The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 has made some of its closest approaches to asteroid Ryugu yet, returning breathtaking images. Here you can see the an image of the asteroid from just six kilometers (3.72 miles) away. One pixel in the image is around 60 centimeters (1.9 feet).
Nuclear weapons are already scary enough, but when you dig deeper and find out how powerful the weapons truly are, they get even more terrifying. The weapons we’ve built after the first atomic bombs are so strong that you can basically use Hiroshima as a unit of measurement. The largest nuclear explosion in human…
I’m at a loss for words. This project and accompanying short film, To Scale: The Solar System by Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh, is so incredibly awe-inspiring and so beautifully executed, that it will make me dream of the cosmos tonight (maybe every night). The premise is simple: to build a solar system model to…
The speed of light is fast, but the solar system is very, very big. This video explores the intersection of scales by travelling through an idealized version of our solar system at the speed of light, starting at the surface of the sun and heading to Jupiter over 45 minutes.
In the first week of introductory geology, we explored rock types, learned that not all rocks are the same, and tackled the mysteries of scale. While not always elegantly executed, my experiment in embracing active learning appears to be leaving my students excited and bemused.
Last night, Rosetta made the first of three burns to settle into orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. But, just how big is that lump of dirty snow? It is taller than Mount Fuji, big enough to hide a Borg Cube, and it would make a cozy home for a space slug.
Including scale in photographs is important for them to hold scientific value. When you're a geoscientist taking field-photos, humans make remarkably good scale objects. Enter palaeontologists, with their constant need to point out how much larger dinosaurs are than their research topics.
When faced with a scene in real life, it seems obvious that this is a massive landscape, or a microscopic view under extreme magnification. But when you capture that view and place it out of context, the difference between a pebble and a boulder is quickly lost.
To a first-order approximation, the universe is empty. Josh Worth gets it. He built a map titled, If the Moon Was Only 1 Pixel, where, unlike most maps of the solar system, planet-sizes and the distances between planets are kept to the same scale.
We've seen this comparison made before, albeit never as lucidly as this. Behold: major countries of the world, overlaid atop an outline of the positively giant African continent.
One thing infographics are really good for is providing a sense of scale. Certain numbers are just too big to really comprehend, and can also be made to sound bigger or smaller than they actually are depending on how they're presented. As Shark Week comes to a close, it seems apt to take shark finning as an example.
Though it seems iterative, Withings new Smart Body Analyzer WS-50 adds additional features like heart rate and air quality monitoring. Your weight, body fat and pulse are then transmitted over Wi-Fi/Bluetooth to the Withings Health Mate app (iOS, Android).
It's the oldest Hollywood trick: Take a picture of something small and make it look giant. But that doesn't mean it's any less mind-bending when a Hot Wheels toy looks like a totally drivable, $1 million F1 racer.
Apparently a guy in Salt Lake City named Valter had no takers on his original price of $150 for a 1/3 replica TIE Fighter, because he's lowered the price to a cool zero dollars. So if you're in Salt Lake City, call Valter ASAP to get something totally amazing for absolutely no money.
"Have the coolest toy in your neighborhood!" this Craigslist ad says. "This TIE Fighter looks like shit!" says Sam Biddle. "It's way better than the TIE Fighter I built," replies Brian Barrett. "Let's buy it!" I say. $150? Come on!
Here's a new weight loss tool that uses public humiliation to force you to lose weight. Available from Hammacher Schlemmer, the projection scale will display your current weight on the wall ... where everyone can see it.
A six-foot tall giraffe was born at the Virginia Zoo in Norfolk and in order to get all her measurables (height, weight) the zoo hilariously had a beefy man carry the baby zoo on a scale. It seems so calm!
We're lucky, all things considered, to have as gorgeous and unobtrusive a dance partner as the moon. But what if the other planets in the solar system were in its place, orbiting a mere 380,000km from Earth? Terrifying beauty.
What can you fit in a huge 7676 x 630-pixel image? One hundred characters created by Pixar drawn to scale by Chilean designer Juan Pablo Bravo, from Luxo Jr. to Mr. Incredible to Up! protagonist Carl Fredricksen. Zoom in.
With more tablets being announced each day, there's a lot of pressure on market entrants to stand out. A custom user interface is a great way to do that! The eviGroup Paddle's stop-the-ride-I-wanna-get-off Scale UI, less so. See for yourself:
