This weekend's links accompanied by a photo from Kauai, Hawaii, the "garden island".
I'm off work Monday & Tuesday, so I'm hoping to get some more writing in between birthdays and whatever other obligations arise.
Have a good long weekend.
Secrets of the Metamaterials that Will Make You Invisible
Invisibility used to be the stuff of comic books and Harry Potter novels. But this week, scientists from UC Berkeley have emerged with two new invisibility-producing "metamaterials," engineered substances that bend electromagnetic waves in ways they've never bent before. They call it "negative refraction." But you and I can just call it the first step towards invisible armor.
Heroic Fantasy and Ethnic Identity
In Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, the protagonist is often referred to by his ethnic background-Cimmerian. No matter the vice or virtue of his deeds Conan carries the negative connotations of his people. Brute savagery is all that is expected of him, and one cannot deny Conan often behaves in an uncouth manner given his excessive lusts for wine and loose women that lead to his frequently impoverished state.
Ain't It Cool News retracts "Clone Wars" review
Harry Knowles, the founder of fan-driven movie site Ain't It Cool News, published an unabashedly negative review ("hated the score, the animation, the shots, the characters and most of all the retarded ******** idiot story") of the upcoming animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars a few days ago. Over the weekend, Knowles's post was unpublished, as we now say.
Want Faster-than-Light Travel? Easy! Just Change the Fabric of Space-Time
Albert Einstein predicted long ago that faster-than-light travel was impossible. More specifically, he said the laws of physics forbade the observation of any speed faster than that constant 299,792,458 meters per second — no matter how great the energy involved.
Birthing Stars Tear Into A Nebula With A Fierce Beauty
Here's a detail of a new image the Hubble Space Telescope released to celebrate its 100,000th orbit of Earth. It shows the "firestorm" of star creation in the nebula near star cluster NGC 2074.
Further Proof That Life May Have Originated In Space
We usually think of asteroid impacts as harbingers of mass extinction, but they might be the reason life exists on our planet at all. It's possible for bacteria to hitch rides on rocks ejected by space impacts and move from planet to planet. We know that certain Earth bacteria are capable of surviving the hostile conditions of space, but could they survive the impacts themselves? A group of scientists put them to the test, and we've got the results for you.