Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.
Engadget has the official release pics.
Fully programmable OLED keyboard. Very very cool. And $1490 US. Pre-orders in April with November/December availability.
Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.
Suspected Leader of 9/11 Attacks Is Said to Confess - New York Times
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, long said to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, confessed to them at a military hearing held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Saturday, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon yesterday. He also acknowledged full or partial responsibility for more than 30 other terror attacks or plots.
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Griffin maps out NASA’s moon and Mars plans up to 2057 - NASA SpaceFlight.com
‘For the sake of argument and nothing more, let us say that in 2022 we will begin a sustained lunar program of exploration and development consisting of three manned missions (two outpost crew rotations and one sortie) and one unmanned cargo mission per year, utilizing three Orion/Ares I vehicles and four Ares V launches.
‘Present projections assume a cargo capacity of six metric tons on a lander carrying four crew members, and twenty metric tons on a cargo lander, at a marginal cost of about $750 million for a human mission and $525 million for a cargo mission. The marginal cost in Fiscal 2000 dollars for this nominal lunar program will thus be about $3 billion.’
Mars also received a mention, with the timeline of the early 2020’s being noted by Griffin, who went on to project nine Mars missions within a 20 year period, all costing less than the current shuttle program.
‘By the 2020?s we will be well positioned to begin the Mars effort in earnest. The lunar campaign will have stabilized; a human-tended outpost will be well established; we will have extensive long-duration space experience in both zero - and low - gravity conditions, and it will be time to bundle these lessons and move on to Mars - which does not imply that we will bring lunar activities to an end.
‘Quite the contrary; my prediction is that the Moon will prove to be far more interesting, and far more relevant to human affairs, than many today are prepared to believe. But by the early 2020s, it will be time to assign a stable level of support for lunar activities, and set out for Mars.
Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.
Have researchers found a new state of matter?
Wen suspected that the effect could be an example of a new type of matter. Different phases of matter are characterised by the way their atoms are organised. In a liquid, for instance, atoms are randomly distributed, whereas atoms in a solid are rigidly positioned in a lattice. FQHE systems are different. “If you take a snapshot of the position of electrons in an FQHE system they appear random and you think you have a liquid,” says Wen. But step back, and you see that, unlike in a liquid, the electrons dance around each other in well-defined steps.
It is as if the electrons are entangled. Today, physicists use the term to describe a property in quantum mechanics in which particles can be linked despite being separated by great distances. Wen speculated that FQHE systems represented a state of matter in which entanglement was an intrinsic property, with particles tied to each other in a complicated manner across the entire material.
This led Wen and Levin to the idea that there may be a different way of thinking about matter. What if electrons were not really elementary, but were formed at the ends of long “strings” of other, fundamental particles? They formulated a model in which such strings are free to move “like noodles in a soup” and weave together into huge “string-nets”.
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