Astronomers Find Largest Known Extraterrestrial Water Reserve

gerddie writes “Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world’s ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.

One team, lead by Matt Bradford, made their observations starting in 2008, using an instrument called ‘Z-Spec’ at the California Institute of Technology’s Submillimeter Observatory, a 33-foot (10-meter) telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Follow-up observations were made with the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA), an array of radio dishes in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California. The second group led, by Dariusz Lisused, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find water. In 2010, this team serendipitously detected water in APM 8279+5255, observing one spectral signature. Bradford’s team was able to get more information about the water, including its enormous mass, because they detected several spectral signatures of the water.”

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Astronomers Find Largest Known Extraterrestrial Water Reserve

Google Music Adds Linux, Ogg Vorbis Support

luceth writes “According to Android Police, the Google Music library manager now supports Linux! Also available in the Linux upload manager is new support for Ogg Vorbis, though they transcode it to 320 Kbps MP3 like they do with FLAC. Still, it will be nice to get some use out of that beta invite.”

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Google Music Adds Linux, Ogg Vorbis Support

15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent

The Global Language Monitor estimates that there are currently 1,009,753 words in the English language. Despite this large lexicon, many nuances of human experience still leave us tongue-tied. And that’s why sometimes it’s necessary to turn to other languages to find le mot juste. Here are fifteen foreign words with no direct English equivalent.

1. Zhaghzhagh (Persian)
The chattering of teeth from the cold or from rage.

2. Yuputka (Ulwa)
A word made for walking in the woods at night, it’s the phantom sensation of something crawling on your skin.

3. Slampadato (Italian)
Addicted to the UV glow of tanning salons? This word describes you.

4. Luftmensch (Yiddish)
There are several Yiddish words to describe social misfits. This one is for an impractical dreamer with no business sense. Literally, air person.

5. Iktsuarpok (Inuit)
You know that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet? This is the word for it.

6. Cotisuelto (Caribbean Spanish)
A word that would aptly describe the prevailing fashion trend among American men under 40, it means one who wears the shirt tail outside of his trousers.

7. Pana Po’o (Hawaiian)
“Hmm, now where did I leave those keys?” he said, pana po’oing. It means to scratch your head in order to help you remember something you’ve forgotten.

8. Gumusservi (Turkish)
Meteorologists can be poets in Turkey with words like this at their disposal. It means moonlight shining on water.

9. Vybafnout (Czech)
A word tailor-made for annoying older brothers—it means to jump out and say boo.

10. Mencolek (Indonesian)
You know that old trick where you tap someone lightly on the opposite shoulder from behind to fool them? The Indonesians have a word for it.

11. Faamiti (Samoan)
To make a squeaking sound by sucking air past the lips in order to gain the attention of a dog or child.

12. Glas wen (Welsh)
A smile that is insincere or mocking. Literally, a blue smile.

13. Bakku-shan (Japanese)
The experience of seeing a woman who appears pretty from behind but not from the front.

14. Boketto (Japanese)
It’s nice to know that the Japanese think enough of the act of gazing vacantly into the distance without thinking to give it a name.

15. Kummerspeck (German)
Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.

Many of the words above can be found in BBC researcher Adam Jacot de Boinod’s book ‘The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World.’

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15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent

Android Catching Up In the Tablet Market

TyFoN writes “Year to year, the iPad market share is down from 94.3 percent to 61.3 percent while Android is up about the same, going from 2.9 percent to 30.1 percent in the same period. 'Some 4.6 million Android-based tablets shipped in this year's second quarter as compared with just around 100,000 in the year-ago quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. …the tablet OS market as a whole grew a whopping 331 percent in the last year and Apple grew right along with it in terms of unit shipments. Tablet makers shipped 3.5 million in the second quarter of 2010, with Apple easily leading the charge with 3.2 million iPads shipped. The number of units shipped exploded to 15.1 million in this past quarter— Apple was a bit behind the pace of that growth, but still managed to ship an impressive 9.3 million iOS-based tablets. Microsoft, meanwhile, had the third largest share of the global tablet OS market at 4.6 percent, with about 700,000 Windows 7-based tablets shipped in the recent quarter.'”

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Android Catching Up In the Tablet Market

GE To Sample 500GB DVD-Size Discs Soon

siliconbits writes “GE Global Research announced earlier today that it has managed to cram up to 500GB worth of data on a standard DVD-size disc, an increase in storage density of roughly 100x. What's more, the tech arm of conglomerate General Electric Company says that the storage solution will record data at the same speed as Blu-ray discs while increasing storage capacity by 25 times. The Blu-ray Disk Association says that the commonly available 12x speed Blu-ray writers have a maximum writing speed of up to 400Mbps (or 50MBps) which means that in theory, it would take just over three hours to fill that new holographic hard disk. GE has confirmed that its R&D and licensing team will be sampling the media to qualified partners that may be interested in licensing the technology.”

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GE To Sample 500GB DVD-Size Discs Soon

Nine Things You Should Do After Installing OS X Lion

Lion is here — and as MG summed up in just 3,000 words, it’s great.

No operating system is perfect, though. At least, not for everyone, and especially not right out of the (non-existent) box. Looking to make your Lion experience that much better, we’ve bundled together a bevy of tips and tricks that you really ought to have ready on your first trip into the new OS.

Now, something to keep in mind: these tips aren’t one-size-fits-all. Read through the list and pick out the ones that sound good, and be sure to drop a comment if you’ve got a tip of your own.

Leave It Alone For A Few Hours:


After Lion launched yesterday morning, reports started pouring in that folks who made the jump from Snow Leopard to Lion were seeing terribly sluggish performance. Then, like magic, the sluggishness disappeared.

Here’s why: Lion makes a good number of changes to the way the Spotlight search works. These changes seem to require a reindexing of your hard drive’s contents . The problem? Apple starts this reindexing immediately after Lion boots up for the first time, and it causes systems (even relatively new ones) to run like hot garbage until it’s done. Give Spotlight a few hours after install is complete to work everything out, and you’ll have a much better first impression.

Check Out PDF Signing In Preview:

Three years ago, I threw my printer in the trash. I got tired of stupid ink, and stupid drivers, and that stupid grey box taking up space on my desk. I haven’t missed it since.

Okay, fine. There’s one time I always miss it: whenever I need to print and sign a contract. Thanks to a fancy (but somewhat hidden) new feature in Lion’s Preview app, I’ll never miss my printer again.

Open up a PDF in Preview. Click the annotations button (), then click the signature button (), then hit “Create Signature from Built-in iSight”. Scribe your signature onto a white piece of paper, hold it up to your iSight, and bam: you’ve got a stampable version of your signature sitting in Preview. Mr. Printer, meet Mr. Trash Can.

Reverse Mouse/Touchpad Scrolling:


With Lion, Apple made a fairly controversial change regarding scrolling up/down on touchpads and mice: they reversed it. Any behavior that once scrolled you up now scrolls you down, while scrolling what-was-down now takes you up the page. The idea is that you’re now moving the content, rather than the scroll bar. Mouse-scroll down, page content moves down (while the scroll bar scrolls up).

Some love it. Some hate it. Gruber says to give it a week. I say screw it — do whatever feels best to your brain. I personally think it makes sense on a trackpad, but doesn’t feel right on a mouse — unfortunately, one setting controls the direction of both. As I use a mouse more than 90% of the time, I’ve reversed the setting.

You can find the checkbox to set the scroll direction to what you’re used to under System Preferences > Trackpad > Scroll and Zoom. Look for the “Scroll Direction: natural” option.

Re-enable Dot Indicators Under Running Apps:

This one’s a weird one, as it depends on whether you upgraded to Lion or bought a new system running Lion out of the box.

If you upgraded, your running apps will have the glowing dot indicators you’re used to seeing in the dock. If you’re on a new Lion system, they won’t. With Apple trying to move to a persistent state/instant start app design model, these running indicators may eventually be unnecessary. For now, though, with the vast majority of apps still being designed for Snow Leopard and earlier, the lack of dots is just really damned confusing.

You can re-enable the dots under System Preferences > Dock > Show indicator lights for open applications

Software update:

Lion is new, but there’s still a good chunk of stuff that needs to be updated right out of the gate. You’ll want to update iTunes, iLife, and iWork, for example, to get all the fancy new fullscreen features out of them. Just run the Software Update app found under the Apple logo in the upper left of the screen.

Disable Dashboard In Mission Control:

Mission Control (Apple’s new all-encompassing view of everything running on your system) is awesome. So much so, in fact, that “Use Mission Control” was going to be one of the tips here, but I pulled it assuming that it’s a core enough feature that everyone will be using it anyway. Learn the gestures, and learn the keyboard hotkeys.

There’s one thing that’s a bit weird about Mission Control, though: for one reason or another, it pulls your widget dashboard in as if it’s a separate Desktop/Space, which get’s reaaaally annoying if you’re using the gestures/hotkeys to quickly switch from view to view. Who uses the dashboard so much that the standard key (F12) isn’t enough?

You can keep dashboard from appearing in Mission Control by toggling the option found under System Preferences > Mission Control > Show Dashboard As Space.

Give Filevault Another Chance:

Apple’s real-time disk encryption tool, Filevault, used to suck. A lot. If one tiny little bit in your Filevault image got flipped, the entire thing would explode in your face. Bam! Data gone! It was enough for many to swear off Filevault entirely, myself included.

Well, it’s time to give Filevault another shot. Apple has completely rebuilt it — so much so, in fact, that the only thing the new version really shares with its predecessor is its name. The new full-disk-encryption based setup is super fast, super secure, and has essentially no impact on your system performance. Oh, and it won’t randomly eat all your data.

Learn the new multi-touch gestures:

Apple teaches you how to two-finger scroll the first time you boot up Lion, but myriad other gestures go unmentioned. Some of the best multi-touch gestures:

  • Swipe between pages: Scroll left or right with two fingers
  • Swipe between full-screen apps/desktops: Swipe left or right with three fingers
  • Access Mission Control: Swipe up with three fingers
  • Show Launchpad (All of your installed apps in an iOS-esque view): Pinch with thumb and three fingers
  • Show desktop: Spread with thumb and three fingers

Disable Autocorrect:

Oh, Apple. Haven’t you learned anything from auto-correct on the iPhone?

The optional autocorrect in OS X doesn’t seem to be nearly as sensitive (or hilarious) as its iOS equivalent, but it still misfires from time-to-time. You’re a big boy (or girl) on a big boy (or girl) keyboard. You can type fine. Unless you’re constantly swapping “teh” for “the”, you can turn off autocorrect under System Preferences > Language & Text > Text > Correct spelling automatically.

Got any tips you think others should see? Drop’em in the comments.

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Nine Things You Should Do After Installing OS X Lion