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An international team of researchers have developed a new type of gyroscope that is the first to measure the "wobble" in the rotational axis of the Earth from a ground-based laboratory. Astronomers normally track this wobble by continuously monitoring the position of distant objects, such as quasars. But this new method will provide a much simpler and cheaper alternative to these large-scale astronomical readings, the scientists claim.

is this of any use for spacecraft?

mmm it's like saying that you can replace satellite tracking by accelerometers on-board satellites... for Leo: you'd better put an atomic gyro on a spacecraft these laser gyro are huge !

impressive

New technology (STARE-a constellation of nano-satellites) for tracking satellites and space debris could improve the accuracy from 1km (current by NORAD) to less than 100m. Increasing the reliability of collision detection, preventing 99% of false warnings.

"I don't have a cell phone. I won't carry a cell phone," says Stallman, founder of the free software movement and creator of the GNU operating system. "It's Stalin's dream. Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I'm not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I'm not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop." he is right once more ...

I am going to live in the forest! Sadly, while true, there's no way around it these days. On the up-side the information overflow these days exceeds processing speeds. Soon it will become increasingly difficult for NSA or other organizations to find anything in the tons of data they stash away. Like some guy said in a random youtube video I can't find now anymore: "good luck trying to find my personal data when I'm tagged in 5000 pictures of cats!"

The sound track of Apolo mission. They have a full album devoted to the space race.

HIGHLY suggested read if you are interested in the Anonymous phenomenon.

Curiosity Cloning? This is 2006 but are there any publication related? Can someone track the results of this research?

also interesting (for the Earth Science girls): Nilton Renno of the University of Michigan, who studies how rocket plumes from Mars landers affect the Martian surface.

A personal interest of mine that I want to explore a bit more in the future. I just bought a ZigBee electricity monitor and I am wondering whether from the signal of the mains one could detect (reliably) the oven turning on, lights, etc. Probably requires Neural Network training. The idea would be to make a simple device which basically saves you money by telling you how much electricity you are wasting. Then again, its probably already done by Google...

Randomly I found this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/consumer-electronics/gadgets/curb-startup-home-electricity-tracking Isn't it a similar kind of stuff Thijs?

haha, yep, that's it... but we can do better than that right! :)

interesting story with many juicy details on how they proceed ... (similarly interesting nickname for the "operation" chosen by our british friends) "The spies used the IP addresses they had associated with the engineers as search terms to sift through their surveillance troves, and were quickly able to find what they needed to confirm the employees' identities and target them individually with malware. The confirmation came in the form of Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn "cookies," tiny unique files that are automatically placed on computers to identify and sometimes track people browsing the Internet, often for advertising purposes. GCHQ maintains a huge repository named MUTANT BROTH that stores billions of these intercepted cookies, which it uses to correlate with IP addresses to determine the identity of a person. GCHQ refers to cookies internally as "target detection identifiers." Top-secret GCHQ documents name three male Belgacom engineers who were identified as targets to attack. The Intercept has confirmed the identities of the men, and contacted each of them prior to the publication of this story; all three declined comment and requested that their identities not be disclosed. GCHQ monitored the browsing habits of the engineers, and geared up to enter the most important and sensitive phase of the secret operation. The agency planned to perform a so-called "Quantum Insert" attack, which involves redirecting people targeted for surveillance to a malicious website that infects their computers with malware at a lightning pace. In this case, the documents indicate that GCHQ set up a malicious page that looked like LinkedIn to trick the Belgacom engineers. (The NSA also uses Quantum Inserts to target people, as The Intercept has previously reported.) A GCHQ document reviewing operations conducted between January and March 2011 noted that the hack on Belgacom was successful, and stated that the agency had obtained access to the company's

I knew I wasn't using TOR often enough...

Cool! It seems that after all it is best to restrict employees' internet access only to work-critical areas... @Paul TOR works on network level, so it would not help here much as cookies (application level) were exploited.

Looks like crowdsourcing for astronomy stuff is already being done.

As Stevens says in the new article, researchers now know that increased nighttime light exposure tracks with increased rates of breast cancer, obesity and depression. Correlation isn't causation, of course, and it's easy to imagine all the ways researchers might mistake those findings. The easy availability of electric lighting almost certainly tracks with various disease-causing factors: bad diets, sedentary lifestyles, exposure to they array of chemicals that come along with modernity. Very difficult to prove causation I would think, but there are known relationships between hormone levels and light.

There is actually a windows program called flux, that changes the temperature on your screen to match normal light cycles. When the sun sets it switches to a "warmer" more reddish tint on your screen to promote sleepiness. The typically bright blue/neon white settings of most pc settings is quite "awakening" and keeps your brain running for longer. This impacts your sleeping patterns and all the consequences of that. Amazingly, this flux thing does have an effect. That being said, I wouldn't be too quick to blame it all on PC/artificial lighting time. Sedentary lifestyles, etc can very well place one in a position of long term pc/phone usage so it's quite hard to draw a causal link.

nice - also exists for MAC btw: https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/mac/

YAY!!

Great work from my former colleagues in Montreal. For more information (in french, sorry) please click on: http://www.nouvelles.umontreal.ca/recherche/sciences-technologies/20121114-perdue-dans-lespace-des-astronomes-lont-enfin-trouvee.html

Nice! How much dark matter still left to find?

looks like some backwind for all the cold fusion believers ...

I just answered something very similar to Franco, except the conclusions: I don't think that there is a good reason for us or anybody else in ESA to get involved at this stage.

I agree - if this device would work it there would be other interest groups (like the energy sector) with a much more concrete stake in the technology.