Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
SETI: Private Donors help re-open mothballed telescopes
Telescopes looking for extra terrestrial intelligence should re-open within weeks after donors replaced income lost in public funding cuts.
Donors, including actress Jodie Foster, raised more than $200,000 (£122,000).
The 42 radio telescopes, in northern California, search space for potential signals from alien life forms.
Ms Foster was one of more than 2,400 people who contributed to the fund to save the Allen Telescope Array.
She played the lead role of an astronomer looking for evidence of aliens in the 1997 film Contact.
Science Fiction into Science Fact
Another donor was the Apollo 8 astronaut, Bill Anders.
SETI Institute Astronomer Seth Shostak told BBC News, the deal with the Air Force is not yet done but he said he is fairly confident it will go through. Even then the money will need to be ratified by Congress and so there may be a delay. He hopes the array will re-open in September or October.
Thomas Pierson, SETI chief executive, agreed that a deal with the Air Force, combined with the donations, should allow the array to start listening for space chatter once again.
Donors help re-open mothballed telescopes searching for ET
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Ultimate Photographer's Wedding Ring
When Matthew Harrison got married recently, he was given the awesome gift of a f/.95 Noctilux ring: "As is tradition, the bride and groom exchanged gifts prior to the wedding.
While Matthew purchased Emily the watch that she had always wanted.
Emily commissioned a custom ring for Matthew’s shooting hand (as opposed to for his wedding band).
This one of a kind band has the depth of field scale from his favorite lens, the .95 Noctilux. On the sides, the ring features both Matthew’s name and The Leica Guy moniker on one side, and the Lens information including name, filter size, and serial number on the other.
The ring was commissioned and made by jeweler Gaelen in British Columbia, Canada, from handmade engagement rings.
A knitted R2D2 sweater
This awesome R2D2 sweater. This is the droid you’re looking for!
Via Neatorama.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Wacky Motorcycle helmets
The company is now hoping to find a firm to manufacture them. Designer Renat Abdrakhmanov explains: "The project with helmets was initiated as a creative experiment; we tried to do something different than ordinary advertising, just for fun, for ourselves and for potential clients.
There are no real helmets yet, just the design. But once it became clear that hundreds of thousands people showed interest in the product we started thinking about production.
We have so far got proposals requesting rights for production in US and Japan."
Picture: good.kz / Rex Features
Contact lenses fitted with real diamonds and gold.
Want to make your eyes really sparkle? A company is offering contact lenses fitted with real diamonds and gold.
Dubbed 'eye jewellery', the bling eyewear sees 18 diamonds studded onto an 18-carat gold plate on a special lens.
Created by Shekhar Eye Research in Mumbai, the 'La SER' brand lenses can be custom-made at a cost of $15,000 a pair in four designs of diamonds on white gold, diamonds on yellow gold, or just gold or yellow gold.
Picture: Chandrashekhar Chawan / Rex Features
Dubbed 'eye jewellery', the bling eyewear sees 18 diamonds studded onto an 18-carat gold plate on a special lens.
Created by Shekhar Eye Research in Mumbai, the 'La SER' brand lenses can be custom-made at a cost of $15,000 a pair in four designs of diamonds on white gold, diamonds on yellow gold, or just gold or yellow gold.
Picture: Chandrashekhar Chawan / Rex Features
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Cover girls: Women Feature More in ‘sexualised’ images
The study will be published in the September issue of the journal Sexuality & Culture.
“We chose Rolling Stone,” explains study co-author Erin Hatton, assistant professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo, “because it is a well-established, pop-culture media outlet.
It is not explicitly about sex or relationships; foremost it is about music. But it also covers politics, film, television, and current events, and so offers a useful window into how women and men are portrayed generally in popular culture.”
After analysing more than 1,000 images of men and women on Rolling Stone covers over the course of 43 years, the authors came to several conclusions. First, representations of both women and men have indeed become more sexualised over time; and, second, women continue to be more frequently sexualised than men.
Their most striking finding, however, was the change in how intensely sexualised images of women—but not men—have become.
To measure the intensity of sexualized representations men and women, the authors developed their own “scale of sexualisation.” An image was given “points” for being sexualised if, for example, the subject’s lips were parted or his/her tongue was showing, the subject was only partially clad or naked, or the text describing the subject used explicitly sexual language.
Based on this scale, the authors identified three categories of images: a) those that were, for the most part, not sexualised (i.e., scoring 0-4 points on the scale), b) those that were sexualised (5-10 points), and c) those that were so intensely sexualised that the authors labeled them “hypersexualised” (11-23 points).
In the 1960s they found that 11 percent of men and 44 percent of women on the covers of Rolling Stone were sexualised. In the 2000s, 17 percent of men were sexualised (an increase of 55 percent from the 1960s), and 83 percent of women were sexualised (an increase of 89 percent). Among those images that were sexualised, 2 percent of men and 61 percent of women were hypersexualised.
“In the 2000s,” Hatton says, “there were ten times more hypersexualised images of women than men, and 11 times more non-sexualised images of men than of women.”
“What we conclude from this is that popular media outlets such as Rolling Stone are not depicting women as sexy musicians or actors; they are depicting women musicians and actors as ready and available for sex. This is problematic,” Hatton says, “because it indicates a decisive narrowing of media representations of women.
“We don’t necessarily think it’s problematic for women to be portrayed as ‘sexy.’ But we do think it is problematic when nearly all images of women depict them not simply as ‘sexy women’ but as passive objects for someone else’s sexual pleasure.”
These findings are important, the authors say, because a plethora of research has found such images to have a range of negative consequences:
“Sexualised portrayals of women have been found to legitimise or exacerbate violence against women and girls, as well as sexual harassment and anti-women attitudes among men and boys,” Hatton says.
“Such images also have been shown to increase rates of body dissatisfaction and/or eating disorders among men, women and girls; and they have even been shown to decrease sexual satisfaction among both men and women.”
“For these reasons,” says Hatton, “we find the frequency of sexualised images of women in popular media, combined with the extreme intensity of their sexualisation, to be cause for concern.”
More news from the University at Buffalo: www.buffalo.edu/news/
Monday, August 8, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Never ever Park in the Cycle Lane in Lithuanian Capital
This is the incredible moment a frustrated mayor drove an armoured vehicle over a Mercedes-Benz S-Class parked in a cycle lane.
Arturas Zuokas became infuriated with motorists parking their luxury cars illegally around the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.
So the 43-year-old politician drove over this Merc in a Russian tank to set an example.
The mayor said: "I’ve had enough of these drivers parking their luxury cars on bike lanes and pedestrian crossings.
This tank is a good tool to solve the problem of parking in the wrong place." We think it was probably a set-up, but we certainly wouldn't take a chance by parking illegally in Vilnius.
Picture: SWNS
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