Artificial Optical Materials Could Allow Cheaper, Flatter, More Efficient Detectors For Night Vision

Amazing Maps of the World

A look inside the world's first underground park, the Lowline

Over the weekend a test lab for the world’s first underground park opened its doors to visitors in New York. Housed in the former Essex Street Market building in Manhattan, it is the first step toward making former NASA engineer James Ramsey's idea for the Lowline a reality. His plans for the Lowline propose transforming a disused trolley terminal into a subterranean park using innovative solar technology.

I think it’s a cool engineering experiment but if he really is pursuing this to give green spaces to under served urban communities, then proposing it to be built in LES is fallacy. That area already has parks close by and is inhabited by at least the upper 30% (economically) of the city. What would be spectacular is if the technology they’ve developed for channelling sunlight could be used in subway stations that people already use. Plants and sunlight there would make the lives of millions of commuters across the subway network so much better. This disused trolley place should be made into an urban farm me thinks :)

my man went for it

Study: Superconducting Technologies Will Soon Be Used for Transportation, Power Storage

One thousand different words for water

Researcher puts New Guinea’s numerous languages online

New Guinea is one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world, with more than 1000 distinct languages crammed into an area not much larger than the state of Texas.

Despite this rich variety—for comparison, Europe contains about 280 languages—linguists have only analyzed the grammatical structures of a fraction of the South Pacific island’s languages. Now, Simon Greenhill, a linguist at Australian National University in Canberra, is trying to remedy that situation, by gathering together hundreds of thousands of words from published surveys, book chapters, and articles, as well as the accounts of early European explorers, and putting them into an online database called TransNewGuinea.org.

Updated daily, the site already contains glossaries for more than 1000 languages from 23 different language families, including 145,000 words. There are roughly 1000 different words for “water,” as well as for “louse,” and linguists and language enthusiasts can view all the languages by geographic origin in an interactive map.

Greenhill introduced the scientific community to the site(PDF) this week in the journal PLOS ONE; already, he has used the database to look for clues about how the different languages are related. Through comparative, historical, and computational analyses of the data, he hopes the linguistic community will now use the site to solve long-standing questions about how New Guinean populations expanded and spread their culture. 

Don’t feel drowned by your habits, we all know smoking doesn’t make sense, we all know somebody who is sick because of smoking. You have the power to stop smoking. Or replace your bad habits that hinder your life with good habits that help it progress. I have a client that used to smoke, now every time she is craving a cigarette she does 50 squats, no smoking now for 2 months, but great muscle tone in her legs! This is what I mean when I say love yourself… Not your reflection. Your actions are a reflection of how you see yourself. Big up all those who have stopped smoking, stopping smoking or even thinking about it! If you have stopped let me know how long for, if you are stopping let me know how and why. If you are thinking about it hopefully you will read the comments and try to stop. #spartanfam #strength #health #streetart

Well I’M ready for the holidays.