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Richard Branson Unveils New Virgin Galactic Spaceship, Stephen Hawking Helps Name It

2/22/2016

In the latest chapter of Virgin Galactic’s space tourism story, Sir Richard Branson yesterday unveiled the company’s newest version of SpaceShipTwo, called VSS “Unity.” The craft is the result of a valiant effort by staffers to replace SS2 “Enterprise,” which, after 55 test flights – four of them rocket-powered – broke apart on ascent Oct. 31, 2014, over the Mojave Desert.

After an extensive NTSB investigation, human error was determined to be the cause of the accident. Co-pilot Michael Alsbury was killed, and pilot Pete Siebold was badly injured.
Helping to choose the name for the new Unity vehicle was none other than renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, who plans someday to fly on it (Branson has given him a free ticket). Hawking, who suffers from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, wasn’t present at the Mojave Air & Space Port for rollout, but he did offer thoughts via a pre-recorded four-minute message to the hundreds of attendees including Branson and his family, actor Harrison Ford and singer Sarah Brightman.

“We are entering a new space age, and I hope this will help to create a new unity,” said Hawking, 74. “Space exploration has already been a great unifier — we seem able to cooperate between nations in space in a way we can only envy on Earth. Taking more and more passengers out into space will enable them and us to look both outwards and back, but with a fresh perspective in both directions. It will help bring new meaning to our place on Earth and to our responsibilities as its stewards, and it will help us to recognize our place and our future in the cosmos — which is where I believe our ultimate destiny lies.”

Branson, 65, was clearly moved by Hawking’s interest in space, and responded. “We felt strongly that we should somehow make sure that Stephen remained a permanent part of Unity’s story, because so much of what he stands for resonates with what we at Virgin Galactic aspire to be,” said the billionaire. “So the Galactic Girl on the side of our proud Spaceship Unity now carries a banner using an image of Stephen’s eye.”Like the plan for predecessor Enterprise, Unity will be dropped from a mother-ship, light its rocket motor and carry six passengers and two pilots into space, considered 100 kilometers (62 miles) above sea level. The rides will be short and suborbital – ie, straight up and down – unlike ISS, which circles the Earth. Passengers will see the curvature of Earth and the blackness of space, while at the same time experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness. Current ticket price is $250,000.

VG’s commercial flights will be the culmination of work from the turn of the century when SS2’s predecessor, SpaceShipOne (built by Burt Rutan), flew pilots three separate times to space in 2004 to win the prestigious $10-million Ansari X Prize.

Other companies working on space tourism include Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which in January vertically launched its New Shepard vehicle unmanned into suborbital space and brought back the booster and capsule intact – and XCOR Aerospace, which is still in the development stages of its Lynx vehicle. Another company, World Sky View, is planning to take customers just above 100,000 feet in a balloon, technically not space but offering space-like views.

VG expects test flights of Unity to start later this year. Its 700 or so ticket-holders seem confident that they will become astronauts within the next few years, as is Hawking. “If I am able to go, and if Richard will still take me, I would be very proud to fly on this spaceship,” said the scientist.

In the meantime,many future tourist-nauts are training for their flights in centrifuges and high-altitude supersonic MiGs, and on parabolic weightlessness flights over the U.S. and Russia.

How dangerous is the tool the FBI is asking Apple to build

2/20/2016

Imagine if you owned hundreds of rental homes. And imagine that one of your tenants in one of your homes committed a horrendous crime.

If the FBI got a search warrant for that house and asked you to open the door to investigate, you wouldn't have a problem with that, would you?

Probably not.

But imagine they didn't do that. Imagine, instead, that they said:

"Hey, all these locks and doors and other security features you have on your rental properties are too difficult for us to get through when we need to search somebody's house....

....so we want you to give us the keys and alarm codes to ALL your rental properties, even though no one in those houses committed a crime."

That's a much different situation.

And that's what the argument between Apple and the FBI is about.

The FBI is not asking Apple to unlock a single phone.
They're trying to force Apple into give them the key to every iPhone in the world.

That's why this is important. And it's got the potential to turn into history's biggest battle over your right to privacy.

What happens when you hit the water at 85mph?

2/19/2016

Think being a Red Bull Cliff Diver is as simple as jumping off a cliff? Think again. It’s an exercise in mental mindset, bodily control, and, oh yeah – maths. Leaping off a 27m-high platform is most certainly a calculated risk. But we’ve seen the mid-air flips and twists countless times. Today – with some incredible underwater shots from Alex Voyer – want to take a look at the landing?

The drop takes three seconds and they reach 85kph

The divers accelerate off the platform at 9.8m/s – that's almost as fast a Bugatti Veyron supercar accelerates from 0–60mph. Did we mention they're flipping and twisting, while spotting their landing? Because they are. World record: five forward rotations by Steven LoBue.

They hit the water with two to three times the force of gravityThe impact isn't easy. The divers go from 85kph to zero in less than a second.

Muscles engaged: extensor muscles in legs, groin, core, abs!

This is one time it's OK to flex. By tensing muscles before impact, the divers protect themselves from injury (but injuries can still occur).

It’s like an underwater bombThe divers hit the water so fast that they actually create a 'bomb hole' where they entered the water.

As the divers enter the water, friction slows them down incredibly fast. The water jetstreams around the leading edge of the diver's feet or hands. The shot above is a precise moment after impact.

As soon as the diver enters the water, friction hits the brakes for them – but they also spread their arms towards the end of the dive to decrease the depth.What happens if they mess up on the landing? "Anything that's not straight up and down is really going to hurt," says Orlando Duque. And what if they do a 'belly flop'? Thankfully, that doesn't happen too often...as it could be catastrophic.

WORLD’S LARGEST INDOOR/UNDERGROUND BIKE PARK

2/19/2016

Previously, abandoned limestone mines were only good for one thing: low-budget horror movies. But some resourceful types in Louisville, Kentucky, have come up with an even better idea: build the largest indoor bike park in the world.

The Louisville Mega Cavern has opened the Mega Underground Bike Park, and with a whopping 17 miles of space to play in, we’re officially calling this a better day than the Kentucky Derby. Besides having the world’s only underground off-road bike course, there’s also zip lines, a ropes course, and plenty of event space. And don’t forget, being 100 feet underground means perfect weather 24/7. Spread out over the 320,000 square feet are 45 trails, jump lines, pump tracks, slalom courses and more. It just opened to the public, and bike rentals begin in April at $24 per person for half a day.

That moment when Buzz Aldrin punches moon landing denier Bart Sibrel

2/18/2016

On September 9, 2002 moon landing denier Bart Sibrel followed Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin out of a Hollywood hotel and relentlessly harassed him about whether he actually landed on the moon. Buzz reacted. Many have seen the short clip of the actual punch, but note how much verbal confrontation preceded it. Sibrel has pulled similar stunts with many other Apollo astronauts. Californian authorities have decided against prosecuting former astronaut Buzz Aldrin after he punched a documentary maker who claimed his moon missions were faked.

Scroll down for the video

Mr Aldrin responded by punching Mr Sibrel, but said he merely struck out to defend himself and his stepdaughter, who was with him at the time.Mr Aldrin, famous for his participation in the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, hit Bart Sibrel after he approached the former astronaut outside a hotel in Beverley Hills, Los Angeles and demanded he swear on a Bible that the landing was not staged.

Beverly Hills police investigated the incident, which occurred 9 September, but said that the charges were dropped after witnesses came forward to say that Mr Sibrel had aggressively poked Mr Aldrin with the Bible before he was punched.Witnesses also told police that Mr Sibrel had lured Mr Aldrin to the hotel under false pretences in order to interview him. Deputy District Attorney Elizabeth Ratinoff told Reuters news agency that a videotape shot by a cameraman hired by Mr Sibrel had shown the film-maker follow Mr Aldrin, calling him a “thief, liar and coward”.

Mr Sibrel handed over the tape to police investigators, but as Mr Sibrel sustained no visible injury and did not seek medical attention, and Mr Aldrin had no previous criminal record, no charges were filed. Mr Sibrel says his new documentary proves the Apollo 11 landings were faked by the Nasa space agency in order to fool the then-Soviet Union into thinking the US had beaten them in the space race.

The two countries had been embroiled in a desperate race to reach the moon, with the US initially trailing after the Soviets became the first to send a man into space and orbit the earth.

Moon walk

Mr Aldrin, the second man after Neil Armstrong to set foot on the moon in the Apollo 11 mission, is one of America’s most famous space pioneers. A former US Air Force pilot who flew in the Korean war, Mr Aldrin joined Nasa space agency in 1963.

Wakeboarding in a Cranberry field Is beyond Cool

2/16/2016

Red Bull Winch Sessions explores what can happen when you combine high-powered winches with action sports such as snowboarding, wakeboarding, paragliding, and more.

In this episide of Winch Sessions, Josh Tranby and the crew travel to the town of Tomah in Wisconsin, to create a visually stunning wakeboarding session in a cranberry bog. The song name is "909s and Half Minds" by Jack D. Elliot.

Before harvest in Autumn, the irrigated fields where the cranberries are grown are flooded with between 6 inches to one foot of water, before a a harvester is driven through the waterbeds to remove the cranberries from their vines. The berries then float to the surface of the water, creating beautifully crimson carpets. The floating berries are then either pumped or conveyed to packing stations where they are sorted, cleaned and stored.

Prior to filming this episode of Red Bull Winch Sessions, Josh had never seen a cranberry bog, let alone wakeboard through one. "The Red Bull Winch has let us be able to ride something so unique, so different... you know, I never thought I'd be in Tomah, Wisconsin and winching a cranberry field."

Akbar Idiots: Terror Fails and Jihadi Bloopers

2/16/2016

“Fratricide” is my middle name. When my mortar explodes in my hands… Allahu Akbar! When my buddy point blanks me with an anti air heavy machine gun… Allahu Akbar! When I am so incredibly stupid as a result of uncountable generations of inbreedingthat the simple process of aiming my rifle is too complicated for me to fathom… Allahu Akbar! God may be great, but it’s painfully obvious that he doesn’t think a whole lot of you clowns.

This Motorised V12 Coffee Table Is A Stupidly Cool Piece Of Home Decor

2/16/2016

When posting about it on Reddit Cars, the builder of this intriguing piece of furniture mentioned that it’s “powered by the ignition switch giving power to a battery which then powers the starter which spins the flywheel, crank, chains and cams”. He admits that it’s “not the safest piece of art”, but points out that the key isn’t kept in the block, and that his workshop isn’t somewhere that’s usually visited by kids anyway….

If drone racing is the sport of the future, how will we watch it?

2/16/2016

There has been a growing excitement around the prospect of a new sporting league where competitors race that very futuristic sounding vehicle, a drone. By drone they mean small remote controlled quadcopters, incredibly agile little aircraft that can move at speeds of over 100 miles and hour. Unlike most racing sports — cars, horses, dog sleds — there is no human onboard the drone. The pilots are all standing about with goggles on, steering based on a live video feed from a camera on the drone's nose. It's called FPV racing, a term borrowed from the world of video games, meaning first person view.

But while the pilots don't have much choice about which view to use, the audience does. So what is the best way to view the race? So far most videos do a mix of first and third person. Sometimes you're watching from the perspective of the drone, zipping through turns and blasting along straightaways. Other times you're watching from the sidelines as the drones whizz by. Here's one completely from an FPV view.

Putting the audience into the same perspective as the driver is neat, but of course it means they don't have any sense of how near or far the other competitors are. That, and the loops and rolls many drones do send the entire universe end over end, a visual that can quickly become nauseating to the casual viewer. Viewed from the sidelines, however, drones are not nearly as big and colorful as race cars. They often look like little more than black specks, hard to pick out against a background at high speed.

So what's the solution? Drone Racing League garnered a lot of attention recently with a sizzle reel it put together for it's debut. One nice touch was that they covered each drone in colorful LED lights and matching rotors, so that they pop against the background, and it's much easier to tell them apart. They also introduced a lot of crazy atmospheric elements — Drones crashing through glass lightbulbs! Drones rising through thick fog! Drones chopping up innocent plants! — which work well in an edited montage, but might not pan out in an actual race.

That trick worked well in the one clip of a "race" released by DRL so far. But as you can see from that clip, it's really hard to tell where the drones are in space, who's in which position, and how they are passing one another. A true sport requires more than a manufactured feeling of excitement from bombastic music, fast cuts between drones and pilots, and a staged slow motion crash at the end.

This year will see a number of competing leagues try to bring drone racing to the mainstream. Having seen it live, I can attest it works as entertainment in person. But nothing about this clip, or others I have seen from various leagues, convinces me anyone has figured out a way to turn live drone racing into a compelling spectator sport for people watching from the comfort of their homes.

Einstein's gravitational waves 'seen' from black holes

2/11/2016

Scientists are claiming a stunning discovery in their quest to fully understand gravity.

They have observed the warping of space-time generated by the collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth.

The international team says the first detection of these gravitational waves will usher in a new era for astronomy.

It is the culmination of decades of searching and could ultimately offer a window on the Big Bang.

The research, by the LIGO Collaboration, has been published today in the journalPhysical Review Letters.

The collaboration operates a number of labs around the world that fire lasers through long tunnels, trying to sense ripples in the fabric of space-time.

Gravitational waves: A triumph for big science

Expected signals are extremely subtle, and disturb the machines, known as interferometers, by just fractions of the width of an atom.

But the black hole merger was picked up by two widely separated LIGO facilities in the US.

The merger radiated three times the mass of the sun in pure gravitational energy.

"We have detected gravitational waves," Prof David Reitze, executive director of the LIGO project, told journalists at a news conference in Washington DC.

"It's the first time the Universe has spoken to us through gravitational waves. Up until now, we've been deaf."

Gravitational waves are prediction of the Theory of General Relativity
Their existence has been inferred by science but only now directly detected
They are ripples in the fabric of space and time produced by violent events
Accelerating masses will produce waves that propagate at the speed of light
Detectable sources ought to include merging black holes and neutron stars
LIGO fires lasers into long, L-shaped tunnels; the waves disturb the light
Detecting the waves opens up the Universe to completely new investigations

That view was reinforced by Prof Stephen Hawking, who is an expert on black holes. Speaking exclusively to BBC News, he said he believed that the detection marked a key moment in scientific history.

"Gravitational waves provide a completely new way at looking at the Universe. The ability to detect them has the potential to revolutionise astronomy. This discovery is the first detection of a black hole binary system and the first observation of black holes merging," he said.

"Apart from testing (Albert Einstein's theory of) General Relativity, we could hope to see black holes through the history of the Universe. We may even see relics of the very early Universe during the Big Bang at some of the most extreme energies possible."

Team member Prof Gabriela González, from Louisiana State University, said: "We have discovered gravitational waves from the merger of black holes. It's been a very long road, but this is just the beginning.

"Now that we have the detectors to see these systems, now that we know binary black holes are out there - we'll begin listening to the Universe. "

The LIGO laser interferometers in Hanford, in Washington, and Livingston, in Louisiana, were only recently refurbished and had just come back online when they sensed the signal from the collision. This occurred at 10.51 GMT on 14 September last year.

On a graph, the data looks like a symmetrical, wiggly line that gradually increases in height and then suddenly fades away.

"We found a beautiful signature of the merger of two black holes and it agrees exactly - fantastically - with the numerical solutions to Einstein equations... it looked too beautiful to be true," said Prof Danzmann.Prof Sheila Rowan, who is one of the lead UK researchers involved in the project, said that the first detection of gravitational waves was just the start of a "terrifically exciting" journey.

"The fact that we are sitting here on Earth feeling the actual fabric of the Universe stretch and compress slightly due to the merger of black holes that occurred just over a billion years ago - I think that's phenomenal. It's amazing that when we first turned on our detectors, the Universe was ready and waiting to say 'hello'," the Glasgow University scientist told the BBC.

Being able to detect gravitational waves enables astronomers finally to probe what they call "dark" Universe - the majority part of the cosmos that is invisible to the light telescopes in use today.

Perfect probeNot only will they be able to investigate black holes and strange objects known as neutron stars (giant suns that have collapsed to the size of cities), they should also be able to "look" much deeper into the Universe - and thus farther back in time. It may even be possible eventually to sense the moment of the Big Bang.

"Gravitational waves go through everything. They are hardly affected by what they pass through, and that means that they are perfect messengers," said Prof Bernard Schutz, from Cardiff University, UK.

"The information carried on the gravitational wave is exactly the same as when the system sent it out; and that is unusual in astronomy. We can't see light from whole regions of our own galaxy because of the dust that is in the way, and we can't see the early part of the Big Bang because the Universe was opaque to light earlier than a certain time.

"With gravitational waves, we do expect eventually to see the Big Bang itself," he told the BBC.

In addition, the study of gravitational waves may ultimately help scientists in their quest to solve some of the biggest problems in physics, such as the unification of forces, linking quantum theory with gravity.

At the moment, General Relativity describes the cosmos on the largest scales tremendously well, but it is to quantum ideas that we resort when talking about the smallest interactions. Being able to study places in the Universe where gravity is really extreme, such as at black holes, may open a path to new, more complete thinking on these issues.

A laser is fed into the machine and its beam is split along two paths
The separate paths bounce back and forth between damped mirrors
Eventually, the two light parts are recombined and sent to a detector
Gravitational waves passing through the lab should disturb the set-up
Theory holds they should very subtly stretch and squeeze its space
This ought to show itself as a change in the lengths of the light arms (green)
The photodetector captures this signal in the recombined beam

Scientists have sought experimental evidence for gravitational waves for more than 40 years.

Einstein himself actually thought a detection might be beyond the reach of technology.

His theory of General Relativity suggests that objects such as stars and planets can warp space around them - in the same way that a billiard ball creates a dip when placed on a thin, stretched, rubber sheet.

Gravity is a consequence of that distortion - objects will be attracted to the warped space in the same way that a pea will fall in to the dip created by the billiard ball.

Inspirational momentEinstein predicted that if the gravity in an area was changed suddenly - by an exploding star, say - waves of gravitational energy would ripple across the Universe at light-speed, stretching and squeezing space as they travelled.

Although a fantastically small effect, modern technology has now risen to the challenge.

Much of the R&D work for the Washington and Louisiana machines was done at Europe's smaller GEO600 interferometer in Hannover.

"I think it's phenomenal to be able to build an instrument capable of measuring [gravitational waves]," said Prof Rowan.

"It is hugely exciting for a whole generation of young people coming along, because these kinds of observations and this real pushing back of the frontiers is really what inspires a lot of young people to get into science and engineering."

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Richard Branson Unveils New Virgin Galactic Spaceship, Stephen Hawking Helps Name It

How dangerous is the tool the FBI is asking Apple to build

What happens when you hit the water at 85mph?

WORLD’S LARGEST INDOOR/UNDERGROUND BIKE PARK

That moment when Buzz Aldrin punches moon landing denier Bart Sibrel

Wakeboarding in a Cranberry field Is beyond Cool

Akbar Idiots: Terror Fails and Jihadi Bloopers

This Motorised V12 Coffee Table Is A Stupidly Cool Piece Of Home Decor

If drone racing is the sport of the future, how will we watch it?

Einstein's gravitational waves 'seen' from black holes

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