More Great Gifs!
Monday, April 25, 2016
Eiffel Tower Construction Progression In The 1800's
Double Click For Super Large Version:
More Interesting Photos:
One of the oldest photos of the Great Sphinx, from 1880
This Is The Way To A Man's Heart...Unless He Is A Vegetarian...
More Vegan Fun:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Vegan
Vegetarian Thanksgiving
Nut Job Vegans Make Website And Threaten Ex-Vegans Tempted By The Fruit Of Another Piece Of Bacon
I hope you choke on a vegan pizza while crying over a lady gaga song.....
Please do not View this Post unless you are a Vegan
Anne Hathaway's Descent Into Madness
Scientists can now make lithium-ion batteries last a lifetime
Researchers at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) said that's exactly what they were doing when they discovered how to increase the tensile strength of nanowires that could be used to make lithium-ion batteries last virtually forever.
Researchers have pursued using nanowires in batteries for years because the filaments, thousands of times thinner than a human hair, are highly conductive and have a large surface area for the storage and transfer of electrons.
The problem they have encountered, however, is that nanowires are also extremely fragile and don't hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, known as "cycling." For example, in a typical lithium-ion battery, they expand and grow brittle, which leads to cracking.
UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai solved the brittleness conundrum by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and encasing the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The combination, they said, is reliable and resistant to failure.
The findings were published today in the American Chemical Society's Energy Letters. Hard work combined with serendipity paid off in this case, according to senior author Reginald Penner.
"Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it," Penner, chair of UCI's chemistry department, said in a statement. "She discovered that just by using this gel, she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any...
Rape Trees, Dead Migrants and the Consequences of an Open Border
Many of the most caring people in the U.S. think they are helping the poor from Latin America by leaving our Southwest border wide open between ports-of-entry, but they are not. Several of the transnational criminal organizations (cartels) operating in Central America and Mexico make an estimated one-third or more of their profits from illegal immigration. Specifically, two groups below Texas, the Gulf and Los Zetas cartels, are largely fueled by the trafficking and smuggling of human beings.
The brutality of these criminal groups, from incinerating innocents in a network of ovens to their near complete control of state and local governments, is largely paid for by funds generated from illegal immigration–a shadowy economic engine that is only possible because we refuse to properly secure our border with Mexico.
Women and young girls from Central America are routinely given birth control or morning after pills by their mothers in anticipation of the likely sexual assaults that will occur on their illicit journey to the United States.
These females are often raped immediately upon making it to their first stop once they arrive in a Mexican stash house from Guatemala. They then are shipped to the U.S.-Mexico border, usually to Reynosa, Mexico, immediately south of McAllen, Texas. In the process of making it from the first stash house to the second, the women and young girls are often sexually assaulted or raped again by the smuggler–or group of smugglers–taking them between the two locations. The sexual assaults and rapes then often happen again in the second Mexican stash house of their journey.
They are then trickled into the U.S. across the porous border and brought to a third stash house in a U.S. border town, usually in or near McAllen, Texas. They are often sexually assaulted or raped again by...
IRS Can Track Your Cell Phone, but Leaves Billions in Taxes Uncollected
While the Internal Revenue Service continues to leave uncollected tax money on the table, the agency beefed up its surveillance capabilities in a move that alarms both conservative and liberal privacy advocates.Now some complain the IRS is acting too much like Big Brother and not enough like a traditional taxman.
Since 2006, the IRS has overseen an annual tax gap—the shortfall between taxes owed and collected—of about $385 billion, government analysts say. And according to an April report, the agency has not implemented 70 of 112 actions identified by the Government Accountability Office to close that loop.
In 2009, though, the IRS purchased a “cell-site simulator,” more commonly known as Stingray technology. And since November, the agency has been trying to buy another of the devices.
Like something from a spy movie, a Stingray device mimics a cellphone tower, tricking all mobile phones in an area into revealing their location and numbers. Authorities can deploy the powerful technology to tag and track an individual’s location in real time.
More advanced versions of the devices can be used to copy information stored on a cellphone and to download...
Sunday, April 24, 2016
The Navy’s new drone warship may change naval combat
The Pentagon is about to realize its dream of having a drone warship to hunt foreign stealth submarines.Meet the ACTUV (Antisubmarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel) — a crewless,140-ton, 132-foot-long robotic ship unveiled in Portland’s Willamette River on Thursday.
“This is a big, big, deal,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said.
“It looks like a Klingon Bird of Prey,” he added, admiring the vessel’s narrow bow.
“It’s extremely inexpensive compared to a manned system and it takes men and service women out of harms way. So why wouldn’t we want to do this?”
The ACTUV, pronounced “active,” costs $15,000 to $20,000 a day to operate, according to the Department of Defense. It was conceived in 2010 by Darpa, the Pentagon’s developmental wing responsible for testing emerging military technologies.
And those expenses are chump change compared with the operating costs of an aircraft carrier or submarine. For example, the USS George Washington, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, costs a cool $1.1 million a day to operate, the Navy told The Wall Street Journal. Staffing the ACTUV costs an estimated $684,900 a day.
“You can afford to use it in ways or think about using it in ways that would be too dangerous for a manned vessel,” Scott Littlefield, the ACTUV’s program manager, told Business Insider. “Like taking it into a minefield or taking it within range of somebody else’s weapons.”
“I don’t think we’ll ever get away from sailors on big ships,” he added, “but I could imagine a future in which we have a mixture of ...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)