Pompeii ruins street view: Visit the Pompeii ruins via Google Maps street view.
Courtesy Google Maps You can now visit the Pompeii ruins via Google maps "street view". The link takes you to an overhead view. Click on the "A" and then click on "street view". You can zoom in or out and look around using your mouse movements. To walk down the streets click on ovals further up the road or on the arrowheads.
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Old moon?: The moon cooled to a solid 4.4 billion years ago.
Courtesy ViaMoi
Where did the moon come from?
Scientific studies indicate the solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago and that about 4.5 billion years ago an object about the size of Mars hit the Earth, blasting away material that eventually cooled into what is now our moon. (Read more in Science News: "The Solar sytem's big bang")
How do we know the moon's age?
Rocks brought back from the moon contain zircon crystals. Zircons crystallize only after 80 to 85 percent of a volume of molten rock has solidified. By understanding how uranium within the zirconium breaks down into lead, scientists believe they know when the crystals formed with an error margin of less than 4 million years. The oldest zircons from the moon are about 10 million years older than the oldest yet discovered on Earth. The ages of lunar zircons identified in other studies hint that small amounts of the moon’s crust remained molten for another 200 million to 400 million years.
"Alexander Nemchin and his colleagues have used a uranium-lead dating technique to scrutinize a 0.5-millimeter-wide zircon embedded in a moon rock collected by Apollo 17 astronauts in December 1972. The crystal — which, although small, is rather large as zircons go — is about 4.417 billion years old, the researchers report online January 25 in Nature Geoscience."
Source:
Science News: "Oldest zircon fine-tunes history of moon's formation"
My homepage: This is my homepage with a couple of the mentioned gadgets.
Courtesy JoeIf you are interested in tracking hurricanes, typhoons, tropical storms, etc. there is a cool gadget available for your Google hompage (and probably others) that allows you to view, track and interact with maps that show the most current active of these tropical weather systems. Its an interesting way to keep up and monitor the systems - and remind yourself that they happen all over the world. The one I use is here but I am sure there are others that are similar.
There are also gadgets for earthquakes, volcanoes and even one specific to world disaster photos.
Google Sky now works in a web browser (without a download). From within a web browser one can navigate the sky in a way similar to using Google Maps. Zoom or drag your way through a universe of stitched together images from telescopes and satellites. Try it out. It is lots of fun.
Making the world a better place
A philanthropic arm of the Google Foundation called Goggle.org drawing upon its nearly $2 billion in Google stock will invest "hundreds of millions" in companies specializing in renewable energy, co-founder Larry Page said.
"If we achieve these goals, we are going to be in the (electricity) business in a very big way," Page said. "We should be able to make a lot of money from this."
One gigawatt of renewable energy
Google's plan, known as RE< C, is to develop a gigawatt of electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from burning coal. Google is betting its R&D dollars on advanced solar thermal power, wind power, and enhanced geothermal technologies. Google's headquarters already draws some of its power from one of the country's biggest solar power installations.
"Cheap renewable energy is not only critical for the environment but also vital for economic development in many places where there is limited affordable energy of any kind," added Sergey Brin, Google Co-founder and President of Technology.
Google.org grants and investments
Two companies Google.com is working with are eSolar Inc. and Makani Power Inc. By focusing sunlight with mirrors, eSolar Inc. hopes to generate utility-scale power cheaper than with coal. Makani Power Inc. is developing high-altitude wind energy extraction technologies (Get more information via pdf downloads by clicking the company names).
"Google.org's hope is that by funding research on promising technologies, investing in promising new companies, and doing a lot of R&D ourselves, we may help spark a green electricity revolution that will deliver breakthrough technologies priced lower than coal." (Nov 27 Google press release)
Sources & resources: Yahoo News and Google.com and FAQ
From the comfort of your PC. Visit Google Moon or Google Mars.
How do you get started on the internet looking for science information? I jump on Google and get searching. But this can cause you to miss a ton of great science resources that are invisible to the search engine. Too dig a little deeper check out the Online Educational Database's Research Beyond Google -- science resources for some stuff you won't see on Google.
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