Game of Thrones just came to an and, so I thought it was an appropriate time to look at the world of the series and examine how a planet could have the random and unpredictable winters that they experience on the show.
The Philadelphia Experiment is the story of a military exercise gone horribly wrong. In October of 1943, the USS Eldridge supposedly was teleported from the shipyards of Philadelphia to Norfolk, Virginia, with some disastrous results.
Much of the mythology of the story comes from a man who went by the name of Carlos Allende, but was he a credible witness? Did the US Navy have a secret program in place in WWII? And is teleportation possible?
The Burj Khalifa is the tallest structure humans have ever built. But that record may fall in the coming years as a new generation of supertall buildings go under construction.
The first tallest structure in the world was the Great Pyramid of Giza, which held its record for nearly 4000 years. It was beat by the Lincoln Cathedral in the UK in 1311, which was topped by the Washington Monument, then the Eiffel Tower, and then the Chrysler Building in 1929.
North America saw the next wave of world-record skyscrapers, with the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, and the Sears Tower.
Then Asia had their turn with the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, then the Taipei 101 Building.
The next and current tallest building is the Burj Khalifa, but it may soon be topped by the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, or the Burj Mubarak al-Kabir in Kuwait, or the Dubai Creek Tower, solidifying the Middle East as the current epicenter of supertall buildings in the world.
Designs for vertical cities of the future include Ultima Tower, the Tokyo Sky Mile Tower, and the Shimizu Mega City Pyramid. But the tallest building ever designed is the X-Seed 4000 building which would stretch 4 kilometers into the sky and house up to a million people.
HH Holmes became known as the Devil in the White City because of the legend that he built a murder castle in Chicago in 1893 with the intent of murdering hundreds of people as they visited the Chicago World Columbian Exposition (which became known as the White City).
He built a hotel with secret walls and rooms so that he could kill people and dispose of their bodies in the basement.
At least, this is the story we’ve all been told. The real story is quite different.
The Hubble Space Telescope was just the most recent advancement in telescope technology that opened up the universe to us in ways we could have never imagined. But Hubble’s abilities are soon to be eclipsed by several space and ground-based telescopes with bigger mirrors and data collection and analysis than the world has ever seen.
James Webb Space Telescope
The successor to Hubble, the James Webb will feature a 6.4 meter mirror, dwarfing the 2 meter mirror on Hubble. It will focus on the infrared spectrum and will see further into the past than ever before. It’s currently scheduled to launch in 2021, but has been delayed multiple times.
WFIRST
The Wide Field Infra Red Survey Telescope will have the same resolution as Hubble, but will be able to image 100x more of the sky at once. The plan was to use it in conjunction with the James Webb to find interesting targets. It is in danger of being cancelled later this year.
LUVOIR
The Large UV/Optical/Infrared Telescope would have a mirror between 8 and 16 meters wide and will collect light in all wavelengths. This is a massive space telescope that is too big for any current rockets, though could be carried up on the SLS, New Glenn, or SpaceX Starship.
Thirty Meter Telescope
This massive ground-based telescope has faced numerous delays due to native Hawaiians protesting it being built on Mauna Kea, which they consider sacred land. This telescope would have 20x the power of Hubble.
Extremely Large Telescope
Currently being built in the Atacama desert of Chile, this 39-meter wide mirror will focus on the infrared spectrum and should answer some of the biggest questions about universal expansion.
Large Magellan Telescope
Constructed out of 7 8-meter wide mirrors – the largest in the entire world – this telescope is the simplest of the telescopes, which should allow for optimal optics.
FAST
This Chinese radio telescope took the prize from Arecibo in Puerto Rico as the largest telescope in the world, and even though they’re still calibrating it, it has already discovered dozens of pulsars.
Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
While not impressively huge, the LSST is exciting because of how it will be used – to scan the entire sky every 3 days. Over 10 years, the amount of data this telescope will produce will equal 50 petabytes and could help find new planetary objects in our own solar system.
At Tesla’s Investor Autonomy Day, they laid out their plan for building a self-driving network of robotaxis and made the argument that their computer vision approach is better than LiDAR-based approaches.
Here I take a look at the two strategies and see which one could be the first to create the self-driving car.
Fast Radio Bursts are exactly what they sound like. They’re highly energetic bursts of radio waves that last mere milliseconds. And they’re totally random.
Because of how elusive they are, scientists are still trying to explain this weird phenomena. But thanks to new telescopes like CHIME in Canada, we’re getting closer to the solution to this science mystery.
Buckminster Fuller wasn’t the massive success that he wanted to be, but he became a defining influence on the engineering, architecture, and design that shapes our world today.
Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion house was designed to be a machine that works around you.
It featured some of the same design elements that made his famous geodesic domes so sturdy, plus it featured smart home features long before smart homes were a thing.
Ever since antibiotics were invented, we’ve known that they come with an expiration date. That’s because bacteria, like everything on Earth, evolve. And they are quickly evolving a resistance to the thing protecting us from them.
Alexander Fleming first discovered penicillin by accident in 1928, and ever since then we’ve been dealing with various types of antibiotic resistance. But it’s the recent trend of pan-resistant bacteria – bacteria that’s resistant to all forms of antibiotics.
Multi-drug resistant forms of pneumonia, salmonella, tuberculosis, and even gonorrhea have surfaced over the last 5 years. And researchers are scrambling to figure out how we’re going to protect ourselves in the age of superbugs.
Last week, the Event Horizon Telescope released their first images ever taken of a black hole, specifically the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87. I thought this would be a good time to look back at how we’ve visualized Black Holes over the years and what we can learn from them.
Solving The Mystery Of The Somerton Man With Professor Derek Abbott – Episode 22
If “The Universe Isn’t Real…” Then What Is It?
The Harpe Brothers: America’s First Serial Killers
This Company Wants To Build Offices In Space
Designing The Most Efficient Car In The World With Chris Anthony, CEO of Aptera – Episode 21
 Is Sending Fast Radio Bursts?&media=https://answerswithjoe.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/ms-joe.jpg){kind=link}
