Last year, Shanee Stopnitzky dropped her doctoral studies in marine biology for another soggy pursuit: submarines!
Picking up a pair of used submarines (apparently they're not just for the Canadian Navy anymore), she and a team of volunteer enthusiasts set to repairing, upgrading and making the wee underwater vessels the bad ass exploratory monsters they were always meant to be.
You read that headline right: the ISS has been bopping around our planet for two long decades. How do you celebrate one of the greatest collaborative scientific undertakings in human history? If you're the European Space Agency, you plop out the longest spacebound timelapse video ever taken for the world to enjoy. Read the rest
Very quickly. Before it, and you, freeze.
On Cyprien Verseux's Twitter account, wonderful snapshots of fun with food on the bleak, frozen ice sheets of Antarctica. Read the rest
Life on the Rocks is a fascinating account of a scientific expedition to a craggy archipelago off Brazil, where conditions may unlock secrets about possible life forms on Europa, Enceladus, and other nearby celestial bodies. Read the rest
Australia's Sampling the Abyss project went 2.5 miles underwater 62 miles off the east coast of the continent, netting a treasure trove of delightful creatures, including a peanut worm that in Rob Zugaro's photo looks a lot like a... Read the rest
One of the weirdest places in Antarctica is Blood Falls, a five-story cascade of blood-red liquid pouring from Taylor Glacier. Researchers finally traced its source: a saltwater lake millions of years old trapped under the glacier. Read the rest
Lucy Bellwood, an adventure cartoonist of the beloved (to me, at least) ligne claire school of illustration, created this webcomic about spending time aboard the R/V Falkor, "a state-of-the-art oceanographic research vessel." It's available as a PDF, or get read it here.
E/V Nautilus explores the ocean, sharing highlights of their video captures, like this adorable googly-eyed stubby squid seen off the coast of California. Read the rest
In 1912, Herbert Ponting captured remarkable film and images of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition. Amateurs and pros have all worked to restore and colorize Ponting's work. Read the rest
Martin Critchley shot this lovely ice cave footage, which proved so popular he released an extended cut. Read the rest
While we were busy enjoying the spectacular images of Pluto, ESA's Rosetta camera released this image of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Read the rest
The Antarctic Heritage Trust of New Zealand announced (PDF) that it had discovered a century-old box of photographic negatives from Captain Scott's last expedition base at Cape Evans, depicting Ernest Shackleton's 1914-1917 Ross Sea Party. The mouldy cellulose nitrate negs were among 10,000 artifacts recovered from Scott's Cape Evans hut, and were "clumped together." The negs were painstakingly restored and the photos have been published. They're damaged but remarkable, and no one knows who took them. (via /.) Read the rest
What's better than new shots of Mount St. Helens? How about some new photos of the Ross Sea Party — a group of men who traveled to Antarctica to set up supply depots for Ernest Shackleton in 1914 and ended up stranded until 1917 when Shackleton's ship was destroyed by ice and their own ship broke free and drifted off without them in it.
The photo above shows the team's chief scientist Alexander Stevens on the deck of the Aurora, the ship that left without its crew. The photos were found frozen in ice in a hut at Cape Evans. (This is not the same hut where researchers found a bottle of whiskey left by the Shackleton team a few years ago, that was at Cape Royds.) The New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust restored the negatives and developed the photos. You can see all of the images (as well as some really amazing pictures of the negatives, themselves) at their website. Read the rest
Call it Schrödinger's space probe: Voyager I may or may not have left our Solar System. Some of the information the probe has collected suggests that it's slipped the surly bonds of the Sun, while other incoming data leaves scientists believing it hasn't yet crossed that boundary. Both Xeni and I have written about this in the last couple years. At Nature, Alexandra Witze explains why we probably won't know exactly when Voyager leaves the Solar System. Instead, we'll only figure it out when the probe is well past the System limits sign. Read the rest
I'd never seen this NASA photo of Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan before. It was taken after one of his three moonwalks with crewmate Harrison Schmitt, though you could be forgiven for assuming that Cernan just came in from a shift at the coal mine rather than a jaunt across the surface of the Moon.
At the Life, Unbounded blog, Caleb Scharf writes about the Moon dust you can see clinging to Cernan, describing it as sticky, abrasive, and gunpowder-scented. It's also not something we totally understand yet — at least, we still have a lot to learn about how Moon dust behaves on the Moon. On September 6, NASA is launching a satellite to study this very phenomenon. One thing it might figure out: Whether electrically charged particles of Moon dust might form an extremely thin and vanishingly temporary "atmosphere" that hovers and falls over the Moon's surface. Read the rest
