Light Start – 4K Sun, Kickstarter/Facebook billions, rocket failure, and tattoo printers

Your day won’t be complete without staring at the Sun in 4K for 30 minutes

The guys at NASA must have a lot of fun. Probably a perk of the job when you need to keep a collection of the smartest guys in the world under one roof. Take the video above, the result of collecting a huge bunch of images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). What the SDO does is take photographs of the Sun (every twelve seconds) in extremely high-resolution. What you’re looking at here is varying wavelengths of nuclear activity from the Sun. 30 minutes of it. In 4K, if you have the streaming connection and screen for it. It was nice knowing you.

Source: NASA (YouTube)

Kickstarter funders have crowd-contributed more than $2 billion towards… stuff

Kickstarter has raised a lot of money for a lot of projects but it still took them four years and ten months in order to raise their first billion dollars. Their second billion, a milestone that the crowdfunding website recently passed, trimmed down on that length of time. Considerably. The second billion dollars was raised on 11 October this year and took just one year and 7 months to attain. Kickstarter have also compiled all of of other stats related to this milestone (amount pledged per minute, total contributors, stuff like that) so hit the source length to be buried in sweet, tasty numbers.

Source: Kickstarter

Facebook has more than 1 billion daily users (most of them on mobile)

Facebook has a lot of users, we all know that. But did you know that the company now has around 1 billion daily users? That’s one billion people logging into the social network, posting photos, liking posts, updating statuses and being advertised to. Every. Damn. Day. Well, 1.01 billion users. And of those, some 894 million users are accessing the site on mobile devices. Facebook’s seen an overall increase in mobile users. 1.39 billion of their overall 1.55 billion users use Facebook on some kind of mobile device. Yikes.

Source: The Next Web

This is what a rocket failure looks like when it just… stops

We’re all for space flight and the more rockets are launched, the better. Because eventually we’ll be on one of them. But not every launch goes as planned. Earlier this week the ORS-4 (Operationally Responsive Space) mission went pear-shaped when a rocket, which was using a Super Strypi launch vehicle (an experimental launch pad), launched in Hawaii and then failed about a minute into flight. If you’re on the website you can see the unspectacular failure happen in the video above. We’re not sure if we should be more impressed about the launch or that the video was shot with a Galaxy Note 5.

Source: The Verge

Dave’s ill and can’t do your tattoo… but we do have this 3D printer…

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It’s amazing what you can do on a deadline. This French design team, Appropriate Audiences, turned a 3D printer into a robotic tattoo artist for an event called Public Domain Remix. It took less than a day to convert a 3D printer into something that would etch ink on skin and the group was so taken with the idea that they continued to develop it. The result? A robotic tattoo artist, who probably gets the job done quite quickly once the design is programmed in. Oh, and they have since detailed how to turn a 3D printer into a tattoo artist. Watch the video above for the introduction and then hit the source link for the rest of this journey.

Source: Appropriate Audiences