Frogs in Space!

This photo which circulated around the internet last fall of a frog, taking an unexpected flight via a rocket -- may seem unusual. But #rocketfrog, as the little guy has become known, is not the first amphibian to, with the help of some human ingenuity, get a little closer to the final frontier. Nor is it the second. Nor is it the third. NASA and other space agencies, in their zeal to test the effects of microgravity on different organisms, have sent many, many other frogs into space -- not accidentally, as was the case with this launch, but purposely. For science. 

The following is a brief a brief history of frogs in space. Frogonauts, if you will.  READ MORE

A short trip through the Known Universe

Look up in a clear night sky you glimpse just a tiny part of a vast Universe. For years, astronomers have labored hard to map it's depths. But it's only been in recent years, with the help of composite imaging from the Hubble Telescope, and intensive map rendering, using the most powerful supercomputers, have we been able to begin to grasp the immensity of the Universe. This video is the result... an animation of every object in the known universe, located precisely in it's relationship to each other.
The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas, through our atmosphere and the inky black of space, to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan.