Two Canadian teenagers have sent a Lego man 80,000ft into the outer reaches of the Earth's atmosphere using a homemade helium balloon. The pair managed to capture the entire journey using four cameras.
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The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers from Earth. In the photograph, Earth is shown as a tiny dot against the vastness of space. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of Carl Sagan. He later used the image as the main title of his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
A solar eruption that blasted an estimated billion tonnes of material into space has been captured by Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
The eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), was accompanied by a solar flare that emerged from a sunspot on Tuesday. The solar flare is expected to reach Earth later today. It could possibly affect power grids and GPS satellites.
>> Experts downplay threat to Earth from solar flare
In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on this day in 1969, Google have added some NASA imagery to their Maps interface. Here you can view the Apollo landing sites and, if you zoom in all the way, you will discover what the moon is really made of.
The WordCount website presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it.
The word Birth is ranked 1964 (the year I was born). Spooky!
In 1514 Albrecht D?rer created an engraving called Melancholia that included a magic square. In the bottom row of his 4 X 4 magic square he placed the numbers "15" and "14" side by side to reveal the date of his engraving.
Today NASA Spirit Rover transmitted sharpest picture ever taken of surface of Mars. NASA said the "postcard" had three to four times the resolution of any other pictures but I don't know how they could miss the first sign of life on the top right corner of the picture!
Click here to see the interactive image.
