Robinson's Roost

Costa Rica Is Running Only on Renewable Energy

Costa Rica has now powered the entire country for more than 75 days using only renewable energy. The country hasn’t needed fossil fuel for all of 2015 thanks to hydropower and a heavy rainy season.

Hunting Sword

Dated: circa 1600

Medium: steel; sword; horn; grip

Hunting sword, with a horn grip and a straight etched blade.

INCREDIBLE ILLUSTRATIONS THAT SEEM TO CROSS INTO THE REAL WORLD by GAIKUO  l  PART-1  l  Via

Now that Google is allowing anyone with a cool $1,500 lying around to score themselves a pair of Glass, you’ll probably start seeing a lot more tech geeks wearing headsets in public talking to themselves. Our hands-free, hyper-tethered future is well on its way! So if voice command interfacing is the wave of the future, what good is something seemingly as reductive as an input keyboard?

That was my question—and guessing I wasn’t alone—until I saw Minuum.

We come from the land of the ice and snow,

From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.

How soft your fields so green, can whisper tales of gore,

literally so many movies

best movies for if you can’t sleep

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Finally! A black hole that you can visit and survive!

Want a trip through a black hole without having to experience that pesky death? You’re in luck. There’s a special kind of black hole that’s not just survivable, but might get you to another time, or another universe.

Black holes are, traditionally, the scariest things in the universe. Huge, mysterious, inescapable, they wander through the universe and eat everything that gets too close. “Too close” is defined by their event horizon. This is the point at which they go dark, because it requires so much energy to escape them that not even light can get away. Since not even a photon can cross the barrier, no event that happens inside the horizon can ever have an effect on people outside.

Unless, something very odd was going on in the center of the black hole. Most black holes spin - this is something that was discovered way back in the 1960s by physicist Roy Kerr. It wasn’t exactly a shock, because most of the material that collapses into a black hole was already spinning. Sometimes, however, the spin on Kerr black holes goes a little above and beyond. Ever spun a glass of water, or soda bottle, so that the liquid inside swirls? Sometimes, if you spin it enough, the liquid actually parts, leaving a clear center and a spinning ring of water around it. The same kind of thing can happen in Kerr black holes. Instead of a singularity at the center, there’s a ring. And you can go through the open portion of that ring without touching the gravitational crush.

What’s on the other side? A lot of people have wondered. Some people think that these kind of black holes might be our key to time travel. They might be wormholes that let us hop between different points of the universe. Or they might be portals to different universes entirely. First we’ll have to find a few, and then we’ll need a few volunteers to go through. Preferably ones that haven’t seen Event Horizon.

Top Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Second Image: Dana Berry/NASA

Sword with Scabbard

Dated: 18th–19th century

Culture: Tibetan

Medium: iron, silver, wood, textile, turquoise, coral, leather

Measurements: L. overall, 38 3/8 in. (97.5 cm); L. of blade 30 5/8 in. (77.8 cm)