A kangaroo with a knot in its tail!

I was camping out at the Orroral Valley for a night of stargazing and photography. The next morning I ran into this young lady near the old historical homestead. It didn't seem to be holding her back too much. She could hop reasonably and perch - in a rather different manner from everyone else though!

Can't afford a boat trip to the Antarctic? Try this instead!

This is the view today from the bow webcam on the Aurora Australis, the resupply vessel that services Australia's Antarctic bases.

Not your average cruise ship view! Not your average webcam view either…

The ship left Australia on 15 October, and was slated to return on 16 November. The latest sitrep has them here (and it is so worth your time to zoom in and look around the shoreline on this map!):

Amazing landslide escape—just a whisker from a right squishing!

This guy is about as lucky as you could possibly imagine. Watch this massive boulder almost kiss the side of his car.

Go full screen in HD resolution, and at the very beginning watch the hanging rock right at the very peak of the hillside as it comes loose.


According to the ABC, this happened yesterday near Keelung City in Taiwan.

This owl needs an exorcist, pronto!

You knew owls had swivel heads right? But this little GIF is crazy! (Via @Smebble)

Now, who's got the number for an exorcist? (Language warning on the following clip.)

The Pale Blue Dot - beautiful words, beautiful timelapses...

Take the words of Carl Sagan, some beautiful timelapses, and perfect musical accompaniment and you have a pretty compelling combination.

Try to focus on Sagan's words. They are just as important and hopeful now as when he first shared them years ago. Then share.


EARTH: The Pale Blue Dot from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.

Well done Michael Marantz!

How much water really is there on Spaceship Earth?

We're told that all the water on Earth came here via comet impacts. That's a fact that's pretty hard to reconcile. I mean there's just so much water right?

Not when you look at it all balled up and sitting next to the planet...

And not when you compare it against all the liquid water in Saturn's moon Titan - not even compared to the water on Jupiter's moon Europa.

The heavy bombardment period must have been a pretty serious time to be around...

Related articles

• Oh my. This puts it all in perspective wonderfully...
• Here's an interesting size comparison of the terrestrial planets in our Solar System
• New exoplanet PH2 b is the second for citizen science project PlanetHunters.org
• Take a full tour of the International Space Station with former Commander Suni Williams

What I've been reading lately

Just an archival catch-up of recent The Beach House Weekly—my Paper.li auto summaries—of an interesting few weeks in science, space and Australian politics.

From rockets to meteorites, Roxon to Rudd, novas to Nobels, planet hunters to metric hunters.

25 March 2013
18 March 2013
11 March 2013
4 March 2013
25 February 2013
18 February 2013
11 February 2013
4 February 2013
28 January 2013
21 January 2013
14 January 2013
7 January 2013
31 December 2012
24 December 2012
17 December 2012
10 December 2012

Intriguing to look back through actually. Something in there for everyone.

This Cosmoquest Hangout is an absolute cracker! Live on air with a scanning electron microscope.

Scanning electron microscope picture of
a fly's eyes. (Screengrab

Courtesy of Cosmoquest, in this Google+ live Hangout recording you are taken on a guided tour of the nano world by Dr Jon Hillier, an electron microscopist in the Nanoscience & Technology Division at Argonne National Laboratory, US. As Cosmoquest describe the Hangout:

Jon’s research includes the development of state-of-the-art electron and ion beam instrumentation for materials and nanoscale research. He is most well known for his work in 3 dimensional Focused Ion Beam (FIB) tomography and complex sample fabrication for electron microscopy. His characterisation of diamond thin films has lead to the development of the artificial retina.

Watch some pretty amazing live on-air demonstrations of scanning electron microscopy.


The hosts are left speechless during the demos. Understandably so. One of the coolest Hangouts I've seen yet.

And Hillier promised to come back from a reprise with an even better microscope...

Bioluminescent algae—great photos by Phil Hart

Phil Hart has done it again, with another set of gorgeous photos of bioluminescent algae—coupled with the night sky—from the Gippsland Lakes.

One of the most viewed articles on this blog, with more than 500 views, pointed people towards Hart's previous photos and story from three years ago.

More photos on his blog.

Related articles

• Night-time satellite images are pretty - like light reflecting off oil scum in wetlands is pretty!
• My photos of all the Enlighten projections for Old Parliament House, Canberra
• Clear skies, no moon and a 14" telescope made for great viewing last night. With photos!
• My photos of all the Enlighten projections for Questacon, Canberra

Before the Canberra storm was the build-up... My 1:20 timelapse

iPhone shot out the other side of the house while the timelapse was shooting

No fireworks for this Australia Day - not the artificial kind anyway. But plenty of the natural white kind!

And before the big storm hit Canberra, there were some dramatic clouds during the build-up.

It was all very reminiscent of South-East Queensland actually...

Enjoy my first YouTube upload—1849 frames, four seconds apart, covering from 3:56pm to 6:20pm in one minute 19 seconds:



Pity Picasa doesn't fade out the sound at the end...

A still from the series

Related articles

• My photos of all the Enlighten projections for the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
• My photos of all the Enlighten projections for Old Parliament House, Canberra

Beautiful timelapse of opening flowers - three minutes to warm your day...

Here's a video just under three minutes that is guaranteed to put a little warmth into your day.

Using a controlled environment and steady artificial lighting, Katka Pruskova has captured timelapses of a range of flowers opening—some over a few hours, and some over days.

Make sure you view this wide, and enjoy the music too.


Flowers Timelapse from Katka Pruskova on Vimeo.

She says it's her first effort at timelapse photography. Well wow...

Here's her description of the process:

Listen to our frogs celebrating the rains

Have a listen to the wonderful sounds of the frogs in the pond outside our kitchen. Glad we put this away from the bedrooms!


And they got a lot more into the swing of things shortly after I recorded this. It was during the rain Christmas Eve.


Apart from the three or four of one (loudest) species playing ping pong, you can hear two other quieter species chirping and squeaking in the background. Then around 70% through, another deep sounding species chimes in, and then the whole lot get really wound up...

As you can see from the photo, in winter the pond gets pretty cold! Yet the fish and tadpoles survive...

Could Brian Cox by the next David Attenborough? He's launched a new nature series with help from Eric Idle.

We love the Wonders of the Universe and other astronomy and cosmology documentaries hosted by astrophysicist Professor Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox). He has some unusual pronunciations, but then so did Carl Sagan, and it never stopped us loving him (remember "youmans"?).

Earlier this year, Cox was busy filming a new BBC series called Wonders of Life, including a couple of visits to Australia. You can already buy the book and an (expensive) iPad app has been out for several months.

And this week, BBC2 released a trailer for the series, to be aired in the UK early in the new year. It's a lovely clip too, with funny out-takes by Cox and overlaid with a rewrite of Eric Idle's (@EricIdle) great The Galaxy Song, performed by Idle himself and with lyrics focussing more on Earth than the cosmos:

Earth As Art - gorgeous satellite photo ebook from NASA - free.

As this incredible photo of Western Australia's Carnegie Lake shows, the Earth can look pretty darn amazing from space—particularly with a bit of false colour imaging thrown in...

NASA has assembled a big collection of its best satellite images into a book. Many of the photos are easily recognisable as natural features—but no less beautiful for it—and others are hard to conceive as being part of our planet!

My blog has been archived by the National Library, plus the week's readings.

The National Library of Australia run an amazing resource called Pandora that saved entire copies of important websites in Australia, creating a historical record of this new societal resource. And recently they contacted me for authorisation to duplicate my blog!

To be fair, I think it had a lot more to do with my being an election candidate that the intriguing mix of science and society news—in fact I think that was really the only reason... But hey—it means they 'accidentally' preserved a whole bunch of neat science stuff too!

So, saved for posterity, is my blog in Pandora: http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-136401.

And wrapping up some other 'saved for my own reference' info, here's the last week's readings, via paper.li, replete with slushie Tony Abbott, bouncing tiger cub, homeopathy comeuppancy, climate crisis, and lots of rocket science:
Week ending 3 December 2012

And lastly, 60,000 views! Crikey...

My readings over the last month or so...

Another catch-up of my readings via various sites and social media forums, for anyone interested (but mainly just for my own record), through the Paper.li automatic magazine tool.

There's something in here for everyone...

Week to 26 November
Week to 19 November
Week to 12 November
Week to 5 November
Week to 29 October
Week to 22 October
Week to 15 October

Cyberbully pot-kettle, Greens launches, telescopes, more. The week that was.

Alan Jones learns what it's like on the receiving end; the ACT Greens campaign powers towards 20 October; the first stage of the Square Kilometre Array is turned on; a Nobel laureate yanks the rug out from under Newspoll; iPad Mini confirmed; and much more.

The week that was - my readings and posts.

What I've been reading and writing - a bit of a catch-up

This is a catch-up of my reading and writing lists as auto-compiled into e-zines by Paper.li. As usual, it is mostly for my own reference down the track, but maybe someone is interested.

The recycling bin may no longer be full of discarded newspapers, but holy moley I'm chewing through some online reading...

Editions for the week ending:

1 October

24 September

17 September

10 September

3 September

27 August

20 August

13 August

6 August

30 July

23 July

16 July

9 July

Phew. That's it. Must keep on top of this a bit better...

Visit Antarctica with Streetview - even the actual South Pole. Awesome in a can!

Google is really pushing the boundaries with where it takes its Google Streetview cameras. So I'm thinking I'll feature some of these wonderful places with some screen grabs, for those who don't have the time to explore themselves.

First up is Antarctica. Click through to go exploring, and don't forget to wander on through doorways, or to zoom in on displays, artefacts and signs ("Close the damn door").

Mawson's Hut.

Shackleton's Hut.

The actual South Pole - yes there is a pole. And a whopping great building! Unfortunately one frame is poorly spliced...

Glaciers - you never know when one is gonna whoop your ass...

The bottom end of a glacier can be a dangerous place, as these two guys found out. Far from being a static wall of ice, a glacier is always moving.

They thought they were far enough away from this glacier in Eqi, Greenland, but they were in for a big surprise in their 5.5 metre boat.


To cap off their day, they hot a small iceberg on the way home, disabling their engine... Time to take a hint?