The Software of the Mars Phoenix Lander

Go here to read an interview about the software used on the Mars lander: http://news.oreilly.com/2008/07/the-software-behind-the-mars-p.html

"In cruise, we had contact about every three days for eight hours. During EDL, we had continuous contact for about I don't know 24-48 hours. Maybe it was longer than that. I'm not really sure. On the surface, we get at least two passes, two full communications passes a day. We actually get passes about every two hours during nighttime operations. The spacecraft has to wake up every couple of hours and verify its power state, and sometimes there's a communications pass associated with that. Generally in terms of command ability and getting science data back, we do two or three passes a day."

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/index.php

PLASMA PROPULSION

"University of Florida mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Subrata Roy has submitted a patent for a circular, spinning craft that can hover and take off vertically. The wingless electromagnetic air vehicle, or WEAV, is just six inches across, but has the potential to be scaled up to a much larger size. The WEAV is covered with electrodes that ionise the surrounding air into plasma, which functions as the conducting fluid. Passing a current through the plasma creates lift and momentum."

http://cpdlt.mae.ufl.edu/index.htm
http://www.gizmag.com/the-wingless-electromagnetic-air-vehicle/9615/

Morphing chemical robots

"Tufts University has received federal funding to develop chemical robots that will be able to squeeze into spaces as tiny as 1 centimeter, then morph into something 10 times larger, and ultimately biodegrade. The "chembots" could access urban environments, tunnels, caves and debris fields, and carry out other risky operations in complex environments."

http://www.physorg.com/news134043071.html

The end of days are coming.

BRAINS

"Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought."
-Wall Street Journal

Read the full article here.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121450609076407973.html

Large Hadron Collider at CERN

This diagram shows the LHC and the SPS pre-accelerator (in blue) and the transfer lines that will connect them (in red). Spanning the France-Swiss border (shown by green crosses), the 27-km LHC tunnel will receive a beam that has been pre-accelerated to 450 GeV in the smaller SPS storage ring. The transfer lines will remove each beam from the SPS and inject them into the LHC where they will be accelerated to the full energy of 7 TeV.

Here's a really interesting article explaining how the Large Hadron Collider at CERN actually works. It's really impressive how it all works considering it will apparently generate 2GB of data every 10 seconds.

http://news.oreilly.com/2008/06/large-hadron-collider-as-a-mas.html

This is a breakdown of the computer model, a bit more detailed: https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CMS/WorkBookComputingModel

Here is a whole multimedia gallery of images from CERN: http://multimedia-gallery.web.cern.ch/multimedia-gallery/PhotoGallery_Main.aspx

Forget What You Know

The Torus Tube as a geometric - mathematical model of the universe.

Here is an interesting article, I found on reddit, on the topic of how models in scientific advancement are becoming obsolete as the amount of information available increases. The article also takes a look at Google and how they're transforming information as we know it (still). Keep in mind this is an opinion based article.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory

I'm not too sure how I feel about this as I'm surrounded by models all the time with software. This is where I go off topic from the article: I feel that a general majority of people are too quick to settle on searching for a previously defined "model" to achieve what they're seeking rather than striving for advancement to create their own "model". Yes, there are times when a previously defined "model" fits what you need to achieve your goal, even if small modifications are necessary.

Sorting Algorithm Examples

Throughout my programming classes at college I always enjoyed discussions on sorting algorithms. Here's a page where you can see examples of some of the methods of sorting items along with examples of how quickly each one runs. There are also psuedocode examples of each method.

http://vision.bc.edu/~dmartin/teaching/sorting/anim-html/all.html