Futuristic GUI

Now, I have to admit I have have something of a penchant for sci-fi movies and always become distracted the plot and often jealous of the cool interfaces the characters in these movies get to use. So you'll understand that I was pretty excited when I stumbled across a tumblr created by a Czech person (I don't know who they are, very mysterious) who shares this interest in futuristic graphical user interfaces and has gone through the trouble of collecting the best examples and turning them into gifs. I've shown my favourites from the collection below:













Check out the whole of this awesome collection over at Visual Punker

A map of the universe

A map of the universe by René Descartes from Principia philosophiae, 1644, one of many fascinating depictions in the visual history of mapping the cosmos.

Read more over on Brain Pickings.

Will Wright makes toys that make worlds

In a friendly, high-speed presentation, Will Wright demos his newest game, Spore, which promises to dazzle users even more than his previous masterpieces.

Star Size Comparison

How do you describe planetary and star size to someone? I love this video for succeeding in showing the viewer the mega-scales and proportions that exist in space.

Project Management, the Darth Vader Method

Time-lapse of the night sky with the Very Large Telescope

The Very Large Telescope (VLT) in an array of four telescopes operated by European Southern Observatory, and together the array "can achieve an angular resolution of around 1 milliarcsecond, meaning it could distinguish the gap between the headlights of a car located on the Moon."

It's busy in orbit

Since the advent of the space-age over five decades ago, more than thirty-five thousand man-made objects have been cataloged by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network. Nearly twenty-thousand of those objects remain in orbit today, ninety-four percent of which are non-functioning orbital debris. These figures do not include the hundreds-of-thousands of objects too small to be cataloged, but still large enough to pose a threat to approximately nine-hundred operational satellites in orbit around the Earth. In addition, collisions between debris objects could potentially lead to a continuously growing debris population, thus increasing the risk to operational satellites.




via SmartPlanet and Popsci