Moon between Olympic rings makes for breathtaking London photographs (GALLERY)

(Reuters)

A full moon made for a beautiful sixth Olympic ring on Friday night, when a Reuters photographer snapped a breathtaking picture of the moon positioned between a large set of Olympic rings hanging from the top of London's Tower Bridge.
The shots were an instant hit on Twitter, with fans retweeting them thousands of times within an hour of posting.

[ Photos: 20 inspiring moments in Olympic history ]

Photographer Luke MacGregor also snapped photos with the moon positioned between one of the rings and hovering above and below the famed London span.
(Reuters)
(Reuters)
(Reuters)
(Reuters)
The pictures provided an opportunity to crack a few jokes about the IOC and its stringent policies that prohibit illicit use of the rings. In this case, the moon should be expecting a cease and desist letter from the IOC for infringing upon its trademark. Neil Armstrong will also be named in the suit.
Click here to see more photos of the full moon over London.

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Olympic viewing: NBC sets opening ceremony record

NEW YORK (AP) — A look at media coverage of the London Olympics:

 

An opening ceremony from the mother country with a Beatle, a queen and Mr. Bean proved irresistible for viewers in the United States, with a record-setting 40.7 million people watching NBC's first night of summer Olympics coverage.

The Nielsen company said Saturday that London's opener was the most-watched opening ceremony of any summer or winter Olympics. It topped the previous mark of 39.8 million people who watched the 1996 Atlanta Olympics begin, and the 34.9 million who watched the colorful first night from Beijing four years ago.

The London ceremony featured an unusual made-for-TV stunt featuring actor Daniel Craig portraying James Bond escorting the real-life Queen Elizabeth II to the ceremony and ended with Paul McCartney's anthemic "Hey Jude." But according to Twitter, the biggest spike in tweets came when actor Rowan Atkinson ("Mr. Bean") appeared in a "Chariots of Fire" homage.

An estimated 5 million comments about the opening ceremony were made on social media, according to the research company Bluefin Labs. It was more interesting to women, apparently, as 58 percent of the comments were from women and 42 percent from men, Bluefin said.

It was the most-watched television event in the U.S. since the winter, when 39.9 million people watched the Grammy Awards and 39.3 million saw the Oscars.

The results were a good sign for NBC and broadcast TV in general, which is increasingly finding that big events draw people to the screen more than regular entertainment programming — most likely encouraged by multi-screen experiences, or people conversing through social media while watching television.

NBC Universal also earned a measure of redemption from critics. The company, which began streaming all of the Olympics competition online live Saturday, was blistered on Twitter on Friday by people who wondered why the opening ceremony wasn't shown live (it was aired on NBC on tape delay, because London's time zone is five hours ahead of the eastern United States). But four years ago in Beijing, NBC learned such complaints only increased buzz and made people more interested in watching it on TV in prime time.
"The audience number for the London opening ceremony is a great early sign that our strategy of driving people to watch NBC in prime time is working," said Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBC Sports Group.

But in an increasingly wired world, that strategy is becoming a source of controversy for NBC. Twitter was alight again Saturday with complaints against the network for not televising live the men's 400-meter swimming race that American Ryan Lochte won, with Michael Phelps finishing fourth.

Prominent media critic Jeff Jarvis called it "ludicrous" that NBC was airing promotions for the race when it was easy for anyone to quickly find the results on the computer. Others were angry to learn the results on NBC's "Nightly News" before the prime-time telecast. A further aggravation was the telecast itself, including lengthy features with John McEnroe and Lochte, and Ryan Seacrest with Phelps, simply emphasizing that NBC was pumping up a race that had already been run.

The network aired the race live Saturday afternoon on its Web site. NBC has been adamant about saving the highest-profile television events for prime time, when it has its largest audience. Because of the time difference, there are no live events for NBC to show during prime time.

Regionally, the top ratings Friday night were recorded in San Diego, Washington, D.C. and West Palm Beach, Fla., Nielsen said.

Despite selling more than $1 billion worth of advertising for the London Olympics, NBC Universal has said it expects to lose money on the games. Higher ratings, however, could help NBC earn more money by selling additional advertising at a higher cost as the games go on.

RERUN: NBC aired a rerun of Olympics competition at 11 a.m. EDT on Saturday. But it was justified: the network showed Phelps' initial qualifying race, which had been aired live shortly after 5 a.m.

CLOSE GAME: The tighter-than-expected women's basketball game between the U.S. and Croatia challenged NBC announcers Bob Fitzgerald and Lisa Leslie. They were in an awkward position, following the "home team" for U.S. viewers in what was turning into a Cinderella situation for the other side. Before pulling away at the end, the U.S. led 53-49 after three quarters against a team that it had beaten by 54 points a week ago, a team that barely made the Olympics. The announcers could have done a better job exploring the deficiencies of the U.S. play and whether it put an anticipated gold medal run in jeopardy.

QUOTE: "They'll be partying on the streets of Kazakhstan tonight." — cycling analyst Paul Sherwen after Alexandr Vinokurov's unexpected win in the men's road race.

UPCOMING: The U.S. women's gymnastics team springs into action on NBC on Sunday night. In daytime viewing, the U.S. men's basketball team opens against France.

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Amazing Solar Storm Pictures: Solar storms amp up Northern Lights

Massive solar flares contributed to spectacular light shows in the skies above central Minnesota over the weekend. July 16, 2012.

 

 

 

 

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Samsung Notebook Series 9: Taking Thin and Light to the Extreme

Selecting a mobile PC is a process of balancing trade-offs. Screen size, computational horsepower, battery life, weight, size, and price are all factors that vary from one type of laptop to another. In the past, you had to choose between capabilities like battery life, size, and performance. These tradeoffs are becoming less pronounced with the new crop of thin and light laptops. With these PCs, you can enjoy ultra-mobility, great battery life, and have the power to run popular consumer or enterprise apps. In this post I’ll talk about the latest thin and light laptop from Samsung: the Series 9 (13.3” in this case, 15” models are also available).

If you want to push the limits of mobile computing technology, you have to take on significant engineering and manufacturing challenges. This is exactly what Seong-Woo Nam, Executive Vice President of the IT Solutions Business at Samsung did in late 2011. Seong-Woo Nam challenged Samsung engineers to shave 3.44mm off the already thin 16.33mm Samsung Series 9 laptop (first generation) that was in production at the time. Samsung succeeded in bringing this 12.9mm updated Series 9 machine to market in early 2012, an impressive accomplishment.
So how do you reduce the thickness of an already thin laptop by more than 20%? The answer is by examining every component that makes up the laptop, and by shrinking the thickness of most major components. Translation: this is a very highly engineered machine with tons of “custom” components that were designed specifically for this laptop. While the size of the machine was reduced, the list of capabilities is impressive: SSD for fast boot, USB 2.0 and 3.0 for great peripheral connectivity, ultra bright 400 nit screen, great battery life, and more.

I had a chance to get my hands on a couple variations of this updated Samsung Series 9, including the 900X3C (Intel Ivy Bridge version), and the 900X3B (Intel Sandy Bridge version). These models (13.3” screen) are pretty much identical with the exception of the processor utilized. When I first picked up this laptop, I was impressed with the “thinness” and the solid feel of quality. I asked myself: how did Samsung do that?

Engineering the World’s Thinnest Laptop

The engineers at Samsung started work on the updated Series 9 design by re-thinking the enclosure of the PC. This updated Series 9 would be built on an aluminum chassis machined from a solid billet with diamond tipped cutters. The resulting stiffness, lightness and finish (sandblasted and painted in most visible areas) are quite impressive. In addition to re-thinking the outside of the laptop, all of the major internal components were updated or optimized as well. The following image shows an exploded parts view of the new Samsung Notebook Series 9:


Image courtesy of Samsung Electronics
Components:

• 2: Display
• 3: Keyboard
• 4: Touchpad
• 5-6: Keyboard exterior
• 7-9: Main board (PCB circuits)
• 10: SSD
• 11: Fan
• 12: Heat pipe
• 13: Battery (lithium polymer)
• 14: Speaker
• 15: Bottom unit

It’s not enough to just make the parts thinner and lighter, they also need to perform well. Samsung has a series of stringent tests that are conducted on laptops before they are certified for mass production. This Series 9 update imposed some big certification challenges due to the fact that so many components were being redesigned, and dimensions being squeezed as small as possible at the same time.
After countless hours of engineering iterations and testing Samsung was able to meet their stringent criteria, and the updated Samsung Series 9 was unveiled at CES 2012 (the entire project was completed in a matter of a few months).

Some of the design highlights for the updated Series 9 include custom ports that are exposed in an elegant fashion on both sides of the laptop. On the right side (above image) we see the microphone, display port connector, microphone/headphone jack, and USB 2.0 port.

On the left side of the laptop (above image) we see the power jack, USB 3.0 port, micro HDMI port, and network port (network dongle is supplied with PC). You can tell from looking at these ports that quite a bit of thought and engineering craftsmanship went into the design.
One of the features that makes the Samsung Series 9 attractive to enterprise customers is the available TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip. With this hardware capability, you can use many Windows productivity features like virtual smart cards, bit locker, and direct access.
How thin and how light can laptops get? That’s a good question. There’s always the need to balance the trade-offs between structural rigidity and overall thickness (imposing a theoretical limit on how thin a laptop can get). Samsung did a great job managing these trade-offs that off with the latest Series 9 machine!
Samsung Series 9 13.3” Specifications: (NP900X3C-A03US)

• CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-3317U Processor, 1.7 GHz
• Display: 13.3” 1600x900, 400 nits, LED HD+
• Memory: 4GB DDR3
• Storage: 128GB SSD
• Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000
• Dimensions: 12.3" x 8.6" x 0.50", 2.55 lb

Full specifications are available on the Samsung website.

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New tech could target and treat irregular heartbeats

The tech behind a new study may help cardiologists double their success in treating heart arrhythmias by pinpointing the tiny electrical disturbances that cause them.

The eye of a hurricane (left) bears some resemblance to the localized source of an arrhythmia (right) in a patient with atrial fibrillation. In a new study, ablation targeting these rotors successfully stopped the arrhythmia.

(Credit: UCSD/UCLA)

Researchers are reporting that they have found, for the first time, that tiny electrical spinning tops ("rotors") within the heart cause atrial fibrillation (AF), a type of arrhythmia in which the heartbeat is faster and irregular.

What's more, they found that by targeting the so-called eye of the storm, they could actually slow or even terminate the AF, the multidisciplinary team from UC San Diego, UCLA, and Indiana University reports in the July issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Today, catheter ablation is a common therapy used to treat AF, but because the sources of these arrhythmias have been so elusive, its success has been limited.

Now that the researchers have been able to map out these so-called hurricanes within the heart using their new technique, which they call Focal Impulse and Rotor Modulation (FIRM), they are reporting a near doubling in treatment success.

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But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the procedure, the researchers report, is that their new approach shut down or significantly slowed AF in an average of just 2.5 minutes. This compares with the more conventional several hours of treatment over larger regions of the heart with about half the success rate.

"We are very excited by this trial, which for the first time shows that atrial fibrillation is maintained by small electrical hotspots, where brief FIRM-guided ablation can shut down the arrhythmia and bring the heart back to a normal rhythm after only minutes of ablation," said lead author Sanjiv Narayanof of the UC San Diego Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center in a news release.

With only 92 subjects, the study is small and the results preliminary, but if these results hold across a larger group of patients with AF, better treatment is surely on the horizon.

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THE NEW MICROSOFT OFFICE 2013

Even at this early stage, I really like The New Microsoft Office, but it's important to point out that this suite of productivity apps is not free. So I wouldn't blame you for asking why a business would pay for it when it could get a comparable set of office tools from Google Docs for a lot less or even free. But after using The New Microsoft Office (that's the official name of the entire suite) for a few days, I can tell you that there are plenty of reasons for trading up.

For starters it's available wherever you are, on whatever device you're using at the time, and with full touch-screen support, the entire suite has been reinvented to work with Windows 8-driven tablets, regular keyboard-and-mouse desktop setups, and even smartphones. Along with a completely reinvented interface, all of these things come together to make it the best Office yet.

C is for convenience
Like most recent versions of Office, the suite comes in many versions with tiered packages from the cloud-supported Office 365 to the desktop standalone Office 2013. Whether you choose to pay for Office 2013 or sign up for a subscription to Office 365, the bigger challenge for Microsoft will be how it markets the suite to both businesses and individual consumers to show why they need to make the switch at all.
Continue reading for more interesting pictures, videos and information about this story...

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Aeroscraft: The future of luxury travel?

1 of 11 from Inside Aeroscraft, the future of luxury airships (pictures)

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A hybrid airship coming soon may be the future of luxury travel. It's an airborne hotel with large staterooms, dining areas, theaters, and casinos.

The Aeroscraft is being planned by Worldwide Aeros Corporation and is the result of 25 years of work. It's descended from the canceled DARPA WALRUS Hybrid Ultra Large Aircraft (HULA) airship, a transport vehicle that aimed to carry as much as 500 tons of cargo but was cancelled in 2010.

Aeros says the Aeroscraft family's smallest member -- the rigid-structure, 180 passenger, 20-ton capacity ML866 -- will be 310 feet in length, have a top speed of 120 knots, and a flight ceiling of around 12,000 feet. The company also plans two larger versions, the 60-ton capacity ML868 and the 500-ton capacity ML86X.

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