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Sunday, January 27, 2008

Viktor Schreckengost, the father of industrial design and creator of the Jazz Bowl, an iconic piece of Jazz Age art designed for Eleanor Roosevelt during his association with Cowan Pottery died yesterday. He was 101.

Schreckengost was born on June 26, 1906 in Sebring, Ohio, United States.

Schreckengost’s peers included the far more famous designers Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes.

In 2000, the Cleveland Museum of Art curated the first ever retrospective of Schreckengost’s work. Stunning in scope, the exhibition included sculpture, pottery, dinnerware, drawings, and paintings.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell announced Tuesday morning that a deal had been struck between state and local officials and the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey franchise. The Penguins organization will formally announce the deal tonight, prior to the Penguins game against the Buffalo Sabres at the Mellon Arena. The deal will ensure that the Penguins will remain in the city with a 30 year lease on a new arena to be built in downtown Pittsburgh. The framework of the deal was constructed in an emergency meeting last Thursday in Philadelphia, when both government and franchise officials indicated that progress had been made, with the details laid out over the weekend. With the new deal, the Penguins organization would be expected to pay $3.8 million per year, as well as $7.5 million per year from both Don Barden, owner of Majestic Star Casino, and the state economic development fund. The Penguins organization has also been given the option of building a parking garage on property of the Pittsburgh Sports Authority between Centre and Fifth avenues, by contributing $500,000 per year.

The new arena is expected to cost approximately $290 million, and should be completed and ready to host hockey games by 2009. The Penguins will sign a temporary lease to keep the team at Mellon Arena until the new building is finished.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN, Geneva suffered light damage on September 19, 2008 when one of the giant superconducting magnets that guide the protons failed during a test. A large amount of helium, which is used to cool the magnets to 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) leaked into the collider tunnel. LHC will now be shut down for at least two months for repairs. Physicists say such setbacks are an inevitable part of starting up such a large and complicated machine.

Several mishaps, including the failure of a 30 ton electrical transformer, have slowed LHC’s progress since the initial start-up on September 10, 2008. The laboratory said in a statement that an electrical connection between the magnets had melted because of the high current. The machine has more than 1,200 dipole magnets arranged end-to-end in the underground ring. These magnets carry and steer the proton beams which will accelerate around the machine at close to the speed of light. One of the LHC’s eight sectors will now have to be warmed up to well above its operating temperature so that repairs can take place.

The collider is designed to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts and collide them together in search of new particles and forces. After the initial success of accelerating protons through the machine, physicists had hoped they could move ahead quickly to low energy collisions at 450 billion electron volts and then 5 trillion electron volt collisions as early as mid-October.

The recent setbacks, however, mean that hopes the first trial collisions would be carried out before the machine’s official inauguration on October 21, 2008 now look doubtful. It even looks uncertain whether this can be achieved before 2009.

Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Scientists in the UK have developed a new way to ensure boiled eggs are perfectly cooked thanks to a brand new hi-tech logo being printed on shells.

After cooking starts, people will be able to see if their egg is soft, medium or hard-boiled with the help of a thermochromic print which appears in black ink on the egg’s shell.

The eggs will be sold to consumers in the UK within the next few months. A spokeswoman for Lion Quality, the assurance scheme which came up with the idea, said: “We had a lot of inquiries from people which sparked an interest in the industry. We said OK, this is a big issue – people can’t even boil an egg.”

Gilly Beaumont, from B&H Colour Change, the company which created the logos, said: “We are still perfecting the technology, but we are very excited at the prospect of sorting a problem that has wound people up at breakfast time for decades.”

The most successful way to cook an egg has baffled some of the greatest chefs in the past. In 1998, Delia Smith dedicated a whole episode of her How To Cook programme on the best way to boil an egg. And last year, a survey carried out by the magazine Waitrose Food Limited showed five top chefs all had different techniques.

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

On Monday, at the 58^th Grammy Awards ceremony, Canadian singer The Weeknd won his first Grammy Award, Best R&B Performance, for his song Earned It, which was also featured on the soundtrack of the 2015 Fifty Shades of Grey movie based on E.L. James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey.

The Weeknd also won the Grammy Award for Best Urban Contemporary Album for his second studio album Beauty Behind the Madness. Abel Tesfaye — The Weeknd — had seven nominations in total including Record of the Year for his song Can’t Feel My Face and Album of the Year.

The YouTube video of the song received more than 179 million views and more than 1.1 million likes.The Weeknd was also nominated for Grammy Award for Best Pop Solo Performance, but British singer Ed Sheeran won the golden gramophone for his song Thinking Out Loud.

Last year, Beyoncé won the Award for Best R&B Song for Drunk in Love featuring her husband Jay-Z.This awards ceremony marked the first Grammy wins for The Weeknd, Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

In a televised statement on Monday, Thailand’s Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva blamed the loss of life last Saturday in Bangkok on armed terrorists who had infiltrated the Red Shirt protesters. He added that the security forces had opened fire only when fired upon.

The Prime Minister’s statement came as he was suffering a double blow to his authority. As coffins draped in Thai flags paraded through Bangkok to symbolise the death of democracy, Thailand’s electoral commission ruled that Vejjajiva’s Democrat Party should disband. In addition, the chief of the Thai Army, General Anupong Paojinda, publicly called for the dissolution of parliament.

Despite pressure from the Vejjajiva administration, the Thai Army, which traditionally has been politically significant in the country, has been reluctant to use force against the protesters, and will become even more so following what will be seen as innocent blood on its hands.

Even though Vejjajiva has stated that the government and military remain united, without the unequivocal support of the Thai military and security forces, his administration has very little room for maneuver.

Ironically, Vejjajiva may be saved from having to concede to the Red Shirts’ demands for fresh elections through the same process that deposed his predecessor and led to his own rise to the premiership. A court has ruled that Vejjajiva’s Democrat Party accepted 258 million baht in illegal campaign donations from cement maker TPI Polene. Under Thai law, the courts have the power to dissolve any party ruled to have broken electoral laws and to ban its members from public office for five years. This is the same law that in 2008 resulted in the disbanding of the People’s Power Party and the removal of Somchai Wongsawat from office. Leaders from both sides of the political divide have welcomed this development as a way to resolve the current deadlock.

However political commentators note that even with fresh elections the impasse that led to what is now known as Black Saturday would not end. Thai society has become increasingly polarised into pro-Thaksin Shinawatra and anti-Thaksin Shinawatra camps, and neither side will be willing to see the other side in power whatever the results of elections.

The violence on April 10, 2010, the worst for 20 years, saw the death of 21 people, four soldiers and sixteen civilians, including Reuters reporter Hiroyuki Muramoto.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Stardust, a NASA space capsule carrying precious comet samples from deep space, is scheduled to return to earth January 15, 2006.

Scientists hope to discover new meaning to the beginning of our solar system.

Stardust’s 2.9 billion mile round-trip mission took it halfway to Jupiter to catch particles from Comet Wild 2 two years ago. Its journey will have lasted a total of just over seven years when it lands in the Utah desert.

On Sunday, the ship will remain in space while a 100-pound (45 kg) capsule loaded with comet dust returns to earth and lands at the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range at 3:12 a.m. local time (5:12 a.m. EST or 1012 GMT). If the skies are all clear on January 15, then people from Northern California, Oregon and Nevada could get quite a show as the capsule enters Earth’s atmosphere. The show will be quick, but should prove impressive.

Comets are thought to be remnants from the process of planet formation, and scientists said the dust collected by Stardust will give them their first opportunity to study pristine samples of materials formed billions of years ago. The particles from the comet were captured using a tennis-racket-sized space probe containing ice-cube sized compartments lined with aerogel, a porous substance that is 99.9 percent air. It is the first time since 1972 that any solid extraterrestrial material has been collected and brought back to Earth, and the first time ever for comet particles.

During its descent over the desert, the capsule is scheduled to deploy two parachutes, though NASA officials said they have prepared for the possibility of a hard landing. A NASA probe called Genesis crashed to Earth in 2004 when its parachute failed to open. That craft had been on a three-year mission to collect solar wind ions, which were recovered by scientists even though the spacecraft was destroyed.

Stardust’s project manager, Tom Duxbury, said that “after the Genesis incident and the Columbia shuttle disaster, the mission’s team spent six months testing and reviewing the spacecraft’s design to make sure there were no errors”. Once the craft is recovered, it will be whisked away to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Only after it is in a secure lab, free of potential contamination, will the probe be pried open to reveal its payload.

“We are at the end of a fantastic voyage,” Don Brownlee, the lead scientist for the mission known as Stardust, recently told reporters at a media briefing. “We will learn a phenomenal amount… from the most primitive materials in our solar system. It is a real thrilling time.” Now, near the end of its long voyage home, the probe is set to plunge back to Earth in the predawn hours on Sunday.