Stories by Michael Cooney

NASA Mars rover Spirit has survivability option?

As NASA celebrates its Mars rover Spirit’s sixth anniversary exploring the red planet it is hunting for a way to keep the machine, which is mired in a sand trap, alive to see a seventh year. On its Web site, the space agency this week noted there may indeed be such an option.

NASA helicopter crash tests flying airbag

NASA is looking to reduce the deadly impact of helicopter crashes on their pilots and passengers with what the agency calls a high-tech honeycomb airbag known as a deployable energy absorber.

Commercial spaceship roll-out revs space tourism

Looking to keep the hype machine revved as customers wait at least another year, space tourism company Virgin Galactic today will debut the suborbital SpaceShipTwo spacecraft it expects will take the first space tourists on a ride they’ll never forget.

IBM smartphone software translates 11 languages

Researchers at IBM say they have created smart software that that translates text between English and 11 other languages including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Arabic.

NASA space shuttle’s cosmic cuisine

As NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis astronauts blasted into space this afternoon, the last thing on their minds was wondering what’s for dinner.

NASA to power Mars rover out of sand trap

NASA's long running Mars rover is stuck in a sand trap – a situation the space agency would like to fix. So NASA will begin what it called the long process of extricating Spirit by sending commands that could free the rover.

Cisco computer game lets you play CEO

If you want to be a CEO but not have any of the real responsibilities of one, you could try to play a new online game being offered by Cisco. The company this week posted myPlanNet, a computer game that lets anyone be a broadband executive making network deployment decisions.

Can the Internet handle H1N1?

While sounding a bit like Chicken Little, US Federal government watchdogs today said that the H1N1 pandemic will cause a significant increase in the use of the Internet by students and teleworkers that would create serious network access congestion.

What kind of cloud computing project would you build with $32M?

The US Department of Energy said today it will spend US$32 million on a project that will deploy a large cloud computing test bed with thousands of Intel Nehalem CPU cores and explore the work of commercial cloud offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

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