Bookmarks

0JrYLH8F = m*a

And like Shiva the destroyer, here is Scientifically Accurate Ducktales

Bookmarks

The Electric Landscape of Earth at Night

This view of Earth at night is a cloud-free view from space as acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite (Suomi NPP). A joint program by NASA and NOAA, Suomi NPP captured this nighttime image by the satellite’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The day-night band on VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, gas flares, and wildfires. This new image is a composite of data acquired over nine days in April and thirteen days in October 2012. It took 312 satellite orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of land surface.

Today’s bookmarks

Finally, a recording still for the ages: In 1996, just months before he died, Carl Sagan recorded this message to future colonists living on Mars.

Today’s bookmarks

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.

Today’s bookmarks…

With two prior DUIs, David Wheaton led cops along highways around western and northern Houston, at one point reaching 92 mph, the official limit for the micro-vehicle. Eventually Wheaton drove all the way to his driveway, where police arrested him without fuss.
via

Also, Google Maps is teaming up with NASA to add street view of the Kennedy Space Center. Awesome.

Earth as Art: beautiful satellite images of Earth from the Landsat programme

NASA asked the public to vote on their favourite images from more than 120 images in the online ‘Earth as Art’ collection acquired by the Landsat programme over the last 40 years. The winner was this image, called Van Gogh from Space due to its similarity to Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night. In the satellite photo, acquired on 13 July 2005, massive congregations of greenish phytoplankton swirl in the dark water around Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea.

Empty Quarter - February 1st, 2003 - White pinpricks of cloud cast ebony shadows on the Rub' al Khali, or Empty Quarter, near the border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The lines of wind-sculpted sand are characteristic of immense sand deserts, or sand seas, and the Rub' al Khali is the largest desert of this type in the world. A highland ridge is just high enough to disturb the flow of the lines. In the center of that interruption lies the Saudi Arabian town of Sharurah.

Desert Patterns - April 13th, 2003 - Seen through the eyes of a satellite sensor, ribbons of Saharan sand dunes seem to glow in sunset colors. These patterned stripes are part of Erg Chech, a desolate sand sea in southwestern Algeria, Africa, where the prevailing winds create an endlessly shifting collage of large, linear sand dunes. The term erg is derived from an Arabic word for a field of sand dunes.

More via The Telegraph picture gallery

Today’s bookmarks

Specimen: Adult mouse hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Reactive astroglia (pale yellow) have proliferated and enlarged in response to neuronal activity over time. Technique: Confocal microscopy, Z-stack of 7 slices. (Dr. Sandra Dieni/Institute of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Albert-Ludwigs University/Freiburg, GermanyThe Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition winners

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.

Mars: Curiosity – Seven Minutes of Terror

Whilst the music is somewhat of a pretty over-dramatic Inception knock-off (which consequently detracts from the overall message), this video just released from NASA demonstrates the complex multitude of stages that their 890 kilograms Curiosity rover will have to go through in order to land on Mars surface in August. Even ignoring the at times jarring music, this shit looks to be one awesome (and nail-biting) feat of engineering.