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Our view of the Universe just grew quite a bit more detailed as NASA JPL released the compendium of results from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer orbital telescope. WISE was launched into a 525 km orbit on December 14, 2009 and gathered data until the WISE team ran out of funding on February 17, 2011.

With hardware over 1,000 times more sensitive than prior infrared space surveys, WISE surveyed 99 percent of the sky at 4 different wavelengths. Over 15 terabytes of data and 2.7 million images revealed 560 million stars, galaxies, comets, asteroids, and various other objects too cool or red-shifted to show up in anything but the infrared. Astronomers saw Y-dwarfs for the first time, which are white dwarf stars that have become nearly invisible as they cooled. The first Earth trojan asteroid also revealed itself to WISE—it scouts Earth’s orbit 60 degrees ahead of us around the Sun.

Our view of the solar system also grew quite a bit more detailed, as WISE identified or confirmed over 90 precent of the Near Earth Asteroids. One thing WISE was not able to do was see very much in the Kuiper belt; that task and many others remain for the James Webb Space Telescope now scheduled to be launched in 2018. The JWST will be several times more sensitive yet.

Berkeley University has published many WISE images as they become available, and Cal Tech hosts JPL’s WISE website.

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The sky just swelled to contain over 560 million objects from the new WISE mission catalog

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A guinea pig in Rosyth, Fife, Scotland, named Truffles took a leap into the record books in front of Guinness-appointed witnesses, his 13-year-old owner Chloe Macari, and her scout troop. Truffles jumped for neither fame nor fortune, but for his favorite snack, cucumber. The jump was measured at 30 centimeters, which was 10 centimeters more than the previous record set in 2009. When Macari learned of the 2009 record, she knew her guinea pig could jump further, and petitioned Guinness officials for a chance to prove it. Truffles now goes into the record book, and Macari earned credit toward a community events scout badge. Link -via Arbroath

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World Record Guinea Pig Jump

Illustrator Caldwell Tanner has created some colorful travel posters for locations familiar to lazy people. So, now you can feel like you do all kinds of traveling every day, even though you rarely leave your house!

Who needs fresh air and sunshine when you’ve got the arctic chill of the refrigerator and the rainbow waterfall of infinite pages that is the glorious interwebs?

Link –via Rampaged Reality

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Travel Posters For Lazy People

The TSA has announced a new program rolling out at a few airports that allows selected customers to skip the security lines by checking in at a kiosk and going through a nominal screening, but only after they’ve paid a $100 application fee and been approved through a background check. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Transportation Security Administration is rolling out expedited screening at big airports called “Precheck.” It has special lanes for background-checked travelers, who can keep their shoes, belt and jacket on, leave laptops and liquids in carry-on bags and walk through a metal detector rather than a full-body scan. The process, now at two airlines and nine airports, is much like how screenings worked before the Sept. 11 attacks.

To qualify, frequent fliers must meet undisclosed TSA criteria and get invited in by the airlines. There is also a backdoor in. Approved travelers who are in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s “Global Entry” program can transfer into Precheck using their Global Entry number.

I can’t quite decide whether this is the TSA finally getting their shit together to put things back to normal with some intelligent screening practices that inexplicably can’t be covered by the same budget that bought all those scanners, or if it’s boldly admitting to the world that it’s all been a horrific charade. Let’s see what the TSA blog has to say about it:

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TSA Precheck: $100 application fee to skip the song and dance

You back up your computer, right? (If you’re not, you should be—you can get started here.) And if you do, you know that the most painful part of off-site backup is the initial backup, which takes forever, requiring you to upload gigabyte after gigabyte of data to your service’s servers. If you’ve bought a new computer or upgraded your operating system, but have transferred all the same data to your new machine, you don’t want to do your initial back up all over again. And with our favorite backup service, CrashPlan, you don’t have to. More »

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How to Move Your CrashPlan Backups to a New Computer [Backup]

The new iPad guts are nice, at last with 1GB of much needed RAM to accelerate all that web browsing. But the most impressive thing is the new battery, which takes most of the space. It’s a gigantic 70-percent larger! More »

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Holy F*ck, the New iPad Has a Gigantic 70-Percent Larger Battery [Ipad]

Hear that? That’s the sound of coins hitting the mental floor at a breakneck pace, and if PayPal’s meteoric success is any indication of how it’ll do in mobile… well, stockholders should be pleased. Nearly three years after first hearing of Jack Dorsey’s Square (formerly ‘Squirrel‘) project, the most hated division of eBay is coming out with a rival. President and CEO of eBay John Donahoe took the wraps off of the device at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco today, with an aim to bring PayPal to “merchants in the offline world.” The plastic triangle module plays a familiar role: pop it into an iPhone, load up an app and swipe until you just can’t sell anything else. We’re hearing that PayPal will charge merchants 2.7 percent (just 0.05 percent less than Square), but further details — and even the thing’s name — are still developing.

As much as we jest about PayPal‘s polarizing nature, we’ve been victim to one too many unjustified account freezes to become overly joyous here, but we won’t kvetch about a little competition. Here’s hoping we see rates and fees on the decline thanks to another major player stepping up to bat, but something tells us those kinds of dreams are dreamt only by fools. That aside, the fact that famed designer Yves Behar (profiled here on The Engadget Show) and Fuseproject were tapped to engineer it gets a major thumbs-up from us.

Update: Looks like it’ll go by the name Here. PayPal Here. Moreover, the hardware and app will be gratis, and shipments will begin to go out in the US, Canada, Hong Kong, and Australia today. Everyone else will need to sit tight for a few weeks, and we’re still digging for information on compatibility beyond the iPhone.

Update 2: Look like Android support will be here at launch, but iOS devices will need to run iOS 4.0 or higher.

Continue reading PayPal Here mobile card reader: it’s like Square, but with way more frozen accounts

PayPal Here mobile card reader: it’s like Square, but with way more frozen accounts originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Mar 2012 13:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PayPal Here mobile card reader: it’s like Square, but with way more frozen accounts