City/Light Sketch For A Thingy

Sylvie Fleury

The Rio Tinto is a river in southern Spain that is noted for its distinctive bright red hue, which is caused by the presence of dissolved iron in the water. With a pH of 2, it is also extremely acidic; because of this fact, it has recently gained interest among the scientific community due to the presence of extremophile aerobic bacteria that thrive in its waters. The river has been extensively studied by astrobiologists for its implications on the potential to find such bacteria in subterrenean oceans elsewhere in the solar system. 

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Artist Christina Hutchinson combines the cosmos and Earth in her series of exquisite resin necklaces.

You can check out her Etsy shop here: [x]

NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula

Steak and shrimp sheet pan fajitas

Stephen Hawking Is Building Thousands Of Tiny Spaceships To Find Intelligent Life

When asked what extraterrestrial intelligent life might look like, Hawking answered, "Judging from the election campaign, definitely not like us."

World famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced Tuesday their newest attempt to find extraterrestrial life: a project called Breakthrough Starshot.

“Today we commit to the next great leap in the cosmos,” Hawking told reporters at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City. “Because we are human and our nature is to fly.”

Hawking said the goal of Breakthrough Starshot was to reach Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to us, within a generation by using thousands of tiny spaceships.

Astronomers believe an Earth-like planet could exist within the “habitable zones” of Alpha Centauri, located 25 trillion miles away. It is therefore the most likely place to find life or even, as Hawking said, a possible new home for future humans.

Breakthrough Starshot’s spacecrafts, which they call “nanocrafts,” will be a gram-scale computer chip that will include “cameras, photon thrusters, power supply, navigation and communication equipment,” Avi Loeb, a Harvard scientist involved in the operation told reporters.

A rocket would deliver a “mother ship” carrying a thousand or so of the nanocrafts into space. Once in orbit, the crafts would be propelled with thin sails and hyper-powerful laser beams shot from Earth into the universe to explore and discover. There the crafts would take pictures of their surroundings, which would take around four years to be sent back to earth.

The nanocrafts would travel at around 20% of the speed of light, Loeb said. At that rate it would be possible to reach Alpha Centauri in around 20 years, and the potentially habitable planets within 70. Using the best currently existing technology, it would take some 78,000 years.

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In Japan, manhole covers are decorated with intricate art pieces.

(Artist)

Artificial Intelligence Isn’t About Intelligence, but Manipulating Humanity

Flora and Sylva

These vibrant botanical illustrations are hand-colored lithographs from volume 4 of Asa Strong’s  4-volume work The American Flora, published in New York by Green & Spencer between 1850 and 1853, with illustrations by Edwin Whitefield.  The set, part of the donation of important botanical and horticultural books from Lynde Bradley Uihlein, includes nearly 200 hand-colored lithographic plates with extensive taxonomic descriptions for the propagation, culture, and medical use of 444 plants.

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