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YEE e-Newsletter December 2013
Incredibly Realistic Rainy Day Paintings by Karen Woods
On a rainy afternoon, artist Karen Woods observes large raindrops as they transform windshields and window panes into beautiful formations. She then converts those meditative moments into mesmerizing oil paintings that capture the tranquility of a quiet, stormy day.
In her paintings, Woods turns everyday urban scenes into impressive moments filled with captivating distortions. She pays close attention to details, providing her viewers with an opportunity to really feel the mood of different types of weather, from windy days where water streaks across the glass to leftover drops that remain still after a storm. Through lights and shadows, the artist captures amazing, hyperrealistic depth, and, while looking at the paintings, viewers can almost hear the pitter-patter of rainfall on glass.
The Top 10 Things People Wanted to Learn in 2013
A major part of the human experience is learning about new tools and how to use them — a process the Internet makes much easier and quicker. Thanks to the massive amount of online information and tutorials, it's simple to find the best ways to complete tasks and actions of all difficulties
According to data from Google, Internet users were preoccupied with classic dilemmas in 2013, searching for answers to questions such as how to tie a tie and how to flirt, as well as some more modern issues, including how to unjailbreak their smartphones
More about Youtube, How To, Social Media, Videos, and 2013Nokia Camera Beta available for all Lumia phones
You're invited to try out the latest Nokia Camera Beta application, which brings the Nokia Camera application to all Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices.
With this beta you will also get frequent updates with the latest features and improvements, but there could be bugs. You can help us improve the app by giving us feedback. Either post on our forum or go to the Feedback section in the app and let us know what you think. We are interested in feedback about the overall usability of the app on all Lumia phones as well as verification of the latest fixes and improvements we do.
So, please give it a try and let us know how it works for you.
Nokia Camera Beta can be used in parallel with the commercial Nokia Camera application that is public in the Windows Phone Store for Pureview Lumia devices. And you can set Nokia Camera Beta as your default camera, so that it starts up with the hardware shutter button.
Note: This beta is provided as a standalone app for Lumia phones that have the Lumia Amber or Lumia Black software release. You can check your software release from Settings >> Extras + info. To check for software updates for your phone, go to Settings >> Phone Update. Find out more about Lumia software updates online at nokia.com/lumia-update.
Lecsapolt vizes élőhelyek, polgárháborúk miatt halhatnak ki állatfajok
The Top 10 Things People Didn't Understand in 2013
Thanks to the Internet, we no longer have to be too embarrassed to ask "obvious" questions. Instead, we type them into a search engine and hope no one is peering at our screen. We can find answers to the most basic inquiries with very little digging, whether it's the goings-on of the world, medical worries or whatever is trending on Twitter.
Google compiled a list using data on the most popular searches for 2013. Results ranged across current events, pop culture and general knowledge queries, giving us a look at what people were most curious about over the last year.
More about Google, Social Media, Features, Google Search, and ConversationsThe Universal Translator Is Real and Its Name Is Sigmo
Product Name: Sigmo
Price: $50
Who would like this? Travelers, Star Trek fans, ex-pats and people trying to learn a new language
Ever since Star Trek explained away how all alien races could speak English through a piece of future tech called the Universal Translator, technology companies have worked to create just such a device. One may have succeeded in developing a 1.0 version with the Sigmo.
The Sigmo is a small, pillbox-sized device equipped with a microphone and speaker, but with a cloud-connected twist. Select the language you'd like to translate into, then hold the Sigmo up and speak to it. The Sigmo records your voice, then sends the recording to the cloud for translation via Bluetooth connection with your smartphone. Read more...
More about Tech, Gadgets, Supported, 30 Days Of Gifts, and SigmoSunrise in Antarctica
Laurence Topham and Alok Jha are travelling with the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. On Tuesday, the expedition will reach Commonwealth Bay on the Antarctic coast and begin a quest to reach the huts used as a base by the explorer Douglas Mawson on his ill-fated expedition a hundred years ago
New Solar Cell Material Offers Both Cheap and Efficient Power
Another potential path for ever cheaper solar power is now being researched by scientists investigating the use of perovskite minerals to make solar cells. Perovskites are a very cheap material that have good light capturing properties as well as good conductivity. The advantage that perovskites offer is a great combination of inexpensive production combined with good efficiency in energy production.
Current laboratory experiment versions of perovskite-based solar cells have efficiencies of about 15 percent. Although there are other solar cells with greater efficiency, the figure for perovskite cells is higher than other cheap-to-manufacture methods.
The advantages provided with perovskite materials come from requiring a far less intensive manufacturing process. While fabricating silicon-based solar cells requires careful and expensive processing of silicon to a high degree of purity (not to mention the energy intensity of that manufacturing), cells using perovskites are made by spray applying materials to a glass or metal foil substrate, described as a "solar cell [that] can be fabricated as easily as painting a surface."
Perovskite-based solar cells might eventually be able to be produced for 10 to 20 cents per watt, as compared to present soalr panels which are around 75 cents per watt.
Are hurricanes getting stronger?
For more than a decade, the question of how global warming is affecting the scariest storms on the planet — hurricanes — has been shot through with uncertainty. The chief reason is technological: In many parts of the world, storm strengths are estimated solely based on satellite images. Technologies and techniques for doing this have improved over time, meaning that there is always a problem with claiming that today’s storms are stronger than yesterday’s. After all, they might just be better observed.
That’s why, despite expectations that global warming will make hurricanes stronger — as well as massive societal consequences if more powerful storms are slamming coastlines — scientific authorities like the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have demurred on the hurricane/climate question. Most recently, the IPCC earlier this year said it had “low confidence” that global warming is worsening hurricanes.
But maybe, just maybe, a new scientific paper has managed to get past this long-standing data problem. The study, just out in the Journal of Climate from hurricane and satellite expert Jim Kossin of the National Climatic Data Center and his colleagues, seeks to create a completely consistent database of hurricane satellite images that will finally allow for apples-to-apples comparisons. How? “We can’t take bad data and make it good, because that’s adding information that we don’t have,” explains Kossin. “But we can take the good information and make it worse.”
That’s the surprising solution that the scientists implemented in their paper. Data that was too “good” — for instance, because the satellite images were too high in resolution — was degraded to what Kossin calls the “lowest common denominator”: one satellite image of each storm taken every three hours, with a pixel size no greater than eight kilometers by eight kilometers. Using this technique, Kossin and his colleagues at NCDC created a 28-year record of storm images across the world’s seven hurricane basins, from 1982 to 2009. Then they used a computer algorithm to compute each storm’s maximum strength, removing human error and unpredictability from the equation.
The result? The scientists found that globally, hurricane wind speeds are increasing at a rate of a little more than two miles per hour per decade, or just faster than six miles per hour over the entire period. There are some key caveats, though, the biggest being that the trend they found was not statistically significant at usually accepted levels. (For nerds: the p value was 0.1). But there were strong and significant trends in some hurricane basins of the world, especially the North Atlantic (the region encompassing the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and open Atlantic north of the equator), where storms have been strengthening at the rate of nearly nine miles per hour per decade (see chart above). But other basins offset that, including the western North Pacific, which showed a negative trend.
The punch line, then, could hardly be called overwhelming. But as Kossin explains, that may be precisely what you expect to see once you’re finally analyzing the troublesome hurricane data reliably. These results, after all, are quite consistent with the idea that the signal of hurricane intensification might be just now emerging from the “noise” of natural climate variability. “What we’re observing could very easily fit into an assumption of this greenhouse gas forced trend in the tropics and the effect that it has on tropical cyclone intensity,” says Kossin.
Perhaps the best news is that if scientists continue adding to the new database of homogenized satellite images — starting with the years 2010-13, which were not part of this study — the chance of finding a significant trend (or showing that there just isn’t one to be found) will increase. “I think every year, we’ll get a little bit closer to the truth,” says Kossin.
At that point, perhaps we can finally can leave the sound and fury to the hurricanes themselves, rather than the debate over what’s happening to them.
This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Filed under: Article, Climate & Energy
Raklap recycling!
Még több raklap alkotások a lakberendezés világából a Dizájn képtárban!
Agua sónica
Si yo tuviera un centro de investigación sería solo para llamarlo algo así como Laboratorio Cinemático para los Estudios de Sonidos y Vibraciones Visibles en el Agua Sónica.
Alternativamente, Centro de Investigaciones Foto Atómicas también me vale.
Reality TV Accounts for 5 of the 10 Most-Searched Shows This Year
From Sean Lowe to Arya Stark, a number of popular television stars and characters made their way into our hearts — and our search bars — in 2013.
Below, we've compiled a list of the U.S.'s top 10 most-searched television shows of the year, according to BingTrends.com. Reality television had a stronghold on this year's rankings, with 5 of the top 10 showsThe Big Bang Theory was the only sitcom; premium cable drama Game of Thrones on HBO and AMC's The Walking Dead also made appearances. A staple of the morning show lineup, The Today Show made it to the top 10 list this year as well.
More about Search, Tv, Entertainment, and BrandspeakATS-I Anniversary: SSEC Continues to Advance Technology
December 6, 19661 marks the launch anniversary of NASA’s Applications Technology Satellite-I (ATS-I). On board was the ground-breaking Spin-Scan Cloud Camera (SSCC) invented by Professors Robert Parent and Verner Suomi, founders of the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With the camera, Suomi demonstrated the value to weather forecasting of utilizing geostationary orbit (22,000 miles above the equator) for monitoring cloud motion from a satellite platform. The camera provided full disk visible images of the Earth and its cloud cover every twenty minutes.
For the first time, scientists could observe weather systems as they developed. Satellite remote sensing technology was suddenly transformed from producing interesting snapshots into gathering of meaningful, quantitative data that could be used to improve weather forecasts. The sequential pictures of cloud movements provided a breakthrough in visualizing and comprehending atmospheric circulation. According to the late Suomi, “the clouds move; not the satellite.” This concept revolutionized satellite meteorology. The weather satellite images and “movies” of weather in motion seen on the evening news and on many web sites are a direct result of Suomi’s invention.
Weather in motion from the ATS-I synchronous satellite, by V.E. Suomi, A.F. Hasler, and J. Kornfield, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Meteorology. Produced by Jack Lund, University of Wisconsin-Extension, Department of Photography, n.d. 9 minutes, silent, black and white.
Since the 1960s, the advances in weather forecasting have been extraordinary – today the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) can transmit nearly continuous imagery and data, making it possible to issue earlier and more detailed warnings when severe weather develops.
SSEC scientists along with partners at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) and NOAA’s Advanced Satellite Products Branch (ASPB) continue to advance and improve the U.S. geostationary satellite program. They are making vital contributions to GOES-R, the next generation geostationary satellite, through instrument trade studies, algorithm development, risk reduction, and proving ground preparations for operations.
GOES-R, scheduled to launch early in 2016, will be comprised of improved spacecraft and instrument technologies, which will result in more timely and accurate weather forecasts, and improved support for detecting severe weather events that affect public safety.
1 NASA’s official launch date is December 7, 1966 (UTC), which is December 6, 1966 (local Madison time).
Featured image caption: Robert Parent (left), V.E. Suomi (second from left), and colleagues view ATS photos made possible by the Spin-Scan Cloud Camera. Photo credit: UW Communications.
Razor and LXDE-Qt merging
Lab photographed from a bird's-eye view by Menno Aden
This image by German photographer Menno Aden offers a view down from the ceiling onto an empty pharmaceutical laboratory. (more...)
CryoSat measures European storm surge
Antarctica’s ice loss on the rise
Maps of Mercury
The USGS has released quad maps of the planet Mercury as a set of PDF files: "The 1:5 million-scale series of Mercury maps divides Mercury into 15 quadrangles, H-1 through H-15 (five Mercator, eight Lambert Conformal, and two Polar Stereographic quadrangles). The base mosaic was produced with orbital images by the MESSENGER Team and released by NASA's Planetary Data System on March 8, 2013. This new global mosaic includes 100% coverage of Mercury's surface."