VizWorld.com

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera is one of the instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Recently this camera captured an avalanche on Mars. The white portion of the image is carbon dioxide (dry ice). The cliff there is 2,000 ft high. The plume of dust itself is probably 150 feet high. I have trimmed down the original image which you can find here.

Looking at all of the individual instances of avalanches from all of the images will also allow us to piece together a sequence of snaphots of the whole avalanche process, from beginning (a stream of material falling down the cliff face) to end (lingering puffy clouds). Based on this year’s observations, these events happen mostly in the middle of spring, roughly equivalent to April to early May on Earth. And, they are indeed more widespread than just this one scarp. All together, it seems this is a regular spring process at Mars’ north pole that may be expected every year – avalanche season! This information, in conjunction with the results of numerical modeling of the behavior of the materials involved, will help us find out what is causing these dramatic events.

via : Avalanche Clouds

Science nasa

Infographics are popping up everywhere these days, and more and more I see companies that have nothing to do with Infographics or Visualization publishing them as a way to attract traffic and attention.  The bright colors and pretty visuals are eye-catching, but typically present little to no information in a useful form.  Robert Kosara takes issue with these vague charts that ‘dilute the field’ of visualization in a new blog post.

Visualization has become the tool to create pretty (or at least colorful) visuals that attract attention. There’s about as much visualization in these images as in an actor depicting a scientist in a tv commercial.

The picture above comes from his post, which comes from the Ford Fusion visualization ‘contest’, which I think really is a contender for Most Useless Visualization of All Time.

via The Visualization Cargo Cult | EagerEyes.org.

Science infographic, visualization

One of my favorite websites to visit, FlowingData, has posted an article about the coming 2010 elections in the United Kingdom. The election in the UK is to take place on May 6^th. FlowingData points to The Guardian, which has posted an interactive infographic which allows you to view different possible outcomes in the election.

With the 2010 UK elections coming up, the Guardian explores possible outcomes, given a certain amount of swing votes. Three views are provided: a grid map (above), your traditional geographic map, and a bar chart. You can select a region of interest, and it stays highlighted as you switch between the options.

via Swing vote effects explored with swingometer | FlowingData.

Graphics interactive infographic

Messier 66 is a spiral galaxy that is located approximately 36 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo. The galaxy is part of the Leo Triplet, a group of three galaxies that include Messier 65 and NGC 3628.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new view of Messier 66. This is shown in the Hubblecast video above, as well as in several images that occur after the break. From the news release on the image:

Messier 66 is the proud owner of exclusive asymmetric spiral arms which seem to climb above the galaxy’s main disc and an apparently displaced nucleus. This asymmetry is unusual; most often, dense waves of gas, dust and newly born stars wind about the galaxy’s centre in a symmetric way. Astronomers believe that Messier 66′s once orderly shape has most likely been distorted by the gravitational pull of its two neighbours.

More images are after the break.

Read more…

Science astronomy, hubble, nasa

Mitsubishi has just issued a press release about a few new televisions they’re bringing to market, and it includes what very well might be the largest 3D-capable Television on the market at 82 inches.

“3D is a large screen, immersive experience, and we're proud to offer consumers the most affordable line-up of 3D TVs available today, in cinema-like 60, 65, 73, and 82-inch screen sizes,” said Max Wasinger, executive vice president of sales and marketing, Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America. “3D represents the highest level and most advanced form of home entertainment, and we clearly see our 3D DLP Home Cinema TVs playing a key role in meeting consumers craving for the best, most advanced 3D home theater experience.”

Now, these are DLP televisions, so they’re not the classy slim LCD models making the rounds today.  There’s also no information on just what type of 3D technology they’re using, aside from “the same core DLP technology used in the vast majority of 3D movie theaters”, so it could be passive stereo.  The new models include 16-speaker 5.1 channle Doly Digital surround sound, and StreamTV internet media for Flickr, Pandora, Facebook, the New York Times, and more.

The TV’s range in price from $1,199 to $4,499.

via Mitsubishi WD-82738: 82 Inches of 3D TV For $3800 – mitsubishitv – Gizmodo.

Hardware dlp, mitsubishi, stereoscopic, television

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope has captured a beautiful picture of IC 342. While that sounds like a droid out of Star Wars, it is actually a galaxy that lies close to the galactic plane of the Milky Way. What that means is that all the dust in the galactic plane of the Milky Way blocks much of IC 342′s visible light. That makes it hard to estimate the distance to the galaxy. The current estimate ranges from 6.6 million light years to 11 million light-years away from earth. That is a pretty high range of uncertainty.

The image shows that IC 342 is a spiral galaxy much like our own. The dust and gas are mainly found in the arms of the galaxy, which new stars being formed in both the arms and core. The blue stars in the image reside in our own Milky Way.

This image was made from observations by all four infrared detectors aboard WISE. Blue and cyan represent infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is primarily light from stars. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is primarily emission from warm dust.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

You can see another image of IC 342 at the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

via WISE – Multimedia Gallery: IC 342.

Science astronomy, nasa, wise

CGSociety and NVidia have announced the new NVArt competition, the fifth, which focuses on the amazing artwork of Syd Mead.

The Master Futurist, famous for his concept designs in Blade Runner, TRON and 2010, will lead a panel of star judges: Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman (cohosts of Mythbusters), Mark Frauenfelder (founder of boingboing.net) Kevin Kelly (the founder of Wired Magazine), Brian Gernand (Creative Director of Kerner), Lorne Lanning (of Oddworld fame), David Wright (Creative Director of NVIDIA) and Mark Snoswell (President of CGSociety).

Together these luminaries will choose the top five entries, who will share in over $35,000 in prizes.

No doubt the entries will be fantastic, but I’m a little disheartened to see half the judging panel outside of the Computer Graphics industry.  Nothing against the Mythbusters guys (I love the show, personally) but I don’t much see the point of them judging a graphics art competition.

Deadline for entries (2560×1600 JPEG images) is June 30th.  Check the CGSociety site for all the details.

via NVArt – ACCELERATE – Introduction.

Graphics art, contest, nvidia

Expreview.com is reporting that the GeForce GTX 460 will be arriving on June 1^st. The timing is about right since COMPUTEX runs from June 1^st to June 5^th. The GTX 460 is rumored to have 384 shader cores running at 500 to 600 MHz. The memory bus would be 256 bits wide, run at about 850 MHz, and support 1 GB of GDDR5 memory.

Previously we reported that the GeForce GTS 450, 440, and 430 would be arriving in June. The GTS 440 and 450 would have a 40nm GF104 core. This core has 256 shader cores and a 256-bit memory bus. The GTS 440 would have 20% slower clock speeds than the GTS 450. The GTS 430, using a cut-down version of the GF104, will have 192 shader cores and have a 192-bit memory bus. These video cards are reportedly due in June 2010.

Hardware fermi, gtx460, nvidia

While NVidia has Quadro, AMD has FirePro, a similar line of high-performance cards targeted at graphics designers and visual effects artists.  Yesterday they announced the new line of FirePro cards, the ATI FirePro V8800, which supports DirectX11 and Eyefinity multi-display technology.  That’s not all tho, as the new card offers 2.6 teraflops of compute power and an impressive 147.2GB/s of memory bandwidth, beating out the QuadroFX5800′s 104GB/s.  The card can drive 4 independent 30″ displays (via Displayport), and works with the S400 Synchronization Module.

“Autodesk recognizes the importance of having our customers invest in a professional graphics solution,” said Jim White, director of Global Alliances, Autodesk. “Together with AMD, a leader in the professional graphics space, we’re able to provide Autodesk users with visually accurate, high performance creative tools. We look forward to working with AMD and the next generation of ATI FirePro graphics to enable our customers with exceptional productivity.”

Has an MSRP of $1499 USD, although I don’t see it available on NewEgg or Tigerdirect yet.

via AMD Extends Leadership To Professional Graphics.

Hardware amd, ati, firepro

Guru3d has some pictures from EVGA running a setup of four, count them, four GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards running in quad-SLI. Can you imagine the power supply that would be needed to drive that thing? Let’s see here. Four GeForce GTX 480′s at 250 Watts apiece equals one kilowatt of power. And that does not include the rest of the system. While they can and do make power supplies up to 1400 Watts, I imagine that they actually used two different power supplies. That is just sketched out using a back-of-the-napkin approach. Click through the link below to see another image of the setup.

As you can see the setup is up and running, but no benchmarks are shared just yet. It certainly will be very interesting to see how well the scores scale. The motherboard used was a eVGA 4-Way SLI classified motherboard. Anyway have a look at some photo’s.

via EVGA teases with GTX 480 4 Way SLI.

Hardware fermi, gtx480, nvidia, sli