A dust storm and the onset of Martian winter have brought the Phoenix Mars Lander’s mission to an end, NASA announced Monday.

"We are actually ceasing operations, declaring an end to mission operations at this point," project manager Barry Goldstein with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told reporters in a teleconference.

Mission controllers last heard from the vehicle on November 2.

Despite ongoing efforts to re-establish contact using NASA satellites in orbit around Mars, the spacecraft is silent.

"We’ll constantly turn on the radio and try to hail Phoenix to see if it is alive, but at this point nobody on the team has any expectations of that happening," Goldstein said. "But we do hope the vehicle will surprise us once again."

The Phoenix team knew when it selected a landing site on Mars’ arctic plain that the spacecraft would not survive a winter there. But researchers picked it anyway because satellite observations indicated vast quantities of frozen water were in that area, most likely in the form of permafrost.

They thought such a location would be a promising place to look for organic chemicals that would signal a habitable environment.

Phoenix landed on May 25 — mid-summer in the Martian year — and conducted five months of research, scooping up soil samples for analysis in onboard scientific instruments. The sun never sets on the arctic region during the summer, so the solar-powered craft had plenty of power for the first few months of its mission.

Read more @ CNN

Visa is introducing a revolutionary new credit card allowing users to use their PIN for online card transactions.

Aimed at savvy internet users, the Visa PIN card features an alpha-numeric display and a 12-button keypad built into the back of a conventional credit, debit or prepaid card. The card, developed using technology from Australia-based Emue technologies, promises a three-year battery life, and much improved protection from online fraudsters.

Customers enter their PIN code onto the keypad and this generates one-time password. The one-time password is then used to authenticate online purchases.

MBNA, a Bank of America company in the UK, Cornèr Bank in Switzerland, Cal in Israel and IW Bank in Italy will each begin limited pilot trials of the new card shortly.

Source: Emue

In overall opinion, I believe most people would agree that technology is indeed a blessing. When we compare our society to times past, there is an obvious difference in efficiency, communication, and readily available information. No matter how much of a blessing technology is, as a society we are becoming far too dependent on it.

Case and point: calculators. I am going to use an anonymous example to demonstrate. I am going to call her Jessica.

Me: "Jessica, do you know the square root of 1?"
Jessica: "Is it like point 653 (.653)?"
Me: "Do you know what the square root of 1 means?"
Jessica: "What times itself equals 1?"
Me: What times 1 equals 1?"
Jessica: "I don’t know!"
Me: "Do you have a calculator?"
Jessica: "Yes."
Me: Find the square root of 1."

And she did. It was no problem. Regardless, she was angry that I made her feel stupid. And she was even more upset when I asked her if I could use this in my story.

In this example technology is teaching people to be lazy. Instead of knowing to find the answer to a function, and a fairly simple function at that, she needed a calculator.

Other examples you ask? How about almost any modern communications that require electricity? Cell phones, computers, and even our national defence system all relies on electricity. Yes there are power generators that would hold us for a while if something major were to happen, but there is no way it could hold permanently.

Try to imagine a worldwide power outage. Not for one day, but for one month, or hell maybe even permanently. Could modern people really survive? No refrigerators, no telephones, and eventually no cars (as we rely on gas and electricity). Where would we be? It’s difficult to imagine how much more difficult it would be to live. Imagine people who need technology for health reasons, they no longer have what is required for them to live.

How about the massive shock wave of panic that would whip through the world. No one would have any idea what happened seeing as there is no real news any more.

We as a society need to do two things; teach ourselves to survive without modern technology in case the worse could happen and prepare ourselves for the day when electricity is no longer available, because it isn’t a matter of "if" a worldwide power outage were to occur, but when it will happen. And, in this modern age with our complete and utter reliance on technology, we as a civilization would be lost.

Source: Neowin