hylobatidae.org

That Martian space-robot has gone for another space-drive - having poked and sniffed and ingested lots of Martian space-dust over the past weeks. Did it detect something important? We don't know yet!

Interactive MSL Curiosity NAVCAM panorama - for sols 102 through to 104. I hear they're going to be taking shots for a big, full-colour panorama over Thanksgiving. Whatever that might be.

Anyway, to celebrate I've been poking away at Hugin and Photoshop to produce another Pannellum-powered interactive panorama. Explore!

Requires a WebGL-enabled browser, etc. etc. - works fine for me in Safari and Chrome.

Kombinat DAG Alfred Nobel Krzystkowice - ruins of a WW2-era German munitions factory in the forests outside Nowogród Bobrzański, Poland. More shots here! via locworks

Tower climbers working - more vertigo-inducing video, this time of workers climbing a 540m-high radio tower in a not-actually-OSHA-compilant manner. I tried identifying the tower shown. Did you realise how many radio masts of greater than 500m in height there are in the USA? Blimey. via kris

Ice caving, Gornergletscher - while looking at photos from the BBC's Operation Iceberg, I discovered that their photo-taking ice-climber had taken lots of photos of ice-climbing elsewhere in the world.

Bonus The Robots Are Replacing Us corner:

• Random Shopper - a bot is given a budget and goes shopping for unknown items on Amazon. First shipment is decidedly mysterious...
• Agisoft PhotoScan - extract detailed, 3D model data from photos. The free, two-image StereoScan is quite impressive also. I suspect it's code originally intended for Soviet cruise missiles and the like.
• Windows 95 Tips - the guide for Windows Me was written by Cthulhu himself.
• SynDaver™ - vomit-inducingly realistic anatomical models, as spotted on MythBusters. My desk at work is notoriously untidy as it is. I need to add more stuff.

Electricity. What can't it do?

Tesla coil electricity fight - to be honest, they look more concerned about falling off their platforms than of getting shocked. via rincewind

590 MeV ring cyclotron - just a single, low-resolution image, but I love the painted, solid metal surrounds. Compare: TRIUMF cyclotron, stellarators.

Power line 'explosion' - wait until just after one minute in for things to start arcing. Loudly. Not actually explosions, but still surprising. Compare.

June 19, 2011 McCook Nebraska supercell - next step, releasing clouds of probes into the atmosphere of Jupiter, this time with cameras and sufficient buoyancy to avoid the crushing depths. Above the storm could have been interesting...

Bonus Hidden London corner:

• London's hidden interiors - dance halls, power stations, masonic lodges, majestic spiral staircases all out of reach of the public eye.
• Post Office Railway - tiny, unmanned railway for transporting mail underneath London, considered lost from view before being infiltrated by urban explorers.
• London Underground - perhaps not completely hidden, but still a vast, underground warren resisting exploration...

Multiple phobia-tickling videos and photos for your amusement today. We start with...

Flooded Titan missile silo dive - both the claustrophobic and aquaphobic should look away right now. Connoisseurs of cold war rust may look on with horrified interest.

Hua Shan cliffside plank walk - the acrophobic amongst us (myself included) will enjoy this one. Apparently, it was traditional to ascend Mount Hua during darkness - it being considered safer to climb when one couldn't see the horrifying drops beneath. Also enjoy - bonus nightmare fuel from Spain.

Wolf spider with young - the arachnophobic may enjoy this fine example of a spider ... covered with more spiders!

Cows & cows & cows - apparently bovinophobia is a thing. If you're a sufferer, congratulations on choosing the wrong blog to follow!

Bonus Martian Robot corner - if you missed yesterday's article update, please find linked an unofficial interactive panorama of the MSL Curiosity Mars rover! What is the fear of suffocation? 'Claustrophobia', disappointingly. But what about suffocating on vast, desolate alien landscapes? Cosmonauts of the future need distinct terminology!

Raw images spotted! Self-portaiture using MAHLI instrument verified! Unofficial MSL Curiosity self-portrait assembled using Hugin! Dust-covered camera lens cap retracted!

Click for decidedly large! Still just half the resolution it popped out of Hugin, though. I need to mess around with different projections, too...

Edit 2012-11-01: Please note that the above image is an utterly unofficial panorama made from the converted-for-web raw images very kindly provided by the Mars Science Laboratory teams. They've already got an official, low-resolution panorama up - I'll link to the official full-res version when that gets posted. If you're a news source looking for imagery, please do use the official stuff instead!

Edit 2012-11-01: Official high-resolution self-portrait panorama is up! Now with actual scientific and engineering know-how behind it:

Edit 2012-11-03: Highly unofficial interactive panorama displayed using the WebGL-using, HTML-5-powered Pannellum viewer. Apparently only works on Chrome, Firefox and Safari (with WebGL enabled). Enjoy!