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GPS is an utterly pervasive and wonderful technology, but it’s increasingly not accurate enough for modern demands. Now a team of researchers can make it accurate right down to an inch.

Regular GPS registers your location and velocity by measuring the time it takes to receive signals from four or more satellites, that were sent into space by the military. Alone, it can tell you where you are to within 30 feet. More recently a technique called Differential GPS (DGPS) improved on that resolution by adding ground-based reference stations—increasing accuracy to within 3 feet.

Now, a team from the University of California, Riverside, has developed a technique that augments the regular GPS data with on-board inertial measurements from a sensor. Actually, that’s been tried before, but in the past it’s required large computers to combine the two data streams, rendering it ineffective for use in cars or mobile devices. Instead what the University of California team has done is create a set of new algorithms which, it claims, reduce the complexity of the calculation by several order of magnitude.

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When I was a kid I remember being a member of Ms. Frizzle’s classroom. We went on adventures under the ocean, into the rainforest, out to the stars, and even to the center of the Earth and it was amazing.

Of course I am talking about my time on the Magic School Bus.

A relic of the nineties, the Magic School Bus starred Lily Tomlin as Ms. Frizzle, an eccentric teacher who owned a magic school bus that she used to take her students on fantastical journeys. The show and subsequent video games were a big part of my, and thousands of other children of the nineties’, formative years as it presented educational topics in an engaging way that made you curious to learn more.

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The Milky Way and hundreds of galaxies surrounding it are being drawn toward a mysterious force scientists call the “Great Attractor”.

And it took the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s (CSIRO) Parkes telescope to see them.

The force was first revealed back in the 1970s, when it was discovered that the Milky Way was one of hundreds of galaxies deviating from the “universe is expanding” model.

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Karl Sagan ka thene dikur se ka me shume yje ne univers se sa kokrriza rere ne te gjitha plazhet e Tokes. Ne te njejten kohe, ka me shume molekula H2O ne dhjete pika uji se sa ka yje.
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The scale of the universe (HD)

Published on Sep 23, 2015.

Carl Sagan told us that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all of the Earth’s beaches. At the same time, there are more H2O molecules in just 10 drops of water than there are stars.

Ranging from the unimaginably small to the unimaginably big, the scale of the universe is mind-boggling. Watch to try to wrap your head around it.

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NASA laser expert Mike Krainak and his team plan to replace portions of this fiber-optic receiver with an integrated-photonic circuit (its size will be similar to the chip he is holding) and will test the advanced modem on the International Space Station. (credit: W. Hrybyk/NASA)

A NASA team plans to build the first integrated-photonics modem, using an emerging, potentially revolutionary technology that could transform everything from telecommunications, medical imaging, advanced manufacturing to national defense.

The cell phone-sized device incorporates optics-based functions, such as lasers, switches, and fiber-optic wires, onto a microchip similar to an integrated circuit found in all electronics hardware.

The device will be tested aboard the International Space Station beginning in 2020 as part of NASA’s multi-year Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD). The Integrated LCRD LEO (Low-Earth Orbit) User Modem and Amplifier (ILLUMA) will serve as a low-Earth-orbit terminal for NASA’s LCRD, demonstrating another capability for high-speed, laser-based communications.

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