Living for 3 billion years for really good reasons, how much banana is that tuna? The Geeks—Ben, Miles, Lyle, and special geek guest Joanna Bresee—cover news and answer calls.
A banana equivalent dose (actually biologically effective dose, abbreviated BED) is a whimsical unit of radiation exposure, informally defined as the additional dose a person will absorb from eating one banana (for example).
“In one of the truly bizarre incidents we’ve seen out of the e-book publishing world, a translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace for Barnes & Noble’s Nook platform has replaced all mentions of the word “kindled” with ‘Nookd.’"
“For two months last fall, Eric Simons secretly took up residence inside the Internet giant’s Palo Alto, Calif., campus, eating free food, enjoying gym access, and building a startup in the process.”
Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan’s crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.
“We were frankly kind of startled,” said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that’s still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.
The first private space flight to the International Space Station has ended with a successful splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
“Welcome home, baby,” SpaceX founder and chief designer Elon Musk said in a post-flight briefing, “it’s like seeing your kid come home.”
Musk was clearly elated by the successful reentry and splashdown, saying that when you know how complex the spacecraft is inside and out, you know everything that can go wrong. When the mission ends in success, there’s the one simple thought going through your head: “Wow, OK, it didn’t fail.”
Today, Intelsat, the world’s leading provider of satellite services, and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), the world’s fastest growing space launch company, announced the first commercial contract for the Falcon Heavy rocket.
“SpaceX is very proud to have the confidence of Intelsat, a leader in the satellite communication services industry,” said Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO and Chief Designer. “The Falcon Heavy has more than twice the power of the next largest rocket in the world. With this new vehicle, SpaceX launch systems now cover the entire spectrum of the launch needs for commercial, civil and national security customers.”
It’s a definite hit. The Andromeda galaxy will collide with the Milky Way about 4 billion years from now, astronomers announced today. Although the Sun and other stars will remain intact, the titanic tumult is likely to shove the Solar System to the outskirts of the merged galaxies.
Researchers came to that conclusion after using the Hubble Space Telescope between 2002 and 2010 to painstakingly track the motion of Andromeda as it inched along the sky. Andromeda, roughly 770,000 parsecs (2.5 million light years) away, is the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way.
In today’s modern society everyone is looking for ways to improve their productivity. Time is shorter than ever but demand for output has never been higher. Fortunately there are hundreds of tweaks we can make to improve our working environment, and an understanding of our own psychology can conceivably double our concentration levels. This article will discuss current research on the effect of music on concentration and then carry out its own study on music with personality types as an independent variable and their effect on performance.
SPACE COMMAND is a series of new and original feature films written, produced, directed by and starring some of the top science-fiction visionaries working today.
“Major ISPs, home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services by 6 June 2012.”
“As a follow-up to the Executive Order 13571 issued on April 27, 2011, requiring executive departments and agencies to identify ways to use innovative technologies to streamline their delivery of services to lower costs, decrease service delivery times, and improve the customer experience—Barack Obama has directed federal agencies to deploy Web APIs.”
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.”
