At the Art Basel spectacle in Miami last week, heavy rains swamped the parties, forcing fairgoers to prance through the streets in soggy stilettos. It wasn’t a freak occurrence. It was a peek at the future.
Remember that time back in the 1990s when Walt Disney was awakened from his cryogenic sleep, started building artificial islands off the coast of Massachusetts, and then privatized the U.S. military to protect his new capitalist paradise from an evil, one-world government?
Zachory Berta says that "GJ1214b is like no planet we know of." Like Berta, part of a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics lead by David Charbonneau, his colleagues were surprised when they discovered that this planet is made mostly of water.
This is how I imagine GJ1214b, a super-Earth discovered only forty light-years away from us, orbiting a red dwarf star in the constellation of Ophiuchus. The good news: It's three parts water. The bad news: The beaches are too hot.
Click to viewWhat do you do with a 25-meter-high acrylic glass cylinder, 238,000 gallons of sea water, 2,600 fish from 56 different species, and two divers? The Aquadom, the largest cylindrical aquarium in the world, that's what. In its core there's an elevator that travels through a cylinder of glass. As you will see…