Good Morning MOTleyville, It's Saturday June 8th, 2013
MOT is here every morning at 6:30 AM
The Washington Monument Repair
The towering marble symbol of the nation's capital is chipped, cracked and closed, though will soon be pieced back together by engineers working delicately across the Washington Monument's surface.
Some gashes in the 555-foot-tall monument are deep with stones cracked all the way through, while others have hairline cracks or had their corners chipped off in a 2011 earthquake that closed it to the public. Mortar is missing between some pieces, shaken loose by the worst vibrations at the top. And at least one massive stone shifted a thumb's length out of line with the piece below it.
The Associated Press had a look at some of the worst damage 500 feet above the ground and the preparations underway to begin making repairs. On the same day, a group of government officials and philanthropists clipped themselves into harnesses and climbed to the tip of the towering obelisk.
Stone by stone, engineers are reviewing cracks, missing pieces and broken mortar now that huge scaffolding has been built around what was once the world's tallest structure. Once each trouble spot is identified, repairs can begin
High school senior who was shot in the head surprises his class
For most high-school students, graduation is a major achievement. For Northwestern High School senior Balaal Hollings, being at graduation was nothing short of miraculous.
Almost two months ago, the senior class president, honor student and football star went to a party. When a fight broke out, the good Samaritan jumped in to help—and was shot in the head.
Hollings did not return to his Detroit school, but he had enough credits to graduate. On Tuesday, he came back to collect his diploma at the ceremony.
Video of the graduation shows what a huge and happy surprise his entrance on stage makes. Screams of joy greet the senior, who wears a helmet on his head instead of a graduation cap.
San Onofre Nuclear Plant to Close
The owners of the San Onofre nuclear power plant in Southern California, which has been shut since January 2012, said on Friday that they would close it permanently because of uncertainty over when it could be reopened.
The two reactors at San Onofre had not run since a small amount of radioactive steam escaped from new tubes damaged by vibration and friction. Coming months after the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in Japan, the event prompted a wave of public opposition and set off a legal and regulatory battle that included Southern California Edison, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which manufactured the parts that leaked.
Those parts, called steam generators, cost more than $600 million. In the end, uncertainty over the plant’s fate “was not good for our customers, our investors, or the need to plan for our region’s long-term electricity needs,” said Theodore F. Craver Jr., chief executive of the utility’s parent company, Edison International.
Student earns 9 scholarships
The success story of Lloyd Chen, 17, is the stuff that dreams are made of. Raised in poverty by a single mom who emigrated from South Korea to the U.S., the young man from Elk Grove, California, recently received nearly $3 million in full scholarships, earning one at every top university he applied to. He’s chosen to attend Harvard University, which he said was his “dream,” starting this fall.
“I’m so excited, and so grateful,” said Chen, who was the valedictorian at Laguna Creek High School. He was also offered a free ride at Yale, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and UC Davis.
Chen chose Harvard, he told Yahoo! Shine, because “It’s where I felt like I could grow the most as an individual, and because, in Boston, “there’s so much vitality.” He'll arrive on his 18th birthday, August 19. As for a major, he's deciding between economics, psychology and engineering.
Duckling Rescue! It's a Video
Mars Rover Opportunity is set to break a record
NASA's Opportunity Mars rover is poised to break the distance record for off-planet driving, but any celebration of this exploration milestone will have to wait until scientists figure out exactly what the record is.
The all-time mark is held by the Soviet Union's remote-controlled Lunokhod 2 rover, which traveled about 23 miles (37 kilometers) on the moon back in 1973. Opportunity is breathing down Lunokhod 2's neck, having racked up 22.75 miles (36.61 km) on Mars since touching down in January 2004.
But it's unclear exactly how much farther Opportunity needs to go, because the old moon rover's mark is imprecise, scientists say.
"They didn't really have any good orbital images in which to operate [Lunokhod 2], so their estimate, which has been published for many years, of 37 kilometers is highly uncertain," Opportunity principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University told reporters today (June 7).
Atlantis Exhibit is on schedule to open June 29th, 2013
Space Shuttle Atlantis is "go" for launch.
The retired NASA orbiter and the new $100 million exhibit that bears its name is on schedule to open to the public on June 29 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.
"Everything is go," said Tim Macy, the director of project development and construction for Delaware North Parks & Resorts, which operates the complex for NASA. "We are looking forward to having a big turnout that Saturday."
Macy, together with Bill Moore, the visitor complex's chief operating officer, updated reporters about Atlantis' status on Thursday (June 6), the day before welcoming the press inside the 90,000 square foot (8,360 square meter) "Space Shuttle Atlantis" exhibition to get a first look at the historic spacecraft in its final display condition.
4 of 5 High denomination bills still in circulation
Collectors are barred from owning this one.
There have been several bills printed that dwarf those wimpy $100s in your wallet.
In fact, during the recent battle in Congress over extending the debt limit, one of the solutions proposed by academics and commentators to prevent default was minting a $1 trillion platinum coin and using that to fund the government's commitments until a more permanent solution could be found.
While a $1 trillion coin would be far and away the biggest denomination of currency ever issued by the U.S., these others made Benjamins look like chump change.
Trash is littering the Seafloor
The mention of ocean pollution usually triggers searing images of birds and turtles choked by bags, fasteners and other debris floating at the ocean surface. But thousands of feet below, garbage also clutters the seafloor, with as yet unknown consequences for marine life, a new study finds.
"It's completely changing the natural environment, in a way that we don't know what it's going to do," said Susan von Thun, a study co-author and senior research technician at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Monterey, Calif.
For the past 22 years, MBARI researchers have explored the deep ocean seafloor from California to Canada and offshore of Hawaii. Video researchers tagged every piece of trash seen during the deep-sea dives, cataloguing more than 1,500 items in all. Sparked by a recent study on trash offshore of Southern California, scientists at MBARI decided to analyze the database of ocean debris they had gathered. The results were published May 28 in the journal Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers.
This one pisses me off ! I try to keep the road in front of DRI clean & mowed in both directons about 1/4 mile. The Ocean shouldn't be a dump ! I Hate Litter !