Beyond Gravity: the complex quest to take out our orbital trash | Ars Technica

Beyond Gravity: the complex quest to take out our orbital trash | Ars Technica: "As Gravity made clear to the general public, it’s getting crowded in Earth orbit. In the nearly 57 years since Sputnik’s launch on October 4, 1957, Earth has seen a cloud of human-created objects continue to grow, expanding like dandelion fluff around our planet. In 2014, there’s good and bad news on the subject."



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First fundamentally new lubricant in decades created from liquid crystals

First fundamentally new lubricant in decades created from liquid crystals: "The world uses tens of millions of tons of lubricant every year, from the smallest part of a micro-precision instrument to the expansion rollers on the largest bridges. Most are oil based, though others use powders, and even metals, and it’s been that way for decades. That could be changing as the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials (IWM), Nematel GmbH, and Dr. Tillwich GmbH have developed a new class of lubricants that are based on liquid crystals instead of oil. According to Fraunhofer, this is the first fundamentally new lubricant developed in twenty years."



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If You Want To Dig Through The Earth To Get To China, You’d Better Start In?

If You Want To Dig Through The Earth To Get To China, You’d Better Start In?: "Although the trope of “digging to China” was a common one in mid-20th century Western cartoons like those produced by Warner Brothers, and many a parent has joked that their child, furiously digging in the sand box, was working on digging their way to China, it turns out digging your way through the Earth (if such a feat were possible) from anywhere in, say, North America, doesn’t get you anywhere near China. In fact, you’d end up in the ocean off the coast of Australia."



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Images recovered 100 years later show German soldiers during WWI | Mail Online

Images recovered 100 years later show German soldiers during WWI | Mail Online: "They lay forgotten in a dank cellar for almost a century. But these remarkable photos, published for the first time, give  a rare and uncensored view of the horrors of the First World War from behind enemy lines.

They were taken by Walter Kleinfeldt who joined a German gun crew in 1915 and fought at the Somme aged just 16. As his haunting pictures, taken with a Contessa camera, make all too clear, life in the  trenches was a harrowing experience. The images provide an insight into the epic machinery of war – and capture the darkest moments of battle, with bodies strewn among the rubble."



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