The NASA Visualization Explorer is a free app that allows you to explore a lot of the science NASA is doing on space-based Earth research. Topics covered include climate change, wildfires, glaciers, hurricanes, volcanoes and more. If it can be observed from an orbital platform, they will cover it sooner or later. This is a great way to get a comprehensive overview on how the planet is doing, and it is not just raw data dumps from the satellites. There are a lot of comprehensive yet concise presentations here, including narrated slide shows and full video presentations. They claim it is for the iPad only, but I am going to see if it will run on my iTouch; it looks like they have some data-dense screens you wouldn’t be able to read the text from but most of the presentations should play just fine on the small screen. You can grab it on iTunes.
This amazing video, called A Slice of Life, was put together by the folks at the GE Show. The premise of the program is to make the technology that is changing our day to day lives understandable in ways everyone can understand. The videos are short, punchy, and full of good information. The one presented here is the 7th in the series and demonstrates how an MRI works by giving you an analog equivalent; everyday objects (mostly food) are sliced up and photographed, the images then organized so you can view it in depth and over time. The soundtrack was nicely chosen to put a tempo to the process. Thanks to Laughing Squid for the heads up on this one.
One of the early geniuses of the space age, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was born on this day in 1857. He was pretty much the first person to put forth the idea that you could use a rocket to go into space, he worked out a lot of the principles of space flight, and he designed the first space stations.
Real Steel hits the big screen in October, and they have turned loose another few trailers to get us ready for it. If you have ever built your own combat bot (all of mine have been in the Nano class, I can’t afford the heavy weight hardware it takes to make it to Robot Wars), you will appreciate this movie. It is also yet another Sci-Fi movie starring Hugh Jackman that has no mutants in it (remember The Fountain, or Van Helsing , or Kate & Leopold?).
The Radioactive Orchestra has an assortment of over 3,000 radioactive isotopes which you can use to create music. Strange as that sounds, it is a first class way to get an instinctive understanding of radiation decay behaviors and patterns, allowing you to directly perceive the activity. And, with a little mixing of isotopes and adjusting your BPM rate and root frequency you can actually end up with an interesting music bed from which to build your own compositions. They also have some wave filter functions; it defaults to a sine wave, but try a square wave or sawtooth for some interesting acoustic variations. Thanks to the folks at New Scientist for the heads up on this one.
Physicist Michio Kaku, the originator of Sci-Fi Science on the Discovery Channel, recently got together with The Daily and explained the latest advances that may finally make the Space Elevator a real possibility.
Like space stations and airlocks, this is another space technology originally proposed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky back in 1895, long before most of his contemporaries consider space as someplace you would go. Along with Germany’s Hermann Oberth and America’s Robert H. Goddard, Russia’s Tsiolkovsky completed the trio who invented rocketry and astronautics, paving the way for today’s modern space programs from around the world.
With the development of Buckey Tubes (Named after Buckminster Fuller who designed the geodesic structure they use, they also named Fullerines aka Buckey Balls after him), or carbon nanotubes as they are also known, we finally have a material both light enough and strong enough to build the elevators. At the moment we can only build Buckey Tubes in small batches, so they are used for things like Biochip interfaces, Nano Radio control systems and other microscopic to nanoscopic scale projects. But now that we have been building them for such applications for the last decade or so, we are beginning to ramp up he production batch sizes, so the space elevator may be able to begin serious construction in another decade or 3. Thanks to the Science News Blog for the heads up on this one.