Cutting Edge

Engineers plan to load the shuttle Endeavour's external tank with rocket fuel July 1 to test vent line fixes intended to stop, or at least reduce, gaseous hydrogen leaks that grounded the shuttle June 13 and 17, NASA officials said Wednesday. If the repairs work, the agency will press ahead with a third attempt to launch Endeavour on a space station assembly mission July 11.

A different sort of problem has cropped up for the shuttle Atlantis, just back from a successful mission to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope. Sources say engineers recently discovered an astronaut work light attachment knob lodged between the inner pressure pane of cockpit window No. 5 and the back of an instrument panel housing.

The knob, used to mount a light on a bracket much like the knob on a tripod holds a camera, floated into a hard-to-see corner of the window area during the mission, when the crew cabin was pressurized to 14.7 pounds per square inch. It apparently got stuck between the inner window pane and the instrument panel housing when Atlantis returned to Earth and the cabin structure shrank slightly.

The knob is now firmly lodged against the inner pressure pane of window No. 5, the sources said. Because of uncertainty about whether the pane has been damaged, the knob must be removed--and the pane confirmed to be structurally sound--before Atlantis can fly again in November.… Read more

IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich plan to build a water-cooled supercomputer whose surplus heat will be re-used to heat the university's buildings.

The Aquasar supercomputer will be located at the ETH Zurich facility, and it will start operations next year, the partners said in an announcement on Tuesday.

The supercomputer will combine two rack-mounted IBM BladeCenter servers, each containing multiple blades with a mixed population of IBM PowerXCell 8i and Intel Nehalem processors. It is expected to deliver a peak performance of about 10 teraflops.

The installation will re-use heat directly for in-building heating. … Read more

Despite the Jaguar nipping at its heels, Roadrunner continues to speed past the supercomputing pack.

That's according to the twice yearly Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, which is to be announced Tuesday morning at the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. The list is released in June and November every year.

The IBM supercomputer housed at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, known as Roadrunner, maintains the lead it grabbed a year ago. The computer can process 1.105 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to … Read more

I am very fond of love. It makes people do silly things, giddy things, and, sometimes, very strange things indeed.

However, I am full of vicarious admiration for Noah Fulmor and Erin Finnegan, a Brooklyn couple who decided to do silly, strange, and giddy all together for their wedding on Saturday. Terrestrial weddings were far too mundane for their refined sci-fi tastes.

So they thought they'd space out.

They hired a 727 from a company called Zero Gravity Corp. and floated off not so much into the sunset, but toward the sun. And then suddenly away from it.

Their … Read more

An ordinary warehouse-style building in a nondescript office park in San Leandro, Calif., is home to some of the most futuristic and cutting-edge medical research in the U.S. It's where the Kaiser Permanente Sidney R. Garfield Health Care Innovation Center is located and testing out new technology, mock hospital environments, and high-tech gadgetry for the health care field.

Walking through mock hospital corridors with eco-friendly floors made from recycled materials are real patients, doctors, and nurses testing out the limits of technology. They're not only examining the impact of the rubber-based floor on their backs, but also … Read more

The flagship particle accelerator at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research is to be restarted in October, as opposed to September.

The Large Hadron Collider has been offline since an incident on September 19, when an equipment failure caused extensive damage. James Gillies, CERN's head of communications, said on Monday that an internal schedule set in February to restart the experiment has been pushed back by two or three weeks, but that the restart would still commence in the fall.

"The situation is a retreat from February," Gillies told ZDNet UK. "We had aimed for the … Read more

A slight misalignment in the way a vent port on the shuttle Endeavour's external tank was built into the structure is the leading candidate for what caused gaseous hydrogen leaks that derailed two launch attempts June 13 and 17, the shuttle program manager said Friday.

The use of a different type of seal where the vent line attaches to the side of the external tank may resolve the problem, he said. The alternative seal design should provide a tighter fit that is less susceptible to the temperature-induced mechanical shrinkage and motion that can put uneven stress on the interface … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Much more than most companies, Intel's success depends on the technology that will arrive in its field years hence. As a result, the company has more than 1,000 researchers beavering away to gauge and develop that technology.

And the company wants everyone to know it.

At its Intel Research Day at the Computer History Museum here Thursday, the company touted a wide range of projects that extend beyond the company's core business of making computer processors. On display were projects to improve the WiMax regional wireless network technology, improve mobile devices' processing power while … Read more

An Atlas 5 rocket thundered to life and streaked into space Thursday, hurling two NASA spacecraft toward the moon for a $583 million mission to scout out landing sites for future manned missions and to search for evidence of hidden ice near its frigid poles.

One spacecraft will map the cratered surface from a perilously low 31-mile-high orbit while the other will blast out 350 tons of pulverized rock and soil for chemical analysis, digging a shallow 66-foot-wide crater in a kamikaze crash visible from Earth.

"First, we want to identify safe landing sites," said project scientist Rich … Read more