Fun Fact:
We all know Mozilla’s Firefox browser, and by the name and logo, you would probably assume that it is a Red Fox. However, Firefox is another name for the Red Panda and that’s exactly what Mozilla’s Firefox is! To learn more about the Red Panda check out National Geographic.
If the seven-member Los Altos Historical Commission completes it’s “historic property evaluation” and decides it so, Steve Jobs’ childhood home could become a historical site. The home is located on 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, California. The garage you see in the picture is the same garage that Steve Wozniak was in when he put together the first 50 Apple 1 computers.
“Steve Jobs is considered a genius who blended technology and creativity to invent and market a product which dramatically changed six industries — personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing,” according to the property evaluation.
“His influence is expected to be felt by multiple generations forthcoming.”
Source: CNN
Newly declassified information actually contains the first official acknowledgement of Area 51 by the government along with information on just exactly what was going on behind closed doors. Area 51 is mentioned many times in the documentation and is also shown in a declassified map (shown above).
The primary use of Area 51 according the the newly released history was, no surprise here, to test out secret US government projects, but more interestingly, the declassified history points out the secretive development of the U-2, a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft used by the CIA and USAF to gather intelligence. The documents go into great detail and include information like the names of pilots, code names, locations, inter-govermental co-operation details, cryptonyms and more.
Unfortunately, for those who are awaiting acknowledgement of extraterrestrial life, you will have to wait a little longer. There are clearly no references to knowledge of alien life forms, but there is a ton of awesome, once highly secretive and classified information that’s now available to the public.
You can read the history of the U-2 project at the official National Security Archive website. The site contains many images, maps, videos and even offers up some highlights from the documentation, it’s definitely worth a look.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is the most distant human-made object at over 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) away from our sun. The mission of the Voyager spacecraft both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, was to explore Jupiter and Saturn. After major success, the mission was extended to have Voyager 2 explore Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 is still operating and sending back data after more than 35 years later. The new mission of the Voyager spacecraft named, the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), is to explore space outside of our solar system, which is all new territory for us.
We have been anticipating Voyager 1 to finally leave our solar system completely and enter interstellar space, one group thinks we have done just that. UMD research scientist Marc Swisdak, James F. Drake and Merav Opher of Boston University believe that recent data suggests that Voyager 1 is now in interstellar space, this conflicts with NASA’s view of the data in which they believe the spacecraft is still on the outer edge of our solar system.
It’s a somewhat controversial view, but we think Voyager has finally left the Solar System, and is truly beginning its travels through the Milky Way”
It’s all about our sun’s magnetic field and how it interacts with the magnetic field of interstellar space. The direction that the magnetic field of interstellar space is coming from is the source of controversy. As NASA writes, “Other models envision the interstellar magnetic field draped around our solar bubble and predict that the direction of the interstellar magnetic field is different from the solar magnetic field inside. By that interpretation, Voyager 1 would still be inside our solar bubble.”. This is in contrast to the view that the interstellar magnetic field direction is the same as that which originates from our sun, which would mean that Voyager 1 left our solar system back on July 27th, 2012.
This is obviously new for everyone and discussions will need to continue in order to better understand what’s going on at the edge of our solar system. The best thing we can do is continue to analyze new data as it comes in and hopefully it will provide a clearer picture.
You can read the original article from NASA about this topic and you can learn more about the Voyager spacecraft from a post we did last year.
The question that you may or may not have ever asked; what currency will we use in space? PayPal is trying to answer this question by officially launching PayPal Galactic. It’s one of the problems that no one ever really seems to talk about, until now.
I often think about how people could soon be spending their vacation in a “space hotel” and how we could set-up shop on Mars and start building cites and growing our own food there but I never thought about how we would pay for things in these places. It may sound like crazy science fiction movie but I think it’s a great time to start figuring out these problems as space becomes more accessible.
As space tourism programs are opening space travel to ‘the rest of us’ this drives questions about the commercialization of space. We are launching PayPal Galactic, in conjunction with leaders in the scientific community, to increase public awareness of the important questions that need to be addressed,” -David Marcus, PayPal’s President.
Even if spending your vacation on Mars doesn’t happen during your lifetime, it doesn’t mean that it will never happen. It’s the way we are built as humans, we want to explore and push the limits of what we can do and where we can go, so space colonization is highly likely if not completely inevitable. One day, generations after us may need to study their history books to prepare for a test that focuses on the earliest settlers who came to Mars and built the first cities. Perhaps PayPal will be in those books as the pioneers who helped create the first universal space currency.
PayPal is currently working with the SETI Institute (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) to help bring this issue to light and hopefully make all of this happen. PayPal Galactic also has Buzz Aldrin talking about the issue, whom you can see in the video above.
So, What do you think about PayPal Galactic? Are we ready to talk about space currency?