These are the latest articles and videos I found most interesting.
- Landing on a Comet – ESA’s Rosetta Mission
- Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs’ Favorite Product: The Apple Team
- The Caterpillar in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (The Royal Ballet)
- ‘Matter waves’ move through one another but never share space
- Floating touchscreen lets you feel virtual objects
- Aerodynamics Simulation Using a Supercomputer
- Mindsuckers: The Sting of Doom
- Nik Wallenda Conquers Chicago Skyline
- Why We Fart (Science Out Loud)
Landing on a Comet – ESA’s Rosetta Mission
Landing on a Comet – ESA’s Rosetta Mission
A Decade of the Rosetta Mission in 90 Seconds
We’ll make discoveries that nobody’s imagined yet
Philae lander sends back first ever image from comet
Rosetta’s Comet Lander Landed Three Times
From Rosetta’s takeoff in French Guiana in 2004 to its rendezvous with comet 67P this past summer, Rosetta mission’s milestones in the past 10 years.
Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs’ Favorite Product: The Apple Team
Walter Isaacson discusses how Steve Jobs may have had a prickly personality, but his ability to build loyal and innovative teams was one of his greater talents. Isaacson is the author of The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.
Transcript: You know Steve Jobs was one of those romantic innovators who comes up with great ideas, has real passion, real vision and that prickly personality, that very pushy reality distorting personality that can get something done. However, in writing about Steve Jobs I realized something interesting. It wasn’t just his one vision. It was his ability to create a team around him, his ability to work in partnership with Steve Wozniak. You go down the list with dozens of people all the way to Tim Cook. And not only to work in partnership but to create a collaborative team around him of great designers like Jony Ive and software people like Phil Schiller and Johnny Rubinstein. And I once asked Steve Jobs, you know, what product are you the proudest of. And I thought he might say the iPod or the iPhone or the iPad, whatever, the Mac. And he said, you know, making a product is hard but making a team that can continually make products is even harder
The product I’m most proud of is Apple and the team I built at Apple. And that’s when I moved to this new book, The Innovators, because I wanted to say it’s not just about the visionary, it’s about the visionary being able to execute on the vision by finding the right people to be collaborative and creative with. So with Steve Jobs even though we think of him as being a tough boss or we think of him as having sort of a prickly personality, there were people who were so loyal to Steve they would walk through walls for him. He developed around him the tightest, most loyal, most integrated team in Silicon Valley.
You know, Steve Jobs was very intuitive in the way he made decisions. He wasn’t somebody who deeply reflected or spent a whole lot of time hashing it through. But he would work with everybody from the hardware designers like Jony Ive to the software people and just sort of say no, that doesn’t feel right. Sometimes he used a little bit stronger language than that. Or it’s genius, it’s perfect, it’s awesome, it’s incredible. But, you know, don’t try this at home. People come up to me sometimes and say I’m like Steve Jobs – when somebody does something that stinks I tell them it stinks. Yeah and have you invented the iPod? Have you invented an iPhone? No, Steve Jobs didn’t just have a tough personality. He also had a charismatic visionary personality and he brought people in.
And he really could inspire people because even though sometimes he couldn’t articulate exactly what he wanted he could sure point the way to getting it there. He also believed in physical space as necessary for collaboration. We think maybe we can collaborate in the digital age by doing it virtually from afar but when he built the Pixar building and when he designed what will be the new headquarters for Apple it was all about making sure people had serendipitous encounters. That they came through the atrium.
That they walked through the perimeter where the light was in the new Apple headquarters. Where they would just bump into people and say what are you working on. And then naturally collaborate. But he felt that, you know, just by walking through Jony Ives design studio and touching a few things and talking to people he could collaborate by being in a physical space better than he could do it by Skype or email or, you know, Google hangouts. So Steve’s team building skills really sort of came from the force of his personality and being with him.
The Caterpillar in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (The Royal Ballet)
Sarah Lamb as Alice and Eric Underwood, Christina Arestis, Olivia Cowley, Melissa Hamilton and Nathalie Harrison as the Caterpillar in Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Recorded for cinema broadcast on 28 March 2013.
‘Matter waves’ move through one another but never share space
How can two clumps of matter pass through each other without sharing space? Rice University physicists have documented a strange disappearing act by colliding Bose Einstein condensates that appear to keep their distance even as they pass through one another.
Floating touchscreen lets you feel virtual objects
Floating touchscreen lets you feel virtual objects
Ultrasound makes hologram keyboard touchy-feely
HaptoMime uses reflective surfaces to create a floating virtual screen that you can actually feel.
Aerodynamics Simulation Using a Supercomputer
Automotive Aerodynamics Simulation
Predicting Local Wind Pressure on Buildings TV
Automotive Aerodynamics Simulation Using a Supercomputer from Applied Aerodynamics Group, Hokkaido University.
Mindsuckers: The Sting of Doom
A jewel wasp uses her stinger as a syringe to drug a cockroach’s brain with neurotransmitters. The docile roach becomes a living cradle for her egg—and then, when the egg hatches, the hungry larva’s first meal.
Read about parasites online in National Geographic magazine:
Mindsuckers
Nik Wallenda Conquers Chicago Skyline
Nik Wallenda Conquers Chicago Skyline
Nik Wallenda’s Epic Blindfolded Skyscraper Walk
Relive Nik Wallenda’s two incredible walks across Chicago at epic heights with no safety tethers or nets.
Why We Fart (Science Out Loud)
Why We Fart
Why Do We Like Our Own Farts?
Behind every fart (and poop) is an army of gut bacteria undergoing some crazy (and crazy useful) biochemistry. Learn what they have in common with beer brewing, and why we’d want to know about this science anyway…