NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has released an animated video showing the tsunami originating off the coast of Japan, and then spreading across the Pacific. Dramatic, to say the least.
Last year, NOAA also produced an animation that visualized the tremors from the big Chilean quake as they worked their way across the globe. Catch it here.
The Smithsonian Institution has launched Smithsonian WILD, a new web site that lets you search through its collection of over 202,000 images culled from seven ongoing wildlife studies. Researchers in remote locations across the globe have set up “camera traps” – automated cameras triggered by motion sensors – and left them to record whatever wildlife passes by. The resulting images, be they of giant pandas in China, barking deer in Thailand, or roughed grouse on the Appalachian Trail, aren’t nearly as pretty or clear as those we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in nature magazines and HD primetime specials. But their rawness is part of their appeal: Clicking through these galleries imparts a sense of real-time excitement, as if we too have been crouched in the jungle for hours, waiting to catch a glimpse of something wild.
via Boingboing
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Robert Sapolsky, Professor of Biology at Stanford University, famously focuses his research on stress above all else. (Don’t miss his book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.) The video above features Sapolsky presenting the Pritzker Lecture at the California Academy of Sciences on February 15, 2011. The full lecture can be seen here. In this excerpt, Sapolsky amusingly tells the audience how monkeys and humans commonly generate the highest levels of dopamine when pleasure is anticipated, not when pleasure is actually experienced. But humans, as opposed to monkeys, can “keep those dopamine levels up for decades and decades waiting for the reward.” And for some, Sapolsky adds, that perceived reward lies beyond this life – in the afterlife. (Sapolsky was raised in an orthodox Jewish family, but is an atheist now.) The Stanford professor talks about similar issues (what separates us from primates) in another captivating talk, “What makes us human?”
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
Have you ever wondered what the WiFi signal looks like around your office, school, or local café? In this video, Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen, and Einar Sneve Martinussen show you the invisible. And they pulled this off by building a WiFi measuring rod, measuring four meters in length, that can visualize WiFi signals around Oslo, Norway with the help of long exposure photography.
What’s fascinating to see is how the WiFi signals vary across the city. Away from residential buildings, the drop-off in WiFi strength is steep. On the other hand, the WiFi signal is dense around commercial and academic buildings. The amazing visualization gives us a glimpse into the complex relationships between WiFi networks and the physical environments underpinning them. For a deeper read about this project, see this blog post.
Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.
Last Thursday, the sun delivered the goods, unleashing a beautiful solar flare. The eruptions lasted somewhere around 90 minutes, and the plasma flares were all captured in high def by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a project dedicated to studying the sun and its impact on space weather. This footage comes soon after another groundbreaking NASA video – the First 360 Degree View of the Sun.
Courtesy of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, we’re zooming into a “majestic disk of stars and dust lanes” and getting a stunning view of the spiral galaxy NGC 2841, which lies 46 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear). But wait, it gets even better. This high resolution still photo shows the spiral galaxy in all its beauty and splendor…
File under Everything is a Remix. Ben Hillman offers a creative little riff on “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (listen here), an Anglican hymn inspired by William Paley’s 1802 treatise, Natural Theology, which positions God as the designer of the natural world … in an Enlightenment kind of way. You can catch more Hillman videos on Vimeo here.
A new NASA breakthrough lets us see the sun in a 360 degree, panoramic view. The upshot? Better space weather reports coming our way. The video from NASA’s YouTube channel has all the good details …
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