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The Project That Tracks Big Projects more similar news »
The Human Genome Project isn't the only spendy endeavor that aims to significantly expand the scope of humankind's knowledge. Ambitious and obsessive researchers in a handful of fields aspire to do the same. Unfortunately, none of them used their funding to buy a thesaurus: Tracking the projects labeled project is a project in itself. Here are our fave five.
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Project
Budget
What It Is
The ITER Project
$14.7 billion
Gorbachev helped thaw the Cold War by pitching Reagan a superpower collaboration to suss out fusion energy. The 180,000,000°F temperature requirement has been a significant stumbling block.
The Music Genome Project
$23.3 million
Every tune has hundreds of building blocks — from syncopation to harmony. Pandora's analysts are sequencing these "genes" by ear (up to 10 million a month) to create its proprietary database.
The Milky Way Mapping Project
$2 million
Using the Very Long Baseline Array — radio wave telescopes with 100 times Hubble's accuracy — astronomers are seeking ultraprescise measurements of the distances between us and 100...
Wired.com
Sat Oct 04, 2008 more from this source»»
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Instant Suburb of Prefabs Hits New York more similar news »
Tourists press up against the construction fence on the corner of 53rd and Sixth, staring speechless as a giant crane lifts an entire bathroom into the air and deposits it in what will be a master bedroom. Cellophane House is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.
Prefab is "modernism's oldest dream," curator Barry Bergdoll says. Since the industrial revolution, architects have been in thrall of the idea that houses could be built in factories, like any kind of widget. But reality hasn't been extremely cooperative. Whether because of conservative public tastes, unachievable economies of scale, or designers' less-than-stellar business acumen, their utopian visions have mostly remained fantasies.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and Charles and Ray Eames each had compelling concepts of housing for all, most of which turned out to be housing for a few. Modernist masters Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier were among...
Wired.com
Sat Oct 04, 2008 more from this source»»
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How to Hack Your Apple TV With Boxee more similar news »
The open source software package Boxee frees up your Apple TV, allowing you to play any DRM-free movie, TV show, song or video on the set-top box. All you need is a USB stick and some know-how. We show you how to unleash your Apple TV from the clutches of iTunes in Wired's How-To Wiki. Got extra tips? Log in and contribute.
Wired.com
Fri Oct 03, 2008 more from this source»»
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Fiction or Fiction: IP Piracy Cost 750,000 American Jobs more similar news »
Saying intellectual property theft has cost 750,000 American jobs, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged President Bush to sign legislation creating a copyright czar a czar on par with the nation's drug czar. The chamber said the 750,000 number came from the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Commerce Department, which often cites the figure, said it got the number from the Chamber of Commerce.
Wired.com
Fri Oct 03, 2008 more from this source»»
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Congress Clears Hotly Contested Bailout Bill more similar news »
Congress passes complex and highly criticized legislation authorizing $700 billion in government money to shore up the nation's stressed financial industry. The 263-171 vote by the House sends the Senate-passed version to the White House for President Bush's signature. Among many features, the measure would allow the Treasury Department to buy up bad debt from various lending institutions.
Wired.com
Fri Oct 03, 2008 more from this source»»
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Mad Men With an Ad Man: Optimedia Edition more similar news »
Every week on "Mad Men" Don Draper and Roger Sterling lead the men and women at the fictional advertising agency Sterling Cooper in creating and designing iconic 1960s ad campaigns in between their chain-smoking, heavy drinking, and round-the-clock womanizing. Looking for a little fact in the fiction of “Mad Men,” Wired.com is asking some of the real ad men (and women) in the industry to talk about the show’s realism and relevance in the world of advertising.
Wired.com
Fri Oct 03, 2008 more from this source»»
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Photographer Awarded TED Prize for Work on War, Disease more similar news »
: Photo: James Nachtwey
Last year, acclaimed war photographer James Nachtwey was honored with the 2007 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Prize for his work documenting images of war, disease and political unrest across the globe for over 25 years. Along with President Bill Clinton and Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, Nachtwey was awarded $100,000 to help him bring "one wish to change the world" to fruition.
James' wish was to share an underreported worldwide story, prove the power of news photography in the digital age and raise awareness about a global health issue that has the potential to become a worldwide pandemic — Extensively Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (XDR TB).
Tonight Nachtwey will unveil the images of the disease he hopes to combat at a special screening at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. His poignant images will be used to offer awareness about the worldwide spread of tuberculosis through a multimedia campaign on all seven continents, in 50 cities around the globe, and across the web. You can find out more information about screenings and the images at http://www.xdrtv.org.
Nachtwey shared his digital images with us and took a few moments to tell Wired.com what he learned during the yearlong process of tracking the global spread of tuberculosis.
: Photo: James Nachtwey
Wired.com: When did you first encounter XDR-TB?
James Nachtwey: In 2000, I did a story for Time on AIDS in Africa. It was my first introduction to that subject. In South...
Wired.com
Fri Oct 03, 2008 more from this source»»
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Oct. 3, 1947: Birth of Palomar's 'Giant Eye' more similar news »
1947: After 13 years of grinding and polishing, the Palomar Observatory mirror is completed at Caltech.
It was, at the time, the largest telescope mirror ever made in the United States, measuring 200 inches in diameter. Following its completion, the disk was mounted in Palomar's Hale Telescope and first used in January 1949 to take pictures of the Milky Way. Edwin Hubble was the first astronomer to make images using the new scope.
The mirror began as a 20-ton piece of molten Pyrex, a new glass blend, at the Corning Glass Works in upstate New York. Pyrex expands and contracts far less than regular glass, making it less prone to distortion, a problem that plagued the 100-inch mirror already in operation at Palomar.
After being heated to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, the Pyrex was poured into a ceramic mold and cooled at an average rate of one or two degrees per day until it reached room temperature 11 months later. After that it was shipped west to Caltech in Pasadena, where the glass was painstakingly ground to perfection in a process lasting more than a decade.
The era of giant telescopic lenses began in the 1700s, when astronomers recognized that the bigger the lens (or reflecting mirror), the better the image. In 1774, English astronomer William Herschel mounted several 9-inch mirrors in a 10-foot-long telescope and recorded, with satisfaction, that he had spent the first night looking at "Saturn's rings and two belts in great perfection."
Herschel followed that...
Wired.com
Fri Oct 03, 2008 more from this source»»
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