I Thought I Lost You There For A Second, Just When I Was Getting Used To You. That Was Scary, Huh?

The triskellion is my favorite symbol. I doodle them everywhere.

Candy Minimal – The soft and colorful Instagram photos of Matt Crump

Get your tickets today to The Moth Ball 2015! Your ticket purchase goes directly to supporting Moth programs like the GrandSLAM series. 

http://themoth.org/support/special-events#gala

Jodie Foster's mystical flight Contact

A falling stream of water will break into droplets due to the Plateau-Rayleigh instability. Small disturbances can create a wavy perturbation in the falling jet. Under the right conditions, the pressure caused by surface tension will be larger in the narrower regions and smaller in the wider ones. This imbalance will drive flow toward the wider regions and away from the narrower ones, thereby increasing the waviness in the jet. Eventually, the wavy jet breaks into droplets, which enclose the same volume of water with less surface area than the perturbed jet did. The instability is named for Joseph Plateau and Lord Rayleigh, who studied it in the late 19th century and showed that a falling jet of a non-viscous fluid would break into droplets if the wavelength of its disturbance was larger than the jet’s circumference.  (Image credit: N. Morberg)

Star Trek Into Darkness Gag Reel

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Add to your electronic bookshelf with these free e-books from NASA!

1. The Saturn System Through the Eyes of Cassini

This work features 100 images highlighting Cassini’s 13-year tour at the ringed giant.

2. Earth as Art 

Explore our beautiful home world as seen from space.

3. Meatballs and more 

Emblems of Exploration showcases the rich history of space and aeronautic logos.

4. Ready for Our Close Up

Hubble Focus: Our Amazing Solar System showcases the wonders of our galactic neighborhood.

5. NASA’s First A 

This book dives into the role aeronautics plays in our mission of engineering and exploration.

6. See More 

Making the Invisible Visible outlines the rich history of infrared astronomy.

7. Ready for a Deeper Dive? 

The NASA Systems Engineering Handbook describes how we get the job done.

8. Spoiler Alert

The space race really heats up in the third volume of famed Russian spacecraft designer Boris Chertok memoirs. Chertok, who worked under the legendary Sergey Korolev, continues his fascinating narrative on the early history of the Soviet space program, from 1961 to 1967 in Rockets and People III.

9. Take a Walk on the Wild Side

The second volume of Walking to Olympus explores the 21st century evolution of spacewalks.

10. No Library Card Needed 

Find your own great read in NASA’s free e-book library.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

In Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? Susannah Gibson argues that, for millennia, humans have tried to classify and categorise the world around them. One of the oldest, and most enduring, classifications is the simple troika of “animal, vegetable, mineral”. Though scientists are no longer completely reliant on this simple three-part system to divide the natural world into workable groups, it has become an essential part of our pop culture and is referenced everywhere from art to games, comic books to computer programming, literature to hip hop.

For example, it is mentioned in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There:

The Lion had joined …‘What’s this!’ he said, blinking lazily at Alice, and speaking in a deep hollow tone that sounded like the tolling of a great bell.

'Ah, what is it, now?’ the Unicorn cried eagerly. 'You’ll never guess! I couldn’t.’

The Lion looked at Alice wearily. 'Are you animal — or vegetable — or mineral?’ he said, yawning at every other word.

'It’s a fabulous monster!’ the Unicorn cried out, before Alice could reply.

Image: Alice, the Lion, and the Unicorn, by John Tenniel. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

As dangerous as explosions are in air, they are even more destructive in water. Because air is a compressible fluid, some part of an explosion’s energy is directed into air compression. Water, on the other hand, is incompressible, which makes it an excellent conductor of shock waves. In the video above we see some simple underwater explosions using water bottles filled with dry ice or liquid nitrogen. The explosions pulsate after detonation due to the interplay between the expanding gases and the surrounding water. When the gases expand too quickly, the water pressure is able to compress the gases back down. When the water pushes too far, the gases re-expand and the cycle repeats until the explosion’s energy is expended. This pulsating change in pressure is part of what makes underwater explosions so dangerous, especially to humans. Note in the video how the balloons ripple and distort due to the changing pressure. Those same changes in pressure can cause major internal damage to people. (Video credit: The Backyard Scientist; submitted by logicalamaze)