My mom send me a link to this video.  Very cool footage of a creek in Yosemite that looks like the output of a giant slurpee machine!  It’s ice and water that flows like lava. 

Bonus feature is the “snow cone” that forms at the bottom of one of the water falls as water freezes on the way down.

It’s one thing to get a picture of the International Space Station… quite another to get a picture while it’s passing in front of the moon or sun!

I got this picture from Discover Magazine who did a whole article about how the photograph was taken.  Check it out!

Discover - Bad Astronomy: Insanely Awesome Solar Eclipse Picture

There is also another article with a shot of the ISS passing in front of the moon.

Discover - Bad Astronomy: When Natural and Artificial Moons Align

I love data visualization stuff and this video is a very cool way of looking at a LOT of data. 

I noticed a couple of things about this presentation that skewed the data a little bit.  Did you notice that the Y axis doesn’t start at zero?  Did you notice that the X axis is logarithmic while the Y axis is linear? The overall effect is to make wealth appear to have a greater impact on lifespan than it does. 

In spite of the skewing of the data, it’s still a very cool visualization!

This morning I came across an awesome site for Robotics.  Festo is a company that focuses on industrial automation and they do a lot of research through their Bionic Learning Network. 

Below is a video they put together a few years ago…. super cool stuff!

They also have a  CyberKitevideo on their website that is worth checking out.

Their website (link above) has a lot of videos posted and a search of "Festo Bionic Learning Network"on YouTube will bring up lots of other time wasting educational videos.

Did your mom ever yell at you for looking directly at the sun?  Turns out that long before Galileo figured out how to use a telescope to project sunlight onto paper people were viewing sunspots with their naked eyes.  History records that some observations of sunspots go back before the time of Christ even!

This week I came across some interesting graphs in a book by Edward Tufte.  They showed some recorded history of sunspots showing their intensity and number vary on a roughly 10 year cycle. 

Turns out that tonight and tomorrow we are going to get blasted with a wall of ionized atoms that erupted from the Sun’s surface on Sunday.  Apparently the ten year cycle is starting over and the sun is waking up to become more active for a while!

Here’s a story about the solar storm from Fox News

Solar Tsunami

Click on this cool image of the sun to see a slideshow with more great pics!

Remember the movie Armageddon where Bruce Willis and Ben Afleck save the world from a massive asteroid?  Who can forget Liv Tyler right?  :)

So apparently there is an asteroid that is headed towards earth that might cause some serious destruction.  Some estimates say that it could make a crater the size of say… London.  I haven’t been to London but it seems like that would be a pretty big impact!

Panic! Run! Hide! OK not really.  It won’t get here until 2182… if it does get here.  There’s a 1 in a 1000 chance of impact.

The name of the asteroid is 1999 RQ36. In all seriousness, NASA needs to hire some creative namers.  Look what the hurricane naming has done for the meteorological world!  People talk about Katrina and Andrew and everyone knows what they are talking about.  1999 RQ36?  Really? 

Anyway, I found a way cool simulator at NASA.  Takes a little bit of playing with to get the controls to work but you can fast forward to 2182 by changing the drop down to “1 year” then hitting play for a bit.  When you get to about 2180 pause it and switch it to “1 day” then hit play and let it go through to about September of 2182. 

Way cool stuff!

JPL Small-Body Database Browser

Robots are cool.  Robots that look like the AT-AT from Star Wars are even cooler!

The Ranger is a new robot built by people at Cornell and it recently broke a walking record… for robots anyway!

Read the story on MSNBC.  They say it looks like a toaster on legs but in a side by side comparison I think the AT-AT resemblance is definitely there!

Remember the Happy Hollister books?  No?  Hardy Boys?  Maybe?  The Three Investigators?  Hm…  so many memories of reading books as a kid.  I always loved a great mystery though and I think the Three Investigators were my favorite books. 

Anyway, a real-life mystery was solved recently involving a famous poet, an astronomical event and some historical detective work.  Intrigued?  I was!  Read about the Walt Whitman Meteor Mystery that was solved by some Texas State astronomers. 

Walt Whitman Meteor Mystery

Remember how as a kid you and your friends would get into a cardboard box and pretend to be flying into outer space?  Everyone does that right? How would you like to do that for real…  climb into a box with some other people and for 18 months pretend to be flying to Mars?

That’s what these guys are doing.  ESA Mars 500

Granted, the box they are going to be living in for the next 18 months is a lot nicer than the old refrigerator boxes we used to use!  Here are some diagrams: Mars 500 Isolation Facility

We can follow along with updates from the fake Mars mission too, just look for the Mars Mission Diary on the right side of the home page.

The visual display of information is a very intriguing field to me.  I like to think I am an organized person (my fiance disagrees but we won’t go there!) so charts that organize a lot of information efficiently are cool.

Periodic tables are a very efficient method of organizing large amounts of information in a visual space. 

Here are a few periodic tables, starting with the most famous, the Periodic Table of Elements:

Periodic Table of Elements

Periodic Table of Typefaces

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods (ironic or just cool!?)

Here are a few less useful tables.

Periodic Table of Candy

Periodic Table of Elephants

and last but not least for my fiance:

Periodic Table of Wine

Then this guy on his Hot Chocolate Blog points out that you can spell “Chocolate” with the element symbols… in four different ways!