NASA’s real life interstellar Enterprise concept ship may look straight out of Star Trek, but their Orion crew module for Exploration Flight Test-1 looks chrometastically cool, like the alien spaceship in Flight of the Navigator. Read more…
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NASA’s Orion crew module looks like a liquid metal alien spaceship
I never imagined I was going to see something like this: A video of a star bursting in space, illuminating the interstellar dust around it at the speed of light. This is not a computer simulation. It’s an actual time-lapse video taken over four years by the Hubble—and scientists don’t know its origin yet. Read more…
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I can’t believe this Hubble’s star explosion time-lapse video is real
I watched The Lego Movie once again. Like the first time, I cried like a little kid. It’s a good movie, but the strong emotional reaction came from deep inside, firing the same childhood memories that The Lego Memory Lane —Leg0 HQ’s underground secret vault with all their sets—did when I visited it in Billund, Denmark. Read more…
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Secret underground vault contains all Lego sets in history
…and it can all be yours for a measly £16, 245 (or about $27, 000) from the London-based Prop Gallery . Just check out all that insane signage (more pix at the link). It’s a potent reminder of how a really well made miniature (built in this case by veteran modelmaker Martin Bowers ) can trump CGI in terms of surface detail. Read more…
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The level of detail in this Nostromo model component is INSANE
Hardscrabble Pictures added sound to this old black and white silent film of San Francisco’s Market Street in April 14, 1906, just four days before the big earthquake that destroyed 80 percent of the city. It’s really wonderful—put on your headphones and listen to the calm before the storm. Read more…
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This is how San Francisco sounded just before getting destroyed in 1906
There may be an answer for people suffering from traumatic brain injuries. It’s a device called a brain-machine-brain interface — and it has the potential to revolutionize the way brain damage is treated in humans. Read more…
Bruce66423 writes “Milton Keynes is the most successful new town in the U.K., being built on a green field site from the ’60s onward. Initially famous for concrete cows, it is the home of the Open University, which offers college-level courses at home. Now, the U.K. Business Secretary has announced plans to have small driverless cars shuttle people around parts of the town starting in 2015. There will be about 20 of the pod-like vehicles to start, each capable of holding two people. They will have their own pathways and move at about 12mph. The plan is to continue developing and testing the vehicles, and by 2017, 100 of them will share walkways with pedestrians.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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UK Town To Get Driverless ‘Pods’ Mixing With Pedestrians
Taco Cowboy writes “‘NASA is calling off attempts to find its Deep Impact comet probe after a suspected software glitch shut down radio communications in August, officials said on Friday.’ Last month, engineers lost contact with Deep Impact and unsuccessfully tried to regain communications. The cause of the failure was unknown, but NASA suspects the spacecraft lost control, causing its antenna and solar panels to be pointed in the wrong direction. NASA had hoped Deep Impact would play a key role in observations of the approaching Comet ISON, a suspected first-time visitor to the inner solar system that was discovered in September 2012 by two Russian astronomers. The comet is heading toward a close encounter with the sun in November, a brush that it may not survive.” Deep Impact has had a pretty good run, though: from its original mission to launch a copper slug at a comet (hence the name), to looking for Earth-sized planets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Software Glitch Means Loss of NASA’s Deep Impact Comet Probe
kkleiner writes “A team has launched a crowdsourcing campaign to develop sustainable natural lighting by using a genetically modified version of the flowering plant Arabidopsis. Using the luciferase gene, the enzyme responsible for making fireflies glow, the researchers will design, print, and transform the genes into the target plant. The project, which was recently launched on Kickstarter, has already raised over $100k with over a month left to go.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Genetically Modified Plants To Produce Natural Lighting
Christian Rex van Minnen paints his subjects in a very classic style of European portraiture, but makes the subjects themselves hideously grotesque. From humanoid fungus to creatures that appear to be half-cartoon, van Minnen’s portraits are compelling and repulsive all at once. Van Minnen combines a wide range of visual inspirations for his portraits, often jamming fashion, biology (with a special emphasis on entrails and spider eyes), tattoos, logos, and bits of cartoon imagery into a single image. They feel at times overloaded (especially in his more recent work), but also fascinating as our brains try to resolve how all those pieces could fit together into one cohesive painting. Some of his subjects look like plausible alien creatures, while others are deformed refugees from Toon Town, but each possesses its own unsettling beauty. Van Minnen is featured in Issue 25 of Hi-Fructose Magazine , where you can also take a peek at his solo show, Welsh Rats , which opens today at Robischon Gallery in Denver. And be sure to check out van Minnen’s website for more portraits and alien still lifes as well. Christian Rex van Minnen [via Hi-Fructose ]
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Grotesque Portraits of Aristocrats from Another Dimension