A new subduction zone forming off the coast of Portugal marks the beginning of a cycle that will see the Atlantic Ocean narrow as Europe moves closer to America.
Lead author João Duarte, from the School of Geosciences at Monash University, says the team mapped the ocean floor and found it was beginning to fracture, indicating tectonic activity around the apparently passive South West Iberia plate margin.
I get a strange email from Google. Just sign the paperwork they say. We can’t tell you anything. I sign, assuming it’s gotta be cool with an approach like that.
Fast Forward One Week
Next thing I knew, I was up in a helicopter over Tekapo, New Zealand, sitting by Steven Levy from Wired magazine tracking balloons as they headed for the stratosphere. I was just a few hours north of my home in Queenstown, so I was excited to check out this secret Google X project right in my own backyard!
So, here’s the whole story. I’ll start with a video I shot with Google Glass that shows some of the behind-the-scenes:
(Note, here is the Longer Video linked therein that has a lot of the tech talk and geeky stuff if you want to know more.]
So, what’s the reason for all this? Well, there are billions of people on Earth without internet. Billions! What’s a crazy (loon-y) idea to get them internet? Step in Project Loon from Google X and Rich DeVaul.
New Zealand was a perfect test bed because even though we have only 4 million people, 1 million of us don’t even have internet. Or, if we have it, it’s crazy-expensive. We even visited one farmer (Charles) who said that he had to pay $1400 for ONE month of satellite-internet. Crazy!
So, imagine a network, a mesh of balloons that spin around the earth, effortlessly handing off internet from one balloon to the next, just like the way you hand off phone service from one tower to the next as you drive. You can see more about the tech on Google’s Project Loon site.
Anyhoo, I was invited along to take photos. Google was nice enough to even officially license a few photos (thanks!). No, they didn’t pay me to write a nice article. I’m just kind of a Google fan. Stephen Levy and Wired liked some of the more special photos too, so you can see even more in Stephen’s article Wired magazine. Man, he’s a cool guy. You really get to know a dude when you’re ripping through the New Zealand mountains with these crazy Kiwi pilots!
After watching the flawless launch on a chilly morning, we ended up taking a chopper to a remote farm. There were a lot of choppers. It was kind of like Apocalypse Google Now.
We landed and jumped off to go try out the internet. Again, flawless. I can only assume they had a few failed tests beforehand… they must have been working on this for a long time. But man, it was smooth. The family was super excited. They were on www.Trademe.co.nz, which is the eBay of New Zealand. The husband was looking for a new truck… his wife was not thrilled.
At lunch, the creator of the project, Rich DeVaul, told us a funny story. I don’t even know if I can repeat it, but I will. It seems innocuous enough. BTW, I’m not a real journalist or anything. I’m just a guy that takes photos and likes stories.
[Queue Radiolab soundeffects] Rich is tearing down a highway in central California. He’s in his own car. There are other Google people in there, and they are peering upwards and out the window like tornado chasers. They have radio antennae, laptops, and all kinds of crazy Google equipment as they try to track a balloon. At some point, they overload his alternator and they come to an unceremonious stop. They are stranded.
Rich has to call his wife to pick them up. She’s been in the dark for years about this project, and he hasn’t told her anything. She drives hours and hours to pick them up. He fills up her car with nerds and equipment and they sit there silently, ignoring the Fringe/X-Files nonsense that is happening in the backseat. His lips form a line as he looks side to side innocently. I’m not sure if that look actually happened, but it probably did.
I heard she’s here at this press conference that’s happening right now in Christchurch. So now she knows everything; She’s probably quite proud of him!
And, by the way, if you are here in New Zealand in Christchurch, come see me at the Festival of Flight at the Air Force Museum on Sunday! The Project Loon event is from 10am-2pm on Sunday June 16th. There will be a lot about balloon science and stuff like that… bring the family! Here’s a map.
Anyway, hats off to all the engineers and team members. It’s a cool project. It’s all quite early, of course, but if they can keep iterating, it will be a really cool option to get internet everywhere. I can see remote villages in Africa having one of those red-ballooned antennas. I can see it forcing competitive local internet services in SE Asia to provide cheaper service and no data caps (the same way Google Fiber is disrupting competitive services). I can see myself putting one of those antenna on my truck so I have internet no matter where I travel in New Zealand to take photos. Man, I can’t wait!
Fifteen years after Richard Siegel, Hong Kong’s then-director of civil aviation, bid farewell and turned off the lights at Hong Kong Kai Tak International Airport, the old airport has been given a new life.
With official ceremonies set for this week, it will be rechristened Kai Tak Cruise Terminal. The new facility will accommodate cruise ships and other large vessels.
Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas will be the first ship to arrive at the cruise ship berth — formerly runway 13 — today at 8 p.m.
Kai Tak was most reknowned for its runway that extended in to the sea, and for its hair-raising take-offs and landings. There is even an aerial manoeuvre named after one of the turns needed for a plane to turn and make the runway.
One pilot recalls:
As a pilot, it was totally unique. It was the only major airport in the world that required a 45-degree turn below 500 feet to line up with the runway, literally flying between the high-rise buildings, passing close to the famous orange and white checkerboard as you made that final turn toward the runway.
A British teacher and aviation photographer, responsible for many of the outstanding photographs of planes approaching and taking off from the Hong Kong airport explains:
Kai Tak was very different to most international airports because it was right in the city … Lion Rock (a prominent hill in Hong Kong) blocks the standard straight-in approach; thus planes had to make that special turn over Kowloon City while landing on runway 13.
Chapman recalls watching flights landing at Kai Tak during … “demanding flying conditions.”
Being at the Kai Tak car park watching airplanes land in heavy rain could be very worrying,” he said. “The pilots could not see the runway, and landing over Kowloon, you had to be visual with the runway. Some (pilots) seemed to wait a little longer than others before they aborted the landing and went around for another go. Some would appear out of the low clouds on the approach path, then power up and vanish back into the clouds.
The scariest memory for Chapman was the landing of an Air France 747-200 freighter contending with an extremely low ceiling.
“We could hear it coming but saw no sign of the landing lights. It was dark,” he said. “It got louder and louder; then you could see the glow of the red beacon under the plane. He overshot the turn and went right over the car park and control tower as he powered up and went around for another try.”
For more on this story and for some of the amazing photographs from Kai Tak see: here: CNN Travel. You can also search YouTube for some amazing videos of planes at Kai Tak.
Think again, thanks to the incredible talent of Unlocking the Truth, a group of twelve-year-olds who started hanging out in the garage getting out their angst before they even hit kindergarten.
Could those who suffer from type 1 diabetes soon be kissing their insulin shots goodbye?
Boston Children’s Hospital and their top-ranked Nephrology Division certainly hope so, because they’ve just taken a huge step towards conquering it by pinning down the root cause of diabetes!
[Dr. Paolo] Fiorina and his team studied hundreds of pathways in animals with diabetes. They eventually isolated one, known as ATP/P2X7R, which triggers the T-cell attacks on the pancreas, rendering it unable to produce insulin.
“By identifying the ATP/P2X7R pathway as the early mechanism in the body that fires up an alloimmune response, we found the root cause of diabetes,” says Fiorina. “With the cause identified, we can now focus on treatment options. Everything from drug therapies to transplants that require less immunosuppression is being explored.”
Fiorina and his team are optimistic that the next few years will not only find a cure, but a way of preventing the disease in children.
Travel and Leisure has compiled a list of what they call, America’s Best Little Beach Towns. Some are east coast and some are west coast and some are south coast. For each town, they give suggestions of what to do, what to see, where to stay and where to eat. I’ve been to 6 (mainly because they’re not far away from me), what about you?
Here are the six I’ve been to – for the others and info about all of them, check out the link below.
Sunset Beach, Hawaii
Chincoteague, Virginia
Boca Grande, Florida
Santa Cruz, California
Rehoboth, Delaware
Gulf Shores, Alabama
For the others, and for all the information about their picks, see here: CNN Travel.
