Read moreWhat those of us with more freedom of movement may ignore all our lives: that the world is populated not only by biological, political, and geographic features, but by imagination and speculation, and that it is impossible to know any place entirely, but that there are ways of approximating our knowledge of a place that moves beyond the facts of typography, longitude, latitude, or demographics.
Judith Schalansky, cited in Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands
Read moreChinese man builds mountain on top of apartment
Daily Mail: A Chinese man has spent six years building his dream mountaintop villa – on top of a Beijing apartment block.
Eccentric Professor Zhang Lin shifted tons of rubble and rock onto the roof of the building to construct the outrageous home which looks like it has been carved from a mountainside.
Mr Lin could now be ordered to tear down his mountain penthouse if it is deemed unsafe.
‘It has come to our attention that Professor Zhang did not apply for permission for this structure. So unless he can prove it is safe, it will have to come down,’ explained an city official.
Photo: Mountaintop home in Beijing (EPA)
Read more“Fans will think they’re playing a video game or watching a Sci-Fi movie, but they’ll actually be viewing real NFL football as never presented before.”
Read: Replay Technologies Will Make Sports Replays Look Like Scenes From “The Matrix” – Fast Company
In the new movie “Elysium,” Earth is beyond repair, and the rich and powerful have decided to leave it behind.
“The premise is totally believable to me. I spent 28 years working on NASA’s International Space Station and retired last summer as the director of ISS at NASA Headquarters,” Mark Uhran, former director of the International Space Station Division in NASA’s Office of Human Exploration and Operations, said. “When I took a look at the Elysium space station, I thought to myself, that’s certainly achievable in this millennium.” (via Space Station Science: Could Humans Build the ‘Elysium’? | Space.com)
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It took decades for global warming to slowly melt the surface of the Larsen B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, forming nearly 3,000 lakes. But at the end of the Antarctic summer of 2002, all the lakes drained away in the space of a week. And then the 2,700-square-kilometre ice shelf, which was some 220 metres thick and probably had existed for some 12,000 years, rapidly disintegrated into small icebergs, leaving glaciologists scratching their heads.
The researchers showed that if there are many lakes on an ice shelf, the disappearance of one lake could result in fractures under others — an effect that can spread rapidly throughout the ice shelf. “This chain reaction could explain why the lakes drained all together,” MacAyeal said.
Most of the lakes were about 1,000 metres wide, according to a poster presentation at the same meeting by study co-author Alison Banwell. Once drained, each would leave behind a ring fracture about 4,000 metres wide. When lakes are tightly packed together, as they were on the Larsen B ice shelf, the chain of fracturing would result in thin icebergs calving off, Banwell said.
via Chain reaction shattered huge Antarctica ice shelf : Nature News & Comment
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A 60-foot-wide sinkhole formed under a resort in central Florida late Sunday, forcing guests out of their rooms as one three-story building collapsed and another slowly sank. Guests at the Summer Bay Resort in Clermont, about 10 minutes from Walt Disney World, called for help before the collapse, saying they heard loud noises and windows cracking. All guests inside the buildings – an estimated 35 people, authorities said – were evacuated before the first structure crumbled. (via Florida sinkhole swallows parts of resort near Disney World – CNN.com)
Read moreRead moreOther communities across a bone-dry south-west are resorting to extraordinary measures to keep the water flowing. Robert Lee, also in the oil patch, has been hauling in water by tanker. So has Spicewood Beach, a resort town 40 miles from Austin, which has been trucking in water since early 2012.
San Angelo, a city of 100,000, dug a pipeline to an underground water source more than 60 miles away, and sunk half a dozen new wells.
Las Cruces, just across the border from the Texas panhandle in New Mexico, is drilling down 1,000ft in search of water.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 