NASA has released a series of new satellite data visualizations that “show tens of millions of fires detected worldwide from space” between July 2002 and July 2011. The visualizations were produced by the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instruments onboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. And they help scientists understand how fires affect our environment on local, regional and global scales — one of the many unexpected things that come out of NASA space missions. h/t holykaw
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In 1933, 18-year-old Alan Lomax took a break from college to travel into the American South with his father, John Avery Lomax, on a quest to discover and record traditional folk songs for the Library of Congress. It was the beginning of a journey that would last the rest of his life.
With his father, and later on his own, Lomax traveled the back roads of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, from religious revival meetings to prison chain gangs, in pursuit of Southern folk music in all its forms. Along the way he discovered and recorded such singular artists as Mississippi Fred McDowell, Vera Hall and Lead Belly. Later, Lomax would widen his field of research to focus on European folk music, but in 1978 he went back to the Mississippi Delta with a camera crew to document a culture that was rapidly disappearing.
The result, The Land Where the Blues Began (watch it online here), is a fascinating look at traditional country blues in its native environment. Filmed in levee camps, churches, juke joints and on front porches across Mississippi, the documentary draws attention to musicians unknown outside the Delta. The Land Where the Blues Began is a must-see for blues fans, and is now part of our collection of Free Movies.
Cobbling together some LEGOs and a smartphone running a custom Android app, Mike Dobson and David Gilday built CubeStormer II, a lean, mean Rubik’s Cube-solving machine. Cracking a Rubik’s Cube in 5.35 seconds, Cubestormer II made mincemeat out of Ruby, the previous robot record holder — 10.18 seconds. And it even edged out the existing world record, 5.66 seconds, set by Feliks Zemdegs earlier this year. Watch him go below.
To see Cubestormer II in action, you can visit ARM TechCon 2011, to be held in Santa Clara, California on October 26 and 27. H/T Science Dump.
It all started when filmmaker Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things Are) met handbag designer Olympia Le-Tan and asked her to create a Catcher in the Rye embroidery for his wall. She asked him to collaborate on a film in return. And so Jonze and Le-Tan, together with French director Simon Cahn, spent six months writing a script, then animating 3,000 pieces of felt cut by Le-Tan herself. The result is Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side), a short stop motion film set inside the famous Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and it features a skeleton, his lover, and some famous book covers that spring to life.
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For 17 days this past June, timelapse cinematographer Joe Capra traveled across Iceland, capturing its natural beauty during the months when the sun never sets and never rises. Making Midnight Sun was no easy feat. Capra worked at it around the clock, taking 38,000 images and traveling 2900 miles. Our recommendation? Watch the film on Vimeo, in HD and with a full screen.
Bonus: Don’t miss this new Cambridge Ideas film, Memories of Old Awake, that looks at how Iceland’s centuries old sagas are deeply intertwined with the everyday lives of people who live there.
As a chronicler of war, Don McCullin is a legend. Henri Cartier-Bresson once compared him to Goya, and John Le Carré wrote, “He was a communicator of the world’s worst agonies, a pilgrim to the front line of human suffering, returning with his kit-bag of horrors to appal the comfortable, the wilfully blind and the unknowing.” As a photojournalist for The Observer and the Sunday Times Magazine, McCullin covered all the major conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the minor ones: Vietnam, Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Cyprus, Biafra, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War. But McCullin has always hated the term “war photographer” for what he calls its mercenary ring. In recent years the photographer has turned his lens on more peaceful subjects, like the English landscape. Yet even in pastoral settings, McCullin’s work retains a sense of menace. The very light seems to brood, as one colleague put it. “My favorite time to photograph landscape is evening,” McCullin said in a 1987 interview. “I can’t avoid wanting everything to go dark, dark, dark.”
A major exhibit of McCullin’s work is on display at the Imperial War Museum in London through April 15, while a smaller exhibit of his non-war photographs (see above) is on display at the Tate Britain through March 4.
You may have seen levitation tricks performed by magicians, but rest assured that they can’t beat this: quantum levitation. The video above was captured at the 2011 ASTC conference, a gathering of scientists in Baltimore, Maryland, with the purpose of demonstrating “how science centers and museums are putting new ideas to practical use to serve their communities.” The School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel-Aviv University has put together this physics experiment showcasing quantum superconductors locked in a magnetic field.
While the video fails to explain the science of what is happening here, the complementary website is helpful. The white round disk (essentially a sapphire wafer coated with a thin layer of yttrium barium copper oxide) is cooled to below negative 185 degrees C. At that temperature (dubbed the critical temperature), the material becomes superconductive, meaning that it has zero electrical resistance. From the website:
Superconductivity and magnetic field do not like each other. When possible, the superconductor will expel all the magnetic field from inside. This is the Meissner effect. In our case, since the superconductor is extremely thin, the magnetic field DOES penetrate. However, it does that in discrete quantities (this is quantum physics after all! ) called flux tubes.
Inside each magnetic flux tube superconductivity is locally destroyed. The superconductor will try to keep the magnetic tubes pinned in weak areas (e.g. grain boundaries). Any spatial movement of the superconductor will cause the flux tubes to move. In order to prevent that, the superconductor remains “trapped” in midair.
And in case you’re wondering: are there practical applications for quantum levitation? The answer, of course, is yes!
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Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.
Novels — they’re in inevitable decline. They can’t compete with the movie screen, the TV screen and now the computer screen. Give things 25 years, and there will be just a small cult of readers left. That’s the prediction of American author, Philip Roth, who has 27 novels to his credit. And apparently, Roth is personally hastening the process. Earlier this year, he told a reporter for the Financial Times: “I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.” When asked why, he quipped: “I don’t know. I wised up … ”
For Paul Auster, another productive novelist, the reports of the novel’s death are greatly exaggerated. Humans hunger for stories. They always will. And, the novel, it knows how to adapt and survive. Will it survive with the help of technology? Auster might not be the best person to ask. He owns neither a computer nor a mobile phone. Lucky man.
Bonus: You can listen to Paul Auster read The Red Notebook, a collection of short stories published in 2002, right here. (He starts reading at around the 8:30 mark.) We have it listed in our collection of Free Audio Books.
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