Side Note

Scientists Create First-Ever 3-D Model of a Melting Snowflake, on YouTube.

Get high and watch this melting snowflake video for an hour

NASA just created the first ever 3D video model of an individual snowflake melting, and it makes for an incredibly “chill” YouTube experience.

The video shows that meltwater gathers in the canyon-like regions of a snowflake, gradually accumulates, and eventually transforms the exquisite snowflake into a (still exquisite!) water droplet. The video was just posted today, but it supplements research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last month.

NASA claims that the data will be used to help its remote-sensing satellites, which judge the amount of vapor and clouds in the air and help make weather forecasts and climate projections.

It’s probably worth noting that Trump’s National Space Council has unrolled a regulatory agenda to make it easier for private companies to send up these remote-sensing satellites, so the use of this snowflake data could proliferate over the next several years.

But it’s also just nice to watch.

The Future

1967
The year nations agreed they wouldn’t fight over territories in outer space... and yet.
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