Interest of the day

The short film Magnetic Movie is wonderful. Solar scientists talk about the sun, magnetic fields, the corona, and the solar wind while you see images of magnetic fields in a lab and hear sounds of the solar wind. Very cool.

Future City Competition is a national, project-based learning experience where students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade imagine, design, and build cities of the future. Student build their concept cities from recycled materials and compete with other teams. Registration opens again in March but that should stop you from building a mega-city with the posted step-by-step guides.

Wired magazine has posted the 16 Best Science Visualizations of 2011. There are some pretty cool presentation here. I hope to finish seeing them all.

The HHS.gov web site reports on the quality of hospitals. After you enter your zip code and select some hospitals to compare, check the tab on the left for patient safety measures for statistics on Serious Complications and Deaths, Hospital Acquired Conditions, & Healthcare Associated Infections (HAIs). There seems to be a lot of useful information on this site.

Backstage Science has posted two videos about the latest Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). The first video, Solar Scientist, Chris Davis describes the two STEREO spacecraft monitoring the sun. The second video Tracking the X flare describes the solar flare associated with this particular CME. The Royal Observatory has put together the solarstormwatch.com web site to enlist the general public to process raw solar data in real time to provide an early warning of solar eruptions.

I was so excited to see the Powers of Ten video that was produced in 1077 and narrated by Philip Morrison agian. The video explores the scale of space in factors of 10 from the nucleus to the edge of the known universe. It still holds up even today.

The ISS has captured a video of storms over Africa. The Milky way can be seen clearly in the background. It is a very cool video.

Cassini is still sending back spectacular images from Saturn. This photo is of Titan, Tethys, and Saturn's rings.

The Computer History Museum has posted a timeline of the development of semiconductors.


Intel 4004 microprocessor 1971

I've always loved that line and use it whenever I can. Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer.