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Guitarati Brings Music and Color Together
If you've ever been green with envy, red with rage, or moping with a serious case of the blues, and wanted a sound track to go with your mood, you might want to check out Guitarati. The music site has taken a fresh approach to helping you find the music you want to listen to - by color coding it. Say what?!
It's simple, but a little strange. The site assigns a color to every MP3 uploaded to it. If you want to match your mood to the music, you must first decide what color describes it best. Then you click on that color on the site. Supposedly, this brings up music that suits your current sensibility.
You can listen to a sample for free, or pay a penny to hear the full song. If you want to download the MP3, you pay whatever price was set by the artist(s) who uploaded it. It's certainly an interesting concept, and may be worth playing with.
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Scientists Discover Smallest Extrasolar Planet Yet
Astronomers have discovered 280 planets outside of our own solar system to date. Most of them are gassy giants like Jupiter, but the most recent find, made by scientists in Madrid, is special. Dubbed GJ 436c, it is a rocky orb only half again as big as the earth.
The Spanish scientists discovered the relatively small world by analyzing the distortions in the orbit of another planet in the same system. A similar technique was used more than a century ago to find Neptune in our own solar system. The discovery carries with it some huge implications. "I think we are very close, just a few years away, from detecting a planet like Earth," said Ignasi Ribas, leader of the scientific team that discovered the planet.
Though GJ 436c is close to the size of our own planet, a visitor to it would likely experience very different conditions. It circles a small red dwarf star about 30 light years from our solar system, and takes five Earth days to complete one orbit. Due to its rotation, the sun only rises every 22 Earth days on the planet - so its days are four times as long as its years.
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Rube Goldberg Burger Not Fast Food
The spirit of Rube Goldberg lives on in the national Rube Goldberg competition. Held every year, it encourages college students from around the country to build a machine that performs a simple task in the most steps possible. This year, the teams had to put together a hamburger - one precooked patty, two vegetables and two condiments, between two buns. This feat had to be accomplished in at least 20 steps; the winning team managed it in a mere 156 steps.
Created by the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers, the winning Rube Goldberg machine features an around-the-world theme, with representations of King Kong climbing the Empire State Building and landmarks such as Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower. It took 4,000 to 5,000 man hours of work to put together, for which the team won a trophy and $1,000.
One could say the winners had a home team advantage, since the competition was held in the Purdue University Armory. But that shouldn't minimize the achievement, which surely represents engineering at its finest and strangest. And how will these students celebrate? After noting that most of them pulled an all-nighter before the competition to prepare, Purdue team captain Drew Wischer said that "I'm probably going to go back and sleep." Spoken like a true engineer.
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