Net-Warriors

Remember the last time you tried to assemble your family for a group photo and how hard it was to squeeze everyone into the frame?  Now imagine trying to fit 200 billion stars into a single photo… stars that span 7,054,199,780,000,000 miles in space.

The imaging team from the Spitzer Space Telescope has unveiled the largest, highest resolution infrared picture ever taken of the Milky Way galaxy.  The GLIMPSE (Galactic Legacy Infrared Midplane Extraordinaire) photo is 180 feet wide (55m) and is composed of 800,000 snapshots taken by Spitzer.  This photographic survey has 100 times the sensitivity and over 10 times the resolution of previous surveys, allowing us to see stars and dusty objects throughout much of our galaxy for the first time.

GLIMPSE Online Viewer

Though everyone makes mistakes, usually goofs are not permanently branded onto your body. Unless you get a silly tattoo.

Authors Aviva Yael and P.M. Chen searched the country for the most ridiculous, outrageous, and often regrettable examples of body art for their new book, “NO REGRETS: The Best, Worst, & Most #$%*ing Ridiculous Tattoos Ever.”

This photo shows a tattoo on the chest of a really dedicated yuppie. This guy likely grew tired of paying $50 for an Izod Lacoste polo shirt, so instead he branded himself with the iconic alligator logo. The best part is he even included the registered trademark in the lower right, so he’s truly a walking billboard.

Most Ridiculous Tattoos Ever

Whether you realize it or not, you have likely used one or more satellites today.  If you checked a weather report, watched CNN, or looked up directions on Yahoo Maps, you used one of the automated satellites orbiting the Earth hundreds of miles above your head.

Modern satellites are used for astronomy, communications, GPS, imaging, research, weather, and of course spy and military applications.

io9 has compiled a list of the most important satellites that make our modern life possible.

Ten Most Important Satellites Orbiting the Earth

French photographer Cedric Delsaux has created a series of photographs where he places Star Wars characters and vehicles in modern urban locations.

Star Wars Urban Series

“Souvenirs” is an ongoing book project by Hughes Photography in which toy replicas of famous landmarks are held up and photographed in front of the real thing. Check out this interesting collection of 95 souvenir photos from all over the world.

Souvenir Photos

The Panama Canal is a man-made waterway that bisects Central America and joins the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The 51-mile long canal can accommodate small private yachts to large commercial vessels. A ship sailing from New York to San Francisco via the Panama Canal travels 6,000 miles, less than half the 14,000 mile route around Cape Horn at the southernmost tip of South America. The United States built the canal, which opened in 1914. An estimated 27,500 workers died during construction, mostly from malaria and yellow fever.

A new time-lapse video compresses the 9-hour journey through the Panama Canal down to just two minutes:

A trickshot is when a pool cue strikes one or more balls on a billiards table, and the balls react in an odd or unexpected way. There are sanctioned trickshot world championships such as the WPA Artistic Pool World Championships, and made-for-TV events such as the World Cup of Trick Shots. Unlike artistic billiards, in which competitors must perform over seventy pre-determined challenges, trickshot competitions usually allow the players to make up new tricks. However, there are many standard tricks, and serious players will often have a large notebook of trickshot designs that they bring with them to competitions. Here is an amazing trickshot video from the Czech Republic:

Hollywood knows that simply having a robot in a movie can double its potential audience.  Movie robots typically possess the human abilities to think, reason, communicate and kill.  Most of the time, however, these robots that look so cool on screen are really incompetent losers on the job.

For example, the Terminator movie asks us to believe that computers become sentient, launch a nuclear holocaust, then “demonstrating child-like frustration at having only murdered about 5.8 billion people, send a Terminator back in time to take out the most annoying human before he knows how to fight back.”  Then a waitress and eventually her kid manage to outwit the clueless robot three times.

“That alone should be proof of the laughable incompetence of the grossly misnamed Terminator.  But it gets worse.  As witnessed in T3, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator has a little battery thing in his chest that basically acts like a nuclear device when he needs it to.  Why didn’t the original, whilst crawling through the machines that eventually crushed it, just use that to kill Sarah Connor?  We may never know.”

8 Movie Robots that Suck at Their Jobs

The world is full of strange and exotic creatures.  For example, the Star-Nosed Mole in this photo lives in wet lowland areas and eats small invertebrates, aquatic insects, worms and mollusks. It is a good swimmer and can forage along the bottoms of streams and ponds.  Like other moles, it digs shallow surface tunnels that often exit underwater.  The mole’s sensitive nasal tentacles are covered with almost one hundred thousand touch receptors for navigating and locating food.

World’s Strangest-Looking Animals

WebUrbanist has compiled a list of 10 incredible private islands that serve as tropical getaways to the rich and famous. While private islands have always been the mark of the uber-rich, many people don’t realize that some islands can be bought for as little as $100,000 or even rented for a weekend.

But most islands are outrageously expensive.  For example, Cerralvo Island is a former volcano located in the Sea of Cortez off the coast of Baja Mexico. The large private island contains 60 square miles of undeveloped terrain, except for a few massive mansions. The sandy beaches get plenty of warm Mexican sunshine, offer lots of privacy, yet is only 30 miles from the mainland. The island can be yours for a cool $35 million.

10 Private Islands You Cannot Afford