Whether you’re looking to give this away as a birthday gift or Christmas present, these accented light fixtures are sure to be a hit.

For you passionate Robodustrial readers, we along with Banana Design Labs have decided to giveaway their awesomely cool Deep-Sea Anglerfish accent LED light.

Here are a few ways to enter:

The more times you enter, the more chances you have to win! Just remember to leave a comment for each contest entry you complete. (Ex. “I tweeted this” and then add the link of your tweet.)

Note: Please use a valid email address. Contest open to North American residents only.

The winner will be chosen randomly. Giveaway ends Tuesday, November 16th, 2010. The winner will be reached by email, and announced on the blog on that same day.

Good luck!

The winners are Richard F. Heck, 79, a retired University of Delaware professor now living in the Philippines; Ei-ichi Negishi, 75, a chemistry professor at Purdue University; and Akira Suzuki, 80, a professor at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. The three will split the $1.4 million prize.

Over the years, all three of these men have each independently made advances in using the metal palladium as a catalyst to link together carbon molecules into larger, more complicated structures. While drugs, plastics and many other industrial chemicals consist of large carbon-based molecules, getting one carbon atom is bind to another is not an easy task. In 1968, Dr. Heck reported new chemical reactions that used palladium as the key catalyst for shepherding carbons together. In 1977, Dr. Negishi used zinc compounds and eased the mingling of carbon atoms on palladium, and two years later, Dr. Suzuki found that boron compounds worked even better. This all came after a century ago, when a French chemist named Victor Grignard found that coupling a magnesium atom to a carbon atom pushed additional electrons to the carbon atom, making it easier to bond with another carbon atom.

“They say that even 25 percent of all medicines that are synthesized today are made by one of these reactions, so it’s a huge impact on the pharmaceutical industry,” Lars Thelander, chairman of the chemistry prize committee. “Palladium has this magic property that it can bind two different carbons make them come very close together and then they react under very mild conditions.”

While the three are extremely grateful for having achieved this award, Dr. Negishi said an early-morning phone call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobels, did not catch him completely by surprise. “There have been some people who have been mumbling about that,” he said during a Webcast news conference following the announcement, “and I began thinking of this and that.”

Previous winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in Chemistry include Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz, Ada E. Yonath in 2009. Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, Roger Y. Tsien in 2008, and Gerhard Ertl in 2007. It has been awarded 102 times to 160 Nobel Laureates between 1901 and 2010. Frederick Sanger is the only Nobel Laureate who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice, in 1958 and 1980.

Russia wants to take over the North Pole, and by 2012 when these eight floating nuclear power stations are put in place, they’ll be well on their way. 2012 you say? Man, the news just keeps getting worse and worse, doesn’t it? Moscow is claiming more than a million square kilometers of extra territory in the Arctic, stretching from its current border in the Arctic Sea, all the way to the Pole. This is so they can, wait for it…drill for oil at an underwater mountain range which could hold as much as 75 billion barrels.

“These [floating nuclear power stations] have very good potential, creating the conditions for exploring the Arctic shelf and setting up drilling platforms to extract oil and gas,” says Sergey Zavyalov, deputy director of the operating company, Rosenergoatom. Yes, all you can do is shake your head.

Each floating nuclear power station costs about $400 million and can supply electricity and heating for communities of up to 45,000 people, and can stay on location for 12 years before needing to be serviced back in St. Petersburg. They will initially be positioned next to Arctic bases along the North coast, but there are plans for floating nuclear power stations to be taken out to sea near large gas rigs.

Of course the Russians are saying that they can guarantee the safety of the units one hundred percent, and that all risks have been ruled out, but I believe I heard Tony Hayward say something like that just before the Gulf of Mexico turned black.

Bottom line: this is a disaster of epic proportions waiting to happen from the same people that brought you Chernobyl and dropped atomic bombs near one million people just to see what would happen. Considering that all the water in North America comes from the Arctic circle, the last thing I need is to wake up in the morning just so I can make a pot of radioactive coffee. Some may say I’m being a bit over the top here, and that’s fine. When a Sharktopus really does come to fruition because of nuclear radiation in the seas, I’ll be saying, “I told you so.”

The complaint, which would be filed under the Clean Water Act, would see BP pay out $1,100 per barrel, but if the government can prove that the oil company engaged in gross negligence or willful misconduct leading up to the Deepwater Horizon spill, that cost could go up to $4,300. Theoretically then, BP could see fines as much as $17.6 billion for the more than four million barrels of oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of 87 days.

At the moment, the Department of Justice is reviewing the Oil Pollution Act, as well as the Clean Water Act and other statues which may be appropriate. Federal judge, Carl Barbier of New Orleans, is overseeing the entire complaint process.

“As we have said from the beginning, we are committed to ensuring that those responsible clean up the mess they made, restore or replace the natural resources lost or injured in this tragedy, and repay every cent of taxpayer money,” Justice Department spokeswoman Hannah August said.

While BP has already spent eight billion cleaning up the mess in the Gulf of Mexico, it is forecast that those costs will soar to a whopping $32.2 billion, aside from the costs of fines leveled against them from the United States government. An estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil spewed fourth from the well off the coast of Louisiana, as 11 workers lost their lives in the rupture. Hundreds of miles of coastline from Texas to Florida suffered because of the disaster, as wildlife were killed, local industries such as tourism and fishing were brought to a halt, and beaches were closed for the entire summer.

While it is doubtful that the United States government will see any money from the civil complaint, if filed, it could be the final nail in the coffin of BP, as the money spent on the Gulf of Mexico cleanup is sure to drive them into bankruptcy, a fate some say is deserving of the oil company after the worst oil spill in the United States captivated the nation for more than four months.

Lets say I wanted to travel to Miami for a month and work on a project with a client of mine. I could simply browse SYS and find any other creatives interested in traveling to Los Angeles around the same time. If I find the right person, we could then exchange dates, travel to each others homes and work at each others offices. This definitely takes a lot of stranger trust, but hopefully you’ll be able to feel out your prospects well enough before the switch.

SYS even has a section on the site, where interested employees can direct their boss to if they have any questions or concerns about the exchange.

It would be interesting to see larger companies participate in these types of exchanges. They would be able to cutback expenses on lodging, but also make sure their employees are comfortable living in other people’s homes, apartments etc… It might make more sense for startups to take advantage of SWS, rather than large companies, simply based of the lack of funds most entrepreneurs don’t have. .

The pure genius behind this idea is pretty amazing. To be high enough to fit cars underneath the bus and low enough to drive under the overpasses, this “straddling bus,” as many refer to it is quite a marvel.

The concept will actually begin construction at the end of the year in Beijing’s Mentougou district. Not much has been said about the safety features and what type of risks are involved, but we should find out once the project is complete. As seamless and revolutionary as it seems, this concept still has a long way to go being incorporated in major cities around the world. It looks as though they’re off to a great start and will succeed if their projections are correct.

Constructed by JDS Architects, the Holmenkollen is a cantilever design, which recently passed technical and safety standards conducted by the World Ski Championship Association. One cool feature to mention is the stainless steel mesh cover intended to protect the skiers from severe fog or wind. For their opening ceremony, skiers did what they do best and entertained the crowd by jumping off the 20 or so different jumps available.

From the offset, the actual design of the structure doesn’t look like it can hold a restaurant, nor very many people for that matter. But, they definitely had the spectator in mind and adjusted the facility accordingly. It will be interesting to see where they position the media and camera equipment. I’m sure we’ll see a lot of great shots from the Nordic World Ski Championship next year.

Between the loss of the snows atop Mt. Kilimanjaro, the loss of several of Antarctica’s ice shelves, and the depletion of the fourth-largest lake in the world (the Aral Sea), I’ve become convinced that global warming is indeed taking place. Now I’m no scientist, but it seems pretty evident that humans are at least partly responsible for this potentially catastrophic rise in the earth’s temperature. From our ongoing deforestation of the Amazon rain forest to the exponential population growth of ours species, humans have emerged from the pre-industrial age as the biggest environmental threat this planet has ever seen – and it’s seen quite a bit.

You can add to this the ongoing fossil fuels crisis. No, not the fact that the oilfields worldwide are reaching a state of peak oil soon, a fact that is also hotly debated. I’m talking about the continual contamination that the planet faces from one gigantic oil spill after another. From the Exxon Valdez incident off the coast of Alaska to the current BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond…we’ve figured out how to use up all of the oil, but not how to prevent it from contaminating our environment, and our food chain.

So what’s the solution? I don’t think there is any “one size fits all” solution…but I do think there is a universal appeal to save the planet, or at least there should be. I posed the question  on Facebook the other day about what would lead to the type of utopia on earth that we see in some futuristic science fiction shows, like Star Trek. You know what I’m talking about – where money isn’t everything and the people of earth have united for a cause like space exploration, etc. Someone suggested it would take a global tragedy, like hordes of invading aliens. I would like to propose that the global tragedy is already upon us, and it’s called global warming. The sad fact is that unless something drastically changes, and soon, this will be a very different planet climate-wise in only 100 years or so. Our grandchildren will not know the planet as we do today. Today, we have to power to change the future. Tomorrow, we could be the cause of the next mass extinction event on planet earth. Hopefully we will make the right choice.

Physics and the theory of quantum mechanics intrigued Teller and he moved to Munich to pursue his interests. While in Munich, Teller had an accident that cost him his right foot. After he recovered from this injury, he transferred to the University of Leipzig to study with Werner Heisenberg. Teller received his doctorate in physics in 1930 and took a job as research consultant at the University of Göttingen.

When Adolf Hitler came into power, Teller moved to Denmark and joined the Institute for Theoretical Physics. There he worked to unlock the secrets of the atom.  In 1934, Teller married Augusta Harkanyi. The couple was married for almost half a century. Teller moved to the United States in 1935, and became a citizen in 1941.

When President Franklin Roosevelt was informed of Hitler’s work with nuclear fission, he approached the scientific community to join the fight. Teller joined the Manhattan Project. This project had one goal: create an atomic bomb before the Germans.  After working in Chicago with Enrico Fermi and in Berkeley with J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller joined Oppenheimer in an isolated laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico.  Teller discovered intense heat generated from nuclear fission could cause an explosion.  This plan was abandoned in the later stages of bomb creation.

Teller’s further calculations determined that the fallout from an atomic bomb would not spread forever (which was the fear of many scientists), but rather the fallout would be limited to one area. The first successful atomic bomb test took place in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945. The German scientists were not even close to a finished bomb when Germany surrendered.

After the war Edward Teller begged his superiors to try to create a fusion-based thermonuclear weapon. He suggested the bomb would be more powerful. They refused until the Russians detonated their own bomb. President Truman then ordered the lab to develop a fusion weapon. The first hydrogen bomb was successfully detonated in 1952.

Teller lobbied the government to open a separate lab for thermonuclear research.  The government answered with the Livermore Laboratory on Northern California. Edward Teller served as a consult, associate director and director of the Livermore Lab.

During his later years, Teller always advocated a strong national defense. He authored dozens of books and was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institute for the Study of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.  Edward Teller died in September 9, 2003 at the age of 95.

If you were to ask scientists what it is, most of them will tell you they really don’t know. What they do know is that it exists, and approximately 25% of the universe is comprised of this so-called dark matter.

To try and understand what dark matter is, scientists eliminate possibilities by determining what it is not. They know dark matter is not stars or planets, baryon cloud particles or antimatter. Two possible theories that may explain dark matter are WIMPs and MACHOs.

WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) are subatomic particles made from non-ordinary matter and include things like neutrinos, axions, and neutralinos. MACHOs (MAssive Compact Halow Objects) are made from ordinary particles, and could include black holes, neutron and brown dwarfs.

Albert Einstein was the first theorist to discover that just because space is “empty” doesn’t make it nothing. Empty space holds the capacity to expand, meaning empty space contains its own energy. As the universe expands, more empty space, or dark energy, is created.

To date, scientists have been unable to reproduce dark matter in a laboratory, which makes it near impossible for them to gain real understanding about what dark matter is and what role it plays in the universe. A recent discovery, however, suggests that by studying particles trapped in the sun’s center when dark matter collides with the sun and captures them in its gravitational pull.

A team of researchers led by Dr Stephen West from the Department of Physics at Royal Holloway simulated this effect, and believe the effects of dark matter on the sun cool the sun’s core and send heat particles toward the surface. This theoretical discovery could unearth the effects of dark matter on solar physics.

Coming to understand dark matter and its purpose in the universe would provide physicists with answers to a longstanding question, and could reveal some of the darker secrets of the universe. I for one, find it beautifully ironic that the sun has the potential to shed some light on this dark matter. (Pun 100 percent intended!)

I just hope that as we probe into this dark matter, we don’t disturb H.P. Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones, as we all know that never turns out well for humanity.

The Airbus A321 has been a staple of the airline industry since its inception in November 1989. The main difference between the Airbus A321 and its predecessor, the A320, is the length of the fuselage, which resulted in heavier weight and a reduction in the range of the aircraft. The Airblue flight originated in the southern city of Karachi and was only a two hour flight to Islamabad, at just over 700 nautical miles, which is well within the 2,350 nautical mile limit of the A321 fully loaded. The maximum passenger capacity of the jetliner is 220 with an operating crew of two.  The first 104 Airbus A321s were delivered in 1989. Despite the vehicle design’s age, the production of A321s continues today, with an order of 20 recently purchased by the Air Lease Corporation in the U.K.

So how does the performance of these two vehicles compare? The Volt is being promoted with a capability of going 40 miles on the battery charge before the gasoline “booster” engine kicks in to extend the vehicle’s range by 300 miles. The Leaf, on the other hand, boasts a whopping 100 miles on a fully charged battery, but (and this is a big caveat) it has no gasoline engine to extend its range.

In my opinion, the best option at this point would be to lease, if you are looking at one of these new ultra-green vehicles. Primarily, which one you decide to go with should probably be decided by the length of your daily commute, all other factors being equal. Both cars are featuring an eight year, 100,000 mile warranty on the battery.   President Obama is scheduled to test drive a Volt next week in Michigan, which will highlight the importance he has placed on new battery technology.

First up, gone is the big V8 engine option. That’s right, gas guzzlers beware! So what are the motor options for this mild-mannered cousin of the former SUV realm? 3.5-liter T-VCT V6 or a 2.0L I-4 EcoBoost are the only options available. Yes, that’s right. Hard to imagine an inline four cylinder motor inside an SUV? Wait until you hear what’s being used for the chassis. This new Explorer is built on the same front-wheel drive unibody platform that is used on the Taurus and Flex vehicles. Say what?! Well, now you can understand why it’s not quite as big and why the cost is coming down and safety ratings will be going up. This ain’t your father’s SUV, that’s for sure. Below is a video from the Facebook reveal promoted by the Ford Explorer website on this latest marvel of engineering. I have to give them one thing…they are still coming up with innovation and advances in their vehicles, despite not taking any of the Government bailout money. Ford is still an American icon, even if this SUV sucks.

Not just their brains, but the size of their brains, as scientists discovered a link between life longevity in mammals and their brain size.

CREAF scientists,César González-Lagos and Daniel Sol, in conjunction with McGill University researcher, Simon Reader published new findings in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology that suggest mammals with larger brains have a longer life-expectancy than mammals with smaller brains.

Their research included data from nearly 500 different species of mammals, from marsupials to bats. According to their findings, larger brain sizes, as well as larger body sizes, allow mammals more opportunities to adapt to their environmental conditions, create survival solutions and improve their chances of survival as a species. Because they are more likely to survive longer, they have more chances to breed, increasing their population as a species.

Not only are male members of the species offered more opportunities to breed, females with longer life cycles are afforded the opportunity of longer ovulation cycles as well. Animals who live longer are also more-likely to reach sexual maturity later, giving them more time while developing and maturing to adapt to their environment and learn to survive.

As well as brain size, body size is also taken into consideration, as mammals with larger brains also tend to have larger bodies. They also noted that animals born in captivity were also more-likely to live longer than animals born in the wild because there were less environmental situations requiring harsh adaptation skills for captive species.

In the end, the research seemed to denote that brain size was somewhat of a revolving, evolutionary door. Larger brain size equals longer life, longer life equals more time for brain size to increase on the evolutionary scale.

I guess we should be grateful for our massive brain size, though they’re certainly not as big as whale brains. I’m kind of glad I’m not the size of a whale either. It’d make romping through the grocery store a little difficult.

It did make me wonder though… could this be why human obesity rates are on the rise? It’s our brains trying to tell us bigger bodies equal bigger brains equal longer life? Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case.

The map is intended to help scientists build an inventory of how much carbon the world’s forests store and how fast that carbon cycles through ecosystems and back into the atmosphere. It shows that the tallest forests are clustered in the Pacific Northwest of North America and portions of Southeast Asia, while shorter forests are found in broad swaths across northern Canada and Eurasia. This is all part of an ongoing effort to estimate the amount of carbon tied up in Earth’s forests and for explaining what sops up 2 billion tons of “missing” carbon each year.

We releases about seven billion tons of carbon annually, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide. Of that, three billion tons end up in the atmosphere, and two billion tons in the ocean. Where the other two percent goes, no one seems to know, although it is suspected that forests capture and store much of it as biomass through photosynthesis.

The map was constructed by using a laser technology called LIDAR, which shoots pulses of light at the surface and observes how much longer it takes for light to bounce back from the ground surface than from the top of the canopy.

Being billed as a a powerful laser gun that can temporarily blind and disorient a suspect with a large modulating pool of green light, it is said to have no long-term effects. With deadly force supposed to be used as a last resort, the Dazer Laser just might be the answer to taking criminals out in sticky situations. It has a range that works anywhere from three feet to a mile away, and even if the subject has their eyes closed or is wearing sunglasses, they can still feel and experience the effects of the Dazer Laser since it’s so damn powerful.

“If you can impair their vision where they can’t effectively target or locate you,” a rep for Laser Energetics, the makers of the Dazer Laser, said. “You’re controlling them, you have those couple seconds you need, which in law enforcement is a year.”

Could this be the new craze in law enforcement? I don’t know, but it seems pretty effective based on the video below. While I still doubt that it doesn’t have long-term effects, who cares when it’s being aimed at someone who has committed a crime? Down with the scum, I say. Blind them all!

The mechanism looks a lot more streamlined and sci-fi than you might expect. It seems fairly simple to slip into, requiring only the same movements wheelchair users already perform to transfer in and out of their chair. From there, a series of straps hold the legs in place, while the user pulls himself upright to a standing position.

Movement is controlled via a right-mounted joystick, and while the movement in the embedded video below seems slow, that criticism would surely fade against the thrill of upright mobility. The rechargeable battery lasts two hours on a full charge, and it may be easily swapped out for a fresh one. Worn over clothes, the Rex exoskeleton was designed to be comfortable to be worn all day if desired. The Rex can stand up, walk, move sideways, turn around, go up and down steps, and walk on flat hard surfaces including ramps and slopes.

So what are the drawbacks? First of all, it carries a price of $150,000, and for now it will only roll out in New Zealand. It isn’t known at present how many exoskeletons will initially be available. One can only imagine what innovations this will spark, though one immediately comes to mind: power lifters a la the movie Aliens. Soon, you too will be able to face down giant xenomorphs and save the day! Check out the video below to see the Rex exoskeleton in action.

Called the Crew Space Transportation-100 (CST-100), it is designed to carry up to seven astronauts on short missions up to 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The capsule comes after Boeing won an $18 million award by NASA under the Commercial Crew Development Space Act Agreement, which is intended to help in the development for new commercial spacecraft systems for transporting folks to the International Space Station, as well as any future private space stations. Bigelow Airspace’s Orbital Space Complex, anyone?

The CST-100 can stay docked to a space station for up to seven months, and is protected by an ablative heat shield. The design allows for up to 10 missions for each capsule. Expect the first one to be launched from Florida in 2014 if all goes well, and with current specs, it is able to ride on the Atlas V, Delta IV or SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket in order to get it off the ground.

The biennial Fanborough International Airshow runs until July 25, and with so much awesome stuff coming out of this years event, I may have to consider attending the next one in 2012.

Trying to figure it out makes my head spin, but thanks to science, I don’t need to hash it out anymore. A team of scientists from Warwick and Sheffield Universities put their minds together to finally answer the age-old chicken and egg debate. Their answer just may shock you… or confirm what you’ve always believed to be the only answer possible.

With the use of an amazing super computer called HECTOR (High End Computing Terascale Resource), the science team broke down the components of the egg’s shell. Their research began in effort to understand how chickens create shells for their young so we as humans can one day reproduce this fascinating natural process.

The team discovered a natural protein called ovocledidin-17 that can only be found in a chicken’s ovaries. Inside the ovaries, the protein works to assemble the shell piece by piece in preparation for the baby chicks. Since this is the first process in forming a baby chicken, and it can only take place inside a chicken’s ovaries, science has deemed the chicken itself had to come first.

Well snap! Now what am I going to talk about at parties? You’re probably wondering the same thing, but have no fear, my science savvy friends. You can still debate… or at least keep the conversation going. Know why? Because science still has no idea where this first chicken could have come from.

You can even shift the conversation toward dinosaurs, which some people still like to insist never existed in the first place (despite the fact that we’ve all seen their bones at the museum.) Scientists believe the chicken may have been related to an egg-laying dinosaur, so the real answer to the question–What came first? The chicken or the egg?–is neither chicken, nor egg, but dinosaur!

And we all know birds look like mini-dinosaurs with feathers. In fact, I was watching chickens peck around the neighbor’s pond the other day. Having just watched Jurassic Park over the weekend, all I could think about was how much they looked like tiny, feather-covered velociraptors. Scary, I know. I just hope there isn’t some crazy billionaire scientist somewhere with an amber walking stick planning to spawn a bunch of dinosaurs on an island and charging admission.

So now you know. The chicken came first, and anyone who tries to tell you different, you tell them you’ve got proof. Then send them over to read this article if they continue trying to argue with you.

However, a new story released recently offers the opinion that what witnesses saw on the 7th was nothing more than a Chinese missile launch, meant to test the country’s new missile defense shield. This would seem to corroborate with speculation that an official explanation was not forthcoming because it was of a military matter. If this is the case, it makes one wonder what the capabilities of these purported missiles are, as the objects in the videos appear to be moving much more slowly than standard long-range projectiles typically do.

At the same time, there is a huge plume of vapor being spewed behind the object, and no long, cylindrical body to suggest the standard missile shape. Also, it doesn’t seem to make sense to fire a missile over inhabited areas without prior warning of the populace, or at the very least the authorities — populations have panicked for much less, as anyone who remembers Orson Welles’s classic radio play version of War of the Worlds can attest.

Watch the video below and draw your own conclusions. This is a UFO in its classic sense — an unidentified flying object — but is it man-made? Should we worry about an impending alien invasion? Is it nothing more worrisome than a missile test (if thoughts of a missile test don’t bother you, that is)?

Workers trying to clean up the affected beaches are wearing little more than rubber gloves and using chopsticks, but more than 40 oil-control boats and hundreds of fishing boats have also been deployed in the area. According to Zhong Yu, a worker with the environmental group Greenpeace China, the oil is “half-solid and half liquid and is as sticky as asphalt.”

While it’s been spread over 165 square miles of water five days since a pipeline at a northeastern port exploded, the China oil spill is dwarfed by the BP one, yet Greenpeace China is still finding it difficult to estimate the spill’s real size, and the damage it is causing. It is being reported though that 400,000 gallons have been spilled, compared with 94 million to 184 million gallons in the BP oil spill off the U.S. coast.

At least one person has died in the clean-up efforts; a 25-year-old firefighter drowned after a wave threw him from a vessel and pushed him out to sea. As of right now, the cause of the China oil spill is still not clear.

BP went so far as to try and hire the entire marine scientist department at the University of South Alabama, and were turned down after the lawyers got a hold of the contract. In it, BP states that scientists are prohibited from “publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists, or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years,” according to documents obtained by Mobile’s Press-Register.

Basically, BP is trying to cover their own butts by having as many scientists on their payroll as possible, so when it comes time for the Natural Resources Damage Assessment to bring about a lawsuit that will drag on forever in court, there won’t be anyone credible left to testify against them.

There’s nothing stopping these scientists from signing on with BP, either, since most universities allow employees to do outside consultation for up to eight hours a week. Word has it, BP is offering them $250 a week, plus signing bonuses. Let’s see, working eight hours a week at $250 and hour adds up to $104,00 a year on top of their regular salary. Pretty tempting, yet you have to wonder just where the morals of these people are who have already signed on with BP, and yes, there have been a bunch. Scientists from Louisiana State University, University of Southern Mississippi and Texas A&M are among the bunch.

It kind of makes me sick that BP is getting away with this. Watch the video from the Rachel Maddow Show to see what I mean, and tell me this doesn’t cause your blood to boil.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

With speeds of 70,000 cubic meters per second, flood waters hit the Three Gorges Dam early this week. That’s 20,000 cubic meters per second more than the flood that killed 4,150 people in 1998. According to the Chinese government, the $24 billion dam is able to withstand 22 million cubic meters of extra flood water, and that without the Three Gorges Dam, smaller dams and the towns and cities along the lower reaches of the Yangtze would be seriously endangered.

China is expecting six to eight typhoons this year, and although the dam is one of the most controversial projects the country has ever dealt with, it has already proven its worth as it spans China’s Yangtze River in Yichang, Hubei Province. It is the world’s biggest hydroelectric project and is now instrumental in helping to control flood efforts that plague the country every year.

Although there have already been 700 people who have lost their lives since the start of the year due to torrential rains and flooding, if not for the Three Gorges Dam and efforts made by the Chinese government to help control the situation, that number very easily could be in the thousands due to a much bigger catastrophe.

Yes, it was on July 20, 1969 that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first two men to walk on the moon after their lunar module was propelled into the sky using the Saturn V rocket. An estimated 500 million people watched the event on television, but sadly, interest in the space program has dwindled down to the point where such a monumental event cannot even make mainstream headlines anymore. Is it because it’s not an even number? Come on, don’t be hating on 41.

Since that historic occasion, there have been 10 other people to walk on the moon (you don’t hear the conspiracy theorists talk about them), with the last two being Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt on Apollo 17. Their moon landing took place on December 14, 1972 – 36 years ago.

With the current fleet of space shuttles being retired, and cuts being made left and right, sometimes it seems that another moon landing will never come, despite what the politicians say. Should that be the case, I think it’s important to celebrate the past and all that we have achieved, even if it isn’t a round number.

Happy 41st Anniversary, Apollo 11. You deserve recognition of the highest form, and even though I’m not with CNN or MSNBC, I’m doing my part to help spread the word far and wide.

This Laser Close-In Weapon System (CIWS) has already been tested successfully by shooting down unmanned vehicles using a solid state fiber laser that produces a 50 kilowatt beam. It can also be used against mortar, rockets and small surface ships. Made by U.S. company, Raytheon, it’s already been tied to Phalanx, the U.S. Navy’s anti-missile defense system. Which, oddly enough, is nicknamed “R2-D2.”

While problems such as weather conditions, and even the target itself, have plagued laser weapon development in the past, Raytheon Missile Systems’ vice president, Mike Booen, says that these problems could be overcome. “Every material reflects, but you can overcome this with power; once you get over a certain threshold – measured in multiple kilowatts – then the laser does what it is designed to do.”

Based on the video below, it sure looks like the CIWS can do a lot of damage, regardless of the conditions or target. Watch as it blasts a UAV into flames, and pay attention to the night test. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now living in a world where lasers can shoot down stuff, and as much as that kind of frightens me, my adrenaline can’t help but pump when I see this thing in action.