DETROIT, MI – For the second straight week, a music act has pulled out of a commitment to perform at Detroit’s historic Masonic Temple.
And it’s unclear what that mean’s about the venue’s future.
Flickr photo by Matt Callow.
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Vehicles, especially cars that carry the TPMS (Tire Pressure Monitoring System) sensors are not exactly a rare sight in this day and age, and are pretty handy in letting you know just what kind of pressure your tires have left within while you drive. Definitely an ideal method to know whether your ride’s about to experience a flat or not, that’s for sure. Since it is smart, and safe, how about transferring this particular idea over to the world of cyclists? Known as the BTPS sensor instead (for obvious reasons), it will connect to a compatible smartphone and lets you know of the exact pressure of your tires, with a reading range of between 0 and 174 psi. Of course, it goes without saying that this device would be a more useful tool as a convenient indicator of tire pressure; and your back will also thank you for it as there would be less need to bend down each time.
After all, since most road bikes require a regular air adjustment, a quick glance at this phone app would be much appreciated. The BTPS unit comprises of a pressure sensor, circuit board, and battery. When used in conjunction with tubeless tires, it will be mounted on the rim tape. Should tubes see action, it is stuck right onto the tube, similar in manner to that of a patch. The BTPS is currently a crowdsourcing idea, so it remains to be seen whether it will be realized or not.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Qbeak Prototype Unveiled, Parrot Asteroid Mini Picks Up FCC Approval,
Hmmm, it seems that obesity is not the only disease to strike and plague us humans, as we have also seemingly brought this “curse” upon our four legged friends – dogs. Assuming your pooch is overweight and needs some assistance to get around, how about this pet elevator that will let your dog go up and down the stairs without putting additional strain on those joints of theirs?
Basically, this prototype comes with a start button that is close to the ground, allowing your dog to learn to push said button with its paw in order to have it ride the basket up or down, depending on the direction where it wants to go. Of course, your dog would need to practice using this and a lack of fear of heights would help as well, as the dog elevator lifts several feet off the ground in order to traverse up and down the stairs. All I can say is, if your pooch is overweight, it is about darn time you sent it for daily walks – and chances are the owner is overweight, too.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Man Builds Spaceship For Son, HiSense Pulse Google TV Going For $99 ,
Taiwanese PC giant Acer is ready to rock the gadget world with a new $99 tablet set to compete in the low-cost market against Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Acer is planning to launch the $99 Android tablet, Iconia B1, in early 2013, a source close to the project told the Wall Street Journal. The $99 tablet will feature a 7-inch display with a 1024 x 600 pixel resolution screen and 1.2GHz dual-core processor. Plans for the tablet reportedly began in the fall, after the company’s competitors began offering aggressively priced options.
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AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — Wind power generated in Maine is now producing nearly 500 megawatts, enough to supply the average needs of 175,000 households. However, it’s still well short of the state’s goal for wind generation by 2015.
But new projects that are in conceptual stages, under regulatory review or approved but facing challenges could catapult the state to half of its wind-power goal of 2,000 megawatts by 2015. The Legislature has set that goal for installed wind power capacity, along with 3,000 megawatts by 2020.
Maine’s operating wind power plants have a capacity to produce 468 megawatts online now, according to figures from the state Department of Environmental Protection, which regulates grid-scale projects in Maine’s Unorganized Territory.
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Pineapple is hardly considered an exotic fruit these days. Although it needs a tropical climate to grow and may have once been considered exotic, today it’s readily available in grocery stories at reasonable prices. Heck, you’ll find pineapple chunks in your standard fruit cup. But when grown in Cornwall, England with peculiar methods, that pineapple may be worth a lot more.
The Lost Gardens of Heligan employs Victorian techniques that involve growing the pineapples under piles of straw, manure and horse urine — an unlikely combination that stimulates a chemical reaction that allows the pineapples to grow in colder climates. Not to worry, the pineapple doesn’t actually come in contact with the aforementioned waste, and the Lost Gardens of Heligan was quick to point out that fact once news of the pineapples began to surface.
The work that goes into these traditional growing methods is both time- and labor-intensive. The Gardens estimate that one pineapple would cost about £1,000 (about $1,600) and one of the fruits that has been nurtured over two years could allegedly be worth ten times that, reports The Telegraph. However, that fruit isn’t actually going to the market — it will be shared with the garden staff. The Garden explains:
One Nevada Republican wants his fellow lawmakers to give up part of their pay in the name of public education.
Freshman state Sen. Mark Hutchison tells the Las Vegas Sun that he intends to draft a bill calling for members of the state legislature to give up the equivalent of about $150 per day in salary to fund the state’s public schools.
While Hutchison says the proposal “sends the right signal to the public,” state Senate Majority Leader Moises Denis, a Democrat, called it a “gimmick.” He says lawmakers should instead be taking the time to devise real solutions to increasing public school funding, the Sun reports.
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I like my lattes with plenty of sweetener in them, but I think that I’d be fine with a dose of power pills instead of sugar or aspartame if that’s what they’re serving these days.
This Ms. Pac-Man latte was carefully composed by expert barista Andrew Alcala (aka MonkDrew), who clearly knows his way around a cup of espresso and some foamy milk.
While he hasn’t made a whole lot of other geeky lattes, he does have a nice Triforce and a couple of awesome dragons among his many other creative beverage designs. I can only imagine such artistry slows down the line at the coffee shop a little bit.
Santa brought lots of good boys and girls across the world new iPhones yesterday. Hurray, Christmas! Unfortunately, with new iPhones come the perils of iPhone ownership, which is to say, that many of these beautiful new handsets are already broken. Here are some poor saps who already busted their new toys. More »
By: Govert Schilling, SPACE.com contributor
Published: 12/26/2012 11:42 AM EST on SPACE.com
A giant helium balloon is slowly drifting above Antarctica, about 22 miles (36 kilometers) up. Launched on Tuesday (Dec. 25) from the National Science Foundation’s Long Duration Balloon (LDB) facility on Earth’s southernmost continent, it carries a sensitive telescope that measures submillimeter light waves from stellar nurseries in our Milky Way.
"Christmas launch!" wrote officials with NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, which oversees the agency’s balloon research program, in a Twitter post yesterday. "BLAST launched today from McMurdo Station, Antarctica."
This is the fifth and final mission for BLAST, short for the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, and mission designers hope it will reveal why so few stars are born in our galaxy.
On Dec. 12, BLAST was still in one of the two giant Payload Assembly Buildings at the LDB facility, a short distance from the U.S. research center McMurdo Station. Principal investigator Mark Devlin of the University of Pennsylvania and a group of graduate students were mounting a giant sunshade on the telescope, to ensure that the ultra-cold detectors won’t heat up during the flight.
"The detectors are cooled to 0.3 degrees aboven absolute zero, using liquid helium," said Devlin. "If they were any warmer, they wouldn’t be able to register the faint submillimeter radiation of cold interstellar dust clouds at just 30 degrees above absolute zero."
Star mystery
After test flights in 2003 in New Mexico and in 2005 in Sweden, BLAST’s third flight, in 2006 from Antarctica, was a "mind-boggling" success, Devlin said. The instrument revealed beyond doubt that in most distant galaxies, new stars are born at a prolific rate. By measuring the star formation rate in galaxies more than 7 billion light-years away, the researchers determined that over half of the stars in the uuniverse were born within the first 5 billion years after the Big Bang.
"But there’s an unsolved problem," added co-principal investifator Barth Netterfield of the University of Toronto, Canada, who was assisting the BLAST team with the launch preparations. "BLAST found lots of so-called dark cores in our own Milky Way — dense clouds of cold dust that are supposed to be stars-in-the-making. Based on the number of dark cores, you would expect our galaxy to spawn dozens of new stars each year on average. Yet, the galactic star formation rate is only some four solar masses per year."
So why is the stellar birth rate in our Milky Way so low? Astronomers can think of two ways in which a dense cloud of dust is prevented from further contracting into a star: turbulence in the dust, or the collapse-impeding effects of magnetic fields. On its new mission, BLAST should find out which process is to blame. [Images: Life at Antarctica’s Concordia Station]
The idea is straightforward: magnetic fields tend to align electrically charged, elongated dust particles. If dust particles have a preferred orientation, they will slightly polarize the submillimeter radiation from the cloud. Using polarimeters, BLAST can detect if the radiation is indeed polarized, and if it is, determine the direction of the magnetic field. "If there’s no polarization present," said Netterfield, "turbulence must be the reason" why so few dark cores collapse into new stars.
Final mission?
In 2010, on its fourth mission, BLAST was already equipped with polarimeters. However, accdording to Devlin, "that flight did not do so well because of a melted filter. We have some data, but we know we can do better."
Luckily, repeating a balloon-borne experiment is much easier and much cheaper than re-launching a scientific satellite. After each flight, most of the payload is recovered and can be used again. In particular, the BLAST camera with its sensitive and expensive detectors has been recovered every single time.
BLAST’s fifth flight will probably last between 12 and 14 days. While Devlin, Netterfield and their colleagues are celebrating Christmans and New Year’s Eve, the 4,000-pound (1800 kilograms) stratospheric telescope will observe selected star-forming regions in the constellations Vela and Lupus.
And if senior graduate student Tristan Matthews of Northwestern University Illinois has his way, this may not be BLAST’s final mission after all. Depending on the results and the recovery success of the current flight, Matthews hopes to fly BLAST in its present configuration for a sixth time, in the Arctic. "That would give us access to a well-studied and nearby star-forming region in Taurus," he said.
Meanwhile, Devlin has received a $5 million grant from NASA over a period of five years to develop a larger version of BLAST, with a 2.5-meter mirror, as compared to the current 1.8-meter aperture. That would vastly increase the number of stellar nurseries that could be studied. "We could fly SuperBLAST in 2016 or so," he said.
Dutch astronomy writer Govert Schilling visited McMurdo Station and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station as a selected member of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s 2012/2013 media visit program. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We’re also on Facebook and Google+.
Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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