Would you like to see the size of an impact crater depending on the size and make-up of an asteroid?

Yes?

I knew you would.  Go over here and check it out: [Impact Calculator]

SEE not infer.

The technology does not use glass lenses nor reflective mirrors but an advanced form of a pinhole camera, the "pinhole" technique is called Fresnel zone plates.

New Scientist article.

The technical hurdles would be tricky but nothing unbelievable.

Essentially we would need to launch two spacecraft.: one is the "lens" and one is the "receptor".  The focal point using the Fresnel method is kilometers away from the lense, ergo the two spacecraft solution.

Go read the whole article, just fascinating.

Feeds right into this post: Planet Hunting, The Next Generation - The Lyot Project

So if you are the Soviet Union back in 1971 and oh let's say you are out exploring for natural gas and umm...one of your exploration rigs happens to fall into a sinkhole...that'd be bad right?

Now let's say that all of a sudden natural gas starts coming out of this hole, what do you do?

1. Devise some clever way of stopping the flow of natural gas and perchance capture it for using to create energy?
2. Scramble and backfill the hole as best you can to "cap" the problem and then re-assess how you can access this seemingly rich natural gas deposit.
3. Light it and watch it BUUURRRRRN!

You guessed it!

Soviet ingenuity stretched as far as a match and the natural gas hole has been burning for 40 years...

Awesome! Communism at work.  Second world creation, third world sustained engineering.

Update: This comment from techRivet's #1 fan.  This must be a the cause of Global Warming!  We can blame the ice [not] melting at the south pole on the Soviet Union!

Where oh where is the Goreical to save us?  Oh the Earthanity.

[I may have changed her words up a bit in that last sentence.]

Just saying what a lot of people are thinking.

– Global warming is a “total crock of ****.” Then he added: “I’m a skeptic, not a denier. Having said that, my opinion doesn’t matter. (With the battery-driven Volt), “I’m motivated more by the desire to replace imported oil than by the CO2 (argument).”

I think we are going to wake up from this mass hypnosis in 10 years with the realization that it was exactly as Bob Lutz has so succinctly put it.

Just plain cool:

A java app that displays the ground passing under the Landsat satellite as it is traveling over it (sometimes it is a replay if there is not a satellite over the US at the time you are watching).  It scrolls smoothly, compiled from images made before.