In October 1946, American scientists, working in White Sands, New Mexico, shot a V-2 missile 65 miles into the air. The missile (originally designed by the Nazis during World War II) carried a 35-millimeter camera aloft that snapped an image every second and a half.

A couple of years ago, Maria Popova (aka @BrainPicker) highlighted for us a 2009 talk by John Cleese that offered a handbook for creating the right conditions for creativity. Of course, John Cleese knows something about creativity, being one of the leading forces behind Monty Python, the beloved British comedy group.

In 1979, the charismatic physicist Richard Feynman journeyed to the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and delivered a series of four lectures on Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), the theory for which he won his Nobel Prize.

Hats off to the Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, which produced this three minute animation called Perpetual Ocean. The visualization shows ocean currents as they swirled around between June 2005 and December 2007, and it was all produced with a computational model called ECCO2.

On 18 June 2009, NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) from Cape Canaveral to conduct investigations that would pave the way for future lunar exploration.

Don Pettit joined NASA in 1996 and has since logged more than 176 days in space, living abord the International Space Station (ISS) multiple times, and always taking his camera with him. In the past, he has shown us What It Feels Like to Fly Over Planet Earth, Views of the Aurora Borealis Seen from Space, and How to Drink Coffee at Zero Gravity.

As the sun’s 11-year cycle of magnetic storms moves closer to peak intensity sometime early next year, people who live at higher latitudes can expect to see colorful auroras lighting up the night sky. But what would it be like to look down at the auroras, or to move through them? In these striking images from NASA, we find out.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked by a reader of TIME magazine back in 2008, “What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?” Here’s his answer, set to a newly-designed video. If you want to see the original TIME Q&A, you can revisit it on YouTube here.

Forget about inclined planes and pulleys. In this series from the PBS program NOVA, physics is presented as an exotic, mind-bending realm.
The Fabric of the Cosmos, first broadcast in November, follows up on the 2003 Peabody Award-winning The Elegant Universe.

It’s a little random. It’s very cool. It’s Jared Ficklin’s interactive art project that takes Stephen Hawking’s Cambridge Lectures and then uses an algorithm to turn the physicist’s words into stars. The video pretty much explains all that you need to know. I should only add two things. 1.