kathleen hunt

moderation:NASA Prepares for Asteroid’s Close Pass by Earth—On Tuesday, November 8, at 6:28 p.m. EST, an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier will soar past our planet at a distance closer than the Moon… and NASA scientists will be watching! 2005 YU55, a 400-meter (1,300-foot) -wide C-type asteroid, was discovered in December 2005 by Robert McMillan of the Spacewatch Program at the University of Arizona, Tucson. It’s pretty much spherical in shape and dark – darker than charcoal, in fact! Scientists with NASA’s Near-Earth Objects Observation Program will begin tracking it on November 4 using the 70-meter radar telescope at the Deep Space Network in Goldstone, California , as well as with the Arecibo Planetary Radar Facility in Puerto Rico beginning November 8. They will continue tracking 2005 YU55 through November 10.(via universetoday) (click for cool graphic)

NASA Prepares for Asteroid’s Close Pass by Earth
—
On Tuesday, November 8, at 6:28 p.m. EST, an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier will soar past our planet at a distance closer than the Moon… and NASA scientists will be watching!

2005 YU55, a 400-meter (1,300-foot) -wide C-type asteroid, was discovered in December 2005 by Robert McMillan of the Spacewatch Program at the University of Arizona, Tucson. It’s pretty much spherical in shape and dark – darker than charcoal, in fact! Scientists with NASA’s Near-Earth Objects Observation Program will begin tracking it on November 4 using the 70-meter radar telescope at the Deep Space Network in Goldstone, California , as well as with the Arecibo Planetary Radar Facility in Puerto Rico beginning November 8. They will continue tracking 2005 YU55 through November 10.
(via universetoday) (click for cool graphic)

(via jtotheizzoe)

01/10/12

THIRTEEN: Hey, New York: Let Us in Your Apartment

thirteenny:

If you don’t have a nightmarish apartment story, we say you’re not a real New Yorker. Apartment-hunting in this city has to be one of the Circles of Hell, but sometimes the apartment themselves are even more … unusual.
For an upcoming online series, we’re searching for the most bizarre,…

01/8/12

latimes:

Several hundred protesters continue “Occupy San Diego”
Photo: The Occupy San Diego movement behind City Hall. Credit: Tony Perry / Los Angeles Times

(via californiawatch)

01/8/12

hotchicksofoccupywallstreet:

Photo by Adrian Kinloch
She is identified as being 18 years old. And totally badass.

01/6/12

(via shitthatsirisays)

01/6/12

Check out the new Beastly 'Makeup" featurette, now on Apple Trailers! In theaters March 4th.

(via cbsfilms)

01/5/12

smarterplanet:

Is Thorium the Biggest Energy Breakthrough Since Fire? Possibly. - Forbes
For the past several months, a friend of mine has been telling me about the potentially game-changing implications of an obscure (at least to me) metal named Thorium after the Norse god of thunder, Thor.
It seems he is not the only person who believes thorium, a naturally-occurring, slightly radioactive metal discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, could provide the world with an ultra-safe, ultra-cheap source of nuclear power.
Last week, scores of thorium boosters gathered in the United Kingdom to launch a new advocacy organizing, the Weinberg Foundation, which plans to push the promise of thorium nuclear energy into the mainstream political discussion of clean energy and climate change. The message they’re sending is that thorium is the anti-dote to the world’s most pressing energy and environmental challenges.
So what is the big deal about thorium? In 2006, writing in the magazine Cosmos, Tim Dean summarized perhaps the most optimistic scenario for what a Thorium-powered nuclear world would be like:

What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles? And what if the waste produced by such a reactor was radioactive for a mere few hundred years rather than tens of thousands? It may sound too good to be true, but such a reactor is indeed possible, and a number of teams around the world are now working to make it a reality. What makes this incredible reactor so different is its fuel source: thorium.

01/5/12

“

We can upgrade our iPhones, but we can’t fix our roads and bridges. We invented broadband, but we can’t extend it to 35 percent of the public. We can get 300 television channels on the iPad, but in the past decade 20 newspapers closed down all their foreign bureaus. We have touch-screen voting machines, but last year just 40 percent of registered voters turned out, and our political system is more polarized, more choked with its own bile, than at any time since the Civil War. There is nothing today like the personal destruction of the McCarthy era or the street fights of the 1960s. But in those periods, institutional forces still existed in politics, business, and the media that could hold the center together. It used to be called the establishment, and it no longer exists. Solving fundamental problems with a can-do practicality – the very thing the world used to associate with America, and that redeemed us from our vulgarity and arrogance – now seems beyond our reach.

George Baker in his piece

(via csmonitor)

01/2/12

oatmeal:

Why Netflix is splitting itself in two

12/31/11

apt2n:

Stirred, not shaken

12/30/11