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Towers of food, farms in the sky: self-sustaining skyscrapers in the city, vertical farming gains new interest
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What if “eating local” in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?
Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact. read more »
Galactic clash unmasks dark matter: ordinary mater and dark matter separate as two massive galaxies collide
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Striking evidence has been found for the enigmatic "stuff" called dark matter which makes up 23% of the Universe, yet is invisible to our eyes. The results come from astronomical observations of a titanic collision between two clusters of galaxies 5.7 billion light-years away. Astronomers detected the dark matter because it separated from the normal matter during the cosmic smash-up. The research team are to publish their findings in the Astrophysical Journal.
They used the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes to study the object MACSJ0025.4-1222 - formed after an incredibly energetic collision between two large galaxy clusters. Each of these large clusters contains about a quadrillion times the mass of our Sun.
25 Aug 1609. Galilei Galileo demonstrates his first telescope
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Called the Father of Modern Science by Einstein, Galileo was born into a musical family in Pisa. After studying mathematics and natural philosophy he was appointed to the Chair of Mathematics in 1589 before moving to the University of Padua where he made major discoveries in Fundamental and Applied Science. These included a military compass and an improved version of the telescope. With the later he was the first to identify the moons of Jupiter and describe the topography of our Moon.
On 25 August 1609, he demonstrated one of his early telescopes, with a magnification of about 8 or 9, to Venetian lawmakers. With a Galilean telescope, the observer could see magnified, upright images on the earth - it was what is commonly known as a terrestrial telescope or a spyglass. He could also use it to observe the sky; for a time he was one of those who could construct telescopes good enough for that purpose.
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Image credit Giuseppi Bertini (Public Domain)
Parties of the century: closing as well as the opening ceremonies of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games
Two Number Ones – China in Gold, U.S. in Total
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The Beijing Olympics have come to a close after 16 days of thrilling competition - with the home nation sat on top of the gold medal table.
China has spent seven years planning for this event. It must be relieved that these Olympics are being hailed as both a sporting and an operational success. Worries about air pollution, protesters and media freedom were eventually overshadowed by what went on in the sporting arenas.
At the closing ceremony the International Olympic Committee President, Jacques Rogge, said they had been "truly exceptional games".
Best of the best
Worldwide, 200 countries provided a staggering 5,000 hours of coverage through rights-holding broadcast partners. In China, 842 million people - more than twice the population of the United States - tuned in to watch some part of opening ceremony. read more »
Amazing photos from Greenland, where unfortunately ice runs away by hundreds of billions of tons a year
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Ice sculptures constructed from the spare core samples by the scientists working on the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project.
The ice samples, which the researchers analyze for clues to the temperature and concentration of greenhouse gases of the ancient atmosphere, are collected using this drill.
The visiting group of scientists, journalists and Danish environmental officials land at NEEM, the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project. NEEM had arranged for the visitors to examine their research, which focuses on the climatic conditions which shaped the warm geologic period before the earth's last Ice Age, an important clue in understanding global warming. The camp is located approximately 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle. read more »
Wikipedia - Open Source
Wikipedia definition of Open Source.
All the same: clone breaching lives’ uniqueness? S Korea reveals 1st dog clones - 1 dead dog into 5 identical ones
She has brought her precious pooch back from death, more than one but five – via cloning at the price of $50,000. Not the one unique dog Booger, but a bunch - FIVE!
Woken up at midnight by dear memory of the dead dog? Or thrilled by five identical dogs resembling the dead one? It is not a bad idea to hear from the very first commercial cloning client, or to imagine, the true sentiment before jumping to clone yours.
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(SEOUL, South Korea) — Booger is back. An American woman received five puppies Tuesday that were cloned from her beloved late pitbull, becoming the inaugural customer of a South Korean company that says it is the world's first successful commercial canine cloning service. Seoul-based RNL Bio said the clones of Bernann McKinney's dog Booger were born last week after being cloned in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who created the world's first cloned dog in 2005.
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