Tim Williams’ goal was to create a device to test soil moisture around peanut pods, but his modest invention is now helping probe the soil of the Red Planet for traces of water.
Williams was on sabbatical in 1987 working with a Washington State University team led by soil scientist Gaylon Campbell when he started to design a device to measure the water content around delicate peanut pods without destroying them.
His hand-held contraption has two parallel needles — one is heated with a known quantity of energy and the other measures what happens to that heat when it’s put into the ground. The tool was uncomplicated. Most of the University of Georgia agronomist’s half-dozen or so inventions are simplifications of more complex measuring instruments.
Williams also designed a device to measure radiation in crops to help scientists understand the productivity of a crop, and he devised a gauge of leaf coverage on the ground to estimate how much light penetrates ground cover.
He’d forgotten the peanut invention until he got a call last year saying it would be part of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander.
Campbell’s firm, Decagon Devices, had updated the contraption for the Mars mission, making it more durable and adding the capacity to measure the thermal and electrical properties, air temperature, wind speed and water vapor.
It is mounted on a robotic arm that will excavate a trench in the planet’s surface.
China’s bullish on Net addresses: Registrations for Internet addresses ending in China’s “.cn” have surpassed those for the global “.net,” showing the continued rapid rise in Internet use in the communist nation.
A study by VeriSign Inc., which runs the “.net” databases and other core directories for helping computers find Web sites and route e-mail, found that “.cn” overtook “.net” sometime in the first quarter of 2008.
VeriSign did not provide registration breakdowns but said “.cn” registrations grew 23 percent from the previous quarter and were triple those in the same period in 2007.
The organization that runs Germany’s “.de” domain pegged “.cn” registrations at 11.8 million and “.net” at 11.6 million as of May.
The findings come as China reported that the number of Internet users there has soared to 221 million, by some measures tying the U.S. online population as largest in the world.
There’s no threat of “.cn” overtaking “.com” any time soon, however. The “.com” suffix, which VeriSign also runs, is the overwhelming leader, with 76.5 million registrations worldwide, while “.de” is second with 12.1 million, according to the German group.
Both “.com” and “.net” are global domain names, available to individuals, groups and companies worldwide on a first-come, first-served basis. They are typically used by U.S. entities, however. Elsewhere, country-specific addresses such as “.de” and “.cn” are typically preferred.
At work, everybody’s surfing on the sly: It’s no secret that people sneak in some personal e-mail and Web surfing when they’re supposed to be working.
A new study attempts to shatter perceptions that these Web surfers are just slackers trying to avoid work. In fact, it turns out everyone does it, from senior managers to entry-level employees — and researchers figure that means management attempts to clamp down on Internet use may be missing the mark.
Many legitimate reasons may be at play, speculates Kelly Garrett, one of the study’s authors and a communications professor at Ohio State University. For instance, people may use the Web at work to help balance job and life responsibilities; with the personal matters taken care of from work, they can focus on the task at hand.
“It’s appropriate to just avoid the knee-jerk response that all personal Internet use is detrimental,” Garrett said.
Installing filters to block access to Web sites and e-mail services could backfire by reducing job satisfaction and thus productivity, researchers wrote.
The study on “cyberslacking,” based on statistical analyses of responses in a phone survey of 1,024 people during the summer of 2006, was published in the June issue of the CyberPsychology and Behavior journal.
Will 3-D catch on? Badminton matches look so real playing on Hyundai’s new 3-D TV that you may reflexively dodge the virtual shuttlecock. A polar bear pawing the glass of his tank may seem to be inside the TV pushing on the screen.
Hyundai is offering — in Japan only — the first product for watching the 3-D programs that cable stations in Japan now broadcast about four times a day.
There are a few catches:
The 46-inch liquid-crystal display requires 3-D glasses; it’s expensive — $3,960, including two pairs of glasses, or about 25 percent more than a comparable regular LCD TV; and the only programs available so far include just a few minutes of video from the northern island of Hokkaido — shots from the zoo, motorcycle races and other short scenes.
Seen on regular TVs, 3-D programs split the screen vertically so the same image appears in both the left and right halves. Conversely, wearing the 3-D glasses while watching regular programming on the Hyundai 3-D TV produces a slight 3-D effect.
The TV uses stereoscopic technology called TriDef from DDD Group Plc in Santa Monica, Calif., which works by sending the same image separately for the left eye and the right eye.
The Associated Press
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