368465
submission
MaineCoasts writes:
A team of scientists from the Marine Science Institute in Bologna claims to have found the crater left by the aerial blast of a NEO in 1908 in the Tunguska region of Siberia. The blast flattened 770 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) of forest but to date, no remains or crater have been found. This has left open the question of what kind of object made the impact. The team believes that, contrary to previous studies, nearby Lake Cheko is only one century old and "If the body was an asteroid, a surviving fragment may be buried beneath the lake. If it was a comet, its chemical signature should be found in the deepest layers of sediments."
The team's findings are based on a 1999 expedition to Tunguska and appeared in the August issue of the journal Terra Nova.
368415
submission
Bergkamp10 writes:
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tried to shoot Google's new mobile platform down in flames at a press conference in Tokyo. Ballmer called Android a mere 'press release' at present, and suggested the mobile platform market was 'Microsoft's world'.
Ballmer dodged requests to comment on specifics of the Android software platform, preferring instead to highlight the successes of the Windows Mobile platform which he said is on 150 different handsets and is available from over 100 different mobile operators.
"Well of course their efforts are just some words on paper right now, it's hard to do a very clear comparison [with Windows Mobile]," Ballmer said.
"Right now they have a press release, we have many, many millions of customers, great software, many hardware devices and they're welcome in our world," he added.
367469
story
Hugh Pickens writes
"Whose laws apply if astronauts from different countries get into a fight, make a patentable discovery, or damage equipment belonging to another country while on the International Space Station? According to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, ratified by 98 nations, states have legal jurisdiction within spacecraft registered to them. When the space station was assembled from modules supplied by the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency (ESA), partners rejected an initial proposal that US law should prevail throughout the space station. "It was agreed that each state registers its own separate elements, which means that you now have a piece of the US annexed to a piece of Europe annexed to a piece of Japan in outer space, legally speaking," said Dr Frans von der Dunk of the International Institute of Air and Space Law at the University of Leiden. So what happens if a crime is committed in space? "If somebody performs an activity which may be considered criminal, it is in the first instance his own country which is able to exercise jurisdiction," Dr. von der Dunk added."
