February 11, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides incredibly detailed images of the whole sun 24 hours a day. Capturing an image more than once per second, SDO has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its…
Light travels at a speed of 299,792 km per second (186,282 mps). That’s fast. Jupiter is 778,500,000 km (483,737,000 miles) from the Sun. That’s far. To try to convey the vastness of space, Alphonse Swinehart created this animation to illustrate that even at the blistering speed of light, it takes over 43 minutes just…
In this stabilized time-lapse, the stars’ position in the night sky is fixed so you can get a sense of our planet’s movement through space. And now it’s time for some mind-boggling figures: – Earth rotates around its axis (at the Equator) at roughly 460 meters/second (503 yards/second) – Earth orbits around our Sun…
Seen here is a huge flock of starlings (known as a murmuration), soaring above the skies of Utrecht in the Netherlands. While the science behind their uncanny coordination is not fully understood, what is known is at the individual level, when a neighbour moves, so do you. The hypnotic movements were captured earlier this…
BMW showed off their impressive new laser and OLED lighting technology at CES 2015. The intelligent lighting system seeks to improve driver safety at night in a number of innovative ways. Watch the demo to learn more.
It’s like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. NASA recently released the largest Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, displaying sweeping views of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, the Hubble telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a…
Bill Gates recently got to check out the Omniprocessor, an ingenious machine designed and built by Janicki Bioenergy, which turns human waste into water and electricity. In places without good waste treatment plants, it could be a real game-changer.
George Monbiot explains how whales can change an entire ecosystem through a process known as a trophic cascade. Trophic cascades are ecological processes which start at the top of the food chain and tumble all the way down to the bottom. This video is a follow-up to the original segment on the impact of…
A domino can knock over another domino about 1.5x larger than itself. A chain of dominos of increasing size makes a kind of mechanical chain reaction that starts with a tiny push and knocks down an impressively large domino. Learn the science behind this fascinating experiment.
Photograph by Vladimir Pushkarev/Russian Centre of Arctic Exploration Scientists in northern Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula recently descended into a massive, newly formed crater. Vladimir Pushkarev, the leader of the new mission and director of the Russian Centre of Arctic Exploration, took probes and made measurements with his team in hopes determining the cause of the…