I thought this was a pretty nifty site NASA made that allows you to find out all sorts of things about the space station. Propaganda, to be sure, but still nifty.
To be honest, the station has been creeping slowly together that I hadn’t realized how big it had gotten when I used the 3-D walkthrough. Also cool was the shuttle fly around of the station.
Transient Lunar Phenomena (aka TLP) are bursts of light on the lunar surface whose origins have been a mystery for nearly four centuries since their discovery. But now an astronomer reckons he has the answer – these optical flashes could be the result of gas eruptions on the Moon. [SlashDot]
In light of the recent and tragic bridge collapse in Mississippi, mathematics uber-geek Stephen Wolfram has been doing some thinking about how evolutionary computing could be used to design stronger bridge structures. It looks like strength doesn’t always correlate to regularity of patterns. [BoingBoing]
On Virgin America’s new planes you can build a private playlist from the 3,000 on-board MP3s, play Doom, watch satellite TV, chat with other passengers or order lunch, all from the seat back in front of you. The computers that make this possible run Linux, booted over the network from one of the three servers at the back of the plane. Artur Bergman of O’Reilly Radar has a more detailed description of the experience, and a Flickr photoset with a bunch of cool pics.
Retired engineer Louis Michaud makes small tornados in his garage, but he wants to build them miles high. It works like this: route a nuclear power plant’s cooling pipes through an especially constructed building. Use big fans to blow air over the pipes. Use baffles and retaining walls to shape the hot air into a vortex. Put turbines in the path of the resultant tornado and recapture the energy that would otherwise be lost as waste heat. The idea without all the journalistic fluff of the article linked above is described on Michaud’s website, complete with diagrams. [digg]