African eye opens on the high-energy sky

African eye opens on the high-energy sky... 

A few minutes past midnight on 26 July, the largest Cherenkov telescope ever built blinked open to gaze at the Namibian sky. Named HESS II, the giant telescope's 600-tonne bulk and 28-metre mirror will survey the southern hemisphere, hunting for violent, high-energy cosmic sources such as super massive black holes, supernovae and pulsars.

Cherenkov telescopes search for signs of very-high-energy gamma rays by watching for Cherenkov radiation - a scatter of charged particles produced from gamma-ray interactions in our atmosphere and captured as faint flashes of blue light. HESS II captures these flashes with a camera around a million times as fast as one you or I might own.

There are currently two other operating Cerenkov systems - MAGIC, in the Canary Islands and VERITABLE, in Arizona. The HESS array includes four smaller telescopes, each with a 12-metre mirror. HESS II has an "unprecedented" resolving ability, says the team, enabling it to capture a sharper picture of the skies.

Gamma-ray observations from HESS will be used in combination with data from the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the world's largest radio telescope system, expected to begin observing in 2020. Comprising telescopes scattered across South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, the SKA will be sensitive enough to detect the equivalent of an airport radar on a planet 50 light years away,

 

Galaxy S III

Shin Jong-kyun, the president of Samsung’s information technology and mobile communication division, was proud to announce that the Galaxy S III has surpassed 10 million devices sold (globally) in just under two months. Samsung not only created an amazing device, but made a wise decision to not only launch the device globally, but to make it available on all major carriers.

Since Samsung’s largest competitor, Apple, isn’t set to release their next iPhone iteration until September or October, it’s expected that the Samsung Galaxy S III will continue strong, eventually surpassing the 40 million mark by year’s end. Although the innards of the Samsung Galaxy S III vary slightly by region, it has become the top dog among Android smartphones, and as someone who has been using one for the past few weeks, I can attest to its magnificence.

Samsung continues to impress and lead the Android front, and these latest Galaxy S III sales numbers (as well as the amount of lawsuits brought against them by Apple) are a testament of their growing success. If you’re in the market for a new smartphone, I’d highly recommend the Samsung Galaxy S III, and it appears so would 10+ million others.

 

LIFE IN 2050...

                            LIFE IN 2050

We are on the threshold of a new era. Our planet's climate is at risk. Natural resources are growing scarce. In 2050, the number of people living in cities will be greater than the entire population of the Earth today. That's why researchers, inventors, and engineers need to be more creative today than ever before. Computers as medical assistants, robots as household servants, sensory organs for electric cars, buildings as energy providers, farms in skyscrapers, power plants in the desert and on the high seas, supercomputers the size of a pea - these are not visions but almost tangible realities in laboratories all over the globe.
In a unique survey, science journalist and industry insider Ulrich Eberl vividly describes the key trends that will shape our lives - and how we ourselves can help to invent the world of tomorrow.