Author Archives: Chompsky

Or, pre-1998, Opal Fruits.

Behold: the spiral galaxy NGC 4736, aka Messier 94 – 15 million light years away in the in the northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). To wit:

A popular target for Earth-based astronomers, the face-on spiral galaxy is about 30,000 light-years across, with spiral arms sweeping through the outskirts of its broad disk. But this Hubble Space Telescope field of view spans about 7,000 light-years across M94‘s central region. The featured close-up highlights the galaxy’s compact, bright nucleus, prominent inner dust lanes, and the remarkable bluish ring of young massive stars. The ring stars are all likely less than 10 million years old, indicating that M94 is a starburst galaxy that is experiencing an epoch of rapid star formation. The circular ripple of blue stars is likely a wave propagating outward, having been triggered by the gravity and rotation of a oval matter distributions. Because M94 is relatively nearby, astronomers can better explore details of its starburst ring.

(Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA)

apod

Luxury ‘tree suites’ in a forest near the Austrian town of Kitzbühel designed by Milan based studio Peter Pichler Architecture (you’ll recall Peter’s Dolomite treehouses). 

Envisioned as part of a new ‘7-star hotel resort’, the 60-80m³ cabins and their exoskeleton trestles are made from locally sourced wood. Accessed by glass elevator straight from the forest floor, each has a bedroom, bathroom, living room, sauna and balcony overlooking the pine forest canopy.

designboom

Behold: Europa –  fourth largest of Jupiter’s 79 moons and fictional forbidden location of future intelligent life in Arthur C. Clarke’s ’2010: Odyssey Two’ (1982) and Peter Hyam’s 1984 film adaptation ‘2010: The Year We Make Contact’.

Looping through the Jovian system in the late 1990s, the Galileo spacecraft recorded stunning views of Europa and uncovered evidence that the moon’s icy surface likely hides a deep, global ocean. Galileo’s Europa image data has been remastered here, using improved new calibrations to produce a color image approximating what the human eye might see. Europa’s long curving fractures hint at the subsurface liquid water. The tidal flexing the large moon experiences in its elliptical orbit around Jupiter supplies the energy to keep the ocean liquid. But more tantalizing is the possibility that even in the absence of sunlight that process could also supply the energy to support life, making Europa one of the best places to look for life beyond Earth. What kind of life could thrive in a deep, dark, subsurface ocean? Consider planet Earth’s own extreme shrimp.

Larger image here.

(Image: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SETI Institute, Cynthia Phillips, Marty Valenti)

apod

Behold: the Lamborghini V12 Vision Gran Turismo – a single seat, highly aerodynamic 812bhp concept hypercar that debuted in advance of the 2019 FIA Certified Gran Turismo Championship.

Not destined for actual production any time soon, the Vision is more of a futuristic ‘mission statement’ combining sci-fi touches like holographically projected driver diagnostics with respectful nods to various Lamborghini forerunners, like the powertrain of the Sián FKP 37 and the hexagonal side windows of the 1968 Marzal.

hiconsumption

Zaha Hadid Architects’ winning submission to create a new Rail Baltic terminal in the Estonian capital.

Designed (like a flow diagram of circulation routes) as a transport hub that also serves the function of a public bridge, Ülemiste terminal will accommodate buses, trams and the start point of a new 870km high speed electric railway connecting to Riga and Vilnius.

mymodernmet