by CKR
I’ve been to Indian Market and spent more than I probably should have. I’ve had lunch and hoped to be able to weed my yard or maybe go back to Indian Market without my checkbook. But it’s raining and the grey over parts of the mountains suggests there’ll be more.
While I was in Estonia and then while my computer was down, I accumulated a pile of pages from Science magazine on websites and other remarkable things. A rainy Saturday afternoon is a good time to work through them. I’ve checked all these out and find them intriguing and informative, easy to use with lots of graphics.
Action in Space
The Astrophysics Visualization Archive provides short videos, both photographic and animations, of things happening in space: the Schoemaker-Levy comet crashing into Jupiter, a total eclipse of the sun, seasons on Saturn, the evolution of a star cluster (not very interesting until the very end), and many more. Each video has a page of explanatory text.
The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake
The Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley makes thousands of photos of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake available. There’s a 360-degree panorama from the roof of the Fairmont Hotel and an interactive map that you can use to find photos of different areas.
Google Mars!
You can’t fly around the way you do Google Earth, but if you want to find a feature you’ve read about and see where it is on the red planet, this is the way to go. The elevation colors are garish, but I suppose that using the brown-green Earth conventions would imply things about the surface (like the presence of vegetation) that aren’t true.
El Niño Resource
Since the El Niño climate pattern was recognized, it has been used for long-term forecasts. Measuring instruments have been deployed to its area of the Pacific Ocean to help to understand the phenomenon and improve predictions. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides explanations of the phenomenon and its impacts through words and animations, as well as real-time data from those Pacific instruments.
Want to know more about stem cells?
The University of Michigan provides a site with answers to questions and an interactive tutorial. It also includes a summary of ethical policies recommended by the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences, and other professional organizations.
Wildlife Diseases
I’ve got a lot of friends in Wisconsin. By definition, the male ones hunt deer. Recently, they’ve been worried about chronic wasting disease in the deer they shoot. CWD is similar to mad cow disease, a spongiform encephalitis. For them and for those who would like to know more about bird flu and West Nile fever, along with plague, which is always in New Mexico, the National Wildlife Health Center provides a website on wildlife diseases. It’s got lots of links, including maps, scientific papers, and news updates.
Cold-Water Corals
We associate corals with the tropics, but they thrive in cold water too. This site, from the UK, has photos, maps, and explanations of coral ecosystems, even wallpaper and screen savers.
Visible Demography and Economics
You’ve seen those maps where Russia is scrunched down and the United States balloons up with, say, birth rates. Worldmapper is a store of such maps, illustrating demographic and economic information.
Dragonflies and Damselflies
John Abbot of the University of Texas, Austin, shares his photos, along with checklists and range maps for these beautiful insects.
Black Holes
This is a lovely site, with accurate animations that explain black holes simply.
Squids and Octopuses
The Cephalopod Page discusses giant squids in honor of “Pirates of the Caribbean” and even extinct ammonites, along with all the other squids, octopuses, and nautiluses, with lots of photos.
Early Residents of Southern France
Animations and photos provide the history of the Arago Cave and its residents nearly 700,000 years ago.
Well, I’ve cleared off some of those pages, but there are more. If you’ve gotten this far, you’re persistent, particularly if you’ve been clicking those links! I’m not sure I would, so I’ll stop here.