Man to fly from Robben Island to Cape Town using helium balloons
South Africa’s Matt Silver-Vallance floats above the sea using helium filled balloons from the airfield of Robben Island across the Atlantic Ocean in Cape Town April 6, 2013. Vallance made the 7 km flight to raise funds and awareness for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital. Mandela left hospital on Saturday after more than a week of treatment of pneumonia that raised global concern about the health of the 94-year-old anti-apartheid leader.
“Deji Olukotun’s first novel Nigerians in Space roves across the diaspora, moving easily among the US, Nigeria and South Africa…a deft mingling of satirical humor, Noirish twists…and a keen-eyed yet accessible take on cultural displacement in contemporary times.” Olufemi Terry, winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing
(Source: ricochetbooks.com)
Sleeping in Space
It’s bedtime on the ISS. CSA Astronaut Chris Hadfield shows us how astronauts sleep in space.
Credit: Canadian Space Agency/NASA
(Source: h2origins)
Experience the Apollo 11 moon landing in real time!
This is a stunning website about the moon landing. Really impressive and worth clicking through.
NASA’s Donald Pettit
Donald Pettit, the astronaut who takes all the great time lapse videos and photos of Earth from the ISS, explains how and why he does it. (via PetaPixel)
Great track. I guess Falcons are a Canadian-American duo.
(via hueywasright)
(Source: cameos)
Help Neal Stephenson Engineer the Weird and Create a New World of Sci-Fi
Last week Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, where I serve as director, officially launched the Hieroglyph Project, an effort to get science fiction writers talking with scientists and engineers about the future. (Disclosure: Future Tense is a partnership of ASU, Slate, and the New America Foundation). The goal is to break out of our dystopian rut and get some ambitious new ideas on the table, and we need your help to do it.
Sci-fi great Neal Stephenson founded Hieroglyph with the idea that we need more optimistic visions of the future—visions that are still grounded in real science and technology. As Stephenson has pointed out, a good science fiction story can save us from hundreds of hours of meetings and PowerPoint presentations by immediately getting everyone on the same page about a potential breakthrough.
This was four years ago. I’d love to see what this student is up to today!
My little nerdy heart has grown three book-sizes today.
(via tanuki-in-a-nutshell)
