Brian gives sensible, rational parenting advice totally forgetting what podcast he’s on.
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Something is in the walls
Travis Lake photograph
Underwater Antarctic super-villain team up
[podcast]http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings093010.mp3[/podcast]
Students at the University of Toronto have built the first succesful human-powered Ornithopter (a machine that generates lift through the flapping of its wings). Dubber ‘The Snowbird,” the flying machine achieved. The flight lasted a scant 19.3 seconds, but it is still longer than any other attempt. You can find more info about the project here.
How hardcore is this?
Drilling into an active volcanic doesn’t sound like the safest idea, but a plan to do so along a volcano near Naples, Italy, could help protect the city from a potentially catastrophic eruption.
Geologists will drill into the volcanic formation, called Campi Flegrei, early next month. The volcano, part of a larger volcanic arc that includes Mount Vesuvius, last erupted in 1538. The ground around the volcano, however, has been swelling for the past 40 years, stoking fears of an eruption that would threaten the roughly 1 million residents of Naples.
“The role of deep drilling at this area is then crucial,” according to the drilling project description by the International Continental Scientific Drill Program (ICDP), which is planning the drilling study.
This is either the dumbest plan ever or the most metal heroic thing ever conceived and executed.
Even back in the day, Stonehenge was a tourist trap. One of the oldest human remains found near the site was identified as having Mediterranean origins.
The British Geological Survey’s Jane Evans said that the find, radiocarbon dated to 1,550 B.C., “highlights the diversity of people who came to Stonehenge from across Europe,” a statement backed by Bournemouth University’s Timothy Darvill, a Stonehenge scholar uninvolved with the discovery.
“The find adds considerable weight to the idea that people traveled long distances to visit Stonehenge, which must therefore have had a big reputation as a cult center,” Darvill said in an e-mail Wednesday. “Long distance travel was certainly more common at this time than we generally think.”
Of course people travelled long distances, what else where they going to do without internet or TV? Watch each other’s hair grow?
It would be so easy to get me to go on a 2 month boat trip back then. “Hey were going to see a cult center in the north country, you might die and we’ll probably run out of food but at the same time it’s going to be a couple dozen centuries until someone invents an iPhone… so you in?”
[AP]
Those rascally scamps at io9 have issued this artists rendering of what a colony on the newly discovered Earth-like planet could look like. Since one side of the planet is constantly exposed to the sun and the other is frozen like year-old leftovers from Chilis, only the border areas between the two would be hospitable for life.
Meanwhile, there seems to be a dispute about the name. io9 has been calling it Gloaming and the UC Santa Cruz team that discovered it has dubbed it Zarmina. Meanwhile… some people who deliberately called dibs on the planet when it was announced Tuesday are wondering why their chosen name of Bonearth is not being recognized.
Painting by Don Dixon.
[io9]