Top 10 Commander Chris Hadfield Videos from the ISS!

Commander Chris Hadfield

Colonel Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut, Mission Specialist on STS-74 who also performed multiple EVAs on STS-100, and, for a few hours longer, the well-loved commander of the International Space Station mission 35.

He has been a great inspiration for everything to do with social media (with the assistance of his son, Evan), giving those of us down on Earth some of the best peeks at what it is like to live and work in space, plus has entertained us with his guitar playing as well! He tweets constantly, sharing photos of his view from above and has made nearly 70 informative videos to quench our curiosity about day to day space living. He has captured our imagination for space travel again!

In honor of his return to Earth due on Monday, May 13, I’ve compiled his top 10 videos from his time on the ISS, as determined by views as posted on youtube by the Canadian Space Agency. - Joanne Manaster www.joannelovesscience.com

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 Released today was a revised version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

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7. Commander Hadfield’s Space Kitchen. Peanut butter plus honey on a (nearly) everlasting tortilla = space sandwich! Tortillas replace bread which can leave crumbs everywhere!

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4. Sleeping In Space. How do you keep from floating around while in dreamland? You will be glad to learn you don’t need a pillow or mattress for a good night’s sleep in zero gravity!

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1. By far the most popular video was Wringing out Water on the ISS-For Science!. Without gravity, surface tension wins!

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My personal favorite: Commander Hadefield duet w/ The Bare Naked Ladies from the ISS

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Previous post about the ISS

The 1987 voyage of a barge loaded with New York garbage became a sensational fiasco, but it ended up fueling the modern recycling movement.

Dan Rather dubbed it “the most watched load of garbage in the memory of Man.” Johnny Carson joked about it in his nightly comedy routine. It grabbed headlines around the world. But for all the attention, Americans have never heard the full story of the Mobro garbage barge (a.k.a., “the gar-barge,” “the Flying Dutchman of Trash,” “the barge to nowhere,” “the floating hot potato.”) If you weren’t around in 1987 — or just need a reminder — the Mobro carried six million pounds of New York garbage, got turned away from its destination in North Carolina, and spent the next five months adrift – rejected by six states and three foreign countries.

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The New York Times Co. Monday announced a video collaboration with Retro Report, which “Fact-Checks Yesterday’s News,” in the words of a Times release. The videos will run on the Times’ Booming blog.

Future reports will take on crack babies — “we learn that warnings in the 1980s about these children being damaged for life were not supported by the research of the time or by more recent studies,” Michael Winerip writes — and the Tawana Brawley story.

Retro Report says it combines “documentary techniques with shoe-leather reporting” because “the first draft of history can be wrong.”

When news organizations fail to invest the time and money required to correct the record or provide context around what really happened, myth can replace truth. The results are policy decisions and cultural trends built on error, misunderstanding or flat-out lies. via Poynter

A Butler Well Served by This Election

For more than three decades Eugene Allen worked in the White House, a black man unknown to the headlines. During some of those years, harsh segregation laws lay upon the land.

He trekked home every night, his wife, Helene, keeping him out of her kitchen.  At the White House, he worked closer to the dirty dishes than to the large desk in the Oval Office. Helene didn’t care; she just beamed with pride.  President Truman called him Gene.  President Ford liked to talk golf with him.  He saw eight presidential administrations come and go, often working six days a week. “I never missed a day of work,” Allen says.  His is a story from the back pages of history. A figure in the tiniest of print. The man in the kitchen.  He was there while America’s racial history was being remade: Brown v. Board of Education, the Little Rock school crisis, the 1963 March on Washington, the cities burning, the civil rights bills, the assassinations.

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The movie’s story is inspired by Wil Haygood’s Washington Post article about a black man who served as White House butler to eight presidents over three decades.

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White House Butler Eugene Allen witnesses swearing in.  Eugene Allen, who worked for more than three decades as a White House butler — some of those years during an era of brutal segregation when he often had to use back doors despite his employer’s rarefied address — sat in the shadow of the Capitol dome yesterday and watched Barack Obama become the first African American president of the United States.

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In the end, Eugene Allen, a White House butler who lived a life behind the scenes of history, was the subject of wide acclaim.  Several hundred people packed a funeral service Thursday at Greater First Baptist Church on 13th Street NW to celebrate Allen’s life and the national narrative he embodied. -Will Haygood

Insect eye-inspired camera captures wide field of view with no distortion

U.S. Dept. of Defense/Darpa Project

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By mimicking the bulging, bowl-shaped eyes possessed by dragonflies, praying mantises, houseflies and other insects, a team of researchers that includes a University of Colorado Boulder engineer has built an experimental digital camera that can take exceptionally wide-angle photos without distorting the image.

“The most important and most revolutionizing part of this camera is to bend electronics onto a curved surface,” said Jianliang Xiao, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at CU-Boulder and co-lead author of the study. “Electronics are all made of silicon, mostly, and silicon is very brittle, so you can’t deform the silicon. Here, by using stretchable electronics we can deform the system; we can put it onto a curved surface.”

Saturn Hurricane: Space Probe Spies Massive Storm At Planet’s North Pole (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

NASA Cassini Solstice Mission: Report

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn’s north pole.  In high-resolution pictures and video, scientists see the hurricane’s eye is about 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Thin, bright clouds at the outer edge of the hurricane are traveling 330 mph (150 meters per second). The hurricane swirls inside a large, mysterious, six-sided weather pattern known as the hexagon.

Interactive model of Cassini

NASA Saturn homepage

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On Monday, NASA released stunning photos and video of a massive storm that researchers believe has been swirling at high speed around Saturn’s north pole for years.  Called a “Saturn hurricane,” the huge vortex was first detected when the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft entered orbit around the planet in 2004, NASA said.  Cassini – an unmanned probe funded by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency — had to wait years for Saturn’s north pole to be lit up by the sun before it could photograph the storm, NASA said. The spacecraft also had to change its orbit to get a clear view of the area, a process that required years of planning.

The Brazen Bibliophiles of Timbuktu: How a team of sneaky librarians duped Al Qaeda

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One afternoon in March, I walked through Timbuktu’s Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Studies and Islamic Research, stepping around shards of broken glass. Until last year, the modern concrete building with its Moorish-inspired screens and light-filled courtyard was a haven for scholars drawn by the city’s unparalleled collection of medieval manuscripts.

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This vision of a philosophical, scientific Islam means little to the Al Qaeda–linked Islamist group Ansar Dine, which for most of last year ruled Timbuktu through terror, cutting off the hands of thieves, flogging women judged to be dressed immodestly, and destroying centuries-old tombs of local saints.

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Also: El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Palatial Theater Now a Beautiful Bookstore

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With each incarnation since its inception in 1919—first as a performing arts theater, then as a cinema, and now as a bookstore—the Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires, Argentina, has proven itself befitting of its majestic title. Having retained its original frescoed ceilings, ornate theater boxes, elegant rounded balconies, detailed trimmings, and plush red stage curtains, the interior of the building remains as stunning today as when it was first envisioned by architects Peró and Torres Armengol.

Conflict Kitchen “only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict”

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“We are trying to be provocative in the best use of that term.” –Jon Rubin

You don’t normally think of Pittsburgh as the hub of foreign policy discussion. But 245 miles from DC diplomats, 370 miles from the United Nations, Conflict Kitchen serves up delicious ethnic food and talking points on its wrappers.

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Conflict Kitchen, an aptly named take-out restaurant that “only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict,” has been through four distinct iterations: Since opening in 2010, it’s morphed from Iranian to Afghan to Venezuelan to Cuban. Now, in its new location in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Plaza, Conflict Kitchen is back to serving up Persian dishes.

A Fitting End to the Horrible Harlem Shake Meme

And so it is fitting that this Harlem Shake video of all the Harlem Shake should end the way you wished all the others would. Oh, and don’t feel bad about laughing. For one thing, he walked away with “only a couple of blisters,” according to video’s uploader. For another thing, this video is from Germany, where the word Schadenfreude was invented.

Meet THE Kid In THE Jackie Robinson Photo (Updated: Make That 'Six Photos')

Reblogged from Baseball Nerd:

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"Imagine," Eddie Dweck muses as he looks at The Photograph, "a kid going to a ballgame dressed in a suit and tie!"

You probably don't know Eddie Dweck, but you've probably seen him before. Because of The Photograph he has a cameo role in history. But history is a defiant and elusive thing. It will tell you that The Photograph Eddie Dweck is ruminating on is one of the iconic images of Jackie Robinson just before he stepped out of that Ebbets Field dugout and into history 66 years ago today.

Read more… 2,140 more words

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......This is where it would’ve ended, a story-and-a-half as it was. But then last Monday, Eddie Dweck phoned me and in his voice I could hear a touch of the excitement that must have been felt by his 12-year old self. “Keith, there’s another photograph!”  Eddie was in last Sunday’s New York Times. 

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Oh, for crying out loud! The New York Times Magazine review of the new Jackie Robinson movie “42″ showed another photograph from April 11, 1947. Sure enough, almost dead center,same suit, same sweater, but this time just above and to the left of the beaming Robinson shaking hands with the Dodgers’ acting manager Clyde Sukeforth, there,again, is Eddie Dweck.  “I hadn’t seen that one before!” Apparently The Times had never printed it before, either. But there was more. “I found Bobby Salzberg! He’s next to me, in the bow tie!”   Seeing Bobby also rattled something loose in Dweck’s memory. “Now I know where my cousin Eddie was. It was Passover. He was at our seats, protecting the food! And protecting the seats, for that matter.”  Too bizarre for words, no? The unexpected thrill of getting to see yourself in a new photo in your local newspaper at age 12 in 1947, and then the again unexpected thrill of getting to see yourself in a new photo in your local newspaper at age 78 in 2013 – with both photographs from the same event?  It gets stranger still......

The White House Beast

When Bill Clinton tried to chain up the White House press corps, the correspondents rebelled. Their pointed reports contributed to the president’s low approval ratings and forced him to kick George Stephanopoulos upstairs and bring in spinmaster David Gergen. But can the expert media tamer keep the snarling beast at bay? Jacob Weisberg gets in the cage with ABC’s Brit Hume, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, The Washington Post’s Ann Devroy, The New York Times’s Gwen Ifill, U.P.I.’s Helen Thomas, and the rest. via Vanity Fair