January 4, 2012

Good Morning,

In the final week of 2011, App downloads reached a record high. Read all the details on this statistic and what it indicates for the future of mobile applications in the last article.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Second GRAIL spacecraft enters lunar orbit

PASADENA, Calif. - The second of two U.S. spacecraft sent to study the moon has completed its main engine burn and entered lunar orbit, NASA said. The twin spacecraft, known as the Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B, will explore the moon from crust to core in unprecedented detail, NASA said. "NASA greets the new year with a new mission of exploration," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a news release. "The twin GRAIL spacecraft will vastly expand our knowledge of our moon and the evolution of our own planet. We begin this year reminding people around the world that NASA does big, bold things in order to reach for new heights and reveal the unknown." GRAIL-B reached lunar orbit at 2:43 PST Sunday, while GRAIL-A completed its burn Saturday at 2 p.m. PST. The spacecraft are to transmit radio signals precisely measuring the distance between them. As they fly over areas of greater and lesser gravity caused by visible features such as mountains and craters, as well as masses hidden beneath the lunar surface, the distance between the spacecraft will change slightly. The information will be translated by scientists into a high-resolution map of the moon's gravitational field. That will help scientists understand what goes on beneath the surface and increasing knowledge of how Earth and its rocky neighbors in the inner solar system developed into their current forms, NASA said.


Japan developing anti-virus 'cyber-weapon'

TOKYO - Japan is developing a "cyberweapon" that will be able to track, identify and disable sources of cyberattacks, sources told The Yomiuri Shimbun. The cyberweapon, a computer virus being developed by the Defense Ministry, has been undergoing tests in a closed network since 2008, the newspaper said. Other countries, including the United States and China, are already said to be using cyberweapons. Japan's Defense and Foreign ministries are working on legislation to govern use of cyberweapons, sources said. The Defense Ministry's Technical Research and Development Institute, in charge of weapons development, outsourced to Fujitsu development of the cyberweapon virus as well as a system for monitoring and analyzing cyberattacks as part of a $2.27 million contract. Fujitsu would not comment on the program, citing client confidentiality. The cyberweapon can identify not only the source of the attack but other computers used to transmit a virus and to disable the attacking program while collecting relevant information.


Strange crystals said from outer space

PRINCETON - It turns out unusual crystals found in Russia weren't formed on Earth, researchers say, but rather came from outer space. The so-called quasicrystals, with an unusual structure somewhere between crystals and glass, had only been previously created in laboratories before they were discovered in Russia's Koryak Mountains in 2009, the BBC reported Tuesday. Now a team of researchers says the chemistry of the Russian crystals suggests they arrived in meteorites. Quasicrystals break some of the rules of symmetry that apply to conventional crystalline structures, and it remained unknown what natural processes could create this "forbidden symmetry." Now Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, with Luca Bindi of the University of Florence, Italy, and his colleagues who discovered the crystals in Russia, say tests point to an extra-terrestrial origin for the minerals. Measurements of different forms, or isotopes, of the element oxygen contained in parts of the rock sample shows the pattern of isotopes was unlike any known minerals that originated on Earth. It was instead similar to patterns found in a type of meteorite known as a carbonaceous chondrite, meaning the quasicrystals in the Russian samples could date back to the very earliest days of the solar system, they said. "Our evidence indicates that quasicrystals can form naturally under astrophysical conditions and remain stable over cosmic timescales," the researchers said.


1 billion app downloads in one week

SAN FRANCISCO - Mobile app downloads hit a record high in the last week of 2011 with more than a billion downloads, a U.S. mobile analytics company says. San Francisco company Flurry said 1.2 billion apps were downloaded in the final week of 2011, the first time a single week saw more than a billion. Analysts said the surge was because many users received new devices for Christmas and firms were offering discounted apps over the holiday period. The United States accounted for nearly half of the downloads, followed by China and Britain, the BBC reported Tuesday. Analysts said this pace of download activity would probably continue. "Looking forward to 2012, Flurry expects breaking the one billion download barrier per week will become more commonplace," the company said on its blog. Flurry estimated nearly 7 million Android devices and iPhones were activated Christmas Day, and while Apple does not disclose such figures, Google confirmed more than 3.7 million Android devices were activated over the Christmas weekend.

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