James Boylan.Mobi

(Image credit: Monmouthshirecc/Wikimedia Commons)

The world’s first “Wikipedia town” will launch on Saturday in the small town of Monmouth in Wales.

The town now has more than 1,000 ceramic plaques on every important building, school and on hundreds of shops. The plaques each have a unique QR bar code — a square, black-and-white bar code that can be scanned with a smartphone that will be directed to a web page.

When users scan these codes, they will be taken to a Wikipedia article about the place they are visiting in whatever language their phone is programmed to.

The project, called “Monmouthpedia,” has been in the works for six months. The whole town has a free wireless Internet network and on Saturday, the “the entire town will be bedecked with banners declaring Monmouth as the first Wikipedia Town in the world,” according to its website.

The town’s residents contributed by writing and editing stories about Monmouth, and volunteers have been translating them to dozens of languages including Hungarian, Indonesian and Hindi.

“I started Monmouthpedia because I think that knowledge can give us context and allow us to appreciate the things around us more,”  John Cummings, the Monmouthpedia project leader, said in a video on the project’s website.

“The project is a collaboration between Wikimedia UK, Monmouth City Council, the museums, the library, the University of Wales and Cardiff Met [Cardiff Metropolitan University], but, most importantly, it’s the individual contributors — the local community groups and people not just from Monmouth but all over the world that correct the content and are making this happen,” he said.

Article source: http://feeds.abcnews.com/click.phdo?i=4154b2834356197845b7894aad06c8a5

If you live in a band across the southwestern United States, twilight will seem to come early on Sunday afternoon, well before the sun actually sets.

The cause: a rare annular solar eclipse — a ring of sunlight as the new moon, passing between Earth and the sun, blocks most, but not all, of the sun’s disc.

This is not the kind of total eclipse of which you usually see pictures — the moon blocking the sun completely, creating a few moments of near-night in the middle of the day, with only the sun’s ethereal corona visible around the moon’s edges. The sky will darken a bit, but there will still be a blindingly bright ring (an “annulus” in Latin) of sun, and it’s dangerous to look directly at it.

Still, there will be a striking sight to see, if you look at a heavily-filtered image projected onto a screen through binoculars or a small telescope, or protect your eyes with No. 14 arcwelders glass (not something found at most hardware stores).

The ring will be visible Sunday afternoon in a strip that begins on the California-Oregon coast and stretches southeastward across Reno, Nev., the Grand Canyon, and Albuquerque, N.M., and ends at sunset near Lubbock, Texas. In the map we’ve provided, the best viewing is in the yellow band; outside it, people will see a partial eclipse.

The moon’s shadow moves quickly — about 1,200 mph. Some times when the moon’s disc will be most centered over the sun’s are as follows:

Eureka, Calif.: 6:28 p.m. PDT
Reno, Nev.: 6:31 p.m. PDT
Grand Canyon, Ariz.: 6:35 p.m. MST
Albuquerque: 7:36 p.m. MDT (note time zone change)
Lubbock: 8:36 p.m. CDT (another time zone change)

Why an annular eclipse instead of a total one? Because the moon, constant in size as it may appear to us, does not move in a perfect circle around Earth. Its orbit is slightly elliptical. On average, it’s about 239,000 miles away, but at its closest it comes within about 225,000 miles of us. At its farthest — as it will be Sunday — it’s a little more than 250,000 miles away. It’s just enough of a difference so that the moon will only cover 88 percent of the sun.

(You may recall the “super moon” of two weeks ago; that night the full moon coincided with the low point of the moon’s orbit, making it look a little more vivid than usual.)

The Interior Department points out that a number of national parks — Redwoods and Lassen in California, Zion in Utah, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona, Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico — will all be in the zone from which the ring will be visible. More information from the National Park Service here.

San Francisco, Sacramento, Yosemite, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and Denver will all see a partial eclipse — the sun dwindling to a crescent. Even some distant cities, including Chicago, Dallas and Buffalo, will see a fair portion of the sun blocked by the passing moon.

Yellow band shows where sun will appear as a ring. North and south of it, sun will appear as crescent. Michael Zeiler/Eclipse-Maps.com.

But if you’re in the eclipse path, you really just need a place with a good clear view westward. (Check our weather page for a local forecast, though most of the eclipse zone can expect clear skies, at the moment.) You may want to go to a local observatory or planetarium, where viewing parties are likely.

And if you don’t feel like investing in welder’s glasses, you may be happy — seriously — with a piece of paper, or leafy trees around you. Prick a small hole in the paper and it will act as a tiny lens, projecting a miniscule image of the sun onto the pavement. Likewise, take advantage of the natural pinholes in many leaves. As the eclipse approaches maximum, look down, not up. If you’re lucky, you’ll see hundreds of little eclipse images dancing on the ground beneath your feet.

The laws of orbital mechanics make solar and lunar eclipses fairly common, actually — just not necessarily visible from where you live. If you’re underwhelmed by Sunday’s annular eclipse, there will be a total eclipse on Nov. 13 — but it will only be visible from Australia and the South Pacific.

Article source: http://feeds.abcnews.com/click.phdo?i=31b150a01ca872cdc2fbf9297cf5ea44

AP Photo/NASA

It was to have been the dawn of a new era, private companies launching into space and on to the International Space Station.

The first such launch was set for before dawn this morning, and it came tantalizingly close.

But the SpaceX rocket never got off the ground.

The launch was aborted just half a second before liftoff.

It was so close, that even NASA announcer George Diller was caught by surprise.

“Three, two, one, zero and liftoff,” said Diller. Then he realized the rocket was still on the pad, “We’ve had a cutoff. Liftoff did not occur.” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell blamed high combustion pressure in engine no. 5, one of nine engines needed for liftoff.

Onboard computers detected the problem, and shut everything down.

Shotwell said engineers will now being trouble shooting to find and fix the problem, and switch out the engine if necessary.

The next possible launch date is next Tuesday, May 22.

Despite the disappointment of today’s near-launch, Shotwell insisted, “This is not a failure. We aborted with purpose”, she said, “It would be a failure if we were to have lifted off with an engine trending in this direction.”

SpaceX is one of a handful of private companies racing to get into space, hoping to send cargo and eventually astronauts to the space station for NASA.

With the space shuttles parked in museums and NASA relying on the Russians for space transportation, the agency is looking to private companies to fill in the gap.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told ABC News, these commercial companies are “now going to be primarily responsible for building and operating, and we’re going to buy the service from them or purchase the service from them.”

NASA has shelled out $396 million to SpaceX for test flights, like this mission. It also has a $1.6 billion contract with the company for 12 cargo flights to the space station.

SpaceX is the dream of billionaire Elon Musk, who made his fortune creating PayPal.

He began his space efforts a decade ago.

Before the launch he was both realistic and optimistic.

Musk told ABC News, “I think we are more likely than not going to succeed in this mission but it is a test flight. And there is certainly any number of things that could go wrong. And so we may not actually. We have 2 more flights for later this year. So I’m confident that one of those flights will make it.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Article source: http://feeds.abcnews.com/click.phdo?i=d2e3466f0f4b25886f84ddcb596562eb

Credit: Mark Lennihan/AP Photo

Facebook’s stock market debut seems to be creating a frenzy everywhere but at Facebook.

Shares were fluctuating between $40 and $42 for most of the day before dipping down to $38. 50, as of 3:20 p.m. ET, since opening Friday morning, amid reports that  Nasdaq was experiencing some technical hiccups. Gizmodo reported shares were trading at a record-breaking 2.7 million per second within the first 30 seconds of trading.

But after founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and a throng of cheering employees rang the Nasdaq opening bell from the company headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., at 9:30 a.m. ET Friday, the campus became a ghost town.

“Nightline” anchor Bill Weir talked with Justin Mitchell, a Facebook engineer, and Donna Gutman, who worked in Facebook’s user operations, in New York City’s Times Square shortly after trading began. Both said they had been with the company for more than  four years but  had recently quit, taking stock options with them.

On Thursday night, Facebook priced its initial public offering  at $38 a share, selling $16 billion worth in equity and valuing the company at $104 billion. It’s the largest tech IPO of all time.

All Facebook employees are stock holders, Mitchell told Weir. So why isn’t he out buying a Ferrari?

“It’s not the company culture to go out and celebrate this type of stuff,” Mitchell said. “The culture of the company is very much of not showing off money, not being ostentatious but instead, really just making good products, and that comes from the top.”

One of the big questions is, now that Facebook has gone public, will it have to  tailor user experience to meet shareholders’ expectations. But Mitchell said he thought Facebook’s IPO filing would have little effect on how it does business.

“My hunch is that it’s not going to change the company culture that much,” he said. “Once we filed for the IPO people put up signs that said, ‘Stay focused, Keep shipping.’ I think it’s that type of mentality that you’ll see continue on in the future.”

Last night, Facebook celebrated its  newfound wealth with a wild bash at company headquarters that only Facebook could throw — a “Hackathon,” an all-night, a code-writing “rager,” where Facebook employees worked on their own special projects until the morning light. They do one every couple of months, according to the company’s blog. Those projects are what Facebook deems important, Gutman said.

“I think that the company needs to keep doing what its doing and the work people did last night shows that’s what people are focused on,” Gutman said.

Watch “Nightline” anchor Bill Weir’s full story on the Facebook IPO on “Nightline” TONIGHT at 11:35 p.m. ET/PT

ABC News’ Susanna Kim and Alex Stone contributed to this report

Article source: http://feeds.abcnews.com/click.phdo?i=fae757b7b631ac7506f0f97f4525330e

If you live in a band across the southwestern United States, twilight will seem to come early on Sunday afternoon, well before the sun actually sets.

The cause: a rare annular solar eclipse — a ring of sunlight as the new moon, passing between Earth and the sun, blocks most, but not all, of the sun’s disc.

This is not the kind of total eclipse of which you usually see pictures — the moon blocking the sun completely, creating a few moments of near-night in the middle of the day, with only the sun’s ethereal corona visible around the moon’s edges. The sky will darken a bit, but there will still be a blindingly bright ring (an “annulus” in Latin) of sun, and it’s dangerous to look directly at it.

Still, there will be a striking sight to see, if you look at a heavily-filtered image projected onto a screen through binoculars or a small telescope, or protect your eyes with No. 14 arcwelders glass (not something found at most hardware stores).

The ring will be visible Sunday afternoon in a strip that begins on the California-Oregon coast and stretches southeastward across Reno, Nev., the Grand Canyon, and Albuquerque, N.M., and ends at sunset near Lubbock, Texas. In the map we’ve provided, the best viewing is in the yellow band; outside it, people will see a partial eclipse.

The moon’s shadow moves quickly — about 1,200 mph. Some times when the moon’s disc will be most centered over the sun’s are as follows:

Eureka, Calif.: 6:28 p.m. PDT
Reno, Nev.: 6:31 p.m. PDT
Grand Canyon, Ariz.: 6:35 p.m. MST
Albuquerque: 7:36 p.m. MDT (note time zone change)
Lubbock: 8:36 p.m. CDT (another time zone change)

Why an annular eclipse instead of a total one? Because the moon, constant in size as it may appear to us, does not move in a perfect circle around Earth. Its orbit is slightly elliptical. On average, it’s about 239,000 miles away, but at its closest it comes within about 225,000 miles of us. At its farthest — as it will be Sunday — it’s a little more than 250,000 miles away. It’s just enough of a difference so that the moon will only cover 88 percent of the sun.

(You may recall the “super moon” of two weeks ago; that night the full moon coincided with the low point of the moon’s orbit, making it look a little more vivid than usual.)

The Interior Department points out that a number of national parks — Redwoods and Lassen in California, Zion in Utah, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona, Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico — will all be in the zone from which the ring will be visible. More information from the National Park Service here.

San Francisco, Sacramento, Yosemite, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and Denver will all see a partial eclipse — the sun dwindling to a crescent. Even some distant cities, including Chicago, Dallas and Buffalo, will see a fair portion of the sun blocked by the passing moon.

Yellow band shows where sun will appear as a ring. North and south of it, sun will appear as crescent. Michael Zeiler/Eclipse-Maps.com.

But if you’re in the eclipse path, you really just need a place with a good clear view westward. (Check our weather page for a local forecast, though most of the eclipse zone can expect clear skies, at the moment.) You may want to go to a local observatory or planetarium, where viewing parties are likely.

And if you don’t feel like investing in welder’s glasses, you may be happy — seriously — with a piece of paper, or leafy trees around you. Prick a small hole in the paper and it will act as a tiny lens, projecting a miniscule image of the sun onto the pavement. Likewise, take advantage of the natural pinholes in many leaves. As the eclipse approaches maximum, look down, not up. If you’re lucky, you’ll see hundreds of little eclipse images dancing on the ground beneath your feet.

The laws of orbital mechanics make solar and lunar eclipses fairly common, actually — just not necessarily visible from where you live. If you’re underwhelmed by Sunday’s annular eclipse, there will be a total eclipse on Nov. 13 — but it will only be visible from Australia and the South Pacific.

Article source: http://feeds.abcnews.com/click.phdo?i=ae73ac54d760654d5c3148bd1ac99a00

The Facebook IPO generated intense attention from the media and investors on its opening day Friday, but it failed to generate much of a profit.

The stock closed at $38.23 in Nasdaq trading, up just 23 cents from its initial price, when many analysts had expected at least a jump of 5 to 10 percent.

As Max Wolff an analyst with Greencrest Capital Management put it, “this starlet tripped on the red carpet.”

The market completed its worst week of the year, contributing to Facebook’s disappointing closing price. The tech stock was one of the most-traded stocks on the Nasdaq, however.

The Nasdaq closed down 1.2 percent to 2,779 while the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 0.6 percent to 12,369. The SP 500 closed down 0.7 percent to 1,295.

“Facebook closed up only a few cents but likely would have fared even worse if not for underwriters’ buying every time the stock touched $38,” Jim Krapfel, IPO analyst with investment firm Morningstar, said. “Facebook debuted at an inopportune time, as overall stock market weakness clearly pressured the shares. Had the company gone public a couple of weeks earlier, first day performance would likely have been much better.”

After some technical hiccups, trading in Facebook’s blockbuster IPO officially opened to an eager public today at $42.05 a share. The shares faded after that, touching the offer price of $38 numerous times throughout the day. The big investment houses that underwrote the share offering purchased the stock to keep it from falling below the offer price, sources told Bloomberg News and CNBC.

The trading day started with what is being reported as trading glitches at the NASDAQ, though officials at the exchange are not providing any clarifications for now.

Still, at $38, Facebook is priced more than 100 times its profit — a steep premium compared with Google at 18 times earnings and Apple at 13 times.

Krapfel said he was surprised to see Facebook stay flat given the pent-up retail demand for its shares.

“Clearly concerns regarding the company’s valuation, increased insider selling, and GM news are weighing on the stock. Weakness in the stock market over the last several days is also likely playing a significant role,” he said.

General Motors said this week it was pulling about $10 million of advertising from Facebook.

Morningstar has valued the company at $32 a share but Krapfel had expected the stock to trade into $50 and above.

He said that Facebook’s IPO was “overhyped.”

“Everyone and their child was interested in the IPO,” he said.

Visit Yahoo Finance to view real-time trading of Facebook shares.

On Friday morning, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, and COO Sheryl Sandberg gathered with a throng of cheering employees at the company headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., to ring the Nasdaq’s opening bell at 9:30 a.m. eastern time ahead of the social media network’s long-awaited IPO.

“Right now, this all seems like a big deal,” Zuckerberg said before ringing the bell. “Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here’s the thing. Our mission isn’t to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.”

Trading of the company’s shares, designated with the ticker symbol, “FB,” was scheduled to begin around 10:45 a.m. eastern time but began almost an hour later because Facebook’s underwriter, Morgan Stanley, was reportedly having trouble executing changing orders.

Facebook’s $16 billion raised on Thursday evening, when it priced its shares at IPO, brought in more capital in one listing than all of the combined U.S. IPOs this year, which was $12.1 billion, according to Thompson Reuters.

“In the past eight years, all of you out there have built the largest community in the history of the world,” Zuckerberg said to employees in Menlo Park Friday morning. “You’ve done amazing things that we never would have dreamed of. And I can’t wait to see what you guys all do going forward.”

Facebook will raise $18.4 billion including the full share overallotment, which is the second largest initial public offering in U.S. history behind Visa’s $19.7 billion offering in March 2008. Visa’s initial public offering was priced at $44 a share.

With a large monitor and stage set up outdoors in “Hacker Square,” instead of visiting Nasdaq’s New York exchange, hundreds of employees gathered in the early hours of the morning in California. Many of them had participated in Facebook’s 31st “hackathon,” a company tradition described as an overnight sleepover that encourages employees to work on anything but their normal work duties.

Nasdaq’s CEO, Bob Greifeld, stood beaming next to Zuckerberg, 28, sans necktie, donning a t-shirt and clapping along with the other employees.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Top List of Youngest CEOs: In Photos

It was a long-awaited moment for the eight-year old company that started in the Harvard University dormitory, Kirkland House.

In Photos: A Timeline of Facebook

Not to abandon Wall Street completely, Facebook CFO David Ebersman reportedly was at the Nasdaq in New York City during the opening bell. Instead of scrolling the usual stock prices of the day, Nasdaq’s digital billboard at its market center in Times Square this morning read, “Nasdaq Welcomes Facebook.”

On Thursday night, Facebook priced its initial public offering at $38 a share, raising $16 billion and valuing the company at $104 billion. The company said it made $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011.

The company offered 421.2 million shares of common A-class stock, which includes 180 million new shares sold by the company and 241.2 million shares sold by existing shareholders, such as early employees.

In Photos: Meet the New Facebook Billionaires

The biggest IPO for a U.S. technology firm has gotten the attention of everyone from high school students to Wall Street professionals, many of whom are likely among the 900 million monthly users of the social media site.

Out of four recent technology IPOs — those of LinkedIn, Zynga, Pandora and Groupon — only LinkedIn has recently traded above its IPO price. LinkedIn’s IPO price last May was $45 a share. Shares of LinkedIn were trading down around 5.8 percent on Friday late afternoon at $98.83.

Article source: http://feeds.abcnews.com/click.phdo?i=3a3012815885083fa0886147d2870a63

When SpaceX launches its Falcon 9 rocket it will secretly be carrying celebrities. Actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on the original “Star Trek” series, died in 2005. His ashes will be on board this mission — as will those of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and 306 other people. If you have the money, Celestis, a space services company, will send your loved one’s ashes up to orbit Earth. l

Sound familiar? This is the second time around for Celestis and Space X; the companies tried to launch Doohan and Cooper and 206 others back in August 2008. When SpaceX launched the remains on its Falcon1 rocket, the rocket never made it to space. When the rocket failed to get to orbit, neither did the cremated remains, or, for that matter, some small satellites sent by NASA and the Department of Defense.

The satellites were lost, but Celestis has a performance guarantee, which means it holds some ashes back just in case something goes horribly, terribly wrong. It often does in the rocket business. Hence, a second chance. The Falcon 9 is currently counting down to a launch on Saturday morning at 4:55 a.m. EDT.

Fifty years ago Gordon Cooper piloted the Faith 7 spacecraft on a 22-orbit mission, the last flight of Project Mercury in May 1963. He later served as command pilot of Gemini 5 in 1965, racking up 225 hours in space. His ashes are returning on a rocket that is remarkably similar to the ones that first took him into the heavens.

What Trekkie doesn’t know James “Scotty” Doohan? He was the engineer who beamed Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock back to the starship Enterprise from the most remote of planets. If only it were that easy to get his remains into Earth orbit.

The memorials written by the families of the others on this flight are poignant.

Brady Watson Kane died last year in a skydiving accident in Colorado. His family remembers when he told a teacher, “Some day I will take my family to space!” His parents said they will watch the launch on Saturday at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Friends of Francis Edward McShane of New York pooled their money to send his ashes on this flight. Their tribute to their buddy rights the wrongs in his life. He died of a heart attack in the parking lot of the hospital where he worked.

“In the balance of life, Frank’s scales are uneven,” they wrote. “To help right this injustice we now pool our resources to lift his last remains of a noble man to the heavens.”

Vicki Julian promised her husband, Steve, she would send his ashes to space. Steve Julian died of cancer in 2006. She says his passion to become an astronaut started when Sputnik launched; instead, he majored in history, got married, had two children, and worked in the insurance industry. She is fulfilling his dream of spaceflight.

Sending a loved one’s ashes to space isn’t that outrageous. It requires some patience; Celestis has to find an aerospace company willing and able to get the ashes into orbit. These ashes are in a canister stored in the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, which will separate from the Dragon capsule nine minutes into flight. If all goes as planned, the rocket will orbit the Earth for up to a year before it re-enters the atmosphere and burns up

Celestis’ prices vary. A suborbital flight with a return to Earth starts at $1,000, the launch into Earth orbit is $3,000, a trip to the Moon costs almost $10,000, and if you really want to go where no man has gone before, a flight into deep space will run you almost $13,000.

This puts NASA in a delicate position. NASA’s Alan Lindenmoyer, who oversees the agency’s relationship with SpaceX, says this delicate cargo passed all of NASA’s safety requirements.

“We had to make sure it would be interfere in any way with our mission objectives before we allowed it go into the rocket,” he said.

Article source: http://feeds.abcnews.com/click.phdo?i=56ac5798e618f47c80172aedfde23c40

If you live in a band across the southwestern United States, twilight will seem to come early on Sunday afternoon, well before the sun actually sets.

The cause: a rare annular solar eclipse — a ring of sunlight as the new moon, passing between Earth and the sun, blocks most, but not all, of the sun’s disc.

This is not the kind of total eclipse of which you usually see pictures — the moon blocking the sun completely, creating a few moments of near-night in the middle of the day, with only the sun’s ethereal corona visible around the moon’s edges. The sky will darken a bit, but there will still be a blindingly bright ring (an “annulus” in Latin) of sun, and it’s dangerous to look directly at it.

Still, there will be a striking sight to see, if you look at a heavily-filtered image projected onto a screen through binoculars or a small telescope, or protect your eyes with No. 14 arcwelders glass (not something found at most hardware stores).

The ring will be visible Sunday afternoon in a strip that begins on the California-Oregon coast and stretches southeastward across Reno, Nev., the Grand Canyon, and Albuquerque, N.M., and ends at sunset near Lubbock, Texas. In the map we’ve provided, the best viewing is in the yellow band; outside it, people will see a partial eclipse.

The moon’s shadow moves quickly — about 1,200 mph. Some times when the moon’s disc will be most centered over the sun’s are as follows:

Eureka, Calif.: 6:28 p.m. PDT
Reno, Nev.: 6:31 p.m. PDT
Grand Canyon, Ariz.: 6:35 p.m. MST
Albuquerque: 7:36 p.m. MDT (note time zone change)
Lubbock: 8:36 p.m. CDT (another time zone change)

Why an annular eclipse instead of a total one? Because the moon, constant in size as it may appear to us, does not move in a perfect circle around Earth. Its orbit is slightly elliptical. On average, it’s about 239,000 miles away, but at its closest it comes within about 225,000 miles of us. At its farthest — as it will be Sunday — it’s a little more than 250,000 miles away. It’s just enough of a difference so that the moon will only cover 88 percent of the sun.

(You may recall the “super moon” of two weeks ago; that night the full moon coincided with the low point of the moon’s orbit, making it look a little more vivid than usual.)

The Interior Department points out that a number of national parks — Redwoods and Lassen in California, Zion in Utah, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona, Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico — will all be in the zone from which the ring will be visible. More information from the National Park Service here.

San Francisco, Sacramento, Yosemite, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and Denver will all see a partial eclipse — the sun dwindling to a crescent. Even some distant cities, including Chicago, Dallas and Buffalo, will see a fair portion of the sun blocked by the passing moon.

Yellow band shows where sun will appear as a ring. North and south of it, sun will appear as crescent. Michael Zeiler/Eclipse-Maps.com.

But if you’re in the eclipse path, you really just need a place with a good clear view westward. (Check our weather page for a local forecast, though most of the eclipse zone can expect clear skies, at the moment.) You may want to go to a local observatory or planetarium, where viewing parties are likely.

And if you don’t feel like investing in welder’s glasses, you may be happy — seriously — with a piece of paper, or leafy trees around you. Prick a small hole in the paper and it will act as a tiny lens, projecting a miniscule image of the sun onto the pavement. Likewise, take advantage of the natural pinholes in many leaves. As the eclipse approaches maximum, look down, not up. If you’re lucky, you’ll see hundreds of little eclipse images dancing on the ground beneath your feet.

The laws of orbital mechanics make solar and lunar eclipses fairly common, actually — just not necessarily visible from where you live. If you’re underwhelmed by Sunday’s annular eclipse, there will be a total eclipse on Nov. 13 — but it will only be visible from Australia and the South Pacific.

Article source: http://feeds.abcnews.com/click.phdo?i=ae73ac54d760654d5c3148bd1ac99a00

After some technical hiccups, trading in Facebook’s blockbuster IPO officially opened to an eager public today at about $42.05 a share and drifted lower by mid-day.

Shares were trading at $41.33 at around 12:33 p.m. eastern time, topping the offer price of $38.

Earlier on Friday, the shares nearly dropped to its offer price, lower than what many analysts expected.

Jim Krapfel, IPO analyst with investment firm Morningstar, said he was surprised to see Facebook only up a few percentage points given the pent-up retail demand for its shares.

“Clearly concerns regarding the company’s valuation, increased insider selling, and GM news are weighing on the stock. Weakness in the stock market over the last several days is also likely playing a significant role,” he said.

General Motors said this week it was pulling about $10 million of advertising from Facebook.

Morningstar has valued the company at $32 a share but Krapfel had expected the stock to trade into $50 and above.

He said that Facebook’s IPO was “overhyped.”

“Everyone and their child was interested in the IPO,” he said.

Visit Yahoo Finance to view real-time trading of Facebook shares.

On Friday morning, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, and COO Sheryl Sandberg gathered with a throng of cheering employees at the company headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., to ring the Nasdaq’s opening bell at 9:30 a.m. eastern time ahead of the social media network’s long-awaited IPO.

“Right now, this all seems like a big deal,” Zuckerberg said before ringing the bell. “Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here’s the thing. Our mission isn’t to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.”

Trading of the company’s shares, designated with the ticker symbol, “FB,” was scheduled to begin around 10:45 a.m. eastern time but began almost an hour later because Facebook’s underwriter, Morgan Stanley, was reportedly having trouble executing changing orders.

Facebook’s $16 billion raised on Thursday evening, when it priced its shares at IPO, brought in more capital in one listing than all of the combined U.S. IPOs this year, which was $12.1 billion, according to Thompson Reuters.

“In the past eight years, all of you out there have built the largest community in the history of the world,” Zuckerberg said to employees in Menlo Park Friday morning. “You’ve done amazing things that we never would have dreamed of. And I can’t wait to see what you guys all do going forward.”

Facebook will raise $18.4 billion including the full share overallotment, which is the second largest initial public offering in U.S. history behind Visa’s $19.7 billion offering in March 2008. Visa’s initial public offering was priced at $44 a share.

With a large monitor and stage set up outdoors in “Hacker Square,” instead of visiting Nasdaq’s New York exchange, hundreds of employees gathered in the early hours of the morning in California. Many of them had participated in Facebook’s 31st “hackathon,” a company tradition described as an overnight sleepover that encourages employees to work on anything but their normal work duties.

Nasdaq’s CEO, Bob Greifeld, stood beaming next to Zuckerberg, 28, sans necktie, donning a t-shirt and clapping along with the other employees.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Top List of Youngest CEOs: In Photos

It was a long-awaited moment for the eight-year old company that started in the Harvard University dormitory, Kirkland House.

In Photos: A Timeline of Facebook

Not to abandon Wall Street completely, Facebook CFO David Ebersman reportedly was at the Nasdaq in New York City during the opening bell. Instead of scrolling the usual stock prices of the day, Nasdaq’s digital billboard at its market center in Times Square this morning read, “Nasdaq Welcomes Facebook.”

On Thursday night, Facebook priced its initial public offering at $38 a share, raising $16 billion and valuing the company at $104 billion. The company said it made $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011.

The company offered 421.2 million shares of common A-class stock, which includes 180 million new shares sold by the company and 241.2 million shares sold by existing shareholders, such as early employees.

In Photos: Meet the New Facebook Billionaires

The biggest IPO for a U.S. technology firm has gotten the attention of everyone from high school students to Wall Street professionals, many of whom are likely among the 900 million monthly users of the social media site.

Out of four recent technology IPOs — those of LinkedIn, Zynga, Pandora and Groupon — only LinkedIn has recently traded above its IPO price. LinkedIn’s IPO price last May was $45 a share. Shares of LinkedIn were trading down around 0.83 percent on Friday mid-day at $104.

Article source: http://feeds.abcnews.com/click.phdo?i=b56db7a08948c0e8a829f25c4da8fb80

Image credit: Honda

The Segway a bit too big for you? Or require a bit too much standing for your liking? Well, Honda’s got an interesting-looking solution in the works — the Honda UNI-CUB.

Called a “personal mobility device,” the UNI-CUB looks like a unicycle sans the cycle or wheel part. So how does it work?

Sit in the saddle and Honda’s Omni Traction Drive System lets you control the speed and direction by shifting your weight. Yep, no hands.

Honda touts the UNI-CUB as omnidirectional, meaning the two wheels allow it to move in all directions — side-to-side, backwards, diagonally, etc. Honda will also have a smartphone app that will function as additional control option.

While the Segway, a similar electric powered scooter released in 2002, was designed for outdoor use and is frequently used by police or security guards, the UNI-CUB has been designed for indoor use. Honda claims the precision of its motion is good for “barrier-free indoor environments.”

This isn’t the first time an automaker has tried to take on the popular Segway. In 2008, Toyota announced its own personal mobile solution, called the Winglet. The Winglet was tested but never marketed to consumers.

And that might be the way the way the UNI-CUB goes. Honda says it will start demonstrating and testing the UNI-CUB with Japan’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in June. No additional information has been given on if and when it might be released to the public.

Article source: http://feeds.abcnews.com/click.phdo?i=d8e40352fe846c71129cdc8afab66c9a