Scientists have built a clock which is 100,000 times more precise than the existing international standard.
“One Cubic Foot”
From National Geographic:
How much life could you find in one cubic foot? That’s a hunk of ecosystem small enough to fit in your lap. To answer the question, photographer David Liittschwager took a green metal frame, a 12-inch cube, to disparate environments—land and water, tropical and temperate. At each locale he set down the cube and started watching, counting, and photographing with the help of his assistant and many biologists. The goal: to represent the creatures that lived in or moved through that space.
Visualization of orbiting satellites by country.
I wish this had existed so I could have been inspired by it back when I was doing my film degree project…
Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun’s finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies.
Joseph Shoer, a Ph.D. candidate in aerospace engineering, says any real space battles would likely have — yawn — “relatively long periods during which Newtonian physics govern the motions of dogfighting spacecraft, punctuated by relatively short periods of maneuvering.”
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The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang.
The Outer Limits: In a new paper, engineers Lev Levitin and Tomasso Toffoli have delineated a universal limit on computational performance—a point beyond which no computer, classical or quantum, can feasibly increase its speed.
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The culprit isn’t an asteroid, or a volcanic eruption: it’s us.
Hollywood notwithstanding, it seems fairly unlikely that mankind will be wiped out in 02012. But unfortunately, tales of mass extinction turn out to have some basis in reality; some even say we are already in the midst of a sixth great planetary catastrophe. The difference this time is that the culprit isn’t an asteroid, or a volcanic eruption: it’s us.
The Symphony of Science is a musical project by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form. Here you can watch music videos, download songs, read lyrics and find links relating to the messages conveyed by the music.
Massive 140-square-kilometre Iceberg Drifting Away from Antarctica Toward Australia
A giant iceberg more than seven times the size of Rottnest Island is drifting towards Western Australia has been hailed as a once-in-a-lifetime rarity for both its size and the length of its journey.
Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist Neal Young says the iceberg, named B17B, is 1700 kilometres south-south-west of the West Australian coast and moving north with the ocean current and prevailing wind.
Spacewalkers Viewable from Backyard Telescope!
From WIRED:
With a big enough telescope and some good fortune, an amateur astronomer can look into the sky and see humans at the space station.
Here’s the proof. On March 21, 2009, astronaut Joe Acaba stepped into space for some extravehicular activity. Down on Earth, Ralf Vandebergh was in his backyard, pointing a 10 inch-telescope at the International Space Station as it passed over Europe.
In reviewing the photos he shot, he saw a few bright pixels appear precisely where the work was going on at exactly the moment it was being conducted. In other words, he was looking at an astronaut!
He posted this new video of his images to YouTube earlier this week.
Cool- Hubble in 3D
The 40-foot long Tyrannosaurus rex that failed to sell at a Las Vegas auction in October has finally found a home in an Oregon museum.
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