Suspended: Rescue divers stopped searching for missing people yesterday, for a period, after the Costa Concordia started to slip into the sea

first one to state the location wins an internet

Decades before the September 11th terrorist attacks, New York City saw another tragic event in its skies, when two airliners collided in mid-air over Brooklyn, weeks before Christmas.

Two passenger planes – United Airlines Flight 826 and Trans World Airlines Flight 266 – collided while they were making their descents toward Idlewild and LaGuardia on December 16, 1960, leaving a trail of carnage and flames in their wake.

But out of the tragedy, a new era of airline safety measures was instigated, including the way flight recorders – commonly called black boxes – are used to investigate airline crashes.

[Quote]:

What has happened to Saturn’s moon Iapetus? Vast sections of this strange world are dark as coal, while others are as bright as ice. The composition of the dark material is unknown, but infrared spectra indicate that it possibly contains some dark form of carbon. Iapetus also has an unusual equatorial ridge that makes it appear like a walnut. To help better understand this seemingly painted moon, NASA directed the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn to swoop within 2,000 kilometers in 2007. Pictured above, from about 75,000 kilometers out, Cassini’s trajectory allowed unprecedented imaging of the hemisphere of Iapetus that is always trailing. A huge impact crater seen in the south spans a tremendous 450 kilometers and appears superposed on an older crater of similar size. The dark material is seen increasingly coating the easternmost part of Iapetus, darkening craters and highlands alike. Close inspection indicates that the dark coating typically faces the moon’s equator and is less than a meter thick. A leading hypothesis is that the dark material is mostly dirt leftover when relatively warm but dirty ice sublimates. An initial coating of dark material may have been effectively painted on by the accretion of meteor-liberated debris from other moons. This and other images from Cassini’s Iapetus flyby are being studied for even greater clues.

More than 20,000 photographs, from over 130 countries were submitted to the National Geographic Photography contest, with both professional photographers and amateur photo enthusiasts participating. The grand prize winner was chosen from the three category winners: Nature – Shikhei Goh, People – Izabelle Nordfjell, Places – George Tapan. Shikhei Goh, of Indonesia, took the grand prize honors with his amazing photograph of a dragonfly in the rain and will be published in the magazine. The competition was judged on creativity and photographic quality by a panel of experts composed of field biologist and wildlife photojournalist Tim Laman, National Geographic photographer Amy Toensing and National Geographic nature photographer Peter Essick. The winning submissions can be viewed at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/photo-contest/ – Paula Nelson (14 photos total)

14
Places Honorable Mention – CYBER MONSOON: A torrential monsoon rain in Bhaktapur. Bhaktapur, Nepal. (Photo and caption by Anuar Patjane) #

[Quote]:

Her name is Lana Sator and she snuck into one of NPO Energomash factories outside of Moscow. Her photos are amazing, like sets straight out of Star Wars or Alien. Now the Russian government is harassing her.

It was easy to get in. She just went there, jumped over the fence and got right into the heart of the complex through a series of tunnels and pipes, which was very surprising. After all, this is an active industrial installation that belongs to one of the top manufacturers of liquid-fuel rockets in the world. Their engines power the modern Soyuz, the Zenit 3SL, and the Angara and Baikal launch vehicles. Heck, their RD-180 engine powers the first stage of the Atlas V, an American rocket. More importantly, they have specially strong ties to the Russian military.

And yet, she found nobody. No guards, no security. Nothing. Just a few CCTV cameras here and there in rooms packed with huge machinery.

While some of these zones look decrepit and abandoned, the factory is active. In fact, the government is really pissed off about Lana’s adventure. The authorities have sent her letters saying that her situation will get “much worse” if she keeps posting photos from the factory.

[Quote]:

This amazing image of a map refracted in a drop of water as it forms a globe, was captured by Markus Reugels, using a custom rig he built for photographing liquids. [via]

[Quote]:

The funeral of Kim Jong-il on Wednesday called to mind the best stage-managed Communist state productions: the falling snow, the wailing mourners, the perfectly spaced limousines and rows of chest-beating men.

So perhaps it was because the scene was so nearly impeccable that someone — an overzealous North Korean photo editor? — appears to have taken issue with an errant group of men, barely noticeable in a sweeping photograph of the procession in central Pyongyang, and removed them.

What does a sudden evacuation look like? After everyone is gone, what happens to the places they’ve abandoned? National Geographic Magazine sent Associated Press photographer David Guttenfelder to the nuclear exclusion zone around Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant to find out. Evacuated shortly after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami led to a nuclear radiation crisis, the area has been largely untouched, with food rotting on store shelves and children’s backpacks waiting in classrooms. The area may face the same fate as the town of Pripyat, Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago. This isn’t the first time Guttenfelder has gotten a rare glimpse of a place few see, as The Big Picture featured his photographs of North Korea in an earlier post. Collected here are Guttenfelder’s haunting images just released of a place abandoned, and of people dealing with the loss. — Lane Turner (39 photos total)

15
In this June 18, 2011 photo, a hog naps after eating a meal inside an abandoned feed store and wandering the deserted streets of radiation-contaminated Namie, Japan. (AP Photographer David Guttenfelder on assignment for National Geographic Magazine) #

From the royal wedding to the death of Osama bin Laden, the English summer riots and the fall of Gaddafi, here are some of major news stories of the past 12 months captured in Lego by Flickr members.

We share our world with many other species and live in an ever-changing environment. Fortunately, photographers around the world have captured the moments and beauty that allow us to see amazing views of this awe-inspiring planet. This is a collection of favorite photos from The Natural World gallery in 2011, a showcase of images of animals and environment that runs on Boston.com throughout the year. Next week’s posts will take a look at the year in photos, so stay tuned. -Leanne Burden Seidel (50 photos total)

A swarm of bees, partly loaded with pollen, returns to its hive in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. (Frank Rumpenhorst/AFP/Getty Images) #

(50 great pictures – I picked this because I immediately had “The ride of the Valkyries” in my head….

Discovered only two weeks ago, the kamikazi comet Lovejoy is currently on course for a fiery demise, plunging toward the sun. But before this icy, 200-meter-wide visitor disintegrates, there is a small chance it may become visible to the naked eye during broad daylight today.

[Quote]:

This just in from the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory website: Comet Lovejoy survived its close pass of the sun and has reemerged on the other side of the star. Here is a short clip of the fortunate comet’s re-apparition: