The Soothing Sounds of an Arctic Icebreaker - 10 Hours of Background Noise

Here's something you didn't know that you need in your life, but you'll be totally happy to discover. The Youtube page Relax Sleep ASMR has recently uploaded a video that contains ten hours of white noise and the sounds of an Arctic icebreaker ship. It's absolutely glorious. Last night I put on some instrumental metal music along with this while writing and it really helped my mind to focus solely on the writing. You can check out the 10 hour long video below or at the Youtube page, but, whatever you do, definitely bookmark this one.

Holy Planets, Batman

The Google Doodle celebrating the TRAPPIST-1 system announcement on 22 February 2017

Hopefully you've already heard about today's announcement during a NASA press conference about the confirmation of discovery of 7 Earth-sized planets around the star TRAPPIST-1, three of which are in that star system's Goldilocks Zone for liquid water. This star system is only 39 lightyears away from Earth (coincidentally, that's 12 parsecs, so just within one good Kessel Run if you have the right ship). 39 lightyears is practically down the street in the context of our galaxy (which spans over 100,000 lightyears from one end to the other). This announcement isn't only exciting, but it also comes with a lot of implications for astrobiology. We have the capabilities right now to start observing these planets closely to look for signs of biosignatures in their atmosphere and that will only get better in the coming years (especially when the James Webb Space Telescope goes into operation). I'm still in the process of crunching out my Ph.D. dissertation, so I can't write up all of my thoughts about this incredible announcement right now, but definitely stay tuned to the exoplanet and planetary science community to see what more we can learn in the coming years about these world so close to our own. 

Credit: JPL/NASA

Arrakis, Dune, Desert Art

The above image is now my desktop wallpaper. It's a piece of concept art from Gary Jamroz for the Dune Universe. You can find this piece and more like it at Concept Art World. For instance, here's a rather stunning piece by Jordan Lamarre-Wan:

Billie Jean, smoothly done, by Alexandr Misko

Alexandr Misko, a young musician from Russia, has been bouncing about the interwebs lately with some of his acoustic arrangements for some well-known covers. For instance, I just caught his take on Michael Jackson's Billie Jean and it is pretty damned slick. Definitely worth a listen, my friends. Check it out:

If you dig that, then you might also like some of the tunes from his album that came out last year, "The Songs of Adolescence".

The Post-Technological Future Imagery of Simon Stålenhag

Simon Stålenhag's artwork is beautiful, dark, and suggestive of a post-technological dystopian future where robotics and high-tech have fallen and people are putting the pieces back together. I feel like I can see a story evolving out of every image that he's created. Check out the pictures below for some more, but also visit his website for lots and lots more!

Red Dwarf Lego

Red Dwarf is one of my favorite television shows. If you haven't seen it, then what the smeg are you doing with your life?! Get on it! It has a pretty decent cult following. Enough so that it led one fan, Leigh Hadfield, to build a Red Dwarf Lego set to match the show! You can find a bunch more pictures of the set at the British Comedy Guide. The set has been submitted to Lego Ideas. 

Re-Fuelling a Spaceship

This image comes from the New York Public Library's Digital Collections, which recently released a large number of newly digitized images. The image above, titled "Re-fuelling a Spaceship" comes from the collection of George Arents and the Arents Cigarette Cards. Little images like this were printed on hard cards and added to packaging for cigarettes in the not-too-distant past; they were called cigarette cards. Interesting to think that cigarette manufacturers thought to include images of space exploration in packages of cigarettes.

Whoa, Fractals!

A section of a Mandelbrot Set

Fractals are sets of information that exhibit self-similar patterns at many scales. They've become rather famous because they can be expressed as beautiful geometric designs which are quite appealing to explore.

With our current era of digital video and graphic design, there's a lot that can be done with fractal visuals these days. I've recently been following artist Julius Horsthuis who renders some gorgeous fractal visualizations. Here's one of them, called Fractalicious 4:  

If you enjoyed the video, then definitely jump over to Horsthuis' website and watch some of the others there. There's definitely some awesome stuff that can be done with fractal designs.

Leland Melvin's Space Love Story

Leland Melvin is a NASA astronaut and one of those people who loves to give back through education and outreach just as much as living on the edge of exploration and research. In this episode of Space Love Story from The Planetary Society, Melvin shares his "ah ha" moment from when he was in space: