has improved the efficiency of a type of solar cell by as much as 26 percent. These cells, known as dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC), are made of titanium dioxide (TiO2), a photosensitive material…

Solar panels are, for the most part, large black panels, made of squares, but what if it does not have to be that way. What if users could get all of the benefits of solar panels without making their roofs look like the side of a Manhattan skyscraper?

One Canadian-based solar technology company is looking to change that view. Qsolar has announced the creation of the Kristal and Kristal Rainbow range of semi-transparent and colored semi-transparent solar panels. These lines come in a…

ESA's Herschel space observatory has revealed that nearby interstellar clouds contain networks of tangled gaseous filaments. Intriguingly, each filament is approximately the same width, hinting that they may result from interstellar sonic booms throughout our Galaxy.

The filaments are huge, stretching for tens of light years through space and Herschel has shown that newly-born stars are often found in the densest parts of them. One filament imaged by Herschel in the Aquila region…

NASA's Kepler Mission is giving astronomers such a clear view of changes in star brightness that they can now see clues about what's happening inside red giant stars.

"No one anticipated seeing this before the mission launched," said Steve Kawaler, an Iowa State University professor of physics and astronomy and a leader of the Kepler Asteroseismic Investigation. "That we could see so clearly down below a red giant star's surface was unexpected."



The astronomers' preliminary…

The vivid red cloud in this new image from ESO's Very Large Telescope is a region of glowing hydrogen surrounding the star cluster NGC 371. This stellar nursery lies in our neighboring galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud.

The object dominating this image may resemble a pool of spilled blood, but rather than being associated with death, such regions of ionised hydrogen -- known as HII regions -- are sites of creation with high rates of recent star birth. NGC 371 is an example of this;…

Like a petulant adolescent, Saturn is sending out mixed signals.

Recent data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that the variation in radio waves controlled by the planet's rotation is different in the northern and southern hemispheres. Moreover, the northern and southern rotational variations also appear to change with the Saturnian seasons, and the hemispheres have actually swapped rates. These two radio waves, converted to the human audio range, can be heard in a new…

A team of scientists led by NASA space scientist James Mason have proposed the idea of using a mid-powered laser and telescope to nudge pieces of space junk out of the way and slow it down to avoid collisions.

Currently, the low Earth orbit (LEO) is filled with over 9,700 pieces of debris and 1,500 old rocket bodies that are tracked by the U.S. military. When these pieces collide in space, more debris pieces are created. While many of these pieces are small, when you realize that they…

A desk-sized NASA spacecraft is riding the brakes all the way to Mercury, about to pull a tricky maneuver Thursday night to become the first man-made object to orbit the tiny planet.

After a trip of 4.9 billion miles and nearly six-and-a-half years, the Messenger spacecraft will try to careen into an egg-shaped orbit and fight off the gigantic gravitational pull of the sun. To do so, it will have to use more than half of the fuel it was launched with in 2004 to reduce speed…

In which direction is the sun's stream of charged particles banking when it nears the edge of the solar system? The answer, scientists know, is blowing in the wind. It's just a matter of getting NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft in the right orientation to detect it.

To enable Voyager 1's Low Energy Charged Particle instrument to gather these data, the spacecraft performed a maneuver on March 7 that it hadn't done for 21 years, except in a preparatory test last month.

At 9:10 a.m.…

"We have measured the distance to the most distant mature cluster of galaxies ever found," says the lead author of the study in which the observations from ESO's VLT have been used, Raphael Gobat (CEA, Paris). "The surprising thing is that when we look closely at this galaxy cluster it doesn't look young -- many of the galaxies have settled down and don't resemble the usual star-forming galaxies seen in the early Universe.""We have measured the distance to the most distant mature cluster of…

Rocks on Mars dug from far underground by crater-blasting impacts are providing glimpses of one possible way Mars' atmosphere has become much less dense than it used to be.

At several places where cratering has exposed material from depths of about 5 kilometers (3 miles) or more beneath the surface, observations by a mineral-mapping instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate carbonate minerals.

These are not the first detections of carbonates on Mars. However,…

A student of mine came to me this morning and asked for some ideas for an embedded systems (ideally hardware+software design) project to be completed in the next 6 months or so. He's a freshman, and inexperienced, but has the motivation to learn if pointed in the right direction. The purpose of completing this project, besides getting his feet wet in Electrical/Computer…