On Feb 2nd, 1970, a Convair F-106 Delta Dagger was found in a snow-covered Montana field, pilot-less, landing gear up, and with the engine still running - the melting snow causing the aircraft to slowly move forward…
The pilot - Captain Gary Faust - had earlier ejected from the aircraft at 15,000 feet when it entered a flat spin. Amazingly, the un-piloted aircraft then recovered, to make a gentle “belly-up” landing…
“We’re taking it to an earthquake level that’s associated with being on the verge of collapse,” said civil engineer Michael Symans of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who helped design the test building. “We don’t expect it to collapse, but we expect it to be very vulnerable to a strong aftershock that could cause it to collapse.”
The 23-unit condo building currently sits on the world’s largest shake table, a 50-by-60-foot structure in Miki, Japan. The table will simulate the motions of the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, California, amplified about 1.5 times. Sensors on each floor of the building will record motion and detect internal damage, generating valuable data about how wooden structures perform in a quake.
A biomedical engineering professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham envisioned a program for home computers that could sync via wireless with the Wii remote, and train users on proper resuscitation of people who have suffered cardiac arrest. The students hope to make the program available for download this fall, free of charge, on the American Heart Association's website.
6. The "one small step for man" wasn’t actually that small. Armstrong set the ship down so gently that its shock absorbers didn’t compress. He had to hop 3.5 feet from the Eagle’s ladder to the surface.
7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle's door because there was no outer handle.
8. The toughest moonwalk task? Planting the flag. NASA’s studies suggested that the lunar soil was soft, but Armstrong and Aldrin found the surface to be a thin wisp of dust over hard rock. They managed to drive the flagpole a few inches into the ground and film it for broadcast, and then took care not to accidentally knock it over.
One early British recipe for “Bride’s Pye” mixed cockscombs, lamb testicles, sweetbreads, oysters and (mercifully) plenty of spices. Another version called for boiled calf’s feet.
By the mid sixteenth century, though, sugar was becoming plentiful in England. The more refined the sugar, the whiter it was. Pure white icing soon became a wedding cake staple. Not only did the color allude to the bride’s virginity, as Carol Wilson points out in her Gastronomica article “Wedding Cake: A Slice of History,” but the whiteness was “a status symbol, a display of the family’s wealth.” Later, tiered cakes, with their cement-like supports of decorative dried icing, also advertised affluence. Formal wedding cakes became bigger and more elaborate through the Victorian age. In 1947, when Queen Elizabeth II (then Princess Elizabeth) wed Prince Philip, the cake weighed 500 pounds.
Japan's legions of robots, the world's largest fleet of mechanized workers, are being idled as the country suffers its deepest recession in more than a generation as consumers worldwide cut spending on cars and gadgets. At a large Yaskawa Electric factory on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, where robots once churned out more robots, a lone robotic worker with steely arms twisted and turned, testing its motors for the day new orders return. Its immobile co-workers stood silent in rows, many with arms frozen in midair. They could be out of work for a long time. Japanese industrial production has plummeted almost 40 percent and with it, the demand for robots.
In 1737-8, Johann Sebastian Bach composed and performed a cantata, “O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht” (”O Jesus Christ, light of my life”). Among the instruments called for in the score are “two Litui.” However, the Lituus is a forgotten instrument. No one has played or heard the instrument in modern times; there aren’t even illustrations of one.
Musicians at a Swiss conservatory, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (SCB), had heard of a computer program developed by a University of Edinburgh Ph.D. student to help in the design of modern brass instruments. The SCB provided a group of Edinburgh scientists with design requirements, such as notes that would have been played with the Lituus, how it sounded and how it might have been played. (Though likely made of wood, the Lituus qualifies as a brass instrument.) The result: a two-and-a-half-meter-long horn made of pine with a flared bell at one end and a mouthpiece made of cow horn at the other. And they built two.
