With the recent announcement that their may be a habitable planet just 12 light-years away from Earth, the question keeps getting asked – just how far are the closest solar systems to our own planet? This graphic created by Space.com shows that – the closest stars and their accompanying solar systems – giving us a better perspective of what’s out there in the neighborhood for us to explore. [Read more...]
The continuously growing community of Reddit, with over 3 billion page views per month, has something for everyone. But how exactly does one subreddit link to the next? In this amazing interactive visualization by Andrei Kashcha each dot represents a subreddit and each link reveals a references to other subreddits in that category’s about section. The visualization shows the magnitude of what a gigantic web the site has become and can also help you navigate the overwhelming network to find the categories right for you. [Read more...]
As libraries around the world are moving towards the future and digitizing their collections, this has been no easy task. The fastest scanning method up until now involved cutting books up to feed them through a quick scanner, which seems blasphemous to do to rare editions, but the alternative of manually scanning each page would be far too tedious. But low and behold BFS-Auto, a robotic book scanner that can digitize books at the rate of over 250 pages/minute without damaging the book in any way! [Read more...]
It’s hard to believe that humans have been flying for well over 100 years. Even when we take into account that the Wright brothers took to the air in 1903, that isn’t even old when compared to the first flights. Before the Wrights there was Octave Chanute and Otto Lilienthal, pioneering glider inventors; and before them there was Henri Giffard, creator of the first powered flying machine – a steam powered airship. [Read more...]
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It has been a long time dream of Earth dwellers to shake off our terrestrial bonds and move to far away places, like space for example. While today the world focus tends to be largely land based, in the 1970s we were in the midst of the Apollo space program, watching men walk on the moon; and gearing up for the Space Shuttle program. It was also a time when the sobering realities of our human impact were becoming obvious to the masses. We saw widespread industrial effects from pollution and an ever rising world population – one which was surprisingly only half of today’s staggering 7 billion. [Read more...]
Buzz Aldrin has been working with engineers from Purdue University to transform his ideas for an Earth-Mars Cycler into reality. The astronaut predicts that by 2030 the first astronaut explorers will take missions to Mars lasting 5 years or longer to observe the planet, which would be followed by colonizers, permanent settlements, and eventually attempts to terraform the red planet and create a habitable Earth-like atmosphere. In 2005, Aldrin told Popular Mechanics, “The Cycler system alters the philosophy behind a Mars program. It makes possible the dream of regular flights to the Red Planet and a permanent human presence there. That’s the only way we’ll ever succeed in taking mankind’s next giant leap: a subway-in-the-sky between our planet and our future second home.” Lego aficionado Andrew Becraft has created his own rendition of the Aldrin Mars Cycler. See more at the BrothersBrick.com. [Read more...]
“Most people who live in Kabul will know somebody who has been hurt or killed by a landmine,” says Afghanistan born designer Massoud Hassani. After years of military training in the country by foreign powers, combined with the current war, the land is strewn with explosives which maim and kill people on a regular basis. Hassani is on a mission to stop this danger and he has a smart and simple solution. [Read more...]
There are so many reasons to head for the country and live lightly on the earth: from protecting our fragile environment, to leaving the speed and stress of city life behind, or just getting to live by your own rules. Photographer Immo Klink has an ongoing project which captures the dwellings of people around Europe who have made the challenging decision to step outside the confines of industrial society, creating their own homes out of the natural world at hand. [Read more...]
The Japanese are big fans of the photo booth, producing some of the most original examples of the stand-alone photo devices you can imagine: from machines which add cute frames around your pictures to examples which morph you into a big eyed manga character. Now a company called Omote 3D is taking the concept to the next level and will soon be offering people their likeness in miniature printed 3D form! [Read more...]
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