All that matters

life:

Look carefully: You can just make out Air Force Colonel Joseph Kittinger, Jr. in a record-shattering free fall from the very edge of space on August 16, 1960, after jumping from a balloon-supported gondola 102,800 feet above New Mexico.

During his descent, Kittinger reached approximate speeds of 614 miles an hour. The clouds beneath him are 15 miles away. Kittinger’s leap was part of the Air Force’s “Project Excelsior,” which conducted research into high altitude bailouts from aircraft. Incredibly, almost 50 years later, Kittinger’s record for the longest-ever free fall and highest parachute jump still stand.

(see more — 21 Greatest-Ever Space Photos)

The two sides of promoting materials science

Too much travelling in science

Through the tangled web

“Science in the age of austerity” – an example

diamondlightsource:

20 June 2011: The lighting system on Diamond’s Non-crystalline diffraction beamline (I22) is under commissioning whilst the Diamond synchrotron is in a scheduled shutdown period. Final checks are made before I22 is ready to “take beam” and the X-rays enter the optics hutch.

Semiconductor optical switches reach the speed of light

diamondlightsource:

26 April 2011: A microcrystalline powder sample of a previously unknown phase of organic cage sits in a 1 mm diameter capillary, ready to be placed in the beam on Beamline I11. The crystallites are approximately 1 micron in size. Photo taken by Sam Chong.

Should past cancer prevent you from office?

life:

EXCLUSIVE: The Day Einstein Died

Albert Einstein, whose theories exploded and reshaped our ideas of how the universe works, died 56 years ago, on April 18, 1955, of heart failure. He was 76. His funeral and cremation were intensely private affairs, and only one photographer managed to capture the events of that extraordinary day: LIFE magazine’s Ralph Morse. Armed with his camera and a case of scotch — to open doors and loosen tongues — Morse compiled a quietly intense record of an icon’s passing. But aside from one now-famous image (above), the pictures Morse took that day were never published. At the request of Einstein’s son, who asked that the family’s privacy be respected while they mourned, LIFE decided not to run the full story, and for more than five decades Morse’s photographs lay unseen and forgotten.