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

[WAJsal]

Dont scare me...I've just recently started to go swimming in the sea.

The second jelly fish is so huge.

Now watch this for fun

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=432458896912633

HAhaha,i wonder who came up with this great idea,oh my days.Crazy shit happens in this world.OMG i can't stop laughing .

 

[Taygibay]

@WAJsal
Monty Python man, you and everyone with a sense of humor and derision should own their collected works ( I do ).

Be warned though, they are ultimate iconoclasts. They made a parody of the life of Jesus that honestly, if done about other religious figures would have started World Wars III to XXX.

The Meaning of Life is a good movie to start with.
Have fun if you check it, Tay.

 

[RPK]

Submarine breaks the surface of a Milan STREET...

 

[SvenSvensonov]

NASA's New Landing System Can Adapt in Real-Time Based on What It Sees

Taking a spacecraft to the surface of an alien planet is hard enough, but it can be even more difficult to reach the exact landing spot. Now, new NASA technologies could enable landers to adapt in real-time to what they see before them.

A team of engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been testing several new landing technologies on a demonstration vehicle known as the Autonomous Descent and Ascent Powered-flight Testbed (ADAPT). A vertical-launch, vertical-landing rocket, ADAPT allows the team to approximate the high-speed landings that spacecraft experience when touching down on planets like Mars.

Among the new technologies being tested is a system called Lander Vision System (LVS) which allows the lander to determine its position relative to its specified landing site. During descent, it acquires real-time images of the surface and compares them to previously acquired maps of the area, allowing it to identify its landing spot and change course without intervention from flight engineers.

The team's also been testing a system called Guidance for Fuel-Optimal Large Diverts (G-FOLD) which takes information from LVS about deviations from the intended landing spot and calculates the most fuel-efficient route to get there. "No previous Mars lander has used onboard surface imaging to achieve a safe and precise touchdown, but a future spacecraft could use LVS and G-FOLD to first autonomously determine its location and then optimally fly to its intended landing site," explains Nikolas Trawny, who works on the project, in a NASA article.

So far the new systems have been tested successfully on Earth, landing ADAPT from heights of1,066 feet, diverting its course by 984 horizontal feet from a height of 623 vertical feet. It's not clear when the technology may make it into a real mission—but it may allow NASA to ensure future landings are silky smooth.

 

[jammersat]

Submarine breaks the surface of a Milan STREET...

Isn't that related to the news of a russian Sub crawling in swedish waters?

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Watch Your Dead Tech Get Demolished at an E-Waste Recycling Plant

When we stepped inside the facility, you could almost smell the circuitboard. All around us conveyor belts were transporting staggering heaps of electronics to and from shredders and sorters—from hard drives to old TVs, to medical devices, Macbooks, and printers. So many printers.

It's called e-waste, and it's made of millions of broken, dead, and obsolete gadgets. But often, it's too toxic (and too valuable) just to toss in a dumpster. So it gets recycled. We visited an e-waste recycling facility in upstate New York to see the afterlife of dead tech for ourselves. This video captures what we saw.

In humanity's constant struggle with the vast amounts of waste it produces, a whole new category of trash has entered the mix. Hugo Neu Recycling used to be the largest recycler of scrap metal in the country. Now, they specialize in e-waste—mostly coming from businesses looking to offload their junk.

It starts with loads of junk getting dumped into Hugo Neu's in-feed belt and carried to straight to the shredder. These are items that have already had hazardous materials safely removed. Once it's broken down into bits and pieces, various sorting mechanism separate the junk into piles based on material. It's a combination of mechanization like magnets, screens, and weight separation. But none of these methods is perfect, and sooner or later each "stream" has a set of human eyes scanning the pieces and pulling out mismatches.

Seeing endless ******** of shredded gadgetry flow by sure is cathartic. It's the fate you dream of for your stalled printer or shoebox of old cords you keep in a closet for some reason. But it's also a grim reminder of just how much waste is being produced by our obsession with electronics.

The materials that go in and out of places like Hugo Neu are recycled to the best extent possible. But there's still a huge amount of e-waste that is thrown right into dumps and landfills, with no proper disposal of hazardous materials. Efforts to collect e-waste are growing, but it will take time before it becomes as easy and widespread as recycling bottles and cans.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Ever Wondered How Much Copper Goes Into Electric Cars?

An average American car contains about 55 pounds of copper wiring. An electric car has three times as much mostly thanks to their rotors, and here's how those miles of wire disappear in an engine bay.

Cylinder blocks used to be made out of cast iron before the industry switched to aluminum. That created a massive demand, and with more and more manufacturers beginning to make the rest of their cars out of the lightweight metal as well, aluminum production is at an all time high.

Turning bauxite into a Jaguar F-Type is not a walk in the park, and when it comes to copper mining, well, we've lost some mountains to that process as well.

The good news is that there's plenty of copper left in those rocks and we know how to recycle what we have already. That means this soft metal can take us to wherever we want to go once again - as long as we don't go too far from a high-speed charger - while driving our Volkswagen e-up!:

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Human Bodies Glow, Proving That The World Is Weirder Than We Can Imagine

Human bodies emit photons. What's more, they do so in a pattern that repeats itself every day. Find out why you're shooting light from your face, at regular intervals.

There are a few animals that we know glow in the dark. Fireflies, certain species of fish, and jellyfish are among the animals that have been shown to emit visible light. Now, humans have joined their ranks. We don't emit light the way they do. They have specialized chemical processes that are meant to produce bright, concentrated visible light. We mostly do it by accident. But we do it on a regular schedule.

Researchers aimed ultra-sensitive cameras at people in a totally dark room. They captured photon emission levels that varied diurnally, probably as a result of the people's metabolism revving up and cooling down. How do we do it? According to the researchers creepily filming people in the dark, we're not special:

Virtually all living organisms emit extremely weak light, spontaneously without external photoexcitation. This biophoton emission is categorized in different phenomena of light emission from bioluminescence, and is believed to be a by-product of biochemical reactions in which excited molecules are produced from bioenergetic processes that involves active oxygen species. Human body is glimmering with light of intensity weaker than 1/1000 times the sensitivity of naked eyes.

Still, we do glow. Now hard can it be to make our eyes a thousand times more powerful so we can see each other glowing in the dark?

 

[IrbiS]

March 20, 2015 By Philip Watts

Home science experiments: How to bend water

It’s British Science Week, and here at How It Works we’re celebrating by showing you some of our favourite science experiments that you can try at home.

Here’s how you can bend water with a clever experiment you can easily in your kitchen!

Checklist:

• Tap with running water
• comb
• hair

1 Charge the comb

Rub the comb on your hair. This will transfer electrons onto the comb and negatively charge it. As you are grounded, electrons will come from the ground and balance you, but the comb remains full of negative charge.

2 Force of attraction

Start the water running at a very slow stream. The negatively charged comb repels some of the electrons in the water. This creates a positive charge in the stream so it is attracted towards the comb.

3 Coming together

This desire to transfer electrons pulls the positively charged water toward the comb when it’s nearby. The force that attracted the two together is called static electricity.



What you’ve learnt:

This quick and easy experiment teaches you how to manipulate a stream of water without even touching it. Hair doesn’t conduct electricity very well so every time you comb it, the static charge in increased.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Cool photo of US Navy helicopter reveals the guts of a Transformer

Here's a pretty neat photo of US Navy sailors working on a MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter that gives you an inside look at what's "under the hood". For some reason, all those wires and boxes and more wires and more boxes makes me think we're getting a peak at the inner workings of a Transformer.

The US Navy describes the scene:

Sailors from the Blackjacks of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 21 perform maintenance on an MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter on the flight deck of the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Essex (LHD 2). Essex is underway participating in a composite training unit exercise with the Essex Amphibious Ready Group.



This Is How NASA Tests Spacesuits Ahead of Missions

These NASA employees may be lying down, but the experience isn't perhaps as relaxing as it looks. This is how the space agency goes about testing spacesuits ahead of launch.

In a facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center, staff don the suits—in this case NASA's Modified Advanced Crew Escape Suits—to see how they stand up to the rigours of space. Sat in an 11-foot thermal vacuum chamber, the suits are connected to a life support system while the tower is evacuated of its air. With luck—and, err, some world-class engineering—they work OK.

They ought. These suits are destined for use on the new Orion spacecraft, and should enable crew to walk in space and protect them in the unfortunate event of pressure loss aboard the spacecraft. They will undergo a rigorous evaluation procedure before they're OK'd for use in space—and the test pictured above is in fact just the first in a series of four tests.



This B-1B Depature Will Melt Your Face Off

Watching a B-1B takeoff at night is like watching Han Solo's beloved Millennium Falcon blasting out of a spaceport. Some of you mentioned seeing fully loaded B-1B departures from the hot desert runways of Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Alas, video of exactly this has emerged, and yes, it is glorious.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Nothing exciting today... so happy weekend!!!

A Bada** Way To Kickstart a Hawaiian Weekend

This soldier is running off the back of a CH-47F Chinook helicopter during a simulated combat dive mission on the Hawaiian shoreline. Even if it's hard work, I'd like to be him — and leave behind these screens, and keyboards, and Interwebz.

 

[friendly_troll96]

Almost a billion people in India don't have access to the internet. Internet.org by Facebook is taking action to solve this.

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Behold, the Stellar Explosion that Could Spawn Up to 7,000 Earths

Exploding stars are always a sight to behold, but not all supernovae are created equal: Some, for instance, may give birth to thousands of Earth-like worlds.

Shown above is a false-color image of the interstellar dust cloud Sagittarius A East, located 26,000 light years away toward our Galactic center. It's the remains an core-collapse supernova that took place 10,000 years ago, one that spewed forth enough dust to create up to 7,000 Earth-like planets, according to the astronomers who pieced it together. Whoa.

This rare glimpse of an exploded star's entrails was captured using NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), the world's largest airborne astronomical observatory, which basically consists of a massive telescope strapped to a modified Boeing 747.Remnant dust from the supernova (shown above in white contour lines), was mapped based on infrared emissions, or heat signatures left over from the ancient explosion.

What's significant and new here is how we can see stardust escaping the scene of the crime, seeping out into space where it'll provide the raw materials for new celestial bodies to coalesce.According to NASA:

The findings also offer strong evidence that the "dustiness" of young, distant galaxies may be the result of supernovae—a hypothesis that until now lacked observational support.

The notion that we're all just stardust may be almost cliche at this point, but still, it's remarkable that we now have the technology to see the evidence strewn all over the cosmos.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Soon we will all have a Woody Allen "Sleeper" car.
Next up... Orgasmatron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[SvenSvensonov]

Can't wait to see driver-less cars hit US streets in numbers. And damn... the F 015 looks amazing!!! Google's driver-less car looks like butt in comparison.

. Sorry Google, I'm buying German!!!