Molecular Movies Go Hollywood BioVision's latest animation shows how food is converted into energy. By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News Biologists are using the kind of animation technology you might see in a multimillion-dollar "Toy Story" movie to show the general public how molecules inside a cell work. The resulting high-tech visual aids have found their way into thousands of high-school classrooms, and they've been watched millions of times on video-sharing websites such as YouTube. That's the kind of success Robert Lue, director of life sciences education at Harvard University and the creator of the BioVisions project, has been hoping to achieve. "It is very much about how do you put science in context, how do you take advantage of the fact that we are visual animals, that we in fact understand the world through our eyes to a significant degree, and apply that reality of who we are as animals to the way in which we perceive science," he told me. More stories on the science of movies and animations:
SIMBAD Astronomical Database What is SIMBAD, and what is it not ? % The purpose of Simbad is to provide information on astronomical objects of interest which have been studied in scientific articles. Simbad is a dynamic database, updated every working day. It provides the bibliography, as well as available basic information such as the nature of the object, its coordinates, magnitudes, proper motions and parallax, velocity/redshift, size, spectral or morphological type, and the multitude of names (identifiers) given in the literature. Simbad is a meta-compilation built from what is published in the literature, and from our expertise on cross-identifications. Simbad is not a catalogue, and should not be used as a catalogue.
The Incredible Relative Speed of the Earth Embed This Quick Fact: <a href=" title="The Incredible Relative Speed of the Earth"><img src=" alt="" title="The Incredible Relative Speed of the Earth" border="0" /></a><br />Source: <a href=" title="Random Quick Facts">Random Quick Facts</a> Click Here for the Sources and to Learn More Interesting Astronomy/Earth Related Facts Text Version Along with orbiting around the sun at 66,600 mph, the Earth is also rotating at its axis at about 1,070 miles per hour. SJAA | San Jose Astronomical Association The Story Of The Pioneer Plaque – Beginning Pioneer 10 was the first object made by humans to ever go past the solar system and travel into the universe at large. It was a spacecraft that was sent by NASA to methodically snap photos of Jupiter and beam them back to Earth. But it also carried with it pictures of it’s own that were etched into a small golden plaque. These pictures are intended to communicate very specific stories to anyone or anything Pioneer 10 might come across in it’s voyage across the galaxy. NASA didn’t originally intend to send such an unusual object out with Pioneer 10. Trying to communicate far in the future with aliens in some remote corner of the galaxy was something the cautious bureaucracy definitely did not want to venture into back then. It was only through the efforts of someone as dedicated and charismatic as Carl Sagan that it even had a remote chance of being approved by NASA administrators. There was only one problem, NASA said the plaque had to be done in three weeks or not at all. Humans.
Determine Your Longitude With Jupiter's Moons It was MIT physicist Philip Morrison on a television documentary who taught me how to use Jupiter's moons as a system for synchronizing clocks, the first step in calculating longitude with astronomical observations. With an ephemeris for Jupiter satellite transits and occultations that is accurate for the time at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, you can synchronize your clock to the observatory's by watching the scheduled event. The difference between your local time and Greenwich local time reveals your longitude. On a clear night in late February, I decided to try this experiment. I set up my 4-inch refractor on my back deck outside my house in San Rafael, California. These days it's easy to set your watch to GMT. At about 8:40 p.m., I had my mount aligned and tracking, and Jupiter was looking big and beautiful. Finally it was clear that nothing was left. But my experiment was missing a crucial piece of equipment that an 19th-century surveyor would have had: a transit scope.
relativity Lunar Sinuous Rilles Atlas The Atlas of Lunar Sinuous Rilles is a comprehensive collection of images of 195 lunar sinuous rilles that are globally distributed around the Moon. The interface for the atlas, seen below, contains red circles that represent the source locations of each sinuous rille. Sinuous rilles are identified with numbers that correlate with a matching set of numbers in a database accessible at a link below. The atlas allows the user to zoom into the sinuous rille of interest by centering the region of interest on the screen and scrolling the mouse wheel or clicking shift on the keyboard (click control to zoom out). Alternatively, the user can select the sinuous rille of interest by number from the drop-down menu at the top right of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera’s (LROC) Wide Angle Camera (WAC) image mosaic. Reference: Hurwitz, D. Additional information and an extended published database can be accessed at the following website: