Recent sunspot counts fall short of predictions. Credit: Dr. Tony Philips & NOAA/SWPC.
2013 was supposed to be the year of Solar Max, the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle. But so far, solar activity has been fairly low, with sunspot numbers well below expectations as well as infrequent solar flares.
Back in 2008, the NOAA/NASA Solar Cycle Prediction Panel, said that due to the extrememly deep and quite solar minimum going on at that time, they anticipated Solar Cycle 24 – our current cycle – to be below average in intensity. They’ve certainly been right about that.
In this video, solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center says that this solar max looks different from what we expected because it may end up being “double peaked.”
This video shows the low amount of sunspots so far in 2013:
Screenshot from the “UFO Over Santa Clarita VFX Breakdown” video.
We’ve yet to see an authentic and convincing UFO video, and this one takes the cake. It is completely fake. Not one thing in it is real. Seriously. If you haven’t yet seen or heard about the “UFO Over Santa Clarita” video (above), it appears to be footage taken from a handheld camera, shakily taking shots from within a moving car. Then a spaceship darts across the sky, and the gasping filmmaker stops the car, only see a huge hovering mothership grab the first ship and disappear.
The filmmaker, Aristomenis “Meni” Tsirbas, revealed to Wired that, as many suspected, the video was fake. But impressively, absolutely everything in the film, from the car’s interior to the sky to the UFOs, is not real. It is all CGI (Computer Generated Imagery).
“The video is 100 percent CGI through and through,” Tsirbas told Wired. “The electric towers [seen alongside the road] are 3-D geometry and the sky is a 3-D dome that has a texture map on it that’s a combination of painting, volumetric clouds and photogrammetry.”
Tsirbas has now produced a new video showing the breakdown of the CGI, and it’s quite impressive:
“The point of the video was to prove that CGI can look natural and convincing,” Tsirbas told Wired in another article. ”Everybody assumes the background and car are real, and that the UFOs are probably fake, especially the over-the-top mothership at the end. The general reaction is disbelief, so I usually have to prove it by showing a wireframe of the entire shot to prove that nothing is real.”
Tsirbas has worked on movies such as Titanic and Hellboy and several Star Trek television shows. Wired said Tsirbas and his team spent about four months mimicking the look of an accidental extraterrestrial encounter captured on a smartphone.
As impressive as Tsirbas’ handiwork is, what is most perplexing is the reaction to the video by some of the UFOer crowd.
“But the most unusual comments come from a growing chorus of people who insist that the announcement of the hoax is actually part of an elaborate government plan to cover up the fact that the video is real,” Tsirbas said in Wired. “I even received a mildly threatening personal e-mail from one of these people.”
“Say, do you like mystery stories? Well we have one for you. The concept: relativity.”
Well look at that, it’s a new video from John D. Boswell — aka melodysheep — which goes into autotuned detail about one of the standard principles of astrophysics, Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Featuring clips from Michio Kaku, Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene and Lisa Randall, I’d say E=mc(awesome).
John has been entertaining science fans with his Symphony of Science mixes since 2009, when his first video in the series — “A Glorious Dawn” featuring Carl Sagan — was released. Now John’s videos are eagerly anticipated by fans (like me) who follow him on YouTube and on Twitter as @musicalscience.
“E = mc2… that is the engine that lights up the stars.”
(What does Einstein’s famous mass-energy equivalence equation mean? For a brief and basic explanation, check out the American Museum of Natural History’s page here.)
'The full moon rises over the only planet we have ever called home,' Tweeted astronaut Chris Hadfield.
We never get tired of these amazing views from the International Space Station, but this one has it all: a silvery Moon setting into the Earth’s atmosphere, the dazzling Milky Way rising into a brilliant sunrise, airglow of all colors, popping lightning, shimmering aurorae, and incredible views of the stunning space station and our gorgeous planet. Brian Tomlinson put this one together, using stills from the Johnson Space Center’s “Gateway to Astronaut Photography of the Earth.”
Below is a recent image taken by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield showing the Moon hovering above Earth, as seen from the ISS, similar to the views in the opening of the video:
What happens when you give 1,000,000 particles their own gravity and spring repulsion and send them out to play? Watch the video above and find out.
This was created by David Moore, a self-taught computer programmer, aspiring physicist and student at San Diego Miramar College. It’s a custom code made with SDL/C++ and 8 days of render time. According to David there’s a bug at the end “where particles can get arbitrarily high energy… but before that it’s very physically accurate!”
It’s fascinating to watch the attraction process take place — one might envision a similar process occurring in the early Universe with the formation of the first galaxies and galactic clusters out of a hot, uniform state. Plus it’s great to see young talented minds like David’s working on such projects for fun!
This brief quote by the late Carl Sagan is wonderfully illustrated in the beautiful and poignant short film “Stardust,” directed by Mischa Rozema of Amsterdam-based media company PostPanic. Using actual images from space exploration as well as CGI modeling, Stardust reminds us that everything we and the world around us are made of was created inside stars… and that, one day, our home star will once again free all that “stuff” back out into the Universe.
The film was made in memory of talented Dutch designer Arjan Groot, who died of cancer in July 2011 at the age of 39.
“I wanted to show the universe as a beautiful but also destructive place. It’s somewhere we all have to find our place within. As a director, making Stardust was a very personal experience but it’s not intended to be a personal film and I would want people to attach their own meanings to the film so that they can also find comfort based on their own histories and lives.”
– Mischa Rozema, director
Credits:
A PostPanic Production
Written & directed by Mischa Rozema
Produced by Jules Tervoort
VFX Supervisor: Ivor Goldberg
Associate VFX Supervisor: Chris Staves
Senior digital artists: Matthijs Joor, Jeroen Aerts
Digital artists: Marti Pujol, Silke Finger, Mariusz Kolodziejczak, Dieuwer Feldbrugge, Cara To, Jurriën Boogert
Camera & edit: Mischa Rozema
Production: Ania Markham, Annejes van Liempd
Audio by Pivot Audio , Guy Amitai
Featuring “Helio” by Ruben Samama
Copyright 2013 Post Panic BV, All rights reserved
In the grand scheme of the universe, nothing is ever wasted and it finds comfort in us all essentially being Stardust ourselves. Voyager represents the memories of our loved ones and lives that will never disappear.
When the Apollo boys visited the Moon back in the ’60s and ’70s they left more than just some experiments, rovers, and family portraits behind –- they also left, shall we say, a little bit of themselves on the lunar surface. It makes total sense when you think about it, but still… there’s poop on the Moon.
In this video, Minute Physics and Destin from Smarter Every Day show how astronauts would relieve themselves during the Apollo missions (or at least the gadgets they used — we all know how they did it) and why it was decided to make astronaut poop a permanent part of their lunar litter.
(Because there’s no public toilets in the Sea of Tranquility.)
In another video Destin goes on to discuss some of the other things the Apollo astronauts left on the lunar surface as part of their… duties… most notably the Laser Ranging Retroreflectors that are still being used today to measure distances between Earth and the Moon. Destin explains how their corner-cube reflectors work — using, fittingly, the mirrors in a restroom shared with NASA at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Check out the video below.
According to the Lunar and Planetary Institute: “The Laser Ranging Retroreflector experiment has produced many important measurements. These include an improved knowledge of the Moon’s orbit and the rate at which the Moon is receding from Earth (currently 3.8 centimeters per year) and of variations in the rotation of the Moon. These variations in rotation are related to the distribution of mass inside the Moon and imply the existence of a small core, with a radius of less than 350 kilometers, somewhat smaller than the limits imposed by the passive seismic and magnetometer experiments. These measurements have also improved our knowledge of changes of the Earth’s rotation rate and the precession of its spin axis and have been used to test Einstein’s theory of relativity.”
Want to see how corner-cube reflectors work? Click here.
The Laser Ranging Retroreflector experiment deployed on Apollo 11 (NASA)
Just goes to show that not everything that got left behind was crap.
See more videos from Destin at Smarter Every Day here and more Minute Physics here.
The Columbia crew. From the left: Mission Specialist David Brown, Commander Rick Husband, Mission Specialists Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla and Michael Anderson, Pilot William McCool and Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon. Credit: NASA.
Airing on PBS stations in the US tonight (January 31, 2013) a new film in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of the space shuttle Columbia disaster. Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope tells the little-known story of Columbia astronaut Ilan Ramon from Israel, the son of Holocaust survivors who became Israel’s first astronaut. Ramon carried into space a miniature Torah scroll that had survived the horrors of the Holocaust, given to a boy in a secret bar mitzvah observed in the pre-dawn hours in the notorious Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.
“Moving tributes like this film remind us all that spaceflight always carries great risk,” said NASA Administrator and four-time space shuttle astronaut Charles Bolden. “But fallen heroes like Ilan were willing to risk the ultimate sacrifice to make important science discoveries and push the envelope of human achievement.”
See the trailer, below:
The film premieres tonight at 9:00 p.m. EST (check local listings here) on PBS stations. It will be followed by an encore broadcast of NOVA “Space Shuttle Disaster” at 10:00 p.m. EST, which examines the causes of the tragedy.
Most PBS specials are rebroadcast and are usually available later on the internet, and so check your local listings if you missed it, and we’ll also post a link if/when this film becomes available online.
Stranded on an alien planet, ejected from your burning ship and with only minutes of breathable air left, your chances of survival look slim indeed. And with — something — tearing holes in your suit, you’ll likely be dead before you know it.
That is, of course, unless you have a good narrator.
“Voice Over,” a short film directed by Martin Rosete, puts you in this and a couple other similarly precarious situations, each seemingly bleaker than the last. Through it all a narration by Feodor Atkine underscores the hopelessness (in French, with subtitles) until the final reveal, which… well, I won’t spoil it for you. All I’ll say is it’s well worth 9 minutes of your time.
Watch the video below.
(Quick warning: a couple of parts are slightly graphic.)
I must say, I couldn’t help but feel like I was watching a film version of a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
Voice Over
Starring Jonathan D. Mellor and Feodor Atkine
Directed by Martin Rosete
Produced by Koldo Zuazua, Sebastian Alvarez, Manuel Calvo, and The Rosete Brothers
Cinematography by Jose Martin Rosete
From Kamel Films
'Riding the edge of darkness, to beyond the horizon," Tweeted astronaut Chris Hadfield.
Here’s the latest video shot from the International Space Station, courtesy of the crew of Expedition 34. You’ll see the view from above as the ISS crosses the terminator from night into day, and then slips back into night again. This day/night cycle happens 16 times in orbit during a 24 period. This sped-up view shows two complete orbits on January 3, 2013 from 11:43:46 to 15:49:31 GMT, and includes a couple of cameo appearances from a rising Moon.
While the beauty of Earth is indisputable, the magnificence of the space station is readily apparent here, as the solar arrays glow with the setting sunlight, even as Earth below is plunged into darkness.
Let’s hope we can one day all experience this view first-hand!
