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NASA's 19-Gigapixel Filmstrip of the Earth from Russia to South Africa

May 21, 2013 NASA's Landsat satellites have been snapping pictures of the Earth from orbit since 1972. The most recent iteration of the project, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, arrived at its orbital resting place on April 12, and shot thisseries of 56 images shortly thereafter. NASA stitched the pictures together into one ...

from govexec

National Weather Service Warned About School Safety in Oklahoma City Region

May 21, 2013 Monday, the National Weather Service's Rick Smith posted a briefing to YouTube at 11:30am, which laid out a scenario for the day's weather events that was eerily precise. Specifically, he mentioned schools as an area of concern and highlighted the potential for an EF-4 tornado in the area south of ...

Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity?

May 17, 2013 For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell. And yet, these ...

from govexec

What the Obama Campaign's Chief Data Scientist Is Up to Now

May 9, 2013 By all accounts, Rayid Ghani's data work for President Obama's reelection campaign was brilliant and unprecedented. Ghani probably could have written a ticket to work at any company in the world, or simply collected speaking fees for a few years telling companies how to harness the power of data like ...

Operation Acoustic Kitty: The CIA's Would-Be Cat Spy

May 9, 2013 You see, cats are sly and unpredictable. They can slip unnoticed from place to place, watching, listening, wryly judging, surveilling. So, why wouldn't the Central Intelligence Agency stick a microphone in a cat's ear and embed a radio transmitter in her body? Oh, but they would! In an excerpt from ...

The Hordes of Microbes Inside Your Body Are Your Friends

April 26, 2013 As tools for engineering life’s building blocks have proliferated in recent years, our definition of human life has become more expansive. For example,we are learning that the vast ecosystems of microbes inside our bodies are as integral to our health as our own tissues, affecting everything from our immune systems ...

NASA Announces the Discovery of the Most Interesting Planetary System Outside Our Own

April 18, 2013 The Kepler Space Telescope has been in orbit looking for planets around other stars since 2009, and it's started to find some startlingly interesting solar systems out there. Today, the Kepler team announced the discovery of star system Kepler 62, a group of five planets circling a red star, two ...

Hey Reddit, Enough Boston Bombing Vigilantism

April 18, 2013 If there's one thing we want to believe about the Boston bombing, it's that someone saw the perpetrator. Somewhere, inside an iPhone or on a memory chip, there's an image of the terrorist(s). The video would serve as evidence at a trial, and it would calm the queasy feeling that ...

The SSA Employee Behind All the Great Data on Baby Name Popularity

April 16, 2013 Every year, the Social Security Administration releases its annual list of the most popular names in America. They've become a valuable source of data for researchers, as Ruth Graham brilliantly laid out in the Boston Globe this weekend. The best thing about name data is that it is the perfect ...

How Boston Police Could Examine Videos From the Boston Bombing

April 15, 2013 As investigators try to figure out what happened today during the bombings at the Boston Marathon, they'll turn to video taken at the scene of the explosions. In addition to any closed-circuit television cameras lining Boylston Street and its surroundings, The Bureau Chief of Public Information, Cheryl Fiandaca,called for members ...