Proposed satellite would collect and beam solar power to Earth
The idea of a solar power collection satellite has been percolating for years. The technology has always been just far enough out of reach that no one had the gumption to stand up and seriously talk about doing it. Now NASA has decided to give some consideration to building such a satellite and has awarded a grant to Artemis Innovation Management Solutions to take a look at the logistics of such a system.NASA engineer John Mankins has come up with an intriguing design for the solar collector array. Mankins looked to nature and replicated what he saw; this is called bio-mimetics. The proposed satellite would be shaped a lot like a flower, with a spread-out conical shape. The array would be composed of many small, lightweight mirrors arranged in a lattice. This is the only way to get an array of sufficient size into orbit. Mankins believes this design will be more efficient at collecting solar radiation, but that’s only half the battle.When power is collected in orbit, it has to get back down to the Earth for us to run our blenders, iPhones, and other electronic whatnot. A very long extension cord certainly isn’t the answer, but a microwave generator might be. The microwave signal would be received by a station back on Earth, and converted into usable electricity. The satellite would be positioned far enough from Earth that is can collect sunlight at all times, so even when it’s dark at the receiving station, it will still be pumping out power.The money handed out by NASA isn’t going to actually build anything. No, this early phase is all about studying the feasibility of the whole endeavor. If things look good, a smaller version of the device will be put into near-Earth orbit as a test. There’s only so much solar energy that can be collected on Earth, but in space the rules are different. If the bio-mimetic solar collector satellite proves plausible, it could change everything.via Phys.org
Free Mobile: Orange s’épanche, Bouygues se taitQuelques heures après la présentation des nouvelles offres de téléphonie mobile de Free, les réactions des autres opérateurs commencent à apparaître.Orange n’a pas perdu son temps et l’annonce a été faite assez rapidement. L’opérateur historique a déclaré qu’il ne réagirait pas immédiatement au lancement de Free Mobile. “C’est le jour J pour Free, nous allons leur laisser savourer leur journée” a déclaré le porte-parole de la société. Elle a tout de même tenu a rassurer ses clients: “nous allons revenir vers eux pour leur parler des propositions que nous avons préparées”. La firme n’a cependant pas précisé si ces changement passeront par l’opérateur low cost d’Orange, Sosh. De son côté, Bouygues Télécom reste très discret et préfère rester à disposition de ses clients. Contrairement à SFR et Orange, il est le seul à conserver son mur Facebook et continue à interagir avec ses clients. B&You, l’opérateur low cost de Bouygues a tout de même réagi en annonçant que “B&YOU a toujours regardé les offres de la concurrence et a toujours écouté sa communauté pour faire évoluer ses forfaits. N’hésitez pas a nous faire part de vos idée via le lien suivant:https://idees.b-and-you.fr/. Nous revenons vers vous très prochainement.”Le Nouvel Observateur révèle aussi que les services de résiliation des trois opérateurs saturent depuis 10h ce matin. Le 10 janvier 2012 à 12:37 • Maxime Lambert
Let us know what you like about Geek by taking our survey. Stay on target If you’re a gamer, then you know the title everyone’s currently talking about is God of War. Like I said in my review, this is easily one of the best releases of 2018. It comes as no surprise God of War would get spotlighted during this year’s Tribeca Games Festival, where the game’s director and cast spoke about its development and shared behind-the-scenes stories in front of a live audience.After the panel, I interviewed director Cory Barlog, and actors Christopher Judge (Kratos), Danielle Bisutti (Freya), and Jeremy Davies (Balder). Given the spirit of the event (a celebration of story-driven media), I focused on how the actors brought their respective characters to life and how wearing motion-capture equipment impacted their performances. I also asked the director about how this entry honors the legacy of the series and if he believes they were successful on that end.What was it about Christopher Judge that made him an ideal actor to play Kratos? Was it due to his natural speaking voice?Cory Barlog: The power he had as a performer was the thing that really drew it. I mean, I also was a gigantic Stargate fan, so I entertained the idea early on but because of a lack of confidence, didn’t know if we should approach him. It took a little while but then it came back around and everything kind of fused together.First and foremost we were looking for the physicality in the voice, but that was such a small part of it. There was so much of the performance that had to come through on the set with all the actors because I needed to do it all in one take. Everybody had to hit their sort of emotional range all the time. He was, without a doubt, just so incredibly powerful, even in the first audition. It’s wonderful.Jeremy Davies: I want to credit Chris as well. I have met a number of individuals who were just born with this gift. They can roll out of bed and sound like god. I’ve seen folks rely on that. But what you get when you’re this close to him is that you really sense this powerful presence. He isn’t relying on his god-given voice. He’s got a lot to back it up. He is a dangerously gifted guy.What was the motion capture process like? Was it difficult to act while having all of that motion-capture equipment on you? Without a traditional set, how much of your imagination did you need to use?Judge: Stargate kind of came out right at the beginning of CGI. So, very often, our reactions to stuff didn’t match what was there. I learned that when someone says “it’s immense, it’s the world” it’s believable. Every time Cory would say “so, this is going to [be huge],” I took him at his word. Thank god that I did because all of the set pieces were just mind-blowing. I was watching my son play, and I remember thinking to myself: “My reaction, it almost wasn’t big enough.”Davies: I found it interesting. The whole apparatus, the camera, these massive hard drives right over your heart. But the phenomenon with having a camera right in your face, I found really surprisingly helpful. When you’re shooting film, the cameras use these long lenses; you kind of feel this tendency, if it’s wide especially, to push it. With the camera so close, it can be reassuring to know that when they see it, they’re not going to miss anything. You don’t have to redo it. I found that really, really helpful. It helped me get over the fact you got these suits on.Judge: You really articulated something that I felt but I never thought about. When you do film or television, you generally do a lot of takes. You always get a break, you’re off camera. But sometimes when you do something that is surprising and it’s in the wide, then you have to re-create it.Judge: Every time we did discover something [during this shoot], it was documented.Davies: That’s right. From every conceivable angle.Bisutti: A lot of times in the theater, you’re in a black box. It’s black box theater. There’s no set. You create these imaginary sets and circumstances and you can see it. So, as we were there, we had the privilege of sometimes watching the rehearsals or sometimes seeing the scenes and the animation that was happening so we can kind of get a sense of the world. Of course, then actually watching it when it all came together was like, oh my god, that is a big scope, the world we’re living in.Davies: Because you’re surrounded by all these computers, computer power from every single angle, you could imagine a director just having an attitude of a robot like we talked about [during the panel]. An attitude of “we will fix your performance.” But it was like, as I said, equal to the best experience I’ve had. It’s a human being working with human beings.Chris, was it intimidating to know you were portraying such a beloved character that people have high expectations for?Judge: I… sometimes got a little performance anxiety [laughs]. Especially in the beginning, when we were discussing what he should sound like. I worked with a voice coach but we quickly moved away from that from the first day.Barlog: That was the fantastic sort of miscommunication on that one. We had talked to the voice coach but somehow there was a misinterpretation. I said we need to look at the previous Kratos’ performance since there is a sense of the speech pattern that can act as the foundation. The interpretation was more “this is the time period” so you [Chris] had more of an English accent at some point. That was was totally my fault. So we went through the whole thing. You trained with all that stuff. You came on the set with a little bit of this English accent and we’re like “what the fuck?”Judge: Cory walked up to me and he was like: “Was that a British accent?” I thought you wanted just a hint of that [laughs].Thank you for getting rid of that. That’s just weird. Kratos with an English accent? No way.Bisutti: Especially in Norse mythology. You see those films in Roman times and they speak with a British accent. That’s not quite right [laughs].Danielle and Jeremy, did you discuss your characters off-set? Your relationship with one another was very natural. How were you able to make that authentic?Bisutti: Well, I just fell in love with him the second I met him. I was already a fan of his work. I mean, Lost was for me one of the best shows ever created. But of course, I’d known him prior. I just have this approach of just opening my heart as an actor, opening my heart to these imaginary circumstances and believing them as real. We actually didn’t discuss very much, did we? A little bit. But we kind of just brought it in the moment and riffed off each other.Davies: It was instantaneous. The first day you got on set, everybody kind of warmly welcomed each other. It felt like the momentum, this sort of kinetic energy, was instant. We were going from zero to one hundred right away. I just felt like we were all family from a long time ago. It never felt like we had to work on it or force any of it. That was just incredibly lucky. I was thankful every single day that it just came naturally.Judge: You said something very interesting. Acting is supposed to be the recreation of the natural. But what you’re asked to do is something very unnatural. To walk into spaces where you don’t know people with an open heart and an open mind, which is very unnatural and can be very, very painful. We keep saying over and over again about the safe space that it was. That’s why it always happened. The ground was watered and fertilized and lovingly cultivated so that it was a space for these relationships to grow at a very unnatural speed.Cory, in a lot of ways, this is a soft reboot of the franchise. You’re introducing a lot of new mechanics, storylines, locales and so on. At the same time, you still have this giant legacy behind it. Was it a challenge to balance everything people know about God of War with all of the new elements you wanted to incorporate?Yeah, it was something that I was conscious of at all times. To not just respect the work that we had done, but to honor it. To know that we made every choice that we made to create this world very specifically. The continuation of this growth, the evolution needed to be built on that foundation. While you can blur your eyes and see something differently, the clarity shows you very clearly, that the DNA, that the molecular level of what we were doing, was so incredibly inspired by what we started with. It’s easy, very easy, to lose sight of that.We’re blessed to have such good, smart people like Richard Gaubert and Matt Sophos, our writers, being on set every day. They were the honesty that I needed. That gut-check, that mirror that I needed to look at. To say “Alright where are we going with this?” Because, I would just throw things in on the day of like “Hey, something came to me last night. Let’s try this.” And they were the sounding-board to go “I don’t know about that,” and I had to defend it. If I couldn’t defend it, it was something I realized, okay that’s not what we need to do.It was constant discussion, constant evaluation of “is this Kratos?” He can evolve and change, but does he go in a direction that is antithetical to where he began? There were a lot of times where we had to course-correct to ensure the evolution felt correct. I think the response that people are having says that we did hit a few of those notes right to resonate, to connect in the right way.
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The American Soybean Association (ASA) is strongly urging Congress to reject additional budget cuts to policies within the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry or the House Committee on Agriculture.ASA, along with other representatives of U.S. agriculture, finance, forestry, energy, trade, local government and more, sent a letter this week to chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House budget and appropriations committees, emphasizing how burdensome delays and more cuts to the 2018 Farm Bill would be to a struggling rural economy.“We have all begun preparing for the 2018 Farm Bill and recognize that passing a bill with additional funding reductions would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Therefore, as the Senate and House Agriculture Committees begin preparing for the 2018 Farm Bill, it is imperative that the committees not be hamstrung by further budget or appropriations cuts to any farm bill program,” the groups state in the letter. “Instead, we strongly encourage you to recognize the substantial savings already achieved, which far exceed expectations, and to provide the committees the opportunity to complete their work through regular order, without arbitrary budget cuts or caps.”The groups underscored the significant contribution the 2014 Farm Bill made to deficit reduction.“Almost three years ago, Congress passed a bipartisan farm bill that made a significant contribution to deficit reduction. This bipartisan legislation was estimated to contribute $23 billion to deficit reduction over 10 years at the time of passage,” the letter states.The groups encouraged budget flexibility during the committee process for the 2018 Farm Bill.Click here to read the entire letter.
Details were sketchy, but a motorist rear-ended a C-Tran bus about 1:45 p.m. Wednesday at Stapleton Road and Fourth Plain Boulevard.C-Tran’s Scott Patterson said the bus was on the 39 Route. Patterson said no one on the bus was injured. He also said a police officer observed the accident. Patterson said he did not have the exact time of the accident.Information on the driver of the car was not available at The Columbian’s press time.
Facebook0TwitterEmailPrintFriendly分享Next year, the Alaska State Legislature will be taking at closer look at Permanent Fund Dividend checks that are sent out-of-state. Knopp says that the study found that 81% of non-students who were eligible but out-of-state did not return to Alaska. Also in this category, peace corps volunteers, U.S. Olympic Team members, those serving as a member of the United States Congress and their staff, and state employees working in a field office. To be eligible for a PFD, applicants must have been an Alaska resident for the entire calendar year preceding the date they apply for a dividend and intend to remain an Alaska resident indefinitely at the time of application. Story as aired:Audio PlayerDorene-on-legislature-to-look-closer-at-pfd-checks-mailed-out-of-state.mp3VmDorene-on-legislature-to-look-closer-at-pfd-checks-mailed-out-of-state.mp300:00RPd Rep. Gary Knopp Courtesy of Alaska State Legislature.Representative Gary Knopp R-D 30: “In 2016, we sent 26,500 dividend checks out of state. In a study that was commissioned back in ’06, it was determined that 64% of students we sent checks out-of-state to did not return.” 
Representative Gary Knopp R D-30: “It is something we are looking at, it was millions and millions of dollars we sent out-of-state.” Regardless of why applicants are absent, at all times during their absence they must demonstrate intent to remain an Alaska resident indefinitely. In addition, they must return to Alaska for at least 72 consecutive hours every two years and 30 cumulative days every five years to retain eligibility. This is a diverse group of applicants, ranging from active duty members of the armed forces and their families, merchant marines, those receiving continuous medical treatment or providing care for a family member suffering from a critical life-threatening illness.
Go back to the e-newsletter >Perth Airport has transformed the International Departures experience with the opening of a new Departures lounge area in the current International Terminal 1 (T1).This lounge is part of the $145 million expansion and refurbishment of the T1 International Departures, seeking to offer passengers a greater range of retail and dining choices along with expanded and improved check-in, outbound Immigration and security screening areas.Brad Geatches, Chief Executive Officer, Perth Airport said that there has been consistent international passenger growth in recent years with 4.2 million passengers travelling through T1 last financial year, with this number forecast to increase to 5.1 million by 2019.“The continuing demand for international air services meant we had to expand and improve the International Departures experience to meet current and forecast demand.“We recognised that significant investment was needed to bring this terminal up to an acceptable standard, and we are well advanced with a diverse program that sees a total of $325 million being invested across the terminal,” he said.International DeparturesThe new Departures lounge has the capacity to accommodate passengers departing on two A380 aircraft at the same time, with 538 seats that allow passengers to charge their electrical appliances prior to their flight, and 184 comfortable lounge chairs.“From this new area, passengers will be able to board directly onto the aircraft without navigating stairs and Emirates passengers will be able to access their new airline lounge,” said Mr Geatches.“This expansion will provide travellers with an enjoyable experience comparable to other gateway airports,” Mr Geatches said.In addition to the new lounge, the International Departures expansion also includes:16 extra check-in counters,a second A380 compatible gate with direct boarding to the aircraft,an expanded outbound Immigration area with more counters and a designated area for future technology, such as outbound SmartGates, anda security screening area more than twice the size of the previous space with a special lane for families and people requiring assistance.Retail, Dining & AmenitiesThe transformation of the International Departures experience includes the remodelling and refurbishing of level one to create a central retail and dining area prior to security screening. This will be completed before the summer holidays.A further $12.5 million is being invested in a new ‘six-in-one’ food and beverage concept on level two called ‘Haymarket’ comprising a bar, café, juice bar, bakery, deli and pizzeria. Located in close proximity to Haymarket will be a new children’s playground with family friendly seating.“The opening of the new departures lounge area and the completion of the remaining works in the coming months marks a major milestone as part of Perth Airport’s commitment to improving the customer journey.“Our aim is to become an integral part of the community – a vibrant place to shop, dine, relax and travel through – and an airport we can all be proud of,” Mr Geatches said.Go back to the e-newsletter >
March 26, 1997Pouring the next footings for the Heat Duct Tunnel.
An overwhelming majority of PASYNO nurses’ union members on Monday voted in favour of going on an indefinite strike in a bid to seek higher entry level wages.Close to 1500 members voted, with Cyprus News Agency sources put the figures at 95 per cent in favour of a strike, two per cent against and three per cent leaving their ballots blank.Seven per cent of the members abstained from voting.The secret vote, which started from 7:30am in all state hospitals across the country, ended at 3:30pm with the results announced about two and a half hours later.Union nurses will now demand moving up their current pay scale which currently ranges from A5 and A7, to A8 after having their qualification made equal to a university degree and the unfreezing of promotions. If the government agrees, it is estimated it would cost some €4 million for the first few years.“The right to strike is completely respected and sacred. However, just as sacred, if not more sacred is the right of our fellow citizens to health,” Health Minister Giorgos Pamborides said in a statement.“Therefore I appeal to all to consider their responsibilities in this sensitive time. I want to make clear that the state cannot function under threats and will not allow patients become hostage.”Calling on them to engage in dialogue, he said developments were already underway in reforming the health sector, boosting health services for the public but also improving working conditions for everyone working in the sector.No one would be left out of these efforts, Pamborides said “especially nurses which are an important pillar and without them there could be no health”.On Tuesday, the board of directors of PASYNO will meet to evaluate the votes and decide on further action.Earlier in the day, union general secretary Panayiotis Georgiou said “nurses were and are considerate of the state, their patients and their duties,” and had been patient enough due to the financial crisis.It is now the government’s turn to be considerate of nurses, Georgiou added. You May LikeLuxury Crossover SUV I Search AdsThese SUVs Are The Cream Of The Crop. Search For 2019 Luxury Crossover SUV DealsLuxury Crossover SUV I Search AdsUndoGundry MD ProPlant Complete Shake SupplementCalling All Carnivores! There Is One Protein That Can Restart Your Body’s Fat Burner, And No, It’s Not FishGundry MD ProPlant Complete Shake SupplementUndoProstaGenix SupplementHow To: Boost Prostate Health (Do This Daily)ProstaGenix SupplementUndo Concern over falling tourism numbersUndoTurkish Cypriot actions in Varosha ‘a clear violation’ of UN resolutions, Nicosia saysUndoPensioner dies after crash on Paphos-Polis roadUndoby Taboolaby Taboola
