Hayabusa & Hayabusa2 – Hunting Asteroids

We have heard more about Rosetta mission and how epic it was. We landed a space probe on a comet, and that’s some achievement not only for ESA but also for whole humanity. Now another mission by JAXA (Japanese space agency) was sent yesterday (Dec 3, 2014) to pursue C-Type asteroid named “1999 JU3”. Hayabusa2 is as name suggests a second mission for exploring asteroids.

Hayabusa mission was launched in 2003 to collect samples from s-type asteroid “Itokawa” and it returned to Earth in 2010, successfully completing the mission with asteroid samples. The reason behind Hayabusa’s mission was to study about the birth of our solar system. You might ask why asteroid, why we are searching for answers for our solar system in asteroids.

Hayabusa

Only extra-terrestrial samples we have gathered so far is from our moon, but like our Earth, moon too went terrestrial transformation over the billions of years due to the thermal processes, therefore these samples from moon or anything from our Earth cannot provide more accurate data about the birth of our solar system. Asteroids were produced at the birth of the solar system and since they are so small, they went little or no transformation over these billions of years. Therefore studying the samples from asteroid will give more accurate details about our solar system.

In a technological perspective, Hayabusa mission has another feat. It used ion engine as the main propeller. Ion engines are high-efficient engines still in technological making and will become important key player in future space exploration.

Hayabusa also used autonomous navigation system, one that allow the space craft to navigate to the target without human intervention. It uses optical navigation camera for light detection and ranging.

Hayabusa2 is going after c-type asteroid, they are considered to be more ancient than s-type and is considered to contain more organic materials than that of s-type. Studying c-type asteroid will yield more details about origin of organic materials and water in our solar system. Hayabusa2 uses identical configuration of Hayabusa, but some parts are improvised, such as flat-disk high gain antenna.

Hayabusa2 will reach asteroid 1999 JU3 in mid-2018 and orbit it for one and a half years to collect samples and then return to Earth around the end of 2020. After it return with collected samples, we will have more knowledge about what and how organic materials and water came to solar system and also some questions about life formation also more likely to be answered.

Scientists explain nitrogen-rich atmosphere of Earth with plate tectonics

Earth, unlike its neighbor planets Venus and Mars, has 78% nitrogen in its atmosphere. Our current day atmosphere is a result of billions of years of photosynthesis by plants, but that only increased the amount of oxygen to almost 20% of atmosphere, but why there is too much nitrogen in the atmosphere is still not understood well.

Now scientists try to explain abundance of nitrogen with plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is the reason for mountains and also volcanoes, when volcano erupts it does bring lot of deep earth stuffs into the surface of earth.

Gases like sulfur, carbon dioxide and nitrogen are the gases usually comes out of volcanic eruption.

Scientists say that nitrogen is locked into the silicate rocks in the earth’s crust. When this silicate rocks interact with oxygen based compounds, they break into water (H2O) and nitrogen (N2). This nitrogen then came out of volcanic eruption to the atmosphere.

This is why Mars and Venus have little nitrogen because they don’t have plate tectonics.

Read more at arstechnica

Image: NOAA via arstechnica

The thinnest phone yet, Oppo R5

Oppo R5 is the world's thinnest smart phone! With just 4.85 mm thickness, this phone just looks like metal plate.

The phone features Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 chipset with octa-core running at 1.5Ghz. The phone also comes with 2 GB of RAM and has full HD screen (1920x1080). It also has 13MP Sony rear camera and 5MP front camera.

R5 only comes with 2000 mAh battery, most probably due to the slim size. It also has only 16 GB internal storage and no SD card slot.

Whether this phone too prone to bendgate is yet to be tested! Well the phone goes on sale in December and available off contract at $499 USD.

Source & Image: engadget

Germany Demands Google to Show Their Searching Algorithms

Heiko Mass, Germany’s justice minister, wants Google to open their searching algorithms so the way Google works will be much more transparent. Google has lot of impact on businesses lately, and depending on how businesses are shown in Google’s search results make a major impact in businesses.

With Google dominating online search market with more than 60%, Google has become a standard for online search, and many of Europe countries including Germany feels that Google take this as an advantage and promoting its own brand of services over native services in Europe.

So Germany’s minister believes that Google must expose how it’s searching algorithms works, therefore explaining the search results with high Google service dominance.

Even though Google’s many works are open source, including all famous Android OS, but very important aspects of Google’s primary income generating businesses are closed source and proprietary. Google Search is one of these deeply closed and guarded project. Showing the algorithm to authorities may ended up in technology breach and others copying the algorithms.

Microsoft’s EMET 5.0 is Released, Providing Extensive Defense Against Cyber-Attacks

Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit is Microsoft’s second layer of security that was primarily available for enterprise customers, it helps prevent damages against cyber-attacks, and providing methods to detect and block exploitations techniques that are used by cyber criminals. It provides real time protection against such attacks and help secure your system before your formal anti-virus or anti-malware get updates with the patch for such attacks.

EMET is less known by normal users, because it wasn’t much advertised by Microsoft, but now this EMET is free and anyone can use it, even on your home computers, and it gives you extra protection against hackers.

EMET is also compatible with most anti-virus and anti-malware applications, so it can work alongside to provide more security.

Download EMET 5.0 here (11MB)

More details on EMET here.

Material Design Comes to Google Chrome Beta for Android

Google revealed Android 5 in their IO conference, it is called Android L, and it has some new UI makeovers, that Google called it Material Design. It gives more attention to type and have lot of animation based UI changes.

Before releasing the actual OS, Google has already showed off few of their apps with Material Design such as Gmail and Maps. Now Google released Chrome Beta for Android with Material Design.

Chrome Beta 37 has totally new look, but the dev team said they were experimenting with some of the elements of Material Design. It seems they will continue to work with the new design and finally it will come to Chrome for Android.

Download Chrome Beta for Android here.

Here is the full gallery at arstechnica

Three Super Massive Black Holes Rotating Closely

4.3 billion light years away, in a distance galaxy, 2 black holes have been identified, they are not ordinary black holes, they are supermassive black holes, that is they are millions or billions time massive than our Sun. Usually these kind of black holes lies in the center of the galaxy.

Super massive black holes are surrounded by disk of glowing hot gas, commonly with that it forms quasar. Quasars are monstrous objects in space and with its colossal power can outshine the entire galaxy.

The quasar named SDSS J1502+1115 is in constellation Bootes, 4.3 light years away is actually 2 supper massive black holes and are almost 24,000 light years apart. But when scientists looked one black hole closely with intercontinental array of radio dishes – which can produce sharper images than Hubble Space Telescope – they discovered that one of the black hole is actually a duo.

This new found pair of black holes are actually 450 light years apart and orbiting each other every 4 million years. There is only one more tightly paired black hole we ever discovered and that is 24 light years apart.

Scientists believe that tightly paired black holes can help detect “gravitational wave” predicted by general relativity, but so far no known binary black holes are tight enough to cause detectable gravitational wave.

Source: ScienceMag

Sony Kernel Sources are Available on GitHub

Sony is really great with cooperating with open community, and they have been releasing Xperia kernel modules as zip files until now. Recently it changed and they are now available on GitHub, this is great news because now it has all the changes and history logged and it is great for developers to merge any mother modules with them.

Sony already provides official way to unlock their Xperia devices’ bootloader – allowing the device to install 3^rd party roms such as famous CyanogenMod for Xperia from FreeXperia project.

It is also noted that recently Sony hired the founder of FreeXperia project, Alin Jerpelea.

Sony GitHub

Source: Sony Mobile

MIT Researchers Shows off 36 Core CPU with “network-on-chip”

Last week, at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, MIT research group unveiled 36 core chip. What’s new about this chip is the way it communicates with its cores – it is called “network-on-chip”.

Today’s multicore CPUs are connecting and communicating with its multiple cores with single wire, called bus, when two cores are needed to communicated, they are given access to the bus. This will become an issue as the number of cores increases, because then time to wait for the access to bus will increase and it will reduced the performance of the chip.

Nexus 9 Details Leaked Ahead of Google IO Conference

The next version of Google Nexus 7 – Google Nexus 9 details have been surfaced. This 8.9 inch tables will be the successor of Nexus 7 and made by HTC – it is codenamed Volantis.

Though it is named as Nexus 9, but it may change before coming into market. It has 8.9 inch display at 2048x1440 pixels and powered by NVIDIA Logan 64-bit processor with 2GB of RAM. It also has 16GB/32GB storage configuration.

With 8MP rear camera with optical image stabilization and 3MP front facing camera.

The body is built using what they call “aluminum zero-gap construction”. It is also believed that 16GB version will be priced at $399 and $499 for 32GB

Source: Android Police

Nokia's Z Launcher for Android - Simple and Smart

Nokia has released a launcher app for Android platform, which is still in beta but this is the first Android app Nokia has made public. Microsoft bought Nokia recently and move ahead with Windows Phone / Lumia series. But Microsoft didn't buy whole Nokia. This app is from one of the original Nokia group, one of the group Microsoft hadn't bought.

Z Launcher is very customizable and simple to use. It is much different than conventional Android launcher apps. Z Launcher features clock, calendar and appointments on the top, and list of apps according to the time - Z Launcher learns the pattern on how you use your apps and shows them accordingly. It shows some sets of apps in the morning and another set of apps in the evening. It not only shows apps in the list, also contacts and meetings reminders.

Z Launcher also has finger gesture feature called "Scribble". Just draw the first letter of the app and it shows relevant list of apps and details for that letter.

Z Launcher is currently in a pre-beta release. You can head over to zlauncher.com and click on the download link to download the app to your phone directly.

Z Launcher works with app major phones and phones running Android 4.1. CyanogenMod phones or any phones which are rooted are not supported.

Amazon’s Fire Phone Will be Available on July 25th

It was rumored for long time that Amazon was making phone of its own. Now Amazon has announced it “Fire Phone” and it will be released on July 25^th, 2014. So what is in the package?

It is packed with Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 CPU at 2.2GHz with Adreno 330 GPU. It has 13MP rear camera and 720p display. But this phone has 5 front facing camera for 3D effects.

Apple Added Low-end iMac in Their Store

Apple has updated their apple store website today with new Apple iMac product which is priced at $1099.00 – which is lower than any of the previous offering.

This entry level iMac has 1.4GHz dual core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost up to 2.7GHz with 8GB of memory. It also has 500GB hard drive and Intel HD 5000 Graphics.

This 21.5 inch iMac can be seen as Apple’s entry to cheaper market, though it is powered by low-end hardware, but it is pretty good comparing to the Windows machines built with the same quality.

This iMac will be shipped with Mac OS 10.9 and will be able to update to 10.10 when it becomes available.

Easy Way to Install .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows 8 / 8.1

Sometimes you need to install some software that require .NET 3.5 framework, but you cannot just download and install it on Windows 8/8.1. On demand download fails most of the time, and sometimes takes much longer. Easier way is to install it from Windows 8/8.1 installation media.

By using the Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) command line tool, we can install .NET 3.5 easily.

What you need to have

1. Windows installation DVD or ISO image
2. Administrative privilege to run command prompt as Administrator

How to install

1. Insert the DVD into drive, or mount ISO image, and note the drive letter.

2. Now open command prompt as administrator. Easy way is to move your mouse cursor to the left down corner (where the start button is) and right click – you will see a menu.

Click “Command Prompt (Admin)” and it will open as admin.

3. Now copy and paste the following command prompt.

DISM /Online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:NetFx3 /All /LimitAccess /Source:d:\sources\sxs

You see the last part of the command “d:\sources\sxs” – you need to change d: into whatever drive letter your installation media is in.

4. That’s all – hit enter and it will install without trouble or asking any more question.

Now you can install any app that needs .NET 3.5 – and you don’t need to restart your system after installing .NET 3.5

SwiftKey –Beloved Android Keyboard is Now Free

SwiftKey one of the most popular keyboards for android is now free, it is known for the auto predicting feature, it just works like magic. It was a paid app and cost $4.99, but now the team made it all free, for those who already paid for the app, will receive premium themes for SwiftKey for free.

SwiftKey now also features theme store where you can download free and paid themes for the keyboard. Also recently SwiftKey added emoji predictions too.

SwiftKey supports 66 languages and will also be available on iOS 8.

Download from Google Play Store

Intel’s Devil’s Canyon Processor Reaches 4.4GHz for Just $339

In the processing power in terms of clock speed, Intel did not bother much. AMD have already showed their FX processors which run at 4GHz. With the introduction of 4^th generation Haswell Core i7 – 4790K processor, Intel is entering the arena with a capable processor which runs at 4GHz and it can go up to 4.4GHz in Turbo mode.

The biggest advantage is Intel is not charging much for the processor, at the price is tagged at $339. Only downfall is that it uses slightly higher watt – 88W. But nonetheless for the price, this is really good deal.

Source: AnandTech

Intel® Core™ i7-4790K Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.40 GHz)

Another OpenSSL Bug Discovered

You might have already heard about the Heartbleed bug, it was so massive everyone who implemented OpenSSL had to quickly fix it and asked their user to change the passwords, including Google, Facebook and others.

Yesterday, new vulnerability was found in OpenSSL, this bug could lead to an attacker on the same network to steal the decrypt data such as passwords and credit card numbers.

Researchers says that is bug is not as bad as the Heartbleed bug because, in order to exploit this new but, attacker should be on the same network as you are. This is a problem for public networks such as free Wi-Fi on restaurants and coffee shops. But on your home or office, this is usually not possible.

Another point about this bug is, that unlike Heartbleed, both server and client has to run vulnerable version of OpenSSL in order to carry on the attack.

OpenSSL is an open sourced encryption library used in server – client transactions that uses SSL and TSL protocols. The project is managed by worldwide community and are updated in fast phase.

Soruce: Neowin

Facebook App Listens to Your Surroundings and Records Audio

It is Facebook app again. It is one of the app that requires all special permissions from android to run, and now they have added one more permission, to access your microphone. Facebook app can now listen to your environment and understand what you have been listening to or watching to.

This is indeed caused a massive outcry from the community, but nevertheless Facebook added it, but Facebook says it still respect your privacy and doesn’t store the recorded audio in the servers, it just records and match the audio fingerprint so you can post it on Facebook only if you choose to.

For now this recording option is optional, you can disable it if you choose to. But it is not sure for how long this will stay optional.

Source & Images: Geek

Google’s Project Tango Tablet is Here on Nvidia Tegra K1

Few months ago, Google has demonstrated its new 3D sensing phone, which can learn the special dimensions of the surroundings by just moving with the phone. With depth sensors and motion-tracking camera it could build a 3D maps of your location.

It was just a prototype 5inch phone, but now Google’s Advanced Technologies Group is about to release a real device, which is slightly bigger than 5inch prototype, this is 7inch tablet powered by Nvidia’s Tegra K1 processor.

Google Chrome to Block Local Extensions Installations on Windows

Malicious extensions are real headache for user, such as Ask and few others, they hijack your settings and make changes that are difficult to restore for normal users. Back in October Google added “Reset browser settings” button to recover from such disaster, but malicious extension makers are finding new ways to bypass that.

Google has now announced that from today local extensions installations are no longer allowed in Chrome for Windows. In order to install the extension, it must be hosted on the Chrome Web Store. Google says with this new policy, extensions previously installed not from Chrome Web Store will be automatically disabled.

Developers are not affected by this policy though. They will be able to locally install extensions during development and websites providing extension installation on their own can use inline installs feature.

Source: Google Chrome Blog