[url]http://www.space.com/14370-asteroid-shield-earth-threat-protection-meeting.html[/url]

Restored Edison Records Revive Giants of 19th-Century Germany
 

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/science/bismarcks-voice-among-restored-edison-recordings.html?_r=1&ref=world]Restored Edison Records Revive Giants of 19th-Century Germany[/url]: [i]Tucked away for decades in a cabinet in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, just behind the cot in which the great inventor napped, a trove of wax cylinder phonograph records has been brought back to life after more than a century of silence.[/i]
[quote]The cylinders, from 1889 and 1890, include the only known recording of the voice of the powerful chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Two preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe’s “Faust” into a phonograph horn. (Moltke was 89 when he made the recordings — the only ones known to survive from someone born as early as 1800.) Other records found in the collection hold musical treasures — lieder and rhapsodies performed by German and Hungarian singers and pianists at the apex of the Romantic era, including what is thought to be the first recording of a work by Chopin.

Officials at Edison’s old laboratory in West Orange, N.J., now the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, unveiled the newly identified recordings on Monday.

“This is sensational,” said Ulrich Lappenküper, director of the Otto von Bismarck Foundation in Friedrichsruh, Germany. The Bismarck cylinder is documented in the foundation’s archive, but after searching for it in the United States and Germany since 2005, Dr. Lappenküper and his colleagues assumed it had been lost forever.

The unlabeled recordings, all housed in the same wooden box, had been found in 1957. But their contents remained unknown until last year, when Jerry Fabris, the curator at the Edison laboratory, used a playback device called the Archeophone to trace the grooves of 12 of the 17 cylinders in the box and convert the analog electrical signals into broadcast WAV files.[/quote]

That is really interesting news. And useful too, as I never heard of an [URL="http://www.archeophone.org/windex.php"]archeophone[/URL] before (well, even my spell checker is marking it red :smile: he also did not heard the word...)

Amazing what you can learn from the web (click on the "film" on the provided link, it is interesting, it shows how the toy works, but it is in french). I am a bit disappointed however. As they talk so much about avoiding damaging the wax cylinders (and they also make big fuss about the french patent, even on wikipedia), so I imagined the device like some very-professional optical/laser stuff, that in fact does not touch the cylinder, but read the groves using some light or vibratory (no contact, like echo-location) stuff. That "milling machine" toy I can make too, I used to sculpt chess pieces in the past (a rotating wood like the one in the film, and a normal kitchen knife or cutter held in hand), no need a patent for it... :sad:

[QUOTE=ewmayer;287838][url=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/science/bismarcks-voice-among-restored-edison-recordings.html?_r=1&ref=world]Restored Edison Records Revive Giants of 19th-Century Germany[/url]: [i]Tucked away for decades in a cabinet in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, just behind the cot in which the great inventor napped, a trove of wax cylinder phonograph records has been brought back to life after more than a century of silence.[/i][/QUOTE] Is this it?
[YOUTUBE]pnsizkVjGm8[/YOUTUBE]

[url]http://news.yahoo.com/self-guided-bullet-strikes-target-mile-away-video-132957445.html[/url] [QUOTE]The self-guided 4-inch bullet prototype has been successfully tested in both computer simulations and field testing -- where bullet speeds have reached 2,400 feet per second. [/QUOTE]

easy way to make lousy shooters murderers laser sight and this munition, though admittedly at the 2400 ft/second it only takes about 2 1/6 seconds to reach a target that far away.

Mystery of Renaissance Portrait of a Young Girl
 

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Girl_in_Profile_in_Renaissance_Dress[/url]

PBS Nova Monday night was on this (purported) rediscovered-as-a Leonardo drawing - fascinating stuff. The high-tech digital imaging done in Paris may particularly interest Mac users, looks like they used the same Apple "stitching" an amatuer-photographer friend of mine uses on his Mac to create seamless digital panoramas.

The Nova episode showed a well-known world-expert on Renaissance drawing style (and world-class drawer in her own right) attempting to reproduce the style and peculiar pigments of the drawing, reflecting the same kind of experimental techniques Leonardo used throughout his life, not always successfully - [i]The Last Supper[/i] started flaking off the walls within 20 years of its painting, for instance. After seeing the incredible level of detail and mastery in the drawing, all I can say is if this is a more-recent forgery done on 16th-century vellum, the forger's skills would have had to have been such as to prompt the question, "why did he need to make a living in doing fakes?". The PBS piece also ends with a bombshell discovery in (of all places) a museum in Poalnd not mentioned in the Wiki article.

Interestingly, auctioneer Christie's (which is being sued by the original owner, as the above article notes) mislabeled the piece as 19th century German, and didn't even bother to try to date the Vellum (which later C14 dating shows to date to 1450-1600) or analyze the drawing materials. Feckin' morons...

Anyway, if you can get hold of a podcast of the Nova episode, well worth your time.

[url]http://news.yahoo.com/sugar-regulated-toxin-researchers-180605186.html[/url]

[url]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46237284/ns/technology_and_science-space/[/url]
Planet supposedly smack in the habitable zone, not a borderline case or anything. It has a 28 day orbit around a dwarf star in a triple star system 22 lys away that's very metal-deficient. Very interesting find.

[QUOTE=Dubslow;288112][url]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46237284/ns/technology_and_science-space/[/url]
Planet supposedly smack in the habitable zone, not a borderline case or anything. It has a 28 day orbit around a dwarf star in a triple star system 22 lys away that's very metal-deficient. Very interesting find.[/QUOTE]

interesting but does the planet only orbit one star in the system ? if not is it out of the habitable zone around the other stars ?

[QUOTE=science_man_88;288115]interesting but does the planet only orbit one star in the system ? if not is it out of the habitable zone around the other stars ?[/QUOTE]Why don't you try reading the article in question?

If you did, you would find this: '[I]"The planet is around one star in a triple-star system," Vogt explained. "The other stars are pretty far away, but they would look pretty nice in the sky." [/I]'.

AFAICT this gives you your answers.


Pauil

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_667[/url]

^ has a more filled-in description of the orbits. That must be a funky system; two planets orbiting at <.3 AU around a star which is orbiting a binary system between 50-100 AU, while the binary stars themselves are separated by 5-20 AU. Wow. Computationally describing that would be a pain.