This Insanely Loud Sound System Simulates the Roar of a Rocket Launch

Being shot into space puts spacecraft under extreme stress—but did you know that the sound of the rocket launch can damage a craft? Inside the Large European Acoustic Facility, engineers recreate the incredible noise of a launch to make sure satellites can survive it. According to the ESA, “no human could survive” the sound. Read more…        

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This Insanely Loud Sound System Simulates the Roar of a Rocket Launch

Archaeologists Uncover 300,000-Year-Old Kitchen in Israeli Cave

Sure, early hominins used fire for upwards of a million years. But when did early hominins start acting like humans—for example, cooking in the same spot each night? The new discovery of an old ( really old) hearth at an Israeli dig site could hold the answer. Read more…        

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Archaeologists Uncover 300,000-Year-Old Kitchen in Israeli Cave

Watch this cruise ship get cut in half and made 99 feet longer

As far as behemoth man-made objects, few things are more dwarfing than a cruise ship. That’s why it’s so incredible to see such a thing in the process of being taken apart. This striking timelapse video, posted at FStoppers, shows off the entire process. Read more…        

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Watch this cruise ship get cut in half and made 99 feet longer

A Single Man Spent 53 Years Building This Massive Cathedral

Very few of us will work at a single job our whole lives. Even fewer will work on a single, self-led project our whole lives. Spanish octogenarian Justo Gallego Martinez is an exception: He’s been the sole designer, engineer, and construction worker on a cathedral in Madrid since 1961. Read more…        

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A Single Man Spent 53 Years Building This Massive Cathedral

Stunning massive sundog captured over Moscow

Imagine looking up on your daily commute and catching this crazy visual trickery in the sky! Yesterday, Youtube user melkiy582 captured a massive halo of light was seen around the sun on the horizon in Moscow—a cool atmospheric phenomenon known by an even cooler name: Sundog. Read more…        

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Stunning massive sundog captured over Moscow

This Amazing, Light-Bending Metamaterial Can Do Calculus

When we last saw metamaterials, they were helping us create real-life invisibility cloaks . But, in even more exciting news for true nerds, light-bending metamaterial can also do math. Not just simple math, but calculus. Read more…        

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This Amazing, Light-Bending Metamaterial Can Do Calculus

Berkeley Breathed’s concept art for a Grinch movie with Jack Nicholson

In an alternate universe, the feature-length adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! isn’t a live-action film starring Jim Carrey but a CG animated film, with Jack Nicholson voicing the Grinch and designs by Bloom County cartoonist Berkeley Breathed. Read more…        

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Berkeley Breathed’s concept art for a Grinch movie with Jack Nicholson

Watch Google Play Videos on Your iOS Device with the YouTube App

Google Play and iOS don’t work with each other, but if you’ve bought movies on Google Play and want to watch them on your iPhone or iPad, CNET has a workaround. All you need is the YouTube app for iOS. Read more…        

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Watch Google Play Videos on Your iOS Device with the YouTube App

How Corpses Helped Shape the London Underground

As Mexico City archaeologists sort through the surreal array of Aztec sacrificial skulls recently uncovered while excavating their city’s subway system , it’s worth remembering that parts of the London Underground were also tunneled, blasted, picked, and drilled through a labyrinth of plague pits and cemeteries. Read more…        

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How Corpses Helped Shape the London Underground

CSI Style Zoom Sees Faces Reflected In Subjects’ Eyes

mikejuk writes “A recent paper by Dr Rob Jenkins of the Department of Psychology at York University (UK) has managed to prove that you can get useful images of faces from the reflections in eyes. It really is as simple as zooming in. The catch is that the experiments were done with a 39 mega pixel camera — even so the actual final images were low resolution. In the experiment a number of people were photographed with a ‘bystander’ in a position so that a reflection of their face would be captured in the eye. The resulting extracted image of the reflection in the eye was only 27×36 and then rescaled using bicubic interpolation to 400×240 or bigger and enhanced using standard PhotoShop operations to normalize the contrast and brightness. Test subjects were able to match faces using the low resolution images but the important result was that if the subject knew the person in the photo then recognition went up to 90% with false positives down at 10%. So the next time you appear in a photo consider the fact that a simple procedure might reveal who you are with.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CSI Style Zoom Sees Faces Reflected In Subjects’ Eyes