CO2-Absorbing Crystals

LOS ANGELES -- Researchers at UCLA made headlines this month by developing a nanoscale crystal that traps roughly 80 times its volume of carbon dioxide. The process that head researcher Omar Yaghi and his lab used to develop the compound is potentially much more significant. At one point, the technique was yielding so many potentially useful compounds that Yahgi had to ask his students to stop so they could publish their findings.

14 Grand Engineering Challenges of the 21st Century

Some of the world's brightest minds have been laying out this century's greatest engineering challenges.

The panel of 18 engineers, technologists and futurists included Google co-founder Larry Page and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter. They spent more than a year pondering how best to improve life on Earth and came up with 14 Grand Engineering Challenges, a list the National Academy of Engineering deemed so momentous it should be capitalized.
The list addresses four themes the committee considered "essential for humanity to flourish" - environmental sustainability, health, reducing our vulnerability and adding to the joy of living.
"We chose engineering challenges that we feel can, through creativity and committment, be realistically met, most of them early in this century," said committee chair William J. Perry, the former Secretary of Defense who teaches engineering at Stanford University. "Some can be, and should be, achieved as soon as possible."

Heres the list:

Make solar energy affordable.
Provide energy from fusion.
Develop carbon sequestration methods.
Manage the nitrogen cycle.
Provide access to clean water.
Restore and improve urban infrastructure.
Advance health informatics.
Engineer better medicines.
Reverse-engineer the brain.
Prevent nuclear terror.
Secure cyberspace.
Enhance virtual reality.
Advance personalized learning.
Engineer the tools for scientific discovery.

The committee, which also included such luminaries as futurist Ray Kurzweil and robotics guru Dean Kamen, decided not to make any predictions or focus on gee-whiz gadgets. They felt it more important to outline broad objectives that might influence research funding and governmental policy.

The 14 challenges they laid out were culled from hundreds of suggestions from engineers, scientists, policymakers and ordinary people around the world.
"Meeting these challenges would be game changing," said Charles M. Vest, president of the NAE. "Success with any of them could dramatically improve life for everyone."


You too can have input by clicking on the engineering challenge you think is the most important:

Engineering's Grand Challenges
http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/

The Genius of Christopher Wren

Today is the day when the extraordinary Christopher Wren died. Feb. 25, 1723.

Wren was a leading mathematician, astronomer and architect of his time.

Born in 1632, Wren had a breadth of interests worthy of a Leonardo. His ideas and inventions include instruments for surveying, measuring angles and writing in the dark, as well as different machines to lift water and create perspective drawings, ways of finding longitude and distance at sea, military devices for defending cities, and designs for submarines and telescopes. He also discussed the grinding of conical lenses and mirrors and devised a blood-transfusion method, demonstrating it with two dogs.

Wren became a professor of astronomy at age 25. He solved Kepler's Problem on cutting a semicircle, independently proved Kepler's third law, and formulated the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction.

Wren was a founding member of the Royal Society in 1660 and later served as its president. But his interest in physics and engineering soon led him to architecture, and he designed buildings at Cambridge and Oxford, where he was teaching.

He submitted plans for a classical addition to the decrepit, decaying, dilapidated Gothic St. Paul's Cathedral in London in May 1666. His plan was accepted just six days before the Great Fire of London in September of that year. The conflagration burned nearly all of the ancient city center, including 87 churches, 44 livery halls and 13,200 houses -- but took only nine lives. The fire left most of the cathedral in charred ruins, but plans proceeded to restore it. Then a further collapse in 1668 made it clear that a completely new St. Paul's would have to be built.

Wren submitted three new designs before King Charles II and his commissioners finally agreed to one. The foundation stone was laid in 1675, and after 33 years a-building, Wren's architect son (also named Christopher) placed the last stone on the topmost spire above the lantern above the dome in 1708.

Within days of the fire, Wren had also submitted to the king a complete urban design to replace the twisting, meandering and often narrow lanes of the City of London with a plan of baroque splendor, including wide, radial avenues and broad vistas. It was not to be, as merchants and property owners did not want to have their lots realigned. They set about rebuilding as soon as the ashes had cooled and -- with just a little widening and straightening here and there -- rebuilt the city along its medieval streets.

As surveyor general of the Royal Works, Wren designed many buildings in the post-fire years, including the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, hospitals in Chelsea and Greenwich and 51 churches -- 23 of which survive (some with significant post-Blitz rebuilding). He was knighted in 1673, but for all this work, he was paid only 200 pounds a year ($56,000 in today’s money) and was summarily dismissed in 1718 amid a dispute over the speed of rebuilding.

Wren died at age 91 at his home in Hampton Court after returning from a visit to St. Paul's. He is buried in the crypt of St. Paul's, beneath a plaque that in Latin acknowledges him as "builder of this church and this city…. Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”

Mental Health

Mental Wealth (PS Ad) - Amazing videos are here

David Lynch on Film Making

David Lynch On Filmmaking And Meditation - Watch the top videos of the week here

Undulating Nudes Become Spiraling Galaxy - The Calling by Chris Boyd

This is Pure Genius:Wow absolutely amazing.The Calling is profound and stirring and cuts into our preconceptions of origin and evolution, not only of ourselves, the human creature, but from the inaugural onset of time itself, the planet. The imagery used on the single channel video by artist Chris Boyd is sensual and emotive. It imbues a sense of our physical entity and existence, where we have come from and ultimately leaves one with a sense of reflection and retrospective. An awareness of the moment, now, as if standing on the precipice of contemplation of where humanity is going. It is both sexual and spiritual, the fundamentals that drive life forward. It is provocative, yet intrinsic, and touches on the core elements of human consciousness and perception of time and space and our roles within the socio-historical edifice. As I watched the writhing and cascading bodies, genomic re-reproduction of digitalised forms, I saw my heritage, myself and my progeny in that one moment. It captures the viewer, but gets inside and holds them at that moment where time seems to stand still. The split second of awakenings and realisations cognitive, as ‘I think, therefore I am’ (Descartes), E = mc² (Einstein); Eureka (Archimedes); ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’, Oppenheimer. The sentience is embodied in Boyd’s visualisations. In 2004 Chris, an Interactive Arts student at Manchester Metropolitan from 2003-2006, received a Microwave award from FACT, the UK’s leading organisation for the development and exhibition of film, video and new media. He won the Big Art Challenge, where he was labelled a genius by art critic Brian Sewell, the 6 part series on channel 5 was aiming to seek out the next Damien Hirst or JMW Turner with a prize of £10,000. In 2005 Chris received a Priestley prize and provided a video in 40 artists 40 Days, a special Tate Britain project supporting London’s Olympic bid that brought the Games to Britain in 2012. He curated the Chaosmos exhibition for the Liverpool Biennial 2006.

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Who is Magibon / MRirian ?

One of the most popular profiles on YouTube features videos of a young girl named "magibon" or "MRirian" staring bashfully into a webcam. Her profile says she is 21-years old but various sources say she is actually only 14. Wonder if her parents know she is getting hundreds of thousands of views each week? She looks like she is either gonna break out into tears or peals of laughter.
What is this? Who is this? More important, why are so many people watching this girl, and not just watching but responding with imitations -- some better than others -- of their own?
There's an easy answer for this -- you can account for her popularity in the same way one explains any Internet phenomenon, which is that when you put a billion people or more together in a liberating digital landscape, kickass things happen -- but, of course, it's possible to gin up more penetrating arguments.
MRirian, as she calls herself, is a Japanese girl who lives in the United States, or an American girl who longs to live in Japan, or both, or neither. She looks like a teenager, but her profile pegs her as 21. She writes a blog in Japanese, and in the videos in which she speaks, she speaks Japanese, though Japanese speakers say she's not very fluent.
MRirian, as she calls herself, is a Japanese girl who lives in the United States, or an American girl who longs to live in Japan, or both, or neither. She looks like a teenager, but her profile pegs her as 21. She writes a blog in Japanese, and in the videos in which she speaks, she speaks Japanese, though Japanese speakers say she's not very fluent.
Two themes interleave the online discussions -- some not at all nice -- that seek to grapple with her popularity: One, that she's playing "pedobait," to use a lovely phrase, aiming to gain an audience of boys and men for ad-revenue purposes (i.e., she's a camgirl).
And/or two, that she's making some kind of artsy, deep comment by playing a stereotype, that stereotype being either -- now hang with me here -- of pop culture-addled Japanese teenage girls, or of white American girls who play pop culture-added Japanese teenagers (which girls are known as "wapanese," a word roughly comparable to "wigger.")
Probably a little bit of all of these things is true. None of MRirian's videos is overtly sexual, but you can tell from the YouTube comments that that's where some in her audience have their minds. Look at the way she writes -- all those smileys! She's trying, to be sure, to be cute in the cute-overload way that some Humbertish men find arousing.
At the same time, much of the interest in her seems to be driven by sheer puzzlement. People are watching just because other people are watching, all of us as interested in why everyone else is interested. That she seems to be trying to make some kind of point animates the attention, but her point, whatever it is, is not really the point.

Crumpler Ugly Divorce Laptop Bag

It wasn't pretty, but you got it all! You've weathered the storm and came out the other side with this leather-clad beauty draped across your shoulder. Ditch your mortgage and buy yourself a party boat, it's all smooth sailing from here on. Clear the decks and batten down the hatches for some serious partying. Let those other suckers show up at the office. With a few lazy clicks on your keyboard you work from your cockpot, surrounded by everything you could possibly desire.
My friend has got the black version of this bag and after seeing it I want the red one.

Elizabeth Gaskell's North & South. Heart Wrenching final scene from the series.

This is such a sweet scene and is my favourite from the series. I've been watching this again and again! Am currently reading the book.

Elizabeth Gaskell's classic explores the simmering, restrained passion between two very different people who fall in love in spite of themselves.

Set against the backdrop of Victorian England's industrial north, it follows the fortunes of Margaret Hale, one of 19th century literature's most original heroines.

Gibson: Node Mag.

"One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition [Gibson's previous novel] is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text ... there's this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now."
Gibson
What the author is outlining here is the theory of a new and innovatively creative reading practice. The first line in Spook Country is:

"'Rausch,' said the voice in Hollis Henry's cell. 'Node', it said."

Node is a Wired-like magazine that doesn't and probably never will exist. Rausch is the (non-) editor. Hollis is in Los Angeles, doing a feature on locative art - holograms of the famous dead, which can be attached, like ectoplasm, to places (eg River Phoenix outside the Viper Room).

Hollis is sleeping (as the next sentence informs us) in the Mondrian. It's a hotel on Sunset Boulevard - along from the Standard and the Chateau Marmont: five-star joints which feature centrally in the first chapters. Gibson's current fiction is product- and allusion-heavy. And the plot of Spook Country (which revolves around the concept of GPS triangulation) is fiendishly indirect. Help is appreciated.

iAno - iPhone / iPod Touch Piano App.

iAno - iPhone / iPod Touch application that turns your cellphone / iPod into a piano. It offers a fully functioning multitouch piano, as you can see in the video. A 4-octave piano is represented in iAno and the arrow keys at the top are used to navigate around. The software was put together by a developer going by the name of Mr Aardvark, and he managed to pack in polyphonic sound that allow five key presses to be heard simultaneously. Sweeeet.Word has it Mr Aardvark also plans on updating iAno with a complete 88-key keyboard, switchable sample sets, recording and playback, as well as support for loading .MID tracks. Get composing people.

Apple MacBook Review for 2.0GHz White Color Version

by Darryl Ponting, England

An indepth review into my next new laptop.

Humming Bird Illustration