Joy of Life
"Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one." - Voltaire
Built to fly.
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Hawaii approves permit for world’s largest telescope
Pacific Business News: A permit for the $1.3 billion Thirty Meter Telescope was approved...
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abandoned hotel
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Full story: An 8-year-old boy in Austria has made friends with a local colony of marmots. It’s the cutest thing ever. I can only imagine what...
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San Francisco, CA
Watch all 13 episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on Youtube!
Episode 1: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean
Episode 2: One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue
Episode 3 - The Harmony Of The Worlds
Episode 5 - Blues for a Red Planet
Episode 7 - The Backbone of the Night
Episode 8 - Journeys in Space & Time
Episode 9 -The Lives of the Stars
Episode 10 - The Edge of Forever
Episode 11 - The Persistence of Memory
Episode 12 - Encyclopædia Galactica
Episode 13 - Who Speaks for Earth?
See also:
Yay!
(via likeaphysicist)
Electronic chips self-heal after laser blast
It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips.
The team demonstrated this self-healing capability in tiny power amplifiers. The amplifiers are so small that 76 of the chips—including everything they need to self-heal—could fit on a single penny.
In perhaps the most dramatic of their experiments, the team destroyed various parts of their chips by zapping them multiple times with a high-power laser, and then observed as the chips automatically developed a work-around in less than a second.“It was incredible the first time the system kicked in and healed itself. It felt like we were witnessing the next step in the evolution of integrated circuits,” says Ali Hajimiri, professor of electrical engineering. “We had literally just blasted half the amplifier and vaporized many of its components, such as transistors, and it was able to recover to nearly its ideal performance.
The team’s results appear in the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.
Read more
(via thescienceofreality)
A rendering of Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 suit by artist Tom Sachs, based on the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal – one of several artist tributes to cultural icons who passed away in 2012.
The Largest Cut Piece of Aquamarine in the World
At 14 inches tall, the aquamarine obelisk known as the Dom Pedro is pure light. Like a cool oasis on the horizon, the cut gem stands as a pale blue beacon. It is the largest cut piece of aquamarine in the world and, after journeying from miners in Brazil to dealers in Germany and collectors in the States, the Dom Pedro, named for Brazil’s first two emperors, is now the newest addition to the Natural History Museum’s gem collection. Joining other noteworthy stones, including the much-loved Hope Diamond, the obelisk is a one-of-a-kind, according to the museum’s curator of gems and minerals Jeff Post. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.
Photo: Donald E. Hurlbert, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural history
Ed note: Here is where you can see some of the world’s most famous diamonds.
We will be giving away 10 of these wristbands… For a chance to win
