Big Asteroid to Pierce Earth-Moon Orbit Tuesday
By Mark Brown, Wired UK
An asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier is to soar past the Earth this week and, while NASA is certain that the space rock will not hit us, it will be our closest encounter with such a large chunk of rock in three decades.
The 400-yard-wide asteroid is called 2005 YU55 and at the point of closest approach it will graze our planet at 201,700 miles — about ten percent closer to Earth than the Moon’s typical orbit.It is the “closest approach by an asteroid, that large, that we’ve known about in advance,” said principal investigate Lance Benner, from...
Nook Fires Back: Tablet E-Reader Family Aims at Amazon and More
NEW YORK — A year after the release of the Nook Color, Barnes & Noble returns to a market suddenly crowded with “reader’s tablets,” including the red-hot Kindle Fire from its top competitor. B&N is firing right back at Amazon with a high-powered new multimedia Nook Tablet and competitive price cuts to the current Nook Color and Nook Simple Touch e-reader.
“Nook Tablet is our lightest fastest, media tablet,” said Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch. Lynch presented the $249, 7-inch Nook Tablet at a press event Monday morning. It will be available on Nov. 16, just in the nick of time for...
How Russian Tycoon Yuri Milner Bought His Way Into Silicon Valley
This is my first trip to Moscow, and Yuri Milner, the world’s most successful investor in social media, is taking me to his parents’ apartment, which he bills as a typical middle-class Moscow dwelling. It’s drab Soviet brick outside. The none-too-reliable-looking elevator is encircled by a crumbling staircase. But inside, the apartment is genteel and highly recognizable to me. It’s like many you would find on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a cramped and comfortable set o...