River Wall

While playing around on Google Maps recently, I followed the course of a river from its headwaters to its outlet in Hudson's Bay.  I noticed that as I followed it's course it was abruptly cut off by a dam... and it was cut off a half-dozen more times by similar dams.  Dams from the air look funny: they cut off the beautiful fractaline/neuronal shape of the river making it abstract.   Below is a series of images showing various dams in North America and how they cut off the rivers flow (the might canyons after the dam host only a rivulet).  I'm not sure whether this makes me sad to see, or maybe some other emotion that is as yet inarticulate

Bowling Ball and Feather in Vacuum

Comet and Moon

via http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/pan-starrs-time-lapse/

Galaxy Simulation

 "For many years, I have been working on a project to visualize and animate the dynamics of galaxies using supercomputer simulations." - John Dubinski, University of Toronto. 

 via http://www.galaxydynamics.org/home.html

Photographic Timelines

A photographic technique developed by Jay Mark Johnson.  



From the site: 

"In the image, anything that is stationary is repeated throughout the sequence (that’s the horizontal lines across the image), but objects that move are only in part of the scene. Furthermore, the faster they move, the thinner they appear. In this way, a single image is capturing objects and their rate of motion through a sliver of space. The leftmost edge of the image is the furthest back in time." 



via http://singularityhub.com/2012/10/29/camera-technique-captures-new-view-of-space-and-time/

Cities from Space (at night)

via NASA

Ant Colony Castings

Pretty  Cool:



Thanks to my brother for the link.

Geoff

*Update: Here are some more....





Reminds me of the Catacombs of Domitilla (see old post: http://blog.geoffchristou.com/2012/06/m1-8-catacombs-of-domitilla.html)

-g

Hover Bike

I'll believe it when I own it...



... so often these are fake and more often these new-flight-thingys are run by terrible business-people or idealists who destroy the company. Anyone remember Solotrek?



But then again Sikorsky must have been a nut bar and he brought us the helicopter... so...



-g

Water in Zero Gravity

M1 - 2 - Iso- vs. Anisotropic Space

Research survey spurred by "the isotropy of space".

Heat Map of Halo 3 level called "Assembly".  Red is where more players have died, blue less. Not all space is equally deadly. (bungie.com)

Anistropy of water crystals in human brain (via dMRI scan) shows interconnections within brain and across brain regions. 

Mouse Nerve fibre layer. (Gabriel Luna. US Santa Barbara)

Galactic Filaments are the largest observed structures in the Universe.  The Great Sloan Wall measures 1,370,000,000 Light Years (Light travels at 299,792,458m/s) Long.  In between these filaments are Voids, huge volumes of space devoid of almost all mass.  


The variable distribution of mass in the Universe is illustrated by the recent observation (1978) that the Local Group of Galaxies, including our Milkyway (and its potential super-huge blackhole) are all actually being drawn, towards a common region of space so dense that it is known at the Great Attractor. 


The distribution of mass or "luminous matter" in the universe is more like a foam that does not violate the Cosmological Prininciple (Viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the Universe are the same for all observers.' (Keel 2007)

This in image from one section of a 10,000,000,000 particle simulation by the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.  

The Millennium Run used more than 10 billion particles to trace the evolution of the matter distribution in a cubic region of the Universe over 2 billion light-years on a side. It kept busy the principal supercomputer at the Max Planck Society's Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany for more than a month. By applying sophisticated modelling techniques to the 25 Tbytes of stored output, Virgo scientists have been able to recreate evolutionary histories both for the 20 million or so galaxies which populate this enormous volume and for the supermassive black holes which occasionally power quasars at their hearts. By comparing such simulated data to large observational surveys, one can clarify the physical processes underlying the buildup of real galaxies and black holes. (From their website).




x

The World at Night - Atacama

Delicious Time-lapse from Space

100 Million Mile Wide Bubbles

Earth Drags Space Time

From a CBC article:

"Imagine the Earth as if it were immersed in honey. As the planet rotates, the honey around it would swirl, and it's the same with space and time," Francis Everitt, the Stanford University physicist who led the mission, said in a statement.

Gravity Probe B was designed to test the predictions by taking measurements from four ultra-precise gyroscopes. Those instruments contain rotors that NASA bills as the "most perfect spheres ever made by humans," allowing them to spin indefinitely without drifting from the alignment of their rotation.

The gyroscopes were aboard a spacecraft circling the Earth in a polar orbit — that is, it travelled perpendicular to the Earth's rotation, passing over both poles during each orbit.

The experiment was set up so the gyroscopes' axes of rotation should always point in the same direction — toward the "guide" star IM Pegasi — provided the Earth's gravity did not affect space and time.

However, the researchers detected tiny, measurable changes in the direction of the gyroscopes' spins, confirming that the Earth's gravity does:

• Warp space and time around it, which is called the geodetic effect.
• Pull space and time with it as it rotates, an effect called frame dragging.

NASA began planning the mission in 1963, making it one of the longest-running projects in the U.S. space agency's history. The satellite was decommissioned in December 2010, after the final parcels of data were collected.

via http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/05/05/science-gravity-probe-b-relativity.html