Françoise Tellier-Loumagne. 

Funfetti marshmallow popcorn treats

Bots you can’t ignore

Bite-sized bots at Vanderbilt University, drumming bots at Georgia Tech, and touchy-feely bots at UCLA… it’s all about ‪‎National Robotics Week‬ at Science360 Radio this weekend. Download the Science360 Radio app to hear our featured podcasts about cutting edge robotics‬ research.

Above: Founding director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology Gil Weinberg created a robotic drumming prosthesis with motors that power two drumsticks. The first stick is controlled physically by the musician’s arms and electronically by his muscles. The other stick on the prosthesis actually “listens” to the music and plays on its own.  Credit: Rob Felt/Georgia Tech Story: http://www.news.gatech.edu/2014/03/05/robotic-prosthesis-turns-drummer-three-armed-cyborg

Below:  Research engineers and students in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Biomechatronics Lab are designing artificial limbs to be more sensational, with the emphasis on sensation. The team, led by mechanical engineer Veronica Santos, is constructing a language of touch that both a computer and a human can understand.  Credit: National Science Foundation Video: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/robotictouch.jsp

Flora and Sylva

These vibrant botanical illustrations are hand-colored lithographs from volume 4 of Asa Strong’s  4-volume work The American Flora, published in New York by Green & Spencer between 1850 and 1853, with illustrations by Edwin Whitefield.  The set, part of the donation of important botanical and horticultural books from Lynde Bradley Uihlein, includes nearly 200 hand-colored lithographic plates with extensive taxonomic descriptions for the propagation, culture, and medical use of 444 plants.

View more posts from this set.

View other posts from the Uihlein donation.

View more posts from our Flora and Sylva series.

William Hundley.

Casa del Mar

Ahrix - Nova.

Year: 2015.

Genre: Electro House.

Mini Creme Brulee Doughnuts

Mochi chocolate covered strawberries

Fun Facts About Mars

Mars is a cold desert world, and is the fourth planet from the sun. It is half the diameter of Earth and has the same amount of dry land. Like Earth, Mars has seasons, polar ice caps, volcanoes, canyons and weather, but its atmosphere is too thin for liquid water to exist for long on the surface. There are signs of ancient floods on the Red Planet, but evidence for water now exists mainly in icy soil and thin clouds.

Earth has one, Mars has two…moons of course! Phobos (fear) and Deimos (panic) are the Red Planet’s two small moons. They are named after the horses that pulled the chariot of the Greek war god Ares, the counterpart to the Roman war god Mars.

The diameter of Mars is 4220 miles (6792 km). That means that the Red Planet is twice as big as the moon, but the Earth is twice as big as Mars.

Since Mars has less gravity than Earth, you would weigh 62% less than you do here on our home planet. Weigh yourself here on the Planets App. What’s the heaviest thing you’ve ever lifted? On Mars, you could have lifted more than twice that! Every 10 pounds on Earth only equals 4 pounds on the Red Planet. Find out why HERE.

Mass is the measurement of the amount of matter something contains. Mars is about 1/10th of the mass of Earth.

Mars and Earth are at their closest point to each other about every two years, with a distance of about 33 million miles between them at that time. The farthest that the Earth and Mars can be apart is: 249 million miles. This is due to the fact that both Mars and Earth have elliptical orbits and Mars’ orbit is tilted in comparison with the Earth’s. They also orbit the sun at different rates.

The temperature on Mars can be as high as 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) or as low as about –225 degrees Fahrenheit (-153 degrees Celsius). How hot or cold the surface varies between day and night and among seasons. Mars is colder than Earth because it is farther from the sun.

You know that onions have layers, but did you know that Mars has layers too? Like Earth, Mars has a crust, a mantle and a core. The same stuff even makes up the planet layers: iron and silicate.

Ever wonder why it’s so hard launching things to space? It’s because the Earth has a log of gravity! Gravity makes things have weight, and the greater the gravity, the more it weights. On Mars, things weigh less because the gravity isn’t as strong.

Take a deep breath. What do you think you just breathed in? Mostly Nitrogen, about a fifth of that breath was Oxygen and the rest was a mix of other gases. To get the same amount of oxygen from one Earth breath, you’d have to take around 14,500 breaths on Mars! With the atmosphere being 100 times less dense, and being mostly carbon dioxide, there’s not a whole lot of oxygen to breathe in.

Mars has about 15% of Earth’s volume. To fill Earth’s volume, it would take over 6 Mars’ volumes.

For more fun Mars facts, visit HERE.

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Frontier Fields Galaxy Cluster MACS J0717 : Frontier Fields galaxy cluster MACS J0717, one of the most complex and distorted galaxy clusters known, is the site of a collision between four clusters. It is located about 5.4 billion light years away from Earth.

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