Huge ocean confirmed underneath solar system’s largest moon Ganymede
The solar system’s largest moon, Ganymede, in orbit around Jupiter, harbors an underground ocean containing more water than all the oceans on Earth. Scientists were already fairly confident in the ocean’s existence, based on the moon’s smooth icy surface—evidence of past resurfacing by the ocean—and other observations by the Galileo spacecraft, which made a handful of flybys in the 1990s. But new observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, published online today in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, remove any remaining doubt. The Hubble study suggests that the ocean can be no deeper than 330 kilometers below the surface.
http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2015/03/huge-ocean-confirmed-underneath-solar-system-s-largest-moon
The consistent speed of differing photon energy’s rules out some models of quantum gravity
Here, for the first time, we place Planck-scale limits on the more generic spacetime-foam prediction of energy-dependent fuzziness in the speed of photons. Using high-energy observations from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) of gamma-ray burst GRB090510, we test a model in which photon speeds are distributed normally around c with a standard deviation proportional to the photon energy. We constrain the model’s characteristic energy scale beyond the Planck scale at >2.8EPl(>1.6EPl), at 95% (99%) confidence. Our results set a benchmark constraint to be reckoned with by any QG model that features spacetime quantization.
http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys3270.html
Google boss wants self-drive cars ‘for son’
The director of Google’s self-drive car project has revealed his motivation for ensuring that the technology is standard on roads within five years.
Google’s retrofitted self-drive cars have undergone extensive testing, racking up more than 700,000 miles on the road, and in 2013 were given to one hundred employees to test.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31931914
Lumo Interactive Projector
Lumo is an interactive projector. You can use it to bore people with PowerPoint slides or you can use it as a game machine. It has a built-in (low res) camera that can detect a kick (as shown at the beginning of the video) and make a (virtual) ball move as a result of that action.
The consumer version is expected to cost less than $500, according to Lumo CEO (and Slashdot interviewee) Meghan Athavale. And while she doesn’t talk much about it in the interview, if you already have a computer, a projector, and a Kinect or webcam, you can buy the a stripped-down version of the company’s ‘interactive-floor-wall projection’ software for $39, plus games or customizable game templates.
Uber banned in Germany as police swoop in other countries
Uber’s “low-cost” UberPop service has been banned in Germany after a court decided it contravened transport laws. Judges imposed fines of €250,000 (£181,000) for each violation of the order. It followed the news that the company’s Paris offices were raided by police investigating the same service. And, in South Korea, nearly 30 people linked to the company, including chief executive Travis Kalanick, were charged with running an illegal taxi firm. Uber said it regretted the Frankfurt District Court’s decision, saying it represented a “fundamental infringement of our ability under European law to establish and provide a service”. While UberPop, which unites passengers with drivers who don’t have professional licences, is banned, the company insisted it would continue to run its services using licensed limousine and taxi drivers in Germany.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31942997
2degrees buys Christchurch-based Snap for reported $26 million
Christchurch’s Mark Petrie has sold his Snap telecommunications company, reportedly for $26 million.
His telecom and internet service provider has been bought by national mobile player 2degrees, though no price has been confirmed yet.
2degrees said it would launch fixed-mobile services this year.
3,000 atoms entangled with a single photon
Physicists from MIT and the University of Belgrade have developed a new technique that can successfully entangle 3,000 atoms using only a single photon. The results, published today in the journal Nature, represent the largest number of particles that have ever been mutually entangled experimentally.
The researchers say the technique provides a realistic method to generate large ensembles of entangled atoms, which are key components for realizing more-precise atomic clocks.
“You can make the argument that a single photon cannot possibly change the state of 3,000 atoms, but this one photon does—it builds up correlations that you didn’t have before,” says Vladan Vuletic, the Lester Wolfe Professor in MIT’s Department of Physics, and the paper’s senior author. “We have basically opened up a new class of entangled states we can make, but there are many more new classes to be explored.”
http://phys.org/news/2015-03-atoms-entangled-photon.html
Google ‘makes people think they are smarter than they are’
In a series of experiments, participants who had searched for information on the internet believed they were far more knowledgeable about a subject that those who had learned by normal routes, such as reading a book or talking to a tutor. Internet users also believed their brains were sharper.
“The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world’s knowledge at your fingertips,” said lead researcher Matthew Fisher, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in psychology at Yale University.
“It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source. When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet.”
