Posted 9 hours ago

Time Machine - the EBEX telescope measures the cosmic microwave background radiation will suspended from a high altitude balloon over 42,000 meters high. EBEX was launched on 29 December, 2012, near McMurdo Station in Antarctica. and will use the Polar vortex winds to circle around the South Pole, returning after two weeks. Tor has posted a first hand account of the Time Traveling Physicist Amber Miller:

A whole team of scientists and engineers designed and built the telescope EBEX, which takes pictures of light from when the universe was 380,000 years old. “It’s the closest you ever get to time travel. It’s okay for people to think of that,” says Miller, a professor of physics and Dean of Science for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University.

Posted 1 day ago

SEED - a haunting short scifi film about an offworld reconnaissance mission gone wrong. The story is a little obscure, but the visuals are truly epic. From the image of the gas giant hanging in the sky to the strange overall lighting, the environment is just strange enough to make you truly feel like you are on an alien planet. Throw in a couple of time-shifting indigenous lifeforms, and you get something quite captivating.

Set in the year 2071, where technology has brought mankind to the brink of colonization on a planet named Gaia, one astronaut takes on an isolated mission and discovers unearthly horrors that could bring an end to human life on this planet.

Posted 2 days ago

Supersonic - this image shows a subscale prototype of a supersonic commercial airliner. The plane was unveiled to the media in Utsunomiya, Japan last week and is is being developed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Fuji Heavy Industries Inc.It’s been 10 years since the Concorde retired, could this be the start of a rebirth for faster than sound commercial air travel?

For something that was developed in the early 1970s, the now-defunct supersonic Concorde jet was the most futuristic-looking airliner the world had ever seen. Until now, that is.[…] The prototype, which weighs a ton and measures eight meters in length, will go through a series of flight tests later this year in Sweden.

A major drawback of the original supersonic jet, the Concorde, was that it was ridiculously loud. But this one is being designed to feature significant noise reduction effects. If a passenger jet for up to 50 people is built with the same technology, it could be about 75% quieter than the Concorde.

(Source: io9.com)

Posted 3 days ago

China Returns to Space - a Chinese spacecraft has returned three more astronauts to low Earth orbit. The piloted spacecraft successfully rendezvoused with the Tiangong-1 Chinese space station, and the crew entered the space station without incident. This is china’s 5th crewed mission, and has been hailed as its most sophisticated to date.

This is the third and final mission for Tiangong-1 as China prepares to send more advanced modules in its place. The end goal is for China to have its own functioning space station by 2020 — a goal the country’s leaders say they’re determined to meet.China is not one of the countries involved in the International Space Station project.

(Source: newsy.com)

Posted 5 days ago

Shots of Awe - check out this new web video series on the Singularity by Jason Silva. A new video is released once a week to express the vision and excitement of the humanity’s future. This first installment certainly captures the kind of breathless technology gold rush feeling of past generations, when men were still real men, woman were still real women, and furry little creatures from outer space were still real furry little creatures from outer space!In the author’s own words:

Silva says these videos are “condensed nuggets of techno-rapture, psychedelic viral videos meant to radically pull people out of their habituated modes of thinking. The goal is to infect people with inspiration and invigorate the imagination!”