Have you ever wondered why some telescopes are launched into space while others are built on remote mountain tops? What is actually the best for astronomy? Here we provide a ringside view of the fight for the elusive photons from deep space - is it a battle of the telescope giants?
I videotaped my bring-up attempts for my homebuilt computer. This is the one that worked. Magic-1 is a completely home-built computer, including the CPU. It is made out of about 200 74 series TTL chips plus relatively modern SRAM, UARTs and an old 8055 programmable 8-bit I/O port. For more details see http://www.homebrewcpu.com
Jaws, MAUI (January 20, 2011)ËœThis morning at 2:00am local Hawaii time, professional big wave surfer Mark Visser made history by achieving a night ride on waves measuring 30-40 foot faces off the shores of Maui with specially engineered LED lights built into a buoyancy vest and modified into the surfboard. The lighting technologies were created especially for the project by Solus Corporation using ground breaking NASA submarine lighting to ensure the wave and board were lit in the right places, at the right time and illuminated the wave without hindering the vision of Visser, the jet ski drivers and the helicopter pilots.
A true world first - no one has attempted to ride and capture big waves at Jaws, Maui before in total darkness quite like this. With the help of his team overhead in a helicopter, Visser was towed in by jet ski as he entered the infamous big wave break just prior to the peak of the swell, completely illuminated.
In this first-of-its-kind demo, Heather Knight introduces Data, a robotic stand-up comedian that does much more than rattle off one-liners -- it gathers audience feedback through advanced sensors and tunes its act as the crowd responds. Is this thing on?
Plenty of robots can fly -- but none can fly like a real bird. That is, until Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull, that flies by flapping its wings. A soaring demo fresh from TEDGlobal 2011.
The Bolshoi simulation is the most accurate cosmological simulation of the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe yet made (bolshoi is the Russian word for great or grand).
The starting point for Bolshoi was the best ground- and space-based observations, including NASA's long-running and highly successful WMAP Explorer mission that has been mapping the light of the Big Bang in the entire sky. One of the world's fastest supercomputers then calculated the evolution of a typical region of the universe a billion light years across. The Bolshoi simulation took 6 million cpu hours to run on the Pleiades supercomputer—recently ranked as seventh fastest of the world's top 500 supercomputers—at NASA Ames Research Center.
