Short Film: The Terrible thing from Alpha 9

Check out this very clever animation by Jake Armstrong. The animation style is familiar in some aspects, but the short is very original.



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Record breaking super massive black hole discovered

Tim Sayell sends in this eye opener from Yahoo News concerning a record breaking super massive black hole at the center of a nearby galaxy - M87.

From the article:

• The supermassive black hole is two to three times heftier than previously thought, a new model showed, weighing in at a whopping 6.4 billion times the mass of the sun. The new - method of determining the size of black holes - suggests that other black holes in nearby large galaxies could also be much heftier than current measurements suggest.

This new finding may help clear up the size disparity between galaxies extremely far away and those close up. Until recently - distant galaxies which contained quazars - were found to have cores massing about 10 billion solar masses. None of the galaxies relatively close to the Milky Way - seemed to mass anywhere near that of the distant ones. The new finding seems to indicate that most large galaxies contain a super massive black hole, massing on an order comprible with that of distant quazar galaxies.

Yahoo News article

Darpa working on T1000 type tech?!

Not so much chrome / mercury killer bots.... but a material that can self-assemble or alter their shape, perform a function and then disassemble themselves.

As the Wired / Danger Room article puts it, this material:

• could lead to “morphing aircraft and ground vehicles, uniforms that can alter themselves to be comfortable in any climate, and ’soft’ robots that flow like mercury through small openings to enter caves and bunker complexes.” A soldier could even reach into a can of unformed goop, and order up a custom-made tool or a “universal spare part.”

Wait...robots that could flow like mercury?! Damn that DOES sound like a T1000!

Read the complete article sent in by Shaun Saunders

Free Floating Black Holes?

I was reading this in Gizmodo and Shaun sends me a message "hey check this out!" and you know this is fascinating and I got to wonder if there is a story in here somewhere. But I digress:

Remember that report a few months back about a flare happening where nothing was suppose to be? And this flare lasted FAR longer than any usual super nova and led to all types of speculation. Ancient civilization trying to communicate, FTL star ship drive exploding... that kind of stuff.

Now it would seem astronomers might have an answer: It was possibly a rogue or "free floating" black hole eating a star that was, until said black hole devoured it, residing in a galaxy to dim to view using existing technology.

According to the Gizmodo article:

• Lucky for us, one of Hubble's new additions could help us find more rogue black holes in the void. The Wide Field Camera 3, installed by members of the Atlantis crew earlier this month, might be able to determine if there was actually a host galaxy around the mysterious flare that was just too faint to see.

New Scientist article

LaVerdiere's In Space!

Yep, there is going to be a LaVerdiere's in space. Now you have to be from Maine to understand the humor in this statement. Let me give you some background. Stephen LaVerdiere, a self proclaimed space nut from Belgrade Lakes Maine is paying $200,000 dollars to fly into space aboard Virgin Galactic's Space Ship Two. Stephen's claim to fame will be as the first native Mainer to fly into space. Now before we get cat calls that this isn't outspace and its not at orbital velocity that is true, but "space" is defined as any altitude above 62 miles, so 80 miles more than covers that bill.

But to fully understand the humor of a LaVerdiere's in space is to know that Mr. LaVerdiere is the former owner of a drugstore chain in Maine called....yep...LaVerdiere's...

The 52 year old LaVerdiere is scheduled to fly sometime next year and is a group of about 100 that have already signed up to go.

Good Luck Steve....don't forget your dramamine.... yeah, I went there...