THE WORLD'S LARGEST CRUISE SHIP

                     Allure of the Seas

She’s the newest addition to the Royal Caribbean fleet and the world’s largest cruise ship. With 2,700 rooms spanning 16 decks, the Allure of the Seas is like a miniature city, travelling from Fort Lauderdale to the Carribbean at a comfortable 22 knots. Oh and there’s a Starbucks on board…

Below you will find a collection of images and jaw-dropping statistics in an attempt to put this behemoth into perspective. Enjoy!

THE ALLURE OF THE SEAS

- 225,282 Gross Registered Tonnes
- 1,187 feet (360 meters) long, 208 feet (64 meters) wide and 213 feet (65 meters) high from the water line
- 30 feet (9.1 meters) draft
- 22 knots cruising speed
- 16 passenger decks and 24 passenger elevators
- 4 bow thrusters with 7,500 horse power each
- 5,400 guests (double occupancy) 6,296 guests total, 2,384 crew (From apprx. 80 countries)

Staterooms


- Total: 2,706, Balcony: 1,956, Outside: 254, Interior: 496
- Staterooms with additional berths: 683
- Wheelchair accessible staterooms: 46

A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE

- Standing upright at 1,187 feet tall, Allure of the Seas is 124 feet taller than the Eiffel Tower.
- Allure of the Seas’ length is approximately equal to three and half regulation size soccer/football fields
- Allure of the Seas is 5.11 times longer than a Boeing 747 Jetliner
- Allure of the Seas was constructed out of 500,000 individual parts
- 158,503 gallons of paint was used
- The electrical cables onboard Allure of the Seas would stretch approximately the distance from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. to Juneau, Alaska

ENVIRONMENTAL

- Oasis of the Seas is the first cruise ship to have achieved DNV (Det Norske Veritas) Green Passport designation. This is an important part of the voluntary Clean Ship Design certification

- Advanced Wastewater Purification System – Oasis of the Seas was awarded the first Clean Sea Award by NorShipping, thanks to an Advanced Wastewater Purification System, which was designed to be twice as stringent as U.S. Federal standards for in-port wastewater discharge

- Everything and anything that can be recycled, is recycled onboard Oasis of the Seas. The ship boasts state-of the art facilities, complete with shredders, bailers and compactors, as well as crushers for glass, light bulbs, tin and aluminum In addition, Oasis houses the largest cold storage room on any ship in the world to safely store all recyclables, special/hazardous waste, cooking oil, solvents, incinerator ash, etc.

- The coating on Oasis of the Seas’ hull was made of non-toxic, technologically advanced materials that reduce hull resistance, thereby increasing fuel efficiency

ALL INFORMATION COURTESY OF ALLUREOFTHESEAS

5 Crazy Things You Could Do with Your iPhone

The mixture of touchscreen technology with features like GPS and impressive on-board cameras makes the iPhone a virtual playground for clever developers with a novel idea.
Today we’ve compiled five crazy things you can do with your iPhone using various apps. Several of these apps seem too good to be true but they all work exactly as advertised. Intrigued?  Read on!

Monitor Your Heart Rate

I was sure that this app was completely bogus when I first saw it, but after a quick trial run, it seems pretty convincing. The Heart Fitness app claims that it can effectively monitor your heart rate using only your iPhone. How in the world is that possible?

Heart Fitness

To accomplish this feat, the app takes advantage of both the camera and the bright LED on the back of your iPhone 4. First, you cover the light and the camera with your index finger. The light then illuminates your finger so that the camera reads that reddish color that results when you stick a flashlight up to your finger.
Here’s where the magic happens. As blood is pumped into your finger, the hue pulses. The camera reads this pulse and uses it to measure your heart rate! Pure voodoo right? Perhaps not. I tested the app on myself a few times and consistently came up with a measurement around 70BPM, which I confirmed by taking my own pulse manually. Then I got up and ran around for a while and used the app again, over 100BPM this time. As crazy as it sounds, it seems to work!
Now, many commenters note that they can get readings from every day items such as ketchup bottles, but this doesn’t prove anything. If you consider that the app reads pulses in color, pointing your camera at something red combined with camera-shake would produce a similar result. This proves that you can trick the app, but not that it doesn’t do what it claims.

Scan Documents

You know that your iPhone has a camera on it, so it’s no surprise that it can take a photo of a document right? The problem with this though is that a handheld camera is a far cry from a flatbed scanner. Holding your phone perfectly level isn’t easy, even if you can pull it off, it’s still a hassle.
Enter Genius Scan. With this app you can quickly snap a shot of any document without really thinking about how properly aligned it is on your screen.
Genius Scan will automatically detect the edges of the document and allow you to quickly skew the perspective so that you get a perfect shot every time.

Genius Scan

You can save your documents as a PDF or JPG and even share them over Wifi for quick access from any computer.

Measure Almost Anything

You’ve seen measuring apps that simply place a ruler on your screen, which are great if you need to measure anything less than a few inches, but what if you want to measure an entire person or even a tree? For this feat you’ll need something more.
Aim@ is a $0.99 application that pulls this seemingly impossible task off pretty well. By telling the app how tall you are and holding your phone at arm’s length, you can use your phone’s camera and a series of taps at strategic points to make approximate measurements.

I’ll warn you in advance, this app does work, but it’s a little quirky. If you’re not good at following directions, you’ll never get it to work. If you are reasonably patient, the app walks you through the specific processes for taking the height and width of an object, or even the distance from you to it. In my tests, when I didn’t screw up, I usually came within an inch or two of the actual size of the object.

Take 3D Photos

This is another app that sounds like it’s more gimmick than reality, but it actually works! In fact, the technology really isn’t that amazing if you think about it. Your two eyes work together to help you perceive depth. By taking two photographs at slightly different positions, you can mimic this functionality.
3D Camera does exactly that. You take one photo, move over a few inches, snap another, then combine them to create a three-dimensional illusion.

3D Camera

3D Camera gives you three different options for viewing the resulting 3D image. The first is an anaglyph, which you can view with your typical cheap pair of red/cyan 3D glasses, a stereogram, which works just like the old Magic Eye images (no glasses necessary), and a wigglegram, which simply changes from one image to the next quickly to simulate a 3D effect.
If you’re still confused and/or skeptical, check out the online gallery of images.

Spy On Your Spouse

Tracking someone’s every move is a myth taken straight from spy movies right? Today’s modern GPS technology actually makes it quite easy. In fact, I recently showed my wife how to keep track of me when I’m out. Luckily I’m a pretty trustworthy guy!
Apple’s Find My iPhone app allows you to track the location of any iOS device using a web browser, another iPhone or even an iPad. So if I take too long at the grocery store, my worrisome wife can pull my position (or at least that of my phone) up on our iPad to see if I’m lying dead in a ditch or merely made a pit stop at the Apple Store yet again.

Find My iPhone

MEET THE WORLD BIGGEST TRUCKS

The  biggest truck in the world is neither a 
Volvo nor a Ford, not even a Mack truck with 
a double trailer. The real monsters are mining 
trucks that stand more than 21 feet tall and 
48 ft long.

 Courtesy: Caterpillar











These mining trucks produce about 4,000 horsepower to move all that mass and travel at a maximum speed of 67 kmph.

The images shown here are those of a 
Caterpillar 797F Mining Truck, which weighs 
more than one million pounds (453,592 
kilograms) and can carry and dump more 
than 300 tons of material in the back.

1. The biggest truck in the world is neither a Volvo nor a Ford, not even a Mack truck with a double trailer. The real monsters are mining trucks that stand more than 21 feet tall and 48 ft long.

2. This gargantuan of a truck is hard to describe, but put it this way, the driver needs to climb from his cab into an open window on the second floor of an average building. Imagine standing on the terrace of your duplex house and driving the entire building?

3. There are many manufacturers building these monsters and the trucks are relatively close in size, so it’s not easy to determine which one is truly the largest.

4. The images shown here are those of a Caterpillar 797F Mining Truck, which weighs more than one million pounds (453,592 kilograms) and can carry and dump more than 300 tons of material in the 

This gargantuan of a truck is hard to describe, but put it this way, the driver needs to climb from his cab into an open window on the second floor of an average building. Imagine standing on the terrace of your duplex house and driving the entire building?

NASA ARTIFICIAL SATTELLITE CRASHED

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A six-tonnes NASA science satellite fell back to Earth, the U.S. space agency said on Saturday, but it was not yet known where the remains landed.

NASA said its decommissioned Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite was "passing over Canada and Africa as well as vast portions of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans" as it returned to Earth, and that "the precise re-entry time and location are not yet known with certainty."

The 20-year-old satellite, which took an unpredictable course as it tumbled through the upper atmosphere, fell to Earth sometime between 11:23 p.m EDT on Friday and 1:09 a.m. EDT on Saturday (0323 to 0509 GMT on Saturday), NASA said.

There were reports on Twitter of debris falling over Okotoks, a town south of Calgary in western Canada, most likely satellite remains.

Stretching 35 feet (10.6 metres) long and 15 feet (4.5 metres) in diameter, UARS was among the largest spacecraft to plummet uncontrollably through the atmosphere, although it is a slim cousin to NASA's 75-tonnes Skylab station, which crashed to Earth in 1979.

Russia's last space station, the 135-tonnes Mir, crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2001, but it was a guided descent.

NASA now plans for the controlled re-entry of large spacecraft, but it did not when UARS was designed.
The 13,000-pound (5,897 kg) satellite was dispatched into orbit by a space shuttle crew in 1991 to study ozone and other chemicals in Earth's atmosphere. It completed its mission in 2005 and had been slowly losing altitude ever since, pulled by the planet's gravity.

Most of the spacecraft burned up during the fiery plunge through the atmosphere, but about 26 individual pieces, weighing a total of about 1,100 pounds (500 kg) could have survived the incineration.

The debris field spans about 500 miles (805 km), but exactly where it is located depends on when UARS descended.

With most of the planet covered in water and vast uninhabited deserts and other land directly beneath the satellite's flight path, the chance that someone would be hit by falling debris was 1-in-3,200, NASA said.

"The risk to public safety is very remote," it said.

The satellite flew over most of the planet, traveling between 57 degrees north and 57 degrees south of the equator.

UARS was one of about 20,000 pieces of space debris in orbit around Earth. Something the size of UARS falls back into the atmosphere about once a year.