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Anila Quayyum Agha Sweeps ArtPrize, Winning Both Jury and Public Grand Prize Awards. Anila Quayyum Agha’s “Intersections” at the Grand Rapids Art Museum (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic) After years of jokes about Jesus paintings and quilts seducing the art crowds flocking to the Grand Rapids-based ArtPrize art competition, this year the juried and popular votes have synched up to reveal one big winner. Another view of Agha’s “Intersections” Pakistan-born and Indianapolis-based Anila Quayyum Agha has swept the grand prizes, winning the $200,000 popular one, and splitting the purse for the $200,000 juried prize with Richmond, Virginia-based artist Sonya Clark.

Agha’s “Intersections” installation at the Grand Rapids Art Museum filled an entire gallery with a light source in the center of a laser-cut wooden cube. The lattice of shadows represents, according to the artist’s statement, “geometric patterning in Islamic sacred spaces, associated with certitude.” For her “Hair Craft Project,” Sonya Clark explored the poetry and politics of black hair care specialists.

Emdrive - Home. Quantum bounce could make black holes explode. A. Corichi/J.P. Ruiz The collapse of a star into a black hole could be a temporary effect that leads to the formation of a 'white hole', suggests a new model based on a theory known as loop quantum gravity. Black holes might end their lives by transforming into their exact opposite — 'white holes' that explosively pour all the material they ever swallowed into space, say two physicists. The theory suggests that the transition from black hole to white hole would take place right after the initial formation of the black hole, but because gravity dilates time, outside observers would see the black hole lasting billions or trillions of years or more, depending on its size.

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that when a dying star collapses under its own weight, it can reach a stage at which the collapse is irreversible and no known force of nature can stop it. In a loop Information paradox All in the timing. Dark matter makes up 80% of the Universe—but where is it all? It’s in the room with you now. It’s more subtle than the surveillance state, more transparent than air, more pervasive than light. We may not be aware of the dark matter around us (at least without the ingestion of strong hallucinogens), but it’s there nevertheless. Although we can't see dark matter, we know a bit about how much there is and where it's located. Measurement of the cosmic microwave background shows that 80 percent of the total mass of the Universe is made of dark matter, but this can’t tell us exactly where that matter is distributed. From theoretical considerations, we expect some regions—the cosmic voids—to have little or none of the stuff, while the central regions of galaxies have high density.

Unlike ordinary matter, we can’t see where dark matter is by using the light it emits or absorbs. Despite that difficulty, astronomers are making significant progress. A (very) brief history of dark matter The Bullet Cluster. Mysterious signal from the center of the Perseus C... - The Watchers. Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to explore the Perseus Cluster, a swarm of galaxies approximately 250 million light years from Earth, have observed the spectral line that appears not to come from any known type of matter. The signal they received can not be explained by known physics but they say it shifts suspicion to the dark matter. Perseus Cluster a collection of galaxies and one of the most massive known objects in the Universe, immersed in an enormous 'atmosphere' of superheated plasma.

It is approximately 768 000 light years across. Perseus Cluster. Image credit: Credit: NASA / Chandra "I couldn't believe my eyes," says Esra Bulbul of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. "What we found, at first glance, could not be explained by known physics. " "The cluster's atmosphere is full of ions such as Fe XXV, Si XIV, and S XV. Yet, in 2012 when Bulbul added together 17 day's worth of Chandra data, a new line popped up where no line should be. Perseus Cluster. Infographic: The State of 3D Sex Toy Printing « Future of Sex Future of Sex. By Jenna Owsianik+ on May 8, 2014 Create your own X-rated toys at home with digital technology. 3D printing has become all the rage, opening up a sea of possibilities for do-it-yourself designs at home and in the workplace. The cheaper models sell for just a few hundred dollars, making the technology more affordable than ever. Of course, it hasn’t taken long for the sexually curious to tinker with it and create 3D models for the bedroom.

Right now, it’s possible to print life-size replicas of your own genitals as well as someone else’s. For those smitten with teenybopper culture, custom designs of Hello Kitty and Justin Bieber are also available for vibrators. Be aware: 3D-printed objects often have rough surfaces that can collect bacteria. Check out this thorough and funky infographic from Pink Rocket below. The Quest for Randomness. Determining whether numbers truly can have no pattern has implications for quantum mechanics, not to mention the stock market and data security. Scott Aaronson One of my favorite Dilbert cartoons features a lizardlike creature that’s billed as a “random number generator,” but that only ever seems to spit out the number nine.

Dilbert asks his guide, “Are you sure that’s random?” The guide replies, “That’s the problem with randomness. It’s funny (at least to me), but is it true? These questions might sound metaphysical, but we don’t need to look far to find real-world consequences. Then there’s quantum mechanics, which famously has declared for a century that “God plays dice,” that there’s irreducible randomness even in the behavior of subatomic particles. The obvious way to check whether a sequence is random is just to throw some statistical tests at it. A moment’s thought will reveal that the problem is completely general. The situation is not quite as hopeless as it sounds. Bras in Space: The Incredible True Story Behind Upcoming Film Spacesuit | The Credits. “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” – President John F.

Kennedy, September 12, 1962, Rice University. When we think of the Apollo 11 moon landing, what do we think of? President Kennedy’s bold vision. Why? A crucial cog in the Apollo 11 moon landing, hard at work. The creation of the Apollo AL7 Pressure Garment is one of the great American stories of the past forty-plus years. Instead, pitted against the military-industrial complex, Playtex created the 21-layer spacesuit, each layer distinct yet interrelated in function to the rest of the whole—a masterly combination of elegance, complexity, and form. Yes. It wasn’t totally unheard of. 1969-70 - SEEK - Nicholas Negroponte (American) - cyberneticzoo.com. "Seek", 1970 by Nicholas Negroponte with the Architecture Machine Group , M.I.T.

Originally shown at the "Software" exhibition, curated by Jack Burnham for the Jewish Museum in New York 1970. This piece consisted of a Plexiglass encased, computer-controlled environment full of small blocks and inhabited by gerbils, who continuously changed the position of the blocks. Following instructions programmed by the authors the robotic arm automatically rearranged the blocks in a specific pattern.

Once the arrangement was disrupted, a computer-controlled robotic arm rebuilt the block configurations in a manner its programmers believed followed the gerbil's objectives. The designers, however, did not successfully anticipate the reactions of the animals, who often outwitted the computer and created total disarray. Cover of the Software exhibition that SEEK was exhibited in. Close-up of the gerbils on the front cover. Source: Digital Visions – Computers and Art by Cynthia Goodman 1987 p41. We face being buried under an avalanche of Chinese science | Kostas Kostarelos. I was chatting with a friend and collaborator based in Germany recently about the completion of a new building that his university was constructing, dedicated to biomedical imaging sciences.

I was sharing my own exhilaration about the serious investment that our government, regional agencies and the EU were making in graphene research at the University of Manchester. At some point in our conversation it became apparent that as extraordinary as the investments in our institutions were, they did not even come close to what we had both experienced from recent trips in China. Our conclusion was that "for each floor refurbishment in Europe, a new building is built is China, and for each new building in Europe, a new campus is built in China …" The magnitude of R&D investment in China is unprecedented and well-documented.

Nanoscience is a strategically important field in the eyes of Chinese policymakers: a poster-child of new-age, high-tech China. How to #DrownYourTown: a step by step guide to modeling sea level rise in Google Earth. We’ve reached the point in the program where requests for #DrownYourTown are coming in faster than I can process. That’s great! It means people are really connecting with the #DrownYourTown hashtag as a way to bring the concept (if not the specific details) of sea level rise home. The response has been greater than I ever imagined! So, rather than leave people high and dry (we wouldn’t want that, would we), here is a step by step guide to simulating sea level rise anywhere in the world using Google Earth and a little geographic wizardry. The best part? It can all be done with completely free software. 1. 2. Clear the world 3. Add some buildings. 3b. 4. 5. Add image overlay 6. 7. 8.

Set the altitude. 9. 10. Take a picture! New discovery reveals 2100 could be a "catastrophic" year. If it gets much hotter and drier....bye bye Phoenix!! (I live here) PHOENIX — A blazing heat wave expected to send the mercury soaring to nearly 120 degrees in Phoenix and Las Vegas over the weekend settled across the West on Friday, threatening to ground airliners and raising fears that pets will get burned on the scalding pavement.

The heat was so punishing that rangers took up positions at trailheads at Lake Mead in Nevada to persuade people not to hike. Zookeepers in Phoenix hosed down the elephants and fed tigers frozen fish snacks. Truck Carrying Nuclear Waste Stolen In Mexico: IAEA. A truck carrying nuclear waste was stolen in Mexico earlier this week, Agence France-Presse reported. The truck was transporting the radioactive isotope cobalt-60 from a hospital in Tijuana to a radioactive waste storage facility when it was taken on Monday, NBC noted. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mexican authorities are currently conducting a search for the missing truck, and have issued a press release to alert the public. Cobalt-60, which is primarily used in medical treatments, cannot be utilized in a conventional nuclear weapon; however, it could be added to a "dirty bomb.

" Such a device could potentially spread the radioactive material over a wide area. In a statement, the IAEA cautioned anyone against trying to access the material inside the truck. "At the time the truck was stolen, the source was properly shielded. Exposure to large sources of cobalt-60 can cause skin burns, acute radiation sickness or death, the CDC reports. Also on HuffPost: The Climate Bomb Redux - ImaGeo. Mushroom clouds blossom over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right) from atom bombs dropped by the United States on August 6 and 9, 1945. (Source: Wikimedia Commons) Imagine four atomic bombs like the one that incinerated Hiroshima, Japan on Aug. 6, 1945 exploding in the atmosphere every single second of every day of every week and every month, year after year, ad infinitum.

That, says John Cook and colleagues at the web site Skeptical Science, is a good way to understand the excess heat that is building up in the atmosphere as a result of humankind’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Four atomic bombs’ worth of extra energy, every second. My friend and fellow Discover blogger Keith Kloor called this, well, explosive comparison “The Climate Bomb.” Thus my headline, “The Climate Bomb Redux.” I found it compelling at first. So I decided to investigate. The Climate Bomb – Hiroshima Comparison Click for information about the widget. A Lack of Scientific Context. Do We Live in the Matrix? They could create a plethora of pet universes, vastly outnumbering the real cosmos. This thought led philosopher Nick Bostrom at the University of Oxford to conclude in 2003 that it makes more sense to bet that we’re delusional silicon-based artificial intelligences in one of these many forgeries, rather than carbon-based organisms in the genuine universe.

Since there seemed no way to tell the difference between the two possibilities, however, bookmakers did not have to lose sleep working out the precise odds. Learning the Truth That changed in 2007 when John D. Barrow, professor of mathematical sciences at Cambridge University, suggested that an imperfect simulation of reality would contain detectable glitches. Just like your computer, the universe’s operating system would need updates to keep working. Last year, Beane and colleagues suggested a more concrete test of the simulation hypothesis. The simulation’s lattice has another observable effect that astronomers could pick up. Gallery: Disorienting audiovisual show prepares you for teleportation. Do We Live in the Matrix? They could create a plethora of pet universes, vastly outnumbering the real cosmos. This thought led philosopher Nick Bostrom at the University of Oxford to conclude in 2003 that it makes more sense to bet that we’re delusional silicon-based artificial intelligences in one of these many forgeries, rather than carbon-based organisms in the genuine universe.

Since there seemed no way to tell the difference between the two possibilities, however, bookmakers did not have to lose sleep working out the precise odds. Learning the Truth That changed in 2007 when John D. As the simulation degrades, Barrow suggested, we might see aspects of nature that are supposed to be static — such as the speed of light or the fine-structure constant that describes the strength of the electromagnetic force — inexplicably drift from their “constant” values. Last year, Beane and colleagues suggested a more concrete test of the simulation hypothesis. The weird consequences would not end there. New type of quantum excitation behaves like a solitary particle. Gravitational waves show deficit in black hole collisions. Florida Teen Girl Charged With Felony After Science Experiment Goes Bad. Atoms star in world's smallest movie from IBM.

Where art meets science: Who will produce the next da Vinci? How Far is it to Mars? Trailer For Futuristic Film ‘Project Kronos’ Explores Interstellar Space Travel Program. A Horrific Bionic Choir That You Play Like An Organ. From idea to science: Knowing when you’ve got a good idea. Laser intended for Mars used to detect “honey laundering” Pure Social, Location, and Mobile: A Tough Nut to Crack. Tattooed Taxidermy. Branded taxidermy by peter gronquist | TheCoolCollector. Taxidermy + art | :: thesis diary ::