Watch Our Story In One Minute, a mesmerizing tapestry of footage tracing the cosmic and biological origins of our species, all sewn together to the sounds of original music by MelodySheep. 

As you’ll read below, our friends over at Open Culture do a fantastic set-up to this amazing graphic novel-style story about Dark Matter — however I will add that if you love science, comics or anything inbetween, you will love this.

“We finally got the big announcement. After decades of work, physicists have pinned down the Higgs Boson. It’s a major milestone. But physicists at CERN won’t be left with nothing to do. The same folks at PhD Comics who gave us this helpful primer that uses animation to explain the Higgs Boson have also produced a companion video on Dark Matter, the mysterious stuff being researched by CERN scientists and their Large Hadron Collider.

In the clip above, physicists Daniel Whiteson and Jonathan Feng underscore how much of the universe remains dark to us. We understand about 5% of what makes up the cosmos. Another 75%, we call Dark Energy, the other 20%, Dark Matter, which are possibly manifestations of the same thing (or possibly not). Research on Higgs Boson will tell us something important about the origin of mass in the universe. But whether any of this will help explain Dark Matter (which accounts for most of the matter in the universe and behaves differently than the mass we understand — it neither emits nor absorbs light) — that’s another big question.”

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The Earth As You’ve Never Seen It: Atmophere, Airglow and Aurora

Our fascination with Aurora and all other awe-inspiring astronomy dates back many centuries and for many reasons, be it for ritual or research. Luckily, every day seems to take us closer to better understanding the magnitude and the beauty of the colossal space above us.

As this Discover article explains, “the atmosphere of the Earth thins out gradually the higher you go, and when you get to about 100 kilometers (60 miles) up, different physical processes become important. One of them is calledchemiluminescence — light produced by chemical processes. This can make the upper atmosphere glow in different colors.” Which is what you see happening in this video. 

*Full disclosure: this video is entrancing — to the point of meditative. Enjoy. 

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Another day, another adventure in space. Following not too far behind the Annular lunar eclipses, the transit of Venus has been another event for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory to capture, and of course, time-lapse for our viewing pleasure. As this hypnotic footage shows, the astronomical phenomenon truly helps to understand the expanse of space in our solar system and as it turns out, helps scientists in their search for exoplanets. 

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