Terrifyingly Accurate

RoboAction

Painting series by Dragan Ilić features abstracted mark-making using an industrial robot, sometimes carrying and guiding the artist himself:

The artist constantly transposes into the third dimension his decade’s long-running conceptual practice based on the usage of pencils as the basic draftsman’s tool, starting primarily with the media of performance art, installation and sculpture in extended field. Gradually, over the years, his expressive and mechanical compositions have become even more advanced with the development of modules, diverse in shape and sizes, devices designed for the task of mounting and holding his drawing tools, which has led ultimately to the construction of an appropriate drawing machine. Construed for non-artistic purposes, these robots have been reshaped into special draftsmanship implements with which the author is capable of processing his ideas at far greater speed and with considerably greater precision. The metamorphosis of the artistic work is positioned at a point where human and machine activity intersects, resulting in an interaction that is essentially based on the need to transcend the limitations of the human body. 

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Pretty sure that's a tank

Tinspider’s first steps at the Exploratorium! 🕷

science news: another incredibly smart and driven woman who discovered really important things just died without receiving recognition in her lifetime for any of her groundbreaking crucial work after decades of brutally unfair sexism click through for even more in depth accounts of the monstrous amount of sexist bullshit she had to put up with every single day of her goddamn life

science news: girls today are hesitant to go into STEM fields for some reason

Me thinks there's something under the Rockies

Temperatures at a depth of 10 km beneath the contiguous United States

It’s Friday...Come Space Out with Us

It’s Friday…which seems like a great excuse to take a look at some awesome images from space.

First, let’s start with our home planet: Earth.

This view of the entire sunlit side of Earth was taken from one million miles away…yes, one MILLION! Our EPIC camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory captured this image in July 2015 and the picture was generated by combining three separate images to create a photographic-quality image.

Next, let’s venture out 4,000 light-years from Earth.

This image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is not only stunning…but shows the colorful “last hurrah” of a star like our sun. This star is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, which formed a cocoon around the star’s remaining core. Our sun will eventually burn out and shroud itself with stellar debris…but not for another 5 billion years.

The material expelled by the star glows with different colors depending on its composition, its density and how close it is to the hot central star. Blue samples helium; blue-green oxygen, and red nitrogen and hydrogen.

Want to see some rocks on Mars?

Here’s an image of the layered geologic past of Mars revealed in stunning detail. This color image was returned by our Curiosity Mars rover, which is currently “roving” around the Red Planet, exploring the “Murray Buttes” region.

In this region, Curiosity is investigating how and when the habitable ancient conditions known from the mission’s earlier findings evolved into conditions drier and less favorable for life.

Did you know there are people currently living and working in space?

Right now, three people from three different countries are living and working 250 miles above Earth on the International Space Station. While there, they are performing important experiments that will help us back here on Earth, and with future exploration to deep space.

This image, taken by NASA astronaut Kate Rubins shows the stunning moonrise over Earth from the perspective of the space station.

Lastly, let’s venture over to someplace REALLY hot…our sun.

The sun is the center of our solar system, and makes up 99.8% of the mass of the entire solar system…so it’s pretty huge. Since the sun is a star, it does not have a solid surface, but is a ball of gas held together by its own gravity. The temperature at the sun’s core is about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius)…so HOT!

This awesome visualization appears to show the sun spinning, as if stuck on a pinwheel. It is actually the spacecraft, SDO, that did the spinning though. Engineers instructed our Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to roll 360 degrees on one axis, during this seven-hour maneuver, the spacecraft took an image every 12 seconds.

This maneuver happens twice a year to help SDO’s imager instrument to take precise measurements of the solar limb (the outer edge of the sun as seen by SDO).

Thanks for spacing out with us…you may now resume your Friday. 

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

#Yes

Charlie Rose interviews…a robot?

What happens when Charlie Rose attempts to interview a robot named "Sophia" for his 60 Minutes report on artificial intelligence

“Sophia means wisdom,” Hanson explains, “and she is intended to evolve eventually to human-level wisdom and beyond.”

She still has a long way to go.

“Sometimes she can figure things out in a way that’s sort of spooky and human-like,” Hanson says. “And other ways, she just doesn’t get it.”

During Sophia’s interview, Rose asks her if she’s been programmed, but she responds only with silence. At times, her replies were nonsensical. But at other moments 60 Minutes producers were surprised by her ability to converse with one of the great conversationalists in journalism.

The wood siding could age badly unless it's well-treated, but otherwise cool.