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Hubble's Greatest Hits

Fri, 27th Mar 2009, 16:11:01  |  Category: News Articles  |  Permalink

NGC 2818 is a beautiful planetary nebula, the gaseous shroud of a dying sun-like star. It could well offer a glimpse of the future that awaits our own Sun in about five billion years.The times have done a nice feature entitled Hubble's greatest hits with some fantastic images up... Well worth a look!

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Is the Hard Disk dead yet?

Mon, 15th Oct 2007, 17:45:59  |  Category: News Articles  |  Permalink

Maybe the hard disk won't be yielding to solid state memory just yet...

"A single hard drive with four terabytes of storage (4TB) could be a reality by 2011, thanks to a nanotechnology breakthrough by Japanese firm Hitachi.

The company has successfully managed to shrink the read-write head of a hard drive to two thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.

..The company said this would mean hard drive storage would continue doubling every two years."

See the original article on the BBC here...

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Lego

Sat, 11th Aug 2007, 15:56:34  |  Category: News Articles  |  Permalink

Giant Dutch Lego on the BBCAn awesome photo in the "Week in pictures" section of the BBC news page today, the caption reads:
"A huge Lego toy has mysteriously appeared on Zandvoort beach in the Netherlands. Nobody knows where it comes from."

I love that stuff like this can still happen :)

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Fertility

Tue, 3rd Jul 2007, 17:11:31  |  Category: News Articles  |  Permalink

Sperm Fertilising an egg - http://www.thedoctorwillseeyounow.com/Just reading an interesting story on the BBC (link) about a new technology that's being developed to help infertile men. Fertile sperm are found and can be cloned and then used to fertilise an egg.

Whilst in principle I think this is great news, and will give hope to many couples who would otherwise be unable to have children, it does contribute to a worry in the back of my mind about human fertility. For example, say a man who would naturally have too low a sperm count to father a child has a son by this technology. The son also has a low sperm count, but again, by the same technology has a child. Soon the human gene pool has a lot of naturally infertile men introduced into it, and if that technology is removed for any reason (eg. nuclear war) then the human race is suddenly in trouble.

Perhaps I just took Children Of Men to heart a little too much, but human fertility and medical advances halting human evolution in humans does worry me.

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Twisting Skyscraper

Wed, 27th Jun 2007, 17:20:21  |  Category: News Articles  |  Permalink

Check out this crazy design for a new tower block in Dubai - each floor rotates individually, meaning that waves of rotation can be sent up the skyscraper.

If this does get built, it'll look immense! Another news article on it here...

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High speed wheelchair driving

Fri, 8th Jun 2007, 10:24:38  |  Category: News Articles  |  Permalink

The BBC reports on how a man in his wheelchair got caught up in the front grill of a lorry in the US, and got pushed along on the front at about 50mph for several miles before the police pulled the driver over. He was totally unaware of the new attachment on the lorry.

Awesome... (link)

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Science Is Hard

Sat, 2nd Jun 2007, 18:53:35  |  Category: News Articles  |  Permalink

A Hard Science Paperthe Onion, June 07
National Science Foundation: Science Hard.

The Onion reports how The National Science Foundation has revealed that science is actually really hard. The article concluded that "I guess there's cool stuff about science, ... like space travel and bombs. But that stuff is so hard, it's honestly not even worth the effort."

Find it here...

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Big Brother Kidney

Sat, 2nd Jun 2007, 12:47:18  |  Category: News Articles  |  Permalink

de grote DONORSHOWThe BBC covered the airing of the immensely controversial Dutch TV Program, 'de grote DONORSHOW' whereby three contestants who were on a waiting list had to compete for a terminally ill patient's kidneys.

The world watched with amazement that such a politically incorrect show could go to air, but no-one predicted what would happen. At the end of the show, it was revealed that the whole thing was a hoax!

Glad to see that television hasn't become as sick as I thought it had, and that some people out there still have a sense of humour :)
Link to the BBC story - clicky clicky.

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Hogzilla

Wed, 30th May 2007, 20:28:33  |  Category: News Articles  |  Permalink

Monster PigYahoo! News - "Boy, 11, bags hog bigger than 'Hogzilla'". Read the article here.

Apparently the wild boar was 1051 pounds (75 stone, 477kg) and nearly 10 feet long. Best of all, they hope to make 500 to 700 pounds worth of sausage.

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