TTL - The Tech Link Blog

GeoEye-1

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in partnership with Google (and other sponsors), has helped fund the construction of the GeoEye-1 satellite and its launch on September 6th.

GeoEye-1 is the world’s highest-resolution commercial satellite currently in Earth’s orbit and can take photos at a resolution of up to 41 centimeters from the ground. However, Google will only be able to use images taken at 50 centimeters because of a government restriction.

GeoEye-2 is set to launch in 2011 or 2012 with a resolution of 25 centimeters.

WIRED

Toshiba

Toshiba once again confirmed that it plans to introduce their new lines of fuel cell batteries as early as March of 2009.

The batteries should be more powerful and longer-lasting than current batteries found in electronic devices such as cell phones, laptops, mp3 players, etc.

TechSpot

Planet Mercury

NASA has published some of the most recent images of Mercury returned by the Messenger probe yesterday.

Some of the pictures were taken when the probe was only at 200KMs from the surface of the planet. The probe is set to enter Mercury’s orbit in March 2011.

You can see more of the images taken by the probe on NASA’s web site.

NASA

SpaceX Falcon 1

SpaceX’s Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed launch vehicle to reach earth orbit from the ground yesterday.

The rocket carries a payload mass simulator developed by SpaceX, which is aiming for private space transportation and deliveries.

After three unsuccessful attempts, SpaceX has finally done it with this fourth attempt. Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, called the launch a “great day for SpaceX.” Elon Musk is also the co-founder and former head of PayPal.

WIRED
cNet
SpaceX

Google

Have you ever felt like something was missing and that you have the solution to a problem but just don’t have the resources or money to fix it or make it happen?

Well, now is the time to put that brainpower to good use! Google’s Project 10 to the 100th has been launched this week and is taking all your ideas in consideration until October 20th.

Submit a “World changing” idea and get a chance at Google making it happen.

Google Blog
Google’s Project 10 to the 100th

iYo

What if you could play the yo-yo and use all the energy that you put into playing straight in your iPhone or iPod? Swedish designer Peter Thuvander created a yo-yo just like that.

The yo-yo is in fact an induction charger that has an onboard battery that gets charged while playing. Once the battery is charged with the motion from playing the yo-yo, you plug the device to your iPhone or iPod and it will charge it. Very clever!

treehugger
iYo by Peter Thuvander

First Half or the CMS Inner Tracker Barrel Installed at LHC

WIRED web site brings us the Top 8 Large Hadron Collider Videos.

If you are as curious as I am on this project and the consequences/discoveries that could result from its use, click the link below and enjoy this fine selection of videos.

WIRED

Large Hardron Collider

The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is now out of order because of (not official) leaks in the helium cooling system.

The CERN says that it will take approximately 2 months to make the necessary repairs to the cooling system and so the LHC will be down for at least 2 months.

Sorry guys… no atom-smashing news for another 2 months it seems!

BBC News

Hurricane IKE

Personally, I preffer having Internet downtime than having my roof ripped from my house but nonetheless, IKE is causing quite a headache for some ISPs in the states.

According to a study by Renesys Corp., the outages of the last few days would be the most important since the general outage of 2003. 400 networks were unavailable for more than an hour lately comparted to over 2500 in 2003. Each one of these networks represents a small ISP or a University.

The most affected connections are located in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Although many outages were still reported yesterday, access to most of the networks have been reestablished.

Google Sea Datacenter

Seems people at Google are desperate to find new ways to save energy / money and to reduce pollution. They have recently filed a patent that shows us how a datacenter in the middle of the sea would be feasible.

Using cold water to cool down the servers and wave movement to generate electricity, this would mean that the datacenters could be self sufficient.

I have to ask: ”Why not add some solar panels to that?”

Times Online

Large Hardron Collector

A hacker group known as the Greek Security Team has apparently left a message on the CERN’s (European Organization for Nuclear Research) servers confirming that they have successfully infiltrated the their network.

The CERN is the organization behind the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project.

The Telegraph UK