Will It Send?

A very small, 30cm-long, satellite is going to be sent into orbit by a team at Surrey Satellite Technology Limited of Guildford U.K. The satellite is going to be powered by a smartphone using the Google Android operating system, though the precise make and model have not been disclosed.

SSTL project manager Shaun Kenyon says "They come now with processors that can go up to 1GHz, and they have loads of flash memory. First of all, we want to see if the phone works up there, and if it does, we want to see if the phone can control a satellite." The company's goal is to find an inexpensive, off-the-shelf solution that can aid in lowering it's cost of design and development.

"We're not taking it apart; we're not gutting it; we're not taking out the printed circuit boards and re-soldering them into our satellite - we're flying it as is," Mr Kenyon explained.

"And, in fact, we're going to have another camera on the satellite so we can take a picture of the phone because we want to operate the screen and have some good images of that as well."

You see Apple? This is why an open platform is far superior to your closed model... just sayin.

NASA Running Tests On Spider Monkeys

For the first time in decades NASA is working with primates as part of the preparation for space missions. This time around spider monkeys are being exposed to radiation similar to that which a human might be exposed to when traveling to Mars.

"We realized there was a need for this kind of work," Jack Bergman, a behavioral pharmacologist at Harvard Medical School's McLean Hospital in Boston, told Discovery News.

"There's a long-standing commitment on the part of NASA to deep space travel and with that commitment comes a need for knowing what kinds of adverse effects deep space travel might have, what are the risks to astronauts," Bergman said. "That's not been well assessed."

The animals will not be destroyed after the experiments but will rather be cared for at a veterinary hospital, with no further experiments to be preformed on them.

Chimpanzees were sent into space prior to the first human attempts in order to test the Mercury capsules.

Source: Discovery News.

Panel Says Particle Collision Experiment No Threat To Earth / Humans

This week CERN will fire up it's particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider lies in a 27-kilometre-long underground circuit and is set to begin low-energy operations on September 10th. Despite fears among the general populace, the group in charge of safety at the facility says in a report that the experiment poses no threat to mankind. "Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programs on Earth – and the planet still exists," they wrote. Physicists from around the globe will be involved in the experiment that aims to answer "the secrets behind the laws of the universe, both on the tiny scale of quantum mechanics and the huge domain of galaxies and black holes." CBC Story here.

McAfee Spam Expirement = 23,233 e-mails In One Month

In an experiment, McAfee invited 50 people from around the world to surf without spam filters. The results varied depending on where the surfer resided however I think you'll agree that even the least affected geographically still received a staggering amount of spam! Spam received by surfer by country (in one month):

US - 23,233

Brazil - 15,856

Italy - 15,610

Mexico - 12,229

UK - 11,965

Australia - 9,214

The Netherlands - 6,378

Spain - 5,419

France - 2,597

Germany - 2,331

"Many of our participants noticed that their computers were slowing down. This means that while they were surfing, unbeknownst to them, websites were installing malware," said Guy Roberts, director of McAfee's labs in Europe.

The future does not seem to hold any promise for eradicating spam either, "...it is such an immense problem and it's never going to go away. It's no longer a question of solving it but one of managing it," says Dave De Walt, chief executive of McAfee.

BBC story here.