Amazing Wall-Painted Animation by Artist BLU: BIG BANG BIG BOOM
BIG BANG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Interesting New Scientist Article – Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge
Societies come and go over time and with them their history and people. Ancient societies recorded their history in rock preserving the language and leaving a glimpse into their story for a millennia. With the advent of paper and printing press books became the standard lasting for centuries. With the advent of the digital age we have become dependent on magnetic and flash based media to contain ours hopefully lasting a decade.
Perhaps the most crucial loss will occur after half a century or so, as any surviving engineers, scientists and doctors start to succumb to old age. Their skills and know-how would make a huge difference when it comes to finding important information and getting key machinery working again. The NASA tape drives, for instance, were restored with the help of a retired engineer who had worked on similar systems. Without expert help like this, retrieving data from the tapes would have taken a lot longer, Cowing says.
A century or so after a major catastrophe, little of the digital age will remain beyond what's written on paper. "Even the worst kind of paper can last more than 100 years," says Season Tse, who works on paper conservation at the Canadian Conservation Institute. The oldest surviving "book" printed on paper dates from AD 868, he says. It was found in a cave in north-west China in 1907.
It will be interesting to see what types of initiatives will be taken to preserve our societies history, into the uncertain future...
[Via NewScientist]
Protecting the Great Lakes through mass poisoning…
I had know idea that these fish even existed let alone posed a threat to the Great Lakes. Seeing those fish fly out of the water is crazy.
Sometimes the "few" are made to suffer to protect the many. Tens of thousands of fish were poisoned last week in a drastic attempt to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes.
Officials poured more than 8000 liters of the fish poison rotenone into a 9-kilometer stretch of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which links the Mississippi river and Lake Michigan, during maintenance work on a barrier that normally keeps invaders at bay using electric shocks.
[Via New Scientist]
Ship sank by jellyfish
Now that is crazy. A 10 ton Japanese fishing trawler was sank by dozens of Nomura's jellyfish. I had no idea that jellyfish could grow to such a scale. They can reach 440 pounds and be up to 6.5 feet across.
Experts believe weather and water conditions in the breeding grounds, off the coast of China, have been ideal for the jellyfish in recent months.
[Via Telegraph UK]
Land speed gurus aim for 1000mph
Aiming to break their own record the the Bloodhound project sets their sites on the 1k mark. You can check out the projects homepage for more information. And follow the build diary on the BBC website.
RAF fighter pilot Andy Green intends to get behind the wheel of a car that is capable of reaching 1,000mph (1,610km/h). Powered by a rocket bolted to a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine, the Bloodhound car will mount an assault on the land speed record.
NASA releases iPhone app
NASA has released a great looking new app for the iPhone. If your interested in everything going on at our favorite space agency give it a try!
Among the outstanding features brought by this application are new images from the Hubble Space Telescope, live tracking of space missions such as the Mars Rovers and live feeds about upcoming developments in the International Space Station.
Check it out at the iTunes Store.
[Via TopTenREVIEWS]
Crazy arm mounted flame thrower
I think the video says it all, but that is both cool as hell and a little dangerous at the same time.
[Via Hack a Day]
Absolutely Amazing Milky Way Portrait
Credit: Axel Mellinger
The internet is an amazing place. Space.com just posted an amazing image of the Milky Way. And it turns out the professor that created the image is a faculty member of Central Michigan University, Axel Mellinger, just a few miles north of Shepherd. It is an amazing combination of over 3,000 images. Check out the high resolution image here.
Image credit: Axel Mellinger, A Color All-Sky Panorama Image of the Milky Way, Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacific 121, 1180-1187 (2009).
[Via Space.com]
Polar bear grizzly hybrid
The first study of such a hybrid was done at the Osnabruck Zoo in Germany. In 2006 I remember hearing an account of a big game hunter taken a polar/grizzly hybrid in the wild, but this is the first time I've heard about them in captivity. It's interesting to see how the traits intermingled such as the specialized hair of the polar bear. I wonder with the current climate changes if we won't see more of this happening in the wild.
[ Via BBC]
Ultrasound could be enhanced by metamaterial based acoustic hyperlens
Photo: Zhang Laboratory/UC Berkeley
In recent years researches have developed metamaterials to focus or bend light in diverse ways, but this is the first attempt to do the same with sound.
Nicholas Fang, a mechanical science and engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that acoustic hyperlenses could make it possible to see objects just a few micrometers in size. Currently, ultrasound scans have a resolution of a few millimeters, and even those are achieved by using short-wavelength, or high-energy, signals. "For better resolution, you dump more energy into the tissue or structure under inspection," Fang says. "[But] with more ultrasound energy, you're at risk of harming or destroying healthy tissue or healthy structures."
[Via IEEE.org]
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