From Astronomy Picture of the Day .
Diamonds in a Cloudy Sky
Credit & Copyright: Óscar Martín Mesonero (OSAE), SAROS Group
Explanation: Cloudy skies over Wuhan, China hid the delicate solar corona during July’s total eclipse of the Sun. Still, the Moon’s silhouette was highlighted by these glistening diamonds as the total eclipse phase ended. Caused by bright sunlight streaming through dips and valleys in the irregular terrain along the Moon’s edge, the effect is known as Baily’s Beads, named after Francis Baily who called attention to the phenomenon in 1836. The dramatic appearance of the beads at the beginning or end of a total solar eclipse is also known as the Diamond Ring effect. In this remarkable image, a small, pinkish solar prominence can also be seen along the edge, below the diamonds.
Twitter has a reputation as that “new Internet trend” that’s all the rage among kids, but recent data suggests that an older crowd is what’s really driving Twitter’s growth. Sparked by a very unscientific Morgan Stanley report (PDF) about how teens apparently don’t use Twitter, market research powerhouse Nielsen decided to take a look at its own data from a NetRatings panel of over 250,000 US Internet users. While “teens don’t tweet” is a pretty gross generalization of the data, the young’uns don’t make up as significant of a group as one might expect.
According to Nielsen’s data, Twitter reached 10.7 percent of all active Internet users in 2009 “despite a lack of widespread adoption by children, teens, and young adults.” The firm notes that people under the age of 25 make up almost a quarter of all US Internet users and yet only 16 percent of Twitter’s audience in June of 2009, meaning that Twitter is “under-indexing” the youth market compared to the Internet as a whole. Conversely, the large majority of Twitter users (64 percent) fell into the 25 to 54 age group, and 20 percent were 55+. That’s right: there were more Twitter users who are our parents’ age than those who are in high school or college.
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Google isn’t taking Apple’s rejection of their Google Voice app lying down. They’ll be developing a full featured web app for the iPhone.
From Google plans to bypass Apple’s App Store on the Web, on Appleinsider.
With its native Google Voice application rejected from the iPhone App Store, the software maker is planning a full-featured Web application in its place.
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The source couldn’t be specific but it has to be Blu-Ray doesn’t it?
From Apple’s next iMacs rumored with compelling new features, on AppleInsider.
A couple of new features rumored to be in the cards for Apple’s forthcoming iMac refresh will up the value proposition for prospective buyers in the market for an all-in-one desktop system, AppleInsider has been told.
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