MEXICO CITY — Scientists were fascinated by the ghostly find: a human skeleton buried in an Aztec temple with a clay, skull-shaped whistle in each bony hand.
But no one blew into the noisemakers for nearly 15 years.
When someone finally did, the shrill, windy screech made the spine tingle.
If death had a sound, this was it.
Sweet!
On another site, you'll find the MP3 file of the whistles being played, by archaeologists. [Not Safe For Life]
I've discussed the need for a space webcam before. These people seem to think there is a business in it.
By delivering the first live, continuous, true color image stream of Earth from space, AstroVision will revolutionize the delivery of weather, news, and environmental information.
We will capture and track catastrophic events such as hurricanes, volcanoes, forest fires, and a multitude of other continuous and unforeseen events—live.
Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. If your group has moderate programming, web, sysadmin, and hardware resources, you can use BOINC to create a volunteer computing project. With a single Linux server you can get the computing power of thousands of CPUs. Organizations such as IBM World Community Grid may be able to host your project (please contact us for information). Use BOINC to create a Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center. Use BOINC for desktop Grid computing.
Like distributed.net but putting it to good use... Lets see if we could get a memestreams user grid going... Tom had some kinda of idea going around....
I'm down for that. How do we organize it? Which projects should we pick up? Have you considered doing a lightning talk on this at Outerz0ne or Summercon?
Technology Review: The 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008
Topic: Science
7:03 pm EST, Mar 1, 2008
Each year, Technology Review publishes its list of 10 emerging technologies that its editors believe will be particularly important over the next few years. This is work ready to emerge from the lab, in a broad range of areas: energy, computer hardware and software, biological imaging, and more. Two of the technologies--cellulolytic enzymes and atomic magnetometers--are efforts by leading scientists to solve critical problems, while five--surprise modeling, connectomics, probabilistic CMOS, reality mining, and offline Web applications--represent whole new ways of looking at problems. And three--graphene transistors, nanoradio, and wireless power--are amazing feats of engineering that have created something entirely new.
Drying of the West - National Geographic Magazine Online
Topic: Science
2:51 pm EST, Feb 4, 2008
The wet 20th century, the wettest of the past millennium, the century when Americans built an incredible civilization in the desert, is over. Trees in the West are adjusting to the change, and not just in the width of their annual rings: In the recent drought they have been dying off and burning in wildfires at an unprecedented rate. For most people in the region, the news hasn't quite sunk in. Between 2000 and 2006 the seven states of the Colorado basin added five million people, a 10 percent population increase. Subdivisions continue to sprout in the desert, farther and farther from the cities whose own water supply is uncertain.
"What we have come to consider normal is profoundly wet," Stine said. "We're kidding ourselves if we think that's going to continue, with or without global warming."
This is extremely important. The skyrocketing cost of fresh water is going to have a huge impact on the Southwest over the coming decades, with reverberations felt across North America.
There are so many incredible astronomical photographs released every year that picking ten as the most beautiful is a substantial task. But it becomes easier when you consider the science behind the image as well. Does this image tell us more than that one? Was the scientific result drawn from an image surprising, or did it firm up a previously considered hypothesis?
