Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Typically, Myrtle Beach is quite picturesque—as evidenced by this early morning view toward the end of the Cherry Grove fishing pier. (credit: Kelly Verdeck Photography / Getty Images)

Authorities and vacationers in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, are waiting anxiously for more information on a case of flesh-eating bacteria that struck a Lumberton, North Carolina, grandmother who had been staying in the area last week.

Family of the woman, Bonita Fetterman, stated matter of factly online and to local media that she contracted the dire bacterial infection from waters at the beach. But authorities there are skeptical, given frequent water testing they conduct. They’re pressing for more information.

The case came to light following a viral Facebook post Sunday by Fetterman’s daughter, Marsha Barnes Beal. In the post, Beal reported that her mother was in stable condition at University of North Carolina Medical Center in Chapel Hill after being airlifted and admitted to the intensive care unit there. Asking for prayers, Beal said doctors were preparing to cut away the infected flesh from her leg to try to salvage the limb.

Enlarge / President Donald Trump gives the pen to Buzz Aldrin after signing an Executive Order to reestablish the National Space Council in June. (credit: Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

As the lunar module pilot for Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin remains the most well-known figure in the aerospace industry today and a consistent advocate for human exploration of Mars. He has long pushed for the concept of a "cycler," a semi-permanent spacecraft in orbit around the Sun that would carry cargo and crew between Earth and Mars periodically.

But in recent years Aldrin has begun to embrace the world that made him famous—the Moon—as a critical waypoint on the road to Mars. This involves the collection of lunar ice, believed to be accessible at the poles, for use as propellant to send astronauts deeper into space.

As we inch closer to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, momentum appears to be building behind this idea. Several officials with the Trump administration have indicated their preference for lunar landings before attempting to send astronauts to Mars, and after six years of promoting the "Journey to Mars," NASA has also begun considering a human return to the Moon.

Enlarge (credit: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, a faction of the Bitcoin community launched an audacious experiment: a new version of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash that's incompatible with the standard version. As a result, the Bitcoin network split into two mutually incompatible networks that will operate side-by-side.

The confusing result is that if you owned one bitcoin before the split you own two bitcoins now: one coin on the original Bitcoin network, and a second coin on the new Bitcoin Cash network. The two coins have the same cryptographic credentials, but they have very different values if you sell them for old-fashioned dollars. On Wednesday morning, one standard Bitcoin was worth about $2,700, while—on paper at least—a unit of Bitcoin Cash was worth around $600.

Getting Bitcoin Cash off the ground is a remarkable achievement. The big question now is whether the network's supporters can keep it aloft in the coming weeks and months. So far, most of the Bitcoin community has chosen to stick with the mainstream Bitcoin software and network. If Bitcoin Cash can't attract a critical mass of users and businesses, the rival payment network could wither on the vine.

Enlarge / IBM's Mark Lantz holding one square inch of the new super-dense magnetic tape. Sony can squeeze more than a kilometre of tape inside a cartridge, for a max capacity of 330 terabytes. (credit: IBM Research)

IBM and Sony have developed a new magnetic tape system capable of storing 201 gigabits of data per square inch, for a max theoretical capacity of 330 terabytes in a single palm-sized cartridge.

For comparison, the world's largest hard drives—which are about twice the physical size of a Sony tape cartridge—are the 60TB Seagate SSD or 12TB HGST helium-filled HDD. The largest commercially available tapes only store 15TB. So, 330TB is quite a lot.

To achieve such a dramatic increase in areal density, Sony and IBM tackled different parts of the problem: Sony developed a new type of tape that has a higher density of magnetic recording sites, and IBM Research worked on new heads and signal processing tech to actually read and extract data from those nanometre-long patches of magnetism.