Planet Found in Habitable Zone

Sadly, it is 600 light years away from us, but still... we could colonize it.. (If it is not yet.)

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepscicon-briefing.html

GIS Applications - Biodiversity Geographic Information System

I want to present a great research about a Biodiversity Geographic Information System. 2010 is the year of biodeversity. I think, this application represents also an importat part of the protectection of bidiversity.

"Goals: To achieve the aim of creating a network of natural resources and ecological data, this project belongs to Natural Resources and Ecology GIS Database of the "10-year Plan for Building and Promoting National Geographic Information System" and promotes to build up the basis of data and databases. The system of data standardization assists the data interoperability and sharing. Also, the internet technologies enable developers to build up a web platform for front-end query, display, and back-end management. Thus, users can browse, query, add, and manage the species data through a browser to achieve the goal of central management, distributed applications, and data sharing and to improve the data use efficiency."

source: http://www.supergeotek.com

Sunset

"Layers of Earth's atmosphere, brightly colored as the sun sets, are featured in this image taken by the STS-127 crew on the Earth-orbiting space shuttle Endeavour. This image was taken on July 29, 2009, one day before the shuttle landed, completing a 16-day, 6.5-million mile journey.

Image Credit: NASA"




link: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

Entertainment videos

What Earth would look like with rings like Saturn:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoz5Q2rGQtQ

Simply amazing.. but we still have a wonder: total eclipse.

So you dont have to envy Saturnians..

(And since total eclipse is a rare event, it is affecting our imagination much more.

Having rings would be nice, but total eclipse is a more arcane something..)

CIA laser listener:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylo72DyapVY

The problem with Discovery channel is, that most of the time it's entertaining, but if it is about your field, sometimes it sounds ridiculous. So, if it's entertaining: maybe you don't understand something. It has to be popular, so they are colouring stories.

A friend of mine from the field of biology told me, that the pictures about oceanic life are really wonderful (even though most of these were shot in aquariums), but often they say misleading sentences about those beautiful fishes. I'm simply enjoying it, but he can tell the mistakes.

(Even worst, if you're watching it dubbed, not in English: once I heard the "those tanks ran on mine" phrase translated with the meaning of "mine" as in "goldmine."

First I did not understand: what? Those tanks were driving on a mine? Then I figured, they said in the dubbed version "goldmine" instead of "landmine." I can't believe no one spotted it at the dubbing studio, but it still has happened.)

So it's good for entertaining, but if you want information: go there and see with your own eyes!

The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica

"The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) is the first true-color, high-spatial-resolution image of the seventh continent. It is constructed from nearly 1100 individually selected Landsat-7 ETM+ scenes. Each image was orthorectified and adjusted for geometric, sensor and illumination variations to a standardized, almost seamless surface reflectance product. Mosaicing to avoid clouds produced a high quality, nearly cloud-free benchmark data set of Antarctica for the International Polar Year from images collected primarily during 1999–2003...."

I like movies, one of my favorite is “The Thing” in the sci-fi/horror category. The story plays on an Antarctic research station. The man can feel on this place the weakness, it is impossible to get help. If I could choose between ice and desert, like extreme places on the earth, I would like to travel to Antarctica. Darkness and nothing (wintertime)…. It is peaceful!

link:

http://lima.usgs.gov/

For Xmas, we give you: The Known Universe!

http://www.amnh.org/news/2009/12/the-known-universe/

Nice video from AMNH.

After the animation left our universe, it stopped playing, but it was only loading, so don't you worry: the "out there" is out there.. :)

It was an obvious choice to start this journey from Tibet.

Missions

Get it, print it, enjoy:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamcrowe/4002050596/sizes/o/

Clouds of Apocalyps

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/17-10/st_clouds

Laser Center in Hungary

"We are supporting it, and giving the needed government guarantees." - said Gordon Bajnai on Saturday (2009.09.26) about ELI (Extreme Light Infrastructure), which may be built at Szeged, Hungary.
The same time, Hungarian government plans to increase R&D money by more than 5% next year.
"We cannot allow the crisis to live up our future." - said Bajnai, Hungaries prime minister.

Radar Map of Buried Mars Layers

http://spacefellowship.com/2009/09/23/radar-map-of-buried-mars-layers-matches-climate-cycles/ Whats laser to Earth, is radar to Mars.

Detailed photo of a 300 ft tall tree

"...what the photographer ended up doing was building a custom rig containing 3 cameras, each one taking a slightly different shot: one to the left, one to the right, and one on the dead center. The rig was mounted to a gyroscope, and then the cameras took a series of pictures as the rig was lowered to the ground.

The end result: a vertical panorama comprised of 84 pictures, all stitched together to create one of the most complete pictures of a redwood tree we’ve ever seen."

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/09/30/how-to-photograph-a-300-ft-tall-tree-without-getting-a-splinter/

Night sky, milky way

http://www.sergebrunier.com/gallerie/pleinciel/360.swf

Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes With Lasers

For the first read I didn't believe it...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680870885500701.html

"Each time a beam strikes a bug, the computer makes a gunshot sound to signal a direct hit." - wow! Excerpt:

http://www.physorg.com/news156423566.html

Permanent cloud and rain over cartoon city

This poor little lakeside town has clouds over it every time...

(I've been checking it for the last few months.)

Hopefully I'll be there in a few weeks, with a bicycle, and a few friends.

(So I'll check that cloud in real life as well.. :)

Morning Glory, 1000km long clouds

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090824.html

Gigantic jets

Not really our business, but this is just super-cool: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17664-gigantic-jets-blast-electricity-into-upper-atmosphere.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Gigantic jets shoot upwards from thunderclouds and can reach altitudes above 80 kilometres. Now some people managed to measure the electrical discharge from a single gigantic jet, and it turns out: they are as strong as a lightning hitting the ground.

So... a lot of charge is going to heaven... the sky.. the void.

Okay, this is not 'into the void' at all, but still interesting, even after you've been told that the material there is ionised.

You should read the article: there is a hidden world behind the clouds.

Where on Earth? #2, Turtle Head

You can easily tell which direction is the water flowing, and that it is a lake.

But the question arises again: Where is this turtle?

I'll help: I have spent beautiful days around here... :)

Nasa hunts down planet

"As NASA's first exoplanets mission, Kepler has made a dramatic entrance on the planet-hunting scene," said Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Detecting this planet's atmosphere in just the first 10 days of data is only a taste of things to come. The planet hunt is on!"

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/06aug_kepler2.htm

Global Sunscreen Won’t Save Corals

It's not only global warming: ocean acidification is an issue as well:
http://www.ciw.edu/news/global_sunscreen_won_t_save_corals

homeproject

http://www.youtube.com/homeproject
wir haben noch einiges vermessen, wenn alles erledigt, kann man eine künstliche Erde bauen....