Hurricane Irene is still a Category 3 storm with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph, as of the most recent update from the National Hurricane Center.
International Space Station Passes Over Hurricane Irene – Astronaut Commentary
| August 29, 2011
Month: August 2011
Astronomers Find Planet Made Of Diamond
| August 28, 2011
An international team of astronomers, led by Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology professor Matthew Bailes, has discovered a planet made of diamond crystals, in our own Milky Way galaxy.
The planet is relatively small at around 60,000 km in diameter (still, it’s five times the size of Earth). But despite its diminutive stature, this crystal space rock has more mass than the solar system’s gas giant Jupiter.
Researchers from institutions in the UK, Australia, Germany, Italy and the USA used a variety of radio telescopes — including the Australian Parkes CSIRO, the Lovell in Cheshire and the Keck in Hawaii — and 200,000 Gigabytes of celestial data to find the nifty diamond-esque planet.
French Snail Racing Championship: Ready, Set, Slow!
| August 28, 2011
As usual, the annual snail racing championship in France got off to a slow start this year.
Now in its 43rd installment, the march of the mollusks pits these slimy creatures against one another in an actual run for their lives. Those snails that don’t make it to the outer ring of the race track could find themselves in a big pot of escargot.
“It’s great, it’s a lot of fun,” one guest told Reuters in the video below. “It’s all about nature and it’s something different than we usually see.”
A Brief History of Military Camouflage
| August 28, 2011
In the late ‘90s, the Canadian military adopted a digital pattern that replaced swirls with a pixilated design. The idea was not to make the uniforms undetectable, but rather to create ambient visual noise that the roving glance of an enemy would disregard. In 2001 the US Marines adopted a similar design. Today all branches of the American military have some version of digital camouflage.
Genius 13-Year-Old Has a Solar Power Breakthrough
| August 28, 2011
When I was 13 I was smoking cigarettes I’d found on the ground and playing Super Nintendo like it was my life’s work. This kid discovered a way to draw 20-50% more power from solar cells.
7th grader Aidan Dwyer was walking in the woods during the winter, and looking up, he noticed something about the bare branches above him. They didn’t appear to be growing randomly. So he took some measurements of the angles of the branches, crunched some numbers, and wouldn’t you know it, he found that the ubiquitous Fibonacci Sequence was behind it all. He suspected there was a reason behind this. That trees were using this pattern to gather more light.
Timelapse – The City Limits
| August 28, 2011
Locations include :
– Montreal, Quebec, Canada
– Quebec city, Quebec, Canada
– Toronto, Ontario, Canada
– Manhattan, New York, USA
– Chicago, Illinois, USA
