Hiding the Lockheed Plant during ​ World War II [via Nina Reznick]


Hidden in Plain View

During WW II - Lockheed (unbelievable 1940s pictures). This is a version of special effects during the 1940's.  I have never seen these pictures or knew that we had gone this far to protect ourselves. During World War II, the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a possible Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

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The person I received this from said she got back an interesting story about someone's mother who worked at Lockheed, and she as a younger child, remembers all this. And to this day, it is the first pictures of it she's seen.

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Another person who lived in the area talked about as being a boy, watching it all be set up like a movie studio production. They had fake houses, trees, etc. and moved parked cars around so it looked like a residential area from the skies overhead.
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Note.... I lived in North Long Beach during World War II, I was 13 years old. (1940) The Long Beach airport was near Lakewood , CA . There was a large Boeing Plant there. If you would drive down Carson St. going south you could drive under the camouflage netting. (Ed Pollard) 

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I am 85 and had much of my pilot training in Calif. I have been under this net and have seen it from the air. During preflight training I rode a bus under the net and was very surprised as I didn't know it was there. It was strong enough to walk on and they hired people to ride bicycles and move around as if they lived there to make it look authentic. (Warren Holmgreen, Jr)

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Hiding the Lockheed Plant during World War II - wow this is amazing!


Interesting Historical Photographs [via David Angsten]


A lion rides in the sidecar during a performance of The Wall of Death carnival attraction at Revere Beach, Massachusetts in 1929.



An iceberg photographed in 1912 bearing an unmistakable mark of black and red paint.  It is believed that this is the iceberg that sank the Titanic.



Betty White at home with her dog in 1952


Children for sale in Chicago, 1948.  Some parents sold their children due to poverty.


Incredible Photos [via Cacciatore]

 The Internal Mechanism of a Watch by Patek Philippe, Considered the Finest Watchmaker in the World
Sunset and Eclipse Happening at the Same Time

Algodones Sand Dunes Curvy Border Fence in Southern California

Perfect Cubes of Pyrite Formed by Mother Nature

 Melted Glass in a Fire Damaged Building

World's Deepest Swimming Pool - 113 Ft. Deep and Holding 600,000 Gallons

Path-Laying Machine

A battery you never have to replace [via Nina Reznick]



Top: Schematic diagram of all-nanowire-based capacitor (similar to a battery), using gold-manganese dioxide conductors and PMMA gel layer. Bottom: photograph of the capacitor containing 750 parallel nanowire loops patterned onto a glass microscope slide. (credit: Mya Le Thai/ACS Energy Lett.)

New nanowire-based battery material can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times
University of California, Irvine researchers have invented a new nanowire-based battery material that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times, moving us closer to a battery that would never require replacement.

It could lead to commercial batteries with greatly lengthened lifespans for computers, smartphones, appliances, cars, and spacecraft.

The design is based on nanowires, which are highly conductive and feature a large surface area for the storage and transfer of electrons.

Currently, nanowires are extremely fragile and don’t hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging (cycling). In a typical lithium-ion battery, they expand and grow brittle, which leads to cracking.

UCI researchers have solved this problem by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and encasing the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The liquid electrolyte is replaced with a poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) gel electrolyte. The combination is reliable and resistant to failure.

The study leader, UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai, cycled the testing electrode up to 200,000 times over three months without detecting any loss of capacity or power and without fracturing any nanowires. The findings were published Wednesday Apr. 20 in an open-access paper in the American Chemical Society’s Energy Letters.

“Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it,” said senior author Reginald Penner, chair of UCI’s chemistry department. “She discovered that just by using this gel, she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity. That was crazy, because these things typically die in dramatic fashion after 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 cycles at most.”

The researchers think the gel plasticizes the metal oxide in the battery and gives it flexibility, preventing cracking.

“The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option,” Thai said. “This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality.”

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Yet another example of things being faster; smaller; longer; older; larger than originally thought.

In the late 1990s, archeologist Francois Rouzaud used carbon dating to estimate a chamber in the Bruniquel Cave in France to be around 47,000 years old. This was news because it meant that the cave sculpture was older than the oldest known cave art, and more importantly it meant that the chances it was created by Neanderthals as opposed to Homo sapiens was very high. This would be, arguably, the most powerful evidence at the time that Neanderthals were much more sophisticated than had been previously believed.



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