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ISS spacewalk aborted when water begins to fill astronaut’s suit

American Chris Cassidy and Italian Luca Parmitano were forced to call off this morning’s planned spacewalk outside the International Space Station when Parmitano suddenly reported that there was water inside of his suit helmet. “My head is really wet and I have a feeling it’s increasing, ” he radioed about an hour into the spacewalk. Video of the aborted EVA, starting with the discovery of the water. The call to terminate EVA comes at 12:45. Station airlock opens at 44:48. The EVA, designated EVA-23, was one of the ones that Ars watched astronauts Cassidy and Parmitano train for late last year. That was during our visit to NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory , the giant swimming pool where NASA simulates spacewalks in microgravity. According to NASASpaceFlight’s recounting of events , Parmitano was in the process of running data cabling to connect the as-yet-unlaunched Russian Nauka module when the water began to make itself apparent. The quantity of liquid in Parmitano’s helmet rapidly increased, with Parmitano noting that it had begun to enter his eyes, nose, and mouth. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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ISS spacewalk aborted when water begins to fill astronaut’s suit

Virtualization startup puts desktop apps seamlessly in the cloud

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

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Virtualization startup puts desktop apps seamlessly in the cloud

$99 ARM-based PC runs either Ubuntu or Android

A new ARM-based Linux PC with a host of capabilities—including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, two Gigabit Ethernet jacks, and five USB ports—goes on sale next month starting at $99. ” Utilite , ” offered by Israeli company CompuLab, won’t be as cheap as a Raspberry Pi , but the specs justify the cost. With dimensions of 5.3” × 3.9” × 0.8”, Utilite comes with a Freescale i.MX6 system-on-chip with a single-, dual-, or quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor (which uses 3-8 watts of power). It will have up to 4GB of DDR3 1066MHz memory, up to 512GB of SSD storage, and a microSD slot allowing another 128GB. The PC can be purchased with either Ubuntu Linux or Android. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

USB 3.0 continues to steal Thunderbolt’s thunder

PCs that use Thunderbolt are rare, and they’re getting rarer. Chris Foresman For Thunderbolt fans hoping that the high-speed interface will catch on, we’ve got more bad news: an Acer representative talking to CNET has said that the company has no plans to support Thunderbolt in its PCs this year. Acer’s Aspire S5 Ultrabook was one of the few Windows laptops to include Thunderbolt support when it was introduced in early 2012. “We’re really focusing on USB 3.0—it’s an excellent alternative to Thunderbolt, ” said the Acer spokesperson. “It’s less expensive, offers comparable bandwidth, charging for devices such as mobile phones, and has a large installed base of accessories and peripherals.” By itself, the news of one company distancing itself from Thunderbolt might not be a big deal, but this is just another example of the trouble that Thunderbolt faces two-and-a-half years after its public introduction in the 2011 MacBook Pro. A Newegg search reveals a handful of high-end desktop motherboards that support it (five boards, all above $150), but the complete list of non-Apple prebuilt systems that have ever supported the interface is pretty short . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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USB 3.0 continues to steal Thunderbolt’s thunder

Female scammer who taunted US authorities online finally caught in Mexico

A Southern California woman who mocked American authorities via Twitter—after having fled the country—was finally arraigned on Monday in a San Diego courtroom. Wanda Lee Ann Podgurski, 60, was arrested in Rosarito, Mexico on July 4, 2013. This was a month after she tweeted “ Catch me if you can , ” seemingly directed at San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis , apparently the only person Podgurski followed on Twitter at the time. A superior court judge sentenced Podgurski in absentia on June 21, 2013 to 20 years and four months in state prison. She was convicted (PDF) of 29 felony counts stemming from an insurance fraud scam. Podgurski worked as a clerk for Amtrak and held health insurance policies with six different companies, then she filed claims with all of them after she declared that she was disabled from supposed fall in her home in August 2006. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Female scammer who taunted US authorities online finally caught in Mexico

Optical transistor switches states by trapping a single photon

NIST Optical connections are slowly replacing wires as a means of shuffling bits in between systems—there are already plans afoot to have different components within a single system communicate via an optical connection. But, so far at least, all the processing of those bits is taking place using electrons. Yesterday’s edition of Science includes a demonstration of an all-optical transistor that can be switched between its on and off states using a single photon. Although it’s an impressive demonstration of physics, the work also indicates that we’re likely to stick with electrons for a while, given that the transistor required two lasers and a cloud of a cold atomic gas. The work relied on a cold gas of cesium atoms. These atoms have an extremely convenient property: two closely separated ground states, each with a corresponding excited state. All of these states are separated by an energy that corresponds to a specific wavelength of light, so using a laser of that wavelength allows you to shift the system into a different state. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Verizon would end “century of regulation” by killing wireline phone, says NY AG

Hurricane Sandy caused widespread damage in Fire Island, New York. Fireisland.com New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman this week accused Verizon of trying to “depart from a century of telephone service regulation” by ending wireline telephone service in a part of Fire Island devastated by Hurricane Sandy in October, 2012. In addition, Schneiderman has accused Verizon of violating a state order by telling customers outside of Fire Island that they should accept wireless phone service instead of repairs to their landline service. He says Verizon should be fined $100, 000 per customer, per day. Verizon says it has not violated the state order, and that its offer of wireless service outside Fire Island is strictly optional. Verizon is, however, trying to gain state approval to end wireline service entirely in western Fire Island. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon would end “century of regulation” by killing wireline phone, says NY AG

Ken May

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