In connection to this, they have very low heat outputs and these two factors combine together to give way to yet another benefit which is that they are very economical. They are also quite versatile in nature because their light is tunable. Of course, these grow lights aren’t perfect and do have their drawbacks but here is an interesting fact: the appeal of these lights has gone so far that even NASA has started using them now.

A recent breakthrough in the science behind LED grow lights has resulted in the concept known as Solid State Lighting (SSL). SSLs have demonstrated a capability to emit light either at the site or very near to the visible part of the color spectrum. What this means is that the given off light can be used straight or can be converged to a small extent if required. In addition to this, you can rest assured if you are using SSL technology that any damaging effects of the light sources will be completely cut out. It is here that we come back to NASA; the famous space centre has started using this SSL technology in its space farming programs.

The space farming effort that NASA is undertaking has the purpose of developing artificial light sources that would help any future space explorers to be more self sufficient when landing on colonies set anywhere in outer space. The reason why NASA has started to use LED lighting technology is because of the big list of benefits that it brings to the table. This is unlike fluorescent and incandescent lamps which are simply not feasible because where energy is concerned there is very little efficiency in terms of the amount of electricity being consumed.

Scientists at NASA have therefore utilized LED grow lights to encourage the growth of salad plants like lettuce and radishes while in outer space. Like when used on earth, the grow lights are blue and red in color to encourage fast and optimal growth of the plants that they are being directed towards. The scientists have eradicated all other wavelengths found within the spectrum of white light, which means that the energy needed to help plants grow has reduced in quantity. This has led to a dramatic decrease in energy costs.

It should be taken into account that the lack of green lights to the plants that are subjected to the LED grow lights often results in a somewhat black color of leaves. If need be though, artificial green light can be introduced to remedy the situation.

The images of Japan before and after the recent earthquake and tsunami, the image of the Santa Maria crater on Mar, the image of the surface of the sun, the images of the oldest and most distant galaxy cluster and so on are the most impressive images from the space. 

This is the contrastive image of Torinoumi city in eastern Japan before and after the magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami. Images of the Japan’s earthquake and tsunami were pictured in the 48 hours following by the German Optical RapidEye, TerraSAR-X satellites and other 63 satellite observations.

Japan’s image before (left) and after the recently powerful earthquake

The Mars rover Opportunity is discovering the Santa Maria crater on Mar. The image was photographed by a camera on the orbiting High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on March 9.

Photographed by the observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the image shows dramatic effects made by baby stars in region NGC 6729, one of the closest stars to Earth

This stunning photo was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows part of the Tarantula Nebula.

The sun seems to be alive through the lens of the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory. The image taken in early March shows magnetic field lines interacting above the surface of the sun. It is further evidence that the sun is going out of its long solar minimum period of reduced activity.

Stormy Sun

A team from Russian Soyuz capsule rests minutes after landing near Arkalyk town in Kazakhstan on March 16. The crew finished their nearly six months aboard the International Space Station.

The European Space Agency has recently announced that they discovered the oldest and most distant galaxy cluster named CL J1449 0856. It is said to be already in its prime, which can be seen clearly from its widely distributed x-ray emissions.

The oldest and most distant galaxy cluster CL J1449 0856

Well-manicured gardens have welcomed thousands of visitors each year. They tell how much love and effort were put into maintaining the gardens. Such gardens are not only home to many rare animals and plants, but they also feature styles and architecture of certain periods and countries. Let’s catch a city break in stunning gardens around the world.

Bodnant Garden, located above the River Conwy, overlooks the valley towards the Carneddau range of mountains. Notably, the gardens are bounded by clipped box hedges, formal herbaceous borders, and ornamental ponds. The garden has two parts namely the upper garden around Bodnant Hall and the lower portion known as the “Dell”. The former includes the terraced gardens and informal lawns. The latter is formed by valley of the River Hiraethlyn. It is home to many beautiful and interesting plants around the world.

Bodnant Garden, Conwy, Wales

The Huntington’s botanic gardens expand 120 acres. Notably, the gardens, home to many rare plants from around the world, are divided into more than a dozen themes including the Australia Garden, Camellia Collection, Children’s Garden, Rose Hill Foundation Conservatory for Botanic Science, Herb Garden, and Rose Garden.

Huntington Library Botanical Garden, San Marino, California

Courances Castle Gardens is less than 50 km from Paris, France. Its surprising beauty is combined by classical and romantic, historic and contemporary ways.

Courances Castle Gardens, France

Fin Garden, a historical Perian garden, covers 2.3 hectares. Its main yard is surrounded by ramparts with four circular towers. Including Kashan’s Fin Bath, the garden employs many water features and contain many cypress trees.

Fin Garden, located in Kashan, Iran, combines architectural features of Qajar, Zandiveh, and Safavid periods.

Rikygien is one of the most beautiful Japanese style landscape gardens in Tokyo. The garden features a central pond, man-made hills, forested areas, and some teahouse. The garden has 88 spots named after famous places in China and incidents from Chinese history, and Japan.

Rikugien Garden, Tokyo, Japan

The Butchart Gardens, located near Victoria on Vancouver Island, is a group of floral display gardens. Its collections include birds and statuary.

The representation of the Butchart Gardens at the Canadian palivion

The Boboli Gardens, an Italian I Giardini di Boboli, are rich pleasure-gardens. Extending from the hill behind the Pitti Palace over the Arno from central Florence, the garden is one of the largest Italian style gardens. Boboli is dotted with fountains, statuary, and a variety of features.

Boboli Gardens, Florence, Italy

Related links:

Beautiful rooftop gardens worldwide

Yu Garden – an architectural miracle

The world’s creative architectural miracles

Logical conclusion and deduction tell us this, but when man’s curiosity and daring sense of adventure kicks in, the result is trillions of dollars invested to explore space and possible alien civilizations.

The nearest planet there is to earth that could be habited by man is Mars. And as you read this article, efforts are being made by different nations to explore and possibly live in Mars. If there is an amazing race, then the race for Mars is clearly one of them indeed.

As NASA looks into the future in space exploration, other companies are eyeing this direction and thinking of ways how to be part of this inevitable trend.

One such company is Apple who has their own goals of sending their products into space. Yes, soon you may be seeing an astronaut logging in his daily space report to a specially designed Apple iPad for space.

The iPad’s revolutionary design does make it very easy to use in zero gravity. With no buttons to get in the way, future space explorers can easily input data with certain finger movements. One particular design is also the physical movement of the entire iPad to make commands. We can actually see now in the iPad, even when kids play racing games with it where the whole iPad becomes the steering wheel.

Today’s iPad is already futuristic and since it’s unveiling, there have been so many orders and inquiries about our iPad insurance to protect their space tablet of the future. Indeed, the iPad looks like something out of a science fiction movie in the late 1940′s but it is a reality today.

The most number of inquiries that we have about our comprehensive Apple iPad insurance is about international cover.

Many people travel with their iPad and they are concerned if they bought their iPad in the UK and traveled to China and it got damaged there, will it still be covered. Indeed, international cover is one of the main feature of our all-inclusive iPad insurance UK and we also cover accidental damages and even replace your iPad incase it was stolen.

However, when the future comes that space travel will be economically viable and you can now take a vacation in Mars, we may as well design our insurance to have not only international cover, but universal insurance protection as well.

“If a man finds a corpse for the first time (Without previously having found a corpse in the same spot, and without knowing that it was there) lying in the usual position he may remove it together with the soil it occupies. If he finds two, he may remove them together with the soil they occupy: Where is this law of the soil [a corpse] occupies to be found in the Torah? R. Judah said: The verse says, “You shalt carry me out of Egypt,” [signifying] carry with me [some Egyptian soil].” (Nazir 65a)

Even though Jacob was never buried in Egypt, we can rely on this verse to support the law. (Tosafot Yom Tov in the name of the Rambam)

Perhaps, Jacob’s request to be buried in Israel with some Egyptian earth was to indicate to his family that he would remain connected to them as long as they would remain in Egypt.

It is also possible that Jacob wanted some of the earth from outside Israel to be placed in his grave as a gesture to Joseph, whose mother, Rachel, was buried “along the way.” This would explain why his request to add some Egyptian earth was only mentioned to Joseph, and not when Jacob repeated his instructions to his other children.

One of the members of my congregation in Saratoga Springs wanted to have her husband buried on their farm.

It took a few years for her to file all the necessary paperwork and, after having me dedicate the “cemetery” according to Halacha, was ready to have him disinterred from his grave in Long Island, and rebury him on the farm.  She watched as I scooped some earth from his original resting place and wondered why.  I explained the law of “Tefusah,” taking some earth from the original resting place, and that we were honoring the place that held him until he was buried in his permanent grave. She didn’t respond, and sat silently for the entire ride from Long Island back to her farm high up on a hill near Saratoga. Once the crane lowered the concrete box into the freshly dug grave, she asked me for the container of soil so that she could pour it into his final resting place. “This earth is a symbol of his journey through life even after his physical death. Long Island wasn’t a “holding space,” it was part of his journey. Thank you.”

Have you used Google Earth to sanction the highest quality teaching and learning within your classroom? Or have you challenged your students to use Google Earth to answer new innovative and thoughtful questions? If not, I believe that as a trainer you are missing an important and free learning tool. At its first glance, Google Earth does sound a little bit about geography. But, it is good for so much more and provides many useful utilities. Consider the innovative folks at Google Lit Trips who have developed Google Earth lessons related to the most popular trade books read in today’s classrooms. Certainly, if we magnify literature through a lens of Google Earth, it helps students understand literary concepts from a different perspective. Imagine floating high over Missouri with the ability to view conservation areas near your home. Now imagine being able to zoom in for a closer look at area facilities. With the availability of Google Earth, you don’t have to imagine anymore.

Google Earth is a new product that combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips. Google Earth puts a planet’s worth of imagery and other geographic information right on you’re desktop. You can type in an address and Google Earth will fly to that location. You can get driving directions between locations. You can even tilt and rotate to see 3D buildings in metropolitan areas such as St. Louis.

With a new data file from the Missouri Department of Conservation, you can even view conservation areas along with information on their facilities, activities and regulations. Save and share your searches and favorites. Even add your own annotations. There are many ways to make geography lessons memorable and interesting for your students. For example, instead of having your students stare at maps for a class period each time you teach a geography lesson, you can get them involved in some hands-on activities that cement and enrich the topic. After teaching students about each theme of geography (location, culture, characteristics, human interaction, and movement) you can have them practice applying these ideas by focusing on different parts of the world using some of the following activities of Google Earth. Google Earth is a fantastic computer application that allows students to actually see what you are talking about when you mention a particular location. When you discuss Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon, you can actually show students the location and take a remote tour. Google Earth also allows students to explore the moon, the ocean, and their own backyard – literally. Now, not only can you see visuals of Earth, you can explore space and see the stars and planets.

In June and July of 2003, two NASA launched rare robot rovers obliged for Mars with the goal of NASA  to assemble informations about our neighbour globe, the red earth called Mars. Previous expeditions of the last near 30 years have given us so much informations about Mars, but they have been passing visits and not enough records had been collected. Nevertheless this mission would be different. The two rovers were projected to last 90 Martian living at best, but even after more than 1000 Martian living on, they were still departures solid.

The two rovers were nicknamed Spirit and Opportunity. They weighed about 180 kg each, that is about 400 lbs in American language. They passed batteries, communication tackle, and solar panels. The rovers worn artificial intelligence that evened allowed them to reject to do what their controller told them, if the felt an action would be dangerous.

Because of the conservative quality of their use, they lasted more than 10 time the epoch originally planned and have travelled a space of more than 10 miles across the Martian outside.

The first one to make it to the apparent of Mars was the rambler nicknamed Spirit. Spirit landed on Mars January 4th, 2004 in a bowl a measly 10km from the butt. Spirit made many important discoveries. From its shrink in the hole, it has discovered many rocks of volcanic basis and the action of subsurface water on these rocks. Spirit discovered patches of soil with a high salty pleased that tends to be caused by the older poise of water. It discovered also one particularly interesting sway, nicknamed Humphrey, a volcanic-like pitch twisted probably by magma.

It had brightly coloured, mineralized parts inside, that would most prone be caused by water result its way into it, before, or sometime after the pitch was twisted. This finding abandoned has impassive doubts from many scientists whether water existed or not on Mars at sometime in the past.

Not only has Spirit helped us understand more on the geological and real aspects of Mars: Spirit took the first picture of Earth from the seeming of another world. It has also full night-time movies of the transit of the moons and even Mercury across the sun. Spirit was lucky enough to problem an astral outdo of the Mars’ moon Phobos as it disappeared into the shadow of Mars.

The flash rover to make it to the shallow of Mars was Opportunity. It landed 21 existence after Spirit on January 25th, 2004. It landed on the opposed edge of the planet in a cavity in the heart of a patent. Opportunity worked extensively in craters on rocks presumably produced by sulphite sweet sands from evaporated lakes and that had been pushed and formed by the basics, curve, make, and water. Scientists wore this as testimony that water existed on Mars in obsolete times.

The two rovers have sent back hundreds of thousands of similes in both grey-balance and colour of the Martian seeming. The stunning panoramic shots can take your breath way. Equipping with a geological kit and motorized rock tools, they were able to look beneath the seeming to determine more than previously thought imaginable.

All these new discoveries have amplified our wisdom while at the same time increasing the total of question we have about Mars. Why did the water recede? Was their life on Mars? Could humans live on Mars? As these little rovers keep running, perhaps we will even have more questions answered in the near coming. Who knows what mendacity outside the next rock outcropping?

Beamed Energy Propulsion (BEP) is a rocket science, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to grasp the concept. Because it is simple as any ingenious ideas are. In the next four paragraphs and in simple layman terms I will explain it to you.

It is all about rockets. What everyone knows about them? On Earth motion is based on pushing from the medium, wherever the motion takes places: cars pushing from pavement by wheels, swimmers pushing from water by limbs, etc. Rockets fly in space and space is mostly a vacuum, it is empty. Rockets move in space using reactive principle, i.e. exhausting hot gases (backward) and pushing away from exhaust in opposite direction (forward). Rockets have to carry all their fuel and burning agent on board, because there is nothing in space that can be used for burning fuel (like air for burning gasoline in automobiles on earth).

Rockets cargo space is very expensive.

Why? Because with so many elements on board: fuel, oxidizer, cryogenics, tanks, lines, you name it, there is a small (and very expensive room) for the payload. If we could only find a way to separate the heavy energy source from the rocket, the gain in efficiency of such rocket will be tremendous.

This can be done if instead of carrying energy source on board, we will beam that energy from a remote power station. What kind of beam it can be? Laser beam, microwave beam, even x-ray, in all cases energy will be delivered to the rocket with speed of light. When a great number of photons is focused (even loosely) on a solid matter, such matter is evaporated and ionized almost instantaneously, i.e. the release of energy is much higher than one used from burning hydrogen.

So, laser-driven vehicle will be still flying on the same rocket principle (pushing away from its exhaust), but exhaust energy and structural lightness will be incomparably superior to hydrogen-burning rockets.

Beam-driven rocket is equipped with beam- collecting optics (i.e. mirrors) and some relatively lightweight solid fuel. That is it: no more tanks, oxidizer, cryogenics, nozzles, lines, – the rest will be cargo. Such rocket will be a subject of 4P Principle, formulated by the founder of laser propulsion, Arthur Kantrowitz: Payload, Propellants and Photons, Period!

How much beamed energy is more efficient than traditional hydrogen burning? About hundred times! Currently, for reasons disclosed above we are paying ,000 per pound of payload delivered from ground to low earth orbit only. If space launches will be done with high-power lasers, the price per pound of payload will fall to 0! This is 100-fold gain!

In addition to laser beams, other types of energy transfers using microwave, x-ray and even particle beams are getting explored for BEP. The number of in-lab demonstrations of BEP principles grows every year, and the day when we will achieve in-space BEP demonstration becomes inevitable. Of course, there are still a plenty of scientific and engineering problems which should be solved before BEP will bring us its benefits. However, the days for first practical use of beamed-energy propulsion are near.

It is recommended that every business owner that the creation of each Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files for all addresses branch. Find your own (latitude and longitude) (the space in the tags, place your arms to multimap.com postal code and read the resulting coordinates of the “information card”. Save KML files in the root directory of your site (ie http:// www.yourdomain.com/location-1.kml), then add a line of code for each location of the site, so Google indexes your location data in its next crawl the site. Now, geo-tag content is destined to become very important, as research is becoming more and more local. In the future, companies are investing in a short time in KML using Google Earth and the optimization of art. It ‘sort of sense that these two words are what mountain bikers can be a handful in Google Earth (maps.live.com or) when you are looking for. Claim your free business listing in Google earth and your company will be added to Google Maps, Google Earth, GOOG-411 (Research Library on phone), and Google Maps for mobile. Lists also give priority to investment as a standard Google search, which is why it is necessary, even if the business is global.