When Facebook goes public later this spring, its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, will be following in the footsteps of a long line of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs that includes Steve Jobs and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But there was a time when the idea of an engineer or scientist starting his or her own company was rare.

In 1956, what is now called Silicon Valley was called the Valley of the Heart’s Delight. Its rolling hills were covered with farms and orchards. To become Silicon Valley it needed four ingredients: the first, brilliant scientists.

Collecting Scientific Talent

William Shockley was certainly brilliant, says Leslie Berlin, a historian and archivist at Stanford University.

“People tend to collectively agree,” she says, that “[Shockley] was one of the smartest people to walk about this valley for quite a long time.”

In 1956, Shockley won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the transistor. His next dream was to make transistors out of silicon; he decided to set up his lab in Mountain View — near Palo Alto — largely for personal reasons.

“He’d grown up in Palo Alto,” Berlin says. Most importantly, she says, “his mother was still living in Palo Alto.”

Of course, it helped that nearby Stanford University was also doing federally funded electronics research. Shockley was a magnet who drew more brilliant scientists to the valley. Among them was Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and the man who would come up with Moore’s Law — the observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years.

Please click here to continue reading the original article by Laura Sydell at NPR.

We imagine the ocean as having high tides and low tides, water that comes in and out in waves. Beyond that, how does water actually move around the world? What’s that flow look like?

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio assembled this remarkable animation of the surface currents of our oceans. It’s called Perpetual Ocean, and the full work is 20 minutes of HD video, assembled from a huge amount of satellite, on location, and computational data generated by ECCO2 (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase 2). ECCO2 itself exists to better understand our oceans and their role in the changing global climate.

What you’re looking at is the surface current flow (not anything deeper) of oceans around the world, recorded from 2006 to 2007. The white lines are the currents, and the darker blue colors of the water represent bathymetry (the fancy word for misnomer “ocean topography”).

Please click here to continue reading the original article by Mark Wilson at Fast Company’s Co.Design.

Forty-four years ago, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.

Please click here to watch this American Experience clip of King describing the teachings of the nonviolence movement.

King also shares his thoughts on Malcolm X’s criticism and President Kennedy’s strides to help the Civil Rights Movement.

Source: PBS This Day In History

These piping hot pictures cost photographer Miles Morgan a tripod and pair of shoes, and almost turned him to toast when he came within a foot to capture lava reaching the sea from the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii.

Source: The Daily

Despite its serene appearance when viewed from Earth, the energy produced from the Sun is so strong that every second its core releases the equivalent of 100 billion nuclear bombs.

The next time you’re cloud watching, ponder this: by studying the skies, you are essentially staring into history. Why? The light you presently enjoy travels from distant stars and galaxies takes hundreds, thousands and sometimes millions of years to reach us.

While Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, its temperatures can reach a biting -280 degrees Fahrenheit as Mercury lacks the atmospheric pressure necessary to trap heat. Venus, on the other hand, has a thick atmosphere to trap heat and is markedly hotter than Mercury, despite being farther away from the sun.

If you are ever lucky or wealthy enough to gallivant to the moon, you can expect your presence to remain much longer than anticipated. As there is no air or wind on the moon, your footprints are likely to last forever (barring a meteoric collision, of course).

Source: All That Is Interesting

Marlon Brando, Jr. (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was an American movie star and political activist. “Unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema” according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Brando was one of only three professional actors, along with Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe, named by Time magazine as one of its 100 Persons of the Century in 1999.

Brando had a significant impact on film acting, and was the foremost example of the ”method” acting style. While he became notorious for his “mumbling” diction and exuding a raw animal magnetism, his mercurial performances were nonetheless highly regarded, and he is widely considered as one of the greatest and most influential actors of the 20th century. Director Martin Scorsese said of him, “He is the marker. There’s ‘before Brando’ and ‘after Brando’.” Actor Jack Nicholson once said, “When Marlon dies, everybody moves up one.” He was ranked by the American Film Institute as the fourth greatest screen legend among male movie stars.

An enduring cultural icon, Brando became a box office star during the 1950s, during which time he racked up five Oscar nominations as Best Actor, along with three consecutive wins of the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. He initially gained popularity for recreating the role as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a Tennessee Williams play that had established him as a Broadway star during its 1947-49 stage run; and for his Academy Award-winning performance as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954), as well as for his iconic portrayal of the rebel motorcycle gang leader Johnny Strabler in The Wild One (1953), which is considered to be one of the most famous images in pop culture. Brando was also nominated for the Oscar for playing Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata! (1952); Mark Antony inJoseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1953 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar; and as Air Force Major Lloyd Gruver in Sayonara (1957), Joshua Logan’s adaption of James Michener’s 1954 novel.

He won his second Academy Award for playing Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), a role critics consider among his greatest.

He finished out the decade of the 1970s with his highly controversial performance as Colonel Walter Kurtz in another Coppola film, Apocalypse Now (1979).

Source: Wikipedia

Marvin Gaye was born on April 2nd, 1939. Watch a timeless performance of What’s Going On below:

Source: The Strut

How do you remake an automotive icon? If you’re West Coast Customs, it starts with some oversized dubs and copious quantities of neon lighting. If you’re the Microsoft skunkworks development team, it means incorporating the company’s entire suite of mobile and gaming services into one of Motown’s greatest pony cars.

Despite what you see above, this isn’t a 1967 Ford Mustang. The fastback body is a replica produced by Dynacorn, but underneath are the modern components of a 2012 Mustang chassis. But like momma always said, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, and that’s where the West Coast Customs crew and their compatriots at Microsoft went wild.

Please click here to continue reading the original article by Damon Lavrinc at Wired.
Photo: Courtesy of Microsoft

On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey tweeted the first ever tweet on Twitter.

The sheer fact that you can understand that sentence shows you how far Twitter has gone since then. It has become the de facto short message system of the internet and the favorite social networking service of celebrities all around the world.

And, with over 500 million users, it is the largest one-to-many open communication platform on the web.

However, the service’s beginnings were modest. The service started out as an off-hand project from the creators of podcasting company Odeo, and though it immediately showed potential, it was plagued by frequent downtime in its first couple of years.

Stability problems seem to be a thing of the past now, and Twitter handles and hashtags have become a part of popular culture – they are regularly seen on TV and movie trailers. Ask a celebrity how you can reach them, and the most likely answer will be their Twitter nickname.

When it comes to business plans, in the last 12 months Twitter has been somewhat eclipsed with Facebook’s IPO. The questions about Twitter still remain the same as on its last birthday: Will it go public, will it be acquired by a giant such as Google, Apple or Microsoft, or will it simply keep growing?

We’ll see. In the meantime, happy birthday, Twitter!

Source: Stan Schroeder at Mashable