Google said Thursday it is establishing a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab to trigger the next phase of machine learning with the power of quantum computers. The efforts could trickle down to ordinary people. Read more »
Google, NASA, USGS and TIME have released a set of photos that show a “picture of Earth through time.” It is stunning to see Amazon rainforest shrink and a glacier vanish. Impressive Read more »
A Swiss project that is 10 years in the making aims to show that solar powered planes could one day shuttle people around the world. After carrying out demonstration flights in Europe and North Africa, Solar Impulse is coming to America this year. Read more »
Jesse Andrews, an OpenStack veteran who’s done stints at NASA, ANSO Labs and Rackspace, will lead Nebula’s plug-and-play OpenStack development effort as it nears launch, the company said. Read more »
What would happen if you put hackers and scientists together and let them play? That’s what Ariel Waldman is trying to find out with Science Hack Day, a wildly popular event that brings together science, design, and technology. Read more »
NASA wants unmanned aircraft that can fly in tight airspaces and may launch a competition to find partners to design and manufacture such vehicles. The agency is working with the FAA and Air Force Research Lab on this effort which may stir controversy. Read more »
NASA and a couple other government agencies have kicked off a series of TopCoder challenges designed to find innovative solutions to the government’s big data problems. The first contest is all about making disparate, incompatible data sets usable and actually valuable across agencies. Read more »
New images built using 10 years of data of the Furnace constellation and beyond show what NASA and ESA officials call the deepest look ever into the universe. Read more »
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab used Coverity and a suite of other static analysis tools to analyze and check millions of lines of C code to make sure the Mars Curiosity Rover got to its destination safe and sound. Read more »
The company behind the enterprise Linux market leader has now made preview code of its OpenStack cloud platform available for download. The final release is due next year. Rackspace, Internap, HP and others already have OpenStack deployed. Is IBM next? Read more »
We previously detailed the test architecture that NASA built to ensure the live stream of the Curiosity landing could handle traffic, and now Amazon Web Services is showing what the final architecture looked like. NASA scaled up its test build and monitored traffic in real time. Read more »
With millions of viewers expected to watch history Sunday night, NASA couldn’t afford to let the live stream of its Mars rover Curiosity landing go untested. Here’s how NASA put its Amazon Web Services-based infrastructure through its paces to ensure it keeps up with demand. Read more »
If all goes according to plan (knock wood) NASA’s Curiosity Rover, a 1 ton, nuke-powered space robot that’s traveled 345 million miles in eight months, will land on Mars Sunday night. Here’s how you can watch the landing, which is slated for 10:31 p.m. PST. Read more »
SpaceX is one of 3 rivals competing — with NASA’s help — to power the next U.S. manned space launch. Boeing, Sierra Nevada (no not that Sierra Nevada) and SpaceX will benefit from NASA expertise — and millions of dollars of its dough — under the 21-month contract. Read more »
In a recent interview, NASA CIO Linda Cureton said the space agency still uses OpenStack for some projects but that it must be pragmatic in all cloud technology choices going forward. Various NASA entities are using Amazon and Windows Azure as needed. Read more »
In a recent blog post, NASA’s CIO Linda Cureton gives both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services a shout-out for helping NASA save money while serving its constituencies. But she made no mention of OpenStack, the cloud platform NASA helped bring to life. Read more »
NASA, one of the two original backers of the OpenStack project, plans to stop actively developing software for that open-source cloud computing platform. NASA executive Karen Petraskas signaled the move at the Uptime Symposium this week, according to a published report. Read more »
The anticipated SpaceX launch was aborted at the last possible second after a computer detected a glitch in one of the rocket’s nine engines. The snafu raised anew questions of whether private industry can handle a space program. Read more »
Here is a wild idea: mining energy materials for batteries, fuel cells and other electronic devices from asteroids. Except that is exactly the plan announced by a startup on Tuesday that counts Larry Page and Eric Schmidt as investors. Read more »
DARPA and NASA are sponsoring a challenge run by the MIT Space Systems Laboratory, TopCoder, and Aurora Flight Sciences that will invite coders to write a computer program that enables a satellite to dock with a space object that is tumbling in geosynchronous orbit. Read more »
In its new Diablo release, the OpenStack cloud OS gets perks including a dashboard to give IT a peak into what’s happening in the cloud, better authentication that ties into existing directories, and an API to ease integration into big, dynamic networks. Read more »
Europe’s web scene is now thriving, and we’ve compiled a list featuring some of the best and brightest European web startups — what we’re dubbing the GigaOM Euro 20. Depending on how closely you watch Europe’s online scene, some of these companies may be familiar to you. Others you may not have heard of. But all of them are worth watching closely. In this report, we profile the 20 startups that we feel best represent Europe’s current tech scene. We have organized our list around perception, and as lists go, it is intended to be a guideline rather than a rule book. It’s not exhaustive, and clearly, with such a diverse and vibrant continent as our playing field, it never could be. Companies mentioned in this report include GetJar, Huddle, Made.com and Songkick. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Open-source cloud computing project OpenStack turned one this week, and cloud backup provider Backblaze freely shared detailed specifications for a storage device capable of holding 135 terabytes of data. Open-source options for everything from servers and data centers to clouds and application platforms are growing more robust. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Piston Cloud Computing has launched with $4.5 million from True Ventures, Hummer Winblad and others in what is both a big deal for the relatively young OpenStack platform as well as an expected move by the founders of what became the code for OpenStack. Read more »
When I covered a space shuttle launch in 2005, what struck me most about it was how jury-rigged and flawed and human things seemed — especially for a multibillion-program aimed at putting people into space — and yet, how inspiring it all was at the same time. Read more »
The final U.S. space shuttle launched Friday morning from Cape Canaveral, Fla. and the world was watching. Since many of us at GigaOM have some special shuttle memories to share, we gathered a few of them and invite y’all to provide yours as well. Read more »
Flow batteries — big tanks of liquids that can store energy — are jockeying for a place in a growing energy storage market that will enable utilities to better manage the electric grid, provide back-up power and potentially work with the electric rates system. Read more »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
At 2:00 p.m. EST/11:00 a.m. PST, NASA is announcing “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life,” and if you want to watch, all you have to do is hit NASA.gov (and update your Windows Media Player). Read more »
Space enthusiasts who follow information coming out of NASA with excitment should download the free NASA HD app for the iPad right now. This app aggregates all of the happenings at NASA with a gorgeous interface that is tailored for touch operation on the iPad. Read more »
