Imaging The Arctic: "In Spring 2013, based out of the small settlements of Niaqornat and Kullorsuaq,
expeditionary artist Maria Coryell-Martin will accompany scientist
Dr. Kristin Laidre onto the pack ice of Baffin Bay." They are keeping an online field journal detailing Dr. Laidre's study of the effects of sea-ice loss on narwhals and polar bears, with Maria Coryell-Martin's illustrations accompanying field notes.
posted by ChuraChura
on May 1, 2013 -
1 comment
Excuse Us While We Kiss The Sky. [Single page view] "By day they work as computer programmers and stock boys and academics. But at night they are known as urban explorers. The Brooklyn Bridge,
London's Shard, Notre Dame—each structure is an expedition waiting to happen. Each sewer, each scaffold, each off-limits site is a puzzle to solve. No wonder the cops are after them. Matthew Power embeds with the space invaders and sees a world—above- and belowground—that the rest of us never knew existed."
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Mar 11, 2013 -
17 comments
Daily Telegraph:
Why the world isn't running out of oil:
"Moreover, as well as bountiful oilfields in North America, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other producers in the Middle East, there are massive, barely tapped reserves in South America, Africa and the Arctic: not billions of barrels’ worth, but trillions. So the planet is not about to run out of oil. On the contrary, according to a Harvard University report published last year, we are heading for a glut.
The 75-page study, by oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, was based on a field-by-field analysis of most of the major oil exploration and development projects in the world, and it predicted a 20 per cent increase in global oil production by 2020."
[more inside]
posted by Wordshore
on Feb 21, 2013 -
69 comments
"A mission scientist with NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, Natalie Batalha hunts for exoplanets — Earth-sized planets beyond our solar system that might harbor life. She speaks about unexpected connections between things like love and dark energy, science and gratitude, and how "exploring the heavens" brings the beauty of the cosmos and the
exuberance of scientific discovery closer to us all".
(Audio link of interview at top left corner of page, other relevant links at bottom of page)
posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Feb 17, 2013 -
10 comments
Practical, economic development of space — treating it not as a mere borderland of Earth, but a new frontier in its own right — has not materialized. Still, the promise is as great as it ever was, and, contrary to popular opinion, is eminently achievable — but only if the current legal framework and attitude toward space can be shifted toward seeing it as a realm not just of human exploration, but also of human enterprise.
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Jan 12, 2013 -
17 comments
Atomic Rockets is chock full of stuff to tickle the imagination of anyone who has enjoyed science fiction accounts of space travel. You can move your cursor over the "Show topic list" button in the top right corner of the page and start exploring.
posted by Egg Shen
on Sep 29, 2012 -
8 comments
For more than two years, scholars and imaging scientists have been using advanced scanning techniques to recover the mostly illegible contents of an 1871 field diary kept by the British explorer David Livingstone in Africa. Low on paper and ink, the explorer had resorted to writing on newspaper sheets, with ink made from berries, and over time the original document had become almost impossible to read. Now the team has unveiled an online “multispectral critical edition” with images, transcriptions, and relevant notes, making Livingstone’s first-person account accessible again. They’ve also created a “Livingstone Spectral Images Archive” to give anyone who wants it direct access to the images, transcriptions, and metadata the project has created, no strings attached. Almost everything in both the edition and the archive comes with a Creative Commons license that allows the contents to be reused with attribution. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Jun 3, 2012 -
11 comments
OMG SPACE aims to illustrate the scale and the grandeur of our solar system, as well as illustrate through the use of
infographics our work in the exploration of our solar system with various spacecraft.
[more inside]
posted by zamboni
on Apr 3, 2012 -
19 comments
Fifty years ago today,
John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. In an recent interview, he lamented the decline of the manned US space program: "It's unseemly to me that here we are, supposedly the world's greatest space-faring nation, and we don't even have a way to get back and forth to our own International Space Station."
[more inside]
posted by dsfan
on Feb 20, 2012 -
80 comments
William and Sly 2 is a gorgeous, ethereal fantasy exploration game wherein you play a nimble fox tasked with finding the scattered pages of your human friend's journal, while gathering mushrooms, finding keys to unlock mystery boxes, and freeing rune-bound spirits and pixies trapped in frost along the way.
[more inside]
posted by taz
on Jan 16, 2012 -
14 comments
The London Geographical Journal, the preeminent publication in its field, observed in 1953 that “Fawcett marked the end of an age. One might almost call him the last of the individualist explorers. The day of the aeroplane, the radio, the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest.” Fawcett was none other than
Percival "Percy" Harrison Fawcett,
British soldier, trained as a surveyor of unknown lands, doubling as a British spy. But
his true love was exploration, and not simply to mark boundaries on a map. His final goal was the same that had been the demise of many explorers:
a mighty lost civilization in South America.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Dec 29, 2011 -
6 comments
Built as part of the fifth
/dev/fort developer retreat,
Spacelog.org allows you to explore early space missions via the original NASA transcripts. Currently live are
Mercury 6 which made John Glenn the first American in orbit, and the 'successful failure'
Apollo 13 (The transcribed
key moment and the
original). Alongside the transcripts are supporting materials from the NASA archives including
photography and descriptions of the
mission phases. The developers are
looking for help to digitise the Gemini 7, Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 missions.
posted by garrett
on Dec 1, 2010 -
11 comments
Fifteen years ago this week, programmer
Ron Britvich launched version 1.0 of
Active Worlds. Started as an autonomous project of
Worlds, Inc. (a spinoff of educational gamesmaker
Knowledge Adventure), Active Worlds was one of the first and most ambitious attempts to create a 3D virtual community on the web.
Built on the architecture of Britvich's
Worlds Chat beta, Active Worlds
debuted in the form of
Alphaworld, a sunny green infinite plane open to
public building. In its opening years Alphaworld experienced
a land rush of construction, resulting in
an anarchic starfish sprawl larger than the state of California. A sister company, Circle of Fire, was soon founded to craft
additional themed hubs, and once individual ownership of worlds became possible the AW community spawned a veritable universe of
hundreds of worlds.
Although
the company has seen its
ups and downs since those heady times and its fortunes have slowly dwindled, the
Active Worlds platform survives to
this day. Look inside for a simple guide on how to log in to the (free) service, rundowns of the best worlds, links to essays analyzing the program's legacy, and other content summing up
its venerable community.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Jul 4, 2010 -
18 comments
Early in the days of
exploration of Antarctica, Australian geologist
Douglas Mawson turned down an invitation to join Robert Falcon Scott's
Terra Nova Expedition in 1910 (
Cool Antarctica previously). Instead, Mawson lead his own expedition, the
Australasian Antarctic Expedition (December 1911 to December 1913), an expedition to chart the 2000-mile coastline directly south of Australia, one of the least-visited parts of the continent throughout the early years of Antarctic exploration.
The group's efforts and activities are well documented, and many remnants of the expedition remain on Antarctica.
The conservation of Mawson's Huts is now an ongoing effort from
Association of Australasian Palaeontologists (AAP)
Mawson's Huts Foundation. While most efforts were focused on the recovery and treatment of artifacts inside the main hut, the group also searched for the
Vickers (
Aviation)
monoplane that was modified to become an "air tractor", or motorized sledge. The remains of the plane were last seen in 1975.
Now the plane has been found, thanks to an exceptionally low tide and a bit of luck.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jan 5, 2010 -
11 comments
MAN is one of a number of animals that make things, but man is the only one that depends for its very survival on the things he has made. That
simple observation is the
starting point for an
ambitious history programme that the BBC will
begin broadcasting on January 18th in which it aims to tell a history of the world through 100 objects in the British Museum (BM). A
joint venture four years in the making between the BM and the BBC, the series features 100 15-minute radio broadcasts, a separate 13 episodes in which
children visit the museum at night and try to unlock its mysteries, a BBC World Service package of tailored omnibus editions for broadcasting around the world and an
interactive digital programme involving 350 museums in Britain which will be available free over the internet. The presenter is
Neil MacGregor, the BM’s director, who has moved from the study of art to the contemplation of things. “Objects take you into the thought world of the past,” he says. “When you think about the skills required to make something you begin to think about the brain that made it.”
via The Economist [more inside]
posted by infini
on Dec 30, 2009 -
36 comments
Spacehack "A directory of ways to participate in space exploration. Interact and connect with the space community."
posted by chrismear
on Aug 4, 2009 -
6 comments
NYC Grid is a photo blog dedicated to exploring and discovering The City of New York block by block and corner by corner. Updated every weekday, each post covers a new block with a focus on the mundane and ephemeral. An optimistic snapshot of New York as it is now.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Aug 1, 2009 -
8 comments
Cool Antarctica is a site dedicated to all things Antarctic. There are
pictures (
penguins),
videos (including, among much else, an old
documentary about Edmund Hillary's and Vivian Fuchs' Transantarctic Expedition),
a history section focusing on the famous explorers (e.g.
Amundsen,
Scott,
Shackleton,
Charcot and
de Gerlache) and a
fact file, which includes what may be my favorite section, an
Antarctic slang dictionary (
degomble: removing snow that's stuck to clothing before going inside -
monk-on: a term for being in a bad, usually introspective mood, "he's got a monk-on" -
poppy: alcoholic beverage that is chilled with natural Antarctic ice). All this is but a taster of what's on the website.
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 29, 2009 -
20 comments
