Art and science complement each other very nicely in this incredibly cool and simple paper kit to build an articulated horse by James Watt from Clockwork Robotics. (Any relation to the Steam Engine linkage inventor James Watt?)
It may not look all that interesting in the static photo above, but check out this video of the [...]
I have seen the future of books, and it is the Kindle. Or maybe Kindle rev. 2 will be anyway.
Having witness the repeated failure of several electronic book efforts in the past, I was pessimistic. But now I believe. Amazon’s new approach to the electronic book has successfully tackled several of the [...]
Over the course of the last few months, it turns out that one of the most popular posts here on All the Best Bits was the one entitled: A Snowflake Closeup. So in honor of the season, here is some more on snowflake science.
Some folks from Caltech have posted Snowcrystals.com, a great [...]
If you didn’t happen to catch this when it was live on television, YouTube has come to the rescue. Check out this amazing Rube-Goldberg machine from a couple-year-old Honda ad:
“This Advertisement for the new Honda Accord was shot in real time with no CGI involved in the sequence. It required 606 takes and cost [...]
From NASA:
The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the [...]
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity near the rim of Victoria Crater. Victoria is an impact crater about 800m (half a mile) in diameter at Meridiani Planum near the equator of Mars. Opportunity is the dot at the centre of the zoomed image. (Nasa/JPL/UA)
From NASA:
NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity reached the rim of “Victoria Crater” in Mars’ Meridiani Planum region with a 26-meter (85-foot) drive during the rover’s 951st Martian day, or sol (Sept. 26, 2006). After the drive, the rover’s navigation camera took the three exposures combined into [...]
Remember the studies back in the nineties about what makes someone’s face attractive? Judith Langlois et. al. discovered that the most attractive faces turned out to be the ones that were the average composite of all the faces in a large population study.
Images were posted across Newsweek and other trade magazines about how beautiful [...]
From The World’s Fair at Science blogs, though originally published in Science. The Y chromosome sequenced at last!
For all you Global Warming doubters out there, assuming there are any of you left outside of our government:
The European Space Agency has posted some of the latest data from their Envisat spacecraft which confirms the results of last week’s NASA postings on thinning arctic ice cover. Note the before and after photos between [...]
Another great talk by Malcolm Gladwell, author of two excellent books Blink and The Tipping Point, has been posted on the TED Blog. This one covers the falacies of focus groups as applied to Pepsi, mustard, and spaghetti, among other things, and mirrors many of our findings at MobiTV.
The rapid evolution of the electronics industry is certainly one of the world’s unique industrial marvels. For over 20 years, the electronic design industry has managed to reliably followed the trajectory charted by Moore’s law, which holds that microcircuit technology development will drive increases that double the density and power of integrated electronics every [...]
Hurricane Gordon from the Shuttle Bay
The view from this place is to die-for!
It is starting to look like a respectable long-term space habitat.
Since my Extra Terrestrial Update post last week, several folks have asked me about the notion of looking backwards in time by looking farther away. This week, those questions are even more relevant, as scientists have just managed to look farther back in time than ever before, through more than 13 billion years, or [...]
Intellectually, I understand that the Internet is a globally connected network. That said, I generally spend the vast majority of my browsing time within the U.S. network with occasionally forays to the UK, Canada, and Germany (My 6 years of German study weren’t completely wasted).
But you just have to love the idea that a [...]
It’s photos like these that make the whole NASA thing seem worthwhile, even with all the recent problems. More details here, and here.
The ESA is on a roll. After purposefully crashing a spacecraft into the Moon last week, they just published the first-ever census of Black Holes using their orbiting Gamma Ray spacecraft namesd Integral.
One of the cool things about the project is that they ended up using the Earth itself as a giant shutter in [...]
Here is the Yahoo News Link. Great gadgetry. I wonder what their teachers are like.
All those years of school finally pay off!
Rob, over at the Big Monkey Blog, put together an interesting chart to examine science communication from a macro-perspective. Though his original intention was to highlight the role of science blogs in fostering a more scientifically informed general public, it also turns out to be a nice framework upon which to illustrate a [...]
If you didn’t actually see the Lunar impact of the Smart-1 spacecraft, don’t be too disappointed. Even without the cloud cover here in Berkeley, it wouldn’t have been visible through any of my telescopes. As it turned out, you needed a 3.6 meter infrared scope to detect the miniscule flash. At least [...]
Here are a couple more nice graphics describing a little more detail of Saturday night’s planned Lunar crash landing of the Smart-1 spacecraft.
Let’s hope for a big plume so that we can see it.
Also, here are some more details on the ion engine drive architecture:
1. Xenon gas atoms are pumped into a cylindrical chamber, [...]
