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Saturday, February 28, 2015
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
WSJ: Apple car project is for real, and it's a minivan
Jason Aycock, SA News Editor
- Some more color on reports that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has been hiring auto engineers, including from Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA): The Company has several hundred employees working on project "Titan," toward an Apple-brand electric car that one source says resembles a minivan, The Wall Street Journal reports.
- It might not end up as a released car, the report notes -- lots of work along the way could be used to boost other Apple products -- but the size of the team is telling.
- VP Steve Zadesky was reportedly given permission to create a 1,000-person team for the project and to work off-site from Apple HQ.
- Building cars is expensive, requiring billion-dollar plants, but Apple's $178B in cash means the barrier to entry is far smaller than for others.
- A self-driving car (a la Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)) is not in Apple's plans, a source says.
- After hours, TSLA -0.9%.
- Previously: Talent showdown between Tesla Motors and Apple (Feb. 10 2015)
Monday, February 16, 2015
Mysterious plumes erupt from Mars
Mysterious plumes erupt from Mars
Traci Watson, Special to USA TODAY12:13 p.m. EST February 16, 2015
Amateur astronomers have spotted huge cloudlike plumes erupting from Mars – a phenomenon that scientists are at a loss to explain.
The bright flares, which have now died away, towered higher than anything else observed in the Martian atmosphere. Their tops reached some 150 miles in altitude, more than twice as high as the highest Martian clouds, and they sprawled across 300 to 600 miles, researchers report in this week'sNature, a science journal.
The researchers initially were skeptical, but "we came to the conclusion that what we were seeing is actually real," says study co-author Antonio García Muñoz, a planetary scientist at the European Space Agency. The plumes are "exceptional. … It's difficult to come to terms with this."
This scientific brainteaser first came to light in early 2012, when amateur astronomer Wayne Jaeschke was poring over footage of Mars he had captured at his private observatory. He came across a puzzling image showing the Red Planet with a blob billowing off the planet's rounded edge.
In all his years of peering at Mars, "I'd never seen anything like that," says Jaeschke, a West Chester, Pa., resident who spends about 100 nights a year training his gear on the heavens. He quietly ran the image by a few friends, then circulated it among a larger group of both amateur and professional astronomers.
The image confounded the pros, too. Martian clouds, which are typically made of ice crystals, tend to be wispy, like the thin cirrus clouds seen high in Earth's sky. But these were enormous wide plumes seen on 11 days in March 2012 and again in April 2012. Later, the scientists dug up 1997 images of Mars from the Hubble Space Telescope that show a similar plume.
Perhaps the bright fingers are clouds of ice crystals. But for that to be true, the Martian atmosphere would have to be much colder than expected, the scientists concluded. Perhaps the plumes are a particularly dazzling Martian aurora, like the Northern Lights on Earth. If so, they were 1,000 times stronger than any aurora ever seen on Earth. Further, there's no record of unusual sun activity – an essential ingredient of a spectacular aurora – on the days when the shiny bulges appeared on the planet's profile.
Photos: 10 years on Mars:
Other scientists, however, are reacting with caution to the claims.
Planetary scientist Nicholas Heavens says the Hubble image adds credibility to the claims of something new and strange in the atmosphere of Mars. But he's still not convinced there hasn't been some kind of mistake.
"It's a pretty good argument, but there's a hole or two in it," says Heavens, of Hampton University in Hampton, Va.
Planetary scientist Todd Clancy of the Space Science Institute is more blunt.
"I don't think it's real. … Basic physics says this can't occur," Clancy says, adding that the conditions in Mars's upper atmosphere don't supply the necessary ingredients for clouds.
In response, study co-author Agustin Sánchez-Lavega, a planetary scientist and physics professor at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, notes that 19 different observers captured the strange eruptions. He considers the source of the formations "open to discussion," he says via e-mail.
As an amateur, Jaeschke is happy to let the academics argue over what exactly he saw.
Amateurs "only dabble," he says, so it's "exciting … (to) have seen something that stumped the professionals."
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Chinese herdsman stumbles onto a 17-pound gold nugget
Chinese herdsman stumbles onto a 17-pound gold nugget
By Barbara Kollmeyer
Published: Feb 5, 2015 10:45 a.m. ET
A Chinese herdsman found a chunk of gold like this one.
MADRID (MarketWatch) — Imagine it! You’re walking along and nearly trip over a 17-pound (7.85 kilograms) gold nugget. File that under a most improbable gold bonanza.
But that’s exactly how it played out for one lucky sun-of-a-gun farmer in China.
Berek Sawut, a Kazak herdsman from Qinghe County in Altay Prefecture told Chinese news agency Xinhua that he found the giant nugget “practically lying on bare ground.” The area is in China’s far western Xinjiang Uygur region.
That gold nugget, assuming it’s at least 80% pure, would be worth 1.6 million yuan ($255,313 U.S. dollars), says Xinhua, which also points out that a 1.84 kilogram nugget was discovered in the region in 2010. Gold GCJ5, -2.33% for April delivery was trading at $1,261 an ounce on Thursday.
The odds of such a thing happening, of course, are not as rare as, say, finding 1,400 rare U.S. gold coins practically in your backyard. And yes, that actually happened to one lucky California couple a year ago.
It can’t be confirmed if this is indeed it, but this supposed image of that China nugget was floating around earlier on Twitter.
Oddly enough, on Feb. 5, 1869, the world’s biggest alluvial gold nugget (i.e., gold deposited by water) was found in Moliagul, Victoria, Australia. Dubbed the ‘Welcome Stranger,’ the nugget had a gross weight of 109.59 kilograms, and had to be broken into three pieces because there were no scales large enough to weigh it, according to Wikipedia.
Last month thieves smashed an SUV into a Wells Fargo museum in downtown San Francisco early Tuesday and made off with gold nuggets and ore worth more than $12,000.
But that’s not a strategy we’d recommend in trying to get your own chunk of gold.
By Barbara Kollmeyer
Published: Feb 5, 2015 10:45 a.m. ET
A Chinese herdsman found a chunk of gold like this one.
MADRID (MarketWatch) — Imagine it! You’re walking along and nearly trip over a 17-pound (7.85 kilograms) gold nugget. File that under a most improbable gold bonanza.
But that’s exactly how it played out for one lucky sun-of-a-gun farmer in China.
Berek Sawut, a Kazak herdsman from Qinghe County in Altay Prefecture told Chinese news agency Xinhua that he found the giant nugget “practically lying on bare ground.” The area is in China’s far western Xinjiang Uygur region.
That gold nugget, assuming it’s at least 80% pure, would be worth 1.6 million yuan ($255,313 U.S. dollars), says Xinhua, which also points out that a 1.84 kilogram nugget was discovered in the region in 2010. Gold GCJ5, -2.33% for April delivery was trading at $1,261 an ounce on Thursday.
The odds of such a thing happening, of course, are not as rare as, say, finding 1,400 rare U.S. gold coins practically in your backyard. And yes, that actually happened to one lucky California couple a year ago.
It can’t be confirmed if this is indeed it, but this supposed image of that China nugget was floating around earlier on Twitter.
Oddly enough, on Feb. 5, 1869, the world’s biggest alluvial gold nugget (i.e., gold deposited by water) was found in Moliagul, Victoria, Australia. Dubbed the ‘Welcome Stranger,’ the nugget had a gross weight of 109.59 kilograms, and had to be broken into three pieces because there were no scales large enough to weigh it, according to Wikipedia.
Last month thieves smashed an SUV into a Wells Fargo museum in downtown San Francisco early Tuesday and made off with gold nuggets and ore worth more than $12,000.
But that’s not a strategy we’d recommend in trying to get your own chunk of gold.
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
Ben Carson Blames Measles Outbreak On 'Undocumented People'
Dr. Ben Carson was just starting to sound like one of the sane passengers in the GOP 2016 clown car, at least when it comes to the topic of vaccinations... and then he went on Jake Tapper's show this Tuesday afternoon.
Ben Carson Blames Measles Outbreak On 'Undocumented People':
Potential 2016 candidate Dr. Ben Carson, who has expressed support for strict vaccination policies, on Tuesday linked the measles outbreak in California to undocumented immigrants.
CNN's Jake Tapper asked Carson if parents' decisions not to vaccinate their children led to the outbreak.
"It is a good example of what happens," Carson responded.
But he then suggested that the outbreak may have started with undocumented immigrants.
"These are things that we had under control. We have to account for the fact that we now have people coming into the country sometimes undocumented people who perhaps have diseases that we had under control," he said. "So now we need to be doubly vigilant about making sure that we immunize them to keep them from getting diseases that once were under control."
According to the World Health Organization, about 93 percent of children in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, from which a majority of undocumented children have emigrated from, have gotten a measles vaccination.
When asked how to enforce immunization in the U.S., Carson noted that many schools require certain vaccinations.
"We already have policies in place at schools that require immunization reports. A lot of people are put off when they hear the word government force. And perhaps there's a better way to put these things," he said, adding that the benefits of immunizing children have been proven.
Ed. Note: Someone should tell Ben Carson that Mexico's vaccination rate is 98 percent, compared to the US rate of 90 percent.
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