Not a picture from this planet, but impressive anyway. Hopefully Hubble telescope will take more pictures from our universum in future.
This one has been composed and mosaiqued using 51 individual Hubble photos plus a few ground-based.
Galaxy Messier 101 is 25 million light years away, direction Great Bear.
Image credit goes to to NASA and ESA. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between both.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006 at 22:19:08 (UTC)
In a depth of 11km an earthquake with magnitude of 7.5 happened yesterday in Mozambique.
7.5 is quite strong and scared people run onto streets leaving their houses. Last similar earthquake occured in 1900 with a magnitude of about 7.6.
More detail you’ll find at U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program
Your comupter searches Aliens with SETI? Well, from now he can compute more useful data. BBC started a distributed computing experiment. The entry page of the project is easy to understand with a lot of information and everyone is invited to share his personal number crunching facility. Download (<11MB) is available for W2K and WXP.
At the beginnig you’ll download a single unique climate model. Starting from 1920 it will calculate and simulate weather on your private earth model. Current year, temperature, pressure is shown in a nice 3D interface similiar to NASA World Wind. Try zooming or panning to achieve a better view.
Reaching the end at 2080 model is send back to Oxford. Assuming your model has turned earth into an ice planet in 2006 it was a bad one. Models with reasonable outcome will become part of future analysis.
The project page has more background information and an interesting interview with Professor Bob Spicer from the Open University.
The BBC Climate Change Experiment was created using the Met Office climate model. A team at Oxford University runs climateprediction.net, along with colleagues at several other academic and research institutions, including the Open University and the University of California, Berkeley.
As a result of collaboration with geonames.org we proudly unleash the first 2 new map extensions: Placenames and Earthquakes.
Both extensions are part of the default geoLink (999) , you can toggle them (FireFox only) with Alt-p for placenames or Alt-q for earthquakes. 
Placenames are much faster loaded from geonames than maps and help you to stay oriented while zooming into your place of interest.
They are displayed in your choosen language and link to city’s Wikipedia page when ever possible.
The extensions use latest Web 2.0 technologies as AJAX and JSON to deliver instant update within milliseconds.
Inter domain data exchange format is JSON, while EOP uses XML to transport additional meta service data between PHP Connector and Javascript’s XMLHttpRequest.
The geonames.org database contains 2 million toponyms of populated places. Up to twenty are shown sorted by population with priority on capitals.
A sophisticated algorithm prevents overlapping of placenames, so the screen is not cluttered up with unreadable citynames.
Overlapping of earthquakes is wanted to have them all visible. The data is obtained from USGS Earthquake Center and gets refreshed periodically and is near realtime.
Picture shows Turino where the Olympics started yesterday together with Placenames and the pan sharpened Global Mosaic from NASA Onearth Server.
Click here to check it out, go fullscreen with F11 and do the wheelzoom.
“One Planet, Many People: Atlas of Our Changing Environment demonstrates how our growing number of people and their consumption patterns are shrinking our natural resource base. The challenge is, how do we satisfy human needs without compromising the health of ecosystems. One Planet Many People is an additional wake-up call to this need.”
Ola Ullsten
Co-Chair World Commission on Forests
and Sustainable Development
Former Prime Minister of Sweden
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