The Alpine Capsule is an 8-meter wide structure with a double-glass skin that is covered with a special reflective coating. The coating meant to reflect the structure's surroundings and blend in with the environment. The capsule is straight out of a sci-fi novel and looks more like a bead of mercury than an alpine retreat, but Lovegrove is by no means traditional.
In some parts of the US, there's been reports that trees aren't bearing acorns this year. "We're talking zero. Not a single acorn. It's really bizarre," said Greg Zell, a naturalist at Long Branch Nature Center in Arlington.
The world's first commercial wave farm in Portugal is now operational. Three 750kW Pelamis Wave Energy Converters (PWEC) have been installed in the first stage of a project which, when complete, will provide enough clean energy to meet the needs of 15,000 households.
Facebook Connect, as the company's new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.
Until we all are living in outer space with flying automobiles and robot servants, we can pass the time with these 45 vintage illustrations of a space age tomorrow. Hopefully these beautiful and creative works of art won't bring back too many childhood disappointments.
Don't worry, you'll get your jetpack someday.
British UFO researcher Gary Heseltine, who edits a monthly UFO magazine in the UK, says that he has some of the debris that was collected by the soldiers, who saw the UFO slam into the Troodos mountain range in Cyprus in 1973. They were ordered to collect the debris and put it into black plastic bags, but Clarke managed to confiscate some small pieces of golden tinted foil (similar to the debris found at Roswell).
Corpus 2.0 by Marcia Nolte is a set of seven portraits illustrating how the human body could adjust itself to the design of products, including a hole in the lips for smokers and an extended shoulder for holding a phone.
Other proposals include a ridge in the nose developed for wearing glasses, ears moulded to accommodate earphones, a thumb with an extra joint for sending SMS messages more efficiently and a foot adapted to create the same posture as wearing high heels.
Artist Marco Perego sculpted a lifesize scene of Amy Winehouse shot dead in the head. William Burroughs is holding the shotgun.
A Wal-Mart worker was killed Friday when "out-of-control" shoppers desperate for bargains broke down the doors at a 5 a.m. sale. Other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue the man, and customers shouted angrily and kept shopping when store officials said they were closing because of the death, police and witnesses said.
The Canadian Coast Guard has confirmed that in a major first, a commercial ship travelled through the Northwest Passage this fall to deliver supplies to communities in western Nunavut.
Glaciers high in the Himalayas are dwindling faster than anyone thought, putting nearly a billion people living in South Asia in peril of losing their water supply.
Glycolaldehyde has previously only been detected near the center of our galaxy, where conditions are extreme compared to the rest of the galaxy. But its discovery in an area far from the galactic center in an area known as 'G31.41+0.31' suggests that the production of this key ingredient for life could be common throughout the galaxy. This is good news in our search for alien life, because a wide spread of the molecule improves the chances of its existing alongside other molecules vital to life, and in regions where Earth-like planets may exist.
The concept is applicable to freshwater or shoreline applications and consists of an outer ring membrane with an interlacing web of pedestrian roads connecting the hotel, cafes, a restaurant and garden areas. The Aerohotel would also include recreational activities on the water-line below and would be accessible via sea or built to accommodate airship docking.
A mile and a half (two and a half kilometers) underwater, a remote control submersible's camera has captured an eerie surprise: an alien-like, long-armed, and -- strangest of all -- "elbowed" Magnapinna squid.
(Via Futurismic.)
Every serious scientist knows that we and other animals evolved from the same ancestors. The real question today is whether to put our DNA and theirs back together. Until now, that question has been raised in the form of human-animal hybrids made in labs for research. You can argue that these are somehow wrong because they're newfangled and artificial. But what can you say about Neanderthals? They were made by nature, not industry. In fact, we're the industrial villains who apparently wiped them out. They're as natural as we are.
Concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O) touched new highs after more steady rises in 2007, and methane had its largest annual increase in a decade, the World Meteorological Organisation said.
"The major greenhouse gases -- CO2, methane and N2O -- have all reached new highs in 2007. Two of them, CO2 and N20, are increasing steadily and there is no sign of levelling off of those two gases," WMO expert Geir Braathen told a news briefing.
It could be argued, of course, that a ring made out of planetary material, a habitat so vast that it completely encircles its star, is actually one of the smaller Dyson concepts. It was in 1960 that Freeman Dyson suggested how a civilization advanced to the point of such astro-engineering might use everything it found in its solar system to create a cloud of objects, a swarm that would make the most efficient use of its primary's light. And as you keep adding objects, you point to the ultimate outcome, a Dyson Sphere that completely envelopes the star from which it draws its energy.
The company, Element Four, has developed a machine that it hopes will become the first mainstream household appliance to have been invented since the microwave. Their creation, the WaterMill, uses the electricity of about three light bulbs to condense moisture from the air and purify it into clean drinking water.
Over the years, say, tens of thousands -- even millions -- of these machines are installed in a humid city like New York, Tokyo, or London, achieving imperceptibly slow local climate modification. The city goes into a drought, with very little rainfall as humidity disappears -- and it's all because of a certain line of products that have been installed, gradually, home by home, over the course of a decade.
As astronomers explore newly discovered planets and create computer simulations of virtual worlds, they are discovering that water, and life, might exist on all manner of weird worlds where conditions are very different from those on Earth. And that means there could be vastly more habitable planets out there than we thought possible. "It's like science fiction, only better," says Raymond Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago, who studies planets inside and outside of our solar system.
(Via The Anomalist.)
Yet despite these shortcomings, Dick embodies everything that I like about sci-fi, for while his characters and their interactions may be lacking, the worlds in which they dwell and the societies that run them are superbly realized. The conflicts which arise in these worlds are fantastic, oftentimes absurd, and yet they mesh flawlessly with the reality that he created. It was these aspects that defined the genre for Dick and, in turn, it was these aspects that he poured most of his efforts.
Another classic case of the headline saying it all: physicists have confirmed that matter is no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum. Everything is arguably illusory, including ourselves. All of a sudden I have a vision of Terence McKenna muttering Beatles lyrics to the hyperspace elves in between fits of gently manic laughter . . .
To produce the clone, researchers took a cell from the ear of a dead Amami rabbit and injected it into the unfertilized egg of an ordinary lab rabbit. After the egg developed into the cloned embryo, researchers inserted it into the oviduct of a lab rabbit surrogate. The clone will be born in the coming weeks if the pregnancy comes to term.
"This electron excess cannot be explained by the standard model of cosmic ray origin," said Wefel. "There must be another source relatively near us that is producing these additional particles."
Evidence of vast frozen water reserves on Mars: scientists
Ground-penetrating radar used by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals numerous huge glaciers up to one half-mile thick buried beneath layers of rock and debris. Researchers said one glacier is three time the size of Los Angeles in area.
"All together, these glaciers almost certainly represent the largest reservoir of water ice on Mars that's not in the polar caps," said John Holt, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of a report about the discovery, which appears in the November 21 issue of the journal Science.
In a historic event, the Indian space programme achieved a unique feat today (November 14, 2008) with the placing of Indian tricolour on the Moon's surface on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's birthday. The Indian flag was painted on the sides of Moon Impact Probe (MIP), one of the 11 payloads of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, that successfully hit the lunar surface today at 20:31 hrs (8:31 pm) IST. This is the first Indian built object to reach the surface of the moon.
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