science posts

Filed under: Cool tools, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Grand Tour for the iPhone is a grand exploration of the solar system

by Mel Martin (RSS feed) on Apr 6th, 2009

I admit I have a real love for astronomy and other science apps. Mike Smithwick, the creator of Distant Suns [App Store link] has come up with another winner for the space minded. Grand Tour [App Store link] is a $4.99US application that will let you tour the solar system in very smooth and realistic animations. Named after the NASA Voyager missions* of the '70s that explored the outer planets, Grand Tour will let you move to Mars, explore its two moons, and then shuffle off to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. The program beautifully renders the starry background accurately, as well as presenting the Milky Way.

The app is loaded with information about the planets and moons, and with a flick of your finger you can rotate the planets and see their relationship to the sun and their satellites in real time. You can also speed up or reverse time, illustrating the orbits of the planets and their smaller companions.

Another nice touch is when you look at the earth, the images of the clouds are in real time (updated every 3 hours) so you are pretty much seeing the real thing in the palm of your hand.

I still marvel at how esoteric iPhone apps are getting. There is truly something for everyone, and the ability to hold a scale model of our solar system and interact with it would have seemed like science fiction a few years ago. Thank goodness Apple decided to bless real apps last year. The experience offered by programs like Grand Tour would really have been lame as a web app.

Grand Tour runs on the iPhone and iPod Touch with OS software 2.1 or greater.

* One of our readers correctly points out that the original NASA Grand Tour missions never happened, because of deep budget cuts. Many of the ideas from the mission were incorporated into the Voyager missions. Thanks for the clarification Mark.

Check out the gallery for some screen shots.

Gallery: Grand Tour

Tags: astronomy, education, iPhone, iPod touch, science, solar system

Filed under: Odds and ends, Apple

Apple launches Science Productivity Lab

by Scott McNulty (RSS feed) on Jul 1st, 2008

Apple has just added a new section to the Science portion of its website (you did know Apple's website has a section devoted to science, right?). The Science Productivity Lab includes a number of video tutorials aimed at helping researchers and scientists use their Macs to share their work.

Most of the tutorials have a sciencey theme, but with subjects like, 'How to Create Live Screen Captures with Snapz Pro X,' I think it is safe to say that people other than scientists will find this information useful.

Note: The use of Bill Nye's picture should not be construed as an endorsement by the Science Guy. He does, though, think that science rules.

Tags: productivity-lab, science, science-rules

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Enterprise, Software, Apple

MIT uses Macs to learn how children gain speech skills

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on May 2nd, 2008

Apple's Science page has a profile up for the folks over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- apparently two MITers, Deb Roy and Rupal Patel, are using Macs, including "five Apple Xserves and a 4.4TB Xserve RAID," to record and track every single moment of their son's early childhood.

Not only are they assured to get his first few steps on tape, but they're also studying early development and how young children gain the skills to interact with other human beings. In order to do this, they're dealing with huge amounts of audio and video data -- about 250TB. And they're also building an analysis application on the platform called TotalRecall to scan through all the audio and video and pick out interesting parts and patterns (creating the kind of image seen above -- apparently that means something to them).

Of course, there is one thing they do that Apple can't -- when the time came to figure out how to transfer 200GB a day from the home environment to work, they eventually settled on a "sneakernet" approach, packing up the digital tapes in a case and carrying them to work. Here's hoping Apple will announce their own proprietary version of iSneakernet at the next WWDC (with a stylish design and a reasonable pricetag, of course).

Tags: apple, children, development, mit, research, science

Filed under: Humor, iPod Family, Video, How-tos, Tips and tricks, Odds and ends

Charge an iPod with an onion

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Nov 14th, 2007

I think we somehow missed this at TUAW, but I have no idea how. Just in time for everyone to head home for the holidays (and forget their iPod chargers), here's a quick fix solution to get that battery back up and you back listening to The Cars' Greatest Hits. Household Hacker put this together, and unfortunately they say on the same page that you should not attempt this at home if you're not an expert, but all of you TUAW-reading iPod owners out there are experts, right? If you do try this, don't hurt yourselves or your iPods.

How does it work? Beats us-- the electrolytes in the Gatorade might be breaking down the individual cells of the onion, and releasing excess energy as electricity of some kind, but obviously that's just a guess based on my many years of watching Bill Nye, Beakman's World, and more recently, Mythbusters (pop science for the win!).

There is one major problem with this plan, however, and that is that as of right now, onions do not properly install updated firmware for any iPods of any generation. Hopefully, Apple will fix this oversight in the next Software Update.

Tags: electricity, electrolytes, ipod, ipod-charger, onion, plug, science, usb

Filed under: Internet Tools, Universal Binary

BOINC client lets Mac users contribute cycles

by Michael Rose (RSS feed) on Mar 5th, 2007

If you encountered a labful or officeful of Macs in the early 2000s, chances are good that a bunch of them were running SETI@Home, the 'contributed computing' project to search through radioastronomy signals for the telltale signs of an extraterrestrial civilization. While the classic SETI@Home application was closed down in December of 2005, the successor client for grid science is alive and well: BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, recently updated to version 5.8.15 and happily Universal Binary. OS X users are full peer clients along with Windows and Linux machines.

You say finding LGM isn't your cup of MIPS? You can contribute to plenty of other projects affecting life here on Earth via the BOINC client and the World Community Grid, a 'meta-project' that aggregates work on several key initiatives (protein folding, cancer, climate and AIDS research) and lets you split up your processing power between your choices. You can sign up and start helping immediately; if you like, join the TUAW team and have your contributions tracked with fellow Macnatics. Note that the BOINC client from boinc.berkeley.edu is several versions newer than the one you get from WCG (5.8.15 vs. 5.4.9), so best to download from the source and then register.

Of course, in the interest of environmental sensibility: please don't leave your machine powered on just to run BOINC; save a watt and let it go to sleep when it's truly idle.

Tags: boinc, grid computing, GridComputing, science, seti, world community grid, WorldCommunityGrid

Filed under: Enterprise, Hardware, Software, Apple Professional, Apple

Apple posts 'Mac at Work' site

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Jun 3rd, 2006

So much for those "Apple isn't interested in the science/business/pro sector" theories. Behold, Mac at Work, a new promotional site from Apple with information, case studies, online seminars and real world event listings for just about every interest and sector besides consumers. Just look at the first section, Science, with a brief case example of UC Irvine's "HIPerWall", a 200-megapixel (yes, 200) display built from fifty 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays driven by twenty-five PowerMac G5s (I wonder if their interns sneak in at night to load up World of Warcraft). Other notable case studies include an OB-GYN whose office is 100% Mac OS X, a business learning to use podcasts and even a section just for the IT Pros (though I'm not sure if that section is entirely new).

It's nice to see Apple pimping their products to people who are in the market for more than just an iPod. Here's hoping they deliver the Intel-based pro goods (Mac Pros, Xserves) in August to really get the ball rolling on this push into the professional world of computing.

[thanks Kevin!]

Tags: Apple, business, case studies, CaseStudies, conference, industries, industry, online, pro, professional, science, seminar, seminars

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