Waterproof Your iPhone, Everything Else With This Spray. Twice the height of the Empire State - EnviroMission plans massive solar tower for Arizona. An ambitious solar energy project on a massive scale is about to get underway in the Arizona desert. EnviroMission is undergoing land acquisition and site-specific engineering to build its first full-scale solar tower - and when we say full-scale, we mean it! The mammoth 800-plus meter (2625 ft) tall tower will instantly become one of the world's tallest buildings.
Its 200-megawatt power generation capacity will reliably feed the grid with enough power for 150,000 US homes, and once it's built, it can be expected to more or less sit there producing clean, renewable power with virtually no maintenance until it's more than 80 years old. In the video after the jump, EnviroMission CEO Roger Davey explains the solar tower technology, the Arizona project and why he couldn't get it built at home in Australia. View all How Solar Towers Work Enviromission's solar tower is a simple idea taken to gigantic proportions. The Arizona Project. Geometry - Is this Batman equation for real? - Mathematics - Stack Exchange. Mythbuster's Hyneman designs next-gen military armor.
Mythbusters - the Discovery Channel reality show - has gained quite a reputation for dramatically shattering preconceived notions that many viewers have believed for years. So it doesn't come as much of a surprise that Jamie Hyneman’s prowess recently caught the attention of the U.S. military. Yes, the Department of Defense has asked Hyneman to help it develop a new generation of lighter, stronger armor for military vehicles. Of course, Hyneman is already involved with several other projects outside his regular ol' "day job" at Mythbusters - including developing special effects for the film industry. Still, Hyneman is making time to work with the Office of Naval Research in its quest to improve vehicle armor and better protect U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Anyone that has watched Mythbusters for a while will attest to Hyneman being no stranger to experimenting with explosives in different scenarios.
[Via Discovery News & CNET] Space-Time Cloak Possible, Could Make Events Disappear? It's no illusion: Science has found a way to make not just objects but entire events disappear, experts say. According to new research by British physicists, it's theoretically possible to create a material that can hide an entire bank heist from human eyes and surveillance cameras. "The concepts are basically quite simple," said Paul Kinsler, a physicist at Imperial College London, who created the idea with colleagues Martin McCall and Alberto Favaro. Unlike invisibility cloaks—some of which have been made to work at very small scales—the event cloak would do more than bend light around an object.
Instead this cloak would use special materials filled with metallic arrays designed to adjust the speed of light passing through. In theory, the cloak would slow down light coming into the robbery scene while the safecracker is at work. When the robbery is complete, the process would be reversed, with the slowed light now racing to catch back up. Event Cloak "Fun" but Challenging. Polar bear ancestors came from Ireland | Science. It's a long way from the Arctic to Tipperary, but scientists have discovered polar bears can trace their family tree to Ireland. Genetic evidence shows they are descended from Irish brown bears that lived during the last ice age. Modern polar bears share a distinct DNA sequence, passed down the female line, with their now extinct brown ancestors.
However, the same DNA fingerprint is absent from other species of brown bear alive today. It is thought the link arose from interbreeding between prehistoric polar bears and female brown bears when their paths crossed as the Irish climate cooled. Scientists made the discovery after analysing DNA in mitochondria – energy-producing structures within cells – that are only passed from a mother to her offspring. Polar and brown bears are hugely different in terms of body size, skin and coat colour, fur type, tooth structure and many other physical features. They are also very distinct behaviourally.