cinnamon thoughts.

Apple recently purchased C3 Technologies, a company partly owned by Saab before Apple got its hands on some nifty mapping technology. It would be pretty cool should these 3D maps find their way to iOS devices.

The spiral is produced by a binary star about 3000 light years from earth and is 3 trillion kilometers in diameter. [...] older stars run out of available hydrogen. Eventually, they fuse helium into carbon. When this happens the star swells up and becomes a red giant [...] Red giants tend to blow a lot […]

It was nice and quiet in Iceland back in 2007. Now — in addition to water spewing geysers (picture) — the volcano Eyjafjallajökull is shooting large amounts of ash, smoke and steam into the atmosphere forcing many European airports to cancel flights. It first erupted in March and boston.com has several stunning photos of the […]

Go directly to the web app: http://gpscoords.cinnamonthoughts.org/ Do what your iPhone’s Maps and Compass apps can’t and copy your current coordinates to your device’s clipboard and use them anywhere. Your device will use GPS, wireless LAN and cell towers to get the most accurate coordinates, just as Maps and Compass on the iPhone do. After […]

A cool video on YouTube showing the launch of a Saturn V model rocket. Scale 1:10 might sound small but it’s freaking huge for a model rocket!

At space.com you can take a tour of our corner of the cosmos. Like the famous National Geographic poster it gives you a good sense of how small our solar system (and every other) really is. Truly fascinating.

A collection of stunning pictures of Mars’ surface taken by HiRISE onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment website has high resolution versions of most images and also beautiful wallpapers. (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

A bird apparently dropped a pice of baguette on a part of the Large Hadron Collider which shut down the whole operation. It had to be a bird from the future preventing the total apocalypse if you believe this article from the New York Times: [T]he hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with […]

Fantastic photos of Saturn and its rings and moons at equinox, when the Sun shines directly on the edge of the ten meter thin rings. Photo: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

NASA has released information on water molecules found on our moon and in unexpected places on Mars. Exciting news! I’m looking forward to see whether LCROSS — the Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite — finds larger quantities of water ice on the Moon. Its impact is on Oct. 9, 2009.

Photos of the 2008 eruption of the Chaiten volcano in Chile—its first eruption in about 9000 years. Be sure to scroll at least down to the sixth picture! Cases of electrical storms breaking out directly above erupting volcanoes are well documented, although scientists differ on what causes them. Picture taken May 2, 2008. Full article […]

Until recently I didn’t know of the Viking 1 and Venera 13 missions that took the first pictures on the surface of Mars and Venus. In 1976 NASA’s Viking 1 took the first photos as a lander on Mars. At the moment Spirit and Opportunity are still working and snapping pictures on Mars. In 1982 […]

The widely accepted rule of even numbered Star Trek movies being great and odd ones being crap was disrupted after Nemesis and is officially reversed with the 11th iteration simply named Star Trek. A large portion of all Star Trek films and TV shows was about science and galactic phenomenons the viewer just had to […]

My updated GeoMapLookup — a website to geolocate a host, domain or IP address with Google Maps integration — now sports a newly created iPhone and iPod touch version which was chosen as Apple.com’s Staff Pick and featured web app for February 26th 2008. GeoMapLookup is a web app to display information about the geographical […]

Getting cozy with an Airbus A380 during the first-ever visit of an A380 to San Francisco International Airport. Great close-ups and pictures of the inside of Airbus’ new flagship. (by telstar)

Prepping a Space Shuttle for launch is a lot of work. “After looking at the pictures you will know why there’s a good period of time between shuttle launches.” (link)

That’s what I was wondering when I heard about the exploding steam pipe in NYC today. Transportation of heat, granted — but during summer? Luckily those pesky interwebs have the answer to this question: Why the heck does New York have steam pipes, anyway?

An out of the ordinary illusion shows two blurry faces: one grim, the other neutral. Viewed from approximately two meters distance changes the looks on both faces to the opposite. The key to this illusion is the picture’s blurriness. Quite simple, nevertheless amazing.

Retrofuturo — or IL FUTURO VISTO DAL PASSATO as Fabio Feminò puts it — is a 35 page series of mostly pictures and magazine covers from the past (up to 80 years old) showing how the people living then thought our world would look like today. It includes classics like flying cars, enormous cities, moon […]

Find the solution at Scientific American: Why are snowflakes symmetrical? How can ice crystallizing on one arm ‘know’ the shape of the other arms on the flake?