Landing the Mars Rover: 7 Minutes of Terror

NASA gets dramatic. But the drama is oh so appropriate when you see what they have to do to land a rover on Mars. There are so many steps to the landing — heat shields, atmospheric friction, parachute, rockets — that it’ll be amazing if it works, and the video is a wonderful “strike the imagination” introduction to the physics of forces.

Murmuration: A Flocking of Birds

Amazing footage of an enormous flock of birds in flight by Sophie Windsor Clive.

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Brandon Kelm explains a little of how it works, mostly using terms like “scale-free correlation” and “criticality”, which pretty much sums up that we don’t know a lot about the phenomena.

NetLogo has a nice little Java model showing an attempt at simulating flocking. They give a good description of how there model works.

(via The Dish)