Spider-Man is a fighter, an acrobat, a breakdancer, and a martial arts master -all at the same time! The bad guys don't have a chance. Aaron Gassor is a martial arts instructor, fight choreographer, and filmmaker. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
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The blogger at Harribel & Terribel posted this picture of her grandmother and friends. The photo was taken in the spring of 1930 in Estonia. These young teenagers appear to be emulating the slightly older flappers of the Roaring Twenties, and most likely looked forward to growing up glamorous. At the time, Estonia was an independent democracy. In 1934, it fell into a dictatorship, followed by occupation by the Soviets in 1940, then by Nazi Germany in 1941, and the Soviets again in 1944. You have to wonder how those events affected these young girls. Link -via reddit
Walter White is trapped, but not in the way he thinks. Rachel imprisoned him in this 11 inch tall miniature meth-fueled ecosystem:
Lining the bottom of this open terrarium are pieces of blue sea glass, closely resembling the blue crystals "Heisenberg" cooks. Alongside the crashed meth lab is the tiniest depiction of Mr. White you may ever see, handmade at about 1/4" tall, glasses tighty whities and all. The RV is a whopping 1/2" long, hand sculpted and painted. The desert scene is a slight DIY project, with lichen, a petrified mushroom, stones, a tiny tree and reindeer moss to create a great little sustainable ecosystem that you can keep anywhere in your home or office. With easy care instructions, anyone care care for these tiny worlds, from the most experienced botanist to those with a brown thumb.
Link -via Ian Brooks
In this Pepsi ad, race car driver Jeff Gordon takes a Camaro out for a spin, with a hapless car salesman in the passenger seat, who supposedly doesn't know who is driving. Does it matter how "real" it is, when it's this funny? -via Viral Viral Videos
Stairs are so plebeian! The Manhattan elites rock climb up and then slide down tubular steel slide in this gorgeous penthouse apartment dubbed the Skyhouse, as designed by architect David Hotson.
First, climb up the steel beam in the middle of the living room:
Then enter the gleaming stainless steel slide, which entrance is cut in a hole on a seamless glass wall:
Then you go down, down, down ...
Antarctica has an abundance of abandoned structures for several reasons. No one stays there long, there are few (if any) looters, and while the environment might wreck buildings, they won't see mold, bacterial rot, or damage from plants. Shipping old equipment, ships, and buildings off the continent is usually more trouble than it's worth. And those abandoned camps and towns each have a fairly well documented history. Some even contain their original supplies! Take a little tour and see some of the more interesting abandoned places in Antarctica at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
(Image credit: Lyubomir Ivanov)
Photographer Fabian Oefner (previously at Neatorama) has a new series of works called Black Hole.
"Black Hole" is a series of images, which shows paint modeled by centripetal force. The setup is very simple: Various shades of acrylic paint are dripped onto a metallic rod, which is connected to a drill. When switched on, the paint starts to move away from the rod, creating these amazing looking structures.
The motion of the paint happens in a blink of an eye, the images you see are taken only millisecond after the drill was turned on.
This picture shows what it looks like from an angle. You can see the other images, plus a video of the process, at Oefner's Behance gallery. Link -via Twisted Sifter
SpaceX continues to make progress in private space exploration. Their vehicle called Grasshopper took off, and then landed straight up! It looks like special effects from a movie. The demonstration proves that a rocket can land intact.
On Thursday, March 7, 2013, SpaceX’s Grasshopper doubled its highest leap to date to rise 24 stories or 80.1 meters (262.8 feet), hovering for approximately 34 seconds and landing safely using closed loop thrust vector and throttle control. Grasshopper touched down with its most accurate precision thus far on the centermost part of the launch pad. At touchdown, the thrust to weight ratio of the vehicle was greater than one, proving a key landing algorithm for Falcon 9. The test was completed at SpaceX’s rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas.
Link -via Laughing Squid
Begin planetary evacuation immediately. This is not a drill. Proceed to your designated evacuation points and await dropship liftoff.
At least, that's how I'm responding to this scene shot by Martin Rietze at the Sakurajima volcano in Japan. Why are these two events taking place in the same location? Physicists Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell write:
Why lightning occurs even in common thunderstorms remains a topic of research, and the cause of volcanic lightning is even less clear. Surely, lightning bolts help quench areas of opposite but separated electric charges. One hypothesis holds that catapulting magma bubbles or volcanic ash are themselves electrically charged, and by their motion create these separated areas. Other volcanic lightning episodes may be facilitated by charge-inducing collisions in volcanic dust.
Link and More Photos -via Spoon & Tamago | Photographer's Website
Who wants to be a damsel in distress? Girls can be heroes, too! So Mike Hoye altered the programming of Donkey Kong so that his daughter can play Pauline and rescue Mario, rather than the reverse.
Link -via Popular Science
What do you lay awake at night worrying about? Are your worries different than those far smarter than you? Perhaps.
John Brockman of Edge magazine asked what the world's most intelligent brainiacs - including Physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, technologist Tim O'Reilly, musician Brian Eno, The Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb - about their professional worries and got a lot of responses.
One hundred and fifty distinct worries, in fact. Thankfully, VICE's Motherboard blog has summarized it for us:
1. The proliferation of Chinese eugenics. – Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist.
2. Black swan events, and the fact that we continue to rely on models that have been proven fraudulent. – Nassem Nicholas Taleb
3. That we will be unable to defeat viruses by learning to push them beyond the error catastrophe threshold. – William McEwan, molecular biology researcher
4. That pseudoscience will gain ground. – Helena Cronin, author, philospher
5. That the age of accelerating technology will overwhelm us with opportunities to be worried. – Dan Sperber, social and cognitive scientist
6. Genuine apocalyptic events. The growing number of low-probability events that could lead to the total devastation of human society. – Martin Rees, former president of the Royal Society
7. The decline in science coverage in newspapers. – Barbara Strauch, New York Times science editor
8. Exploding stars, the eventual collapse of the Sun, and the problems with the human id that prevent us from dealing with them. -- John Tooby, founder of the field of evolutionary psychology
9. That the internet is ruining writing. – David Gelernter, Yale computer scientist
10. That smart people--like those who contribute to Edge--won’t do politics. –Brian Eno, musician
11. That there will be another supernova-like financial disaster. –Seth Lloyd, professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering at MIT
12. That search engines will become arbiters of truth. --W. Daniel Hillis, physicist
13. The dearth of desirable mates is something we should worry about, for "it lies behind much human treachery and brutality.” –David M. Buss, professor of psychology at U of T
14. “I’m worried that our technology is helping to bring the long, postwar consensus against fascism to an end.” –David Bodanis, writer, futurist
15. That we will continue to uphold taboos on bad words. –Benhamin Bergen, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, UCS
Humanity, start worrying! Or, you can just accept it all, like Terry Gilliam of Monty Python, who said:
I've given up asking questions. l merely float on a tsunami of acceptance of anything life throws at me... and marvel stupidly.
Read the original post over at Edge: Link | Summary at Motherboard blog
Bismuth (Image: fluor_doublet/R.
Tanaka/Flickr)
We all know the periodic table of the elements from high school chemistry, but have you ever wondered what the actual chemical elements look like? Japanese chemist and photographer R. Tanaka is on a mission to photograph the world's most photogenic elements and we dare say he succeeded with flying colors.
Check out his website and Flickr page to see more wonderful images of the elements.
Osmium
Palladium
Monoclinic sulfur
Oxidized arsenic
Gold crystal
Yes, these young folks are hanging on to an electric fence. In a shocking turn of events, Josh had no insulation. As punishment for their shenanigans, they were all grounded. -via reddit
The immune system usually fights the virus, but sometimes, a sneaky virus turn the tables against the host and uses its immune system against itself:
Bacteria often carry repetitive genetic sequences called CRISPRs, which protect them against viruses.
When a bacterium is attacked by a virus, it copies a small piece of the virus's DNA and stores it among the CRISPRs. The bacterium will then be better at fighting off the virus: the bacterium can acquire resistance, just like a human acquiring resistance to a disease.
The CRISPRs are a library of diseases, storing samples of past infections. If the same kind of virus attacks again, the bacterium is ready. Any viral genes that enter the cell are quickly marked for destruction. [...]
But the war isn't over. Viruses are notoriously adaptable. According to Andrew Camilli of Tufts University in Boston and colleagues, ICP1 has managed to turn the CRISPR system to its own advantage.
Camilli discovered ICP1 in 2011, and found it to be common in cholera bacteria in Bangladesh. The surprise came when his team found ICP1 had its own CRISPRs, and genes for the Cas proteins, probably stolen from a bacterium.
Camilli looked at the genetic samples stored in the virus's CRISPRs, and found that two of them were identical to a section of the V. cholerae genome. Better still, these bits of DNA are involved in other aspects of the bacterium's immune response.
The implication is that at some point, the virus must have stolen part of the bacterium's arsenal and re-programmed it to target what was left.
Michael Marshall of NewScientist's Zoologger has the post: Link
You've probably seen a lot of popped water balloon photography before, but have you seen one so cool that it's got to wear sunglasses? Photographer Scott Dickson explained how he took the photo above over at PetaPixel (it involves a surprising amount of engineering!): Link - via Photography Blogger
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