I don’t even know how to categorize this…it’s just stunning.

To quote Elvis: “Technology is Cool!”

Update: So you say, “Big deal, that’s neato, but what would I use that for.”  Well take a look at this video.

That’s so cool it made me cry.

Place a Knight on a chess board and following the rules of chess move it to land on every square only once.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight%27s_tour

On an 8 × 8 board, there are exactly 26,534,728,821,064 (directed, i.e. two tours along the same path that travel in opposite directions are counted separately) closed tours.

This may be the dawn of a bold new era in space exploration.  For years space enthusiasts and entrepreneurs have pondered what on earth we could do, in space, that would turn a big profit.  And, space junk may be the key.  Low earth orbit is full of debris, and sooner or later we will need a costly cleanup.  In the end, it could be the garbage business that finally makes the first space billionaires.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

We at techRivet aims to please.

You think you have a hobby?  Steve Eves has a hobby.

Read all about it here: One man's quest to honor America's Saturn V rocket

Lessons In Survival

Morgan's research—the first of its kind—produced some fascinating findings about who does the best job resisting the interrogators and who stays focused and clearheaded despite the uncontrollable fear. Morgan looked at two different groups going through this training: regular Army troops like infantrymen, and elite Special Forces soldiers, who are known to be especially "stress hardy" or cool under pressure. At the start or base line, the two groups were essentially the same, but once the stress began, and afterward, there were significant differences. Specifically, the two groups released very different amounts of a chemical in the brain called neuropeptide Y. NPY is an abundant amino acid in our bodies that helps regulate our blood pressure, appetite, learning and memory. It also works as a natural tranquilizer, controlling anxiety and buffering the effects of stress hormones like norepenephrine, one of the chemicals that most of us simply call adrenaline. In essence, NPY is one of the fire hoses that your brain uses to extinguish your alarm and fear responses by keeping the frontal-lobe parts of your brain working longer under stress

The science is cool, but reading about the SEAL training was freaky.

PG&E just requested approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to enter into a power purchase agreement with Solaren Corp.  Solaren would deploy a solar array into space to beam an anticipated 850 gigawatt hours for the first year and 1,700 gigawatt hours for the subsequent years.

An actual contract from an actual Power company.

Wow.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30198977/

Boerman said Solaren's plan called for four or five heavy-lift launches that would put the elements of the power-generating facility in orbit. Those elements would dock automatically in space to create the satellite system. Boerman declined to describe the elements in detail but noted that each heavy-lift launch could put 25 tons of payload into orbit.

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-04/top-10-telescopes-all-time

Cool list.

The big news this week is the discovery that Theta 1 Orions C, a bright star in the Trapezium in Orion (that is a collection of bright stars in the Orion nebula, just below his belt) is actually a binary star.

What’s more exciting is the discovery was made by the VLTI in Chile, an optical interferometer with amazing resolving power.  Light from the 4 telescopes can be combined in a way to increase the resolving power to be equivalent to a single telescope with a much larger mirror.

In other space imaging news, an images of exoplanet HR 8799b was found in 10 year old images collected by the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) instrument on Hubble.  It turns out the image had been collected many years ago, but the existence of the planet was not known at the time.  HR 8799b was officially “discovered” at the Gemini North observatory in 2007.  Later examination of the NICMOS images revealed the planet actually was imaged much earlier.  In astronomy, it’s actually fairly common for some celestial object to be “discovered” and then later found in much earlier images.  The star HR 8799 has 3 known planets, each with 7-10 time the mass of Jupiter orbiting far from their sun.  HR 8799 is about 1.5 times the size of our sun.  The inner planet has a nearly circular orbit, and although the shapes of the orbits of the other planets are not known, they most likely orbit in a roughly 1:2:4 resonance.  Although the planets are much larger than the gas giants of our solar system, there are many striking similarities between HR 8799 and our own solar system, including the possibility of undiscovered terrestrial planets in the inner solar system. 

Meanwhile, on Mars, Spirit set a new driving record (for 5 wheel driving) and Opportunity is using the RAT, MI, Mossbauer Spectrometer, and X-Ray spectrometer on a new target found on Meridiani.  Some of these instruments have not been used in years.  As usual, HortonHeardaWho has posted some terrific images on his flickr photo stream, it is definitely worth taking a look.

In other news, LISA, an spacecraft designed to detect gravity waves scheduled for launch in 2018, should also be able to detect and measure the mass of near earth asteroids as they pass by.  They are predicting they will be able to measure 1 or 2 NEAs per year.  Also, Paragon Space Development Corporation plans to grow plants on the moon

DSR 2.7