Interesting Stuff Thread

joseph brand

Tech Billionaires Plan Audacious Mission to Mine Asteroids

A group of wealthy, adventurous entrepreneurs will announce on Apr. 24 a new venture called Planetary Resources, Inc., which plans to send swarms of robots to space to scout asteroids for precious metals and set up mines to bring resources back to Earth, in the process adding trillions of dollars to the global GDP, helping ensure humanity’s prosperity and paving the way for the human settlement of space.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/planetary-resources-asteroid-mining/

I wonder what Neil DeGrasse Tyson thinks of this. NASA's funding dropped but here we see private wealthy individuals getting involved in venturing into space. They get their precious metals, and we get the spin off products. Hopefully.

dmw07

Jernal wrote: »

Anyone who completes this gets my respect.

I can imagine you are a fan of Japanese game shows then

robindch

joseph brand wrote: »

RADIO PRESENTER RAY D’Arcy has refused to offer an apology or retraction to the “hierarchy of the Catholic Church” for telling listeners of his TodayFM show last week that the “Catholic Church, in many ways, has ****ed up this country”.

There's a facebook support page open at:

http://www.facebook.com/SupportRayDArcy

Currently at 2500 likes.

fitz0

joseph brand wrote: »

Tech Billionaires Plan Audacious Mission to Mine Asteroids


http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/planetary-resources-asteroid-mining/

I wonder what Neil DeGrasse Tyson thinks of this. NASA's funding dropped but here we see private wealthy individuals getting involved in venturing into space. They get their precious metals, and we get the spin off products. Hopefully.

I'm quite excited by this. I really hope it gets off the ground (literally and figuratively.)

The future...
Today!

On the Ray D'Arcy scandal, I say fair f*cks to Ray. I may not like him much as a presenter but it's a big moment that this has finally been said on air. Email of support sent.

Calibos

...until someone explains to them that the collapse in commodity prices and the effect on the world economy will wipe out any money they make on the asteroid mining....

The Spanish dominance in the 15th century ended not long after all those precious metals started arriving back.

fitz0

I think they're looking for rare metals that, because of cost, prohibit their widespread use. They're not going up there looking for some copper wiring.

Dades

fitz0 wrote: »

They're not going up there looking for some copper wiring.

Though it would very cool if that's what they found. :pac:

Delirium

Sydney scientist helps design tiny super computer

It is only a tiny device - a flat, pancake-like layer of 300 atoms hovering in space.

Yet it has the potential to provide insights into how materials behave at the quantum level that none of today's conventional computers would be capable of calculating.

Turtwig

Isn't she a beauty?

Turtwig

shizz

Cause everyone needs a new wallpaper

Go here for size choices

recedite

koth wrote: »

Sydney scientist helps design tiny super computer

I suspect this device will be involved in the arrival of the tech singularity they were talking about in post #2231. (Expected some time in the middle of this century)

Turtwig

shizz wrote: »

http://i.space.com/images/i/16908/wS1/eastern-north-atlantic-iss-1600.jpg?1335289426

Cause everyone needs a new wallpaper

Go here for size choices

Take your pic.

CerebralCortex

recedite wrote: »

I suspect this device will be involved in the arrival of the tech singularity they were talking about in post #2231. (Expected some time in the middle of this century)

I've been following the talk on the technological singularity for a while. The way I see it is, as long as there isn't a social collapse like that posited by Jared Diamond, then it's not a case of if but when. Either way life as we know will with a high degree of probability drastically change beyond recognition (goes without saying). But when I see things like this I fear it will be catastrophe over something positive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLRkV1-LMMs

joseph brand

The 'beauty' of rotten veg.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/9225833/Rotten-food-landscapes-by-Heikki-Leis.html?frame=2202635

Third photo, (potatoes) reminds me of Gremlins.

Hotblack Desiato

Potatoe? Has Dan Quayle got a job at the Torygraph??

Turtwig

Not sure if Real or not but pretty sweet eitherway.

Hotblack Desiato

True, according to snopes.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/accident/towboat.asp

Turtwig

See what Creationists are missing out on?

robindch

ninja900 wrote: »

Potatoe? Has Dan Quayle got a job at the Torygraph??

Didn't know that he'd been caught on video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdqbi66oNuI

Fer all ye young 'uns, Dan Quayle was foot-in-mouth veep to President George Bush the First (1989-1993).

Quayle wrote:

The holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history.… No, not our nation's, but in World War II. I mean, we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century, but in this century's history.

Quayle wrote:

[...] what a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.

etc, etc.

Hotblack Desiato

Quayle is a liberal intellectual compared to what the Republican Party dredges up these days.

shizz

robindch wrote: »

ninja900 wrote: »

Potatoe? Has Dan Quayle got a job at the Torygraph??

Didn't know that he'd been caught on video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdqbi66oNuI

Fer all ye young 'uns, Dan Quayle was foot-in-mouth veep to President George Bush the First (1989-1993).

Quayle wrote:

The holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history.… No, not our nation's, but in World War II. I mean, we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century, but in this century's history.

Quayle wrote:

[...] what a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.

etc, etc.

but... mmmm... what? I thought the one thing politicians had going for them was speaking coherently. never mind making sense.

Delirium

God particle discovery due within months

A WEST Belfast-born engineer who is director of accelerators and technology at the Cern particle physics laboratory in Geneva has predicted that one of the key secrets of the universe will be discovered in a matter of months.

Dr Stephen Myers told an engineers’ conference in Belfast yesterday that evidence for the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson – the so-called God particle – could be discovered as early as August and by October at the latest.

Delirium

Student researcher spies odd lava spirals on Mars

LOS ANGELES (AP) – A researcher has spotted lava flows shaped like coils of rope near the equator of Mars, the first time such geologic features have been discovered outside of Earth.

These twisty volcanic patterns can be found on Hawaii's Big Island and in the Pacific seafloor on our planet. While evidence for lava flows is present in many places on Mars, none are shaped like this latest find.

Turtwig

Linky.

The link. wrote:

"Our results suggest that habitual analytical thinking could be one reason scientists tend to be disbelievers," notes Norenzaya. It also suggests that – as some religious people fear – exposure to science may erode belief, not just through discoveries such as evolution, but just by promoting analytical thinking.

I can see how this makes sense, but two of the who I would regard as the greatest analytical thinkers I know personally are devout Catholics. Then again it must be said they know their religion intimately, something that I can't say for many Catholics. One of them doesn't even believe in the concept of luck! It absolutely boggles my mind each time how they can have so much compartmentalisation.

Dades

koth wrote: »

God particle discovery due within months

Sounds like a very unscientific way to release (non) information.

Are they trying to drum up funding, I wonder?

Turtwig

Dades wrote: »

Sounds like a very unscientific way to release (non) information.

Are they trying to drum up funding, I wonder?

They probably are trying to drum up funding but either way it's common knowledge that Higgs will either be found or ruled out for definite in the coming months.

joseph brand

Not sure if this belongs in 'Hazards of Belief' or not.

Laxmi Sargara was only a year old when her parents married her to 3-year-old Rakesh. Nearly two decades later, the Indian woman successfully had the marriage annulled. .

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/26/laxmi-sargara-india-child-bride_n_1456212.html

“Child marriage is linked to poverty, lack of education and, above all, to the entrenched social norms that push parents to marry their daughters off early,”

This is what happens to those who haven't eaten from the 'tree of knowledge'.

mikhail

Dades wrote: »

Sounds like a very unscientific way to release (non) information.

Are they trying to drum up funding, I wonder?

It's just various scientists giving what would be normal, low-profile seminars except that the media has flagged this as a big issue, so every one of them gets reported.

robindch

Pushtrak

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-religion-analytical-thinking-20120427,0,5374010.story

Those who think more analytically are less inclined to be religious believers than are those who tend to follow a gut instinct, researchers conclude.

Read more at the link. I'll also post the concluding bit of the article...

So does this mean that religious faith can be undermined with just a little extra mental effort? Not really, said Nicholas Epley, a social psychologist at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the study. But it does show that belief isn't set in stone, but can respond to a person's context.

"There's an illusion that our brains are more static than they actually are," he said. "We have fundamental beliefs and values that we hold, and those things seem sticky, constant. But it's easier to get movement on something fundamental."

As for whether this should alarm the layperson, Epley shrugged. "Even deeply religious people will point out they have had moments of doubt," he said.

Turtwig

Pushtrak wrote: »

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-religion-analytical-thinking-20120427,0,5374010.story

Read more at the link. I'll also post the concluding bit of the article...

*Cough* *five posts up from yours*

(Or four posts up on the previous page if you're awesome.:D)

robindch

Via /.:

See what Dublin would look like with an extra 7m of sea level:

http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=53.3642,-6.2468&z=4

Discovery crashes planes for curiosity's sake:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2012/04/discovery-channel-crashes-plane-for-documentary.html

Primordial soup available near Oslo:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47225834#.T55-CNntPCp

Dades

robindch wrote: »

Via /.:

See what Dublin would look like with an extra 7m of sea level:

http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=53.3642,-6.2468&z=4

I'll have a close-to-seafront property if we get a 7m rise...

.. ker-CHING! :pac:

Pushtrak

Dades wrote: »

I'll have a close-to-seafront property if we get a 7m rise...

.. ker-CHING! :pac:

Evilution will have to give me gills or I'm fecked.

magicbastarder

interesting that o'connell street seems untouched by a 6m rise.

Sonics2k

It's a shame it's not another 20m :pac:

joseph brand

True size of Africa.

http://flowingdata.com/2010/10/18/true-size-of-africa/

Antarctica

http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/Antarctica/ComparativeSize.jpg

Texas- Europe

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5tqi4g02Y1qz8guyo1_500.jpg

British Isles-Antarctica

http://scentofpine.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/antarctica_map.jpg

smokingman

robindch wrote: »

Via /.:

See what Dublin would look like with an extra 7m of sea level:

http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=53.3642,-6.2468&z=4

Looks like I'm safe as long as it's not between 50 and 60 metres
"Build your house on a hill son, 'tis the only way..."

Suddenly my Dads old fashioned words have discovered some climatological meaning! :cool:

Gbear

Dades wrote: »

I'll have a close-to-seafront property if we get a 7m rise...

.. ker-CHING! :pac:

You can zoom out and scroll around the place.

Look at the Netherlands with +7 :eek:

I have to say I wonder is it accurate.

7m is about 23ft. Ignoring the Netherlands, it doesn't seem to be that serious, particularly around cork.

I would've thought half the city would be under water.

shizz

I'm guessing it's just going by terrain altitude. Look at Australia after i think 20m? The middle of it s flooded.

Delirium

Highly Religious People Are Less Motivated by Compassion Than Are Non-Believers

"Love thy neighbor" is preached from many a pulpit. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the highly religious are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.

In three experiments, social scientists found that compassion consistently drove less religious people to be more generous. For highly religious people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they were, according to the findings which are published in the most recent online issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Mark Hamill

Saw this on the "Photo's that shook the world" thread:


150 gigapixel image of a section of the Milky Way, comprised of a billion suns like our own. It represents less than 1% of the galaxy.

Zoom in to see each star.

http://djer.roe.ac.uk/vsa/vvv/iipmooviewer-2.0-beta/vvvgps5.html

recedite

Lizard found with a placenta*

* this upgrade not normally available to reptiles

joseph brand

recedite wrote: »

Lizard found with a placenta*

* this upgrade not normally available to reptiles

Also from that site:

Does Rain Come From Life in the Clouds?

The size and composition of each particle flash across Prather’s monitor. The specks at the heart of those ice crystals are high in aluminum, iron, silicon, and titanium, the chemical signatures of dust not from California but from faraway deserts in Asia or even Africa. There’s something else in the crystals too: carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, telltale signs of biological cells...

Does this mean that there's microbes, bacteria or living cells high above us?

Sarky

Bacteria live everywhere.

magicbastarder

bill hicks writes to someone who is not a fan

robindch

Patrick Moore hasn't quite got over WWII:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2137652/Patrick-Moore-says-hates-Germans-70-years-Nazi-bomb-killed-fianc-e.html

Genghiz Cohen

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Saw this on the "Photo's that shook the world" thread:


150 gigapixel image of a section of the Milky Way, comprised of a billion suns like our own. It represents less than 1% of the galaxy.

Zoom in to see each star.

http://djer.roe.ac.uk/vsa/vvv/iipmooviewer-2.0-beta/vvvgps5.html

I found him!

robindch

The Russian church still has money. The exchange rate is roughly 40 rubles to one euro:

http://englishrussia.com/2012/05/01/the-plant-of-the-russian-orthodox-church/