Archive - 2012 - blog

News / Marilyn Monroe's Death 50 Years On: What's Changed, What Hasn't

One change is certain - the temperature of Earth has been obviously and continuously rising particularly in the last 50 years:

Data on global land-ocean temperature anomalies indicate that Earth has been warming approximately 0.36 Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees Celsius) per decade for the past 30 years. This rapid warming has brought global temperature to within about 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C) of the maximum estimated temperature during the past million years.

 read more »

Olympic rings lit with pyrotechnics - 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony in London

The Olympic cauldron burns during the Opening Ceremony on July 28.

Sir Steve Redgrave hands off the Olympic torch to seven young athletes representing Britain’s hopes for the future.

A person dressed as Queen Elizabeth II parachutes into the Olympic stadium during the Opening Ceremony.

A blimp or a glowing UFO above the opening ceremony of the London Olympics??

Becks Bond? David Beckham passes under Tower Bridge driving a speedboat named 'Max Power' which carries the Olympic Torch with its torchbearer.

 read more »

An intense stare-down: Bullfighter Juan Jose Padilla kneels down in front of a bull during the last bullfight of the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, Spain.

Adventure-loving Andy Lewis, 26, slacklines at Fisher Towers playground in Utah's Moab Desert. The spectacular location, with towers ranging from 35 to 800 feet...

Just in time for the film premiere on July 3. The Mwanza Flat Headed Agama lizard bears a striking resemblance to Spider-Man and even captures his crouching pose perfectly, albeit in Kenya rather than the Big Apple. (Let's not tell him Lizard is the villain in the latest flick.)

A young girl squeezes between honor guard soldiers to get a glimpse of the Olympic torch on Saturday in Staffordshire, England.

Just 5,000 ducks out for a stroll. A farmer snarls traffic in China as he herds his huge flock three-quarters of a mile to a pond. With only the help of a colleague and long stick, the man claims he didn't lose one bird on the trip.

 read more »

*update* Dec. 01, 2012
The first-ever flying drone competition “In the next few years the idea of drones will dramatically change. You no longer need a PhD... The same functions every Web programmer uses to build apps can now make drones navigate, take pictures, find people, fly through windows, play games, and so on. When the low level control of hardware comes built-in, hobbyists can focus on writing algorithms and routines." "Autonomous Flight, with a Few Lines of Javascript"

(quote)

July 4, 2012 U.S. drone 'hijackings' - University of Texas professor and grad students manipulate unmanned crafts' flight paths...even able to make them land

Thousands of drones are destined for US skies. The use of drones is taking off in America. Local governments and private businesses see them as a cheap and effective way of maintaining an eye from the sky.

But will the drones be fully under their control? A college professor and his students say not necessarily.

A civilian drone aircraft was "hijacked" by Professor Todd Humphreys and his graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin. They were able to hack into the drone's GPS signals. Later, in an exercise done in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security at White Sands, N.M., they were even able to make the drone land.  read more »

(quote)
Västra Hamnen, also known as the City of Tomorrow, was transformed from a former shipyard in 2001 and is now home to 4,000 people.

Europe’s ‘First Carbon-Neutral Neighborhood’: Western Harbour
With a smart heating and cooling system and renewable energy, the city district of Västra Hamnen (Western Harbor), in Malmö, Sweden has established itself as the first carbon-neutral neighborhood in Europe, says Malmö mayor Ilmar Reepalu.

Västra Hamnen, also known as the City of Tomorrow, was transformed from a former shipyard in 2001 and is now home to 4,000 people.

The district uses an aquifer thermal energy storage system to store water collected during the summer 70 meters (230 feet) underground and pump it up with wind energy to heat the homes during the winter. The chilled water is then reused to cool buildings in the summer. “There’s no need for air-conditioners in the district,” Reepalu proudly told the audience at the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize Forum, held during the World Cities Summit on July 2 in Singapore.  read more »

(quote)

Ueno Zoological Gardens in Tokyo released photographs of its newborn giant panda on July 6, showing its mother breastfeeding the tiny cub.

Born to 7-year-old Shin Shin on July 5, the panda--a male--is the first born at the zoo in Taito Ward as a result of natural breeding. “Even though she is a new mother, Shin Shin takes very good care of her cub,” said Yutaka Fukuda, deputy director of the zoo. “I'm sure she will be a good mother.”  read more »

A typical ‘candidate event’ in the Higgs-hunting CMS experiment. Red lines represent high-energy proton beams while yellow lines show the tracks of particles produced in the collision.

(quote)

The Higgs boson appears in a theory first fleshed out in 1964 by Peter Higgs at Edinburgh University and five other physicists. Finding the particle proves there is an energy field that fills the vacuum of the observable universe. It plays the crucial role of giving mass to certain subatomic particles that are the building blocks of matter. The Higgs field is thought to have switched on a trillionth of a second after the big bang that blasted the universe into existence. Without it, or something to do its job, the structure of the cosmos would be radically different than it is today.

So what is the Higgs boson?  read more »