Lift off in NASA’s mission to "Touch the Sun"
The Parker Solar Probe was launched on Sunday in a mission to venture closer to the Sun than ever before.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.technology-in-business.net
Flying cars are being developed by companies spanning from new startups like Ehang and Pal-V, to industry giants like Airbus and Rolls-Royce.
Not long ago, the idea of traveling by flying car was pure science fiction. The Jetsons made the concept famous, but turning such a machine into reality seemed like a step too far. How should they be governed? Would you need a license? Where would they land and take-off from?
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.gearbrain.com
Blood Falls is an aptly named feature in Antarctica. The 100-foot stream of water running down the side of a glacier is a deep, rich, blood red.
Though we’ve known for decades what causes the red color, it took more than 100 years for scientists to discover the source of Blood Falls: a secret, ancient, underground lake.
Blood Falls were first discovered by Australian explorer Griffith Taylor during an expedition in 1911. At the time, he and other explorers guessed that the red color might be caused by algae living in the water.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: motherboard.vice.com
Observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope have for the first time revealed the effects predicted by Einstein’s general relativity on the motion of a star passing through the extreme gravitational field near the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way. This long-sought result represents the climax of a 26-year-long observation campaign using ESO’s telescopes in Chile.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.eso.org
The Future of Roads could mean Cars not having to stop at Intersections Researchers at MIT and ETHZ have developed a working mathematical model for slot-based intersections. If successful, traffic efficiency would double and pollution would be greatly reduced.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.thefuturist.co
The “Onassis Cultural Centre” is Athens’ (Greece), new cultural space hosting events of all spectrum of arts with an emphasis on contemporary cultural expression. Theatre, dance, music, visual arts, written word, to support Greek artists, to cultivate international collaborations and to educate children and people of all ages through life-long learning….
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.graphicart-news.com
The expression of a gene involved in female birds’ color vision is linked to the evolution of colorful plumage in males, reports a new study from the University of Chicago. The findings, published Nov. 26 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, confirm the essential role of female color perception in mate selection and sexual dimorphism.
"This is the first time an aspect of the visual system in birds has been directly associated with plumage evolution," said Natasha Bloch, PhD, who authored the study while a graduate student in ecology & evolution at the University of Chicago. "It tells us color perception plays an important role in the evolution of the spectacular diversity of colors we see in nature."
Sourced through Scoop.it from: phys.org
Professor Ishikawa Komuro’s Tokyo lab is better known for robot hands that can dribble and catch balls and spin pencils between their fingers. Now, two researchers have taken this speedy sensing tech and applied it to the ripping of paper books.
Books are different from other kinds of media, like music and movies – it’s very hard to get them into a computer. There is no equivalent of CD or DVD rippers like iTunes or Handbrake. This not only makes piracy laborious, it also stops you from turning your own books into e-books.
This high-speed scanner changes that, at least if you have the room and tech skills to build one. By using a high-speed camera that shoots at 500 frames per second, lab workers Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe can scan a 200-page book in under a minute. You just hold the book under the camera and flip through the pages as if shuffling a deck of cards. The camera records the images and uses processing power to turn the odd-shaped pictures into flat, rectangular pages on which regular OCR (optical character recognition) can be performed.
The technique is unlikely to be coming to the home anytime soon (although ripping a book by flipping it in front of your notebook’s webcam would be pretty awesome), but it could certainly speed up large scanning efforts like Google’s book project.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com
Why you should use percentages, not words, to express probabilities.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: hbr.org
30,000 years ago, a ground squirrel burrowed out a spot for itself, about 10 inches in diameter at its widest, where it brought back seeds and other grassy and fruited plants to nibble on. The place where the squirrel chose to make its burrow is now known as Siberia, and the burrow is close to 100 feet below the surface and in a layer of permafrost.
The squirrel, of course, is long gone. But tiny roundworms, a type of nematode, that also made their home there have lasted those tens of thousands of years, frozen and immobile. Now, though, scientists in Russia have revived them, making these worms—all of them female worms—the first multicellular organisms to have survived being frozen in Arctic permafrost.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.atlasobscura.com