With potential oceans flowing below its icy surface, NASA thinks Jupiter's Europa moon is promising candidate to harbor organic life. As such, the space agency and its JPL laboratory are looking to send a lander there within a decade, and have detailed what it wants it to explore in a new paper. Key goals include measuring the organic content of surface and near-surface chemistry, exploring mineralogy, measuring the thickness and salinity of the oceans and ice, imaging surface formations and looking at microscopic ice and non-ice grains. Researchers also looked at potential landing sites, and were torn between a more interesting, active site like "Thera Macula" and a more stable location with ancient geology. NASA's Juno mission, launched in August 2011, is expected to help settle such issues when it probes Europa from orbit starting in 2016. Though it'd be hard to top Curiosity's setdown, a Europa landing could be even more dramatic, considering the moon is over 10 times farther away than Mars and never gets above minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit.
Via: The Register
Source: NASA (paper)
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/m-hLaAXhcx8/
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Bootstrapping founders, Jeremy Greenfield and Keyvon Olomi, have taken a non-traditional route to marketing their new photo aggregation and sharing application, Divvy. They’ve hopped into a 1973 VW camper bus and are on a cross-country road trip to tour colleges around the U.S., in an attempt to get the word out about the privacy options their app allows. They left April 1st from Tulsa, and are now in the New York tri-state area, with plans to hit up Boston, MIT, Harvard, and more, before heading to Denver in three weeks. Olomi, who’s also the founder of app development marketplace AppTank, says he built Divvy to scratch a few of his own itches: the hassles of moving between Facebook and Instagram to follow his friends’ photos, the?inability?to zoom in on Instagram photos, and the inability to save those photos. But he also thinks that more private photo sharing is something today’s younger users want. A desire for more private socializing has of course fueled the rise of messaging apps and new twists on photo-sharing, as with the “disposable” photo and video sharing on Shapchat, for example. But penetrating the space as a newcomer is always tough. That’s why Divvy starts off by selling itself as a photo aggregator first and foremost. Today, the app pulls in the feeds from Facebook and Instagram, with plans to support Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Dropbox in the future. You can not only view your friends photos, but also like and comment on them using Divvy. This isn’t an entirely novel concept, since many apps and services have offered the combined albums experience, including Dropbox acquisition Snapjoy, Shutterfly acquisition ThisLife, Picturelife, Woven, Everpix, and even those not focused only on photos, like Flipboard, for example. What Divvy does differently is add its own photo-sharing features to the mix. Like a mini-social network of its own, friends can share photos to all their followers on Divvy, share selectively with individuals or groups, or share with nearby Divvy users – even if they don’t have their contact information. The nearby photo thing has been tried before too – with Color, most notably – but also with more under the radar options like Evertale’s Wink.?It’s a use case that doesn’t quite seem capable of supporting a standalone application of its own, so it makes sense for Divvy to sideline this as an option, not as the key feature. Divvy’s
