Category: Realm

Umbraphiles Rejoice!

~ mehopper

umbraphile : One who loves eclipses, often travelling to see them.

You are probably hearing a lot about the August 12th solar eclipse. It’s path of totality will pass over the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, Iceland, Atlantic Ocean, Portugal, and northern Spain.

The National Solar Observatory has created a neat eclipse map that shows the path.

Here’s a trailer from NASA about this eclipse.

NASA (YouTube Channel)
NASA (Official Website)

If you don’t live in the path of totality, then you can still watch it online. NASA will livestream the eclipse starting at 1:15 p.m. EDT.

The Exploratorium in San Francisco will also livestream a telescope view of the eclipse from the path of totality in Villalibado, Spain.

Finally, the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has a page where you can see what the eclipse will look like at any Location.

However, as I pointed out in my post Umbraphiles about the Solar eclipse of April 8, 2024, this event isn’t all that rare.

Here’s a story about just how “unrare” they are.

Total Eclipses Aren’t that Rare — and You’ve Probably Missed a Bunch of Them: They Happen About Once Every 18 Months (Sara Chodosh, Popular Science)

There is one group of people who know this well — they are the Umbraphiles, more commonly known as Eclipse Chasers. They are unique tribe, and their fascination with the celestial event tends to be described in terms outside the realm of science.

Here’s a link to the article about them that actually inspired the title of this post.

Chasing Totality: A Look Into the World of Umbraphiles (Andy Wright, Atlas Obscura)

Better yet, here’s a talk by David Baron that may have single-handedly helped to increase the ranks of Umbraphiles over the last few years.

David Baron’s Talk (TEDxMileHigh)
TEDxMileHigh – July 8, 2017 (YouTube Playlist)
TEDxMileHigh – July 8, 2017 (Official Website)

If you’re inclined to join the ranks of umbraphiles, here’s a handy list that includes when and where future total solar eclipses will occur.

List of Solar Eclipses in the 21st Century (Wikipedia)

If you would like to become an Armchair-Umbraphile, then head on over to YouTube — there are a ton of 360° Videos of Solar Eclipses to enjoy anytime and anywhere.

Here are even more links that might be of interest to Umbraphiles.

History of Eclipses (Objectivity, YouTube)
Eclipses (National Solar Observatory)
Solar Eclipse Resources (National Informal STEM Education Network)
Eclipses (Eric Weisstein’s World of Astronomy)
Eclipses (Wolfram Alpha)

Have a great week, and may your weather be great for viewing the eclipse if you are lucky enough to be in the path!

Find out more about the Sun, Moon, Stars and the Universe in general …

Happy Week ‘o Nature!

~ mehopper

This is a busy week for nature lovers!

Wednesday, April 22nd is Earth Day, and Friday, April 24th is Arbor Day!

Of course, the typical way to celebrate is to attend events and plant trees.

My way of celebrating is to also update Cosma’s Nature pages.

Done! Links to the updated pages are below.

In the past I’ve also written posts for Earth Day.
Great Views of Earth
Perspectives on Earth

However, this year I decided to dust the cobwebs off of my Nature Center!

Click “doors” and objects to enter 360° experiences and “i”s for information about them.


You can also see it directly on Kuula.

Touch signs or use these links to enter Botanical Gardens Orangery, Hiking Trails Hall, Critter’s Hollow Refuge, and Natural History Museums).

Happy Earth Day and Arbor Day!

—————————

Find out more about Earth Day and Arbor Day!

Earth Day (Official Site)
Earth Day 2026 Events (Official Site)
Earth Day Network (YouTube Channel)
Earth Day (Time & Date)
Earth Day (Wikipedia)

Arbor Day Foundation (Official Site)
Arbor Day Foundation (YouTube Channel)
Find an Arbor Day Celebration Near You (Celebrate Arbor Day)
Arbor Day (Time)
Arbor Day (Time & Date)
Arbor Day (Wikipedia)

—————————

Find out more about Nature@Cosma …

Earth
Sphere Land, Ice, Water (Ocean), Air, Life (Cell, Gene)
Ecosystem Forest, Grassland, Desert, Arctic, Aquatic

Tree of Life
Microorganism Virus
Prokaryote Archaea, Bacteria
Eukaryote Protist, Fungi, Algae, Protozoa (Tardigrade)
Plant Flower, Tree
Animal
Invertebrate
Cnidaria Coral, Jellyfish
Cephalopod Cuttlefish, Octopus
Crustacean Lobster, Shrimp
Arachnid Spider, Scorpion
Insect Ant, Bee, Beetle, Butterfly
Vertebrate
Fish Seahorse, Ray, Shark
Amphibian Frog, Salamander
Reptile Turtle, Tortoise, Dinosaur
Bird Penguin, Ostrich, Owl, Crow, Parrot
Mammal Platypus, Bat, Mouse, Rabbit, Goat, Giraffe, Camel, Horse, Elephant, Mammoth
Walrus, Seal, Polar Bear, Bear, Panda, Cat, Tiger, Lion, Dog, Wolf
Cetacean Whale, Dolphin
Primate Monkey, Chimpanzee

Athena’s Chamber & Muses’ Tea Party

~ mehopper

You are cordially invited to explore the two newest additions to the pantheon of Cosma’s Web Worlds.

They are both reimaginings of earlier Toy Worlds.

Just touch the 360° images to explore them!

Athena’s Chamber is a reimagining of Athena’s Office.

Muses’ Tea Party is a reimagining of Muses’ Playroom.

Enjoy!

You can also (re)visit Cosma’s Knowledge Navigation Center!

Touch posters and objects to find out about them or visit other worlds.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

About | Worlds | Adventures | Contents | Index

Cosma is not a funded project — money is neither requested nor accepted, so there is no budget for publicity.

The only request is that you please tell other people about it.

Thank you!

© M. E. Hopper

Fat Bear Award?

~ mehopper

I just read this fun story on CNN!

Fat Bear Week 2025 is the Distraction Everybody Needs (Lilit Marcus, CNN)

I couldn’t help but click on it because I was curious, and I did need some distraction.

So, there is a “Fat Bear Award” and it is pretty well known.

It even has a Wikipedia page. Here’s a quote from it.

Fat Bear Week is an annual event held in late September or early October by Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, commemorating the seasonal preparations made by Alaska peninsula brown bears inhabiting Katmai as they ready themselves for their winter hibernation. The competition is organized by the National Park Service and Explore.org. Spectators from around the world are invited to cast online votes to determine the bear that has most effectively accumulated fat reserves. — Wikipedia

If you want to watch Fat Bear Week voting unfold, here’s a link to the website.

Fat Bear Week (Explore.org, Official Website)

If you need more distraction, then watch Explore.org’s Live Cams. You can also check out Explore.org’s YouTube Channel that has Live Streams and a bunch of Videos.

Of course, I did 🙂

Then I went looking for 360° videos of the bears on YouTube.

Here’s a link to one that I think might be of bears at Katmai, but I’m not certain.

Swimming With Bears (National Geographic, YouTube 360° Video)

Of course, I couldn’t help but watch this video, even if it isn’t from Katmai.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Wildlife Protection Solutions (YouTube Channel)
Wildlife Protection Solutions (Official Website)

So, that’s was a LOT of distraction!

However, if you still need even more, check out Critter’s Hollow.

Yes, if you look around, there’s a bear!


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Enjoy & Happy Fat Bear Week!

Find out more about bears and animals in general …

Find YOUR Cool Museum!

~ mehopper

It’s officially summer, and baby it’s HOT outside!

Hot Outside

Stories like this are everywhere.

A Potent Heat Dome is Building Over the US, Sending Temperatures into the Triple Digits (Luke Snyder and Mary Gilbert, CNN)

Thus there are also many stories like this one about how to stay cool.

Here are 7 Fun Ways to Beat the Heat this Summer (Kelly Chan, Boston.com)

I was surprised to see that the above story didn’t mention museums, though.

Of course, I’m probably biased about this because I just updated my New Media Museum’s guide to learning about media and computing in the Boston area (NMM@Boston).

New Media@Boston
Media & Perception
Harvard’s Mark I & Hopper
MIT’s Whirlwind & Forrester
Artificial Intelligence & Robots
Logo & LEGO
Games & Immersion
Micro Center & MIT Flea

Not everybody is going to want to geek out to my guide.

Most folks are likely to opt for well-known museums like those in this article.

12 Boston Museums Everyone Should Visit at Least Once (Kristi Palma, Boston.com)

There’s actually a whole website devoted to the Museums of Boston.

If you’re further afield, here’s a website for finding somewhere to enjoy cooling off.

Museums & Galleries in New England (Visit New England)

Finally, if you’re nowhere near Boston, then there’s a site for you, too.

The 51 Best Museums in the United States (Condé Nast Traveler)

If you’re lucky, you may even have get free admission if you are a member of a museum in the North American Reciprocal Museum Association.

“The North American Reciprocal Museum (NARM) Association® network is a mosaic of 1,470 art museums and galleries, historical museums and societies, botanical gardens, children’s museums, zoos, and more. When you sign up with your favorite participating NARM institution, you can receive reciprocal membership benefits across the United States, Bermuda, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.”

My membership to Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) includes it. If you have a museum membership, it’s worth checking.

Perhaps you’re feeling adventurous and want to try a museum that’s a bit off the beaten path, but is specific to your interests.

For example, if you’re into sports, there’s a Sports Museum located in Boston’s TD Garden (which is above where I catch the commuter rail).

Sports Museum

In fact, there are other sports museums here in this state.

Sports Museums in Massachusetts (Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism)

There are also hundreds of them around the country. You can find them here.

Sports Museums in the US (Museums.US)

Museums.US is a great place to find all sorts of museums.

Here’s a page with links to well over a hundred categories.

Museums in the US (Museums.US)

Although, I couldn’t help noticing that “illusions” wasn’t a category on the list.

This means that you wouldn’t find some of the experiences described in this post.

Perception, Illusions & Holograms@Boston (New Media Museum)

One of the experiences covered in the post is the Museum of Illusions, Boston.

It has illusions galore, and many of them are mind-bending!

Museum of Illusions, Boston

This museum displays a variety of well-known optical illusions.

Example Exhibits, Museum of Illusions, Boston

It also has many more elaborate exhibits such as an Ames Room.

Ames Room, Museum of Illusions, Boston
 
If you’re not in Boston, there are plenty of other neat museums out there.

Here’s a story about some of them.

10 of the Most Unique Museums In the United States (Nina Derwin, MSN)

The post includes the Idaho Potato Museum in, where else, Idaho. It covers the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, and last, but not least, the Spam Museum in Minnesota.

Of course, if you live anywhere near them, you’ve probably already heard of them.

Here’s a “somewhat” obvious trick for finding museums near you that you haven’t heard of yet.

Google “Unusual and Weird Museums, and then add your location to the search.

For example, my search for Unusual and Weird Museums in Boston included this article.

11 Quirky and Unusual Museums in Greater Boston (Celina Colby, The Boston Calendar)

The search also included this article from Atlas Obscura.

Unusual Museums in Massachusetts (Atlas Obscura)

If you’ve never hear of Atlas Obscura, then you MUST check it out!

Atlas Obscura: The Definitive Guide To The World’s Hidden Wonders

You’re bound to find something interesting near you.

Finally, it’s only fair to mention the museum that inspired this post.

Ice Cream Museum Boston

The Museum of Ice Cream is a “cool” and “instagrammable” place (and yes that’s a real word according to the Cambridge Dictionary).

One just opened in Boston, and there’s one in New York where it originally started.

You can also find one in Chicago, Miami, Las Vegas, Austin and even Singapore!

There you have it. I hope this inspires you to find a cool, refreshing experience near you!

However, if you prefer to stay ensconced in your air conditioning, then perhaps you might enjoy exploring this “Web World” with links to hundreds of virtual 3D and 360° experiences!

Click on objects to see 3D and 360° experiences, and click doorways to go to other Web Worlds.

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

You can find out more about “Web Worlds” in this post …

Hike, Wander & Walk-in the Web!

Stay Cool & Happy Summer!

Find out more about Museums@Cosma …

Hike, Wander & Walk-in the Web!

~ mehopper

Welcome to Web Worlds@Cosma!

The pages of Cosma have links to many thousands of the best resources on the Web.

Immersive 3D and 360° experiences are among the most valuable types of resources, and so there are links to thousands of them distributed across the hundreds of pages on the Web site.

The Web Worlds@Cosma are thematic 360° images with visual links to a sample of ten to twenty of the best Immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the Web for a specific subject.

There are many Web Worlds distributed across the pages on the Cosma Web site.

The Web World below is a special one with links to many of the others.

There are hundreds of immersive 3D and 360° experiences to explore!

Click on objects to see 3D and 360° experiences, and click doorways to go to other Web Worlds.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

If you’ve been following Cosma, then you know that Web Worlds have been evolving over the course of the last year. Continue reading below to learn the story behind them.

———————–
New Worlds, Old Ways@MEHopper

The story of Web Worlds began while I was updating my MEHopper Web site last summer.

I had been playing around with virtual home staging software and noticed that some of the spaces looked as if they were generated in the virtual world SecondLife. It was neat to see that “nearly” photorealistic 360° images could be generated and exported from that system.

I’ve used SecondLife to create Knowledge Places for decades, and I knew that it was now possible to take and download 360° photos, but I hadn’t gotten around to trying it yet.

I finally got inspired to do it and started with (re)creating my MEHopper Gallery Toy World. Toy Worlds are dioramas created with dollhouse furniture and other miniature objects that are photographed with a RICOH THETA S 360° Camera. The resulting 360° photos are posted on Kuula to overlay links to the Web.

Sure enough, I was able to take a 360° picture in SecondLife and upload it to Kuula to add links in the same way that I had for the Toy World. The result was this new MEHopper Gallery.

Click on the pictures to read posts about when and where they were taken.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Web Worlds@New Media Museum

The experiment was successful enough that I decided to try my hand at another one.

This time it was for a space for my New Media Museum Web site. I had experimented with making virtual museums using my own museum’s content, but this time the goal was to create an interface to other computer museums.

This goal also inspired me to resurect my idea of “Magic Doors” from my work in SecondLife. You can read about the history of them on the Knowledge Objects page.

M.E.Hopper's Magic Window in SecondLife 2006
M.E.Hopper's Magic Window Farm in SecondLife 2006

The result of this experiment was the Computer Museums Lobby below, and you can read the story about why this came about in this post on my New Media Museum Web site.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, objects to learn about them, “i”s to learn about the museums, and doors to enter the virtual museums.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

It was around this time that it dawned on me that Web Worlds was a good term for describing the 3D interfaces that I was creating in SecondLife and Kuula to make visual links to other immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the Web. I did some research and found that the term had been used to describe virtual worlds on the Web before, and so I decided that it was the right term to use for what I was doing.

———————–
Web Worlds@Cosma

It wasn’t long after the term Web Worlds stuck that I decided Cosma needed some of them.

One major goal of Cosma is to have 3D interfaces for spatial Knowledge Navigation of the resources on Cosma and other Web sites. The history of this work is on the Worlds page.

There are currently a series of Toy Worlds that serve as 360° visual interfaces for the major content areas of Cosma. There is also a Cosma Welcome Area Toy World on the front page of Cosma that has links to the others.

However, there are some content areas that don’t have Toy Worlds. That’s because I never got around to making them, and this has bugged me for awhile. Web Worlds struck me as a way to remedy the situation.

The idea of “Magic Doors” as links to other immersive 3D and 360° experiences came in handy, too. I’ve been adding links to immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the pages of Cosma for about five years, and there are thousands of them distributed across the Web site. Unfortunately, few people notice them because the links to amazing experiences blend in with more mundane links (Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Open Courseware, JSTOR etc.). I decided that Web Worlds with visual links could be a way to bring more attention the links to immersive 3D and 360° experiences.

I happened to be updating the Transportation pages, and it was one of the content areas with no Toy World. I also happened to have tons of cool objects in SecondLife to use for the job (Cars, Trains, Boats, Planes etc.). It wasn’t long before Transit Paradise was born.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

One limitation of my approach to making Web Worlds reared it’s ugly head, though.

You can only cram so many doors and objects into a single 360° photo.

This result was that there wasn’t enough room for all of the Transportation content, and I decided that Space Transportation needed to go into a separate Web World.

I was also updating the Space pages at the time and decided to address another weakness. While the existing Solar Extremes Toy World was a fine interface for the Solar System pages, there were some pages related to Astronomy that weren’t included in it.

Ultimately Space Transportation and Astronomy were combined into Space Depot.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

Soon after that I was working on the Library page and saw experiences there begging for attention. The Great Libraries Antechamber resulted, and the post Little, Big, Old, Spooky Libraries explains more about it.

———————–
Hike the Web!

November 17th is National Take a Hike Day, and I planned a post to highlight some virtual hikes on the Web. A Web World with doors to those and some parks seemed like a nice idea, and so Hiking Trails Hall came into being.

I was also updating the pages in the Nature section of Cosma around that time, and I thought it would be good to make Web Worlds to emphasize the links to experiences quietly lurking about on those pages.

For example, there were links to 3D tours of Natural History Museums on the Dinosaur page, and so a Web World for accessing Natural History Museums seemed like a “should do.”

The Plant, Flower and Tree pages had links to some lovely Botanical Gardens, so Botanical Gardens Orangery was an obvious choice for another Web World.

There were many links to fun experiences on the Animal pages that needed attention. I also happened to already have some very cute animals in my inventory in SecondLife, so Critter’s Hollow was a no-brainer.

Finally, I created this Nature Center to integrate and access the four separate Web Worlds and introduced it in the Hike the Web post.

Touch doors and objects to enter 360° virtual experiences, touch “i”s to learn more, and touch arrows to go to other areas of the Nature Center.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Beach Bum Break

Then came January, in New England, and this year was worse than usual! 🙁

I’m a hopeless “beach person.” That’s why there’s even a Beach page on Cosma.

I couldn’t go visit beaches with warm weather, so making Enchanted Beach Hut, Enchanted Beach Shack and the Enchanted Beach House below were therapy. You can read about it in My Enchanted Beach Houses post.

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters and objects to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

It turned out that my beach adventures weren’t just therapy — they also inspire the design of the largest Web Worlds creation so far …

———————–
Wander the Web@Wanderlust!

Later in January I got busy slogging through updating and expanding the “World” pages (Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Antarctica and their many children).

Years ago I made an arm-chair Travel Lounge Toy World. It was okay, but it didn’t showcase many immersive experiences.

In fact, there were so many links to fantastic experiences on the pages that I was updating, a single Web World wasn’t going to be enough. There ended up being six Web Worlds (Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania and Antarctica).

Notice that I loved my Enchanted Beach House so much, I repurposed it for all of them. Then, as with the Nature Center, I made a central Web World to access the others. Voila! The result was Wanderlust Travel Villa!

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Walk-in-Web

Earlier in February, after the extravaganza that was Wanderlust, I wasn’t sure that I would be up to making more Web Worlds any time soon. Then I was updating the Arts & Entertainment pages and realized a few things.

First, I don’t spend nearly enough time on them, and I don’t add that content to the other pages as much as I should either. I need to fix that.

Second, my earlier Walk-in-Art Toy World was kind of pathetic, and it didn’t have links to great art museums that you can visit on the Web.

Of course, that just wouldn’t do at all, so welcome to Walk-in-Art & Museums.

Touch the art and doorways to visit 360° experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
One World to Rule Them All

After reading the story above, I hope you can see why I needed to make a single Web World to access the others. It became too unwieldy to find all of the Web Worlds distributed across the Cosma Web site, and old fashioned text links to them would be too boring and not in the spirit of why I made them.

I hope you enjoy using Web Worlds@Cosma to Hike, Wander and Walk-in the hundreds of 3D and 360° experiences that you can find through Cosma Web Worlds Welcome Area!

Enjoy!
— M. E. Hopper

Walk-in-Art & Museums!

~ mehopper

Last week I wrote Enchanted Beach Houses where I explained how I was inspired to create the Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa. It’s a “virtual travel” application with a visual interface to over a hundred 3D and 360° experiences.

In case you didn’t see it, here it is again.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

You can use the above interface or these posters to visit all seven “Web Worlds.”

           

One thing that I regretted was that I couldn’t include more 3D and 360° experiences.

There just wasn’t enough room in the Villa to link to the hundreds of experiences that I’ve included on the pages on Cosma.

For example, I had to decide whether to include the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre?

I ultimately decided to leave off the Louvre.

That means that there are links to virtual experiences on the page about France on Cosma that are not in the Europe Room in the Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa.

Here are examples of experiences that you will see links to on Cosma that are not in the Villa.

Virtual Tours (Louvre, Official Website)
Louvre Museum (360 Stories)
The Louvre Museum a 360° Experience (Escape Now, YouTube 360° Video)

I found myself leaving out a lot of museum experiences, and I was particularly sad to leave out experiences for some of the greatest art museums. That’s why I decided that this old Toy World Walk-in-Art could use an upgrade.

This is the old world. Click on paintings to see 3D and 360° experiences.


You can also explore this Toy World on Kuula.

Now welcome to Walk-in-Art & Museums!

Touch art and doorways to visit 360° experiences.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Here are links to some other, related posts on Cosma.

Walk-in-Art
Art Revisited
Dive-in-Art
Leonardo Lately
Magical Paintings
Into Van Gogh

Enjoy, but beware, it’s easy to get lost in 360° art!

Find out more about the visual arts and museums …

Enchanted Beach Houses

~ mehopper

I live in the Northeast, and I hate January!

I know it’s “almost” February, but I’m not a huge fan of that either.

This is the view outside my window right now.

There’s more winter left than I can take, no matter what the ground hog says this weekend.

Look at my weekend forecast from yesterday.

What the heck is freezing spray advisory anyway? I had to look it up on Wikipedia.

Freezing Spray Advisory is issued by the National Weather Service to warn sea vessels and sometimes road vehicles near the shoreline that accumulation of freezing water droplets and icing due to a combination of cold suspended droplets, wind, and cold air, so vessel movement is possible, however, accumulations are not expected to reach rates of 2 cm per hour, or else a heavy freezing spray watch, warning or a specific notice would be issued. — Wikipedia

Lovely.

I guess I should be grateful that it’s not a heavy freezing spray warning, right?

Somehow I just can’t muster that gratitude.

Being the beach person that I am, it’s at times like this that I do what I’ve dubbed “beachscrolling” — it’s a bit like doomscrolling, but far less depressing.

For example, my favorite walk between King’s Beach and Nahant Beach looks like this now.

So I go visit various web pages where I’ve posted this 360° image that I took years ago.

When I go to walk at Revere Beach, this is what it looks like at the Wonderland MBTA Station.

Here’s a view from the South end of the beach.

That’s when I get a bit of joy out of re-visiting this 360° image that I took a few summers ago.

Finally, sometimes I get bored with my own still pictures of local beaches. That’s when I start beachscrolling on YouTube looking for other people’s 360° videos of beaches that I loved visiting in the past. This is probably more aptly dubbed “beachstrolling.”

Here’s a 360° video by Ryan Kawailani Ozawa for beachstrolling on Waikiki Beach.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Ryan Kawailani Ozawa (YouTube Channel)

Last week I got a little carried away, though.

I decided it would be more visceral to have a 3D interface for beachstrolling.

Here’s an imaginary hut that I hacked together on Waikiki Beach.

Just click the doorway to take a beachstroll.

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

Now that’s a break from winter in New England!

One problem, though.

I love to beachstroll on South Beach, too.

Here’s a 360° video from YouTube for doing that.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

vr360videos (YouTube Channel)

There’s just one door in my tiny beach hut.

What to do?

Make a beach shack with more doors, of course!

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

I was happy with my new digs for a few days.

Then I happened to be updating all of the country pages on Cosma, and I came across a bevy of 360° YouTube videos showing awesome beaches in Australia. Here are a few of them.

Sydney Bondi Beach (SouthernCross VR, YouTube 360° Video)
Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia (Tourism Australia, YouTube 360° Video
Bells Beach Drone Interactive Flight. (Spin 360-3D, YouTube 360° Video)

That beach shack got an(other) upgrade!

Welcome to my Enchanted Beach House!

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

If you get bored with my set list and want to go somewhere else, here is how to do it.

Start by picking a beach. It can be one you’ve been to yourself, or any other one.

You can find plenty of great U.S. beaches on Stephen Leatherman’s Dr. Beach website. If you’re feeling more adventuresome, then you can take your pick from the best beaches in the world using CNN Travel’s Worlds Best Beaches website. They have an Interactive Map to help you find a great beach for “beachstrolling.”

Once you know where you want to go, then go to YouTube and put in the name of the beach followed by “360°.” Voilà, you will probably have plenty of gist for beachstrolling.

So a few things happened during my adventures in beachstrolling this week.

One of those things is that I got inspired to add a new category of links called “Fun in the Sun” to the country pages on Cosma.

In addition, I was listening to the radio and heard these lyrics to the song A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman.

There’s a house we can build
Every room inside is filled
With things from far away
The special things I compile
Each one there to make you smile
On a rainy day
— Benj Pasek and Justin Paul

Now that was food for thought, and look what happened after that …

Welcome to Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa!!!


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Happy beachstrolling … and other travels 😉

Find out more about beaches, travel and the World…

Americas Canada, United States, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina
Europe United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece
Africa Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, South Africa, Madagascar
Asia India, China, Japan
Oceania Australia, New Zealand
Polar Regions Arctic, Antarctica

Hike the Web

~ mehopper

Sunday, November 17th is National Hiking Day, and it’s one of my favorite “made up” holidays!

Here’s an inspirational video about it that includes a bit of nice history.

On This Day (YouTube Channel)
On This Day (Official Website)

Celebrating is easy — just take a hike, or a walk, if that’s more your speed.

The U.S. National Park Service maintains this handy map to help you find a place near you.

Find a Park Map (U.S. National Park Service)

Now, perhaps you are someone who needs a bit more inspiration than watching a video and clicking a link to find a park, or maybe you’re not in a position to take a hike or walk at all.

In that case, perhaps a “virtual” hike might help you celebrate. There are actually a surprising number of ways to take those on the Web.

For example, the U.S. National Park Service maintains a page for that, too.

Find Your “Virtual” Park (US National Park Service)

In addition, many of the parks’ websites have “Photos and Multimedia” pages that include “virtual” experiences. Here is an example from the Grand Canyon.

Grand Canyon Virtual Tours (US National Park Service)

There are also many 360° videos on YouTube that provide virtual visits to National Parks.

For example, Air Pano has made quite a few of them. Here are links to pages on their website for three of them. Their home page has a map where you can find more.

Grand Canyon National Park
Yellowstone National Park
Bryce Canyon National Park

Here’s another YouTube Channel with a long playlist of great videos.

National Parks Virtual Tours — 360° Immersive Travel Experiences (Odyssey Visual Media)

Of course, Google doesn’t just make it so that you can immerse yourself in YouTube videos — they are also behind Google Earth. Here’s their “virtual visit” to the Grand Canyon.

Grand Canyon (Google Earth)

There are also some neat custom made “virtual” experiences. Virtual Yosemite is an example. There is also a Virtual Yosemite Directory.

Finally, writing this post inspired me to create this 360° experience called Hiking Trails Hall.

Click the “doors” to enter 360° virtual parks and “i”s for information about them.

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

All of this nudged me to update the “nature” pages on Cosma. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, I was inspired to create this entire Nature Center with three other spaces to explore in addition to Hiking Trails Hall. Again, click “doors” to enter 360° experiences, “i”s for information about them, and arrows to go to other areas of the Nature Center. Some objects also link to fun 360° experiences.

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

Enjoy & Happy Hiking!

Learn more about nature …

Umbraphiles

~ mehopper

umbraphile : One who loves eclipses, often travelling to see them.

You’ve probably heard about the April 8th solar eclipse (Wikipedia), and if you live near the path of totality, then you’ve probably also seen news stories like this one.

Party in the Path of Totality at These Solar Eclipse Getaways Across New England (Kristi Palma, Boston.com)

There are also a ton of stories like this about why this year’s eclipse is a such a big deal.

Why the 2024 Eclipse Will be a Different Experience from 2017 (Ashley Strickland, CNN)

While there are plenty of information sources out there, my favorite one is good ol’ NASA.

They even made a trailer about this year’s event.

NASA (YouTube Channel)
NASA (Official Website)

NASA will be streaming the eclipse live April 8 From 1 to 4 p.m. EDT.

2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Through the Eyes of NASA (Official Broadcast, YouTube)

Here’s a link to their neat interactive website for finding out “where & when” it will happen.

2024 Total Eclipse: Where & When (NASA)

They also have a dedicated webpage for the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse, one for Eclipses in general and one with Safety Guidelines.

Now, you may or may not know, all of the fuss about people in the United States getting to see a total solar eclipse might be just a wee bit overblown. With all the hype about the tourism and special sun glasses, you may have missed a couple of stories pointing out that the event isn’t all that rare. Here’s one of those stories.

Total Eclipses Aren’t that Rare — and You’ve Probably Missed a Bunch of Them: They Happen About Once Every 18 Months (Sara Chodosh, Popular Science)

There is one group of people who know this well — they are the Umbraphiles, more commonly known as Eclipse Chasers. They are unique tribe, and their fascination with the celestial event tends to be described in terms well outside the realm of science.

Here’s a link to the article about them that actually inspired the title of this post.

Chasing Totality: A Look Into the World of Umbraphiles (Andy Wright, Atlas Obscura)

Better yet, here’s a talk by David Baron that may have single-handedly helped to increase the ranks of Umbraphiles over the last few years.

David Baron’s Talk (TEDxMileHigh)
TEDxMileHigh – July 8, 2017 (YouTube Playlist)
TEDxMileHigh – July 8, 2017 (Official Website)

So, one way or another, in real life if you’re lucky enough to be in a good place to see the eclipse, or online with NASA at YouTube, enjoy next Monday’s eclipse with safety and awe.

Then if you’re inclined to join the ranks of umbraphiles after that, here’s a handy list from Wikipedia that includes when and where future total solar eclipses will occur.

List of Solar Eclipses in the 21st Century

If you would like to become an Armchair-Umbraphile, then head on over to YouTube — there are a ton of 360° Videos of Solar Eclipses to enjoy anytime and anywhere.

Here are even more links that might be of interest to Umbraphiles.

History of Eclipses (Objectivity, YouTube)
Eclipses (National Solar Observatory)
Eclipses (Eric Weisstein’s World of Astronomy)
Eclipses (Wolfram Alpha)

Finally, if you’re into really rare celestial events, then keep an eye out for a star to appear sometime between now and September. Here’s a NASA story about it that I tripped over while doing research for this post.

View Nova Explosion, New Star in Northern Crown (Beth Ridgeway, NASA)

Have a great week, and may your weather be great for viewing if you’re in the path!

Find out more about the Sun, Moon, Stars and the Universe in general …

Space Cadet Academy

~ mehopper

Confession — I’m a major space cadet! I mean this in an older, positive sense of the word, which is that I’m a “space enthusiast.”

That’s why I really get into updating the pages on Cosma having to do with space.

Things got a little out of hand this time, though.

I began just like I always do, updating the Mars page, because that’s my favorite one.

Poking around YouTube, looking for new ideas, turned up this 360° video taken by NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover. It is a video with a 2.4 billion-pixel panorama of the Van Zyl Overlook.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (YouTube Channel)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Official Website)

Better yet, there’s an interactive version online that’s even more impressive.

I also found an entire YouTube Playlist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with more than twenty 360° panorama videos of Mars.

Let’s just say all of that exploring Mars took …   a few minutes.

Then I came across this YouTube video about something called Eyes on the Solar System from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that renders scientifically accurate views of the planets and spacecraft from their missions.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (YouTube Channel)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Official Website)

That video had me at space buff, arm-chair astronaut and 3D, but it was outdated.

It turns out that there is no need to download anything anymore — there’s a newer version of Eyes on the Solar System that is entirely online.

I scrounged around YouTube and found this longer video about a more recent version of Eyes on the Solar System. This video explains that it is actually part of a larger suite of apps called NASA’s Eyes that includes Eyes on Asteroids, Eyes on Earth, Eyes on Exoplanets and Mars 2020.

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (YouTube Channel)
NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (Official Website)

Okay, neat! Watching that video, and then playing around with all of it (particuarly the Mars area of Eyes on the Solar System and Mars 2020) didn’t take “much” time at all 😉

I was only a “little” behind schedule.

Then I just had to spend a “little more time” playing around with cool things from NASA/JPL (Experience Insight, Experience Curiosity and Explore with Curiosity). There’s more about them and links to them on Cosma’s Mars page along with some other fun stuff.

One problem. I spent all that time on the Mars page, but I hadn’t even touched all of those other pages about space.

Time to get back to work …

… but it wasn’t long before things went awry.

I came across a NASA website called Solar System Treks. It allows you to visualize, explore, and analyze the surfaces of other planets, moons and astroids using real data. You can view the worlds through the eyes of many different instruments, pilot real-time 3D flyovers above mountains and into craters. Here’s a video about it.

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (YouTube Channel)
NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (Official Website)

The web site opens with a tutorial that takes a few minutes to do, but it is worth it. Of course, I just had to play with that to make sure it worked, right?

So now this was well past when I thought I would have been long done with updating the space related pages on Cosma, but I did eventually get all the way to updating the top Universe page.

While doing research for that, I tripped over the Hubble Skymap (NASA), WorldWide Telescope (American Astronomical Society), and ViewSpace: Discover the Universe Interactives (Space Telescope Science Institute).

Oh noooo …

All in all, updating the space pages ended up taking ten times longer than I had planned.

So there you have it. I spent the better part of this last week being a real space cadet!

The good news is that I put descriptions and links to all the fun stuff that I found on the pages as I updated them, so you can find them and spend a time becoming a space cadet, too.

You can use the Web World called Space Depot and the Toy World below it called Solar Exremes to get started exploring the updated pages as well as a few other fun experiences.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

You can also view this Toy World on Kuula.

You can also choose your own adventure by clicking on the links below.

Happy Space Cadeting!

“Space”
Universe (Astronomical Instrument)
Galaxy Milky Way, Andromeda
Planetary System Star, Brown Dwarf, Planet, Moon

Our Neighborhood
Solar System Sun
Terrestrial Planet Mercury, Venus, Earth (Moon), Mars
Asteroid Belt Ceres, Vesta
Jovian Planet Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune
Trans-Neptunian Object
Kuiper Belt Pluto, Haumea, Makemake
Scattered Disc Eris, Sedna, Planet X
Oort Cloud Etc. Scholz’s Star
Small Body Comet, Centaur, Asteroid

p.s. I confess that I can be a space cadet in the other sense of the word too. I accidentally “re-posted” TRAPPIST-1 a few days ago. If you subscribe to the Cosma blog, then you probably saw it in your email. However, I have trouble feeling bad about it, because the post is an oldie, but goodie. There’s a companion post called Exoplanet Junket still worth a gander.

Polar Party Toy World

~ mehopper

About five years ago I created a series of what I called Toy Worlds to be 3D interfaces to Cosma.

You can see all of my Toy Worlds on my page on the Kuula service that I use to post them.

That was a phase that I thought was over   —   I moved on to exploring other technologies for making 3D websites (more about that in the spring). However, I got nostalgic for Toy Worlds while I was pulling out holiday decorations this year, so here is a brand new Toy World.

Click and drag to look around and click on objects to learn more about them.

Enjoy & Happy Holidays!
Mary

Easter Tidings & Tidbits

~ mehopper

I’ve been immersed in working on updating Cosma pages about technical subjects like computers and the internet lately.

Make that TOO immersed, I needed a break.

Given it’s Easter weekend, make that a bunny break!

First, I dug up my old Bunny Fix post from 2020. That was fun, but those bunny clips were only a few minutes long. I wanted more, so I headed to YouTube in search of some more bunnies.

However, I didn’t find any because I got distracted by a video about Easter traditions.

The Adventure Buddies (YouTube Channel)

Some of the traditions were fun and familiar, but others not-so-much. The Scandinavian Witches, Czech Switches and Cold Water in Hungary weren’t so enviable.

Of course, that cute Australian Easter Bilby caught my eye. I set off on a YouTube safari in search of them. Here’s one of the better videos I found.

Behind the News (YouTube Channel)
Behind the News (Official Website)

Those bunnies and foreign traditions were fun distractions, but my favorite Easter thing to do remains coloring Easter eggs. That is why I was a sucker for this video about ways to dye them. It is a bit long, but each time you think the ideas won’t get any more creative, they do.

Cleverly (YouTube Channel)
Cleverly (Official Website)

Finally, one last fun traditional distraction is the Easter Egg hunt.

In case you can’t do a real one, here’s a 360° video with a quick virtual version.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

ABC11-WTVD (YouTube Channel)
ABC11-WTVD (Official Website)

There you have it. That’s the end of my break — I hope you enjoyed coming along for my unexpectedly meandering (de)tour through Easter tidbits =:)

Find out more about bunnies and celebrations in general …

Pi = Spring

~ mehopper

Did you know that Tuesday, March 14 is Pi Day?

I’m both a geek and a softy for cool numbers, so I’ve known of Pi Day since not long after Larry Shaw made news about it with his escapades at the Exploratorium in the 1980s.

Although, I’m more aware of it than “usual” because I’ve been working on the Mathematics page on Cosma — it just naturally came up 🙂

If you don’t know what Pi Day is, then there are lots of ways to find out about it.

In fact, when you Google Pi Day, you’ll get around a whopping 1,290,000,000 results. Ironically, if you Google Pi Day Facts you’ll get a slightly more overwhelming 1,300,000,000 results (Hummmm, that’s “interesting”).

A simple way to cut through all that would be to search out the Wikipedia page about it.

However, I prefer going to the source, so I’m partial to the Exploratorium’s Pi Page.

There’s also a dedicated “Pi Day” site that has a page with the Top 25 Most Interesting Pi Facts. My favorite fact is that March 14th also happens to be Albert Einstein birthday!

One thing they fail to mention is the whole “Pi Day Food” thing. If you Google Pi Day Deals 2023, you will see that sources ranging from CNET to Good Housekeeping will give you advice on where to get deals on Pies and Pizza.

Now I personally prefer to learn about things using YouTube videos.

Alas, searching YouTube for Pi Day is only a bit less overwhelming than searching the Web. There are thousands of videos, and many of them are, non-coincidentally, 3.14 minutes long.

I spent awhile rummaging through them and think this minute long video is one of the best.

cleveland.com (YouTube Channel)
Cleveland.com (Official Website)

Now, for a bit o’ fun, it turns out that searching YouTube for Pi Day Song turns up slightly fewer videos. Here’s one of the cuter ones.

Tiny Tunes (YouTube Channel)
Tiny Tunes (Facebook)

Here’s another fun video from one of my favorite YouTube channels.

FlippyCat (YouTube Channel)
FlippyCat (Facebook)

I must confess that frequenting the FlippyCat YouTube Channel is akin to watching cat videos.

In fact, one of my favorite Flippy Cat videos features a cat!

FlippyCat (YouTube Channel)
FlippyCat (Facebook)

Ahhh, but I digress, a lot.

Onward, one of the reasons that Pi Day is so near and dear to my heart is that it is also one of a triad of holidays that serve as a prelude to the official start of Spring on March 20th (the other two were St. Pat’s and the Holi Festival of Colors).

So this post is also a salutation to Spring!

Happy Pi Day + Spring!

Find out more about Mathematics and Holidays …

Hummingbird Parties!

~ mehopper

Sometimes a link to a story begs you to click on it. Here’s one that I couldn’t resist.

Watch hummingbirds ‘dance’ through waterfalls (Lucy Hicks, Science Magazine)

Sure enough, the story has an animation of a hummingbird ‘dancing’ in a waterfall.

The research that the story described was a tad odd, but the clip was worth the visit. However, I was disappointed because I was hoping to see a video of the phenomena.

In fact, I was so bummed that I went fishing on YouTube for the video that I craved.

Voilà! A user named Happydog744 posted a 20 second clip of a hummingbird dancing, and it even has a soundtrack!

Happydog744 (YouTube Channel)

There wasn’t a waterfall, but watching the video was still cathartic.

Then YouTube’s algorithm assumed that if I wanted to see a hummingbird dance, then I would want to watch this hummingbird pool party that was posted by wildwingsla.

Wildwingsla (YouTube Channel)

So, YouTube’s algorithm was right about what I wanted to watch, and hummingbirds are fascinating creatures!

By now the algorithm decided that if I was that into hummingbirds, then I might want one as a pet and suggested this neat video by a user named Uncle Ben.

Uncle Ben (YouTube Channel)

Humm, well, I’m don’t think that I need a pet hummingbird, but it was fun to know how someone could pull off taming one…

After I watched all of those videos, YouTube suggested a slew of videos about how to make a hummingbird feeder. I can’t imagine why.

I resisted watching those and decided to go the virtual route to hummingbird gazing. Here’s a “real” live cam hosted by Hummingbird Spot in California (good to know if it is dark when you see it.)

Hummingbird Spot (YouTube Channel)
Hummingbird Spot (Official Website)

When I signed on there were over a hundred other people at the “hummingbird” party.

BTW You can visit Hummingbird Spot on YouTube to watch and even join the party!

Find out more about Birds@Cosma …

Jigsaw Puzzledom

~ mehopper

I got lost in puzzles, and I couldn’t get out!

However, unlike most normal people, I didn’t get lost in doing jigsaw puzzles.

Nope. Leave it to me. I managed to get lost in finding out about them.

The journey began when I saw this video about a color-changing jigsaw puzzle from the MoMA Design Store.

MoMA Design Store (YouTube Channel)
MoMA Design Store (Official Website)

Geeezzz! Who thought of that? It looks mind-bendingly hard, but still neat!

Then this time-lapse video posted by Andre F caught my eye.

Andre F (YouTube Channel)

Again, neat! The description of the video said that the puzzle was called Around the World.

I did a Google search and, Voilà!, I found it …

Around the World – 42000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle for $559.99 (Puzzle Warehouse)

… but, I had also fallen deeper down the rabbit hole that is Jigsaw Puzzledom.

I couldn’t help noticing that my search for Around the World Jigsaw Puzzle also brought up a video about a different puzzle from Ravensburger entitled Disney Moments. Here’s a mini-documentary about their 40,320 piece monster.

Ravensburger UK (YouTube Channel)
avensburger UK (Official Website)

You may have noticed that the video covered just about everything that most normal people would ever want to know about how puzzles are made. However, if you want to know more, then here’s a recent article from the New York Times that I stumbled upon.

Here’s How Those Hot Jigsaw Puzzles Are Made (Amie Tsang, The New York Times)

Then I got curioius and did some fact checing. Guess what?

The Guinness World Records website says that the jigsaw puzzle with the “mostest” actually had a whopping 551,232 pieces, and it was completed by 1,600 students of the University of Economics in Vietnam.

Nice trivia.

In addition, the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of jigsaw puzzles is held by Luiza Figueiredo in São Paulo, Brazil. This 360° video shows a quick glimpse of her epic collection of 1,047 puzzles.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

VR 360 (YouTube Channel)

Okay, as you can tell, I was way into Jigsaw Puzzle Land at this point.

Heck, while I was there, I decided that I might as well wander around and explore a bit more.

For example, YouTube kept suggesting that I watch a video about the history of jigsaw puzzles.

Piecing together the history of jigsaw puzzles (CBS Sunday Morning, YouTube)

If you would like to learn more about the history of jigsaw puzzles, then you might also be able to get your hands on the book The jigsaw puzzle: piecing together a history by Anne Williams (the historian featured in the CBS Sunday Morning clip above).

Also, did you know that you can order personalized puzzles from Shutterfly, Portrait Puzzles and Create Jigsaws?

Finally, if you’re still reading this post, let alone doing any of that stuff, then you’ve fallen deep into Jigsaw Puzzledom, too.

If that’s the case, then you should know that you’re in good company. Here’s an article that explains that you belong to a club that includes the likes of Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Bill Gates and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones!

The Rich and Famous Who Love the Humble Jigsaw Puzzle (Wentworth Wooden Puzzles)

Fun stuff!

Alas, no matter how great the company, I had to finally drag myself out of Jigsaw Puzzle Land to share this with you, and then get back to work on what I should be doing (i.e. a much needed overhaul of this Cosma web site).

I will leave off here, but if you continue exploring Jigsaw Puzzledom on your own, then there’s a few things you should know.

First, be careful about calling yourself by a term like “Puzzler.” It’s colloquial. The correct, technical term to use is Dissectologist.

Second, you may want to join a club called the Benevolent Confraternity of Dissectologists. If you’re into jigsaw puzzles, seriously, check that out!

On the other hand, if this post has just gotten you in the mood to work a jigsaw puzzle, right here and now, then you will probably enjoy the online puzzles at Jigsaw Explorer!

Enjoy some for me! 🙂

Find out more about hobbies, fun and games…

Bunny Fix!

~ mehopper

Easter is here, and it’s time for a bunny fix!

I decided to go rummage around YouTube for some bunnies.

My quest began with searching for a random cute bunny that I could just watch for a awhile. Instead, I found a 360° video about the Japanese island Okunoshima.

Jackpot!

This video from NowThis explains why Okunoshima’s nickname is “Rabbit Island.”

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Now This News (YouTube Channel)
Now This News (Official Website)

In addition, the site Gateway to Rabbit Island was basically a virtual vacation.

Next up I found a video entitled INVASION! from Baobab Studios narrated by Ethan Hawke and is a bit out of this world.

Note, as is usually the case with 360° YouTube videos, it makes sense if you watch it in the regular way, but it’s more fun if you interact with it and look around.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Baobab Studios (YouTube Channel)
Baobab Studios (Official Website)

After all of that, I was starting to feel better, but I still didn’t quite feel like I had gotten the “Easter bunny” vibe that I was looking for, yet.

Onward!

Happily, the next thing that I stumbled upon was exactly the medicine that I needed.

You’ve heard of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, right?

Well, it turns out that there’s a rendition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, narrated by none other than Dame Judi Dench, posted on the Beatrix Potter YouTube Channel. Better yet, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny and many others are posted there too.

Beatrix Potter (YouTube Channel)

Now that’s the kind of bunny fix that I needed, and I hope you enjoyed it too =:-)

Find out more about bunnies …

Forest Bathing?

~ mehopper

I just came across a new, perplexing phrase.

Forest bathing?

Ugh? What’s that? I want to know more!

It turns out that it’s a form of nature therapy that originated in Japan where it is known as Shinrin-yoku.

Here’s a link to a video I found about the practice.

Why You Should Try the Japanese Art of Forest Bathing (LifeHacker, YouTube)

That stress relief sounds good, but I don’t happen to have a forest handy 🙁

However, I did find this soothing 360˚ video of the Hokkaido forest.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

GALAXIID (YouTube Channel)
GALAXIID (Official Website)

Nice, I could use some more of that!

Of course, there are plenty of other videos like that on YouTube. For example, you might enjoy a 17 minute long 360˚ video of a relaxing walk in a Norwegian forest.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Real Virtual Movies (YouTube Channel)

In fact, writing this post inspired me to create this 360° experience called Hiking Trails Hall.

Click the “doors” to enter 360° virtual parks and “i”s for information about them.

You can also see it directly on Kuula.

Here’s the thing, though. As neat as 360˚ videos and experiences can be, they are no substitute for the real thing when it comes to physical activity. If you don’t happen to have ingredients for “forest bath” nearby (i. e. an actual bunch of trees), then just go for a regular walk, in the real world, as often as you can.

So get out there and get moving to stay healthy and less stressed, whether or not you happen to be lucky enough to have a forest 🙂

Find out more about forests, trees and nature in general…

Moon’scapes

~ mehopper

There’s no denying that it’s been a rough week for many Earthlings.

On the other hand, it’s been a great week for anyone who spends their time more preoccupied with the Moon than with more earthly concerns.

That’s because there’s a treasure trove of news about our lunar realm.

For example, NASA’s Goddard Media Studios released this stunning 4K video that used data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to generate a visualization of what the Apollo 13 astronauts would have seen between the time that they came around from the dark side of the Moon and when they reestablished radio contact with Mission Control.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
NASA Goddard (Official Website)

If you have ever seen the movie Apollo 13, then you appreciate why this particular time frame was so poignant. If you have never seen it, then I highly recommend that you do!

Of course, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is no longer our only source of imagery from the far side of the Moon because China landed their Chang’e-4 spacecraft and Yutu-2 rover there last year, and they’re still there working away. The Chang’e-4’s mission team celebrated the anniversary of their success by releasing some data and images to the public.

You can find out more about Chang’e-4’s moonscapes in this article.

The Most Detailed Photos Yet of the Far Side of the Moon (Neel V. Patel, Technology Review)

In addition, hot off the press, the Yutu-2 rover’s radar scanned up to 40 meters below the surface of the Moon, and those findings were just published this week as well.

China’s Moon Rover Takes a Deeper Look at the Far Side (Jonathan O’Callaghan, Scientific American)
Digging into the Far Side of the Moon: Chang’E-4 Probes 40 Meters into Lunar Surface (Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters, AAAS EurekAlert)
The Moon’s Farside Shallow Subsurface Structure Unveiled by Chang’E-4 Lunar Penetrating Radar (Chunlai Li, et al. Science Advances)

So, what a great week for Moon lovers!

Finally, it’s Friday, so a bit of fun is in order — check out this 360° video that shows a “different” way of seeing a (fictional) moonscape.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

VR 360 TV (YouTube Channel)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief stint as a “Moonling.”

If you want more Moon’scapes, then head on over to NASA and Google.

If you want to learn more about space and space travel, explore Space Depot!

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also see it directly on Kuula.

Happy Friday, Stay Healthy & Have a Great Leap Day!

Find out more about the Moon@Cosma …

Bubblephilia

~ mehopper

Pretty much everyone loves bubbles when they are kids, but some grown-ups elevate their passion for them to a whole ’nother level.

For example, a physicist at Emory University named Justin Burton and his team made news by publishing an article in a scientific journal about the ideal recipe for blowing giant soap bubbles. Here are links to the scientific article and the story on Ars Technica where I learned about it.

How to Make a Giant Bubble (Stephen Frazier, Xinyi Jiang, and Justin C. Burton, Physical Review Fluids)
Physicists Determine the Optimal Soap Recipe for Blowing Gigantic Bubbles (Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica)

The video from Emory University that was featured at the bottom of the Ars Technica article was okay, but it didn’t have any narration. I wondered if I could find a better one. Sure enough, there were a ton of them. Here’s a really cute one!

JoJo’s Science Show (YouTube Channel)
JoJo’s Science Show (Facebook)

Searching for that video turned out to be quite a rabbit hole. There are hundreds of neat YouTube videos about bubbles, and they definitely aren’t just for kids.

For example, here’s a mesmerizing and informative video from the The Slow Down Show YouTube channel that captures giant soap bubbles bursting in slow motion.

The Slow Down Show (YouTube Channel)

It was fun to see and learn about giant bubbles bursting in a controlled setting, but I found myself more drawn to videos of them floating around in the wild.

Here’s 360° video from Dr Zigs that shows a bubble master at work in a field.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Dr Zigs Extraordinary Bubbles (YouTube Channel)

Better yet, here’s a clip of some beautiful, giant bubbles haunting a beach.

Mark Day (YouTube Channel)

Whilst wandering around in the rabbit hole that is bubbles on YouTube, I also tripped across a brief clip by Kevin Casey Fleming that shows the beauty of a bubble freezing along with its surprising demise.

Kevin Casey Fleming (YouTube Channel)

All that was an amusing diversion, but then I got totally enthralled by an artist named Richard Heeks that’s elevated photographing bubbles to an art form. Here’s a link to his Flicker feed.

All Bubbles (Richard Heeks)

Finally, there are a slew of “how to” videos on YouTube for anyone that wants to get more involved with bubbles. Here’s one that starts out by explaining why (sadly) you can’t make heart shaped bubbles. On the up side, it describes how to make other interesting shapes as well as a way to touch and play with bubbles without breaking them.

SciTechDiscovery (YouTube Channel)
SciTechDiscovery (Official Website)

I hope you enjoyed this tiny romance with bubbles!

Find out more about science, physics, art and fun in general …

Panda’s Playtime

~ mehopper

There’s nothing cuter watching two pandas playing!

Here’s a YouTube video from the Atlanta’s Zoo with a serious “aawwwhhhhh” factor.

Zoo Atlanta (YouTube Channel)
Zoo Atlanta (Official Website)

Adorable!

However, it turns out there’s something even cuter.

That’s pandas playing in the snow. They love it, apparently. Check out this video from Smithsonian’s National Zoo.

Smithsonian’s National Zoo (YouTube Channel)
Smithsonian’s National Zoo (Official Website)

So pandas are very entertaining creatures.

It turns out they are fairly odd, but kinda fascinating creatures as well.

Here’s a link to a video that explains some ways that’s true.

How Do Pandas Exist? (SciShow)

Of course, after all of that, I just had to make a new page about pandas!

Find out more about pandas and bears in general …

Cuttle Vision

~ mehopper

Cuttlefish are odd creatures, so news stories about them tend to be interesting.

However, a story about them that’s going a bit viral is downright amusing!

As you can see from the image in this video from the Guardian, some scientists wanted to find out whether or not cuttlefish have stereoscopic vision (like humans do), so they strapped some 3D glasses to their faces and showed them some movies.

Guardian News (YouTube Chnnael)
Guardian (Official Website)

It turns out that cuttlefish DO have stereoscopic vision, so that’s neat.

Here are links to the story that featured that video and the scientific article about the research.

Scientists Give Cuttlefish 3D Glasses and Shrimp Films for Vision Study (Ian Sample, Guardian)
Cuttlefish Use Stereopsis to Strike at Prey (R. C. Feord, et al., Science Advances)

I found this story refreshing because it was nice to see something about how cuttlefish see things rather than about how other creatures can, or cannot, see them.

Generally stories about cuttlefish and their cephalopod cousins, octopuses and squids, tend to focus on their talent for camouflage. Here’s a link to a video that covers some scientific investigations into their peculiar abilities.

You’re Not Hallucinating. That’s Just Squid Skin Deep Look (Deep Look)

Of course, this post wouldn’t be complete without a peek at what cuttlefish look like in the wild. Here’s a one minute 360° video that I found on YouTube that does the trick.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Elvistse2005 (YouTube Channel)

I hope you enjoyed the virtual swim, too 🙂

Find out more about cuttlefish, octopuses, squids, cephalopods and animals in general…

Great Blobs

~ mehopper

This is the time of year when you see the words “Best of” quite a lot.

No matter what you care about, someone somewhere is going to publish something about the “best of 2019” or even the “best of the decade” for that thing.

For example, I pay a lot of attention to science, so this article caught my eye.

The Best Science Images of the Year (Nisha Gaind and Ewen Callaway, Nature)

I confess that I can’t help but click on articles like these, too!

Kaboom! The Biggest Space Bloopers of 2019 (Elizabeth Howell, Space.com)
The 10 Weirdest Science Studies of 2019 (Nicoletta Lanese, Live Science)

That last article “suggested” an even better “related” article about, of all things, blobs!

The 9 Best Blobs of 2019 (Brandon Specktor, Live Science)

I assumed that it was going to be an excuse to revisit the *many* stories about slime mold inspired by an exhibit of ‘le blob’ at the Parc Zoologique de Paris earlier this year.

Here’s a video about that, err, dare I say, publicity stunt? Slime molds are certainly interesting creatures, in their own way, but not necessarily to watch in real time.

France 24 (YouTube Channel)
France 24 (Official Website)

As it turns out, the article Best Blobs of 2019 didn’t even include anything about ‘le blob,’ but it did include a story about a jellyfish as big as a human that was spotted in Cornwall (UK). Here’s a video from Guardian News about that sighting.

Guardian News (YouTube Channel)
Guardian News (Official Website)

Neat! I wanted to watch a 360° video of that, but I had no luck finding one.

On the other hand, I did find a 360° video from AirPano that was shot off the coast of Cuba. Heck, if you’re going to go swimming with giant jellyfish at this time of year, then water around Cuba is a whole lot more inviting than waters off England anyway. Wouldn’t you agree?

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

AirPano VR (YouTube Channel)
AirPano (Official Website)

Hummm, that video felt familiar…

It turns out that it was one that I used in an my post called Jellyfish Therapy back in January of 2019. That was nice to revisit.

Maybe you could use a bit more post-holiday Jellyfish Therapy, too?

Find out more about Jellyfish …

Penguin Playtime

~ mehopper

Brrr, baby, it’s cold outside!

Let’s embrace it, even celebrate it, by watching some penguins play for a few minutes!

Here’s a 360° video of magellanic penguins sledding, right up until and after they knock the camera over and have a good laugh.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Wildlife Protection Solutions (YouTube Channel)
Wildlife Protection Solutions (Facebook)

Okay, truth be known, they were probably making all of that noise for another reason 😉

Here’s a 360° video of rockhopper penguins frolicking in a tidal pool until they start doing close-up cameos for the camera.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Wildlife Protection Solutions (YouTube Channel)
Wildlife Protection Solutions (Facebook)

Finally, this 360° video introduces you to a vast party of king penguins and their woolly chicks carousing on a beach in Gold Harbour in South Georgia. It’s interesting enough to watch as a regular video, but it’s more fun to watch if you look around, and it’s really adorable if you look down — be sure to do that!

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Adam Cropp (YouTube Channel)
Adam Cropp (Official Website)

What is it about penguins that make them so darn cute?

I’m not sure, but whatever it is, it inspired me to make a brand new page about Penguins@Cosma!

Happy Weekend!

Touch the Sun

~ mehopper

Remember how Icarus wanted to touch the Sun, but met his demise instead?

Well, scientists at NASA wanted to touch the Sun too, but unlike Icarus, they succeeded!

Better yet, they are beginning to share what they learned by doing it!

Before we get into all of that, let’s go back and start at the beginning.

NASA launched a robotic spacecraft called the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) in 2018, and this video describes the probe’s audacious mission to “touch the Sun.”

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
NASA Goddard (Official Website)

Then NASA posted this 360° video about the probe’s launch that was narrated by Nicola Fox (Project Scientist at that time and now Director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division).

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

NASA (YouTube Channel)
NASA (Official Website)

Since its launch, the probe has done a spectacular job of starting to achieve its scientific goals, and some of the first results were just released this week.

Here’s a quick teaser that NASA posted ahead of a press conference on Wednesday.

ScienceAtNASA (YouTube Channel)
NASA Science (Official Website)

This video summarizes the key discoveries that NASA shared at the press conference.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
NASA Goddard (Official Website)

Four articles about the results were also posted by the journal Nature ahead of their publication in the print edition on December 12th. This article introduces those articles and has links to them.

A Step Closer to the Sun’s Secrets (Daniel Verscharen, Nature)

It’s awesome to know more about what makes that great glowing ball in the sky tick, but I also found myself a bit sad because the mission’s goals do not include sending back imagery for us Earthlings to enjoy. That means we still don’t know what it looks like to “touch the Sun.”

Perhaps it would look a bit like this 360° video of a simulation of the Sun that was posted by a hearty YouTuber way back in 2016.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Zproxy (YouTube Channel)

That was cathartic to watch, but of course it wouldn’t sound like that because there is no “sound” in space. The actual experience would also be way, way more visually stunning.

We can be certain of that because, while the Parker Solar Probe doesn’t capture imagery, there’s another NASA mission called the Solar Dynamics Observatory that does. It doesn’t capture 360° videos, but what it does capture is far more dynamic than the simulation.

Here’s a video that the Solar Dynamics Observatory captured on June 18, 2015. This isn’t exactly how it would look because it’s been colorized in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, but it still gives you a sense of the unbelievable majesty of the activity that you would see on the surface of our favorite star if you were able to go there in person.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
NASA Goddard (Official Website)

How beautiful was that?!?!

Kudos to the scientists and engineers at NASA for having the audacity to find ways to go where no one has gone before and for communicating to us what it’s like there, too!

If you want to learn more about the the rest of the Solar System, explore this Toy World!

Click the 360° image below to explore it, click the menu in the upper right for controls and click “i” buttons on/off for links to experiences. Use “portals” to visit otherToy Worlds.

You can also explore this Toy World on Kuula.

You can also choose your own adventure by clicking on the links below.

“Space”
Universe (Astronomical Instrument)
Galaxy Milky Way, Andromeda
Planetary System Star, Brown Dwarf, Planet, Moon

Our Neighborhood
Solar System Sun
Terrestrial Planet Mercury, Venus, Earth (Moon), Mars
Asteroid Belt Ceres, Vesta
Jovian Planet Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune
Trans-Neptunian Object
Kuiper Belt Pluto, Haumea, Makemake
Scattered Disc Eris, Sedna, Planet X
Oort Cloud Etc. Scholz’s Star
Small Body Comet, Centaur, Asteroid

Find out more about the Sun@Cosma …

Zip the World!

~ mehopper

Virtual zipline rides are addictive, and they’re also a neat way to see the world!

I found this out by accident.

While I was planning a trip to Niagara Falls, I stumbled over a 360° video of a zipline ride.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Akron Drone Services (YouTube Channel)
Akron Drone Services (Official Website)

Then I watched it again “just for fun,” and that led to a “side adventure” that grew into this post.

That’s because watching the Niagara Falls video led to YouTube suggesting another minute long 360° video of a zipline ride in Cañon City, Colorado within Royal Gorge Bridge & Park.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Royal Gorge Bridge and Park (YouTube Channel)

Then another 360° video of a zipline ride by Superfly Ziplines in Whistler, British Columbia popped up. Again, only a minute long — innocent enough, why not?

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Superfly Ziplines (YouTube Channel)

How beautiful, not to mention seasonally appropriate, was that!?!? Show me more!

The next 360° video that YouTube suggested was of a ride at Zip World in Wales.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Orchard Immersive Tech (YouTube Channel)

Wahoooo! Notice that the speedometer on the video said 100 MPH!

That ride turns out to have been on the longest zipline in Europe and the fastest in the world. Great to experience virtually, but probably terrifying in real life!

A Google search showed that Zip World is a sort of playground for grown-ups with a number of jungle gym like “destinations.” Here’s a non-360° video about what they offer.

Zip World (YouTube Channel)

After watching ten 360° videos of zipline rides in under 15 minutes, it occurred to me that ziplining is a “thing” at tourist destinations, and taking 360° videos of the rides is too. I couldn’t help but wonder, how many more 360° video clips of rides are there out there?

A YouTube search for zipline+360 turned up hundreds of results from all over the world!

Better yet, the rides themselves are only about a minute’ish long, by definition, and they’ve got great bird’s-eye views of scenery that you wouldn’t see otherwise. If you’re into seeing great places, what a way to do it!

Happy Zipping 🙂

If you enjoy adventures with a side of adrenaline then check out these other posts …

Heights!
Up, Up and Away!
Wingsuit Rush!
Go for a Fly!
NYC Highs
Extreme Biking, Artfully!
Catch Some Waves!

Find out more about travel, the World and adventure in general …

Talented Greenery

~ mehopper

Note: This post was updated and reposted in honor of Arbor Day 2026!

Check out this minute long 360° video from Genesis Visual Studios.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Genesis Visual Studios (YouTube Channel)

Peaceful, isn’t it?

The bees are busily buzzing about, but the plants aren’t doing much, right?

Well, those plants are up to a LOT more than they look like they are in the video.

Now, you’re probably thinking, yeah, right.

They can move towards light, VERY slowly. Big whoop-d-doo!

Not so fast. There may be more to those Ents in The Lord of the Rings and the Tree of Souls in Avatar than you might expect.

For example, did you know that plants really do “warn” each other of danger?

Here’s a recent video and a couple of related articles about the skill.

Buzz60 (YouTube Channel)
Buzz60 (Facebook)

When Plants Cry Out for Help, Their Neighbors Start Screaming, Too (Kat Eschner, Popular Science)
Insect Herbivory Selects for Volatile-Mediated Plant-Plant Communication (Aino Kalske, Et al., Current Biology)

This is just the latest development in a long line of research about the talents of plants.

For example, in 2013 there was a PBS Nature special dedicated to “plant behavior” entitled What Plants Talk About. Since then, once or twice a year, the topic pops up in the media.


Here’s a video published in 2016 by Richard Karban on TED-Ed that gives a very nice summary of some of the research that’s made the news.

TED-Ed (YouTube Channel)
TED-Ed (Official Website)

You can find out more from Richard Karban’s accompanying TED-Ed Lesson and these sources upon which he says it was based.

How Trees Talk to Each Other (Suzanne Simard, TED Talk, YouTube)
Plant Sensing and Communication (Richard Karban, University of Chicago Press)
How Plants Secretly Talk to Each Other (Kat McGowan, Wired)
The Intelligent Plant: Scientists Debate a New Way of Understanding Flora (Michael Pollan, The New Yorker)

Here’s a recent video and article about the subterranean fungi network that’s now been dubbed the “wood wide web.”

BBC News (YouTube Channel)
BBC News (Official Website)

Wood Wide Web: The Underground Network of Microbes that Connects Trees—Mapped for First Time (Gabriel Popkin, Science Magazine)

So plants can talk, trade and wage war.

That’s nice, but that doesn’t make them all that talented, right?

Well, believe it or not, with a bit of help from their friends, plants can “sing” too, and that shard of news is what actually inspired this very post!

This week I came across a device on Kickstarter from Data Garden that’s called PlantWave, and it’s designed to let you “listen to the music” of plants!

Here’s their two minute promotional video.

PlantWave (YouTube Channel)
PlantWave (Official Website)

Here’s a story with more background.

Let Your Plants Play Music, and Gardens of Sound Will Bloom (Arielle Pardes, Wired)

Of course, now that you know that plants can even “sing,” then it’s only fair to mention that, with a tad more help from their human friends, they can also dance!

Here’s a video of some doing a ballet to Chopin’s Mazurkas, Op. 67.

Mirela Athanas, ClairDeLune25 (YouTube Channel)

If you like that, then you will probably enjoy this extremely relaxing seven minute long video of flowers dancing to, appropriately enough, Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers.

Mirela Athanas, ClairDeLune25 (YouTube Channel)

So there you have it — the next time you’re surrounded by plants, even if you can’t actually hear them talk and sing or watch them move or dance right then and there, perhaps it may not seem “quite” so quiet 🙂

Here are some further resources about the many “talents” of plants.

Do Trees Talk to Each Other? (Richard Grant, Smithsonian Magazine)
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (Peter Wohlleben)

Have a great weekend!

Find out more about plants, trees and flowers …

F.L.Wright (De)Tours

~ mehopper

It never ceases to amaze me how clicking on an innocent little link to a news story can turn into an unexpected, intriguing adventure.

For example, I clicked on a link to this story about a Frank Lloyd Wright house that will be going on the market.

A Frank Lloyd Wright Home in N.H. Will Hit the Market for $850,000 (Brittany Bowker, Boston.com)

The house is known as the Kalil House, and as is generally the case with Wright houses, there’s an interesting aspect to the architecture. In this case the house is one of seven “Usonian Automatic Houses” that Wright designed. They were intended to be moderately priced and used concrete blocks that could be assembled in a variety of ways.

That sounded like a sort of “LEGO” house, so I wanted to know more!

First, I found this video that shows the house.

Paula Martin Group (YouTube Channel)
Paula Martin Group (Official Website)

Interesting concept, but not my personal favorite example of Wright architecture.

However, while I was trying to find out more about how the house looked, something else caught my attention. The website for the sale of the house had a 3D tour.

Neat! Of course, I had to check that out!

That tour was created using a platform called Matterport. The core of their business is that they do a 3D scan of a space and host the 3D model on their platform so users can navigate by simply matching a blue circle attached to their cursor to white circles on the 360° image and clicking.

Matterport is clearly used for selling high-end real estate, but it’s also been used for other types of spaces, and their website has a gallery of interesting tours. The Arts & Culture and Historic sections feature hundreds of great sites. No surprise, I took some (de)tours.

I also accidentally tripped over something else.

There’s another Wright house up for sale, or in this case auction, in October. It’s in Phoenix, and it’s known as the Circular Sun House or the Norman Lykes House.

Heritage Auctions (YouTube Channel)
Heritage Auctions (Official Website)

Better yet, there was another 3D tour of it!

Once I found that, I decided a try a simple Google Search to find out if there were any other 3D tours of Wright houses
.
Sure enough, there were, which also meant more (de)tours for me!

There was even a tour of Taliesin West, which was Wright’s desert laboratory that was mentioned in the video about the Norman Lykes House.

Then my journey took yet another unexpected turn due to this article.

Take A 3D Virtual Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West (Katharine Keane, Architectural Digest)

That article was innocent enough, but it had a link to this article from a few years ago.

10 Facts About Frank Lloyd Wright You Didn’t Know (Carrie Hojnicki, Architectural Digest)

Here’s a sample of what’s in the article.

For all the praise Frank Lloyd Wright garnered in his 70-year career, the architect was equally a magnet for controversy in all its forms. With three wives and eight children (seven biological, one adopted), the architect spent much of his adult life racking up sensational, though not untrue, headlines like “SUIT ENDS WRIGHT ROMANCE; Sculptress Who Fled With Architect to Japan Obtains Alimony” (New York Times) or “ISSUE WARRANT FOR WRIGHT; Architect’s Wife Seeks to Re-enter Their Wisconsin Home” (also New York Times), each referring the personal tumult that seemed to follow the architect through much of his adult life.

Wow, so Mr. Wright wasn’t boring!

I did a tad more research about Wright’s life and found a trailer for a documentary about him entitled Frank Lloyd Wright: Murder, Myth & Modernism. It starts out covering his architecture, but it doesn’t end there!

Movies & TV (YouTube Channel)

I found out more about the “Murder” in the title of the movie in a YouTube video from the Smithsonian Channel entitled A Horrific Tragedy at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home, but it was so gruesome that I could not bring myself to include anything but a link to it here. I will caution you that you should take the word “horrific” seriously as you decide whether or not to click the link and watch the video!

I’ll stop sharing my own (de)tours here, but if you want to take some further ones on your own, then there are plenty of places to find out more about Wright’s work and his extraordinary life. You can check out the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust (YouTube Channel). The Architectural Digest has a very nice section. Then, of course, there’s good old Encyclopædia Britannica and last, but not least, Wikipedia.

Finally, on a brighter note, according to an article on Atlas Obscura, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy says that there tend to be between 15 to 20 properties for sale at any one time. These days, a fairly high percentage of those are bound to have 360° tours to explore, so that means that Wright fans can enjoy some new Wright architecture (de)tours with just a bit of clicking.

Find out more about architecture and arts in general…

Wacky World

~ mehopper

It’s a weird and wacky world out there, and Guinness World Records (GWR) loves to remind us of that fact from time to time.

Just last week they released their 66th Edition of extreme factoids and an accompanying media blitz to rain outrageous strangeness down upon the media landscape.

It all started with a silly little one minute video. Here’s a link to it.

Guinness World Records 2020 – Out Now (Guinness World Records, YouTube)

Then Guinness World Records followed that up with a two minute video highlighting their hand-picked stars.

Meet The Stars of GWR 2020 (Guinness World Records, YouTube)

Then there was this article on their website with more detail about the “Stars” in the video.

Power your Curiosity: Introducing the Stars of Guinness World Records 2020 (Connie Suggitt, Guinness World Records)

They also have a YouTube Channel where they post separate videos about the Stars.

Finally, they distribute their press release, and voilà, there’s a media frenzy.

The next thing you know, news organizations starved for something to cover besides politics, the weather, the state of the roads and whatnot, latch on to it and print articles like this one.

Pinky Pull Ups, Mayo Eating and Other Weird Feats in the New Guinness World Records book (Scottie Andrew, CNN)

There is a finer point to be made here, though. Guinness World Records is a business, so they tend to delve into a “records for hire” approach sometimes.

That is why I was able to find a 360° video with this description.

Watch the All-New F-PACE defy gravity in a Guinness World Record-breaking 360° loop. As we celebrate our 80th anniversary, our new performance SUV was driven with daring precision by Legendary Stunt Driver Terry Grant, showcasing its lightweight design, agility, sports car speed and performance.

Here is a link to the video.

Jaguar F-PACE 360° Experience of Gravity-Defying World Record Loop (Jaguar, YouTube)

Yes, indeed, for better or worse, profit motive or not, they do a great job of catering to all sorts of interests — they even had a cool 360° video for me to post about here!

Lest you think you’re safe from their hijinks, I highly recommend that you check out their Showcase organized by interests. Better yet, you may wish you’d stuck to cat videos, because the website has a category for animal lovers!

Oh nooo… there you gooo…

Happy Weekend!

Find out more about competitions and the rest of the World in general …

Strange Stays

~ mehopper

I concluded my last post about Sand Art with highlighting how Booking.com offered the chance to stay in a sandcastle as a promotion for Coney Island’s Sand Sculpting Competition. Here’s a link with more on that unusual “opportunity.”

Giant Coney Island Sandcastle Offers Sleepovers (Summer Delaney, WPIX)

That may have sounded like a one-off type of oddity, but in truth, it wasn’t.

Booking.com is known for cooking up some “unique” promotions. For example, here’s a silly clip on what they did for that illustrious holiday, National Avocado Day.

Buzz60 (YouTube Channel)
Buzz60 (Facebook)

The aren’t alone in promoting atypical places to stay. In fact, far from it!

There are also a bevy of travel articles about a broad array of places to stay.

17 Weird and Wacky Hotels Across the United States (Violet Kim, CNN Travel)
22 Weird, Wonderful and Unique Hotels in the World (Stine Gjevnøe Sørensen, momondo)

No matter what your passion happens to be, there’s bound to be a place to stay for it.

The reason that I’m so aware of this is because awhile ago, with amusement, I realized that there’s some sort of lodging related to almost every subject on Cosma. Sometimes those experiences end up as adventures like Sand Art. That’s why I have a huge stash of links to “thematic” lodging that range from mildly amusing to pretty wild.

For example, there’s some kind of place to visit for what ever kind of transportation.

If you like trains, then you might enjoy a say at the Featherbed Railroad (Upper Lake, California). If you’re into cars, then you might want to book a night at V8 Hotel Motorworld (Stuttgart, Germany).

DIRS21 by TourOnline AG (YouTube Channel)

Are planes more your thing? There’s quite a few adventures ranging from sleeping in a Plane Airbnb (St Michel Chef Chef, France) to a 727 Airplane Fuselage (Costa Verde, Costa Rica).

If you’re into boats, then try a stay at The Queen Mary Hotel (Long Beach, California).

If you prefer an even more aquatic experience, then there are undersea hotels like these.

Atlantis – The Palm (Dubai, United Arab Emirates)
The Manata Resort (Psv-zanzibar, Tanzania)
Jules’ Undersea Loadge (Key Largo, Florida)
The Muraka (Rangali Island, Maldives)

Let’s say you are into trees, then how about staying in a tree house? There are many places to consider. Here are links to a few of them.

Out’n’About Treehouses Treesort (Takilma, Oregon)
Azulik Resort (Tulum, Mexico)
Treehouse Lodge Resort (Iquitos, Peru)

Less run-of-the-mill tree houses include Freespirit Spheres (Vancouver Island). Here’s a link to a video about them.

Free Spirit Spheres Ultimate Treehouses (Animal Planet, YouTube)

Trees are nice, but what if you prefer animals?

Dog lovers might get a kick out of cuddling up inside a beagle at Dog Bark Park Inn (Cottonwood Inn, Idaho).

KTVB (YouTube CHannel)
KTVB (Official Website)

If you love giraffes, there’s Giraffe Manor (Nairobi, Kenya). Here’s a virtual 360° visit.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Photos of Africa (YouTube Channel)
Photos of Africa (Official Website)

Do you long to see polar bears in the wild? Then climb on the Tundra Buggy Lodge (Churchill, Manitoba).

Amanda Williams (YouTube Channel)

There are some places where you can take shelter in ice. The two most famous are Hôtel de Glace (Quebec City, Canada) and Icehotel, Sweden (Jukkasjärvi, Sweden).

There’s also a place called Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort in Saariselka, Finland where you can have all sorts of winter fun and then chill in glass igloos and watch the northern lights.

Goway Travel (YouTube Channel)
Goway Travel (Official Website)

So there you have it — there really is a place for about any interest that you can imagine, and also some that you might not expect.

For example, there are places where dyed in the wool Tolkien fans can live like hobbits!

5 Places Where You Can Vacation Like a Hobbit on Hobbit Day (A. Pawlowski, USA Today)

You might think that nobody would want to stay in a jail, voluntarily, but that’s not so.

While people do pay to stay in an ex-jail here in Boston called The Liberty Hotel, that’s a tame example. A far more extreme and bizarre experience can be found at the Karostas Cietums aka Karosta Prison (Liepāja, Latvia)!

Monta Krafte (YouTube Channel)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this adventure in strange places to stay around the world.

Now you know that whatever your passion, there’s bound to be some lodging where you can revel in it.

Here are still more sites where you can find unusual lodging organized into handy categories.

Unusual Places to Stay and Unique Holiday Accommodation (CoolStays)
The Most Unique and Unusual Places to Stay (Host Unusual)

If something isn’t covered in this post or those sites, then you can probably find something with a search for “Your+Interest+Hotel 🙂

That’s how I found a place for my inner librarian called the Library Hotel. It’s on Madison Avenue in New York City, and the rooms are organized by Dewey Decimal! Here’s a link to a video about it.

Library Hotel New York (NY) (HotelReviews, YouTube Channel)

So, next time you are booking lodging, I hope you will consider looking for something a bit less “traditional” that will fit your interests and maybe even become an adventure in its own right!

Find out more about travel, adventure, the World and knowledge in general…

The Maya Underworld

~ mehopper

Chichén Itzá is a fascinating place, and believe it or not, it’s just gotten even more so!

But let’s start from the beginning.

In case you aren’t familiar with it, here’s a link to a 360° video that will give you a sense of why it is considered a World Wonder.

Seven Wonders of the World: Chichén Itzá | 360 Video (The New York Times, YouTube)

It’s hard to believe that such a place could become more intriguing, but I just stumbled across another 360° video in which archaeologist Guillermo de Anda explains how there’s more below El Castillo than meets the eye — a lot more!

Inside Chichén Itzá | 360 Video (National Geographic< YouTube)

That video hardly scratches the surface of what Guillermo de Anda and Gran Acuífero Maya are discovering about underwater caves and their importance to the Maya.

Not only was Chichén Itzá built over a cave, but that cave is connected to Sistema Sac Actun which is now considered to be the largest underwater cave system in the world. In addition, sinkholes called cenotes serve as a network of entrances to the cave system!

Al Jazeera (YouTube Channel)
Al Jazeera (Official Website)

The most mind boggling thing of all is that divers are finding both Maya relics and much, much older human artifacts in the the underwater caves. Here’s a link to a video about the discovery.

Divers Discover 215-Mile-Long Cave in Mexico Full of Mayan Relics (Business Insider, YouTube)

Here are links to where you can learn more about these discoveries!

Remains of Maya Underworld Found in World’s Longest Submerged Cave (Megan Gannon, Live Science)
Cave Full of Untouched Maya Artifacts Found at Chichén Itzá (Jason Daley, Smithsonian Magazine)
World’s Largest Underwater Cave System Discovered in Mexico (Jason Daley, Smithsonian Magazine)

Follow these links to learn more about Chichén Itzá!

City of Chichén Itzá (UNESCO World Heritage Centre)
Chichén Itzá (National Geographic)

Find out more about Mexico, the Americas, the World and History …

Lunar Landings

~ mehopper

Saturday, July 20th is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, and there’s a massive media blitz surrounding the occasion. Pretty much every major news outlet is covering it in some way, and it’s no surprise that NASA is leading the publicity frenzy.

On Friday at 1 p.m. (EDT) NASA is broadcasting 50 Years Ago Apollo 11 Launches Into History on NASA Live.

NASA (YouTube Channel)
NASA (Official Website)

There are also a ton of related events going on all over the place — there’s bound to be something going on near you!

For example, here are a few links to stories about how the restored Apollo Mission Control Center at NASA Johnson Space Center is opening this weekend.
Restoring Apollo Mission Control Center (NASA)
Apollo Mission Control Reopens in All Its Historic Glory, July 20 (NASA)

In honor of this momentous occasion, and being the total space buff that I am, I couldn’t resist dipping into my personal trove of “Moon Media” and rummaging around to find a few tidbits that might not show up in mainstream news stories.

Let’s start with the Apollo 11 Command Module that \resides at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. A team there did a full 3-D scan of it, so among other things, you can tour it online (Smithsonian fully digitized the Apollo 11 Command Module).

Here’s a link to a trailer about the project.

Smithsonian Gives Virtual Look Inside Apollo 11 (Wall Street Journal, YouTube)

You can explore it here!

Here’s an article some of the neat details that you can see in the module.

Apollo 11: The Writings on the Wall (Allan Needell, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum)

If you’re a computer buff, then you might get a kick out of this video.

How Did the Apollo Flight Computers Get Men to the Moon and Back? (Paul Shillito, YouTube).

The website Virtual AGC — AGS — LVDC — Gemini also has tons of information about computer simulations of the guidance computers used in the Apollo lunar missions.

If you want a glimpse into at least part of the calculations that the Apollo computers had to do to get humans to the moon, then try your hand at the game Lunar Lander. There’s an example of it on the Web thanks to the artist Seb Lee-Delisle who created it as part of his Lunar Trails exhibit. His version is called Moon Lander.

Of course, my archive happens to have a few relevant 360° videos 🙂

My favorite one is this two minute simulation of Apollo 11’s landing and the first moonwalk.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Seymour & Lerhn (YouTube Channel)
Seymour & Lerh (Official Website)

That’s great, but it’s a tad short on realism.

Here’s a link to a more realistic 360° video about Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan’s last walk on the moon in 1972 that has a panorama created from photos that he took at the time.

VR Walk on the Moon with Gene Cernan (USA TODAY, YouTube)

Here’s another one minute 360° video of the same stills where you can look around and feel as if you are really standing on the Moon!

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Apollo 360 (YouTube Channel)

If you want to experience some more “real” moon imagery, then try out Google Moon!

Hardcore Apollo 11 fans might also enjoy the two plus hours of NASA’s restored video Moonwalk, and NASA even uploaded all of the 9,000 hours of audio from the Apollo 11 mission to the Internet Archive.

Cool stuff!

However, if you’re only looking for a fun way to kick off the weekend, then take a ride on this Space Mountain-esque 360° video complete with audio from the Apollo 11 Mission!

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

VR 360 TV (YouTube Channel)
VR 360 TV (Discord)

Happy Moon Adventures!

If you want to learn more about space and space travel, explore Space Depot!

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Find out more about the Moon and space travel…

Fairy Chimneys

~ mehopper

I was searching YouTube when a video about “fair chimneys” came up in my results.

It sounded so whimsical, I couldn’t resist checking it out.

It turns out that fairy chimneys are geological formations, also known as hoodoos, that form within sedimentary and volcanic rock in dry, hot areas around the world.

While that may not be that interesting, the video about them is quite enticing. It’s footage of an area of Turkey called Cappadocia where fairy chimneys have been carved out to be homes, churches and even whole villages for millennia.

Go Türkiye (YouTube Channel)
Go Türkiye (Official Website)

Here’s a 360° video that’s more history of the Goreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia featured in the above video.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Turing Kültür Sanat (YouTube Channel)

On a more entertaining note, anyone that visits Cappadocia can become a troglodyte because some hotels there are in fairy chimneys.

Here’s a video with some peeks into the exotic “cave hotels.”

Globe Motion (YouTube Channel)

Finally, what about all those hot air balloons in all of the videos?

They were there because Cappadocia also happens to be one of the hot air balloon capitals of the world. Check out this brief 360° experience.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

VIEMR – Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality (YouTube Channel)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this “fairy chimney” inspired adventure.

If you’ve become as enchanted as I have with Cappadocia’s fairy chimneys, cave hotels and hot air balloons, maybe even added visiting them to your bucket list, then here are some links to where you can learn more.

Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia (World Heritage Site, UNESCO)
Turkey’s ‘Fairy Chimneys’ Were Millions of Years in the Making (Chris Heller, Smithsonian Magazine)
Cappadocia: Turkey’s Land of Fairy Chimneys (James Bainbridge, Lonely Planet)

Find out more about the Asia and the world in general…

Great Eyes o’ the Sea

~ mehopper

The news is full of stories about how a giant squid was filmed in U.S. waters for the first time. Here’s a link to an article by ABC7 that includes a great clip about it.

Wondrous 10-foot Giant Squid Spotted Deep in Gulf of Mexico (Danny Clemens, ABC7 New Orleans)

Here is a link to the web site of the researchers that did the filming.

Here Be Monsters: We Filmed a Giant Squid in America’s Backyard (Sönke Johnsen and Edie Widder, NOAA Ocean Exploration and Research)

The accomplishment was applaudable, but I was a bit disappointed about the clip.

Where were the eyes?

The text in the video said that the giant squid can have eyeballs that measure up to ten inches in diameter — that’s almost a foot! Yet the eyes weren’t actually captured in the video.

Luckily there’s another place where you can see a giant squid’s eyes.

While this was the first time a giant squid was filmed in U.S. waters, it wasn’t the first time that one’s been filmed. That happened back in 2012 when researchers from Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science filmed one in the Ogasawara archipelago, and that time they did get a fleeting shot of the giant squid’s humongous eyes. Here’s a link to a clip that covers that sighting as well as some background like how giant squids have the largest eyes in the animal kingdom and how sightings of them probably led to the legends about kraken.

Giant Squid: King of the Ocean (Seeker)

Giant squids aren’t the only cephalopods with great eyes — octopuses’ eyes are also neat.

Here’s a link to a mesmorizing video that shows a rainbow colored blanket octopus with a closeup of its eye at the end.

Rare ‘Rainbow’ Blanket Octopuses Caught on Camera in the Philippines (USA Today)

When you’re looking eye to eye with a squid or octopus, it’s easy to imagine that they would see you in the same way that you would see them, but that’s not so. Until a couple of years ago, researchers believed that since cephalopods only have a single type of photoreceptor, they would be colorblind. Then in 2016 some researchers suggested that the truth may be more intriguing than that — their eyes may work like a prism. Here’s a video about that and a link to the the research that it was based upon.

Ocean Imaging (YouTube Channel)
Ocean Imaging (Official Website)

Spectral Discrimination in Color Blind Animals via Chromatic Aberration and Pupil Shape (Alexander L. Stubbs and Christopher W. Stubbs, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

Of course, cephalopods aren’t the only creatures in the sea with great eyes. Plenty of marine mammals have wonderful eyes, too. Here’s a lovely video filmed and edited by Sally Bartel for Save The Whales that brings you eye to eye with whales, dolphins and an affectionate manatee who will even come up and give you a smootch!

Sally Bartel (YouTube Channel)

They were all beautiful, but I must confess to being partial to whale’s eyes. In fact, one of my favorite 360° videos of all time is TheBlu because at one point a blue whale comes up and looks you right in the eye for a bit.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Transport by Wevr (YouTube Channel)
Wevr (Official Website)

TheBlu is awesome, but it is just an animation. There’s another non-360° video that was posted by Cheesemans’ Ecology Safaris that’s even more impressive — it takes you eyeball to eyeball with a real humpback whale!

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Cheesemans’ Ecology Safaris (YouTube Channel)
Cheesemans’ Ecology Safaris (Official Website)

Again, since those huge creatures are also mammals, it’s easy to assume that their eyes would see you in much the same way as you would see them. While that’s more true than it is with the cephalopods, it’s still not really the case. Here is a story that will give you sense of how whales might really see you.

You’re Eye-to-Eye With a Whale in the Ocean—What Does It See? (Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic)

Finally, I’ll leave you with this 360° video from the American Museum of Natural History. It’s a bit slow in the middle but features some nice eye to eye shots near the beginning and end.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

American Museum of Natural History (YouTube Channel)
American Museum of Natural History (Official Website)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this deep dive into seeing eye to eye with some giants of the sea.

Find out more about squids, octopuses, whales and the ocean…

Yellow Submarines

~ mehopper

My last post was about an adventure with seals doing science in Antarctica.

This adventure begins where that one left off, but this is a very different, and fun excursion that happened because Boaty McBoatface surfaced in my news feed.

In case you never heard of him, Boaty’s a submarine that got his name via a publicity stunt by the UK’s National Oceanography Centre that went viral and didn’t turn out like they expected. He turned up in my news feed this week because he’s been doing science similar to the kind that the seals in my last post were doing, and the results have just been published.

Google assumed that if I would want to know what seals with antenna were doing in Antarctica, then I would definitely want to know about Boaty’s activities.

Here’s a video about Boaty’s discoveries as well as the fiasco that led to his name.

Audacy (YouTube Channel)
Audacy (Official Website)

Here are links to some stories about Boaty’s research.

Boaty McBoatface Sheds Light on Warming Ocean Abyss (British Antarctic Survey)
Rapid Mixing and Exchange of Deep-Ocean Waters in an Abyssal Boundary Current (Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, et al., PNAS)

Boaty’s research is important, but seeing him, whose thoughts could help but wander to The Beatles’ song/album/movie Yellow Submarine?

Google/YouTube couldn’t resist helping me along with those musings. Next thing I knew, nostalgia kicked in, and I was watching a trailer for the re-release of the movie in the UK and Ireland that was done for the movie’s 50th Anniversary.

Yellow Submarine UK Theatrical Trailer (Beatles, YouTube)

Then I discovered that The Beatles have official Playlists on YouTube, and there’s even a dedicated Yellow Submarine Playlist that has over twenty videos with all sorts of insider stuff about the movie.

The Internet then led me to scads of ancillary products inspired by the movie. For example, there’s a Yellow Submarine turntable from Pro-Ject (YouTube). Who knew?

LEGO also released a Yellow Submarine Set, and here’s their colorful trailer for it.

The Beatles’ LEGO Yellow Submarine vs. the Sea Monster (LEGO, YouTube)

That’s fun, but there are a number of fan videos that are pretty great, too.

Here’s a lovely stop motion video with a creative take on building the kit.

The Bits Beatles Tribute (YouTube Channel)

Here’s another fan made stop motion video done in the MTV style.

White House Productions (YouTube Channel)

Neat stuff!

Of course, LEGOLAND in California even went so far as to build a ride!

Theme Park Insider (YouTube Channel)

Personally, I prefer the open sea, and it turns out that there’s a ride for that, too.

An outfit called Submarine Safaris operates Yellow Submarine tours out of Tenerife and Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. Here’s a promo video for their tours.

Tenecar Tenerife (YouTube Channel)

If you’re inspired to book a trip on a real Yellow Submarine, then here’s a link to a video with some background on the Canary Islands that you may want to know before you head out on a real-life adventure.

Introducing the Canary Islands (Lonely Planet, YouTube)

There you have it. One minute you’re doing science with seals in Antarctica, and then the next thing you know, you’re exploring the warm waters of the Canary Islands in a Yellow Submarine.

Isn’t the Internet a wonderful place?

Finally, if all this talk about The Beatles has you craving something a bit more psychedelic, or you just want to play a little while longer, then here’s a trippy little 360° video that claims to be “inspired by The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Rock Hy. Zhang (YouTube Channel)

Find out more about music, fun stuff in general and ways of getting around in the water …

Under the Ice

~ mehopper

To paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous words in The Lord of the Rings, “It’s a dangerous business, clicking on a link. You glance at a story, and if you don’t watch out, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

This week I innocently clicked on a link to this story from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Mysterious Holes in Antarctic Sea Ice Explained by Years of Robotic Data (University of Washington, AAAS EurekAlert!)

In turn, that link led to this research study that was just published in Nature last week.

Antarctic Offshore Polynyas Linked to Southern Hemisphere Climate Anomalies (Ethan C. Campbell, et al., Nature)

Indeed, the articles provided an interesting explanation for those odd polynya phenomena in Antarctica, but it was actually this intriguing image that really grabbed my attention.

Instrumented Seal, University of Washington. Credit: Dan Costa/University of California, Santa Cruz
Image: Ocean measurements were also collected by seals swimming under the sea ice with temporary satellite tags, showing normal water conditions in the years that did not have large polynyas.
Credit: Dan Costa/University of California, Santa Cruz

Yep, that’s a seal with an antenna on it’s head!

It turns out that the study used data combined from satellite images of sea ice cover, some robotic drifters as well as elephant seals outfitted with sensors.

What’s more, using seals wasn’t a one-off operation. It was part of a program that’s been operating for over a decade according to the Coriolis Operational Oceanography site:

Since 2004, several hundred seals have been equipped with conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) sensors in the Southern Ocean for both biological and physical oceanographic studies. A calibrated collection of seal-derived hydrographic data is now available from Coriolis, currently consisting of more than 300,000 temperature/salinity profiles. — Coriolis


The Coriolis site also has information about a program called Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole that provides access to an international database of validated ocean observations collected by marine mammals such as seals, sea lions, and even turtles.

You can find out more about the program here.

MEOP Web Portal: Ocean Observations by Marine Mammals (Argos System)

On my journey to learn how scientists have been strapping sensors to seals to find out about what’s going on under the ice in Antarctica, it was impossible to miss stories about other methods they are using.

For example, here’s a story where an evolutionary biologist named Paul Cziko explains how they setup something called the McMurdo Oceanographic Observatory (MOO).

Spoiler alert. This time it’s humans diving way down under the ice. Burrrr!

KGW News (YouTube Channel)
KGW News (Official Website)

Yes, you really can go to the MOO site and listen in on some seals and ice for yourself.

After all of this stuff about seals, why stop with listening? Aren’t you itching to see some more?

Here’s a link to a short 360° video that takes you under an iceberg to visit with a crabeater seal along with some gentoo penguins before returning to the surface to share some other views and perspectives about Antarctica.

360° Diving Under Icebergs With A Seal In Antarctica (BBC Earth, YouTube)

That video had a nice view of a seal under ice, but now here’s an even better 360° video that get’s you up close and personal with an elephant seal on a beach.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Wildlife Protection Solutions (YouTube Channel)
Wildlife Protection Solutions (Official Website)

So there you have it. The moral of this story is be careful about what you click on, or you might find yourself on an unexpected virtual journey to learn about seals with sensors, and then end up spending an hour or more exploring the frigid waters under Antarctica.

In case you’ve got a few more minutes and the interest, here are links to two more very nice YouTube videos about the amazingly diverse and beautiful life deep under the Antarctic ice.

The Deepest Dive in Antarctica Reveals a Sea Floor Teeming With Life (OceanX, YouTube)
Discovering Life Under Antarctica’s Ice (Great Big Story, YouTube)

Finally, now that I’ve got you down here with me on this unexpected adventure in Antarctica, the trip wouldn’t be complete without some more penguins, right?

Here’s a 360° close-up view of a colony of some Adélies, chinstraps and gentoos — some of them are having a rough time, but nonetheless, they’re all still fun to watch (esp. the chicks).

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

PBS News Hour (YouTube Channel)
PBS News Hour (Official Website)

Have a great weekend!

Find out more about seals, penguins and Antarctica …

NYC Highs

~ mehopper

New York City has a new place with a view.

Two weeks ago Hudson Yards opened to cheers from the developers and some jeers from the community.

The Escheresque whimsy of The Vessel captured the media’s attention at the opening, but the views from the observation deck called Edge is the big draw. Here’s a link to a clip about the views.

Sky-High Observation Deck Being Built in NYC (Associated Press, YouTube)

Seeing the views from Hudson Yards inspired me to open my files and look for my notes about other clips with views of New York City posted online — they’re all 360° videos, so look around!

This first clip takes you on a two minute stroll along the High Line which was mentioned in the Hudson Yards clip above. It’s a 1.45 mile long elevated walk way that ties together Greenwich Village, the Meatpacking District, Chelsea, and Midtown Manhattan. The views are nice, but more down to Earth than those at Hudson Yards.

TXTExploring the High Line, NYC’s Elevated Urban Park (Washington Post)

Of course, no matter how many new views are generated by new developers, there will never be a more iconic vista in New York than the one from the top of the Empire State Building.

Empire State Building 360 4K VR (Thoughtworks Canada)

A more adventuresome 360° experience was posted by the New York Times. It is a two minute clip from the perspective of a guy who climbed the spire of World Trade Center.

Climbing 1 World Trade Center: Man on Spire (The New York Times)

Finally, The New York Times< also published another great view from even greater heights. It's entitled Take Flight, and it was featured in their 2015 edition of Great Performances. The piece lifts you up from a New York City street at night to take you on a mesmerizing flight of fancy towards the Moon.

Take Flight 360 Video (The New York Times)

The soundtrack is fine, but I can’t help hearing Christopher Cross’s Arthur’s Theme when I watch it.

There’s also a non-360° version on The New York Time’s YouTube Channel that shows each of the individual performances up close, and here are some more stories about Take Flight.

Editor’s Letter: Take Flight With Virtual Reality (Jake Silverstein, New York Times Magazine)
Great Performers Take Flight (New York Times Magazine)
Behind the Scenes of ‘Take Flight’ (Kathy Ryan, New York Times Magazine)
The Art of Flying in the Movies: A cinematic history of going airborne (A. O. Scott, New York Times Magazine)

If you enjoy adventures with a tourch of adrenaline then check out these other posts …

Heights!
Up, Up and Away!
Wingsuit Rush!
Go for a Fly!
Extreme Biking, Artfully!
Catch Some Waves!
Zip the World!

Find out more about North America and the World …

St. Paddy’s Day Jaunt

~ mehopper

Yeah, it’s finally time to see some green around here — the official start of Spring is next week, and today is St. Patrick’s Day!

Brace yourself — you’re getting a whirlwind virtual visit to Dublin for St. Paddy’s Day!

We’ll start the excursion off with a quick 360° tour of some well known places in Dublin.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

360 Video Ireland (YouTube Channel)

It’s early, so for the art lovers, we’ll take a quick trip over for a three minute 360° tour of the National Gallery of Ireland.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

The Journal (YouTube Channel)
The Journal (Official Website)

It’s still early, and there’s a place called Knockdrin Castle that might still be for sale. I’m pretty sure we can’t afford it, but it will be a hoot to take a quick 360° tour. We do have those lovely lottery tickets for sale in the US, so you never know 🙂

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Bloomberg Originals (YouTube Channel)
Bloomberg Originals (Official Website)

Knockdrin Castle is on Sale for the First Time in Half a Century (James Tarmy, Bloomberg)
Knockdrin Castle (Wikipedia)

Okay, the festivities will be starting, so it’s time to get back to Dublin and take in the parade. Thanks to SEDA College, we have a three minute preview taken last year.

SEDA College (YouTube Channel)
SEDA College (Official Website)

This adventure wouldn’t be complete without some traditional Irish music, so let’s stop into Hogans and get a close-up, 360° view.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Communications Concepts, Inc. (YouTube Channel)
Communications Concepts, Inc. (Official Website)

There you have it. I hope you enjoyed this brief virtual vacation, and the good news is that you still have plenty of time to head out and celebrate St. Paddy’s Day in your own way.

If you do decide to make a real Visit to Dublin for St. Patrick’s Day, then there are a few things that you should know, though.

Jameson Irish Whiskey (YouTube Channel)
Jameson Irish Whiskey (Official Website)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day Weekend!

Find out more about Ireland, Eruope and holidays …

Super Sexy, Singing Mice

~ mehopper

It’s not often that mice sneak into the news, but they do manage it from time to time.

One story that gotten a lot of attention is about how researchers created “super mice” by injecting nanoparticles into their eyes to give them “night vision.” Here are links to the stories about that research.

A Shot of Nanoparticles Lets Mice See in the Dark (MIT Technology Review)
Night-Vision ‘Super-Mice’ Created Using Light-Converting Nanoparticles (Matthew Warren, Nature)
Mammalian Near-Infrared Image Vision through Injectable and Self-Powered Retinal Nanoantennae (Yuqian Ma, et al., Cell)

In case you’re wondering what that would look like, here’s a link to a 360° video about how animals see the world that will give you a sense of it. The video concludes with segments on how rats see the world normally (2:32) and snakes see the world in the infrared (3:30).

How Animals See The World (BuzzFeedVideo, YouTube)

So that’s “interesting.”

Another story was a bit more entertaining. It involved a critter called Alston’s singing mouse. Here’s a link to a one minute introduction and an article about the talented little guys.

Singing Mice Perform Incredible Songs (Animal Wire, YouTube)
Interspecific Dominance Via Vocal Interactions Mediates Altitudinal Zonation in Neotropical Singing Mice (Bret Pasch, Benjamin M. Bolker and Steven M. Phelps, The American Natura)

In fact, these mice, and others, actually sing ultrasonic love songs. Here’s a link to a video and some articles about the talented, frisky little guys.

Male Mice Sing for Females (Slate, YouTube)
Male Mice Song Syntax Depends on Social Contexts and Influences Female Preferences (Jonathan Chabout1, Abhra Sarkar, David B. Dunson and Erich D. Jarvis, Frontiers of Behavioral Neuroscience)
Call of the Wild: The Male Mouse’s Adorable Ultrasonic Mating Songs (Jim Festante, Slate)

Adiposity Signals Predict Vocal Effort in Alston’s Singing Mice (Tracy T. Burkhard, Rebecca R. Westwick and Steven M. Phelps, Proceedings of the Royal Society B)

Awww, such sweet little fellas! 🙂

Finally, the most interesting news was about how studying the singing mouse’s serenades could lead to treatments for humans with communication disorders that are a result of things like stroke or autism. Here’s a link to a video and some articles about that research.

Singing Mouse Study Shows How Brains Achieve Conversation (NYU Langone Health, YouTube)
Singing Mice Could Offer Clues About How Human Brains Manage Conversation (Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica)
These Mice Sing Their Little Hearts Out — and That’s Good for Neuroscience (Jessica Boddy, Popular Science)
This Singing Mouse’s Brain Could Reveal Keys to Snappy Conversation (Kelly Servick, Science Magazine)
Motor Cortical Control of Vocal Interaction in Neotropical Singing Mice (Daniel E. Okobi Jr., et al., Science Magazine)

So that’s neat stuff, but if you’re sad because you thought this was going to be about a mouse actually singing a song, with words, here’s a link to a clip from Sing to help you feel better.

Sing – Singing Mouse Scene (Fandango Family, YouTube)

Find out more awesome things about mice, music and communication in general…

Periodic Party

~ mehopper

Hey, it is the Periodic Table’s Birthday!

Dmitri Mendeleev sketched his first draft of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements on February 17, 1869.

Notice that this year’s a “big one” for the Periodic Table — it’s 150 years old!

In fact, it’s such a big deal that the United Nations General Assembly and UNESCO have gone so far as to declare this the International Year of the Periodic Table (2019 IYPT).

Of course, unless you’re a chemist by trade, it’s fairly unlikely that you’ve heard about this.

That’s a shame, too — who knows where we would all be without the handy dandy thing.

So celebrate!

Here are some suggestions for how to do it…

First off, rather than sing Happy Birthday, you could try to sing Tom Lehrer’s The Elements.

Here’s a link to a video of Daniel Radcliffe pulling it off in about a minute.

Daniel Radcliffe sings “The Elements” (The Graham Norton Show, YouTube)

In case you’re not familiar with Tom Lehrer’s music, here’s a link where you can learn more about the awesome guy.

Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire (Andrew Robinson, Nature)

I also found a video where someone created an animation to go with Tom Lehrer’s version

Timwi Terby (YouTube Channel)

Here’s different fun one you could try to sing.

Partha Pratim Manna

Lest you believe that caring about such things is for boring old, incredibly geeky grown-ups, here’s a link to a segment from The Ellen Show where a 3-year old shows she knows her stuff.

Adorable 3-Year-Old Periodic Table Expert Brielle (The Ellen Show)

Slightly older children might enjoy a tradition of reading Harry Helium and the Noble Gases Party (Good Reads).

For the more intellectually minded, you could hold a discussion about the alternative life stories of the Periodic Table.

Here are some resources to get your started.

The periodic tables we almost had (Mark Lorch, Quartz)
Alternate Periodic Table Designs (Western Oregon University)
The Internet Database of Periodic Tables (The Chemogenesis Web Book)

Finally, if you do want to throw a party, Etsy’s got you covered.

Periodic Table Party (Etsy)

Here are more resources to help you celebrate…

The International Year of the Periodic Table (2019 IYPT)

An unelementary affair: 150 years of the periodic table (Robert P Crease, Physics World)
How the Periodic Table Went from a Sketch to an Enduring Masterpiece (Tom Siegfried, Science News)

Setting the Table (Phillip Szuromi, Science Magazine)
Ordering the Elements (Michael D. Gordin, Science Magazine)

The Periodic Table of Elements in Pictures and Words (Keith Enevoldsen, Elements.wlonk.com)
This Awesome Periodic Table Tells You How to Actually Use All Those Elements (BEC CREW, Science Alert)

Periodic Table of Elements (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry)
Interactive Periodic Table of Elements (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Periodic Table (American Chemical Society)

Find out more about the periodic table …

Speleological Wonders

~ mehopper

I came across a cool 360° video about how biologist Naowarat Cheeptham has been searching for antibiotics in a cave.

Spelunking in Search of Antibiotics (New York Times, YouTube)

It’s an interesting story, and there’s a lot more about it in this article from Wired.

Inside the Slimy Underground Hunt for Humanity’s Antibiotic Saviour (Tom Ward, Wired)

What I didn’t expect was that a two minute excursion into a cave would turn into a fascinating journey into speleology. One thing just led to another, and that’s what happened.

It all started because the video and story about the cave reminded of my own experiences in Mammoth Cave. It’s in Kentucky, and I grew up in Indy — it wasn’t that far away, so I visited it numerous times over the years.

In case you’ve never been, here’s a link to a quick peek.

Nature: Mammoth Cave National Park (CBS Sunday Morning)

Each visit was a bit different, but the one thing that I remember most was that Mammoth Cave was billed as the largest cave on Earth. After many hours of tours, it felt like it, too.

Ha, what I saw hardly scratched the surface, literally and figuratively!

Check this video out!

International Mapping (YouTube Channel)

It was a bit mind-bending when they zoomed out to show the true scale of the place. Yet that was nothing compared to what I tripped across next.

It turns out that Mammoth Cave was the largest cave, but it’s not anymore.

That honor belongs to Son Doong Cave in Vietnam. It was “discovered” in 1991, but it wasn’t really explored until 2009. Wow, it’s positively Verne’esque — it even has a jungle!

Here’s a link to a video about how photographer and journalist Martin Edström went on a 360° photo expedition into the cave for National Geographic.

Journey Through the Largest Cave in the World Expedition Raw (National Geographic, YouTube)

Here’s a link to an interactive website where you can explore the results of the expedition.

Son Doong 360: Exploring the World’s Longest Cave (Martin Edström, National Geographic)

Here’s a link to another video with some awesome drone footage.

Drones Take You Inside Hidden World Live (Good Morning America, YouTube)

It’s worth noting that there are tensions surrounding tourism at Son Doong Cave. Here are links to a two part 360° video series about the issue.

Saving Son Doong: Part One (RYOT, YouTube)
Saving Son Doong: Part Two (RYOT, YouTube)

While it is hard to top Son Doong, I came across a number of other speleological marvels in my unexpected journey.

For example, speaking of Verne, here’s a link to some drone footage of a gorgeous ice cave in Vatnajokull National Park on the south coast of Iceland.

The Ice Cave – Drone Video from an Icelandic Ice Cave (Iceland 360VR)

Here’s a 360° video of another ice cave under Pemberton Icefield in British Columbia. Not surprisingly, the lifespan of such wonders in our current climate also comes up in the video.

360° Ice Cave Exploration Near Whistler, BC (Super, Natural British Columbia)

Here’s a 360° video by AirPano that shows a breathtaking time lapse of a sunset looking out of an ice cave at Baikal in Russia.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

AirPano VR (YouTube Channel)
AirPano VR (Official Website)

That was mesmerizing, but there is a Giant Crystal Cave in Mexico made out of gypsum instead of ice that might be even more stunning to see. Unfortunately, you can’t.

Luckily here’s a video that shows a bit of what it looks like as well as explains why you really don’t want to see it in person.

Weird Places: Mexico’s Giant Crystal Cave (SciShow, YouTube)

I was bummed that I couldn’t find great footage of Crystal Cave. However, while searching for that, I found this fun 360° video of the Waitomo Glowworm Caves in New Zealand.

Glow Worm Caves of New Zealand in 360° (National Geographic, YouTube)

The Waitomo Glowworm Caves even have a whole YouTube channel dedicated to them!

Waitomo Glowworm Caves (YouTube Channel)

Near the end of my unexpected detour into caves, I found this neat 360° video and lesson about ancient cave paintings. It’s about art, creativity and communication. These are all near and dear to my heart, so I couldn’t resist including it.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

TED-Ed (YouTube Channel)
ED-Ed (Official Website)

Explore Cave Paintings in This 360° Animated Cave (Iseult Gillespie, TED-Ed)

Finally, my unexpected journey ended with this fun, semi-off-topic, discovery 🙂

GoPro Awards: Epic Cloud Cave Wingsuit in Fusion Overcapture (GoPro, YouTube)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this speleological detour as much as I did. If you want to continue exploring caves on your own, here are some resources to get you started.

From the Biggest to the Longest, Five Amazing Caves To Visit (Natasha Geiling, Smithsonian.com)
Hidden Earth: The UK’s National Caving Conference and Exhibition
National Speleological Society

Find out more about Earth and its geology …

Bird’s-Eye Views

~ mehopper

Humans tend to interact with animals as if they see the world in pretty much the same way that we do. However, the more scientists study animal vision, the more they tell us that is just not the way that it is. Furthermore, what scientists know about animal vision goes way beyond the fact that our pet cats and dogs can’t see color the same way that we do.

In fact, what they tell us about what birds can “see” is particularly awesome!

For example, birds can see ultraviolet light, so that means they can essentially see a forth primary color. They also have the bizarre ability to “see” magnetic fields. Here’s a link to a video that includes an explanation of a wide variety of things that birds can see along with some interesting facts about our own vision.

How Birds Really See the World (SciShow, YouTube)

Here are links to articles about how scientists modeled a bird’s ultraviolet vision to show how perceiving ultraviolet light aids them in their navigating through dense forests. There are some neat photos in the article that illustrate the difference between how we and birds would see the leaves of trees.

Birds Can See a ‘Colour’ Humans Can’t. Now Scientists Have Revealed This Hidden World (Tessa Koumoundouros)
Avian UV vision Enhances Leaf Surface Contrasts in Forest Environments (Cynthia Tedore & Dan-Eric Nilsson, Nature Communications)

Some research has also came out with more detail about how birds perceive magnetic fields. Here’s a link to a video and an article about it.

This Quantum Sixth Sense Could Allow Birds to Navigate Earth’s Magnetic Field (Seeker, YouTube)
The Mystery of How Birds Navigate is Over, and the Answer is So Amazing (Philip Perry, Big Think)

Awesome stuff! It gives a whole new meaning to bird’s-eye view, doesn’t it?

While I was doing some research for this post, I also tripped across this slick site with a nice visualization of bird migration patterns.

Millions of Birds Migrate: Where Do They Go? (National Geographic)

Lest you be disappointed that the title of the post promised a “bird’s-eye view,” here’s a 360° video that shows an eagle’s point of view while soaring over Dolomites in Italy.

Exploring the Dolomites from an Eagle’s Point of View in 360° (Red Bull)

Finally, here’s a link to a video that describes a multitude of incredible ways that other animals perceive the world.

How Animals and People See the World Differently (National Geographic, YouTube)

Find out more about birds, animals in general and electromagnetism…

Jellyfish Therapy

~ mehopper

Feeling stressed out and need to relax?

How about a nice swim in a swarm of jellyfish?

What, that’s not a remedy for stress, you say!

You mean by using imaginative thinking, right?

Well, no, I do mean it literally.

There’s an actual place called Jellyfish Lake on Eil Malk island in Palau where you can swim with hundreds of thousands of the mesmerizing creatures without fear of being stung. Here’s a video with some calming underwater footage.

Scuba Zoo TV (YouTube Channel)
Scuba Zoo TV (Official Website)

Of course, you may not have time to jump on a plane to Palau right now. Even if you did, perhaps going for a swim in a sea of jellyfish still doesn’t sound all that relaxing to you?

In that case, perhaps a nice, safe one minute 360° virtual dive with a single jellyfish near the Gardens of the Queen off of the coast of Cuba might do the trick.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

AirPano VR (YouTube Channel)
AirPano (Official Website)

Here’s another interesting one minute 360° experience from PBS News Hour filmed inside the jellies exhibit at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

PBS NewsHour (YouTube Channel)
PBS NewsHour (Official Website)

That felt like being in a lava lamp, didn’t it?

Well, it turns out that the National Aquarium also has a live cam of their jellies, and it’s down right hypnotic. Who needs a lava lamp when you can get such awesome, calming nature delivered right to your screen, live!?!

Here’s another great clip from TED-Ed about how jellyfish aren’t just therapeutic to stare at — they also have all sorts of other intriguing properties. Some of them glow, and that helps them contribute to medical research. Others are even “sort of” immortal!

TED-Ed (YouTube Channel)
TED-Ed (Official Webite)

Jellyfish are cool!!!

Find out more about Jellyfish …

Space Rocks!

~ mehopper

NASA engineers had quite a New Years celebration in 2019 when New Horizons successfully executed a flyby of a tiny object named 2014 MU69 while moving at 32,000 miles per hour.

The planetesimal 2014 MU69 is better known by it’s nickname Ultima Thule, and it’s located way out past Pluto in a region of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt.

Here’s a link to a video covering the achievement as well as what it has to do with the rock band Queen!

NASA Photographs Most Distant Space Object Ever Reached (CNN, YouTube)

The video explains how Brian May, former lead guitarist for Queen, is an astrophysicist and a team member on the New Horizons Mission.

He wrote and performed this new song entitled New Horizons to celebrate the flyby on New Years day.

NASA Video (YouTube Channel)
NASA (Official Website)

Some scientists may be referred to as “rock stars” from time to time, but it’s seldom literal. It’s also fairly rare for an astrophysicist to be mentioned in Rolling Stone.

Hear Queen Guitarist Brian May’s New Anthem to Space Travel (Kory Grow, Rolling Stone)

Brian May also created a 3D stereoscopic image of Ultima Thule that was released in a NASA news conference.

SciNews (YouTube Channel)
SciNews (Official Website)

Scientists Show Off Space Snowman, Ultima Thule, in 3D (Marcia Dunn, Associated Press)

You can find out more about New Horizons’ flyby of Ultima Thule in these articles.

New Ultima Thule Discoveries from NASA’s New Horizons (New Horizons, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)

With Ultima Thule Flyby, NASA Probe Helps Unlock Secrets of Planetary Formation (Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com)
NASA’s New Horizons Just Made the Most Distant Flyby in Space History. So, What’s Next? (Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com)

Finally, New Horizons’ First Photos of Ultima Thule (Robbie Gonzalez, Wired)

Most news stories about Ultima Thule mentioned that it’s the furthest object that’s been photographed. However, New Horizons isn’t the spacecraft that’s the furthest away.

That honor belongs to the twin Voyager spacecraft. In fact, months before New Horizon’s encounter with Ultima Thule, Voyager 2 joined Voyager 1 in interstellar space. Here are a couple of stories abou that feat.

NASA’s Voyager 2 Probe Enters Interstellar Space (NASA/JPL)
What’s Next for NASA’s Voyager 2 in Interstellar Space? (Meghan Bartels, Space.com)

Many stories about the Voyagers mention that they both carry special golden records. Here’s a link to a video that explains how the records were designed to communicate with any aliens that might happen upon them in the distant future.

40 Years Ago, NASA Sent a Message to Aliens — Here’s What It Says (Business Insider, YouTube)

Believe it or not, there’s even a tie-in with rock ‘n’ roll here, too. The cool scientists that designed the record included a recording of Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode!

Voyager, What’s on the Golden Record: Music From Earth (NASA/JPL)

Here’s a video from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame of Chuck Berry performing it with Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band.

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (YouTube Channel)
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (Official Website)

There was a lot of news about space rocks closer to home around that time as well. That’s because, not just one, but two spacecraft reached milestones in their respective journeys to explore two asteroids.

The biggest news was that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx entered orbit around asteroid 101955 Bennu on New Years Eve. Among other things, this set records for the smallest body ever orbited by a spacecraft and the closest orbit of a planetary body by any spacecraft.

Here’s a video and press release about this milestone that was posted by the OSIRIS-REx Mission on December 31st.

OSIRIS-REx Mission (NASA, YouTube Channel)
OSIRIS-REx Mission (NASA, Official Website)

OSIRIS-REx entered orbit around Bennu on 31 December 2018 (Lonnie Shekhtman, Osiris-Rex Mission)

There are many reasons that Bennu is an interesting object, but one of its biggest claims to fame is that it is a “potentially hazardous object” that is listed on the Sentry Risk Table with the second-highest cumulative rating on the Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale. The only one with a higher rating is asteroid (29075) 1950 DA (JPL/NASA) (Wikipedia). Neither of these asteroids are very likely to hit Earth, but they are the most likely (that we know of, so far).

That holiday season also brought continuing coverage of Japan’s nail-biting Hayabusa2 Mission to asteroid 162173 Ryugu (Wikipedia). The mission is scheduled to collect a sample of Ryugu and return it to Earth in December 2020.

Here’s a fun bit of trivia. Last summer Brian May also created a 3D stereoscopic image of Ryugu using a picture captured by Hayabusa2.

Queen’s Brian May Will Rock You with This Stereo Image of Asteroid Ryugu (Meghan Bartels, Space.com)

Finally, closer to Earth, the most recent development of the season is that China successfully landed the Chang’e 4 rover on the far side of the Moon.

Here’s a link to a video that explains why this is a big deal.

China Is The First To Land On The Dark Side Of The Moon (Tech Insider, YouTube)

Of course, almost every story takes advantage of the teachable moment to clarify that it should be called the “far side” rather than “dark side” of the Moon, because it isn’t dark there. There are also inevitable references to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. In fact, when I went searching on YouTube for videos about China’s landing, it served up this trippy 360° video.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Rexstick (YouTube Channel)

I’m sort of sad that it happens to be Pink Floyd’s album that’s getting a bit of play over this, because the more relevant rock music about the Moon is probably David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Notably, astronaut Chris Hadfield paid homage to this by making a music video of it while living on the International Space Station (ISS).

NOVA’s Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers (YouTube Channel)
NOVA’s Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers (Official Website)

Here’s a fantastic 360° video that frames a trip to the Moon as a tribute to David Bowie.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

NPR’s Skunk Bear (YouTube Channel)
NPR’s Skunk Bear (Official Website)

So that’s a wrap up of that wild holiday season in space exploration, and I hope you enjoyed the detours into rock ‘n’ roll, too.

Space Rocks & Happy New Year!

If you want to learn more about the the Solar System, explore this Toy World!

Click the 360° image below to explore it, click the menu in the upper right for controls and click “i” buttons on/off for links to experiences. Use “portals” to visit otherToy Worlds.

You can also explore this Toy World on Kuula.

Find out more about Solar System, Space, Space Travel and Music …

Goat Yoga?

~ mehopper

Feeling a little stressed out and need a quick relaxation break?

How about a bit of goat yoga?

Wait, Goat Yoga?

If you haven’t heard of it yet, then it might strike you as a bit strange, but it’s become a real craze over the last year or two. Here’s a link to a short video about how it all started.

How an Oregon Farm Owner Started the Goat Yoga Craze (b/60, YouTube)

Yes, you can even buy books about how to do Goat Yoga by the woman who started it.

Little Book of Goat Yoga (Lainey Morse)

Still not sure if yoga and goats go together?

Here’s a fun two minute 360° video to give you a sense of why it’s so popular.

Goat Yoga in 360 is the Cutest Thing Ever (NowThis, YouTube)

Okay, I confess I was still skeptical. Then I found this video of a cute baby goat, and I started to believe that there could be something to it after all 🙂

VR Baby Goat (Deengineer, YouTube)

If you want to try it yourself, you might be able to get in on an “official” Goat Yoga class if you live in CA, FL, IL, KY, MI, MN or OG.

If there’s no “official” version available near you, then just enter “goat yoga” and “your location” into your search engine of choice, and something nearby will almost certainly pop up. It really is that popular!

Finally, if you don’t know yoga, start here:

Yoga With Adriene (YouTube Playlist)

Find out more about goats …

Palessi Shoes

~ mehopper

Payless pulled off quite a stunt!

They set up a fake “luxury” store dubbed “Palessi” and filled it with their $20-$40 footwear. Then they invited so called “influencers” to a clever party, and the invitees actually ended up paying up to $600 for the Palessi shoes.

Here’s a link to an ABC News YouTube video and news story about the “prank.”

Payless Opens Fake Luxury Shoe Store as Prank (ABC News)
How Payless Tricked Influencers Into Paying $600+ for Their $20 Shoes (Holly Rhue, Elle)

Here’s a link to a Payless commercial that explains the prank.

The Payless Experiment (Payless YouTube)

Of course, it’s shoe haute couture that was being lampooned in the ad. Yes, some people really do pay many hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for shoes.

Here’s a video tutorial and article for those of you that are unfamiliar with brands like Christian Louboutin and Manolo Blahnik that are featured at places like Neiman Marcus and shows like Sex and the City.

AllTop Ten (YouTube Channel)

Top 25 Most Expensive Shoes in the World (Beautiful Life)

Lest you think it’s just those of the feminine persuasion who fall prey to expensive shoe fetishes, here’s an article that covers the masculine side of the isle as well.

Top 10 Most Expensive Shoe Brands of 2024: From Gucci to Stuart Weitzman (Finances Online)

So, you may wonder, why are such shoes so outrageously expensive?

Here is a link to a short featurette thta covers some reasons why Christian Louboutins start at more than $600 and can cost more than five grand.

Why Louboutin Shoes Are So Expensive (Business Insider, YouTube)

Here’s a link to 360° video by the British Fashion Council with Manolo Blahnik explaining his artistic design process.

Join Master Shoemaker Manolo Blahnik in Virtual Reality

Finally, here’s a link to a fun video of Consumer Reports slaughtering a Manolo Blahnik.

Cutting up Manolo Blahnik Shoes (Consumer Reports)

Here’s a link to their research and results.

Are Manolo Blahniks Worth the Money? (Consumer Reports)

Short story, yes , they are better constructed, and perhaps more fashionable, but not necessarily more comfortable.

No shocker there 🙂

Find out more about fashion and commerce …

Nutty Nature News

~ mehopper

I’ve been updating the “nature” related pages on this site, so I’ve spent an abnormal amount of time perusing nature related sites for the last few weeks. Along the way I came across more than my fair share of odd nature stories. Many of them were viral, so you may have seen some of them before, but I bet you haven’t seen or heard about all of them. So, here’s a rundown of some of the most noteworthy, fun tidbits that I’ve come across.

First, today, there’s a story about birds going on benders.

FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul (YouTube Channel)
FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul (Official Website)

They’ll Sober Up,’ Chief Says: No Need to Call Police Over ‘Drunken’ Birds Up North (Forum News Service, Twin Cities.com)

A quick search on YouTube revealed that this isn’t even all that unusual.

Next, there was that seal that slapped a man in the face. Of course, the most unusual part of the story was that the seal used an octopus to do it.

A Seal Slapped A Man In The Face With An Octopus Because Nature Never Stops Surprising (TIME, YouTube)
Seal Slaps Kayaker with Octopus in Viral GoPro Video (Caitlin O ‘Kane, CBS NEWS)
Why Did An Octopus-Wielding Seal Slap A Kayaker In The Face? (Rachel D. Cohen, NPR)

Speaking of octopuses, did you hear about the scientists that got octopuses high on ecstasy? It was done in the name of research, and it turns out that the octopuses didn’t respond all that differently than humans.

Octopuses Are Being Given Ecstasy in the Name of Science (Mashable, YouTube)
On Ecstasy, Octopuses Reached Out for a Hug (JoAnna Klein, New York Times)

On the invertebrates on drugs front, there was also a story about the owner of Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound in Maine getting lobsters high before cooking them.

I first saw this in a story from Boston.com.

A Maine Restaurant Owner is Giving Weed to Lobsters Before They’re Cooked (Erin Kuschner, Boston.com)

Then I hunted down a video about it.

CBS Boston (YouTube Channel)
CBS Boston (Official Website)

Of course, after that story went viral, it resulted in this follow-up story a week later about how the Maine Health Inspection Program cracked down on the restaurant for selling “adulterated” lobsters. The owner then claimed that she hadn’t actually sold the lobsters to customers, but she and her father had experimented with eating some “adulterated” lobsters themselves.

The Maine Department of Health is Investigating the Restaurant that Gives Its Lobsters Weed (Erin Kuschner, Boston.com)

Now here’s something that falls a bit more clearly into the “humane” category. There’s this story about an injured turtle that got a Lego wheelchair.

WJZ: CBS News Baltimore (YouTube Channel)
WJZ: CBS News Baltimore (Official Website)

Injured Turtle At The Maryland Zoo Gets Lego Wheelchair (WJZ-TV CBS Baltimore)

A quick search of YouTube did reveal that it isn’t all that original, though. In fact, it’s appears to be about as common as birds on berry benders.

Another one from the “animals and tech” front was this video that pretty much speaks for itself (spoiler alert, “training” was involved).

b/60 (YouTube Channel)

Then there’s the story about a small town in Greece getting covered in spider webs. However, according to your news source, you may not have heard that it was due to frisky spiders.

Inside Edition (YouTube Channel)
Inside Edition (Official Website)

This Town in Greece is Draped in Thousands of Spider Sebs (Christina Maxouris & Brandon Griggs, CNN)

Finally, no post like this would be complete without a fun cat video or a 360° video, so here’s a 360° video from Big Cat Rescue in Tampa that fits the bill nicely.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Big Cat Rescue (YouTube Channel)
Big Cat Rescue (Official Website)

If you want to see some more fun “cat” videos there’s a Big Cat Rescue YouTube Channel that even has a 360 VR Playlist with some clips that are guaranteed to make you go Awwww … for a good cause!

I personally liked the one with the kittens, of course! 🙂

Find out more about birds, seals, octopuses, lobsters, turtles, spiders, tigers, animals, life and nature …

Milky Way Lost & Found

~ mehopper

Have you seen the Milky Way?

You may think that you have, but are you sure?

Unless you live in an extremely remote area, or you’ve visited one, then you probably haven’t seen our own galaxy, the Milky Way, very well, or at all.

Worse yet, you may not even realize that it’s missing.

The New World Atlas of Artificial Sky Brightness demonstrated that vast swaths of people have never seen the Milky Way due to Light pollution. Here’s a link to a video and some articles about the the atlas.

We’re Missing More And More Of The Night Sky (Newsy, YouTube)

Light Pollution Limiting Night-Sky Views (Brady Dennis, Portland Press Herald/Washington Post)
The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness (Fabio Falchi et al., Science Advances)

You can learn a lot more about the unexpectedly scary effects of light pollution on animals and us humans in a longer, more in-depth video from Seeker.

Light Pollution Is More Dangerous Than You Think (Seeker, YouTube)

Here’s a link to a 360° video from CNN that discusses the problem and explains how a group called the International Dark Sky Association is trying to improve the situation by establishing Dark Sky Places in remote locations like Utah’s Zion National Park.

The Endangered Starry Sky 360 Video (CNN, YouTube)

Here’s a story about a viral video that shows how the sky over New York City would look without the glow of lights blocking out the view.

Here’s What the Stars Above NYC Would Look Like If We Could See Them (Talia Avakian, Fortune)

That viral video was the work of filmmakers Harun Mehmedinovic and Gavin Heffernan, and it was just the latest addition to their Skyglow Project. They were inspired by the Dark Sky Movement, and they’ve published similar videos featuring Los Angeles and other places. Here’s is a link to a video that explains more about their work.

Skyglow Illuminating The Night Sky Talking Pictures (Wired, YouTube)

Now, back to how well you have seen the Milky Way.

For that, it is useful to know about the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale (Wikipedia). It’s used to rate the sky’s brightness on a scale of 1 to 9.

Here’s a link to a beautiful film entitled Lost in Light by Sriram Murali that shows the night sky as seen at different levels of the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale. Notice the Milky Way is increasingly prominent as it gets darker.

Where Are the Stars? Lost in Light, See How Light Pollution Affects Night Skies (Sriram Murali National Geographic, YouTube)

Now that you know how to quantify what you can or can not see, here’s a Interactive Light Pollution Map where you find out how well you can see the sky from where you are now or where you’ve been. To learn about how it works, check out the Help.

If you find that you have lost the Milky Way where you are, then you can figure out the nearest place to find it by using the International Dark Sky Association’s list of International Dark Sky Parks and their handy dandy Dark Sky Place Finder.

Finally, while I was doing research for this post, I tripped over this folksy music video about light pollution. Enjoy, and don’t forget, turn the lights down, or better yet, off!

Dark Skies: The Light Pollution Song (Matthew Dimakosm, YouTube)

Find out more about our galaxy …

Rock n’ roll, Noise Pollution?

~ mehopper

Is rock and roll noise pollution?

If you are a rock and roll fan, then you probably know that this is a question that AC/DC famously weighed in on in their song Rock And Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution (YouTube).

If you are a language or communication expert, rock and roll fan or not, you probably have a bit more nuanced response that might begin with the phrase “it depends” and end up including words like perspective and context.

But what do lady bugs think?

Your answer might be who knows … or cares?

Well, it turns out that somebody tried to find out, and the answer is surprisingly relevant as well as entertaining.

b/60 (YouTube Channel)
b/60 (Facebook Page)

Here are links to the Newsweek story and the journal article mentioned in the video.

Loud Rock Music Like AC/DC Can Hurt Animals, Ecosystem but Willie Nelson Has No Effect, Study Says (Scottie Andrew, Newsweek)
Population‐Level Manipulations of Field Vole Densities Induce Subsequent Changes in Plant Quality But No Impacts on Vole Demography (Lise RuffinoSusan E. HartleyJane L. DeGabrielXavier Lambin, Evolution and Ecology)

Personally, I found it funny that they singled out Willie Nelson as representative of the “not rock and roll” condition. I also couldn’t help but wonder if the ladybugs were just too busy dancing to eat 🙂

Seriously though, the study was actually about an important issue. There really is such a thing as noise pollution, and in some cases, it can be harmful to animals (including us). Here’s a link to an informative video about the impact of noise on humans.

Noise Pollution Is Much Worse For You Than You Think (Tech Insider, YouTube)

It isn’t just us humans and other land animals that have a problem with noise. It’s a problem for animals in the ocean, too.

Scripps News (YouTube Channel)
Scripps News (Official Website)

So, that study about ladybugs opinions on rock and roll had a point, albeit an odd one.

However, I’m still not convinced that rock and roll is noise pollution. I lean towards siding with AC/DC on this one, although I must confess to being more on the same page as Joan Jett.

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts (YouTube Channel)
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts (Official Website)

I even tried to find a 360° video of her or someone else performing I Love Rock N’ Roll.

I had no luck, but I did trip over one of Cheap Trick performing at their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Enjoy, or not, as you see fit 😉

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

HBO (YouTube Channel)
HBO Max (Official Website)

Find out more about music and noise …

How Spidey Flies?

~ mehopper

Note: This was posted in 2018 and updated in 2026 in honor of the of the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day!

Have you ever watched a Spider-Man movie and wondered whether real spiders can do anything remotely like what Spidey does? Well, it turns out that they can. However, not even Spidey, or his friends Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, really knew how. No one did, until recently.

Just over this past week there have been a slew of news stories about an article published in Current Biology by researchers Erica L. Morley and Daniel Robert from the University of Bristol. Here is a cute video narrated by Morley that describes their neat study.

University of Bristol (YouTube Channel)
University of Bristol (Official Website)

Here is the original article and other articles based upon it.
Electric fields elicit ballooning in spiders (Erica L. Morley and Daniel Robert, Current Biology)

Watch a Ballooning Spider Take Flight (Emily Underwood, Science Magazine)
Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity (Ed Yong, The Atlantic)
It Turns Out Spiders ’Fly’ on Magnoelectricity (Robby Berman, Big Think)

The video makes the phenomena of spider ballooning sound so fascinating, you might even think it would be cool to see it for yourself. However, in reality, very few readers would enjoy an encounter with the real thing.

Every few years a story comes along about it happening somewhere in the world, and those descriptions generally sound a lot less entertaining. For example, here’s a quick video and some stories about an incident of “spider rain” in South Australia in 2015.

Onlooker (YouTube Channel)

Why is It Raining Spiders in Australia? (Elizabeth Palermo, Christian Science Monitor)
It’s Raining Spiders In Australia, And That Excites UFO Believers (Eric Mack, Forbes)

Yuck. Seeing spider rain is definitely NOT on my bucket list.

On the other hand, seeing Spider-Man fly in fiction is fine. While writing this post, I tripped across a 360° Video of Spidey flying.

It was fun to watch, and it also struck me as funny. I think it’s a good thing that Stan Lee wasn’t too accurate in his depiction of how spiders fly. Don’t you agree?

Find out more about spiders …

Watchable Whales

~ mehopper

A popular tourist activity in Boston is whale watching (Trip Advisor). That is because it’s only a short 25 mile trip out to Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (Wikipedia). Stellwagen Bank hosts several different species of large whales, including humpbacks, finbacks, minkes, pilot whales and right whales. If you’ve never seen a whale in person, then it is hard to imagine how surreal it is to be in the presence of such an immense creature.

Here’s a short two minute video of a Boston Harbor Cruises Whale Watch shot by DronePros that shows a particularly unique perspective of the experience.

DronePros (YouTube Channel)

If you do happen to be in Boston and want to find out more about whales, then check out the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism’s Massachusetts Whale Trail.

Okay, so watching whales from the surface is fascinating, but an even more impressive experience is to see them in their full glory underwater. Hardly anyone has the gear, experience, or sheer guts to go out and do that for themselves, though. Luckily, there are some underwater photographers that do, and a few even share the view. Here’s a 360° video of a humpback whale and its calf swimming near Reunion Island.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

CLICK Research 360° VR (YouTube Channel)

That’s a memorizing view, but it leaves you wanting more, doesn’t it? I must confess that I’m usually one to prefer the real thing over simulation, but I can’t help but prefer Wevr’s 360° video the Blu Whale Encounter that brings you eye to eye with an 80 foot blue whale. Gulp!

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Transport by Wevr (YouTube Channel)
Wevr (Official Website)

Finally, as impressive as those experiences have been, none of them show the whale’s grace and beauty like this clip of humpbacks in the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. It was captured by divers filming Jean-Michel Cousteau Ocean Adventures, and it was featured in the two hour America’s Underwater Treasures (PBS)

Ocean Futures Societ (YouTube Channel)
Ocean Futures Societ (Official Website)

Absolutely beautiful!

There is one cautionary note.

Here are two articles by Daniel Cressey brought some unfortunate realities about whale watching to the public’s attention.

Ecotourism Rise Hits Whales (Daniel Cressey, Nature)
Whale-Watching Found to Stress Out Whales (Daniel Cressey, Scientific American)

While experts agree that whale watching isn’t very healthy for the whales, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry, so few of them believe that the practice is likely to stop. Instead, they back a movement to encourage more responsible practices for dealing with whales in the wild. For example, here’s a PSA that covers some basics of how to co-exist with whales responsibly.

Ocean Wise Marine Mammal Research Program (YouTube Channel)

In addition, one way to tell if a whale watch is operated responsibly is to check to see if the operators are a member of Whale Sense.

Here are a few more helpful links about responsible whale (and dolphin) watching.

Whale Watching (Animal Wellfare Institute)
Whale and Dophin Watching (Whale and Dolphin Conservation)

Find out more about whales, dolphins, cetaceans and animals in general …

Exoplanet Junket

~ mehopper

This week NASA released a new project that they’ve dubbed the Exoplanet Travel Bureau.

The core of the project consists of a set of interactive 360° images that show “imagined” surfaces of five exoplanets (TRAPPIST-1e, Kepler-16b, Kepler-186f, PSO J318.5-22 and HD 40307 g). Here are three articles about the experience.

This Brilliant Interactive From NASA Lets You Virtually Explore Planets Far, Far Away (Jacinta Bowler, Science Alert)
Visit Exotic Exoplanets with NASA Visualization Tool (Mike Wall, Space.com)
NASA’s New VR Demo Puts You on Distant Exoplanets (Ryan Whitwam, Extreme Tech)

NASA’s new experience includes a feature that let’s you download snazzy travel posters for each of the planets, and those posters have a backstory of their own. Here’s a Buzz 60 story about three of the posters in the new project.

Buzz60 (YouTube Channel)
Buzz60 (Facebook Page)

Here’s a Slate article with some more background on the Work Projects Administration (WPA) See America poster series that inspired the style of NASA’s travel posters.

See America Through a Nostalgic Lens With These Neo-Vintage Travel Posters (Kristin Hohenadel, Slate)

This isn’t the first time that NASA has dabbled in publishing travel posters. The three exoplanet posters featured in the video are actually a subset of fifteen posters that NASA released in 2016 as a series entitled Visions of the Future.

Here are some links about the posters and where you can still download them for yourself.
Exotic Cosmic Locales Available as Space Tourism Posters (NASA/JPL)
Space Tourism Posters (NASA)
Visions of the Future Posters (NASA/JPL)

NASA also published this special page about the inspiration for the posters.
About Visions of the Future Posters (NASA/JPL)

Of course, the timing of the release of the Exoplanet Travel Bureau is no coincidence — it’s neatly timed to coincide with last month’s launch of NASA’s planet hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Here’s a short one minute explanation from NASA Goddard about what TESS will be doing.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
Goddard Space Flight Center (Official Website)

Find out more about planetary systems and planets near and far …

Octopuses from Space!

~ mehopper

Did you hear the one about the octopuses from space?

It sounds like the title of a cheesy sci-fi movie, doesn’t it?

But it isn’t, this time, or at least, yet. Instead, it’s actually an oddball theory that’s been put forth in a recently published “scientific” article that’s getting quite a lot of buzz in the media lately.

First, let’s start with the particular article about octopuses that is causing all of the fuss.

It appeared in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, and it was published with a list of an 33 co-authors.

Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic? (Edward J.Steele, Et al., Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology)

One can’t help but wonder if there was a share the blame scenario going on. It’s not even the theory that is suspect. The problem is in the scientific aspects of the work. Even the sensationalist article in Newsweek politely described most responses from the scientific community as “critical.”

Are Octopuses From Outer Space? Study Suggests Cephalopod Eggs Traveled to Earth on a Comet (Katherine Hignett, Newsweek)

Here’s a link to a YouTube video that covers the article and also uses the word “critical” to describe the scientific responses.

Is The Octopus An Alien? (Mach NBC News)

Personally, I checked to see if the article was published on April 1st — that would’ve been a bit o’ fun, but it wasn’t. Perhaps they submitted it on April 1st, though?

Anyway, all joking aside, the core of the article is based on an old and relatively well established theory about how life began on Earth. The theory is known as panspermia, and it really has been discussed by serious scientists.

Panspermia is a hypothesis proposing that microscopic life forms that can survive the effects of space, such as extremophiles, become trapped in debris ejected into space after collisions between planets and small Solar System bodies that harbor life. Some organisms may travel dormant for an extended amount of time before colliding randomly with other planets or intermingling with proto-planetary disks. Under certain ideal impact circumstances (into a body of water, for example), and ideal conditions on a new planet’s surfaces, it is possible that the surviving organisms could become active and begin to colonize their new environment. — Wikipedia

Here is a link to a video segment that covers the scientific basis of the panspermia theory relative to Mars, and an article from Scientific American that goes into more depth about various discussions about it among well known scientists.

Panspermia is Theory that Life on Earth Came from Mars (Tech Insider)
The Origins of Directed Panspermia (Christian Orlic, Scientific American)

Of course, the usual biological suspects mentioned are those cute little water bears, but this is not the first time octopuses have been included in the list of suspects.

Given the recent understanding of the necessary conditions for life existing on large ocean moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the theory that octopuses are from elsewhere in our solar system isn’t quite as crazy as it might sound.

Here’s a video about Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

NASA Just Revealed There Could Be Life On Saturn’s Moon, Enceladus (Seeker)

If you listen to the whole story, you will hear that some scientists tend to believe that it is actually Jupiter’s moon Europa that is the older, and thus the more likely candidate to harbor ocean life beyond Earth. This has been reinforced by a study just published in Nature this month that shows reanalysis of old data gathered by NASA’s Galileo probe back in the 1990s provided unexpected evidence of salt water plumes on Europa.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (YouTube Channel)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Official Website)

Evidence of a Plume on Europa from Galileo Magnetic and Plasma Wave Signatures (Xianzhe Jia, et al. Nature)

Unfortunately, the scientific basis of the particular article in the news about a life form on Earth being from space, while not as nutty as it might sound, has serious flaws. Here are two articles that are far more elaborate about the criticisms being waged against the article.

Octopuses Are Not Aliens, But Boy Are They a Bunch of Beautiful Weirdos (By Sara Chodosh, Popular Science)
No, Octopuses Don’t Come From Outer Space (Brandon Specktor, Live Science)

Still, you can kind of see why they would think that octopuses, in particular, are alien. They are indisputably the weirdest, intelligent life form on Earth. That much is pretty much hard to deny. Here’s a link to a lovely video that goes into just some of the reasons that is the case.

Octopuses 101 (Nattional Geographic Wild)

Here are links to a couple of entertaining videos that show what it’s like to meet octopuses.

My Date With A Giant Pacific Octopus! (Be Smart)
Giant Pacific Octopus (Discovery)

Those where in captivity. Here’s what they look like in the wild, and in a full 360° to boot!

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Laura James (YouTube Channel)
Laura James (Official Website)

Okay, this could go on and on. I’ve got videos of these creatures escaping from a jar, going through holes the size of a quarter, stealing crabs from fisherman, using shells to hide from prey, walking on land to hunt and a ton of other absurd things that they can do that you don’t exactly expect from a lump of flesh with some eyes and suckers. You can see them all on the octopus page if you like.

However, one of the most bizarre things about them turns out to be their DNA. Here are some videos and links that show how Ragsdale Lab at the University of Chicago found out some extremely surprising truths about octopus DNA that explains their amazing powers of camouflage, dexterity and deception.

University of Chicago (YouTube Channel)
University of Chicago (Official Website)

Cliff Ragsdale Lab Leads International Team in Successful Sequencing of Octopus Genome (Department of Neurobiology, University of Chicago)
The Octopus Genome and the Evolution of Cephalopod Neural and Morphological Novelties (Nature)
The Octopus Genome and the Evolution of Cephalopod Neural and Morphological Novelties (Caroline B. Albertin, et al. Nature)

So octopuses are impressively weird, and they are wicked smart too. That doesn’t make them “aliens,” right?

Well, hold on to your brains, because that isn’t even the strangest thing about them. New research has shown that they can even edit their own RNA! Here’s a link to a video about this along with some supporting sources.

Why The Octopus Is The Weirdest Animal On Earth (Insider Science)
Curiouser and Curiouser–Octopus’s Evolution Is Even Stranger Than Thought (Bret Stetka, Scientific American)
How Octopuses, Squid and Cuttlefish Defy Genetics Central Dogma (Eureka Alert, AAAS)
Global Proliferation of Cephalopods (Zoë A. Doubleday et. al., Current Biology)

In the end, octopuses really are relatively alien, whether or not they’re from space. The thing is, even if they are from Earth, which honestly, they probably are, then that means some core things emerge, independently, in entirely different biological milieus.

That’s kind of awesome news, when you think about it!

Who knows? Maybe water bears really are from Mars and octopuses are from Jupiter, or well, Europa specifically. There is also that pesky little problem of that unexplained methane on Mars, so who knows?

We could by now, but we don’t.

Specific theories about octopuses and water bears aside, there are serious scientists that do believe that life on Earth may have come from space in general, and that said life might still be out there elsewhere in our solar system right now. We also have the technology that we need to find out what is, or is not, lurking about on other planets and moons. The real question is whether or not it will happen, soon, perhaps in some of our lifetimes, or at all, in the future history of humanity.

Find out more about octopuses, water bears and life in general …

Arbornautics

~ mehopper

Traditional news stories usually cover a single subject or the straightforward relationship between two subjects. However, every once in awhile, a story comes along that crams a deceptive number of subjects and interesting relationships into a tiny space. Exploring stories like that can be an adventure. Here’s a link to a wonderful, five minute video that’s like that.

What Tardigrades Can Teach Us About Life in the Rainforest (Seeker, YouTube)

One of my favorite parts of the clip was the analogy about the rainforest as a system.

In an airplane, there are a lot of redundant screws. Maybe you don’t need every single one to fly the plane, but at some point, if they keep dropping off of the machine, it’s not going to work anymore.

Nicely said. So now, let’s unpack the story.

The most obvious thing to do is find out more about the main character in the story, Dr. Meg Lowman. It turns out she is widely known as “Canopy Meg,” she also bills herself as an “Arbornaut,” and she’s been involved in some “interesting” research.

Here’s a clip that shows more about how she was involved with some researchers who explored the canopy using hot air balloons and, incredibly, a luge. Yes, a sled, and even more oddly, they also used a raft! It’s hard to imagine — you’ve got to watch it!

CanopyMeg Lowman (YouTube Channel)
CanopyMeg Lowman (Official Website)

I couldn’t help but wonder if Canopy Meg’s experiences in the Amazon served as the basis for Medicine Man with Sean Connery and Lorraine Bracco. If you’ve never seen it, then here’s a trailer about the scientific side of the plot.

Medicine Man Trailer (YouTube)

As it turns out, Medicine Man doesn’t appear to be based upon Canopy Meg. Instead, it may have been based upon a man named Dr. Henry Ferguson.

Doctor Sues the Makers of Medicine Man (Terry Pristin, LA Times)

Trying to understand more about what Ferguson and his colleagues were doing, as well as what Canopy Meg mentioned about pharmaceuticals in the first clip, led to an unexpected detour into Ethnobotany, Ethnobiology, Ethnomedicine and Ethnopharmacology.

It turns out there are tons of articles about these subjects out there.
Ethnobotany (bioRxiv), Ethnobotany (JSTOR)
Ethnobiology (bioRxiv), Ethnobiology (JSTOR)
Ethnopharmacology (bioRxiv), Ethnopharmacology (JSTOR)
Ethnomedicine (bioRxiv), Ethnomedicine (JSTOR)

There’s even a whole Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine. It can be interesting reading if you’ve got an appropriate scientific background.

Along the way, while looking for media about the rainforest, I found this 360° video.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Conservation International (YouTube Channel)
Conservation International (Official Website)

This shorter, non-360°, “behind the scenes” is even more interesting.

Conservation International (YouTube Channel)
Conservation International (Official Website)

Finally, what about those “cute” little water bears that Canopy Meg mentioned? Well, they may or may not be all that cute, but they sure are tough little buggers.

Scripps News (YouTube Channel)
Scripps News (Official Website)

They’re SO fascinating, I decided to create a whole new page dedicated to water bears.

Maybe water bears aren’t so “cute” afterall, but if you want to see something really cute, then be sure to check out this absolutely adorable little video from David Williams.

Big Word Club (YouTube Channel)
Big Word Club (Official Website)

Find out more about Arbornauts at the Tree Foundation …

Find out more about forests, trees, water bears, microorganisms, life and nature in general on Cosma …

Yellowstone, Beauty & Beast

~ mehopper

If you have been Yellowstone National Park, then you know it is a vast, beautiful place with some fairly odd geologic features that smell bad, like rotten eggs. If you’ve never been there, then you might just have a fairly apocalyptic view of it because of the supervolcano under it that has been featured in disaster movies.

Here’s a link to a short short introduction about what is above and below the surface.

Yellowstone World’s First National Park (National Geographic, YouTube)

Very informative, and the last line is key.

It must be seen and experienced to be believed and enjoyed.

National Geographic also made a “Virtual Yellowstone” 360° video.

Virtual Yellowstone 360° – Zen-Out at Yellowstone National Park (Nat Geo WILD, YouTube)

Here’s a link to a more specific coverage about the most famous geyser, Old Faithful, along with the 200 others in the park.

Old Faithful from the Air (Smithsonian Channel)

Here’s a link to another clip from the Smithsonian Channel about the current scientific understanding of the volcano.

Why Yellowstone Supervolcano Could Be Huge (Smithsonian Channel)

You can find out more about Yellowstone on these websites.

Yellowstone National Park (National Park Service)
Yellowstone Volcano Observatory

You can also find out a ton more from these sources.

Yellowstone Supervolcano (Science News)
Yellowstone Supervolcano (Science Daily)
Yellowstone Supervolcano (Phys.org)
Yellowstone Volcano (JSTOR)
Yellowstone Volcano (NPR Archives)

Sometimes exploring news about Yellowstone can be interesting in unexpected ways. For example, I triped across a story about how studying life in Yellowstone’s toxic soup could help us find out if there’s life on Mars!

A Yellowstone guide to life on Mars (Michael Miller, Phys.org)

Neat stuff!

Find out more about Earth …

Great Views of Earth

~ mehopper

April 22nd is Earth Day! In honor of that, here are some great ways to see the honoree.

First, you can get a nice view from this neat 360° video from Seeker. It essentially shows you what it would feel like if you could just fly straight up and see the Earth from space.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Seeker VR (YouTube Channel)

National Geographic also just released a 360° video connected to their documentary series One Strange Rock that lets you see the Earth from the International Space Station (ISS).

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

National Geographic (YouTube Channel)
National Geographic (Official Website)

For a really, really extreme wide shot of Earth, there’s a relatively hot off the press snap from New Horizons. It was taken from about 3.79 billion miles away. Not surprisingly, this is the record for the furthest away a picture of Earth has ever been taken, and this video covers both the shot as well as some interesting context about how it was taken.

STM Daily News (YouTube Channel)
STM Daily News (Official Website)

Here are some more in-depth articles about the shot.

These Record-Breaking Pictures Were Taken by the Farthest Camera from Earth (Ben Guarino, Washington Post)
New Horizons Snaps Farthest Image Ever Taken From Earth (Jason Daley, Smithsonian Magazine)

Of course, the video paid a humble tribute to the iconic Pale Blue Dot (Planetary Society) image taken by Voyager 1 that was then made famous by this commentary by Carl Sagan.

CarlSaganDotCom (YouTube Channel)
Carl Sagan (Official Website)

Those are certainly some awe inspiring views of Earth! Along the way it is hard not to notice that NASA has a lot to do with all of those long shots.

As great as it is to have the pictures and the knowledge from the missions, it turns out that NASA keeps pretty busy taking care of our home planet, too. Here’s a lovely article that Forbes published for Earth Day that highlights the many ways that NASA is working to save the Earth.

The 19 Small Ways That NASA Will Try To Save The Earth (Ethan Siegel, Forbes)

Find out more about our planet Earth, getting to space as well as zooming in and out …

Dinos for Geeks

~ mehopper

There’s been a lot of cool news for dinosaur lovers lately.

The most bizarre story is about an extinct lizard called Saniwa ensidens that had four eyes.

Here’s Why an Ancient Lizard Had 4 Eyes (Laura Geggel, Live Science)

Creative-Tube (YouTube Channel)

There are also some massive 170 million year old dinosaur footprints from the Jurassic period that have been discovered on Scotland’s Isle Of Skye.

Huge Dinosaur Footprints Discovered on Scottish Coast (Michael Greshko, National Geographic)
A sauropod-dominated tracksite from Rubha nam Brathairean, Isle of Skye, Scotland (Paige E. dePolo, et. al., Scotish Journal of Geology)

That’s cool news for dinosaur lovers, but it’s not all that geeky.

Before we dive into the really geeky stuff, check out this 360° video from the American Museum of National History in which Mike Novacek describes how Roy Chapman Andrews led an expedition to the Gobi Desert back in the 1920s.

American Museum of Natural History (YouTube Channel)
American Museum of Natural History (Official Website)

You can find out a ton more about the expeditions and dinosaurs in general on the American Museum of National History YouTube Channel series Dinosaurs Explained.

That’s probably the kind of methodology that you think of when you think about paleontology. Paleontologists do still use those traditional field methods, but they also use some fairly geeky technology these days. Here’s a video in which paleontologist Ken Lacovara explains how his field uses laser scanning and 3D modeling.

Live Science (YouTube Channel)
ive Science (Official Website)

Here’s a link to an even geekier video and related story about how the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History is scanning and printing fossils.

How to 3D Print a Dinosaur (Mashable, YouTube)
Hold a T-Rex Bone in Your Bare Hands, Invites Smithsonian (Eric Larson, Mashable)

Doesn’t all that talk about 3D dinosaur parts make you just itch to see a complete one?

Here’s a 360° video in which paleontologist Dr. Ken Lacovara “shows” us a giant dinosaur called Dreadnoughtus while he explains how it was discovered. If you have a powerful computer, change the quality setting on the video to 1080s for a more impressive experience.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Jaunt XR (YouTube Channel)
Jaunt XR (Facebook)

This wasn’t the first neat 360° video about dinosaurs. Over a year ago Sir David Attenborough worked with BBC One to make a 360° video to introduce the biggest dinosaur ever discovered. Here’s a link to that video, and again, increase the video quality for a better experience.

Meet the Largest Dinosaur Ever Discovered – Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur (BBC One, YouTube)

The BBC also published a website with more backstory about the project. If you follow the link, be sure to also click the tabs for more information.

BBC Taster Attenborough 360 (BBC)

Here’s another story about the project.

Sir David Attenborough set to Reveal the Biggest Dinosaur Ever to Walk the Planet in Upcoming BBC Show (Doug Bolton, The Independent)

Finally, I saved the geekiest stuff for last. If you crave realistic extinct creatures, how about some real ones? Impossible, you think? Not necessarily! De-extinction is a real thing that is being actively explored, and while true dinosaurs are still far fetched, species that only went extinct within the last 500 years or so are not all that far out of reach.

Here’s a link to a video and news story about the state of the art in resurrecting extinct species as well as the complex pros and cons of doing so.

How Close Are We to Resurrecting Extinct Species? (Seeker, YouTube)
The Increasingly Realistic Prospect of “Extinct Animal” Zoos (Christine Ro, BBC)

Find out more about dinosaurs …

Dogs at Museums

~ mehopper

Dogs and museums are things that you don’t expect to see in the same sentence very often. However, if you live in the Boston area, then you might have seen them together in the cute story covered by most local media about Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts “hiring” a 12 week old Weimaraner puppy named Riley to protect their collections from unwanted visitors. Here’s a clip from the local CBS News channel and their news story about the little guy.

CBS Boston (YouTube Channel)
CBS Boston (Official Website)

Museum Of Fine Arts Welcomes New Pest Detection Dog (CBS Boston)

So, dogs and museums aren’t as incongruous as they may seem at first.

In fact, there’s also a Museum of the Dog in St. Louis, MO backed by the American Kennel Club. Here’s a local news clip about that museum.

Nine PBS (YouTube Channel)
Nine PBS (Official Website)

Last year the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis also hosted an exhibit entitled Dogs: Faithful and True. Here’s a clip from the local news channel about it.

WRTV Indianapolis (YouTube Channel)
WRTV Indianapolis (Official Website)

Here’s a longer, more in depth piece made in connection with the exhibit that features a chat with a musher from the Iditarod.

Pet Pals TV (YouTube Channel)
Pet Pals TV (Official Website)

The Smithsonian even has a whole page dedicated to dogs entitled Dog: Museum’s Best Friend. So dogs and museums aren’t incongruous, and this is all even fairly down to Earth stuff as far as the conservative world of traditional museums go.

A bit further off the beaten path was a contemporary art show that premiered in London in 2016 that featured interactive sculptures by Dominic Wilcox as well as wall based paintings, drawings and collages that dogs would appreciate. The paintings were even created in colours dogs can see and scented in the subject matter of the art work.

Onlooker (YouTube Channel)

The literary minded geeks might also be itching to thrust their hands into the air. Yes indeed, there is a quirky novel by Jonathan Carroll entitled Outside the Dog Museum.

Of course, the less intellectually inclined readers amongst you are probably disappointed because this post hasn’t been about what you thought it was going to be about. You thought it was going to be about C.M. Coolidge’s series Dogs Playing Poker colloquially known as Dogs at Cards, didn’t you?

Don’t fret — here are a few morsels for you 🙂

HighRollerRadioTV (YouTube Channel)

15 Things You Should Know About Dogs Playing Poker (Kristy Puchko, Mental Floss)

Find out more about dogs, museums and, of course, just a tad o’ humor 😉

Maya Megalopolis

~ mehopper

You may remember learning about the Maya in school, and you may have heard of Chichén Itzá (UNESCO) because it is often included on recent lists of “World Wonders” (as well as being a convenient day drive from Cancún). Here’s a link to a 360° video that will give you a sense of what it’s like to see Chichén Itzá.

Seven Wonders of the World: Chichén Itzá | 360 Video (The New York Times, YouTube)

There are also other less heavily promoted places where you can see Maya ruins, and one of the most impressive and famous is in Tikal, Guatemala (UNESCO). Here’s a link to a 360° video that will give you a sense of what it’s like to visit those ruins.

Tikal, Guatemala 360 VR Temple Number 2 (Miguel Barreto MAC, YouTube)

It is actually these ruins that are receiving more attention right now, and that is because an organization called Fundación Patrimonio Cultural y Natural Maya (Pacunam) backed a project to use a “laser” technology called Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) to discover and map what is being called a “megalopolis” built by the Maya from 250 to 950 CE. Here are links to a video and two news stories about it.

Lasers On Planes Used To Reveal Massive Complex Of Mayan Ruins (NBC Nightly News, YouTube)

Sprawling Maya Network Discovered under Guatemala Jungle (BBC)
Laser Mapping Uncovers Dozens of Ancient Mayan Cities (Oscar Holland, CNN)

Here is a link to a slightly longer, in-depth story that also mentions a nifty Augmented Reality (AR) application that makes it possible to “navigate” LiDAR data.

Scientists Use Laser Technology to Uncover More Mayan Ruins (CBS Mornings, YouTube)

Find out more about the Americas, the World and History …

Space Art & Junk

~ mehopper

In certain circles it is not uncommon to trip across the debate “Is graffiti art?” You can also find scads about it online if you are so inclined (Google). However, the debate doesn’t come up all that often in the context of conversations about satellites or space… until now.

In 2018 a company named Rocket Lab launched some previously announced satellites from New Zealand. They also launched an unannounced satellite, and more notably, one with no explicit scientific or technical purpose. That satellite was The Humanity Star, and it was a carbon fiber geodesic sphere about 3 feet in diameter that is designed to reflect the sun in order to be one of the most visible objects in the night sky from anywhere on Earth for about nine months. Here’s an article about the satellite, its sponsor, Rocket Lab’s CEO Peter Beck, as well as the message that it is intended to convey.

Space-Spotting: How To See Humanity Star and Other Objects in Orbit (Lisa Ruth Rand, Popular Mechanics)

The satellite was intended to be a relatively short-lived statement of inspiration, but it created quite a stir. Here’s a link to a one minute video about the satellite, its creator and the controversy surrounding the whole enterprise.

Rocket Lab NZ Blasted for Sending Giant Disco Ball into Space for No Real Scientific Purpose (1 News, YouTube)

The story behind the controversy is that Caleb A. Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia, published this scathing rant about the satellite via Scientific American.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Satellite Vermin (Caleb A. Scharf, Scientific American)

Scharf’s post was picked up and echoed by other news outlets. Here are some examples.

Space Gets an Artificial Star. Astronomers Ask: Do We Need More? (Christina Caron, New York Times)
Company Shoots Shiny Orb into Orbit and Angers Astronomers Over Space Graffiti. (Ben Guarino, Washtington Post)

The truth is that if you dig deep enough, there was probably more controversy about this than was warrented. First, while “light pollution” is a serious issue (worthy of an entire post), this particular case of it is a temporary and spurious scapegoat. The same is true about the accusation that it is contributing to the problem of “space junk” since this modest little missionary was designed to follow modern protocols for such things and plunge to its own pre-calculated death upon the conclusion of its short life.

Interestingly, while the satellite probably didn’t deserve the bum rap it got, it did end up serving a higher purpose. It brought attention to the serious, real problem of the massive amount of “space junk” that’s floating around our planet now and the bevy of stuff that is likely to join the ruckus in the near future.

Here’s a two minute visualization generated by Stuart Grey using tracking data from Space-Track.org that shows how space debris has propagated over the last half century.

Stuart Grey (YouTube Channel)
Stuart Grey (Official Website)

Of course, the problem of “space junk” in not a new and shiny problem. It has been a growing concern in scientific and engineering circles for decades. Here’s a link to a PSA from the ESA about it.

Dealing with space debris (ESA, YouTube)

Here’s a link to a related segment from the BBC.

Time to Take Out Space Trash (BBC Newsnight, YouTube)

Here’s a link to a fantastic article from the Washington Post that also provides more specifics about controversial subjects like “collisional cascading impacts” a.k.a. Kessler Syndrome (Wikipedia) and the CubeSats that are especially worrying to some space scientists and engineers.

Thousands of Tiny Satellites are about to go into Space and Possibly Ruin it Forever (Avi Selk, Washington Post)

If you are so inclined, you can track objects yourself at SATFLARE: Online Satellite and Flare Tracking. Space.com also maintains a site where you can track the Latest News About Space Junk and Orbital Debris.

If you think satellites are cool in general, then you might want to check out an app that Google Earth and Analytic Graphics Inc. made to track the positions of satellites around Earth. You can find out about the app on this blog post.

There’s even a whole site dedicated to Satellite News!

Finally, if you want to learn more about space and space travel, explore Space Depot!

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

You can also choose your own adventure by clicking on the links below.

“Space”
Universe (Astronomical Instrument)
Galaxy Milky Way, Andromeda
Planetary System Star, Brown Dwarf, Planet, Moon

Our Neighborhood
Solar System Sun
Terrestrial Planet Mercury, Venus, Earth (Moon), Mars
Asteroid Belt Ceres, Vesta
Jovian Planet Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune
Trans-Neptunian Object
Kuiper Belt Pluto, Haumea, Makemake
Scattered Disc Eris, Sedna, Planet X
Oort Cloud Etc. Scholz’s Star
Small Body Comet, Centaur, Asteroid

Find out more about getting to space, uses for satellites, space and arts in general…

Island Escapes

~ mehopper

One of the more entertaining stories to hit the net recently was a tale of some hearty Kiwis who successfully got away from a local alcohol ban by building their own island in nearby international waters.

New Zealanders Build Island in Bid to Avoid Alcohol Ban (BBC News)
To Avoid New Year’s Drinking Ban, Group Builds Tiny Private Island in New Zealand Waters (Grace Guarnieri, Newsweek)

Fun stuff, but these guys were certainly not the first to cook up a politically motivated scheme to get away from it all at sea. The concept has a long, albeit somewhat dubious, history. Pirates and the whole Water World fiasco aside, way back in 1960s there was a relatively well publicized, but ill-fated experiment dubbed Operation Atlantis.

More recently, there’s the Seasteaders. They periodically provide updates about how their vision of a floating utopia is just around the corner.

TomoNews US (YouTube Channel)

As Climate Change Accelerates, Floating Cities Look Like Less of a Pipe Dream (Mike Ives, New York Times)

Further afield, here’s a TED talk that presents a take on reasons to take to the seas. It does include a few obligatory libertarian cultural allusions to things like Burning Man, but it also covers environmentally responsible reasons for the movement like safety, sustainability as well as much needed new additions for cities and slums.

TEDx Talks (YouTube Channel)
TEDx Talks (Official Website)

If you watch the talk all the way through, you will see that it also covers a few more exotic topics like private floating islands (i.e. really, really huge yachts). If you’ve never come across that concept before, there are hundreds of videos about floating private islands on Youtube.

Now, if you truly love the idea of getting away from it all for libertarian leaning reasons, you could always join the Asgaurdians. Asgardia is Igor Ashurbeyli’s plan for taking the idea of sovereign nation to space. The Asgardians did launch a satellite, but no one is suggesting that if you want to move in with them, you won’t have a long, long wait.

Asgardia, The World’s First ‘Space Nation’, Takes Flight (Andrea Lo, CNN)
Space Nation to Earthlings: Do You Read Us? (Eric Mack, CNET)

Finally, if you are in a position where headlines like this are not terribly relevant, you may be wishing for a good old fashioned, non-politically motivated island escape. If so, then here’s a nice 360° video from Down Under for you.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Australia (YouTube Channel)
Australia (Official Website)

Find out more about sovereign states and government in general…

A Golden Gift

~ mehopper

If you’re looking for a perfect gift for your favorite geek, look no further. Now you can give them a copy of the Voyager Golden Record. Up until 2016, you couldn’t buy a copy, but then Ozma Records ran a brilliant Kickstarter campaign to issue a limited vinyl edition.

Here’s a link to a video about the successful Kickstarter campaign.

NASA’s Golden Records Coming Back To Life, 40 Years Later (NBC Nightly News, YouTube)

The campaign was so successful, they went on to work with Light in the Attic to release a two-disc CD set.

Here’s a link to a one minute video and article about the release.

Soon you can buy NASA’s Earth playlist (Newsy, YouTube)

NASA launched this record into space in 1977. Now, you can own your own copy (Travis M. Andrews, The Washington Post

Finally, here’s a link to a beautfiul 360° video about the Golden Record.

Voyager’s Golden Record Decoded (SciFri, YouTube)

You can find out more about the Voyager Mission on NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Voyager 1 & 2 YouTube Channel

The Voyager spacecraft will continue to send back information, and you can keep track of where they are on this page.

If you want to learn more about the the Solar System, explore this Toy World!

Click the 360° image below to explore it, click the menu in the upper right for controls and click “i” buttons on/off for links to experiences. Use “portals” to visit otherToy Worlds.

You can also explore this Toy World on Kuula.

Perspectives on Earth

~ mehopper

Last week NASA released this fascinating video entitled Our Living Planet based upon 20 years of data from satellites that observe all plant life at the surface of the land and ocean.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
Goddard Space Flight Center (Official Website)

You can find out more about the video from this article.
The Changing Colors of our Living Planet (NASA)

Of course, releasing fantastic imagery like this is nothing new for NASA — they have a long and illustrious history of sharing iconic imagery to amaze and inspire people around the world.

The most famous image NASA ever shared is the photo known as Earthrise. It was taken by astronaut Bill Anders in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission, and it was the first time a human ever saw the whole earth from space. Here is a video about the image that was released in 2013 on the image’s 45th anniversary.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
Goddard Space Flight Center (Official Website)

The next most famous image from NASA is probably The Blue Marble. It was taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. Here is a NASA video from 2015 that discusses the original image as well as newer imagery captured by the Deep Space Climate Observatory.

ScienceAtNASA (YouTube Channel)
NASA Science (Official Website)

These two images may be the most famous, but thanks to Carl Sagan, none has been more inspirational than the Pale Blue Dot. It was captured by Voyager 1, and here is a video of Sagan unveiling the photo in 1990.

The Planetary Society (YouTube Channel)
The Planetary Society (Official Website)

The press conference was inspiring, but it was actually the language that Sagan later used to frame the image that truly captures the imagination.

CarlSaganDotCom (YouTube Channel)
Carl Sagan (Official Website)

Of course, NASA continues to share awesome imagery from time to time. For example, back in 2012 they released Earth at Night. It is also sometimes called “The Black Marble,” and it is an animation of Earth’s city lights assembled from data from the Suomi NPP satellite.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
Goddard Space Flight Center (Official Website)

NASA also ran a campaign for Earth Day in 2014 that generated the Global Selfie.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (YouTube Channel)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Official Website)

NASA has already released numerous 360° Videos related to other planets, so it is only a matter of time before they release an explorable 360° image or video of Earth. In the meantime you can enjoy this 360° Video created by the Opaque Media Group to promote their VR application Earthlight.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Opaque Media (YouTube Channel)

Find out more about Earth …

Around the World In …

~ mehopper

Once upon a time, back in the Victorian era a hundred years ago when Jules Verne was writing Around the World in Eighty Days, it took a little while to even vicariously circumnavigate the world by reading about it.

These days, thanks to professional video productions from groups like Travel Channel and Lonely Planet, you can feel like you’ve seen the world in far less time than it takes to read a book about it, and you can see it in considerably more vivid detail.

But now, thanks to the wonders of compilation, time-lapse and 360° video, you can make the journey even faster and with a far greater field of view than ever before. Here are links to three excellent examples from YouTube that together, appropriately enough, take eight minutes.

Daybreak Around the World (The New York Times)
The Best 360° Aerial Footage by AirPano (AirPano, YouTube)
Explore the World with IM360 (Ryan Whitehead, YouTube)

So, there it is — “Around the World in 8 Minutes,” and in 360° no less!

Of course, that just scratches the surface of how great 360° videos and other types of “3D virtual experiences” can take you to exotic places all around the world.

Check out Cosma’s newest Web World called Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa that is designed for exploring the World through 360° experiences!

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

Also, check out these recently updated pages on this site to see more fine-grained experience, but beware, there are enough experiences in the Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa and on these pages to take you around the world in about 800 hours!

Find out more about the World and how to travel around it…

Americas Canada, United States, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina
Europe United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece
Africa Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, South Africa, Madagascar
Asia India, China, Japan
Oceania Australia, New Zealand
Polar Regions Arctic, Antarctica

Leonardo Lately

~ mehopper

Leonardo da Vinci sure gets press for a gentleman who hasn’t been around for five centuries! That’s not to say that it’s not well deserved. Here’s a brief video that gives just a glimpse of why he was such an amazing guy.

Past Vault (YouTube Channel)

The Smile

Of course, one perennial reason for Leonardo’s popularity is the never ending fascination with how he achieved Mona Lisa’s smile. This video is about just one study about it.

Newsy Entertainment (YouTube Channel)

Here’s a link to a video that further explains the fantastic techniques that Leonardo used to create the illusions that make the painting so enigmatic.

How Leonardo Da Vinci Augmented Reality More Than 500 Years Ago (The Atlantic)

Unfortunately, it’s hard for an average person to actually experience the effect for themselves. In case you’ve never been to the Louvre and tried to see the original, here’s a 360° Video that will give you a sense of what you will probably encounter (skip to 2 minutes into video).

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

360 Vacation VR (YouTube Channel)

The Genius

One of the above videos was made to accompany a story by Walter Isaacson about Leonardo da Vinci in the The Atlantic, and that story is a sample of the book Leonardo da Vinci that Isaacson has just added to his pantheon of biographies about geniuses (Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs).

Here’s an inspiring 2 minute video where Isaacson talks about Leonardo’s creativity.

New Scientist (YouTube Channel)
New Scientist (Official Website)

Here’s a link to another video where Isaacson discusses the book.

Walter Isaacson on Accessible Genius of Leonardo da Vinci (CBS, YouTube)

The Auction

It is probably no coincidence that Isaacson’s book was timed to coincide with the auction of Leonardo’s last painting in private hands — the Salvator Mundi was auctioned at Christie’s.

Associated Press (YouTube Channel)
Associated Press (Official Website)

Here’s a link to a video from Christie’s that explains the importance of the painting.

In truth, though, the authenticity of the painting still remains controversial in some circles.

Mystery over Christ’s orb in $100m Leonardo da Vinci painting (Dalya Alberge, The Guardian)

The painting ended up going to Saudi Arabian Prince Badr bin Abdullah, and the Wikipedia page about it keeps tabs on its whereabouts and exhibition status.

The Movie

Good news — Leonardo as Leonardo may be coming to a screen near you! Leonardo DiCaprio, who is named after da Vinci, is going to be starring in a movie about his namesake, and it will be based upon Isaacson’s book.

Here’s a link to a story about about the project.

The Role Leonardo DiCaprio Was Literally Born to Play (Yohana Desta, Vanity Fair)

Given what Leonardo da Vinci himself documented about his own exotic exploits, well, that should be “interesting” — it would be hard to be boring. Okay, it has the potential to be pretty gruesome, but fascinating nonetheless.

If you want to know about Leonardo da Vinci, but can’t wait for the movie, here’s a link to an older documentary.

Leonardo’s Universe (National Geographic, YouTube)

You can also find out a ton more about Leonardo on The History Channel and Wikipedia.

Find out more about the time I met Walter Isaacson at Harvard…

Finally, here are links to some other, related posts on Cosma.

Walk-in-Art
Art Revisited
Dive-in-Art
Magical Paintings
Into Van Gogh
Walk-in-Art & Museums!

Enjoy, but beware, it’s easy to get lost in 360° art!

Find out more about the arts and history…

The Waves Won!

~ mehopper

Gravitational waves that is!

It has been announced that Rainer Weiss (MIT), Barry Barish (Caltech) and Kip Thorne (Caltech) have won the 2017 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for their decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the first observation of gravitational waves in 2015.

Here are links to a one minute video from Newsy and a few articles from The New York Times that celebrate the honor.

US physicists Win Nobel Prize (Newsy, YouTube)
2017 Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to LIGO Black Hole Researchers (Dennis Overbye, New York Times)
Learning from Gravitational Waves (David Kaiser, New York Times)

Needless to say, the gentleman’s respective institutions are proud of their faculty’s achievements, and they’ve each published press releases celebrating the win as well.
MIT physicist Rainer Weiss shares Nobel Prize in physics (Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office)
Caltech Scientists Awarded 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics (Caltech)

MIT also published a short video of Rainer Weiss describing his reaction to finding out that LIGO had successfully discovered gravitational waves.

Rainer Weiss wins Nobel Prize in Physics (MIT, YouTube)

If you’re not exactly well versed about gravitational waves, here’s a neat little video that explains the concept with stick figures.

Minute Physics (YouTube Channel)
Minute Physics (Facebook)

If you would like a more in-depth explanation of the science that earned the Nobel Prize, here’s a video of Walter Issacson interviewing Kip Thorne that covers the fascinating story of how LIGO helped prove something predicted by Einstein a century ago.

Kent Presents (YouTube Channel)

Of course, Kip Thorne isn’t new to the public eye. If he looks a bit familiar to you, it could be because you saw him on TV back in 2014 during numerous interviews where he explained the awesome contributions that he made to the movie Interstellar. Here’s a link to a short clip from the Interstellar Featurette that explains how he helped make the movie spectacular to watch and contributed to a better understanding of physics too!

Interstellar Featurette – Building A Black Hole (Rotten Tomatoes, YouTube)

Cool stuff!

Find out more about gravity, physics, the universe and science in general …

Up, Up and Away

~ mehopper

Want to take a ten minute break and float away from it all?

Here are some nifty 360° videos that will take you on some virtual hot air balloons rides!

This first clip is from the The Golden Ring of Russia Air Balloon Festival.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

AirPano VR (YouTube Channel)
AirPano VR (Official Website)

The next one is a one minute view of a ride in Cappadocia, Turkey.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

VIEMR – Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality (YouTube Channel)

This one takes you on a quick ride over the Theban Mountains in Egypt.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Vocativ (YouTube Channel)
Vocativ (Official Website)

If you’re hooked, there a ton more hot air balloon 360° videos …

Finally, for those who are too young to know or too old to remember, here’s a fifty year old pre-MTV flashback by the The 5th Dimension singing the song that inspired the title of this post.

Groovy!

If you like this adventures then perhaps you will enjoy these other posts …

Heights!
Wingsuit Rush!
Go for a Fly!
NYC Highs
Extreme Biking, Artfully!
Catch Some Waves!
Zip the World!

Find out more about getting around by air, adventure and the World in general …

Why Not Butterflies?

~ mehopper

Now that the eclipse has passed, and we all survived with our vision intact (hopefully), it is time to get back to our regular news, right? Unfortunately, I’m not finding anything in my “go to” news feeds all that inspiring right now. Everything seems to range somewhere between the mundane and the terrifying, so I keep hearing the gist of J.K. Rowling’s refrain, as spoken by the character Ron Weasley in Chamber of Secrets. running through my head:

“Why couldn’t it be butterflies?”

Here’s a clip of the humorous scene for the uninitiated.

Why Can’t We Follow the Butterflies? (YouTube)

While I do tend to be what some might perceive as overly fond of butterflies, the specific reason that the line keeps popping into my head is because I keep wondering why my favorite YouTube Channel for 360° Videos hasn’t featured them yet. Animals in general have been honored with their own playlists, but the poor little butterflies have been neglected. That’s a shame, because there are plenty of nice 360° Videos about them.

So, in an attempt to remedy the situation, achieve a sense of catharsis and brighten other people’s news feeds a bit, here are links to five videos that I would include in the playlist.

3D Monarch Butterflies in 360° (National Geographic, YouTube)
Basking in Butterflies (New York Times, YouTube)
Nabokov’s Butterflies Shelf Life (American Museum of Natural History, YouTube)
Butterfly House & Aquarium 360 Video (HenkinSchultz, YouTube)

Butterfly World (jvtosiartist, YouTube)

These are just my favorites. There are plenty more on YouTube, so you can flutter on there!

Find out more about butterflies …

Dark, Deep & Spooky…

~ mehopper

Today’s physics is “probably” not the kind of thing that you, or at least your parents and grandparents, learned about in school (unless you happen to be a Physicist). Even the most casual science buff knows that today it’s all about exotic stuff like dark matter (NASA), ghost particles (FermiLab) and “spooky action at a distance” (MIT).

There’s been a lot of developments on all of these fronts, so here are some intriguing updates from the cutting edge of physics.

Dark

One big story that made the news is that the Dark Energy Survey has released a new “Dark Matter Map of the Universe.” Of course, by definition, that’s pretty hard to do, but they did it.

New map of Universe’s dark matter (Pallab Ghosh, BBC News)
Standard model of the universe withstands most precise test by Dark Energy Survey (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
DES Year 1 Cosmology Results: Papers (Dark Energy Survey)

Deep

The Dark Energy Survey used good old astronomy to find dark matter, but Motherboard did a fantastic feature on an underground science laboratory called SNOLAB that takes a very different approach to finding dark matter and pesky things like neutrinos.

SNOLAB Dark Matter Lab Buried Over a Mile Underground (Motherboard, YouTube)

The folks at Motherboard also did this 360° video that shows more background on their visit, literally and figuratively.

Exploring An Underground Dark Matter Lab in 360° (Motherboard, YouTube)

Ghostly

SNOLAB’s experiments try to find the “ghostly” neutrinos, but what are they? Here’s a quick, top level explanation.

MinutePhysics (YouTube Channel)
MinutePhysics (Facebook)

Here’s a bit more elaborate introduction to neutrinos by Fermilab’s Don Lincoln.

Fermilab (YouTube Channel)
Fermila (Official Website)

Here is a full length lecture by Arthur B. McDonald (Co-recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that neutrinos have mass).

The Royal Institution (YouTube Channel)
The Royal Institution (Official Website)

Arthur B. McDonald and Takaaki Kajita, Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 (Nobel Prize Press Release)

Ghost Busters!

Scientists from University of Chicago’s Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics announced a new development in the search for the the elusive, ghostly neutrinos. The first link is to a video that provides an overview of what they did, and the second link to a video and accompanying story from the University of Chicago gives more background.

New Neutrino Experiment Seeks Dark Matter (Scripps News, YouTube)

UChicago Physicist Helps Create World’s Smallest Neutrino Detector (The University of Chicago, YouTube)
World’s smallest neutrino detector observes elusive interactions of particles (Steve Koppes, University of Chicago News)

Spooky

On a somewhat different front, scientists in China used a satellite to show that Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” really does happen!

Quantum Satellite Achieves ‘Spooky Action’ at Record Distance (Science Magazine, YouTube)

The Universe Is as Spooky as Einstein Thought (Natalie Wolchover, The Atlantic)
Satellite-based entanglement distribution over 1200 kilometers (Juan Yin, et. al., AAAS Science)
Cosmic Bell Test: Measurement Settings from Milky Way Stars (Johannes Handsteiner, et. al., Physical Review Letters)

Wow, and that’s just what’s been in the news lately — imagine all of the other stuff going on out there now!

Find out more about the Cosmos, Physics and Science …

Moon+H2O=Moonbase?

~ mehopper

One of the big science stories in the news now is that Earth’s Moon has more water than scientists expected. Here is a link to just one of the hundreds of stories flooding news feeds.

The Moon Has More Water Than Originally Thought (Scripps News, YouTube)

This round of stories has been inspired by this article.

Remote detection of widespread indigenous water in lunar pyroclastic deposits (Ralph E. Milliken & Shuai Li, Nature Geoscience)

A story about unexpected amounts of water on our Moon is certainly noteworthy, but it’s not the first time that a slew of news stories have heralded an unexpected abundance of water on the moon. In fact, it’a almost becoming a yearly ritual during the Northern Hemisphere’s late spring to mid-summer sluggish news season (probably not coincidentally, also highly correlated with summer vacation season).

For example, this article from Science Magazine about water in volcanic materials on the Moon made the rounds of news media throughout the first half of summer of 2011.

High Pre-Eruptive Water Contents Preserved in Lunar Melt Inclusions (E. H. Hauri, et.al., Science Magazine)

Then this MIT News press release in 2012 and similar stories about water in Shackleton Crater made the rounds that summer.

Mapping the Moon’s Shackleton Crater (MIT News Office, YouTube)

NASA’s Goddard Space Center posted this video about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (NASA) findings regarding water on the Moon in June, 2013. Predictably, the story made the rounds that summer.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
NASA Goddard (Official Website)

The list goes on, but point made.

Of course, “scientific knowledge for the sake of knowledge” is wonderful stuff, but the real kicker to all of the stories is that unexpectedly high amounts of water on the Moon means that humans are much more likely to be able to establish viable bases there, and so plans for Colonization of the Moon are rendered far more realistic.

So walking on the Moon “may” become less the stuff of hypothetical dreams than it has been since the Apollo 17 astronauts were last there back in 1972. Something to look forward to, right? Well, at least it is if you happen to be an astronaut or have mega bucks, but that’s another story…

In the meantime, us Earth-bound folk are going to have to continue to make do with a combination of real recordings and simulated experiences. Here’s a link to a great two minute 360° video that does a fine job of combining both types of experiences.

VR Walk on the Moon with Gene Cernan (USA Today, YouTube)

Enjoy & Dream!

Finally, if you want to learn more about space and space travel, explore Space Depot!

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also see it directly on Kuula.

Find out more about Good Old Luna …

Best Cat Toy?

~ mehopper

This site doesn’t usually deal in silly internet memes (list) like cute cat videos, but it is Friday, and this character on YouTube called FlippyCat went and posted this awesome 360° video.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

FlippyCat (YouTube Channel)
FlippyCat (Facebook)

If the think the dominoes art part is cool, and you want to waste more time, head on over and check out the rest of FlippyCat’s World of Dominoes YouTube Channel. Here’s a promo video to give you a sense of what’s there.

FlippyCat (YouTube Channel)
FlippyCat (Facebook)

Find out more about cats, toys and fun in general …

Beach Gazes

~ mehopper

You know those “virtual fireplace videos” that you can play to feel all warm and cozy? Yes, there’s even a YouTube Channel for that 🙂

Well, there are some 360° Videos made to serve a similar purpose for a summertime feeling, so you can kick back, relax and imagine some sand between your toes anytime you want.

The best one I found was this beauty from Australia.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Australia (YouTube Channel)
Australia (Official Website)

You can also find a number of other nice 360° videos on their YouTube Channel.

Now if you prefer the real thing, here’s a video for that.

TenPlus.TV (YouTube Channel)
TenPlus.TV (Official Twitter)

You can always check with good old Dr. Beach to find the best sea, sand and sun near you (or further afield if you’re very motivated).

Find out more about Beaches …

TRAPPIST-1

~ mehopper

You’ve probably heard that NASA has found a trove of “Earth-like” planets circling the TRAPPIST-1 system roughly 40 light years away, but just in case you haven’t, here’s a short video from NASA/JPL about the discovery.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (YouTube Channel)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Official Website)

Most entertainingly, here’s a 360° YouTube video published by NASA/JPL that let’s you experience an artist’s conception of the view from the 4th planet in the system.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (YouTube Channel)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Official Website)

Here’s the text posted with the video as context.

This 360-degree panorama depicts the surface of a newly detected planet, TRAPPIST-1d, part of a seven planet system some 40 light years away. You can explore this artist’s rendering of an alien world by moving the view using your mouse or your mobile device. The depiction is based on the latest scientific data about this planetary system, and this world’s sister planets can be seen as bright points of light in a dark sky. Each world is roughly in Earth’s size range, in terms of both mass and diameter. Further observations will be needed to determine whether any or all of these worlds might be habitable.

Find out more about TRAPPIST 1 …

TRAPPIST 1 (NASA Exoplanets)
TRAPPIST 1 (Wikipedia)

Find out more about planetary systems, planets and astronomical instruments …

Animal Vision

~ mehopper

What if you could see like an animal? Well, now you can!

Here’s a link to a 360° video that shows what it’s like to see as a cat, dog, insect, rat and snake.

How Animals See (BuzzFeed, YouTube)

There are even some augmented reality apps out there that go a step further and let you experience your own world “through the eyes” of animals (Android, iOS).

Is “animal vision” a killer app for AR? Probably not, but still, it’s pretty cool!

If you really get into this stuff, there’s a ton of “traditional” media about it.

For example, here’s a link to a video that covers the science behind how we know how animals like bees, reptiles, cats, fish and insects see the world.

9 Ways Animals See The World Differently (SciShow, YouTube)

Find out more about animals …

Lions, Tigers & Bears…

~ mehopper

The advent of360° cameras brought a plethora of 360° videos about animals.

Many are conservation oriented like these about lions and tigers.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

METAVRSE (YouTube Channel)
METAVRSE (Official Website)

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

AirPano VR (YouTube Channel)
AirPano VR (Official Website)

National Geographic is a prolific producer of them. Here is a link to an example.

Swimming With Bears in 360° (National Geographic)

You can find a ton more great 360° videos from National Geographic on YouTube!

One company even showcased their professional cinematic VR cameras by producing this video that was Sundance worthy.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Condition One (YouTube Channel)

Finally, YouTube even created a very nice channel called The Animal Point of View full of neat 360° animal videos.

They are endlessly educational and entertaining — enjoy!

Find out more about animals …

AirPano

~ mehopper

While reviewing the posts during “the move,” there was one glaring omission that emerged. It turns out that there was never a post about a fantastic Russian crew going by the name “AirPano” that has been traveling the world using drones to capture and publish fantastic 360° panoramic videos, and they have been doing it since before there were 360° YouTube videos. As soon as there was such a thing, they were doing that, too. It was very remiss to not “Spotlight” their work before this. Here’s their boiler info. off of their YouTube channel…

“AirPano is a not-for-profit project created by a team of Russian photo enthusiasts focused on taking high-resolution aerial panoramic photographs. Although we usually photograph from a helicopter, we also like to shoot from an airplane, a dirigible, a hot air balloon, and a radio-controlled helicopter. Today AirPano is the largest resource in the world — by geographical coverage, number of aerial photographs, and artistic and technical quality of the images — featuring 360° panoramas of the highest quality shot from a bird’s eye view.”

So true, so true, they are definitely not exaggerating. Check them out!

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

AirPano VR (YouTube Channel)
AirPano (Official Website)

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

AirPano VR (YouTube Channel)
AirPano (Official Website)

Here’s a great article about them!

A Cut Above the Rest: Stunning Drone Photographs Capture the New Seven Wonders of the World Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before (Becky Pemberton, Daily Mail UK)

Find out more about them!

AirPano (Official Site)
AirPano (YouTube)
AirPano (Facebook)

Find out more about the world…

Molecular Machines

~ mehopper

Molecular machines have been around for a while, but these little wonders are getting the public’s attention today because a trio of scientists were just awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their progress in the area. Here’s a link to a video and other resources about this neat development.

Mini Machines Win 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (Euronews)

World’s Smallest Gadgets Bag Nobel Chemistry Prize (Daniel Clery, AAAS Science Magazine)
Press Release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 (Official Press Release)
Molecular machine (Wikipedia)

File this one under “insanely cool technology” and “things that will change everything!”

Find out more about Find out more about machines, physics, science and innovation in general … …

RIP Rossetta!

~ mehopper

The “Little Mission that Could” has come to an end, but what a mission it was to watch! In honor of the success, here are some videos and articles about the many, many accomplishments.

Euronews (YouTube Channel)
Euronews (Official Website)

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (YouTube Channel)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Official Website)

Rosetta Mission Ends With Spacecraft’s Dive Into Comet (Kenneth Chang, New York Times)
Landing on a Comet, 317 Million Miles From Home (Jonathan Corum, New York Times)

Comet Landing: Organic Molecules Detected by Philae (Paul Rincon, BBC News)
Rosetta Comet: More Black Swan than Yellow Duck (Jonathan Amos, BBC News)

A Cosmic First! Rosetta Probe Goes Into Odd-Duck Orbit Around Comet (Alan Boyle, NBC News)
Rosetta Spacecraft’s First Images of Comet (Larisa Epatko, PBS News Hour)

Philae Lander’s Data Reveal Surprising Details About Comet (Reuters)

It may be a superlative that is way, way overused, but sometimes it is just the right word, and in this case it certainly applies.

Awesome!

More information…
Rosetta Spacecraft (Wikipedia)
Rosetta Mission (ESA, Official Site)

Find out more about comets …

Smart Crows

~ mehopper

Note This content is not very elaborate as well as a bit dated, but it is important for historical purposes. It was the first adventure (a.k.a. Post) on this iteration of the Cosma website way back in September 15, 2016.

Sometimes news just catches your eye.

Here’s a video got me today — enjoy!

Nature (YouTube Channel)
Nature (Official Website)

Here are some related news stories I found afterward.

Tool-Using Crow: Rare Bird Joins Clever Animal Elite (Victoria Gill, BBC News)
Scientists Have Found Another Crow That Uses Tools (Ed Yong, The Atlantic)
Discovery of Species-Wide Tool Use in the Hawaiian Crow (Nature)

Find out more about Crows@Cosma …