Oct/090
CO2 to CO2
When we talk about carbon footprint is not always clear what we mean by it. Carbon.to is a sleek web application that lets you compare CO2 emissions from actions in our everyday's life.
Via: Microsiervos
Oct/093
Nobel Prize (The real one)
The other day I was writing about the Ig Nobel Prizes and today the traditional ones have been unveiled. Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith were hailed by the Nobel jury as "the masters of light" for setting the foundations of today's networked society.
One of the prizes goes for fibre-optic cable, which enables us to transmit digital signals at tremendous speeds and volumes using a fraction of the energy used by the traditional copper wires.
The other prize went to the base of the "Electronic Eye" of today's digital cameras, the CCD sensor. CCD devices are not the ones capturing the light in a digital camera, which is done usually by and photoelectric cell. Instead they manage the transfer between the signal coming out of this light sensor and the processing unit in the camera. In very simple terms a CCD is a device able to transfer electrical charge from any place on it's surface to an output pin where it can be processed by another device.
Oct/090
Benin Empire
In one of the knowledge trips that today's information world let us do from our couches I found this eye-catching flag. It belongs to the Benin Empire, a pre-colonial African empire in the area of what we currently call Nigeria. Benin is also a today's country, which lies very close to the old Empire's location, but which should not be confused with.
The Empire and city under this name was, as my recently visited Uganda, a British protectorate, but after the slaying of eight British representatives, the city was conquered and burned in 1897 by a British force.
Sep/090
Permanent Space Post: a step closer
As you most likely know already, our moon does not have a atmosphere as Earth's, which, among other things, holds the precious oxygen that we breath and use to grow food or create water. Lack of oxygen has been one of the main limiting factors to create a permanent space post in our celestial body as is not only essential for our own survival but also it makes possible to burn the rocket fuel used in the space aircraft.
Scientist from NASA have just tested components of a oxygen generator that will produce the element from the silicon dioxide and metal oxides contained in the lunar soil to make sure it works in lunar gravity environment (about 6 times weaker than the one in Earth). For this they have used "Vomit Comet", a fixed wing plane specially designed to briefly provide a micro gravity environment.
Sep/091
Personas
The MIT media lab is displaying until the end of this month a piece of software that visually characterize the name of a person based on the web data available for that name: Personas.
The project shows again how the vast information available nowadays, when processed by a computer, can lead to completely inaccurate results, in this case due the inability of the machine to separate the data from two different persons with the same name.
Sep/090
Cryosphere
NASA has released and short but well produced movie about the relation between the cryosphere - those parts of The Earth that are in a frozen state - and the climate at a worldwide level and how its dynamics have been affected in the last decades. The don't step in the lands of explaining why and I won't either, that is much better considered as an exercise to the reader.
Aug/090
Snif!
Did you know that we are unconsciously more attracted to sweat smell of those people whose immune system is most different than ours, therefor having the healthiest children. That there is a theory stating that the red of our lips is no more than the migration of the vivid colours of the flowers that used to cause high pleasure to our ancestors.
Or that is what they think today. Why do we blush, laugh, have pubic hair, dream or like so much kissing each other. The following article in New Scientist shows how few things we know about these things.
Aug/092
The 10th dimenssion
For those of you that have read about string theory, you may well know that one of the major outcomes of it is the existence of up to 10 dimensions. We, humans, live and feel in a 3 dimensional world, where any object is made up of length, width and height. We can even perceive an extra one, a 4th dimension that we call time, or duration. From that point on, things become very difficult to imagine, our brain cannot draw a picture anywhere of a 5th dimension, but the theory says that we are just "trapped" in a three dimensional world, just as a King in a playing card could only "see" things in the plane where its eyes sit.
This animation tries to explain the concept visually, and even when the theory does no support this approach, I think it does a good job:
Aug/091
40th Birthday of Abbey Road
As the story goes, Lennon said: "Why don't we go outside and take a picture for the cover?". Today is 40 years since the famous picture was taken and the name of the album changed from Everest to Abbey Road.
Only Paul, Ringo and Tony Bramwell are still alive from the people who were there when the picture was taken, but even today the whole thing carries on, hundreds of tourists go and visit the zebra crossing every hour. They all congregate on each side of the road, waiting for a gap in the constant traffic to step on the stripes and try to clone the work of Iain Macmillan. Sometimes, bored of waiting, they try to stop the traffic and big differences emerge between the drivers and the photographers, which many times end up in the police having to walk around the area to keep things calmed.
If you want to check the crossing from home and have a good laugh, just have a look at the live webcam installed on the studio entrance, on the weekends it is just incredible.
I saw it on ALT1040