Luke Geissbühler and sons (“the Brooklyn Space Program”) launch a Go Pro Hero HD video camera (with iPhone for geo-location) into space attached to a weather balloon. The project was FAA-approved and the camera safely retrieved after falling the 100,000 feet back to Earth. Close to half a million views over the past fortnight. (via John August)
Hiroshi Sugimoto is showing prints from his latest series in progress, Lightning Fields, at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Each image is created by applying an electrical charge from a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator directly onto the negative. I find them truly stunning.
A series of posters for a lecture by New Zealand ecological architect Frans Kammermans. Designed by Avraham Cornfeld and Shir Chulev.
Beautiful local work.
Richard Buckminster Fuller portrait by Todd St. John. (via Peak Energy)
I’m standing next to a Croatian-born American genius in a half-empty office in Watertown, Massachusetts, and I’m about to be fried to a crisp. Or I’m about to witness the greatest advance in electrical science in a hundred years. Maybe both.
— Paul Hochman writes for Fast Company about the coming revolution in wireless electricity, and the competing approaches of the various players. (via David Kaneda)
Astronaut Stephen Robinson rides the 17-meter-long Canadarm2 during the STS-114 mission of the space shuttle Discovery to the ISS in August of 2005. The Big Picture celebrates the international space station’s tenth anniversary.
Shapeways
Look out Ponoko, this spinoff from Philips Research is providing mail-order rapid prototypes using 3D polymer printers. They deliver within 10 days of ordering, with prices typically between $50 and $150. (via Tina T.H. Lee)
Yes my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable… When the deposits of coal are exhausted we shall heat and warm ourselves with water. Water will be the coal of the future.
— Jules Verne’s novel The Mysterious Island (1874–5) was the genesis of the hydrogen economy, but aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin dispels the science in a long, technical and fascinating article for The New Atlantis, preferring ethanol and methanol as viable alternatives to the “hydrogen hoax”. (via Jack Shedd)
All the so-called clean development mechanisms authorized by the Kyoto Protocol, designed to keep 175 million tons of CO₂ out of the atmosphere by 2012, will slow the rise of carbon emissions by … 6.5 days. Depressed yet?
— Spencer Reiss suggests in the June 2008 edition of Wired magazine that carbon offsets are the environmental version of subprime mortgages.
