The Last Question
Published in 1956, the Last Question is one of Asimov’s most acclaimed short stories.
You can read it in full here.
A hurricane on Saturn
NASA Cassini spacecraft provided us with the first close-up, visible-light views of a gigantic hurricane around Saturn’s north pole. Truly stunning.
The spinning vortex of Saturn’s north polar storm resembles a deep red rose of giant proportions surrounded by green foliage in this false-color image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
The north pole of Saturn, in the fresh light of spring, is revealed in this color image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
This spectacular, vertigo inducing, false-color image from NASA’s Cassini mission highlights the storms at Saturn’s north pole. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
Via NASA
Grasshopper – next generation space flight
This revolutionary new design for a rocket that is able to perform multiple take-offs and landings will change space exploration forever. This means that rockets can now be used multiple times instead of shedding their segments once at every stage of leaving the orbit.
SpaceX’s Grasshopper flies 820 feet, tripling its March 7th leap. Grasshopper is a 10-story Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) vehicle that SpaceX has designed to test the technologies needed to return a rocket back to Earth intact. While most rockets are designed to burn up in the atmosphere during reentry, SpaceX’s rockets are being designed to return to the launch pad for a vertical landing.
Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination
TV Buddha by Nam June Paik
Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meani ngs in symbolic terms, and the reordering of nature–the qualities of space and time–in new perceptual and material form.
Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain. But art and technology are not separate realms walled off from each other. Art employs techne, but for its own ends. Techne, too, is a form of art that bridges culture and social structure, and in the process reshapes both.