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By   Nicole Rae   @simmerandshoot   ·   On December 30, 2011 Yesterday, we posted a piece about the amazing light painting of  Brian Matthew Hart . If you thought that was impressive, you’re going to love this. According to  Video Mapping Blog , video projection mapping is “an exciting new projection technique that can turn almost any surface into a dynamic video display. Specialized software is used to warp and mask the projected image to make it fit perfectly on irregularly shaped screens. When done right, the end result is a dynamic projection installation that transcends ordinary video projection.” Uh, yeah. Translation: “it looks awesome”. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the United Arab Emirates National Day,  Obscura Digital  put together this incredible light display using video projection mapping onto the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. They used forty-four projectors to cover the 600 x 351 foot high surface ...

By   Kaushik  Friday, October 26, 2012 Some years ago, a British engineering firm  Atkins  proposed an extravagant design for a five-star hotel located deep within a 100-meter, abandoned and half flooded pit near the base of Tianmashan Mountain in the Songjiang District of Shanghai. Construction on the 19-story, 380-room Shimao Intercontinental Hotel finally is already underway. Initially the hotel was expected to be completed by May, 2009, but construction commenced only in March early this year. The innovative design of the luxury resort hotel stands two levels higher than the rock face of the 100 meter deep quarry and includes underwater public areas and guestrooms. Instead of draining what water there is in the quarry, it will be flooded to become a sunken artificial lake. Two of the hotels floors housing guest rooms and a restaurant are to be situated underwater. An artificial waterfall will plunge down in front of the hotel's facade and into the quarry, at...

In what could prove to be a major breakthrough in quantum memory storage and information processing, German researchers have frozen the fastest thing in the universe: light. And they did so for a record-breaking one minute. It sounds weird and it is. The reason for wanting to hold light in its place (aside from the sheer awesomeness of it) is to ensure that it retains its quantum coherence properties (i.e. its information state), thus making it possible to build light-based quantum memory. And the longer that light can be held, the better as far as computation is concerned. Accordingly, it could allow for more  secure quantum communications  over longer distances. Needless to say, halting light is not easy — you can't just put in the freezer. Light is electromagnetic radiation that moves at 300 million meters per second. Over the course of a one minute span, it can travel about 11 million miles (18 million km), or 20 round trips to the moon. So it's a rath...

In what can be called a "gem of a discovery," astronomers at the University of Manchester found a rare planet made of diamonds, which orbits a pulsar about 4,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Serpens. The astronomers from Australia, Germany, Italy, the UK and the U.S. used the Parkes 64-meter radio telescope in western New South Wales to find the carbon-based planet, which is denser than any other discovered so far. A diamond forms when carbon is put under immense pressure. As the planet largely consists of carbon, scientists speculate that the conditions are right for the carbon within it to be crystallized -- in other words, a giant celestial diamond -- and believe it to be completely made of diamond. The diamond planet measures up to 60,000 km across, is about five time Earth's diameter and about 300 time heavier, as indicated by the astronomers' measurements. It is believed to be the remnant of a once-massive star that lost its outer layer...