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Elements
Everything around us contains material that was once part of a star. The cells in our bodies, the air we breathe, and materials that make up the planets in our solar system are all linked to the stars through chemical elements.
Hydrogen and helium are the two most abundant elements. They were made in the Big Bang more than 13 billion years ago. Others, like oxygen and iron, are created deep inside stars. Supernova explosions blast them into space and form even heavier elements, such as gold and uranium.
Everyday Elements
Chemical elements are the building blocks of everything. The Sun and stars, the silicon chips in our computers, and all the cells in our bodies are collections of elements.
Hydrogen is the lightest and most plentiful element. It has one proton, one electron, and an atomic number of 1. It was created in the Big Bang, along with helium. The other elements up to uranium (number 92) are made in stars.
Elements Made by People
When physicists smash smaller atoms together during experiments in nuclear accelerators and reactors, they create elements that have atomic numbers higher than 92. Neptunium, californium, and plutonium (which is used in spacecraft power supplies) are good examples of these elements. Scientists also study the tracks atomic particles make in bubble chambers during high-speed experiments (right).
Formation and Distribution
Big Bang
The nuclei of the three most basic and plentiful elements in the universe began forming during the first 100 seconds after the Big Bang.
Stars
Atomic reactions deep inside stars combine atoms to form many of the familiar elements that make up planets, stars, galaxies, and us.
Supernovae
The extremely high temperatures and pressures inside exploding stars help create the heaviest elements. Supernova explosions scatter them throughout space.
Humans
Our bodies contain more than two dozen elements. We are made of material that was created in stars.
Gases
Most elements are solids and liquids at room temperature. Eleven are gases.
Stars, People, and Atoms
Elements in Us
The human body is mostly hydrogen and oxygen, with traces of other elements (color coded to the elements table).
How Elements Reach Our Bodies
If you want to know where most elements originate, look at the night sky. Most of the stars and all the planets you see came from materials cooked up deep inside other stars. When those stars died, their elements were scattered into space in gas and dust clouds.
•A nebula is the graveyard of a star that exploded as a supernova. Material in the cloud may become new stars.
We, too, are part of the cosmic recycling process. It began billions of years ago inside an ancient star. The calcium in our bones, iron in our blood, and oxygen in our lungs were all created inside that long-dead star.
•Look at your hand. It is a piece of the universe. Its millions of skin cells are each made of elements from stars.
Elements are the building blocks of the universe. Atoms are the basic units of elements. Most atoms are made up of three types of particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Every structure in the cosmos is made of atoms from many different elements.
•Each droplet of carbon is a tenth of the width of a human hair and contains thousands of atoms.
Creation of Elements in Supernova Explosions
Thanks to stars and the elements they create, the universe renews itself. When stars die, their material gets scattered through space as the seeds for new generations of stars. The heaviest elements are created in huge stellar explosions like Supernova 1987a (left). Temperatures and pressures in these outbursts are so high that atoms fuse to make more complex elements, such as lead, gold, and uranium.
The Fingerprints of Elements
Light from celestial objects identifies the chemical elements they contain. Each element has a specific fingerprint, which we can see with a spectroscope. Helium and neon are made inside stars. Helium’s spectral fingerprint is simple, while neon has many more lines. Elements like krypton and mercury are created in supernova explosions.
Wonderful structural, minimalist views of gas pipes outside of residences in Tel Aviv. These were all shapes and sizes and numbers of pipes. Generally a single larger pipe came up from the ground and spilt into multiple smaller pipes, connected with valves and meters, and then further pipes dissapeared into building walls.
I managed to scan in my pinhole camera photos! I knew they'd be really shit quality which is sort of why I went into London to take them.
Kim Stanley Robinson is a writer of landscapes—both real and imagined. His work is grounded in the grit of Earth’s geology, the physics of climate, and the political and social structures that shape human life. When I photographed him at Fort Mason for the Long Now Foundation’s Long Now Talks, we spoke about Mars and Antarctica, two places that have defined his thinking about the future. It was an easy conversation, shaped by a shared affinity for that part of the planet—its vast, glacial quiet, its lessons in resilience.
Robinson’s fiction defies easy classification. He is one of the most celebrated science fiction writers of our time, but his books are as much about ecology, economics, and governance as they are about space exploration. His Mars Trilogy does not simply imagine a human settlement on the Red Planet—it builds a civilization from the ground up, with the careful hand of a scientist and the moral weight of a historian. His attention to detail is obsessive in the best way. He once spent weeks backpacking in the Sierra Nevada to better understand the rhythms of life in a place untouched by modernity, a practice that shaped much of his writing.
Antarctica, a place he has visited extensively, is another world to him—an Earthly analog to Mars, a frontier that demands ingenuity, cooperation, and resilience. His novel Antarctica captures the vast silence of the continent, its brutal beauty, and the way it forces people into a kind of existential clarity. In his mind, the two places—Mars and Antarctica—are linked, both revealing what it takes for humans to survive in extreme environments.
Despite the scope of his ideas, Robinson is remarkably down-to-earth. He speaks with the clarity of someone who has spent decades thinking deeply but never lost his sense of wonder. He is, above all, an optimist. Not in a naive or sentimental way, but in the sense that he believes human ingenuity, if properly harnessed, can solve even the most daunting planetary crises. His later novels, particularly The Ministry for the Future, take this optimism and run with it, presenting climate change solutions that feel as tangible as they are urgent.
For Robinson, science fiction isn’t about predicting the future but about expanding the realm of possibility. It serves as a tool for stretching human imagination, for testing the limits of what we believe is achievable. His vision of the future isn’t about escape but about adaptation. Whether on another planet or in the shifting climate of our own, survival depends on cooperation, scientific literacy, and an ability to reimagine how we live.
Robinson doesn’t just write about the future—he studies it, inhabits it, and challenges others to think beyond their own lifetimes. His work insists that our fate is not sealed, that the future is something we build.
Breakwater on the south side of the Adelaide Sailing Club Boat Ramp
This photo is a 3D Stereoscopic red/cyan anaglyph. This means that if you view it through red (left eye) and cyan (right eye) tinted glasses the image appears to be three dimensional.
We started watching this group to get a sense of when the shuttle was approaching, since they had a clear view to the east and we didn't.
Commentary: Watching Endeavor Land in LA.
12-17-2010, Structure Fire Twin Lakes Mobile Home Park in Potrero. Upon arrival Firefighters found a single-wide mobile home well involved in fire. An aggressive interior attack by firefighters helped keep the fire from spreading to the back bedroom of the home where Christmas presents and other valuables had been stored.
Our company "Ekra Decor Private Limited" is engaged in manufacturing and supplying of permanent tensile structure: www.ekradecor.com/
this is one of my favorite structures in all of Maricopa. It's been abandoned for who knows how many years, and i'm not even certain what it was once used for. But for a year I"d been driving by it saying...one of these days, I want to take a session there. FInally one day I just stopped and stayed there for an hour, taking shots of every angle of this place, just communing with the place. Awesome place to photograph and visit, especially during an extremely windy day and everything on teh structure creaks with a dangerous severity. I wasn't brave enough to actually GO IN.
Waterbury Fire responded for a possible structure fire at 34 Brook St in the City's downtown. They arrived to find dumpster fire which had spread up the exterior wall of the Tryst Cafe and into the building's attic space. The initial structure response was E 2,4,7,Rescue Engine 1,Truck 1,3, and Cars 2 & 5. With the RIT team being put to work with concerns for the other exposure buildings E-6 was added to the assignment. The fire was quickly knocked down, roof ventilated, and positive pressure ventilation applied. While the crews picked up the fire marshal's responded to the scene to invesigate the fire.
shade structure. it took two days to erect. didn't really use it. took fifteen minutes to come down.
Found while hanging at the beach. Possibly some sort of old factory. There were rows of these, but after discovering a transient off in the distance, we chose not to continue exploring the rest, for our own safety.