Global Climate Maps

"Climatemaps visualizes the weather over the course of a year around the whole world. The map animates average global monthly climate data from 1961-1990 to show you when every location in the world has its hottest, driest or wettest weather." - http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.nl/2016/08/annual-weather-patterns.html#links

We're on the cusp of a revolution that will change the world as much as computers did

Most people do not yet understand the potential impact of our newfound ability to edit and eventually rewrite genetic code, the blueprint for life itself.
At least, so say a number a number of experts in genetics and genomics. That idea was the major common thread in a series of interviews with some of the leading researchers in the field.

Full article... 

Please read the article so you are not 'most people'. I also truly believe this will be big. This is the technology that allows a gene drive that could exterminate a mosquito species for example.

Planet orbiting in the habitable zone discovered just 12ly away

Awesome!

A planet with conditions that could support life orbits a twin neighbour of the sun visible to the naked eye, scientists have revealed.
The world is one of five thought to be circling Tau Ceti, a star just 12 light years away that is almost identical to the sun.
Astronomers estimate the Tau Ceti planets to be two to six times bigger than Earth. One of them, with five times the Earth's mass, lies in the star's "habitable zone".
Also known as the "Goldilocks zone", this is the orbital region that is neither too hot nor too cold to allow liquid surface water and, potentially, life. Details of the discovery are to appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Full Article...

Trillion FPS Camera

What could possibly go wrong?

The Mars Science Laboratory has been launched towards Mars. Only the first few steps in a long series of single point of failures that can all waste 2 billion dollars.

Real prospects for life extension

Good TED video.

She is 56 years, I wonder if she is secretly testing her findings on herself, or if it's just her genes or diet that makes her look younger.

Fairly projecting the world

I always knew that Africa was much bigger than it looked on many maps, but I didn't know so many other countries would fit in it as you see in the image below.

The reason why people usually don't realize how big Africa truly is, is because of the map projections commonly used to show the Earth. Projecting a sphere in 2D is a difficult task and will always have some some compromises. Often the Mercator projection was used. 

The Mercator projection distorts the size and shape of large objects, as the scale increases from the Equator to the poles, where it becomes infinite.

Greenland takes as much area on the map as Africa, when in fact Africa's area is approximately 14 times greater than Greenland.

The Gall-Peterson projection is the other extreme. In this projection the landmasses have their actual size compared to each other, but there is a lot of distortion. Here the huge size of Africa is immediately clear.

The Robinson projection is a map projection of a world map, which shows the entire world at once. It was specifically created in an attempt to find a good compromise to the problem of readily showing the whole globe as a flat image.

More about map projections.

The Dark Side of Saturn

Source

More cool pics

Relevant

Symphony of Science - Ode to the Brain

Supernova vs (dusty) Galaxy

"Far away, long ago, a star exploded. Supernova 1994D, visible as the bright spot on the lower left, occurred in the outskirts of disk galaxy NGC 4526."

Global average NDVI over time

Plants strongly absorb red light and are highly reflective in infrared which keeps them from overheating. Other earthly surfaces don't show this behavior. NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) is based is based on the ratio of measured near-infrared and red light and therefor is a strong indicator of vegetation density and health.

This is a sequential slideshow I made of the bi-monthly global NDVI data averaged over the years 1981-2008. It plays from January to December (I should have added the months in the video) and you can clearly see the vegetation react to the seasons. The raw data comes from NASA GIMMS.

From these maps in combination with a global map of vegetation types one can calculate other vegetation parameters such as the Leaf Area Index in my case. LAI is the area of leaves per area of ground and is an important parameter in hydrology because it intercepts and stores rainwater and transpirates water which plants extract from the soil. The maps I generate will then be used in a hydrological model to see how it performs with respect to the current LAI implementation which uses standard vegetation 'curves'. This is the main subject of my thesis.

If you want to see the maps in higher resolution you can download the PNGs here.

Ben Goldacre on the placebo and nocebo effect

Placebo and nocebo @ wiki.

Large Hadron Collider - How does it work?

Richard Feynman on Pseudoscience

Three interesting articles about fake science by Richard Feynman,
Cargo Cult Science
Mr. Papf's Perpetual Motion
A visit with Uri Geller

Video imaging of walking myosin V by high-speed atomic force microscopy

In living systems, molecules called molecular motors convert chemical energy into mechanical motion, and are essential for many life processes including intracellular transport, cell division, and muscle contraction. Myosin V is a type of molecular motor that transports cargo through cells by "walking" along filaments.
Here's a diagram that shows a clearer picture of what's happening. It's amazing that they were able to capture video of such a tiny phenomenon, its steps are only 74nm and it 'walks' at ~380 nm/s.

And a rendered video of the process in a white blood cell (leukocyte). I linked to the relevant time, but recommend watching the entire thing.

Video of individual carbon atoms was featured previously on the blog.

Water Droplets Bouncing on a Superhydrophobic Carbon Nanotube Array

Superhydrophobicity @ wiki

xkcd: Purity

TIL: you can travel a wind powered vehicle faster downwind than the wind speed

TIL (today I learned)

I still can't get my head around how it works, but it has been proved that it does.

Background article that I can make little sense of.

The Mandelbulb: first 'true' 3D image of famous fractal

NewScientist

It may look like a piece of virtuoso knitting, but the makers of an image they call the Mandelbulb (see right) claim it is most accurate three-dimensional representation to date of the most famous fractal equation: the Mandelbrot set.

There have been previous attempts at a 3D Mandelbrot image, but they do not display real fractal behaviour, says Daniel White, an amateur fractal image maker based in Bedford, UK.

Spinning the 2D Mandelbrot fractal like wood on a lathe, raising and lowering certain points, or invoking higher-dimensional mathematics can all produce apparently three-dimensional Mandelbrots. Yet none of these techniques offer the detail and self-similar shapes that White believes represent a true 3D fractal image. Two years ago, he decided to find a "true" 3D version of the Mandelbrot.

Hints of life found on Saturn moon

Two potential signatures of life on Saturn's moon Titan have been found by the Cassini spacecraft. But scientists are quick to point out that non-biological chemical reactions could also be behind the observations.

Titan is much too cold to support liquid water on its surface, but some scientists have suggested that exotic life-forms could live in the lakes of liquid methane or ethane that dot the moon's surface.

In 2005, Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field and Heather R Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, calculated that such microbes could eke out an existence by breathing in hydrogen gas and eating the organic molecule acetylene, creating methane in the process.

This would result in a lack of acetylene on Titan and a depletion of hydrogen close to the moon's surface, where the microbes would live, they said.

Now, measurements from the Cassini spacecraft have borne out these predictions, hinting that life may be present.

More @ NewScientist