A Bear's-Eye View of Yellowstone

"For the first time, trek into the wild backcountry of America's first national park and see what it looks like from a bear's point of view."

"Special cameras were attached to the tracking collars of two grizzlies and two black bears in Yellowstone. Massive and hungry, these bears prowl for food and confront danger along the way. It's a matter of life and death for all of them. Tag along as National Geographic gives you an unprecedented window into some of the most fearsome predators on Earth. And watch as these bears act as tour guides through their secret world, with little human intervention."

View National Geographic video

Stuff in Space

Stuff in Space is a realtime 3D map of objects in Earth orbit, visualized using WebGL.

The website updates daily with orbit data from Space-Track.org and uses the excellent satellite.js Javascript library to calculate satellite positions.

The creator of this site is James Yoder; He's an alumnus of FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Team 624 and an incoming Electrical and Computer Engineering freshman at the University of Texas at Austin.

Visit this site. 

The Internet in Real-Time

Click the animation to open the full version (via PennyStocksLab).

The Internet in Real-Time looks at a number of websites and services, including app downloads from Apple and Google, You Tube videos watched, items purchased on Amazon, tweets sent, hours viewed on Netflix, and so much more.

Cognitive Lode - Brain gems for decision-makers

Cognitive Lode is a free resource by ribot to help you make better products. They distill the latest behavioural economics and consumer psychology research down into helpful little brain gems. You start by reading the summaries on the home page and should you want to know more you click on the link to read the long descriptions. As example here is a typical summary:

"The Cognitive Miser. We’re intellectually lazy, avoiding hard questions where possible. A bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does ball cost? Intuition says 10¢, but it’s not. The answer’s in the long description…"

Or this one:

"Hedonic Adaptation. Restricting pleasure increases pleasure. Enjoyment of a television program is actually enhanced by commercial interruptions, despite what viewers say."

These bits of advice would seem to valuable for decision-makers, while the rest of us will enjoy how we are often manipulated by companies without us even knowing.

 View the Cognitive Lode

A 50-cent microscope that folds like origami

"Perhaps you’ve punched out a paper doll or folded an origami swan? TED Fellow Manu Prakash and his team have created a microscope made of paper that's just as easy to fold and use. A sparkling demo that shows how this invention could revolutionize healthcare in developing countries … and turn almost anything into a fun, hands-on science experiment."

Watch this TED Talk below:



  View Source

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A Model of the Solar System

Artist and designer Josh Worth wrote on his blog:

"I was talking about the planets with my 5-year-old daughter the other day. I was trying to explain how taking a summer vacation to Mars in the future will be a much bigger undertaking than a trip to Palm Springs (though equally as hot). I kept trying to describe the distance using metaphors like “if the earth was the size of a golf ball, then Mars would be across the soccer field” etc., but I realized I didn’t really know much about these distances, besides the fact that they were really large and hard to understand. Pictures in books, planetarium models, even telescopes are pretty misleading when it comes to judging just how big the universe can be. Are we doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring all the emptiness?

So I thought I would see if a computer screen could help make a map of a solar system that’s a bit more accurate (while teaching myself a few things about javascript, SVGs and viewports along the way). Not that pixels are any better at representing scale than golfballs, but they’re our main way of interpreting most information these days, so why not the solar system?"

Click here to visit some of the big spaces out in space and be prepared to scroll!

Science Snacks

"These pages are full of Snacks...but they're not the kind you eat. Science treats for the mind! These mental snacks are all about doing your own scientific experiments and observations with mostly common household items. Learn about light refraction, magnetism, balance, motion - all from the comfort of your home!"

Explore Exploratorium: Science Snacks

The Human Clock

"Humanclock.com shows a photograph of the current time, with the photo changing every minute of the day (all 1,440 occurring minutes on Earth!) Thus you end up with a rotating picture clock sorta deal.

How the time is actually displayed is a whole different matter. A lot of photos have the time written on a crummy cardboard sign, while other photos might have the current time in a more edible format, such as olives. There are photos below sea level and ones over two miles above sea level. There are even clock pictures with people who played at Woodstock.

Many people viewing this website end up sending in their own clock pictures, be they in an airplane, installing brakes, or on a playground in Missouri. There are clock pictures from all over the world ranging from Outback Australia to Canada to Pakistan to Antarctica to Italy to Brazil. Other people travel around the American Southwest and end up taking a clock photo on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. There are even enough clock photos now to have pictures from Phoenix Arizona, Tacoma, Philadelphia, Atlanta, LA, and Northern California."

What time is it? Check at: The Human Clock - A Clock Photo for Every Minute of the Day

NASA - SuitSat

"One of the strangest satellites in the history of the space age is about to go into orbit. Launch date: Feb. 3rd 2006. That's when astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) will hurl an empty spacesuit overboard.

The spacesuit is the satellite -- "SuitSat" for short.

"SuitSat is a Russian brainstorm," explains Frank Bauer of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Some of our Russian partners in the ISS program, mainly a group led by Sergey Samburov, had an idea: Maybe we can turn old spacesuits into useful satellites." SuitSat is a first test of that idea."

Visit: NASA - SuitSat

Online Guide to Snowflakes

"This site is all about snow crystals and snowflakes -- what they are, where they come from, and just how these remarkably complex and beautiful structures are created, quite literally, out of thin air."

Visit: Guide to Snowflakes

World Sunlight Map

"The World Sunlight Map provides a computer-generated approximation of what the earth currently looks like. While less impressive than actually being into orbit, this is much more accessible to most of us.

It starts with cloudless images of the earth during the day (from a pair of NASA satellites) and night (from a DoD program to map city lights). Every 3 hours, it downloads a composite cloud image based on data from weather satellites all over the world. And every half hour, these images are composited and mapped onto a sphere by xplanet according to the relative position of the sun. The flat maps are post-processed by ImageMagick to cut off the 15 degrees nearest the north and south poles where cloud data is unavailable."

View the world map showing current sunlight and cloud cover at: World Sunlight Map

Archimedes Death Ray

"Ancient Greek and Roman historians recorded that during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, Archimedes (a notably smart person) constructed a burning glass to set the Roman warships, anchored within bow and arrow range, afire. The story has been much debated and oft dismissed as myth. TV's MythBusters were not able to replicate the feat and 'busted' the myth. Intrigued by the idea and an intuitive belief that it could work, the MIT's 2.009ers decided to apply the early product development 'sketch or soft modeling' process to the problem. Our goal was not to make a decision on the 'myth' we just wanted to assess if it was at least possible, and have some fun in the process."

Learn more at: Archimedes Death Ray

What's That Bug?

"What's That Bug? is bigger and better than ever. We continue to be OVERWHELMED by letters from our sensitive and scared readers. We have been getting hundreds of letters a week, and it is getting to be impossible to answer them all, but we try. If you have a question about a bug, please take the time to look at our alphabatized list of bugs before writing us. The most popular household intruders we get letters about are HOUSE CENTIPEDES and PANTRY BEETLES. Larger frightening creatures that are frequent letter topics include POTATO BUGS, DOBSONFLIES and TOE-BITERS. So please check out those sections if you see something creepy in your house or yard!"

Visit: What's That Bug?

The Nine Planets Solar System Tour

"The Nine Planets is a collection of information about our Solar System intended for a general audience with little technical background. No special expertise or knowledge is needed; all technical and astronomical terms and proper names are defined in the glossary. The bulk of this material should be familiar to planetary scientists and astronomers but they may find a few interesting tidbits, too.
This site consists of about pages, one page for each major body in the Solar System. Each page has: a large picture of its object and usually several smaller thumbnail images (all linked to their full-size originals) some scientific and historical facts about it, if the object has satellites then its page has a table of data on them and links to their pages, links to more images and information about the object elsewhere on the Web, and a list of open issues for which we as yet have no answers."

The Nine Planets Solar System Tour

Causes of Colors - Why are things colored?

"Why are things colored? Why is the sky blue? Why is fire yellow? What about flamingos or emeralds?

Scholars have learned that all the colors in the universe originate from a mere fifteen fundamental physical causes. These causes appear over and over, lending color to the world around us. Some common causes seem logical -- for example, both light bulbs and candles are colored by incandescence -- and others are surprising -- did you know that the colors of peacock feathers and bubbles are both caused by interference? These fifteen causes of color derived from a variety of physical and chemical mechanisms are summarized in five groups in this exhibit. "


Causes of Colors - Why are things colored?

Ban Trans Fats: The Campaign to Ban Partially Hydrogenated Oils

"It is now universally accepted that partially hydrogenated oils should be removed from our food supply as soon as possible. Partially hydrogenated oils contain trans fats that contribute significantly to premature heart attacks and other health problems.

About 40% of products in supermarkets contain them. Some health conscious markets such as Whole Foods will not sell any products containing partially hydrogenated oils. If the words "partially hydrogenated" or "shortening" are in the list of ingredients, don't buy that product, and if you've already bought it then just throw it away. You can always find an equivalent product which is just as tasty, without the partially hydrogenated oil."

Learn more: Ban Trans Fats: The Campaign to Ban Partially Hydrogenated Oils

The Biology of B-Movie Monsters

"Size has been one of the most popular themes in monster movies, especially those from ... the 1950s. The premise is invariably to take something out of its usual context--make people small or something else (gorillas, grasshoppers, amoebae, etc.) large--and then play with the consequences. However, Hollywood's approach to the concept has been, from a biologist's perspective, hopelessly naïve. Absolute size cannot be treated in isolation; size per se affects almost every aspect of an organism's biology. Indeed, the effects of size on biology are sufficiently pervasive and the study of these effects sufficiently rich in biological insight that the field has earned a name of its own: 'scaling.'

In The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), the hero is exposed to radioactive toxic waste and finds himself growing smaller and smaller. He is lost to family and friends while fending off the household cat and must make his own way in a world grown monstrously large. He forages food from crumbs and drinks from puddles of condensation. In one famous scene, he defends himself against a house spider by using an abandoned sewing needle, which he has to struggle to lift."


Stop the projector! Time for a little analysis. The Biology of B-Movie Monsters

Welcome to The Mistletoe Center

If you need to get in touch with your inner botanist then learn more about Mistletoe. Do you see it as something to kiss under at Christmas or a "plant pest that saps and sometimes dwarfs and kills the trees it feeds on."

Need to learn more then visit Welcome to The Mistletoe Center

Numbers Stations

"For more than 30 years the Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of “Numbers Stations”.

Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a “one time pad” is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is."

Tune in and learn more about The Conet Project

Longest Burning Light Bulb in History

"Welcome to the homepage devoted to the Longest burning Light Bulb in history. The average light bulb lasts for 750 to 1,000 hours. The carbon filament bulb burning in the fire department in Livermore, California has been burning since 1901."

Learn more about this long-life bulb at: Livermore's Centennial Light

View the BulbCam at: BulbCam Updates every 30 seconds.