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Does anyone here have any experience with crowd funding? In order to finish the development of my new product, I need to raise approximately $65,000 to finish, prototype, and produce an initial product run of 100 units. I have already built the entire machine, minus the magnetics necessary to power it. I would like to try crowdfunding since I cannot find any other venues for funding. Does anyone have suggestions or experiences with this strategy? Thanks for any advice received!

Here’s Hydra! The New Horizons team spotted the tiny moon of Pluto in July, about six months ahead of when they expected to. You can check it out in the images below. The find is exciting in itself, but it also bodes well for the spacecraft’s search for orbital debris to prepare for its close encounter with the system in July 2015. Most of Pluto’s moons were discovered while New Horizons was under development, or already on its way. Mission planners are thus concerned that there could be moons out there that aren’t discovered yet — moons that could pose...

Psychologists have shown humans are poor judges of their own abilities, from sense of humour to grammar. Those worst at it are the worst judges of all. You're pretty smart right? Clever, and funny too. Of course you are, just like me. But wouldn't it be terrible if we were mistaken? Psychologists have shown that we are more likely to be blind to our own failings than perhaps we realise. This could explain why some incompetent people are so annoying, and also inject a healthy dose of humility into our own sense of self-regard.

Site J is an intriguing region on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko that offers unique scientific potential, with hints of activity nearby, and minimum risk to the lander compared to the other candidate sites, according to ESA. “As we have seen from recent close-up images, the comet is a beautiful but dramatic world – it is scientifically exciting, but its shape makes it operationally challenging,” says Ulamec. “None of the candidate landing sites met all of the operational criteria at the 100% level, but Site J is clearly the best solution.” Philae’s history making landing on comet 67P is currently scheduled for around...

Explanation: Spacecraft Rosetta continues to approach, circle, and map Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Crossing the inner Solar System for ten years to reach the vicinity of the comet last month, the robotic spacecraft continues to image the unusual double-lobed comet nucleus. The reconstructed-color image featured, taken about 10 days ago, indicates how dark this comet nucleus is. On the average, the comet's surface reflects only about four percent of impinging visible light, making it as dark as coal. Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko spans about four kilometers in length and has a surface gravity so low that an astronaut could jump off of it. In...

I home school a young girl. In years past, we have gone to the local air show and done such things as measure the tops and bottom of wings and rotos and figure the ratio or difference between the area of the top of the wing versus the bottom and estimated which wings had more lift than others. We measure how much area the wheels occupied on the ground and consulted with the crew chief what the tire pressure was and calculated the weight of the plane. In years past we were able to see F18s form a vapor cone...

Eric Worrall writes:Professor Bob Carter, writing in today’s edition of The Australian, a major Aussie daily newspaper, warns that the world is unprepared for imminent global cooling, because of the obsession of policy makers with global warming.According to Bob Carter; Heading for ice age“GRAHAM Lloyd has reported on the Bureau of Meteorology’s capitulation to scientific criticism that it should publish an accounting of the corrections it makes to temperature records (“Bureau warms to transparency over adjusted records”, 12/9). Corrections which, furthermore, act to reinforce the bureau’s dedication to a prognosis of future dangerous global warming, by turning cooling temperature trends...

The Antarctic Sea Ice Extent on Sept 13 2014 may have set a  new all time record (at least for the satellite era, we don’t have data prior to that).Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent With AnomalyNational Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC) – Click the pic to view at source Sunshine hours writes: Antarctic Sea Ice Extent Sept 13 2014 – 1,121,000 sq km above the 1981-2010 mean. Data for Day 255. Data here.Breaking the record set in 2013 by 48,000 sq km.Source: http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/antarctic-sea-ice-extent-sept-13-2014-new-all-time-record

Opinion by Dr. Tim Ball |The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is running a campaign using television weather presenters and national broadcasters from around the world, to influence the UN’s Climate Summit 2014 scheduled for New York City on September 23. It is a counter attack designed to offset their losing the public, political, and scientific debate.They’re releasing a series of films to, as WMO Secretary General Michel Jarroud said, “paint a compelling picture of what life could be like on a warmer planet,”…“Climate change is already leading to more extreme weather such as intense heat and rain…We need to act...

Explanation: The first hint of what will become of our Sun was discovered inadvertently in 1764. At that time, Charles Messier was compiling a list of diffuse objects not to be confused with comets. The 27th object on Messier's list, now known as M27 or the Dumbbell Nebula, is a planetary nebula, the type of nebula our Sun will produce when nuclear fusion stops in its core. M27 is one of the brightest planetary nebulae on the sky, and can be seen toward the constellation of the Fox (Vulpecula) with binoculars. It takes light about 1000 years to reach us...

Researchers at Caltech and the University of Miami in Florida found that the volcano pictures, such as those that are forming the Hawaiian Islands, illustrate that it erupts when magma gushes out as narrow jets from deep inside Earth but those pictures are wrong. Don Anderson, the Eleanor and John R. McMillian Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus, at Caltech said that new seismology data are now confirming that such narrow jets don't actually exist. He further explained that, in fact, basic physics doesn't support the presence of these jets, called mantle plumes, and the new results corroborated those fundamental ideas. It...

Explanation: Now, as you sip your cosmic latte you can view 100 Hubble Space Telescope images at the same time. The popular scenes of the cosmos as captured from low Earth orbit are all combined into this single digital presentation. To make it, Hubble's top 100 images were downloaded and resized to identical pixel dimensions. At each point the 100 pixel values were arranged from lowest to highest, and the middle or median value was chosen for the final image. The combined image results in a visual abstraction - light from across the Universe surrounded by darkness.

Explanation: Driven by the explosion of a massive star, supernova remnant Puppis A is blasting into the surrounding interstellar medium about 7,000 light-years away. At that distance, this remarkable false-color exploration of its complex expansion is about 180 light-years wide. It is based on the most complete X-ray data set so far from the Chandra and XMM/Newton observations, and infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. In blue hues, the filamentary X-ray glow is from gas heated by the supernova's shock wave, while the infrared emission shown in red and green is from warm dust. The bright pastel tones trace...

Explanation: You might not guess it, but sunrise was still hours away when this nightscape was taken, a view along the eastern horizon from a remote location in Chile's Atacama desert. Stretching high into the otherwise dark, starry sky the unusually bright conical glow is sunlight though, scattered by dust along the solar system's ecliptic plane . Known as Zodiacal light, the apparition is also nicknamed the "false dawn". Near center, bright star Aldebaran and the Pleiades star cluster seem immersed in the Zodiacal light, with Orion toward the right edge of the frame. Reddish emission from NGC 1499, the...

Explanation: It is not only one of the largest structures known -- it is our home. The just-identified Laniakea Supercluster of galaxies contains thousands of galaxies that includes our Milky Way Galaxy, the Local Group of galaxies, and the entire nearby Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The colossal supercluster is shown in the above computer-generated visualization, where green areas are rich with white-dot galaxies and white lines indicate motion towards the supercluster center. An outline of Laniakea is given in orange, while the blue dot shows our location. Outside the orange line, galaxies flow into other galatic concentrations. The Laniakea Supercluster...

Explanation: This sky looked delicious. Double auroral ovals were captured above the town lights of Östersund, Sweden, last week. Pictured above, the green ovals occurred lower to the ground than violet aurora rays above, making the whole display look a bit like a cupcake. To top it off, far in the distance, the central band or our Milky Way Galaxy slants down from the upper left. The auroras were caused by our Sun ejecting plasma clouds into the Solar System just a few days before, ionized particles that subsequently impacted the magnetosphere of the Earth. Aurora displays may continue this...

Explanation: What is so super about tomorrow's supermoon? Tomorrow, a full moon will occur that appears slightly larger and brighter than usual. The reason is that the Moon's fully illuminated phase occurs within a short time from perigee - when the Moon is its closest to the Earth in its elliptical orbit. Although the precise conditions that define a supermoon vary, given one definition, tomorrow's will be the third supermoon of the year -- and the third consecutive month that a supermoon occurs. One reason supermoons are popular is because they are so easy to see -- just go outside...

The way we perceive color is greatly influenced by our cultural understanding. We all grew up learning that Fire is Hot and Ice is Cold. Therefor red and orange are warm colors while blue and cyan are cool colors.This association in our mind is so strong that filmmakers can actually invoke a sense of temperature just by the color palette they use in their films.Take for example Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing”The film beautifully photographed by Ernest Dickerson, is awash in yellows, oranges and reds invoking the heat of a long, hot day in the Bed Stuy...

With cameras and computers everywhere in our modern world, it’s easy to forget that the very first motion pictures were, themselves, essentially a special effect. It’s here at the beginning of filmmaking that we’ll start our journey:  the close of the 19th century with one of the world’s first prolific filmmakers – a man who spent his life studying the art of illusion – Georges Méliès.Georges Méliès In his 1898 film  Four Heads are better than one, (Un Homme De Tête) Méliès employs a visual trick that is the rudimentary beginnings of what we now think of as greenscreen compositing. The...

From Benny Peiser and The GWPF – [Conservative MEP] Miguel Arias Canete, Spain’s former agriculture and environment minister, was nominated as the European Union’s next commissioner for climate and energy, becoming the first single supervisor of those two policy areas. The new commission will take office as energy policy is moving up the EU agenda amid a crisis in Ukraine, the transit country for around half of Russian natural gas to Europe, and the unrest in Middle East. –Ewa Krukowska, Bloomberg 10 September 2014 Jean-Claude Juncker’s decision to group EU commissioners into teams serving under a vice-president has been...