3D Technology Enters the Home Without the Glasses

Philips is going where no television has gone before, or at least commercially. It will soon be making available, the first 3D mass-market television that allows viewers to watch shows in three dimensions. That's right. It would be as if there's a real scene and objects inside your television that you can just reach out to and touch!

Actually, it was launched back in 2005, but as you can tell, it still has to make waves, and I'll bet that's soon. The technology works by showing the same picture shown in different angles in layers, which are then "translated" into 3D with a lenticular screen. This new TV will have applications not only for entertainment but for advertising and medicine as well.

I'd like to thank Jim Dorey for taking me to his blog, which has a lot of good stuff on 3D entertainment.

Check out this really weird headset TV which makes you look like the Marvel villain, Mysterio.

Jump to i-Mash for news on 3D and DLP technology.

3-D DLP TV with the glasses

Planes Are Said to Contribute to Global Warming: Germans Urged to Quit Flying

Flying is perhaps the only way to get from one side of the gobe to the next very quickly. But there are tradebacks, one of which is the fact that plane exhust, courtesy of jet fuel, releases tons of carbon dioxide into the air, contributing to the greenhouse effect which traps heat in the atmosphere.

While it may be an extreme move for some, quitting or refusing to fly when travelling is said to lessen one's carbon (dioxide) footprint, thereby helping to mitigate the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Some environmentalists have pushed for a reduction in flights and have suggested other means of transportation. Germans, for instance, have been advised to substitute exotic travel destinations for more local and less exotic Baltic sea destinations. "In the near future, people are going to become increasingly aware that aircraft emit vast amounts of greenhouse gases, far more than cars or trains," said Manfred Stock, a climate researcher in Potsdam near Berlin.

Still, even if you take a ship or a car to get from point A to point B, you would still use fuel and release carbon dioxide, unless the vehicle you're riding in is some kind of next-generation transport that does not use fossil fuel.

EXCLUSIVE: For a video of the tragic plane crash in Phuket, Thailand taken by a survivor during the crash, go to i-Mash.

Large Meteorite Falls on Peruvian Village and Sickens People

In a scene typically witnessed in a movie, residents of the Puno village in the Desaguadero region of Peru suddenly got sick after a large meteorite struck and left a hundred-foot-wide and twenty-foot-deep crater. Experts and rescue workers were dispatched to the impact site where people witnessed boiling water coming out of the crater. There were also reports of rock and cinder particles in the area.

Residents thought an airplane had crashed after people saw an explosion and a fireball. They then complained of a strange odor which caused them to vomit and get nauseated. Policemen who went to investigate had to be given oxygen to breathe and were later hospitalized. Much about the fumes and the meteorite that caused them are still a mystery as of press time. The meteorite is likely part of the Perseid shower which comes from comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which is in an orbit that is expected to intersect that of Earth's, although not in the next thousand years. The photo of Swift-Tuttle above is by Gerald Rhemann.

For more news and a video of the impact site, jump to i-Mash.

Melting Arctic Opens Northwest Passage

The shrinkage of Arctic ice has freed "iced" water to allow ships to use the Northwest passage and cut trips times between North America, Russia, and Asia. Arctic ice has melted to the lowest level since the late 1970s when satellite photos of the top of the world were taken. It is believed that global warming due to anthropogenic (man-made) emissions of carbon dioxide is the cause of the shrinkage.

It is believed that vast resources of oil and other fossil fuels exist underneath the Arctic, and nations like Canada, The United States, and Russia are scrambling to be the first to make the discovery and claims. A Russian submarine has already planted a flag underneath the North Pole. Ironically, the discovery and use of more carbon-dioxide-releasing fossil fuels will theoretically only contribute more to global warming and ice-melt.

The picture above shows how much the Arctic has shrunk, enough to allow ships to pass along its fringes during the summer season. Some believe that the whole of the Arctic will be free of ice in fifty years' time.

Jump to i-Mash for the news video and more.

An Island Is Born and Dies in the South Pacific

Swedish sailor Fredrick Franson first came upon what looked like a great desert in the middle of the ocean in Home Reef. “We looked out, and in front of us it was as if there was no more sea,” he said. “It was like the Sahara, with rolling hills of sand as far as the eye could see.” But the yacht he was on, the Maiken, wasn't anywhere near land. The "desert" he was describing was actually a "sea" of floating pumice stones. Some distance away was an underwater volcano erupting and giving birth to a new island. “Then we saw a black pillar shooting up into the air, and we understood that it had to be a volcano.” He described the island as a "kind of a smoldering, smoky stuff. It looked like coal, and when there was an eruption, we could see the new material piling up on it.”
Franson reported the discovery and scientists immediately had satellites zooming in on the new island as it was being born. It was the first time that such an island birth was studied in detail. When volcanologist Scott Bryan personally visited the site, he saw that the island was gone, as it was made up only of deposited material that easily washed away. The life of the island lasted only a few months. Bryan believes that a high sea mount was all that's left of it. The pumice stones left behind by the eruption became home to animals like barnacles that hitch a ride as they float to wherever the ocean currents would take them.

Videos of an island volcano erupting in India and the science behind eruption-prediction in i-Mash, after the jump.

Remains of Mythical Chupacabra Creature Found?

This woman, Phylis Canion, who has been a hunter all her life and had lived in Africa collecting head trophies of various wildlife, claims to have found roadkill near her Texas ranch, 80-miles southeast of San Antonio and believes them to be the remains of the fabled chupacabra creature which is said to kill livestock and drink their blood until the body is dry. There were three bodies of the strange animal found over four days and each one weighed about 40 pounds, and had ash-blue skin that was practically hairless. Canion said she had saved the head of the one she found to save it for posterity and to have the DNA tested. She believes the creatures are the ones that killed 26 of her chickens in the past two years. The bodies of the chickens weren't eaten, but were drained of blood.

Veterinarian Travis Schaar of the Main Street Animal Hospital in neighboring Victoria thinks the remains are of a strange breed of dog which may be the result of a mutation. Oh, well. Whatever. The pictures do remind me of the zombie dogs in the movie Resident Evil. For more movie and other entertainment news, go to Hots Up. Read about the new supernatural reality show Destination Truth and how it may finally disclose the truth behind the fabled El Chupacabra. The study that deals with "hidden" or mythical animals is cryptozoology.

FLASH! The identity of this chupacabra is revealed, along with a close up picture of the head, here.