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POPSMost spectacular view in the Solar System Few sights in the solar system are more strikingly beautiful than softly hued Saturn embraced by the shadows of its stately rings. The Cassini Orbiter on its mission in deep space caught this rare occasion of Saturn eclipsing the Sun.
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POPSA JOKE THAT IS TOO TRUE TO BE FUNNY. Finally some clever person put Republicans in the middle of the light bulb screwing joke and IT HITS THE OLD PROVERBIAL NAIL ON IT'S OLD "IF THE SHOE FITS, WEAR IT" BLOCKHEAD! The only screwing light bulb joke EVER without humor! Just to be fair... Here is one about Dems screwing a light bulb: How many Democrats does it take to change a light bulb? One to change the bulb, six to talk about how wonderful it's going to be when the new bulb is screwed in, and ten to argue for increased funding for solar lighting research.:eek:
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POPSFive Reasons Why Aliens Will Make Contact with the Japanese First North Korea is rumored to have recently released a statement claiming that their nuclear reactor has the dual capability of communicating wirelessly with alien species up to 1,000 light years away in real time. Of course, we can't believe everything that the North Korean government says, but seriously, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were already communicating with other planets. If that's the case, it should be relatively easy for Japan, a neighboring country, to intercept their signals with laser pulses and let the world know definitively what Kim Jong Il has known for decades—that there is life beyond Earth.
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POPSMore (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers Smashing Magazine presents more (really) stunning desktop wallpapers related to typography, photography, illustrations, HDR as well as some abstract and fantasy-related wallpapers. All can be downloaded for free.
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POPSCould Jupiter wreck the solar system?
"So what's the likelihood Mercury could crash into the Earth? If it did, the asteroid that most likely wiped out the dinosaurs will seem like a drop in the ocean compared with a planet 4880 km in diameter slamming into us. There will be very little left after this wrecking ball impact. But here's the kicker: There is only a 1% chance that these gravitational instabilities of the inner Solar System are likely to cause any kind of chaos before the Sun turns into a Red Giant and swallows Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in 7 billion years time. So, no need to look out for death-wish Mercury quite yet… there's a very low chance that any of this will happen. But some good news for Mars; the researchers have also found that if the chaos does ensue, the Red Planet may be flung out of the Solar System, possibly escaping our expanding Sun. So, let's get those Mars colonies started! Well, within the next few billions of years anyhow…" Good stuff for the next science-fiction movie :-)
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POPSIs your English Pronunciation O.K.? I was inspired by the earlier clip on the difficulty of learning English to post this page. I first got a copy of a variation of this nearly 30 years ago. I've only included the first three verses here. There are are about 12 more verses like this one on this page. Check it out and let me know if you don't hung up on some of this!!
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POPSWill "Th!nk" Ignite an Electronic Car Revolution in the U.S.? Think City is one of two models that are out already, together with the Think Ox, with a choice of either lithium or a sodium battery, it's range is enough to take a suburban dweller to the downtown office and back, with zero carbon footprint. The car is thoughfully fully computerized and allows a key-less entry. It features real time navigation, web, e-mail and open source interfaces, intelligent and sustainable driving and route calculations. The DNA-key gives the user feedback on charging status and sends messages, for example, for pre-heat or pre-cool options via GPRS. Pricing has yet to be announced, but the company's current vehicles cost less than $25,000.
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POPSTop 10 Archaeological Discoveries of 2007 This is Archaeology Magazine's Top 10 list - mine would be a little different. If you visit source site, there are more discoveries of 2007 which didn't make it into the magazine's list but proposed by scholars.
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POPSWorld's Largest 38,500-meal Solar Kitchen in India This is pretty damn incredible. A total of $5 million has been spent on this endeavor. The Academy for a Better World is interested in renewable energy technologies and the program is part of a special demonstration project of Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), Government of India.
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POPSUnintelligent Design At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth. The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.
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POPSWoW, Now THAT'S a rainstorm NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope observed a fledgling solar system like the one depicted in this artist's concept, and discovered deep within it enough water vapor to fill the oceans on Earth five times. This water vapor starts out in the form of ice in a cloudy cocoon (not pictured) that surrounds the embryonic star, called NGC 1333-IRAS 4B (buried in center of image). Material from the cocoon, including ice, falls toward the center of the cloud. The ice then smacks down onto a dusty pre-planetary disk circling the stellar embryo (doughnut-shaped cloud) and vaporizes. Eventually, this water might make its way into developing planets.
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POPSNASA Plans to Visit the Sun The two mysteries prompting this mission are the high temperature of the sun's corona and the puzzling acceleration of the solar wind: Mystery #1—the corona: If you stuck a thermometer in the surface of the sun, it would read about 6000o C. Intuition says the temperature should drop as you back away; instead, it rises. The sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, registers more than a million degrees Celsius, hundreds of times hotter than the star below. This high temperature remains a mystery more than 60 years after it was first measured. Mystery #2—the solar wind: The sun spews a hot, million mph wind of charged particles throughout the solar system. Planets, comets, asteroids—they all feel it. Curiously, there is no organized wind close to the sun's surface, yet out among the planets there blows a veritable gale. Somewhere in between, some unknown agent gives the solar wind its great velocity. The question is, what?
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