Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Tomb-Bot Will Be the First to Enter Final Secret Chambers of the Great Pyramid
The robot will traverse two unexplored shafts leading from the Queen's Chamber in the pyramid. Nobody knows where the shafts, which were discovered in 1872, lead.
Known as the Djedi project, after the magician whom the Egyptian king Khufu consulted when planning his pyramid, the robot will be able to drill through a secret door in the pyramid’s innards to see what lies beyond.
A robotics team from Leeds University in the UK is working with Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities to design the tomb bot, which is a follow-up to an earlier robotic mission that found the secret door in the first place.
The Pyramid of Khufu, after the king who built it around 2,560 BC, is the last remaining wonder of the ancient world. It involves a series of passageways and two rooms at its center, called the King’s Chamber and the Queen’s Chamber. Two shafts rise from the King’s Chamber at 45-degree angles toward the sky -- as the Independent reports, they’re thought to be a passageway to the heavens.
The Queen’s Chamber has two shafts too, but they don’t lead to the outside of the pyramid.
In 1992, researchers sent a camera up the shaft and found it was blocked by a limestone door with copper handles. Ten years later, researchers drilled through the door, hoping to unlock a treasure trove of artifacts -- but they found yet another door about 8 inches away. The Djedi project will drill through the second door and, researchers hope, follow the shaft to its end.
The team hopes to send the robot through the door by the end of the year, the Independent reports.
Robert Richardson, of the Leeds University School of Mechanical Engineering, says the team will continue the expedition until they reach the end of the shafts, and that they have no preconceptions about what they’ll find.
One can only hope it will be something out of this world.
Four-Ton Transformer Tribute to Ancient Chinese General Meshes History and Sci-Fi
The sculpture was assembled from components of an old Jiefang brand vehicle, a 25-year-old military service truck employed by the People’s Liberation Army. Robo Guan Yu stands about 32 feet tall and wields a dynastic-era weapon that makes for a nice juxtaposition with the post-Revolutionary scrap he’s assembled from.
As for the real Guan Yu, he was a respected general at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty and a key player in the civil war that ended it. Though his military exploits and valor have been pumped up to mythical standards over the years, he was apparently legitimately revered for his prowess at kungfu. Though Robo Guan Yu is unfortunately static, check out the accompanying promo video below to see the general’s latest moves.
[MMO]
Archive Gallery: Yesteryear’s Airports of the Future
Cotton runways, a runway powered by ocean currents and something called "the Aerotropolis"
Like us, past generations have envisioned a future of efficient, aesthetically-pleasing airports, and our 137-year archive certainly yields a few fantastical gems.
Just three decades ago, wave-powered landing fields, rotating airports atop skyscrapers and football arenas within terminals were all posed to revolutionize travel, or at least to get people to their destinations on time.
Even today's most renowned facilities, like the Hong Kong International Airport, have nothing on the past imaginings of visionaries and architects. Click through our gallery for a retrospective look at the oddest (and most extravagant) concepts of futuristic airports. Only time can tell whether any of these features will be realized—maybe then, we'd enjoy flying a little bit more.
The History OF WWW
Many People can't imagine there life without the Internet today. We use it for chat, work, shopping, searching and other reasons. And it goes without saying that talking about Internet, people don't think about protocols and cables either as they don't think, that TV - is a set of cables and communication satellites use to transfer tv-channels.
Let's determine the Internet itself: Internet - is an integration of nets of the world, where all the computers "talk" using a special language - net protocol TCP/IP, also it's based on this protocol and available for using services (such as e-mail, Web & so on). This is a present-day definition. But many years ago the conception of the Internet was different.
Let's briefly talk about the history of the Internet. The Internet we know today grew from seeds planted by the U.S. government.
And was developed to regain technical superiority for the United States as a response to the USSR that launched Sputnik.
J.C.R. Licklider first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it.
About this same time, a RAND researcher by the name of Paul Baran was working on a classified U.S. Air Force contract
about a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike. Baran's finel proposal was a packet switched network.
Leonard Kleinrock also developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections.
Packet switching is an approach that slice a message into separate, discrete pieces(datagrams) or packets.
Each packet then moves from its point of origin to its destination over any open route, regardless of which path the other packets take. When all the packets arrive at the destination they are reassembled -- and the message is delivered intact. To embody this ideas, that were needed technologies, the Advanced Research Projects Agency(ARPA) used a competitive bidding process.
In 1968 BBN won the ARPA contract. So, The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the ARPA which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah). Later some other branches were added. So, the physical network was constructed in 1969. Anyone who used the early Internet, had to learn to use a very complex system.
Needless to say, that in the beginning was chaos as it always happens when people are trying something new, using there great energy and excitement, differing techniques for creating common standarts and protocols. E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972.The telnet protocol, enabling logging on to a remote computer, was published as a Request for Comments (RFC) in 1972. At first the extraction of the information from the Internet was connected with a program called FTP(File Transfer Protocol). FTP-protocol allows a user to connect to a remote system and then exchange files with it. But this system was inconvenient, because required to know for sure the name of the file. Later more convenient FTP-clients with graphic interface were created, but there were still no tools to index the resources that were available.
The first effort to index the Internet was created in 1989, as Peter Deutsch and his crew at McGill University in Montreal, created an archiver for ftp sites, which they named Archie. This software would periodically reach out to all known openly available ftp sites, list their files, and build a searchable index of the software.