David Pierini - page 61

The muse of the Hubble Space Telescope is even more alluring 20 years later.

Of all the breath-taking photos from the telescope’s camera, the blooming pillars of gas of the Eagle Nebula from 1995 became Hubble’s most iconic image, depicted on stamps, tee-shirts and in several cameos for film and television.

Hubble recently took another look at the star-lit towers of gas and cosmic dust – dubbed the Pillars of Creation — with a newer camera (installed in 2009) and captured greater detail that should give astronomers a chance to see how the clouds of oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur have changed since the first photograph.

He is an Eagle Scout, a versatile bar-band drummer and a senior GUI designer for a company that creates mobile apps for the health care industry.

But Scott Wade is famous for drawing dirty pictures.

It’s not the content that raises eyebrows but the canvas on which Wade creates. Present him with a dirty car and see why some call him the “da Vinci of Dust.”

Who hasn’t walked by a car coated in dirt and used their finger to scrawl the message, “Wash me”? Wade, inspired by the dirt roads of his home state of Texas, uses a car’s dirty window as an opportunity to create elaborate landscapes, detailed portraiture with subtle shading and re-imagined classic works like The Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

If you can suffer through the selfies, food shots and pet pictures, you can catch a glimpses of the revolutionary art form that is mobile phone photography. Book publisher Pierre Le Govic has positioned himself to be the first important curator of the fleeting beauty on Instagram.

Le Govic, who established a publishing house in France for mobile photography in 2013, has issued Out of the Phone: The Mobile Photo Book 2014 Edition, featuring one picture each from 100 photographers from 25 countries

Politics makes for strange bedfellows. But it doesn’t have to.

The creators of a new dating app helps singles connect based on politics to help find like-minded matches on hot-button issues like guns, abortion, gay marriage and climate change.

So if size (of government) does matter, candiDate is available for free download on the Google Play store with a version for iPhone in the works.

A majority of single people in the United States have tried online dating, according to the website Statistic Brain. OK Cupid has 12 million users while Tinder boasts of having 50 million seeking a connection.

More than 50 percent of people ages 18-29 are not registered to vote and the digital agency HelpsGood wanted to develop a product that could invigorate young people to get more politically engaged.

Photography’s impact on society doesn’t come down to single, striking images like it once did. Instead, the power today comes from conversations: What we talked about in 2014 often began with pictures and videos that were seen and shared over and over again.

It did not matter whether the images came from skilled photojournalists or witnesses with cellphones. Consider that Instagram alone churns out 70 million images a day. From that sea of imagery, a collective and comprehensive body of work emerged. We subconsciously curated those images based on our own experiences and attitudes — and maybe even grew a little in the process.

The roads just got a little safer for bicyclists — as long as everyone drives a Volvo.

The Swedish car company, which wants to build cars that do not crash, has teamed with helmet manufacturer POC in an attempt to solve the problem of car-bike collisions. Their solution? Wearable technology that alerts both motorist and cyclist when a collision is imminent.

Volvo, POC and smartphone manufacturer Ericsson will unveil the safety system at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month.

The buff and beautiful lifeguard runs in slow motion down the beach, unseen winds blowing their hair in a Hollywood-made rescue fantasy. But hey, you’re drowning, there’s no time for that.

Your savior could be a group of Connecticut high school students who have developed a drone accessory that deploys an automatically inflating life ring to a swimmer in distress in under 30 seconds.

The lengthy list of logistics involved in starting any business eventually lands on what to do about equipment and office space.

James Turner and Holly Kennedy run their user experience design consultancy out of a single backpack each as they trek from country to country like nomadic college students with a free summer.

Kennedy says you won’t find the couple “wearing bandannas or growing dreadlocks” but they are happy living life on their own terms — with an unconventional commute and ever-changing scenery. Cult of Mac caught up with the ex-Londoners, both 26, in northern Thailand, where they were working around spotty Wi-Fi and a client 13 time zones away.

Jewelry maker Mat Brown is getting married, and the romantic in him is hard at work creating wedding rings out of an alloy of silver and gold called electrum.

But on the practical side of sharing a life, Brown recently created space in his kitchen with shelves as unique as his jewelry: Brown used a glow-in-the-dark resin to fill in cracks in the wooden shelves, and happily shared the luminescent process and result on his blog.

Flatworms are the darlings of the molecular biology field. What scientist doesn’t love a species that can lose an organ or body part — even its head — and grow it back?

It’s quite a trick. We’ll see if they can do it in space.

About 150 planarian flatworms, creatures that are happiest living in rivers or under a log, have first-class tickets aboard the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship, which will take them to the International Space Station for an experiment that could unlock the key to human immortality.

Maci Peterson made a Christian man blush with a text message she sent to plan a first date.

“I wanted to know where to meet, D.C. or Maryland,” she told Cult of Mac. “So I typed, ‘Are you in DC or MD?’ and AutoCorrect changed it to, ‘Are you in D.C. or Me?’ I was so embarrassed.”

Peterson recovered and hopes she is on the verge of saving us all from stumbling fingers, drunken texts and the bewildering algorithms of AutoCorrect. Her new app, On Second Thought, launches this week for Android devices with a version for iPhone users due out early next year.

If only we could float above the noise, the dirt and the concrete. What we would see is something peaceful and beautiful.

A graphic designer from Brazil is serving up that kind of serene macro view of the world as wallpaper for our smartphones. His Tumblr blog, Aerial Wallpapers, is loaded with a wonderfully curated collection of satellite photography images.

Joao Paulo Bernades looks for colorful, graphic, Creative Commons-licensed images of Earth from NASA and Airbus Defense and Space, then crops and scales them to fit the iPhone 6. The images appear to be scalable for other devices.

Can you hit your targets when playing an Xbox shooting game? If so, the Navy might just want to put a video-game-like controller in your hands. Except this version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will have you aiming a ship-mounted laser at real enemies.

A Navy video shows a new laser weapon system successfully zapping a small target on a moving ship, shooting an unmanned aircraft out of the sky and picking off other targets at sea.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make a music video, and maybe you shouldn’t be. Turns out, rocket scientists can’t dance.
NASA released a parody video on YouTube Thursday called “All About That Space,” designed to raise excitement about Orion’s recent first test flight.

The lyrics of Meghan Trainor’s monster hit “All About That Bass” were re-engineered by the Pathways Interns of NASA’s Johnson Space Center to lead the viewer on a behind-the-scenes look at the men and woman hard at work on space travel.

You can wait until the 2030s when NASA hopes to land astronauts on Mars. Or, if you have four minutes to spare right now, you can see what it is like to stand on the edge of the red planet’s Victoria Crater or catch a Martian sunset.

Erik Wernquist will even throw in a side of rings — Saturn’s that is — for watching his awe-inducing short film, Wanderers, which is embedded below.

“I am always inspired by reading about astronomy, and planetary astronomy in particular,” Wernquist told Cult of Mac. “And when I read about, or see pictures from places, I often fantasize about what it would … feel like to actually be there.”

Tortoises are born with houses on their backs. But what if their legs aren’t strong enough to move about with such a burden?

A veterinarian in Germany found a solution for one gimpy tortoise by raiding his son’s toy collection: Dr. Carsten Plischke used Lego bricks to make a kind of scooter for Blade, a shellback that has difficulties walking because of a growth disorder.

Oh good, more selfies.

Instagram has surpassed more than 300 million users, doubling its membership in just over a year.

The app, which has a stream of more than 70 million photos and videos per day, now has more users than Twitter (284 million), proving once again your friends would rather see a picture of your dinner than read about it in 140 characters or less.

“Over the past four years, what began as two friends and a dream has grown into a global community,” CEO Kevin Systrom said on the Instagram blog. “We’re thrilled to watch this community thrive and witness the amazing connections people make over shared passions and journeys.”

Remember being lost in the 8-bit world of Atari and Nintendo? When Adam Lister was a boy, he couldn’t spend enough time in his basement playing Pong, Space Invaders or Donkey Kong.

Games and graphics, of course, evolved, and the chiptune music of those game consoles went silent long ago. But the graphic language where characters are a rough collection of cubes and rectangles still speaks to Lister.

It is the lens through which he views art history and pop culture in a series of more than 250 watercolor paintings he created over a three-year period.

Whatever she earns, Grumpy Cat has plenty of reasons to smile. The Internet-famous feline just knows her earning power would dry up if she expressed happiness.

The world’s favorite sourpuss has reportedly earned more than $100 million in two years, according to British tabloid The Daily Express. That’s more than Hollywood stars Nicole Kidman, Matt Damon or Mathew McConaughey.

For the kid expecting a Lionel model train set under the Christmas tree, unwrapping a pack of copper wire, a couple of magnets and a battery is sure to disappoint.

But show them how to make a train out of those items, and you just might spark their curiosity and instill a love of science. Now that’s a gift — here’s how it works.

Smartwatches may have a lot of firepower, but what about a wearable that lets you shoot actual flames from your hands?

The PYRO Fireshooter puts fireballs right up your sleeve. It attaches to the underside of the wrist and contains four individually triggered barrels, each able to launch a fireball 10 feet.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a drummer. When it came time to assign instruments in elementary school, I started on a practice drumming pad.

The music teacher never let me graduate to a real drum because he knew what he was hearing on the rubber pad would be a disaster on a simple snare. But an aspiring drummer in Japan has mastered the pad — the iPad, that is. His fast-moving fingers earned him the title of “sickest drummer in metal right now” on Digg.

NASA’s spaceship of tomorrow might make a critic of skeuomorphic design cringe.

Orion, which flew successfully on an unmanned test Friday and is seen as a critical first step toward flying a crew to Mars, is guided by sophisticated computer control panels.

But instead of a modern digital interface, NASA designed the controls to look like something from the Gemini missions from the ’60s. Orion’s computer screens are full of virtual flip switches and levers that would put Yuri Gagarin at ease.

It’s a little like Apple putting a virtual rotary dial on an iPhone.

The only thing missing from Friday’s Orion test flight was a black-and-white live stream and the voice of Walter Cronkite calling the moment of the capsule’s splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

Orion may be the future of deep-space travel, with ambitious missions planned for an asteroid in the next decade and eventually Mars, but the event had a nostalgic feel, like a 1960s or ’70s living room with all eyes on a black-and-white television set.

If size does matter, being too big can get you laughed at, too.

Such is the case with Samsung’s 105-inch curved UHD TV. With a price tag approaching $120,000 — the cost of a few cars or a small house in most ZIP codes — the reviews on Amazon are pure comedy gold.

A visit to Amazon’s listing for the gigantic TV, which includes FREE Prime shipping, by the way — might leave you disappointed at first because the item is not in stock. But scroll through the reviews and you will find the many hilarious ways shoppers express sticker shock.