Inside the New Harry Potter Movie's VFX Tech

From Popular Mechanics:

The sixth Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, opens today. Recently, PM's Digital Hollywood spoke with the film's visual-effects supervisor, Tim Burke, and with Tim Alexander of Industrial Light & Magic, about some of the technical effects behind the new wizarding film.

Millennium Bridge
At the beginning of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince—the first Potter film in two years, out today—things are looking pretty grim not just for the boy wizard, but for everyone. Gray storm clouds roll ominously over London as pedestrians, eyes on the sky, hurry across the city's Millennium Bridge. Suddenly, the bridge begins to quake. Cables snapping, the bridge undulates and twists, pulling free of its piers, and crashes violently into the Thames. Voldemort has recently returned from the dead, and he isn't satisfied to wreak havoc only in the wizarding world: His Death Eaters take his campaign of violent mayhem into the Muggle realm by destroying the Millennium Bridge in the film's dramatic opening sequence.

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Lunar Orbiter Photographs Apollo Landing Sites

The Apollo 11 landing site, photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The scene is 925 feet across. (Credit: NASA)

From CNET News:

Forty years after the Apollo 11 voyage to the moon, NASA released photographs from the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft Friday showing five of the six Apollo landing sites. Shadows cast by the Apollo descent stages are clearly visible and in some cases, the moon walkers' paths can be seen in the disturbed dust.

"We were very interested in getting our first peek at the lunar module descent stages just for the thrill - and to see how well the cameras had come into focus," Mark Robinson, principal investigator of the LRO's main camera, said in a statement. "Indeed, the images are fantastic and so is the focus."

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Windpower Could Provide 40 Times Earth's Power Needs

Virgin Waters: The Hywind project aims to perfect technology for floating windmills in the deep ocean, opening up new room for wind power to breathe Stephen Toner/Getty Images

From Popsci.com:

A team at Harvard decided to reinvestigate the potential for windpower around the globe, and found their new results to be significantly different than previous studies. According to the new study, we're capable of someday producing 40 times more power via wind than we currently consume overall.

This finding corresponds with recent research suggesting that you can draw more power at higher altitudes. The Harvard study is based around the use of taller 100-meter turbines, as opposed to 50-to-80-meter turbines.

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Apollo 11 Hoax: One In Four People Do Not Believe In Moon Landing

20 July, 1969: Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin E."Buzz" Aldrin, Jr erecting the US flag at Tranquility Base during the First Lunar walk Photo: NASA

From The Telegraph:

A quarter of Britons believe the Apollo 11 mission moon landings in 1969 were a hoax.

Eleven of the 1009 people surveyed thought Buzz Lightyear was the first person on the Moon.

The Toy Story film character was named alongside Louis Armstrong. Eight of those taking part thought the late jazz musician made the first moon walk.

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Attack Of The Giant Squids

Photo: Marine biologist John Hyde holds a jumbo flying squid,
which have returned to the Californian coast

Terror As Hundreds Of 5ft Long Creatures Of The Deep Invade Californian Coastline -- The Daily Mail

Hundreds of aggressive jumbo flying squid have appeared off the coast of San Diego, attacking divers and washing up dead on beaches.

The 5-foot long sea monsters, which have razor-sharp beaks and toothy tentacles, have been bringing terror to scuba drivers and swimmers on the coast's tourist-packed beaches.

The carnivorous calamari, which can grow up to 100 pounds, came up from the depths last week and swarms of them have pounced on unsuspecting divers.

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DNA Not The Same In Every Cell Of Body: Major Genetic Differences Between Blood And Tissue Cells Revealed

New research calls into question one of the most basic assumptions of human genetics: that when it comes to DNA, every cell in the body is essentially identical to every other cell. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 16, 2009) — Research by a group of Montreal scientists calls into question one of the most basic assumptions of human genetics: that when it comes to DNA, every cell in the body is essentially identical to every other cell. Their results appear in the July issue of the journal Human Mutation.

This discovery may undercut the rationale behind numerous large-scale genetic studies conducted over the last 15 years, studies which were supposed to isolate the causes of scores of human diseases.

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Neanderthals Were Few And Poised For Extinction

From Live Science:

Neanderthals are of course extinct. But there never were very many of them, new research concludes.

In fact, new genetic evidence from the remains of six Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) suggests the population hovered at an average of 1,500 females of reproductive age in Europe between 38,000 and 70,000 years ago, with the maximum estimate of 3,500 such female Neanderthals.

"It seems they never really took off in Eurasia in the way modern humans did later," said study researcher Adrian Briggs of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

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New Material Could Cool Electronics 100 Times More Efficiently

Thermal Ground Plane Conductive Material Georgia Tech

From Popsci.com:

Georgia Tech researchers are working on a new novel material for cooling high-powered military radar gear up to 100 times better than current conductive heat-dissipation technology.

Developed in conjunction with Raytheon and DARPA, the material is a composite of copper and diamond, two of the most effective heat-conducting materials. The composite would serve as part of a sandwich of cooling materials called a Thermal Ground Plane, which, combined with a liquid cooling setup, would surround the transmit/receive module in a radar system.

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Cave Record Of Britain's Pioneers

From The BBC:

The Cheddar Gorge in Somerset was one of the first sites inhabited by humans when they returned to Britain towards the end of the last Ice Age.

New radiocarbon dates on bones from Gough's Cave show people were living there some 14,700 years ago.

The results confirm the site's great antiquity and suggest human hunters re-colonised Britain at a time of rapid climate warming.

From 24,000 years ago, an ice sheet extended over much of Britain.

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Periodic Table Gets A New Element After The Discovery Of 'Copernicium'

Image: Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, after whom the new element is named

From The Daily Mail:

The periodic table - the chart studied by generations of children and chemists - is to get a little more crowded.

Scientists yesterday announced they are to add a 'super heavy' element, called copernicium, to the table.

The element - which has the symbol Cp - is named after the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus who deduced that the planets revolved around the sun.

It was discovered 13 years ago in a German nuclear laboratory - but was only accepted as a genuine element in June. For much of the last 13 years, copernicium was known as element 112.

The discovery and naming of a new element is big news in the world of chemistry.

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After 40 Years NASA Has Goals, But Lacks Funds

Photo: The Saturn V makes history. The launch is marked in the annals of time by a period that included two other key events: Sen. Edward Kennedy's crash at Chappaquiddick (July 18) and Woodstock (Aug. 15). Apollo 11 video here. NASA

From Houston Chronicle:

It had all come down to three men sitting atop a 363-foot Saturn V rocket.

In the eight years since President John F. Kennedy stunned the spaceflight community and issued his challenge to put a man on the moon, NASA had spent $25 billion — akin to $140 billion-plus, today — and employed more than 300,000 technicians in its race against the Russians.

The result of these labors sat on a pad at Launch Complex 39A.

At 8:32 a.m. Houston time July 16, 1969, the rocket's engines fired, and the Apollo 11 crew — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins — shook, rattled and reached orbit 12 minutes later.

Four days hence, with the planet watching from 240,000 miles away on television signals delayed by 1.3 seconds, Armstrong guided the lunar module Eagle to the surface of the moon. Then he uttered words that would make the city of Houston famous around the world:

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Footage Enhanced Hollywood Style

From The Telegraph:

It may have been a giant leap for mankind, but it was recorded for posterity in dark, fuzzy footage that has never quite lived up to importance of the occasion.

However, now, with a little help from Hollywood, man's first steps on the moon can be seen in suitably discernible, if not pristine, quality.

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo mission and Neil Armstrong's historic stride down from the ladder of a lunar excursion module, NASA has released an enhanced version of the television footage first broadcast to an audience of half a billion.

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Mysterious, Glowing Clouds Appear Across America’s Night Skies

From Wired Science:

Mysterious, glowing clouds previously seen almost exclusively in Earth’s polar regions have appeared in the skies over the United States and Europe over the past several days.

Photographers and other sky watchers in Omaha, Paris, Seattle, and other locations have run outside to capture images of what scientists call noctilucent (”night shining”) clouds. Formed by ice literally at the boundary where the earth’s atmosphere meets space 50 miles up, they shine because they are so high, they are lit by the sun longer than the Earth’s surface.

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Moon Landing Tapes Got Erased, NASA Admits

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.

NASA released the first glimpses of a complete digital make-over of the original landing footage that clarifies the blurry and grainy images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the surface of the moon.

The full set of recordings, being cleaned up by Burbank, California-based Lowry Digital, will be released in September. The preview is available at http://www.nasa.gov.

NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing.

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Weaving The Way To The Moon

Don Eyles says getting a job on the Apollo mission was probably the greatest stroke of luck in his life (Archive footage: MIT and Nasa)

From The BBC:

As Apollo 11 sped silently on its way to landing the first men on the Moon, its safe arrival depended on the work of a long-haired maths student fresh out of college and a computer knitted together by a team of "little old ladies".

Now, 40 years after Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, the work of these unsung heroes who designed and built the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) is back in the spotlight.

"I wasn't so aware of the responsibility at the time - it sort of sunk in later," said Don Eyles, a 23-year-old self-described "beatnik" who had just graduated from Boston University and was set the task of programming the software for the Moon landing.

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Not Only Dogs, But Deer, Monkeys And Birds Bark To Deal With Conflict

Photo: Why do dogs bark so much? A recent paper by UMass Amherst evolutionary biologist Kathryn Lord and colleagues suggests that it has more to do with their evolutionary history as scavengers in dumps than their desire to communicate with humans. (Credit: Raymond Coppinger)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 15, 2009) — Biologically speaking, many animals besides dogs bark, according to Kathryn Lord at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but the evolutionary biologist also says domestic dogs vocalize in this way much more than birds, deer, monkeys and other wild animals that use barks. The reason is related to dogs’ 10,000-year history of hanging around human food refuse dumps, she suggests.

In her recent paper in a special issue of the journal, Behavioural Processes, Lord and co-authors from nearby Hampshire College also provide the scientific literature with its first consistent, functional and acoustically precise definition of this common animal sound.

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40 Years After Moon Landing: Why Aren't People Smarter?

Being smart involves being able to understand the relationships between events, finding and questioning hidden assumptions, and so on. The fact is, most students are not taught how to think analytically and critically. Image Credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

Editor's Note: Forty years ago this month, humans landed on the moon for the first time. We asked Benjamin Radford why, four decades later, humans have not become any smarter.

A look at old periodicals reveals something very interesting about human nature. Newspapers and magazines from the early 1900s were full of advertisements for instant weight loss gizmos, miracle cures, and all other forms of self-evident quackery. A century later, this stuff is still being advertised — and lots of people are buying.

You would think that by now people would know that you can't lose 10 pounds a week taking a "breakthrough" miracle pill, and you can't earn $50,000 a week working from home in your spare time (at least not legally).

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World's Oldest Tattoos Were Made Of Soot

Photo: Tattoo lines on the right leg of the Tyrolean iceman, Ötzi. (Image:Leopold Dorfer)

From New Scientist:

For those inclined to put ink to flesh, modern tattoo parlours offer dizzying arrays of dyes – mercury-containing reds, manganese purples, even pigments that glow in the dark.

Getting inked wasn't always quite so complicated, however. A new analysis concludes that the world's oldest tattoos were etched in soot.

Belonging to Ötzi the 5300 year old Tyrolean iceman, the simple tattoos may have served a medicinal purpose, not a decorative one, says Maria Anna Pabst, a researcher at the Medical University of Graz, Austria, who trained optical and electron microscopes on biopsies of Otzi's preserved flesh.

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What’s In Earth Orbit And How Do We Know?

Tracking all the active satellites and orbital debris around the Earth is a challenging task, even for the US Defense Department. (credit: NASA)

From Space Review:

Whenever the topic of space debris and satellites in orbit comes up a lot of numbers tend to get thrown around by a lot of different people, and it can be hard to keep all the figures straight. Compounding this is the superficial knowledge (at best) of the subject by many media commentators and the tradition of secrecy by the US military, the organization that has historically been the main keepers of the data on space debris.

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The Challenge for Green Energy: How To Store Excess Electricity

From Environment 360:

For years, the stumbling block for making renewable energy practical and dependable has been how to store electricity for days when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. But new technologies suggest this goal may finally be within reach.

“Why are we ignoring things we know? We know that the sun doesn’t always shine and that the wind doesn’t always blow.” So wrote former U.S. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger and Robert L. Hirsch last spring in the Washington Post, suggesting that because these key renewables produce power only intermittently, “solar and wind will probably only provide a modest percentage of future U.S. power.”

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