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This amazing picture was taken on June 3, 1964 which is before I was born. The development of human society has been extraordinary these last few hundred years and to prove it where is one of many amazing pictures of great deeds.

Just before the time we were getting color TV we also had men’s walking in space.

The astronaut managed to walk in space with the help of a hand-held maneuvering oxygen-jet gun and an 8 meter tether. The gun held in his right hand ran out of fuel 3 minutes after he started the space walk making the astronaut use the tether to come back to the ship. The visor of his helmet is gold-plated to protect him from the unfiltered rays of the sun.

Hope you enjoy this fantastic picture.

Image via Wikipedia

On 2 of December, 1995 a spacecraft called SOHO (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory) was launched into space with the mission of studying the internal structure of the Sun, it’s extensive outer atmosphere and the origin of the solar wind which is a stream of ionized gas that blows continuously outward through the Solar System.

This project is the result of a combination of strength between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA. ESA was responsible for the production of the space craft and its instruments while NASA was responsible for the launch and is now responsible for mission operations because NASA keeps track of the spacecraft through large radio dishes spread around the world which form NASA’s Deep Space Network.

Trough subtle waves that come from the interior of the Sun and that show up at its surface in the form of small ripples which are extremely difficult to be observed in detail from Earth, scientist expect to get more information about the core of the Sun. These details about the hidden core of the Sun will shed light to questions related to its formation, 4.6 billion years ago.

These subtle waves called g modes are thought to occur when churning gas bellow the solar surface sinks deeper into the star and collides with denser material originating ripples that propagate through the Sun’s interior up to its surface. When these waves reach the surface of the Sun they only measure a few meters and last some hours since it takes between two and seven hours to rise and fall just once.

Since 1995 that most of data retrieved by SOHO helped a lot of investigations and answered some questions about space.

One of the most important questions that this project expects to answer is the speed of the rotation of the Sun’s core which will reveal a lot of information about how our solar system was formed, because it represents the hub of rotation for the interstellar cloud that eventually formed the Sun and all the planets.

Now that you know the general information about this amazing machine that has been traveling the space for over 11 years and 5 months I’m sure that you’re going to like to check out the best pictures sent by SOHO.

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(Above: the Sun)An EIT 304Å image captures a pair of curving erupting prominences on 28 June 2000 — Prominences are huge clouds of relatively cool dense plasma suspended in the Sun’s hot, thin corona. At times, they can erupt, escaping the Sun’s atmosphere. Emission in this spectral line shows the upper chromosphere at a temperature of about 60,000 degrees K. Every feature in the image traces magnetic field structure. The hottest areas appear almost white, while the darker red areas indicate cooler temperatures.

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(Above: the Sun)Blasting CME
This LASCO C2 image, taken 8 January 2002, shows a widely spreading coronal mass ejection (CME) as it blasts more than a billion tons of matter out into space at millions of kilometers per hour. The C2 image was turned 90 degrees so that the blast seems to be pointing down. An EIT 304 Angstrom image from a different day was enlarged and superimposed on the C2 image so that it filled the occulting disk for effect.

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(Above)SWAN observed a huge cloud of hydrogen, 70 times the size of the Sun, that surrounded Comet Hale-Bopp when it neared the Sun. Ultra violet light, charted by SWAN in 1997, revealed a cloud 100 million kilometres w ide and diminishing in intensity outwards (contour lines). The cloud was generat ed by a comet nucleus perhaps only about 40 kilometres in diameter. The yellow c ircle (lower right) gives the size of the Sun. Solar rays broke up water vapor r eleased from the comet by the Sun’s warmth. The resulting hydrogen atoms shone by ultraviolet light invisible from the Earth’s surface.

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(Above: the Sun)This composite image combines EIT images from three wavelengths (171Å, 195Å and 284Å) into one that reveals solar features unique to each wavelength. Since the EIT images come to us from the spacecraft in black and white, they are color coded for easy identification. For this image, the nearly simultaneous images from May 1998 were each given a color code (red, yellow and blue) and merged into one.

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This device which is expected generate energy from the tides of the sea on a commercial scale belongs to Marine Current Turbines and was built and assembled at the Harland and Wolff dockyard at Bellfast.
This first project which consists of a huge 1,000 tonne pole with two turbines is being installed at Strangford Lough, Nothern Irland and is expected to generate enough energy for 1.000 homes (1,2MW) within weeks.
This system works with 16m blades that are propelled with the force of the sea tides which can reach the velocity of 8 knots at Strangford Lough.
If this double turbine generator is successful at producing the amounts of energy expected, the company will expand to a tidal farm taking over the Anglesey coast by 2010 or 2011.
This is a technology that is developing incredibly fast, leaving us the certainty that new projects will arrive and that new things will be implemented in a nearby future.
Since this is a clean and renewable power source we can only expect that everything goes according to plan and that more countries besides Britain start investing on it because it will boost the development of this technology and reduce the amount of polluting emission.

Image from Wikipedia

Has you might imagine there are several sizes of black holes and this one besides being the smallest ever found still digests everything around him because of the huge gravitational force that even draws light into it.
The previous record holder would weight 6.3 Suns which isn’t much when we know black holes weighting up to billions times the weight of our Sun.
NASA scientists Nikolai Shaposhnikov and Lev Titarchuk identified this black hole which is the smallest (15 miles across) and the lightest known black hole in the universe weighting only 3.8 of our suns.
This discovery was made with the help of NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite that was launched in late 1995.
This flyweight XTE J1650 which exists outside our star system was formed in the center of a dying star when she ran out of fuel and collapsed due to its own gravity into a black hole. As well as being the smallest known black hole scientist also think that it must be very close of being the smallest possible size for a black hole because if after the star collapses the result is less than 3 times the weight of our sun, instead of becoming a black hole it becomes a called neutron star.
Amazing how this powerful and fearful phenomenon of the universe only measures 15 miles that is the size of a city.

Photo above: The lowest-mass known black hole belongs to a binary system named XTE J1650-500. The black hole has about 3.8 times the mass of our sun, and is orbited by a companion star, as depicted in this illustration. Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobar

The measurement of the black hole’s mass is due to high-precision timing observations made by NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite, shown here prior to launch. Credit: NASA

Miami police is thinking about adopting the new cutting wedge spy in the sky technology to help tackle crime.

This small flying drone is 14 pound (6.3 kg.), doesn’t need a pilot and is capable of hovering and communicating images using electro-optic or infrared sensors.

This flying drone still needs to go through the Federal Aviation Administration for approval so that it’s certified as a safe flying instrument. After that it seems like is going to be an open road or skies for this useful machine.

The spy in the sky already works successfully for the U.S. military and for the U.S. Customs doing border patrols.

It’s a pity that we have to see our privacy attacked or diminished in order to fight crime, but these are the times we live in.

The Honeywell Micro Air Vehicle or “Honeywell MAV” is seen during a flight test at an undisclosed location.

It is 14 inches in diameter and 22 inches from the feet to the top

Photos: REUTERS/Honeywell/Handout

In the future motorcyclists will have the option to use the new airbag for motorcyclists.

This amazing airbag featured in the video is supposed to be commercialized around 2010.

When you use this airbag your chances of surviving a crash will increase greatly. Let’s hope this stuff doesn’t come too expensive, until then where’s the video of the tests made to the future motorcyclists airbag.

When salt water mixes with fresh water at the river mouths it increases the water temperature by 0.1 degree Celsius (0.2 Fahrenheit). To harvest this energy scientists have developed a special membrane which is extremely expensive. The process only problem is the cost of the production of this membrane which is quite expensive but that can be solved with a better and more energy efficient production.

Dutch scientists say that if we could harvest the energy from all the world estuaries we could provide 20 percent of the world electricity demand.

There are already two projects to build osmosis energy plants in the world, one at Fjord (south of Oslo) and another at a Dutch seaside lake. If scientists could manage a way of making this process not to be so expensive we might as well be facing the answer for our future energy problems in a clean and recyclable way.

Photo: REUTERS/Alister Doyle

A view of an industrial estate at Tofte near Oslo, Norway, March 2, 2008, where state power group Statkraft will build an experimental “salt power” plant in 2008.

The electronic industry still use a lot of harmful chemicals to the environment but the situation is getting better has some companies make an effort to produce “greener” products. By greener products I mean products whit less harmful chemicals and easily recyclable.

In the recyclable field we have to consider as well the structures made to recycle the products and their efficiency.

The results of this study made by Greenpeace in March 2008 show Nintendo with the worst score, being the company that takes less care in producing green electronics. The top green companies are Samsung and Toshiba due to their improvements in this area followed by Nokia, Sony, Lenovo and dell. In the really not so green corner we have Panasonic, Philips, Microsoft, Sharp and Acer.

So, if you consider the harm products make to the environment when you buy them you should avoid the not so green products because the pollution made by this products is quite high and the rapid proliferation of these products doesn’t help too.

In this photo there’s an example of this kind of electronic pollution: in Guangdong at China there’s 4,000 tonnes of toxic e-waste discarded every hour.

Photo: © Greenpeace / Natalie Behring

New super camera “sees” under clothes

That’s right, there’s a new camera that’s going to beat all the others. A British company called ThruVision developed a camera that detects weapons, drugs or explosives from up to 25 meters.

This new camera identifies objects through the electromagnetic radiation that all objects emanate.

For sure that’s going to be great to have cameras that detect illegal hidden objects but what about the privacy of the people?

For sure I wouldn’t like to have someone checking under my clothes but nowadays it’s what happens.