BigPicture
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Our digital future as a 'Forest of Numbers'
Over the next ten years, we'll see ever-faster chips, artificial intelligence and exponentially more data. Forest of Numbers, an exhibition by architect Emmanuelle Moureaux at the National Art Center of Tokyo (NACT) gives viewers a chance to contemplate that future by gazing into what looks like a never-ending string of digits. Careful observers will also spot two girls and a cat, showing that there's humanity buried somewhere in all the data.
The Big Picture: A colorful and dazzling view of Pluto
While NASA has already shown us Pluto's best images yet, the administration is anything but done blowing our minds. What you see above is an enhanced high-resolution color view of Pluto, created with a combination of blue, red and infrared images. NASA says this photo, taken by New Horizons spacecraft, highlights Pluto's diverse landforms and shows us its complex geological and climatological story -- as much as scientists have been able to figure out, anyway. Over the past few months, NASA's shared many things related to Pluto, including a closer look at its desolate surface and icy mountain range.
The Big Picture: Los Angeles' light pollution, as seen from space
What you see above is a stunning image of California (and surrounding areas), captured from space by astronaut Scott Kelly. But what quickly stands out is Los Angeles, with its bright lights shining through and morphing into one massive, glowing spot. As Quartz points out, this shows the city's massive light pollution problem -- which, in the past, has been subject to countless research pieces and even a Kickstarter book/video series. City of Angels? More like City of Lights.
The Big Picture: A nebula with the grace of a butterfly
Nebulae tend to be stunning by their very nature, but the Twin Jet Nebula might just take the cake. The Hubble Space Telescope team has captured an updated image of the dying binary star system (the last shot was from 1997), and its namesake twin jets of ejecting gas are unfurling like the iridescent wings of a butterfly. The seemingly magical effect stems from the stars' unusual interaction with each other -- while only one star is ejecting its outer layers, the other (an already-shrunken white dwarf) is pulling those layers in opposite directions. You won't have to worry about this light show disappearing any time soon, by the way. The nebula only got started around 1,200 years ago, so it's going to be visible for many, many years to come. [Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA]
The Big Picture: 'Mass Effect' Reapers invade Los Santos
It's a mod, mod world when a universe-destroying Reaper from the Mass Effect series invades Grand Theft Auto V's Los Angeles stand-in, Los Santos. What you see up above is the result of Flickr user berdu applying the pretty self-explanatory "Mass Effect 3 Reaper as Blimp" modification to the PC version of Rockstar's stick-up simulator. It looks awesome and there's video of it in action after the break. As creator JJxORACLE writes on the (currently in beta testing) tweak's download page, sometimes the vanguard of our destruction will disappear from the skies completely and there doesn't seem to be any collision detection here. Oh, and its legs can touch the ground while it moves every now and again, because, you know, it's replacing Los Santos' legless blimp.
The Big Picture: Saturn illuminates the surface of its icy moon
Saturn's moon Enceladus is covered in ice. We already knew that. But what you see above is evidence of just how icy it actually is. The right side of the celestial body isn't illuminated by the sun. Nope, that's actually brightened by the light reflecting off of the adjacent ringed planet according to NASA. If you're looking for something a bit more solar in nature, take a peek at the bright wedge on the moon's left side. The aerospace outfit says that these types of pictures from Cassini are "designed to capture the extended plume of icy material" coming off the moon's south pole.
The Big Picture: U2's tour art takes a page from particle physics
Who said that science can't be pretty? Certainly not artist Jeff Frost. When U2 asked Frost for tour art that reflected a "neural net of humanity," he went to CERN's Large Hadron Collider to capture timelapse footage and otherwise treat the particle smasher as a creative tool. As you can see above, the result is dazzling -- it looks like the internet made manifest in a painting. And while you'd think that physicists would be annoyed by this kind of interruption, they actually went out of their way to give Frost access to areas that even they couldn't always see. This doesn't quite make up for U2 foisting an album on millions of people, but it does give Bono and crew some extra geek cred.
The Big Picture: NASA posts DSCOVR's epic first image of Earth
What does Earth look like from a million miles away? Well, NASA provided the masses with a glimpse today, thanks to the first photo snapped from the Deep Space Climate Observatory Satellite (DSCOVR) launched by SpaceX's Falcon 9 in February. More specifically, the image is constructed from three separate photos taken with NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC). The camera captures a series of ten images ranging from ultraviolet to near infrared narrowband filters. For the visual you see above, the red, blue and green channels were used to create the view. What's more, once the instrument is to put a regular work schedule, it'll send new images to Earth every day -- 12 to 36 hours after they're taken. And yes, you'll be able to see them as NASA is planning a dedicated web page to house them all in September.
The Big Picture: 'Dark Souls' gets creepy with 'Limbo'-like mod
The Dark Souls series might not be the game for those folks who lack patience, but what you see up above is something just about anyone can appreciate. Reddit user CystisomaMagna was fooling around with the Reshade mod for the game and happened across some settings that turned the world of Lordran into a monochromatic, but still absolutely dangerous, wonderland. The user notes that the Limbo-esque modification isn't just for show, and that it's even possible to keep the game's HUD intact with it active. It might not get you soft-banned, either. Wanna know how to activate it on your system? That's what the videos embedded below are for.
The Big Picture: Hubble peeks at the Milky Way's densest star cluster
Some parts of space are a little more crowded than others. The Arches Cluster, located 25,000 light-years from Earth, is currently the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way. For comparison, if you measured the distance between our sun and its nearest star, and used that as a radius for a section of the Arches Cluster, you would find more than 100,000 stars twinkling back at you. These balls of gas burn brightly -- NASA says 150 are among the brightest it's ever recorded -- which limits their natural lifespan to a few million years. Once their nuclear fuel has been depleted, they explode in breathtaking supernovas which create abnormally high volumes of heavy elements in the gas between the remaining stars. The image above was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in infrared; due to enormous dust clouds, the cluster is otherwise obscured and difficult to observe.
The Big Picture: Ultraviolet strands form this celestial tapestry
Sometimes you just need to grab 18 miles of fluorescent string, coat it in ultraviolet paint and stretch it along an art installation and hit it with black lights. At least that's what artist Julien Salaud did recently with his "Stellar Cave" series. As My Modern Met observes, the threads are wrapped around nails to create images of animals, humans and other stuff in a way that'd evoke "mythology and mysticism." The exhibits were on display at Israel's Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art and you can check out more images at the links below.
The Big Picture: Chevy's self-driving concept car is straight out of sci-fi
Thought that Mercedes' F 015 self-driving car was futuristic? It looks old hat next to GM's autonomous electric concept, the Chevrolet-FNR. The pod-like design appears ripped straight from a sci-fi flick, complete with crystal laser lights, "dragonfly" swinging doors and sensors (including radar) that aren't as conspicuous as they are on other robotic vehicles. And that's just the outside -- inside, it's touting magnetic hubless wheel electric motors, wireless charging, swiveling front seats and eye recognition to verify the owner. As with most out-there concepts, the chances of driving what you see here are slim to none. However, it won't be at all shocking if the technology in the FNR eventually trickles down to more practical (if far less adventurous) cars.
Here's an unprecedented peek into an interstellar nursery
This is where stars are born. Nearly 30 infant blue-white stars (100,000 times brighter and 50 times bigger than our own Sun), which are formed by collapsing hydrogen gas clouds in the southern Ara constellation, constitute star cluster NGC 6193. The European Southern Observatory's VLT telescope, the first telescope to ever directly image an exoplanet, captured this unprecedented shot. You can revel in the full, uncropped glory of star formation over at the ESO.
The Big Picture: A far-away supernova split into four
Gravity can play a lot of tricks with light, and we're not just talking about black holes. Take this recent Hubble Space Telescope discovery from UC Berkeley's Patrick Kelly, for example: those four lights are actually a distant supernova magnified and split into four images by the gravitational lensing of a giant galaxy. Besides looking cool, the image promises to be a gold mine for astrophysics. The time delay between those four lights will let researchers study both the properties of the exploding star and the galaxy, including the presence of dark matter. The best part? Due to the light's unusual path, there's a good chance that scientists will get a "rerun" in a few years if they want to see it again. [Image credit: NASA/ESA/FrontierSN/GLASS/Frontier Fields]
The Big Picture: A young star poses for its close-up
The Hubble Space Telescope spots a lot of stars, but some of them are seemingly more eager to pose for snapshots than others. Take the star you see above, for example. That's V1331 Cyg, a young stellar object that's conveniently sending a jet of gas directly toward Hubble, providing a clear (and rather dramatic) view that isn't clouded by interstellar dust, like its neighbors. Astronomers don't mind that V1331 is hogging the spotlight, though -- this scene offers an ideal way to look for signs of planetary formation and other phenomena that would otherwise be hard to detect. This could be much, much more than a pretty picture if it helps scientists understand how stars grow up.
The Big Picture: The Congo's solar-powered traffic robocops
While Detroit waits for its Robocop statue, the Democratic Republic of Congo's one-upped The Motor City and installed a quintet of robots to keep an unblinking eye on any traffic-law violators. The Guardian reports that these solar-powered aluminum bipeds are armed with cameras to monitor the vehicle-piloting populace, and hand-mounted red and green lights to help regulate the bustling flow of city Kinshasa's some nine million residents. Each new, female-engineered unit runs $27,500 (cheaper than some SWAT 'bots), and the country hopes to add another 30 to the force in an expansion effort for monitoring its highways.
The Big Picture: The frozen US as seen from space
Wondering why February has been so mind-numbingly cold? Here's why. NASA's Terra research satellite took a snapshot on February 19th showing that much of the US has been draped in Arctic and Siberian air masses, painting the country white with snow. Even southern cities like Macon, Georgia dipped well below freezing, according to weather reports. While those conditions are (thankfully) going away, they made for a spectacular view from space -- not that you'll likely want to see it again.
The Big Picture: Astronauts pilot a jetpack in virtual reality
Astronauts can't waste their jetpacks' fuel horsing around, lest they run into trouble, Gravity-style. Instead, they practice on board the ISS with a chunky laptop strapped to their head -- for real. That laptop runs a virtual reality simulator through a VR headset that's far more... substantial than the ones we're used to here on the ground. It's absolutely necessary for them to know how to control those jetpacks, since they're used to propel astronauts to safety if their tether gets severed during a space walk. These jet packs, by the way, are called Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue or "SAFER." They're completely different from the armchair-like propulsion systems called Manned Maneuvering Unit (the one Mr.Clooney was using in the aforementioned movie) that astronauts use to go to locations far from the ISS. SAFERs are the backpacks they wear during tethered space walks near the station, which they can fire up if they're in danger of getting lost in space. [Image credit: Terry W. Virts/Twitter]
The Big Picture: Rosetta gets up close and personal with a comet
Thought the Rosetta probe's earlier comet snapshots were special? They don't have a patch on its latest photo session. The ESA spacecraft went on its first dedicated close flyby of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko this weekend, and the images it captured have revealed a whole new level of detail. The picture you see above was taken a mere 5.5 miles above the comet's surface, and shows how the landscape varies wildly over short distances. You'll see everything from relatively smooth plains to fractured hills in a span of just 0.8 miles -- unlike a planet, there's no significant gravity (or many other factors, for that matter) to shape the terrain. Be sure to savor this imagery while you can, by the way. Rosetta's next goal is to get a long-range shot from 158 miles out, so you won't be getting more close-ups any time soon. [Image credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM]
The Big Picture: three Galilean moons make their way across Jupiter
It's easy for Hubble to take pictures of Jupiter or its moons, but it only gets the chance to capture the planet on cam with three visible Galilean satellites once or twice a decade. That's what makes the photo above special: it's a picture of the gas giant with three of its largest moons (and their shadows) making their way across the surface. Hubble used its Wide Field Camera 3 to take several photos of the event on January 23rd, 2015 -- the still you see above shows how the moons were positioned by the end of the 40-minute period.
