In the market for a space shuttle? NASA has a deal for you.
Here is a recession bargain: the space shuttle. NASA has slashed the price of the 1970s-era spaceships to $28.8 million apiece from $42 million.
The shuttles are for sale once their flying days are over, which is scheduled to be this fall.
I bet they’re full of wood paneling and orange carpet.
I don’t get migraines, but bad headaches always make me want to bury my head under a stack of pillows. Scientists may now know why:
Of the 20 blind individuals who volunteered for the study, six couldn’t perceive light at all; they lacked eyes or had a severely damaged optic nerve, which connects the eye to the brain. The other 14, who suffered from genetic and other conditions that lead to blindness, couldn’t see, but they could sense certain shades of light.
Not surprisingly, the six people who had no vision at all didn’t experience pain from light when they had a migraine. But the other 14 did. This was an interesting clue, because these individuals had faulty rods and cones, cells in the retina that do most of the work of light detection. They did, however, have other retinal cells that functioned fine, particularly those with a type of receptor called melanopsin. Melanopsin doesn’t help people see shapes, but it does react to light–specifically, blue light.
At this point, says Burstein, “we needed to follow the melanopsin,” to see whether the cells expressing it might link up with cells that transmit pain. And indeed, in the rat brain, axons from the light-sensitive melanopsin cells hooked up to specific nerve cells in the thalamus that play a role in pain sensation, the team reports online this week in Nature Neuroscience.
A giant digital camera is being built by an international team of scientists at Fermilab in an attempt to solve the mystery of dark energy.
Of course, we don’t really know whether dark energy even exists. What we do know is that the universe has been expanding since the big bang. But rather than slowing down like everything else fighting gravity’s pull, this expansion seems to be speeding up. Something must be causing this, and astronomers call that something dark energy. The hope is that scientists can use detailed photos to chart the light from galaxies and supernovas, which will show the growth of the cosmos and at least give them more evidence for the existence and effect of dark energy.
Speaking of Star Wars, here’s a commercial from 1977 for a collection of movie tie-in toys. For some reason, I very clearly remember the part with Han Solo and Chewbacca on the potted plant from when I was a kid.
That Death Star playset is one of the best toys I ever had.
When the Gestapo arrested Frank’s family and 4 others who had been hidden from the Nazis in a secret room, Miep Gies kept Anne Frank’s diary safe until Otto Frank returned after the war.
The girl had chronicled two years of the emotions and fears that gripped her during hiding, as well as candid thoughts on her family, her feelings for friend-in-hiding Peter van Pels, and dreams of being a professional writer. Mixed into the entries were the names of the Dutch helpers, who risked their lives to keep the family’s secret.
“I didn’t read Anne’s diary papers. … It’s a good thing I didn’t because if I had read them I would have had to burn them,” she said in the 1998 interview. “Some of the information in them was dangerous.”
Back when I was a boy, I bought a children’s book at my town’s library book sale called “2010: Living in the Future” by Geoffrey Hoyle. Written in 1972, it had been withdrawn from the library’s collection by the mid-80s, when I picked it up. I’ve somehow managed to hang onto it for 25 years and now, suddenly, here we are: 2010. I’m reproducing this long out-of-print book here to see how we’re doing. Are we really living in the future?
French photographer Vincent Fournier has produced some wonderful images of the Chinese, Russian and US space agencies, including their earthly training grounds.
More of Fournier’s work can be found at his website.
(via snarkmarket)
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a witness to both of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August, 1945, and not only survived, but lived into his nineties.
Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was in Hiroshima on a business trip when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the so-called Little Boy device detonated above the city.
Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than two miles away from ground zero that day. His eardrums were ruptured, and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.
Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to Nagasaki, his hometown, the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people.
Netflix has entered into an agreement that will oblige customers to wait a month to rent new releases from Warner Bros.
Today is sad day for Netflix customers. The online video rental supplier has just announced an agreement with Warner Bros. that will forever alter your online rental experience. Now should you wish to rent a Warner Bros. flick you’ll have to wait out a 28-day holding period after the film’s initial DVD release date.
From Bookslut, on a new biography of Arthur Koestler by Michael Scammell.
So you’re writing a biography, and the guy is a genius. Wrote a masterful book, and is underappreciated for a lot of the rest of his career, something you’d like to see changed. But there are a few weird personal life details you have to overcome in the biography. Like, say, how the guy had a slight rapey habit. How do you deal with that?
Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago, the Burj Khalifa rises 2,717 feet above the desert in Dubai. Originally named the Burj Dubai, it opened on Monday with a new name, a month after Dubai narrowly avoided bankruptcy by receiving a bailout from Abu Dhabi to help cover its debts.
But in deciding to change the tower’s name from Burj Dubai to Burj Khalifa, in honor of the president of Abu Dhabi, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Dubai revealed a rare streak of humility consistent with its diminished economic condition. Once the most proudly autonomous of Arab Emirates, Dubai has found that its financial troubles have made it more dependent on Abu Dhabi and more likely to be drawn closer into the federation.
“Dubai not only has the world’s tallest building, but has also made what looks like the most expensive naming rights deal in history,” said Jim Krane, the author of “City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism.” “Renaming the Burj Dubai after Sheik Khalifa of Abu Dhabi — if not an explicit quid pro quo — is a down payment on Dubai’s gratitude for its neighbor’s $10 billion bailout last month.”
David Pogue reviews Google’s Nexus One phone and doesn’t find it as groundbreaking as we are led to believe, especially regarding the new Google phone store.
I mean, it’s a great idea and all. It’s just that, well, apart from the iPhone, who really cares which carrier has a certain phone? In the list of complaints about American cellphone carriers sent to me by readers, that one is waaaaaay down the list.
Besides, the Google phone store doesn’t really do much to solve the problem. In this country, there are two competing network formats. There’s C.D.M.A. (used by Verizon and Sprint) and there’s G.S.M. (favored by AT&T and T-Mobile and most other countries).
The current Nexus One is a G.S.M. phone. So when you buy it online, you get the following vast menu of carriers: T-Mobile. (Or you can use AT&T, but you have to supply your own subscriber card, and you won’t get 3G Internet speed.)
Wow, that changes everything, doesn’t it?
Still, you have to agree that it’s in everyone’s best interests for the Google phone store to succeed. Here’s hoping it gets better.
Bridge House in Adelaide, Australia, designed by Architect Max Pritchard, spans a creek and provides “the experience of living amongst the trees in an almost untouched beautiful setting”.
Whenever Guenter Grass was in the communist German Democratic Republic after The Tin Drum came out in 1959, the East German secret police went to great lengths to track his every move.
“Grass was completely surrounded by spies when he came to the GDR. All his official interlucutors were IMs, ‘unofficial employees’ (spies), all of them,” said Schlueter, who went through over 2,000 Stasi files to compile his book.
“Whether they were from writers’ associations, publishers’ representatives, state representatives, theatre people … he was completely surrounded.
MicMacs is a new film from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the man behind Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and Amelie.
All about the New Year’s Eve Ball that descends every year from atop One Times Square, including the newest high-tech incarnation that is both brighter and more energy efficient than previous balls.
The new Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball is a 12 foot geodesic sphere, double the size of previous Balls, and weighs 11,875 pounds. Covered in 2,668 Waterford Crystals and powered by 32,256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LEDS, the new Ball is capable of creating a palette of more than 16 million vibrant colors and billions of patterns producing a spectacular kaleidoscope effect atop One Times Square.
The organizers also announced that the new Ball will become a year-round attraction above Times Square in full public view January through December.
The aim of the Times Square to Art Square project is to replace all advertising on billboards in Times Square with works of art. If it pans out, artists will upload artwork to the website and visitors will donate money to the artists that impress them. How much money an artist has donated to them will determine how much exposure time they get in Times Square.
The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies is a collection of essays on Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 movie The Big Lebowski.
As a new generation of “Lebowski” fans emerges, Dude Studies may linger for a while. In another of this book’s essays, “Professor Dude: An Inquiry Into the Appeal of His Dudeness for Contemporary College Students,” a bearded, longhaired and rather Dude-like associate professor of English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., named Richard Gaughran asks this question about his students: “What is it that they see in the Dude that they find so desirable?”
One of Mr. Gaughran’s students came up with this summary, and it’s somehow appropriate for an end-of-the-year reckoning: “He doesn’t stand for what everybody thinks he should stand for, but he has his values. He just does it. He lives in a very disjointed society, but he’s gonna take things as they come, he’s gonna care about his friends, he’s gonna go to somebody’s recital, and that’s it. That’s how you respond.”
Nation’s Pride is the fictional Nazi propaganda film screened for the German high command at the end of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. It was filmed by Eli Roth, who played Sgt. Donny Donowitz in Basterds.
Also available, and just as ficitonal, is the Making of Nation’s Pride, with Roth as director Alois Von Eichberg.