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Color Night Vision (2016) [video]
The X27 camera takes videos in darkness that looks like they were shot in the daytime. And they’re in color…none of this black and white, thermal, or infrared s
Jason Kottke
Jason Kottke's daily links and commentary on art, science, technology, design, film, and culture since 1998.
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Visit kottke.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jan 2009 – Nov 2026
Society, Policy & Culture 42History & Retro Computing 24Science & Space 21Life, Learning & Writing 21Tech Industry & Business 8Math & Algorithms 7
2
How photos were transmitted by wire in the 1930s
I didn’t know what to expect from this 1937 video explanation of how wire photos were transmitted to newspapers, but a double stunt sequence featuring an airpla
3
The Remarkable Brain Waves of High Level Meditators [video]
What’s going on in the brains of people who meditate? Anecdotal evidence suggests that meditation does something to people’s minds and bodies…quiets and calms t
4
Go Pro on a soaring eagle [video]
What does it feel like to soar majestically like an bird? Maybe something like this video, shot with a camera strapped to the back of an eagle flying near Chamo
5
It’s Time for Some Queueing Theory
Queueing theory is the scientific study of waiting in line. It can apply to familiar lines like those at the grocery store or bank but also to things like web s
6
A googol-to-one gear ratio [video]
To celebrate being alive for a billion seconds, Daniel Bruin built a machine with 100 gears with a 10-to-1 gear ratio…meaning that the overall gear ratio is a g
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Plane Lands/Takes Off in Only 20 Feet (2013)
I posted a video earlier today of a Super Cub airplane landing on the side of a mountain. Super Cubs are ideal for that undertaking because of their low stall s
8
If you watch closely enough, everything is a speaker
Using high speed cameras, it’s possible to record the vibrations of everyday objects caused by nearby sounds and reverse engineer the sounds…essentially turning
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Picking up glowing hot space shuttle tiles with bare hands (2011) [video]
Space Shuttle thermal tiles conduct heat so poorly that after being in a 2200 °F oven for hours, you can pick them up with your bare hands only seconds after th
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Temperature chart for the last 11,000 years
For the first time, researchers have put together all the climate data they have (from ice cores, coral, sediment drilling) into one chart that shows the “globa
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Our Dazzling Night Sky When the Milky Way Collides with Andromeda in 4B Years
This is what our night sky is going to look like in 3.9 billion years: Wow! So what’s going on here? Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at
12
A small 2009 car demolishes a 1959 Chevy in a crash test [video]
In 2009, The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted a crash test between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevy Malibu. The video plainly shows how
13
Flyover video of Jupiter’s Europa
NASA engineer Kevin Gill stitched together images from two 1998 observations of Europa by the Galileo spacecraft to create this super smooth flyover video of th
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Telescope Ranchers
Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business, Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditio
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Image of our satellite-choked night skies
To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together. Thi
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How the Great Green Wall is holding back the Sahara desert
The Great Green Wall being built in Africa to halt the southern progress of the Sahara Desert is a favorite public works project of mine — it’s massive, ambitio
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The World’s Loudest Sound (2014)
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and wa
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Yellowstone National Park’s Sound and Video Libraries
Yellowstone National Park maintains a collection of sounds and videos taken in the park that are in the public domain and free for anyone to use. The collection
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If you put your hand in the Large Hadron Collider...
Several physicists weigh in on what would happen if you were to place your hand in the proton stream of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. There’s not a definit
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Vaccines don't cause autism
The debate is essentially over and the final word is in: vaccines do not cause autism. The results of a rigorous study conducted over several years were just an
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Insanely deep fractal zoom
I was really into fractals in college (I know…) when I was making rave flyers (I know!) for a friend’s parties in Iowa (I know! I know! Shut up already!). Anywa