Some congratulations are in order for a team of students from The University of New South Wales. Earlier this month, they set a world record for the fastest solar-powered car. Their car, traveling 88km/h (or 54 miles per hour), broke the previous record of 79 km/h. We’re not talking about NASCAR speeds, to be sure. But the research that went into making the UNSW car could mean big things for future generations of green-powered cars. Wired has more on the story, plus some photos…
Fractal Landscape
An evolving fractal landscape, all created with a WebGL 3D fractal renderer. If you join/log into Vimeo, you can download the video right here and watch “Surface Detail” in full detail…
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Arthur C. Clarke Presents the Colors of Infinity
NASA: The Frontier Is Everywhere
Reid Gower writes: “NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings …” but “none of their brilliant scientists appear to know how to connect with the social media crowd.” Strange given that “NASA is an institution whose funding directly depends on how the public views them.” Taking matters into his own hands, Gower has produced a little marketing gift for NASA: The Frontier is Everywhere, a video modeled after Michael Marantz’s beautiful short film, Earth: The Pale Blue Dot, which also features the voice of Carl Sagan – someone who understood the importance of popularizing science…
P.S. NASA isn’t exactly inept on the marketing front. We should remind you of two pretty cool and recent NASA productions:
The Best of NASA Space Shuttle Videos (1981–2010)
NASA Lauches Photo Archive on Flickr
via Zadi.TV
The Impossible Motion Contraption
Every year, The New Scientist sponsors an illusion contest, and, above, we have the winner of the 2010 edition: A contraption created by Koukichi Sugihara (Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences, Japan) that appears to defy gravity, allowing wooden balls to roll up slopes. But, in actual fact “the orientations of the slopes are perceived oppositely, and hence the descending motion is misinterpreted as ascending motion.” You can now make submissions to the 2011 edition.
World’s Smallest Periodic Table on a Human Hair
Fun with science. The world’s smallest periodic table etched onto a strand of hair belonging to chemistry Professor Martyn Poliakoff (University of Nottingham). This clip comes from the Periodic Videos collection and it comes recommend by the great @OliverSacks.
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Related Content:
A Periodic Table Visualizing the Year & Country in Which Each Element Was Discovered
The Periodic Table of Elements Presented as Interactive Haikus
How Large is the Universe?
For centuries, humanity has been utterly transfixed by the cosmos, with generations of astronomers, philosophers and everyday ponderers striving to better understand the grand capsule of our existence. And yet to this day, some of the most basic, fundamental qualities of the universe remain a mystery. How Large is the Universe? is a fascinating 20-minute documentary by Thomas Lucas and Dave Brody exploring the universe’s immense scale of distance and time.
“Recent precision measurements gathered by the Hubble space telescope and other instruments have brought a consensus that the universe dates back 13.7 billion years. Its radius, then, is the distance a beam of light would have traveled in that time – 13.7 billion light years. That works out to about 1.3 quadrillion kilometers. In fact, it’s even bigger – much bigger. How it got so large, so fast, was until recently a deep mystery.”
For more on the subject, see these five fascinating ways to grasp the size and scale of the universe.
Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine and DesignObserver, and spends a great deal of time on Twitter.
The Milky Way over Texas
This 45 second timelapse video of the “Galactic Center of the Milky Way” rising over Texas Star Party (2009) just gets more spectacular as it rolls along. William Castleman created this sequence using a Canon EOS-5D, with exposures at 20 and 40 second intervals. This complements nicely Stéphane Guisard’s panoramic view of the Milky Way taken from the Atacama desert in Chile. See the The Milky Way in 360 Degrees here.
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Open Video, Open Knowledge
Readers of Open Culture will appreciate how video has become, in many ways, our newest vernacular—growing in popularity every day, and estimated to reach 90 percent of worldwide web traffic by 2013. Yet so little of our moving image heritage is actually online. As of October 2010, just single percentage points of the great collections at the BBC Archive, ITN Source, Library of Congress, National Archives, etc., are actually digitized and available over the Internet! A new short film out this week from the UK’s JISC Film & Sound Think Tank makes the point with clarity. (Watch here or above.)
What if it were possible to enjoy the world’s largest and most popular information commons and enable it with downloadable video–video of great quality, whose originators, owners, and rightholders opened to reuse and remix by anyone for free?
Intelligent Television and iCommons have produced a report–just out now–to help cultural and educational institutions understand and appreciate the possibilities presented by openly licensed assets for Wikipedia and the open web. Video for Wikipedia: A Guide to Best Practices for Cultural and Educational Institutions describes how Wikipedia is now opening its doors to video, and how leading institutions can participate in what is, in effect, the newest knowledge revolution.
The issues are situated, of course, within the larger context of building a free and informed society. For universities, museums, archives, and others, bringing video online from our cultural heritage (and equipping students to use it) has become a new cultural imperative. Open video on Wikipedia is not simply a call for free media fragments to be stored online. It augurs a new vision of teaching and learning, and a new creative and political discourse. Everyone is invited to participate in this conversation just getting underway…
This post was contributed by Peter Kaufman, the CEO and president ofIntelligent Television, who shares our passion for thoughtful media.
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