BBC Earth: Life Is – The British Broadcast Company is famous for its nature documentary series and films, and we have all come to know Sir David Attenborough, the avid naturalist, acting as the engaging narrator of many of BBC’s nature productions. Now BBC Earth, with a huge repertoire of footage and content related to the natural environment and planet Earth, invites us all to explore our world like never before.
Explore nature in a totally new mesmerizing way, through images and videos of nature, filmed human stories, and see it all from the filmmakers’ point of view. To browse the vast world of content available on Life Is, click ‘search for more stuff’ which will bring you to this page (see below), where you can search by climate conditions, color, media type and more. Come and meet your planet right here on BBC Earth. You will be amazed!
SkyView – This amazing iPhone app (compatible with 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad 2) offers a unique planetary experience using cool augmented reality technology. Watch your favorite stars and constellations fade in and out of your camera view, search for stars and planets’ current location, and track celestial objects’ path through the skies in a 24 hour period (including satellites and the space station!) Tilting your iPhone to landscape view prompts the SkyView’s scientific mode which gives real-time azimuths and elevation of starts.
SkyView not only offers captivating images of celestial objects and zodiac constellations, but also offers a fantastic way to learn astronomy and physics. Available on the App Store on iTunes.
A Google a Day – Google has done it again with this brilliant trivia game. To help its vast community of users in learning how to search better and faster, Google came up with A Google a Day, a daily trivia question for which the answer lies in the proper search, via Google search, naturally.
Each day a new question will be waiting for you, and it’s your job to go ahead and find the answer. Clciking “Answer” won’t give you the bottom line answer, but will rather give you clues of what to look for, and by the end of that process you will discover the answer yourself. Since this trivia game is both fun and didactic, it gets an A plus from me. Why don’t you challenge your friends to a Google duel? Should be fun and interesting!
Here’s an example of a question and the answer of Google a Day’s question from April 16.
True Life Costs – This amazingly designed and executed website by Volkswagen brings an entire town to life to teach us the concept of good value and expenses over time. Once you arrive in town you are invited to explore a variety of expense categories, including vacation, house, food, family, and of course, car -after all, it’s Volkswagen’s website and they do a terrific job at showing their cars’ good value.
Putting marketing agendas aside, the True Life Costs project is fun to explore, it’s beautifully designed and it does succeed to send the message of calculated spending.
BioDigital Human – I certainly wish I had this website to go to when I was taking my Anatomy classes. This amazing human body imaging software allows 3D exploration of our anatomy of each of the different systems we are all made of; skeletal, digestive, reproductive, muscular and seven other systems. All these can be easily applied to your skeleton or cleared by clicking the On/Off buttons on the left.
Each time you add or remove a body system to your skeleton, you can rotate it 360 degrees using your mouse. In addition, there are advanced view options using the toolbar under your sekeleton. That’s how I applied the X Ray View below. Amazing!
Clicking on any organ, bone, muscle or blabber will prompt a small info window to your right with some additional info. This is a terrific study aid for those interested in or learning anatomy.
YouTube’s First Orbit – On April 12, 1961 Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to fly into outer space and complete an orbit around planet Earth. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of one of humanity’s most important milestones, YouTube created a compelling movie, “a real time recreation of Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering first orbit, shot entirely in space from on board the International Space Station. The film combines this new footage with Gagarin’s original mission audio and a new musical score by composer Philip Sheppard.”
First Orbit is a poignant film unlike anything you’ve seen before. It is a well-documented piece of history everyone should enjoy and cherish.
What Was There – If cement could talk. It’s hard to believe, but today’s streets of America’s metropolises hold countless stories and moments of history. To us the streets of major cities have always been there, but What Was There shows what the streets that are so familiar to us today looked like in the past.
Based on Google Maps technology and user-submitted data and photos, What Was There is “a virtual time machine of sorts that allows users to navigate familiar streets as they appeared in the past.” The result is nothing short of astonishing and fascinating. Here are a couple of examples:
Not only you can see photos of what the streets looked like decades, even 100 years ago, you can use the magnifying glass feature on any zoomed in photo to see more details (simply roll over the photo). It’s just like going back in time.
In front of Tiffany’s, CA 1899
If you have an old street photo of anywhere in the world, and you wish to submit it to this formidable project, sign in and upload your photos. Help in perpetuating the human experience of past places and moments.
FitSugar – There are lots of fitness and exercise how-to sites on the Web, but this one’s especially fun and easy to follow. FitSugar is a daughter site of the Popsugar network, and the content here is both pleasant and inspiring.
All the posts here, aside from covering the vast world of fitness and well-being, offer great content on great exercise and healthy foods with lots of photos and videos for an enhanced and rewarding fitness experience. Click on the photo below to read this interesting post about yoga.
For more health & fitness resources online (only the best of course), go to our designated MiniFaves page.
Grovo – This online video hub is, simply put, an efficient site discovery tool. Intended for the amateur, average and savvy Internet users alike, Grovo offers video lessons that show you the exact how-to when it comes to searching for websites of your needs and areas of interest. How does Grovo produce its content? Their content is “professionally produced, in-house, by our staff of writers, editors and voiceover talent. All content is extensively researched and crafted prior to production; once produced, content is regularly updated to maintain relevancy.”
How does it work? You can dive right into the site’s colossal video lessons section, or you can consult Grovo’s glossary in case you’ve stumbled upon an unfamiliar Web term, and then proceed to see a relevant video. Another option to test your Web knowledge is to explore Grovo’s Quiz section. Grovo is a terrific service, although currently only a part of its video collection is open to free viewing – there’s a 7-day free trial after which you will have to pick one of their paid subscription tracks (annual, monthly and enterprise) if you wish to have access to all of Grovo’s content.
Despite the payment hindrance (hey, sometimes high quality things will cost you), Grovo is a great Web search aid worth exploring. See this video showing how to block pop-ups for example.
Weezic – This website is a unique take on music practice. Download and print music sheets, choose your own tempo and then play with a whole orchestra (mp3 accompaniments), or even record your interpretation of a known piece and share it on the site.
To learn more about Weezic and how it can be your best online musician friend, see the video below.
blufr – Rightfully described as “not your mamma’s jeopardy,” blufr is a cool trivia game where you are presented with a statement and you need to decide whether it’s true (“Way!”) or false (“No Way!”). Test your knowledge and intuition to see how well (and how how high) you score on this game.
blufr is brought to us by Answers.com, and it’s certainly refreshing to see an online trivia game that’s targeting a younger crowd than usual. There is also an iPhone app available (free on the App store), so you can play blufr on the go and never miss a question!
Top10 – Search from the hundreds if not thousands of Top10 lists available on this cute site, ranking just about anything you can think of. There are conventional, what-you-would-expect lists such as Top 10 Language Guides, but also surprising entries, such as Top 10 Austin Powers Moments, and this is just the tip of the Top10 iceberg.
Although browsing Top 10 lists other have created is entertaining -quite funny at times-there’s nothing like creating your own and mixing others’ lists! Don’t be shy now, do it now and add it to Top10’s list.