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Category: space – Page 1,094

Enormous Christmas Eve Asteroid Sparks Fears: ‘Potentially Hazardous’ Space Rock Could Cause Earthquakes, Wake Dormant Volcanoes

Merry Christmas, my friends. wink

A massive asteroid flying by Earth on 2015 Christmas Eve has scientists on edge. While NASA is downplaying the threat to human life and property, conspiracy theorists and several experts say space rock 2003 SD220 is larger than believed and has the potential to cause deadly earthquakes and eruptions from dormant volcanoes.

According to a Sun report, the Christmas Eve asteroid is one of at least 10 rocky bodies in space that are considered “potentially hazardous” to Earth. According to an internal report, NASA officials say it measures about 1.5 miles wide and is moving at 5 miles per second.

“Little is known about the remaining 10 high-priority targets other than the absolute magnitudes and their heliocentric orbits that make six of them potentially hazardous to Earth.”

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What Was Your 1st Computer? — Computerphile

Before each Computerphile interview we asked guests and regular contributors about their first computer.

Professor Uwe Aickelin: Missing Data: https://youtu.be/oCQbC818KKU
Professor Ross Anderson: Chip & PIN Fraud: https://youtu.be/Ks0SOn8hjG8

Spencer Lamb: Inside a Data Centre: https://youtu.be/fd3kSdu4W7c
Tom Scott: Animated GIFs and Space vs Time: http://youtu.be/blSzwPcL5Dw

Horia Maior: Brain Scanner: COMING SOON!
Dr Sean Holden: The Singularity & Friendly AI: https://youtu.be/uA9mxq3gneE

Brian Kernighan on Computerphile: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzH6n4zXuckqZ90zLyy36qjO5YIn1RulG

Olly Chick: Captain Buzz: Smart Phone Pilot: https://youtu.be/DE5e0C7xw7c

Continue reading “What Was Your 1st Computer? — Computerphile” | >

The Biggest Meteor Shower of the Year Is This Weekend and Here’s How to Watch

This weekend’s Geminids are going to be the biggest meteor shower of this year, and you absolutely should not miss it. Here’s when, where, and how to watch the Geminid meteor shower—and what you should be looking for when you do.

The Geminids are a mid-December (this year peaking on Sunday, December 13th) meteor shower formed by the debris of comet 3200 Phaeton burning up in our atmosphere. Phaeton is unusual in that it was only recently recognized as a comet at all. For many years, astronomers believed that Phaethon was really a large asteroid, due to its total lack of ice. Eventually, researchers figured out that Phaethon’s lack of ice was simply due to how close its path was to the sun, and they reclassified it as an extinct comet or a “rock comet.” That extinct comet is responsible for the Geminids you’ll see this weekend.

The Biggest Meteor Shower of the Year Is This Weekend and Here's How to Watch

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Can You Own Part of an Asteroid? How Asteroid Mining Is Changing Space Law

Coal miners mine coal; diamond miners mine diamonds; gold miners mine gold; space miners (will) mine space—and anything in it that has precious metals or compounds that can be whisked into rocket fuel. But, just like the first three kinds of “resource extraction,” the celestial kind will face more than a few philosophical, financial, and regulatory complications.

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Google says its quantum computer is more than 100 million times faster than a regular computer chip

Google appears to be more confident about the technical capabilities of its D-Wave 2X quantum computer, which it operates alongside NASA at the U.S. space agency’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

D-Wave’s machines are the closest thing we have today to quantum computing, which work with quantum bits, or qubits — each of which can be zero or one or both — instead of more conventional bits. The superposition of these qubits can allow great numbers of computations to be performed simultaneously, making a quantum computer highly desirable for certain types of processes.

In two tests, the Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab today announced that it has found the D-Wave machine to be considerably faster than simulated annealing — a simulation of quantum computation on a classical computer chip.

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