Slacked a bit on the posts last week and still have to do one on 48 hours at some point soon.  Things have just been pretty busy and mental at the mo.

In the meantime…  behold this very impressive timelapse footage of the night sky, shot around the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama, Chile.  Gorgeous.

Haven’t had much time to blog.  Been busy, especially with 48 Hours coming up this weekend and have prepped so far almost nothing.  Nothing!

Pfft…  totally gonna just embrace the chaos and wing it.

Meanwhile, here’s a bloody awesome picture of the space shuttle Endeavour taking off on it’s final flight.

This is totally freakin’ cool…

Amateur astronomer Nick Risinger travelled across the globe to capture the night sky on a special camera rig and create this 5000 megapixel, 360-degree interactive view of the Milky Way and more than 20 million stars.

Composed of 37,440 images, this giant image provides a high level of detail to our night sky and for me, gives another alarming call to how bad light pollution is getting at night.

Anyhow, to check out the interactive awesomeness, go to https://skysurvey.org/

This is officially my favourite thing on the internet today.

The KFC Double Down got released today and you could say I’m just counting down the minutes till lunchtime.  Have even developed a rather fitting hangover for the occasion too.  Can’t wait.

In honor of it’s release, here’s a write up article about a modified burger, well known and dubbed the McGangBang.  A super burger where you put a McChicken burger inside of a Double Cheeseburger.  Hell’s yeah.

And this quote is the best…

It’s kind of like having a threesome with two ugly chicks. While it’s happening you’re stoked, because hey threesome!!! But once you’re finished it kinda sinks in about what you’ve done.

Science is awesome.  But slow down with the helping our future robot overlords.

Magnetic scout-bots to sneak on board ship
“Throwbots”, which can be tossed through a window or door, are standard equipment for many US police forces. These small robots – invaluable in sieges and hostage situations – are designed to always land right side up before being driven around by remote control, beaming back video from inside a building.
[full article]

Way back in 2005 when science was finally getting interesting, movies were sucking less and climate change was a thermostat brand, the good man Ross MacLeod was a regular enough contributor to our University magazine with his Captain Evil comics.

Fast forward to today and he’s reviving the ol’ bastard and spreading his evil online.  Go to https://captainevil.org/ and get your support on.

…very, very good.

Produced by the award-winning Blur Studio, David Fincher and voiced by Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown, The Goon follows the adventures of a muscle-bound brawler who claims to be the primary enforcer for a feared mobster. The stories have a paranormal and comedic edge to them and concern ghosts, zombies, mad scientists and “skunk apes.”

It’s a slow, yet all over the show week this week…

Second experiment hints at seasonal dark matter signal
Feng suggests that the discrepancy among all the experimental results may simply be due to the assumption that WIMPs interact the same way with protons and neutrons. If this is not the case, that could explain differences in the signals from xenon and germanium detectors, which each have a different ratio of protons to neutrons (arxiv.org/abs/1102.4331). “These experiments may look inconsistent, but a small theoretical tweak can bring everything in to line,” he told New Scientist.

Sky survey maps distant universe in 3D
Past surveys have relied on galaxies to map the universe (bright dots in the image’s central region). Now cosmic cartographers have probed even greater distances – to about 11 billion light years away – using intergalactic gas clouds (pictured along the perimeter in blue). The gas clouds are detectable because they absorb light from even more distant objects called quasars, blazing beacons powered by supermassive black holes that are devouring surrounding matter.

Beating the traffic before it even exists
The Smarter Traveler Research Initiative blends real-time traffic data with past traffic patterns to predict congestion up to 40 minutes into the future. Drivers are then automatically sent an email or text message of conditions on their regular commute before their trip begins.

…is pretty sweet.  Doesn’t look like much on first glance, but it’s a picture of Obama and his team watching a video feed of the raid on Bin Laden.

And just as I’m about to hit post on this, there’s a great Times write up on it to be found here: After Uncertainty, a Moment of Triumph in the Situation Room: ‘We’ve IDed Geronimo’

The President sat stone-faced through much of the events. Several of his aides, however, were pacing. For long periods of time, nobody said a thing, as everyone waited for the next update. In the modern age, Presidents can experience their own military actions like a video game, except that they have no control over the events. They cannot, and would not, intervene to contact the commanders running the operation. So when word came that a helicopter had been grounded, a sign that the plan was already off course, the tension increased.