Hardly a day goes by when the wonders of modern science don't excite me, but this made my jaw drop.
NASA's new High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment consists of four cameras that have been attached to the International Space Station. The cameras are exposed to radiation from the sun and outer space. It's a natural experiment — partially designed by high school students participating in the High Schools United with NASA to Create Hardware (HUNCH) program — to learn about how radiation affects the instruments. It's also hooked up to the internet so that we can all watch the Earth from space, live — or at least with just a couple seconds of delay, as the signal has to be beamed back down to Earth — and in high definition. --John Aziz