matterhacker

Wired has a story on the BIL conference. It’s like the TED conference, but you don’t have to be invited to come and see the speakers. It’s also free. Wish I could go, but unfortunately there’s the APS March Meeting conference for which I need to prepare for. Perhaps next year. Haha… Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure just came to mind… I’ve spent too much time in the lab lately hehe.

Wired has a nice picturesque story about the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC). Cool place. I did some research there at some point in my career. The whole complex is like something out of a James Bond movie. Catwalks and all kinds of crazy electronics all over. It’s probably most useful as a synchrotron source. You can do a lot of really neat stuff with high energy x-rays… especially in relation to structural molecular biology. I probably should have stayed in that line of research. It’s a lot more applicable.

The internet a series of tubes?? Haha, no! However, a lot of the wiring infrastructure that makes up the internet backbone is found underwater. There have been a couple instances recently where major parts of the world have had their internet knocked out due to one of these cables being cut. Here’s a map (from The Guardian) of the undersea cables:

Pretty cool. Also WIRED recently had an article with another cool picture of the exact point where the high speed trans-Atlantic fiber cables come up out of the ocean and onto US shores.