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Slayer1
Title: ,,!,, for you know who
Joined: Sep 23 2008
Posts: 4274
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I plan on staying up to 1 AM my time anyways so if It's not cloudy I'll watch it! thanks for the heads up 
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username
Title: owner of a lonely heart
Joined: Jul 06 2007
Location: phoenix, az usa
Posts: 16136
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Apple Does It Again!
Apple announced today that it has developed a breast implant that can store and play music. The iTit will cost from $499 to $699, depending on cup and speaker size. This is considered a major social breakthrough, because women are always complaining about men staring at their breasts and not listening to them. |
http://current.com/items/91327303_apple-does-it-again.htm
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| Klimbatize wrote: |
| I'll eat a turkey sandwich while blowing my load |
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SoldierHawk
Moderator
Title: Warrior-Poet
Joined: Jan 15 2009
Location: San Diego, CA
Posts: 6113
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| username wrote: |
| Quote: |
Apple Does It Again!
Apple announced today that it has developed a breast implant that can store and play music. The iTit will cost from $499 to $699, depending on cup and speaker size. This is considered a major social breakthrough, because women are always complaining about men staring at their breasts and not listening to them. |
http://current.com/items/91327303_apple-does-it-again.htm
honestly?! |
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| William Shakespeare wrote: |
| Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none. |
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username
Title: owner of a lonely heart
Joined: Jul 06 2007
Location: phoenix, az usa
Posts: 16136
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Beginning of time discovered
Scientists have seen the first starlight ever recorded, and we don't mean the first incidence of a monkey marking something down - we mean the first star to send light which reached Earth. This light is the earliest, the furthest away, the most red-shifted, and every other factor that could possibly say:
"Everything else ever came after this."
The bright light is also poignant as it results from a Gamma Ray Burst, GRB 090423, meaning that this first light comes from the death of a star imploding into a neutron star or even an early black hole. The light exhibited a record breaking redshift of 8.2, the electromagnetic equivalent of an ambulance's siren sounding lower pitched because it's moving away from you. Now ramp up that ambulance close to the speed of light, turn it into an exploding sun, put it on the opposite end of the observable universe and - while you're at it - stick it at the beginning of time.
The event occurred when the universe was only half a billion years old and the light has literally spent all of time to get here. The signal was detected by the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, and a good thing too - can you imagine coming all that way and not being seen? The starburst was so early it was used to confirm that this kind of thing even happened back then. The signal outshone galaxies, and is now our earliest evidence of anything that happened back then. |
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/11/universes-first-starlight-sighted-everything-else-came-after-this.html
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| Klimbatize wrote: |
| I'll eat a turkey sandwich while blowing my load |
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Lady_Satine
Title: Head of Lexian R&D
Joined: Oct 15 2005
Location: Metro area, Georgia
Posts: 7287
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Two this week:
Dinosaur skull found in church
http://news.discovery.com/dinosaurs/dinosaur-skull-found-in-church.html
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Encased in pinkish marble-like slabs supporting a balustrade, this dinosaur -- or what's left of it -- has for centuries been the most faithful presence in the Cathedral of St. Ambrose in Vigevano, a town about 20 miles from Milan.
“The rock contains what appears to be a horizontal section of a dinosaur’s skull. The image looks like a CT scan, and clearly shows the cranium, the nasal cavities, and numerous teeth,” Andrea Tintori, the University of Milan paleontologist who spotted the fossil near the altar, told Discovery News.
Measuring about 30 cm (11.8 inches), the skull was cut in sections as slabs of the marble-like rock were used to build the Cathedral between 1532 and 1660.
Indeed, Tintori found a second section of the same skull in another slab nearby.
The calcareous rock in which the dinosaur remains are embedded comes from the rich fossil-bearing site of Mount San Giorgio, which is on the Unesco World Heritage List.
“It is called Broccatello and was mined in Arzo, Switzerland. We know that this type of rock dates geologically to the Lower Jurassic, about 190 million years ago,” Tintori said.
It is not clear what animal the skull belonged to. Tintori hopes to solve the mystery with a three-dimensional reconstruction of the fossilized remains.
According to Paul Sereno, a paleontologist and professor at the University of Chicago and one of the world's leading dinosaur experts, the finding “looks very interesting.”
“While definitely a fossil, I cannot say what it is. I do not definitively see teeth. There is some bone texture, but other areas look double-layered, unlike typical cranial bone,” Sereno told Discovery News. |
100-Year Spaceships
http://www.popsci.com/node/49255/?cmpid=enews102810
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If NASA ever gets a clear directive for interplanetary exploration, a new Hundred-Year Starship could be their version of the Mayflower. And like the first pilgrims, Martian explorers might set sail with the knowledge they would never return home.
NASA and DARPA have joined forces to build something called a Hundred-Year Starship, according to the director of NASA’s Ames Research Center. Simon “Pete” Worden said NASA contributed $100,000 to the project and DARPA kicked in $1 million.
“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” Worden said, according to a Singularity University blog that covered the event. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.” (Worden added that he was fired by President George W. Bush.)
Beyond that, there are no details. But the prospect of a DARPA-NASA spaceship collaboration for Star Trek-esque exploration sounds thrilling — even if by definition, a 100-year ship means leaving Earth and never coming back.
Incidentally, that’s exactly the proposal in a new paper in press in the Journal of Cosmology, a relatively new, peer-reviewed open access journal. Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies suggest sending astronauts to Mars with the intention of staying for the rest of their lives, as trailblazers for a permanent Mars colony.
They would get periodic supply missions, but they would be expected to fend for themselves for water, shelter, nutrients and mineral/chemical processing. They would be expected to develop some kind of homegrown Martian industry, which could ultimately serve as a hub for an expanded colonization program. Plus, leaving some people on another planet would probably ensure that we’d want to go back, to visit them and see what they created.
Such a mission would save money, the authors say, because the prohibitive costs (in dollars and payload) of a manned Mars mission are mostly associated with bringing the astronauts home.
“Eliminating the need for returning early colonists would cut the costs several fold and at the same time ensure a continuous commitment to the exploration of Mars and space in general,” they write.
In a news release, Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University’s Beyond Center, compared would-be Mars colonists to swashbuckling explorers like Columbus and Amundsen.
“It would really be little different from the first white settlers of the North American continent, who left Europe with little expectation of return,” he said.
Still, getting there would require an advanced propulsion system that could get off the ground with minimal fuel and land safely. At the weekend event, a Long Now Foundation-funded conference in San Francisco, Worden also said NASA is also exploring electric propulsion systems.
He believes we should go to the moons of Mars first, and believes it can happen by 2030.
“(Google cofounder) Larry Page asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, ‘Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?’ So now we’re starting to get a little argument over the price,” Worden said.
Of course, that price tag does not include the inestimable cost of saying goodbye forever. NASA has worked with several psychologists and psychiatrists to study future astronauts' response to isolation and long-term absence from loved ones — but a permanent absence is even more complicated.
Schulze-Makuch, a Washington State University associate professor, said he would do it — but only after his kids are grown. |
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"Life is a waste of time. Time is a waste of life. Get wasted all the time, and you'll have the time of your life!" |
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UsaSatsui
Title: The White Rabbit
Joined: May 25 2008
Location: Hiding
Posts: 7565
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Hey, I thought I was the only one digging up year-old threads! Give me back my shovel!
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