How Does A Spider Spin A Web Between Two Trees?

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If you look up in a tree, you might see a spider web that spans a distance of several feet or more. How is the spider able to reach between this distance? How do they do that?
LINK: The Presurfer

This is Our Planet

This is Our Planet from Tomislav Safundžić on Vimeo.

"This Is Our Planet," by Croatian 18-year-old Tomislav Safundžić, was created from imagery captured by NASA at the International Space Station. Wow.
LINK, Via: petapixel, Via: Vimeo

Felix Baumgartner to Jump from a Height of 37 km

Felix Baumgartner from Austria closer to his goal to jump from a height of 37 km (~23 miles). On Thursday, he has successfully completed a test jump with a height of almost 22 km, the balloon was filled with helium. The flight lasted eight minutes from there. 3 minutes and 43 seconds of them have been in freefall. LINK, Via: Youtube


On March 15, 2012, Austria's Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a space capsule from an altitude of approximately 71,580 feet as the Red Bull Stratos project moved forward into the manned flight stage in New Mexico. The 42-year-old rode the space capsule attached to a giant helium balloon above the so-called "Armstrong Line." The goal of the Red Bull Stratos project is to see Baumgartner attempt a record-breaking freefall from 120,000 feet this summer where he'll potentially become the first man to go supersonic without the support of a vehicle.

Water Drops Orbiting a Needle in Space

(Video Link) Don Pettit, an astronaut and science educator whose work we’ve featured extensively on Neatorama, is now on the International Space Station. For his most recent demonstration, Pettit charged knitting needles with static electricity and then shot water drops at them. The drops, attracted by the charge, orbited the needles. Via: Geekologie | Pettit’s Twitter Feed | Via: Neatorama

Official: Gifford's Husband to Fly on Shuttle

The astronaut husband of wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has made his choice. He's headed to space in April. (Feb. 4). LINK: Youtube

JR Minkel, science writer, RIP

Rising-star science journalist JR Minkel, whose work we've linked to many times on Boing Boing, took his own life on Monday. Only 31 years-old, JR was a talented writer who covered space, physics, cosmology, and technology for Scientific American, where he was a staff writer, Popular Science, New Scientist, LiveScience, IEEE Spectrum, and many other publications. Author of the Instant Egghead Guide: The Universe, he also blogged at his own site, A Fistful of Science. JR had a knack for making complex science understandable by anyone, and his quest for knowledge, meaning, and humor shone through his writing. We send our deepest condolences to JR's family and friends. JR Minkel obituary (The Tennessean). LINK: Boing Boing

Space Battleship Yamato in Zen Magnets

Flickr user Eric 10d used lots of Zen Magnets rare earth magnet balls and some nails to create this sculpture of the Space Battleship Yamato: Link, Via: Neatorama

This is our universe, can you comprehend it?

This is our universe, can you comprehend it? LINK: Youtube

Homemade Spacecraft

Video from a weather balloon that rose into the upper stratosphere and recorded the blackness of space. Visit brooklynspaceprogram.org to get the entire uncut voyage. LINK: Vimeo

Music video made from re-cut public domain science fiction B-movie

Noah from the Skull-a-Day project sez, " I thought you would enjoy this video I made for my new project, League of Space Pirates. It's a track from our recently released digital Hypertrophy EP and the video was made entirely with footage of the public domain film Assignment Outer Space which I got from Archive.org. I was interested in seeing if I could find enough footage within the film to carve out a new totally different story that related to the song."

League of Space Pirates - Constant Reminder (Thanks, Noah!). Via: Boingboing, Via: Youtube

This 2-Year-Old Kid Knows More About Space Than You Do

This adorable little astronomer knows the solar system. He loves magnetic fields and can recognize Neil deGrasse Tyson. He knows that Pluto is a dwarf planet. He knows the names of Pluto's moons. It's like a supernova of cute. LINK: Youtube

The video is the runner up in the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center Anniversary Video Contest, a competition that enlisted science-junkies to make videos about the stories that inspired them most. Clearly this little fellow finds space very inspirational.

The winner of the contest was this very good video overview of the Large Hadron Collider:



Excellent production values! It won its creator, Luke, a trip to New York to celebrate the Rose Center's 10th anniversary. That's OK though, New York is a little too terrestrial for the runner up's tastes anyway. [AMNH] LINK: Youtube Via: Gizmodo

Annoying Orange: Close Encounters of the Annoying Kind

Orange and Pear are abducted by an alien race of broccoli. LINK: Youtube

Dr Mason on New Horizon Spacecraft and New Solar System Discovered

New Horizons' voyage through the Jupiter system in 2007 provided a bird's-eye view of a dynamic planet that has changed since the last close-up looks by NASA spacecraft. A combination of trajectory, timing and technology allowed it to explore details no probe had seen before, such as lightning near Jupiter's poles, the life cycle of fresh ammonia clouds, boulder-size clumps speeding through the planet's faint rings, the structure inside volcanic eruptions on its moon Io, and the path of charged particles traversing the previously unexplored length of the planet's long magnetic tail.

New Horizons passed our solar system's largest planet on its way to Pluto, which it should reach in 2015. I was right!!!

European Southern Observatory In Chile Discovers New Solar System.

The team used an instrument known as the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) to locate the system.

Geneva University Observatory's Chiristophe Lovis led the team that made the discovery. He noted that it was possibly "the system with the most planets yet discovered."

The solar system is known to harbor five exoplanets (those outside of our solar system) circling a sun-like star HD 10180, and is suspected to contain two additional planets.

"It's a very interesting discovery," said Dante Minniti, an expert on exoplanets at Universidad Católica. "They have discovered a system of five planets, and if the other two are confirmed, this system would be the most similar to our own." LINK: Youtube

Time-Lapse Video of the Earth Rotating Under an Astronaut

(Video Link)
Astronaut and educator Don Pettit recorded this time-lapse video from the International Space Station. It shows day turning into night as the Earth rotates beneath him.

Via: Radley Balko, Via: Neatorama

NASA Captures the Rising Sun Lighting Up the Midnight Sky

The International Space Station snapped a particularly beautiful photo of the various layers of our globe's atmosphere with the rising sun peeking out to say hello, while touring over the Greek islands around midnight just a few weeks ago.

NASA's Earth Observatory, which posted the photo, pointed out the polar mesopheric clouds, or "night-shining" clouds as they called them, which are seen at twilight. Usually the clouds are only lit up by the sun when it's setting, however this particular shot shows the rising sun inking its rays across the low clouds. [Earth Observatory, Via: io9], Via: Gizmodo

MUSIC OF THE SUN

“The sun has been the inspiration for hundreds of songs, but now scientists have discovered that the star at the center of our solar system produces its own music. Astronomers at the University of Sheffield have managed to record for the first time the eerie musical harmonies produced by the magnetic field in the outer atmosphere of the sun. They found that huge magnetic loops that have been observed coiling away from the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere, known as coronal loops, vibrate like strings on a musical instrument. In other cases they behave more like soundwaves as they travel through a wind instrument.” Video LINK

Ultra Slow-Motion Apollo 11 Launch - Diggnation with Jimmy Fallon

Like a scene from Superman 3, this is an excellent, slow motion high definition video of the Apollo 11 launch. The question is: would you go to space with Richard Branson? The answer is: YES. The next question is: do you get hammered in space or before? LINK: Youtube

A gallery of stunning Hubble images from new book

These images are featured in the stunning new book Hubble: A Journey Through Space and Time by Edward J. Weiler, published by Abrams in collaboration with NASA. All images: Courtesy NASA. LINK: Boingboing

Beautiful & Amazing Space Wallpapers

I kept a few of these that I really liked. LINK

Virgin Galactic Unveils World's First Commercial Passenger Spaceship

Virgin Galactic has unveiled the world's first ever commercial passenger spaceship. The sleek black-and-white vessel represents a gamble with a sky-high price tag to create a commercial space and tourism industry.

The company hopes the winged, minivan-sized SpaceShipTwo, will rocket space tourists into zero gravity within just two or three years. LINK