Into the abyss: The diving suit that turns men into fish

Humans have proven themselves remarkably adept at learning to do what other animals can do naturally. We have taught ourselves to fly like birds, climb like monkeys and burrow like moles. But the one animal that has always proven beyond our reach is the fish.

The invention of scuba diving has allowed us to breathe underwater but only at very shallow depths. Diving below 70m still remains astonishingly dangerous to anyone but a handful of experts.

Now an inventor in the United States believes he has solved the riddle of how to get humans down to serious depths – by getting us to breathe liquid like fish. Arnold Lande, a retired American heart and lung surgeon, has patented a scuba suit that would allow a human to breathe "liquid air", a special solution that has been highly enriched with oxygen molecules.

Liquid ventilation might sound like science fiction – it played a major role in James Cameron’s 1989 sci-fi film The Abyss – but it is already used by a handful of cutting-edge American hospitals for highly premature babies.

read more at www.independent.co.uk
(Click above link to read about "How it works")

Scientists glimpse universe before the Big Bang

In general, asking what happened before the Big Bang is not really considered a science question. According to Big Bang theory, time did not even exist before this point roughly 13.7 billion years ago. But now, Oxford University physicist Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia have found an effect in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that allows them to "see through" the Big Bang into what came before.

read more from www.physorg.com

BitTorrent visualization in processing.js

BitTorrent visualization in processing.js. Processing.js is an open programming language for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions for the web without using Flash or Java applets. This visualization How file sharing works in BitTorrent?. It was originally started off at aphid.org and now improved/maintained by Jeff Atwood from codinghorror.com.

You can use the 's' and 'p' keys to add new seeds and peers to the swarm. Hitting 'r' will remove one of the seeds or peers at random, but it takes a few seconds before it activates. Works in pretty much any modern browser except IE (because IE doesn't have support for the <canvas> tag).

via mg8.org
(Click above link to see an interactive animation)

CQ Economy Tracker

A massive data visualization tool that lets users find out how the U.S. economy is performing, including breakouts on jobs, house prices, inflation and income. The visualization was designed & developed by the editorial multimedia team of CQ-Roll Call Group, the premier political news and information provider covering congress.

The data is collected from government and non-government sources; the interactive shows all historical data and is updated live as new data is released. It also features a glossary with sources and descriptions of the data and the data is available for download in Excel format. We think it's the first interactive tool of its kind to pair up this much national and regional/state data side-by-side. It's hooked up to a database and was built in Flash. All of the components, including the graphing and mapping portions, were custom built and are fully reusable APIs.

via cqeconomytracker.cq.com
(click above link to play with this interactive tool)

Note: If you read this via Email or Feed-reader click above link to play with this interactive tool.

Linear Layout for Visualization of Networks

The Linear Layout visualization is a productive approach to network visual analytics. It is a scalable, computationally fast, and straight-forward network visualization method that makes possible visual interpretation of network structure and evolution.

Problem: Conventional network visualization is unsuitable for visual analytics of large networks. So-called hairballs earn their moniker by becoming impenetrably complex as your network grows. They are least effective when visualization is most needed — for large networks.


Solution: The linear layout presented here addresses the shortcomings of the conventional hairball layout and is very effective at identifying meaningful structural components in your network.


via linnet

Weave Data: How to Analyze Your Personal Internet Traffic?

We all use twitter, write emails, skype and blog all day long. There isn’t a single day we are not going to visit websites like google, youtube, the website of our favorite newspaper or social network and browse through the web. Despite that, or actually because of it, everybody tends to use the web in a different manner.

To visualize this fact and the traces we leave on our journey through the internet and to reveal some of the hidden patterns of our everyday online life, weave magazine asked onformative to create a data visualization of the online activity of several interaction designers, artists and developers.

By analyzing your personal internet traffic logfile using the custom written software you get a distinctive and unique visualization of your online activities.

Collecting the Data : Download LogTool
Analyzing & Visualizing : Download Visualization Sourcecode
How to do - tutorial: Weave Data Tutorial

Ocean Life: Diversity, Distribution, Abundance

Census of Marine Life Maps and Visualization. The Census of Marine Life is a global network of researchers in more than 80 nations engaged in a 10-year scientific initiative to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans.  The world's first comprehensive census of the past, present, and future of life in the oceans is being released in 2010.

Download the map (PDF, 7.4MB)

Download a full resolution map (PDF, 128MB)

via www.comlmaps.org

Note: If you read this via Email or Feed-reader click Permalink below to download bigger image.