Thanks to the advent of portable high definition camera and high speed Internet, we are now able to see views that only a handful of extremely lucky and highly-trained individuals get to experience.
Dr. Justin Wilkinson from NASA’s astronaut team serves as a tour guide as he takes us on a a special trip around our globe. The seven-minute journey is seen from the lofty perch of space, and is compiled from footage taken by various astronauts over the years. From the distinctive red sand dunes of the Namib Desert to a swirling hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean to the majestic Amazon River, check out What an Astronaut’s Camera Sees below.
No matter how many times we’ve marvelled at the Photopic Sky Survey panorama or at the numerous time-lapse videos of the night sky, we’re still drawn to the ever-changing heavens above.
Astrophotographers Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado travelled to the Paranal Observatory on a 2,635m-high mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert and took all the images in this most wonderous time-lapse video. Not only does it show the stars, but also the four separate optical telescopes – the Very Large Telescope ( or VLT) – that monitor the movement of the celestial bodies. Have a look at the video below.
According to Wikipedia’s article on adaptive optics, the laser beam you see emanating from one of the telescopes is in a bid to correct the distortions or blurry effects created by atmospheric turbulence.
In a charming little video called Flottille, French artist Etienne Cliquet creates origami that is a few centimetres long, and then places them onto the surface of water.
Likely due to capillary action, the micro-origami as he calls it, slowly expands and opens up to reveal the shapes hidden underneath the main piece. It’s a wonderful, meditative piece – have a look at Flottille below.
The Space Shuttle Endeavour took its last flight yesterday as it roared into space from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. STS-134 is the 25th and final space flight for Endeavour, it carries six astronauts and scientific gear to the space station. One of the equipment on-board the vessel, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is a USD 2 billion device intended to search for evidence of “dark matter”. Wired.com reports that a bobtail squid was an unlikely passenger.
STS-134 is the penultimate mission in NASA’s space shuttle program and in case you missed the live event like I did yesterday, here is a recap of day one, including the launch and some operations performed within the Endeavour.
For more STS-134 mission videos, visit NASA. Flight commander, Mark Kelly should be tweeting during the course of the mission, follow his handle, @shuttlecdrkelly and the official tweets from the Kennedy Space Center, @NASAKennedy.
Headed up by composer/video producer John Boswell, the Symphony of Science is a musical project that aims to teach the fundamentals of science through an interesting channel – that of music.
Video clips featuring renowned scientists such as Robert Winston, Bill Nye, and Carl Sagan are combined with the goodness of Auto-Tune to create rather unique and illuminating science music videos. This educational series saw its ninth episode just released and it waxes lyrical about the very centre of our nervous system. Check out Ode to the Brain below.
Here’s a wonderful example of life imitating art. Inspired by the events of Pixar’s charming action-adventure, Up, scientists and engineers over at National Geographic set about turning a house into a makeshift airship.
They attached 300 coloured weather balloons to a lightweight yellow house in an attempt to lift it off its foundations. The team successfully launched the flying house from a private airfield, and the two balloon pilots onboard the contraption flew it for an hour and reached an altitude of over 10,000 feet. It secured the team a world record for the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted.
Have a look at the news report from Good Morning America below and some images from the build after the jump.
You may recall an earlier post on Watson (refresh your memory), IBM’s artificial intelligence system that is part of their DeepQA, a research project that aims to understand and answer questions that are asked in everyday natural language.
During a warm-up match shot in early January 2011, Watson competed against two of the all-time greats of the popular American quiz show, “Jeopardy!” Watson was pitted against Ken Jennings, who has won over USD 3,000,000 and Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money earner on the show. At the end of the round, Watson came out the clear winner. Now the time for the IBM Challenge has come, and during the period from February 14th to the 16th Watson will officially face the two champions in two matches. The winner of the matches will pocket the USD 1,000,000 prize. Here is day one of the IBM Challenge where the show introduces Watson and takes a look at its innards and history before proceeding to the contest.
Space is huge and the planets that occupy the solar system are pretty gosh darn big aren’t they? There have been quite a few images on the Internet that compare the relative sizes of these planets, and artist Brad Goodspeed adds his perspective to it in his creative video entitled Scale.
After watching a lunar eclipse, Goodspeed wondered how large the Earth would look like it were there in place of the moon. He shows this in his video along with all the other planets, as if they orbited our world as the moon does. There are reportedly some small errors with Goodspeed’s calculations (you boffins can read that here) but that doesn’t take away from the sense of scale he is trying to show in the video. Check it out below.
We live in an age of wonder where people are able to communicate with each other instantly. Using cell phones, computers, and gaming consoles, to name but a few. We have become so reliant upon these marvels, that to envision living life without them is down-right scary. It has integrated into our very fabric of existence, and it is funny to see how we have evolved with it.
I’m sure all of you, me included, have had a discussion along these very same lines at some point in the recent past. How would life have turned out differently without cell phones? I personally cannot imagine a life without mine. But it’s not just cell phones that shape the way we live; we depend on televisions, refrigerators, microwaves and coffeemakers (who can function without coffee these days?).
Let’s take a look at the comical aspect of how we as humans have evolved along with technology and where inevitably it might lead. Read more after the jump.
Word around the server room is that a super computer has beaten two supremely champions in a test match of Jeopardy. It was in preparation for the human vs. computer contest that is due to be recorded in the coming days. Initially I wasn’t surprised the machine won, it’s a supercomputer; it can search through its massive banks of data and produce the correct answer before its human opponent can say “Um…” But it turns to be somewhat more complex and grand undertaking than I could have ever imagined.
Watson is the name of this all-conquering overlord artificial intelligence system created by IBM. It is named after the founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson who in 1948 said, “I think there’s a world market for about 5 computers.” I bet his mind would have exploded if he were to see the extent to which computers are ingrained in our lives today. In 2007 IBM Research began creating Watson as part of DeepQA, a research project that aims to understand and answer questions that are posed in spoken sentences that we use every day, natural language as it’s called. This little clip from IBM explains how Watson came into being.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1c7s7-3fXI&NR
And here is the warm-up match where Watson competed against contestants Ken Jennings who has earned over USD 3 million on the game show, and Brad Rutter who is biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy.
If Watson had emotions (we are informed he does not), I’d just imagine a huge shit-eating grin would be plastered all over its LCD screen. The human vs. computer Jeopardy episode will be aired in mid February. If you’re a betting person, who would you put your money on?
