Interest of the day

Ellen McManis at xkcd posted a What if scenario for someone throwing a baseball at close to the speed of light. It a cool idea and the results are surprising to me at least.

New Scientist posted a handy guide to what the Higgs Boson measurements might mean.

NASA reports a X1.4 class solar flare and CME was ejected from the Sun yesterday. All the energetic particles should arrive here on Earth sometime Sunday morning.

NASA has release a game (simulator) that allows you to build and launch your own virtual space telescope to study the universe.

Curiosity is big so landing on Mars is hard. NASA produced this short video describing the sequence. Everything must go right or there will be another crater on Mars. Yikes.

CBS ran this story about Bell Labs in March. It had an amazing record of innovation and accomplishments. It's still around although much smaller with around 1500 people working world wide, but has a respectable budget of $3B/year according to the video.

Voyager 1 will likely become an interstellar traveler very soon as described in this short NASA video.

Cassini took this wonderful photo of Titan during a recent flyby.

Astronaut Don Pettit shows how he built a Van de Graaff generator using LEGOs, a rubber band, a electric driver, and some metal foil in this video. His device looks like it generates 20-30 KV based on the length of the electric arcs. He built it to study electrostatic fields in microgravity. It was cool to see a piece of charged foam orbit his structure like a satellite when negatively charged, and stick to when positively charged. It's a neat demo with very simple materials.

Researchers have developed imaging technology to photograph ants and make them available to the public at Antweb. The images are combined together to make 3D images of the ants in great detail. Dr Brian Fisher describes the process in this short video.