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What you don’t know about Nikola Tesla

Despite being incredibly popular during his day, now Tesla remains largely overlooked among lists of the greatest inventors and scientists of the modern era.  Thomas Edison gets all the glory for discovering the lightbulb, but it was his one-time assistant and life-long arch-nemesis, Nikola Tesla, who made the breakthroughs in alternating-current technology that allowed for people to cheaply use electricity to power appliances and lighting in their homes.

They constantly fought about whether to use alternating or direct-currents (their bitter blood feud resulted in both men being snubbed by the Nobel Prize committee), but ultimately Tesla was the one who delivered the fatal kick-to-the-crotch that ended the battle – at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, his AC generators illuminated the entire experience, marking the first time that an event of that magnitude had ever taken place under the glow of artificial light.

Today, all homes and applicances run on Tesla’s AC current.

Not bad for a mad scientist, huh? Read the full article about Tesla on Badass Of The Week.

Sarah Palin, doing what she does best

… Presenting the sports news. Here’s a vid of Palin from KTUU-TV in 1988:

Welcome to 2010, by the way.

Thought Google was just a search engine?

Think again… Google also carries a good chunk of the world’s Internet traffic through transit arrangements (it’s one of the reasons why running YouTube costs them so little)… And this is what it looks like when something goes wonky at their end:

American politics aren’t black and white…

… They’re blue and red apparently, according to InformationIsBeautiful:

And you thought you were dedicated to your work?

Dan Hanna’s spent the past 17 years (and counting) taking a photo of himself. He’s already collated a great deal of the photos into a video (available on YouTube), and he’s not done yet.

Go take a look at his explanation of his camera rig (no, not kidding) and surf around to other related projects. Surprising how many people do the same thing, but Dan’s certainly taken it one step beyond with a rig and spending the best part of 20 years compiling the shots… I considered starting something similar but I just didn’t have the tenacity to keep doing it after a couple of days. Would you?

Space Telescopes aren’t just for Space, you know

A recently released image from NASA, documenting the incredibly savage wildfires rampaging through the LA region of Southern California. Examine the full-resolution version and read more on the NASA web site.

If Man walked on the Moon today…

Via Noumisphere

I spy, with my little eye…

The inside of Richard Winchell’s right eye, taken in December 2005.

I love thinking about the intricacies of our own bodies. For example, did you know that the skin covering our bodies is actually composed of three layers (the epidermis, the dermis and the subcutaneous layer) - and in each minute of each day, we lose between 30,000 to 40,000 flakes of dead skin cells, equating to about 4 kilograms every year? KidsHealth has the skinny. (And I’ll get my coat for that last joke.)

While we’re talking about skin, let’s dive down to the molecular level… What holds our skin’s molecules together? Skin, like most of the human body, is composed of oxygen & carbon molecules plus nitrogen-based compounds. But what holds all of this together? Amongst other things, a protein called Laminin, which bonds everything together, adheres cells to each other and is generally ‘the glue of the human body.’ But what dictates Laminin’s subunit composition (or literally, what holds it together), and how did the particular polypeptide chains come to find themselves in harmony with each other producing this wonderful protein?

And all this, just from studying one of the fingers on one of my hands for five minutes earlier today. The human being is one truly amazing machine, and there’s so much going on - even at a sub-atomic level - that we just don’t appreciate because we can’t see it happening, although if it didn’t we would quite literally cease to be.

Something to ponder over on your lunchbreak. :)