Google has released the prototype of their anticipated Internet Glasses.
In Japan (where else?), Suidobashi Heavy Industry will soon have mech-like devices available commercially.
In Serbia, at least five mammoth skeletons have been unearthed.
Bulgaria, meanwhile, is displaying a 700-year-old vampire skeleton (that item is true, from a certain point of view).1
At least forty new species of ants have been discovered in the Philippines
Italy‘s Prada has introduced a Steampunk line of clothes. Is this success– or the beginning of the end of the aesthetic?
At Pulpfest this year, in the United States, long-time collector Albert Tonik will be auctioning off his prize collection of books, magazines, pulps, dime novels, and fanzines. This sizable collection contains many rare items.
In China and aboard the International Space Station—President Hu Jintao called to congratulate the taikonauts on their successful docking.
This Thursday, astronaut Rex Walheim will be conducting satellite interviews live on NASA television. Emphasis will be on Orion, which may take us far beyond our planet.
Video for some of these stories below the cut, and for the Team Fortress 2 short film, “Meet the Pyro.”
1. In an unrelated story, five men have been arrested in Austria for the alleged theft of 9.5 tons of garlic.
While Prada’s Steampunk collection looks good, in the sense that it’s based on vintage designs, without the addition of gratuitous Brass Goggles or gears, one thing bugs me. The whole “punk” part of steam punk was that it was hand made – stuff made by members of a community, either based on vintage designs or using vintage clothes.
This is sort of like if Prada was to do the Leiji Masumoto Cosplay Collection, with clothing taken from various Leiji Masumoto series (like Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999, or Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers).
By the autumn of ’67, the San Francisco hippes were staging the “death of hippie” event because the saw their style becoming another marketing ploy/trend. This is the inevitable fate of any “fringe” movement that lasts any length of time. We’ll see how mainstream this gets (certainly, the design has been influenced by and made its way back into mainstream(ish) movies).
True. On the other hand, Steampunk is a part of geek culture, and we’ve never quite been as counter-cultural as the hippies and as punk. When our sub-cultures are adopted and adapted well by mainstream sources (like this clothing by Prada, or in film), it gets accepted instead of rejected. If geek culture is adapted poorly, while the adaptation is rejected, we tend to not reject that aspect of geek culture along with it.
In last week’s Newsspace, I mentioned the successful NuSTAR X-Ray telescope launch and mast deployment. Here is something high up on its observational agenda….there’s gonna be some incredible fireworks next year.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2165467/Supermassive-black-hole-eat-gas-cloud-heart-Milky-Way-galaxy.html
Awesome!
I’ll bring the popcorn.
Anyone wanna do the beer run?
Nustar works! First calibration picture of the Cygnus X-1 black hole (highlighting the FANTASTIC resolution improvement now available):
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-space-telescope-x-ray-eyes.html
This thing also can measures X-Rays up to 80 MeV compared to 8 MeV on Chandra, the previous champ – and is way more sensitive (makes good pictures with fewer photons / “better night vision”) too).