Micro stories - small news bits too small to have their own thread

[Hamartia Antidote]

LED Lightbulbs are coming way down in price

Soft White dimmable, omnidirectional, 60W (815 lumens) equivalent are now only $2.97 at HomeDepot.

In 2013 LED's were $25!!!

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Check Out Three Amazing Rocket Launches That All Happened on One Day

What a busy weekend for space exploration. There were three successful lift offs around the world, including two Soyuz launches from opposite sides of the Earth:

Friday, 19:42 GMT (3:42 p.m. EDT): Liftoff of the Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (pictured above and below), with Gennady Padalka, Mikhail Kornienko and Scott Kelly on board, headed to the International Space Station for a year-long mission.

Friday, 21:46 GMT (5:46 p.m. EDT): Liftoff of another Soyuz rocket from Kourou, French Guyana, loaded with two satellites for the European Space Agency 's Galileo navigation program.

Saturday 11:49 GMT (7:49 a.m. EDT): Launch of the Indian Space Research Organisation's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle PSLV-C27/IRNSS-1D, with the fourth satellite of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System in its payload, from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India's east coast.

Chainsaw ice skating looks both fun and insanely dangerous

When I saw this video of Swedish skier Erik Sunnerheim zooming over the ice while carving with a chainsaw two thoughts popped into my mind: At first I though it was super fun and wanted to try it right away but then, all the things that could go wrong started to pile up in my brain taking the shape of a giant nope.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Hey he's got ear protection on...must be worried about ear damage.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Two men dressed as women try to crash through the gates at the NSA.
One shot dead, the other injured.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

A Medieval Recipe Could Kill Hospital Superbugs. No, Really.

Staph infections are one of the most pervasive and annoying bacterial infections faced by hospitals every year. It infects half a million people in the US every year, with symptoms ranging from skin infections to heart problems — and worse, some strains (commonly known as MRSA) have evolved to resist common antibiotics.

As it turns out, medieval communities also faced staph — in particular, with staph causing eye sores called styes. Our ancestors had an old-timey cure, too, written in Old English in Bald's Leechbook:

Take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks’ gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time apply it with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.

Christina Lee, the Viking studies professor who came across the recipe, decided to take it to a microbiologist at her university to test. They painstakingly followed the recipe — not easy, when since modern crop varieties differ significantly to the older ones.

They tested the homebrew potion on scraps of skin taken from mice infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the most difficult-to-kill version of staph. Surprisingly, the recipe killed 90 per cent of the bacteria — the same success rate as Vancomycin, the drug hospitals use to treat MRSA. An American researcher contributing to the project found a similar rate when he repeated the effect.

Now, researchers need to work out which particular compound worked the magic. The team also tested the individual ingredients on their own, and found no effect on the MRSA strain; it seems that there's something about steeping in a brazen vessel that bacteria just doesn't like. (Of course, it's worth mentioning that test-tube results don't always play out so well in the real world.)

The findings are due to be presented at a conference this week in Birmingham, UK. Until then, just make sure you stock up on garlic, bile salt, and wine. Particularly the wine.



These Pretty Vortices Make This Super Hercules a Magical Aircraft

Feeling dizzy? These amazing vortices were formed by the MC-130J Commando II Special Operations tanker aircraft during its flight to the Kadena Air Base in Japan on March 19th.

Three variants of the C-130J Super Hercules aircraft were recently delivered to U.S. military operators from Lockheed Martin Aeronautics.

Two men dressed as women try to crash through the gates at the NSA.
One shot dead, the other injured.

Yup, good luck to them. Bunch of idiots. Government, and especially military or intelligence buildings are heavily guarded by armed officers (both outside and inside, I've been in the NRO and NSA HQs) and feature "special" defense systems to stop intruders.

Systems such as:

and on a more light-hearted note:

 

[Taygibay]

Additional details to your piece above on medieval recipe, @SvenSvensonov
Anglo Saxon remedy kills hospital superbug MRSA - health - 30 March 2015 - New Scientist

I loved the
"A side effect was that it made the lab smell of garlic. "It was not unpleasant," says Harrison. "It's all edible stuff. Everyone thought we were making lunch."
part, Tay.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Take A Leap Into The US Army Golden Knight Jump Team's Surreal World

Touring around the nation and jumping out of airplanes in front of millions of people, all on the Army's dime? That's pretty Rockstar, and these guys know it.

The truth is that members of the Golden Knights have worked hard and have risked a lot to be there. Currently, 93 percent of the team have combat experience and the selection pool is incredibly competitive, pulling from all different segments of the Army.

All that effort and all those sacrifices add up to something pretty awesome to watch, particularly their ability to land in tight spaces where normal military aircraft demos just don't translate. Landing inside stadiums is one particular niche in that the Golden Knights have down, and trust me, even an NFL stadium looks like a tiny postage stamp from thousands of feet in the air, especially at night with your ankle on fire!

Spectacular photo of a scuba diver swimming under a massive fish tornado

National Geographic's Your Shots features this spectacular picture of a scuba diver swimming under a massive shoal of fish at Cabo Pulmo, in Baja California peninsula, Mexico. The picture, shot by Californian photographer Jeff Hester, shows a colorful ocean full of life but that wasn't always the case:

I believe this is what our oceans should look like. In 1995, [the] park was established by local citizens to counteract depleted reef fishes and marine life due to overfishing. Today, the biomass is booming, and the ecosystem is returning to a healthy state. For this particular image, I wanted to show some scale ... so I had my wife, seen in the foreground, swim ahead of me.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Scientists Just Broke a Quantum Record By Entangling 3,000 Atoms

Quantum entanglement is an odd phenomenon that can connect two or more particles over even vast distances. Scientists have now managed to entangle not two, not 100 (the previous record), but 3,000 atoms with a single photon, opening the door to atomic clocks more accurate than ever.

In quantum entanglement, particles are correlated so that a change in one will instantaneously induce a change in others—even if they are at opposite ends of the universe. The classic example is a pair of entangled particles: If one changes its spin to clockwise, the other simultaneously flips to counterclockwise.

Entangling particles, especially large numbers of them, is no easy task. MIT and University of Belgrade scientists report in Nature that they managed to entangle 3,000 particles trapped in a supercooled cloud. The key was using very weak light, as weak as a single photon of light, which is less likely to disturb the cloud than a strong beam. The photon bounced thousands of times between two mirrors, passing back and forth through the cloud of atoms. This was enough to entangle the atoms, which LiveScience explains:

If a photon in a pulse interacted with the cloud’s atoms, the polarization of the photon would rotate slightly. Strangely, in the realm of quantum physics, the act of measurement can dramatically influence the object getting measured, and the act of detecting a photon that interacted with these atoms can essentially generate entanglement between those atoms.

So why does this matter? One possible application is quantum clocks—the more atoms are entangled, the more accurate the clock. This technique might even be used to get around the uncertainty of quantum measurements. (Physics World has a great technical explanation of how.) Atomic clocks are used to keep track of GPS systems.

This could also be a step toward complex entangled states that can give us quantum computing and quantum encryption. But it’s also just pretty damn cool to push the limits of what’s possible.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

A Day in the Life of the Fastest Growing Megacity in the World

China’s rapid growth isn’t all about wacky buildings—there are also millions of people whose lives have been uprooted in the name of progress.

Many of them have moved to the new megacity of Chongqing, where photographer Tim Francohas managed to capture its hyper-vertical, accelerated brand of urbanism, and the odd juxtapositions it creates with the humans who live there.

Franco, who is a photographer living in Shanghai, has been making trips to Chongqing since 2009. He has collected a gallery of the images on his website and has published a book of the photographs which can be pre-ordered now.

On paper, Chongqing’s population is eight million—not as large as China’s other fast-growing megacity of Shenzhen—but the large number of undocumented workers might make it closer to 30 million, according to Quartz. Last year, the city grew by 4,000 each week.

Many of the people of Chongqing were displaced by construction on the Three Gorges Dam, the largest infrastructure project in the world, which is basically rerouting the Yangtze River to get water to China’s other fastest-growing megacities.

Some of these new residents took jobs at local manufacturing plants and moved into instant skyscrapers, as other residents continue to farm the land between them as they have for centuries.

The building boom is unprecedented. According to Quartz’s Richard Macauley, Chongqing is home to some of the largest bridges in the world, the scale of which is needed simply to get the people from one side of the city to another.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

NASA's Flying Saucer

This spinning piece of scifi is NASA’s low-density supersonic decelerator (we’ll work on the name) specifically designed to deliver large payloads to the surface of Mars. Yesterday, NASA preformed an important spin test in Hawaii to make sure everything is good to go for the summer’s upcoming flight test.

This saucer/parachute combo was designed to address the tricky conditions of Mars’ atmosphere, which is too thick for rockets but also too thin for parachutes. NASA says they can only deliver about 1 ton of cargo to the surface of Mars at a time, as demonstrated with the Curiosity mission, but if humans are serious about exploring the Red Planet, NASA will need to do better.

Now You Can Fly Around Asteroid Vesta and Explore Every Crevice

NASA launched Dawn spacecraft in 2007 to study two of the three known protoplanets of the asteroid belt: Vesta and Ceres. And now here is an amazing interactive tool, very similar to Google Earth, called Vesta Trek, which let you explore Vesta—one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System—on your own.

Dawn studied Vesta from July 2011 to September 2012 and now is orbiting its second target, the dwarf planet Ceres. VestaTrek visualises tons of data gathered from multiple instruments aboard Dawn, the application developed by NASA’s Lunar Mapping and Modeling Project, including:

• Interactive maps with different layers of data sets including topography, mineralogy, abundance of elements and geology.

• 3D printer-exportable topography so you can print your own physical model of Vesta’s surface.

• Standard keyboard gaming controls to fly across the surface of the asteroid in a first-person view.

Here is a section of the 2D topography of Vesta you can zoom into a very detailed level in the application:

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

NASA's Flying Saucer

This spinning piece of scifi is NASA’s low-density supersonic decelerator (we’ll work on the name) specifically designed to deliver large payloads to the surface of Mars. Yesterday, NASA preformed an important spin test in Hawaii to make sure everything is good to go for the summer’s upcoming flight test.

Hmm...how to test...how to test...ah!...stick it on a rocketsled!!!

 

[SvenSvensonov]

This Exoskeleton Boot Saves Energy In An Ingenious Way

After millions of years of evolution, your feet are still not perfectly energy efficient. Enter exoskeletons. Researchers have created a new boot that, unlike other exoskeletons, makes walking more efficient without an extra battery or power source.

The boot contraption reduces the energy it takes to walk by about 7 percent. That may not sound like a lot, but keep in mind this is without a bulky battery pack for power. And it works differently from exoskeletons that give you superhuman strength, which are really a matter of expending less energy over a longer period of time, so total energy expenditure is the same.

Here, it’s a more subtle process of finding tiny inefficiencies and correcting them. It is human walking, optimized. For example, one inefficiency is that our muscles use energy even when they’re locked in place. Not so for a mechanical clutch. Davide Castelvecchi explains in Nature:

The researchers’ exoskeleton structures, built of lightweight carbon-based materials, have a spring that connects the back of the foot to just below the back of the knee, where it attaches with a mechanical clutch. When the Achilles tendon is being stretched, the clutch is engaged and the spring, rather like an additional tendon, stretches and helps to store energy. After the standing leg pushes down, unleashing elastic energy, the clutch releases and absorbs the slack in the spring, in preparation for the next cycle..

The downside though, as you can hear in the video below, is that you sound like a robot squeaking through the woods. The researchers hope to refine the boot, so that energy gains apply regardless of speed and terrain. No word on the squeakiness though.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Stunning photographs capture day and night of Shanghai and Hong Kong

These time-slice photographs of Shanghai and Hong Kong are beautifully unreal. In each photo, photographer Dan Marker-Moore captures an entire day of those amazing cities from one vantage point. You see day shift into night, sunlight giving way for city lights and it all adds up for photos that looks absolutely stunning.

The picture above and immediately below captures a time slice of Shanghai. You can see the haze of the city during the day open up into the night skyline all in one picture.

Here is Hong Kong:

And here's the fascinating process on how Marker-Moore makes his time slice photos:

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Sorry @Armstrong this always happens to me. I try to go to sleep, get distracted and end up posting something.

Unreal photographs of tunnels looks like portals into the underworld

I love the mystery of Robert Burn's underground tunnel photography. They look like portals into another world, entrances to alien homes and haunting, unused gateways leftover from a different time. But they're just photographs of tunnels in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that have been perfectly lit and captured to heighten the supernatural aspect.

Now that that's out of my system, peace!

 

[SvenSvensonov]

What's In These Mineral Veins On Mars?

The Curiosity rover has sent back data on these multi-colored mineral veins it found on the surface of Mars — but the veins themselves are not the most interesting thing about the discovery.

What’s really interesting is what they tell us about ancient Mars, and the water situation there. The two-toned mineral veins (which Curiosity scientist Linda Kah compared to “ice-cream sandwiches: dark on both edges and white in the middle”) are pretty good evidence that liquid once flowed along the mountain base the vein was found at. While the white tone is made up of calcium sulfate that’s previously been analyzed nearby, NASA notes that the darker mineral stacked around it looks like what would be left behind if some kind of fluid had passed over that calcium sulfate long ago, just like we see on Earth.

Of course, some kind of liquid flowing on Mars doesn’t necessarily mean the existence of anything like the water that we have here; in fact, a lot of the evidence points to the idea that flowing water on Mars would be more comparable to some sort of antifreeze brine than anything else. Still, it’s another clue to what ancient Mars was like.



Of Course Japan Has An Island Where Cats Outnumber People

This short film documents life on Tashirojima, a tiny island off the Oshika Peninsula in Japan. It’s home to 800 cat overlords, and the 100 or so humans who slavishly feed their feral masters.

Cats were originally brought onto the island to control the mouse population, who fed on silkworms and threatened the fishing industry that supports the two villages on Tashirojima. But, according to folklore, the fishermen grew a fondness for the cats, and when one of them was killed, they enshrined it — starting a tradition that’s resulted in cat shrines and monuments all over the island, in addition to the high feline population.

The 10-minute film is a teaser of an hour-long documentary coming out sometime soon. I’m not sure if 60 minutes will be enough for me to decide whether these cats are very cute, or extremely creepy.