Fridaygram: Google Public DNS, lonely black hole, tiny chameleons
By Scott Knaster, Google Code
Blog EditorGoogle Public DNS is a fast, free
DNS service that we introduced a little more than 2 years ago. As the
Official
Google Blog post aptly puts it, “
DNS acts like the phone
book of the Internet”, translating from human-readable URLs to all-numeric IP addresses.
Google Public DNS started as an experimental service and has now become the most-used public
DNS service in the world with over 70 billion requests per day, mostly from outside the U.S.
Will the next step be support for users in
more
distant places? (Probably not there.)
Speaking of faraway
places, astronomers using images from the Hubble space telescope have found
black hole
HLX-1, which appears to be all that’s left of a dwarf galaxy that once contained
other stars. The theory is that this late galaxy was torn apart by a nearby spiral galaxy,
leaving only HLX-1. The other stars became part of the larger galaxy.
While you’re musing on this supermassive black hole, consider some much tinier creatures:
little chameleons, just about one inch long,
recently discovered in
Madagascar. Scientists think this miniaturization might be an evolutionary response
to limited resources.
 |
| Tiny chameleon: he comes and goes, he comes and
goes |
Finally, we can’t
help but jump on the
Linsanity
bandwagon. Of course, we’re doing it in a nerdy way by pointing you to
this
article (interesting even for non-sports fans) about why talent evaluation is so
tricky.
On Fridays we take a break and do a
Fridaygram post just for fun. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be
interesting to us nerds. Special thanks to Wired Science for having many excellent
posts this week.
Images: Glaw, F., et al., PLoS ONE
