Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami Move the slider to compare satellite images from before and after the disaster.

via NYTimes.com.

brilliant presentation of devastating reality.

Muammar Gaddafi warned the rebel stronghold of Benghazi he would storm the city in the night showing no mercy, while the United Nations moved toward a resolution allowing air strikes to stop him. "We will come zenga, zenga. House by house, room by room," he said in a radio address to the eastern city.

Thousands of residents of Benghazi gathered in a central square, waving anti-Gaddafi tricolour flags and chanting defiance of the man who has ruled the country for four decades.

"It's over. The issue has been decided," Gaddafi said, offering pardon to those who lay down their arms. "We are coming tonight...We will have no mercy and no pity with them."

via Reuters.

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.