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Galactic Views (30)

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SPACE WATCH

Compact Planetary System
NASA – This artist’s concept depicts a planetary system so compact that it’s more like Jupiter and its moons than a star and its planets. Astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler mission and ground-based telescopes recently confirmed that the system, called KOI-961, hosts the three smallest exoplanets currently known to orbit a star other than our sun. An exoplanet is a planet that resides outside of our solar system.

The star, which is located about 130 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation, is a red dwarf that is one-sixth the size of the sun, or just 70 percent bigger than Jupiter. The star is also cooler than our sun, and gives off more red light than yellow.

The smallest of the three planets, called KOI-961.03, is actually located the farthest from the star, and is pictured in the foreground. This planet is about the size of Mars, with a radius of 0.57 times that of Earth. The next planet to the upper right is KOI-961.01, which is 0.78 times the radius of Earth. The planet closest to the star is KOI-961.02, with a radius 0.73 times the Earth’s.

All three planets whip around the star in less than two days, with the closest planet taking less than half a day. Their close proximity to the star also means they are scorching hot, with temperatures ranging from 350 to 836 degrees Fahrenheit (176 to 447 degrees Celsius). The star’s habitable zone, or the region where liquid water could exist, is located far beyond the planets.

The ground-based observations contributing to these discoveries were made with the Palomar Observatory, near San Diego, Calif., and the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Martina McBride Stunning Leg Display Performing on Stage in Short Dress and High Heels

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Wow. This was a pleasant surprise. These photos of Martina McBride performing onstage in a short blue sequined dress and high heels is quite impressive. There are quite a few country stars that have great legs like Sara Evans or Carrie Underwood, but obviously I have been remiss not to have included Martina in that leggy list. Her legs are toned and fit. Very shapely. Perhaps no finer gams have I observed so far this year. Well done

Martina McBride legsMartina McBride legs

LAS VEGAS, NV – MARCH 10: Recording artist Martina McBride performs during the opening night of The Smith Center for the Performing Arts on March 10,…

Source: Best Celebrity Legs in High Heels

Galactic Views (30)

By

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SPACE WATCH

Compact Planetary System
NASA – This artist’s concept depicts a planetary system so compact that it’s more like Jupiter and its moons than a star and its planets. Astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler mission and ground-based telescopes recently confirmed that the system, called KOI-961, hosts the three smallest exoplanets currently known to orbit a star other than our sun. An exoplanet is a planet that resides outside of our solar system.

The star, which is located about 130 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation, is a red dwarf that is one-sixth the size of the sun, or just 70 percent bigger than Jupiter. The star is also cooler than our sun, and gives off more red light than yellow.

The smallest of the three planets, called KOI-961.03, is actually located the farthest from the star, and is pictured in the foreground. This planet is about the size of Mars, with a radius of 0.57 times that of Earth. The next planet to the upper right is KOI-961.01, which is 0.78 times the radius of Earth. The planet closest to the star is KOI-961.02, with a radius 0.73 times the Earth’s.

All three planets whip around the star in less than two days, with the closest planet taking less than half a day. Their close proximity to the star also means they are scorching hot, with temperatures ranging from 350 to 836 degrees Fahrenheit (176 to 447 degrees Celsius). The star’s habitable zone, or the region where liquid water could exist, is located far beyond the planets.

The ground-based observations contributing to these discoveries were made with the Palomar Observatory, near San Diego, Calif., and the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Elizabeth Banks Delievers a Stunning Leg Show in a Short Orange Dress for the Hunger Games Premiere

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Elizabeth Banks blistered the Hungry Game premiere in a short orange dress that showed off her gorgeous legs. I can’t say I am a fan of her wedge high heels though they did do the job of accentuating her long legs. Not much else to say. She looks fantastic. Has a great body. And did a good job of showing it off. Well done.

Celebrity videos

Elizabeth Banks legsElizabeth Banks legsElizabeth Banks legs

LOS ANGELES, CA – MARCH 12: Actress Elizabeth Banks arrives at the premiere of Lionsgate’s “The Hunger Games” at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on March 12,…

Source: Best Celebrity Legs in High Heels

Galactic Views (29)

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SPACE WATCH

Orion’s Rainbow of Infrared Light
NASA – This new view of the Orion Nebula highlights fledgling stars hidden in the gas and clouds. It shows infrared observations taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency‘s Herschel mission, in which NASA plays an important role.

Stars form as clumps of this gas and dust collapses, creating warm globs of material fed by an encircling disk. These dusty envelopes glow brightest at longer wavelengths, appearing as red dots in this image. In several hundred thousand years, some of the forming stars will accrete enough material to trigger nuclear fusion at their cores and then blaze into stardom.

Spitzer is designed to see shorter infrared wavelengths than Herschel. By combining their observations, astronomers get a more complete picture of star formation. The colors in this image relate to the different wavelengths of light, and to the temperature of material, mostly dust, in this region of Orion. Data from Spitzer show warmer objects in blue, with progressively cooler dust appearing green and red in the Herschel datasets. The more evolved, hotter embryonic stars thus appear in blue.

Infrared data at wavelengths of 8.0 and 24 microns from Spitzer are rendered in blue. Herschel data with wavelengths of 70 and 160 microns are represented in green and red, respectively.

This image was released on Feb. 29, 2012. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/IRAM

Hubble Image of Galaxies’ El Dorado
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has produced this beautiful image of the galaxy NGC 1483. NGC 1483 is a barred spiral galaxy located in the southern constellation of Dorado — the dolphinfish (or Mahi-mahi fish) in Spanish. The nebulous galaxy features a bright central bulge and diffuse arms with distinct star-forming regions. In the background, many other distant galaxies can be seen.

The constellation Dorado is home to the Dorado Group of galaxies, a loose group comprised of an estimated 70 galaxies and located some 62 million light-years away. The Dorado group is much larger than the Local Group that includes the Milky Way (and which contains around 30 galaxies) and approaches the size of a galaxy cluster. Galaxy clusters are the largest groupings of galaxies (and indeed the largest structures of any type) in the universe to be held together by their gravity.

Barred spiral galaxies are so named because of the prominent bar-shaped structures found in their center. They form about two thirds of all spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way. Recent studies suggest that bars may be a common stage in the formation of spiral galaxies, and may indicate that a galaxy has reached full maturity. Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

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Entrepreneur Astronaut: Here’s How You’ll Get to Space

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Richard Garriott, age 50, was the 483rd person to leave planet Earth — and he’d like you to be one of the first thousand.

Garriott, creator of the popular Ultima videogame series, spent a good chunk of his fortune visiting the International Space Station via Soyuz rocket in 2008 (with ground-based assistance from his father Owen, a former NASA astronaut). Now he acts as an advisor to both NASA and commercial space companies.

Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin Saturday, Garriott laid out his vision for the next 30 years of space travel. He said while the cost of his flight was in the tens of millions of dollars, competition will bring the cost of a sub-orbital trip down to the same as a round-the-world ticket within a matter of years.

What’s going to take us there: entrepreneurial spirit. “If I could make a profit in going to space, I would go all the time,” Garriott said. Indeed, he made several million dollars while in space — partly by developing a new kind of earth-imaging software for NASA, partly by growing protein crystals for pharmaceutical companies.

That didn’t offset the cost of the $ 10 million-plus trip, but Garriott outlined the new technologies that will bring costs down — such as SpaceX‘s reusable launch rocket components and private Space Shuttle-like vehicles that are 10 times cheaper than the NASA version.

Armadillo Aerospace, a private venture by fellow game designer John Carmack, is building its rockets largely from components it is ordering on the Internet.

“All of the cryogenics from the Apollo mission are now in the AC unit outside your house,” Garriott said. “Pretty much any kid who can build a robot can build a rocket that will fly to space.”

All that remains: figuring out how to make more of a profit when you’re up there. Garriott suggested vaccine development and solar satellites — small ones that could power a military base, say — as low-hanging fruit.

“A lot of you are smarter entrepreneurs than I,” Garriott told the SXSW Interactive crowd, “and will make more money than I did.”

Want to know more? Check out Garriott’s documentary Man on a Mission, as of this week available on iTunes and Netflix.

Source: Mashable » Tech

How To Follow the Japan Quake and Tsunami Anniversary on Social Media

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This Sunday, March 11, marks the one-year anniversary of northern Japan’s threefold devastating disaster — a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, a tsunami that engulfed entire towns and cities, and a nuclear disaster that has since shut down 52 out of 55 commercial reactors in Japan and stirred an international debate about nuclear energy.

While the Fukushima disaster has become a story of its own, numerous projects have developed to help document the personal perspectives of those who lived through the earthquake and tsunami. These two disasters — which lost media attention as the Fukushima crisis unfolded — have killed nearly 20,000 people and displaced thousands of others. Here’s Mashable‘s official list of the top five projects documenting and commemorating the earthquake and tsunami, which are available in English on social media sites:

“Children of the Tsunami”

Perhaps one of the most heart-wrenching videos to come out of the disaster is this BBC documentary showing the disaster through the eyes of Japanese school children. With the children describing step-by-step what they were thinking and what was happening at the time, the video takes you straight to Japan at the heart of the disaster. Catch the preview below and view it in its entirety here.

Japan In A Day

Director Ridley Scott’s crowdsourced project, in collaboration with Fuji Television Network, invites people in Japan to submit videos of their lives this March 11 as a way to commemorate the event online. Modeled after Scott’s Life in a Day, Japan In A Day is not asking for any specific views about the disaster — rather, it’s seeking the ordinary, everyday activities that people have been doing since, as they rebuild their lives and move forward. Since the film is asking for users to submit videos on March 11, it won’t be available for screening on the exact date of the anniversary. But, it will be available the day after, on March 12. Check out the trailer below:

#Quakebook

Before there was Storify, there was Quakebook, a Twitter-sourced account of the disaster whose proceeds go directly to the Japanese Red Cross. Propelled by OurManInAbiko, an expat in Japan who voiced the idea in a single tweet when the quake hit, the project gained an incredible amount of steam in a short amount of time. Within four weeks, a team of 26 people — including copy editors, translators, designers and illustrators, advisors, a tech team and a press officer — created an e-version of the book, and a hardcover edition soon followed.
Quakebook

[Screenshot taken from OurManInAbiko’s website]

Quakebook Anniversary BookThis year, for the anniversary, the Quakebook team has created another book, this time striving to provide independent, unfiltered analysis about — in Quakebook’s words — “what has happened, and what has not since 3/11.” The book, Reconstructing 3/11: Earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown — how Japan’s future depends on its understanding of the 2011 triple disaster, was published on March 8 and is now officially available on Amazon.

“Tsunami Stories”

A project by Voice of America, Tsunami Stories is a Tumblr-powered website crowdsourcing content around the web from survivors. With the tagline, “How a nation heals from invisible wounds,” the site looks to find how people affected by the disaster are coping. They can submit pictures, videos, links or text describing their experience. The site just launched on March 8, and the hashtag #tsunamistories is gaining some traction on Twitter to encourage submissions. My favorite post so far is this video of robot seals comforting Japanese elderly:

#311memory

Of course, what would a commemoration be without Twitter? The Japan Times will be doing official commemoration coverage using the hashtag #311memory.

Graphic courtesy iStockphoto/PhotoTalk

Source: Mashable!

Tweet-A-Beer Lets You Buy Drinks for Twitter Pals

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Buying someone a drink in person is a nice gesture, but buying someone a drink via Twitter is, well, not something you do often.

Online networking app Tweet-A-Beer hopes to change that and make paying for other Twitter users’ drinks more of a habit. The web tool officially rolls out at South by Southwest.

Here’s how it works (flip through the gallery below for a visual tour): Tweet-A-Beer uses Chirpify — an ecommerce platform that lets you buy, sell and donate money — to sync your Twitter account to your PayPal account. You can safely send beer money in $ 5 allotments.

Oregon-based agencies Waggener Edstrom Worldwide and tenfour brewed the app for public consumption in six weeks, just in time for SXSW where networking is known to stem from quaffing alcoholic beverages.

Users have already bought more than 500 beers to incite in-person meetups or wish SXSW attendees good luck. For example, I sent $ 5 to Mashable colleague Sarah Kessler, who will be at SXSW reporting on all things dealing with startups. I personalized my transaction with a message, which was tweeted to my followers after I hit, “Send Beer Money.” The app also allows you to add your current location and a meeting location to drink beers together.

Another Twitter user shows some love for a SXSW-goer:

 

“Given how large the conference is, the best way to track where the hottest spots are and where to meet up face-to-face is via Twitter and location-based services,” Kent Hollenbeck, Waggener Edstrom senior vice president of global corporate communications, told Mashable. “We’re launching it at SXSW Interactive festival — it’s the perfect venue to help foster real-life connections.”

SEE ALSO: 7 Hot Apps to Watch at SXSW | 6 Ways to Up Your Networking Game at SXSW

Waggener Edstrom will also introduce at SXSW a Windows Phone 7 app called News of the Day, which displays a real-time stream of top news and topics as well as trending stories on Twitter. Last year at SXSW, the company launched Hot Spots, an app that showcases popular hangouts in Austin.

Source: Mashable » Tech

Galactic Views (28)

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Hubble Views Grand Star-Forming Region
NASA – This massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. There is no known star-forming region in the Milky Way Galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.

Many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the most massive stars known. Several of them are 100 times more massive than our sun. These hefty stars are destined to pop off, like a string of firecrackers, as supernovas in a few million years.

The image, taken in ultraviolet, visible and red light by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, spans about 100 light-years. The nebula is close enough to Earth that Hubble can resolve individual stars, giving astronomers important information about the stars’ birth and evolution.

The brilliant stars are carving deep cavities in the surrounding material by unleashing a torrent of ultraviolet light, and hurricane-force stellar winds (streams of charged particles), which are etching away the enveloping hydrogen gas cloud in which the stars were born. The image reveals a fantasy landscape of pillars, ridges, and valleys, as well as a dark region in the center that roughly looks like the outline of a holiday tree. Besides sculpting the gaseous terrain, the brilliant stars can also help create a successive generation of offspring. When the winds hit dense walls of gas, they create shocks, which may be generating a new wave of star birth.

These observations were taken Oct. 20-27, 2009. The blue color is light from the hottest, most massive stars; the green from the glow of oxygen; the red from fluorescing hydrogen.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee

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