It’s called the Plant Host Drone (PHD) and it’s a wheeled robotic plant holder that will actively seek out the sun’s rays, moving over to where it (and the plant it holds) can soak in some sunlight. The PHD was developed by Stephen Verstraete, a scupltor from Belgium, and it is designed to look like a trilobite. It moves around on a RP5 tank-tread platform, finding the areas of higher light intensity. Like a Roomba, it also has collision switches to prevent it from bashing into your walls, doors, banisters and furniture.

If you want to have a sun-seeking plant holder of your own, Verstraete has posted the schematics online and you can make your own. If you’d prefer a little more guidance, he plans on producing a DIY kit of some kind for about $32. While it would incredibly logical sense for the PHD to be solar-powered, it is just regular battery-powered at the moment. Verstraete says that he is thinking about an optional solar kit though.

[Source]

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Solar storms, as you know, head towards Earth once in a while to remind us about the Sun’s incredible power. The fast-moving clouds of charged particles reached our planet this week and we are extremely lucky to be on Earth and not on Mars. Studies show that the Earth’s magnetosphere makes sure that the planet is not too affected by solar storms.

It was in 2008 that researchers got a chance to study the effects of the solar storm on two planets (Mars and Earth) at the same time and under the same solar-wind conditions. It was found that the Red Planet lost oxygen atoms in its atmosphere 10 times faster than Earth. This difference is thought to be dependent on the strength of each planet’s magnetic field. As you might know, Mars has a magnetic field that is only one-tenth as strong as Earth’s.

As scientists have long believed that the presence of a magnetic deflector shield is a good defense against charged particles from the Sun, the new results didn’t come as a surprise for the researchers.

But some discoveries made in the past few years related to the Earth’s magnetosphere have also suggested that the field is less-effective against solar storms. Studies have suggested that our planet’s magnetosphere might be transferring more energy from the solar wind to the upper part of the atmosphere when compared to smaller planets with weaker magnetospheres.

But when Mars and Earth lined up on the same side of the sun in 2008, Yong Wei, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, and his team were able to collect data on the loss of oxygen atoms from the atmospheres of both the planets. The oxygen loss at Mars was found to be 10 times higher than at Earth.

More solar storms are expected this week and the researchers are looking forward to take advantage of a present alignment between the Sun, Earth, Mars, and Venus. Venus is important in the study as the planet has a thicker atmosphere and no magnetic field.

The post Recent Solar Flares Affect Mars Much More Severely Than Earth appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Solar astronomy is a fascinating science. When it comes to mega eruptions from solar spots, you can usually see these in the form of solar prominences. There are also solar flares that might have much more energy than prominences, which usually look like they are arcs bent and flowing its plasma back to the solar surface.  All of these bursts, both bent and unbent solar phenomena, seem rather exciting to see when watching a good SciFi film.

When it comes to reality though? This is a completely different story, and an occurrence that we may be facing right now. According to the Daily Mail of UK, just last week the sun shot out a Coronal Mass Ejection that barely grazed our planet and yet it managed to cause some disruption with airline communications. Now it seems that another similar CME is heading our way for a more direct hit, and its the largest observed in the last 30 years.

The solar flare was classified as an X18-category explosion, meaning it can trigger planet-wide radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation storms.

This Coronal Mass Ejection may bring some electromagnetic impulses capable of interrupting radio communications here on Earth and may even fry a few satellites right in their orbits.The biggest noticeable impact of the hit should be displayed in the northern auroral lights. These lights will become spectacular, colorful, and especially visible down to the south (or north, if you’re watching them from New Zealand).

Such an electromagnetic pulse generally “weighs” next to nothing and could disrupts some delicate microelectronics devices such as cell phones, communication satellites, and all such exposed and vulnerable devices.  Allegedly, this CME has a tremendous mass of plasma flying in the general our direction, and even a small portion of it not declined by our Earth’s feeble magnetic field can hit the power grids and all the utilities controls very hard.  With x18 category explosion we should be ok, those reaching x30 would be severely devastating.

At least according to Daily Mail UK, scientists believe that the flare of energy will hit sometime tonight with multiple shots continuing up to 24 hours or more from different directions across the globe.

You have to wonder though, if such massive activity is really heading our way why aren’t there other major news articles buzzing about this major disaster in the making? This means you should likely take the claim with a grain of salt, but for those of us that really love our cellphones we might want to at least consider the possibility of wrapping our phones in tinfoil to keep them protected.

As for me though, I’m not planning to hide and shield my “dumb” phone with tinfoil though: let it fry. This will give me a convenient excuse to get a good one during the upcoming Holiday sales, right?

The post Could Solar Activity Harm Satellites And Even Cell Phones? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Florian Mueuller calls himself an “intellectual property activist,” and the FOSSpatents blogger apparently did some digging around in the Android 2.2 Froyo and Android 3.0 Gingerbread code. In his digging around, he found that there were at least six files that were taken directly from the Java source code, in addition to 37 files that had “proprietary/confidential” slathered on them.

As least, that’s the accusation that’s been making its way around the Internet by news sites and bloggers, adding fuel to the fire between Oracle (which owns Sun, which is responsible for Java) and Google. However, it has now come to light that Google may not have actually done any wrongdoing. It may have just been fine with the level of “borrowing” on the part of the Android developers.

Expert developer Ed Burnette says that those files may have been “borrowed,” but they were simply a part of the usual testing process and they were deleted before Android was sent out to consumers:

There are two sets of files in question. The first set of 7 (PolicyNodeImpl.java, AclEntryImpl.java, AclImpl.java, GroupImpl.java, OwnerImpl.java, PermissionImpl.java, and PrincipalImpl.java) are in the unit test area of the source code tree. As any programmer will tell you, you don’t ship your unit tests with your product. Unit tests are tools used internally to ensure the quality of the software before you ship it.

The second set of 37 files is actually zipped up into one file called MMAPI.zip and tucked away in a directory used for native code audio drivers for one particular type of chip set. Florian really had to go digging for this one. I double-checked the make files and it’s clear this file is not shipped with Android either. Somebody uploaded it by mistake and it should simply be deleted.

So, what does this mean at the end of the day? Google’s in the clear and new CEO Larry Page (who just replaced Eric Schmidt) likely won’t have any new checks to sign for Oracle… at least, not in relation to this finding by Mueuller. There are other outstanding lawsuits between the two parties, after all, and Florian may have been trying to add some fuel to the fire while gaining publicity.

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