Nasa is proposing to build a robotic rocket-plane to explore Mars from the air, and has advertised for help building it.


By Tom Chivers


The Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Surveyor (Ares), around the size of a small plane, will be folded into a rocket and launched to the red planet. It would be the first aircraft ever to fly over another world.

After entering the atmosphere in a capsule, the aircraft would deploy parachutes and unfold its wings and tail, before firing its rocket motor and flying around a mile above the surface of Mars for around an hour and a quarter.


The idea is that an atmospheric craft like Ares can explore far more ground than existing rovers, like Spirit and Phoenix, but in much more detail than an orbital spacecraft. It is hoped that it could cover as much as 600 square miles in its short flight.

While the idea was tabled several years ago, with suggestions it could even have launched by 2007, no progress has so far been made.

However, now Nasa has issued a “teaming opportunity”, offering private companies and designers the chance to help create the craft. The team behind the concept hope that it will be accepted as one of the space agency’s “Discovery” missions, aimed at swiftly and (relatively) inexpensively exploring other worlds in our solar system.

Other recent proposals that been put forward for Discovery include a nuclear-powered robot sailing-boat to plough the seas of Saturn’s moon Titan.

Similarly, a proposal by scientists at the California Institute of Technology has suggested that armies of flying, sailing and driving robots will one day explore other planets.

Whether you're in the mood for some classic animation or some old-school spooky films to get you in that Halloween spirit, Classic Cinema Online has hundreds of films in dozens of categories.
Classic films have a certain charm to them—the small budgets, simple special effects, and archaic dialogue all lend themselves to creating a sort of celluloid-quaintness that tends to get lost in modern "Is that real or CGI?" blockbusters.
Classic Cinema Online has gathered together hundreds of films in categories ranging from Action to Westerns and even old cinema shorts and news reels. They routinely feature selections of movies based on the time of year, holidays, and other notable events. This week, of course, it's classic spooky, scary, and supernatural movies in honor of Halloween's approach. Even if you're somewhere you can't sit down and watch a film from yesteryear, browsing the awesome movie posters is worth the price—free!—of admission.
Have a favorite spot to catch some vintage media? Whether it's film, television, or radio, we want to hear about it in the comments.

Over at Gizmodo, Wilson Rothman has a great post up about a new book on the photography and the creative process of Norman Rockwell. Ron Schick edited and compiled the collection.
Gizmodo's Wilson calls Rockwell "the original king of Photoshop," despite the obvious fact that Rockwell reigned on those corny Saturday Evening Post covers long before Adobe (or image editing software of any kind) emerged. Snip:

The book is not about painting. Rockwell's oil-on-canvas work feels like an afterthought for Schick, who mostly documents Rockwell's photography and art direction. Throughout the book, you see a painting, then you see the photographs he took to make that painting. In most cases, many shots comprise the different elements, and are joined together only in paint. It's almost sad: Vivid interactions between people, remembered jointly in the country's collective consciousness, may never have taken place. Even people facing each other at point blank range were photographed separately, and might never have even met.

The Gizmodo post has more amazing side-by-side photos.
Here's an Amazon link for the book: Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera.

Ad by Grabarz & Partner emphasizes the Volkswagen Golf's speed.






Which gives me a good excuse to be the last blogger to post these photos of a woman turned into a Lichtenstein through the magic of MAC Cosmetics. See more photos of the application process here.

un archivio per le pagine GeoCities

Come sicuramente ormai saprete, lo scorso 26 ottobre la storica piattaforma di hosting GeoCities è stata chiusa da Yahoo!, con conseguente perdita non tanto del materiale presente sui vari siti - ormai quasi preistorici - ma in termini di storia e memoria del web, dove GeoCities è stato un punto di riferimento a cavallo tra gli anni ‘90 e il nuovo millennio.
Ma per alcune delle 38 milioni di pagine presenti sulla piattaforma c’è ancora qualche speranza grazie a Reocities, frutto della mente di un solo uomo olandese che ha costruito un vero e proprio archivio per i siti un tempo ospitati da GeoCities.
Insieme alla suddetta piattaforma, Jacques Mattheij si è preso anche la briga di scrivere una lettera aperta, associata a una petizione per richiedere l’apertura in “sola lettura” di GeoCities e l’eventuale collaborazione con archive.org per salvare tutto il contenuto dei siti hostati.
Via | Pctips3000.com

Eye exercise may boost creativity

A study in the scientific journal Brain and Cognition suggests that increasing the "crosstalk" between the brain's left and right hemispheres can increase creativity. Researchers from the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey ran an experiment on 62 people to gauge creative thinking. After a first try at the task, some of the participants were told to shift their eyes horizontally back and forth for 30 seconds, an exercise that boosts the communication between the hemispheres. Those subjects performed much better on the test the second time around than a control group who stared straight ahead. The scientists published the results of their study in the journal Brain and Cognition. From the British Psychological Society Research Digest:

An important factor that the researchers took note of was the participants' handedness. Prior research has suggested that people who have one hand that is particularly dominant, so-called "strong-handers", have less cross-talk between their brain hemispheres compared with people who are more ambidextrous or "mixed handed"... The key finding is that on their second creativity attempt, strong-handers who'd performed the horizontal eye movements subsequently showed a significant improvement in their creativity, in terms of being more original (i.e. suggesting ideas not proposed by others) and coming up with more categories of use...
The researchers also showed that, for strong-handers, the beneficial effects of the eye movement exercise lasted nine minutes for originality, but just three to six minutes in terms of coming up with more categories of use.

"Performing horizontal eye movement exercises can boost your creativity"

Star Wars fans will get a chance to add another piece of memorabilia to their collection in 2010. adidas honors the timeless intergalactic tale with a few of its classic models in what looks to be a very promising collaborative. The shoes take inspiration from scenes and characters for a literal interpretation and while we only have these sneak peak images you can only imagine how soon the hi res detailed photos will be online. Who’s excited? Or were you all trekkies? Via Hypebeast

That's SIR Christopher Wonka Dracula Saruman Dooku Lee To You