Saturns B movie & Assassins Creed
Saturn
Every so often it makes headlines: Radio waves from Saturn sound like sound effects and music from a B movie. It's true, too...sorta. For a variety of reasons, Saturn and many other planets (including Earth) are sources of completely natural radio wave emissions. Obviously us Earthlings are transmitting a fair amount of non-natural ones too, but if we were all to shut up simultaneously, you'd still be able to listen to the music of our Aurora Borealis. The Cassini-Huygens, probe orbiting Saturn, started picking up these same phenomena from Saturn when it arrived. Scientists recorded these signals and converted them into something we could actually hear and the results are...eerie. It sounds like something out of Doctor Who (the old ones) or the Forbidden Planet. Give it a listen: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/sounds/
Assassin's Creed
Video Games are a lot of fun and offer me the opportunity to do things I could never do in real life. Assassin's Creed is a game about one of those things. You're a medieval Assassin task to carry out a variety of missions. I don't know anything about the plot, beyond that, and I don't need to. You can never have enough bad-ass assassin games. Only one thing could kill a game like that: bad gameplay. From everything I've seen, this game won't have to worry about that, though. The cities are dynamic and the inhabitants react in complex and realistic ways. I couldn't begin to describe it well so you should just go look at it: http://www.assassinscreed.com/index.php
Fuel economy…in a rocket?
Until now, all chemical rocket engines function essentially the same: spark off the reaction and hold on for dear life. You could redirect the thrust and, sometimes, turn it off entirely, however it was pretty much a light-switch type reaction. Although this certainly made it easy to calculate fuel use, it was also extremely inefficient. See, an engine must be capable of accelerating the rocket to escape velocity, and keeping it at, or above, that speed. Since our current rocket engines are only capable of accelerating, we have to calculate the exact break even point where the rocket runs out of fuel but has enough velocity to reach it's intended orbit. This means a lot of wasted fuel and problems if we miss our mark. It's basically like driving a car with only one gear, no brakes, and a throttle that is either open all the way, or completely closed. To get anywhere, you must accelerate to a point where you can just coast the rest of the way. Fortunately, that's all about to change. Some researchers at Georgia Tech have designed an new rocket engine that would be 40% more efficient, and be smaller, than what we have now. It's basically the equivalent of upgrading to a five gear transmission with full throttle control.
Curious? Read more here.