As they built their dream house last year on the shimmering sands of the Gulf of Mexico, Russell King and his nephew, Dr. Lebron Lackey, painstakingly documented every detail of the elevated construction, from the 40-foot pilings buried into the ground to the types of screws drilled into the walls. They picked gleaming paints from a palette of shore colors, chose salt-tolerant species to plant in the beach dunes and christened their creation the Sand Palace of Mexico Beach.
They also installed an outdoor security camera. Its video footage became the only view of their property as Hurricane Michael thundered ashore last week, the most intense storm recorded in the history of the Florida Panhandle.
The camera showed a horrifying tunnel of gray fury worsening by the hour as Dr. Lackey, a 54-year-old radiologist, stared helplessly from more than 400 miles away at the corner of his roof.
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The elevated house that the owners call the Sand Palace, on 36th Street in Mexico Beach, Fla., came through Hurricane Michael almost unscathed.CreditCreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times
To pay for college, Amy Wroblewski sold a piece of her future. Every month, for eight-and-a-half years, she must turn over a set percentage of her salary to investors. Today, about a year after graduation, Wroblewski makes $50,000 a year as a higher education recruiter in Winchester, Va. So the cut comes to $279 a month, less than her car payment.
Wroblewski struck this unusual deal as an undergraduate at public Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. To fund part of the cost of her degree in strategy and organizational management, she sidestepped the common source of money, a student loan. Instead, she agreed to hand over part of her future earnings through a new kind of financial instrument called an income-sharing agreement, or ISA. In a sense, financiers are transforming student debtors into stock investments, with much of the same risk and, ideally, return.
In Wall Street terms, Wroblewski, a first-generation college student, is more small-company stock than Microsoft. Her mother works as a waitress; her father, as a quality control inspector in a car dealership’s body shop. With a strong work ethic, Wroblewski always held down at least two part-time jobs in school, working as a Purdue teaching assistant, a Target cashier, and an Amazon seasonal worker. Showing potential for leadership—not to mention earnings—she rose to vice president of Delta Sigma Pi, a business fraternity.
If the 23-year-old becomes a star in her field, she could pay twice as much. If she loses her job, she won’t have to pay anything, and investors will be out of luck until she finds work.
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Amy Wroblewski
Photographer: Maura Friedman for Bloomberg Businessweek
Using a telescope the size of the planet, astronomers have captured the first image of this space oddity. Here’s why that matters.
More than 50 million light-years away, in the heart of a giant elliptical galaxy called Messier 87, a gargantuan beast is devouring anything that strays too near. Stars, planets, gas, and dust—not even light escapes the monster’s grasp once it crosses a threshold called the event horizon.
Today, scientists unveiled an image of that object, a supermassive black hole containing the same mass as 6.5 billion suns. Resembling a circular void surrounded by a lopsided ring of light, this landmark image is the world’s first glimpse of a black hole’s silhouette, a picture that creeps right up to the inescapable edge of the black hole’s maw.
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The Event Horizon Telescope—a planet-scale array of ground-based radio telescopes—has obtained the first image of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. The image reveals the central black hole of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the Virgo cluster.
Photograph by Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
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This Americans Selfie trend is going viral worldwide…
Phone selfies are boring. People aren’t doing them anymore and they’ve become unpopular…
First, there was the standard selfie, then the selfie stick, and now the next evolution of the selfie has arrived!
Nobody knows who did it first, but soon thousands of people in America started uploading incredible selfies from insane angles. They uploaded them to social media and soon EVERYONE wanted to do the same!
Now, this new type of selfie has taken off – Literally – across the world!
Stronger and more flexible than graphene, a single-atom layer of boron could revolutionize sensors, batteries, and catalytic chemistry.
Not so long ago, graphene was the great new wonder material. A super-strong, atom-thick sheet of carbon “chicken wire,” it can form tubes, balls, and other curious shapes. And because it conducts electricity, materials scientists raised the prospect of a new era of graphene-based computer processing and a lucrative graphene chip industry to boot. The European Union invested €1 billion to kick-start a graphene industry.
This brave new graphene-based world has yet to materialize. But it has triggered an interest in other two-dimensional materials. And the most exciting of all is borophene: a single layer of boron atoms that form various crystalline structures.
Tai chi moves can be easily learned and executed by people of all ages and states of health, even elderly people in wheelchairs.
Watching a group of people doing tai chi, an exercise often called “meditation in motion,” it may be hard to imagine that its slow, gentle, choreographed movements could actually make people stronger. Not only stronger mentally but stronger physically and healthier as well.
I certainly was surprised by its effects on strength, but good research — and there’s been a fair amount of it by now — doesn’t lie. If you’re not ready or not able to tackle strength-training with weights, resistance bands or machines, tai chi may just be the activity that can help to increase your stamina and diminish your risk of injury that accompanies weak muscles and bones.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
The elevated house that the owners call the Sand Palace, on 36th Street in Mexico Beach, Fla., came through Hurricane Michael almost unscathed.CreditCreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times
Amy Wroblewski
Selfie Quadcopter
