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Photo: Orbital Sciences Corporation

Usually, residents of Florida and California have a leg up over the rest of the country when it comes to one of America’s most favorite past times: watching rockets soar into the sky. But in the early evening today, the Northeast coast will be treated to a special show. At around 5 p.m., from Maine to South Carolina, look up in the sky and you just may see the brand new Antares rocket climbing into the sky on its maiden voyage as it blasts off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility.

Wallops has seen launches before, in 2006 and 2007, but the Antares launch, says Universe Today, will be “the biggest, loudest and brightest rocket ever to launch” from the site. CBS News:

“We’ll lift off with approximately 750,000 pounds of thrust, weighing about 600,000 pounds,” said Frank Culbertson, a former shuttle commander who oversees Orbital’s advanced programs group. “So it’ll not race off the pad, but it will accelerate very quickly once it gets going.

 

The launch will appear lower on the horizon the further you are from Virginia. Photo: Orbital Sciences Corporation

For those not in the northeast, or if clouds mar your view, NASA will be streaming the show live starting at 4 pm.

The Antares rocket is a huge machine, a two-stage booster rocket that stands 131 feet tall, says Space.com. The rocket is designed to carry cargo to the International Space Station, and will be the first direct competitor of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket in the burgeoning private space race. This evening’s launch will be the rocket’s first.

According to CBS News, the weather may not play nicely with Orbital Science Corp’s test. If the launch is scrubbed, they’ll have openings to try again through the end of the week.

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Imagine you burned your arm with boiling water fresh from the stove, or your child was born with a clubfoot, or you got a deep cut at work. Now imagine you don’t have health insurance. But not just that, you don’t have access to the health care or surgery you need. You’re turned away entirely.

A new online crowd-sourcing venture known at Watsi, says the New York Times, is looking to give people with money a way to help those who are trapped in such medical circumstances by providing a portal for micro-loan donations. The organization is focusing on “low-cost, high-impact” treatments, says the Times.

The procedures range from relatively simple ones like fixing a broken limb to more complicated surgery — say, to remove an eye tumor. But the treatments generally have a high likelihood of success and don’t involve multiple operations or long-term care.

Watsi joins a slew of other recent websites designed to let people fund the individual projects or causes that strike a chord: Kickstarter and Indiegogo are home to products and creative projects, and Kiva works with micro-loans to entrepreneurs.

Unlike many existing charities where large portions of donations can go to administrative fees and overhead, Watsi says that the entire donation goes toward the surgery. They cover office expenses with money raised from donors.

As much as Watsi’s story is a tale of the new global economy, with people with money individually picking and choosing to fund what they feel is important, it’s also a testament to the power of the New York Times. Two days after the Times‘ profile of the non-profit, every single case Watsi had lined up is now fully-funded – for now.

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The internet’s complexity has given rise to dedicated cartographers who try to map the cyber world in order to better understand its users, geography, behavior, and potential weak points. Mapping the internet, however, is no small task, the New Scientist writes:

Previous attempts to map the internet have been from within, using “sniffer” software to report the IP addresses of devices visited along a particular route, which, in theory, can then be translated into geographical locations. But this approach doesn’t work, says Paul Barford at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “After 15 years nobody can show you a map of the internet,” he says.

Sniffer software gets sidetracked by internet service providers and router shortcuts, the New Scientist writes, meaning this technique gives only a partial view of the internet’s true scope. Instead, Barford and his colleague Matthew Roughan are going old school, searching through ISP databases to find network information to stitch together manually. Eventually, they hope to connect the dots around the world.

Roughan’s Internet Topology Zoo is a growing collection of maps of individual networks. Barford’s Internet Atlas expands on this, adding crucial buildings and links between networks to flesh out the map. So far the Internet Atlas, perhaps the most comprehensive map of the physical internet, maps 10,000 such structures and 13,000 connections.

If they succeed, the two researchers think their Atlas will play an integral part in finding vulnerabilities—including the location of hubs of activity, servers and cables—and preventing them from ever becoming a problem. Banks, governments, businesses and nearly every other facet that keeps society up and running depends upon the internet. Understanding its potential weak points is an important step in protecting against cyber terrorism and natural disasters that could shut modern society down.

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A new company called Genius.box wants to help keep science-obsessed kids up to their ears in fun experiments. Aimed at kids from 8 to 12, Genius.box—still looking to get off the ground after coming second place in a recent entrepreneur contest—wants to deliver a fun science experiment to your house each month for around $20 a pop,  says Engadget.

[T]he projects inside each package teach a basic lesson in science, technology, engineering or math through a hands-on experience. All of the materials needed for each experiment are included, along with a lesson plan, instructions and “factoid” cards with tidbits of interesting trivia, such as the number of elements on the periodic scale.

So, for their pitch to the start-up challenge, the folks behind Genius.box demonstrated a crystal-growing kit and a circuit-building kit. The monthly club could be a good deal for parents whose kitchen-science skills can’t keep up with their budding little Einsteins.

Like many other early-stage start ups, the program is not yet in full swing. If you’re interested and want to see it get off the ground, they have a sign-up page to help you keep up with the project as it unfolds.

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Hurricane Katrina brought flood waters, destruction and tragedy to New Orleans. But it has also facilitated an entrepreneurial renaissance. Within three years after Katrina, the rate of new start-up launches in the city doubled, the Atlantic reports, and NOLA currently ranks only behind Austin and suburban Washington, D.C., in the speed of its population growth.

Several factors account for these trends, the Atlantic explains:

• Katrina did bring devastation, but the storm also offered an opportunity to reinvent the city. The school system’s experiment with charter schools is one of the clearest and best-known examples: Since the storm, the share of students enrolled in charter schools has jumped from 30 to 68 percent, making New Orleans the only major city in the country in which the majority of public school students are enrolled in charter schools.
• New Orleans is also an incredibly cheap place to live compared to other major cities. This is a plus for startups struggling to get off the ground, since the cost of labor and office space are so low.
• A host of startups have managed to make it big in New Orleans. iSeatz, a company that allows users to book multiple legs of travel on one platform, jumped from gross bookings of $8 million in 2005 to $2 billion in 2013. Another tech company, Kickboard, which helps tracks students’ education progress, raised a $2 million round of funding in February.

Of course, not everything is easy in the Big Easy. Demand for programmers far outstrips supply regardless of whether a startup launches in New York, Boston or Seattle. But New Orleans particularly suffers from a shortage of programming talent. The Atlantic:

There is no getting around this central fact: The city isn’t merely miles behind San Jose and Austin in attracting the nation’s top talent. It’s behind the national average. The share of New Orleans young adults with a bachelor’s degree has increased from 23 to 26 percent since 2000. That’s not just below the average city, but also it’s growing slower than the average city.

But, as the Atlantic points out, entrepreneurs tend to flock. If New Orleans can gain some momentum, the industry might just decide to make the city a new hub.

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