What is beneath the world’s largest ice sheet? Compiled by the British Antarctic Survey and made from “millions of new measurements, including substantial data sets from NASA’s ICESat satellite and an airborne mission called Operation IceBridge,” this animated map of the changing Antarctic Ice Sheet reveals the bedrock terrain below with a level of detail never seen before.

Read more about decades of data: Peeling Back the Ice of Antarctica by Wired’s Adam Mann.

In this Science on the SPOT: Preserving the Forest of the Sea, watch Kathy Ann Miller, PhD, curator of the University Herbarium at the University of California - Berkeley, as she shares the wide variety of seaweeds in the collection.

We love when someone gives a personalized video tour of their work, especially when it mixes nature, science and beautiful, art-like specimens all together. Kathy and her team are digitizing samples of 80,000 kinds of seaweed collected from the North American west coast, so that they can be shared online with researchers from around the globe. You can read more about the project here.

PS. Need a DNA primer? Watch this vid.

From KQEDscience

With topography data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, this 30 second video of Mars shows all six NASA spacecraft to reach the Red Planet: Viking 1, Viking 2, Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix.

Toward the end of the video, you can also see Gale Crater, where Curiosity is aiming to touch down on Aug 5 at 10:31pm PST, Aug 6 at 1:31am EST, Aug 6 at 5:31am Universal. (Watch it live on NASA TV.)

For more details, check out this infographic from Space.com: 

(It’s a bit bigger if you click!) 

Type is everywhere. Every print publication, website, movie, advertisement and public message involves the creation or selection of a fitting typeface. Online, a rich and artistic typographical culture exists, where typefaces are created and graphic design seeps in to every image.

Typography and design are part of what we do for a living around here, but it was still a surprise when the co-curator liked this video from PBS’s Off Book series. There’s a fair amount of discussion in the video, but it’s mixed with images of New York City, as well as colors, letters, patterns, and shapes that all have meaning. Kids like all of that, too!

via Visual News.