Posts tagged google

Great Wall Industry Corporation will send a Spanish rover to the moon in June 2014, according to the Galactic Suite company which heads the “Barcelona Moon Team” that is competing in the Google Lunar X Prize contest to the moon.

The rover will be launched by a Long March 2C/CTS-2 rocket from China’s Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

The Barcelona Moon Team is the only team based in Spain to take part in the Google Lunar X Prize, which challenges participants to create a robot that can move over the lunar surface and send live images back to Earth before December 2015.

(Source: futurenow321)

After seemingly overcoming a series of security issues, Google is cashing out of the prepaid payment card market next month. The Web giant began telling users today to get busy spending whatever balances that remain on their cards because they will be discontinued on October 17.

The prepaid card was further hobbled by vulnerabilities that could allow money to be stolen from users’ accounts. Google suspended the use of its prepaid cards in February after a pair of hacks were discovered that allowed access to a user’s funds simply by resetting the PIN and using a prepaid card.

(Source: futurenow321)

Elon Musk is the founder, chief executive and chief designer of SpaceX. The company managed to overcome a series of technical and financial crises and made history Friday by attaching the first private spacecraft to the international space station.

Amazon.com Founder Jeff Bezos runs Blue Origin, a start-up targeting space station runs. An unnamed spaceship developed by Blue Origin suffered a major failure during a test flight in the summer of 2011.

In December, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen indicated he is prepared to commit $200 million or more of his wealth to build the world’s largest airplane as a mobile platform for launching satellites at low cost. The novel, high-risk project was conceived by renowned aerospace engineer.

British billionaire and playboy Sir Richard Branson years ago entered the fray, creating Virgin Galactic, an extension of his well-known brand that intends to take well-heeled customers to the edge of space, but also foresees launching satellites and carrying experiments.

Planetary Resources Inc., a start-up with backers including Google co-founders Larry Page, left, Eric Schmidt, right, and Ross Perot Jr., not shown, unveiled in April a plan to send robotic spacecraft to remotely mine asteroids.

Robert Bigelow is the billionaire founder of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain and the president of Bigelow Aerospace. In the spring of 2012, Boeing completed a parachute drop test of the Crew Space Transportation-1000 spacecraft. Mr. Bigelow plans to use the CST-100 spacecraft for transporting people to and from his expandable modules developed for space habitation.

(Source: futurenow321)

Remember how adult you felt when you first got your driver’s permit? Make sure it’s preserved in your mind to tell your children, because now it’s Google’s self-driving car that’s spreading its wings. The company’s pie-in-the-sky project was approved for a license to hit the road in Nevada this week.As the Las Vegas Sun reported, Google’s cars clearly marked will be able to legally drive on the state’s roads and highways as long as two people are in the car during the tests. Google’s cars allow drivers to take control to steer and step on the brake, but are designed to eliminate the need to do so. Otherwise, the car uses GPS, traffic sensors and artificial intelligence software to drive. Cars that drive themselves are supposed to reduce emissions, reduce accidents caused by human error and, of course, make tech geeks go green with envy. But how soon does Google think that these automated autos will be ready to show up in the average garage? It’s sooner than you may think. In a Wall Street Journal article last month, Anthony Levandowski, who heads up software and sensor development for the cars, said that he expects that the cars will be sale-ready “much sooner than the next decade. If not, shame on us as engineers.”

(Source: futurenow321)

Google announced today that it’s throwing $55 million dollars to the wind… energy, that is. Which is set to generate 1,550 megawatts of energy enough to reportedly power 450,000 homes from a batch of turbines in the Mojave Dessert. Developed by Terra-Gen Power, the operation will carry the resulting energy via transmission lines to “major population centers.”  making it one of the largest sites in the country for wind energy generation. The ever humble internet giant pointed out that this particular injection of funds marks a total investment of $400 million in the clean energy sector. In fact, google signed a deal last year to power several of its data centers with wind power, and most recently announced the opening of a seawater cooled data center in Finland.

(Source: futurenow321)

Can you put the genie back in the bottle?

For a long time, Google co-founder Segey Brin thought that you couldn’t. He thought that the internet was a force that had been unleashed upon the world, and no authority could ever put an effective control on it. But now, he says, he’s not so sure. In interview with the guardian Brin talks about how he thinks that the free internet it is about to go through a dangerous gauntlet that might have the potential to break the world wide web as we have come to know it.

Brin points out three major factors that could start restricting the internet state actors like China, Hollywood and it’s anti-piracy efforts, and companies like Facebook and Apple that put themselves in between users and the information on the internet. We seem to be coming to a real fork in the road with the internet. SOPA, PIPA,CISPA it seems like legislation to change the equation of information on the internet isn’t going to stop coming, and neither supporters or detractors are willing to budge an inch on some of the most basic philosophical questions at stake. Megaupload wont be the last site to come under the fist of government intervention and groups like Anonymous seem to only be getting started in their opposition to those same forces.

(Source: futurenow321)

Two tech heavyweights are about to start the legal fight of the century in a California courtroom Google and Oracle the high-profile battle over intellectual property begins today with jury selection. The stakes are no less than the future of Android. Oracle sued Google over its use of java, a software platform Oracle obtained from its acquisition of Sun Microsystems earlier that same year. Java is actually free to use without licensing it, but when Google developed its Android mobile operating system, it used many of Sun’s Java APIs (application programming interfaces) so Android developers could create apps with Java. Google’s argument is that programming languages are merely the tools software developers use and aren’t subject to copyright, though the programs they make with them are. It says Oracle is trying to copyright an idea rather than an expression — one of the main distinctions about what can be copyrighted and what can’t.

(Source: futurenow321)

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week.

Further, NASA doesn’t need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told Discovery News.

“The ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a microscope — watch the bacteria move,” Miller said.

“On the basis of what we’ve done so far, I’d say I’m 99 percent sure there’s life there,” he added.

(Source: futurenow321)

If you fear the robot apocalypse, perhaps your day would be much improved if you just moved on. Boston Dynamics’ PETMAN robot, developed for DARPA, is getting more humanoid-like by the day it seems, and here we see it—legs, torso, arms, and all—negotiating staircases, running on a treadmill, and even hitting the floor for some pushups. All this strength training appears to be doing PETMAN some good.

(Source: futurenow321)

 A new Ground Systems Power and Energy Lab opening in Warren will help the U.S Army of tomorrow become a more fuel efficient fighting machine. A ribbon cutting ceremony was held Wednesday at the new Army laboratory at TARDEC where technology such as fuel cells and hybrid systems for combat vehicles will be developed. Federal officials say the facility at the Detroit Arsenal is unique in that it brings together a number of high-technology testing capabilities in a single facility that can test vehicle components, systems and full vehicles, which will enable TARDEC to increase its collaboration with the Department of Energy, industry and academia. Among it’s features, the lab can simulate the desert heat of Afghanistan and a bone-chilling day in Antarctica and can transition between the extremes in temperatures in a matter of minutes.

(Source: futurenow321)