Category: Historical Perspectives

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Cost of raising middle-income child in USA increases by 40% in ten years

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Costs have risen dramatically for raising children.

According to the US Dept of Agriculture, the cost of raising a child in a middle-income family has increased by 40 percent over the past ten years. Every major category of child-rearing expense has seen steep increase: day-care, education, food, gas, medical insurance, and so on. At this rate, childrearing may become a luxury item for America’s increasingly wealthy super-rich…

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Breakthrough Thinking, Great New Product, Historical Perspectives, Latest News, New Discoveries, New Viewpoints

Scientists design a novel magnetic cloaking device

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Scientists have just created the antimagnet.

Scientists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona designed a magnetic cloak that’ll both shield an object from an outside magnetic field and prevent an internal one from leaking out. It’s an antimagnet and it’ll have various military and medical applications.

The antimagnet uses a superconducting material that blocks the internal magnetic field of an object and several dampening layers to block the effect of the superconductor on the external magnetic field. Sounds complicated, and it is, but it could save your life some day…

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Breakthrough Thinking, Crazy Stuff, Current Events, Historical Perspectives, Latest News, New Discoveries

Faster than light particles could wreck Einstein’s Relativity Theory

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Is his theory out the window?

This is extremely shocking: CERN scientists using a 1300-ton particle detector have measured particles travelling faster than the speed of light. If confirmed, this discovery could invalidate Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity and revolutionize physics.

Einstein’s theory says that there’s nothing in the universe that could travel faster than light. Now, CERN scientists believe this may be wrong according to their latest experiment…

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Crazy Photos, Crazy Stuff, Culture, Globalism, Historical Perspectives, Latest News, New Discoveries, New Viewpoints

Google Earth reveals strange Nazca-Like ruins in Saudi Arabia

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An amazing new find.

Chalk another one up for Google Earth seeing everything we can’t. Australian armchair archaeologist David Kennedy simply fired up the app and managed to rediscover the ancient ruins of structures that rival the Nazca lines in southern Peru.

The lines were originally discovered by British RAF pilot Percy Maitland in 1927, but this is the first time they’ve ever been seen in all their glory. Kennedy used Maitland’s photos with Google Earth to pinpoint their locations. And Google offers really the only high resolution glimpse at them that can be seen by the ordinary viewer…

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Culture, Globalism, Historical Perspectives, Latest News, New Discoveries, New Viewpoints

US download speeds ranked at just 26th in the world

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If you live in the US and think the internet speeds are as fast, you may be surprised to find out that the country is actually ranked 26th in a list of average global download speeds. In the eye-catching infographic below the US (outside of Google’s offices that is) looking like a digital laggard, but who could be sitting pretty at the top?

Digital download delivery company Pando surveyed about 35 petabytes (a petabyte is 1000 terabytes) of data from 27 million downloads from 20 million computers in 224 countries, and found that South Korea has the world’s fastest internet service, in terms of download speed. The country averaged download speeds of 17.62 Mbps. Compared to the download speeds in the US, 4.93 Mbps, South Korea is lightning fast…

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Patent Trolls costing an astronomical $500 Billion

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Another reason the patent system is so difficult.

Last month, Google stepped up to defend Android coders against notorious patent troll Lodsys. Apple fought the company a few months earlier on behalf of iOS developers. Patent reform is a hot topic right now, especially after President Obama just signed legislation that means the U.S. is shifting to a “first to file” (over “first to invent”) system. This won’t help much with the patent troll situation, which Boston University researchers James Bessen and Mike Meurer say have cost publicly-traded defendants $500 billion since 1990…

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Crazy Stuff, Historical Perspectives, Hot Issues, New Viewpoints

Is printing a gun the same as buying a gun?

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A gun is a gun is it not?

There’s an interesting back-and-forth going on at Thingiverse, a site founded by Makerbot to share 3D projects. Two designers have made two parts for the AR-15 rifle platform. The first part is a standard rifle magazine complete with spring but the second part is AR-15 lower receiver.

Why are these parts important? Well, the magazine is just on the edge of Thinigverse’s implied (but not concrete) “no weapons” philosophy but the lower receiver is something else entirely. It is the only part of the AR-15 that you need a license to buy. Here’s what the creator, KingLudd, has to say about it…

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Analysis, Animals, Health & Fitness, Historical Perspectives, Medical Breakthrough, New Discoveries

Shark steroids can prevent human viruses

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A Dogfish Shark.

The steroid squalamine, found in dogfish sharks, has been found to fight viruses that are difficult or impossible to treat once transmitted to humans. Squalamine is a potential cure-all remedy than may even have the potential to cure cancers and protozoan infections. Discover summarizes the find as such..

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Analysis, Business, Historical Perspectives, Latest News, New Viewpoints

U.S. Solar Industry now employs 100,000 people, grew 6.8% since August 2010

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That’s a net gain 6,700 jobs in one year!

Don’t let the Solyndra talk fool you: The clean energy sector is still booming. And even booming industries — maybe especially booming industries — see a fair share of once-promising companies go belly up. It’s unfortunate that the Obama administration once touted Solyndra as an example of the fast-growing renewable power sector, but its bankruptcy is a poor reflection of the industry’s health as a whole. In fact, renewable energy remains one of the few sectors to see consistent growth over the last couple years.

A new report highlights that health, revealing that the solar industry employs over 100,000 people, and added over 6,700 jobs in the last 12 months alone…

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Analysis, Historical Perspectives, Money Talk, New Discoveries, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

Google Wallet: Is this the future of money?

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Go Go Google Wallet!

“Whoa, how did you do that?” I didn’t say anything when the clerk at Duane Reade—or was it Walgreen’s?—asked me how to pay. I just smashed my phone into the PayPass terminal. Money poured out of my Nexus S, and into somebody’s corporate coffers. Magic!

But then I still had to tell the dumb credit console whether I was paying debit or credit. And then I had to wait for my receipt to print out, all ten miles of it. Which made my attempt at being a mysterious stranger with mysterious magical technology quickly disappearing into the night fail miserably since it would’ve been mad awkward to stare directly into each other’s eyes for 45 seconds without saying a word.

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Breakthrough Thinking, Current Events, Education, Historical Perspectives, Latest News, New Discoveries, New Viewpoints

Higgs Boson may not exist

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To be or not to be. That is the question.

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. Its existence is postulated to resolve inconsistencies in theoretical physics, and experiments attempting to find the particle are being performed using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the Tevatron at Fermilab…

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