Watch This Space
It’s not exactly a new idea and over the past few years watch phones have come and gone with alarming rapidity but two of the mobile phone world’s heavy hitters are about to re-launch the concept, so beloved of science fiction and not forgetting Dick Tracey who started it all. Within the next few weeks both LG and Samsung will be selling wristphones in the UK. Samsung are kicking off with the S9110, it has a 1.76-inch touch screen, built-in MP3 player, speaker, Bluetooth and at under 12mm thick, it’s one of, if not the slimmest offering to date. LG’s wristphone is the GD910 and it has a slightly smaller 1.4-inch screen, but it’s also very well equipped with voice recognition, MP3, Bluetooth and a text to speech feature. No word on whether they tell the time or not, but I think we can take that as read…Prices are expected to in the £350 to £400 bracket. Whether or not they catch on remains to be seen but I’m still a bit concerned about the odd looks you’ll be getting talking to your watch, not to mention letting everyone in earshot hear your phone calls, unless you pop in an earphone or Bluetooth headset, which sort of defeats the object…
How Music Would Sound in Other Worlds
How many of you have ever wondered about how a song played on, say, the Martian surface would actually sound? Assuming you pressed the “play” button on a Hi-Fi audio system, would Bach’s famous “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” sound the same as on Earth, as you would expect? Scientists say that no, it would not, and explain why. Just like the outer space causes sound to travel with extremely high difficulty, because it lacks a proper propagation medium, so does the less dense atmosphere of other planets.
This is why, in the Martian atmosphere, for instance, you would barely hear anything at all, let alone perceive every note or, even less likely, enjoy the richness of Bach’s music. “Sound doesn’t travel very far on Mars,” explained Amanda Hanford, an acoustics doctoral degree candidate at Penn State University. Read more
Space on the Tray
I have to say that if you feel the need to install this little application on your PC, then you probably need a larger hard disc drive. Tray DisK Free sits in the System Tray – next to the Windows clock — and it does just one thing, it displays the amount of free space left on your disc drive. If you hover your mouse over the icon there’s a more detailed analysis. Nominally it’s set for your main drive (usually C:) but it can be set to monitor any drive on your PC. The menu option lets you change how frequently the program checks the drive, and if you want to have a fiddle with some command line switches, you can change the display and text colour.
Tour Space With Microsoft
It’s okay, Bill Gates hasn’t bought NASA, at least not just yet, but Microsoft is giving away a free virtual tour of space with a new web-based application called Worldwide Telescope. Be warned, you’ll need a reasonably quick PC, preferably with a dual-core CPU, and ideally running Vista, though it will still plod along under XP. The images are stunning and based on actual ground and spaced based telescopes, you can zoom in on astronomical features, explore the solar system and warp across the Milky Way. Okay, so it’s a bit like Google Sky, but there’s a bit more depth to it, better controls and it looks like it could become a very useful educational tool.
Don’t Watch This Space
Microsoft, Google. HP, Philips, Samsung and Intel are amongst the big names behind the White Space Coalition, which is looking at ways to provide high-speed wireless Internet access using the gaps between TV channels. The gaps, which are designed to stop channels clashing with one another, are essentially wasted space, but until recently it was thought that any attempt to use them would result in interference and broadcasters are naturally against the idea. Read more
Next Generation Space Telescope
Named in 2002, after NASA’s second administrator, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a planned space infrared observatory, which will be created as an improvement of the aging Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope is planned to be launched in 2013, from an Ariane 5 rocket, and is the result of the collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
The primary mission of the future space telescope, will be to search light from forming stars and galaxies after the Big Bang, the study and evolution of galaxies, the understanding of the stars and planetary systems and the study of the origin of life.
The JWST will be placed in space at a location called Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, meaning that the Earth and the Sun will occupy relatively the same position in the telescope’s view. The future telescope will have a reflective collective area six times larger than Hubble’s, and will operate in the infrared spectrum. Read more
