"Remove all the space within the atoms making up the human body, and every person that’s ever lived would fit inside a baseball."
- Brian Greene (via parislemon)
(via parislemon)
"12% of people have black and white dreams. Before color television the number was 75%."
This is what happens when you stack hundreds of photos of the same sky on top of each other. (via SciencePorn)
(via taylorlorenz)
National Geographic Photo Contest 2012
Yosemite Valley at Dusk: A mist had settled over Yosemite Valley, as automobiles passed through, headlights illuminated the fog.
"We’re already seeing blood-sugar sensors for diabetics that plug into phones, sensors for environmental pollution, and I think we will rapidly see the growth of body-oriented sensors as part of the “quantified self” movement. Remote sensing of the chemical composition of the blood and even simple imaging devices will contribute to the growth of medicine and again, smartphones plus sensors in the body and sensors in the environment will lead to a new medium unlike smartphones as we know them today."
- What does the future hold for the mobile industry? (via thenextweb)
(via thenextweb)
"Computer science remains one of the fastest growing fields, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasting almost 20 percent increases in computing-related jobs by 2020. While myriad efforts at the national, state and local levels have contributed to four years of sustained growth in undergraduate computer science programs, accelerated growth and diversification remains critical to cultivating the next generation of technology industry leaders.
“Computing is the world’s newest great science. Yet, even though enrollments in U.S. computer science programs are on a four-year rise, it’s still not enough to satisfy the workforce demands of a technology-driven global economy."
Here's What Futurist Ray Kurzweil Thinks Life Will Be Like In The Next 20 Years
- Our brains will extend to the cloud, which will allow us to learn new things at any age.
- We will be able to selectively erase pieces of our memory.
- We’ll be in augmented reality at all times.
- By 2029, machines will be able to match the intelligence of humans, and they’ll be able to make us laugh and cry.
- Around the 2030s, tiny “nanobots” able to repair and preserve our organs will keep us healthier and smarter.
- 3D printing will be even more common than it is today, with public 3D printing stations for people to print out clothes, toys, and anything else.
- Within 25 years, computers will be the size of a blood cell and we’ll be able to connect it to the brain without the need for surgery.
- Society will reach a state of “technological singularity” in 2045 where technology enables superhuman machine intelligences to emerge and people and machines become deeply integrated.
An Oyster in the Storm - NYTimes.com
Oysters…once protected New Yorkers from storm surges, a bivalve population that numbered in the trillions and that played a critical role in stabilizing the shoreline from Washington to Boston.
Until European colonists arrived, oysters took advantage of the spectacular estuarine algae blooms that resulted from all these nutrients and built themselves a kingdom. Generation after generation of oyster larvae rooted themselves on layers of mature oyster shells for more than 7,000 years until enormous underwater reefs were built up around nearly every shore of greater New York.
Just as corals protect tropical islands, these oyster beds created undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration (a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day); this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure.
But 400 years of poor behavior on the part of humans have ruined all that. As Mark Kurlansky details in his fine book “The Big Oyster,” during their first 300 years on these shores colonists nearly ate the wild creatures out of existence. We mined the natural beds throughout the waterways of greater New York and burned them down for lime or crushed them up for road beds.
1 Picture, 9,000 Megapixels, 84 Million Stars - The Atlantic
That right there? That’s the center of our galaxy, as seen by the powerful Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) instrument in northern Chile, and this particular image is the largest catalog of the stars there to date, some 84 million of them (10 times more than earlier catalogs).
…The original image, navigable and zoomable here, covers 108,500 by 81,500 pixels (just under nine billion pixels or nine gigapixels). If you were to print it out at normal book-level resolution, it would be something like 30 feet wide and 23 feet tall.
What the Internet Actually Looks Like
Here is what the Internet looks like: not a series of GIFs or a video of surfing goats, but a spindly collection of fiberoptic cables. The Internet, as a physical thing, actually looks a lot like a series of tubes.
