Teens Put Lego Man in ‘Space’ (Actually Stratosphere)
That’s one giant leap for Lego. Two Canadian highschoolers have wowed the Web with their video of a Lego toy taking a balloon ride to near-space.
The video, made by Toronto 17-year-olds Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, shows a tiny Lego man holding a Canadian flag with the blue curve of the Earth far below and the black of space above. It is the latest example of do-it-yourself near-space photography by an amateur balloon launching team.
The teens used a weather balloon to carry the Lego minifigure and set of cameras, one with a fish-eye lens, into to the stratosphere, ultimately reaching a height of nearly 80,000 feet (24,384 meters) before the balloon burst, according to the Toronto Star . Once the balloon popped, the Lego man and its attached cameras fell back to Earth under a homemade parachute.
Pictures that they have taken:
Photo Credit: Lego Man In Space, Mission Success Album
Via The Persistence of Memory
![bluedogeyes:
Earth 500 years ago
The myth of the Flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical.
This idea seems to have been widespread during the first half of the 20th century, so that the Members of the Historical Association in 1945 stated that:
“The idea that educated men at the time of Columbus believed that the earth was flat, and that this belief was one of the obstacles to be overcome by Columbus before he could get his project sanctioned, remains one of the hardiest errors in teaching.”
During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. By the 14th century, belief in a flat earth among the educated was essentially dead.
However, among Medieval artists, depictions of a flat earth remained common. The exterior of the famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch is a Renaissance example in which a disc-shaped earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere.
According to Stephen Jay Gould, “there never was a period of ‘flat earth darkness’ among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology.”
Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that “there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth’s] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference”.
Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over evolution.
Russell claims “with extraordinary [sic] few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat,” and credits histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and Washington Irving for popularizing the flat-earth myth.
(via Myth of the Flat Earth)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyjizni4p71qa64bjo1_500.jpg)
Earth 500 years ago
The myth of the Flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical.
This idea seems to have been widespread during the first half of the 20th century, so that the Members of the Historical Association in 1945 stated that:
“The idea that educated men at the time of Columbus believed that the earth was flat, and that this belief was one of the obstacles to be overcome by Columbus before he could get his project sanctioned, remains one of the hardiest errors in teaching.”
During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. By the 14th century, belief in a flat earth among the educated was essentially dead.
However, among Medieval artists, depictions of a flat earth remained common. The exterior of the famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch is a Renaissance example in which a disc-shaped earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere.
According to Stephen Jay Gould, “there never was a period of ‘flat earth darkness’ among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology.”
Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that “there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth’s] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference”.
Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over evolution.
Russell claims “with extraordinary [sic] few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat,” and credits histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and Washington Irving for popularizing the flat-earth myth.
(via Myth of the Flat Earth)
Photographer Loves Math, Graphs Her Images
Here are some of the pictures the photographer named Nikki Graziano have captured. Graziano, is a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, she overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos.
“I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says.
Graziano doesn’t go out looking for a specific function but lets one find her instead. Once she’s got an image she likes, Graziano whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph. See more of her Found Functions series at Nikkigraziano.com.
Via QUASARS
The book “Orda Cave Awareness Project” (by samebody)
It is dedicated to the biggest underwater gypsum cave in the world. It is located near Orda village (Perm region, Russia). The book contains articles by geologists, stories about animal life of the cave, interviews with pioneers, reviews by leading experts in cave diving. The book is illustrated with more than 100 unique underwater photos. Also the first published map of Orda cave with additions and clarifications. The work on the book took half a year, the team made more than 150 dives. All 5 kilometers of its underwater galleries were photographed. ordacave.ru.
A Scientific Look at the Dangers of High Heels
Does it fundamentally matter if a woman’s calf muscle fibers shorten and she neglects her tendons while walking, especially if she loves the looks of her Louboutins?
That question is difficult for a biomechanist to answer, Dr. Cronin admits. Aesthetics are outside the realm of his branch of science. But the risk of injury is not. “We think that the large muscle strains that occur when walking in heels may ultimately increase the likelihood of strain injuries,” he says. (This risk is separate from the chances that a woman, if unfamiliar with heels, may topple sideways and twist an ankle or bruise her self-image, which is an acute injury and happened to me only the one time.)
The risks extend to workouts, when heel wearers abruptly switch to sneakers or other flat shoes. “In a person who wears heels most of her working week,” Dr. Cronin says, the foot and leg positioning in heels “becomes the new default position for the joints and the structures within. Any change to this default setting,” he says, like pulling on Keds or Crocs, constitutes “a novel environment, which could increase injury risk.”
It should be noted, he adds, that in his study, the volunteers “were quite young, average age 25, suggesting that it is not necessary to wear heels for a long time, meaning decades, before adaptations start to occur.”
So, if you do wear heels and are at all concerned about muscle and joint strains, his advice is simple. Try, if possible, to ease back a bit on the towering footwear, he says. Wear high heels maybe “once or twice a week,” he says. And if that’s not practical or desirable, “try to remove the heels whenever possible, such as when you’re sitting at your desk.” The shoes can remain alluring, even nestled beside your feet.
*Click above to read the full article
Hey, Who Ripped Open a Hole in the Universe?
This eerie patch of blackness in the middle of a busy star cluster may look like a rather misshapen black hole, but it’s actually something even stranger. It’s also quite possibly the loneliest, darkest, coldest place in the entire cosmos.
This is Barnard 68, and it’s what’s known as a dark molecular cloud. Basically, the dust and gas that makes up Barnard 68 is so tightly packed together that it blocks out all the light behind it. The result might look like some alien civilization tore apart the fabric of the universe and opening up a gateway to the howling void, but thankfully - or unfortunately, I guess, depending on how you feel about the howling void - it’s just gas. Make that a lot of gas.
Here’s some additional info on this particular patch of darkness:
Extremely weird, but kinda cool at the same time.
Illustration of dissection of conjoined twins from the 1665 edition of De Monstris by Fortunio Liceti (1577-1657).
Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine. Via. Wikipedia
About me
Sixteen. Goalkeeper. Manchester United.
