Onelargeprawn
If your Monday needed a splash of colour, you might like this video. Gavin Free and Daniel Gruchy, the slow-mo guys, put squibs in nail polish bottles filled with paint and set up a Phantom v1610 ultra high speed camera to capture the explosions of colour. Have a look at paint exploding at 15,000 frames a second, or at 600 times slower than our human vision.
[via Mashable]
In a series entitled Invasive Species, South African photographer Dillon Marsh didn’t photograph pockets of Eucalyptus trees growing amongst the indigenous forest on the slopes of Table Mountain. Instead he made references to the (badly) disguised cell phone towers that have been dotted around Cape Town.
In 1996, mobile telecomms company Vodacom commissioned two gentlemen, Ivo Branislav Lazic and Aubrey Trevor Thomas, to create a set of materials specifically for the concealment and disguisement of the antennae atop the cell phone masts. The duo created what was supposedly the world’s first cell phone tower to be disguised as a palm tree. In 2009, Marsh tracked and photographed these fake palms and other cell phone towers disguised as coniferous trees as they spread across the city. Have a look at the Invasive Species after the jump.
Every day is a scorcher on the star at the centre of our solar system. And on some days it even rains.
In mid-July 2012, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a most beautiful phenomenon that resulted from the combination of solar winds and a solar flare. It’s termed coronal rain.
As the plasma cools and fall back to the surface, the Sun’s magnetic field creates a series of coronal loops that look like they were streams from a sourceless waterfall. The time-lapse video captures a coronal rain shower that lasted 10 hours at temperatures over 49,000 degrees Celsius! See it below.
[via APOD]
Artist Sivu needed to think up a music video to his song, “Better Man Than He”. He had a brain wave.
Sivu lay in an MRI scanner for several hours and as the machine subjected him to loud noises, he made music of his own. Director Adam Powell collected and edited the real-time footage that shows the workings of Sivu’s mind as he sang his single.
Check out the resulting anatomical music video to “Better Man Than He”.
[via Ufunk]
By his own admission, Dmitri Potapoff over at FPSRussia has seen some pretty crazy shit but Charlene is unlike anything he has ever seen. The Charlene that he is referring to is a prototype quadrotor that has a submachine gun mounted on it. Charlene can fly up to 50 KM/h and can soar up to 400 metres above the ground.
In this tech demo, Dmitri shows how Charlene deals with some unwelcome guests. She also lights up a dinner party that she wasn’t invited to.
[thanks Tim!]
We’ve seen some remarkable photos and videos that look out from the International Space Station but not very many that look in.
Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams has spent some 321 days aboard the ISS, as a flight engineer and more recently as a commander of an expedition. She has gone for walkabouts outside and is the first person in the world to do a triathlon in space. In this video, Williams takes us on a tour of the space craft that she has called home for almost a year, showing the different modules, sleeping quarters, kitchens, and orbital outhouses from her perspective. This is most likely the geekiest version of MTV Cribs you’re likely to see.
[via Kottke]
Wikipedia defines the Leidenfrost effect as “a phenomenon in which a liquid, in near contact with a mass significantly hotter than the liquid’s boiling point, produces an insulating vapor layer which keeps that liquid from boiling rapidly.”
Reading the concept might be boring, but seeing it in action is somewhat cooler. In this little clip, a glowing ball of red hot nickel is dropped into a container of water. Thanks to Leidenfrost effect, the surface of the ball becomes insulated from the water by a blanket of steam. But the effect is temporary, watch what happens when the ball cools.
The Leidenfrost effect has been demonstrated in a few other ways, most notably when the mustachioed Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman dared to dip his little piggy into a pot of molten lead. Have a look at that reaction after the jump.
We’ve seen Rube Goldberg machines that turn the simple process of turning a page, taking a photo, and sending a postcard into a series elaborate chain reactions.
With clever use of magnets, magic, and mechanics the folks over at Canadian production company 2D House created a Rube Goldberg machine that seems to defy Newton’s law of universal gravitation. There’s even a nod to the apple incident. Check out Isaac Newton vs. Rube Goldberg below.
[via Colossal]
The majority of us aren’t concerned with the background processes that run when we use Gmail, watch a YouTube video, or do a Google search. The computational requirements for bringing these services to the 2.4 billion Internet users are pretty hefty but Google’s billion-dollar network of data centers are able to handle more than 3 billion daily search queries and to index 20 billion web pages a day.
Physical access to their data centers has only been reserved for a privileged few, but Google recently commissioned photographer Connie Zhou to take a few snaps of their high-tech facilities. In a segment called Where The Internet Lives, we get a virtual peek into colourful and highly organized collection of coolant pipes, server racks, and tape libraries. See the arty photos of Google’s data centers after the jump. There is even a street view clip that shows the inside the Lenoir data center in North Carolina.
From the vantage of the ISS, we’ve seen some stellar views of Earth at night, striking star trails, and swirling auroras.
Astronaut Don Pettit has spent 370 days in space and is one of the principal photographers aboard the ISS. In a recent photo conference, Pettit gave an illuminating TED-style talk on how photos are captured from space. He talks about taking photographs both inside and outside the ISS, the limitations imposed by the environment, the different cameras that he uses, and the wonderful out-of-the-world scenes that he sees out of the seven windows of the cupola.
[via Photoshelter Blog]