Supossably

Soyuz capsule brings back space station fliers

posterbot — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:30:37 +0000

A Russian Soyuz capsule brought two space station crew members back to Earth Thursday after a 169-day stay in space. They landed in blizzard-like conditions in Kazakhstan.

Bad Company 2 Hits 2.3 Million Sold

posterbot — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:24:26 +0000

Electronic Arts’ Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has sold through 2.3 million units globally since its March 2 debut, developer DICE said today. The game’s seen 230,000 concurrent users at peak, and players have spent a collective 2.9 million hours online in the last 24 hours alone, says the company. In fact, Battlefield franchise EP Karl Magnus Troedsson says the game saw “such a tremendous rush to multiplayer gameplay” at launch that servers were initially overwhelmed …

Nanoscale optical antennas based on old-school TV aerials

posterbot — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:11:30 +0000

A paper published in Nature this week details how researchers have taken a common antenna design and replicated it on the the nanoscale level. When a regular TV aerial that handles radio frequencies is scaled down to nanometer sizes and slightly modified, the result was a tiny antenna that could direct light of nanometer wavelengths. The resulting optical antenna array could help improve the design of nanoscale sensors and detectors.

Those old TV antennas, consisting of multiple crossbars, are called Yagi-Uda antennas, named for their inventors. The design of Yagi-Uda antennas is based on a simple principle: a metallic wire resonates strongly if its length matches half of the relevant wavelength. To tune into TV and radio wavelengths, which are around a meter long, the Yagi-Uda uses bars of half that length to pick up the appropriate signals. The design proved to be popular because it is highly directional and can receive or broadcast a strong signal.

To make the design work at the nanoscale level, scientists made tiny crossbars, about a hundred nanometers long, and arranged them in the Yagi-Uda configuration. They made a slight alteration in the design so that the feed bar was tilted 45 degrees, allowing it to be excited by an electric field in a manner that is independent of the other bars.

Once arranged, the nano-antenna array was able to direct visible light on the scale of its tiny antenna bars. The resonant wavelengths were around a few hundred nanometers, corresponding to the orange and red sections of the spectrum—that’s a larger multiple of the antenna bar length than the standard Yagi-Uda antenna, but still quite useful. The nano-array’s creators hope that the itty-bitty antenna will find wide use in optical nanotechnology.

Nature Photonics, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2010.34 (About DOIs).

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GameStop: ‘Publishers Can Participate’ In Used Biz Via DLC

posterbot — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:52:00 +0000

Although some publishers have used downloadable content and unlockables to discourage used game sales, retailer GameStop sees itself as a publisher partner in the DLC biz. CEO Dan DeMatteo doesn’t believe DLC opportunities are much of a deterrent to used game buyers, anyway: “Through our years in the used business, we have learned that the second-hand user is a value-oriented consumer… we don’t believe that a $10 add-on piece of DLC is compelling to a …

Nintendo touts social gaming for DSi XL

posterbot — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:36:21 +0000

The soon-to-be-launched portable game device, its maker says, will help you play well with others.

Microsoft removes hardware barrier to Win 7’s ‘XP mode’

posterbot — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:36:19 +0000

Windows 7 users will no longer need their PC’s processor to support hardware virtualization to run the new and old operating systems together.