"The ISS is the largest man made object in space. Here's how it compares to other notable objects, both real and fictional, all drawn to scale."

The ISS isn't just the largest space craft ever built, it's also the world's most expensive object. According the Government Accountability Office, it cost upwards of 100 billion dollars to complete.

This Bonsai tree was planted in 1626, and survived the atomic bomb at Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, 68 years ago today. It was given to the people of the United States as a Bicentennial Gift in 1976.

Mercury's surface looks similar to our Moon's. Each is heavily cratered and made of rock. Mercury's diameter is about 4800 km, while the Moon's is slightly less at about 3500 km (compared with about 12,700 km for the Earth). But Mercury is unique in many ways. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, orbiting at about 1/3 the radius of the Earth's orbit. As Mercury slowly rotates, its surface temperature varies from an unbearably cold -180 degrees Celsius to an unbearably hot 400 degrees Celsius. The place nearest the Sun in Mercury's orbit changes slightly each orbit - a fact used by Albert Einstein to help verify the correctness of his then newly discovered theory of gravity: General Relativity. The above picture was taken by the only sp ...

This sculpture is constructed by quickly rotating a rope stretched from ceiling to floor through white light. The vibrating string becomes invisible, but the white light that’s being reflected off the rope becomes visible in an exchange that let’s our eyes see magic, as real as science can make it.

The colors change and twist, forming double-helixes that stem from the shape of the swinging rope. Some of these light sculptures are small and handheld, but many of the larger ones include touch screens that allow viewers to adjust the beams. All of them are spinning at very high speeds that result in a constantly moving body of light. ...

Scientists in Japan have built a levitating train that in recent trials hit speeds of almost 500 km/h. It's hoped that by 2027, this floating 'maglev' train will cut 55 minutes off the current travel time between Nagoya and Tokyo on today's high-speed trains.

If you fill two beakers with water, apply an electric voltage across them, and then separate them, you will form a water bridge. This phenomena was discover some 120 years ago and researchers believe it occurs because the voltage makes the water molecules line up, generating a dielectric tension that defies gravity, stopping the bridge from falling.

Understanding how water bridges form could help engineers develop better electrowetting displays. ...

The destructive power of humans.

Briton Peter Higgs (right) and Belgian ">François Englert (left) have won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, 'for something small that makes all the difference' – the Higgs boson.

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While it's hard to calculate the memory capacity of the human brain, some estimates have put the number closer to 2.5 petabytes. But this is a great rough comparison.

A water park in Kansas City is building a water slide, whose name aptly comes from the German word for "insane", that is over 164 feet tall. While nothing has been released about the speed of this slide, by our estimates, we'd say it'll be extremely terrifying.

A foot in a high stiletto. Can you see the tiny nails used to make the shoe? X-ray artist Hugh Turvey, who captured this image a few years ago, thinks the shoe looks like a torture device, what do you think?

At the very top of Venus’s mountains, below a thick layer of clouds, is snow. But not snow as we know it - with some surfaces reaching 480°C, Venus is way too hot for that. So what is this stuff? Researchers have figured out that Venus's heat is vaporising minerals called galena and bismuthinite, causing them to enter the atmosphere as a metallic mist before condensing into a shiny, metallic frost that rains down on the mountaintops.

After winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, Carlsberg gave Niels Bohr a perpetual supply of beer. The brewing company had a pipeline running from the brewery to Bohr’s house, so that he could have fresh beer on tap all the time.

This is a breathtaking 'earthrise' viewed from the surface of the moon. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter sees the Earth rise 12 times a day but is usually so busy imaging the moon's surface it doesn't get to capture the moment. This colourised image was taken on 1 February 2014.

These NASA illustrations from the 1970s depict a toroidal space colony that could support 10 000 humans.

Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon -- some of the key chemical ingredients for life -- in the powder Curiosity drilled out of a sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet last month.

This is all the water on Earth and the air in our atmosphere, to scale. That's 1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of water and 5,140 trillion tonnes of air.

After decades of dreaming and preparation, scientists have finally put the Rosetta spacecraft into orbit around a comet. And now the Rosetta is about to land!

Ever seen 'memory metal' in action? Watch this paperclip - made from an incredible shape-shifting metal called Nitinol - be bent completely out of shape and then restored instantly as it touches a simple bowl of warm water.

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This image, released by NASA a few days ago, overlays a year's worth of photographs of the Sun, revealing the migration of active regions towards the equator.

The collider will be twice the size of the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva in Switzerland. At 80 km in circumference, it could encircle the whole island of Manhattan.

An easy to understand animation of antimatter.

What do you get when you combine ultra-fine sand and the key ingredient in Silly Putty? Kinetic Sand, and this 'non-Newtonian fluid' has got some bizarre properties.

See what happens when scientists drop a bowling ball and a feather in the world's largest vacuum; for the science-illiterate viewers out there (sorry ), a vacuum is a space entirely devoid of matter (also known as an absolute vacuum). A lot of you probably already know how this one ends, but that doesn't make watching it play out any less spectacular.



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When chemistry and physics come together, it looks awesome. This is the emission spectra of the Elements - in other words, these are the colors they emit in the gaseous state.

The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 was one of the worst man-made disasters of the 20th century. An explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, which spread over much of the western USSR and Europe. During the accident itself, 31 people died, and long-term effects such as cancers and deformities are still being accounted for.

An abandoned ferris wheel and buildings reclaimed by nature - the remains of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster show what a city looks like when everyone disappears.

Colourized photo featuring some of the greatest science thinkers of our time, including Curie, Durac, Pauli, Einstein, Schrodinger and more. Can you name them all?

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Each year, over 1.2 million bolts of lightning are confined to the mouth of the Catatumbo River in Venezuela. It's the single highest concentration of lightning in the world.

I'd like to share this mind-opening video. Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was asked by a reader of TIME magazine, "What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?" This is his answer. By far, one of the best...

It's called a superhydrophobic knife and it slices water droplets easier than a butter-knife cuts through butter. As its name suggests, anything that is 'superhydrophobic' is highly hydrophobic, i.e., extremely difficult to wet. This special knife uses polyethylene - a common plastic - zinc, and copper. Its surfaces was dipped into a solution of silver nitrate and a superhydrophobic solution called HDFT for 20 seconds, and once it was washed and air-dried, it was super-great at repelling water.

Would've been better with eggs, but still very cool!

Researchers have discovered that sun exposure gives skin cells a postsunshine hangover that lasts for hours. In fact, UV rays damage skin cells for hours after you've stepped out of the sun - and even if you're in complete darkness!

Watch uranium emits radiation inside a cloud chamber. This is a small piece of uranium mineral sitting in a cloud chamber, which means you can see the process of decay and radiation emission.


Source: http://www.sciencealert.com/watch-uranium-emits-radiation-inside-cloud-chamber ...

Everything is easily explained with cartoons or a childrens book. That is why we do it for children, but apparently adults need it too, that is why we have comics and video games. I found the analogy portrayed above perfect in explaining how voltage and current relate.

Have you ever wondered what may be among the loudest sounds? Or possibly what may happen being exposed to such sounds other than bursting your eardrums? Take a look at this informative video

After a journey spanning nine years and almost 5 billion kilometres, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is closer than ever to everyone’s favourite former planet, Pluto. On 14 July 2015, New Horizons is expected to fly within 12,000 km of the lonely cosmic body - about the distance between Seattle and Sydney - zooming through the orbits of its five tiny moons.

NASA scientists have nominated eight potential new targets for a 2020 Mars mission. They're focusing on ancient river deltas and hot springs as sites that have the best chance of preserving signs of life on the red planet. New sites can still be considered, and mission engineers have yet to weigh in on the technical feasibility of landing the rover in the nominated sites.

The images, taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft from a distance of 18,000 kilometres give Pluto a "strangely Arctic look", NASA scientists said.

This mysterious goo gobbles up everything in its path. It's mesmerizing to watch and a lesson in magnetism.

Taken from a range of just 17 000 km, these images were snapped during the spacecraft's closest approach to Pluto, from its flyby of the dwarf planet in July this year. They document an 80-kilometre strip of the planet's surface, offering an intimate perspective of its cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains. The photos scan from Pluto's jagged horizon about 800 kilometres north-west of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, over the shoreline of Sputnik, and across its icy plains.



Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-05/new-pluto-close-ups-to-help-nasa-piece-together-planets-history/7004516 ...

It's hard to fathom the difficulties our ancestors had to contend with given how our world has advanced with technological sophistication over the past century. We shouldn't, however, underestimate the power of the human-mind, and how everything that was discovered in the past paved the way for the practices used today, especially those used in science.

Of the very first astronomers, the ancient Babylonian were the first to use simple arithmetic to predict the positions of celestial bodies. Evidence reveals that these astronomers, working several centuries B.C.E., also employed sophisticated geometric methods that foreshadow the development of calculus. Historians had thought such techniques did not emerge until more than 1400 years later, ...

The magic number is 42 m/s (94 mph). Using mathematical data and physical experiments, scientists say they have found the law that governs the resistance of wooden beams under stress. According to the study (link), researchers hung weights from wooden rods and pieces of pencil lead to record the amount of force needed to snap the cylinder. As one might sense, they found that for a fixed length, increasing the diameter made the rods stronger: They could bend more before breaking. This would make tall skinny trees most vulnerable, but, as the team points out, trees don’t grow taller without getting disproportionately thicker as well. By incorporating established laws of tree allometry - which explain the relationship of tree size parameters ...

Remember Ms. Frizzle (from The Magic School Bus)? Now you can be just like her with these science-themed dresses from the fashion company, Shenova. These dresses come in prints that celebrate the Fibonacci sequence, the DNA double-helix, printed circuit boards, retinal cells, the periodic table, aerospace engineering, and space-time warps. ...

A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid with properties that differ in any way from those of Newtonian fluids - it changes its viscosity almost instantly under stress, so you can punch it as a liquid and it’ll turn into a solid (watch the video below), and you can literally walk across a pool of it. On the contrary, a Newtonian fluid is defined as the perfect fluid, where its viscosity is influenced mostly by its temperature and pressure. So if you have water at a moderate temperature and pressure, it will continue to act like a liquid no matter how much you punch it. Depending on how you manipulate it, the fluid-like substance can change states from a liquid to a solid, but how this happens has remained a conundrum amongst physicists.

Scientists ...

The world’s longest glass-bottomed bridge in China's Hunan Province, which opened just over two weeks ago has been closed to the public. The Brave Men’s Bridge is 984 feet long, and spans a 590-foot deep crevasse. People attempting to make the terrifying walk across resorted to closing their eyes, crawling, and holding on to the rope guide for dear life.

According to officials, the bridge is attracting too many tourist, deeming it unsafe. The glass floor is made up of a 24 millimeter (approximately one inch) thick glass, and there’s nothing but air below.

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The tough-yet-fragile physical properties of the tadpole-shaped pieces of glass known as Prince Rupert’s drops have puzzled physicists for as long as, well, there have been physicists. Bash the head with a hammer, and a drop gets barely a scratch. But break off its thin tail, and it shatters into fine powder.

Researchers long ago realized that the strength of the drops - named for Prince Rupert of Bavaria, who presented five of them to Britain’s King Charles II in 1660 - has something to do with stresses in the glass created when a drop is made by letting a blob of molten glass fall into water, so that it cools rapidly.

Twenty years ago, a pair of researchers took high-speed video of a drop disintegrating showing that, when the tail is brok ...

Using a technique known as gravitational microlensing, Oklahoma University astrophysicists were able to detect several exoplanets within a quasar 6 billion light-years away called RX J1131-1231 (depicted in the illustration above, left). Their research shows that the planets range in size from masses as small as the Moon to ones as great as Jupiter.

The idea behind this technique is derived from the Einstein's theory of general relativity. Since light waves bend when they pass through space warped by a large gravitational presence, a planet passing in front of a star can act as a lens to focus the light, creating a temporary sharp increase in a star’s brightness, and changing the apparent position of the star. Currently, it's the only known ...