Technology, iPhone, Mobiles, Nokia, and Gadgets

Canada’s underground obesrvatory keeps a fly like eye on the sun

Here at Dvice we love giant science installations like the Large Hadron Collider, but who knew they had something nearly as awesome in Canada? This amazing looking sphere is actually an observatory of sorts, although one that’s more than a mile beneath the earth’s surface.

Unlike regular telescopes which use optics to get a visual fix on their subject, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is designed to measure neutrinos reaching earth due to fusion reactions within the sun. The depth is necessary to reduce the background noise cause by cosmic rays detectable nearer the surface.

The Neutrinos pass through 1,000 tons of heavy water on loan from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, which then causes flashes of light called Cerenkov radiation. The radiation is picked up by the 9,522 ultra sensitive photomultiplier tubes positioned around the 60 foot sphere.

While the original experiment is now completed, a follow up experiment will replace the heavy water with something called liquid scintillator to provide even deeper understanding into the behavior of neutrinos.

That’s all great, but I just think it looks stunning.

All photos by Roy Kaltschmidt for the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, via Make Blog

Whither Natal? Microsoft’s unique E3 challenge

Microsoft has been more than coy about its upcoming motion control hardware, known at the moment as Project Natal. Some members of the press, more fortunate than we are, have seen it, although their coverage could only include images of the writers, not the hardware or the game itself. In some demos last year Peter Molyneux helped the reporters play with the creepy virtual boy, Milo, who could name the color of the writer’s shirt, among other parlor tricks.

In other words, there just isn’t much information or hands-on impressions to be had with Project Natal, and the main challenge Microsoft faces at this year’s E3 is not only to make the hardware real for the press and the readers at home, but to convince readers that this is something they need to buy this holiday season. That may be a bigger challenge than everyone assumes.

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Heatmap of the Most Popular Tourist Destinations

Panoramio is a Google-owned service where anyone can upload photos of places where they have been to.

Unlike Flickr and other photo sharing websites, photos uploaded to Panoramio need to be approved by the community and only pictures that illustrate places are added to the site. For instance, if you capture a picture of the Taj Mahal, it makes a good candidate for Panoramio but if your friends are also posing in that same picture, the community is less likely to approve it.

Most Popular Tourist Destinations on Google Maps

Panoramio is therefore a decent, if not perfect, way to measure the relatively popularity of different regions /cities of the world as far as tourism is concerned. The higher the picture count from a region, the more popular that place should be among tourists.

Using a similar logic, Ahti Heinla has created an interesting heat map on Google Maps that shows how popular different parts of the world are among tourists. The underlying data for the heat map is sourced entirely from Panoramio.

The color yellow on the world map indicates high density of tourists (most of Europe), red indicates medium activity (see Japan) while blue means that destination is less popular with tourists. Places that had no Panoramio photos, and therefore nil tourist activity, are in grey color. [via]

Also see: 3D Tourist Maps of Important Cities

Heatmap of the Most Popular Tourist Destinations

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Can Asus take on iPad with Eee Pad, Eee Tablet?

It wasn’t exactly a surprise that Asus announced its latest touchscreen tablet offerings this morning at at Computex 2010 in Taipei, Taiwan. What was surprising to some is that the company is splitting its slate-style PCs into two distinct brands.

Apple iPad sales remain strong, hits 2 million units sold

Less than a month after Apple’s iPad hit the 1 million units sold milestone, the company is now reporting that it has crossed the 2 million mark in less than 60 days since its April 3 launch.

The sales numbers aren’t exactly surprising. Just a few weeks ago, we reported that the iPad was still tough to find in certain Apple and Best Buy stores, and an analyst report showed that the device was outselling Apple’s entire selection of Mac computers (combined). Apple also recently launched the device on May 28th to a very eager international audience ( it was delayed for a month), and sales from the weekend likely helped drive the iPad to 2 million units sold.

While sales of the device have certainly continued strong since last month, we still don’t know if developer interest has followed suit. Apple ended up copying most of its latest press release from the one it released last month, which stated that over 5,000 iPad applications were available at the time. Perhaps there wasn’t a significant enough change since last month to report (which in itself would be an interesting development), or maybe the PR folks just forgot to update that portion of the release.

We’ve asked Apple for further comment on the application numbers, and will report more when we hear back.

Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Early-bird pricing is available until May 31. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.

Tags: ipad, tablets

Companies: Apple