Declassified spy satellite photos reveal accelerating ice loss at Earth's "third pole"

Recently declassified US spy satellite images reveal Himalayan glaciers have been melting at an accelerating rate

It’s not entirely news that the Earth’s ice budget is under threat from a warming climate, but a new study has looked into just how fast that’s happening. Using recently declassified spy satellite photos, researchers found that compared to the last quarter of the 20th century, Himalayan glaciers have been melting twice as fast this century. In a rare piece of good news, a separate study has shown that a Greenland glacier has gained ice for the third year in a row.

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Category: Environment

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The Iceberg Series chronicles the sublime shapes of Greenland's sea ice

These incredible iceberg images investigate Tom Hegen's fascination with the shapes, texture and appearance of broken ...

A new series of photographs from award-winning aerial photographer Tom Hegen explores the abstract beauty in icebergs. Shot off the west coast of Greenland, Hegen’s work captures the majesty of these giant white castles.

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Category: Environment

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This Robot Swims, Skates, And Crawls

You often hear that art imitates life, but sometimes technology does too. Pliant Energy Systems’ Velox robot resembles an underwater creature more than it does a robot because it uses undulating fins to propel itself, as you can see in the video below.

The video shows the beast skating, but also swimming, and walking. It really does look more like a lifeform than a device. According to the company, the robot has excellent static thrust/watt and is resistant to becoming entangled in plants and other debris.

The downside of this report is that it is sparse on technical detail. However, …read more

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iCEBreaker, The Open Source Development Board for FPGAs

The Hackaday Superconference is over, which is a shame, but one of the great things about our conference is the people who manage to trek out to Pasadena every year to show us all the cool stuff they’re working on. One of those people was [Piotr Esden-Tempski], founder of 1 Bit Squared, and he brought some goodies that would soon be launched on a few crowdfunding platforms. The coolest of these was the iCEBreaker, an FPGA development kit that makes it easy to learn FPGAs with an Open Source toolchain.

The hardware for the iCEBreaker includes the iCE40UP5K fpga with …read more

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Artistic Images Made With Water Lens

It’s said that beauty and art can be found anywhere, as long as you look for it. The latest art project from [dmitry] both looks in unassuming places for that beauty, and projects what it sees for everyone to view. Like most of his projects, it’s able to produce its artwork in a very unconventional way. This particular project uses water as a lens, and by heating and cooling the water it produces a changing image.

The art installation uses a Peltier cooler to periodically freeze the water that’s being used as a lens. When light is projected through the …read more

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