Have you ever wanted to travel back to the beginning of time to see what some galaxies in our universe looked like?  Well, now you can!  (Well, almost...!)

Astronomers have recently released a new and updated version of our deepest view into the universe - the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF).  The XDF follows about eight years after the previous Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) image, which was released in 2004.

The XDF image was created by the assembly of almost 10 years of Hubble telescope photographs, focused on just a portion from the center location of the original UDF image.  Even though the XDF was created from a tiny portion of our sky, it contains images approximately 5,500 galaxies - some of which are estimated to date back to 13.2 billion years in time, when they were relatively young and still growing (!).

You can learn more at the HubbleSite: Hubble Goes to the eXtreme to Assemble Farthest Ever View of the Universe, and you can find the XDF and related images and illustrations on their Release Images page.  It is fascinating to download the high resolution version, then zoom in and pan around, and see the seemingly endless number of massive galaxies...!

This is really fun!  (Vi Hart has a number of other great videos on her YouTube page - highly recommended!)

You can learn more about Flexagons (and Hexaflexagons and all sorts of other variants) and how to make them from the Wikipedia Flexagon page.

Vimeo has always been a fantastic service - their support of the creative community is great, and the quality of some of the videos people create and host there is simply incredible.

They've just announced a set of simple-to-use services and tools to help content creators, including a "tip jar" and "pay-to-view" (coming in 2013).  This is great, and I'm certain this will help generate even better and better videos by all the incredibly creative people that there are out there.

Read more about this at their new Creator Services page (and you can find more background in their Staff Blog.)

This is neat - Khan Academy has a new interactive computer science program.  Step-by-step presentation, with true interaction!  This is definitely worth checking out if you or someone you know is interested in the area and wants to start learning about it.  (You can learn more about the background of this cool new program by checking out ejohn.org and jamie-wong.com.)

Why does this remind me of Portal 2? :-)  In any case, the scale of this is very impressive!

(Be sure not to miss the "making of" video.)

This is a great idea -- it makes you almost want to wait for the crosswalk to be red!  Think of all the cool games that could be used with a system like this...

I've found this tool to be very handy on occasion.  Set the desired properties, then hit the "Get Scheme" button to export the configuration for your terminal of choice.