Emmerdale Set Photosynth

Another installment for our photography section, this time we have an interior of the Wool pack pub which is the set for the popular soap Emmerdale TV set 
You will need to install Silverlight  to view the 3D panoramic

We will be touring the city trying to pick up all the action using Qik via of Mobiles

stay tuned for all the action

http://photonbelt.co.uk/photonbelt-tv

The US space agency’s Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said.

The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said.

“Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts,” astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP.

“If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don’t stop for anything — they just bore through and that’s why we can see them from enormous distances,” Reddy said.

A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics determined that the huge gamma-ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away.

The sun is eight light minutes from Earth, and Pluto is 12 light hours away.

Taking into account the huge distance from earth of the burst, scientists worked out that the blast was stronger than 9,000 supernovae — powerful explosions that occur at the end of a star’s lifetime — and that the gas jets emitting the initial gamma rays moved at nearly the speed of light.

“This burst’s tremendous power and speed make it the most extreme recorded to date,” a statement issued by the US Department of Energy said.

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe’s most luminous explosions, which astronomers believe occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse.

Long bursts, which last more than two seconds, occur in massive stars that are undergoing collapse, while short bursts lasting less than two seconds occur in smaller stars.

In short gamma-ray bursts, stars simply explode and form supernovae, but in long bursts, the enormous bulk of the star leads its core to collapse and form a blackhole, into which the rest of the star falls.

As the star’s core collapses into the black hole, jets of material blast outward, boring through the collapsing star and continuing into space where they interact with gas previously shed by the star, generating bright afterglows that fade with time.

“It’s thought that something involved in spinning up and collapsing into that blackhole in the center is what drives these jets. No one really has figured that out. The jets rip through the star and the supernova follows after the jets,” Reddy said.

Studying gamma-ray bursts allows scientists to “sample an individual star at a distance where we can’t even see galaxies clearly,” Reddy said.

Observing the massive explosions could also lift the veil on more of space’s enigmas, including those raised by the burst spotted by Fermi, such as a “curious time delay” between its highest and lowest energy emissions.

Such a time lag has been seen in only one earlier burst, and “may mean that the highest-energy emissions are coming from different parts of the jet or created through a different mechanism,” said Stanford University physicist Peter Michelson, the chief investigator on Fermi’s large area telescope.

“Burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood, and Fermi is giving us the tools to understand them. In a few years, we’ll have a fairly good sample of bursts and may have some answers,” Michelson said.

The Fermi telescope and NASA’s Swift satellite detect “in the order of 1,000 gamma-ray bursts a year, or a burst every 100,000 years in a given galaxy,” said Reddy.

Astrophysicists estimate there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.

The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope was developed by NASA in collaboration with the US Department of Energy and partners including academic institutions in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

Via Yahoo News

Riding a bicycle at night may have just gotten a bit safer. Designers at Altitude have unveiled Lightlane, a gadget that mounts on a bicycle and shoots two bright red laser beams and the universal symbol for a bicyclist on the pavement below the bike, according to Autopia. The idea is to remind motorists behind the bicyclists to leave a little room for the bike as they approach.

“Clearly one of the biggest benefits of bicycle lanes is that there is an established common boundary that both drivers and riders respect and must stay within,” designer Evan Gant said in the report. “However, this requires a great deal of resources and planning to implement, so we decided to focus on the fact that the bicycle lane establishes a safety buffer outside of the bicycle’s footprint.”

Gant was quick to point out that the Lightlane is no substitute for actual bike lanes, which cities clearly need more of—especially since the Lightlane only works at night. But at $50, this looks to be one safety accessory that could rank up there with headlights and helmets if it works as advertised. 

( via Gearlog )

Sakkara (Saqqara) is one of the most extensive archaeological sites in Egypt! It was the cemetery for Memphis, the capital of Ancient Egypt, yet it is still one of the virgin archaeological sites.

The site is dominated by the Step Pyramid of King Zoser, which goes back to 2700 BC. It is one of the oldest stone structures in the world.

for a Mac OSX viewer go here ( Silverlight needed )

“The Madrasa of Sultan Hassan at Cairo…is a collegiate mosque, cruciform in plan. Four iwans, or recessed porches, with immense pointed arches, constitute the arms of the cross. There is a minimum of decoration, and the walls of the 100-ft sahn rise skywards with splendid architectural effect. The founder’s domed mausoleum, situated behind the qibla, is enriched with stalactite decoration

You can see the Mac osx viewer here ( Silverlight needed )

This is a 3D panoramic created using a technology from Microsoft called Photosynth. The technology creates a 3D map and an interactive walkthrough of a series of photos, unlike traditional panoramic s the synth really displays photos in a way unseen ever before.

This Synth is of the Great Pyramid of Giza, with has an HDR filter applied to really brings out the images.

To run on Mac OSX use the silverlight version 

Part of a field called “cognitive computing”, the research will bring together neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists.

As a first step in its research the project has been granted $4.9m (£3.27m) from US defence agency Darpa.

The resulting technology could be used for large-scale data analysis, decision making or even image recognition.

“The mind has an amazing ability to integrate ambiguous information across the senses, and it can effortlessly create the categories of time, space, object, and interrelationship from the sensory data,” says Dharmendra Modha, the IBM scientist who is heading the collaboration.

“There are no computers that can even remotely approach the remarkable feats the mind performs,” he said.

“The key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain.”

‘Perfect storm’

IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do.

The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat’s brain.

Prof Modha says that the time is right for such a cross-disciplinary project because three disparate pursuits are coming together in what he calls a “perfect storm”.

We are going not just for a homerun, but for a homerun with the bases loaded  Dharmendra Modha IBM Almaden Research Center

Neuroscientists working with simple animals have learned much about the inner workings of neurons and the synapses that connect them, resulting in “wiring diagrams” for simple brains.

Supercomputing, in turn, can simulate brains up to the complexity of small mammals, using the knowledge from the biological research. Modha led a team that last year used the BlueGene supercomputer to simulate a mouse’s brain, comprising 55m neurons and some half a trillion synapses.

“But the real challenge is then to manifest what will be learned from future simulations into real electronic devices – nanotechnology,” Prof Modha said.

Technology has only recently reached a stage in which structures can be produced that match the density of neurons and synapses from real brains – around 10 billion in each square centimetre.

read more ( via bbc )