Kiev 23.03.2015 Poroshenko and FC Dynamo congratulated Cyborg Happy Birthday. Ukraine News – Video

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Kiev 23.03.2015 Poroshenko and FC Dynamo congratulated Cyborg Happy Birthday. Ukraine News
UKRAINE TODAY NEWS. The latest news, only the freshest videos on our channel. Subscribe to our feed. Very glad to see you! War in Donbass - fighting on the territory of Donetsk and Lugansk...

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Kiev 23.03.2015 Poroshenko and FC Dynamo congratulated Cyborg Happy Birthday. Ukraine News - Video

Beaches with the best sand

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By Krisanne Fordham, David Jefferys

Courtesy Peter Adams Photography Ltd / Alamy

Courtesy GARDEL Bertrand/Hemis/Corbis

Courtesy Robert Harding World Imagery / Alamy

Swimming and snorkeling is great, but some beaches beckon for you to just lie back and dig your toes in their silky sand. According to Cond Nast Traveler readers, you'll find the world's best sand at the following beaches

Courtesy Peter Adams Photography Ltd / Alamy

Whitehaven Beach is consistently ranked as the worlds best beach, and with good reason: Its almost surreally beautiful. Besides its crystal clear waters, its known for its white sand, consisting of 98% pure silica which gives it a bright white color. Unlike regular sand, the sand on Whitehaven Beach doesnt retain any heatmaking it comfortable to walk on barefoot, even on a hot day. Its also one of the largest beaches in the Whitsundays, stretching over four long, gorgeous miles.

Courtesy GARDEL Bertrand/Hemis/Corbis

Cayo De Agua is a double threat: Its crystalline, pool-like waters are great for snorkeling and swimming, and its deserted ivory sands are perfect for doing absolutely nothing at all. Though most beaches in Venezuela are pristine, the arch-shaped cay is especially so; its part of the Los Roques Archipelago National Park, the largest protected marine park in the Caribbean Sea.

Tiny Cocoa Island is technically not a beach, but the soft, silvery ring of sand that encircles it serves the same purpose: You lie back, dig your toes in, sip on a cocktail, and watch the sunset. If you can somehow manage to drag yourself from its velvety shore, theres a coral reef teeming with marine life just a short swim away from Cocoa Island by COMO, Maldives resort.

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Beaches with the best sand

Volunteers brave winds, sea swells to collect a record amount of rubbish from Tasmanian beaches

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A group of volunteers has braved big swells and strong winds to clean-up some of the most remote beaches in Australia, smashing a record for the amount of garbage recovered.

The week-long expedition involved three dozen people travelling on fishing boats to the rugged south-west of Tasmania to pick up mountains of rubbish, mostly plastics.

The South West Marine Debris Cleanup, which is now in its 13th year and run by environmental scientist Matt Dell, is funded purely by donations and sponsorship.

This year the clean-up set a record for most items collected, with 37,000 items picked up in one day and a total of just over 79,000 items for the week.

Mr Dell said it was disappointing that the problem was getting worse.

"It's so obvious in this beautiful environment when there's rubbish lying around, it's supposed to be our jewel of the environment in Tasmania and it's pretty sad," he said.

"It has very, very open exposed beaches, they receive the highest wave energy of any of the beaches in Australia, and for that reason they're exposed and they collect a lot of rubbish."

The volunteers started at Cox's Bight, a long rocky beach inside the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area only accessible by light plane, a multi-day bushwalk or boat.

On the beach they found soft drink and beer cans, household items like a tomato sauce bottle and microplastics.

Mel Sheppard came from Queensland to pick up rubbish and said it was confronting to see what had washed up.

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Volunteers brave winds, sea swells to collect a record amount of rubbish from Tasmanian beaches

Ballground STEM Academy Solar Astronomy time lapse March 16th 2015 – Video

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Ballground STEM Academy Solar Astronomy time lapse March 16th 2015
Please share these videos freely... Its about Science! Please support The Charlie Bates Solar Astronomy Project with your tax deductible donation at http://www.charliebates.org (a nonprofit 501c3...

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Ballground STEM Academy Solar Astronomy time lapse March 16th 2015 - Video

NASA loans moon rocks for CCAC astronomy class

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When Patrick Huth learned he would be teaching an honors astronomy course at Community College of Allegheny Countys Boyce campus this semester, he figured he should offer his students something special.

So he went out and borrowed parts of the moon.

To be precise, what Mr. Huth has are a half-dozen tiny but priceless samples of moon rocks and lunar dust encased in a clear Lucite disk, all of which must be returned to the federal government after two weeks.

Between 1969 and 1972, astronauts on six Apollo missions gathered and brought back to Earth 842 pounds of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which houses many of the samples at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Some of those national treasures are available for two-week loaners to educators like Mr. Huth, who underwent training in the science behind those rocks and in the strict rules to safeguard them while in transit.

In the parlance of NASA, Mr. Huth, a physics professor and former NASA contractor, is lunar certified.

He plans to bring the moon rocks and a separate disk with meteorite samples into not only his astronomy class but also into his physics classes and those of other Boyce professors who have expressed interest. The rocks also will be displayed in the Boyce Student Union from 12:30 to 3 p.m. today and from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesday.

I wanted to get them into as many classrooms on campus as possible, Mr. Huth said. Its generated a lot of excitement and thats a good thing.

Along with what they teach about the moons composition and history, these lunar loaners symbolize one of Americas crowning scientific achievements, Mr. Huth said. Increasingly, they also are a historical marker for students who grew up decades removed from the Apollo era.

I know a couple people who have told me they want to take selfies with them, Mr. Huth said. Thats not something you would have heard back then.

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NASA loans moon rocks for CCAC astronomy class

Doing astronomy with neutrinos

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The site at the South Pole where all the science happens.

The IceCube detector, located at the South Pole, monitors a cubic kilometer of ice for the flashes of light produced as energetic particles traverse the ice. Each second, about 3,000 muons, produced by cosmic rays slamming into the atmosphere, interact with matter in the detector. In contrast, neutrinos are only detected once every six minutes.

Francis Halzen, the principle investigator for IceCube, described the search for these particles in the detector at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "It's like doing astronomy, but the sky is cloudy," he said. "It's cloudy all the time." Even the majority of the neutrinos that arrive at the detector aren't especially interesting; they're also produced as part of cosmic ray particle showers. Instead, the computers behind the detectors have to sort through 100 billion muons each year, along with 100,000 atmospheric neutrinos, just to find about 10 interesting events.

But the interesting events are incredibly energetic. "When it arrives, it hits your detector like a hammer," Halzen told the audience. "You don't have to look for it; it just announces itself." (The same goes for some of the energetic muons, two of which have deposited over 560 Tera electron Volts in the detectorcompare that to the LHC's upcoming 14TeV collisions.)

In part due to the small numbers it detects, IceCube has mostly told us that incredibly energetic neutrinos exist. And we can work back from that knowledge to appreciate that there are incredibly energetic processes that must produce these neutrinos"hadronic accelerators create a lot of the energy in our Universe" is how Halzen put it. But to start figuring out where in the sky these neutrinos originate, and thus what might be creating them, we need to get better at capturing more of them.

But Halzen has a plan. The ice beneath the South Pole turned out to be much better at transmitting the light from neutrino interactions than we'd expected. They now think they can take the same number of detectors (there are 5,160 of them) and spread them over 10 cubic kilometers of ice, significantly increasing the ability to capture these rare events, and possibly start zeroing in on the processes that generate them.

If IceCube has a hard time pinning down high energy neutrinos (at least until there's a nearby supernova; see sidebar), pity cosmologists. Just like the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons that tell us about the Big Bang, there's a cosmic neutrino background created by the event itself that could tell us even more. And it consists of copious numbers of neutrinos; according to Fermilab's Branford Benson, at the time the CMB was emitted, 10 percent of the Universe's energy density was neutrinos. Even today, despite their phenomenally light mass, "at the low end of the known [mass] range, neutrinos weigh as much as all the stars in the Universe," said Benson.

But, at such low energies (they're on the scale of a Mega-electronVolt), we have no way of possibly detecting the cosmic neutrino background. Until that changes, the CMB can tell us some things about neutrinos themselvesthings that are difficult to determine because the particles are so annoying to work with. Benson works on the South Pole Telescope, located near IceCube, which examines a patch of the CMB in the southern skies, achieving a 13-fold boost over the space-based WMAP probe.

With these observatories, you can spot the acoustic oscillations of matter, caused by the counteracting pull of gravity and push of radiation pressure. And these tell us about the contents of the Universe itself; matching their properties is one of the great successes of the lambda-cold dark matter model. Referring to the model, Benson said "the CMB is the best piece of evidence that we live in this Universe." And this Universe contains a lot of neutrinos.

In fact, differences in neutrino masses of as little as 0.1 electronVolts is enough to change the amount of structure in the Universe (galaxy clusters and the like) by about five percent. Of course, it's possible that this value is more than half the combined mass of all three neutrino types, so it's not as informative as it might be. Still, the CMB places some of the tightest limits on the masses of neutrinos that we've identified.

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Doing astronomy with neutrinos

Cisco Live!: How Internet of Things will be the next big disruptor

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Joseph Bradley, vice president IoE practise, Cisco Consulting Services, and Ros Harvey, chief strategy advisor, Sirca and founder of Sense-T at the University of Tasmania.

Cisco's investment in the Internet of Things (IoT) will help Australia's key industries push into the 21st century, especially in areas of agriculture, resources, and astronomy.

The company announced its Internet of Everything (IoE; its version of IoT) centre will be located in Sydney at Sirca, an organisation owned by 40 universities across Australia and New Zealand, and in Perth at the Curtin University campus, contributing $15 million over five years.

See ARN's full story here.

CiscoLive! 2015 saw the assembling of key experts that have worked on the project, including Joseph Bradley, vice president IoE practise, Cisco Consulting Services; Kevin Bloch, CTO Cisco A/NZ; Dr Michael Briars, CEO, Sirca; Professor Steven Tingay, research fellow, director of the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy; and Ros Harvey, chief strategy advisor, Sirca; and founder of Sense-T at the University of Tasmania.

Bradley, who is responsible for leading Cisco's IoE vision worldwide, says that there remains some confusion over the nature of the Internet of Everything, not just from end user consumers, but in terms of those that are expected to deploy it. Questions of the value proposition abound.

"The IoE value is not in the things in and of themselves, but the connection between them," he said.

Even after the assets are connected, it becomes more about how data should be structured to make it usable. Then the application of analytics to that data is how the major value will be extracted, and how it is applied.

"Big Data is nothing without big judgement," he said.

The opportunity from 'dark assets', that is, something that's not connected to the internet today, is vast, he said.

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Cisco Live!: How Internet of Things will be the next big disruptor

Alert! Danger! New 3D printer take us one step closer to the Singularity! – Video

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Alert! Danger! New 3D printer take us one step closer to the Singularity!
3D printing has reached a new level of creepy. If you #39;re paying attention, we #39;re following the Artificial Intelligence Skynet Siri Singularity Gray Goo script pretty much down to the letter....

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Alert! Danger! New 3D printer take us one step closer to the Singularity! - Video

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence | Future Forward | Channel NewsAsia – Video

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The Rise of Artificial Intelligence | Future Forward | Channel NewsAsia
Will artificial intelligence one day be the downfall of humanity? Elon Musk calls it our biggest existential threat and Stephen Hawking warns that it could spell the end of the human...

By: Channel NewsAsia Connect

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The Rise of Artificial Intelligence | Future Forward | Channel NewsAsia - Video