Camspiracy
This shaggy dog is mostly for the entertainment of me and sinister_dr_x:
Excerpts for your consideration; relevant sections are bolded for emphasis.
Graphene
Graphene is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice.
The price of epitaxial graphene on silicon carbide is dominated by the substrate price, which is approximately $100/cm2 as of 2009. Even cheaper graphene has been produced by transfer from nickel by Korean researchers, with wafer sizes up to 30" reported.
Graphene is quite different from most conventional three-dimensional materials. Intrinsic graphene is a semi-metal or zero-gap semiconductor. It was realized early on that the E-k relation is linear for low energies near the six corners of the two-dimensional hexagonal Brillouin zone, leading to zero effective mass for electrons and holes. Due to this linear (or “conical") dispersion relation at low energies, electrons and holes near these six points, two of which are inequivalent, behave like relativistic particles described by the Dirac equation for spin 1/2 particles.
Due to the incredibly high surface area to mass ratio of graphene, one potential application is in the conductive plates of ultracapacitors.
Stacking the Deck: Secrets of the World's Master Card Architect by Bryan Berg
Tokyo, 1995
I still regard this copy of a Japanese shrine, built for a television game show, as one of my best buildings.
I was told that the god honored by the shrine is believed to bring a good fish catch. The show's producers insisted I help carry an actual shrine in a festival parade. There I was, an Iowa farm kid, dressed in a loincloth and thin slippers and lugging a monument to good fishing.
It was a trip I'll never forget. Many of the fishing families who hosted me were very poor, yet they welcomed me into their homes and shared what they had.
China's Leaders Harness Folk Religion For Their Aims
In China, folk religion has undergone a remarkable rebirth since the days of the Cultural Revolution four decades ago, when all religious worship was banned. One example of a folk goddess that has gained an enormous following is Mazu, a sea deity believed to protect sailors and fishermen. Though she started as a local folk goddess, she has entered the Daoist and Buddhist pantheon, and is also known as Tianhou or Tinhau in Hong Kong.
Scholars say she has an estimated 160 million followers and 4,000 temples devoted solely to her in China.
"Mazu protects fishermen at sea from shipwrecks and helps the poor. Most of our village depends on fishing, and Mazu worship is growing stronger than in the past," Cheng says.
Wang Hongguang, head of the Mazu Research Institute at Shanghai Institute for International Studies, explains that unlike Daoism and other religions, Mazu temples are not administered by monks. There is no organized mass or ritual that requires the spiritual leadership of a religious institution.
After China's economic reforms began in 1979, Mazu worship spread further along trade routes, notes Lin Qitang, an expert on Mazu at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "Businessmen from Fujian built Mazu temples wherever they went," Lin says. "Mazu temples were seen as offices where Fujian businessmen congregated. They also stored goods, traded and consulted each other there."
"Taiwanese coming here on pilgrimage have really helped communication between mainland China and Taiwan," he agrees. "We've bought a small island near Macau, and we're building a Mazu temple there this year. It'll be finished by next year."
Macau Venetian house of cards sets new record
MACAU | Wed Mar 10, 2010 12:03pm GMT
Crowds of baccarat-obsessed Chinese punters crammed inside the world's largest casino, the Venetian Macau, witnessed on Wednesday the mega-casino's latest claim to fame as the world's largest "house of cards."
Kneeling at a quiet spot not far from the cavernous gaming floors of the casino, Bryan Berg, an American architect, placed the last of 218,792 playing cards onto his paper edifice -- a replica of the Venetian Macau -- to break his own Guinness World Record for the largest house of free-standing playing cards.
Berg, a Harvard-trained American architect, took 44 days and 4,051 decks of cards to complete his model inside the Venetian, which sits at the heart of Macau's Cotai Strip, the China-ruled city's version of Las Vegas' neon alley.
"It's really like a real construction project because you have to engineer every single adjacency and every support that's supporting everything above," he told Reuters.
"Weird" New Squid Species Discovered in Deep Sea
Deep-sea submersibles have spotted and filmed a new type of squid in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. "We have never seen anything like it," says cephalopod biologist Michael Vecchione, of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and an author of a report, "Worldwide Observations of Remarkable Deep-Sea Squids," that appears in the December 21 issue of the journal Science.
Although no specimens have been captured, Vecchione suspects that the creature belongs to the recently identified squid family Magnapinnidae, which means "big fins."
Vecchione says it is not surprising that such a large creature has not washed up on a beach. The squid live in very deep water and their bodies are very fragile and would probably be eaten long before reaching the surface.
"They must be fairly common for people to bump into them all over the world," says Vecchione.
Submarine LULA
The autonomous submarine LULA (Portuguese for squid) is being used in different scientific projects.
Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is a robot which travels underwater. In military applications, AUVs are also known as unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs).
Most AUVs in use today are powered by rechargeable batteries (lithium ion, lithium polymer, nickel metal hydride etc), and are implemented with some form of Battery Management System. An emerging trend is to combine different battery and power systems with Ultra-capacitors.
ROKS Cheonan (PCC-772)
ROKS Cheonan (PCC-772) was a South Korean Pohang-class corvette of the Republic of Korea Navy (ROKN), commissioned in 1989. On 26 March 2010, it broke in two and sank near the sea border with North Korea.
North Korea suspected in blast that sank warship
Yoon said the twisting of metal from the salvaged stern that was raised on Thursday indicated the blast had come from outside but the team will wait until the rest of the ship was raised and other evidence gathered before reaching a final conclusion.
MODEL PREDICTIVE CONTROL OF AN AUTONOMOUS UNDERWATER VEHICLE
The potential usage of AUVs is restricted by two main factors. The first is the limitation of battery power, which confines the AUVs for long duration missions. Most of the vehicles in use, uses car batteries that need to be recharged every few hours and that makes them unsuitable for long duration missions.
Graphene cuts battery recharge times
Vorbeck, a materials company, is working with U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to implement its graphene material in batteries that could store large amounts of energy and recharge quickly, said John Lettow, president of Vorbeck.
Battery research could lead to shorter recharge time for cell phones
[Note the ethnicity of the conspicuously anonymous researcher in the photo, supposedly an employee of PNL.]
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
The William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE Office of Science national scientific user facility, is located on PNNL's Richland campus. PNNL operates a marine research facility in Sequim, and has satellite offices in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and Washington, D.C.
Deepwater Horizon
Deepwater Horizon was an ultra-deepwater dynamically positioned, semi-submersible offshore oil drilling rig. Built in 2001 in South Korea by Hyundai Heavy Industries, the rig was commissioned by R&B Falcon, which later became part of Transocean, registered in Majuro, Marshall Islands, and leased to BP plc until 2013.
At 9:45 P.M. CDT on 20 April 2010, during the final phases of drilling the exploratory well at Macondo, a geyser of seawater erupted from the marine riser onto the rig, shooting 240 ft (73 m) into the air. This was soon followed by the eruption of a slushy combination of mud, methane gas, and water. The gas component of the slushy material quickly transitioned into a fully gaseous state and then ignited into a series of explosions and then a firestorm.
Excerpts for your consideration; relevant sections are bolded for emphasis.
Graphene
Graphene is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice.
The price of epitaxial graphene on silicon carbide is dominated by the substrate price, which is approximately $100/cm2 as of 2009. Even cheaper graphene has been produced by transfer from nickel by Korean researchers, with wafer sizes up to 30" reported.
Graphene is quite different from most conventional three-dimensional materials. Intrinsic graphene is a semi-metal or zero-gap semiconductor. It was realized early on that the E-k relation is linear for low energies near the six corners of the two-dimensional hexagonal Brillouin zone, leading to zero effective mass for electrons and holes. Due to this linear (or “conical") dispersion relation at low energies, electrons and holes near these six points, two of which are inequivalent, behave like relativistic particles described by the Dirac equation for spin 1/2 particles.
Due to the incredibly high surface area to mass ratio of graphene, one potential application is in the conductive plates of ultracapacitors.
Stacking the Deck: Secrets of the World's Master Card Architect by Bryan Berg
Tokyo, 1995
I still regard this copy of a Japanese shrine, built for a television game show, as one of my best buildings.
I was told that the god honored by the shrine is believed to bring a good fish catch. The show's producers insisted I help carry an actual shrine in a festival parade. There I was, an Iowa farm kid, dressed in a loincloth and thin slippers and lugging a monument to good fishing.
It was a trip I'll never forget. Many of the fishing families who hosted me were very poor, yet they welcomed me into their homes and shared what they had.
China's Leaders Harness Folk Religion For Their Aims
In China, folk religion has undergone a remarkable rebirth since the days of the Cultural Revolution four decades ago, when all religious worship was banned. One example of a folk goddess that has gained an enormous following is Mazu, a sea deity believed to protect sailors and fishermen. Though she started as a local folk goddess, she has entered the Daoist and Buddhist pantheon, and is also known as Tianhou or Tinhau in Hong Kong.
Scholars say she has an estimated 160 million followers and 4,000 temples devoted solely to her in China.
"Mazu protects fishermen at sea from shipwrecks and helps the poor. Most of our village depends on fishing, and Mazu worship is growing stronger than in the past," Cheng says.
Wang Hongguang, head of the Mazu Research Institute at Shanghai Institute for International Studies, explains that unlike Daoism and other religions, Mazu temples are not administered by monks. There is no organized mass or ritual that requires the spiritual leadership of a religious institution.
After China's economic reforms began in 1979, Mazu worship spread further along trade routes, notes Lin Qitang, an expert on Mazu at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "Businessmen from Fujian built Mazu temples wherever they went," Lin says. "Mazu temples were seen as offices where Fujian businessmen congregated. They also stored goods, traded and consulted each other there."
"Taiwanese coming here on pilgrimage have really helped communication between mainland China and Taiwan," he agrees. "We've bought a small island near Macau, and we're building a Mazu temple there this year. It'll be finished by next year."
Macau Venetian house of cards sets new record
MACAU | Wed Mar 10, 2010 12:03pm GMT
Crowds of baccarat-obsessed Chinese punters crammed inside the world's largest casino, the Venetian Macau, witnessed on Wednesday the mega-casino's latest claim to fame as the world's largest "house of cards."
Kneeling at a quiet spot not far from the cavernous gaming floors of the casino, Bryan Berg, an American architect, placed the last of 218,792 playing cards onto his paper edifice -- a replica of the Venetian Macau -- to break his own Guinness World Record for the largest house of free-standing playing cards.
Berg, a Harvard-trained American architect, took 44 days and 4,051 decks of cards to complete his model inside the Venetian, which sits at the heart of Macau's Cotai Strip, the China-ruled city's version of Las Vegas' neon alley.
"It's really like a real construction project because you have to engineer every single adjacency and every support that's supporting everything above," he told Reuters.
"Weird" New Squid Species Discovered in Deep Sea
Deep-sea submersibles have spotted and filmed a new type of squid in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. "We have never seen anything like it," says cephalopod biologist Michael Vecchione, of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and an author of a report, "Worldwide Observations of Remarkable Deep-Sea Squids," that appears in the December 21 issue of the journal Science.
Although no specimens have been captured, Vecchione suspects that the creature belongs to the recently identified squid family Magnapinnidae, which means "big fins."
Vecchione says it is not surprising that such a large creature has not washed up on a beach. The squid live in very deep water and their bodies are very fragile and would probably be eaten long before reaching the surface.
"They must be fairly common for people to bump into them all over the world," says Vecchione.
Submarine LULA
The autonomous submarine LULA (Portuguese for squid) is being used in different scientific projects.
Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is a robot which travels underwater. In military applications, AUVs are also known as unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs).
Most AUVs in use today are powered by rechargeable batteries (lithium ion, lithium polymer, nickel metal hydride etc), and are implemented with some form of Battery Management System. An emerging trend is to combine different battery and power systems with Ultra-capacitors.
ROKS Cheonan (PCC-772)
ROKS Cheonan (PCC-772) was a South Korean Pohang-class corvette of the Republic of Korea Navy (ROKN), commissioned in 1989. On 26 March 2010, it broke in two and sank near the sea border with North Korea.
North Korea suspected in blast that sank warship
Yoon said the twisting of metal from the salvaged stern that was raised on Thursday indicated the blast had come from outside but the team will wait until the rest of the ship was raised and other evidence gathered before reaching a final conclusion.
MODEL PREDICTIVE CONTROL OF AN AUTONOMOUS UNDERWATER VEHICLE
The potential usage of AUVs is restricted by two main factors. The first is the limitation of battery power, which confines the AUVs for long duration missions. Most of the vehicles in use, uses car batteries that need to be recharged every few hours and that makes them unsuitable for long duration missions.
Graphene cuts battery recharge times
Vorbeck, a materials company, is working with U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to implement its graphene material in batteries that could store large amounts of energy and recharge quickly, said John Lettow, president of Vorbeck.
Battery research could lead to shorter recharge time for cell phones
[Note the ethnicity of the conspicuously anonymous researcher in the photo, supposedly an employee of PNL.]
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
The William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE Office of Science national scientific user facility, is located on PNNL's Richland campus. PNNL operates a marine research facility in Sequim, and has satellite offices in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and Washington, D.C.
Deepwater Horizon
Deepwater Horizon was an ultra-deepwater dynamically positioned, semi-submersible offshore oil drilling rig. Built in 2001 in South Korea by Hyundai Heavy Industries, the rig was commissioned by R&B Falcon, which later became part of Transocean, registered in Majuro, Marshall Islands, and leased to BP plc until 2013.
At 9:45 P.M. CDT on 20 April 2010, during the final phases of drilling the exploratory well at Macondo, a geyser of seawater erupted from the marine riser onto the rig, shooting 240 ft (73 m) into the air. This was soon followed by the eruption of a slushy combination of mud, methane gas, and water. The gas component of the slushy material quickly transitioned into a fully gaseous state and then ignited into a series of explosions and then a firestorm.