Who ever was behind the latest commercial in Sony’s “Long Live Play” advertising campaign deserves a HUGE raise. I don’t care which platform or format you prefer. If you’re a gamer, you’ll appreciate this.

[PlayStation Blog]

The International Space Station is privy to many a gorgeous view of this big blue marble we live on, but this composite video of an evening on the ISS reinvents jaw-dropping.

In this video, James Drake took 600 photos from NASA's Gateway to Astronaut Photography on Earth and combined them together into a 62-second reel. Here's what you're looking at:

This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.

[Via Universe Today]

New high-speed videos show that a hot sphere falls through liquid more than twice as fast as a cold sphere, a finding that may someday help ease high-speed submarines through the sea.

The spheres can move faster thanks to the same phenomenon that makes water droplets skate across a frying pan, known as the Leidenfrost effect. A thin layer of vapor forms beneath the water droplet and protects it from evaporating quickly, allowing it to levitate and skitter about freely.

It turns out the effect works just as well in reverse. An international team of physicists showed that heating a sphere to the point where the Leidenfrost effect takes over cuts the drag the sphere experiences in free fall by 85 percent.

The researchers, led by Ivan Vakarelski of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, heated a steel sphere to 482 degrees Fahrenheit and magnetically suspended it in a special liquid with a low boiling point.

The sphere immediately formed a layer of vapor about 200 micrometers thick, which rippled and bubbled around it. But when the sphere got too cool, around 266 degrees Fahrenheit, the protective layer dissolved in a dramatic burst of bubbles (around 35 seconds in the video above).

To test whether that layer actually lubricates the sphere’s movement, the researchers sank balls heated to between 77 and 536 degrees Fahrenheit. Balls that were hot enough for Leidenfrost fell at a rate of about 11.5 feet per second, more than two and a half times as fast as the coolest spheres (video below).

The results could help develop new energy-saving technologies for high-speed underwater vehicles, the researchers write.

Videos: Ivan Vakarelski/Physical Review Letters

Citation: “Drag Reduction by Leidenfrost Vapor Layers.” Ivan U. Vakarelski, Jeremy O. Marston, Derek Y. C. Chan, and Sigurdur T. Thoroddsen. Physical Review Letters, Vol 106, Issue 21, May 23, 2011. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.214501.

See Also:

• Weird Clouds Look Even Better From Space
• Mini Plasma Thruster Way Better Than Rockets
• Hacked Wiimote Makes Super Scientific Sensor
• Weird, Rare Clouds and the Physics Behind Them

Fans of Valve video games sure love making hyper-detailed fan movies. The latest one, Outside Aperture, tells the hidden history of what happened after the first Portal. It's not canonical, but it's cute.

Here's the description of Outside Aperture from the filmmaker Eisen Feuer:

With the fate of the main character of the game, Chell, left up in the air at the end of the game, we took the liberty of creating a fan film under the assumption that Chell lived to escape the Aperture Science Laboratories, and must now face life out in the real world. She finds an abandoned house, still stocked with food, and begins a new life with her trusty Portal Gun at her side.

Hat tip to Dan!

Continue reading Bookeen shows off FMV on a standard E Ink Pearl display (video)

Bookeen shows off FMV on a standard E Ink Pearl display (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Feb 2011 21:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

[Video Link] Is space awesome? Yes, explains the voice of Carl Sagan in this video produced as a sort of homage to NASA *by a fan* — this is not an official NASA video.

Remixer/director/NASA fanboy Reid Gower, the Random Internet Gentleman behind this video provides full credits for sources and inspirations here, and explains,

I got frustrated with NASA and made this video. NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks. Seriously. None of their brilliant scientists appear to know how to connect with the social media crowd, which is now more important than ever. In fact, NASA is an institution whose funding directly depends on how the public views them.

In NASA's defense, they have embraced social media. I guess my point is that they don't fully understand how to best use it. In all of their brilliance, NASA seems to have forgotten to share their hopes and dreams in a way the public can relate to, leaving one of humanity's grandest projects with terrible PR and massive funding cuts.

Mr. Gower's YouTube channel is here.

(thanks, Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides!)

Continue reading Adobe shows off plenoptic lenses that let you refocus an image after it's taken (video)

Adobe shows off plenoptic lenses that let you refocus an image after it's taken (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Sep 2010 14:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• Link (via Kotaku)

• Link
• Thomas Hawk’s photos on Flickr
• Thomas Hawk’s photos on Zooomr
• I’d also recommend checking out Thomas’ blog.

Supported file container formats are, amongst others, AVI, MPG, MOV, WMV, ASF, FLV, Matroska and MP4. Supported codecs are amongst others, MPEG-1\2\4 (XVid, DivX, etc.), Windows Media Audio\Video. MP3, OGG Vorbis, H264, and On2 VP5\6. For a full list of supported container, audio and video formats, see http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC20

• Link (via Lifehacker)