Stephen’s Untold Stories

June 10th, 2008

Photos from above the clouds.

Here is an amazing photo collection taken by on the most recent Space Shuttle flight.

Click each image for a larger version.

Link to complete gallery.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
June 1st, 2008

How well do you know basic physics?

Apparently I don’t know basic physics as well as I thought. As I was taking the quiz, I began to anticipate scoring around 70% or so. I was quite disappointed to attain only 47.5%. I guess it’s a good thing I never taught science.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
May 31st, 2008
May 27th, 2008

Photos of Mars

NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander has been taking some amazing pictures lately. Here is a nice gallery.

Link to gallery.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
May 20th, 2008

I made it to the Official Google Documents Blog!

A while back I got a comment here from one of the editors of the Official Google Documents Blog. She asked if I could put something together to include on their blog. I’m glad to report that my contribution went live today.

Here is a link to my post over there.

Does this mean I’m famous? Or maybe infamous? :)

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
April 16th, 2008

How many elements can you name in 15 minutes?

Very cool animation. I only scored a 58. :(

Click chart to play.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
March 11th, 2008

Amazing Image of the Earth at Night

The red areas are wildfires. Looks like Africa is having some huge ones.

You really need to see the larger version here.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
February 27th, 2008

Funny Science Fair Photos

I’m sure many of you created some that were just as amusing.

idealpancreas

thegarlic

videogamesaffect

Here is the entire gallery.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
December 28th, 2007

More Blue Angel Awesomeness

This guy creates a Prandtl-Glauert condensation cloud by flying about 25 feet above the water.

December 13th, 2007

Energy Source of Northern Lights Found

Very cool!

Scientists think they have discovered the energy source of the spectacular color displays seen in the northern lights. New data from NASA’s Themis mission, a quintet of satellites launched this winter, found the energy comes from a stream of charged particles from the sun flowing like a current through twisted bundles of magnetic fields connecting Earth’s upper atmosphere to the sun.

The energy is then abruptly released in the form of a shimmering display of lights visible in the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, said principal investigator Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Link to article

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
November 14th, 2007

Earthrise

Beautiful photos from a Japanese moon probe.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
October 4th, 2007

Sputnik Anniversary

Google Remembers

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
September 25th, 2007

Who has the oil?

Interesting graphic. Click image for larger version.

 

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
September 20th, 2007

So who wants to live on the moon?

Not sure I’m ready for that, but I’d be interested in checking out the property values.

NASA announced new details yesterday about its plans for a Moon base that included a pair of small, pressurized rovers with a range of nearly 600 miles.

The space agency plans to return astronauts to the Moon around 2020. Agency officials first described proposals last December for a polar lunar base powered by near constant sunlight on solar panels.

Earlier proposals to carry small habitation modules to the Moon in stages might be supplanted by a proposal that would heave a single large module to the Moon on an unmanned cargo ship, Doug Cooke, the NASA official leading the lunar study group, said.

The new rover would not be much larger than the buggies the Apollo astronauts drove, but would be pressurized so that astronauts could drive in shirt sleeves and be protected from radiation — probably by a layer of water in the rover’s body, said Geoff Yoder, an official working on the lunar plans. To explore on foot, astronauts would put on spacesuits and leave the vehicle, Mr. Yoder said. The cost? “More than a Ferrari,” he joked.

Link to article

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
September 3rd, 2007

The Panama Canal is getting wider

This reminds me of a famous palindrome.

  • A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.canal

Anyway, I guess it’s time some improvements were made to the canal.

Panama blasted away part of a hillside next to the canal on Monday, marking the start of the waterway’s biggest expansion since it opened 93 years ago.

The $5.25 billion expansion is expected to double the 50-mile canal’s capacity and lower the price of consumer goods on the East Coast of the United States by allowing wider vessels to squeeze through with more cargo.

About two-thirds of the cargo that passed through the canal is headed to or from the United States. China is the Panama Canal’s second-largest user.

The waterway now moves 4 percent of the world’s cargo. The new locks, approved in a referendum nearly a year ago, are expected to be ready for use between 2014 and 2015.

Link to article

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
August 12th, 2007
August 6th, 2007

Teacher-Astronaut to Fly Decades After Challenger

This is a great story. I’m glad she will get her chance.

07shuttle-600

Barbara R. Morgan is now an astronaut by profession, heading into space this week for the first time on the space shuttle. But she said she would be approaching her mission “with the mind, eyes, ears and heart of a teacher.”

“That’s what I am, a teacher,” Ms. Morgan said, “That’s what I am at my core.”

She said patience and perseverance were virtues that defined good schoolteachers. Living her principles, she is about to fulfill a two-decade-old dream by becoming the first “educator astronaut” when she and six fellow astronauts blast off in the space shuttle Endeavour on Wednesday on a mission to the International Space Station.

The flight will also fulfill a dream deferred from January 1986, when the shuttle Challenger blew up during takeoff, killing a crew that included the first designated teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe, Ms. Morgan’s friend. A high school teacher from Concord, N.H., Ms. McAuliffe had planned a series of educational sessions from space.

Not losing faith in the program, Ms. Morgan, as the backup teacher for that mission, kept the dream alive even when returning to the classroom by becoming an advocate for spaceflight and helping the National Aeronautics and Space Administration find a way to continue including teacher-astronauts in its plans.

“I believe in my heart that space exploration is key for all of us, especially for our young people to keep their futures open-ended,” she said in a preflight news conference.

Link to complete article

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
July 19th, 2007

We have the technology to rebuild him/her!

I was always a fan of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Maybe soon those will be reality shows that I won’t watch.

070719-bionic-hand_big

Seriously, it’s good to see that amputees will have better options.

Link to article

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
July 11th, 2007

Baby Mammoth Found Frozen in Russia

I haven’t posted anything from National Geographic in a while, but I had to get this one up.

070711-mammoth-picture_big

A Russian hunter traipsing through Russia’s remote Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region in May noticed what he thought was a reindeer carcass sticking out of the damp snow. (See a map of Russia and its remote Siberian regions.)

On closer inspection, the “reindeer” turned out to be a 40,000-year-old baby mammoth, perfectly encased in ice.

The six-month-old female mammoth is the most well-preserved example yet found of the beasts, which lumbered across the Earth during the last Ice Age, 1.8 million to 11,500 years ago.

“It’s a lovely little baby mammoth indeed, found in perfect condition,” Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Zoological Institute, told the Reuters news agency.

At 110 pounds (50 kilograms) and 51 inches long (130 centimeters long), the baby is the size of a large dog, Reuters reported.

Link to article

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens
June 20th, 2007

Venus Eclipse

Now this is something you don’t see every day.

venuseclipse_heinzen_big

(Click image for larger version)

Something was about to happen. Just two days ago, two of the three celestial objects easily visible during the day appeared to collide. But actually, Earth’s Moon passed well in front of the distant planet Venus. The occultation was caught from Switzerland in the hours before sunset. Moments after this image was taken, the Moon, visible as the crescent on the right of the above image, eclipsed Venus, appearing in gibbous phase on the lower left. Clouds that once threatened to obscure the whole event, were visible on the far left. About 90 minutes later, Venus re-appeared just to the right of the bright crescent.

Link to article

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite PicLens