NASA/SDO/IRIS Last month we told you about the launch of NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) satellite, which was built to study a poorly understood layer of the Sun’s atmosphere. After its successful launch , the satellite settled into its orbit and NASA took the lens cap off the telescope on July 17. Now, NASA has released the first imagery from the telescope, and it is gorgeous . The image above shows the unprecedented detail of IRIS’s view (on the right) compared to the view from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, a satellite that has been studying the Sun since 2010. (The video below shows these images in motion.) The feathery features you see are the result of differences in density and temperature. It’s the movement of energy through this layer of the solar atmosphere that NASA scientists are trying to understand. It should help them figure out how the Sun’s upper atmosphere gets so hot, as well as how solar flares form. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
If you don’t follow the often-shady world of Bitcoin , you may not be familiar with Bitcoin Savings and Trust (BTCST), a virtual bitcoin-based hedge fund that many suspected of being a scam. BTCST shut down in August 2012, and on Wednesday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) formally charged its founder, Trendon Shavers, with running a Ponzi scheme. In a statement , the SEC said Shavers “raised at least 700, 000 Bitcoin in BTCST investments, which amounted to more than $4.5 million based on the average price of Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 when the investments were offered and sold.” The government’s financial regulator alleges that Shavers violated a number of federal financial regulations. In court documents , the SEC wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments 
The British government has announced that it will approve testing of driverless cars on public roads in the United Kingdom before the end of 2013. According to a new 80-page report published on Tuesday entitled “Action for Roads: A network for the 21st century, ” a team at Oxford University and Nissan have already begun work but have only been testing in private areas. The plan comes less than a year after Florida , California , and Nevada have approved similar testing. Michigan is not far behind, either. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments 
For software developers, cloud services solve all sorts of problems. They make it easy to ensure license compliance, they keep customers running up-to-date software, and they skip the need for downloads and installations. But cloud services also have their issues. It’s hard for cloud services to take advantage of local compute resources such as fast CPUs and powerful GPUs. A compute-intensive cloud service will need to buy a lot of computation. They also lack the vast array of rich, complex desktop applications that already exist. Starting today, a startup is aiming to create the best of both worlds with a cloud offering it’s describing as “Native as a service.” Numecent claims that it can take almost any desktop application and convert it into a cloud offering within a few hours. The software is delivered to end-user PCs using Numecent’s “cloudpaging” technology , which downloads applications on a piecemeal, as-needed basis. The downloaded portions of the application are retained client-side in an encrypted store. This enables Numecent to also enforce license conditions and prevent piracy. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments 
