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Astronauts often refer to "the overview effect," the moment, when looking down at Earth from space, they realize our smallness, our fragility and improbable existence, and the need for humanity to protect our one and only home. In Daily Overview, Benjamin Grant seeks to create this cognitive shift for the majority of people who will never travel to space. A Wired article describes his method, he begins by scrolling through Google Earth and selecting the most visually stunning and thought provoking images of both nature and man- "congested metropolises, stunning empty wilderness, and monstrous mining operations." Then he uses color correction sparingly to emphasize the image, much like a photojournalist would edit a RAW file from their camera.

There's a new island in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to an underwater volcano eruption that's been going on for the past month.
The new island is in the Tonga archipelago--a group of islands southeast of Fiji. Scientists discovered it on January 16, about a month into the volcano's eruption. The volcano, called Hunga Tonga, has since stopped erupting.
The island is mostly made of ash and formed around the crater of the volcano, measuring a little more than half a mile wide. The before-and-after images, from the Pleiades satellite, gives a clear picture of how far the ash spread, extending toward on of the two islands that border the underground volcano.

A constantly updated collection of articles from PopSci about the efforts of private companies to get involved in space travel and exploration

Video from Discovery on why Pangea happened.

Here at Popular Science, we love space-and we know you do too. From seeing the nearly-true colors of Europa, a molten metal orb levitate in microgravity, or even a map of a distant protoplanet, pictures of and from beyond Earth are often the best way to journey to the final frontier.
To that end, this is your (almost) daily dose of amazing space imagery. Bookmark this page to see a wide variety of space-related eye candy, including photographs our home planet taken from orbit, stunning scientific visualizations, and of course, amazing astronomy images.

In April 2013, Mars One opened up applications for aspiring astronauts. By the time the application period had closed, more than 200,000 people had applied. Mars One's goal is to pick 28 to 40 candidates by the end of 2015 and train them for their mission.

Here are the steps Kraft is currently undergoing to find the crews for the Mars mission:

This year will be another exciting one for space exploration. While 2014 will be remembered as the year we landed on a comet(!), 2015 may be known as the year of Pluto (and other dwarf planets). The New Horizons spacecraft begins its approach to Pluto this month, and will get closest to the dwarf planet in July, taking in the best view ever of the icy, remote world-possibly revealing a dramatic landscape with mountains, volcanoes, and geysers. In March, the Dawn spacecraft will arrive at Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is another icy world, possibly with liquid water under a frozen surface, making it potentially habitable for life.

The public is responding in novel ways to share its own enthusiasm. There's the annual Yuri's Night space party April 12, celebrating Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first flight into space April 12, 1961, and promoting space exploration. The Desert Wizards of Mars, a global group of scientists, designers, and builders, bring space education to Burning Man. The Facebook community Space Hipsters disseminate news about space issues, enthusiast meet-ups, and related personal anecdotes among its roughly 3000 members. (NASA's Jacobs drops in on occasion to say hi "and show that we're paying attention.")

NASA's newest spacecraft, Orion, will be launching into space for the first time in December 2014, on a flight that will take it farther than any spacecraft built to carry humans has gone in more than 40 years and through temperatures twice as hot as molten lava to put its critical systems to the test.

The hypnotic video-recorded through the crew module's windows-was among the first data removed from the unmanned Orion capsule after its Dec. 5 test flight that lifted off from Cape Canaveral, FL and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean 4.5 hours later after traveling 3,600 miles above Earth. It was the farthest journey of a human-spaceflight vehicle since 1972, when the last of NASA's Apollo missions flew to the moon.

Unlike its real-time airing on NASA TV, this video shows all of the re-entry footage, beginning 10 minutes before splashdown, and including parts missed during the original downlink's blackout, when atmospheric friction caused peak temperatures of 4,000 ºF temperatures. As the capsule hurtles through the atmosphere at 20,000 mph, the resulting trail of plasma changes color from white to yellow to lavender to magenta as temperatures increase. The camera also captures the elaborate parachute deployment that slowed Orion's fall to a gingerly 20 mph for landing.

Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has been exploring the Martian surface for over a decade - that's an amazing ten years longer than the 3-month primary mission it began in January 2004. But with its great successes, inevitable age-related issues have surfaced and mission engineers are being challenged by an increasingly troubling bout of rover "amnesia."

Venus may have once possessed strange oceans of carbon dioxide fluid that helped shape the planet's surface, researchers say.

PLAY VIDEO
60 Billion Planets Could Harbor Life
For years, we've believed that around 2 billion planets in the galaxy are able to support alien life. But what if we were wrong? Anthony discusses how new knowledge of the 'Goldilocks Zone' could mean life on up to 60 billion planets.
Venus is often described as Earth's twin planet because it is the world closest to Earth in size, mass, distance and chemical makeup. However, whereas Earth is a haven for life, Venusis typically described as hellish, with a crushing atmosphere and clouds of corrosive sulfuric acid floating over a rocky desert surface hot enough to melt lead.

A Discovery News bit that details the rather amazing statistic that almost 60 BILLION Planets could harbor life. Explains how we come up with statistics like that by studying the Goldilocks zone.

An article on how mimicing the structures of animals can be useful in product development.

As Rosetta moved into what's officially called a "hyperbolic orbit", the cameras on board have been busy taking new images of the strange, icy body, comet 67P.

"It was very emotional to see these high resolution pictures," said Dr Holger Sierks, principle investigator of Osiris (the main camera instrument onboard Rosetta).

Nasa's next Martian rover will attempt to make oxygen on the surface of the red planet when it lands there in 2021.

The rover will carry seven scientific projects, aimed at paving the way for future manned missions, seeking evidence of life and storing samples to be brought back in the future.

Among them is a device for turning the CO2 that dominates the thin Martian air into oxygen.

This could support human life or make rocket fuel for return missions

Find out why NASA astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison wanted to go into space in this profile from NOVA's The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers.

A physician, a chemical engineer, a teacher, a dancer, and the first African American woman astronaut to go to space, Dr. Jemison launched into orbit on September 12, 1992 as a STS-47 Mission Specialist for Space Shuttle Endeavor. During the eight day mission, she and the STS-47 crew conducted 44 life science and materials processing experiments.

This is an educational video "IMAX: The Earth", produced by the JPL and NASA. Uploaded for an introductory course on Astronomy. ASTR110 section 01, Ancilla College, Donaldson Indiana. Published under the Creative Commons License and in the Public Domain.

The groundbreaking two-hour special that reveals a spectacular new space-based vision of our planet. Produced in extensive consultation with NASA scientists, NOVA takes data from earth-observing satellites and transforms it into dazzling visual sequences, each one exposing the intricate and surprising web of forces that sustains life on earth.