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Best school assembly ever: A lifelike dinosaur puppet
1Boingboing recently posted a video showing a life-like dinosaur puppet, controlled by a masterful puppeteer, that brought delight and surprise to a group of Australian school children. I can only imagine my daughters hiding in fear as this thing lunged and roared at them! What’s so amazing is that the incredible realism of the puppet and its movements almost completely mask the puppetmaster’s legs sticking out of the costume.
If the kids weren’t already enthralled with the subject of paleontology, I’m sure they are now!
Finally we can stare right at the sun!
02 years ago
Earlier this week, NASA announced their STEREO project to map the entire sun in 3D. STEREO employs two orbiting satellites – “Ahead” and “Behind” – to map the surface of the sun in real-time. This is intended to provide early warnings in the event of solar flares and other such occurrences that tend to disrupt communications.
By combining images from NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) Ahead and Behind spacecraft, together with images from NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) satellite, a complete map of the solar globe can be formed. Previous to the STEREO mission, astronomers could only see the side of the Sun facing Earth, and had little knowledge of what happened to solar features after they rotated out of view.
Following this, space.com posted an amazing image of a solar filament (shown here) that scientists estimate stretches across nearly 700,000 km of the sun’s surface.
