Richard Leis

Horror Writer & Poet

Month: June 2004

  • Cassini Arrives at Saturn

    The Cassini spacecraft and the Huygens descent probe should be in orbit around Saturn now after Cassini completed a 96-minute engine burn to slow down and allow itself to be caught. Because of the nearly one and one half hour speed of light time lag between Saturn and the Earth, we are only now getting…

  • South Korea: The Most Technologically Advanced Society in History

    CNET News.com is running a series of articles this week exploring the technological rise of South Korea. The small country is now considered to be the most technologically advanced society in the world. Broadband reaches 71 percent of the country at speeds ten times faster than broadband in the United States. This infrastructure has brought…

  • Wetware Rising

    Subjectively, analog representations of reality, such as an LP of music played on a record player, are considered to be “warm” by purists, as opposed to the “cold” digital playback of MP3 and other audio codices. In all things digital, reality is translated into binary code using only 1 and 0 (or off and on).…

  • SETI@home Begins Transition to BOINC

    SETI@home is one of the original peer-to-peer success stories, using the idle times of millions of private computers to crunch data looking for alien signals in radio waves from space. The application that enables this virtual supercomputer has gotten a high tech upgrade by moving to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform.…

  • NASA Holds Phoebe Press Conference

    NASA held a press conference today regarding the latest analysis of data received from the Cassini spacecraft flyby of Saturn’s moon Phoebe. The data suggests that Phoebe is a captured object that originated in the Kuiper Belt rather than the Asteroid Belt. It appears to be composed mostly of water ice and rock, with some…

  • Futuristic Cancer Treatment Undergoes Initial Trials

    Read Richard’s current thoughts about transhumanism and related fringe topics here. Researchers have initiated animal trials for a potential cancer treatment using nanotechnology. The early results are promising. In the experiment, nanoshells built to heat up under a specific near-infrared frequency were injected into groups of mice with cancerous tumors in their tissues. After a…

  • Human Cloning Around the World

    Read Richard’s current thoughts about transhumanism and related fringe topics here. Human cloning for therapeutic purposes is winning governmental approval [defunct link] in Britain and Japan, among other countries. This new support contrasts with past debate that resulted in the ban of federal funding for such research in the United States. Despite this ban, researchers…

  • Success!

    SpaceShipOne and its pilot (now astronaut) Mike Melvill succeeded in reaching space and have returned to Earth. This goes into the record books as the first piloted private mission into space. Burt Rutan, chief of Scaled Composites is already planning to send a pilot into Earth orbit, after they attempt to win the Ansari X-Prize…

  • Historic Flight in Progress

    CNN and other news outlets are now (around 7:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time) showing live the flight of Scaled Composites’ White Knight and SpaceShipOne in its attempt at sending the first piloted private spacecraft into space. White Knight, the carrier jet, is currently heading up to 50,000 feet where it will release the SpaceShipOne space…

  • UA Researchers Discuss Cassini-Huygens Mission

    Researchers discussed the upcoming Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and preliminary composition results for Saturn’s tiny moon Phoebe at the University of Arizona this past Saturday. The public was invited to view informational displays, listen to speakers, and take part in a cake cutting ceremony. Dr. Michael Drake, Director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and…

  • Twirling Under Heaven

    Chris Schur is an astrophotographer in Arizona. Late Saturday, June 11, 2004 he set up his equipment and made a movie of the night sky, compressed down to 12 seconds. This amazing movie really gives one the sense of Earth’s rotation against the sweeping background of our galaxy.

  • Cable Comes to the Internet

    The Internet is likely to become the newest conduit for cable networks (in addition to cable, satellite, and advanced telephony backbones). RealNetworks and Starz recently announced a new movie service under the Starz brand over RealNetworks RealPlayer 10 on the Internet. For US$12.95 a month, viewers have unlimited access to a library of 100 films…

  • The Storage Singularity

    A specific and easy to watch example of exponential change at work is the state of the art in hard drive technology. In just the past couple years, functional hard drives have shrunk down to matchbox size, with .85-inch hard drives coming out later this year. These smaller and smaller drives usually start out in…

  • Software Automation

    For some time now software has been a bottleneck in the development of computer technology. While hardware advances speed ahead on an exponential trajectory, software advances are sluggish in comparison. Several new efforts have been underway to help speed up the process, including aspect oriented programming and development tools that automate the compiling of data…

  • Humanity’s Place in the Universe

    An important trend throughout history is the overturning of our beliefs about humanity’s central position in the universe. We now know that the Earth, the Sun, and the Milky Way are not the center of the universe. We have learned that Homo sapiens evolved from the same genetic heritage as all life on the Earth.…

  • Closeups of Phoebe

    CICLOPS (the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations) released new images on Sunday from Cassini’s flyby of Phoebe including close-ups of craters and global images. Scientists now believe that the moon is an icy body covered by dark material. The Cassini-Huygens probe is now a little over 16 days away from entering orbit around Saturn.

  • A Grid for the Brain

    Read Richard’s current thoughts about transhumanism and related fringe topics here. Brain-machine interface technology seems to be advancing more quickly than predicted. Scientists at Washington University have successfully implanted a brain grid into patients [defunct link] that reads their electrocorticographic (ECoG) brain activity and allows them to move a cursor on a computer screen with…

  • Historic Launch Set in Mojave, California

    Ansari X Prize competitor Scaled Composites plans to launch on June 21, 2004 the first piloted private spaceship into space, something that only governments have accomplished since Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space on April 12, 1961. The public is invited to the launch, scheduled for early morning. While not an attempt for…

  • Phoebe Has a Face

    Cassini began sending back data from its flyby of Phoebe early Saturday morning and the first images have been released. These images show a heavily cratered moon that may be, according to scientists, a remnant of the creation of the solar system. The surface is of an unknown dark material. Scientists will pour over the…

  • Phoebe Unveiled

    The best pictures ever taken of Saturn’s moon Phoebe are streaming back to Earth as Cassini rapidly approaches. Just before 2:00 pm Pacific Time today, Cassini will pass over Phoebe. The two images in the composite above were taken about 13 hours apart and show two different hemispheres of the moon. The moon appears to…

  • Veiled Titan

    Titan, the largest moon in the Saturn planetary system, remains an enigmatic target. The latest visible light image from Cassini of Titan shows the dense cloud cover. A peak at the moon’s surface will have to wait until Huygens separates from Cassini and falls through the atmosphere in January 2005.

  • First Stop: Phoebe!

    First Stop: Phoebe!

    Cassini is rapidly approaching Phoebe, the outermost known moon of Saturn. The first images are already twice as good as the best image of Phoebe taken by Voyager 2 in 1981, and will only get better over the next few hours. Cassini will pass only 2000 kilometers over the surface of the tiny moon around…

  • Avoiding the Grey Goo

    One of the earliest proposed risks of molecular manufacturing (nanotechnology used to build products from the atom up) was “grey goo“, coined by Eric Drexler in his phenomenal 1986 book Engines of Creation. Self-replicating nanobots could escape into the environment and start devouring everything around them to reproduce, resulting in a runaway exponential destruction of…

  • Venus in Transit

    As viewed from the Earth, Venus is currently passing across the face of the sun, the first such transit in 122 years. The images currently coming in on various websites from amateurs and observatories in select regions of the world show a small black circle slowly making its way across the gigantic face of the…

  • Terabit Memory System on the Way

    It is now only a matter of time, perhaps as little as a few months, before the first terabit memory system is released for computers to replace hard drives, RAM, and perhaps CDs and DVDs. Such systems are expected to be non-volatile (meaning they hold on to their memory even when shut off) and faster,…