Living

The Mars Rover Curiousity landed safely this week, and surprisingly, some other things still managed to happen as well. Between massive security exploits regarding Amazon and Apple, a terrifyingly odd message written on an airplane wing, a stupid DMCA takedown, and yes, a bunch of Mars Rover stuff, a lot went down. Catch the juiciest bits below. This might just look like a microscope image of some strange, small life-form. But actually its a view of a massive 281-gigapixel image of a zebrafish embryo, which can be zoomed in on to show sub-cellular levels of detail. More » Great news keep coming from the red planet. Curiosity has opened her eyes for the first time. She took a good look around her and decided that life is good in Mars-albeit a bit lonely. More » Talk about a dealzmodo! DC resident Seth Horvitz bought a new HDTV on Amazon, but when he opened the peculiarly not-TV-shaped box, he found a $2,000 Sig Sauer SIG716 semi-automatic rifle instead, DCist reports. A mistake has be...

Great news keep coming from the red planet. Curiosity has opened her eyes for the first time. She took a good look around her and decided that life is good in Mars—albeit a bit lonely. Updated: New images coming in, including panoramas and high definition images from the descent. The Navigation Cameras—the eyes that will guide her around Mars—have been activated and they are beaming perfect images down to Earth. The left camera may have had a problem at the beginning, because at first the image was all dark and with a weird white artifact. It actually looked as if she had eyelids and was slowly waking up. This didn't happened with the right camera, which was sending perfect images from the moment it was turned on. I can imagine someone at mission control singing Oh You Pretty Things! in his or her head. "Wake up you sleepy head, put on some clothes, shake up your bed..." The first two images sent by the left Navcam—on the left—looked black and showed a weird artifact. T...

A lot of people are wondering why the first color image from the Mars Curiosity Rover looks so murky. Or why the black and white pictures look so low-resolution and out of focus in some areas. Calm yourselves. They will look absolutely amazing soon, perfect and in high-def. There's many good reasons why they look bad now. Today's image—Curiosity's first color snap—was taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), which, though clearly capable of photographing the horizon, is really designed to take close up pictures of martian rocks and soil. MAHLI is part of a Swiss-army-ish gadget arm that has five more instruments. Its color sensor is 1,600 by 1,200 pixels in size—just a 2-megapixel camera. More than enough to take close-ups of the objects that may get drilled by the other gadgets in the arm. Two megapixels is not that bad. In fact, it can capture plenty of detail, as the crop below clearly shows. So why does the image look hazy and murky? Two words: dust cap. All the cam...