Free Republic

NEW DELHI, Dec 1 (Reuters) - India's first mission to Mars left Earth's orbit early on Sunday, clearing a critical hurdle in its journey to the red planet and overtaking the efforts in space of rival Asian giant China. China's Mars probe rode piggyback on a Russian spacecraft that failed to leave Earth's orbit in November 2011. The spacecraft crumbled in the atmosphere and its fragments fell into the Pacific Ocean. India's mission showcases the country's cheap technology, encouraging hopes it could capture more of the $304-billion global space market, which includes launching satellites for other countries. India's low-cost Mars...

Cisco announced two important things in today’s earnings report: The first is that the company is aggressively moving into the Internet of Things—the effort to connect just about every object on earth to the internet—by rolling out new technologies. The second is that Cisco has seen a huge drop-off in demand for its hardware in emerging markets, which the company blames on fears about the NSA using American hardware to spy on the rest of the world. Cisco chief executive John Chambers said on the company’s earnings call that he believes other American technology companies will be similarly affected. Cisco...

The UK and US must do more to protect internet users' privacy, the inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has warned as a survey of online freedoms is released. Berners-Lee warned that "a growing tide of surveillance and censorship" posed a threat to the future of democracy, even as more and more people were using the internet to expose wrongdoing. His remarks came before the second annual release of a global league table that classifies countries according to a set of freedoms. Since last year, the US has dropped from second place to fourth, while the UK...

Steroid injections given to pregnant women before premature birth may increase the child's risk of later behavioural difficulties, a study has found. Mothers who are expected to give birth prematurely are often given an infusion of glucocorticoids, which mimic the natural hormone cortisol. This treatment is vital for helping the baby’s lungs mature, but the new research suggests it may also increase the risk of mental health problems including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD is the most common behavioural disorder in young people in the UK. The study, by researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Oulu, Finland, is...

The phrase “chemistry set” is embedded in the collective unconscious, but try to actually call one to mind. What does a chemistry set look like? What does it include? What can you do with it? If you’re anything close to being a millennial, you probably have only vague answers to these questions. If you’re a little older, however, you probably remember one of the classic sets that is responsible for our powerful (if nonspecific) connection to the concept of a chemistry set. Chief among these, in many people’s eyes, is the Gilbert Chemistry Set, which inspired untold numbers of young...

The U.S. Air Force has released a new request for a high-powered laser weapon that could be mounted on a next-generation air dominance fighter in the post-2030 era. “The emphasis of this effort is to identify potential laser systems that could be integrated into a platform that will provide air dominance in the 2030+ highly contested Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) environments,” the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) said in a Request for Information document posted on FEDBIZOPPS last week. The AFRL is particularly interested in lasers that would be at technology readiness level four (TRL4) by October 2014. That means the...

If your car was powered by thorium, you would never need to refuel it. The vehicle would burn out long before the chemical did. The thorium would last so long, in fact, it would probably outlive you. That's why a company called Laser Power Systems has created a concept for a thorium-powered car engine. The element is radioactive, and the team uses bits of it to build a laserbeam that heats water, produces steam, and powers an energy-producing turbine. Thorium is one of the most dense materials on the planet. A small sample of it packs 20 million times more...

[7:18:26 pm]: Thanks for contacting Health Insurance Marketplace Live Chat. Please wait while we connect you to someone who can help. [7:18:33 pm]: Please be patient while we're helping other people. [7:18:42 pm]: Welcome! You're now connected to Health Insurance Marketplace Live Chat. Thanks for contacting us. My name is Roberto. To protect your privacy, please don't provide any personal information, like Social Security Number, or any other sensitive medical or personal information. [7:18:50 pm]: CALLER nothing happens when i try to create account[7:19:21 pm]: Roberto Thank you. One moment please while I look that up. [7:20:29 pm]: CALLER still...

Nearly a month and a half into the dismal Obamacare rollout, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services communications director Julie Bataille told reporters on Tuesday that CMS has begun emailing at least 275,000 people who had gotten “stuck” attempting to create accounts on the glitch-ridden HealthCare.gov, asking them to come back to the site and “try again.” Bataille refused to say whether all 275,000 people would be able to use the exchange at the same time without crashing the system. Instead, she dodged specifics about the progress programmers have been making on the website’s repair efforts and how CMS would...

Even before it emerged that the National Security Agency had wiretapped her mobile phone, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was calling for the Internet to have something like Airbus—a joint European initiative able to compete with the dominance of American and Chinese high-tech companies, just as Airbus does with the US aerospace giant Boeing. Currently, the global market for software and online services is firmly in American hands. What’s more, American corporations, such as Google, are subject to the PATRIOT Act, which requires them to allow American intelligence agencies access to their data centers. On the other hand, the equipment that...

A Saskatchewan man who has developed an affordable 3D printer has attracted worldwide attention and more than $700,000 in crowdsourced funding. Rylan Grayston, 28, from Yorkton, said curiosity fuelled his quest to create a 3D copier that sells for just $100. Other high-tech 3D printers sell for several thousand dollars or more. "I didn't have enough money for a 3D printer that I wanted, so I just started thinking about how can I do this myself?" Grayston told CBC News in an interview at a shop in Saskatoon where he is working with his brother on the project...

Using inexpensive materials configured and tuned to capture microwave signals, researchers at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering have designed a power-harvesting device with efficiency similar to that of modern solar panels. The device wirelessly converts the microwave signal to direct current voltage capable of recharging a cell phone battery or other small electronic device, according to a report appearing in the journal Applied Physics Letters in December 2013. (It is now available online.) It operates on a similar principle to solar panels, which convert light energy into electrical current. But this versatile energy harvester could be tuned to harvest...

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a freakish asteroid with six comet-like tails of dust streaming from its body like spokes on a wheel, scientists said on Thursday.

Although CO2 is considered a "greenhouse gas" that contributes to climate change, if the Energy Department (DOE) finds partners to capitalize on the research of one of its laboratories, someday cars might run on sunshine. Technically, cars would run on the product of sunlight, CO2, and water using a "two-step solar thermochemical cycle" developed by the Albuquerque, New Mexico government lab. The DOE posted the special notice seeking interested companies on the Federal Business Opportunities website on Tuesday: Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) is conducting ongoing research and development into solar fuels, the conversion of sunlight, CO2, and H2O into high...

The next time you step onto an airplane, consider the following: In any given year, the pilot of your aircraft probably absorbs as much radiation as a worker in a nuclear power plant. And you are about to follow him wherever he goes. The FAA classifies pilots as "occupational radiation workers." Flying high above Earth with little atmosphere to protect them, they can absorb significant doses of cosmic rays and solar radiation. During a typical polar flight from Chicago to Beijing, for instance, a pilot is exposed to the equivalent of two chest x-rays. Multiplied over the course of...

One in six IT projects face out of control costs, and bring much disruption, making them 'black swans' WASHINGTON - Despite partisan sniping over the Affordable Care Act, members of a U.S. House committee probing the problems at Healthcare.gov Thursday asked some tough, IT-specific questions that revealed some key facts. Two members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, U.S. Reps. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), were especially focused on the testing process for the ACA website that's had problems since its launch on Oct. 1. It turns out that project's 55 contractors had only two weeks to...

A flaw in the security for the healthcare.gov website discloses the pricing pre-subsidized and divulges personal info of any and all navigators. Please note that these databases contain an export button so you can save it to your own PC. This is a serious flaw. Personal Info Breach Link: https://data.healthcare.gov/dataset/Navigators/qyne-xyvd Pricing Info: https://data.healthcare.gov/dataset/QHP-Individual-Medical-Landscape/ba45-xusy

Amid all the tussling over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling, a couple of bombshells went off in the blogosphere that may prove of more enduring importance. They suggest that there is a nontrivial possibility that Obamacare may implode. The first bombshell went off on Tuesday, from Ezra Klein of the Washington Post’s Wonkblog. Klein was one of those young writers who formed JournoList a few years ago so that like-minded Obama fans could coordinate their lines of argument. It was like one of those college-sophomore clubs, not really necessary in an age of ready contact through e-mail, but...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending the NSA's bulk call records database as a "vital" counterterrorism tool. While this wouldn't make the program legal even if true, it also seems clear that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has relied, rather uncritically, on the government's assertions of "necessity" to draw the strained conclusion that every American's phone records are "relevant" to FBI counterterrorism investigations. It's thus worth pointing out how extraordinarily weak the case for the program's utility really is. Feinstein begins by recycling the claim that if only the NSA program...

Renewable energy is blamed for jeopardizing Europe’s energy security this winter, a new study has found. EurActiv France reports. The French multinational company Cap Gemini warned in their European Observatory of Energy Markets that energy security in Europe was under threat and that the region could soon be exposed to massive power outages during the winter, due to a lack of production capacity. They blame wind turbines. …