Posts belonging to Category Awesomeness

Tesla vs Edison – the Epic Rap Battle. Nuff said.

Check this out. This kid, Taylor Wilson, built a nuclear fusion reactor in his garage when he was 14. No, not a crummy old fission reactor… a fusion reactor. When he was 14, no less. Here’s a clip of his recent TED talk. Wow!

Check out this great 40 minute interview and Q&A with famed astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson.

And if you still haven’t gotten enough of Neil deGrasse Tyson, take a look at these great StarTalk videos.

So this group at Lockheed Martin claims they’ll have 100 MW fusion reactors by 2025. That would be great, but… well, they seem a little sketchy on the details. Still, it is Lockheed Martin.

Best of luck!

According to IBM’s Social Sentiment Index, based on an analysis of more than a half million public posts on message boards, blogs, social media sites, etc.,  steampunk inspired by the clothing, technology, and social mores of Victorian society, will be a major trend in 2013 – 2015 (and possibly beyond).

According to the report:

• 33% of online fashion chatter around steampunk can be found on gaming sites.
• 2010 saw a year on year increase in chatter of 296 percent. This increase can be attributed to steampunk-inspired NYC ComicCon events in October of 2010.
• Twitter is the #1 social network for steampunk chatter; hosts six times the number of discussions as Facebook.
• 63% of fashion discussions around steampunk are initiated by individuals less than 30 years old.
• 55% of social sentiment chatter for steampunk fashion derived by blogs.

You can read the full press release here, or check out the article at Forbes (yes Forbes) for more details.

And be sure to check out this really cool accompanying graphic!

The year 2012 marked the first achievement for private space ventures with SpaceX’s docking of their Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station (which they in fact did twice). This year (2013), private companies like SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, XCOR, and Virgin Galactic are gearing up to make even greater strides into the vast, final frontier. And it’s about time!

For more, check out the comprehensive article at Space.com.

Google has put up their retrospective of the year 2012 with Zeitgeist 2012. A lot happened this past year, so a 2 minute 45 video hardly does it justice… Nevertheless, it is a great perspective of the year in review. Enjoy!

This is certainly interesting: NASA Johnson (Space Center) Style, an unofficial NASA parody of that wacky K-Pop song, Gangnam Style (the first YouTube video to get 1 billion hits…)

Check it out!

Hello, and welcome to December 22nd, 2012: the day after the day the world did not end.

Still wondering why the world didn’t end? Well, the short answer is simply that a bunch of crazy people saying the world will end does not simply make the world end. The better answer comes from NASA.

So there you go. The world didn’t end yesterday because the whole Mayan “doomsday” thing was just silly nonsense.

Perhaps you’ve already seen all the impressive Earth at night images (like this famous one), but here something new: an actual video of Earth rotating, as taken from the night side. This is really impressive, and you must watch it at full screen in full HD resolution (and, if you have 3D glasses handy, there’s a 3D mode available if you view it directly on YouTube).

The video was taken over 22 nights by Soumi NPP Earth-observing satellite. If you want to read more about, check out what Phil Plait has to say.