Items tagged with Universe
The consortium governing the planning and construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope — which will be the worlds largest optical telescope when completed — has approved its $500 million assembly phase, which is roughly half of the project's $1 billion overall budget. The massive celestial-gazing instrument and its support facility will be built in Chile, on the Las Campanas Peak in the Andes mountain range. A seven-mirror telescope spanning 25.5 meters, or nearly 84 feet, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will focus six times the amount of light that is harnessed by the biggest optical telescopes in operation today. As described on the project website, the GMT will have “six off-axis 8.4 meter...
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Before reading on, we must warn you that your next 20 minutes should be free, because once you discover the Flash tool "Scale of the Universe", that's just about the amount of time you'll need before you'll be able to focus on other things. Its goal is to help put the universe into perspective, size-wise, from top-to-bottom. If you like having your mind blown, then this tool should be right up your alley. Crafted by brothers Cary and Michael Huang, the tool starts out rather unassuming. There's a human, a Dodo bird and a beach ball. It's not until you grab the slider bar down below that you really see what this is made of. Drag it left, and you zoom into smaller and smaller objects - slide it...
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All Hot Hardware lovers dream of a world of a enormously powerful processor with a command line. A baby is like that. So is Google: As Google nears 10,000 employees, though, it's become impossible to keep up with the 100 or so public products and projects that have come and gone. Some, like Gmail and Google Earth, are huge hits. Others, like the discontinued Google Answers, fizzle. In between are a few low-profile applications with real potential, most of which can be found on a mini-site called Google Labs. Here's my short list of Google's coolest obscure apps. A marvelous business, Google....
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