A Change in Perspective
This sort of inspirational video should probably be saved for a Monday, but maybe it’ll spur someone out there to make something new for the world this weekend.
The video was created by Planetary Collective, a group of filmmakers working with cosmologists, ecologists and philosophers to tell the story of human interconnectedness on Earth. Their narrative is focused through the eyes of astronauts, who report a shift in perspective induced by seeing our planet from space. This phenomenon is being called the Overview Effect.
Top Image: The picture that launched a million adjustments of perspective. This is the famous Pale Blue Dot photograph taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990 when it was almost 4 billion miles from Earth. You can see our planet as the tiny point of light halfway down the brown stripe on the right. Courtesy NASA.
December 14th, 2012
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NASA Sees Powerful Radio Bursts Coming From Lightning-Made Gamma Rays
NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope has helped scientists understand that the brief outbursts of high-energy gamma rays above lightning strikes generate powerful but poorly understood low-frequency radio waves.
After an upgrade to its data analysis technique and operating mode, the telescope’s gamma-ray burst monitor (GBM) is now 10 times better at studying the terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) that explode above thunderstorms after lightning discharges.
December 7th, 2012
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Operation IceBridge Ends Antarctic Survey Season
NASA’s mission to map out changing polar ice, Operation IceBridge, finished its 2012 Antarctic season on Nov. 7, flying the final of 16 science missions in specialized aircraft laden with sensors.
Along with surveys of the upper Filchner Ice Shelf offshore of Recovery Glacier and sea ice floating on the Weddell Sea, the team also continued reconnaissance of changes to Pine Island Glacier. The latter, including a major developing rift that looks set to calve in the near future, is shown in the NASA video below.
Top Image: Sea ice conditions during the time of the CryoSat-2 underpass over the Weddell Sea on Nov. 7, 2012. Courtesy NASA/Michael Studinger.
November 9th, 2012
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Here’s A Reason to Care About Climate Change: It Could Ruin Texas Football
Last week, the U.N.’s official climate change body announced that extreme weather events are tied to climate change and we can expect even more mayhem as the century wears on. Among other climate disasters, the authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report foresee more scorching days and longer and more frequent heat waves across much of the Earth.
For climate advocates, the report was a belated validation of what many had been claiming for years – though several expressed pique at how carefully the climate scientists hedged the conclusions. But much of America, distrustful of climate science and worried about the sluggish economy, likely shrugged the report off, if they noticed at all.
So in an effort to make this most recent climate science relevant to people’s lives for the coming Thanksgiving holiday, we decided to look at how climate change is affecting football.
November 20th, 2011
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