NASA space shuttle coming to live in NYC
The Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum has landed a NASA space shuttle!
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will announce later Tuesday that the prototype Enterprise shuttle has been awarded to the Intrepid, sources said.
The decision follows months of aggressive lobbying from Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Bolden, a four-time astronaut and retired Marine major general, will also announce where the retiring Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour shuttles will go on display Tuesday afternoon.
The Intrepid plans to house the shuttle in a glass enclosure – and hopes that the exhibit will bring in more than 1 million visitors. NASA estimates the cost of preparing and delivering the shuttles at $42 million each – cash the Intrepid hopes to raise through fund-raising efforts. The shuttles are slated to be delivered sometime next year.
The Enterprise shuttle was a test model that flew, but never orbited space. Built in 1976, the Enterprise was initially set to be named the Constitution. Star Trek fans inundated then-President Gerald Ford, pleading for a change to the Enterprise.
Ford, who served aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise supply ship during World War II, never mentioned the Trekkie effort in overriding NASA officials.
The Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum on the Hudson’s Pier 86 was up against tough competition from 20 other cities and institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
But "as the cultural and economic capital of our nation, New York City has the right stuff to best exhibit the shuttle," Gillibrand said.
via the NY Daily News
Broadway sings blues over synthesizer invasion
While audiences at Broadway‘s “West Side Story” thrill to the on-stage drama, musicians in the orchestra pit are fighting a battle every bit as vicious as the Sharks-Jets rivalry.
This is gang warfare of a high-minded sort, pitting some of New York’s best live musicians against a synthesizer they fear will usurp the job of playing Leonard Bernstein‘s pulsating score.
Sophisticated synthesizers and computer-manipulated recordings are increasingly taking over orchestras. Sounding almost like real players, while costing much less, they’re especially popular with provincial or touring companies.
But until mid-July — when “West Side Story’s” producers announced that a synthesizer was replacing three live violinists and two cellists, or half the orchestra’s string section — staff violinist Paul Woodiel thought that at least the classics would be immune to the trend.
“It was the last straw for me,” Woodiel told AFP.
“I was a student and a friend of Leonard Bernstein and it’s almost certain he wouldn’t have allowed this. This isn’t dinner theater, it’s not Las Vegas. It’s Broadway and Leonard Bernstein was the greatest American musician.”
New York bar to set menu prices like stocks
NEW YORK (Reuters) – What’s the value of a pint of beer? Let the market decide, says a new restaurant in Manhattan where prices for food and beverages will fluctuate like stock prices in increments according to demand.
The Exchange Bar & Grill, set amid the bustling shops and pubs of the Grammercy Park neighborhood, is replete with a ticker tape flashing menu prices in red lettering as demand forces them to fluctuate.
Customers can move prices for all beverages and bar snacks such as hot wings ($7 for 6 pieces) or fried calamari ($9). The prices will fluctuate in $.25 cent increments, but will most likely plateau at a $2 change in either direction.
A glass of Guinness starts at $6 but could be pushed to a high of $8 or a low of $4, depending on popularity.
So if one drink is in heavy demand, its price will rise, causing the cost of other equivalent drinks to drop. A rush on a particular beer would increase its price, and cause other beers to drop.
The Exchange Bar & Grill has a long bar facing the ticker tape — and flat screen televisions — as well as a few tables in the back where patrons can eat in greater comfort.
Restaurants in New York and across America have had a tough year because consumers have slashed discretionary spending in a tough economic climate. New York has about 23,000 restaurants, with about 4,400 opening each year according to the city’s Department of Health, which tracks establishment licenses.
NYC mayor: Coney Island 'is coming back, big time'
NEW YORK — State-of-the-art new rides including a roller coaster and a pendulum will open this summer at Coney Island to jump-start the resurgence of the famed Brooklyn amusement park, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday.
"Coney Island is coming back, big time," Bloomberg said at a news conference near the boardwalk where the decades-old Astroland rides were dismantled in 2008.
The new rides are being created by Zamperla, the world’s leading manufacturer of mechanical rides, based in Altavilla Vicentina, Italy.
Luna Park at Coney Island will open on Memorial Day weekend with 19 rides. Among them will be the Air Race, which sends riders swinging and soaring around a control tower. It will be the ride’s global debut.
Also promised are games, live entertainment, and concessions including Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand, which opened in 1916, pioneering America’s concept of fast food.
By the summer of 2011, Scream Zone at Coney Island will offer two roller coasters, go-carts and a human slingshot launching people more than 200 feet into the air.
Central Amusement International of Parsippany, N.J., is investing about $30 million to build and operate the park. The company signed a 10-year lease for about 6 acres of land including the former Astroland site, paying the city $1 million plus part of gross receipts.
"We will have rides that will flip you, turn you, launch you, drop you, splash you and make the mayor want to lose his lunch," said David Galst, a CAI spokesman.
Not all of Coney Island’s old amusements were scrapped.
New Yorkers beware! New cockroach hits the Big Apple
NEW YORK (AFP) – New Yorkers are used to fighting each other for space, but there may be a new contender in town according to a Rockefeller study that appears to have uncovered a new species of cockroach.
“The cockroach is genetically modified. Species don’t differ more than one percent, this cockroach is four percent different, which suggests it is a new species of cockroach,” Professor Mark Stoeckle, an expert on genomics and DNA barcoding at Rockefeller University, told AFP.
“We think that the museums of natural history in Paris or New York could be interested.”
The previously-unidentified creepy-crawly was uncovered as part of a project undertaken by two high-school students, Brenda Tan, 17, and Matt Cost, 18, under Stoeckle’s supervision.
In their roles as “DNAHouse investigators,” the pair trawled New York apartments, stores and street, collecting 217 specimens between November 2008 and March 2009.
They took samples from supermarket food, the remains of an insect found in a box of fruit, a feather from a duster, dried dung and a cockroach and matched DNA sequences using the Barcode of Life Database and GenBank.
The American Museum of Natural History laboratory identified 170 genetic codes, leading the researchers to identify 95 different animal species, including some that were unexpected.
“A feather from a duster yielded ostrich DNA. A delicacy labeled ‘sturgeon caviar’ instead turned out to be from the strange-looking paddlefish. A popular Asian snack was revealed as giant flying squid. Bison DNA was found in a dog biscuit,” the pair wrote on the Rockefeller University website.
In fact, they found that 16 percent of food items were mislabeled, including cheeses labeled sheep’s milk that were actually made of cow’s milk, a potentially dangerous labeling error for those with allergies.
But perhaps the biggest surprise for the researchers was the discovery of “a genetically distinct ‘mystery’ cockroach that might be a new species.”
“By appearance it looks like the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) but it is genetically different from other American cockroaches in the databases,” the researchers said.
