… Read More → "Curiosity (the new Mars Rover) explained"

The International Olympic Committee has run into a bit of a spectrum bandwidth problem at the London Olympics. It seems that spectators at some of the Olympic venues are tweeting so much, that it’s squeezing out the signals for essential event related communications.

The problem came to a head at the men’s cycling road race, with up to a million spectators lining the route. Massive bandwidth use by fans sending tweets and watching live coverage of the event on their phones, made it difficult for the TV networks to get telemetry data about … Read More → "IOC asks Olympic spectators to chill it with the excessive Tweets"

On July 24, 2012, NASA successfully launched a pair of newly developed spectrometers aboard a sounding rocket from the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico to an altitude of 323.8 km (201.2 mi). This may not seem to have much to do with extending the life of a satellite floating between the Sun and Earth about 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 mi) away, but it does. That’s because the tests’ purpose was both to test new instruments … Read More → "Successful launch of NASA’s degradation free spectrometers"

If you’re of the mind that us young whippersnappers’ music all sounds the same, it turns out the science backs you up. The younger generation may have some great new ways to listen to music, but it seems kind of pointless if it all sounds the same.

There exists an archive called the Million Song Dataset, which proves art can be looked at somewhat objectively. It breaks lyrical and audio content into data, and it covers pop songs from 1955 to 2010.

Researchers in Spain ran all this data through a few algorithms and … Read More → "Science proves music all sounds the same these days"

While aquariums provide a relaxing pastime for humans on Earth, recreation is not the goal behind the new Aquatic Habitat, or AQH, aboard the International Space Station. Instead, researchers will use this unique facility to look at how microgravity impacts marine life. 

Sponsored by the Japanese Space Agency, or JAXA, this habitat is a closed-water circulatory system, which provides a new facility option for station research. Scientists will use the habitat … Read More → "The International Space Station is getting an aquarium!"

…and a place you must visit before you die. 

This is the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flatland in the world at 4,086 square miles (10,582 kilometers). Every year, this amazing wonderland in southwest Bolivia covers with a thin layer of water. When that happens, it turns into the largest mirror on the planet, as these photos recently taken by Takaki Watanabe show.
via Read More → "This is the largest mirror in the world…"

Photographer Duncan Davidson presents his thoughts on how perception, mirrors, and the uncanny valley make us hate photos of ourselves in this TED Talent Search talk.
via Laughing Squid

… Read More → "Why do we hate seeing photos of ourselves?"

Now, this isn’t an entomology blog, but technology is often at its best when it imitates the feats of the world of insects. Just as the water strider is able to skate along the water, so can a new microbot described in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. In fact, the bot, built by a team from the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, goes further–not only can it walk on a water, like a certain foundational figure of a major Western religion, it can jump on water.
via < … Read More → "Superhydrophobicity, robot bugs, and you"

Lombard Street, the windy San Francisco road with the line of cars and gaping socks-in-sandals tourists, isn’t the twistiest road in the city (that title belongs to Vermont Street), but it’s a sunny stage that’s ideal for public stunts. And MotoGP racer Stefan Bradl wended his way down the street on his racing-spec motorcycle four times for a Red Bull promotional video.

Bradl is … Read More → "Slaloming Lombard Street in a racing-spec motorcycle"

If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to be a photographer at a major sporting event, Pop Photo has the next best thing: an in-depth interview with Getty photographer Streeter Lecka, who’s going to be shooting the London Olympics in intimate detail.
via Gizmodo

Read More → "The contents of an Olympic photographer’s bag"