Some Stuff: Wednesday, September 2, 2009

The very talented astrophotographer Ralf Vandebergh has captured an astonishing view of the International Space Station: The image was taken on August 29, before the current Discovery mission, and shows the station gleaming in sunlight.

Rumours are circulating this moring that Marvel is looking at converting Jon Favreau's Iron Man 2 into 3D. On top of that, they're considering converting Iron Man 1 to 3D and re-releasing it a bit earlier. Favreau and Downey are teaming up again for a movie called "Cowboys and Aliens".

IMAX has booked J.J. Abrams' Star Trek for a re-release this weekend in 85 theaters around the US and Canada. Star Trek will run for another two weeks until Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs opens on September 18th.

In a recent interview with Sam Worthington on the set of the forth coming “Clash of the Titans” he offered these tidbits…"What these guys and Louis [Leterrier] have set out to do is raise the richter [scale] to 11, in the sense of, the scorpions are the size of dump trucks, Medusa is a lot quicker and a lot more scarier, and the whole world itself is… big and epic in scope."

Is there a scientific way o tell how bad a fart is?

Oh yes! Now there is…For their senior project, two Cornell University computer-engineering whizzes recently built a machine that does just that. After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the three pillars of fart quality: stench, temperature and sound. Temperature, Clain explains, is critical. The hotter a fart, the faster it spreads. “It beeps faster if it’s a high ranker, and a voice rates it on a scale of zero to nine,” he says. “If it ranks a nine, a fan comes on to blow it away. It even records the noise so you can play it back later

Want to know if there’s been an outbreak of H1N1 in the neighborhood? There’s an app for that. Outbreaks Near Me is a location-aware application for the iPhone based on the free HealthMap epidemiological web service, which allows users to access disease-outbreak information. Unlike the web-based service, users can contribute signs that public health trouble is afoot in what the organization is calling "participatory epidemiology." The founder of HealthMap says what he's envisioning with Outbreaks Near me is "...say you're in a clinical setting as a patient or clinician and seeing lots of unusual cases of something. You’d be able to note that down and submit it into the system."