Photonbelt

Nasa has lost it’s critical satellite of its $280 million climate-change mission after a catastrophic launch fault today.
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite was fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on a rocket, but after blasting through the Earth’s atmosphere its protective shield failed to jettison.
Another mishap in low Earth orbit, space doesn’t seem [...]

President Obama’s message of change has not been lost on his appointment of staff photographer Pete Souza who shot the first official portrait of a US president using a digital camera.
The camera in question? Canon’s new 5D Mark II.
Mr Souza used a 24 – 105mm Lens at 105mm stepped down to f10 @ 1/125 sec, [...]

A Japanese spacecraft has begun a mission to help scientists understand and monitor how the Earth’s climate is changing.
Gosat is a two-tonne Earth-orbiting satellite which will map the abundance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and where they are.
The probe was blasted into space from the Tanegashima launch site in southern Japan on Friday.
It will [...]

The next phase in non military manned spaceflight will be NASA’s Project Constallation which aims to get back to the Moon and on to Mars. There are many questions surrounding the project such as funding under the new administration and why lots of the useful scientific data from Apollo has been lost and needs to [...]

Timekeepers at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) will add a leap second at the stroke of midnight to keep GMT synchronised with the slowing spin of the Earth on it’s axis. Enjoy the one second extra countdown and have a good (gregorian) new year from all of us here on the Belt.

Channel 4 has taken the somewhat controversial step of presenting a Christmas message from president Dr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.
This has created some backlash in the more controlled mainstream press and a torrent of opinionated and close minded retoric on sites such as the BBC [link] much of the anger directed at Channel 4 [...]

Available now is the OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator Controller for like getting those frags with brainwaves dude… Looks like something that comes from Guantanamo to me. I wonder if there’s a military spec version too.
Buy now for around £100 from uk site overclockers.

It’s the rise of the machines as Honda creates a ‘walking assist device’ which consists of a groin hugging robotic pair of legs. More over at The Register.

Scientists believe they are on the brink of solving one of the biggest unanswered questions in cosmology, finding out if dark matter, which is theorised is what makes up the unaccounted 85% of matter which is invisible in the universe, actually exsists.
On the other hand, Einstein wasn’t 100% happy with the theory of relativity and [...]