Website: How far to Mars?

• I do not fear death a 2011 essay by Roger Ebert
• Secret Files Expose Offshore’s Global Impact
• Vlado Taneski a journalist who ended up reporting his own crimes
• In 2003: The 727 that Vanished
• The Plutonium ‘Gate To Hell’ Found In Ancient City Of Hierapolis
• How one man’s lies almost destroyed the comics industry
• Tantalizing New Clues Into the Mysteries of Dark Matter
• Tactile Helmet Uses Vibrations to Help Firefighters ‘See’ in the Dark
• Supercomputers help reveal dinosaur mechanics
• Best audio interview is best: Alec Baldwin sits down with Thom Yorke

Mexico’s Haunting Underwater Sculptures

• There’s currently a cheese fire in a Norway tunnel causing traffic issues
• “It might not get weirder than this” an account of being in a North Korean-visiting delegation
• How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp
• CurbTXT service: contacting drivers through their license plate
• Very interesting study into the growing dichotomy of our online and offline identity
• Sleep problems could jeopardise future missions to Mars
• Using pulsars as a form of interstellar GPS
• What would hyperspace travel really look like?
• How a quarter of the cow genome came from snakes
• How Leprosy reprograms the body
• Wired’s best of CES 2013
• It’ll certainly be interesting to see how Oculus Rift will effect gaming
• The ridiculously charming world of ‘Ni No Kuni,’ Studio Ghibli’s gaming masterpiece
• This device supposedly trains you to become a human compass
• A great send up on attending a tech press release conference (and subtly, tech ‘journalism’)
  
• Answered: How valid is the implied legal advice in Jay-Z’s “99 Problems”?
• The producer of ’2 girls 1 cup’ has been sentenced to 4 years for obscenity
• Drew Struzan may return for the new Star Wars trilogy posters
• A great observational piece that goes behind the scenes of Paul Schrader’s The Canyons and what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie
• Some anniversaries you can expect to see covered this year
• 7 Strategies to outsmart writer’s block
• Bad writing advice from famous authors
• The Serif Readability Myth
• Clay Shirky: Remembering Aaron by taking care of each other
• A gallery of 30 insane cloud formations from around the world
• Another gallery of 18 Funny Restaurant Signs
• This website interestingly maps and tracks every current flight: http://www.flightradar24.com/
• And then there’s this video of this dog strutting around on two legs. TWO!

• Firefighter assembles terrifying/awesome supercut of helmet footage
• NYC iPhone owner tricks thief using dating App
• ‘Oompa-Loompas’ sought over city assault
• That’s Dedication: California couple visited Disneyland every day in 2012
• Top secret tombs: the classified stealth aircraft burial grounds
• The science behind 9 big diets
• Still smarting from SOPA, Congress to shy away from copyright in 2013
• NASA mulls plan to drag asteroid into moon’s orbit
• Binary star systems make for unstable planets
• The Helical Model – animations of a vortex solar system
• PlayStation 2 manufacture ends after 12 years
• Stats show the eBook craze is slowing
• My Father’s “Eviscerated” Work – Christopher Tolkien’s first interview in ever
• Ten things on Vince Gilligan’s mind as he writes the final Breaking Bad episodes
• Quentin’s World: NYT interview with Tarantino
• From kottke: Another great Bill Murray story

The Best Astronomy Images of 2012

• Should society be able to tell you how to augment your reality?
• The mind-uploading solution for interstellar missions
• Does Twitter kill TV comedy? Writers from “Daily Show,” “SNL,” “Fallon” and others sound off
• Game of Thrones gets a mind-blowing Minecraft makeover
• Mark Cuban, Minecraft creator donates big to help EFF “fix” software patents
• World’s biggest patent troll saves Kodak from bankruptcy
• Scapegoating at its finest: Proposed US Senate bill to further study violent game effects
• Reformed hitman who inspired ‘The Wire’s’ Omar dies at 58

Also, the chemistry of how snowflakes form their unique shapes.

• Brain’s visual centers study finds that men and women do see things differently
• Neuroscientists successfully control the dreams of rats
• An excellent interactive infographic: How many alien civilizations exist?
• Voyager 1 is yet to find the boundary line of the Solar System
• Twenty-nine of history’s most iconic scientists in one photograph (now in color)!
• The Brooklyn bookshop saving out-of-print sci-fi, one e-book at a time
• Obama and Romney tackle 14 top science questions
• #presspushback: the lost art of fact checking returns
• From Mental_Floss: What’s the Song That Clock Chimes Play?
• How Your Cell Phone Hurts Your Relationships
• Spike Jonze’s Next Movie: A Man Falls in Love With His Phone
• Kickstarter: Charlie Kaufman’s animated feature Anomalisa
• This method is how find cat adopters online: Cat Roulette!

This awesome animation by Alex Parker (whose Kepler-11 Sonata video is also excellent) illustrates the 2299 fast-transiting planets discovered to so far by the Kepler mission and their orbits to-scale around a single star.

There’s a wealth of detail in this rendering like colour/temperature correlation and the white rings representing Mercury, Venus and Earth’s orbits and that’s all elaborated on on it’s vimeo page. But all you need to know is this part of the description:

Watching in full screen + HD is recommended, so you can see even the smallest planets!

Planets. 2299 of them. Up there. And all of them were found in a really short period of time, with still so many more out there yet to discovered.

Fuck yeah, you bet I love this science stuff.

Was going to post and comment on this write up’s ‘counter-arguement’ on Curiosity’s cultural investment/benefits, but then this high resolution footage of the rover’s decent phase from the rover’s point-of-view came out and the thinking is simply: Who care? It’s still goddamn amazing enough that we’ve got a friggin’ Tank of Science on another planetary body.

UPDATE: some reddit user has interpolated the original’s images, creating a ‘smoother’ 25 fps version of the original video. Nice.

• In 1970, a NASA director wrote this letter answering Why Explore Space?
• Worthwhile read: an unexpected meeting with the inventor of the first programmable computer
• Also, visit the very first web page from more than 20 years ago
• Reddit harasses a teen  who may have faked her own cyber-bullying
• Thirty Is Not The New Twenty: Why Your 20s Matter
• Sad news: Tig Notaro Has Breast Cancer
• The Criminalisation of Mental Illness in Black America
• A 74 year-old car buff is selling off his antique car collection, says he wasted his life and would rather have had a wife
• Meanwhile, a New York neighborhood had a proper funeral for a 1982 Honda Civic
• Swiss sheep will warn shepherds of wolf attacks by SMS
• UK Kindle eBook sales have overtaken Amazon UK print sales
• How the BBC crushed NBC and brought Olympics coverage into the future
• Editorial: So, bumbling Boris Johnson is lovable and funny? Well, have I got news for you
• Video: Olympic Stadium sings “All You Need is Love”
• Plus: 10 hours of Ping Pong

Also, here’s the trailer for Zero Dark Hour, the new film from Hurt Locker director Katherine Bigelow about the events of SEAL Team Six and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Slightly underwhelming, but I’m still looking forward to it.

This 25 minute film lays out and explores just what we’ve learned about the Saturn and its various moons; probably the most fascinating planetary system in our solar system. Most of the data is from the Cassini spacecraft’s 7 year findings, with a little from Voyager and Galileo.

Using photos taken aboard the International Space Station, this time lapse video utilises a myriad of different editing techniques, frame rates, music and sound bites to create something quite special about our planet. Am also quite taken by the change up in aspect ratio from the norm.

Be sure to watch in HD full screen.

In this video, astrophysics graduate Alex Parker has taken the orbital information about the Kepler-11 system and, by corresponding a musical note with each planets’ transit, has created a beautifully unique sonata.

…The pitch (note) is determined by the planet’s distance from its star (closer=higher), and they are drawn from a minor 11 chord. The volume is determined by the size of the planet (larger=louder).

The near-4:5 mean-motion resonance of the innermost two planets is audible as the notes “beat” against each other.

A triple-transit (three planets crossing the face of the star at once) in August 2010 is also audible. This event is what is illustrated in the artist’s impression of the system used in cover photo.

The Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition winners

• Great fun/dumb science video: How powerful is an MRI magnet?
• Scientists develop a spray on battery
• Has the Speediest Pulsar Been Found?
• Upcoming Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies That Aren’t Remakes, Sequels or Prequels
• Awesome personal account: Intolerable intolerance
• Crazy: Ex-Wall Street banker, may have swallowed poison pill during courtroom conviction for arson

Finally, along with this Phil Plait write up (bookmark him!) is this really cool video from NASA detailing the recent observations of a giant planet 63 light years from Earth orbiting only 4 million kilometers from its sun. So close is this, that its atmosphere is being boiled and blasted away, streaming a tail of gas ‘behind’ it.

Fuck do I love the crazy/cool things out there for us to keep discovering. Keep it up Universe.

by Tomislav Safundžić