Seven Minutes of Terror: The Challenges of Getting to Mars. Touch down August 5th 2012.
Try yourself, it’s not that scary. Try being who you truly are, instead of being a reflection of what society wants you to be.
VOTE: Ron Paul!
(via mainstreamrevolution)
If I wanted America to fail (I wouldn’t change a thing).
Are there human remains at the Titanic wreck site?
Most of the Titanic’s 1,500 passengers were never recovered, but new photographs suggest there may still be remains to be found. The most discussed photo captures leather boots and what appears to be a coat buried in the mud near the Titanic’s stern. The way the boots are laid out, says James Delgado, the director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), strongly suggests that they landed there while still on the feet and back of a person. ”This is clearly where someone came to rest on the bottom,” Delgado tells The New York Times. “I, as an archaeologist, would say those are human remains,”
In other news: There Are Craters On The Moon! ಠ_ಠ
Let’s be frank: after 100 years on the dinner table, anything that was available to be eaten is gone. All that could possibly remain of organic material are preserved goods, like boots and suit cases.
Calling them human remains is easy, but in what context? They’re human remains as much as KFC’s buckets are remnants of chicken. The best we could possibly do to honor those lives lost is to ensure we document as much as humanly possibly about the site(s) rather than use those sentiments as a means to limit discovery into a potential crime scene.
(via discoverynews)
An Unhackable Baby Quantum Internet Was Born Yesterday
Years from now it may be said that the quantum Internet was born today. When the baby system matures, it will be able to process unfathomable amounts of data and never be hacked.
The system only has two nodes, but the Internet’s birth started in a similar way back in the late 1960s. The developers — physicists led by Stephan Ritter and Gerhard Rempe of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany — published their work in this week’s issue of the journal “Nature.”
The quantum network was built using two atoms of rubidium that exchange photons, or particles of light. Each atom is placed inside a cavity with highly reflecting mirrors on each side, and at a very short distance from each other. The two so-called optical cavities are connected by an optical fiber.
Scientists aim a laser at the first atom, causing the atom to emit a single photon. That photon zooms along the optical fiber to other optical cavity containing the other atom. That’s where the mirrors come in — ordinarily it’s difficult to get an atom and a photon to interact reliably. But by bouncing the photon off the mirrors in the cavity thousands of times, it’s more likley to hit the atom and be absorbed by it. That absorbtion is what transmits the information about the first atom’s quantum state to the second atom.
Besides sending information, the two atoms were entangled, meaning that the atoms were linked. If the first node is in quantum state A, for example, the second node will also be in quantum state A. In this experiment, the atoms were entangled for 100 microseconds — a long time in quantum physics.
This entanglement is what makes hacking into a quantum computer and eavesdropping on impossible. As as soon as a hacker tapped into a quantum network, the states of the atoms wouldn’t match up — a big red flag that something was awary.
It’s a long way yet to a truly large-scale quantum network, but this is a first step.
(via anarcho-queer)
Paintballing with Hezbollah (is the path straight to their hearts), reads the headline on one my my new favorite magazines: Vice.com
We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match.
