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ARCA’s revolutionary aerospike engine completed and ready for testing

ARCA Space Corporation has announced its linear aerospike engine is ready to start ground tests as the company moves towards installing the engine in its Demonstrator 3 rocket. Designed to power the world’s first operational Single-Stage-To-Orbit (SSTO) satellite launcher, the engine took only 60 days to complete from when fabrication began.

Over the past 60 years, space launches have become pretty routine. The first stage ignites, the rocket lifts slowly and majestically from the launch pad before picking up speed and vanishing into the blue. Minutes later, the first stage shuts down and separates from the upper stages, which ignite and burn in turn until the payload is delivered into orbit.

This approach was adopted not only because it provides enough fuel to lift the payload while conserving weight, but also because the first-stage engines, which work best at sea level, are very inefficient at higher altitudes or in space, so different engines need to be employed for each stage of flight.

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Energy Dept Spends $33M to Harden Grid Against Network, Kinetic Attack

The grants focus on improving grid resiliency during a cyberattack and speeding recovery.

The Energy Department announced a roughly $33 million investment Tuesday in seven projects aimed at securing the electric grid against cyberattacks, physical attacks and weather disasters.

The projects are designed both to make grid systems more secure against cyberattacks and to improve their ability to withstand a cyberattack, according to a department fact sheet.

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3D-Printed Wind Turbine Blades Could Bring ‘Sci-Fi’ Level of Performance

(3Ders.org) The rapid advance of 3D printing technology means that hybrid-material wind turbine blades complete with metal mesh inserts are no longer the stuff of imagination. These energy savers with “sci-fi-level” performance could become reality in as soon as two years. Philip Totaro of Totaro & Associates, “The greatest challenge for wind turbine blade structural and manufacturing engineers is to implement the idealized performance and noise mitigated designs of aerodynamics engineers,” explains Totaro. “Limitations of previous generations of manufacturing technology and the reliance on lower cost materials have limited the type of spar/shear web structures which could be utilized.” But 3D printing could be about to change all that, Totaro says.

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Monster Solar Flare Marks 7th Powerful Sun Storm in 7 Days

The sun fired off yet another powerful solar flare yesterday (Sept. 10), its seventh in seven days.

The flare, which peaked at 12:06 EDT (1606 GMT), covered North and South America in high-energy light. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) released a statement that warned of strong, high-frequency radio blackouts and navigation-system disruption, potentially lasting up to an hour.

Like the six other flares observed since Sept. 4, this one came from a sunspot known as Active Region (AR) 2673, which is currently turning away from Earth and will soon be out of sight.

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EU Funds 20 Million Euro ARM+FPGA Exascale Project

At the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre on Wednesday (Sept. 6), 16 partners gathered to launch the EuroEXA project, which invests €20 million over three-and-a-half years into exascale-focused research and development.

Led by the Horizon 2020 program, EuroEXA picks up the banner of a triad of partner projects — ExaNeSt, EcoScale and ExaNoDe — building on their work to develop a complete HPC system based on ARM Cortex processors and Xilinx Ultrascale FPGAs. The goal is to deploy an energy-efficient petaflops system by 2020 and lay a path to achieve exascale capability in the 2022–23 timeframe.

All told, the European Commission is planning a €50 million investment for the EuroEXA group of projects, spanning “research, innovation and action across applications, system software, hardware, networking, storage, liquid cooling and data centre technologies.”

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#G4C12: Rants

http://gamesforchange.org/festival2012

How to “Get Better”: Approaches to LGBTQ-relevant Video Games
Presented by: Robert Yang

Given today’s attempts at LGBTQ outreach and advocacy, e.g. the “It Gets Better” campaign, it makes sense to explore more queer-relevant content through engaging and thoughtful video game design. So how do we get LGBTQ content “right”? For that matter, what does “LGBTQ content” even entail? What are the ways that video games imply notions of gender and sexuality through their graphics, sounds, interfaces, and mechanics? Listeners will take away design techniques to integrate socially relevant content into games, ethical concerns in doing so, and a very brief overview of LGBTQ issues.

Crafting Science Learning Games that People Will Play — Two Voices, One Goal.
Presented by: Jodi Asbell-Clarke, Scott Kirk

Jodi and Scott will tell a tale of woe, hope, and compassion about co-developing educational games. With a dual mission, entertainment and learning, the games developed by EdGE and GameGurus are walking the fine line of research and commercial development. The vastly different perspectives of an educational researcher and a commercial game designer present challenges, tension, grief, and ultimately opportunities for new types of games that can make a difference.
Jodi will explain the need for grounding the game in solid pedagogical design so that research measurements will be effective and convincing to funders and educational systems. Scott tries to fit those constraints into the world of development timelines, budgets, and profit margins. It all works when both teams have the creative spark, worthy goals, and a lot of energy.

If coding games is the new literacy, then… presented by: idit harel caperton.