NASA announced plans today to return to the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008 (the fifth servicing mission thus far) to replace the observatory’s gyroscopes and batteries, install two new instruments: the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), and attempt to repair the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) which has been offline for two years.
This month’s TIME magazine takes a look at “The United Stats of America” in the wake of the national population passing 300 million on October 17th.
“In most Victorian post-mortem photography, the deceased was shown peacefully sleeping. In deaths involving children, post-mortem photography was especially precious since little or no pictures were taken before their death. (..) Most pictures were thought to be a keepsake rather than an alarming reminder of short mortality.”
The Whitney Music Box, a procedural music visualization derived from work by John Whitney, has been updated to include a number of variations on the original.
For a crippled extraterrestrial rover past its prime*, the Martian winter is cold and unforgiving. Tucked away on a small hill with a view of the sun for the past four months, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has been making do, using available solar energy to work on, among other things, the most detailed photograph of the Martian surface to date.
Si Scott’s beautiful, illustrative & typographic work has been circulating recently — is circulating, who am I to stop it.
Laffoley’s paintings depict his vision of reality with geometric precision: theories of time, space, the universe, the soul, etc.
Last week I left a note on Laura’s desk
It said I love you signed anonymous friend
Turns out she’s smarter than I thought she was
She knows I wrote it, now the whole class does too
And I’m all alone during couple skate
When she skates by with some guy on her arm
But I know that I’ll forget the look of pity in her face
When I’m living in my solar dome on a platform in space (…)
Tim Fort’s work is a cross between domino wizardry and a Rube Goldberg machine, kind of like a living Domino Rally meets Honda Cog.
High-res desktops made from satellite images of Earth courtesy Google Maps.
Sony’s new Bravia ad is the sequel in spirit to last year’s ad featuring 250,000 multicolored superballs and a steep San Francisco street. This time an array of copper pipes plus hundreds of cluster bombs and mortars dispensed 70,000 liters of paint on and around an abandoned high-rise apartment complex in Glasgow, Scotland.
Beyond the Horizon is a new IMAX film in progress about “cosmology and the meaning of existence”. Seemingly an accessible film version of Hawking’s theories, in the vein of A Brief History of Time. Characters include Einstein, Feynman and Hawking himself.
Stars spinning out planets spinning out moons, babies, Edwin Hubble, physical cosmology, blog posts about physical cosmology …
On the 15th of September the Cassini spacecraft found itself (by no accident I’m sure) positioned in such an advantageous point as to capture this image of Saturn — the sun completely masked and illuminating the rings from behind.
Kick Ass Classical lists the 100 most popular classical works based on their prominence in popular culture, with audio samples of each piece’s “hook” for easy recognition.
Went to the best show I’ve seen/heard in a while last night: Mr. Invisible & One Self on the US tour “Children of Possibility”, featuring music from One Self’s album of the same name and Mr. Invisible’s debut album, “Sight Unseen”.
A letter written home by an anonymous Marine officer that has been circulating for the past month, recently published by TIME Magazine.
“The answer was yes, they are there, even at the center of the galaxy. (…) This allows us to say now with a very high degree of confidence that there are literally billions of planets in our galaxy.”
“Drink to me!”
“While exploring the blurred lines between soldier and mercenary in today’s conflict resolution, it became clear: The Rules of War Have Changed. The modern US army cannot go to war, cannot even have dinner without these civilian contractors and their role is unlikely to go away any time soon.”
A beautiful photo collection of rural China. If you read a billion feeds a day like I do you’ve probably already seen this, but if not …
In a recent independent study, various laptops were tested for their levels of toxic chemical contamination and among them Apple’s MacBook Pro scored as one of the worst. The “Green My Apple” campaign is in response to this, and although targeted at Apple will no doubt shed light onto the greater issue of these chemicals being used in abundance regardless of manufacturer.