DragonI

The Changing American Diet

See what we ate on an average day, for the past several decades.

flowingdata.com|Nathan Yau

More interesting is the battle between butter and margarine. The former takes over the latter in 2003. This is not so much because of increased butter consumption, but more about the continuous decline of margarine.

In the dairy section, as you might expect, whole milk declined 79 percent between 1970 to 2013. The lower fat milks took the reins, but the cheeses really took control in this category.

I also didn’t expect dark greens, which includes vegetables like spinach and broccoli, to rise so much from barely anything. Did people really consume basically no dark green vegetables pre-1980s?

And how about chicken with the come-from-behind victory? In 1970, people consumed more than twice as much beef than chicken, but by 1987 it surpassed pork, and in 2004 moved passed beef. Chicken has been on top since. You go, chicken.

Around 13 times per century, Mercury passes between Earth and the sun in a rare astronomical event known as a planetary transit. The 2016 Mercury transit occurred on May 9, between roughly 7:12 a.m. and 2:42 p.m. EDT. The images in this video are from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO. Video credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Genna Duberstein Music: Encompass by Mark Petrie For more info on the Mercury transit go to: http://www.nasa.gov/transit

It’s easy to remember how big the universe is when you can just stare up at the night sky and find an uncountable number of stars and see every color of the cosmos staring right back at you. But it’s not like that anymore. Now we’re surrounded by city lights of our own creation and hiding the rest of the universe with light pollution. It sucks.

 Gavin Heffernan and Harun Mehmedinovic want to take a closer look at light pollution too. They’re making a book (funding through Kickstarter) and timelapse series, Skyglow, to explore “the most exotic dark sky locations and archaeoastronomy sites” and “examine the increasing impact of light pollution on our fragile environment.”

The promo video they made for their project below is fun because it combines the city lights of Los Angeles at night with impossibly dark skies filled with stars of every size. It’s something we’ll never see in real life but still cool to see in execution.

To find out more about their project, head here.

This time lapse shows what 24 hours of a summer day (and I guess, a summer night) looks like in the Arctic Circle. You can see the Sun rising and setting like it normally does anywhere else but instead of disappearing beyond the horizon as the Earth turns, it pops right back up and the world never turns dark.

It's like living inside a 2D side scrolling video game. The time lapse was filmed by Maxie Max.

There are numerous time lapse videos of Iceland and Norway showing the beauty of their remote landscapes. But when you're in the mountains, looking down, you see so many things happening. Especially in places like Geiranger (Norway) where ferries are sailing back and forth through the fjords, kayak cruises arriving and departing and cars crawling up and down the steep roads. I wanted to portray this like you are watching an ants hill, which gives such a funny perspective on things.

BTS photoalbum here: tinyurl.com/oaehhh3

Watch Earth roll by through the perspective of ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst in this six-minute timelapse video from space. Combining 12 500 images taken by Alexander during his six-month Blue Dot mission on the International Space Station this Ultra High Definition video shows the best our beautiful planet has to offer.

Marvel at the auroras, sunrises, clouds, stars, oceans, the Milky Way, the International Space Station, lightning, cities at night, spacecraft and the thin band of atmosphere that protects us from space.