It’s been awhile since we sashayed through Klipsch‘s world headquarters back in December of last year, but the company certainly hasn’t let off of the pedal. Today at IFA, it managed to introduce no fewer than three new headphones, including the outfit’s very first on-ear set. The Image One was built to bring Klipsch’s signature sound to folks who’d prefer cans over ‘buds, and it’s also amongst the first to have an Apple-centric mic and three-button remote for controlling music playback on iPods, iPads and iPhones. Travelers will be pleased to hear that the ear cups fold flat for portability, but you’ll need $149.99 to call ‘em yours when they ship this November. Moving on, there’s the Image S5i Rugged (shown above) — essentially, you’re looking at the same sound quality we lauded last year, but with a rugged slant. These feature the aforesaid three-button remote / mic as well as a “safety case” that touts a built-in flashlight. We’re expecting a demonstration of their toughness at IFA tomorrow, but in the meanwhile you can start sacking away $129.99 for their November debut. Finally, the October-bound Image S3 is the company’s new low-end set, priced at just $49.99 but still shipping with a trio of oval ear tips, a carrying case and a choice of gray, red, pink or green hues. The full presser is after the break, if you’re into that type of thing.
Klipsch issues first on-ear headphones, Image S5i Rugged and bargain Image S3 earbuds originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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What does it take to make an addictive game? Not much — just throw in some super simple controls, cute graphics, and basic physics. Rovio Mobile’s Angry Birds is one such game that includes all these elements, and today the studio’s just released a public Android beta to cater those without an iOS, webOS or Ovi-enabled device. In case you’re not already familiar with the popular title, the backstory is that a gang of hungry pigs snatched away some eggs from the birds, forcing the feathered creatures to embark on a rescue mission for the sake of their survival. The gameplay on the Android version is just as simple as before: in each level you use a fixed slingshot to fling the birds — one at a time — into the forts, in order to kill all the pigs inside. As a secondary challenge, you must also attempt to get a three-star rating depending on the amount of structural material you destroy, so the key is to perfect your shooting angle.
At the beginning you’re only given one type of bird that does nothing more than just headbutting, but throughout the game you’ll come across six more birds, each possessing one special power: multiply, explode, accelerate, dropping egg bombs, boomerang, and extra strength. Don’t worry, the instructions are pretty clear when you first meet these enhanced kamikaze birds — most involve just a single tap anywhere to trigger their special abilities mid-flight. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll soon be wanting to try out all sorts of trajectories to take vengeance on those cheeky green hogs. Seriously, the pigs really do laugh at you when your birds miss them.
While we’re not familiar with the Ovi Store and webOS versions of Angry Birds, we’ve definitely spent a fair amount of time on the iOS flavor. Sadly, since the latter’s still running on a low 480 x 320 resolution, the blurred graphics on the notoriously sharp retina display does no justice to the game. On the other hand, the Android version looks a lot prettier on our Nexus One, Dell Streak and HTC Desire, as it runs on their native resolution of 800 x 480. That said, overall the Android beta didn’t feel as well-oiled as its iOS counterpart — we’ve noticed the occasional light hiccups while panning across the scene, so here’s hoping that this will be fixed in the final release. Regardless of this minor flaw, we’d still highly recommend Android users to check out this free Angry Birds beta in the market — go grab it while it’s hot!
Continue reading App Review: Angry Birds (Android)
App Review: Angry Birds (Android) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Colorado Statesman
Washington Post
AP Secretary of State Bernie Buescher has to certify the ballot by the close of business Friday, and Maes says he's not going anywhere. Maes has faced a growing chorus of calls to drop out of the race amid several campaign missteps and questions about …
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Footage from seven ongoing NASA space missions provide hyper-realistic scenery for 3-D animated film Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey, which debuts Saturday at the DragonCon sci-fi convention in Atlanta.
For added star power, Quantum producer Harry Kloor wrangled William Shatner, Chris Pine, Mark Hamill, Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones and Hayden Christensen for the voice cast. Besides guys that pretend to be outer-space adventurers, Quantum also includes Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, who for the first time lends his voice to an animated movie in the role of meteorite hunter Jack Doohan.
Kloor met Armstrong at Purdue University while earning Ph.D. degrees in physics and chemistry. “When I asked Neil if he wanted to promote science to the public through a science fiction film as a means to reach all those people who shy away from traditional science and educational or edutainment films, he read the script and liked the approach,” Kloor told Wired.com in an e-mail.
Following Saturday’s 8:30 p.m. DragonCon screening in the Atlanta Marriott Marquis’ Atrium Ballroom, Kloor will appear with Tom Kenny (SpongeBob SquarePants) and others at the “Captain Kirks vs. Darth Vaders: The Inside Stories Behind the Making of Quantum Quest” panel.
Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey, written and co-directed by Kloor, is slated for release in large-format 3-D theaters in late 2010.
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SB Nation Dallas (blog)
SportingNews.com
The Dallas Cowboys have traded wide receiver Patrick Crayton to the San Diego Chargers, ESPN.com's Adam Schefter reports. The Cowboys get a seventh-round pick in the 2011 draft in exchange for Crayton. Crayton's agent, Fred Lyles, told the Dallas …
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TSN
Kansas City Star
By Sports Network The Philadelphia Eagles have traded for Arizona Cardinals offensive lineman Reggie Wells, the team announced Friday. The 29-year-old Wells, who was acquired in exchange for an undisclosed 2011 draft pick, started every game for the …
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When the super-Earth COROT-7b was discovered in 2009, it was heralded as the rockiest, most truly Earth-like exoplanet yet. But a new study suggests it’s more like a comet.
In a paper to be published in the journal Icarus, an international team of astronomers led by Alessandro Mura of the Italian Institute for Interplanetary Space Physics in Rome argue that, given the planet’s likely composition and distance from its star, COROT-7b probably loses its surface elements to space in a long, comet-like tail of charged particles.
COROT-7b is less than twice the size of Earth and about five times Earth’s mass, and orbits a sun-like star about 390 light-years away. Because COROT-7b’s density is similar to Earth’s, astronomers hailed it as the first rocky exoplanet discovered and one of the best candidates for hosting extraterrestrial life.
But the rocky world also sits almost 100 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the sun, and it orbits its star once every 0.85 Earth days. The temperature on the daylight side of the planet is a scorching 4000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough for minerals on the rocky surface to break down and release charged particles into space, where they would be picked up and blown away by the stellar wind.
“We expect that the stellar radiation pressure and the plasma environment will cause the build-up of an elongated comet-like exosphere,” the authors write. Depending on what the planet is made of, and whether it was once the rocky core of a “super-Neptune” as some have suggested, the tail could be composed of elements like sodium, oxygen, magnesium or silicon oxide.
The researchers compare this vision of COROT-7b with Mercury, which has a similarly antagonistic relationship with the sun and also leaks charged particles in a long tail.
“The planet appears to be more like a ’super-Mercury’ under much extremer environmental conditions,” the researchers write.
The team suggests that a tail composed of sodium or calcium could theoretically be detected on COROT-7b from ground-based telescopes. Although detecting such a tail would probably eliminate COROT-7b as a candidate habitable world, “this project would be the very first attempt to learn something of the mineralogy of a rocky planet orbiting another star.”
Image: 1) Artist’s impression of COROT-7b, ESO/L. Calcada. 2) Model of COROT-7b’s proposed sodium tail, assuming the planet is 4000 degrees Fahrenheit at its surface. A. Mura et al, Icarus 2010. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2010.08.015
See Also:
- Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet
- At Last! First Real Evidence for a Rocky Exoplanet
- Astronomers Closer to Exoplanet ‘Holy Grail’
- Mercury Flyby Maps New Territory
- This Just in: Mercury More Exciting Than Mars
Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.
]]>Gearbox Software has taken the reins of the first-person shooter, which will supposedly be published by Take-Two Interactive next year, according to The Wall Street Journal. At least a portion of the game is being shown to attendees at PAX 2010, the massive videogame gathering this weekend in Seattle.
“We’re in the polishing phase now. This is a game where we cannot make a promise we cannot fulfill,” Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford told the paper.
The oft-delayed videogame, a sequel to 1996’s Duke Nukem 3D, became the perennial winner of Wired’s Vaporware Awards.
GameLife editor Chris Kohler is playing Duke Nukem Forever at PAX. Wired.com will have a full report as soon as possible.
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Panasonic’s gone on a real tear here, releasing two new Toughbook models at once. While you grapple with the implications of such a thing, let’s get down to details. The new 31 and 19 Series Toughbooks are 13.1-inch and 10.4-inch models, respectively, and as far as specs go, they both pack in a 160GB hard drive, up to 6GB of DDR3 SDRAM (with 2GB coming standard), and Intel QM57 Express chipset, and 1024 x 768 resolution displays. Both come with Windows 7 Professional pre-installed, and the Toughbook 31 has a 2.4GHz Intel Core i5 CPU, the 19′s go a 1.2 GHZ inside. Other than that they’ve both got Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, an HDMI slot, four USB ports, and an SD card slot. Of course, they’re also drop resistant in addition to being dust and waterproof. They’ll be available starting in mid-September in Japan.
Panasonic cranks out new 31 and 19 Series Toughbooks for Japan originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The sparkle of starlight off water could be the clincher for finding oceans on extrasolar planets. And it could be observable with the tech that will be deployed in the next generation of space telescopes.
“A glinting planet looks different from a non-glinting planet, and it’s detectable with current technology,” said Tyler Robinson, a graduate student at the University of Washington and lead author of a new paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “This is one step toward proving there’s liquid water at the surface of an extrasolar planet.”
The proposed technique for finding wet worlds takes advantage of the same effect that makes sunsets on the Pacific coast so spectacular. The idea was suggested by Carl Sagan in 1993, and has been used to confirm the presence of liquid lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan.
“The oceans do a really good job of reflecting light like a mirror,” Robinson said. “Especially when you have the sun really low on the horizon, most of the sunlight comes reflected off of the water towards you. The same thing happens on the scale of a planet.”
Robinson and his colleagues showed that when a planet appears crescent-shaped to an Earthly observer, starlight reflecting off oceans can make the planet appear up to twice as bright as a planet with no oceans. They also showed that the sparkle of starlight off oceans looks different from light scattered through clouds.
Most other proposed techniques for finding water on an extrasolar planet rely on taking its spectrum, or detailed measurements of the planet’s atmosphere, and looking for the chemical fingerprint of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. But this strategy would show only that the planet hosts water vapor, not liquid oceans, and the technology is still a long way off.
“To get a good spectrum would require a big telescope that is still 10 or 20 years away from being designed or launched,” said exoplanet expert Darren Williams of Penn State University, who has also studied ways to search for exo-oceans but was not involved in the new work. “That’s really becoming a long-range, futuristic sort of thing.”
Robinson and his colleagues proved that the glint effect could be observable with the telescope touted as the successor to Hubble: the James Webb Space Telescope, slated to launch in 2014. If the telescope is accompanied by a shield to block starlight, as suggested in the New Worlds Observer mission concept, it will be sensitive to the light glinting off extrasolar oceans.
To test whether the glint would be visible to the new space telescope, Robinson imagined he was an alien observer looking back at Earth. He used data from weather satellites and NASA’s EPOXI mission to build a computer model of what Earth would look like to a distant observer, including weather patterns, seasonal changes and wind speeds over the oceans that would influence the height of waves.
The model “does explain what we can observe on our own planet from other spacecraft in the solar system, so you can trust the model that they’re using to do these calculations,” Williams said.
Unfortunately, even the James Webb Space Telescope won’t be able to take sharp enough images of exoplanets to tell whether the planet is in a crescent phase, much less directly see a glint. The telescope will just see a dot of light getting brighter and dimmer as it circles its star.
“We have to look for evidence of this glint when we just have this pale, tiny speck of light on our camera,” Robinson said.
So Robinson and colleagues added up all the light reflected by the model Earth to see if the glint would light up the whole planet enough to be seen from space. They found that Earth in the crescent phase would be twice as bright with a glint as without it. “That’s significant,” Robinson said. “A factor of two is a really big deal.”
The researchers also found that the glint effect is strongest in the near infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, just beyond what the human eye can see. These wavelengths of light are not as badly scattered as they pass through a planet’s atmosphere. Conveniently, they are also the wavelengths that the new space telescope will be most attuned to.
“The James Webb Space Telescope is really well suited to do this,” Robinson said.
Looking for the glint would not be the first line of investigation, however. Rather, Robinson imagines the technique could confirm that a good exo-Earth candidate, a plant that is about Earth’s size planet and lies the right distance from its star to support liquid water, actually does have oceans at its surface.
“We would first worry about whether the planet is even remotely Earth-like before looking for the glint,” he said.
“What’s nice about this result here is that we have a chance of doing interesting things with Earthlike planets with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is basically sitting on the hangar waiting to be launched into space,” commented Williams “We can do that in our research lifetimes. That’s the most exciting thing about this.”
Image: 1) Astrophysical Journal Letters/Tyler Robinson. Left: NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory. Right: Earth and Moon Viewer. 2) NASA
See Also:
- The New Exoplanetology: ‘I Learned It by Watching You, Earth
- Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet Found Right Next Door
- Kepler Shows Exoplanet Is Unlike Anything in Our Solar System
- Photo: Shining Lake Confirms Presence of Liquid on Titan
- The Lagoons of Titan: Oily Liquid Confirmed on Saturn Moon
Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.
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