The Washington Post explains the science—or is it art—of the cherry blossom in D.C. though an illustrated video. Certainly this is literally more illustrative in concept than some other posts here, but the illustrations nonetheless match the audio explanations and parallel nicely with the aesthetic qualities of the cherry trees.
Drawings by Patterson Clark and narration by AJ Chavar.
There is quite a lot of talk these days about the possibility of Israel, either with or without American assistance, launching an attack on Iran to halt the further development of its nuclear programme. The trouble is that Israel may not have the weapons necessary to carry out a successful attack, but the US has quite the arsenal. And one of the most useful, for just such a task is the Massive Ordnance Penetrator.
The National Post created an infographic to look at the bomb and just how it might be used if the US should decide to use it.
Credit for the piece goes to Mike Faille and Richard Johnson.
The subject matter of this piece is out of my area of expertise, but should you be in the UK and looking at women’s fashion, apparently not all listed sizes are the same. This piece by Anna Powell-Smith takes as an input a woman’s size measurements and then best fits them to the known sizes by several major brands by type of outfit: shirt, skirt, and dress.
We are coming upon the date when a year ago an earthquake and its subsequent tsunami devastated Japan. As the wave rushed over land it ripped up and destroyed whole villages. Most of the debris remained scattered across the Japanese landscape, but as the water receded some was inevitably swept back out to sea.
The International Pacific Research Center has released a model of where any floating debris—a good amount is presumed to have sank by now—may have been carried by the ocean’s currents.
Bridges are vital parts of infrastructure networks connecting two separate pieces of territory, but often they can be choke points. Damage to a bridge can result to isolation at worst and at best long, circuitous reroutes that add significant time to travel. In the San Francisco area authorities are building a new bridge to replace the current Bay Bridge. But as everyone knows, buildings and infrastructure in that area can be significantly damaged during earthquakes. And the area is waiting for the ‘Big One’ that shall come some day or another.
So how to build a new bridge for the long-term that will also survive a major earthquake? The New York Times explains it in an interactive piece accompanying an article. The interactive piece includes an animation with voiceover explaining the details of the design, with diagrams illustrating the components placed next to the video player. At the bottom, anchoring the piece (pun intended), is a photo-illustration of the new bridge’s design.
Credit for the piece goes to Mika Gröndahl and Xaquín G.V.
The BBC has an article on a discovery of a growing bulge of fresh water in the Arctic Ocean. The top of the article includes a large set of graphics that explains the story below and links to an animation. The animation depicts the growth of the Arctic ice sheet from the pressure beneath and plots the height of the ice.
We have finally discovered two planets outside our solar system that have roughly the same size as Earth. Unfortunately, unless we learn that life can exist in the form of fire beings, these two planets are too close to their sun to support life. Their temperatures are in the hundreds and thousands of degrees. A bit balmy.
The New York Times has a small but interesting chart that fits inline with its article, at least on its website—presumably it fits similarly in its printed form. Seen here to the left, it plots the orbital distance of the planets that are known to orbit the star Kepler 20. (Unfortunately these planets have less than creative names: Kepler 20e and Kepler 20f.) The other planets are gas giants.
The use of scale of orbits and the gap between 20f and 20d allow for an annotation within the image. And then with a little bit more vertical space, to drive hom the point of these new planets’ nearness to their sun, the orbit of Mercury, the planet nearest our sun, is plotted for comparison.
Plans are afoot to harness the power of the sun in the deserts across northern Africa. The electricity generated in Morocco is planned to turn on light switches in Madrid and throughout the rest of Europe.
The Guardian created a map to show how the solar facilities could be connected to each other and to other renewable power sources in Europe—from Icelandic geothermal plants to North Sea wind turbines to Alpine hydroelectric plants.
Credit for the piece goes to Christine Oliver.
There have been a lot of interesting maps of late that map out continents and planets, but today is one for the sea—the bottom of which we know less about than the surface of the Moon.
According to a story covered by the BBC, the US State Department backed an exploration of the Mariana Trench, a subduction zone where one oceanic plate is slipping underneath another. The result is an inward-folding crumple and then a bunch of volcanos—the Mariana Islands. The US wants to know if it can extend its economic zone further, but can only do so if certain geographic conditions are met. Hence, the study.
Challenger Deep is the deepest, lowest point on the planet. Though one can argue that because the Earth is not a perfect sphere, points in the Arctic and Antarctic may yet be deeper/nearer the centre of the Earth. If one were to Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on the planet, inside the Mariana Trench at Challenger Deep, the very tip of the mountain would still not break the surface of the ocean.
Earlier this year, the earthquake and tsunami that damaged Japan also brought about failures in a nuclear plant at Fukushima. As we near the end of the year, the New York Times reports on how it might take many years for those who had to—or chose to—move away to return to a safe Fukushima.
