NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has released an animated video showing the tsunami originating off the coast of Japan, and then spreading across the Pacific. Dramatic, to say the least.
Last year, NOAA also produced an animation that visualized the tremors from the big Chilean quake as they worked their way across the globe. Catch it here.
Last Thursday, the sun delivered the goods, unleashing a beautiful solar flare. The eruptions lasted somewhere around 90 minutes, and the plasma flares were all captured in high def by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a project dedicated to studying the sun and its impact on space weather. This footage comes soon after another groundbreaking NASA video – the First 360 Degree View of the Sun.
Yesterday’s lackluster Academy Awards ceremony may have afforded you some unexpected time for contemplating life’s more urgent questions, such as the one British comedian Alan Davies pursues above: How long is a piece of string? Watch Davies, who is also a frequent panelist on the popular Stephen Fry-hosted quiz show Quite Interesting, explore the riddle’s philosophical implications and inevitable connection to string theory with the help of physics, quantum mechanics, and finally a visit with mathematician Marcus de Sautoy. Fans of the Davies/du Sautoy interaction may also want to check out Du Sautoy’s TED talk on Symmetry, as well as the debates in that video’s comments section. More docs can be found in our collection of 200+ Free Documentaries, part of our larger collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
A rather different angle on the Discovery’s final launch. The view from 35,000 feet.…
via BoingBoing
Courtesy of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, we’re zooming into a “majestic disk of stars and dust lanes” and getting a stunning view of the spiral galaxy NGC 2841, which lies 46 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear). But wait, it gets even better. This high resolution still photo shows the spiral galaxy in all its beauty and splendor…
File under Everything is a Remix. Ben Hillman offers a creative little riff on “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (listen here), an Anglican hymn inspired by William Paley’s 1802 treatise, Natural Theology, which positions God as the designer of the natural world … in an Enlightenment kind of way. You can catch more Hillman videos on Vimeo here.
A new NASA breakthrough lets us see the sun in a 360 degree, panoramic view. The upshot? Better space weather reports coming our way. The video from NASA’s YouTube channel has all the good details …
Next Monday, the long-running American game show, Jeopardy!, will air a tournament of champions, pitting its two biggest winners, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, against Watson, IBM’s newest supercomputer. And it will provide an occasion to answer an important question: Can computers understand the subtleties of language? Can they answer questions when they’re posed in less than straightforward ways? When, for example, the questions use wordplay and puns? IBM worked on the project for four years, and the early indications suggest that computers can undoubtedly master these subtleties. (Just watch this Watson match against less accomplished Jeopardy! players.) This article does a good job of explaining the fairly staggering things happening on the backend of the new IBM computer, and how this research might shape the future of computing. The Watson/human faceoff begins next Monday, with two matches taking place over three days. Once video becomes available, as it inevitably will, we will tweet it on our ever-flowing Twitter stream.
PS NOVA aired a program last week dedicated to the Watson/Jeopardy! challenge. If it’s not geoblocked, you can watch it right here. H/T to @eugenephoto for flagging the program.
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