Google Earth has long served as a great tool to explore the furthest regions of our beautiful planet from the comfort of our own homes, but for those with more than just a recreational interest, a bundle of pro features had always cost $399... a year.
Tardigrades are some of the toughest but least well-known creatures on our planet. These tiny animals, also called moss piglets or water bears, are definitely of this earth, but some can boast that they've also traveled to space.
Does sitting for hours on end in your office cubicle just make you want to fly away to St. Lucia for a week to bask in the sun? Well, you probably can't do that realistically without taking away from your vacation time, but in the mean time you can fly around virtually using Google Earth's flight simulator.
Seeing an aurora in person is one of the most amazing spectacles you could witness in the skies above. But what about the skies below?
I woke up at 4:00 am this morning in order to take some video of the last total lunar eclipse visible from North America till 2014. The eclipse was beautiful. It was amazing to watch the shadow of our planet creep slowly across our nearest neighbor. Once the shadow was blocking out most of the light from the sun, the moon was significantly dimmer and the color had changed to a reddish orange. This color is caused by the same effect that makes our sunrises and sunsets so colorful. The light fr...
Mother Earth, God, Buddha, the Universe, energy fields... whatever you call it, lightning slo-mo'ed looks like some higher being set off some major fireworks. Beautiful. Two videos in the gallery below.
As first reported by Next Reality last year, game developer Preloaded, in partnership with BBC Studios, has finally launched BBC Earth - Micro Kingdoms: Senses.
Google worked with design agency B-Reel to create some unique wallpapers for its Pixel and Pixel XL flagships, and the end result is quite stunning. These "Live Earth" wallpapers, as they're called, combine Google Earth's high-def satellite imagery with a 3D parallax effect that changes perspective as you move between screens.
Earlier today, a meteorite flew over the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, triggering a shock wave that injured hundreds of people and caused damage to buildings and vehicles in the area. Witnesses describe seeing a bright ball of light streak through the sky followed by a loud boom as the 10-ton meteorite entered the Earth's atmosphere and exploded.
So, I got this email today from Groupon claiming today is Earth's 400 birthday. Groupon is known for their humor, but how (and why) did they pick today as Earth's 400th birthday?
NASA reports that the sun erupted late last night with a large solar flare—an M8.7 class flare. The classification is calculated according to the peak flux of 100 to 800 picometer x-rays near Earth measured from the GEOS weather satellite. There are 5 letter classifications for solar flares, each with a linear 1-9 number scale of severity. M is the fourth most powerful class, with X leading the way. But last night's earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME), captured by the Solar Dynamics Ob...
Let's say today is your birthday. You've just put those boisterous, vicenarian times behind you, reaching the first big step to your upcoming midlife crisis—30 years old. Maybe this is your midlife crisis. After all, if you're not where you want to be in life when you join the tricenarian ranks, the future starts looking bleak.
The Geminid meteor shower 2010 is tonight, climaxing sometime between midnight and dawn Tuesday. Usually, the Geminid meteor showers in December are awesome spectacles, one of the most intense meteor showers of the year, but this year the moon will be out until after midnight, lessening visibility. But just because you can't see the meteor shower this year, doesn't mean a meteorite or two didn't sneak into Earth's atmosphere, hurdling to the ground, waiting for you to find it. So, get your me...
Making a spaceship use its afterburner and escape from the Earth's gravitational pull is tough. Modeling and animating a 3D simulation of the same thing is also hard, although quite as much so. This video series will teach you how to create a 3D model of a flying rocket with an afterburner effect using 3D Studio MAX. At the end you will have a cool little video clip and vastly improved modeling skills.
Pixel Perfect is the "perfect" show to help you with your Photoshop skills. Be amazed and learn as master digital artist Bert Monroy takes a stylus and a digital pad and treats it as Monet and Picasso do with oil and canvas. Learn the tips and tricks you need to whip those digital pictures into shape with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. In this episode, Ben shows you how to create rotating planets and moons in Photoshop.
How to find your direction without a compass if you are in the Northern Hemisphere. Find cardinal points with an analog watch. It's more effective than a compass, because it's not affected by the earth's magnetic fields.
This is it. The last one. The last mission in Battlefield Bad Company 2. Airborne. This is where you and your unit finally find the scalar weapon. If you're scared of heights though, this might be the most terrifying mission of all, with a freefall plummet down to the Earth's surface. Yo have to shoot and kill Kirilenko when you're falling, too, so don't panic. Watch this video walkthrough to learn how to complete the Airborne mission in Bad Company 2 on the PS3.
As a result of a wobble in the Earth's rotation, the zodiac has been revised. All the signs have shifted by a month, and a new sign has joined the traditional twelve. Find out what your new zodiac sign is!
Watch this training video for making Earth Loop Geothermal Slinkies. Geothermal technology takes advantage of the earth's natural heat-storing ability. A geothermal system include three main pieces of equipment: underground piping, a heat pump and an air-handling system. The geothermal process is based on a simple premise: Below the frost line - usually about six feet deep – the earth is a constant temperature of about 50 degrees Fahrenheit all year long.
This energetic video shows what the Cambrian Explosion is and when it occurred in relation to a 24 hour clock that represents Earth's life. The Cambrian Explosion was a huge increase in multicellular life forms that occurred about 542 million years ago. The video then demonstrates how the Cambrian Explosion was only a small part of the history of life on Earth. It goes through the major developments of life on Earth and shows how it relates to a 24 hour period. This video is a tool in underst...
Ursa Major is called the Big Dipper in North America. The seven main stars are easy to identify. The big dipper changes positions throughout the night and throughout the year. The change in position is due to the earth's motion rotating the sun.
On July 20, 1969, humans set foot on the moon for the first time. But some say our microbes beat us there. With the Space Age came new questions about microscopic invaders from outer space and concern about where we are leaving our microbial footprints. The questions are even more relevant today.
Although next week will mark the late David Bowie's 72nd birthday, his fans and admirers are the ones receiving a gift in the form of an augmented reality app that explores the artist's career
Other than sticking your crayon drawings onto your refrigerator door, magnets have a variety of unexpected and sometimes surprisingly practical uses, ranging from keeping your chip bags sealed to creating weird patterns on your nail beds using magnetic nail polish.
Like Marvel's Avengers, Facebook's Camera AR platform now has a number of new AR superpowers at its disposal, so it is fitting that Earth's Mightiest Heroes have the distinction of displaying them.
This past year, Facebook spent $19 billion purchasing the popular messaging app WhatsApp, and for good reason. Mark Zuckerberg isn't going to spend that type of money on just any application. WhatsApp is widely popular and frequently used by more than 500 million users worldwide, which is almost twenty percent of the Earth's population.
You can create a lot of impressive effects by stacking or layering photos, whether you do it in a darkroom or with Photoshop. The Harris shutter effect makes your photos super colorful, and double exposing or stacking negatives makes for some crazy looking portraits.
Red Bull Stratos sent the first skydiver to space in a weather balloon this past weekend. Free-fall jumper Felix Baumgartner reached 24 miles in altitude in the Earth's upper stratosphere before he leaped from the capsule. Felix reached a maximum speed of 833mph, breaking the sound barrier, before slowing down at the atmosphere, where he finished with a 4:20 minute freefall.
Earlier this month, Adam Cudworth, 19, launched a camera attached to a weather balloon into the edge of space. Battling tough winds, freezing temperatures, atmospheric pressure and tumbling speeds, the teenager from Worcestershire, England was able to capture these amazing pictures of the Earth's upper stratosphere. How to Send a Camera into Space
Using only a circle and straight lines, it's possible to create various aesthetic curves that combine both art and mathematics. The geometry behind the concentric circle, ellipse, and cardioid dates back centuries and is easily found in the world around us. From an archery target to an apple, can you name these geometric shapes?
Less than 20 days after the launch of Magic Leap One, Mapbox has jumped at the chance to provide its map services to Magic Leap developers through its Maps SDK for Unity.
No one can dispute the evolutionary success of bugs. The oldest insect fossils were found encased in crystallized mineral silica in Scotland in 1926, and they're between 396 and 407 million years old.
I don't know about you, but visions of pumpkin pie and cornbread stuffing and big, juicy turkeys are constantly dancing through my head right now. I'm sorry, healthy eating habits, but it's Thanksgiving week, and all I can do is think about food.
Get ready to look up in the night sky very soon, because you're in for a real treat. There will be a total lunar eclipse on the night of Monday, April 14th, and folks living in the United States, Canada, and parts of Central and South America will be able to see the moon turn a dark blood-red shade for a little over an hour. This will be the first in a series of four total eclipses that are to happen over the next two years. What Is a Blood Moon?
Is it possible to cut or chop onions in the kitchen without stinging eyes and looking as if you just watched the saddest movie ever? Before we get to that answer, it's important to know why we tear up when cutting raw onions in the first place. What is this irritant? Are you reacting to the odor? The answer to the latter question is "no," and the irritant responsible is amino acid sulfoxides.
Unless you've been hiding under a (moon) rock for the past month, you already know that Saturday, July 20 is the 50th anniversary of NASA's Apollo 11 lunar landing.
Forget the rise of the machines. Tardigrades are set to outlive everything — even the bots. When the last echo of a whisper in a cell phone has long dissipated into space, the water bears will still be hanging out.
If you could save the world by eating a burger, would you? Two companies, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, are on a mission to redefine veggie burgers and eliminate all of the downsides of animal farming on our planet. With over five years of research and product testing, they've finally figured out how to make a plant-based burger look, feel, and taste just like real meat.
Although the enterprise use cases for the Microsoft HoloLens 2 continue to impress, the arts community just can't stay away from the best augmented reality headset on the market.
This week, Apple unveiled its own version of Google Lens in the form of Live Text. In response, Google just hit back with a new feature for its visual search tool called Places, a new search category that can recognize landmarks and return information on them within the camera view, which Apple touted as a capability of Live Text during its WWDC keynote.
