Month: January 2016

The patch for the NROL-39 mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base Space Launch Complex-3E in California. It took off Dec. 5, 2013 carrying the Government Experimental Multi-Satellite (GEMSat) payload to "perform a variety of unique scientific experiments and demonstrate high-technology operational concepts," (PDF) according to the NRO.

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The mission logo, or patch, from the launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is of a giant, orange-ish-colored octopus sitting atop Earth. "Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach," read the logo for the NROL-39 mission. The office of the Director of National Intelligence published a picture of the logo-patch on Twitter hours before launch, tweeting that the "Atlas 5 will blast off just past 11PM, PST carrying an classified NRO payload (also cubesats)."

The launch came as the Guardian was publishing one leak after the other from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The leaks detailed that the US National Security Agency was, among other things, exercising digital domination across the world's fiber optic lines. So a spy agency's cartoon depicting total world domination was an untimely public relations failure given the focus Snowden was bringing to the US surveillance state.

European aerospace giant Airbus and Uber are partnering to offer the public what will indubitably be an expensive breed of services: on-demand helicopter rides. According to The Wall Street Journal, the project will be launched during the upcoming Sundance Film Festival, which will take place in Utah this week. No details have been revealed in regards to what financial agreements have been reached by the two companies—nor how much the chopper rides will cost—but Airbus chief Tom Enders describes the venture as “pretty exciting.”

A spokesperson from Airbus said that the company would be offering Airbus H125 and H130 helicopters for use in the project, while Uber will be dispatching cars to deliver passengers to and collect them from their aerial voyages. Neither company has spoken about what the potential cost of such a journey might be, but Uber has charged between a few hundred to a few thousand pounds for similar services. In 2013, for example, you could pay £2,000 for a helicopter ride from a helipad in New York City to the Hamptons on Long Island, where an SUV would be waiting to take you to your final destination.

This unusual collaboration is, at least in part, potentially the result of low oil prices. The Wall Street Journal writes that oil and gas companies have traditionally been a key market for Airbus, but sales have suffered in the last two years. As for Uber, this could potentially be another move to diversify its portfolio of available vehicles. In the past, the company has tried offering auto-rickshaw services in Delphi (the service was shut down late last year) and luxury boats in Turkey. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, Uber offered chopper rides during CES in Las Vegas.

Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), recently launched a new section that lets users easily browse vulnerable webcams.

The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores, according to Dan Tentler, a security researcher who has spent several years investigating webcam security.

"It's all over the place," he told Ars Technica UK. "Practically everything you can think of."

The reused New Shepard booster rolls out to the launch pad at the company's West Texas launch site. (credit: Blue Origin)

The barriers to reusable rockets keep falling. Late Friday night Blue Origin posted a new video of its New Shepard rocket booster flying into space a second time and then landing safely again back in West Texas. This marked the first time a rocket booster has been flown into space, landed, and re-flown again.

Friday's launch to an altitude of 101.7km, which is just above the Karman line considered to be the boundary of outer space, follows a similar flight of the same booster in November. A month later, in December, SpaceX landed a much larger booster, the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket, back at Florida for the first time. But even as SpaceX has begun testing that rocket, which will likely not fly again, Blue Origin has moved ahead to a second flight.

The rivalry between Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos and SpaceX's Elon Musk is spurring the race toward reusability, with the aim of driving down rocket costs so that more people and hardware can be launched into space. As the new video's tagline says, "You can't get there by throwing the hardware away." This may be a subtle dig at NASA, which is building an expensive, massive new rocket, the Space Launch System, which is entirely expendable.

(credit: Flickr user Andree Lüdtke)

Every year, the Dutch physics community gets together to celebrate the year in physics. These are some highlights from the meeting. Since it is a meeting, it is not possible to link to published work (a talk could cover multiple papers or just parts of papers). Where possible, we've linked to the research group that presented the work.

The flow of pedestrians is a critical part of the design of buildings, stadiums, and much more. The obvious reason is that designers need to ensure that people can exit the building quickly in case of a disaster, but it goes much further than that. Are people significantly impeded during normal use? Where will people congregate and will this obstruct access to various parts of the building? All of this and more must go in to the building design.

Most pedestrian models are reasonably simple. Pedestrians are particles that are driven by some force to go in a direction; they don’t collide with each other because there is a repulsive force between them keeping them apart. At their most simple, the models can treat pedestrians as a hard sphere—the pedestrians touch and bounce off each other like billiard balls. However, you can use any number of different physical models to study pedestrian interactions.

In the past decade, mobile computing has gone from a niche market for well-heeled enterprises with large field organisations to the fastest growing, and often most popular, way for employees of organisations of all sizes to do business computing. The near-universal adoption of mobile devices by consumers—who are also employees—has forced one of the most major shifts that corporate IT has ever seen.

In many cases, expensive company-owned laptop rollouts have been replaced by leveraging phones and tablets that are owned by employees. Business applications are quickly being rewritten, and new ones are being invented that leverage the power and ubiquitous nature of mobile devices.

Mobile computing is no longer just another way to access the corporate network: it is quickly becoming not only a new computing platform, but the dominant computing platform for many enterprises. Along the way, corporate culture has had to change to accommodate the always-present nature of the modern smartphone, and security practices have been completely rethought to deal with the challenge of alien, uncontrolled devices being brought inside the corporate firewall.