When the 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck Japan at 2:46 p.m. local time on March 11, 2011, TIME photographer James Nachtwey was at home in Thailand. Within 48 hours, he traveled to Japan and made his way north of Sendai to Kesennuma, where he began documenting the catastrophe while under threat of possible nuclear contamination. Nachtwey describes what he saw: “The scale of this is beyond belief. Any one town would be a major disaster if it had been just one town that it happened to. It would be unbelievable. This happened to every town, from south of Sendai all the way to the northern end of Honshu. The entire coastline, town after town after town. It’s just apocalyptic. And it all happened between — what? How long did the actual wave [of the tsunami] take to come in and go out? Half an hour? It was just a very brief span of time. The ocean just destroyed — obliterated — a huge coastal area of Japan. Heavily populated. Every town is just wiped out. Flattened.”

via TIME.

You've got to see these pictures.

Angels fell to earth, in augmented reality at least, in a recent campaign for Lynx in London. On March 5, the Unilever-owned brand (known as Axe in the U.S.), put signs in the Victoria railway station telling travelers to look up to a giant video screen. On the screen, they saw an image of themselves plus the angels, who are featured in both the English and U.S. ad campaigns. As this video shows, the reactions ranged from surprised to somewhat lewd.

via mashable.

With just half a dozen close friends online, she has a strict regimen to remain invisible on the web. Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox.  She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. “I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds,” she says by e-mail. She keeps her operating system on a USB stick and uses a virtual machine (VM) to carry out her online shenanigans.

via Forbes.

By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory, which is the foundation of the previous technologies. By 2100, like the gods of mythology, we will be able to manipulate objects with the power of our minds. Computers, silently reading our thoughts, will be able to carry out our wishes. We will be able to move objects by thought alone, a telekinetic power usually reserved only for the gods. With the power of biotechnology, we will create perfect bodies and extend our life spans. We will also be able to create life--forms that have never walked the surface of the earth. With the power of nanotechnology, we will be able to take an object and turn it into something else, to create something seemingly almost out of nothing. We will ride not in fiery chariots but in sleek vehicles that will soar by themselves with almost no fuel, floating effortlessly in the air. With our engines, we will be able to harness the limitless energy of the stars. We will also be on the threshold of sending star ships to explore those nearby.

Although this godlike power seems unimaginably advanced, the seeds of all these technologies are being planted even as we speak. It is modern science, not chanting and incantations, that will give us this power.

via Big Think.

We’re an overconfident species. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills. A survey of high school students found that 70 percent of them have above-average leadership skills and only 2 percent are below average.

via NYTimes.com.

A new analysis of the 8.9-9.0 magnitude earthquake in Japan has found that the intense temblor has accelerated Earths spin, shortening the length of the 24-hour day by 1.8 microseconds, according to geophysicist Richard Gross at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Gross refined his estimates of the Japan quakes impact – which previously suggested a 1.6-microsecond shortening of the day – based on new data on how much the fault that triggered the earthquake slipped to redistribute the planets mass. A microsecond is a millionth of a second."

By changing the distribution of the Earths mass, the Japanese earthquake should have caused the Earth to rotate a bit faster, shortening the length of the day by about 1.8 microseconds," Gross told SPACE.com in an e-mail. More refinements are possible as new information on the earthquake comes to light, he added.

The scenario is similar to that of a figure skater drawing her arms inward during a spin to turn faster on the ice. The closer the mass shift during an earthquake is to the equator, the more it will speed up the spinning Earth.

One Earth day is about 24 hours, or 86,400 seconds, long. Over the course of a year, its length varies by about one millisecond, or 1,000 microseconds, due to seasonal variations in the planets mass distribution such as the seasonal shift of the jet stream.

The initial data suggests Fridays earthquake moved Japans main island about 8 feet, according to Kenneth Hudnut of the U.S. Geological Survey. The earthquake also shifted Earths figure axis by about 6 1/2 inches 17 centimeters, Gross added.

via The Manila Bulletin Newspaper Online.

Philosophy is among the fastest-growing A-level subjects in Britain. This suggests that despite the pressure from governments to increase the teaching of technical, career-oriented subjects, a lot of sixth-formers have a stubborn interest in more traditional enquiries about the meaning of life. Also near the top of the list of fast-growing subjects is Religious Studies; and this again seems to confound the experts. Notwithstanding constant announcements that religion in educated Western Europe is "on the way out", many intelligent young people seem to have a keen desire to learn about traditional spiritual frameworks of human understanding.

via Standpoint.