London captured in record detail

London gigapixel project /Europics

The world's highest ever definition photograph has been taken of London - so detailed that a naked woman caught in a window had to be edited out.

The London gigapixel project took six weeks to complete using high tech computer software and a powerful Fujitsu Celsius workstation with dual 6-core CPUs, 192GB of RAM, and a 4GB graphics card.

The resulting image is made from 7,886 high-resolution individual photos, adding up to an incredible 80 billion pixels, and can now be seen online at http://www.360cities.net/london.

Spokesman Bruce Pales from 360cities.net said: "Our picture of London was shot by photographer Jeffrey Martin over a period of three days from the top of the Centre Point building.

 

View the rest HERE

Baby Photos From the Ultimate Edge -- a Black Hole

Pretty cool, although I'd like to take a moment to note that black holes are theory and not proven. Very good probability they exist, and function as we suspect... but are really just a theory.

 

"Astronomers may have lucked into the ultimate in cosmic baby pictures: a voracious black hole fresh from its violent birth.

After watching a nearby star that exploded into a supernova in 1979, astronomers now believe the star's death wasn't an ordinary one. The star's explosion was big enough to cause a black hole to develop in its wake. They think it's a black hole because they see something steadily consuming the gassy remnants of the exploded star, which is a tell-tale sign of a black hole. It sucks up everything in sight.

And in this case it's a lot. In the past 30 years since this star exploded, this baby black hole has eaten about the equivalent of the Earth in mass, which is about as big as black hole appetites can get, said Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. He's co-author of a new paper in the journal New Astronomy and he discussed the findings at a NASA news conference Monday. On a cosmic scale the mass of the Earth is not an awful lot to eat, but from Earth's point of view, it's kind of awesome, said NASA astrophysicist Kimberly Weaver. "It's like the planet eater in 'Star Trek,"' she said." See the rest HERE

New Laptops May Boot Instantly, Thanks to Faster Memory

This is what I've been waiting for!

 

 

"Apple's newest MacBook Air laptop boots up in mere seconds, thanks to its use of advanced flash memory instead of a standard, slower hard drive. And that memory format, used in so-called solid-state drives, could soon become a standard in PCs, as manufacturers follow Apple's lead and warm to the benefits of flash storage.

Increasingly used in smartphones, the chips used in flash storage are still expensive -- but market leaders Samsung Electronics, Toshiba, SanDisk and Intel are investing billions of dollars in cutting-edge facilities to boost production.

That will help meet growing demand and make solid-state drives, which are made of flash memory chips instead of mechanical parts, more mainstream by 2012 as prices decline, analysts say. Game fans and other tech-savvy consumers are increasingly buying off-the-shelf solid-state drives, or SSDs, because they are quicker, more rugged and less prone to fail.

Intel lowered the prices of some of its solid-state drives on Friday ahead of the Christmas shopping season. Its suggested retail price for an 80 gigabyte drive is now $199, down from around $225." See the rest HERE

Out of This World! Paper Airplane Snaps Amazing Space Photos

Fracking awesome!

 

"An oversize paper airplane sent up toward the edge of space by a British online tech publication has snapped stunning photos of the final frontier and the Earth far below.

The paper aircraft's Vulture 1 mission took place Oct. 28 as part of the Paper Aircraft Released In Space (PARIS) project conducted by three space enthusiasts with The Register, an online technology publication in the U.K.  

Photos from a camera attached to the plane show the curve of the Earth and the black of space beyond.  [Paper Airplane's Photo of Space]

"The project came about as a response to the Japanese proposal to throw paper planes from the International Space Station," Register writer Lester Haines told SPACE.com in an e-mail. "We thought we could do better, so we did." See the rest HERE

Is this the first step toward a flying car?

Can I get it in red?

 

 

"Along with the jetpack, the flying car tops the list of classic science-fiction imaginings that lead legions of fans to ask -- why don't we have this yet?

Now researchers, with some cash from the U.S. military, might be taking a step toward making these hovering vehicles -- seen in such diverse works as "Blade Runner" and "The Jetsons" -- a reality.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is awarding grants to scientists to help develop its Transformer program, which seeks to create a road-worthy vehicle that can take off vertically like a helicopter and fly.

This week, the robotics institute at Carnegie Mellon University was awarded a $988,000 contract to develop a flight system for the Transformer." See the rest HERE