Category Archives: Nature

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Of this stunning image – the clearest ever taken of the solar system’s innermost planet – NASA sez:

This colorful view of Mercury was produced by using images from the color base map imaging campaign during MESSENGER’s primary mission. These colors are not what Mercury would look like to the human eye, but rather the colors enhance the chemical, mineralogical, and physical differences between the rocks that make up Mercury’s surface.

Full res image here.

mercmerc2(Pic Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)

thisisnthappiness

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This just in: last Thursday’s news from southern Tasmania…the Maigh Eo apple.

When Mel Staples asked her eight-year-old son to pick apples from a tree on their property she was baffled at the small harvest he returned with. “I picked up one and it was a like a granny smith apple and a red delicious apple had both been cut in half and then joined together. It was just this perfect line right through the middle of the apple and it was just the weirdest thing,” says Ms Staples.

Rare Apple Mutation Found In Kingston (ABC Hobart)

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moon1moon
An extremely accurate scrolling depiction of relative distances between planets in the solar system created by interactive media designer Josh Worth in which the Earth’s moon (diameter 3475km) is represented by one pixel. Worth sez:

I was talking about the planets with my 5-year-old daughter the other day. I was trying to explain how taking a summer vacation to Mars in the future will be a much bigger undertaking than a trip to Palm Springs (though equally as hot). I kept trying to describe the distance using metaphors like “if the earth was the size of a golf ball, then Mars would be across the soccer field” etc., but I realized I didn’t really know much about these distances, besides the fact that they were really large and hard to understand.

Visitors can scroll sideways or jump to various planets via buttons at the top of the map.
Explore it here.

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