Nov 8, 2014

Solo a cappella

1,595 Posts to “Nov 8, 2014”

  1. Jamestuh says:

    ‘For the public to enjoy’
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    The museum’s history starts in 1998, when Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani opened a building to the public on his farm some 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of Qatari capital Doha.

    A distant relative of Qatar’s ruling family, founder and chairman of Al Faisal Holdings (one of Qatar’s biggest conglomerates), and a billionaire whose business acumen had him recognized as one of the most influential Arab businessmen in the world, Sheikh Faisal had already amassed a substantial private collection of historically important regional artifacts, plus a few quirky pieces of interest, allowing visitors an intimate look into Qatari life and history.

    In an interview with Qatari channel Alrayyan TV in 2018, Sheikh Faisal said that the museum started as a hobby.

    “I used to collect items whenever I got the chance,” he said. “As my business grew, so did my collections, and soon I was able to collect more and more items until I decided to put them in the museum for the public to enjoy.”

    His private cabinet of curiosities has since evolved into a 130-acre complex. Through the fort-like entrance gate lies an oryx reserve, an impressive riding school and stables, a duck pond and a mosque built with a quirky leaning minaret. There’s now even a five-star Marriott hotel, two cafes and the Zoufa restaurant serving modern Lebanese cuisine.

    Of course, there’s also the super-sized museum, with a recently-opened car collection housing everything from vintage Rolls-Royces to wartime Jeeps and colorful Buicks. Outside you’ll find peacocks roaming the grounds, and signs warning drivers to be aware of horses and ostriches.

    Visitors to the FBQ museum are free to explore the grounds and can even enter the stables to pat the horses.

  2. Scottfueks says:

    Iceberg flotillas
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    Located on the west coast, Ilulissat is a pretty halibut- and prawn-fishing port on a dark rock bay where visitors can sit in pubs sipping craft beers chill-filtered by 100,000-year-old glacial ice.

    It’s a place to be awed by the UNESCO World Heritage Icefjord where Manhattan skyscraper-sized icebergs disgorge from Greenland’s icecap to float like ghostly ships in the surrounding Disko Bay.

    Small boats take visitors out to sail closely among the bay’s magnificent iceberg flotilla. But not too close.

    “I was on my boat once and saw one of these icebergs split in two. The pieces fell backwards into the sea and created a giant wave,” said David Karlsen, skipper of the pleasure-boat, Katak. “…I didn’t hang around.”

    Disko Bay’s other giants are whales. From June to September breaching humpback whales join the likes of fin and minke whales feasting on plankton. Whale-watching is excellent all around Greenland’s craggy coastline.

    Whales are eaten here. Visitors shouldn’t be surprised to encounter the traditional Greenlandic delicacy of mattak — whale-skin and blubber that when tasted is akin to chewing on rubber. Inuit communities have quotas to not only hunt the likes of narwhals but also polar bears, musk-ox and caribou — which can also appear on menus.

  3. KevinHow says:

    A long time in the making
    Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012. More than 12 years later, the rover has driven over 21 miles (34 kilometers) to ascend Mount Sharp, which is within the crater. The feature’s many layers preserve millions of years of geological history on Mars, showing how it shifted from a wet to a dry environment.
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    Perhaps one of the most valuable samples Curiosity has gathered on its mission to understand whether Mars was ever habitable was collected in May 2013.

    The rover drilled the Cumberland sample from an area within a crater called Yellowknife Bay, which resembled an ancient lake bed. The rocks from Yellowknife Bay so intrigued Curiosity’s science team that it had the rover drive in the opposite direction to collect samples from the area before heading to Mount Sharp.
    Since collecting the Cumberland sample, Curiosity has used SAM to study it in a variety of ways, revealing that Yellowknife Bay was once the site of an ancient lake where clay minerals formed in water. The mudstone created an environment that could concentrate and preserve organic molecules and trapped them inside the fine grains of the sedimentary rock.

    Freissinet helped lead a research team in 2015 that was able to identify organic molecules within the Cumberland sample.

    The instrument detected an abundance of sulfur, which can be used to preserve organic molecules; nitrates, which are essential for plant and animal health on Earth; and methane composed of a type of carbon associated with biological processes on Earth.

    “There is evidence that liquid water existed in Gale Crater for millions of years and probably much longer, which means there was enough time for life-forming chemistry to happen in these crater-lake environments on Mars,” said study coauthor Daniel Glavin, senior scientist for sample return at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.

  4. LeonardAgito says:

    Everyone is talking about Greenland. Here’s what it’s like to visit
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    A few months ago, Greenland was quietly getting on with winter, as the territory slid deeper into the darkness that envelops the world’s northerly reaches at this time of year.

    But President Donald Trump’s musings about America taking over this island of 56,000 largely Inuit people, halfway between New York and Moscow, has seen Greenland shaken from its frozen Arctic anonymity.

    Denmark, for whom Greenland is an autonomous crown dependency, has protested it’s not for sale. Officials in Greenland, meanwhile, have sought to assert the territory’s right to independence.

    The conversation continues to intensify. A contentious March 28 visit to a US military installation by Usha Vance, the second lady, accompanied by her husband, Vice President JD Vance, was the latest in a series of events to focus attention on Trump’s ambitions for Greenland.

    The visit was originally planned as a cultural exchange, but was shortened following complaints from Greenland Prime Minister Mute B. Egede.

    Had the Vances prolonged their scheduled brief visit, they would’ve discovered a ruggedly pristine wildernesses steeped in rich Indigenous culture.

    An inhospitable icecap several miles deep covers 80% of Greenland, forcing the Inuit to dwell along the shorelines in brightly painted communities. Here, they spend brutally cold winters hunting seals on ice under the northern lights in near perpetual darkness. Although these days, they can also rely on community stores.

    The problem for travelers over the years has been getting to Greenland via time-consuming indirect flights. That’s changing. Late in 2024, the capital Nuuk opened a long-delayed international airport. From June 2025, United Airlines will be operating a twice-weekly direct service from Newark to Nuuk.

    Two further international airports are due to open by 2026 — Qaqortoq in South Greenland and more significantly in Ilulissat, the island’s only real tourism hotspot.

  5. JohnniePluse says:

    Curiosity rover makes ‘arguably the most exciting organic detection to date on Mars’
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    The NASA Curiosity rover has detected the largest organic molecules found to date on Mars, opening a window into the red planet’s past. The newly detected compounds suggest complex organic chemistry may have occurred in the planet’s past — the kind necessary for the origin of life, according to new research.

    The organic compounds, which include decane, undecane and dodecane, came to light after the rover analyzed a pulverized 3.7 billion-year-old rock sample using its onboard mini lab called SAM, short for Sample Analysis at Mars.

    Scientists believe the long chains of molecules could be fragments of fatty acids, which are organic molecules that are chemical building blocks of life on Earth and help form cell membranes. But such compounds can also be formed without the presence of life, created when water interacts with minerals in hydrothermal vents.

    The molecules cannot currently be confirmed as evidence of past life on the red planet, but they add to the growing list of compounds that robotic explorers have discovered on Mars in recent years. A study detailing the findings was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
    The detection of the fragile molecules also encourages astrobiologists that if any biosignatures, or past signs of life, ever existed on Mars, they are likely still detectable despite the harsh solar radiation that has bombarded the planet for tens of millions of years.

    “Ancient life, if it happened on Mars, it would have released some complex and fragile molecules,” said lead study author Dr. Caroline Freissinet, research scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in the Laboratory for Atmospheres, Observations, and Space in Guyancourt, France. “And because now we know that Mars can preserve these complex and fragile molecules, it means that we could detect ancient life on Mars.”

  6. LloydHix says:

    Tesla is bringing its electric cars to oil-rich Saudi Arabia amid falling global sales
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    Tesla will start selling its electric vehicles in Saudi Arabia, entering the Gulf region’s largest economy as the company’s global sales are sliding and CEO Elon Musk courts controversy with his role in the US government.

    The carmaker announced Wednesday that it would host a launch event in the kingdom on April 10, where it will showcase its EVs. Attendees will also have the chance to “experience the future of autonomous driving with Cybercab and meet Optimus, our humanoid robot, as we showcase what’s next in AI and robotics,” Tesla (TSLA) said.

    Tesla may struggle to gain market share in oil-rich Saudi Arabia as EVs make up a little over 1% of all car sales in the country, according to a report by consultancy PwC published in September.
    Tesla’s entry into the new market comes as the company fights battles on several fronts.

    Last year, it recorded the first annual decline in sales in its history as a public company, posting a drop of 1%.

    The company is facing intensifying competition in China, the world’s largest auto market. On Tuesday, BYD, a Chinese maker of electric and hybrid cars, reported $107 billion in annual sales for 2024, beating the near-$98 billion notched by Tesla.

    And last week, BYD unveiled an ultra-fast charging system, which it said was capable of adding 250 miles (402 km) of range in just five minutes, easily outdoing Tesla’s charging technology. Tesla’s Superchargers take 15 minutes to charge an EV, providing a range of 200 miles.

    Tesla has also suffered slumping sales in Europe. In February, the carmaker sold around 40% fewer vehicles on the continent compared with the same month in 2024, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.

  7. Davidred says:

    While the Cumberland sample may contain longer chains of fatty acids, SAM is not designed to detect them. But SAM’s ability to spot these larger molecules suggests it could detect similar chemical signatures of past life on Mars if they’re present, Williams said.
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    “Curiosity is not a life detection mission,” Freissinet said. “Curiosity is a habitability detection mission to know if all the conditions were right … for life to evolve. Having these results, it’s really at the edge of the capabilities of Curiosity, and it’s even maybe better than what we had expected from this mission.”

    Before sending missions to Mars, scientists didn’t think organic molecules would be found on the red planet because of the intensity of radiation Mars has long endured, Glavin said.
    Curiosity won’t return to Yellowknife Bay during its mission, but there are still pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample aboard. Next, the team wants to design a new experiment to see what it can detect. If the team can identify similar long-chain molecules, it would mark another step forward that might help researchers determine their origins, Freissinet said.

    “That’s the most precious sample we have on board … waiting for us to run the perfect experiment on it,” she said. “It holds secrets, and we need to decipher the secrets.”

    Briony Horgan, coinvestigator on the Perseverance rover mission and professor of planetary science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, called the detection “a big win for the whole team.” Horgan was not involved the study.
    “This detection really confirms our hopes that sediments laid down in ancient watery environments on Mars could preserve a treasure trove of organic molecules that can tell us about everything from prebiotic processes and pathways for the origin of life, to potential biosignatures from ancient organisms,” Horgan said.

    Dr. Ben K.D. Pearce, assistant professor in Purdue’s department of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences and leader of the Laboratory for Origins and Astrobiology Research, called the findings “arguably the most exciting organic detection to date on Mars.” Pearce did not participate in the research.

  8. ChesterOdOgy says:

    Curiosity has maintained pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample in a “doggy bag” so that the team could have the rover revisit it later, even miles away from the site where it was collected. The team developed and tested innovative methods in its lab on Earth before sending messages to the rover to try experiments on the sample.
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    In a quest to see whether amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, existed in the sample, the team instructed the rover to heat up the sample twice within SAM’s oven. When it measured the mass of the molecules released during heating, there weren’t any amino acids, but they found something entirely unexpected.

    An intriguing detection
    The team was surprised to detect small amounts of decane, undecane and dodecane, so it had to conduct a reverse experiment on Earth to determine whether these organic compounds were the remnants of the fatty acids undecanoic acid, dodecanoic acid and tridecanoic acid, respectively.

    The scientists mixed undecanoic acid into a clay similar to what exists on Mars and heated it up in a way that mimicked conditions within SAM’s oven. The undecanoic acid released decane, just like what Curiosity detected.

    Each fatty acid remnant detected by Curiosity was made with a long chain of 11 to 13 carbon atoms. Previous molecules detected on Mars were smaller, meaning their atomic weight was less than the molecules found in the new study, and simpler.
    “It’s notable that non-biological processes typically make shorter fatty acids, with less than 12 carbons,” said study coauthor Dr. Amy Williams, associate professor of geology at the University of Florida and assistant director of the Astraeus Space Institute, in an email. “Larger and more complex molecules are likely what are required for an origin of life, if it ever occurred on Mars.”

  9. Larrypof says:

    WASHINGTON — “Liberation Day” just gave way to Capitulation Day.
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    President Donald Trump pulled back Wednesday on a series of harsh tariffs targeting friends and foes alike in an audacious bid to remake the global economic order.

    Trump’s early afternoon announcement followed a harrowing week in which Republican lawmakers and confidants privately warned him that the tariffs could wreck the economy. His own aides had quietly raised alarms about the financial markets before he suspended a tariff regime that he had unveiled with a flourish just one week earlier in a Rose Garden ceremony.

    Follow live politics coverage here
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    The stock market rose immediately after the about-face, ending days of losses that have forced older Americans who’ve been sinking their savings into 401(k)s to rethink their retirement plans.

    Ahead of Trump’s announcement, some of his advisers had been in a near panic about the bond markets, according to a senior administration official. Interest rates on 10-year Treasury bonds had been rising, contrary to what normally happens when stock prices fall and investors seek safety in treasuries. The unusual dynamic meant that at the same time the tariffs could push up prices, people would be paying more to buy homes or pay off credit card debt because of higher interest rates. Businesses looking to expand would pay more for new loans.
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    Two of Trump’s most senior advisers, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, presented a united front Wednesday, urging him to suspend the tariffs in light of the bond market, the administration official said.

    In a social media post, Trump announced a 90-day pause that he said he’ll use to negotiate deals with dozens of countries that have expressed openness to revising trade terms that he contends exploit American businesses and workers. One exception is China. Trump upped the tariff on the country’s biggest geopolitical rival to 125%, part of a tit-for-tat escalation in an evolving trade war.

    Trump reversed course one week after he appeared in the Rose Garden and unveiled his plan to bring jobs back to the United States. Displaying a chart showing the new, elevated tariffs that countries would face, Trump proclaimed, “My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day.”
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  10. Bernardnop says:

    President Donald Trump wants to bring back American manufacturing in ways that would reshape the United States economy to look more like China’s. The campaign which has led to a rapidly escalating trade war with China has given ample social media fodder to Chinese and American observers alike. bs2best.at Announcing a series of sweeping tariffs in a move dubbed “Liberation Day” Trump said last week that it will lead factories to move production back to American shores boosting the U.S. economy after “foreign leaders have stolen our jobs foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream.” bsme In a Truth Social post Wednesday Trump announced that he is raising tariffs on goods imported from China to 125 up from the 104 that took effect the same day due to “the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets.” Higher targeted tariffs on other countries have been paused for 90 days although the 10 baseline tariff will remain in place for all countries. bsme at Meme-makers and Chinese government officials have in recent days begun pointing out the irony of Trump’s tariff-driven manufacturing pivot through AI-generated satire and political cartoons that have percolated online with many American users boosting the jokes. bsme https://m-bsme-at.ru

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