showcase the 19-year-old telescope's new vision. Topping the list of exciting new views are colorful multi-wavelength pictures of far-flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie "pillar of creation," and a "butterfly" nebula. With its new imaging camera, Hubble can view galaxies, star clusters, and other objects across a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. A new spectrograph slices across billions of light-years to map the filamentary structure of the universe and trace the distribution of elements that are fundamental to life. The telescope's new instruments also are more sensitive to light and can observe in ways that are significantly more efficient and require less observing time than previous generations of Hubble instruments. NASA astronauts installed the new instruments during the space shuttle servicing mission in May 2009. Besides adding the instruments, the astronauts also completed a dizzying list of other chores that included performing unprecedented repairs on two other science instruments.

Now that Hubble has reopened for business, it will tackle a whole range of observations. Looking closer to Earth, such observations will include taking a census of the population of Kuiper Belt objects residing at the fringe of our solar system, witnessing the birth of planets around other stars, and probing the composition and structure of the atmospheres of other worlds. Peering much farther away, astronomers have ambitious plans to use Hubble to make the deepest-ever portrait of the universe in near-infrared light. The resulting picture may reveal never-before-seen infant galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 500 million years old. Hubble also is now significantly more well-equipped to probe and further characterize the behavior of dark energy, a mysterious and little-understood repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.

Source : HubbleSite

A meteor (C) streaks past stars in the night sky at the Mont-Tendre near Montricher in the Jura, north of Geneva, late August 12, 2009. The Perseid meteor shower is sparked every August when the Earth passes through a stream of space debris left by Comet Swift-Tuttle. This picture was taken using a long exposure and a fisheye lens. The small line on the right side is an airplane. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse (SWITZERLAND SOCIETY SCI TECH)

In the biggest non-surprise of the decade Intel has announced that it will be installing Windows 7 on its employee's computers. Intel wisely skipped Vista but it could have hardly skipped W7 and been part of the Wintel group. Intel may even jump in before the first service pack is released, surprising for any business with a new Microsoft release.

There is a little bit of irony in this decision. One Intel spokesperson pointed to the virtual XP compatibility mode as a backstop. First of all the CPU needs to support Intel's Virtualisation Technology which many Intel multi-core CPUs don't. Then you have to manually turn it on in the BIOS, not a problem for Intel I suspect but still required. Then there are the older PCs that don't support it simply because Intel VT was introduced in 2005.

For the wider business community, it will come down to lifetime expectations from PCs, the last time they bought some and if the improvement gains touted by MS outweigh the upgrade costs. They can also factor in things like security concerns with older machines, power costs, virus issues and so on. In the end it will be a cost benefit exercise. read more

Writer : James Hein on bangkok pos.com