TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Generations of Skaters Gather to Pay Tribute to a Legend of the City Skaters met in Brooklyn on Saturday to remember Andy Kessler, a skateboarding pioneer who died last week at age 48. nytimes.com |
T-minus 18 months and counting: Virgin Galactic and the future of space tourism Twenty-five years ago when Sir Richard Branson (sans the "sir," at the time) called up Boeing and asked for a spare 747, few would have predicted the brash entrepreneur would so radically disrupt the formerly staid business of air travel. Perhaps folks had higher hopes for the former record executives' feature film production debut at the same time: 1984 . But today Branson is master of airlines on six of seven continents, employing hundreds of jets, and now the ennobled Brit predicts, his company is a scant 18 months from the first commercial near-orbit flight . [More] rss.sciam.com |
Giant Carp, 100 pounds, Could Devastate Great Lakes Michigan has taken its fight against invasive Asian carp to the U.S. Supreme Court, suing Illinois to force the closure of Chicago-area waterways that provide the fish a pathway to the Great Lakes.Experts fear that the invasive carp, which have been traveling up the Mississippi and Illinois rivers for decades, will devastate the $7 billion Great Lakes fisheries. The 100-pound fish have voracious appetites and rapid reproduction rates that could ravage native lake species. [More] rss.sciam.com |
The Rise of Instant Wireless Networks (preview) In this era of Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone, it is easy to take for granted our ability to connect to the world. Yet communication is most critical precisely at those times when the communications infrastructure is lost. In Haiti, for example, satellite phones provided by aid agencies were the primary method of communication for days following the tragic earthquake earlier this year. But even ordinary events such as a power outage could cripple the cell phone infrastructure, turning our primary emergency contact devices into glowing paperweights.In situations such as these, an increasingly attractive option is to create an “ad-hoc” network. Such networks form on their own wherever specially programmed mobile phones or other communications devices are in range of one another. Each device in the network acts as both transmitter and receiver and, crucially, as a relay point for all the other devices nearby. Devices that are out of range can communicate if those between them are willing to help--passing messages from one to the next like water in a bucket brigade. In other words, each node in the network functions as both a communicator for its own messages and infrastructure for the messages of others. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Start of the End After waiting in the long customs queue at JFK airport in New York City a few years ago, I found myself before an agent with a dour expression. He wondered: What kind of work, exactly, requires a trip to Europe and back in less than three days? As I drew breath to explain my job as an editor at Scientific American , his eyes dropped to the slim volume in my hand, and he suddenly beamed. “Oh, I read that book, and it was terrific.” He handed me back my passport. “Welcome home.”The book? Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (W. W. Norton, 2003), by Mary Roach. I’d heard it was witty and thought it would be diverting for a long international flight. It was. In fact, I was well into the chapter on what happens to bodies during airplane crashes before I noticed I’d been reading it at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean. After a pause (in which I confess I thought about the wisdom of tempting fate), I read on. I was rewarded with fascinating scientific information and, more than that, a good story. [More] Mary Roach - New York City - Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers - United States - Curious Lives of Human Cadavers rss.sciam.com |