A fire in Valparaíso, Chile has destroyed more than 2,500 homes, left 11,000 people homeless and killed at least 15 people. It’s an unfathomable tragedy that has destroyed an entire community. This drone footage from Skyfilms attempts to show the extent of the damage caused by the fire’s wrath. It looks like a set of an apocalyptic movie, only it’s real people and real lives on the ground.
This week! Why a huge earthquake didn’t actually cause all that much devastation in Chile. How a not-so-tall building could be the end of a New Orleans neighborhood. And where brands killed Manhattan. Let’s take a look at What’s Ruining Our Cities.
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Connecting Alaska to Argentina, the Pan-American Highway runs some 30,000 miles north to south. Construction to widen the highway briefly stopped, however, to make way for dead whales back in 2010, when workers digging through a remote stretch of the Chilean desert found a huge trove of bones millions of years old. Now, scientists think they have figured out how the extinct whales ended up on land in the first place.
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For a mountain biker, the place where you start your run shouldn’t really matter. But this transparent, fabric-enmeshed cycling pavilion is the kind of place you might find yourself wanting to hang around in.
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OK, it didn’t win the design competition, so this proposed radio tower will never be broadcasting over a city near you, but its harp-like cables and rings sure do make a cool structure in the sky. Designed by the London-based firm Architects of Invention for a site in Santiago de Chile, the tower would have included a circular walkway suspended above the city below. For other entries in the call for a landmark radio tower, stop by Plataforma Arquitectura. [Architects of Invention]
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The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) puts it into perspective right away: “Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth.” It’s important to hold that fact in mind, as we marvel at the first images from deep in the belly of our universe to arrive from the Chile-based Dark Energy Camera (DECam). As that name might suggest, peering at remote galaxies for purely visual gratification isn’t the camera’s primary purpose. The result of eight years of planning and hard work, involving engineers and scientists from three continents, the DECam is mounted on the Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Sitting atop a 7,200-foot mountain, the camera is part of the Dark Energy Survey, which intends to gather information on over 300 million galaxies. The goal is to better understand dark energy — a concept that represents our best explanation for why the universe’s rate of expansion is speeding up, rather than slowing due to gravity. Gaze past the break for the background on the project.
Continue reading DECam: Gazing deep into the final frontier in search of dark energy
DECam: Gazing deep into the final frontier in search of dark energy originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The advent of movie support in iTunes for the Cloud was a boon to Apple TV owners as well as any iTunes user with a tendency to hop between devices — within the US, that is. Apple today swung the doors open and let Australia, Canada, the UK as well as 32 other countries and regions around the world get access to their movies whenever they’re signed in through iTunes or an iOS device. Not every studio is on the same page, as many American viewers will know all too well: it’s more likely that you’ll get re-download rights for a major studio title such as Lockout than an indie production, for example. Even with that limit in mind, there’s no doubt more than a few movie mavens glad to avoid shuffling and re-syncing that copy of Scott Pilgrim to watch it through to the end.
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iTunes in the Cloud movies find their way to Australia, Canada, the UK and 32 more countries originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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