Read moreAviation oxygen mask, 1919?
Author: m1k3y
Read moreSalmon River Ice circle — A rare natural phenomenon that occurs in slow moving water in cold climates. Ice circles are thin and circular slabs of ice that rotate slowly in the water. It is believed that they form in eddy currents.In fluid dynamics, an eddy is the swirling of a fluid and the reverse current created when the fluid flows past an obstacle.
Awesome
Read moreStone tools discovered in this site confirm the continuity of human settlement in Europe, the researchers said.
The finding contradicts the theory of some researchers who believe Europe was populated in small waves without continuity by groups doomed to extinction because of their inability to adapt to new surroundings, they said in their statement.
“Even though they are very archaic tools, they reflect complex activities such as recovering animals that fell into the caves,” which functioned as traps, the statement said.
Researchers have also found the remains of a large bear which is an ancestor to the brown bear that exists today.
Various remains of this species were found at the site, as well as those of other animals such as rhinos, giant deer, bison and wild donkeys.
Read moreBut more often than not, you have J.J. Abrams able to successfully convince much of the movie-going populace that Khan was *not* the villain in Star Trek Into Darkness, a feat made much easier by casting Benedict Cumberbatch in a role made famous by Ricardo Montalban.
Benicio del Toro was first offered the role of Khan in J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek sequel.But since he is the only English-speaking Hispanic person currently pursuing a career in film acting, the Bad Robot clan had no choice but to seek out the whitest white guy they could find. With as much pressure as Paramount was putting on the film to deliver overseas box office, you’d think there would have been an incentive to make the film’s cast a bit more ethnically diverse to appeal to differing overseas markets. Nothing against Cumberbatch, but why no one at Paramount thought “Hmm, let’s ask recent Oscar nominee Demián Bichir if he’d be interested in playing one of the most famous villains in modern American history?” remains to be answered.
Batman film: I think some parts of the Batman mythos are a little too silly or outlandish to work on film, like the themed, superpowered villains, Robin, and the fact that he has a Bat-everything Warner Bros: Okay, well, let’s construct a more realistic, grounded world, limit ourselves to unpowered villains, have people who represent […]
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Read moreSweden’s rather unique garbage problem. (Wow! Only 4% of waste goes into landfalls).
Sweden runs out of garbage, forced to import from Norway
Sweden, a recycling-happy land where a quarter of a million homes are powered by the incineration of waste, is facing a unique dilemma: The nation has run out of much-needed fuel.
Sweden, birthplace of the Smörgåsbord, Eric Northman, and the world’s preferred solar-powered purveyor of flat-pack home furnishings, is in a bit of a pickle: the squeaky clean Scandinavian nation of more than 9.5 million has run out of garbage. The landfills have been tapped dry; the rubbish reserves depleted. And although this may seem like a positive — even enviable — predicament for a country to be facing, Sweden has been forced to import trash from neighboring countries, namely Norway. Yep, Sweden is so trash-strapped that officials are shipping it in — 80,000 tons of refuse annually, to be exact — from elsewhere.
You see, Swedes are big on recycling. So big in fact that only 4 percent of all waste generated in the country is landfilled.
Good for them! However, the population’s remarkably pertinacious recycling habits are also a bit of a problem given that the country relies on waste to heat and to provide electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes through a longstanding waste-to-energy incineration program. So with citizens simply not generating enough burnable waste to power the incinerators, the country has been forced to look elsewhere for fuel. Says Catarina Ostlund, a senior advisor for the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency: “We have more capacity than the production of waste in Sweden and that is usable for incineration.“
Public Radio International [Living on Earth] has the whole story (hat tip to Ariel Schwartz at Co.Exist), a story that may seem implausible in a country like garbage-bloated America where overflowing landfills are anything but scarce.
As mentioned, the solution — a short-term one, according to Ostlund — has been to import (well, kind of import) waste from Norway. It’s kind of a great deal for the Swedes: Norway pays Sweden to take its excess waste, Sweden burns it for heat and electricity, and the ashes remaining from the incineration process, filled with highly polluting dioxins, are returned back to Norway and landfilled.
Ostlund suggests that Norway might not be the perfect partner for a trash import-export scheme, however. “I hope that we instead will get the waste from Italy or from Romania or Bulgaria or the Baltic countries because they landfill a lot in these countries,” she tells PRI. “They don’t have any incineration plants or recycling plants, so they need to find a solution for their waste.“
So long as people are hungry—so long as parents dream for their kids—people will cross whatever border you put in front of them.
Jose Antonio Vargas (via immigrantstories)
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 